Native Man, Pragmatic Man, Nietzschean Man ... but Revolution Man?

On 22nd June 1948 a vessel owned by the Board of Trade but leased to the New Zealand Shipping Company quietly docked at Tilbury.  It disgorged 494 fare-paying black Jamaican passengers: migrants who, at the invitation of the ship-operators, had taken it upon themselves to turn up in our country to improve their lot in life.  This small and novel event precipitated what would quickly become a permanent revolt of the political class against the sovereign people of this land, which itself set off a chain of race/ethnicity-based political, legal, social, and economic actions and reactions.  Inconceivable seven decades ago, these have reached down into every corner of British national life, and have proved absolutely cataclysmic for our people.  They have been conjoined with other immoralities, other political betrayals, each heralding other disasters, such that, in these days, the gravest darkness and uncertainty hangs over even our immediate future.

Any man or woman who finds even some of this troubling and begins to question it already has one foot placed on the long road of understanding that leads to some form of nationalism.  It may take months or even years before the seeker detaches from the old, safe hostilities of left and right, and formulates the notion that the entirety of politics, culture and economics is made horribly, equally destructive by some inhering force or combination of forces.  It will likely take longer still before said seeker also asks what we, as a people, must do to remain not just free or democratic or Christian, or whatever, but who we are.  But then he or she has turned a significant corner.  The people and the people’s everlasting home have been reclaimed from the estrangements of the old ways of thinking, and will not be lost to sightlessness and uncaring again.  With that understanding comes a critique of many other things in this world, such that the whole constitutes an awakening from a deep but general slumber, and a liberation into a new sensing of truth and an intense sensing of identity … of our ethnic person ... of belonging and, most of all, of an existential care.

For the vast majority who accomplish this return it is done alone and osmotically, like a salmon leaving the ocean to return to the place of its arising.  It is a journey of the instinct to an honourable estate, but not a whole nationalist estate.  It is not got from real-world contact with nationalists or any prior ideology of British nationalism.  It is invariably the product of time spent on-line, and had this not been the internet age little of this awakening would ever have been possible.  As it is, the resulting amour propre is nationalism to its possessors, though that singular element of care defines it more exactly as nativism. We might, therefore, justly apply to these good folks the soubriquet “Native Man”.

Because Native Man has won his understanding of the world by his own diligence and perseverance, and by a turn to his nature and ours, and because it sets him so definitively apart from the “normies”, the sleeping masses of his own people, he has a perfect confidence in it.  Notwithstanding the heavy emphasis on negative critique, he will – at least at first - consider his nativism to be sufficient unto the task of securing “the existence of our people and a white future for our children”.  If only every real Briton and, after their own wont, every white American, every German, every Frenchman could be as awake as he and his fellow nationalists are, and see what he and they see so clearly!  So his politics leans more and more heavily on that critique and on the new order of values underpinning it.  They are his point of reference in all things.  Yet he finds that they do not cut through … do not communicate to his sleeping friends and neighbours and workmates, who cling tenaciously to their own prior certainties.  Even when the last slavish assertion of these sightless people has been falsified and their last point of faux-principle dismissed, still they are fish swimming in the waters of liberal modernity.  They may be forced to concede at every turn, but they cannot vacate their own world of truth.  They know nothing else.  They have nothing else.  For, the organising ideas of any age – ours included - are the makers of men’s shared world of truth.  Those ideas are in the minds of men and nowhere else.  They are communicated between men, and so reinforced constantly, and they are communicated between generations.  They possess a decisive, critical mass, such that every man who is born is formed and conformed by them, and unfailingly lives his life by them.  The person of every man … his social man, so to speak ... is their historical product.  To change them … free them ... is to fundamentally change the person and all the persons.  To change them is a work of the absolute, a work of whole ideational systems, because only such systems have sufficient scale, and only such systems can ever imbue men with the historical power and agency required for such change.

But nativism is by no means such a system.  It derives from the tribe’s primacy on the tribal land, ie, from existential (defensive) genetic interests ... from the holding of territory as the guarantor of the tribe’s existence, which is quite enough to make necessary and moralise the rejection of all foreign colonisation.  Its philosophical content amounts to care plus reaction.  Its primary political product is existential concern, out of which grows racialism and, because European racial concern is driven to honesty and justice, the counter-Judaic narrative.  Its animus might be expressed as:

No man may decide for our people on the question of our existence.  We alone shall make that decision. 

Accordingly, its language is defiant, defensive, thunderous, and critical, of course.  However, in our time (ie, late modernity) and in our place (ie, the European nation state), the reflexive nature of nativism is proving to be altogether too thin philosophically and too negative politically to dispel the complacency and inertia, and to power the restorative task at hand.  Caught in liberal modernity as they are, hypnotised by its material comforts and private consolations and scarified by anti-racist propaganda, our people will only rally to a positive offer which nativism on its own cannot supply.  But, as a classic reactionary, Nativist Man tends to respond to that operational limitation via the expectation that reaction will gain in number, reach and force as the foreign impost comes ever closer – the “worse is better” scenario.  In one sense this view is justified, since that is always how Nativist Man himself comes to his politics.  But it is no longer sensible to go on hoping and expecting that a nativist revolution will come of itself as if mechanically.

