Loving Bledsoe
07-02-2008, 05:22 AM
Thinking About White Nationalists
Posted by Paul Gottfried on June 30, 2008
Although it might be disturbing to some readers that in my following remarks about white nationalists I treat my subjects with respect, this should cause no surprise to anyone who is familiar with my work. I am accustomed to show respect for intelligent people, including those with whom I disagree. In writing about the post-Marxist Left, I focused on the intellectual side of traditional Marxists and presented their attempts to reconcile changing social realties with a Marxist historical theory. Although these efforts might have led into a blind alley, those who engaged in them were often learned and theoretically resourceful. Unlike multiculturalists or neocons, old-fashioned Marxists began with a serious body of ideas. I should also note that neither white nationalists nor Marxists represent any kind of political danger to our post-bourgeois society. Far more powerful forces are now at work battering what remains of our Anglo-American traditions of ordered liberty.
If someone were to ask me what distinguishes the Right from the Left, the difference that comes to mind most readily centers on equality. The Left favors that principle, while the Right regards it as an unhealthy obsession. A second distinction concerns individualism and community: while the Left focuses on liberating the individual from encumbering social traditions, the Right understands people as belonging to a framework of reference based on hierarchy and community. For the Right liberty has a communal value. Without the community and its established relations, the individual stands unprotected before modern power structures that would impose equal servitude on all.
These distinctions do not commit their respective partisans to any one direction in the battle between a state-controlled and a free market economy. What counts in terms of this division is not which policy one embraces but which doctrines shape one’s economic positions. English historian John Laughland has pointed out that a pro-capitalist stance can easily coexist with the leftist goal of erasing cultural and social stratification. Defenders of capitalism at the Wall Street Journal embrace Marx’s vision of a unified homogenized humanity, without thinking it necessary to pursue that end through socialist revolution.
Paleoconservatives, by sharp contrast, follow the European nationalists of the 1920s when they emphasize “national communities” and advocate tariffs to protect “a national work force.” This rightist approach toward economic collectivism, as a means of enforcing traditional attitudes, recalls the self-explanatory title of a book by German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus. Spengler did not discern a contradiction between the Prussian military spirit and sense of obedience to lawful, inherited authority and a state-planned economy. The same combination can be found unexpectedly in the postwar German socialist, whom the Nazis had savagely persecuted, Kurt Schumacher. An enigmatic and heroic figure, Schumacher deeply admired Frederick the Great and was known for his efforts to fuse Marxism with Prussian nationalism. Despite his self-identification as a Marxist, Schumacher now seems in retrospect to have been a misplaced figure of the German, anti-Nazi Right.
Having illustrated my distinctions, I would also like to relate them to what today passes for the American Right. To the extent that anything resembling the historic Right can flourish in our predominantly postmodernist, multicultural and feminist society and barring any unforeseen return to a more traditionalist establishment Right, racial nationalism, for better or worse, may be one of the few extant examples of a recognizably rightist mindset. Note that I’m not taking this position because of an ideological or methodological preference. My scholarship stresses nonracial factors in looking for explanations for social and political change. In fact I am often amused by the alacrity with which some white nationalists view civilizations as functions of the testable cognitive levels of genetically linked groups. This perspective is sometimes extended to those who died well before IQ testing was devised.
There is, however, something praiseworthy about the way white nationalists have stepped forward to challenge the purveyors of environmentalist interpretations. And here the white nationalists may be battling an unstoppable enemy. By now the multicultural Left and the politics of shame have done so well in our land that a real Right can no longer be treated with anything but odium and rage. Moreover, the current racial nationalists do not easily substitute for members of the Ku Klux Klan. The white nationalists I have known are articulate gentlemen with extraordinarily high intelligence, who may have started out as IQ prodigies in MENSA, the American organization that enlists high testing achievers. American Renaissance, both a magazine and a self-described rallying point for racial nationalists, has had its annual gatherings soar in attendance over the last seven or eight years. Although its national meeting two years ago was disturbed by a shouting match between Nazi sympathizers and Jewish members (from all indications the latter have prevailed in ousting the former), the wide range of attendees who parade their white pride, according to AR periodical editor Jared Taylor, may be more telling than his movement’s growing pains...
