Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide has finally got around to publishing his long awaited essay on White Nationalism. In the essay, FB explains how the intellectual foundation of White Nationalism is flawed. He lists several objections which are culled from various other writers.
Let’s go through these.
1.) Liberalism – White Nationalists don’t confront the core philosophical problem that confronts the West. Instead, White Nationalists blame Jews and non-Whites for all their problems and imagine that their expulsion alone is a sufficient solution to Western decline.
Response: I’ve made similar arguments on this website in the past. In 2009, I argued that the Jewish Question wasn’t so much the cause of America’s decline as it was an effect of our infatuation with liberal ideology. There were many debates here about the “Single Jewish Cause.”
I pointed out in great detail why the “Single Jewish Cause” wasn’t a sufficient explanation. The Jews didn’t force the Union to attack the Confederacy, occupy the South, abolish slavery, destroy the Klan, and pass the Reconstruction Amendments which granted citizenship and civil rights to freedmen. Jews didn’t force the Northern states to repeal their own Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth century.
It was the Founders who allowed the Jews to settle in America in the first place. It was Whites who imported black slaves to work on plantations. Whites also flirted with importing Chinese labor to the West Coast in the nineteenth century.
The Jewish Question is clearly a reflection of the inherent weaknesses in the American system of liberal capitalist democracy. Jews were invited to settle in America because the Founders frowned on religious bigotry. They were extended all the rights and privileges of American citizenship. They were encouraged to compete with Whites on a leveled playing field. Eventually, Whites let Jews into Ivy League universities and created the meritocratic system which fueled their rise into the American elite.
Ferdinand Bardamu is entirely correct in identifying liberalism as the “meta-problem” of White dispossession. It was liberalism that blinded Whites to the Jewish threat and laid the groundwork for their hostile takeover of America.
In addressing the relationship between liberalism and White Nationalism, I think Ferdinand Bardamu errs: the vast majority of White Nationalists have already dismissed liberalism and seek to replace it with some other philosophical system. It is taken for granted in our circles that potential recruits become disillusioned with the premises of liberalism before they become full fledged White Nationalists.
The reason liberals so fight hard to repress “racism” and “nationalism” is because tribalism – in this and other forms – represents the greatest potential threat to the liberal status quo. Blood, faith, and soil are compelling alternatives to secular millenarianism and liberal abstractions.
As we saw with National Socialism, “racism” and “nationalism” have their own internal logic and can be taken to extremes. By its very nature, White Nationalism is already an “anti-liberal” social movement. If White Nationalism were to triumph tomorrow, liberal capitalist democracy would be swept into the trash pile of discarded ideas.
White supremacy was always in conflict with American liberalism. The same is true of White Nationalism. The White Nationalist worldview is based on radically different premises and doesn’t lend itself to further expansion of “liberty” and “equality.”
There isn’t going to be a serious opposition movement to liberalism which is not based on some form of visceral tribalism. Any potential anti-liberal opposition movement based on similar, but opposed abstractions, will appeal exclusively to the handful of rootless, alienated intellectuals whom Ferdinand Bardamu would describe as nerds.
2.) Multiculturalism – White Nationalism is an ideological heresy of multiculturalism.
Response: Historically, this is false.
“White Nationalism” has existed in some form since the earliest days of Colonial America. It is based on the sentiment that America is a “White Man’s Country.” There have always been Americans who yearned to expel all racial minorities from their race-based republic.
The first organized White Nationalist movement began in Virginia in the 1790s. The first White Nationalists sought to deport Indians to the West and colonize blacks in West Africa. The movement was nominally successful: Indians were expelled from the Southeast in the Jackson and Van Buren administrations. Blacks were colonized in Liberia.
In the 1840s and 1850s, White Nationalism was reincarnated as “Free Soilism,” which was the idea that blacks should be excluded from the Western territories. This movement was popular in the Midwest, Border States, and Upper South where Whites in states like Kentucky, Missouri, and Indiana yearned to be free themselves of the negro once and for all.
