The ‘True Right’ is informed by many writers who oppose the materialist perspective which insists on reducing human conflict to a profit-and-loss struggle over economic resources. While much of modern orthodoxy insists on analysing human affairs through a “rational” prism better suited to comprehending the behaviour of food-seeking worms, these writers (who include, for example, Ricardo Duchesne in The Uniqueness of Western Civilisation) correctly stress the irrational struggle for prestige – recognition of one’s status, remembrance of one’s deeds, and above all, aggrandisement of one’s pride – as a determining factor in social conflict.
It thus stands to reason that, as a corrective to those who have sought to reduce vastly diverse issues to matters of economic interest, we might use the psychology of pride and prestige to illuminate areas of human conduct in which the influence of these motivations is not apparent at first glance. In other words, we might look at the ways in which self-aggrandising pride is hidden, rationalised, or otherwise sublimated into other forms. Something like this was touched upon by the Chinese writer Lu Xun, who in The True Story of Ah Q portrayed a wretched peasant who suffers daily humiliations but mentally reworks them into “spiritual victories”, thus preserving his arrogant delusions of personal prestige. This work was intended as a devastating satire on the national character of the Chinese, whose fantasies of cultural supremacy served as a mask for the inferiority complex resulting from impoverishment in reality.
It is high time that some Western equivalent of Lu Xun wrote a “True Story” for our white progressivists who fawn on the interests of non-Europeans, disparage the majority of Europeans as ignorant bigots and “racists”, and express cheerful approval at the prospect of their own people’s dispossession. However, the subject here would not be abasement masquerading as pride, but self-aggrandising pride masquerading as a hypocritical and moralistic self-abasement.
It is commonly believed on the True Right that white progressivists suffer from “ethnomasochism”, a kind of racial self-loathing which drives them to promote the “suicidal” policies of ethnic replacement and multiculturalism in European countries. This is contrasted with the nationalistic self-interest of most non-whites, whose attitude of racial solidarity is said to indicate a healthier sense of self-esteem. I believe this is a dangerous misunderstanding, and what I have to say on this matter will not make comfortable reading for either white or non-white members of the progressivist “rainbow coalition”.
In order to better illustrate the true mentality of white progressivists, let us first scratch the surface of the aggressive racial pride found in many non-whites. I would suggest that these expressions of “self-esteem” in fact arise from an agonising racial inferiority complex resulting from the perceived greater prestige of Europeans (an essentially irrational grievance, which is impervious to the fact that the most “prestigious” European elites are – of course – busy selling the rest of us down the river). An example of this might be found in the slogan “Black is Beautiful”. Although this can be correctly described as an expression of racial pride that would not be tolerated in Europeans, at a deeper level it is also a reaction to perceived inferiority, conditioned by the sexual insecurity of black women (were this not so, the statement would of course be redundant and unnecessary). Although in this case the reaction does not extend as far as “White is Ugly”, it is easy to see that the resentment generated by such feelings might in fact be the source of many non-white attacks – verbal or otherwise – on Europeans.
This must be borne in mind whenever we on the True Right lament the fact that non-whites alone are allowed to openly appreciate their culture and history. Although this double standard should indeed be contemptuously rejected, we should also remember that the relation of modern non-whites to their ancestral cultures is actually highly ambiguous: for of course these cultures have, like traditional European culture, been utterly desecrated by Western modernity. (In a psychological sense, this fact is perhaps more problematic for non-whites in the present day than in the past; for whereas the first acts of destruction were carried out by European colonialist powers, the hammer of “modernisation” has since passed to the hands of native rulers who have vastly extended its scope, and the relief of complicity that comes with direct foreign oppression has been lost.) There is a tendency in several non-European peoples to conceive their own nationalism in terms of reaction against the more wealthy and prestigious European “Other”, whose history of imperialism, slavery and oppression become a kind of “founding myth” filling the void left by modernity’s desecration of tradition; this myth is then continually re-invoked long after the conditions to which it refers have ameliorated or vanished.
