Learning from Our Enemies

With the Unite the Right rally coming up fast, now seems as good a time as any to say something to the vast right-wing conspiracy that ID and Southern Nationalism in general has decided to tie our little boat to. There’s a lot we’ve accomplished since the presidential election—really, within the last few months as the attack on our heritage and our existence has been renewed. In that time, though, the old ghosts of right-wing past have come to haunt us: talking heads from WN 1.0 and the egos they carry behind them like Oni spirits wreaking destruction and the “not real conservatives” cries of the boomerposting that dominated the Ted Cruz campaign. There has been great organization, great networking, and a tremendous rise in overcoming the problems of leftist political violence—so much so that recently The Nation had to flat-out lie about right-wing political violence. CNN and the rest of the legacy media is imploding, and our talking points are gaining ground in the right places. There’s also been pissing-matches, undermining, and the ongoing feud between the “Alt-Right” and the “Alt-Lite”.

So now is as good a time as any to talk about what we’ve done well and what still needs to be done. Are any of you familiar with David Z. Hines? If the answer is “no”, then get familiar. He’s got a short list of articles that should definitely be on the reading list of absolutely every White rights advocate in the world. (There’s more on his Twitter). There’s also a theme to his writing: the right wing is stupid, and the left wing is smart, and the survival of our civilization depends on that changing. Now, upon first reading there are two basic reactions to Hines’ work: 1. “This is total BS, he just wants to preach at us, I know what I’m doing” and 2. “Holy crap, he’s right, we’re all going to die.” Give it some time and re-read it, setting aside panicked emotion and ego, however, and there’s a lot of wisdom that I have not been hearing in the Alt-South except from a very few people. Our reading lists do not generally include Bill Ayers and Antonio Gramschi, but they should, because those are the people who have been defeating us for the last 70 years.

One of the principal reasons the Alt-Right has been broadly successful has very little to do with Richard Spencer’s actual message (Hines has talked about this already – it’s the result of what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called a “floating signifier” – Saint Paul called it “being all things to all people.”) It has a lot to do with the fact that people can call themselves “Alt-Right” and still not be a huge fan of Spencer. Right now, the Alt-Right is starting to slip into traps that prior leftist movements have slipped into: Occupy is the example that Hines uses drawing on Jonathan Matthew Smucker, which fell apart because it ceased to be all things to all people and became Occupy to all people – communes in the downtown financial district and stupid white college kids getting raped by the minorities they welcomed into their hippie tent-towns. They began playing to their own audience, and not seeking broader audiences. Actually, Antifa is doing the same thing right now, because they’ve painted themselves into a corner dominated by felony rioting.

Unite the Right runs the risk of being the turning point for the Alt-Right, the pivot point at which it either rises or falls on the merits of what it appears to be. It is the point at which we can lose control of the narrative, and we need to keep that from happening—which is why now is the time to start brainstorming. Now is the time to talk about what we do after Charlottesville. Now is the time to begin organizing outside of the “we’re going to go somewhere and hold up signs” level of event. We need diversity of action, diversity of tactics, diversity of membership—and by that I mean a variety of different kind of thinkers. Right now, we’ve got basically two classes of actor: the activist and the intellectual. That’s a great start, but it also breeds contempt. Activists don’t like “keyboard warriors” telling them what they do wrong, and intellectuals feel isolated because the boots-on-the-ground fighters don’t appreciate the risks they take by being associated with career-killing politics. That contempt is all rooted in ego—on both sides, and it is deadly. It is also nourished by a lack of options. Let’s do a quote from Hine’s piece on radical strategy.

What does this mean, if you’re organizing a political movement? Two things, both of them crucial:

1. You have to provide an option for a hardcore experience.
2. You have to define hardcore carefully. Don’t let hardcore equal stupid.

This is, not kidding, one of the most important things I’ve ever read about political movements, and I think Righties, mainstream and radical alike, desperately need to pay attention to Smucker here. When it comes to hardcore, the mainstream Right is seriously deficient. There are not a lot of hardcore opportunities on the mainstream Right — at least, not directed at affecting politics. Going on mission for your church for two years in Godknowswhere is hardcore. Joining the military is hardcore. But if you’re a mainstream Righty and you want to do something hardcore as part of a movement to affect domestic politics? Crickets.

That’s one reason there’s an opening for Based Stickman. Existing Righty groups networking college students could have organized students to peacefully disrupt Lefty speakers in response to Lefties’ unanswered disruptions of Righty speakers. They didn’t. So other people are developing a hardcore response, showing themselves to be valuable, and providing a meaningful hardcore experience for the participants. That’s a failure for mainstream Righties. Let me stress this again: mainstream Righties need to provide some kind of option for a hardcore experience, or they’ll lose ground to radicals.

If you’re a Lefty? Holy hell are you awash in hardcore options. You wanna take over a city park? You want to go live out in South Dakota blocking a pipeline? You want to occupy a government building with protesters? You want to organize a fleet of kayaks to prevent an oil tanker from offloading? You want to go for a mass bike ride, frustrating every commuter in the city? If you’re a Lefty, people are tripping over each other to give you ways to be hardcore at varying levels. (The “varying levels” is important: people have different capacities and desires for hardcore, and different levels of ability to bear its consequences.) What Lefties are really great at, and what Righties should be better at, is providing an experience that feels hardcore to participants but still looks like moral high ground to everyone else. The classic example: SNCC going into the deep South to register poor black voters at a time when segregation is law, the Klan is powerful, and Lefty organizers are getting straight-up murdered. That’s hardcore. SNCC and Weatherman were both hardcore Lefty groups. But SNCC was smart. Weatherman was stupid. Hardcore that is unproductive is stupid by definition.

The upshot of that, by the way, is that you need both hardcore opportunities and not-so-hardcore opportunities. So we need more options—we also need a funded, dues-collecting, salary-paying Institution, which we don’t have yet. Something else we’re lacking is a significant merchandizing wing—and I don’t mean Dixie Republic (although by all means, spend your money there). We need sales people—people who know how to constantly expand our audience, to provide what the normie audience demands. Right now, we have ID. That’s a start, but we’ve got a ton of variety on here and no categories. We need more visible, non-criminal activism; we need charity organizing of our own (TWP is already doing something like this); we need active Church membership and small, informal local organizations; we need to provide a linked network of other Southern Nationalist and Southern Identitarian sites, with low-brow and high-brow writing.

So, if you’re one of our readers, guess what: all successful political agitation depends on you. Evaluate yourself. Where are your skills? How and where do you want to get involved—because you have to get involved; our people’s survival isn’t relying on you stroking your chin thoughtfully while flipping through FB or Twitter. It’s not about self-aggrandizement or feeling secure. Christianity succeeded (besides God sort of inherently knowing what He’s about) because it avoided making people feel comfortable: it was dedicated to the idea that suffering and struggle have meaning. You work for something, fight for something, sacrifice for something. Why should you get involved? Because it benefits you. The more heavily involved you are, the better your network, the stronger your community, the more stable your children’s future. If you’re more than just a reader, and one of my fellow writers, we need to provide these things for our readers. We need to provide for our audience as much as our audience needs to contribute more to us: we owe this to each other, because we are one people and we are not at the country club wondering how to improve our swing, but struggling for the very survival of our children and the memory of our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers.

So read Hines’ advice, and read up on leftist strategy and tactics. We don’t win the game as the board is set, so we need to reset the board or change the rules. We’ve got a major turning point coming up and coming up fast, and that needs to be just another event in a chain of constant activity, not the event where we jump the shark.

-By Leon Pantera and originally published at Identity Dixie.