After the Civil War, Sen. John Tyler Morgan led an effort to deport emancipated blacks to King Leopold II’s Congo Free State. Robert E. Lee wanted to deport blacks from Virginia and replace them with White laborers from Europe.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Senator Bilbo from Mississippi lobbied Congress to deport blacks to Africa. He wrote a book about his racial views, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.
White Nationalism has always existed in America. Until the 1970s, it was an undercurrent of White supremacy in the Border States like Kentucky and Missouri. By the 1970s and 1980s, White supremacists had given up on taking back America. The old idea of White Nationalism reemerged in the radical vanguardist scene, specifically, in groups like the Aryan Nations, The Order, and the National Alliance.
White Nationalism is confused with multiculturalism largely on account of David Duke’s influence. Duke adopted the language and rhetoric of the triumphant Civil Rights Movement. He advocated fairness and equality for Whites through organizations like EURO and the NAAWP, but his appeal fell on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, it was the more radical groups that advocated the White ethnostate. The movement organically grew out of the decline of White supremacy. In the 1990s, the radicals and moderates converged on the ethnostate, which remains the predominant model in our own times.
3.) Whitemanistan – White Nationalists want to unite all Whites in the world into the Whitemanistan Imperium. European ethnicities will be tossed into a blender and mixed into a banal form of whiteness.
Response: There are some White Nationalists who think this way. I don’t consider myself one of them. I have always said that “whiteness” was a marker of American and Southron ethnicity. Race was simply one of the ways that ethnic Southerners and ethnic Americans used to distinguish themselves from other groups. The English language, Protestantism, and republican political ideology were several other such markers.
My ideal is a racially based ethnostate in the American South. I want a race-based republic which is simultaneously an ethnic homeland for White Southerners.
I’m under no illusion that the British, French, Germans, Russians, Poles, Americans and so forth are one people. Instead of one White ethnostate, there should be many: an Irish ethnostate for the Irish, an Italian ethnostate for Italians, a German ethnostate for Germans – which, at a minimum, excludes non-Europeans as potential immigrants – and all these states should, ideally, cooperate as a bloc in dealing with non-Europeans.
Conclusion: White Nationalism, at least how I define it, is the project of creating a Jew-free, White ethnostate in North America. By necessity, the ethnostate that emerges from the wreckage of the United States will have to burst out of the womb of liberalism, as Whites will have to abandon liberal premises simply to conceive of an alternative form of social and political organization.
If a White ethnostate is ever created, it won’t be a Whitemanistan. Instead, it will organically evolve out of the preexisting identities that have been subsumed and buried under the American regime, not unlike how Croats and Ukrainians came out of Yugoslavia and the USSR.
In the South, this could take the form of some type of Neo-Confederate revival and secession. Alternatively, White Nationalism could also become a national movement that redefines Americanism as whiteness, which the Tea Party is already doing implicitly.
I’ve never heard any propose this at all. I’ve always assumed that the “White’ identity is the US came about specifically because there was mixing of various European nationalities. Certainly, no American WNs are expecting Europeans to abandon their various identities into an American-style “White” one, nor is anyone expecting Americans who are pure German, English, or Welsh to abandon those either. This objection is pure red herring.
I think the article debunked this definitively.
The ill effects of non-Whites on Whites may be the symptom, and liberalism the disease, but a doctor has to treat both.
Agreed 100%
HW,
I read FB’s article and found it to be disjointed and borderline incoherent. When he did get around to assessing White nationalism he always did it in the crudest terms imaginable, as if White nationalism amounted to little more than what the average Stormfront poster had to say.
On the other hand, your response was very well argued and made all the right points.
Another sophomoric FB yawner. Good job at demolishing him.
As far as ‘liberalism’ goes, we don’t want to make the mistake of the Yockeyites which is to conflate ‘classical liberalism’ of the 1700s (under which the white race expanded to conquer 90% of the planet) with modern liberalism, which is an entirely different thing. There isn’t any ‘liberal capitalist democracy’ since those things are all opposed to eachother. Liberalism and capitalism are diametrically opposed to eachother. Neither fares well under a pure democracy, as we can see from our current system where people vote themselves welfare, and gay marriage can’t get passed on a referendum even in California and Maine. It’s the modern definition of liberalism which is the problem, and it’s other names: progressivism, socialism, social justice, etc which are all derived from marxism.
