How would white men of previous centuries or even those of earlier decades of the twentieth century view contemporary presentations of the case for racialism? As surprising as it may seem to some, in all probability they would have seen recent racialist apologetics as hopelessly infected with many of the central assumptions of multiracialism. This is due in no small measure to the fact that, although it may be possible (albeit rare) to dissent from widely accepted public policies, it is far more difficult to reject the assumed and often unstated philosophical assumptions of the age. This presents racialists with a particularly difficult task. Conceding their opponents’ core beliefs before engaging in theoretical battle is akin to wrestling with a handicap: all right for Haystacks or Andre, but poor strategy for lesser men.
For example, in the past half-century we have seen a consistent movement away from the advocacy of segregation (which was always far from “separate but equal” in reality), apartheid, colonialism, and general political disenfranchisement of nonwhites, toward the far less harsh positions of racial separatism (including acceptance of “black nationalism”) or the “level playing field” of the libertarian minded.
These latter positions would have seemed curious to white men of earlier times who, by and large, had little philosophical or moral problem with conquest, slavery, imperial domination, economic exploitation or in America’s early days, official exclusion of nonwhites and at times non-Christians from any participation in the legal or governmental process.1 As George Fredrickson, a critical student of the early Republic’s racial attitudes, writes, “In the United States, a true 'Herrenvolk democracy' emerged during the Jacksonian period, when the right to vote was extended to all white males and denied to virtually all blacks, including some who had previously voted under a franchise restricted to property holders.”2 This was echoed in the post-reconstruction South in the absolute political and social supremacy of whites.3 Even in the North non–whites were routinely excluded from housing, employment, education, and other areas via a host of legal, semi-legal, and informal barriers. In Fredrickson’s words, “Emancipation could not be carried to completion because it exceeded the capacity of white Americans—in the North as well as in the South—to think of blacks as genuine equals.”4
Despite the fact that many in the racialist movement see themselves as firmly holding the fort against changing social views on race, this is far from reality. Instead they have recast their views so as to fit comfortably with certain modern notions of universal and reciprocal morality. These notions they have absorbed, probably largely unconsciously, from the general culture.5
Even the nether reaches of neo-Nazism are not free of this process. Whereas one finds in the writings of many Hitler sympathizers of the immediate postwar (such as Savitri Devi6 and George Lincoln Rockwell7) an acknowledgment of the Holocaust but also an advocacy of it or indifference to it, today the neo-Nazi position has completely reformed. Ernst Zundel and similar figures always say that the Holocaust is a “vile lie placed upon the German people.” Zundel “refuse(s) to allow the German people [to] go down in history as mass murderers.”8 Zundel’s anonymous biographer relates in Ernst Zundel, His Struggle, His Life that “Ernst Zundel vowed in a symbolic act, standing and touching the Wailing Wall in Israel in 1968, that he would lift the blood libel of the Holocaust from the German World War II generation and free their children from the curse that is fraudulently peddled ‘Holocaust.’ ”9
Neither Rockwell, Devi, nor many of the SS prisoners the latter encountered during her imprisonment in Germany, had any compunctions of this sort. Even as late as 1980, Professor Revilo Oliver, writing under his frequently used pen name of Ralph Perrier, put forth the older position, albeit with a revisionist twist. “Suppose that the Jews’ characteristically big lie were the truth—that the Germans really had made a desperate attempt to rid themselves of their parasites by killing six million of them. If the Germans had done that, what of it? Why should Aryans be concerned about that effort at national sanitation?”10
The last defenders of racial inequality in Africa, Rhodesia, and South Africa were (unlike their predecessors in the initial postwar period) always at pains to tell the world that their systems were temporary. This is in stark contrast with the earlier leaders.11
Having seen that mainstream morality posits that one may care or do more for one’s own we turn to the further question: Would a man, on behalf of his inner circle, be allowed to take from or infringe upon others? To do unto them what he would not do to his own?
Contemporary universalist ideologies in European lands prefer to see people as individuals rather than groups; race is seen as one of many “illegitimate” group categories.40 Thus, racialists must emotionally escape a powerful ideological double bind. First, they must break through the public dogma which declares group loyalties to be illusory or, in the case of whites, somehow “evil.” Then they are confronted with the now deep-seated notion that groups must treat each other, at the very least, fairly and equally at all times.
