Amerika

As the dust settles in Charlottesville, the Alt Right finds itself again wondering about its future direction. While the event was clearly a great victory in that it raised awareness of the rising Right and drove people away from the middle, it also brought a mentally disturbed person in a car driving into another vehicle, which then pulped some counter-protesters.

More importantly, it raised questions about what the Alt Right actually is. Is it, to use the words of Hunter Wallace, simply white nationalism 2.0? Or does the Alt Right have a life of its own, as posited here many times before in gory detail, as a rising conservative entity which includes the natural tribalism of conservatives alongside other elements of a more realistic Right?

Some have criticized the display of neo-Nazi symbols, salutes and regalia among the protesters. Some, adopting the rhetoric of mainstream politics, have argued that “the optics” are bad, namely that it is hurting the Alt Right to be seen as accepting neo-Nazis and White Nationalists among its ranks. Others have claimed the opposite, which is that a revitalized and unapologetic far-Right is more effective than hiding behind egalitarian sentiments as our RINO/cuckservative mainstream Right politicians have done for decades.

Another point of view may have more relevance. It is not the optics that make neo-Nazism and White Nationalism 2.0 a bad bet for the Alt Right. It is that taking that direction leads us away from where we want to go, and makes us distill our relatively complex beliefs into something else which is both simplistic and unstable.

In other words, it’s not the optics; it’s the failure. The Alt Right was formed to be an alternative to mainstream conservative politics that abandoned crucial issues like nationalism, anti-socialism, maintenance of social order and avoiding becoming tools of a globalist regime hell-bent on installing liberal democracy and consumerism worldwide.

Naturally, this put the Alt Right in a difficult place, because the only people willing to talk about nationalism and race have been underground sources which are evenly divided between the VDARE/AmRen race realists, and “ethno-Bolshevists” such as the neo-Nazi and white nationalist wing who want to make all whites equal by uniting them against other groups.

Many of us avoid mention of Nazis and the Holocaust because we see them as an attempt to fix modernity by using modern methods. Modernity is mass culture, brought about by the notion of equality, and to try to mobilize people in masses requires telling them partial truths and deceiving them. While this is effective, it also loses control of itself, as the Nazis did before winding down in a chaos of death and destruction.

For those of us who are oriented toward the future, the last thing we want is open violence, warfare and murder. We prefer the idea of reclaiming authority in our lands, repatriating the Other and then soft purging the stupid, weak, criminal and Leftist among us. They can be relocated to Brazil or Dubai and be perfectly happy in countries that are closer to their ideals.

Modernistic philosophies — including Nazism and its modern derivates in neo-Nazism and white nationalism — are utilitarian at their core. To them, people are the means to an end that is an ideology, and this ideology consists of re-shaping our human world around the type of simple concepts that motivate masses of people. That is the tail wagging the dog: instead of doing what is right, we do what is popular, and it is not surprising that this always ends poorly.

While Hitler salutes and swastika flags are highly effective, mainly because the media flocks to them in order to emphasize its agenda that anyone who deviates from diversity is a Nazi, they are also unnecessary. Being a neo-Nazi now is like flying a Vietcong flag in 1968 in that it provokes panic and notoriety, which to someone who wants to manipulate mass politics feels like winning.

The Alt Right does not need that, however. Its basic ideas — nationalism, hierarchy, order, purpose — are anathema to the modern mentality and will trigger people even more when spoken by responsible men wearing suits. We are what happens when the liberal democratic order collapses, and if we are to be the next stage in human history, we must be people who have a better plan and are balanced, sober, sane and realistic enough to put it into motion without kicking off WWIII, genocides or other unnecessary and ugly consequences.

