0 comment Friday, July 4, 2014 | admin
I occasionally cite articles from LewRockwell.com and other libertarian-leaning blogs. I've linked to pieces by Justin Raimondo on occasion, but always with the awareness that he, like other libertarians, may only accidentally express an opinion that coincides with my own on some subject.
However, much as I can occasionally find something I agree with in libertarian thought, I have always recognized that in most senses, libertarians are my enemies as much as liberals and leftists/progressives are. I can hear somebody saying, ''no, liberals and libertarians are opposites; liberals want big, intrusive government and libertarians want minimal government. Liberals want social programs and a nanny state, whereas libertarians loathe these things, believing the individual should be as unfettered as possible and make his own decisions without governmental regulation and meddling. Or: ''liberals/leftists hate the free market, while libertarians believe in the free market and laissez-faire capitalism. '' And so on.
But the two groups seem to agree on some important basics, like their blind belief that human beings are some kind of blank slates, who owe nothing to race, family, heritage, or history. Each man is an island, his own sovereign country, to both kinds of 'libs.'
Conservatives, by and large, see human nature as a given, and see that human nature is flawed and in need of laws and restraints to curb the worst behavior, while liberals/libertarians see no such thing. The latter two groups are for the most part not Christian by belief or culture, and so they don't believe that there is a fallen human nature.
While liberals may want a strong state to 'take care' of everybody or to punish incorrect thoughts and ideas, they also believe that crime and deviancy should be defined downward, and people mostly left to their own devices when it comes to ''personal choices'' like abortion, drug usage and dealing, and aberrant sexual behaviors.
I think the liberals and libertarians, for the most part, are simply different factions of the same basic belief system, and have far more in common with each other than with those of a traditional, especially Christian, mindset.
During last year's campaign cycle, I supported Ron Paul's candidacy, though I said here and elsewhere that I was dissatisfied with his aracial and at times quite politically correct positions on racial matters. Libertarians, again like liberals, are ideologues, always trying to squeeze reality into their PC belief system, always denying the obvious realities that clash with the articles of their libertarian faith. Ron Paul, whatever his merits, is an ideologue on racial matters, though some have rationalized that he had to cover up his true beliefs for political reasons.
I think that he truly is an aracialist ideologue, like libertarians in general.
Here is Raimondo's latest piece, denigrating racialist Whites:
...what do the "white nationalists" want? What is their program? They are "nationalists" without a nation. Do they want to expel all non-whites from U.S. territory? Do they want to carve out their own ersatz "nation" in, say, the nether reaches of Idaho and the Dakotas? Do they want to create a caste system based on racial heritage, as the Nazis tried to do, with whites on top and the "mud people"�their disgusting term for non-whites�on the bottom? Or do they just want to abolish race preferences in law and custom�in which case they shed their "white nationalist" hoods and morph into white versions of Ward Connerly? Would Taylor outlaw miscegenation if he could? I have no doubt that he would, no matter what he says in public.''
Notice the allusion to ''hoods''. Not exactly subtle, is he? Read a little further, for his reference to the 'failed portrait-painter from Vienna.'
Americans don�t like racists, not because they have been indoctrinated by leftist professors and do-gooder social workers, but because "white nationalists" and their ilk are looking for the unearned: they want power, prestige, and money in the bank based on factors over which they had no control, that is, their genetic heritage. [...] It is a soulless, materialist, dogmatic view of life that has nothing in common with authentic conservatism, and which has all sorts of statist implications�not to mention a history of racialist-inspired statist measures�that make "white nationalism" antithetical to libertarianism.
Richard Spencer makes a big deal out of how "open-minded" and un-PC Takimag is in publishing Taylor�s tirade against "race-mixing." I cannot share his enthusiasm. There is a good reason to avoid the Taylorites, and their even cruder brothers-in-spirit in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi netherworld, and it has to do with maintaining the intellectual and spiritual integrity of the American Right. I agree with Pat Buchanan, who, in pointing out the disparity between his own ideas and those of David Duke, averred: "We come from different traditions." Indeed we do. Taylor�s is the legacy of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, the Count de Gobineau, and that failed portrait painter from Vienna: ours is the legacy of Christianity, which recognized the centrality of the individual soul, and rejects collectivism, including racial collectivism, as inimical to freedom, reason, and just relations among men.
