Sunday, June 2, 2013

Goody Goody Two Shoes

by Ryan Walsh

Political Correctness is not like a religion IT IS a religion. Complete with its own ruthless high priests constantly on the lookout for heretics to its dogma of ‘tolerance’ and ‘equality’.
But tolerance also means to “endure”, ” to put up with” , “to suffer through” and they are the accurate descriptions of the situation for white people particularly in ultra PC anglosphere countries.
During a football game in a round known hypocritically as the “indigenous round” a specific favouring of race in itself, we see the extraordinary spectacle of a fully grown 30 something man, a fit sports ‘star’ no less in the supposed rough and tough world of football, apparently fall to pieces over ‘name calling’ from a young 13 year old girl.
The player pointed to her in the crowd and kicked off a unforgivable round of events including security guards parading her through the crowd, being interviewed by police who detained her for 2 hours without even her mum, to AFL officials making an example of her and the media spreading her name and picture far and wide.
He later decided that such a deal shouldn’t be made of it, perhaps after realising that a burly, well paid athlete making an example of a young school girl could be received poorly by people, but by then it was too late. A respected, highly-paid footballer, the powerful institution of the AFL and the collective force of the mass media had unleashed a witless, cowardly mob on a vulnerable little girl. The anti-racists witch hunt has found a new target. A change from video footage of people on public transport taken on mobile phones.
Compare the treatment of a similar aged girl from a country we love to bash for ‘human rights’, Communist China.
“Chinese Police Handcuff Teen Girl for Accidentally Spilling Drink on Government Car May 29 2013
Two officials in China reportedly were suspended after allegedly handcuffing a teenage girl who spilled water on a government car and parading her around town.
The story of the teens alleged mistreatment by officials went viral after photos of the handcuffed 13-year-old were posted on a Chinese micro-blogging site.
According to the site, the girl accidentally splashed water on a government car in south-west China. The officials reportedly began arguing with the girl and she was subsequently handcuffed and forced to parade on the street for 20 minutes, according to the International Business Times.”
At least in the Chinese case, these officers were apparently suspended. Not here in Australia where they are lauded
This level of harassment in the West of whites beggars belief that Australia or the USA or UK are democracies, the increasing level of PC laws to stifle dissent, surveillance and coercion by the state really proves that we are not a democracy but only a liberal democracy. Read that as a LIBERAL regime.
The crime this time? the young 13 year old Australian girl called him the name of an animal. In this case it wasn’t a goose -“ya goose you over tightened those bolts” or a turkey “you bloody turkey, didn’t you save that word doc before you shut your computer” or cockroach, dog, pig but APE. Probably the most complex and intelligent out of the animal names listed or any that one might be called.
Aren’t all humans at least from the evolutionary perspective APES? only evangelical Christians say otherwise. Those dogmatic high priests of Political Correct-ianity decreed to the world that we are all the SAME, we are all EQUAL and that race is only a matter of skin colour. This is to be believed as a truth, when it benefits the anti-white brigade, but when it serves their purposes, racial differences become real.
Humanity is a diverse species with many races, ethnicities and associated cultures- this is a good thing. If according to the PC Priests we are ALL EQUAL then why would any one particular race or group of people be more insulted or afraid of a name than any other? I can say I have been called white c##t, cracker, honkey, white devil numerous times and its water off a ducks back, it even brings a smile because I am confident with myself and quietly proud in my heritage as any race or ethnicity should be.  Here lies the paradox. Some anti-racists have pointed out that the term ‘ape’ is derogatory to Aboriginals because of their characteristics, yet at the same time, they argue that such differences don’t exist.
Why does the Liberal establishment go ‘ape’, as it were over this? It is perhaps understandable for Goodes, and he has the right to think what he likes and take offence when he wants, but why the rest? Why do they back him up completely, rather than question whether his reaction, pointing out a 13 year old girl in front of thousands, was disproportionate? Are the Politically Correct Liberals not racist in themselves, by suggesting that Goodes, being Aboriginal has a greater claim to grievance over the “ape” slur than a white person would have?
The way this girl was treated was disproportionate. A 13 year old girl, using what on the surface is a low grade insult, isn’t representing a threat to the future of this country. Most people understand its commonplace to call each other names, it’s part of the robust activity of human interaction which includes giving people a good ribbing and receiving it. Many of us have called someone who is relatively large and or a bit hairy an APE. Heck every father is an APE to his young boys when he wrestles with them, and that father may only be 70kg but that’s huge to a 3 year old.
This incident has given the mainstream media, who are suffering from a slow decline into obsolescence and diminishing sales, another “oh golly gosh, look at this racism” episode to exploit. Liberal journalists are tripping over each other to write about how latent ‘racism’ is still a huge problem, about how a 13 year old girl at the football is an example of some imaginary black stain that taints white history, and how we all must put more effort to make sure there are no more racists. Yes, in an age where an Aboriginal footballer, who most likely is getting paid rather handsomely just for kicking a ball around, who can get a 13 year old girl grilled by police without a lawyer for 2 hours by a simple point of the finger, who has the media (and human rights commission, hate laws, racial vilification laws etc.) behind him, we still have journalists trying to impress upon us that Australia today is not really different to the fictional “slave masters” of days gone by. If they truly cared about Aboriginals, they would do more to help remote communities which are plagued by alcoholism and social dysfunction as well as promote more autonomy for Aboriginal people over their own affairs. If they truly cared about Aboriginals, they would do more to help remote communities which are plagued by alcoholism and social dysfunction. But that wouldn’t serve any anti-white purpose. Far better to focus on someone who is doing well, and get an anti-white, anti-Anglo Australia story out of it. The reaction of the media seems to clearly show that they don’t care so much about Goodes, but rather relish the opportunity to moralise against whites.
A nefarious example is here, an article in The Age titled “Getting real about racism”i. The author, Sam De Brito, who has a blog called “All men are liars” (how Politically Correct!), criticises Australia for allowing this “casual racism” to go unpunished. Taking the anti-racist, that is, anti-white position, he writes some gems, such as this.
“I’ll take a guess at why your casual-Eddie-McGuire-type-racism persists in this country – because you don’t get killed for it and you certainly don’t get punished if you’re rich and white.”
and
I’m saying we need to get real about punishing it.
How does he want to ‘get real’ about punishing a 13 year old girl exactly? But where he really reveals the dark side of anti-racist mentality, is with statements such as this.
This is not to say the standard result for using racial slurs in a country like the US is death – but baby, you pull an “ape” or “nigger” line out on the subway of your average US city, you’re odds-on to get a beating. You say it to the wrong person and you’re gonna get shot or stabbed or stomped into a cranial pizza.
and
Even the dumbest, most rusted-on American racist knows if you call a black person a nigger, you better bring it, because you’re gonna get a savage reaction, born of the hurt Adam Goodes articulated so well in his press conference this week.
The irony was lost on him, but not one some of the commenter’s to this article. In an article “against racism”, he very clearly suggests that black Americans would quickly resort to illegal acts of violent crime and savagery. Not only is he almost supporting such activity, he is unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, stereotyping black people as ones who would shoot, stab or stomp someone who said something offensive. He is contrasting this with (white) Australia, where people are more reasonable! Anti-racism is anti-white, and if an anti-racist, such as De Brito actually make racist comments against blacks in order to be anti-white, then according to the Politically Correct hierarchy, it is permissible. Racism is permitted in all forms, if it is ultimately to criticise whites. Call an Aboriginal an ape or suggest they play the part of King Kong, its police and loss of job for you. Say that blacks would shoot and stop you, but do it to be “anti-white”, you get paid.
We would caution a simpleton like De Brito on immature hints at violence. It’s almost as if he thinks his argument, indeed any position, is stronger when it could possibly be backed up with real violence on the street. Well, De Brito, anyone can harness, organise and arrange ‘violence, everybody always has a bigger stronger brother, a MMA friend that could avenge one act of violence with another, and so on and so forth. What if De Brito had to cover a story whereby in this fictional example Samoans were were allegedly harassing some Chinese. Samoans are well known to be generally larger on average physically than Chinese who are generally smaller, how would his argument flow in this example? would he argue that Samoans should not be worried about street level beatings from Chinese individuals, but warn Samoa that the Chinese collectively are tougher and can ‘bring it’ in the form of military superiority that could stomp the island of Samoa into a pizza? Back off on your threats of violence against whites.
Compare this media created race ‘furore’ over the animal name calling to a recently unlikely media ‘ star’ Charles Ramsay. He is a African American man who made the comment at the end of one interview.
“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms,” he said. “Something is wrong here. Dead give away. Dead giveaway. Deeeeeeeeeeaaaaaad giveaway. Either she’s homeless, or she’s got problems. That’s the only reason she’d run to a black man.”
Where is the chorus condemning that much more explicit comment? oh you say he rescued somebody, fine, but if a white rescuer tacked such words onto any interview we wouldn’t hear the end of it. It would overshadow the good deed.
We defend the right of Mr Ramsay or the young girl to speak their minds, our freedoms do not end where your feelings start.
Maybe we should next move to pickup those ‘racists’ in National Gorilla Suit Day. Look at those white hands sticking out of the suits, they say it’s just for fun but we know they’re really doing it to get at black people.

Then there is Black Face, apparently a horrible act hurtful to black people.
Liberals abroad and a few locally attempted to create hysteria over the 2009 episode of Australian comedy show Hey Hey its Saturday on which some contestants blacked up as the Jackson five.
Then liberals again created a stir in a tea pot about some young Aussie boys who have dressed up as the “The Voice” TV show judges, originally Delta Goodrem (one of the judges imitated) participated via Twitter as any of us would congratulating them on their humour then backtracked.
Why can liberals not explain satisfactorily the hypocrisy of WhiteFace?
Never mind small random skits on a TV show or fleeting tweets on Twitter, the below two African actors played white females in a 2004 Hollywood movie called White Chicks that will forever be available for consumption in bricks and mortar stores.