This requires that we get rid of the somewhat adolescent fascination with neo-Nazism and white nationalism. We are nationalists but nationalism is only one facet of a more complex view. In addition, there are reasons to oppose national socialism, white supremacy and white nationalism:

1. Too limited. Talking about race alone leaves a giant void. Our society obviously got to this failed point through some kind of internal crisis — civilizations die by suicide rather than murder — and so, it needs to be fixed. Even complete political systems like National Socialism left huge voids where action was needed, and they do not escape the problem of modernity, which is mass culture that requires manipulation to achieve even simple things. Even if these were to fix problems with modernity, those would be temporary patches and not oriented toward providing a better future outside of the nightmare that modernity has been.
2. Too scapegoaty. When you assign blame to any group but yourselves, you do not take agency for your own complicity in allowing these events to transpire. Blaming the Jews, the rich, or even international finance misses the point: when people vote, they vote for what is popular, which is as much the opposite of what is true as quality is the opposite of quantity. These simplifications and victimhood narratives are needed to mobilize people around a simple idea, but the notion that mobilizing people around simple ideas is somehow “good” goes against common sense. We need realism, not false symbols. Scapegoating leads to our self-defeat when we fight the wrong problems and enemies, and necessarily leave the real problems intact.
3. Too modern. Modernism is based on the idea that people are objects on a factory line. They come in equal, are stamped with knowledge of right and wrong, then give facts to operate on, and after that are interchangeable parts. In this view, they can be “perfected” through outside force, known as control, which limits the methods they can use by making them equal and therefore, putting the onus on them to demonstrate allegiance and thus rise above the herd. Modernism is mental manipulation in order to create the mass culture that allows for mobilization of the herd. It occurs because of a lack of social hierarchy, which allows those who care the least about the consequences of their actions to thrive, because it is always more efficient to not-care than to care.
4. Too punitive. Rage, we can understand. Outrage, even. Hurt feelings, certainly. But life is not won through emotions but through their suppression. Perhaps there are many people out there who have done wrong and deserve to die. On the other hand, something went wrong that allowed them to do what they do, because their natures have never changed. The solution is to establish order that rewards the good and penalizes the bad — “good to the good, bad to the bad” as Plato wrote — and thus deprive bad people of their power. Punishing people however makes us slaves to them, in that we need their suffering to feel complete, which makes us essentially reliant upon them.
5. Too simplified. Our crisis is that civilization is dying. This means that we need to rediscover our virtue and systematically fix every aspect of civilization and ourselves using this as a guide. Our action must be from inside to out; as in athletics or any other discipline, the mental game is a prerequisite to achievement in the physical world. At that point, we need to restore an organic civilization which does not require authoritarian leadership, secret police, censorship, or any of the other methods that modern societies use to control people. We can sort people, sending away the bad and keeping the good, and we can reward the good and punish the bad, but we cannot force the world to fit our mental model. We can only work with what is there.
6. Too emo. Neo-Nazis and sometimes actual Nazis are disturbing for their willingness to be cruel. We want pure hearts, not twisted and darkened ones; as Nietzsche warned, if you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you, and to hate something fanatically is to become in part what you hate, just in a different form. It is like inviting it into you. We need a cold, logical and positive outlook on our world where we see its potential and develop it while beating back its pitfalls. This means that we will exclude others without mercy, but it does not mean we will make ourselves into monsters.

One of my writings from 2004, summarizing my experience during tumultuous 1990s pro-nationalist but not white nationalist activism, summarizes these views in a more informal mode.

We are in the midst of a fashwave. Samuel Huntington noted this years ago, and thinkers from Plato to de Tocqueville have noted what happens when democracy fails, and what we are seeing now is people becoming tired of tolerance, equality, diversity and democracy because these programs have trashed the West. Tolerance means that the people who are doing the right thing see whatever they do undone by social chaos; equality means that the productive become slave labor to provide for the unproductive; diversity means that no social standards or culture can be had, and endless racial, ethnic and religious tensions roil our societies; democracy guarantees that whatever is popular wins out over what is true, accurate, realistic, sensible, intelligent, long term oriented or common sense. All of these things have failed, with the combination of Barack Obama essentially gutting the American economy in a backdrop of race riots while Europe burned from uncontrolled immigration being the coda to faith in liberal democracy and its related philosophy.

