Contrarian Dissident Missives No.2: Prove it...
On the thorny question and the prospects of a people.
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” (Roman’s 8:28)
Now; the dissident sphere understands the fact that race is important. Though there is some variety of thought on how race should be properly addressed, it is widely recognised that race is a matter needful of address, and further that there is a strong racial element to the operations of our malign political powers. Put loosely, the common perception is that the European peoples across the civilized world are being consciously pressured, humiliated and disfavoured even in their ancestral homelands. This perception is common here for the simple reason that it is essentially true, and the inhabitants of this sphere are uncommonly clear-sighted.
Many of our writers and speakers go further to make broader claims about the place of the races in history and the moral characters and destinies inherent in blood. I am not going to gainsay these thinkers. Though racially-minded dissidents frequently lapse into lazy simplification and cheap pejoratives, they are at least pricking people’s consciences to a crucial ignored reality, and the mainstream stereotype of the dull-witted bigot is of course very far from the truth. Rather I hope to broaden the frame. The discourse on race is already well advanced and there is little I can add to its familiar currents, but I do say that a stale circularity is entering into the question.
Let us postulate that our most outspoken minds have it correct; that the European peoples are the highest type of the world’s inhabitants and that established authority is trying to diminish or destroy them, in large part through the agency of lesser races. However accurate this is in the final place, it certainly has much explanatory power as a hypothesis. The question, of course, is why. Yet we will not here seek the regular “why”, as in; “why would established power be seeking to undermine European peoples, their civilisation and inheritance?” This is a worthy question, but one often discussed already. Some say that it is because another people has an existential animus against European man, others that it is because the foreign peoples now being favoured are an easier population to conform to the degredations of modern industrial society, others say otherwise. Established authority is our corrupt antagonist, and all of these explanations may be true to some extent, but we are not asking why malign powers are causing this to happen; to what end they are privately driving; instead we are asking here why the gods are allowing this to happen; why is it a feature of the story.
Here I take Romans 8:28 as an axiom, which stance I think will find broad sympathy among you. Even if you are a detractor from Christianity and the church, the poetic imagination itself demands a similar formulation; all things must serve a purpose in the direction of a transcendent fulfillment; the life of man is a tale told for its significance, and even a tragic tale is a thing of salutary meaning. Every great story has an antagonist, and the motivations of the antagonist are allowed to be basically evil, and often quite simple and prosaic; but the antagonism is there to prove out and refine the character of the hero, and if the hero is to overcome the devices of his adversary he must recognise how those devices effectively demonstrate his weaknesses.
Of course it is a fools errand to try deciphering the plan of God’s providence for the future, but it is a necessary task of wisdom to recognise providential patterns in what we have experienced; to interpret the lessons implied in prosperity and suffering. Though we may err, we are not excused from the necessity. Therefore let me offer this thought, which I have not yet come across elsewhere amongst our dissidents:
The European peoples have failed a great test, and are being broken to prove what was, or may remain, great in them.
Some of the boldest dissident writers point to the Aryan or European peoples as set apart in greatness. The noble northmen, the classical empires, Christendom; these might well be pointed to as proofs of a precious lineage; perhaps we have received and passed many tests in the course of our generations. Yet we cannot ignore the errors so plain in our more recent history. Of course the progressive narrative has sought to artificially distort and blacken the annals of our people to depict us as no more than slavers and the random beneficiaries of geographic and technological boons, which is cynical and silly, but we can reject these craven claims without blinding ourselves to reality. Many of the angrier messages on race from this sphere concentrate on how our Western conurbations are being driven to ruin by the force of imported foreign masses, and this is a valid anger, but immigration is only an acute agency or catalyst in our late decline. Not so long ago, a few decades, very little of the West had signal troubles that could be laid at the door of demographics. That does not mean that it is not a real and present factor today, but we cannot trace our long decline through it.
