Holding Dr. Pierce's hard line vs. blending in to get along
Posted: Mon Nov 18, 2013 12:46 pm
I found this back and forth between "Lew" and "Trainspotter" and feel it's worth sharing:
Posted by Trainspotter on August 22, 2010, @ Majority Rights forum: http://majorityrights.com/weblog/commen ... ht/#c96408
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Lew:“Well, when a great mind like William Pierce fails to develop a viable method for propagating the ideology over the course of decades, it’s probably because the prevailing social and cultural conditions make the ideology impossible to propagate no matter who does the propagating, how often they do it, or how well they do it.”
Pierce only had access to the internet for a relative handful of years. In that time, he educated and informed many, many people. His “spinoffs” are all over the place. Probably most white nationalists have been influenced by him, including second generation types that don’t even know who he is. He also built up a fairly significant organization, not to mention penning probably the best known book to come out of modern white nationalism.
On the other hand, he had his limitations. For example, he was not very charismatic. I found his radio voice gruff and somewhat offputting at times. The Turner Diaries, while influential in its way, was hardly a magnum opus. Perhaps most telling, his organization did not meaningfully survive his death (some would dispute that, but you know what I mean). A “true” organization would have lived long and prospered, and that he failed to create.
Point is, he did what he did, he generally did it well (and at times superbly), but that’s as far as it goes. The idea that this proves that the spread of intellectual ideas is somehow not viable is rather ludicrous (not sure that you’re going that far). It proves no such thing.
Pierce made a major, and I do mean major, contribution to building the intellectual foundation of white nationalism. That is work that absolutely must be done. How can our vision ever spread, ever attain victory, if it is not even developed? Obviously, it can’t. The fact that Pierce did not deliver us an ethnostate in his lifetime doesn’t change any of this. It simply means that he wasn’t Superman, nothing more.
Lew:“In this sense, Pierce’s revolutionary ideology is most definitely a failure because he came up with something has no chance of success given our historical context.”
No, it doesn’t mean that at all. Does the typical revolutionary idea win overnight? Of course it doesn’t. First, it has to be developed and spread. Sometimes this can happen fairly quickly, but more often it takes a significant amount of time. What you are doing is akin to calling Karl Marx a failure, a man who died decades before the establishment of the first Marxist state. His ideas would in many ways dominate the twentieth century, a century that he himself would never step foot in. If that’s failure, then bring it on.
There is a distinct process that a revolutionary movement must go through, and this process is readily discernible from the historical record. I’m saying: let’s learn from that.
Lew: “Anyway, until the US reaches its own equivalent of 1920s Germany, propagating a revolutionary ideology that will always fail to move people has little real value.”
Not only does it have value, it is essential. We don’t know when the conditions will be *just right* for us. We don’t control those things. But if we aren’t ready when it happens, the historical moment may well pass us by. The Leftists did a tremendous amount of groundwork prior their successes. The intellectual foundation for their twentieth century victories was being actively built in the nineteenth, and they were ready when the time came. Right now, even if circumstances were favorable, white nationalism isn’t close to being ready. It tries to put the cart before the horse. It expects results when the groundwork hasn’t been done.
Lew: “If, for example, a White Advocate can work with local conservatives to make life uncomfortable for illegal immigrants while also nudging those conservatives toward explicit racialism, that seems to me to have a lot more value now than pushing revolution.”
Fine, go for it. But they are going to expect you to shut up and not discuss race. If you do bring race into it, they may very well boot you out in order to prove how open minded and tolerant they are. I don’t see any value in that. None whatsoever. Total waste of time. Because we haven’t taken the time and effort to spread our ideas, there aren’t enough of us. Therefore, the Hannity and Beck types aren’t interested in a coalition with us. We are not numerous enough to help them, therefore we are radioactive. Again, total waste of time. The solution is obvious: spread our ideas until we have enough adherents that we can’t be ignored. Right now, not only can we be ingnored, it pays to actively condemn us. You want to work these people? I don’t.
The truth, at this point in the game, is that if white nationalists blend into the woodwork, we’ll never be heard from again. There currently aren’t enough of us to transform the existing institutions, even by stealth. We need to concentrate on developing our own approach, making it as appealing and palatable as possible, and do our part to change the culture, not give into it. This is not to say that nobody should ever work within a more mainstream group. If someone is so positioned and so inclined, I say go for it. But the bottom line is that we won’t have a prayer of getting much in terms of results until we have spread our message much further than is the case today. On the other hand, as the ideas spread, you’ll start to see “friendlies” in all sorts of organizations, finding allies where you least expected it. At that point, mainstream organizations may well become more fertile fields to work in, But now? I doubt it. We need far more adherents first, and you don’t get them by blending in and disappearing.
