This is the introduction and first part of a four-part series of essays on the nationalism of ethnicity and nation.  This series is intended as a pointer towards a more definitive and necessarily academic study of this aspect of human being, the arrival of which is so sorely needed in the life of European Man.

“Imagination rules the world.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

Should one ever be written, and should it be suitably authoritative and holistic, a theory of ethnic nationalism would – theoretically - supply the means of intellectually formalising and lifting the cause of European peoples out of the darkness in which it has dwelt since 1945 and into the glaring academic light.  Such a shift would, of course, require that it be fairly received by the author’s peers, and not mechanically condemned.  That may become possible if or when the political zeitgeist shifts further to the populist right and, even for academics, freedom from the anti-racist yolk, the neo-Marxist yolk, becomes ever more necessitous.

Here, one has to acknowledge the fact that there are three as yet open questions:

i) Are we really at, or approaching, a genuine inflection point in the western Establishment’s long war upon our genetic fact?  Does the rise of populist parties across the European racial world, allied to the collapse in support for the old two-party system, and allied also to the wave of public anti-immigration protest which is swelling as I write … does all that signal a fundamental and permanent break from the post-WW2 paradigm, or is this a false dawn?

ii) Will a suitably creative philosophical thinker grasp the opportunity to hand, re-imagine the European life-cause, go to the fundamentals and address the existential gap in the literature of ethnic nationalism?

iii) Will such a philosopher’s peers, suddenly released to think and write all manner of formerly forbidden truths, take up his invitation to break out even on this most forbidden of subjects, and begin the work of expanding his new perspective?  Because that is what it will take to assemble the critical mass required to challenge systemic liberalism and change everything.

If the answer to all three is yes, then there is a clear potential for academics to slip their bonds like the rest of us, and meet their appointment with history.  But it isn’t guaranteed.  Inflection is a subtle and unavoidably serendipitous matter.  The reacting Establishment may still find a security solution, beef up its legal sanctions and surveillance, even cancel elections to regain control – albeit this time undeniably a tyrant’s control - over the rebellion.  But then we would perforce be pitched into assessing the potentials for a violent rebellion, even a full civil war á la David Betz at Kings.  We are not doing that at this stage.  We are relying on the liberal democratic heritage to see us through, and on the very human preference for the light over darkness, and for freedom over chains.

In respect to the chains, three open questions might seem too many to warrant much enthusiasm.  Certainly in Britain and in continental Europe, freedom of enquiry, freedom of speech, freedom of thought have never been constitutionally guaranteed.  There have been centuries of incursions against them by the crown or the church, invariably because of some imposed burden or falsehood from which no dissent is tolerated.  In our time suppression has been democratised.  All manner of petty people seem to be suppressing our freedoms by one means or another.  Not only humanities professors (and their students) or even politicians and governments, but billionaires, writers, actors, media personalities, left-wing activists of all stripes, Jewish activists, Muslim activists, trans activists … they have all weighed in to suppress what others, not only nationalists, may need or desire to say.  The crudest and most salient of them, and the one officially employed, indeed weaponised in the Establishment’s cause, is the hard left.  In Britain we now see the police suppressing local public dissent by escorting, and probably transporting in, (illegally) masked activists with “Stand Up To Racism” placards supplied by the suspiciously well-funded Socialist Workers Party.  It is fifty years since such creatures served the secret State by attacking lone National Front members out with their families.  They remain the State’s pathological go-to for intimidating the protesting public.  But … inflection.  Barely a year after Southport and with immigration casting an existential shadow, one can think of little more likely to confirm public opinion on the moral balance, and to harden public attitudes, than the broken-toothed rictus grin and dirty jabbing finger of anti-racism.

A revolution of systems

Anti-racism is a product of the American academy.  A perfectly just principal root lies in 19th century black emancipation.  But in the European context there is no such history.  The ideological mania of the hard-left must draw from other sources.  One is a fanatical but post-Christian religious energy picking up the worst of early Christianity’s model of Man as originally sinning and in need of a radical moral “salvation” duly larded liberally on everything in sight.  The communist fanatic’s peculiarly murderous moral judgement, borne out wherever the creed has taken hold (ie, not only in Christian Russia), lies not far beneath the anti-racist surface.  The dehumanisation and bullying does actually function as a psychological murder.  The Jewish Viennese psychologist Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937) researched the communist revolutionaries of his day and found that a noticeable proportion were second sons who experienced childhood under the quite unattainable power of an elder sibling.  Adler concluded that a neurotic sense of personal impotency projects onto the structural power imbalances in society, and it all goes to hell from there.  Perhaps that explains many anti-racists.  But one also has to account for the visible fact that when they are not hiding behind masks anti-racists look and dress very like the dregs – that is, psychologically damaged dregs - of urban society; because that is what they are, and know themselves to be.  The unattainable power here is that of simple self-acceptance, by which the confidence and ability to accept others comes.  They quite literally project their own self-contempt on to the “powerful” and seek a grand levelling of that which can never be levelled.  But it can be destroyed, and they take joy in it.  They don’t actually believe in the claimed virtue of the diversitoid fruitcakery, and they don’t believe in anything else.  It’s all about “Narcissus and me”, and that is doubtless largely the case in America too.