It may be beyond our ken, and is certainly beyond the scope of this essay to discern if there was some special inflection point in the biography of the European peoples (1598? 1875? 1914?), but I say that clear minds have been cognizant of it for a long time. Perhaps we were a people elect, a favourite son, but how did we spend our inheritance? We might take some rightful pride in our technical genius, but in the days when most European nations were still basically monocultures we were doing a good job at forging our ruin through those very scientific innovations. The industrial societies that we produced were ugly, baleful things rightly despised by the sensitive of soul. Does high technology inevitably usher in the ruin of human and natural order? We cannot say, but we can say that the development of that technology is a test; here is a magical capability; take it up only if you can thereby serve the good, the true and the beautiful. This we did not manage. Even aside from the depredations which we brought to some more primitive parts of the earth, which sins of our fathers we must admit if not cringe over, we did not raise up in our own countries cleanliness, justice and broad abundance. We fell into the perverted logic of technicians and merchants, and allowed our politics to wallow in cynicism varnished with hackneyed bromides. We might say that this was not the fault of the Western peoples but of cunning and powerful agents in their midst, domestic and foreign. That may well be the case, but the failure to resist or root out those agents is no less a failure.
We must all notice how Western man/Europeans/Aryans are often signified in our discourse by certain familiar archetypes. They are all ideals; the viking philosopher, the muscle-bound catholic paragon, the fiercely capable ranching father. There is nothing wrong with holding out the ideal image or looking to the best examples of a type, but we all know how rare these images are in real life. When I walk around a town that is still largely native I see and hear people the great mass of whom could only stand as symbols of decline. I can look in the mirror and see more symptoms of decline than nobility.
Our nations have been tested and found wanting. Our political nations are conduits of corrupt power and have probably been largely so for generations, but our nations as people also seem to have had their day. Now that civil/political distinctions of nation are becoming meaningless in the age of mass migration, when we turn to look at what remains of France, Britain, America, what do we see? We see the skin colour of old, but are these people to inspire? They may retain some of the vestiges of polite civilisation in distinction to the new demographics, but is that enough? A higher mean IQ and a tendency to queue conscientiously? Yes, we may be less likely to produce killers and bandits, but we do produce a fair few of them, and more than our share of legal robber barons.
As much courage and intelligence as I find in the dissident discourse on race, I perceive that the edifice of the European people is leant upon too heavily as having worth and strength in itself. Race, as is so often pointed out here, is family write large; it is a family of families. Certain strengths are endemic in families, and the blood and culture of a family (large or small) can set it apart as functionally better or worse than others; it produces tendencies which are the nexus of individual character, and can therefore bolster or stymie the likely stature of its members. We can be rightly proud or ashamed of our blood. However, no worthy philosophy admits that we can appeal to our lineage to prove our virtue, and however propitious their heritage a family can quickly degenerate through their own poor conduct, physically, intellectually and morally. Too many are crying out “Look at the greatness of my grandfather! Consider what men of my type have accomplished! Imagine what they may become!”. How much sympathy do the gods have for these cries? A great boon, a great blessing blood may be, but for what? For the prosecution of the good, the true and the beautiful; for the salutary victory in the story. Talents are in race, but remember the parable of the talents.
I suspect that our idea of race is too broad, though we have probably been forced into less nuanced understandings through the political realities of modernity. A race is a family of families, but at what scale is it best understood? Not at the scale of the commonality of white skin and not at the scale of British or Russian heritage probably. Race at that scale is a condition or environment, not a vehicle. An Aryanish condition or environment may well have significant advantages for the cultivation of virtue and the pursuit of great accomplishments, but that does not qualify all men of that type as special or command their destiny. A race perhaps is a thing raised up to put men to a higher test, but it is the men or the peoples being tested, not the phenotype. Or let us rather say proven or refined than tested.