"If you can�t beat 'em," says Taylor, "join 'em!" The paleoconservative answer to this must be: Never! ''
Where does he get off trying to define 'authentic conservatism', since he himself does not claim that label? Even more ironic is his allusion to the 'legacy of Christianity.' Excuse me? I thought libertarians consider themselves, like liberals, self-created, autonomous individuals, with no debt owed to heritage or tradition. And I understand he is also a non-believing ex-Catholic, and openly living a lifestyle that Christianity does not accept.
Raimondo more or less equates Jared Taylor and other such moderate racialists with the usual liberal ''racist'' villains, tarring all with the same brush. Again, this illustrates that no matter how moderate or genteel the message and the messenger may be, it will be condemned by the Nazi/Hitler/Klan analogies. Raimondo must surely know that every generation of Americans, up until the mid-20th century, held views very much like those of Stoddard, Grant, et al. Racial views like Raimondo's would have been aberrant to all pre-PC generations.
What is going on with this recent volley of anti-racialist (read: anti-White, anti-heartland American) articles at TakiMag? It seems they have 'WNs' in their sights. If racialists are fringe characters and as marginal as these people would have us believe, wouldn't ignoring be a more logical approach? Or are they afraid or threatened by what they see as a resurgence of the old America, the one they've declared anathema?
To the extent that paleos take Raimondo's advice, they will render themselves totally irrelevant; if paleoconservatives go completely PC they will be as useless as the 'colorblind' Republican crowd, the party of Steele et al.
I've noticed for some years now that libertarianism has grown in influence on the right, and I see this, in part, as one of the reasons why there are so many conservatives whose conservatism has more to do with venerating the 'free market' and legalizing drugs than preserving any aspect of traditional America, including (and especially) race and heritage.
The 'colorblind conservatives' who dominate the Republican party are often libertarians at heart who simply see the GOP as the imperfect but necessary vehicle for their political agenda. And because they are libertarians who see race as unimportant if not non-existent, they care nothing for the future of White Americans, seeing themselves only as individuals, and perhaps generic Americans with no particular traditional ties.
If Raimondo and others of similar ideas have their way, White Americans would have no party representing us and our interests, which interests they perceive as illegitimate and immoral anyway. Here is Raimondo from an earlier piece:
...I deny the validity of the concept of "race." We are nearly all of us racial mixtures, except for some isolated peoples who are the exceptions that prove the rule, and therefore when dealing with individuals�and we are all of us individuals�"racial" criteria are practically useless. Furthermore, this is the natural historical trend: in the end we�re all going to be somewhat coffee-colored, and so the racial theorists are headed for the dustbin of history.
It isn�t race, but culture that is the determining factor in human behavior: not genes, but environment that forms the human character and allows us to interact with each other in a way that makes sense. IQ tests don�t measure only inherent genetic limits, but the quality of the environmental factors that have shaped individual characteristics�and, in any case, since the concept of "race" is so imprecise, the idea of racial superiority or inferiority is a meaningless floating abstraction. That�s why there is no "white solidarity"�people generally termed "white" are Italian, Polish, Greek, Scots, Irish, and whatever. That is where their ethnic loyalties, if any, are located. The idea that "whites" should band together against the encroaching Third World masses is a literary-political construct that has no meaning, at least in America�and thank the gods for that.
I would argue that the problems experienced by the black community are the result of State intervention and social engineering programs, starting with slavery�surely the most damaging�and continuing on with the "Great Society" and all the other social experiments supposedly designed to lift blacks up, and which in reality have only kept them down. The social programs of the 1960s destroyed the black family, and led to the appalling statistics the commenters below have remarked on.
In anser [sic]to Paul Gottfried�s remarks, I would add that the degeneration of the "white" (i.e. racially mixed) population in the US shows that my thesis on the environmental factors as determinative is correct. The welfare state has eroded values that were once considered unquestionable: it isn�t our genetic stock that is the problem, but our political and economic structure, which encourages�indeed, subsidizes�destructive social trends.''
He sounds exactly like most of the liberals I know in that part, except for the part about 'social engineering programs.'
So are we 'nationalists without a nation'? We might be a nation without a state or a country, since the country that our forefathers created for us, their posterity, has been commandeered by others. But a nation is a people, not a governmental system or apparatus. We are a nation nonetheless, with the same right to exist as any other nation, regardless of whether we have any political voice in this corrupt empire in which we now dwell.