Further, what is the appropriate moral response when one’s own requires the space or resources of outsiders? What degree of suffering must one’s own be subject to before that of others may be taken or exploited?41 Although the thought may seem harsh to eco–radicals, all men are willing to displace thousands of insects and animals when they decide the time has come to build a house. How is this done morally? Quite simply, all men conclude that their own life and comfort and that of their wives and children are a far greater value to them than that of other mammals, snakes, insects, and the like. We engage in wholesale slaughter because they are not us. Surely, could these creatures of the meadow be consulted about our massive extermination attempt, they would be quite opposed.
To this example the universalist racialist must respond that humans are radically different. All people must always be dealt with exactly as we would treat those closest to us.
Clearly, though, except perhaps for Catholic clergymen taking vows of poverty, no one treats the other, either as an individual, family, group, race, or nation, as his own. We do not abandon our homes as long as any man on the Earth is homeless. We do not survive on bread and water so long as any man is hungry. We give our children money and opportunity that we withhold from all others who are starving and suffering on the planet. And when our loved ones attend college or work or travel or whatever, they are living the lifestyle they do because hundreds and thousands of those less fortunate work for them in very rough conditions producing their needs. All of us put ourselves and families first.
For the individual to whom his nation, people, or race is very dear, the question is, may or should he regard their needs as of primary and, perhaps, singular importance. Just as he does not subject himself to reciprocal morality as an individual, so too would he exempt his larger group.
Who is to say that race demands this loyalty? Where is the imperative that one be concerned about nation, people, or race? Practically speaking, at least for whites, the loss of racial cohesion has left them defenseless as individuals. The group best protects the individual. Beyond that, though, most men did, some still do experience themselves as group members. This is common outside of Europe today but increasingly rare among whites.
Is it somehow more natural or morally superior to experience oneself as a member of a tribe and to treat fellow tribe members better?
Who is to say what is “natural”? What does seem clear, though, is that in a world of fiercely loyal groups, each battling for its own survival and prosperity, it ill serves the group that feels compelled to behave in accord with the dictates of universal morality and reciprocity.
However, this universalist model, whether motivated by Christianity or simply the “spirit of the age,” is merely the current moral consciousness of European society. It was not the consciousness of previous generations. Its claims to universal moral standards are little understood or practiced by the rest of mankind.
If current trends continue then we will not see universal morality until nonwhites take over. Then at that late date whites will have plenty of time and cause to ponder the wisdom of universalist racialism.
1. For an overview of all the above in the Colonial era and early days of America, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 1968).
2. George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 69.
3. For a thorough overview of the racialist morality of pre-World War II America, see the critical but well referenced Jim Crow’s Defense: Anti–Negro Thought in America, 1900–1930, by I. A. Newby (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1965).
4. Fredrickson, op. cit., p. 81.
5. One finds in the ranks of the neo-Confederates a classic evidence of this surrender. For example, the journal Southern Partisan is forever defending the Confederacy while viciously attacking all those guilty of “racism.” Why the leaders and citizens of the CSA are somehow exempt from this crime remains a mystery.
6. In Devi’s work, Gold in the Furnace (Temple Press: 1952), based on her experiences in Germany in 1948, she writes that she was told by many, including a “woman who held an important post in the management in five concentration camps ...a women who, knowing full well how little I really care, at heart, to what extent such acts took place and how far they were discouraged, had no reason whatsoever to hide the truth from me” that “there were gas chambers in some of the concentration camps under the Third Reich…. There were five in Auschwitz; there was one in Lublin. However, she continues “the people who met their death in them were all sentenced for some serious offense for which that particular penalty was foreseen; they were not 'innocent' people guilty only of being Jews...” This is an early form of revisionism: gas chambers existed, but only for criminals. In a 1978 taped interview with her recorded in New Delhi, sold by Zundel’s Samisdat Publishers in 1979, she declared that although “now knowing” that the Nazis had not killed six million Jews in gas chambers, she “didn’t care. They were just damn Jews anyway.”
7. Rockwell’s position is somewhat difficult to pin down. In his famous Playboy interview he argued against the six million figure and also “den[ied] that there is any valid proof that innocent Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis.” However, in the same interview he noted that should Nazism come to power in America, “there are going to be hundreds of thousands of Jewish traitors to execute” and that “mass gassings are going to be the only solution” (http://www.rebrebel.com/artists/rockwellplayboyinterview.html) (p. 9). And in This Time the World he wrote, “This time we will not permit traitors to ‘escape’ so that they can move in and betray them as the German Communist Jews did to America. None shall pass or escape retribution, not one!” (http://www.churchoftrueisrael.com/rocwell/world/roctttw-18.html) (Chapter 18, p. 14). Whether the reference is to “Jews “ or only “Communist Jews,” of which “there are hundreds of thousands,” one couldn’t imagine many racialists speaking in this manner today.