I hope that I will not be accused of a lack of proper feeling or solidarity when I say that is seems that a great many among the European peoples are being proven out of a higher life in the foreseeable future. We have not raised ourselves up sufficiently. As all good self-help manuals instill; we should not compare ourselves to other people, but to ourselves of yesterday. Have we reached to a higher mark or have we sunk back? The evidence is not hopeful. Technical attainment is practically all we have to appeal to in our progress, especially since the 19th century, and technical attainment, whilst requiring a certain involvement of effort and genius, does to an extent progress according to an automatic economic logic, a momentum of necessity. Our arts, our philosophy, our architecture, our very physiques are all on a shameful trajectory. Take a random snippet of prose from a 1850s book on dentistry and it will probably compare favourably in grace and command to the “literature” of our day. Listen to the worship music in the average church today and consider whether our religious life has been refined. We eat junk and distract ourselves with frippery, consoling ourselves amid the obvious vacancy of beneficial purpose that drives the economic engines which govern our lives. We should not want to make an enthno-state where we can return to enjoy tinned soup and cheap gasoline as stable family units. Our hopes and efforts have been too low, and we have not redeemed the talents we have been blessed with as a people or the advantages won by our forefathers.
We so recently went though the covid panic, and this seems to me a perfect demonstration of what I mean. Whatever malevolent intents wrought the situation, for whatever ends, there is a greater moral demonstration which emerges from the events which acts to reveal character, as in a story. These European peoples were not only duped, but most acted shamefully in compliance. Tell me this was not a spiritual test. To be duped in the first place should not be without shame. How many highlight the basic intelligence of the European peoples as the foundation of their remarkable philosophies and cathedrals; the thing that sets us apart from other tribes? Have we not seen the IQ statistics? Well what use did we put that apparent intellectuality to when the mass of the white west rolled over to transparent falsehoods? Do the Aryan peoples have a rare love for liberty and justice? If so, they seemed to forget those old affections when ordered to by middle-management.
Now of course, not everybody failed this particular test; many quietly or loudly resisted the public iniquity of medical tyranny, and suffered variously in the act. This is the point. Perhaps the people are being broken in the testing to try what virtue still remains in them. One of the aspects of the test seems to be of the courage and activity of the intellect; what are you doing with your talent? In these days it is but few people who have neither the prompting or opportunity to break through the lies of public convention. The conspiracy theorists and the dissidents may none of them have arrived at a full or clear picture of the truth, but have all braved the fence of conventionality to at least attempt a glimpse of reality. I sincerely doubt that this is sufficient for the gods, but is certainly significant.
If we look at statistics delineating the races in all sorts of matters we can come away with a strong impression of racial superiorities, but if we compare favourably to other peoples by these numbers, do we stop to question if that relative measurement is sufficient for pride? The gods do not care about standard deviations or crime numbers, but whether men are fulfilling their destiny or the commission of Christendom. Let us take this unutterable hypothetical to be the case: that European peoples were blessed with a special donation of talents, and won out through history to become the natural leaders of human history. More than that; their superiority is such that their only rightful position in the world is one of benign domination, and their government, being close to the rule of heaven, is the only proper state of mortal humanity, destined to sweep away the modes of lesser races. If that were the case then where is our bold, unapolagetic and complete empire? If we are being brutal about it, maybe we would be entitled to hold all other peoples in servitude to our wants (service in heaven being better than rule in hell, after all), but surely we would then expect to see a general and brilliant prosperity amongst the Aryans. This vision may not be very compassionate, and may be very wrong, but it at least has a Roman grandeur to it. But we have not even attained to this dubitable vision, and with our technology it is not actually an unrealistic circumstance. Perhaps this is the ruthless imperial vision of Europe’s god, but then are we going to answer for ourselves by pointing out that a German is three or four times less likely than a Somalian to fall foul of the law? What if the measure is a little higher; like that amongst Europeans poverty and crime should both be practically unknown, and that no corner of their civilizations should suffer from any filth or ugliness whatever. The towns and cities I know have gotten markedly worse since mass migration, yes, but many of those towns and cities were bleak, grubby places when they were racially uniform, and the difference is only a matter of degree.