The fact is, there is no hysteria, the Australian media like all Western countries is mostly a closed shop owned by a small number of interests and operates on a blatant liberal bias. It’s important to separate your thoughts and impressions from the large power projection into our living rooms, cars and lunch room tables the controlled media has via TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.
Forget, Eddy McGuire, Darryl Summers and Delta Goodrem they are selfish plastic celebrities whose public backtracking just provides a double bonus to the systems attempt at defining our taboos and engineering our responses. But we wouldn’t expect anything else from weak individuals who depend on their ‘media profile’ for monetary gain.
You and I, our workmates, fathers, mothers, neighbours, family and the vast majority of society do not share their views, we instead are outraged at the we are being socially engineered, coerced and harassed into changing our values, traditions and principles. These little Stalin’s will fail, to notice difference, to joke and jest and receive it in return is to be human and artificial repression of our humanity will be ultimately unsuccessful.
This case and the lurking spectre of ‘Anti Racism’ a PC commandment only serves to illustrate that yet again ANTI RACISM is a Codeword for ANTI WHITE.

Butchery in Woolwich in a defenceless Britain

By Lucas Delaney



The brutal attack of the 25 year old solder Lee Rigby in Woolwich on the 22nd of May was shocking, but not simply for the brutal nature of the attack, where a man is hacked to death and beheaded in broad daylight. This is shocking in itself, but was quite surprising, to this author at least, was the brazen and open nature of the attackers. The attackers, both of Nigerian descent but born in London conducted this crime with a disturbing sense of audacity and openness. The attackers upon seeing Mr Rigby in the street wearing a “Help for Heroes” T-Shirt, hit him with their Vauxhall and then set upon him and hacked him to death. The crime was conducted in broad daylight, in full view of others and on camera. After the attack, the murderers remained on the scene, speaking to people and declaring that they wanted to start a war.

One of the assailants made the following speech to someone capturing the event on video.


“The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers, and this British soldier is one, is a eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. So what if we want to live by the Sharia in Muslim lands. Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us? Rather you lot are extreme. You are the ones. When you drop a bomb, do you think it hits one person or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family. This is the reality. By Allah, if I saw your mother today with a buggy I would help her up the stairs. This is my nature. But we are forced by the Qur’an in Sura at-Tawba [Chapter 9 of the Qur'an], through many, many ayah [verses] throughout the Qur’an that [say] we must fight them as they fight us, a eye for a eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologise that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are going to die? No it’s going to be the average guy, like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so we ca.., so you can all live in peace. Leave our lands and you will live in peace. That’s all I have to say. Allah’s peace and blessings be upon Muhammad.” i

This is not the first time, that supposedly “British” citizens have turned against Briton in the name of Islam. Of four bombers responsible for the 7/7 London Bombings in 2005, all four were citizens with three of them being born in England. The 2008 Exeter attempted bombing was also planned by a British born Muslim as well as the members busted planning a more recent attempt in England. Just days after the Woolwich slaying, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight PK709 was threatened by two British nationals, with fighter jets being scrambled to what was appearing to be a potential hijacking. The newspapers call these men British, but their loyalty was clearly not to Britain. Nick Griffin, who predicted prior to the 7/7 London attack that British born Muslims would end up conducting a terrorist attack was vilified for this statement, but he has been proven right, multiple times.

Each time this occurs, we are told that “This is not Islam”, “This is not representative of Muslims” and the like. Meaningless statements, because for ANY political of religious movement, it is always, always a minority of people who are responsible for how it acts, whether it be Judaism, Christianity, Socialism, Islam, Fascism or Scientology. So pointing out that the acts committed in the name of Islam against the west are exceptions proves nothing, as it is always the exceptional few which shape history and shape conflict. Even during the American war of independence, the agitation and fighting was done by a minority. The passive majority simple enable the minority.

Why were these killers so brazen? We can’t be sure, but the quoted statement above shows a level of determination and willing to fight that is foreign to most Britons. White British are set to become a minority on their Island by 2060, a little over a generation from now. White Londoners are leaving London en masse mostly due to the influx of immigrants. Politically Correct laws are enforced with zeal, and any Briton who speaks against the ethnic destruction of Britain is shouted down by masses of people who are essentially too scared to admit agreeing with them. Those who criticize Islam are denounced by the same people as an “Islamophobe”, which Jim Goad defined as “Someone so terrified of Islamic retribution, they’re afraid to say anything bad about Islam.”. So true.

Watching the video of the attacker giving his threats against Britain, this definition seems to quite lucidly sum up Britain today. Where the police hold back investigating Pakistani rape gang for fear of being accused racist. Where an attack on an off duty solder takes place near the army barracks, and the attackers are milling around for 20 minutes before the police arrived. Why so long? Where despite the fact time and time again, that there are successful or aborted terror attempts against the British people, by people born in Britain, the Anti-White Brigade still browbeat people into accepting that they are all one, and that religion or background should not distinguish between Britons. Where a 14 year old can get held for an hour by police for not wanting to sit near Asian children at lunch, and where a 9 year old commits suicide after being bullied for being white and the parents still feel the need to express that they are ‘tolerant’.

It is sad to see a soldier hacked to death, but it is also sad to see the shrugging of shoulders and awkwardness that comes after such an event, where politicians are more interested in continuing to push the ‘diversity is good’ message than protect their nation against belligerents, and where the guilt ridden would rather allow themselves to be attacked and subjugated, than appear to be nationalist or act in their own self interest. This has been called a ‘terror’ attack, but I don’t think this, or the 7/7 London bombing are best described as acts of terror. Calling them acts of terror masks the deeper, underlying problem. These are acts of treason. These are acts, by people born in Britain, whom according to the indoctrination given to every schoolchild, is just as British as Shakespeare and Cromwell, against the British people. They are people who are not of the British nation. They can’t be. Not only are they not even European, let along British, their loyalty, first and foremost is to another nation, another idea, another people.

Why the brazenness by the attacker? I think it comes down to one fact. The British people, that is the White British people are essentially defenseless, both physically and ideologically. The British don’t know it, but all those who want to take advantage of them can. They are fighting someone who has both hands tied behind their back. They are fighting someone who will be stabbed in the back by those behind him, if he fights back.

Britain once ruled the world, but now it rolls out the red carpet to all and sundry in the world, including its enemies, and further to that, forces it citizens to accept them as brothers, despite the insanity such a situation. There was a time when the Western world, when whites would stand up for each other and fight for their nation. Now white people sit and watch their own destruction, as if it is some spectator sport. Once Britain could count on other commonwealth countries to fight for it, as Anglo nations rallied to support the motherland, now it is infested by anti-whites, who want to see the end of their own race and their own nation. Once men would march for their motherland, now those who fight for the survival of their own nation on their own soil, are targeted by their compatriots and government for ‘hate’. When you see the video of the attacker, hands bloodied holding the machete used to hack a soldier walking the street and threatening war to people with impunity and arrogance, just remember this. That in that country, the people who don’t accept such people becoming British are called ‘haters’ and ‘intolerant’ and risk prison.

