The prevailing liberal system has grown stale in the extreme and, for our people, not just unproductive but destructive.  There are political signs all across the West of a yearning for an alternative.  The timing is ripe for ethnic nationalism.  But then as nationalists we come up against the stops of our marginalisation and downright persecution (which will get a lot worse if the Law Commissioners get in England what the SNP government has wanted for Scotland).

The one defence we possess is that the political, media, and liberal Establishments are marginalising and persecuting a political standpoint we, as ethnic nationalists, do not hold.  It is no more correct and appropriate to attack our politics than it is to attack the politics of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.  Advocacy for the existence, natural right, and natural interests of whole peoples cannot be illegitimate, and advocacy for the existence, natural right, and natural interests of the native British people cannot be separated out and treated differently simply because as the natives of this land our interests run counter to those of the non-native populations colonising it. Equality before the law must prevail.  Properly explicated and rid of false associations from the judge and jury which is liberal thinking, ethnic nationalism is morally unimpeachable whichever people it refers to.

Of course, that is a utilitarian argument for theorising the mechanics of ethnic nationalism.  It is a good argument but it is not the whole of the argument, the most serious part of which is the necessity to fashion a philosophy capable of changing history in an epochal sense.  I think we are moving closer to that.  But nothing is yet extant, and in the meantime the narrative of our politics is supplied by so-called “ground-breaking” academics of nationalism.  All working from within the liberal order, they have produced little that we would recognise as our politics.  For example:

Eric Gellner (1925-1995), a Czech-born Jew, theorised nationalism from the starting point of cultural plurality, treating nationalism as a product of modernity and an artificial and strictly political imposition upon the state.  He held that nationalism can only exist in industrial society, by which assertion he could divorce it from the principle of ethnicity (which he did actually hold to be enduring).  In turn, that divorce enabled him to assert that nationalist sentiment is actuated by “the feeling of anger” or “the feeling of satisfaction”, depending on whether “the political and national unit” is “congruent”.  Gellner’s academically influential notions about nationalism are narrow and near-sighted, quite lacking the sense that the fundamental interests of the people must be expressed in their government.

Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), an Anglo-Irishman born in China, also concluded that nationalism was modern, and a response to capitalism.  His famous work Imagined Communities made the classic sceptical plaint that peoplehood requires everyone to have been introduced over the dinner table to everyone else or the people must, to some extent, be a work of the imagination.

This assertion has become a staple of the Marxised left’s stabby little denials.  We could, I suppose, turn to the Mooreian Shift to dispense with it.  But, in fact, that natural acceptance of what is in another because that is also in oneself ... the quiet but utterly solid contentment conferred by being-in-kind, walking among kind ... that suffices.  Were it otherwise ... were a man unable to acknowledge his entire people because he hasn’t met all of them in person, then, in principle, knowledge of the immediate and singular is reified over knowledge of the expansive and plural.  So, for example, a plurality that is a crowd at a football game can only ever possess the meaning of individual football fans as witnessed by each one of them.  When those people leave the stadium they must, by Anderson’s scepticism, remain only and always football fans and not be husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers, workers, shoppers, travellers, holiday-makers, or all that is of the endless round of human experience; because that human fullness would be “imaginary” for everyone at the game.  But we do not hold that other people are incomplete human beings simply on the ground that we do not know them completely.  We know and experience them to be just as we are, even those we have not ourselves met.
 
Anderson, by the way, gave his memoir the title of A Life Beyond Boundaries, which figures.

Anthony D Smith (1936-2015), a Jewish sociologist, argued that ethnic nationalism, as a common ethnic address of power and agency, was a thing of the non-European world.  But in the European world such a nationalism is an invented imposition upon pre-existing ethnicities, histories, myths, and so forth, and properly functions only as an accident of geography and symbolism in the wake, again, of capitalism and modernity.  The organisational rule, meanwhile, is civically nationalist.  It does not even require that its adherents in any given place look alike.