Much ink is spilled in anguish over the question of how the European peoples will survive the coming times. This is understandable and natural, but not fundamental. As European people we worry about the survival of European people in two ways; first and most obvious in the visceral way; we and most of the people we love are European and so are directly at threat from the workings of contemporary power. The second way is more abstract; we worry about the survival of the European peoples because we see ourselves as something that is not only distinct but particularly worthy in history. But virtues can only be embodied in heritage to a limited extent; we recognise that for some reason or combination of reasons the European peoples have been the notable bearers of a goodness and strength which is not only particular, but is higher than what we measure in other tribes; but of course it is the goodness and strength which we respect rather than the bloodline per se, even if the two are practically linked. We have more and more proof every day that this ideal of goodness and strength is very poorly represented now among European peoples except by relative measures. How far, therefore, should we be concerned with the survival of the race?
Though I am playing the contrarian here, do not think that I am trying to evaporate the importance of ethnos, or even minimise it, but only treat it with more circumspection. When we look more broadly, beyond ourselves and the ones we love (family, essentially), we should not so much ask whether a race will survive our times, but whether a people will emerge from our times; which people will emerge from modernity. This is not primarily a question of survival; for though all manner of catastrophes seem to threaten human populations at large, modernity may yet improvise a means of keeping twenty billion humans alive, even comfortable, for ages to come, either mixed into racial homogeneity or widely balkanized. No; the question is which people will emerge from modernity; who will surpass its stultifying level like climbing out of a pool. This does not necessarily suggest a geographical separation, but the emergence of an obviously distinct people even amid modernity’s predominance.
Race, put simply, will not be the predicate here. Remember that modernity is essentially a circumstance that European people built up around themselves and imposed upon the rest of the world. Now and for generations past European people have not been able to extricate themselves from the circumstance of their own folly, and as a race show no signs of improvement. A significant minority of men of the Europeans show signs of promise, but speaking fairly we must admit that men of other tribes show similar promise, only is lesser numbers. The measure is not race but strength, intelligence, honesty, aptitude, principle. Race, blood, is a resource which aids men to these measures, but only very broadly. Therefore it is not conceited to say that the people capable of emerging from corrupt modernity will be found more commonly amongst the European peoples, but this statement must be tempered by the fact that their heritage is not a necessary condition, and not nearly a general qualification. To my sense we will find more of this emergent people among Americans than we will among the British, with the same caveat. Beyond that we will find a people worthy of emergence more in certain regions and districts and families that others, and in all cases these men will be the exception rather than the rule.
A self-defining people with a will to emerge from modernity can only hope to emerge by defining themselves by a standard of virtue and nothing less. Peoples do preserve, transmit and cultivate virtue, so to the extent that our racial prides have any footing in reality, the racial makeup of a new people will prove out a preponderance of certain peoples. The difference between this position and the weakness of civic nationalism and traditional liberal thinking is that our virtues must set a standard significantly higher than the average level of our familiar society; higher even than we ourselves have yet attained. We do not need to dwell upon ethnos or worry about preserving the purity of any race if the standard is sufficient to prove men and winnow them. Taboos and healthy typical preferences will always serve as a preservation to races which make themselves distinct, but the first thing is to make themselves so nobly distinct that, at least unto themselves, the question of loyalty, affinity and belonging is clear. It is not clear in our day and age.
To forge an identity that is based squarely on ethnos now seems somewhat futile to me. In the largely native British town in which I live, the Europeanness of a random one of its denizens would be a very poor guarantor of virtue, strength or stature. I could choose any number of arbitrary measures which would be better lines of division; muscle mass, taste in books, cleanliness of language. Yet by many of these measures I would not only cast off the majority of native Europeans, but obviously include some few men of foreign tribes. Well, so be it if they make the mark.
This essay is becoming unweildy as a single piece, so; to be continued...