Originally posted here in Dec 2008, but definitely worth reading again. — Ed.
By Michael O’Meara
“Prepare to fight to the finish, or your kind will vanish.”
In the last year, one crisis has followed another. First there was a housing mortgage crisis, then a liquidity crisis that led to a banking crisis, then a dollar crisis, then a credit crisis, then a geopolitical crisis, then an energy crisis, then a crisis of consumer confidence, and finally a political crisis at the highest level of the state, involving a crisis of meaning that brought a negro to power—a negro symbolizing everything against which the American once defined himself, and thus symbolizing a transvaluation of the very basis of the American’s original being.
The burning question today is: are these cascading crises “conjunctural” (i.e., due to a combination of circumstances) or are they “structural” (inherent to the system’s nature)? If the latter, then the “American System,” which has governed the world since 1945 and which has programmed the end of European man, faces a potentially systemic rupture whose implications are catastrophic. If only conjunctural, the news is still good, for it cannot but highlight the system’s anti-white nature, of which most white Americans are still clueless.
A crisis, it needs stressing, is always a turning point, “a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, especially for better or worse, is determined.” Though most commentators tend to emphasize the economic origins of the crisis, almost all of them recognize its system-disrupting potential. Hence the current obsession with the Great Depression of 1933 and, in more radical quarters, the Soviet crisis of 1985 that brought Gorbachev to power. But whatever its exact nature—and time alone will tell—the crisis is likely to put increased demands on the welfare and security of the white middle class and thus advance the cause of the ethnostate favored by white nationalists. Lacking an organizational structure and a popular following in the real world, the white nationalist project is, in fact, predicated on just such a crisis.As we enter the new year, the one clear thing is that the crisis is going to get worse. Since the mortgage meltdown of December 2006, the crisis has mainly affected Wall Street, commercial and investment banks, insurance companies, and several government-sponsored enterprises (like Fannie May and Freddie Mac). The new year is likely to take the crisis to Main Street, in the form of retail bankruptcies and unemployment. Auto and related industries will also be hit hard. At the same time, many local and some state governments (like California or Michigan) may collapse because of insolvency. It’s “the worse economic crisis in 70 years” most agree, but no one quite knows exactly what it forebodes. Indeed, the pervasive uncertainty surrounding the crisis, threatening as it does the capitalist system, the prevailing model of globalization, and America’s standing in the world order, lends it a certain apocalyptic quality.
1. The Crisis
Americans like to think that their country is “number one,” though they know almost nothing about “the rest of the world.” Compared to the black and brown nations that comprise the Third World, America may indeed be a paradise (even if most white Americans are lonely, isolated, and lacking any sense of who they are as a people). But compared to Western and Central Europe, or to Japan, Hong Kong, and certain of the other Asian Tigers, it shapes up badly.
The great industries that once made America the world’s foremost economic power and provided working people a decent standard of living have been shipped overseas, along with the technologies and know-how that made them such powerhouses. Trade imbalances have correspondingly grown, just as the US has shifted from being a creditor nation to a debtor nation. At the same time, the national infrastructure has been neglected, household debt has become as unmanageable as the national debt, and American-pioneered technologies are being applied more often abroad than at home.
In 2005, James Fallow, one of the few to predict the current crisis, wrote that: “A year in a private college now costs $83,000, a day in a hospital $1,350, a year in a nursing home $150,000. . . . Eighty percent of the public [has been priced out of a chance for future opportunity”—that is, they have been priced out of participating in what our ideologues call the “American Dream.” Other mainstream observers are claiming that the US “no longer controls its economic fundamentals” and that “compared with the rest of the world, it’s on the way down.”
Even Thomas Friedman, the oily globalist cheerleader at the New York Times, has, after a recent trip to the Far East, begun to complain that America is becoming “decrepit”—somewhat in the way the Stalinist achievements of the old Soviet Union were becoming decrepit in the 1980s. Friedman nevertheless continues to celebrate the openness and creativity of the American people, though he fails to note that unrestricted Third-World immigration has changed not simply the population’s composition, but its character, and that discriminatory practices against white males, based on disproportional taxation, affirmative action in education, hiring, and contracting, and anti-free speech laws and denial of due process, are hardly sign of America’s alleged openness and creativity.
The dominant mantra, which endeavors to portray the above as signs of progress, remains, accordingly, to “consume,” not “produce.” It seems hardly coincidental that America’s principal export is now the junk culture fabricated in Hollywood, a “culture” which celebrates behaviors and values historically-considered pathological.
