THE AMORALITY OF PACIFISM

by James Lawrence

Although there is no single explanation for the plight of the European peoples and the ongoing destruction of Western civilisation, we can perhaps distinguish between two different categories of explanations. With regards to the actions of our globalist, Cultural Marxist, Jewish, and corporate elites, so-called "left-wing explanations" are most appropriate: here we are correct in speaking of a hostile and exploitative ruling class, busily engaged in running down the West for its own benefit. (Indeed, as Sean Gabb argues in Cultural Revolution, Culture War, the various Marxist and Marxist-derived critiques of Western society should be read backwards as "manifestos" of the oppressive, unprincipled and self-interested regimes that are invariably set up by the students of these critiques.)

However, underpinning the rule of this hostile elite - and preceding it in time - is a more longstanding and natively developed self-destructive mentality in Western white people (particularly the middle classes), which cannot reasonably be blamed on anyone other than those white people themselves. This mentality consists of a toxic pacifism and idealism which, even when distinct from pacifism as a political dogma, is generally obsessed with keeping the peace at all costs and furthering the delusional vision of a world in which strife between peoples has become a thing of the past. With regards to this phenomenon, it is "right-wing explanations" such as decadence, cultural effeteness and racial suicide that seem to ring true.

This pacifistic, humanitarian mentality is the reason why groups of formerly colonised peoples living in the West can make demands for tribute from far larger white populations, harassing them about such things as "microaggressions" in the manner of thugs picking on someone for "looking at them the wrong way", and playing on their phobia of disharmony with naked threats like No Justice No Peace. While George Soros may fund 'Black Lives Matter', and the political elite in America may enable it, the white community's kumbaya response of "All Lives Matter" is a sorry reflection of a people that has lost the reflexes of self-defence in the face of racial aggression.

Danegeld for the modern era.

While the increasingly bloodstained and corrupt nature of the Western ruling elite provides us with an opportunity to morally discredit them, pacifist-humanitarian moralism is far more deeply rooted in the European moral imagination, and cannot be rooted out by the sort of "left-wing" arguments that are most effective against the ruling elite. Indeed, those who defend whites in the public sphere often find themselves reinforcing this moral mentality in the process: I am speaking of the sort of rhetoric that contrasts the saintliness of passive, unresisting, kumbaya-ing Europeans with the grubby racial power plays of blacks, Muslims, Jews etc.

To listen to some on the Alt-Right who get too carried away with "left-wing explanations", one might believe that the overthrow of the small and hostile ruling stratum that rules us at present would be sufficient to ensure the resurgence of Europe. However, the sort of pacifistic, humanitarian moral zeal that I have described was already reducing European nations to ruin long before our present elite had its day.

One highly detailed account of this process is given in Correlli Barnett's history The Collapse of British Power, which takes as its main subject the British Empire's disastrous diplomatic failures during the years between the First and Second World Wars. Unlike many, Barnett does not see the British collapse in the 1940s (and "restoration" as an American satellite) as inevitable. Acknowledging a wealth of partial explanations for the collapse - the uselessness of British politicians, the pacifistic and internationalist tenor of British public opinion, the feeble handling of international crises, the decline of British industrial power, the strategic weaknesses of the Empire - he asks why all of these were permitted to arise and were not properly addressed, and finds answers in the British "national character" of the time.

This national character, concentrated mainly in the governing elite and the middle classes, was a product of the Evangelical Christianity and Romantic movement of the two preceding centuries. It consisted of high moral idealism, liberalism, humanitarianism, internationalism, romantic exaltation of feelings over judgment, optimism about the inherent goodness of mankind, studied contempt for "making one's way in the world", a love of the quiet life and corresponding aversion to all discord and unpleasantness, and a pacifistic mentality that clung hopefully to international law.

Bringing an umbrella to a gunfight:
the British governing class.

The system of education adopted in Britain made it unlikely that individual men of position would buck this stereotype. Although the empire-building ruling class of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century had been famously uncouth, hard-headed and pragmatic, by the late nineteenth century, their successors were already being subjected to a rigidly uniform public-school upbringing that molded them to an outlook of naive unworldiness and moralistic zeal. Moreover, since Gladstone's political campaigning in the 1870s, the moral indignation of the middle classes had become a potent force in foreign politics, which made it even more difficult for British statesmen to practice realpolitik.