One other root is observable.  Their ritualistic hate-labelling of those so so ubiquitous and iniquitous “nazis” and “fascists” is an indispensable behaviour, of course.  Although it is an ideological lie today - there are no nazis or fascists - it does in fact root back to the Third Reich’s virulent persecution of Jews in the 1930s, and thus to Magnus Hirschfeld’s subsequent invention of anti-racism as a species of anti-fascism.  Indeed if, now, one excludes the American historical perspective one is left not with a principled defence of non-white colonisation, if such can ever exist, but a rabid overhang of Hirschfeld’s tribal hostility, much amplified by wartime propaganda designed specifically to induce war psychosis in Britain and America.  It’s just a very bad set of psychological circumstances, of which the anti-racist drone is a needy and willing victim.  But his screeching hate-labels have exercised a shocking and unwarranted degree of control, nowhere more so than over the teaching of the humanities and the creative thought of faculty members.

It is also undeniably true that the supremacism and imperialism of the National Socialists comprehensively and inevitably ruined every form of nationalism, ethnic nationalism included, as a respectable field of academic study.  In consequence, no creative work of any stature was undertaken until the 1970s and 80s.  What then appeared, though still only from a handful of (mostly Jewish) political scientists and sociologists, did finally incorporate ethnic nationalism into the academic canon.  But it was at the cost of inauthenticity.  By a variety of quite crude subterfuges the authors managed either to define ethnic nationalism in the European case as a non-natural and inessential reaction to modernity and, latterly, immigration, or simply to exclude our race from its nativist core completely.  Excepting Frank Salter’s work and parts of Walker Connor’s the whole exercise has been reliant on the shameless and irrational assertion that, alone among all humankind, European peoples possess no meaningful inter-relation that scholarship, or “scholarship”, cannot first reduce or negate.  We end up with no common life-cause and nothing to preserve or defend, nothing to advance, nothing to fight for, no “we” at all that is not mere culture or geography or liberal values.  Our peoplehood is, therefore, not peoplehood at all.

It takes some considerable effort (along with much confusion or malignancy, as befits the given case) to fashion intellectual positions which fly in the face of logic, fairness, common sense, and Nature.  No reasonable person would hold that a people’s possession of a common life-cause, including its existential bond to homeland, can be anything other than a human universal.  The ethnic self-awareness which discloses ethnic commonality and the self-preference which particularises it have their evolutionary antecedents in trait selection.  They do not allow for exceptions in one of the races of Man solely because it is European.  But excepted from the politics of ethnicity and nation is exactly what we Europeans are.  Whether that exception originates with intellectuals of our own race or of another, it speaks of a deep racial animus embedded in our social, political and cultural life, one particularising exclusively against us, assigning to us a lesser humanity.

So, although intellectual postures disqualifying us from our own nationalism are completely immoral and full of inconsistencies, still the authors are only exploiting the grand epochal shifts in European racial history which have led us to this point.  We are Judaism’s gentile of the End Time, or perilously close to it.  We are Christianity’s attenuated and womanlike soul, saved or damned by the judgement of Judaism’s male god.  We are liberalism’s secular correlate that is the de-natured will, a philosophical Narcissus conflicted with every other philosophical Narcissus, or “class” or category of philosophical Narcissus, in a vain struggle to be abstract yet “fully human” and “free”.  While we remain these alien imposts we are as nothing, for the gentile, the soul – saved or unsaved - and the liberal individual are nothing.  It is all killing us.

Of course we must live.  As with any people anywhere at any time in human history, our common life-cause is precisely that we must survive whatever challenges we face, and continue unto the morrow.  But the aforementioned three current determinants of our race’s life, together with modernity’s trio of estranging forces - urbanisation, materialism, and techne - and all that flows therefrom, present the most monumental existential challenge.  Excepting what comes from Nature, everything in our social life, everything in our political life has its genesis there; and everything visits some difficulty upon us, not only estrangement but anomie, lightness of being, personal artifice, ontological sloth and illusion, moral disjuncture (ie, economic interest in place of parenthood, ethnic masochism in place of tolerance), and so forth …  all the sins of a second, much manufactured Fall.

