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Myths and great myth I invited and received from Prozium a response on the subject of the utility of Michael O’Meara’s TOQ article on the mythicisation of a white American republic. Here, I am just going to make a very few remarks about the reply and set down a few principles to clarify the terms of debate. I will not be posting on this subject a third time, except to comment on the thread if required. My previous post argued that mythicisation had not been employed to move public will in either of the two historically most recent attempts at nation-building by Europeans (Manifest Destiny and lebensraum). Prozium disagrees but offers very little beyond post-facto romanticisations to indicate what inhabited the minds of the people of the time. His sole concrete attempt to demonstrate a mythicisation process at work in Manifest Destiny is Thomas Jefferson’s dream “of an empire of liberty in Transappalachia and the Louisiana Territory.” Let us be clear that Jefferson’s plan did not constitute myth, and very likely had no influence whatsoever over the men and women who walked and rode westward all those years later. It probably had some incremental role in the politics of expansion. But I think it would be a hell of a stretch to make more of it than that. Prozium’s other justifications for the mythic cause (DW Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”, and “Gone with the Wind” and “Roots”) are just puzzling to me. They testify to the appetites of cinema and TV audiences in their respective eras. But I have no idea what they are doing in this particular conversation, standing as they do at decades remove from the event in question. Further, they demonstrate a resounding lack of interest in what myth is, and is not. So let’s think about that, because until we know what myth is there is very little point in batting opinions back and forth. Words exist for specific purposes, and the word “myth” is no different. It has a specific meaning. However, it is open to a very wide interpretation. There are myth and “myths”. A “myth” may be an entertainment - a legend of saints and sinners of olden days, filled with strange marvels and violent ends. A “myth” may simply be a common falsehood, and an “urban myth” a stubbornly believed one. For example, in the run up to the shooting part of the Falklands War the conscript army defending the honour of Argentina learned that the British force opposing them included Gurkhas. They had heard that these strange and unknowable, un-European fighting men are accepted into the British Army because they are abnormally ferocious, which ferocity expresses itself in killing their own wounded on the battlefield, and taking a kukri to a defeated foe in order to dine on the choicest cuts. For some reason, the thought of a cannibalistic enemy did nothing for the Argentines’ war will. Well, why wait around to discover if this military variant on the urban theme is true? Either way, it meets what seem to me, at least, to be three of the four requirements for myth. It ... 1. expands on the reality (of the fighting spirit of the Gurkha soldier), 2. speaks to the irrational nature, and 3. lays claim to a truth less ordinary. Though it was missing in the Falklands, the fourth element of myth is the telling one for us. If it has pretensions to greatness itself, and to move men and women to build a new life in a new land it must, a newly contrived myth has to address an appropriately great existential issue. It follows that great myth, which is the only true myth, is not to be found everywhere. It is rare. Prozium’s assertion to the contrary takes no account of this vital distinction, and therefore does not recognise what it would mean creatively to mythicise the drive to a white American republic. What it would mean would be to match or better the best that has been done in the past. In my previous post I mentioned that “the Fuehrer” was a mythicised product of the German propaganda machine. To demonstrate this I used a poster from his old SA days. This poster: 1. expanded on the reality of Hitler’s inspirationalism, 2. spoke to the deep yearning for Germany to be given pride and purpose again, 3. claimed that Adolf Hitler was the light and the way to national salvation, and 4. employed the dictum “It lives Germany” which, if my translation is right, could hardly have connected National Socialism to the life of the German nation more directly. And this was just one poster, one tiny contribution to the greater mythicisation of Adolf Hitler - a process which encompassed every propaganda opportunity, not just in the mass medium and film but in architecture and political theatre, and was wildly successful. That’s what it takes, in reality, to transform an existential politics like National Socialism into myth. So when Prozium gestures toward the “myths” of Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty, “Birth