Also as regards ethnic homelands vs ‘whitemanistan’, are you suggesting that the American South[east] be a ‘whitemanistan’ and the rest of the white world is ethnic homelands? I guess the American South[east] would have to be a ‘whitemanistan’ since it’s the part of the country where people don’t have any ethnic identity whatsoever. Would we then have a German ethnostate in most of the rest of America, a Mormon English ethnostate based in Utah, and Irish, Italian, and French ethnostates in the northeast?
As far as Bardamu’s article goes, white nationalism (in the sense of expelling or disempowering nonwhites) won’t fix ALL our problems (I don’t think many people claim it will), but it will fix some of them, and make many others easier to fix, so it’s a worthy goal.
Dividing the White race on ethnic grounds in America, is a very bad idea!
Actually a great deal of our different ethnic groups are concentrated in particular areas, the British Isles in the South, the Germans in the Midwest, the Scandinavians in the upper Midwest, etc. It’s always been that way. America has always been an implied White Nationalist nation until the advent of multiculturalism and diversity. Is it really that hard to turn back the clock 40 years and restore what was?
What happens to black America in this White Nationalist nation? Obviously they can’t live among us and I’m not in favor of bringing back segregation so they can. Shipping them back to Africa is not an option either merely for the fact that no country would take them in.
Bart: “Shipping them back to Africa is not an option either merely for the fact that no country would take them in.”
I do not advocate shipping them back to Africa, but I am certain some African countries would love to have an African-American population with I believe a standard deviation higher IQ. Senegal unsuccessfully tried to immigrate Haitians-who have a much lower IQ than African-Americans-after the earthquake.
The only problem for the White pro-repatriationists is convincing African-Americans to leave America for Tropical Africa.
Bart,
They don’t necessarily have to go back to Africa. We can give them the choice of any black (or heck, any non-White) nation of their choosing. It doesn’t really matter were they go, as long as they leave. And there would be a sufficient time period for them to get their affairs in order.
Of course, there is always voluntary sterilization but something tells me there would not be many takers.
Also, Bart, I do not understand if you support dividing White Americans or not-but, many-if not most-European Americans have multiple European ethnicities in their blood. And the map displayed shows majority-minority status, not majority status. For example, the Italians may be the majority-minority of New Jersey, but, most NJ Whites are not Italians. Likewise, Blacks are actually not the full majority in the whole official “Black Belt;” they are just the majority-minority in many of those counties, and majority in probably a small minority of those counties.
I realize people don’t have all the answers but I would think Puerto Rican independence would be a necessary first move towards establishing a White Nationalist nation. What about Hawaii, Guam and the US Virgin Islands? Do we hang onto them and impose our will or let them go?
Bart,
Absolutely, Puerto Rico has been leeching off of us for too long, they must be let go.
The other territories I could give or take, preferable give (away). Concerning Hawaii though, I am rather divided. It’s the most non-White state in the Union, but it’s of incredible military importance to the nation. I confess to being rather curious as to what will become of Hawaii.
“Shipping them back to Africa is not an option either merely for the fact that no country would take them in.”
Why not? After the earthquake, Senegal offered to take any Black Haitians who wished to com, and give them land to boot. We failed to see the Haitians clamoring to take the offer, interestingly.
I think it would be in Whites’ and America’s interest to let go of all of our territories. Regarding, Hawaii, I also have mixed feelings. We would probably benefit from letting Hawaii (or at least a part thereof) go; but, we really do not want China to procure it, if it decides to try colonization on North America.
“2.) Multiculturalism – White Nationalism is an ideological heresy of multiculturalism.
Response: Historically, this is false.”
It is not. It is not because there are different white cultures and nationalisms. “White Nationalism” with a capital W N asserts the single, unitary, White Nation, to which ALL whites belong. That’s the multicultural aspect.
But we don’t. And it doesn’t exist. And won’t.