That this mentality should be central to African-American racial nationalism is perhaps obvious; however, it is also the founding principle of the modern nationalism of China. This country, which one would think should hardly be lacking in indigenous sources of unity and pride, in fact regards its Confucian heritage in very ambiguous terms – however, it has woven a unifying mythology out of its “national humiliation” at the hands of European and Japanese imperialists. Its nationalist passion largely consists in an angry and frequently hysterical reaction to the perceived contempt of the rest of the world, and it would be a mistake to confuse this phenomenon with arrogance or “national pride” as such. Little need be said about the similar mentality expressed in the anti-Western fundamentalism of the Arab world.
It is important to differentiate this point of view from the progressivist dogma that non-white self-assertion and anti-whitism are justified responses to “oppression”. As noted above, progressivists see the world through a constraining lens of materialism: if there is resentment against whites by non-whites, it must be caused by unequal allocation of resources (or social factors which lead to this: “racism”, “stereotypes”, even “microaggressions”), and correcting the inequality can be rationally expected to remove the resentment. However, in truth we are dealing with the irrational psychology of pride, which does not require direct personal injury to become inflamed at the abstract idea of one’s race being subordinate to another in prestige. All that is required to generate vengefulness is a perception of superior wealth, power, and prestige in the hands of Europeans (regardless of the fact that the European elites possessing most of these things have no interest in ethnic solidarity with the lower classes) and the constantly-reheated memory of past injustices that serve to “delegitimise” this prestige (these, of course, are served up to every child unfortunate enough to be “educated” in the modern West).
Removing economic inequality or hunting down instances of European “racism” can never hope to allay non-white complaints of racial bias, because human pride demands that an inherent inferiority complex be projected into external injuries and oppression in order to provide a face-saving means of reacting against it; this is what we see in the ever-increasing hysteria over “white privilege”, “microaggressions”, and “media stereotypes”, despite the near-complete conversion of white people to dogmatic egalitarianism. In fact, given Nietzsche’s insight that the pride of a sufferer is wounded by the one who aids him, it might be supposed that the ostentatious “benevolence” of white progressivists is, in its own way, just as humiliating to non-whites as were the older ideologies of white supremacism.
If non-European racial pride is not all that it seems, this is all the more true of the “racial self-loathing” so often attributed to white progressivists. We might begin our analysis by pointing to the obvious: do progressivist writers and activists speak and act in ways that suggest a lack of self-esteem and confidence? Do they think of themselves (i.e. not abstract social categories to which they claim to belong) in the negative terms typical of “self-loathing” individuals?
Of course the answer to these questions would be no. It is well understood on the True Right that the “egalitarianism” of the Left goes hand in hand with an insufferably arrogant conviction of its own moral superiority. However, what I would like to explore here is the racial superiority complex possessed by white progressivists, and the depth to which it permeates their supposedly “anti-ethnocentric” worldview. I also want to emphasise the fact that their constant flagellation of “white people” is directed not at themselves, but rather at the majority of Europeans; in this sense, it is a self-aggrandising and self-diffrentiating act, which contains no element of self-loathing.
Let us first recall the argument made above: that a great deal of non-white racial aggression and self-assertion is motivated by an exaggerated sense of insecurity vis-a-vis Europeans, a reaction to outsized perceptions of European prestige. This being so, when we turn our attention from the worldviews of non-Europeans to that of white progressivists, it must strike us with equal force that the white progressivist worldview completely abandons even reasonable levels of group insecurity – i.e., those levels of insecurity vital to one’s own self-defence – against non-European races. When they are not using foreign cultures for their own purposes as a solvent against European traditionalism, progressivists simply assume that the masses of non-whites flooding into European lands will “become Western” by a natural process of evolution, or else that their cultures can be reduced to superficial variations on Western liberalism like a row of spices in an ethnic food shop. But it is interesting that while progressivists insist on not taking non-Europeans as a serious threat even when they are beheading people in the streets, they react with gibbering hysteria to the slightest hint of nationalist self-assertion by lower-class whites.