This fashwave is cultural, not political. It does not mean that people want fascism or any of the belief systems that, while unfairly maligned, also failed for their own reasons during the middle of the last century. We do not want to participate in genocides, total war, complete mobilization, secret police, censorship, Kristallnacht and other stupidities of a bygone time. Those were emotional and out of control reactions to the symptoms of a deeper problem; we want to target the deeper problem, which is that no one in the West desires virtue anymore, so we are bringing it back through intolerance of lies and demands for a higher standard. That is what a fashwave looks like. It may flirt with fascist or national socialist imagery, but in reality, it has more in common with the founding of the Roman Empire or the rebirth of Germany after both its occupying forces and intermediate imperial overlords failed. We see that our civilization collapsed years if not centuries ago, and we want to rebirth it from their most fascist act that is possible, which is self-discipline and suppression of the ego so that we can be unfettered realists who see the world as it is, and find an order within that in which we can thrive, pushing the best upwards so that we have a hierarchy that administers this because we know that mass culture will not.

Stephen Clay McGehee writes of what our actual task is in all non-centrist Right wing activity through his concept of the Civil Right:

When we speak of “the Right”, we speak of cultural matters rather than strictly political matters. Politics follows culture, and there is much overlap, but culture always precedes politics. Those who try to take a shortcut by changing politics without first changing the culture are certain to fail in the long term. Our focus here is on the traditionalist culture of the Right.

Our objective is to reach “The Middle” – those who do not strongly identify with the Left or the Right. We want to reach those who simply want a better life for their families and their descendants than the degenerate culture that has become the norm.

Where did the terms Left and Right come from?

In the assemblies of pre-Revolution France, those who supported aristocracy, an orderly society, and the king sat on the right, while those who supported the revolution, republicanism, and socialism sat on the left. In general, that still holds true today.

The French Revolution that began in 1789 marked the beginning of a new era that put Western civilization on a steady downward path. Those wanting to conserve what came before then have adopted the label, “1788 Conservative”. The Civil Right is, in part, about being a 1788 Conservative.

Western civilization is broken. It doesn’t just need a little tweaking over here and something patched up over there. It needs to be rebuilt as a complete restoration project. The Right is focused on putting us back on the right path: to re-create the best of Western civilization while learning from the mistakes of the past.

We do not need the swastika; yes, it is an ancient Indo-European symbol and should not be demonized, but that is a task for the future. For now, we need to focus on reality and how to create a stable situation that can end the bad and nurture the development of the good, at the same time we achieve the inner discipline and concentration necessary to mature our fashwave into a sea change of people converting to the desire for virtue, balance, order, harmony, excellence, goodness, truthfulness and beauty.

Flags, symbols and salutes come secondary to our actual strength, which is that our ideas themselves are divisive. People either decide to cling to the decaying ruin that took the place of the West, or they accept that what we offer are timeless ideas that have been the basis of every ascendant society throughout history. If we wanted to summarize the Alt Right, we could present it in this way, knowing that our ideas speak for themselves:

1. Nationalism. Nations consist of their founding ethnic group, and not other ethnic groups, races or even hybrids. Germany for Germans. In America, this means the founding Western European group.
2. Realism. Politics by feelings, “rights,” altruism, compassion, empathy, herd morality or other emotions mislead us, because all that matters is the results of our actions, not our intentions or our choice of “safe” methods. Everything in life is ends-over-means because it is more important to achieve your goal than to try the right way.
3. Hierarchy. This consists of two parts, an aristocracy of our best people who will be entrusted with money and power, and a caste system where those with greater intelligence have more social influence than whatever the prole herd is fascinated by at the moment, such as trends, panics, manias, fads or other human stampedes. This was the real lesson from the Great Depression: if you let the herd invest, they will bring you to ruin. The same is true of politics, culture, consumerism and any other area.
4. Social order. We need culture, moral standards, values, customs, habits, calendar, faith, cuisine and heritage. Together with purpose, or a sense of our society having an ongoing and immutable role in the order of nature, these constitute our identity, and this is more important than wealth or power. We must be able to act as an organic whole before we can achieve anything.

