by Greg Johnson
Mr. Covington and Dr. O’Meara are right that most people are not inspired by the written word, no matter how brilliant. (There are exceptions, Robert Mathews being one of them, inspired by a book Which Way Western Man?) It is physical action that inspires and imposes the force of myth upon others, the action of the angel, the warrior, the prophet, and of course the martyr, the action of those sent against time to stop and challenge time.
When that time comes and those persons are there, I shall know it. I shall not, I think, be writing about them as I am now. I shall not have time for writing then. The myth will have drawn me out. In the meantime, in preparation, those who might one day break away should not dismiss options casually. They should seek examples from which they can learn, and they should point to those examples, and they should have better responses than the prevailing elite to the challenges of the day and be seen by growing numbers of people as having those better answers. Then they will not find themselves blindly banging their heads against a prison wall, which has been and continues to be the fate of White Nationalists these many years.
TAKING OUR OWN SIDE255
KEVIN MACDONALD
_____________________
Michael J. Polignano
Taking Our Own Side
Edited by Greg Johnson
Foreword by Kevin MacDonald
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2010
The triumph of the cultural Left is an ongoing disaster to America and every other Western country. The result is stultifying intellectual conformity in all the elite institutions of society, particularly the educational system. All levels of the educational system are rigorously policed to ensure ideological conformity, with the result that college graduates—especially college graduates—emerge zombie-like, mouthing politically correct platitudes they heard from their brilliant professors, mindlessly looking forward to an impossible future of racial harmony where the white minority adapts seamlessly and joyously to life among their non-white brothers.
Michael Polignano somehow managed to overcome all that. And what’s really amazing is that he did it while still a college student. Overcoming the propaganda is a remarkable achievement at any age, but is especially difficult for young people. Not only have they been subjected to this massive propaganda assault since kindergarten, they have to overcome the natural human proclivity to conformity that is especially strong among young people. I am ashamed to say that I was hopelessly conformist in college and grad school. Even after becoming ever more disenchanted with the Left (I was happy Reagan was elected), I couldn’t really get out of the narrow confines of the political mainstream.
Mike Polignano gets it. This is about racial survival: “A proposed moral principle cannot conflict with the survival of the race.” He is a biologist by training, and it shows. He has a clear understanding of group interests:
The reality is: The races are at war with one another. The different human races are distinct subspecies, with distinct temperaments and talents, some of which conflict dramatically. It is an iron biological law that when two distinct subspecies try to occupy the same ecological niche in the same geographical region, there will be group conflict. . . . But since we’re rational creatures, humans also have [another] option: voluntary separation. This last option preserves racial uniqueness and eliminates interracial competition, allowing each race to shape the course of its own future.
Mike Polignano rejects white guilt. We have to develop a sense of urgency to reverse the tide that is swelling against us: “In this time of racial peril, the highest and noblest thing any of us can do is work together to ensure the survival and flourishing of the white race, so it can give birth to new Leonardos and Newtons and Teslas.” I couldn’t agree more.
Multiculturalism then becomes not a source of strength, but the ideology of white dispossession—nothing more than “an attempt to replace white cultures with non-white cultures—or, more precisely, with fantasies, lies, and sanitized half-truths about non-white cultures designed to make them seem spiritually and morally superior.”
And as he notes, “Social ostracism is a small thing to risk considering what’s at stake.” Indeed, he correctly sees whites as “too polite, too concerned to accommodate and demonstrate goodwill to non-white invaders.” It is a politeness fueled at least partly by the desire not to be ostracized, not to take views that oppose what all the “smart people” in the universities and the elite media believe. Going against it takes a lot of intellectual confidence and a very thick skin.
Mike Polignano is a race realist in every sense of the word. Although he sees whites as having made unique and irreplaceable contributions to civilization, he also advocates eugenics. The white gene pool could be improved by providing incentives for the best and the brightest to have children.
Eugenics is an idea that that was once championed by progressive thinkers of all political persuasions but has fallen into disfavor because the contemporary Left rejects any acknowledgment that genes influence important behaviors like IQ—despite the overwhelming evidence from research. Nowadays, there is an automatic, knee-jerk accusation of Nazi sympathies whenever eugenics is mentioned. But the research is quite clear that genetic influences explain most of the variation in intelligence. And that implies that eugenic breeding practices would indeed be effective.
Polignano is also a race realist when it comes to race differences in IQ. The Left quickly noticed that civil rights laws and an equal playing field did not result in equal outcomes. The result has been affirmative action designed to magically create a non-white elite with all the same skills as the people they are displacing accompanied by massive propaganda featuring brilliant blacks and stupid whites. The result is:
a Potemkin village increasingly populated by non-whites who, regardless of their real merits, have been promoted a rung or two above those merits because of their race. Television and the movies portray a fantasy world filled with dumb blondes and black doctors, lawyers, judges, inventors, and computer geniuses. But behind the façade hides a vast, squalid reality of false promises, false hopes, and outright falsehoods about race—all premised on the refusal to accept racial inequality as a natural fact.