This is one of many reasons why Harold Covington is a loony guy who is never actually going to get anywhere. “Whites” are not my nation. There are lots of whites, and certain types of whites, I don’t care for and will not fight for.
All of the historical background you are talking about is specifically American nationalism. However I don’t believe that still exists anymore. Utah Mormon nationalism, white Texan nationalism, Quebecois nationalism, Alberta prairie industrial nationalism, Dixie neoconfederate white nationalism, Vermont hippie nationalism, whatever other local variants might pop up, sure. All of those can be white North American nationalisms. But (unless the Tea Party proves me wrong) I don’t believe it is possible to encapsulate all of them in one unitary group exerting control over most or all the territory north of the Rio Grande. For one thing, there are too many whites who really honestly think it’s evil to not welcome the poor brown people.
I’d be very happy to be wrong about that.
Lawrence,
We can make Hawaii a separate country that happens to have a massive US military base…like every other country.
“I do not advocate shipping them back to Africa”
Agreed- they should be sent back via airplane.
You owe me a new keyboard for that one TabuLaRaza.
European ethnicities will be tossed into a blender and mixed into a banal form of whiteness.
I don’t understand the aversion to voluntary inter-Euro breeding. There is nothing banal about a new White ethnicity in America comprised of various European ethnicities. I also find the remark disparging of my pedigree and what I imagine is the very same pedigree of a large number of Americans.
I’ve never heard any propose this at all.
I have and there are many others. Due to the nature of the settling of the continent I imagine that my vision won’t obtain. I prefer localism over all and I think that the ethnic divisions of the country alluded to above will continue to obtain. This is still a perfectly desirable situation and technically my ideal. However, I think that would interbreeding would be beneficial for our genetic health with occasional intermarriage between localities every three or four generations after we’ve secured th ethnosate. My vision of White Narionalism doesn’t require rigid preservation, in stasis, of a particular genotype. In fact, I think it is a slightly dangerous road to travel.
“In the essay, FB explains how the intellectual foundation of White Nationalism is flawed.”
No, there is nothing wrong with “the intellectual foundation of White nationalism.” That is IF that “intellectual foundation” is utilized and not the 2nd and 3rd rate “reinventions of the wheel” that so many labor at.
Years ago, an old guy I worked with told us, “if you got tools, use them!”
If you have tools, use them!
We have tools. For example, Revilo P. Oliver covered nearly everything that this essay mentions (along with virtually everything else we encounter in this movement). And he did so back in the late 1950s and then set it forth again in a 1981 book, 29 years ago. Oliver stated in straightforward and easy to understand language that Liberalism was the “shield” protecting Jewish, One World mythology and thus what had to be wrestled with and demolished first.
If you have tools, use them!
If the wheel has already been invented, then use it and quit wasting time reinventing it.
In 2009, I argued that the Jewish Question wasn’t so much the cause of America’s decline as it was an effect of our infatuation with liberal ideology.
Old system + no Jews = no problem. (Or at least, no post-1965 disaster.) “Single Jewish Cause” is correct.
3.) Whitemanistan – White Nationalists want to unite all Whites in the world into the Whitemanistan Imperium. European ethnicities will be tossed into a blender and mixed into a banal form of whiteness.
This is pre-1965 America you’re describing, and I think it worked fine. Of course, in the future I’d prefer only a low level of white immigration into the US white gene pool (with exceptions for cases like whites from Zimbabwe and South Africa, if they need to come here).
Instead of one White ethnostate, there should be many: an Irish ethnostate for the Irish, an Italian ethnostate for Italians, a German ethnostate for Germans
Trying to create all these separate ethnostates in America is a laughably absurd idea. Who are you kidding?
‘I read FB’s article and found it to be disjointed and borderline incoherent. ‘
I regard FB’s article as extremely incoherent. However, one of his posters, Brendan, made an interesting comment on the rational nature of liberalism being central to the last 1000 years of Western civilization.