Into this maddening jumble of harm there must be planted the seed of something positive and vivifying.  It must herald the beginning of the end of academy’s denial of nationalism to us.  Accordingly, it must begin among academics and political thinkers.  It must be philosophical in form, an holistic exegesis of the blood, one initial work which, finally after all the misdirection, reaches to the essence of ethnic nationalism, articulating and affirming its universality and power.  It must establish its existential and nativist, not teleological, first principles.  It must disclose as emergent forces the components of kin and self which have been shattered by liberalism.  It must facilitate a defensive and conservative political bearing, and not anything progressive or aggressive and imperialistic.  It must, therefore, express an unimpeachable morality as the abiding philosophy of life and nature, entirely distinct from the confected fascistic forms of the 20th century.  The ruinous racial self-contempt of the hard-left must have no moral loophole through which it can squirm and satisfy itself.

Academic acceptance of and respect for the life-cause of European peoples is the gateway to all our nationalisms, and thus to our challenge to the six fundamentals of our current predicament.  Respect would change everything and introduce a snowball effect.  Each serious academic work would, in its turn, draw wider academic interest.  Productive critiques, re-workings and refinements would flow.  Everything truly human would finds its place and relation.  The result should be a systemic philosophy of and for the life of all peoples, not just ours.  As that lofty ambition implies, it would constitute an act of discovery rather than construction, and of affirmation rather than proposition.  As the politics flow, it would have a real possibility of challenging the dying liberal creed as the organising Idea of our epoch.

For the politics to then flow, peer attention which follows the publishing of said works must spread beyond the faculty environment.  It must connect the nationalist subject matter to all the wider intellectual ports and nodes – creative and analytic in the humanities, Third Sector analysis, aesthetics, journalistic - via which its rightness and timeliness might be more widely communicated.  A certain efflorescence might then develop beyond the intellectual life, popularising it and, in turn, setting in motion the complex but inexorable historical processes that raise and expand it again, universalising and systematising its truths and values and imperatives.  Part of that latter is to posit it, eventually, within a structure that can develop the political agency of its ideology.  Taken together, all this is the way and the means by which a non-violent political, social, cultural and economic revolution can self-initiate and become lasting, and a new epoch of European life dawn.

Our historical function as nationalists, then, begins with finding the academic fuse and lighting it.  We already know that, temporarily helpful as they may be, the politics of reaction, be it populist, civicist, patriotic, traditionalist, or conservative remains firmly within the conventions of the system.  There is nothing life-affirming in it, no language of the kin-recognition and preference which alone can light our way out of existential crisis.  Likewise, there is nothing philosophically novel in it, and nothing, therefore, remotely capable of supplanting liberalism as the organising Idea of our age, along with its deathly model of Man: the individual will unfettering its way to an impossibly god-like ideal … Man the Creator ... the subject without confines.  Its errors were already visible in Hegel’s time (as a student at the University of Tübingen he was a couple of weeks short of his 19th birthday when the Bastille was stormed, and his later political writings contained a selective but trenchant critique of liberalism and social contract theory).  Still, we have followed the French revolutionaries for 236 years, and John Locke for a century longer than that.  Now the meaning of liberalism and its works is all too clear to thinking nationalists (if not to populists et al).  We need to drive forward our model of permanent change.

To reprise and re-emphasise:

i) Formal intellectualism is the gateway to challenging liberalism as the organising Idea of our epoch, and at least some of the other five fundamentals of our current parlousness. 

ii) One major work can be enough to draw wider academic interest.  Productive critiques, re-workings and refinements would flow.  Everything truly human would finds its place and relation.

iii) The result would or should be a systemic philosophy of and for the life of all peoples, not just ours.  As that lofty ambition implies, it would constitute an act of discovery rather than construction, and of affirmation rather than proposition.

If such an intellectual and political triumph happens at some future point - and I do think it if not inevitable then highly probable that some future Martin Heidegger will eventually set it in motion - then the nationalist political movements of European-descended peoples will, for the first time, have recourse to a large store of formative truths.  Only in that event would an holistic and thorough-going nationalist revolution and renewal be manifest; and only in that event would we then have, in the words of the lost soul that was David Lane, secured “the existence of our people and a white future for our children.”  That’s the prize.

People presume themselves to be most surely Christians or Moslems, Buddhists, or Hindus come to that.  Likewise they think they are conservatives or socialists, reactionaries or progressives.  They live their lives and define themselves by such things, or by the professions they have or their abiding interests, or their wealth, their social class, and so on.  But all of these are only got from the world.  They are of the social man.  There are other permanent and real foundations in us, and ethnic nationalism draws directly from these.  Life and politics are uncertain.  But we have Nature on our side.  The next three essays in this series will endeavour to put some detail on that, first addressing principles, then parts, then processes.  They will appear in their own good time, as usual.  But perhaps someone somewhere will pick up some ideas from them, and you never know where that might one day lead.  Inflection allowing.

A European metamorphosis would be good.