Friday, February 15, 2008

Refusing to Live in Babylon

What distinguishes this book, American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro, written in 1971 by Nathaniel Weyl and William Marina, from almost every other book on the same topic is the authors’ commendable effort to avoid moralistic scolding of whites in general, and to avoid demonizing Southern whites in particular. The authors state in their introduction:

Other contemporary studies of slavery and the Negro suffer from an intense moralistic bias and from the fact that their authors seem more interested in scolding their subjects than in understanding their reasons for their action. The proper business of the historian is not to inflict his prejudices on his readers, but, in the vernacular of modern American youth, “to tell it like it was.” As the German historian of civilization, Leopold Ranke, put it, perhaps a bit more eloquently: “Ich will bloss sagen wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.” (“I shall merely state how it actually was.”) The Greek Sophist, Lucian, once observed: “Historical characters are not prisoners on trial.” It may be tempting for the historian to arraign great men, prosecute them and convict them. It panders to his prejudices, inflates his ego and is invariably successful, since they are not present to defend themselves. Nevertheless, it is none of his business.

We believe that the record of the judgments made by American political leaders on slavery and the Negro, their analyses of the underlying problems and their proposed remedies cast light on the difficulty and durability of the problem and its imperviousness to easy solutions. This record now stretches over two centuries which are almost bisected by a civil war that many thought might reduce racial strife in America to inconsequential dimensions. In presenting this record, our purpose is not to place American statesmen in pigeonholes and still less to moralize concerning their doubts and conclusions. It is simply to write down, to the best of our ability, the record of the past in the hope that it may shed light on this vexing topic for the
present and the future.
Would that all historians had the same intentions!

The views of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and many others are presented by the authors. There was a consensus amongst the statesmen mentioned above and the American public that the slave trade and chattel slavery was wrong, but that miscegenation and integration were abhorrent and would mean the extinction of the white race. Jefferson and Lincoln favored re-colonization, which was made impossible after 1865; and Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and others favored legal enfranchisement with the strictest segregation possible in terms of social contact. All of these statesmen perceived a danger if the Negroes were integrated into society as if they were simply pigmented white men.

The Civil War erupted, the authors claim, when two minority factions collided, forcing the men in the middle to choose sides. Robert E. Lee was not in favor of chattel slavery as were Calhoun and the radical slavers, but when forced to choose, he chose to fight for his native state. Lincoln was not in favor of full black integration into white society, but when forced to choose between the radical abolitionists who wanted full integration and the pro-slavery contingent, he went with the abolitionists.

What is depressing but true is that the abolitionists won out. Despite the warnings of every single statesman in American history, by 1960 the radical abolitionists had won.

Weyl and Marina suggest a compromise. They recommend full economic and political enfranchisement for Negroes and the right of free association in private schools, clubs, and neighborhoods for whites. And that right of association would have the complete support of the federal government.

They quote a very interesting work by William Graham Sumner called Folkways, in which Mr. Sumner maintains that federal encroachment on the folkways of the South made racial antagonism inevitable:

In our Southern states before war… whites and blacks had formed habits of action and feeling toward each other. They lived in peace and concord, and each one grew up in the ways which were traditional and customary. The Civil War abolished legal rights and left the two races to learn how to live together under other relations than before. The whites have never been converted from the old mores… The two races have not yet made new mores. Vain attempts have been made to control the new order by legislation. The only result is the proof that legislation cannot make mores. (p. 384)
The authors go on to point out another factor which no-one today will deal with when they ask the question of why the Negro has not, like other minorities, been raised to a higher level after years of efforts. White oppression is not, in the authors’ view, the reason.

These misgivings have, it would seem, been amply justified by the course of events. The United States has undertaken an historically unparalleled effort to raise the Negro by governmental action to the political, cultural, social, and economic level attained by the white man. In the pursuit of this objective, it has spent billions of dollars. It has promoted men to positions for which they are not qualified solely because they are black. It has persuaded universities to admit students who do not qualify educationally or mentally exclusively because of their color. It has filled some of the highest positions in the executive and judicial branches of government on the basis of race and without regard to merit.

The reward the United States has reaped is to be denounced across the world as a racist state and as a recrudescence of Hitlerism. By contrast, the Japanese, who continue to oppress one and a half million Etas, have been silent about their misconduct and it has passed unnoticed. The Indians, who have abolished caste more in name than in fact, remain immune from world criticism even though their untouchables are still largely pariahs. The masochistic traditions of liberal Protestantism, reformed Judaism and modern Catholicism to the contrary, those who publicly display their sores are tagged with the leper’s bell. (p. 387-8)
Their advice? Refuse to wear the leper’s bell. Instead, they suggest:

Government should continue to act to ensure that no citizen is denied his civil rights or access to public schools, public office or other governmental facility because of race.