In a narrative liberally peppered with expressions of frustration, Barnett shows how this moralistic outlook in the British elite and public gave rise to a series of devastatingly stupid foreign policy decisions, while at home the national tension induced by the First World War was blithely permitted to relax back into Victorian torpor. For example:

• Discarding all considerations as to whether the possession of colonies enriched the imperial power, the British redefined their 'coloured' empire as a "house of peace, justice and liberty" existing primarily in the interests of the natives ("His Majesty's Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population") and furthering their advancement under British protection to the distant goal of self-government; this meant, of course, that the British could neither exploit their colonies effectively nor abandon them in the interests of strategic slimming.

• While unwilling to give up the prize colony of India, the British practically created an idle and politicised Indian intelligentsia out of nowhere by "expanding the Indian public mind" with economically useless public-school-style education, then encouraged it to dream of political power with clumsy liberal statements about leading India to self-government; hoping absurdly to found a foreign autocracy on the goodwill of its subjects, they introduced self-governing reforms that constantly stoked the ambitions of the (English-founded!) Indian National Congress while leaving them unsatisfied, leading to a massive upsurge in Indian national feeling during the 1920s and 1930s.

• With regards to the 'white' empire, the British allowed Canada and the former enemy South Africa to scupper various 1920s conferences held to discuss greater strategic and military integration, ending up with a facade of an empire built on hazy liberal-internationalist ideals and requiring heavily one-sided British protection in the event of foreign attack (case in point: Britain had to provide 90 per cent of the entire empire's munitions in the first year of the Second World War).

• When faced in 1922 with the question of whether to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which was the main guarantee that the British navy would not have to face war on both sides of the world at once, the British gave it up in the face of American disapproval and liberal gallantry over China's independence; while this showed the misguided and sentimental British fantasy of a "special relationship" with America, it also displayed their liberal-pacifist obsession with the sanctity international law, for the British truly seem to have believed the worthless naval disarmament treaties of the 1921-2 Washington Conference to have been a fair replacement for the alliance.

By this point we have not even reached the "meat" of Barnett's narrative, which is the disastrous British strategy of appeasement followed by hasty coalition-building and war during the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Unlike some, notably Patrick Buchanan in The Unnecessary War, Barnett sees Britain as wise and justified in opposing both Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany: this was simply yet another application of the old British policy of seeking a division of power in Europe, opposing over-mighty powers that might unify the Continent by building coalitions of weaker powers, and never allying with the strong power for fear of falling under its sway. (Whether the effects of this British policy have been positive for Europe as a whole is a question that shall not be discussed here.) However, as Barnett shows, by the 1930s Britain was incapable of putting its coalition-building policy into practice - primarily because "moral force, or righteous indignation [and not bribery, threats or force], was in fact the only means the British left themselves with which to influence the course of world affairs".

Apparently worth a war on two fronts.

Thus, the British further alienated Japan by leading League of Nations criticism of her takeover of Chinese Manchuria in 1931 as a breach of international law, despite the fact that no real British interests were threatened by this and despite the fact that disarmament in the 1920s had rendered Britain unable to do anything about it. In 1935 they proceeded to make another enemy by indulging in pacifistic moral indignation over the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, again without any real will to go beyond virtue-signalling, for they embargoed Italy on almost every strategic commodity except the crucial one of oil. During the diplomatic resurgence of Germany they repeatedly undermined France, disapproving of her revanchism and sympathising with the German cause, right up until Hitler's demands exceeded the "morally justified" policy of integrating ethnic Germans - whereupon, reverting at the last minute to their old coalition-building policy, they foolishly offered a security guarantee to Poland and (yet again influenced by moralism) even more foolishly chose to act upon it when it failed as a deterring bluff.

The end result of all this, Barnett concludes, was the catastrophe of Britain: war on all fronts, defeat on the Continent and fall of France, national bankruptcy, transfer to American control as Churchill chose to sacrifice Britain's independent existence to the romantic cause of victory, and finally the tragic illusion of that victory played out as a warrior satellite of the United States.

The many cabinet notes and other primary sources analysed in this book paint a horrifying picture of a governing class seemingly divorced from reality, addicted to pacifistic humanitarian moralism, and allergic to any consideration of self-interest. Barnett, a staunch realist, is not shy about meting out occasional savage criticism to the subjects of his narrative; however, apart from making a few sarcastic remarks about British morality being a luxury afforded by the immorality of earlier years, he never examines in realist terms of self-interest why such an ideology gripped the ruling elite and middle classes in Britain so powerfully. One is led to think that an entire nation, at the zenith of its power, simply fell prey by sheer chance to a mental and spiritual cancer.