If there is one picture which sums up Britain today, it’s this…

ihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Woolwich_attack

Thatcher and the Nationalists

by Nicholas Haswell



1. Introduction
A few weeks have passed since Thatcher’s death, and so I thought it would be appropriate to write something on her from a nationalist perspective. This article, however, aims to offer something different from the usual ‘Thatcher tricked Britons into not voting for the National Front’ line peddled by so many British commentators.
In times of great crisis – such as in the white Western countries in the 1930s, or in the 1970s – economics becomes crucial in politics. A politician will stand or fall on ‘the economy’. So, in the middle of this essay, the economics of the Thatcher era is discussed at great length and detail, simply because of the importance of the subject. Yockey wrote, in Imperium (1948), that British intellectuals of the 19th century (and he counts Marx as being of the British intellectual tradition) were obsessed by economics, and that now, in the 20th century – the century of fascism – the ‘old’ British Idea, of liberalism in politics and in economics, has passed. Or so he declares. At any rate, Thatcher, certainly, was part of that British tradition decried by Yockey, and part of the Thatcher mythos was that her government, and influence, would revive the old, Victorian morality, economics, politics.
Another reason why I have devoted such a great deal of space here to the economic question is that an account is needed of what actually happened in Thatcher’s Britain and the other Anglo-Saxon countries (the US, Australia) in her time. There’s a great deal of economic illiteracy on the subject, both in nationalist commentary and in the mainstream media. Often this sort of commentary takes refuge in vagueness and abstraction: ‘Free markets’, ‘Neoliberalism’, ‘Individualism’, ‘Socialism’, ‘There is no such thing as society’ – all of these terms and phrases don’t mean very much. It’s only when we look at the dominant economic ideas of the time- supply-sideism, monetarism (and Thatcher was, in the first half of her career, a devout monetarist) – that we seem to get anywhere with our analysis.
The opening and closing sections of this essay cover more conventional terrain, i.e., subjects which are more conducive to nationalists, so those who don’t have an interest in monetarism versus supply-side can skip the middle section and read the other two.
2. The anti-Thatcher Left, the National Front, Doctor Who
The British Left hates Britain,and the British working-classes. Which is why their behavior after Thatcher’s death, and their attacks, were so hypocritical.
During the 1980s, Thatcher closed some loss-making state-owned mines (which were costing the British taxpayer what would be billions in today’s pounds) and threw thousands of miners out of work. This destroyed the mining communities, the Left say. They Thatcher for this reason. But they don’t have a word for the British working-classes in British towns such as Leicester, Dagenham, Barking, which have been thrust out and reduced to a minority by Indian and Muslim immigration; they wouldn’t throw celebration parties for the deaths of Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson and the other New Labour types who helped bring about the mass ethnic-cleansing of the British in the past ten years.
(The Left controls British political discourse today, and they police it rigorously. They set the rules of engagement, and one of those rules is that attacks on a politician for their economic policies or industrial relations policies is perfectly acceptable, attacks on a politician for their immigration policies aren’t).
The Left doesn’t mention the fate of these working-class towns because the Left, in actual fact, wants to kill off all the white British in Britain and replace them with a multi-culti mix of Africans, Indians, Muslims. They are succeeding in doing this, and succeeding brilliantly: so why would they attack New Labour’s immigration policy? Socialism and anarchism, in fact, don’t lead to a sense of loyalty towards, or a desire to protect, the British working-classes. It’s naïve to think otherwise.
It’s ironic that Thatcher is denounced for encouraging an ethic of “greed” and “individualism”: many of the immigrants who have flocked to the UK in the past fifteen years are among the greediest people on the planet – for example, the Afghan asylum-seeker who lives in a £GBP1.2 million pound house, paid for by the local council, or the Roma immigrant who earns a vast fortune from selling copies of The Big Issue, pickpocketing and stealing copper wire, and who then remits the proceeds back to Romania or Bulgaria. In general, the hordes of African, Indian and Pakistani immigrants who have swarmed to the UK are out to take all they can get; they don’t care what impact they have on Britain – if they take British jobs (nine out of ten British jobs created under New Labour went to immigrants) or British welfare, public housing, health and hospital services, etc. These selfish and greedy individuals have done far more damage to the British body politic than, say, some (largely fictional) Thatcherite Cockney share trader who works in the City of London.
We know that Thatcher was relentlessly attacked by the Left in her lifetime, particularly in popular culture (I know of plenty of negative depictions and satires of Thatcher from the British comic books of that time, also the TV shows – and who could forget the send-up of Thatcher and her husband at the end of the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only (1981)?). Much of this was because of the differences of attitudes between generations: 99% of the artists, writers, comedians, pop singers were liberal baby-boomers who hated Thatcher because, in part, she was the same age as their parents, and Thatcher reflected their parents’ values and attitudes like no other politician.
In regard to those attitudes, the degree to which things have changed since then is astonishing. Thatcher once denounced a children’s book called Heather Has Two Mommies (1989), about a girl raised by two lesbian “mothers”: Thatcher regarded the book as being a symptom of the insanity of the ‘Loony Left’. Well, now the lunatics are running the asylum, and Thatcher’s attitudes towards Heather and her two mommies are out of date – and, worse, homophobic and hateful. Very few politicians today have the courage to go up against the homosexual agenda – certainly today’s British conservatives don’t – and, according to the British tabloids, British schoolchildren are taught about the wonders of gay sex as part of their school sex education from an early age.
I myself felt some sadness when Margaret Thatcher died: not because I am a neoliberal or New Right conservative (by New Right, I mean the 1980s-era New Right of Thatcher, Reagan, Friedman, Hayek, et al.) – no, it was because Thatcher was the same age as my grandmother and the same type of person; both their ideologies – on conservatism, immigration, drugs, promiscuity, crime, homosexuality and the rest – were a reflection of the times they lived in (WWII, and then the post-war boom period), the experiences which shaped their characters. (It’s a curious thing that the Left always blames the environment when it comes to, say, explaining away the bad behavior of an Afro-American murderer in Chicago or Montgomery, Alabama (‘He couldn’t help it, he was raised that way’) but won’t make that exception for someone like Thatcher). The death of Thatcher represents an end of an era: simply put, the generation of our grandparents is passing away, and so are their values. Thatcher’s generation, almost to a man and a woman, was – on a subconscious or unconscious level – racialist, and wouldn’t have approved of what’s happened to Britain today: the colonization of major population centers, like London, by immigrants from Africa, India and the Middle East. Which isn’t to say that they fought against this colonization: they didn’t. In fact, it was certain liberal members of Thatcher’s generation – Edward Heath in Britain, Lyndon Johnson and Teddy Kennedy in the USA, Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam in Australia – who got the ball rolling when it came to mass non-white immigration in the West, and it was these liberals of Thatcher’s generation who, probably more than anyone else, are to blame for our present predicament. But, on the whole, most of Thatcher’s generation was anti-immigrant, but, instead of acting, they looked on helplessly, while their countries were subjected to changes – wrought from the outside – which they didn’t understand.
Among nationalist commentators, Thatcher is always blamed for stealing votes from the National Front in the 1979 general election. As we know, the National Front (it’s hard to believe today) was the third-biggest party in Britain by the late 1970s, and doing well in the polls; then Thatcher went on TV in 1978, made some off-hand comments as to their being too many immigrants (‘People feel as though they are being swamped in their homes’, ‘We are a British nation with British characteristics’) and then went to win the election the next year in a landslide. The National Front’s vote never recovered, and, according to legend (nationalist legend), non-white immigration went up and up.
It’s hard to get statistics on immigration into Britain before the 1990s, but I did find this graph:
As we can see, immigration levels from Africa and Asia (Asia includes India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) were moderate in Thatcher’s time, but exploded under Labour. That’s more or less commensurate with what happened elsewhere in the West: e.g., in Australia, immigration never reached disastrous levels until the past ten years or so, when the “conservative” government of John Howard began bringing in 150,000 – 200,000 immigrants (mainly from India and China), and the Australian population increased by 17%. Both Australia, and Britain, were far more white in the eighties than they are now.
We can use statistics: what about another source? I think one can get a good idea of the level of whiteness in British culture from looking at the history of one of Britain’s longest-running serials, Doctor Who, which began in 1963. The show is a British institution – like the monarchy or the House of Lords – and gives a good insight into Britain and race. If we look at the episodes of Doctor Who from the Thatcher period (starring Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) we see hardly any Afro-Caribbean or Indian actors. In fact, having just about seen all the episodes from that period, I can’t recall any. (No doubt a Doctor Who fanatic can challenge me on this point, and cite such-and-such a storyline with a non-white actor; but the exception proves the rule). If we flash-forward, however, to the present series from 2005, penned by the homosexual Russell T. Davies, the very first scene is of a young white woman character (Rose, played by the popular singer Billy Piper) tongue-kissing a black actor (Mickey, played by the embarrassingly bad actor Noel Clarke). Russell – who also penned the British version of the TV series Queer as Folk (1999-2000) – obviously intended to make a statement: ‘Up yours, Britain! My Doctor Who is about the hip, new, trendy New Labour Britain, where young white British aren’t averse to a bit of coal-burning and mud-sharking’. (The actress Billy Piper, I recall, was married to a black in real life at one time). As can be expected, the new series then went on to gratuitously cast black and Indian actors at every conceivable point – something the old one never did. One episode had the doctor and his companion (a young black woman) go back in time to the Elizabethan era, where they encountered some black people in Elizabethan dress walking down the London streets. The Doctor then turns to his companion and reassures her, ‘You see, things aren’t so different here’. (Those who are familiar with British television will know that this is a typical tactic: depicting the Britain of the past as being at least partly non-white. Often, the British television producers and writers will go to ridiculous lengths to do this: e.g., they made a series of Robin Hood where Friar Tuck was played by a black actor skilled in Kung Fu).
In terms of racial homogeneity, I make the argument that Thatcher’s Britain, or Reagan’s America, or Bob Hawke’s Australia, were much better than the Britain, America and Australia today: and, not coincidentally, the level of national pride in those countries back then was greater (or at least, Thatcher, Reagan and Hawke made a conscious effort to boost levels of national pride).
Did Thatcher steal the National Front by making false promises, and why did the Far Right in Britain struggle in the 1980s? As the American journalist and supply-side economics publicist Jude Wanniski said, during an election, voters are faced with a bundle of issues, and some are more important than others. The issues in 1979 were: industrial mayhem, high unemployment, high inflation, stagnant growth, socialism – and immigration. The latter was important to British voters, then as in now, but simply not as important as the other issues. It’s only now that immigration in Britain seems to be moving to the forefront of the timid British voter’s consciousness, and this is expressed through an increasing vote for UKIP – which is a moderate, anti-EU and non-racialist, non-Far Right party.
3. Advanced Master Class in Thatchernomics
But let’s backtrack to the economy of the 1970s and the 1980s. Why did Britain (along with the rest of the West) enjoy a boom from about 1949 to 1971, and why did it collapse afterwards?
The supply-side analysis is, to me, the most compelling. To the supply-siders, it was sudden hikes in taxes and tariffs which led to the Great Depression; monetary policy (most countries were on the gold standard and fixed exchange rates) had little to nothing to do with it. After the war, Britain, along with the West, signed on to the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, which meant that the pound was fixed to the US dollar, which in turn was fixed to gold. The Depression-era trade barriers were torn down, and the high tax rates from the period of the war were gradually lessened. (In fact, tax rates stayed high on paper – the top rate of income tax in the US was 90% – but hardly anyone paid it. Plenty of tax loopholes were put in place, and the working-class taxpayer received generous credits and rebates – e.g., the US paid a rebate of $USD600 to families with dependent children, which was a handsome sum at the time). British tax rates were sharply progressive, but this only became a problem when Britain periodically devalued the pound (to ‘boost exports’ and ‘create jobs’), which had the effect of bringing about inflation and pushing British workers into higher and higher progressive rates.
The entire system exploded when Nixon took the US – and the world – off gold in August 1971. Nixon had become convinced – under the influence of Jewish-American economists such as Milton Friedman and Ben Stein – that US economic growth could be increased, and unemployment reduced, if the US Federal Reserve were to print more money and create inflation (this is the Bernanke and Obama doctrine of today – today it is called ‘quantitative easing’). The gold standard was an obstacle to this, and so had to be removed. The Fed stopped exchanging gold for US dollars (and vice versa) in 1967, suspended the gold standard ‘temporarily’ in 1971, and then announced that the suspension would be permanent in 1973. The value of the US dollar – and all the currencies fixed to it, including the pound – fell dramatically afterwards, and the price of gold, along with oil, land and other commodities – shot up into the stratosphere. The great inflation and stagnation of the 1970s was underway. (When a currency loses value in terms of gold – that is, it takes more of a currency to buy an ounce of gold – this is inflation. E.g., if the gold price goes from $USD35 an ounce to $USD850 an ounce, the US dollar has lost value, and so buys less goods. Prices in dollars go up – which is inflation).