De-industrialization and “financialization” (i.e., the hegemony of financial economics over equity and industrial economics), which were to make the United States the leading edge of the new postmodern global market, are obviously implicated in the current crisis, but few establishment commentators have cared to explore these implications. At the most basic level, it might be noted that the new interdependence of a world market based on financial exchanges means that problems in one sector inevitably become problems in another, that disturbances in one country are likely to set off corresponding disturbances in other countries, and that local crises have the potential of becoming system-wide crises. Added to the inherent instability of this compromising dependence on exterior forces is the “Ponzi” dynamics of the U.S. financial sector, which is based on speculative confidence, not wealth creation.
Just to pay the interest on its limitless credit card debt, the country in the last decade has been obliged to borrow two to three billion dollars a day from foreigners, mainly Chinese and Japanese, who are acquiring in the process ownership of large swaths of the economy, while American speculators accumulated vast (and, as it turns out, largely meaningless) ciphers of wealth in the virtual world of cyber space.
America’s human capital is also in decline. Literacy rates are among the lowest in the industrial world, its once prestigious graduate schools of science and engineering are now filled mainly with foreigners, and its public schools are less and less concerned with mastering the rudiments of reading and writing than with dispensing contraceptives to fourteen-year-olds and preventing the use of hand guns on its premises.
Geopolitically, the situation is even worse, as other countries begin lecturing the formerly self-righteous schoolmarm on how to conduct her bungled affairs and as regions traditionally subservient to the US (like Latin America) defiantly assert their autonomy.
But most consequential, the dollar is losing its status as the world’s reserved currency—which means no more credit cards and no more free rides.
Relatedly, both American and foreign academics, some with very distinguished credentials, have begun predicting “an economic and moral collapse [which will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the United States.”
There have also been warnings from several former high-ranking Bush officials of a “secret coup,” as the higher reaches of the state fall increasing under military control. What began in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the Army became a colonial administrator, is apparently “coming home.” In violation of the Constitution, the Army is now planning to deploy 20,000 troops within the US to respond to any possible “civil unrest.”
Though the military’s “mission creep” began under Bush, Obama has already appointed three high-ranking officers to his Cabinet, promised not to cut the Pentagon’s astronomical budget, and plans to augment US ground troops by another 100,000.
The Pentagon has also, according to a recent US Army War College publication, prepared its own “transition” in case the crisis provokes social struggles that will need to be quelled at home. What’s most significant here is the expectation, among numerous establishment authorities, that the crisis could lead to violent class struggle, military dictatorship, or even social revolution.
The American System that must be held responsible for this situation has, against all traditional precept, made “the rapacious business-dominated state the embodiment of every cherished human value.” Unlike the 19th and early 20th-century European nation-state, the American System is not, and never has been, a national-state system committed to the defense and well-being of the nation; instead, its principal function has always been to defend those liberal democratic practices that facilitate market transactions. Uncommitted, thus, to the embryonic white nation that made up the American people before 1965, governmental elites have been free to pursue policies that foster their specific institutional interests or those of the dominant economic interests, while policies favoring the interests of the country’s white majority have only rarely been adopted and then usually only under threat of electoral retaliation. More scandalously still, this system, in true liberal form, has “privatized profit and socialized loss,” so that now middle-class tax payers will be expected to pick up the tab for the reckless policies of billionaire CEOs.
The distant lineage of this American System can be traced back to the liberal modern principles born in 1789. More immediately, its foundations were laid by the architects who designed the National Security State and its phony Cold War. When, in the course of the 1970s, this postwar system went into crisis, its social democratic components, which favored a social security net and regulation of important industries and utilities, were jettisoned by the free-market fundamentalism of the neo-liberal Reagan Administration and then given a new armature with the “globalist revolution” carried out by the Clinton Administration.
As globalists proceeded to remove those national barriers preventing the free movement of capital, goods, and labor (which meant, among other things, eliminating borders and “old-fashioned” obstacles representative of any lingering sense of national interest and national identity), they sought a complete deregulation of financial practices, based on the capitalist fiction that markets are self-correcting. At the same time, the globalization of American capital severed whatever remaining ties it may have had to the American nation and its culture.
The folly and stupidity of this system, whose ramifications are now going to be paid for with a good deal of popular misery, assumed fantastic—and, as it turns out, unbearable—proportions under the present outbound Bush Administration. Thus it was that the neo-liberal, globalist tenets that ideologically undergird the American System and reduce every question to a matter of individual economic interest gave way under Bush’s neocon cabal to the boundless vanity identified with its Judeo-Evangelical “faith-based community”—which held that anything the American state does is right, that the US always triumphs in the end, and, contrary to traditional Christian stricture, that the US is identified with God’s purpose in the world. As a result, Washington for the last eight years has been unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy.