To my mind, however, the role of self-interest is quite apparent here. Britain had conquered a vaster swathe of the world than any nation before her, more than enough to sate the wildest of her ambitions, on the back of an ascendancy over other powers that could never have lasted forever and was already coming under serious challenge. What could be more self-interested than for her to suddenly discover in the depths of her culture and religion, and proclaim to all other countries as a universal ideal, a sanctimonious horror of all further violent conquest and a pettifogging obsession with (inherently anti-revisionist) international law?  

Only a country in the extreme opposite situation, i.e. so weak and poor that it could not defend itself, would have had more pressing reason to take up pacifism as an ideal; however, such a country could never dream of convincing the rest of the world to do the same.

I do not mean by this that pacifistic moralism was a deliberately adopted strategy of hypocrisy on the part of the British; if this were the case, the British ruling elite would have been able to switch their pragmatism back on when confronted by opponents like Hitler, who had consciously adopted the mentality of predators and made themselves deaf to all moral appeals. More to the point, a policy of deliberate deceit would never have convinced anyone else for a moment, making it absolutely necessary for the British to be deceived as well: those who would have others drink a life-threatening poison must take the first and deepest swig themselves. Of course, the British could have pursued a very different kind of national character-building, one of keeping their swords ever-sharp and defending their huge possessions by force; but to do so would be to take the path of most resistance, resisting the temptation of such a lazy and easy option as adopting universal pacifism.

100% easier than self-defence.

To come to the point of this discussion: is not every word of this analysis, both on the subject of the mentality and its underlying reasons, applicable to Europeans as a whole today? Although Europeans constitute a small and falling minority of the world's population (specifically, 16.43% as of 2010, to fall below 10% by 2060), communities of white people - we shall leave aside the question of how far they are ruled in their own interests - are spread over a huge and largely underpopulated swathe of North America and Eurasia from Los Angeles to Vladivostok, in addition to other territories, all of which beyond Europe proper were won by colonisation during the last five hundred years. Now that the temporary ascendancy of whites over all other races is inevitably petering out, is it not in the hope of retaining this vast living space (not necessarily as a conscious wish, and not necessarily in the sense of keeping it "racially pure") that Europeans have  suddenly discovered a pacifistic morality utterly foreign to their ancestors, and would rather indulge in wild hopes of spreading this creed to the rest of the world than risk violating it by organising their own self-defence in reality?

If this is the case, while we cannot attack this kind of pacifism in moral terms, we can at least remove it from its alluring moral glow by describing it as essentially amoral. Far from a new advance in human morality, it is a just another example of a collective survival strategy - one that is found in soft and sated peoples, and in weak and defenceless ones too, but is conspicuously absent in peoples that are as-yet-unsated and possess the potential power to conquer in the future (two present-day examples that spring to mind would be China and the Islamic world).

Moreover, we can say with just as much certainty that this strategy of European pacifism simply doesn't work in the present day (leaving aside the question of whether it ever did). Non-Europeans have blocked their ears to our talk of peace, found justifications for every conceivable form of their own violence against whites, and are moving to supplant us not just in our outlying territories but also in our very heartlands. The moral glow of pacifism, while having little effect on other races, is now a serious impediment to whites' pursuing a better course of action. We are faced with the formidable task of voiding ourselves of a poison long already swallowed, and fighting against our own softness and torpor to reacquaint ourselves with the only sure guarantor of life and land, namely force. 

(One fairly positive development is that the "people of colour", no longer capable of restraining their envy and hatred, are rapidly losing the patience necessary to boil the kumbaya-singing white frog without triggering his long-dormant defence reflexes.)

Perhaps some readers will take offence at this argument, specifically its unceremonious booting of the sainted white race from its high moral pedestal, and deem it far too close to SJW rhetoric for comfort. To them I shall have to say, tough luck. Given that many of their disastrously self-destructive belief systems are based on sublimated racial pride, most Europeans do not need more paeans to their goodness followed by prescriptions for drastic action: they will only accept the paeans, wave away the calls to action, and go on complacently wallowing in their own bullshit. A bucket of cold water to the face is a kinder thing to mete out to them.

When a man who is failing miserably with women goes to professional cads like Roosh or Heartiste for advice from the dark side, the first thing he will learn is that his "chivalrous" behaviour towards the female sex is just another seduction technique - albeit a cowardly, hypocritical and ineffective one. Perhaps those of us who would teach collective self-defence to delusional, kumbaya-ing Europeans must start by leading them to a similar self-realisation: making them understand that they have never ceased jockeying for position with other races, but have merely forfeited a great deal of honesty and a great deal of success in this. 

And if they do not get the message first time, then they shall have to be mocked out of their moralism - which is surely something that the Alt-Right could do if we put our minds to it.