We can see, from the following chart, what happened to the British pound in terms of gold in the 1970s:
The massive depreciation of the pound in terms of gold in the 1970s led to inflation, and one side effect was that the working- and middle-class British were pushed into higher and higher tax rates. Given that these rates (83% top rate for income tax, 98% for earnings from dividends and interest, 52% corporate profits tax) were among the highest in the Western world, the effects were pernicious.
Jude Wanniski wrote an amusing editorial for the Wall Street Journal in 1975, describing the Britain of that period:
Britain, it is regularly noted, always seems to somehow “muddle through” despite the best efforts of its government. One reason has been that, in their imperfect understanding of economics, the income redistributors have always overlooked a few opportunities to confiscate wealth. Through these tiny cracks in the tax laws, otherwise known as “loopholes,” the private economy has always been able to spy enough incentive to keep producing. As a result of the current economic crisis, however, the Labor government made a determined search for these tiny cracks and has found most of them.
Because most of what businesses pay their managers in increased wages is taken away by the government in taxes, there have been exotic schemes to permit managers to live off business perquisites. These are being closed up. A year from now, employers will be taxed on any private medical insurance cover they receive, the government having determined that private medical treatment is a great incentive to keep producing. Mr. Healey also promises to tighten up on capital-gains taxation, and has already closed an accounting loophole whereby corporations could avoid some taxation by selling shares they owned and taking the loss, and buying them back the next day.
The British government is now so clearly headed toward a policy of total confiscation that anyone who has any wealth left is discounting furiously at any chance to get it out of the country. Mr. Healey wisely halted the importing of gold coins, which could be rather easily smuggled out, and he’s slapped a 25% value-added tax on jewelry, along with radios, televisions and electrical appliances. The result of all this is of course, to bring investment to a screeching halt by drying up both available funds and potential returns. The price can only be still slower economic growth, and still lower living standards for all the British, rich and poor.
Goodbye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you. Since we’re following down the same road, perhaps we’ll meet again.
http://www.polyconomics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1740:manic-keynesianism&catid=50:2001
Incidentally, Doctor Who ran a story called ‘The Sunmakers’ in 1977, which satirised the Labour government, and the confiscatory British tax rates, of that period.
What was the solution to Britain’s – and the West’s – economic problems in this time? The answer – according to the supply-side economic model – was simple enough: cut those tax rates and go back to gold. As we know, in the 1980s, we saw a dramatic cut in those rates, but no return to the gold standard. At the time, a return to gold wasn’t politically feasible. (Now, after fifteen years of bad monetary policy, a return to gold is at least being discussed, which is an improvement of sorts).
The price of gold, and inflation, went up and up until 1980, but thereafter both fell, and fell sharply. From the chart above, we see a sharp appreciation of the British pound in the early 1980s: gold goes from over £GPB600 an ounce to £GPB400 an ounce – a revaluation of at least 66%. Prices for oil and other commodities also went down and the value of the pound went up; the same happened in the US, where the gold price dropped from $USD600 an ounce to $USD300. This led to the disastrous early 1980s recession in the US and UK which, at the time, was the worst since the end of WWII. (Australia experienced it as well – the Australian dollar was fixed to the US). An appreciating currency, and falling commodity prices, leads to falling prices elsewhere throughout the economy: this is deflation, which can be every bit as detrimental as inflation. (Australia’s economy – which then, as now, depends on exporting commodities – was wrecked by the sudden collapse in commodity prices).
What happened? According to Wanniski, the Reagan and Thatcher tax cuts (Reagan cut the top rate from 70% to 50%, Thatcher, 83% to 60%) led to a revival of economic activity and consequently, a huge demand for dollars and pounds. Unfortunately, neither the Fed or the Bank of England were willing or able to supply currency in the quantities demanded; so demand for pounds and dollars outstripped the supply. When that happens, the value of the pound and the dollar went up, up, up. An increased value of a currency, such as the pound, means that prices in terms of pounds drop. Hence deflation…
This wouldn’t have been a problem under the gold standard: if dollars were in short supply, gold could have been presented to the Fed and exchanged for dollars, and the Fed would have been able to supply the US economy with all the dollars needed. But this wasn’t the case in the early 1980s. So both the US and the UK – and Australia – experienced a brutal deflation. These countries only experienced recovery when their central banks eased up and began providing sufficient quantities of currency. As we can see from the above chart, the UK gold price rose again after that deflationary spell.
The supply-siders opined that the UK recovery wasn’t as quick as it could have been, because, even though Thatcher had cut income tax rates substantially, she had nearly doubled the VAT (value-added tax) from 8% to 15% to ‘make up for lost revenue’. Certainly, the UK economy was quite weak in the 1980s, even in comparison to now, and it was in this period – of the early 1980s recession – that Thatcher gained her reputation as a devotee of harsh austerity.
At the time, the doctrine of monetarism dominated monetary policy in the UK, Britain and Australia. Milton Friedman’s theory was that inflation and economic growth go together, and that inflation can be controlled by controlling the money supply – which is an aggregate measuring the total sum of a currency in circulation. If a central bank increases the money supply, it will increase inflation, economic growth and employment; if a central bank decreases it, it brings about deflation, recession, unemployment. (On the surface of it, this looks like the supply-side doctrine sketched out above, but it isn’t. The supply-siders don’t believe that the amount of money in circulation can be measured with accuracy, and it’s gold and commodity prices which provide the best indication of how much ‘liquid’ – that is, currency – there is in circulation. What’s more, the monetarists believe that you can’t have economic growth without inflation, while the supply-siders do). Britain in the early 1980s had high unemployment, a recession, falling prices and a central bank doctrine of targeting the money supply: a perfect fit for the monetarist economic model. Thatcher saw it and believed that it was good. Her opponents – on the Left and within the British Conservative Party – didn’t agree; a catastrophic recession was too high a price to pay for lower CPI figures. But Thatcher was of the type who relished confrontation, and, what’s more, was not the sort of person to yield to pressure – ‘You turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning’ – no matter how unpopular that made her. (It was around this time that the Thatcherite slogan was coined – ‘There Is No Other Way’). Even so, monetarism as a stated policy was quietly abandoned by the mid-1980s – the Australian Reserve Bank, for example, gave it up by 1985 – and Thatcher even declared, by then, that she had never believed in such a thing.
By 1983, as we can see from the above chart, the Bank of England had relented, and Thatcher won re-election that year. She enjoyed a number of policy successes – the campaign in the Falklands and the defeat of the miner’s strike of 1984 among them – and went on to become Britain’s longest-serving prime minister: so why did she fall?
The answer for that lies in America. Reagan, by 1986, had cut the top rate of income tax from 50% to 28%, the top rate of corporate tax from 46% to 34%, but, as a compromise, raised the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 28%. A supply-side analysis would have predicted that a sharp increase in the capital gains rate would have led a slowdown in growth: capital gains are growth, and the more one taxes of something (in supply-side theory), the less one gets of it. But income tax rates in the US were incredibly low – the lowest since the 1920s – and this carried the US economy along. Bush Sr., however, raised the top rate to 31% and at the same time hiked property taxes sharply. Given that the US recovery was at a delicate stage, this was enough to tip the US into a brief recession and unfortunately, the UK and Australia followed the American lead. In 1989, the top rate of income tax in the UK was cut from 60% to 40%, but the capital gains tax was raised from 30% to 40%, and property taxes were raised too. In Australia the same year, income tax was cut from 60% to 49%, but substantial loopholes in the capital gains tax – which had only been introduced in 1985 – were assiduously hunted down and closed up, as were loopholes in property tax. The result was the death of the 1980s economic recovery, and the end of the careers of both Thatcher and Bob Hawke, both of whom were deposed in coups by their own parties.
What are the political lessons of all this? In general, the economy doesn’t have that great effect on politics – witness the re-election of Obama in 2012, after four years of stagnant economic growth, high unemployment and high (concealed) inflation – unless a country is at rock bottom. It’s then that politics becomes a precarious balancing act. Thatcher and Reagan were nearly destroyed, politically, by the savage recession and deflation of the early 1980s, but fortunately for Thatcher, monetary policy eased by 1983. The conservative Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was not so lucky: deflation hit hard in 1982-1983, and his successor – Bob Hawke, Australia’s answer to Reagan and Thatcher – was elected in early 1983 just before the Reserve Bank of Australia began easing its monetary policy. The electorates of Australia and the UK weren’t willing to tolerate austerity (this time fiscal austerity) at the end of the 1980s. Thatcher’s and Hawke’s respective parties understood this and so threw their leaders overboard. Since then, elections in the US, UK and Australia have been decided mainly on non-economic issues.
(We do see, however, an echo of eighties politics today, insofar as that the Cameron Tory government has become unpopular because of austerity – cuts to welfare and public services, and also hikes in the rate of income tax and VAT. It’s quite possible that Cameron may lose the next election).
4. Evaluating Thatcher and the Eighties
Quite a few commentators in the media have mused on the question, ‘If Thatcher were prime minister now, what would she do?’. It’s an almost impossible question to answer. Thatcher and Reagan were of their time – not only as individuals, with their having lived through (what were by today’s standards) a tumultuous set of life experiences – but also politically. That is, their ideas and approaches just wouldn’t have suited today, any more than Hitler’s or Mosley’s (despite the fact that many German nationalists view Hitler as a saviour, I think Hitler would be deeply confused and disoriented by today’s Germany, had he been brought into the future by a time machine). But I can say with confidence that Thatcher would not have tolerated the Roma sellers of stolen copper wire, or the Afghan asylum seekers on British welfare, or the mass influx of Polish immigrants taking British working-class jobs… The same goes for the gay marriage business, and today’s obsessive, totalitarian British political correctness, which leads to people being arrested for drunken comments made on trains.
There were many bad things about the 1980s: something people don’t remember much was the incredible fear that pervaded the popular culture and politics of the time – the fear of nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union; another thing was the level of casual political violence at the time (e.g., the Brighton Hotel bombing of 1984, which missed Thatcher by inches, and would have been headline news for years were it to happen today, but, at the time, was taken quite lightly, as something that happened every day). Overall, though, I remember it as being a splendid time, especially for British popular culture: the pop music, the comic books, the films and TV shows from Britain were mostly terrific. It was a time of joyous innocence: that’s the message conveyed by the popular songs of that period (although, of course, the time wasn’t so innocent, or joyous, in reality). Thatcher was, in large part, responsible for this – which is to say, she brought about the conditions for this resurgence in British creativity.
The bottom line is, however, that her political problems – industrial mayhem, impotence in the face of Soviet power, double-digit inflation, a weak pound, confiscatory tax rates, loss-making nationalised industries – are not our problems, that is, not the problems of our age. There is only one political problem from her era which has endured and has not been solved: British Trotskyite and liberal trade unionists, teachers, public servants, journalists (especially in the BBC), priests and Labour Party and Liberal Democrat members. It is this class of people who are bent on destroying Britain, and so far, have been doing so successfully.
One can speculate and come up with an alternative scenario: suppose that Thatcher had never come to power and conservative, right-wing Britain had followed the example of Argentina’s much-despised junta of 1976-1983 and launched a ‘Dirty War’ against Britain’s Left? A few thousand ‘disappeared’ British leftists by the mid-1980s would have made the rise of New Labour in the 1990s impossible. (This is the nightmare scenario sketched out in Alan Moore’s dystopian comic book series V for Vendetta (1982-1989): Moore is a baby boomer, a Thatcher-hater and a self-proclaimed “anarchist”). I myself would lament, severely, the passing of the Tariq Alis, Tony Blairs, the staff of the Guardian and the rest, and perhaps, every year, I would light a candle in the memory of all these fine upstanding British men and women who were killed by the evil British junta. But, looking at it from a cold, logical, inhuman perspective, it follows, as a matter of course, that because of the lack of such a ‘Dirty War’, the British may be on the verge of losing their country.
It goes without saying that a Thatcher would never have done such thing, because Thatcher, like her mentor Enoch Powell, was a liberal democrat and a parliamentarian; secondly, because neither she nor anyone else could have foreseen how powerful the Left in Britain would become – and how dangerous.

