by James Mason
[Vol. XIII, #9- Sept., 1984]
The Now
I've ran into discussions of a concept that's been referred to as "The Now" lately in Movement newsletters. I'm all in favor of the Movement becoming familiar with this idea as it is an important one but I want it made certain that it is known that this originated with Charles Manson. I predicted years ago that Manson's ideas would invade all areas of Movement thought and they have and are continuing to do so. But, being of the Rockwell school, I believe in giving credit where it is due.
First of all, I personally would never have any tolerance for any "hippie jargon", as the System calls it, just as I have none for superstitious garbage. The terms are "new", mainly for purposes of emphasis and clarity because the older terms have been rendered cliche and stand for things which are threadbare. Manson was required to practically re-invent the language in order to get his points across. I assure you, his concepts are quite real and valid.
Basically, it is this: the great majority of people live in a mental world split between the past and the future. Few live life. Instead, they are "starring in their own movie", to quote Manson. But the "past" and the "future" exist nowhere but in the mind, or on film or record, or on paper as fiction. The one is gone and the other hasn't yet taken place. We exist in the Now whether we like it or not. And the Now is all we've really got. No wonder why such a tiny few are in such total control of the present - most others are off someplace else.
All true revolutionaries will be found within this arena, center stage, right along with the System Task Masters themselves, because only here can the struggle for command of the fate of the world be decided. Some of the religionists in the past have made the statement that, "we are on a victory march". Blind faith leads them to kid themselves and bluff - or try to bluff - others. I doubt that they knew what they were talking about. I happen to know one thing: I, for one, am in the Now and nearly twenty years of the most bitter experience has made me more than the equal of any System wire-puller. I don't know how much company I've got but I do know that it is only a matter of further disruption of the inertia behind the System coupled with the increased exertion of will on our part and the balance is swung.
Where it's fundamental, we've already won. At least around these parts. Our job is to let them know they have been broken and by whom.
[Vol. XIV, #6- June, 1985]
Staying One Up
The philosophy behind this would indeed make the kind of epitaph each of us should want to have inscribed over our graves: "He died one up on the System".
Even the worst flunkies and pretenders in the Movement sometimes have their moments as well. It happened to be one of them that first crystallized the concept of getting and keeping "one up" at all times against the System so that, if you're ever successfully "taken out" by the System, you may be able to go out not with a sense of loss or defeat but instead with a very real sense of "Und ihr habt doch gesiegt"- of having yet been victorious in spite.
This has always, since the end of the War, been a struggle for the self - an inner struggle primarily. "First myself and THEN the world!" It is just that only now are we becoming more aware of it. When your moment comes, if you have been successful and done your utmost, probably it will be best known only by just you. Inner satisfaction as opposed to fanfare. If it were otherwise, your score undoubtedly would have been cut short a lot sooner. You'll be able to go out like a man. "Prima donna" types will always go out kicking and squealing, protesting their "innocence" and their "rights" to a System that cares only to be able to get its meat hooks on an opponent who has provided it with the chance to do so through a careless mistake.
The System is so vast, so complex, so inhuman, that sporadic, isolated assaults against it do less harm to it actually than a far-flung community of committed revolutionists living and functioning as an entity unto themselves. The real attack is a fully aware individual in this day and age who LIVES his deepest convictions, actually puts them to work! What an attack! In the face of what could be a dictionary definition of hopelessness, individuals grimly and quietly working against it, for themselves, despite all. To "drop out" of it and go on managing for yourself and for its destruction, QUIETLY, year after year, decade after decade, SUCCESSFULLY, UNMOLESTED... what a victory! And then to have gotten in your real jabs, to have drawn real blood besides.., no one can ask more than that under these circumstances.
Aside from being ready for death at any time, such a life's conduct will allow one to be able to accept and cheerfully write off any tactical losses or set-backs that will inevitably arise in due course.
To play against impossible odds and to keep accounts in your favor is the victory.
[Vol. XIV, #10- Oct., 1985]
The Course
I want to speak more clearly than I have before in previous segments of SIEGE on this topic. There are but two separate choices as regards strategies and courses of action for any who consider themselves members of the Movement: TOTAL ATTACK or TOTAL DROP-OUT. These are the opposite ends of the revolutionary spectrum. While the former is the more blazing and heroic, it is the latter, by far, that I favor and would urge all comrades to adopt. I favor the latter as the only sane and realistic choice.
Charles Manson was and is the master of this philosophy. We're talking about survival versus suicide. Manson would tell us that suicide is the lot of the System. Let ours be survival. Never forget that violent revolution may come as a result of a policy of total drop-out, if it is carried out effectively. But should violent revolution come and find us not already highly adept drop-outs, then it will spell our own deaths as well.
Next, if you cannot make a revolution in your own mind, in your daily life and habits, then you certainly cannot do it in any other way. This is why Manson scoffs at the so-called Movement "bad asses" and why they, in turn, scorn him (because he "undresses" them with his eyes).