Although this worldview is laughably called “non-ethnocentric”, and although its proponents no doubt truly imagine that by espousing it they are reaching to an “objective” plane of truth unencumbered by racial “biases”, in reality it could only have arisen in a race that has dominated the world for long enough to acquire a superiority complex so complete and distorting as to be almost entirely impervious to reality. Not only is universalist multiculturalism a parochial phenomenon of modern Western culture, it is also entirely conditioned by recent historical Western supremacy, and as such reflects a far more deformed and unhealthy view of race than the low-level ethnic “clannishness” found in many lower-class Europeans.
Now, this is not to say that progressivists are “proud of being white”; only that it is on the basis of their assumptions of unassailable Western supremacy that they are free to centre their pride in “transcending” or “deconstructing” their native European culture and identity – a pursuit which in reality amounts to little more than the creation of a code of “respectable” manners and dogmatic shibboleths, serving to define progressivists against the majority of “ignorant” lower-class whites. Since it is lower-class and traditionalist Europeans alone who pose a psychological threat to white progressivists, they are more than happy to pay a penny’s worth of self-abasement to non-whites – for example, by dressing up in yokes and chains while ostentatiously weeping – as long as they get back a pound’s worth of moral superiority over these non-progressivist Europeans. The progressivist worldview of “progress” versus “reaction” in the West is primarily one in which all of the central moral actors are white; non-whites appear only on the periphery of this worldview as fetish objects, as blank canvases for the projection of Western ideals (e.g. Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in American Samoa), as litmus tests of the moral character of white people (e.g. the Obama election campaign), and most importantly as battering rams against the heritage, culture and rights of the majority of Europeans who suffer the brunt of progressivist antipathy.
This is in stark contrast to expressions of non-white racial pride, which as I observed earlier are largely conditioned by reaction against the more prestigious European outgroup; and the fact that so many non-whites are willing to lend their fetishised “authenticity” to the dogmas of white progressivism is proof of another observation made earlier, namely that they themselves are hopelessly compromised by Western modernity. It is not difficult to read Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden and trace the origins of modern “liberal” cant about selfless work for the benefit of non-whites; nor to realise that such rhetoric has become all the more important to Western states now that cheap black and brown labour is migrating to the plantation of its own volition, and those who are to suffer dispossession as a result are the majority of whites.
Although I have spoken so far of a white superiority complex in the ruling or privileged “progressive” stratum of European society, it would be naive to suppose that this mentality has not trickled down the social scale into the rest of the white population, and its presence in the majority of Europeans may explain the failure of racial nationalist movements to rally this group to its own defence. While the hidden “white supremacism” of progressivists is characterised by a worldview in which whites alone are the central moral actors, racial nationalism attempts to substitute a worldview in which the impetus of history passes to invading non-whites, and whites are compelled to react in their own defence. While it is certainly necessary to shock whites out of their excessive complacency toward the races that are dispossessing them, the problem of racial nationalism is that it affords few analytical tools for intra-racial conflict (i.e. between class, religion, ideology etc) and is thus compelled to distort even primarily internal problems into conflicts with outsiders.
This can be seen, for example, in efforts to reduce the evil and treacherous behaviour of the Western ruling class to the ethnic hostility of its Jewish element (a hostility that, however, is by no means non-existent or unimportant); or in Guillaume Faye’s designation of Islam as the major threat to Europe, beside which the far more dangerous Western ruling class appears as a mere collaborator. This is a “outsider-centric” mythology that would have a great deal of persuasive power for most non-white groups, but inevitably assaults the self-respect of Europeans.
I would therefore suggest that any movement likely to galvanise the European victims of the Western ruling class will not take the form of simple racial nationalism per se, but will also include a strong “intra-racial” element by which the immorality and misrule we suffer today can be understood and criticised. As has been shown in this essay, the majority of native Europeans are in an unenviable position: squeezed both “from below” by the resentment of non-whites reacting against what they perceive as the greater prestige and world rule of the West, and also “from above” by the contempt and hostility of those very Western rulers, who care little for the interests of the nations they rule and can afford to insulate themselves from the non-white resentment they deliberately incite. We must find a way to liberate ourselves under our own alternative leadership, and leave the hammer and anvil of progressivism to the mercies of each other.
