What Makes a Man Say “Never Surrender” and Mean It?

With the cautionary tale of Haiti before their eyes, the Rhodesian whites still turned their country over to black barbarians. And with the example of Rhodesia before their eyes, the white South Africans still voted to place themselves at the mercy of a people who had no concept of mercy. Then in our own country, in the South of the 1950’s, the wall that separated the whites from the colored races was torn down. Why did they all cave in? Well, let us first look at the outside forces that turned civilized white African countries into voodoo blood orgies and the South into New Orleans.

The prime shakers and movers in the ‘Onward to Racial Babylon’ movement were the Utopian whites. These people had entered, in their minds, the La La Land of Rousseau. They saw themselves as the great white wizards who would give the noble black savages their freedom, and in return they expected to be worshipped by the people of color. They held the reins of power in the United States and throughout the Western world. Their techniques were childishly (that is, of an evil child) simple. They practiced exclusion and name-calling in order to bring racially recalcitrant nations to heel. “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, you are a racist, and you can’t play with us!” was the war cry of the Utopians. And it worked. A friend, who had lived in South Africa during the period leading up to the fateful vote for extinction, said that the main reason the average white South African gave for voting to end apartheid was his desire to be included in the Olympics and other Western sporting events. And if we look at the Southern states in the 1950’s, we can see the same forces at work. The Southern colleges, prior to the 1950’s, used to refuse to play Northern colleges which had blacks on their teams. And until the 1950’s, the South refused to play in the national Little League tournament because they didn’t want to integrate their baseball teams. But they wanted to be included, so they capitulated.

What makes a people give in to name-calling and ostracization when they have a noble history of resisting much stronger measures in the past? Why did the people who had defended Rorke’s Drift and the people who had resisted Reconstruction allow themselves to be led to the slaughter by limp-wristed Utopians? The answer lies in the white man’s faith.

That the white man’s Christian faith produced men and women who were morally superior to the ancient pagans and the barbarian races cannot be proven in the same way that 2 + 2 = 4 can be proved. In fact one must still be connected to the older European civilization to be able to see the value of its people. The European Utopian and the barbarian cannot see the value of the older civilization and its people because the barbarian lives in the darkness and the utopian lives in a mind-forged lunatic asylum. But objective reality, which only the European who is still European can see, is that the European people were moral giants in a world of moral eunuchs and moral pygmies. What the Utopians promised to the last of the white holdouts in Africa and to the South was that they could have their faith and the fleshpots of Sodom and Gomorrah too. The Utopians assured them that they would not become pillars of salt when they looked back. They could be part of the racially harmonious Sodom and Gomorrah to which the rest of the white world had already succumbed.

The results were dramatic in white Africa. The white man could not go back to paganism because, though no longer fully Christian, he was still too Christian to be a good pagan. He became a useless pillar of salt. And in the South? It wasn’t quite as dramatic, but the results were the same: “He did not die, but nothing of life remained.”

It is painful to go back and read all of the “never surrender” assertions of the Southern segregationists and the white Africans. They seemed to be so determined not to give in, yet they did. In hindsight, it appears there were too many George Wallaces and Strom Thurmonds in their midst, men who supported the white cause when it seemed politically expedient and abandoned it when it became inexpedient. Such men lacked the Christian thing. If we look inside the souls of the defenders of Rorke’s Drift and the men of the Reconstruction Era, we can see what makes a man say “never surrender” and mean it.

The defenders of Rorke’s Drift and the Klansmen would not have been able to articulate the reasons for their refusal to surrender to black barbarism. They simply took it as a given – “never surrender, never say die.” But the unarticulated reasons for their refusal to surrender stemmed from the Christianity that was in their blood. The antique Christian knew the sinfulness of mixing with the heathen from his belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, which condemned race mixing. And he knew the foolhardiness of surrendering to the barbarian because of his historical consciousness, which stemmed from his belief in a God who had entered history.