A four-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year war, with no strategic goal, except perhaps to support Israeli interests, was launched simply on the basis of a neocon hallucination (non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction). Then, as the government entered this theater of illusion, its vast military machine bogged down before a few lightly armed insurgents (who were eventually bought off with great dollar sums during the so-called “surge”); lies and deception then became the basis of US policy; incompetents and schemers willing to kowtow to the reigning illusions were put in control of policy-making; billions and billions of US loans and aid somehow went missing; those who questioned the Administration’s aims and practices were deemed un-American, as historic liberties were compromised or destroyed; and, all the while, aliens, at the top and at the bottom of the American polity, were allowed the full run of things—from dictating foreign policy to allowing Mexicans to challenge American sovereignty on American streets.
When George W. was asked recently who should be held accountable for the present economic crisis, he answered that no one person or group was actually responsible. “The whole system,” he explained, “became inebriated.” To the degree that the crisis is indeed systemic, he, better than most commentators, has designated the real culprit. But what he didn’t mention is that the system wasn’t just temporarily inebriated: It was plastered from the start. And like the mind-numbing incoherence of any serious drunk, the destabilizing, destructuring, and disordering power of the American System of the last sixty years—despite the wealth and prosperity it created for some—is about to provoke the most massive civilizational hangover in history.
2. The Man of Destiny
There has been no better example of the bankruptcy of the American System, based as it is on liberal ideological abstractions and certain well-meaning but illusory tenets, than the presidency of George W. Bush. That this third-rate individual, lacking an understanding of the most basic things, including English syntax, was put at the helm of the most powerful state in history testifies better than anything else to the system’s unfathomable corruption. Though different from his predecessor, “a self-indulgent bubba with the morals of an alley cat,” he too was another example of the system’s want of character. Bush’s mediocrity, his lack of vision, his small stature as a man—have all consequently taken a terrible toll on both the nation and the state. His presidency, as even many Republican commentators acknowledge, bears responsibility for squandering the vast power and legitimacy that was bequeathed to the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
Obama’s programmed election was specifically designed to restore something of the power lost by Bush’s neocon administration. In the highest reaches of the American establishment (and this is evident less in written documents than in the innuendos and asides of its representatives), it became apparent in the last two or three years that a restoration of American power and prestige in the world would require a make-over of unprecedented proportions. Hillary, who was previously the leading establishment candidate, was thus abandoned, for she was simply too closely associated with the establishment to create the impression of a major turn-around in American politics.
Hence, the entrance of the black knight, who was provided the money, the advisers, and the media frenzy to make his candidacy not only a shoo-in, but a god-send. Obama has not disappointed his handlers, for he was an ideal candidate: he was inexperienced, undistinguished, and possessed the seemingly “populist” credentials to appeal to an electorate fed up with the neocon mania of the Bush Administration; he naturally took to the tiresome rhetoric of stirring but vacuous campaign promises; and, above all, he knew how to appeal to MTV-educated white youth and feminist-influenced white women who saw his campaign as some sort of rehash of the Great Awakening (with “racism” replacing the older Calvinist notion of sin), which had entranced earlier generations of Americans. He was also, of course, guaranteed the vote of the hundred million non-whites who now occupy our lands. The prominent British historian, Niall Ferguson (who has been dubbed “the Leni Riefensthal of Bush’s new imperial order”), could thus trumpet, once the formality of the vote was over, that “American world leadership is [now back in business.”
Obama may, however, turn out to be the last president of the United States. For those who care to look, scandal and fraud seem to lurk everywhere behind his media-constructed image. His past has thus been carefully erased from the public record; he may not even be a native-born American and thus not constitutionally eligible to be president. But this cover-up won’t last forever. The strident anti-white racism of his wife and many of his close negro associates, as well as his numerous dubious connections to the corrupt Daly machine of Chicago and the scandal-ridden governor of Illinois (Blagojevich) will also eventually surface. Finally, given the nature of the economy, he probably won’t even be able to deliver the goods to the black masses, who see him as some sort of cargo-cult Messiah, and this will undoubtedly become a source of further unrest. But most of all, Obama is thick with the Jews, whose wealth and power controls the Democratic party (even more than the neocon-led Republican party) and whose interests, as already evident, will be foremost among his Administration’s concerns. The gap between the governing elites and a white middle class wary of further social experimentation may thus widen and become more unbridgeable, as blacks, Jews, and raceless whites join the crusade to “change” America.