of a Nation”, “Gone with the Wind” and “Roots” it’s as well to bear in mind the true scale of the endeavour. It’s also worth bearing in mind, as I said in my previous post, that the Germans did not mythicise lebensraum but romanticised it to no great effect. In fact, with the exception of Eretz Yisrael and the Holocaust, no racial expansion has been predicated on myth. There is one other thing to consider, and that’s language. As I’ve already said, what we are actually seeing in Prozium’s more florid examples is not myth-making at all but romanticisation. The language of romance is complex and rich in meanings abstracted from the social milieu. But the making of a great myth works by simplification, employing a vitalistic language that is spare, direct, unmoderated by emotional clutter, and looks past the social and transient to the archetypal and permanent. Therein lies its communicative power. So what I am saying here is that something as great as the future white American republic should call forth a corresponding mythicisation. That’s if one has anything remotely approaching the creative capacity on hand ... and the discernment to know what great myth really is ... and believes that it is the key to everything else. I don’t qualify for the first and last of those. I perceive the settlers of the American past to have been self-interested, see nothing wrong with that, and believe the same motives, essentially, will work for the settlers of the white American future. I wonder whether the contrary desire to make “everything for the race” takes sufficient account of the European sociobiology, especially that of individualistic and genetically varied white Americans. Comments:3
Posted by Dan Dare on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:35 | # Are you saying that myth cannot be true? Not even a mostly forgotten truth, burnished to perfection, with all the rough edges smoothed and the darker crevices airbrushed away? Might not a future white Republic be propelled by the vision of a mythical 1950s? 4
Posted by Friedrich Braun on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:56 | # Labour has done some great things for Britain: 5
Posted by Bill on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:03 | # Dan Dare on August 17, 2009, 11:35 PM | #
Trouble is the deconstruction boys do a damn good demolition job on myths. Thanks for the link @ 11.07pm above ‘This is my Land’ I’ve book marked it. Yes I spent the first twenty years of my life there. Of course the hairbrush is used but the essential core is valid, which I suspect goes for most myths. 7
Posted by the Narrator... on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:52 | # Guessedworker, it seems you’re asking for an official example of the foundation of a national myth, as though it might be found in congressional records. I think this probably derives from the fact that European-Americans have a slightly different outlook on the world than old world Europeans. And that outlook tends to be positive to the point of effervescent vanity. Myth, in America, generally almost always has a positive connotation. If we want to tells a tall tale of something darker, then the word Legend is employed. That’s why most campfire horror stories begin with, “Legend has it….” Generally, Myth = Positive. I think this stems from America’s pompous and ultimately self-betraying optimism. In America tales like Grimm’s Fairy Tales exist ONLY for the fun adventure and happily-ever-after aspect to them. Whereas originally they were meant to serve as warnings about the innumerable dangers and dark things in the world.
The American Myth states that the founding of America was only slightly less significant in the history of mankind than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Simply put, the American Myth is the deification of the America nation-state itself. (read the Star Spangled Banner and the history behind it, for example). The Myth of America’s “Divine Appointment” should explain Manifest Destiny, which, by the way, is still policy as Nato, the UN and the European Union are basically offshoots of it. The American Myth runs in the following order, 1. America’s power and prosperity are divinely ordained and thus destined to be everlasting and all encompassing. 2. America’s ideology of democracy and individual-will-to-power type freedom is self evidently true (we’re the greatest nation in the history of the universe, after all). 3. As America is a creed-based nation (of good old fashion, common sense, practicality of free markets and democracy) the American Ideal must then be universally applicable. Thus everybody can, and should, become Americans. The only reason there is war and poverty in some places around the world is because they have stubbornly refused to step into The Light (aka, Americanism). 4. And sense all people can become Americanized and WILL become Americanized, equality is a given. .
