THE TRIUMPH OF NEGATIVITY

by William Solniger

A common theme on the radical Right is the dilemma over whether to pursue mass political campaigns in the service of our goals, or devote time and effort to organising and educating a smaller group which can separate itself from the sewer of Western culture so as to act freely in the future. On the whole, the overriding tendency is to reject mass political action as unworkable or premature. This is true not only of those who hope to see a restoration of Traditional values in the West, but also of those who confine themselves to the sphere of nationalism and ethnic self-defence.

While I tend to agree with the diagnosis that political action is premature, it is important to note that this is the case only as regards converting the masses to some positive political movement offering a particular solution to the crisis of the West. Converting them to a negative rejection of the current system is another matter entirely, and it is this possibility that I wish to explore.

For simplicity's sake, I will confine the following discussion to my own homeland of Britain, though I dare say that many of my conclusions will find resonance elsewhere.  

It is surprising that a rightist blogosphere theoretically opposed to "liberal democracy" and the Western ruling class often has little to say about the low levels of esteem to which these have recently sunk in the minds of the general public. Thanks to a recurring expenses scandal  and the major political parties’ perceived ideological homogeneity, contempt for politicians and "elites" has become widespread in Britain – and it is to this so-called "anti-politics" that we must trace the rise of the pseudo-nationalist party UKIP. However, a recent public poll suggests that anger towards the political class is also the main reason for disdaining to vote altogether, hinting at a wider and deeper well of rejectionist sentiment aimed at the entire system. This sentiment has no doubt been reinforced by the tainting of "Western ideals" in bloody foreign wars on the one hand, and the post-recession resentment towards the plutocratic element of "liberal democracy" on the other.

Now, it is true that this political rejectionism is often attended to by leftist movements like ‘Occupy’, ‘Anonymous’, and lately the millionaire Russell Brand with his calls for an ill-defined “revolution”. But these Starbucks anarchists are playing with forces which they only imperfectly understand; the prevalence of their own decadent, cosmopolitan, and politically-correct worldview is dependent upon the consensus of the Western ruling class (which is far more advanced in degeneracy than the populace it holds in check), and to undermine the one is to undermine the other. The relentlessly negative, accusatory tone of their discourse could easily be pushed out of their control: for example, their "solution" to the injustices of democratic politics is of course more democracy, but the practical effect of their criticism is to discredit democracy altogether by exposing it as a morass of lies and corruption. Similarly, their attacks on corporate plutocracy can be turned back on their own support for mass immigration, which is after all a system of cheap labour, and the "anti-racist" ideology which protects and moralises it. And so on.

To come to my main point: it should not be unfeasible or premature to rally large masses of people to a negative rejection of the current system, even if discussion of effective solutions must be confined – perhaps for the time being, perhaps indefinitely – to a much smaller and more close-knit group (although by this I am not calling for outright subterfuge). Whether the positive goal were an eventual takeover of the present system, or a smaller-scale withdrawal or secession from it, no effort spent in this course of action would go to waste: it is fairly obvious that the legitimacy and credibility of the existing system must be destroyed before anything new can be put in its place, and would at least have to be undermined to the point of chronic weakness before any group could get away with seceding from its hegemony.

More importantly in the short term, such a course of action would have clear immediate benefits for the radical or "alternative" Right as it exists today. Firstly, co-ordinated political action of any kind has the advantage of promoting realism and unity, and preventing a group from either turning in on itself or falling prey to endless factional division promoted by individual egoism – for this you may have the word of our brilliant enemy, the leftist organiser Saul Alinsky, in Rules for Radicals. Secondly, the aspiration to persuade large numbers of people into rejectionism would promote the development on our part of a corrosive and unsparing moral-intellectual critique of the current system (political, cultural, social) – the very sort of discourse which was long considered by several astute men of the Right to be the most powerful asset of Marxism against bourgeois Europe. In an era when the ruling consensus in the West represents fewer of our ideals than ever, it is surely we who can carry the natural momentum of such a critique farthest of all. 

If I may quote Alinsky at greater length:

"[We] must…agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate…[a] reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do."

Should large masses of people in the West come to believe that democracy is a system of mass deception, "progress" is a lie, Western ideals are a front for costly foreign expansionism, the end of religion means no end of arbitrary bigotry, the multicultural utopia is an apology for a Third World labour camp, "anti-racism" is itself a product of racial pride, feminism is an exhortation to a sterile culture of work and consumerism, the decadent lifestyle of the modern West is a product of slavery to the State, and so on, even this does not mean that they will be ready to adopt our ideals. However, they will certainly no longer heed their masters' calls – at present so strong – to reject us as a threat to all that they hold dear. What remains to be done, assuming it is within the bounds of possibility, can then be carried out by a smaller organised group using whatever method best presents itself at the time.