Update: Please see the deft response to Raimondo's piece here, at Occidental Dissent. Prozium does a great job of answering Raimondo.
However, much as I can occasionally find something I agree with in libertarian thought, I have always recognized that in most senses, libertarians are my enemies as much as liberals and leftists/progressives are. I can hear somebody saying, ''no, liberals and libertarians are opposites; liberals want big, intrusive government and libertarians want minimal government. Liberals want social programs and a nanny state, whereas libertarians loathe these things, believing the individual should be as unfettered as possible and make his own decisions without governmental regulation and meddling. Or: ''liberals/leftists hate the free market, while libertarians believe in the free market and laissez-faire capitalism. '' And so on.
But the two groups seem to agree on some important basics, like their blind belief that human beings are some kind of blank slates, who owe nothing to race, family, heritage, or history. Each man is an island, his own sovereign country, to both kinds of 'libs.'
Conservatives, by and large, see human nature as a given, and see that human nature is flawed and in need of laws and restraints to curb the worst behavior, while liberals/libertarians see no such thing. The latter two groups are for the most part not Christian by belief or culture, and so they don't believe that there is a fallen human nature.
While liberals may want a strong state to 'take care' of everybody or to punish incorrect thoughts and ideas, they also believe that crime and deviancy should be defined downward, and people mostly left to their own devices when it comes to ''personal choices'' like abortion, drug usage and dealing, and aberrant sexual behaviors.
I think the liberals and libertarians, for the most part, are simply different factions of the same basic belief system, and have far more in common with each other than with those of a traditional, especially Christian, mindset.
During last year's campaign cycle, I supported Ron Paul's candidacy, though I said here and elsewhere that I was dissatisfied with his aracial and at times quite politically correct positions on racial matters. Libertarians, again like liberals, are ideologues, always trying to squeeze reality into their PC belief system, always denying the obvious realities that clash with the articles of their libertarian faith. Ron Paul, whatever his merits, is an ideologue on racial matters, though some have rationalized that he had to cover up his true beliefs for political reasons.
I think that he truly is an aracialist ideologue, like libertarians in general.
Here is Raimondo's latest piece, denigrating racialist Whites:
...what do the "white nationalists" want? What is their program? They are "nationalists" without a nation. Do they want to expel all non-whites from U.S. territory? Do they want to carve out their own ersatz "nation" in, say, the nether reaches of Idaho and the Dakotas? Do they want to create a caste system based on racial heritage, as the Nazis tried to do, with whites on top and the "mud people"�their disgusting term for non-whites�on the bottom? Or do they just want to abolish race preferences in law and custom�in which case they shed their "white nationalist" hoods and morph into white versions of Ward Connerly? Would Taylor outlaw miscegenation if he could? I have no doubt that he would, no matter what he says in public.''
Notice the allusion to ''hoods''. Not exactly subtle, is he? Read a little further, for his reference to the 'failed portrait-painter from Vienna.'
Americans don�t like racists, not because they have been indoctrinated by leftist professors and do-gooder social workers, but because "white nationalists" and their ilk are looking for the unearned: they want power, prestige, and money in the bank based on factors over which they had no control, that is, their genetic heritage. [...] It is a soulless, materialist, dogmatic view of life that has nothing in common with authentic conservatism, and which has all sorts of statist implications�not to mention a history of racialist-inspired statist measures�that make "white nationalism" antithetical to libertarianism.
Richard Spencer makes a big deal out of how "open-minded" and un-PC Takimag is in publishing Taylor�s tirade against "race-mixing." I cannot share his enthusiasm. There is a good reason to avoid the Taylorites, and their even cruder brothers-in-spirit in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi netherworld, and it has to do with maintaining the intellectual and spiritual integrity of the American Right. I agree with Pat Buchanan, who, in pointing out the disparity between his own ideas and those of David Duke, averred: "We come from different traditions." Indeed we do. Taylor�s is the legacy of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, the Count de Gobineau, and that failed portrait painter from Vienna: ours is the legacy of Christianity, which recognized the centrality of the individual soul, and rejects collectivism, including racial collectivism, as inimical to freedom, reason, and just relations among men.
"If you can�t beat 'em," says Taylor, "join 'em!" The paleoconservative answer to this must be: Never! ''
Where does he get off trying to define 'authentic conservatism', since he himself does not claim that label? Even more ironic is his allusion to the 'legacy of Christianity.' Excuse me? I thought libertarians consider themselves, like liberals, self-created, autonomous individuals, with no debt owed to heritage or tradition. And I understand he is also a non-believing ex-Catholic, and openly living a lifestyle that Christianity does not accept.