He wrote (in part, the entire comment is worthwhile)
The combination of scholasticism, with its ever-increasing weirdness (delving with philosophy into such mysterious matters as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or the precise nature of life after death), and humanism, with its increasing impatience with anything “imposed from above” beyond the level of the human person, led directly to the Protestant Reformation – a development which was the beginning of the end for the West in spiritual terms.
How so? The core problem of the Reformation was the nature of authority. The slogan regarding authority that was popularized by the reformers, and embraced by most of them, ranging from Luther to Calvin and beyond, was “sola scriptura” – “scripture alone” – as the source of authority. …
Following the Reformation, the balance of power, in terms of determining the course of Western culture, shifted decisively to the Protestant powers. …
If the truth of faith was to be found by reading the Biblical texts with the aid of human reason, it was only a matter of time until thinkers began to expand upon that and come to the conclusion that human reason itself was the critical point.
….The thinkers of the Enlightenment were simply following through on the “idea” of authority which was hatched by the Reformation, and simply asked the question: “Why need we confine ourselves to that text?”. It was only a matter of time until that question was asked, and only a matter of time until human reason became as exalted as Descartes did (cogito ergo sum) – a breathtaking reduction of humanity as much as it is the exaltation of human reason.
There are a few common arguments made against white nationalism and it’s worthwhile to address them. It might behoove you to look up the sophisticated arguments and defenses that the Zionists have concocted. They after all are a rather affluent, “Liberal” people. I am sure they have arguments against:
1. Excluding non-whites (Jews) excludes high end non-whites (Jews), which could advance society.
2. (Jewish) Nationalism is a relic. People want to do what they will and be free.
3. A (Jewish) National-state will lead to the variety of Jews being assimilated into one boring people. So having a state is stupid.
As for this:
“White Nationalism is an ideological heresy of multiculturalism”.
It’s clearly largely a response to multiculturalism. This translates to:
Zionism was just a response to antisemitism and assimilationism. Sure one wouldn’t need the nationalism, if the “white” (read: Western/White/European identity) wasn’t under threat. But it is.
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Look there are reams of sophisticated arguments for Zionism. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel here.
‘political nationalism’ is a relatively recent phenomenon…the upper classes of europe, especially, have always been an internationale of sorts and America became pretty much the same way, only across all class divisions as well…I think white people here who can trace all of their relatives back to the mayflower, or who are ‘pure’ germans or welsh or whatever are a small minority. white with a small w may still exist in europe, but capital Whiteness is America.
The comments are better than the article.
the only problem with the Protestantism as decay theory is that Thomism, i.e. official church philosophy, exalts human reason and claims for discurvise reasoning the ability to reason by way of natural theology to God almighty. It is Catholicism that is in love with reason. Protestants have an advantage in sola scriptura. With the doctrine, we have an unchanging text, a final and objective authority and sole rule for all of life that binds both the king and the peasant. I’d love to elaborate on all the claims I’ve made but I’m on my I-pod.
“White Nationalists blame Jews and non-Whites for all their problems and imagine that their expulsion alone is a sufficient solution to Western decline.”
I think that in general that’a an accurate assessment. There is hardly any discussion among WN about what they like and a whole lot on what they don’t like.
Liberalism descends from Christianity which descends from Judaism.
Liberalism = Christianity without God.
Christianity = Judaism without race.
Liberalism = Judaism without God and Race.
QED
You’re regurgitating the talking points of the godless WN right without justifcation of any of your well worn premises. It is really boring.
In other words, sayin it don’t make it sp and unless you’ve had formal training in logic you should probably refrain from misuse of the terminology. Especially, terminology that suggests you’ve proved something when you’ve done nothing of the sort.
Nietzsche may be stating such in rather simple terms, but Christian WN has been at pains to stretch the bible to fit their ideology for quite a long time now (see even H.S. Chamberlain for a nice glimpse)…if instead of saying ‘liberalism’, he said ‘secular humanism’, would it have been easier to understand? Ultimately I’d choose mead over manischevitz no matter how you try to justify it…
I don’t feel like we are at pains. Ethnonationalism is in the text. As Matt hiton above, it really is a secondary issue for us.
Let me summarize my perspective on this.