8. These quotes appear in the1999 film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter Jr.
9. Ernst Zundel: His Struggle, His Life, no date, no author (Samisdat Publishing) p. 65.
10. “Ralph Perrier” in Religion and Race (Liberty Bell: 1980), p. 23.
11. It should be noted that apartheid generally attempted to allow for and often assist blacks in their development, in their own areas. For example, Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog said in 1936, speaking to a “Native” audience, “We want as few of you as possible in the White man’s area. For that reason we are setting aside defined areas for you in which you can carry on your farming operations, in which you can go and live. When you come within the White man’s area you should know that really you come, in the first place to serve his interests. If possible in your own areas we would like to see you govern yourselves” (Debates, Union of South Africa Assembly, 1936, p 4085).
12. Verwoerd Speaks: Speeches 1948–1966, edited by A. N. Pelzer (Johannesburg: APB, 1966), pp.16, 24.
13. Italics added.
14. Ian Smith, The Great Betrayal (London: Blake, 1997), pp. 105, 108.
15. A recent, lucid exception to this may be found in David Lane’s Deceived, Damned & Defiant: The Revolutionary Writings of David Lane, edited by Katja Lane (14 Word Press: 1999), where we read in the “88 Precepts” that “nature has put a certain antipathy between races and species to preserve the individuality and existence of each” and “inter–species compassion is contrary to the Laws of Nature and, is, therefore, suicidal.” (pp. 88, 89)
16. The title of Madison Grant’s racial history of America’s settlement is instructive in this regard. The Conquest of a Continent or the Expansion of Races in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933) is an event that Grant and his many admirers saw as positive. The “races” referred to in the title are all white sub-races.
17. One hesitates in referencing here that sixties’ favorite by Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (originally published by Henry Holt and re-issued by Owl Press in 1991). It is, however, despite its dated New Left polemical style, highly instructive on the racialism of nineteenth-century Americans toward the long-standing Indian inhabitants of this continent.
18. Herman E. Talmadge, You and Segregation (Birmingham, AL: Vulcan, 1955), p. 49. Interestingly, Talmadge limits his opposition to racial mixing by ruling out “the use of force, or any other unlawful means” (p. 80). Apparently even racial survival was not as vital as peace or law. This was quite a difference from the attitude of Talmadge’s ancestors, who sang in The Bonnie Blue Flag, “Then here’s to our Confederacy, strong we are and brave; Like patriots of old we’ll fight our heritage to save; And rather than submit to shame, to die we would prefer, So cheer for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.”
19. Theodore G. Bilbo, Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongelization (reprinted by Historical Review Press, 1980), p. 280.
20. James Burnham, Suicide of the West (New York: John Day, 1964), p. 130.
21. William F. Buckley Jr., Up from Liberalism (New York: McDowell Obolensky, 1959), pp. 126–131.
22. Historians today are largely agreed that Joshua’s wars of extermination and expulsion are mythical. Thus, Bible-believing Jews are the only people who claim, proudly although falsely, to be genocidists. Holocaust revisionists would argue that Germans have been persuaded to make the same claim, albeit with much guilt and self-imposed penance.
23. Thus, for example, Jews do not have to return money that Gentiles mistakenly gave them in a business transaction (Talmud Bavli, Bava Kama 113b), they need not return to them their lost objects (Talmud Bavli, Bava Kama. ibid., and Sanhedrin, 66b) and one must always give precedence to a Jew in business (buying and selling, hiring and renting) (Torat Kohanim, Section 3). On the other hand one may not steal from them because this could cause “hatred.” According to the Talmud Yerushalmi (Bava Kama 4:4), theft from Gentiles was originally permitted but was later forbidden by rabbinic decree when a Gentile King became aware of the original law. Few Jews today are aware of or would support these standards.
24. It is important to note that various Talmudic authorities, even in the Middle Ages, sought to limit the binding nature of these laws by claiming they were only relevant to "idolaters" who lived in Talmudic times. There is, also, another stream of Talmudic literature citations, less numerous than the first, that seems to embrace universal morality. For a brief overview of the former attempts, see David Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue (New York: Oxford, 1989), particularly chapter two, “Christianity in Medieval European Halakhah” (pp. 42–53). For many citations of universalism in Talmudic and later traditional Jewish sources, see Yosef ben Shlomo Hakohen’s The Universal Jew: Letters to My Progressive Father (New York: Feldheim, 1995).