In the private sector, individuals should have the right to associate or refuse to associate with anybody they please without interference by governmental authority.

Racial mixing of schools, neighborhoods and residential complexes according to bureaucratically prescribed formulas is an abuse of governmental power. It is the business of the state to see that people are not deprived of their rights because of their race; it is not the business of the state to decide how they should be mixed in relation to race. (p. 390)
If the suggestions of Weyl and Marina had been followed back in 1971, there would not now be any need for a white counterrevolution. But now that liberals have institutionalized forced integration and mandated the worship of blacks, more extreme measures than those suggested by Weyl and Marina will be necessary.

If we want to successfully eradicate institutionalized racial Babylon, we need to understand why such reasonable and beneficial – beneficial for both races – proposals such as those suggested by Weyl and Marina were not adopted by our government.

If, in 1971, you had had the opportunity to sit down privately with the individual congressmen in both the state and federal legislatures, I think you would have found that the great majority agreed with the analysis of Weyl and Marina. But not one of those legislators would have voiced their agreement with Weyl and Marina in public because democratic governments are not run by majorities. They are run by passionate minorities who are able to convince finger-in-the-wind pragmatists that their cause is the will of the majority or, at the very least, the will of the majority of the future.

The integrationists consisted of two groups of radicals. The first was made up of secularized Christians and secularized Jews. Having lost their faith in a transcendent God, they made a god of the noble black savage. The second group was the capitalists. They were often opposed to the secularized Christian and Jewish radicals on many issues but they were united with them on the integration issue. In fact, it was the capitalists of the late 19th century who killed the back-to-Africa movement. They needed cheap Negro labor in order to keep making exorbitant profits.

The racial secularists and the capitalists had the religious zeal that the pragmatic men lacked. Only a faith can counteract another faith. So in the absence of a Christian resistance movement, the Christless faith of the secularized Christians and Jews and the golden-calf faith of the capitalists won the day. The integrationists threw their gauntlet onto the courtroom floor and no Christian champion picked it up. The integrationist champion then entered the lists unopposed.

Of course now, some 37 years later, if you sat down privately with the members of the state and federal legislatures, 99% of them would not agree with the modest proposals of Weyl and Marina. And that is a sign of a successful revolution: what was formerly the majority opposition now gives internal assent to the enemy.

In 1971, the hour was very late, but it was still possible then to say, “If we act now we can still conserve a significant portion of European America.” But white people did not act, and European America was jettisoned. True conservatives, cultural conservatives, must now (they have no choice) become counterrevolutionaries. The revolutionaries started out as tiny minorities on the fringe of Western civilization, and now we, the European minority, must start out on the fringes and in the cellars of the new Babylonian empire, and begin the long, slow, painful reconquest.

The only sure way to get a reputation as a prophet is to never make a prophecy. Then, no matter how events turn out, you smile and nod in a Pumblechookian manner and pretend that the way everything has turned out is exactly the way you thought things would turn out. No one can say for sure that a series of cataclysmic events won’t shift the balance of power back into the hands of the Europeans, but one can say that such an occurrence would be highly unlikely. The more likely scenario is that we will have to put in a few centuries of counterrevolutionary work before we see Europe rise from the ashes. But if it be not now, then it will come. Hamlet is right: “The readiness is all.” Now, or later, Europe will rise again. It will rise again, because I and other Europeans, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” will never let the image of His Europe fade from our hearts. Europe is the friend, our friend, that Thomas Moore wrote about:

It is not the tear at this moment shed,
When the cold turf has just been laid o'er him,
That can tell how beloved was the friend that's fled,
Or how deep in our hearts we deplore him.
'Tis the tear, thro’ many a long day wept,
'Tis life's whole path o'ershaded;
'Tis the one remembrance, fondly kept,
When all lighter griefs have faded.

Thus his memory, like some holy light,
Kept alive in our hearts, will improve them,
For worth shall look fairer, and truth more bright,
When we think how he liv’d but to love them.
And as fresher flowers the sod perfume
Where buried saints are lying,
So our hearts shall borrow a sweet’ning bloom
From the image he left there in dying!

Addendum: You will know the European Phoenix is about to rise from the ashes when Europeans stop writing books and citing demographics which show how outnumbered Europeans are and instead start issuing orders to tear down the heathen altars. What were the odds against Cortez? Something like 50 million to one? What were the odds against the British in India? 100 million to one, wasn’t it? Numbers only matter if you plan on living in a democratic, oligarchical, racial Babylon. And the true European refuses to live in Babylon.

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