Read the rest @ http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/thinking_about_white_nationalists/
Posted by Paul Gottfried on June 30, 2008
Although it might be disturbing to some readers that in my following remarks about white nationalists I treat my subjects with respect, this should cause no surprise to anyone who is familiar with my work. I am accustomed to show respect for intelligent people, including those with whom I disagree. In writing about the post-Marxist Left, I focused on the intellectual side of traditional Marxists and presented their attempts to reconcile changing social realties with a Marxist historical theory. Although these efforts might have led into a blind alley, those who engaged in them were often learned and theoretically resourceful. Unlike multiculturalists or neocons, old-fashioned Marxists began with a serious body of ideas. I should also note that neither white nationalists nor Marxists represent any kind of political danger to our post-bourgeois society. Far more powerful forces are now at work battering what remains of our Anglo-American traditions of ordered liberty.
If someone were to ask me what distinguishes the Right from the Left, the difference that comes to mind most readily centers on equality. The Left favors that principle, while the Right regards it as an unhealthy obsession. A second distinction concerns individualism and community: while the Left focuses on liberating the individual from encumbering social traditions, the Right understands people as belonging to a framework of reference based on hierarchy and community. For the Right liberty has a communal value. Without the community and its established relations, the individual stands unprotected before modern power structures that would impose equal servitude on all.
These distinctions do not commit their respective partisans to any one direction in the battle between a state-controlled and a free market economy. What counts in terms of this division is not which policy one embraces but which doctrines shape one’s economic positions. English historian John Laughland has pointed out that a pro-capitalist stance can easily coexist with the leftist goal of erasing cultural and social stratification. Defenders of capitalism at the Wall Street Journal embrace Marx’s vision of a unified homogenized humanity, without thinking it necessary to pursue that end through socialist revolution.
Paleoconservatives, by sharp contrast, follow the European nationalists of the 1920s when they emphasize “national communities” and advocate tariffs to protect “a national work force.” This rightist approach toward economic collectivism, as a means of enforcing traditional attitudes, recalls the self-explanatory title of a book by German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus. Spengler did not discern a contradiction between the Prussian military spirit and sense of obedience to lawful, inherited authority and a state-planned economy. The same combination can be found unexpectedly in the postwar German socialist, whom the Nazis had savagely persecuted, Kurt Schumacher. An enigmatic and heroic figure, Schumacher deeply admired Frederick the Great and was known for his efforts to fuse Marxism with Prussian nationalism. Despite his self-identification as a Marxist, Schumacher now seems in retrospect to have been a misplaced figure of the German, anti-Nazi Right.
Having illustrated my distinctions, I would also like to relate them to what today passes for the American Right. To the extent that anything resembling the historic Right can flourish in our predominantly postmodernist, multicultural and feminist society and barring any unforeseen return to a more traditionalist establishment Right, racial nationalism, for better or worse, may be one of the few extant examples of a recognizably rightist mindset. Note that I’m not taking this position because of an ideological or methodological preference. My scholarship stresses nonracial factors in looking for explanations for social and political change. In fact I am often amused by the alacrity with which some white nationalists view civilizations as functions of the testable cognitive levels of genetically linked groups. This perspective is sometimes extended to those who died well before IQ testing was devised.
There is, however, something praiseworthy about the way white nationalists have stepped forward to challenge the purveyors of environmentalist interpretations. And here the white nationalists may be battling an unstoppable enemy. By now the multicultural Left and the politics of shame have done so well in our land that a real Right can no longer be treated with anything but odium and rage. Moreover, the current racial nationalists do not easily substitute for members of the Ku Klux Klan. The white nationalists I have known are articulate gentlemen with extraordinarily high intelligence, who may have started out as IQ prodigies in MENSA, the American organization that enlists high testing achievers. American Renaissance, both a magazine and a self-described rallying point for racial nationalists, has had its annual gatherings soar in attendance over the last seven or eight years. Although its national meeting two years ago was disturbed by a shouting match between Nazi sympathizers and Jewish members (from all indications the latter have prevailed in ousting the former), the wide range of attendees who parade their white pride, according to AR periodical editor Jared Taylor, may be more telling than his movement’s growing pains...
Read the rest @ http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/thinking_about_white_nationalists/