Obama’s failure, though, will not come through an exposure of the smoke and mirrors surrounding his fabricated persona. There is a deeper, structural problem that confronts this first post-American US government. As William Lind points out, “the heart of our inability to reform is the crisis of the state itself. Reform endangers the money and power of the New Class, which controls the state and feeds off it.” Though there will be a qualitative expansion of the state under the new regime, as money is thrown at the crisis and new projects are undertaken to root out the “racism” of white Americans, the anti-national impetus of the American System, which wars on the forces of history, culture, and nature, is almost certainly to remain untouched, just as the parasitic economic system, so crucial to the elites who support him, will go unreformed. If the crisis is conjunctural and short-lived, this, of course, may not matter; but if it is structural, it will mean the collapse of order and authority, and ultimately of the state’s legitimacy.
Against this backdrop of impending “change” and uncertainty, the controlled media (to the obvious delight of the immodest African) has endeavored to portray Obama as a man of destiny, another FDR or Lincoln, who will lead us through the valley of shadows to the Promised Land. This may, perhaps, occur, for anything today is possible. But I tend to agree with Philippe Grasset at dedefensa.com that our postmodern global age, which destablizes and disorders everything that has meaning for us, is being shaped not by our putative leaders, but by the accelerating force of events, whose “maistrian” effects simply sweep up and carry along all who try to control them.
The man of destiny may turn out, then, to be the man manipulated by destiny. Given that he represents the refutation of America’s European being, it would be ever so fitting if he should preside over the demise of the failed experiment known as “the United States,” opening thus the way to the founding of another, more organic expression of European America.
3. The Knife
As we enter the new year, white Americans once again face a despotic threat to their way of life, as they did in 1776. They have fallen under a regime that cannot control the dysgenic economic forces it has unleashed; a regime ruled by incompetents, thieves, and cosmopolitans; one that never considers the interests of those it rules; that is contemptuous of the history, culture, and tradition of the majority; that refuses to uphold laws and defend the border; that is influenced by foreign lobbies; that relentlessly attacks Christianity; that establishes “hate” laws and restrains free speech to muzzle whites opposing its anti-national policies.
This regime is not, however, some modern variant of old George III’s venal monarchy, but the American System founded on the same liberal modern principles that inspired the Communist system. Native to both systems is the primacy of “reason,” understood mainly in quantitative economic terms. Liberal reason consequently believes in nothing, for belief (which stems from religion, culture, tradition, and tribe) is the opposite of reason. Such economically-anchored systems of “consummate meaninglessness” may therefore function smoothly as long as they deliver the goods, but once things begin to break down and become dysfunctional, they lose all legitimacy.
A half dozen years ago, “Yggdrasill,” one of the pioneers of American white-nationalist thought, argued that the United States would likely go the way of the former Soviet Union if its system of financial rewards and punishments should ever cease to benefit the white majority. For though US elites have not the slightest interest in the welfare and security of the white majority, the majority was willing to be bought off as longs as the elites provided the material benefits to ensure its allegiance. Today, we are entering an era when that ability to deliver the goods may be rapidly diminishing.
For this reason, I believe catastrophe alone will cause white Americans to abandon their allegiance to the existing system and to see the elites controlling it as their real enemies. Such a transfer of loyalties away from the state is thus likely to entail less a racial awakening than an understanding how to live in a hostile reality, once the virtual realities that are at the heart of the American System have collapsed. Nevertheless, at that point when whites abandon the status quo, the possibility of an emerging white national movement will quicken.
Our role as nationalists ought thus to be subversive and revolutionary, not conservative. For there is nothing worth conserving in the existing anti-white system. Instead, we need to forge a spirit that opposes it at its root, that defines America as a nativist variant of European civilization, and that prepares a new Declaration of Independence.
“But our numbers are too small!” it will be argued. This, however, is always the case. For “history is made not by majorities who vote but by minorities who fight.” The great Belgium revolutionary, Jean Thiriat, once pointed out that a man skilled with a butcher knife can reduce a five ton whale to steak slices. The knife is the revolutionary sect and the whale the completely flabby society preoccupied with economic matters and devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. Such a society is extremely vulnerable to the action of a determined and organized political minority, especially in times of crisis.
Where, today, are such minorities to be found?
Every generation of Europeans has produced men ready for the heroic life. When the opportunity arises, they will appear.
The important thing to remember, as we enter this year of crisis, is that the future belongs to us—if we will it!
Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: 1stBooks, 2004).