A Racialist Confronts Ayn Rand: Objectivism and the Rebirth of Implicit Whiteness

by David Haenke



I. Ayn Rand and the Whites
Ayn Rand’s work and life (and the cult which she formed around her ideas – ‘The Collective’) present a number of themes which are of interest to the nationalist intellectual: Jewishness, Anglo-Saxon-ness, neoliberalism, Nietzscheanism, cultism, individualism, Modernist architecture, aesthetics… Her political stances late in her life are of interest to us as well: she became increasingly conservative, if not reactionary, by the early 1970s, and denounced, via her polemical essays, the New Left, the student movement, feminism, environmentalism, hippie-ism and ‘Black Power’, and her vitriolic denunciations of these tendencies – especially the hippie movement – are amusing and make a good few points, and are to be recommended for that reason. Regarding Rand’s work as a whole, some (such as Gregory Johnson, of Counter-Currents Publishing) believe that certain of Rand’s ideas and books can be co-opted to ‘white nationalism’ (whatever ‘white nationalism’, in this instance, may be).
But Rand is a problematic writer – and figure – for any intellectual, nationalist or non-nationalist, and the more one knows about her, the more problematic she becomes. My own experience is as follows. I came across Rand over ten years ago after reading an essay on her and Atlas Shrugged (1957) in Colin Wilson’s classic (but now regrettably out of print) book of literary criticism, Eagle and Earwig (1965) and after that, read both of her two great novels – Atlas- and The Fountainhead (1943) – in succession and enjoyed them a great deal. I then left the books on the shelf for a number of years. Then the movie The Watchmen (2009) came out (an adaptation of the DC comics series of the same name). One of the characters in The Watchmen – Rorschach – was based on two other comic book characters (called ‘Mr A’ and ‘The Question’) who were both fedora-wearing vigilantes and devotees of the Randian philosophy of Objectivism. The Question and Mr A had been created in the 1960s by Steve Ditko, the brilliant, eccentric, reclusive co-creator of Spiderman for Marvel Comics: Ditko was a follower of Rand’s philosophy and went on to produce a number of comic books which are propaganda for Rand and Objectivism. Because of the hoopla around The Watchmen movie and Ditko in 2009, I picked up Rand’s novels again and delved into her non-fiction (which is mostly polemical ranting), and read more about her life in these biographies: Barbara Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), Nathaniel Branden’s Judgement Day: My Years With Ayn Rand (1999) and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009). My earlier enthusiasm for Rand and her novels was somewhat tempered by reading these books, and any naive admirer who takes Rand and her ideas at face value will be taken by surprise by the revelations of the less elevated side of her character – and those of her followers. (Perhaps it’s similar to someone being an admirer of the science fiction of L. Ron Hubbard and not knowing much about Hubbard’s life).
Regarding the politics: what bearing does Rand’s life and work have to nationalism? Rand promulgated a (in her view) water-tight philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy, called Objectivism, which is neoliberal (or, as the Americans would say, libertarian) and definitely non-fascist and non-racialist; and, being a Jewish-Russian intellectual, she wrote many polemics against Nazis, fascists, dictators, racialists, Southern segregationists, and so forth. This neoliberal and anti-racist philosophy tied in perfectly, according to her followers, with her fiction: they state that all the heroes and heroines in her novels and plays behave in a perfectly correct Objectivist manner. I myself don’t believe that this is entirely true: one can’t sum up Rand’s characters – or stories – by Objectivism alone, and this becomes evident the more we look at the Objectivist philosophy and when we discover that Objectivism, and certain of the Randian heroes’ values, morals, behaviour, emotions, are at odds. Rand believed that her heroes and heroines were ‘rational’, but much about them doesn’t strike me as being rational in the conventional sense of the word. (I think most of the concepts Rand speaks about – ‘reason’, ‘rationality’, even ‘reality’ – have to be put in quotation marks, because she doesn’t exactly take these words to mean what we take them to mean).
It’s for this, then, that we can put Rand’s characterisations of her philosophy, and the characterisations made by her (often sycophantic) followers, to one side when we attempt to come to a definition of what Rand is. Henceforth, Trevor Lynch of Counter-Currents makes these comments, in a review of the 2011 movie adaptation of Atlas-:
 Although Rand opposed racial nationalism on philosophical grounds (with a sentimental exception for Zionism, of course), there is still much of value in her novels for racial nationalists. Rand started out as a Nietzschean, and her novels offer powerful defenses of aristocracy and critiques of egalitarianism, democracy, mass man, and mass society. All these elements are in tension with her later philosophy of reason, individualism, and capitalism. Indeed, Rand felt the need to reframe, revise, or simply suppress her earlier, more Nietzschean writings. But the “sense of life” of her novels is so in keeping with the spirit of fascism that her first novel We the Living was made into a movie under Mussolini, a fact that Rand later obfuscated with tall tales and a revised version of the novel. (The Italian We the Living , by the way, remains the only good film adaptation of a Rand novel.)…
Atlas Shrugged, moreover, lends itself to a racial interpretation. Atlas Shrugged is about how a creative and productive minority is exploited by an inferior majority because of the acceptance of a false moral code (altruism) that beatifies the weak and pegs the worth of the strong to how well they serve their inferiors. When one asks “What is the race of Atlas?” it all falls into place. The Atlas that upholds the modern world is the white race, which is being enslaved and destroyed by the acceptance of a false moral code (racial altruism) that teaches that non-whites fail to meet white standards only because of white wickedness, and that whites can only expiate this racial guilt by giving their wealth and power and societies to non-whites…
Rand’s aesthetic is deeply fascist—and Socialist Realist—with its emphasis on man’s heroic transformation of nature through science, technology, and industry. Rand also had a taste for Nordic types. All of her heroes are tall, lean Nordics. Rand, born Alissa Rosenbaum, was not…
On that note, one of the of the most astonishing things about Rand’s fictional world is how white it is. There are no African-Americans in her novels (if they are, they have escaped me). This, combined with Rand’s famous penchant for leggy, Anglo-Saxon heroines and tall, lean handsome Anglo-Saxon heroes, could be construed as an implicit racialism – in much the way Tolkein’s novels (and the film adaptations by Peter Jackson) were. Kevin MacDonald calls this ‘implicit whiteness’ – that is, certain TV shows and films, with a mostly all-white cast, appeal to white audiences because of a subconscious racial, cultural and national identification in the viewer. (This crosses over to popular music, as well: American Country music is obviously aimed at a white audience, but so is heavy metal as well. Metal music more or less sticks to one basic theme – Europe in the Dark Ages, or medieval period – and remains a white, male, European phenomenon). The appeal of Rand’s work is in part due to implicit whiteness.
One has to make a distinction between implicit and explicit whiteness. The excellent American TV show, Breaking Bad (2008-2012), makes heroes out of rather ordinary, middle-class white Americans and villains out of Mexican immigrants (who are uniformly portrayed as either degenerate, evil, criminal or stupid, or all four). The two heroes of the series are white everymen, as evinced by their surnames – Jessie Pinkman and Walter White – and, obviously, the scriptwriters, producers and directors are throwing this explicit racialism, or at least, hinting at its existence, in order to titillate the (mostly white, I imagine) audience. The creators of the show are self-conscious: that is, they are aware of what they are doing. In contrast, I don’t believe that Rand knew what she was doing. Rand was merely recording, more or less faithfully, the world she lived in. Her leggy heroines and square-jawed, chiselled Nordic heroes with cruel mouths were a product of her milieu and so weren’t an instance of explicit whiteness.
To get a good idea of this milieu of Rand’s, one should sit down and watch the great TV series Mad Men (2007-2012), which attempts to duplicate everything about early 1960s America – right down to ashtrays, women’s gloves and racial attitudes – to the last detail. Most of the series is set in Manhattan (Rand was a Manhattanite, and extolled, in her fiction, New York city as the greatest city in the world and the acme of human evolution) and sometimes in Los Angeles. The latter is shown to be bathed in a golden sunlight and comes across as an Aryan paradise, and is achingly beautiful. It becomes clear from watching the show that the producer and writer of the series (Matthew Weiner, a Jewish-American) is a great admirer, like Rand, of white America, WASP-dom and sturdy Anglo-Saxon men and ice-cold Hitchcock blondes, and that he wrote and produced the series as a kind of love letter to that past. It’s now, in 2013, hard to understand, but Rand’s New York – a white city, where Afro-Americans were almost invisible, and any immigrants were white European, where the couture was ultra-stylish – was exactly like the New York portrayed in the show. Rand, I think, took this whiteness and all it entailed for granted: she probably believed that it would never change – which is why she reacts with such shock and revulsion to the social and political changes which took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It would have been quite a disappointment for her to see her beloved America (of the stylish Don Drapers) change, almost overnight, to one of counter-culture ‘hippies’ and ‘yippies’ (many of the latter Jewish-American) and rioting Afro-Americans putting cities to the torch.
