by Nils Wegner
Author’s note: This article was written for the December issue of the German New Right’s bi-monthly magazine Sezession published by the Institut für Staatspolitik (State Policy Institute). The article aims to give the German audience, which for the most part does not even know an American “real” right exists, a basic overview of the AltRight in a first attempt to close ranks. Due to length limitations, some simplifications and omissions could not be avoided. I apologize in advance for these. Translated by the author.
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On October 31st, 2015, while the average American attended Halloween parties that had been arranged weeks in advance, the Arlington/VA based National Policy Institute (NPI) held its annual conference. This time at the prestigious National Press Club in Washington, D.C.—little more than 400 yards away from the White House.
Led by Richard B. Spencer and over here most likely comparable to the Institut für Staatspolitik (State Policy Institute), the NPI—motto: “For our people, our culture, our future” —NPI rallied around 270 attendees round the Identitarian-inspired slogan “Become Who We Are,” borrowed from Pindar and its Nietzschean Zarathustrian rendering “Become who you are!”
"This invasion threatens us on the most basic level of biology. But it contains within itself its own reversal, the potential to heighten and intensify racial awareness. For who are we in the eyes of Achmed, Yusef, or Haleem? We are not Italians, or Hungarians, or Poles, or Liberals, or Conservatives, or Marxists. Little distinction is made by the invaders between those who applauded as they came through the Frankfurt airport and those who remained silent. In our adversaries’ eyes we are white men regardless of how we might see ourselves."
(Richard Spencer in his keynote address)
Not only did the NPI manage to hold a very well-attended conference after a setback the previous year, “Spencer, a relatively young racist activist himself, was able to do something many similar groups have failed to do—attract lots of young people to his event,” as the antifa-playing Southern Poverty Law Center noted with trepidation.
The speakers list, too, was impressive as it gathered a selection of protagonists who identify as “Alt(ernative) Right” in the US and beyond. Besides Spencer himself, there was the retired professor of psychology and evolutionary science Kevin B. MacDonald (cf. Andreas Vonderach: Kevin MacDonald und die jüdische Gruppenstrategie, Sezession 55), writer and philosopher of Masculinism Jack Donovan, musician and 1960s anti-communist militia veteran Robert N. Taylor, as well as dyed-in-the-wool French Nouvelle Droite pioneer Guillaume Faye.
The “alternative” thing about the New Right that has formed across the big pond since about the early 1990s is, above all, its distance from political parties. This—as well as the confusing political terminology used in Europe and the United States—also explains the apparent oxymoron of its name: in current political usage (and, by the way, historically incorrect), “the right,” the political Rechte, are the GOP supporters, while in addition their internal right is distinguished by the term “right-wingers,” which is somehow equivalent to FRG’s Rechtsradikale and not only restricted to party members. Reversed, this also goes for leftists akin to our Green Party which in the US are labelled “Liberals” or “Progressives.”
Within itself, the AltRight movement is rather fanned out. Its earliest exponents, among them the Coucil of American Citizens and the webzine American Renaissance, founded by Jared Taylor, put the case for a “paleoconservative” counterrevolution and a return to US policy before 1964, the year when Congress revoked racial segregation by passing the Civil Rights Act.
The so-called Neocons’ upsurge in the wake of George W. Bush’s first term as president, perceived by many “Paleocons” as radical-liberal infiltration, caused a second wave of such publications, among which Patrick Buchanan’s The American Conservative and Taki’s Magazine are considerable. The latter publication is overseen by a Greek American man of private means, author Panagiotis “Taki” Theodoracopulos and is similar to eigentümlich frei (German libertarian magazine).
Remarkably enough, it was this relatively well-arranged branchwood of paleoconservative networking that lay the groundwork for the “Web 2.0”-fit and—on first sight—more chaotic, rhizomatic structure of the vast number of more radical boards and organs of the AltRight.
The aforementioned Richard Spencer, born 1978, played a key role in this. From 2008 to 2010 he was editor-in-chief of Takimag but quit that job to devote himself to leading the NPI and with the latter’s patronization established the game-changing webzine Alternative Right, which gave the movement its name and especially strove after younger readers as well as authors such as Alex Kurtagić (whose dystopian opus Mister will be released in German soon), Derek Turner (author of Sea Changes, a thalassocratic complement to Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints), and Jack Donovan, whose masculist manifesto The Way of Men will be published in Germany by Antaios in the upcoming year.
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| Old media and old ideas attacking new media and new ideas. |
All the same, the AltRight’s author stock spawned quite a few further projects of which the blog Counter-Currents deserves special attention. There, in the eponymous publishing house, and the attached periodical North American New Right (all of which are conducted by Greg Johnson), one will find countless articles compatible to the European New Right due to their topical span between Radical Traditionalism and Conservative Revolution, often even referring directly to it.
Nonetheless, one must not forget the completely different prerequisites in the US. This epitome of the immigration country—lacking a homogenous people—could not develop modern nationalism like the European peoples. Against the backdrop of the ever-faster ethnic downward spiral, a genuine New-World-based White Nationalism of European Americans was developed, distinct from so-called Race Realists, which means paleoconservatives who acknowledge racial differences but do not derive any consequences from that. This new White Nationalism was popularized to a large degree by the Occidental Quarterly and its blog Occidental Observer, led by Prof. MacDonald.
"To do this we need, in imitation of those who have gone before and in anticipation of those who will follow, to struggle, sword in hand, to be what our myths have destined us to be. The sword is white nationalism."
(Michael O’Meara, "The Sword," www.toqonline.com, 20. August 2009)
To what ends exactly should the awareness of the “melting pot” having utterly failed lead is a matter of some debate. Visions of “cathartic” race war, as outlined in William Luther Pierce’s notorious The Turner Diaries, have been things of the past for long in the AltRight. Instead, ambitions of secession and the idea of a strictly isolationist “white ethnostate”—in most cases envisaged for the Pacific Northwest—are all the rage. About this vision, the former National Socialist activist Harold Covington already published the Northwest Novels, a rather unconventional novel tetralogy of over 1800 pages altogether.
Aspirations regarding the sought-after “White Republic”—besides invoking Enoch Powell’s far-famed “Rivers of Blood” speech—also invoke the US core mythos of “Manifest Destiny” and the pioneer spirit, albeit in a post-modern form: assuming that, after three decades of multiculturalism and crumbling immigration limits, the only means left for racial self-preservation is secession.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned fundamental differences, the American AltRight’s vast cosmos well deserves the attention of the verbally adept European New Rightist. Not only is the US “scene” networking heavily and creating numerous fascinating characters and manifestations, but the different legal situation in the US allows for more trenchant causticity of essays and interviews, the perusal of which can train us for meta-political thought outside the box in completely unexpected ways.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, it has already been understood that cheap compromises are entirely useless: the restitution of European America “will not come about through a process dependent on all that is the root of our present humiliation.” (O’Meara)