It thus stands to reason that, as a corrective to those who have sought to reduce vastly diverse issues to matters of economic interest, we might use the psychology of pride and prestige to illuminate areas of human conduct in which the influence of these motivations is not apparent at first glance. In other words, we might look at the ways in which self-aggrandising pride is hidden, rationalised, or otherwise sublimated into other forms. Something like this was touched upon by the Chinese writer Lu Xun, who in The True Story of Ah Q portrayed a wretched peasant who suffers daily humiliations but mentally reworks them into “spiritual victories”, thus preserving his arrogant delusions of personal prestige. This work was intended as a devastating satire on the national character of the Chinese, whose fantasies of cultural supremacy served as a mask for the inferiority complex resulting from impoverishment in reality.
It is high time that some Western equivalent of Lu Xun wrote a “True Story” for our white progressivists who fawn on the interests of non-Europeans, disparage the majority of Europeans as ignorant bigots and “racists”, and express cheerful approval at the prospect of their own people’s dispossession. However, the subject here would not be abasement masquerading as pride, but self-aggrandising pride masquerading as a hypocritical and moralistic self-abasement.
It is commonly believed on the True Right that white progressivists suffer from “ethnomasochism”, a kind of racial self-loathing which drives them to promote the “suicidal” policies of ethnic replacement and multiculturalism in European countries. This is contrasted with the nationalistic self-interest of most non-whites, whose attitude of racial solidarity is said to indicate a healthier sense of self-esteem. I believe this is a dangerous misunderstanding, and what I have to say on this matter will not make comfortable reading for either white or non-white members of the progressivist “rainbow coalition”.
The Underside of Non-European Racial Pride
 |
| Pimp my history – it needs it. |
That this mentality should be central to African-American racial nationalism is perhaps obvious; however, it is also the founding principle of the modern nationalism of China. This country, which one would think should hardly be lacking in indigenous sources of unity and pride, in fact regards its Confucian heritage in very ambiguous terms – however, it has woven a unifying mythology out of its “national humiliation” at the hands of European and Japanese imperialists. Its nationalist passion largely consists in an angry and frequently hysterical reaction to the perceived contempt of the rest of the world, and it would be a mistake to confuse this phenomenon with arrogance or “national pride” as such. Little need be said about the similar mentality expressed in the anti-Western fundamentalism of the Arab world.
 |
| The ultimate Chinese humiliation - losing to THE FRENCH!!!!! |
Removing economic inequality or hunting down instances of European “racism” can never hope to allay non-white complaints of racial bias, because human pride demands that an inherent inferiority complex be projected into external injuries and oppression in order to provide a face-saving means of reacting against it; this is what we see in the ever-increasing hysteria over “white privilege”, “microaggressions”, and “media stereotypes”, despite the near-complete conversion of white people to dogmatic egalitarianism. In fact, given Nietzsche’s insight that the pride of a sufferer is wounded by the one who aids him, it might be supposed that the ostentatious “benevolence” of white progressivists is, in its own way, just as humiliating to non-whites as were the older ideologies of white supremacism.
“Self-Abasement” is Not Always Self-Abasing
Let us first recall the argument made above: that a great deal of non-white racial aggression and self-assertion is motivated by an exaggerated sense of insecurity vis-a-vis Europeans, a reaction to outsized perceptions of European prestige. This being so, when we turn our attention from the worldviews of non-Europeans to that of white progressivists, it must strike us with equal force that the white progressivist worldview completely abandons even reasonable levels of group insecurity – i.e., those levels of insecurity vital to one’s own self-defence – against non-European races. When they are not using foreign cultures for their own purposes as a solvent against European traditionalism, progressivists simply assume that the masses of non-whites flooding into European lands will “become Western” by a natural process of evolution, or else that their cultures can be reduced to superficial variations on Western liberalism like a row of spices in an ethnic food shop. But it is interesting that while progressivists insist on not taking non-Europeans as a serious threat even when they are beheading people in the streets, they react with gibbering hysteria to the slightest hint of nationalist self-assertion by lower-class whites.