In that connection, even after the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, it took a long time to change the racial composition of America, and to stamp out the nordicism and Aryanism out of the American popular culture (and the political culture – it’s speculated, today, that Reagan couldn’t have won the US presidential election in 1980 with today’s racial composition of the electorate). Recently, I saw an episode, broadcast in 1981, of the great American TV soap Dallas (1978-1991) which shows a pool party for young people at the Southfork residence. A handsome, impoverished young medical student (with a seriously fashion-deficient eighties-era mullet), Mitch Cooper (Leigh McCloskey), is invited there but upon arrival finds that all the people there are rich, unlike himself. He vents his fury at them when he’s asked to participate in a pool-wrestling match for $50. (For those who want to know, a pool-wrestling match is when young men have young women in bikinis sit on their shoulders and wade into the pool: the mounted women attempt to topple one another and push one another into the water). Such sums of money shouldn’t be squandered on frivolous entertainments, he thunders: he knows the value of money because he works hard for it, at two jobs (one as a waiter, the other as a parking valet). (Incidentally, his dogmatism and unwillingness to compromise, his inability (bordering on being an obnoxious character trait) to fit in with other people in certain situations, his prudery, makes him a kind of quasi-Randian hero). As you can imagine, all the young men there at this event are in excellent physical shape (without the aid of steroids or human growth hormone) and have that bronzed Californian look about them, and the young women are pretty, long-legged and voluptuous and untoned (as women of that time tended to be). Now, in 2013, the viewer can only guffaw at Mitch’s righteous indignation at the young, beautiful rich people – because, being bronzed, blonde, blue-eyed and a handsome specimen himself, he looks exactly like them (and is wolf-whistled at by the young women when he walks in). He is the Dallas, Texas, version of a Howard Roark or John Galt, and lives in an attractive milieu (one can imagine a F. Scott Fitzgerald writing a paen to these rich young beautiful folk of the South in the 1970s and 1980s). Suffice to say, Obama’s America today is different: were the same scene shot today, we’d have a Hispanics, a Jewish-American homosexual, a kick-boxing black lesbian, a transsexual, perhaps a one-legged dwarf, all thrown in; that means no WASP demi-gods and demi-goddesses, no beautiful young white women in bikinis… The culture, and with it, the values, have moved on. The pool party in Dallas, Texas in 1981, and the WASP Manhattan in the 1960s, were, from Obama-liberal’s point of view, the embodiment of evil in American culture, and have to be destroyed: the whites have to be replaced by non-whites. Which is why, in the second part of the Atlas- adaptation, Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike (2012), the character Francisco d’Anconia, a blue-eyed Chilean who is the descendant of Castilian-Spanish nobility, is played by the conspicuously Mestizo Esai Morales. (A minor character in Atlas-, Eddie Willers, is played by an Afro-American). Such are the times. At the recent presidential inauguration, a gay Hispanic recited a poem, and the president made a speech in which he held up the homosexual rioters at Stonewall as embodiments of the American ideal.
II. Ayn Rand and Afro-Americans
Colin Woodard makes a convincing argument in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America (Viking Press, 2011), that the USA is composed of not one nation but ten. New York and its surrounding suburbs is one such nation, which Woodard calls ‘New Amsterdam’. Founded by apolitical Dutch merchants, and settled, later, by Jews and outcasts and cast-offs from Western and Eastern Europe, the ethos of this nation – or rather, city-state – is commerce (unwilling to make waves, it acceded to the 1776 revolt against the English, and took the side of the Union in the American Civil War, only reluctantly). New Amsterdam doesn’t have any sense of group identity – unlike Woodard’s other ‘nations’, e.g., Yankeedom, the Deep South, the Left Coast – and is truly a ‘nation of immigrants’. It is here that Rand found her spiritual home. As a Russian Jewess immigrant, and a neoliberal, she fit right in.
The only trouble with the New Amsterdam-ers are that they are completely oblivious to the rest of the country – they don’t understand that the rest of America isn’t like New York. Years ago, the Jewish-American mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, launched a Gestapo-style ‘stop and search’ law enforcement program, which involves stopping and searching (primarily, it seems) young Afro-Americans for weapons. Now, Bloomberg, with sublime New Amsterdamer arrogance, believes that New York gun control laws can be extended to the rest of the US – e.g., to the Deep South and the heavily redneck, white cracker ‘Greater Appalachia’ (the name given by Woodard to this region). We see that same New Yorker solipsism in in Mad Men. The Manhattanite characters speak of the Southerners, at the time engaged in their fight against desegregation, with contempt and disdain, and incomprehension, even though, at the same time, they are portrayed as being unconsciously racist and oblivious of the black people (and, by extension, the “oppression” of black people) in their own New Amsterdam nation-state.
All this has to be kept in mind when one reads Rand’s comments on race and immigration. As a New York Jewess, and an immigrant, of course she is going to be for immigration. That doesn’t necessarily mean, though, she was in favour of white racial replacement, which manifests itself in our culture in a number of ways (e.g., replacing d’Anconia with a Mestizo, Eddie Willers with an Afro-American). Rand died in 1982, and if we are to take that prior-mentioned episode of Dallas from 1981 as a representative sample of the cultural ethos of that time (Rand was an ardent TV watcher) – then we wouldn’t be mistaken, I feel, in surmising that Rand just wouldn’t have understood white racial replacement, or, for that matter, the ascendancy of Barack Obama.
So, intellectuals of Rand’s generation grew up in a milieu of white ethnic homogeneity, which they took for granted: they considered it be a constant. Were they alive today, one would like to consult them and really drill down on the question of white racial replacement. Would Rand have approved of London, in 2013, being less than 50% British? Of immigrants from Africa and India displacing the British and becoming the new ethnic majority? What would Jean-Paul Sartre, who died in 1980, have thought of his beloved Paris becoming an African and Muslim majority city? (We’re not talking about a small African and Algerian quarter in Paris, which existed in Sartre’s time: we’re talking of an African and Arab majority pushing out the French). We know that Sartre was a Maoist, an inveterate radical, and so forth, but one has to ask what he really, really have thought.
Related to the question of white racial replacement is the (explosive) Afro-American question, which really is the main question in all of US politics. Rand wrote an essay denouncing the South, Racism (1963), one which is fairly typical of the times (interestingly, one finds that the essay starts out attacking the evil Southerners, and then ends up with a polemic against affirmative action, the civil rights movement and Black Power – one could look at it as a conservative reaction to the Afro-American civil rights cause, or an expression of Jewish-American disdain for the schwartzes, or both).
Rand didn’t take into consideration the argument of the anti-desegregationist, which was as follows: Afro-Americans are disproportionately inclined to crime, especially violent crime (robbery, rape and murder), more than whites; they are mendacious, and disproportionately reliant on the welfare system); they tend to be, when they get into politics, more corrupt than white people. The corollary of all this is that whites should distance themselves, as much as possible, from Afro-Americans, and that means segregation – and laws against miscegenation, because the characteristics of the Afro-American race are mostly genetic, the product of nature, not nurture.
Now, in 2013, we know that the anti-desegregationist, racialists and so-called white supremacists of the 1950s and 1960s lost. Rand, in her way, helped by writing her essay – but one shouldn’t make too much of that, and the fact that she was Jewish-American, because a vast array of forces (liberals, hippies, beatniks, humanist priests, communists, anarchists), Jewish and non-Jewish, were arrayed against the South, not only in America but overseas as well: the South had the entire world against it in the 1960s, and Rand’s essay – and all the essays of all the Jewish-American intellectuals, each and every one of whom opposed segregation – were merely a few of the last straws which broke the camel’s back.
But the question is, were the anti-desegregationist right about the Afro-American racial character? I won’t answer that question here because of reasons of political correctness. But, if we are to answer the question, we should look at the evidence: today’s American cities where Afro-Americans are the majority: East St. Louis, Illinois; Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; Camden, New Jersey; and, in the south, Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama…
In that connection, the reader should really be advised to read Paul Kersey’s bog, Stuff Black People Don’t Like. Mr Kersey is the author of Escape from Detroit: The Collapse of America’s Black Metropolis (2012). If half of what Mr Kersey says is true, well then, these Afro-American cities are, to say the least, incommensurate with Objectivism and Randian values, and, indeed, they are incommensurate with neoliberalism as a whole. The economics alone in these cities is different from that of a free-market society, which is characterised by trust, the rule of law, freedom from corruption, respect for private property: instead of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’, we have, in a city like Detroit, to use one of Mr Kersey’s highly memorable phrases, ‘The Highly Visible Black Hand’. Ayn Rand rails against, in her The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), the left-wingers who castigate ‘black capitalists’ for being sell-outs and ‘Uncle Toms’. I’m sure that, in those radical times (America in the late 1960s and early 1970s), there were plenty on the Left who were attacking ‘sell-out’ Afro-Americans who tried to better their position by getting into business: after all, this was the time of the Black Panthers, which was a self-declared Marxist organisation. But, in 2013, the ‘Black capitalists’ aren’t under attack from the Left: no, they are under attack from their fellow citizens – in Chicago, Detroit and other cities. It’s a brave Afro-American who dares set up shop in Chicago, a city which (as the crime statistics show) is more dangerous now than Afghanistan: he risks a bullet in the head or the back. (Mr Kersey’s blog recently reported that Chicago fast-food restaurants use bullet-proof glass to separate the patrons from the staff, and that the patrons receive their food through a kind of hatch in the glass barrier…).