There's no use talking about it unless you have done it.
I HAVE DONE IT.
I advocate more of what I have done and am still doing. AND TAKING NO STUPID RISKS TO JEOPARDIZE IT.
It seems too many want what no one has done, can or should do. And to think you can change the System within the System is BULLSHIT!
There are probably a lot more things I'd be ready to do without the bat of an eye than the average Movement member. Some people are born without arms or legs, etc.. I was born without any COMPUNCTIONS. If it feels good, DO IT! If it gets you where you want to go, USE IT! And by the same token, if it's counter-productive, DROP IT!
You must drop out of and away from the System. Mentally, spiritually, physically, economically. Since I do not advocate becoming hermits living in caves, but do strongly advocate living WELL, then it amounts to a matter of short-circuiting your relationship with the System: a highly disproportionate amount of it coming YOUR way; only very grudgingly give anything to the System except in the cases of outright, naked and inescapable blood money (certain kinds of taxes, etc.) and only then in the silent and satisfying knowledge that you'll be retaking that plus some more over the near future. One step backward and two steps forward. Remember, in all of your unavoidable "intercourses" with the System, make sure that you are the "er" and not the "ee".
There are many things I won't be delving into as regards the revolutionary's relationship with the System. But one of the most important would however be to NEVER take anything seriously at all other than that which threatens to directly, materially, affect YOU! And that cuts out so very much and clears away so much time, thought and resources with which to be ready to keep the wolves away from the door. Their phony garbage: elections, world affairs, economy, education, crime - the lot of it. Pull away from it all and LET IT GO TO HELL!
Start now getting ready to survive the demise of the System. You may actually be CONTRIBUTING to that demise! Begin breaking away gradually but on a steady program. CALL NO ATTENTION TO YOURSELF! Say nothing. Just act.
[Vol. XV, #6- June, 1986]
> (This was the final issue of SIEGE)
Appendix I: Address
What follows is the text of an address given to a meeting of Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance by James Mason on December 15th, 1986, delivered from Chillicothe, 01110 to San Diego, California through the medium of long distance telephone attached to loudspeakers.
Betrayal
"I'm sure Tom Metzger doesn't turn his audiences over to any guest speaker without at least some form of prior introduction. While he and I have not met, Tom Metzger and I have become acquainted over the past ten years, that is, during the period just passed when the Movement that we are both part of was basically 'lost' and still searching to find itself. I'm sure all of you there in California are well aware of the tremendous job Tom Metzger has done on behalf of the Movement in his dealings with the masses of people through the media and in the electorate. There will never be a replacement for the ability to reach people and move people in great numbers and if a history of the Movement were to be written today, Tom Metzger would be found among the top half-dozen or so over the past twenty years in the area of reaching and leading and organizing people. That is why I didn't hesitate when he invited me to address this gathering of his today through this unique method.
"What I'm about to tell you will probably have more meaning for many of you if I first provide some information on my own background, as very seldom has any of it appeared in any public medium. For the past five years I have been editing and publishing a newsletter which is entitled SIEGE and that is how most people active in the Movement today know me. But next year, 1986, will mark my twentieth year as part of this Movement as an active and full-time member. I like to think of SIEGE as being representative of everything I've seen, heard, experienced, felt and thought over the past twenty years. Unlike so many of the older, so-called 'professional' Right Wingers of the Fifties and Sixties whose philosophical and editorial line never changed one iota amidst the most radical and dramatic national changes around them, the content of SIEGE today would bear no resemblance to what I was thinking and writing twenty years ago. I would like to view this fact as a genuine learning and maturing process as well as keeping in step with the reality of the times.
"My start with the Movement came with a bang when, at the age of fourteen, I joined the National Socialist Youth Movement which was the young people's part of the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell. This is not to say that I skipped the usual 'conservative' preparatory phase which most of us go through. I well remember the day my father took me out of my classes at school so that we both could go together to see Richard Nixon when, in 1960, he made a whistle-stop here in Chillicothe as part of his first Presidential campaign. I remember, four years later, getting out of class on my own so that I could return to the same spot by the tracks and help welcome Barry Goldwater during his own campaign. And finally, four years later, I was a backer of George Wallace. It was the last time I ever took a serious interest in mainstream 'party polities'. You must by now get an idea of my early background.
"By 1968 however my education as a radical was beginning to take root. That was the year I turned my back on everything connected with the System. That was the year I left school, left home, left Ohio and traveled to what was Party headquarters at that time - Arlington, Virginia. I was sixteen then.