Although this worldview is laughably called “non-ethnocentric”, and although its proponents no doubt truly imagine that by espousing it they are reaching to an “objective” plane of truth unencumbered by racial “biases”, in reality it could only have arisen in a race that has dominated the world for long enough to acquire a superiority complex so complete and distorting as to be almost entirely impervious to reality. Not only is universalist multiculturalism a parochial phenomenon of modern Western culture, it is also entirely conditioned by recent historical Western supremacy, and as such reflects a far more deformed and unhealthy view of race than the low-level ethnic “clannishness” found in many lower-class Europeans.
Now, this is not to say that progressivists are “proud of being white”; only that it is on the basis of their assumptions of unassailable Western supremacy that they are free to centre their pride in “transcending” or “deconstructing” their native European culture and identity – a pursuit which in reality amounts to little more than the creation of a code of “respectable” manners and dogmatic shibboleths, serving to define progressivists against the majority of “ignorant” lower-class whites. Since it is lower-class and traditionalist Europeans alone who pose a psychological threat to white progressivists, they are more than happy to pay a penny’s worth of self-abasement to non-whites – for example, by dressing up in yokes and chains while ostentatiously weeping – as long as they get back a pound’s worth of moral superiority over these non-progressivist Europeans. The progressivist worldview of “progress” versus “reaction” in the West is primarily one in which all of the central moral actors are white; non-whites appear only on the periphery of this worldview as fetish objects, as blank canvases for the projection of Western ideals (e.g. Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in American Samoa), as litmus tests of the moral character of white people (e.g. the Obama election campaign), and most importantly as battering rams against the heritage, culture and rights of the majority of Europeans who suffer the brunt of progressivist antipathy.
This is in stark contrast to expressions of non-white racial pride, which as I observed earlier are largely conditioned by reaction against the more prestigious European outgroup; and the fact that so many non-whites are willing to lend their fetishised “authenticity” to the dogmas of white progressivism is proof of another observation made earlier, namely that they themselves are hopelessly compromised by Western modernity. It is not difficult to read Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden and trace the origins of modern “liberal” cant about selfless work for the benefit of non-whites; nor to realise that such rhetoric has become all the more important to Western states now that cheap black and brown labour is migrating to the plantation of its own volition, and those who are to suffer dispossession as a result are the majority of whites.
 |
| Proto-Progressives survey their domain. Note the casual air of superiority. |
Conclusion
Although I have spoken so far of a white superiority complex in the ruling or privileged “progressive” stratum of European society, it would be naive to suppose that this mentality has not trickled down the social scale into the rest of the white population, and its presence in the majority of Europeans may explain the failure of racial nationalist movements to rally this group to its own defence. While the hidden “white supremacism” of progressivists is characterised by a worldview in which whites alone are the central moral actors, racial nationalism attempts to substitute a worldview in which the impetus of history passes to invading non-whites, and whites are compelled to react in their own defence. While it is certainly necessary to shock whites out of their excessive complacency toward the races that are dispossessing them, the problem of racial nationalism is that it affords few analytical tools for intra-racial conflict (i.e. between class, religion, ideology etc) and is thus compelled to distort even primarily internal problems into conflicts with outsiders.
This can be seen, for example, in efforts to reduce the evil and treacherous behaviour of the Western ruling class to the ethnic hostility of its Jewish element (a hostility that, however, is by no means non-existent or unimportant); or in Guillaume Faye’s designation of Islam as the major threat to Europe, beside which the far more dangerous Western ruling class appears as a mere collaborator. This is a “outsider-centric” mythology that would have a great deal of persuasive power for most non-white groups, but inevitably assaults the self-respect of Europeans.
I would therefore suggest that any movement likely to galvanise the European victims of the Western ruling class will not take the form of simple racial nationalism per se, but will also include a strong “intra-racial” element by which the immorality and misrule we suffer today can be understood and criticised. As has been shown in this essay, the majority of native Europeans are in an unenviable position: squeezed both “from below” by the resentment of non-whites reacting against what they perceive as the greater prestige and world rule of the West, and also “from above” by the contempt and hostility of those very Western rulers, who care little for the interests of the nations they rule and can afford to insulate themselves from the non-white resentment they deliberately incite. We must find a way to liberate ourselves under our own alternative leadership, and leave the hammer and anvil of progressivism to the mercies of each other.
Originally published here in 2014