One really wants a standard orthodox Objectivist to read Mr Kersey’s blog and formulate a response to it. How is Rand’s gospel of individualism, neoliberalism, reason, rationality, non-coercion, and so forth, meant to fix Detroit? The answer is, of course, that it can’t. But then, Objectivists, neoliberals, conservatives, understand all of this, and so do all American whites and for that matter Jewish-Americans. It’s why they prefer not to live in downtown Detroit or Chicago or Birmingham. It’s why (more often than not) they express resentment when their tax dollars being siphoned off in order to subsidise these cities; it’s why they seem to be so obsessed by the problems of socialism, big government, the demoralising effects of welfare, the freedom for whites to own guns to protect themselves from ‘criminals’ of an undefined race (or, conversely, the right of government to seize guns from ‘criminals’ of an undefined race) and so forth. They are talking in code. It’s an evasion and hypocrisy which infects every corner of American intellectual and political life. Objectivism ought to face up to it: after all, isn’t it a philosophy about acknowledging ‘reality’ and denouncing ‘evasion’ in all its forms? But it doesn’t, it prefers to talk in code like the rest of the mainstream American Right.
We can speculate, then, that when modern-day American Randians and Objectivists are denouncing ‘moochers’ and ‘looters’, they are really denouncing you-know-who. But this is a far cry from Rand, or at least, Rand’s original intentions, because, as we know from Rand’s novels, the evil socialists and looters – the Ellsworth Tooheys, Jimmy Taggarts, Oren Boyles, Wesley Mouches and the like – are all white. As Whitaker Chambers points out, they are mostly New Deal types straight out of the 1930s and 1940s – white liberals and socialists (and, incidentally, there is nary a Jewish-American among them). But one can give the ethic of Atlas- a racialist interpretation: that is, transpose the novel’s contrast of ‘producers’ and ‘parasites’ to the racially-divided and ideologically-divided America of the present – with the sober, white, middle-class Republican Party voters on one hand and the Obama-ites, the corrupt Detroit city councilmen and women, the Jesse Jacksons and Reverend Al Sharpes, on the other. Trevor Lynch, in his article, suggests that one can make such an transposition, and I find such a suggestion fascinating – and explosive. But that would be taking us far from Rand’s original intent.
III. Ayn Rand and Life
Ayn Rand is what I call a ‘vitalist’ intellectual – in the same tradition as Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw, all thinkers who were of great interest to fascist intellectuals, and now to post-war nationalist intellectuals. Supposedly, the vitalists (especially Bergson and Nietzsche) were irrationalist, which should put them at odds with Rand, who is a rationalist. But this difference – if it is one, i.e., if these men really are ‘irrationalist’ – doesn’t have any bearing on their vitalism and Rand’s, both of which suffer from the same problems.
If a thinker makes a bad argument, he isn’t wrong, necessarily, in his conclusions – and vice versa. Darwin’s argument for evolution by natural selection in The Origin of the Species (1859) is flawless, but his theory of evolution by natural selection is not necessarily true – and a good many distinguished intellectuals didn’t think, at the time, that it was true. We should keep this in mind when looking at Rand’s philosophy. A few of her key arguments for her positions are bad, but does this badness necessarily invalidate her positions? Yes and no. Rand seems to have really believed that good ideas needed a rigorous argument, and that her conclusions were true because they flowed, indubitably, from premises which indubitably true (believing that the virtues of individualism, capitalism, selfishness, rationality and the rest were deducible from ‘axioms’ such as ‘A is A’, and so forth). I myself don’t share her biases: if someone makes a bad argument for something, that person may not necessarily be wrong.
So what is Rand’s main (vitalist) argument? Rand makes a distinction between mindless people and mindful ones, between those who don’t think – who refuse to use their reason, who evade, who fail, or refuse, to acknowledge ‘reality’ – and those who do. The distinction between the two types is a moral one: the evaders are bad, if not evil; the reason-users are good. ‘Life’, ‘living’, ‘survival’, are the sources of all human ideas of good. Man, alone of all the creatures, can choose to end his life or not, and hence ideas of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are a matter of choice. Man’s reason is his means of survival, his means of earning a living and his defence against predators and the elements. Tigers have claws, strength and speed, birds have wings, but man has only his mind. If he forgoes his use of reason, he forgoes his means of survival, and is pursuing death – the opposite of life, and thereby the opposite of all good. He is thereby immoral… The anti-reason types, the irrationalists, actually preach an ethic of death, of self-destruction, and are thereby evil.
This is the argument in the John Galt speech in Atlas-, and essays such as The Objectivist Ethics (1961) (of course, Rand does a lengthier, more detailed presentation of these theses than I do here). What is wrong with it?
If we reflect on it a little, we will see that many of the anti-reason types don’t simply don’t drop dead and die. A friend of mine told me that he was reading a volume of Rand on a Melbourne tram, when he was confronted by a drunken indigenous man who hassled him for money. My friend argued to me afterwards that the indigenous man – who, according to him, was a man of low intellect, little to no education, few prospects in life, and so forth, and definitely a ‘moocher’ – was, from the Objectivist point of view, anti-reason and thereby anti-life. In response to this, I argued that the man in question did eke out a survival, reason or no: a miserable existence, to be sure, but it was living. Either he didn’t use his reason, but survived nonetheless, or he did use it, like everyone else, and, consequently, couldn’t be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Everyone has a pair of lungs, and uses them to breathe, and survive. One can’t make lung use as a basis of ethics: it’s tautologous to say that everyone uses lungs, just as they use their kidneys, liver, motor neurone system… The fact that the indigenous man in question uses his reason to survive is tautologous, just in the way that he uses his heart, lungs, liver, kidney, to survive. Just about everyone who is living is using their reason, then, and so consequently we can’t use this criterion to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
We can see that – the survival of the ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ people – in Rand’s novels. The ‘anti-reason’ types – who are, consequently, ‘anti-life’ – actually do a fine job of living, i.e., the James Taggarts and Lillian Reardens. America itself, which, in Rand’s novel, becomes a broken country (under the sway of socialism and irrationality), experiencing (to put it mildly) a drop in its standard of living. Many people end up dying in famines and accidents, and so forth, but they do continue to survive. It’s a wretched existence, and all the bad guys in the novel who do live to the end (e.g., James Taggart) live a wretched existence, but it’s still survival. The anti-reason, irrationalist types don’t drop dead, like birds which have been infected with a deadly disease and then fall, like stones, from the air in mid-flight…
The author Michael Prescott puts this much more succinctly and elegantly than I, in a post entitled ‘Ayn Rand and “Is-Ought”‘, at:http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2005/04/ayn_rand_and_is.html
Rand equivocates – that is, she uses the same term to mean two different things. The term in question is “life,” which she takes as the standard for all moral values. Early in her argument “life” means “biological survival,” but later (when applied to humans) it suddenly means “the life proper to a rational being.” She has smuggled in the concept of what is “proper,” what “ought” to be, when all she is entitled to talk about is what “is.”
Now, it could be maintained that Rand is not equivocating because, when talking about humans, she established that reason is the way – in fact, the only way – for humans to survive. Thus a life “proper to a rational being” would be the only possible way for such a being to live at all.
Objectivists do, in fact, make this argument. Ayn Rand, they say, proved that reason is man’s only means of survival.
I take issue with this. Ayn Rand did not prove any such thing; she merely asserted it. Her assertion, though accompanied by much rhetorical hand-waving, is not backed by any empirical evidence. Indeed, it is contradicted at many other points in Rand’s writings. For instance, she often inveighs against the irrationality of “savages” (her term). Yet “savages,” however irrational they may be, manage to survive and even sometimes to flourish. In certain circumstances, such as being stranded on a desert island, a “savage” would have a much better chance of surviving than his “civilized” counterpart. If “savages” can survive while being irrational, then rationality, however desirable it may be, is not essential to survival.
Or take an example closer to home. I would be considered irrational by Objectivists, since I hold many anti-Objectivist ideas and, even worse, am a former Objectivist who is now an apostate to the faith. Nevertheless, I am able to survive — and in fact earn a comfortable living at a job that gives me great creative satisfaction. If I am irrational, and if Rand’s assertion is correct, then how can I survive, much less flourish?
Indeed, how can anybody? How did humans ever make it through the Stone Age, or the Dark Ages, or other periods characterized by “irrationality,” at least in Objectivist terms? Given that Rand described even modern-day American society as “irrational,” presumably none of us should be surviving — yet we enjoy the highest standard of living in history.
Rand is apparently aware of this problem. She tries to solve it (or, I would say, evade it) by insisting that she is not advocating “survival at any price,” but only a worthwhile kind of survival, a survival that allows humans to achieve their creative and intellectual potential. This sounds persuasive, since most of us want to do more than just survive; we want to thrive.
But merely stating what we want to do is not equivalent to a reasoned argument – and Rand is not logically entitled to make this particular jump. She has previously argued that biological survival — survival of the fittest, which can mean nothing but “survival at any price” — is the standard for all living things. To be consistent, she must hold that “survival at any price” is the standard for humans as well. To switch to a different standard in midargument is unjustified, no matter how much polemical firepower she employs.
What Rand might have said is that reasoning is among the various modes of survival available to humans, and that in some (not all) circumstances it is the most useful mode. But this more nuanced approach is foreign to her absolutism.