Walker Connor (1926-2016), an American political scientist, was the best of the bunch born before WW2 in that he made no bones about the ethnic foundation of nationalism.  But he approached it through the lens of conflict in the world instead of through the expression of human being, making it too much a negative phenomenon.

Further, he held it to be non-rational and emotional in character while at the same time insisting that it was based on kinship.  Well, you can’t have it both ways.  Either it is of the human instinct for kin or it is non-rational.  The assumption that the first proves the second is wrong.  Ethnic nationalism, as the whole people’s freedom to pursue its interest in survival and continuity, is not at all problematic to explain intellectually, although such explanation is not a pre-requisite - which it cannot be, of course, because instinct precedes thought.  The idea that anything, actually, is entirely constructed of thought is itself a nonsense.

It is the same with Connor’s related belief that because nationalism belongs to the human instinct it is subconscious.  Do men and women have subconscious mutual attraction, or it is fully and gloriously conscious?  Well, just so with ethnic self-preference.  Connor commits the same error of sloppy thinking and terminological inexactitude that he spent his whole life correcting in fellow academics.  His career-long insistence upon exactitude gave us the clumsy appellation ethnonationalism.  We have no reason to avail ourselves of it.

With the exception of Frank Salter, the later generation of academics have largely devoted their energies to the political relationship of the ethnic group to the state, or to the political expression of ethnicity in citizenship.  The nativist aspects of ethnic nationalism have been treated positively only in respect to archaic Third World tribes.  The nativism of European peoples is consistently reduced to a negative manifestation towards immigrants and immigration, as if the rest of humanity has absolutely no opinion on the colonisation of its homeland and it own replacement by alien populations.

At present, a lot of noise is being made around the self-promoting Israeli religious scholar Yoram Hazony, whose rise to prominence really got going with his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism.  But, of course, while he is for “nationalism” and against globalism as a governing power over nation states (which he characterises as a form of imperialism) he is against “tribalism”, ie, he is for the multiracial nation state (after all, 20% of the population of Israel is Palestinian, and it’s not like the Israeli government is going to flood its Jewish population with Sub-Saharan Africans and North Africans, and the masses of the Turkic world, Arabia and south, central, and east Asia; so that’s alright, then).

The Chatham House “scholar” and globalist pet Matthew Goodwin is the resident go-too British “expert” on all things allegedly right-wing.  He has treated his mainstream political clientelle to studies of the “fascist” BNP, UKIP, populism, the radical right and, with his next tome due in 2021, the whole shabang of nation, identity and belonging.  Goodwin is not a philosopher, of course.  So the strong probablility is that, writing from the liberal mentality as he does, he will have no more comprehension of the real dynamics of ethnic nationalism - its ontology, its philosophical principles and interior workings - than any of the gentlemen above.  I strongly suspect that nationalism as a naturalistic and emergent organising structure or system for the whole life of Man is something neither he nor any of them can penetrate because that cannot be done from the non-emergent, indeed imposed and artificial organising system which is liberalism.  A clumsy new word for this a lá Walker Connor would seem to be needed.  Liberocentricity, perhaps.

At this point we should acknowledge that we, connected though we are to the whole world of nationalism, are little better at formally explicating our own system of thought.  We seem to be content to recline into the comfortable notion that it can’t matter too much because as ethnic nationalists (please let us not employ Connor’s semiotic) it’s all effortlessly instinctive.

Accordingly, we have brought forth vast reams of critical analysis of our deteriorating racial circumstance, such that even those of us who qualify as long-standing nationalists with developed critiques of our own rarely rise in our politics above reaction, be that born of our instincts or from our factual observations and judgements.  To put it bluntly, critique is an unsexed thing.  It can never seed the ideational future.  So it can never serve the historical obligation upon us to re-order the world for the life and good of our kind.  A politics which seeks that has to come out of an holistic and original nexus of thought about the life of Man.  From the moment that modernist thinking appeared as a revolutionary tool of the powerful, nothing less ever had historical agency.