Polignano is also a realist when it comes to Jewish influence. He has a hilarious spoof on the “Differently Intelligent” and the “National Association for the Advancement of Retarded People” where all the advocates for these unfortunate souls are highly accomplished people with obvious Jewish names:
The NAARP was founded and staffed by the law firm of Wiesel, Wiener, Liehr, Ratner, and Cohen (Ari Wiesel, JD, Harvard, SAT 1560; Barry Wiener, JD, Yale, SAT 1470; Aaron Liehr, JD, Harvard, SAT 1510; Shulamith Ratner, JD, Harvard, SAT 1520; and Adam Cohen, JD, Yale, SAT 1420). (Mr. Wiener returned to private practice in 1999 after the passage of the Equalization of Opportunity Act and has won multi-billion dollar settlements in class action suits on behalf of DI individuals.)
Although this is satire, it points to a real issue: Very intelligent Jews from the very best schools have used their abilities to engineer the Potemkin village of black and Latino accomplishment—not to mention altering the law on church-state relations and promoting the “rights” of immigrants, legal and illegal: the Jewish elite hostile to the traditional white majority of America.
Polignano also points to two key traits of Jews that make them such formidable enemies to white America and the West: (1) Their powerful sense of collectivism—that Jews have a strong sense of Jewish communal interest and have a remarkable agreement on the basic issues they see as benefiting Jews—particularly issues such as immigration and multiculturalism in the US, and support for Israel as an ethnically exclusive Jewish state. (2) The Jewish hatred of Christianity “which over the centuries has given rise to terrible persecutions whenever Jews have gained political power.” This is exactly right.
One very encouraging aspect of Mike Polignano’s story is that it shows that a smart and inquisitive college student can bypass political correctn
ess and plug into powerful scientific research that supports a race realist perspective. It goes without saying that such research would not be mentioned in classrooms at the vast majority of American universities, except perhaps to call attention to the “sloppy scholarship” and “moral turpitude” of the scientists who produced it. The good news is that well-informed discussions of this body of research as well as quite a few of the original academic papers are readily available online.
As a result, Polignano has extensive discussions of quite a few of the leading figures in this academic movement, including Frank Salter and Arthur Jensen. His encounter with Jensen’s research seems to have been pivotal. His column on Jensen in the Emory student newspaper not only caused an uproar on campus, it doubtless led to a deep understanding of the current academic environment. He was subjected to a forum pitting six hostile professors (none psychologists) against an undergrad who was expected to defend Jensen’s position.
Imagine his disgust when some professors agreed in private that Jensen might be right but were too cowardly to come out and say so in public. Remember, at least some of these people had tenure and couldn’t have been fired from their jobs for expressing agreement with Jensen. But they could be sure that they could forget about being invited to academic cocktail parties or getting any grants from the university for their travel or research. What a commentary on the contemporary academic world:
I came to realize that an extremely nasty and highly motivated minority of faculty and students held the campus in the grip of fear. The purpose of my public humiliation was clear: It was a warning. Anyone who publicly acknowledged scientific facts or personal experiences about the reality of race could expect the same treatment.
Arthur Jensen is the Galileo of our times. And to its eternal shame, Emory University refused to look into the telescope.
This is exactly the sort of experience that would turn a bright student away from even thinking about wanting to get a teaching or research position in the academic world. Seeing what can happen when one takes seriously the views of someone like Jensen with impeccable academic credentials would certainly be daunting. One could only look forward to hostility, ostracism, and academic unemployment if one went that route. Recent research indicates that graduate students self-select on the basis of their political beliefs: Controlled for IQ, conservatives avoid the academic profession, while people on the Left find a welcome home there. Thus the academy becomes ever more one-sidedly Leftist.
If there is one thing I wish Mike Polignano had done, it is to write about his personal subjective experience of being the focal point of all this hostility on the Emory campus. Did students walk up to him and angrily denounce him? Did faculty members give him condescending looks, implying that, “as anyone with any brains knows, Jensen is a crackpot”? Was he forced to be a loner, or did he find a group of students on campus who offered social support?
I have had quite a bit of experience with the personal shunning and hostility that views like race realism elicit on college campuses these days. I never did really adjust to it. And in my case, I couldn’t rely on anyone on campus who really agreed with me intellectually, although there were a few gestures of friendliness. The result was that encountering faculty members or even some students would lead to a lot of anxiety.
It must have been much worse for Polignano if only because the urge to fit in is much stronger in young people. And while I have tenure, he must have been looking ahead to a life where his views would forever taint his chances of really getting ahead in multicultural America. When a lot of students look back at college, it’s a pleasant blur of parties, socializing, and studying—not memories of hostility and ostracism.
People like Mike Polignano are a rare and courageous breed. We need a lot more like him. And we have to find ways to support them financially as they continue their careers as effective writers and activists on behalf of the white majority of America.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
September 23, 2010
A SERIOUS CASE
F. ROGER DEVLIN
_____________________
Guillaume Faye
Archeofuturism:
European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age
London: Arktos, 2010
“The modern world is like a train full
of ammunition running in the fog.”