Raimondo more or less equates Jared Taylor and other such moderate racialists with the usual liberal ''racist'' villains, tarring all with the same brush. Again, this illustrates that no matter how moderate or genteel the message and the messenger may be, it will be condemned by the Nazi/Hitler/Klan analogies. Raimondo must surely know that every generation of Americans, up until the mid-20th century, held views very much like those of Stoddard, Grant, et al. Racial views like Raimondo's would have been aberrant to all pre-PC generations.
What is going on with this recent volley of anti-racialist (read: anti-White, anti-heartland American) articles at TakiMag? It seems they have 'WNs' in their sights. If racialists are fringe characters and as marginal as these people would have us believe, wouldn't ignoring be a more logical approach? Or are they afraid or threatened by what they see as a resurgence of the old America, the one they've declared anathema?
To the extent that paleos take Raimondo's advice, they will render themselves totally irrelevant; if paleoconservatives go completely PC they will be as useless as the 'colorblind' Republican crowd, the party of Steele et al.
I've noticed for some years now that libertarianism has grown in influence on the right, and I see this, in part, as one of the reasons why there are so many conservatives whose conservatism has more to do with venerating the 'free market' and legalizing drugs than preserving any aspect of traditional America, including (and especially) race and heritage.
The 'colorblind conservatives' who dominate the Republican party are often libertarians at heart who simply see the GOP as the imperfect but necessary vehicle for their political agenda. And because they are libertarians who see race as unimportant if not non-existent, they care nothing for the future of White Americans, seeing themselves only as individuals, and perhaps generic Americans with no particular traditional ties.
If Raimondo and others of similar ideas have their way, White Americans would have no party representing us and our interests, which interests they perceive as illegitimate and immoral anyway. Here is Raimondo from an earlier piece:
...I deny the validity of the concept of "race." We are nearly all of us racial mixtures, except for some isolated peoples who are the exceptions that prove the rule, and therefore when dealing with individuals�and we are all of us individuals�"racial" criteria are practically useless. Furthermore, this is the natural historical trend: in the end we�re all going to be somewhat coffee-colored, and so the racial theorists are headed for the dustbin of history.
It isn�t race, but culture that is the determining factor in human behavior: not genes, but environment that forms the human character and allows us to interact with each other in a way that makes sense. IQ tests don�t measure only inherent genetic limits, but the quality of the environmental factors that have shaped individual characteristics�and, in any case, since the concept of "race" is so imprecise, the idea of racial superiority or inferiority is a meaningless floating abstraction. That�s why there is no "white solidarity"�people generally termed "white" are Italian, Polish, Greek, Scots, Irish, and whatever. That is where their ethnic loyalties, if any, are located. The idea that "whites" should band together against the encroaching Third World masses is a literary-political construct that has no meaning, at least in America�and thank the gods for that.
I would argue that the problems experienced by the black community are the result of State intervention and social engineering programs, starting with slavery�surely the most damaging�and continuing on with the "Great Society" and all the other social experiments supposedly designed to lift blacks up, and which in reality have only kept them down. The social programs of the 1960s destroyed the black family, and led to the appalling statistics the commenters below have remarked on.
In anser [sic]to Paul Gottfried�s remarks, I would add that the degeneration of the "white" (i.e. racially mixed) population in the US shows that my thesis on the environmental factors as determinative is correct. The welfare state has eroded values that were once considered unquestionable: it isn�t our genetic stock that is the problem, but our political and economic structure, which encourages�indeed, subsidizes�destructive social trends.''
He sounds exactly like most of the liberals I know in that part, except for the part about 'social engineering programs.'
So are we 'nationalists without a nation'? We might be a nation without a state or a country, since the country that our forefathers created for us, their posterity, has been commandeered by others. But a nation is a people, not a governmental system or apparatus. We are a nation nonetheless, with the same right to exist as any other nation, regardless of whether we have any political voice in this corrupt empire in which we now dwell.
Update: Please see the deft response to Raimondo's piece here, at Occidental Dissent. Prozium does a great job of answering Raimondo.
Labels: Anti White Racism, Ethnoconservatism, Libertarianism, Nationalism, Political Correctness, Race Denial, Race Realism