When belief in revealed Truth lessens, so does the historical consciousness. “Why not mix with the heathen? It hasn’t been done in the past, but the past is not relevant.” In the absence of a deeply held religious conviction against race-mixing, the seemingly fierce resistance of the George Wallace, Strom Thurmond type of individual turns from a position of ‘never surrender’ to one of ‘You scratch my white back, and I’ll kiss your black a--.’ We’ve all seen how that works.

Robert Louis Stevenson is very underrated as a writer; he has great depth. And through his character Alexander Smollett, a Christian gentleman, he shows us why the Strom Thurmond type of white man caves in, and the Christian European does not. When faced with an ultimatum from the pirates, who seem to have the upper hand, Captain Smollett, replies:

“Now you’ll hear me. If you’ll come up one by one, unarmed, I’ll engage to clap you all in irons, and take you home to a fair trial in England. If you won’t, my name is Alexander Smollett, I’ve flown my sovereign’s colours, and I’ll see you all to Davy Jones.”

There are two reasons why Alexander Smollett refused to surrender. The first reason is that it simply isn’t done. A Christian gentleman, particularly an English one, doesn’t surrender to barbarians. And the second reason is that Captain Smollett knew, because he had an historical consciousness, that those individuals outside the sphere of Christianity have no concept of mercy or of a truce with dignity. Thus surrender is a metaphysical and a practical impossibility. When the George Wallace type of white South African and the Strom Thurmond type of Dixiecrat lost their Christian metaphysic, they were open to the idea that capitulation was practical. And thus they joined the barbarians and the Utopians.

The pathology of the white surrender to barbarism cannot be understood apart from Western man’s religious struggle. It was his faith that made him separate from the other races, and it was his lack of faith that caused him to seek extinction by blending with the other races. Because they are interdependent, Western man’s rush to extinction coincided with his complete rejection of Christianity in the second half of the 20th century. Certainly churches still exist, and some individual Europeans still hold His precious image in their hearts, but the European people, as an incorporate league, have rejected Christ. And it was not Darwin or Freud or Marx that severed European man from Christianity; they were merely additional links in a chain that was started by the medieval scholastics. All of nature, for the pagan, was animated by the gods. There were gods of the bush, gods of the sky, gods of the mountain, and so on. They were gods that could be propitiated in order to gain favor. Christianity dethroned those gods, but gave mankind something greater than nature to worship – a God who loved mankind, a God who desired not sacrifice but mercy. And He was one of us. We shared in His divine essence. God was still immanent, not in nature, but in man himself! How could any pagan lament the death of the nature gods when the alternative was so much better? Certainly not the Europeans. They embraced Christ with a passion. But the scholastic rebellion was the first satanic strike at the heart of the European’s faith. God was not immanent, the scholastics said, He was a derivative by-product of reason’s contemplation of the natural world. Christ’s words, “Behold the kingdom of God is within you,” were rejected as bad theology, and the anti-immanence police became the ruling authorities in the Church.

There were many resistance movements – the Franciscans were one prime example. But every time a St. Francis emerged, his movement was codified and emptied of its divine-human element. The Protestant Reformation was also an attempt to reclaim the original divine-human link. But the Protestant theologians re-imposed the prescriptions (God is not immanent) of scholasticism on the Protestant faithful, thus maintaining the dichotomy between a Christian’s loyalty to an abstract idea of God, preached by the hierarchy of his church, and his loyalty to the living God. And when the ‘Idea God’ of the various church hierarchies triumphs, the European’s loyalty to his own people perishes. How could it be otherwise? When God is an abstraction, so is man. One cannot be loyal to an abstraction.

European man’s battle is with himself. If he conquers the dragon of scholasticism, which is the progenitor of the scientific dragon, he will see his sacred heritage again. And then he will know that his heritage is intimately connected to his faith, which will give him the passion and fire to say, “We shall never surrender,” and truly mean it.