—Robert Ardrey
Most thought described as “conservative” is a kind of political hygienics: it takes its bearings by what is natural, normal, or best in the social order. One hazard of its focus on right order is to leave us unprepared in extraordinary situations. Thus, we all know otherwise intelligent conservatives who would continue, even as blood was running in the streets, to talk of the need for electing fiscally responsible Republicans to office. The best treatment for this sort of blindness is a crash course in political pathology such as the book under review.
Author Guillaume Faye was for many years a luminary of Alain de Benoist’s Group for the Research and Study of European Civilization. Beginning from the principle “no Lenin without Marx,” Benoist conceived his activities as part of a Gramscian (or Cochinian) strategy to undermine the hegemony of liberalism. In the early 1980s, remembers Faye, each issue of Benoist’s journal Éléments was “an ideological barrage that sparked outraged reviews from the mainstream press,” and people sat up and took notice of the Colloques parisiens his organization sponsored. The well-educated men of this “New Right,” as it came to be called, looked down on the young Front National as a “microscopic group of good-for-nothings,” and even barred “that pirate-faced old soldier” Jean-Marie Le Pen from their meetings.
Yet within a few years the tables were turned, as dissatisfied New Rightists flocked to the Front. Any misgivings they had about Le Pen’s vulgarity were outweighed by the impression that his organization was where something was happening. Faye, too, eventually concluded that the New Right had become a mere literary salon: “from 1986 I began to feel that a clique spirit and literary pagan romanticism were prevailing over historical will. . . . In order to prove effective, ideological and cultural action must be supported by concrete political forces which it integrates and extends.”
Archeofuturism marks the author’s return to the political arena after an absence of twelve years. Its first chapter is devoted to a friendly critique of his former colleagues. For example, he finds in New Right publications an overemphasis upon folkloric aspects of European heritage: Breton bonnets, Scandinavian woodcarvings, and the like. Such charming but innocuous traditions have their equivalents among all peoples on earth. Faye would rather maintain “the creative primacy of Western civilization” represented by our tradition of scientific research, philosophy and engineering, as well as our unparalleled artistic and literary high culture.
Faye also considers the New Right wedded to a faulty political paradigm in which “America”—conceived narrowly as the Hollywood/Wall Street/Foggy Bottom axis—is the enemy. This way of thinking is well-expressed in the title of Benoist’s book Europe-Third World: The Same Struggle. Benoist invites the entire non-American world (even Muslims!) to “a fruitful exchange of dialogue among parties clearly situated in relation to one another.” In other words: multiculturalism with one place at the table reserved for white Europeans. Faye rightly dismisses this as “a Disneyland dream.”
Starting from what Faye considers a correct Nietzschean assessment of primitive Christianity as an egalitarian, leveling and ethnomasochistic movement, the New Right launched an ill-considered attack on the folk Catholicism of ordinary Frenchmen. Meanwhile, they ignored their proper target: a return to the “Bolshevism of antiquity” among the high clergy, marked by immigrationism and self-ethnophobia. This latter tendency is identical with what James C. Russell has identified as the “de-Germanization of Christianity.” The New Right would have done better to ally itself with Catholic traditionalists in combating it rather than to alienate these natural allies.
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br /> Lastly, while the New Right professed admiration for the German jurist Carl Schmitt, it never made any practical application of his concept of the Ernstfall: the “serious case” which cannot be met within the normal framework of constitutional law. When Hannibal is at the gates of Rome, when the Royal Guards mutiny—no appeal can be made to law. Such contingencies can only be met with the virtue of prudence, i.e., the ability to make sound judgments about what to do in particular cases.
This blind spot may be fatal, for Faye is convinced that the liberal regime is driving Western civilization towards an Ernstfall the likes of which the world has never seen. He describes it as a “convergence of catastrophes.” Elements include: the failure of multiracialism, the disintegration of family structures, disruption in the transmission of cultural knowledge and social disciplines, the replacement of folk culture by the passive consumption of industrially produced mass culture, increasing crime and drug use, the decay of community, anti-natalism, nuclear proliferation and the re-emergence of viral and microbial diseases resistant to antibiotics, public debt, and the privileging of speculative profits, i.e., the construction of our economy atop the stilts of investor confidence rather than upon the solid ground of production.
Furthermore, liberal ideology has propounded a utopian ideal of universal “development,” whereby every last African hellhole is supposed to become an affluent, tolerant, democratic, and efficient consumerist society. The nations of the South were won over to this project, dazzled by the deceptive prospect of economic growth. They set in motion a process of industrialization that has devastated the natural environment, undermined their traditional cultures, and created social chaos, including urban jungles like Calcutta and Lagos. Resentment at the broken promise of “development” runs deep; the resurgence of religious fanaticism is one of its expressions.