Ferdinand Bardamu notes that white nation-statism is a doomed project on the account of liberalism. Let me explain why he is correct.
You current model of nationalism is a visceral parochialism based on a vague historic identity and a theory on genetic interest. Together this makes it nationalism, in the sense of a “being part of a people.”
As you notice, your nationalism or people-hood, is crumbling. Part of this is because it’s easy to manipulate the visceral parochialism on which your nationalism is based. And many Jews in addition to others, think Gramsci, have done this. They have 1) eradicated any sense of historic peoplenessd 2) demonized any sense of genetic based preference. This has largely reduced Westerners to persons of fair complexion with a visceral parochialism for whomever they are nearest. (read: integration policy).
You are largely reacting to this. You correctly sense that this situation will leads to the death of your people. This is why many of you are white nation-statists. Other preach genetic interests and a few speak of classical Western identity.
What Ferdinand Bardamu pointed out is that the problem is deeper. Even if all cultural marxists disappeared and you had several nationally syndicated papers in which you could remind people of their historic identity and speak highly of genetic interest, and even if you could repeal all integration laws or secede and gather all people in a state together, you would still have the problem of liberalism, which is a distinct problem related to modernism. Which is why you need more than a nationalism based on a visceral parochialism with a vague or not so vague historic identity and a theory of genetic interest.
THE BASIC REALITY YOU MUST DEAL WITH — Modernism: the world event which has lead to increased Affluence + globalism, which undermine local interest and parochial altruism and which promotes individualism and cosmopolitan association.)
You can not fight the above. Rather, you must work with it. The first step is to realize that modernism is not liberal-progressivism, where liberal-progressivism means:
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1. Liberalism: a) the event of humans seeing themselves as individual autonomous agents who choose their identities. b) the idea that it’s uniquely good for each individual to decided their own individualized life path.
2. Progressivism: the idea that inclusive group identities are uniquely good and exclusive ones are bad.
3. Liberal-progressivism: the ideology that national, exclusive,group identities are bad and that it’s good for individuals to form inclusive group identities.
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The the second is to realize that there are two concepts of liberalism. Both revolve around the notion of the person as an individual. There is liberalism as an event or ways of relating (seeing oneself as an autonomous agent)– a) and there is liberalism as an identity. To some extent, liberalism both as a ways of relating and identity represents a polarity. (It was born along with nationalism and Marxism out of the decline of Christendom). And it is clear that this view is fundamentally flawed. Nobody, for example, celebrates the mass rapists or murderer as someone defining their own life path and identity– yet, it is never clear why not — it just an atypical life path. Further, it is pretty clear that people are being herded into a progressive group identities –odd given the value of individual choice of identity.
Regardless liberalism as an event is a theme of our times. As such you need to work with it. That collectivism called Socialism is. Hence Liberal-Progressivism. As such:
Re-envision your group as an exclusive identity in which you, as an individual, participate and in doing so which gives structure to who you are. Get that mental model in your mind. It is not just a sitting around at the bar with Jack and Joe and the ties that comes from that. It is not feeling groupish or tribal with Joe. It is not a nostalgic attachment or a rational calculus of genetic similarity. It is an existential act. It is a philosophy, a seeing yourself, and life history, in relation to a transhistoric identity of which only a privileged number of the worlds population has the potential to participate.
Identity isn’t going anywhere. All modernism has done is make identity more of an individual act. The problem with being Western was and largely still is that it involves group consensus. When large amounts of white people identify as liberal or as progressive, as opposed to as Westerns, this consensus breaks down.
After you re-frame it, liberalism will be ideologically irrelevant. Liberalism is not more a critique to nationalism than it is to progressivism. And since your nationalism is not longer founded on visceral parochialism, modernism is not an existential threat. It may be more or less popular, but it’s sinews are never effected, because it does not exist as mere communal fondness.
Of course, the practical reality is still there. The boundaries of your identity are partially genetic and that has costs and benefits. There are a limited number of people who can participate and there are ever fewer and fewer. Which is why you have to build a critical mass to resist the cultural marxism.