So at some future point when Whites are gathered around a campfire telling horror stories, one such story might begin, “Legend has it, Americans believed in equality!” At which point an incredulous and horrified gasp will be heard as the campers huddle closer together, peering nervously into the darkness about them… . 8
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:19 | # Dan, Are you saying that myth cannot be true? To have utility, it must be true about life. It will not be exactly faithful to the facts. Great myth, is factually selective and remodels even the selected fact to refine its truth. Might not a future white Republic be propelled by the vision of a mythical 1950s? Theoretically. But I’d like to see the white picket fence that can put two-hundred million pairs of feet on the road! Look, petty myth will not do. It represents a failure of the imagination, and a failure to apprehend the scale of what is being asked. This was O’Meara’s failing. Being a “spirit of race” European New Right sort of guy, he rejected the Analytical solution of self-interest and dived straight for the Idealist weapon of choice: myth. But he did not consider what kind of myth is scaled to the work in hand. It isn’t difficult to understand why he didn’t do that. There is something comforting about finding ready “solutions” in the known, rather than scary challenges. But mythicisation IS a terrific challenge creatively, philosophically and practically. I might say in retrospect that, for me, as the winner of Mr Johnson’s competition he had really to broach that issue. It wasn’t nearly enough for O’Meara to say, “The empiricists are going nowhere - we have to have a myth for the republic.” If he is not prepared to face the challenges which then flow, he is really only giving us another installation in the German-American “spirit of race” attack on the abiding empirical themes of WN. Not nearly enough. 9
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:05 | # Narrator, it seems you’re asking for an official example of the foundation of a national myth, as though it might be found in congressional records. A new founding myth, yes. However, I am only pointing out the inconveniently obvious: 1. the story of the making of the American West is one of individual self-interest, not myth-following, 2. the only model of deliberate, large-scale myth-making in the recent European past is the very brilliant and successful reification of “the Fuerher”, and 3. if WNs reject the utility of self-interest and plump instead for petty myth-making, without thinking clearly about the issue of scale, then certainly nothing will be achieved. Prozium concluded his response thus:
Notwithstanding the, in my view, wrongful notion of a pre-mythicised American nativism, this is a conservative voice speaking (he would say communitarian). Proze is correct that the old conservative dispensation was at peace with race and individualism. Perhaps our disagreement lies in the fact that I have radicalised somewhat, and whilst I haven’t put away my conservatism entirely, I now see it not as a live (and certainly not reformatory) politics but as the natural political estate of a settled people. In other words, conservatism arrives at the end of a long political process. The old dispensation is not sitting there, somehow, still available to us if only we gave up our slavery to the postmodern and reconnected to it. We have to create it from scratch. We have to have new ideas, new movements, a new general milieu. 10
Posted by the Narrator... on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:34 | #
That doesn’t agree with the way the American West is interpreted by both its detractors and its celebrators. And self interest and myth-following are not mutually exclusive.
Which gets back to the last point I made in the previous post. A White American Republic will not be founded on the ethos of a (future-tense, positive associated) Myth, but on a (past-tense, negative associated) Legend. We won’t be looking to past America for positive inspiration of how to be. We will be referencing past America on WHAT NOT TO DO to define ourselves, our laws and our ethics. Put it this way, early European man’s culture and morals were fashioned and forged through survival; through trial and error; through enduring more sorrow than joy; through those dark legends of endless winter, god-induced earthquakes and droughts, monster wolves lurking in the forests, dragons slumbering in caves and so on. In other words through real events (exaggerated over time) of near total destruction of their people. We are defined more through negative experience than positive ones (both as individuals and as collective groups).
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Posted by genosnipe on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:57 | # It’s also worth bearing in mind, as I said in my previous post, that the Germans did not mythicise lebensraum but romanticised it to no great effect. In fact, with the exception of Eretz Yisrael and the Holocaust, no racial expansion has been predicated on myth. Right on. I made that point to “GenoType” in an earlier entry. Myth don’t equal revolution. 12
Posted by JLH on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:30 | # The Narrator is right. America has a foundational myth already. The problem is that it requires the country to be transformed and made anew every generation. The old is swept aside. The more you welcome the new immigrants and celebrate change and the rewriting of the past to suit the sensibilities of the new demographic, the more of an American you are. The myth requires it. The myth is the one thing that doesn’t change. The problem for racially conscious Euro whites is that our coracialists understand in a vague way that something is wrong yet are so tied to the foundational myth that pondering it very deeply leads to confusion. We have to break them free of it somehow. The trouble is, when you do break free of it, everything that you see around you becomes intolerable, and yet it seems there is nothing that can be done about it. 13
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:50 | # JLH: That is the foundational myth of Kwa, not America. America’s foundational myth is of the yeoman farmer mixing labor with nature, yielding legitimate occupation of territory. See Locke’s theory of value and property. 14
Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:57 | # The Puritan “errand in the wilderness” is such an example. Racial expansion through a belief in choseness and a mission from God. Their errand, with the eyes of the world upon them, was to build a shining city upon a hill…not individuals motivated by self-interest but moral exemplars. 15
Posted by White Preservationist on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:00 | # Though I’m an American, we need to begin formulating a mythic vision of the future that is not solely limited to only one White nation but can rather be applied to ALL White nations and ALL White peoples worldwide. I am a pan-White nationalist, and I’ve posted my preferred myth of “White survival” on a couple websites before. The opposite of ‘survival’ is of course ‘extinction,’ and there is nothing more potent than talking or warning about the utter oblivion of White extinction to get Whites motivated worldwide. In my opinion, what is needed is a mythic vision that is even more profound than the ‘White Republic,’ a highly idealistic and high-minded (yet still practical and doable) mythic vision of the future that can strongly activate or stir-up the collective unconscious of Whites worldwide to work much more cooperatively/collectively in an ethnic/racial sense before our White nations and White bloodlines become almost totally swamped by the teeming billions of non-Whites. In case some of you missed it, here is the myth of “White survival” that I have partially formulated:
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Posted by annihilation on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:10 | # White Preservationist wrote: ‘‘Whites standing firm against the billions of non-Whites who seek to colonize our White nations, claim our White women as their own, ‘’ TAKE your ugly white women. Whats took you so long??? What are you waiting for??? 17
Posted by JLH on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:42 | # James Bowery: “That is the foundational myth of Kwa, not America.” That may be true enough, but it’s the one the Kwans believe in, not the honest agrarian/labor partnership you describe and which has been delegitimized by propaganda from the usual quarters. The question is how to get it relegitimized. 18
Posted by Dan Dare on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:03 | # Well we don’t seem to have come up with much yet. Neither James’ Kansan sod-busters nor my Ozzie ‘n’ Harriet appear to have gained much traction. Could it be that GW is setting the bar too high? Or is it simply that the challenge of creating a myth that will resonate with all the rich diversity of Euro-Americans is insuperable? WP’s appeal to Pan-Europeanism certainly has an neo-Malthusian appeal but could such a visionary myth include a United States in which, in little more than a generation, half or more of the population will have no claim to European ancestry whatsoever? Won’t the US need to have reversed its own demographic transformation before qualifying for admittance to a future Festung Großeuropa? 19
Posted by Frank on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:34 | # The Civil Rights movement was all about myth. Myths are powerful. My myth: the natural order has been corrupted by magicians attempting to destroy what is to create what cannot be. Virtuous nations bound to their native land, blood, ancestral traditions and laws, and God must struggle to survive and resist amalgamation into the magicians’ leviathan. Time is on the side of the traditionalists as the unnatural empire rots from within, and once it collapses it’ll be up to us to rebuild from the ashes and raise up protections against future magicians. 21
Posted by Prozium on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:00 | # The election of Barack Obama is the culmination of the myth of the Civil Rights Movement. It is a part of a larger Jewish narrative about America’s national ideals and history. The humble mulatto messiah has come to heal the wounds of racism and slavery; to move us “beyond race” into a “more perfect union” which is MLK’s colorblind utopia. This is the sort of transcendental drivel that animates the progressive left. It is pure tikkun olam. 22
Posted by Prozium on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:13 | # Dan, Good to see you here. Actually, I don’t think so. The Second Klan is an instructive example. The original Ku Klux was a Southern based terrorist organization. The Second Klan though was based in the Midwest. The myth of the Ku Klux Klan was powerful enough to appeal to Yankees in Indiana, Oregon and Maine. I believe Desmond has said on several occasions that the Klan had a following in Canada. 23
Posted by Prozium on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:40 | # A small subset of White Americans are analytical Darwinists. Over 50% of Americans reject Darwin’s theory of evolution. The U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the world. Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies. Millions of Americans believe in a literal Rapture after reading about it in the fiction section of the local Barnes and Noble. In 2004, about 44% of Americans believed in holistic or spiritual healing; 49% in ESP; 27% in haunted houses; 35% in telepathy; 26% in aliens; 18% that communicating with the dead is possible; 23% in astrology; 13% in witches; 23% in reincarnation; 11% in channeling the spirits of the dead on ouija boards. 24
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:42 | # Our natural mythology is god-like (“in the image of”) free moral agency choosing sex over eusociality. This means that rather than viewing our individualism as a “problem” we should sanctify it as an aspect of sexual reproduction—and ourselves as an individualistic race “chosen” just as we choose sexuality over eusociality for further creation. This means all government actions that have defended the invasion of our territory by more eusocial races are evil and the resulting presence of those eusocial races on our soil—the soil made sacred by giving rise to our individualism, itself made sacred by sex—is evil. 25
Posted by danielj on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:32 | # We have to create it from scratch. We have to have new ideas, new movements, a new general milieu. That is a Bad Religion song and they are ultra-left. I still feel like the Old is the Panacea. What radicalized you GW? 26
Posted by the Narrator,,, on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:35 | #
No, it wasn’t. It would be more accurate and honest to say the Union and its Puritan Christian driven ideology was a Northern based terrorist organization.