25. Of course, Talmudic morality has nothing to say about what other peoples do to each other when there is no impact on Jews. That is the whole point about pure in-group morality. The definition of “good” is something good for the tribe. “Bad” is bad for the tribe. Events that don’t have any impact on the tribe are simply non-events. Our point is that the logic of in-group morality would allow for these practices.
26. The Marcus Garvey school of black nationalism has long attracted white sympathy. Garvey met with Klan leaders in the 1920s to explore the possibility of a black return to Africa. See, for example, Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African–American Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 104.
27. “Garvey’s Vision” in Nationalism Today, No. 42, pp. 20–22.
28. “Nation of Islam: A Photo Essay” in Nationalism Today, No. 39, pp. 16–19.
29. “Mr. Yacub Goes to Patmos,” in Best of Instauration 1977, pp. 53–54.
30. A presentation of this view in English may be found in the journal The Scorpion, edited by Michael Walker. See, in particular, issue number 10 of autumn 1986, titled “Against all Totalitarianisms.”
31. Telos, a New York-based journal, formally of the left, but having undergone many creative changes over recent years, often features translations of de Benoist’s writings.
32. The post-1986 split in the National Front saw a two-year period in which there were two National Fronts. Griffin’s faction, the self-styled “radicals,” went to great lengths in order to embrace self-determination for all peoples. Among those featured prominently among their mentors and models were Muammar Qadhafi of Libya, American Garveyite Osiris Akebela of the Pan African International Movement, the black Nation of Islam, the American Indian Movement, and many others. See, for example, National Front News, issue number 109, p. 1.
33. Tyndall has always advocated the repatriation of nonwhites from Britain. This was to be done even if the non-whites refused. Griffin, for his part, supported compulsory repatriation during his NF days. Indeed, when the “radical” NF split in 1989 into Third Way and Third Position, it was Griffin’s Third Position that continued to advocate this view. It is only recently, in the context of Griffin’s having assumed control over the British National Party, that he has moved to the voluntary repatriation stance.
34. John Tyndall, The Eleventh Hour (Albion: 1998), pp. 395, 397.
35. National Front News, issue 71, p. 1. Similar cover stories are found in issues 93 and 109.
36. “The Bulldog Breed” in Nationalism Today, No. 41, pp. 25–26.
37. The routine policy of white Southern juries of finding their racial kinsmen innocent of crimes against blacks, even when the evidence was overwhelming, became a national scandal in the Emmet Till murder case in Mississippi in 1955. The acquittal of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam is a good example of this phenomenon of tribal racialism. Interestingly, though, by that time things had changed in the state to the point where the governor, Hugh White, called for the conviction of the murderers. (The defendants later admitted their crime to a national magazine reporter.) It should be noted in passing that this leniency was not always extended in Mississippi to whites whose crime was the rape of blacks, as in the 1957 Dillon/Duncan case.
38. A recent example of tribal morality from black intellectuals may be found in the summer 2003 Black Scholar. There one may read a well-written defense of the person, philosophy, and lyrics of the late black “gangsta rapper” Tupac Shakur. Neither Shakur’s calls for racial murder nor his vicious attitude toward all women are seen as grounds to criticize him (Black Scholar, 33, no. 2, pp. 44–50). Can one imagine a mainstream publication, on sale at every scholarly bookstore in America, making the same case for the late Ian Stuart of the white racialist band Skrewdriver, whose life and lyrics are positively genteel when compared with Shakur? Indeed, even among racialists, Skrewdriver was a subject of controversy. The “radical” National Front embraced, in the late eighties, a rival band called Skullhead and rejected Skrewdriver because the former endorsed self-determination for all in its lyrics.
39. The contradiction between the Jewish identity of Israel and the “pluralism” that is now official state dogma throughout the West is slowly becoming a subject for public discussion. See Tony Judt’s “Israel: The Alternative” in The New York Review of Books of October 23, 2003 (pp. 8, 10). Judt applies antitribalist morality to Jews, a once rare but now more common event. “The very idea of a 'Jewish state'—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel is, in short, an anachronism.”
40. We leave aside for the moment the fact that race is seen as an illegitimate form of identity only for whites.
41. The Zionist movement, in most of its streams, has always referred to Jewish persecution in Europe as a warrant to dispossess the Palestinians.