Civil War 2.0 is here. There are those who want out of the dying system, and others who do not. By espousing the ideas above — essentially, what is considered normal in a healthy time no matter what $current_year is — we “trigger” those who oppose us because they want decay, chaos, disorder and dysfunction in order to mask their own deviant or pointless behavior. There is no compromise between these extremes. The Left, as the party of egalitarianism, will never give in and allow health to prevail. For them, this is the endgame where they destroy everything and then rule in third world disorganization forevermore.

At this point, the Leftists are already so triggered by the fact that we are dissenters that they are engaging in authoritarian and apocalyptic behavior:

At that point the police had completely lost control of the city. The State of Emergency order means that any public gathering is de facto illegal, but antifa are still allowed to roam freely bearing weapons and attacking people. This chaos ultimately led directly to the vehicular incident that killed a woman and badly injured more than a dozen others.

My conclusions are that police wanted this to happen. It’s clear that VSP had specific orders to drive us out of the park to the south, into the teeth of violent armed antifa counter-protesters.

Police could have easily separated the barricades and removed all rally participants to the north, away from antifa and into empty streets fully controlled by law enforcement. We were driven into a hostile situation intentionally. It’s impossible not to believe that the authorities issuing these orders knew exactly what would happen and that they wanted rally attendees to be harmed and possibly killed.

Even the lefty The New York Times admitted that the violence was the result of police activity, essentially agreeing with Pax Dickinson and Scott Greer of Daily Caller in their assessment that the powers that be wanted this to end as a bloodbath:

And at City Hall, a planned news conference by Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized Saturday’s rally, came to an abrupt end when a man wearing a plaid shirt punched him.

…But others, including Mr. Kessler and Ms. Caine-Conley, openly wondered if the violence could have been prevented.

“There was no police presence,” Ms. Caine-Conley said. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”

Right now, our governments are divided. There are a few hopeful figures like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump who are attempting to stop the bleeding and point our nations back toward sanity, but all of those who are profiting from their franchises within a bloated system, including the unionized police, are attempting to prevent the rise of that which ends their happy little Ponzi scheme based on government dollars and being elected by a clueless lumpenproletariat who wants nothing more than additional benefits. This is why Trump condemned all people participating in violence instead of blaming the Alt Right:

Speaking on Saturday from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, the president criticized groups on “many sides” for violence that occurred at a planned rally in Charlottesville, Virginia by white supremacists that led to the death of a counter-protester.

Trump’s comments sparked immediate backlash from both sides, as many congressional Republicans called on the president to issue a more forceful response denouncing white supremacy.

Since Antifa initiated the violence, his statement was correct. The police, Antifa and possibly some members of the Alt Right or those who showed up to participate in the chaos like the driver of the death car that plowed into another vehicle and injured or killed twenty people, are all parties that deserve criticism. The vast majority of the Alt Right did nothing of the sort.

As Everitt Foster and I opined some time ago, the Alt Right needs to choose a direction that is future-oriented and provides positive real-world results in parallel with more long-term goals such as nationalism, aristocracy, social order and some kind of transcendental faith.

We are surrounded not so much by enemies, but by sleeping people who are living in a dream and hoping that despite all logic, modern society will turn out to be survivable. Among them, there are some who are infected with the mental virus of egalitarianism, and they are actively toxic, but the rest are simply sleepwalking and need to only be dissuaded from believing in the Left for it to fall.

For us, Charlottesville was a success. It further put us on the map and differentiated us from being merely a pro-Trump group. At the same time, it revealed the cracks in our fragile coalition. Our goal is to restore Western Civilization, not re-live the past out of an emotional response to how bad the present is. When we stay faithful to that goal, we win.

Tags: alt-right, antifa, censorship, charlottesville