In other words America is no different than Europe, as only 18% of residents in the European Union could be called analytical Darwinists. http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/11/post-christian-but-not-secular-europe.php
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Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:07 | # Daniel: I still feel like the Old is the Panacea. I would say that what is real, what is true in us is the panacea. What radicalized you? Just a growing understanding of how this bad old world works: 28
Posted by Euro on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:38 | #
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Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:33 | # Eusociality includes the naked mole rat as well as social insects where it is taken to the advanced level of haplodiploidy:
What the Wikipedia article doesn’t talk about is that there is another, even more advanced, form of eusociality driven by even greater kin selection and division of labor: The individual multicellular organism consisting of billions of genetically identical cells—a vast population of clones—specialized into various kinds of tissues—the most advanced expression of which is the sexually reproducing multicellular individual. In human societies, there is a gradation of eusociality at both a cultural and at a biological level. Like the naked mole rat we have not yet come to haplodiplody, but the evolution of sterile castes is clearly evident and most ingrained in the highly polygynous African tribes where large numbers of males are excluded from reproduction, not by their inability to kill the “alpha” male in single combat under the law of the jungle, but by their inability to battle the hunting group, read “gang”, under the control of the “king” or BAOWCE. Jews have manipulated our mythology ever since their founding with the lineage of David to present day Hollywood when so many movies end with the climactic variations of two opposing leaders who leave their coteries behind to enter into a one-on-one battle, usually with weapons of some sort, to the death. 31
Posted by Loriver on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:46 | # http://www.toqonline.com/2009/08/the-sword/
Unfortunate as it may be, race-replacement liberalism is very strong in the area of controlling values and ideals. Although On Genetic Interests is a flawed work, it has a rather unique strength. The only kind of inequality that liberalism cannot diminish is the relationship of individuals with their families, and EGI (or its successor) builds upon this. No-one claims that this approach will yield phenomenal success, but it certainly has a role amongst others. It is less naive than the idea that a vague ‘myth’, offering no information, is somehow going to inspire the masses, despite the pervasive indoctrination that functions to combat and belittle memes of this variety.
Would he claim that race denial science has had no effect at all on the state of play? No, that is absurd. Why then should ethnicity-affirming science be dismissed?
Facts inform values. If I discover that a stranger is actually my brother, that is a cold fact about his biological make-up but this fact integrates into my own value-system and becomes a source of value – I value him as a brother, not a stranger. Pretty simple. I would also dispute that culture has anything much to do with this particular example of meaningfulness.
The weakness of ‘poetic myth’ is that it is conflicting only with a person’s values and emotions, which are controlled by anti-racism. Approaches that have a scientific foundation can at least undermine some mistruths or half-truths that support anti-racism, and this is more difficult for someone to dismiss.
Mr. O’Meara is free to assume the reality of race, but he should not expect non-racialists to do so. He is offering no challenge to the powerful arguments that race is not a biological reality, or that racial differences are of no significance. Another problem (of concern to all parties) is that the question of who is ‘white’, or why this particular distinction should be privileged in America, is left unresolved. There is something of the straw man about his referring to America being saved by ‘facts or scientific demonstrations’. Of course inspiring writing must be derived from EGI, not just dry facts – perhaps he should note that Frank Salter (the political writer) is credited over Henry Harpending (the actual geneticist). And again, this is only one approach in a multitude that are needed.
Why can’t scientific truth be used as a weapon in the struggle for power? He presents a false dichotomy. The liberals have made use of scientific arguments, moral arguments and everything possible to successfully further their cause, and this is clearly the productive approach. 32
Posted by Frank on Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:49 | # Battle of the Teutoburg Forest: Germany Recalls Myth That Created the Nation
This has nothing to do with WWII… Basically, being German is partially illegal. Post a comment:
Next entry: Unite Against Fascism, state terror group.
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Posted by Dan Dare on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:07 | #
Can ’radical nostalgia’ pass off as myth?