"Commander Rockwell had been dead just over one year but the Party was still firmly committed to carrying out his strategies of defending, as he called it, the 'White, Christian, Constitutional Republic of America'. It was the time when vast, numberless armies of Blacks, Jews and brainwashed Whites totally lost to their race would rally in Washington, D.C., directly across the river from us, in support of every cause from 'civil rights' to 'victory for the Viet Cong'. And since there was no other opposition to them in evidence, we took it upon ourselves to face the task of, as we perceived it, defending the nation's honor against traitors, standing up for the White Race itself, and, hopefully, as a by-product of this, inspiring some of our own people to wake up and stand with us. At the best of times there were fifty to a hundred of us. Mostly we numbered only a couple of dozen. Then too were the after-hours and 'unofficial', out-of-uniform 'night rides' when we numbered from four to six, during which we disrupted our share of communist and assorted Left Wing gatherings. A legend was made and a lot of fun and adventure was had, all against odds that are pointless to bring up.
"But nothing changed... or did it?
"The Seventies witnessed the final betrayal in Vietnam. Something 'unthinkable' in the Sixties. The Seventies also witnessed the final betrayal of White Americans and the handing-over to Blacks of everything and more that had been arrogantly demanded in the Sixties when the major riots had erupted. And the Seventies saw the break-up of the old traditional forms of political arrangement within the Movement. For my part, the Party was no more and, throughout the Seventies, was reduced to a half dozen or so squabbling factions. Probably most of the rest of you have experienced the same thing. It was a time of great bitterness and disillusionment all around. Just when all of the evils predicted by Commander Rockwell as early as 1960 were coming to pass, the organization he had founded and built up to answer the crisis was laying in pieces.
"Excuses and recriminations aside, the cause for it all was betrayal. In Commander Rockwell's lifetime, it was not at all unreasonable to plan for the action of a spearhead movement to prompt the loyal elements within the established government to wake up and take things back away from the nation's subverters. Since his death and in plain fact things have moved way beyond that stage. What this means to us as a Movement is that any kind of a fascist-style coup d'etat is completely out of the question as the basis for it just doesn't exist. Nothing and no one in government, and I include business, high finance and the military, could be remotely considered as being 'American' in the traditional sense the way Commander Rockwell and any old-style patriot understood it. Those of them who would bother to protest this isn't true are merely pledging their allegiance to the perverted and degenerate concept of 'America' as it is presently being defined by this country's subverters from their now-supreme position of power and influence. And that, my friends, means that there no longer is a real and valid concept of ' America '. It has succumbed to total betrayal.
"And what of those movements and parties designed and created in the Fifties and Sixties to combat that which has indeed already come to pass? They, after having been betrayed by what some within the Movement would term 'majority' elements within the establishment, thus rendering their entire premise and reason for being as utterly futile, were, in turn, betrayed by their own leaders. Sold out. The courage, the vision, the honesty and the guts were not present in the existing leadership at that time to take what was by today's standards a comparatively large, radical body of people - already committed and having already sacrificed a great deal - and carefully, in a professional and controlled manner turning them from the thoughts and ways of reaction to those of REVOLUTION. But, almost as a hallmark for the way everything else that is to come in the future for this struggle, this betrayal too had to be TOTAL.
"From direct personal experience, I want to assure all of you that nothing is ever broken finally or severed completely. Nothing is ever a waste of time unless you, yourself, become so disillusioned that you quit. And even then the waste is confined to just you. Today our greatest sources of revolutionary guidance and inspiration still are Commander Rockwell and Adolf Hitler. Most if not all of the best revolutionary leaders we have today come straight out of the old, reactionary Movement of years ago. People - like Tom Metzger and myself - who, back then, were contented to pay attention and to do our jobs as they were defined for us. Hitler himself admitted in total exasperation at the start of his career that he was doing what he was doing only because no one else was doing it. As far as we today are concerned, we are certain that we can't possibly do a worse job of it than our predecessors.
"In attempting to define some of the basic d
ifferences between a reactionary approach and a revolutionary approach to any struggle or challenge, it would be best to deal strictly with how the individual must view things around him. Because if the individual isn't properly trained and educated, isn't properly indoctrinated and motivated, then he or she is no more than a prime target for disillusionment and betrayal. Leaders can fail or deliberately mislead. Before anything resembling a revolutionary organization can be built, all of the people involved - high and low - must be inculcated with the revolutionary spark within their conscious minds so that they cannot be led astray, so that they cannot be disillusioned or confused and, most important of all, so that they each can serve as revolutionary leaders themselves for the day when action of a truly massive scale arrives.
"The idea implanted by the reactionaries in years past was 'NEVER!' The idea we must implant in the minds of all our people today is 'WHY NOT?' The attitude of 'never' was a purely defensive one. And defensive in the hands of those who had already been struck defenseless, morally and ideologically. Never mind the weapons in the hands of Americans from the H-Bomb down to private pistols. It was never an issue of that. When the System forces won the Second World War and the nations of the West joined to destroy Germany, and particularly what Germany stood for, they in effect committed suicide. What the System had persuaded Americans to destroy by means of open warfare in Central Europe left wide open for more subtle, gradual assault at home those very things that had made this country what it was and had safeguarded it for the future: 'Racism' and the freedom to be what you are and to take measures to protect your future. When the Right Wing said 'Never!', the System responded with 'Eventually.'