Closely related to this is an additional objection which can be extended to all the vitalist philosophies, and not just Rand’s, i.e., the philosophies of George Bernard Shaw, Nietzsche and others. A simple organism like an amoeba is alive, is an instance of life, so surely we should ‘affirm’ it, say ‘yea’ to it? But, if life, living, and so forth, is the source of all good, how can we differentiate – in terms of value – between an amoeba and a human being? How are human beings superior to the amoeba? Indeed, how can we say that one human being is superior, morally more good, possessing of a higher value, than another?
Evola takes a similar line of criticism in his writing on Nietzsche in Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul (1961). Reading Rand, it becomes especially pertinent, because, after all, her books are about nothing but differentiations. Take this passage from The Fountainhead:
Roark stood on the cliff, by the structure, and looked at the countryside, at the long, grey ribbon of the road twisting past along the shore. An open car drove by, fleeing into the country. The car was overfilled with people bound for a picnic. There was a jumble of bright sweaters, and scarves fluttering in the wind; a jumble of voices shrieking without purpose over the roar of the motor, and overstressed hiccoughs of laughter; a girl sat sideways, her legs flung over the side of the car; she wore a man’s straw hat of slipping down to her nose and she yanked savagely at the strings of a ukulele, ejecting raucous sounds, yelling “Hey!”. These people were enjoying a day of their existence; they were shrieking to the sky their release from the work and the burdens of the days behind them; they had worked and carried the burdens in order to reach a goal – and this was the goal.
He looked at the car as it streaked past. He thought that there was a difference, some important difference, between the consciousness of this day in him and in them. He thought that he should try to grasp it. But he forgot. He was looking at a truck panting up the hill, loaded with a glittering mound of cut granite.
Shouldn’t the life-worshipping vitalist look at these revellers in the passage above as an instance of ‘life’, noisy, Dionysian, affirmative ‘life’? But it’s obvious that Rand finds them offensive, and clearly contrasts their conduct, their attitudes, their typology (their species, even) and Roark’s.
I understand this differentiation. I often feel it when I come across certain types of immigrant in the streets of Melbourne: the noisy, jabbering, gesticulating man, shabbily dressed, yelling on a mobile phone in his own language at the top of his voice; he is fecund, this type of man, and is always accompanied by an equally ugly and shabbily-dressed (and often pregnant) wife, pushing a pram, with little miniature versions of themselves running about. What I feel for this sort of man is a revulsion, and a sense of distance – that he is, compared to many of my own kind, on a lesser plane – and that he certainly doesn’t belong in this country. What’s more, I feel that he is an ‘insult to Life’ (‘Life’ with a capital ‘L’) and everything good. Fellow whites of mine who think that his presence here is ‘good for the economy’ are just ignoring the existential reality of this man, and, consequently, may as well be on another world. Unfortunately for me, however, such feelings, insights, sensations, are difficult to quantify – much more difficult than the numbers which appear in an economic model. The conservative blogger Steve Sailer has the same problem when he noted, in a blog post, that the ‘tackiness’ of Mexican immigrants to America ‘got him down’. Tackiness! Isn’t this a value-judgement? Of course it is.
But this is at the root of the problem. By all rights, I should celebrate the fecund, jabbering, gesticulating, avaricious denizens of the slums that this man came from as an instance of ‘Life’, the ‘Life Force’: but I can’t convince myself to. Rand has the same problem. She can’t condemn certain people for not using their reason, because they are: just about everybody is using their reason, otherwise, according to her logic, they wouldn’t be surviving. Which is why she constantly has to revert back to metaphors: ‘death’, ‘death in life’, are meant in the same way that we talk about ‘the death of a city’ (i.e., Detroit) – Detroit really isn’t dying (the citizens of it are very much alive and aren’t going anywhere soon), Detroit is undergoing a deterioration, a decline, from a previous state.
As Prescott points out, Rand and the Objectivists wanted their value-judgements, aesthetic judgements, moral judgements, political judgements, to be deducible about ‘axioms’ – ‘axioms’ which in turn came from ‘reality’. It seems that if such judgements didn’t have this quality, they wouldn’t be objective, what is the case, true whether one likes it or not. In turn, the people who disagreed with Objectivism and Rand, or who just didn’t live up to Rand’s preferred type, wouldn’t be guilty of ‘evading reality’. Indeed, the enemies of Objectivism wouldn’t end up meeting with a premature, sticky end – i.e., dying – as a result of their defying ‘reality’ and thereby chasing ‘destruction’ and ‘death’ (just like in the infamous train crash in Atlas-, in which several ‘irrationalist’, ‘whim-worshipper’ housewives, intellectuals, journalists, trade unionists meet a grisly end because of (it’s implied) their ‘irrational’, ‘evasive’ beliefs – by dying in the train, they suffering the punishment of angry God, a God we may identify with Rand’s ‘reality’).
I don’t have these same commitments, philosophically, as Rand, and I don’t believe that the distinction between the subjective and objective, in human beings, is so clear cut. I ask: aren’t the Randian heroes subjectivists, even spiritualists, who spend more time in the world of the imagination and the spirit than in the ugly, squalid and sordid world that confronts them? Aren’t Roark, Galt and the residents of Galt’s Gulch rejecting reality? Aren’t Roark (an architect) and Galt (an engineer and physicist) dwellers in the world of the subjective, the mind, rather than in the real?
It’s a truism that one sometimes can attain something by not trying to obtain it, or even working against it: in Buddhism, one may reach the elevated spiritual status of an enlightened one by in fact rejecting Buddha’s path to Buddhism; likewise, one may attain the blessed state of the residents of Galt’s Gulch – a kind of anarcho-capitalist Shangri-La, which is perhaps quasi-Buddhist as well – by rejecting ‘reason’, ‘reality’, and all the tenets of Objectivism…
One of the conclusions I draw from all this is that, for the nationalist movement to survive (metaphorically, that is), we in the movement need to be constantly making value-judgements – differentiating, not only between whites and the likes of ‘fecund immigrant man’ sketched out above, but also between the good and bad whites. Anything white, is good: this ‘axiom’ of the movement (in its present state) must be rejected and therefore we must cease being a lost-dog’s home for the refuse of white society, some of whom find acceptance in the movement that they wouldn’t find elsewhere in normal, non-political white society. If this is élitism, so be it…
IV. Ayn Rand today
There has been a revival of interest in Rand’s ideas in America since 2008 (or, at least, the perception of a revival – which, here, is the same thing). Why this revival? The answer has to do with the presidency of Barack Obama and the present political situation in America.
Quite a few conservative and Far right commentators have pointed out the similarities between Obama’s ideology and that of the African socialist dictators (Hunter Wallace has made an intriguing comparison between America today and the West African nation of Mali in the 1960s). This is true enough, but in my view the closest parallels are between Obama’s America and America during the time of the Reconstruction in the ten years after the American Civil War. During the period of Reconstruction, centralised, federal Yankee America attempted to impose, on the defeated South, what the Southerners called ‘Negro rule’. Corrupt Afro-American politicians, who went on to embezzle state finances, were put in to power, and outrageous welfare schemes (the ‘Freedman’s Bureau’), which saw disproportionate amounts of government money be allocated to Afro-Americans, were set up. At the same time, resistance groups – like the Klan, the White League, and others – appeared and tremendous grass-roots efforts were made by Southerners to elect pro-white, pro-segregation Democrats. Eventually, the North lost interest in its social engineering program in the South and withdrew, effectively allowing the South to make its own laws and treating it, de facto, as a separate nation. Now, in 2013, America finds itself in the same situation: Obama-ism is Yankeeism in new clothes. The 19th century Southern intellectuals always held that the abolitionism of the Yankee North was merely one plank of the Yankee platform – which was one of all sorts of destructive tendencies (feminism, socialism, anarchism, free love-ism, spiritualism, and endorsement of race-mixing between whites and Afro-Americans). The Yankees today adhere to a similar destructive (depending on your point of view) platform: gay marriage, lesbianism, marijuana legalisation, amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants, compulsory ‘racial socialism’ and the high taxes needed to support it, the blocking of oil exploration and frakking, state subsidies of electric cars that don’t work, gun control, destructive lifestyles like that portrayed in (the Jewish-American) Lena Dunham’s hit TV show Girls (2012-), federal deficit-spending, dollar devaluations… Support for all this is not uniform throughout America: Yankees, New Yorkers, and Californians vote for this stuff; Southerners and those in the resource rich states of what Woodard calls ‘The Far West’ (Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Utah and others) don’t.
Race is intertwined with all of this, of course, but so is Obama’s socialist philosophy – which is, in Rand’s terms, the ‘gospel of need’, the philosophy of the ‘moocher’, the ‘bum’, the philosophy of ‘am I not my brother’s keeper?’. Obama’s socialist philosophy is also profoundly egalitarian – everything to him is about ‘fairness’: in his inauguration speech, Obama declared that the America idea was ‘equality’, which, as we on the Far Right know now, means to him reducing everything to the lowest common denominator, not just materially, but spiritually.
In addition to his calls for ‘fairness’, he constantly implores Americans to give amnesty to illegal immigrants, and more money to Afro-Americans and Hispanics, on the grounds of pity, compassion, brotherly love – the ethic which is the same as that of the ethic of the bad guys in Atlas-. If one re-reads Atlas-, one can see (well, at least I can see) the parallels between the Obama ideology and the evil ideology of the ‘moochers’ and ‘mystics’: the concordances hit one like a blow to the solar plexus. America is heading down a Randian track, and one can understand how right-wing, Republican-voting Americans (among them, white Southerners) vibrate in sympathy to Rand, even if they don’t, as conservatives and Christians, don’t agree with all of her ideas. Philosophy is meant to be true for all times and all places, but right now, Rand’s philosophy is an American thing.