Posted by Trainspotter on August 22, 2010, @ Majority Rights forum: http://majorityrights.com/weblog/commen ... ht/#c96408
---
Lew:“Well, when a great mind like William Pierce fails to develop a viable method for propagating the ideology over the course of decades, it’s probably because the prevailing social and cultural conditions make the ideology impossible to propagate no matter who does the propagating, how often they do it, or how well they do it.”
Pierce only had access to the internet for a relative handful of years. In that time, he educated and informed many, many people. His “spinoffs” are all over the place. Probably most white nationalists have been influenced by him, including second generation types that don’t even know who he is. He also built up a fairly significant organization, not to mention penning probably the best known book to come out of modern white nationalism.
On the other hand, he had his limitations. For example, he was not very charismatic. I found his radio voice gruff and somewhat offputting at times. The Turner Diaries, while influential in its way, was hardly a magnum opus. Perhaps most telling, his organization did not meaningfully survive his death (some would dispute that, but you know what I mean). A “true” organization would have lived long and prospered, and that he failed to create.
Point is, he did what he did, he generally did it well (and at times superbly), but that’s as far as it goes. The idea that this proves that the spread of intellectual ideas is somehow not viable is rather ludicrous (not sure that you’re going that far). It proves no such thing.
Pierce made a major, and I do mean major, contribution to building the intellectual foundation of white nationalism. That is work that absolutely must be done. How can our vision ever spread, ever attain victory, if it is not even developed? Obviously, it can’t. The fact that Pierce did not deliver us an ethnostate in his lifetime doesn’t change any of this. It simply means that he wasn’t Superman, nothing more.
Lew:“In this sense, Pierce’s revolutionary ideology is most definitely a failure because he came up with something has no chance of success given our historical context.”
No, it doesn’t mean that at all. Does the typical revolutionary idea win overnight? Of course it doesn’t. First, it has to be developed and spread. Sometimes this can happen fairly quickly, but more often it takes a significant amount of time. What you are doing is akin to calling Karl Marx a failure, a man who died decades before the establishment of the first Marxist state. His ideas would in many ways dominate the twentieth century, a century that he himself would never step foot in. If that’s failure, then bring it on.
There is a distinct process that a revolutionary movement must go through, and this process is readily discernible from the historical record. I’m saying: let’s learn from that.
Lew: “Anyway, until the US reaches its own equivalent of 1920s Germany, propagating a revolutionary ideology that will always fail to move people has little real value.”
Not only does it have value, it is essential. We don’t know when the conditions will be *just right* for us. We don’t control those things. But if we aren’t ready when it happens, the historical moment may well pass us by. The Leftists did a tremendous amount of groundwork prior their successes. The intellectual foundation for their twentieth century victories was being actively built in the nineteenth, and they were ready when the time came. Right now, even if circumstances were favorable, white nationalism isn’t close to being ready. It tries to put the cart before the horse. It expects results when the groundwork hasn’t been done.
Lew: “If, for example, a White Advocate can work with local conservatives to make life uncomfortable for illegal immigrants while also nudging those conservatives toward explicit racialism, that seems to me to have a lot more value now than pushing revolution.”
Fine, go for it. But they are going to expect you to shut up and not discuss race. If you do bring race into it, they may very well boot you out in order to prove how open minded and tolerant they are. I don’t see any value in that. None whatsoever. Total waste of time. Because we haven’t taken the time and effort to spread our ideas, there aren’t enough of us. Therefore, the Hannity and Beck types aren’t interested in a coalition with us. We are not numerous enough to help them, therefore we are radioactive. Again, total waste of time. The solution is obvious: spread our ideas until we have enough adherents that we can’t be ignored. Right now, not only can we be ingnored, it pays to actively condemn us. You want to work these people? I don’t.
The truth, at this point in the game, is that if white nationalists blend into the woodwork, we’ll never be heard from again. There currently aren’t enough of us to transform the existing institutions, even by stealth. We need to concentrate on developing our own approach, making it as appealing and palatable as possible, and do our part to change the culture, not give into it. This is not to say that nobody should ever work within a more mainstream group. If someone is so positioned and so inclined, I say go for it. But the bottom line is that we won’t have a prayer of getting much in terms of results until we have spread our message much further than is the case today. On the other hand, as the ideas spread, you’ll start to see “friendlies” in all sorts of organizations, finding allies where you least expected it. At that point, mainstream organizations may well become more fertile fields to work in, But now? I doubt it. We need far more adherents first, and you don’t get them by blending in and disappearing.