MYOPIC PARTISANSHIP

Recalling his KGB days with a knowing smirk...

by Andy Nowicki

I have, in various contexts, remarked upon the tendency for alt-rightists of various stripes to fall for the propensity to needlessly align themselves with a “side” in some geopolitical struggle. Obama’s America sure ain’t groovy, so Putin’s Russia must therefore be the bee’s knees. Ukraine’s struggle for political independence is backed by George Soros and the CIA, so the legitimacy of the Kremlin-ordered invasion of the Crimea (and  apparent push, via proxy forces, to expand his dominion further inland) ought not be questioned in any way, and if you insist upon questioning it, you’re probably just an Obamabot shill who really needs to down a piping-hot cup of STFU. Bolshevism was a monstrous blight threatening the future of the Aryan race, so National Socialism had the proper duty to chop the heads off a bunch of morally sensitive college students who had the unforgivable temerity to hand out anti-government pamphlets urging passive resistance to tyranny. Dresden certainly wasn’t da bomb, so Belsen must therefore have been a gas… Et cetera and so forth.

Another variation of this theme reached my ears recently when I listened to author Joshua Blakeney’s interview with our old friend Henrick Palmgren on Red Ice Radio. What made Blakeney’s rhetorical flanking for the Empire of Nippan (and concomitant glossing over of that regime’s numerous war crimes) somewhat interesting is that it hasn’t been heard as much as the far more common revisionist reconfiguration of Nazi Germany as the put-upon true “good guys” of that Manichean conflict to end all Manichean conflicts; still, it fits together with that overall mindset that the Axis powers have in general gotten a bad rap and ought to be praised to the heavens… because, uh, well, Dresden! and Hiroshima! and the nefarious Morgenthau plan! and the disproportionate strain of contemptible Jewry within Bolshevism! and the obscene, never-ending parade of contemporary cultural Marxist miasmic malodorous monstrosities! and the forever Third World invasion! And feral black criminals raping, rampaging, and running amok! and the ongoing white genocide!!! And smirking hook-nosed Hollywood billionaire Jews!!! Etc.

In general, it is through such a piecemeal, vaguely impressionistic, borderline-hysterical recitation of horrors of the contemporary West that a case for the supposedly virtuous nature of the Axis powers is made. The revisionist rhetorician attempts this rather shoddily shored-together argument by pointing out a couple of undeniable truths, from which he concocts a patently false corollary:

1. The revisionist correctly points out that the Allied powers did terrible things during the war (while he ignores or attempts to dismiss similar crimes committed by the Axis powers, of course).
2. The revisionist accurately observes that things pretty well suck in the Western world today, seven decades after the defeat of the Axis and the triumph of the Allies. Yet from this fact, he inexplicably asserts the highly dubious conclusion that the supremacy of malignantly repugnant contemporary ideologies such as radical feminism, anti-whitism, homophilia, xenophilia, et al. directly trace back to the destruction of Nazism in Europe, as if such an outcome were simply an inevitable matter of historical course following the poor misunderstood Fuhrer’s ignominious Berlin bunker bust in April 1945, as if anyone in 1945 could even have envisioned, much less actively striven to bring about, the ghastly era of totalitarian hypersensitivity, lurid depravity, and mandatory degeneracy in which we now find ourselves.
   
   

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Then again, certain alt-rightists take their cue from the dictates of an entirely different sort of orthodoxy. For some Orthodox Russophiles, the Soviet Union under Stalin, far from being an inhuman and unholy terror, was actually a force for good in the world! Why? Because our noble brother Tsar Joseph led Mother Russia to glorious victory, that’s why!… And one must never ever speak ill of Mother Russia—nyet, nyet, nyet—not if you know what’s good for you, little man!!! (Never mind the Communist persecution of the churches, including the Russian Orthodox church, and never mind the endemic oppression, torture and murder of the Soviet regime during the entirety of its seven decade-long, blood-soaked tenure. It is Mother Russia, right or wrong, da! And don’t you DARE ever mention the rapaciously raping Red Army and how it ravaged the German population in the waning months of the Second World War, or by God, comrade, we’ll drag you to the Lubyanka and apply certain persuasive techniques to get you to show some respect for the ways of the noble Ivan warrior!!!) And on it goes.

The same goes for others under the alt-right umbrella. Certain contemporary partisans of the Southern Confederate American cause, for example, appear to think that nothing beneficent could ever take root north of the Mason-Dixon line, and hold a obstreperously prissy, patently humorless, and slightly neurotic disdain for that fearsome race of subhuman savages known as…“Yankees.” Numerous other myopically-inclined nationalist groups see their national heritage in a similarly narcissistic light; to promote their cause, they will countenance or even endorse a vast array of wicked deeds, provided that such deeds are undertaken with an eye towards uplifting their national glory and bringing low their enemies.

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In each of these cases of the intractable partisan—be he pro-Nazi, pro-Russian, pro-Confederate, or pro-otherwise in orientation—we see an instance this unfortunate proclivity to take a “side” and feel oneself thereby to be righteous, and one’s cause to be just. But this habit isn’t unique to the dissident right; instead, it is a trait that reflects man’s essentially tribal nature. We often feel less than complete if we don’t feel ourselves to “belong” somewhere, or otherwise consider ourselves to be “a part of something.”

We are, it seems, prone to adopting what is often called the “us versus them” mentality, whereby, in the words of a certain rousing New World sports anthem, we “root, root, root for the home team”… then lustily boo on cue when we witness those decked out in the garb of the acknowledged enemy. What makes it somewhat ironic, of course, is that alt-righters are the quickest to see “no difference” between, say, Democrats and Republicans, or between Tories and Labourites, or between other center-right/center-left parties of the mainstream, since both mainstream factions readily accept certain liberal propositions held to be anathema by the right-dissidents—the most glaring of these being “equality.”  

Yet this propensity to haughtily dismiss the squabbles that make for FOX News fodder, while generally healthy, at times leads us badly astray. Take Radix editor Richard Spencer’s latest column, which in effect pours equal scorn upon the totalitarian homo-mafia as it does upon Christian conservative business owners who merely wish to resist such bullying from their would-be rulers. (Spencer’s assertion that the new religious liberty law in Indiana “hardly goes far enough” in promoting freedom of association may be true, but his blithe dismissal of the concerns of those who feel they oughtn’t be coerced into endorsing gay nuptials is obtuse, to say the least.)

                                                                                                      

This kinda stuff is only taking place cuz the Nazis lost the war...

As evidenced by Spencer’s piece, the alt-right tends to disdain the tribalism borne of the largely manufactured “culture war,” and in general, rightly so. Yet most alt-rightists cannot escape the lure of tribal affiliation when it comes to other, similarly manufactured ideological dichotomies.

Precious but few are the ranks of those who would truly stand athwart history yelling, “Stop!” blocking the tanks of “progress” wherever they come from, whichever shifty-eyed, fanatical tyrant it is that sends them. Instead, nearly everyone only wants to get their rah-rah on, so that their side may ascend to glory. But the only meaningful opposition is a refusal to participate in this useless shell game, and to refuse allegiance to anyone save the eternal Good, whose mandates transcend ideology and whose ultimate reward is not an earthly one.