Nativism remains a necessary component of nationalism, and something of it is present in all non-Nietzschean nationalist thinking.  But it is only a component and should not function alone, as the whole Idea (ie, as it is expressed, for example, by the wonderful Laura Towler of Patriotic Alternative).  As such, it is a relatively recent addition to the nationalist political caucus.  It had not been a central focus of earlier British nationalism.  Indeed, it only really began to appear (very tentatively) within nationalist party-politics (and really that means in the British National Party) from the early 1990s, via the interest of some, not all, members in attending to grassroots concerns.  The breakthrough only came from the late-2000s - and from outside formal nationalism - when demographic projections from the ONS, David Coleman’s Oxford unit and the Leeds University demography unit all made waves in the national media.  The subject of our people’s coming minoritisation began to enter the public consciousness.  A decade on, “replacement” is a commonplace term, and the usual suspects are trying to limit its spread.

Oddly, though, when the term first appeared (it was appearing on MR threads from 2005, for example) the BNP was too invested elsewhere to accept the gift of this new narrative and drive it forward.  We have to look back further, to Nick Griffin’s successful 1999 leadership challenge to John Tyndall, to understand the indifference to nativism from the top of the nationalist heap.  Tyndall was the arch-nationalist of old, a racialist, an anti-Semite, a one-time neo-Nazi and street-fighter.  He wrote five books between 1961 and 1988, in the last of which he had the foresight to predict that before long shoppers will be walking out of supermarkets with their purchases in plastic bags emblazoned with “Remember the Holocaust”.  As it is, all the big employers today have “corporate purpose” and their brands have “values” which are dinned into us all day long.  He misread the messaging.  But otherwise he wasn’t very far wrong.

Tyndall had been BNP chairman for seventeen electorally fallow years when Nick Griffin’s modernising faction forced and won a leadership election.  Over two-thirds of the voting members voted for change.  It was no longer acceptable for their party to be, as Tyndall was, disinterested in trading principles for votes.  As leader, Griffin pivoted the party away from Tyndall’s racialist spear-point, dropping the key policy of forced repatriation.  He developed a full-spectrum policy platform and initiated a new drive for local party organisation.  After 9/11 he took the opportunity to shift the focus onto anti-Muslim activism.  The late Marlene Guest, for example, commenced upon her long and brave campaign for justice for the scandalously ignored victims of the Muslim paedophile prostitution gangs.  Griffin went to some pains to reassure the old faithful that the turn away from overt racial nationalism to a more culturalised stance did not imply that the party accepted non-whites in the British homeland providing they all loved dogs and drank cold tea and warm beer.  It was cosmetics, a piece of electoral pragmatism.  But for cosmetics it was to prove definitive.  The same old shriek of “Fascist! ... Racist!” continued from the usual quarters.  But to no inconsiderable extent Griffin’s pragmatism was working.  Some fifty council seats up and down the country were won, and then in 2009 Griffin himself and Andrew Brons were elected to the European Parliament.  There could be no going back.  Further, an ideological Pandora’s Box had been opened.  The pragmatism encouraged some senior members to ask whether a policy platform that was not cosmetic at all but was a real commitment to a politics of monoculturalism would break the scarifying power of authority and authority’s media and anti-racist agents yet properly chime with the electorate.  From there, it could be argued, anything is possible.  Perhaps even from a purist racialist standpoint cultural nationalism, as it would be called, could have a utility that purist racialism sorely and self-evidently lacked.  So why not gamble on it?

So in 2010 a small group of disaffected nationalists, tired of Griffin’s controlling hand … we can label them and their heirs Pragmatic Man ... gambled and set up the British Freedom Party.  They duly cut away Tyndallite monoracialism in toto and posited Islam as the arch-enemy instead of Tyndall’s Jews.  At the time, culturism’s star was rising elsewhere.  The English Defence League was in full voice, sauntering through English city streets, Israeli flags flying, young mixed-race men marching along with actual Englishmen as if it meant something.  The British security state, British courts, and the British media were making a folk-hero of Tommy Robinson.  There was a new breed of activist epitomised by Paul Weston actually advocating culturalism for its own sake and accepting the inevitability of multiracialism in Britain, if not multiculturalism.  This Pragmatic Man was raised at The Gates of Vienna and understood the War on Terror not as a war for Israel but a war for the West and Israel and a war for “Judeo-Christian” civilisation.  Thus pragmatism found its ultimate expression in the Jewish prescription for a non-racial British nationalism.  Weston – a brave and good man, by the way - took on the leadership of the British Freedom Party after the ex-BNP activists lost their way.  It failed and so did Weston’s next endeavour, Liberty GB.  The state and Islam have survived untroubled and the EDL has splintered.  The marches have tailed away.  Likewise, Tommy Robinson’s moment of infamy seems to be past.  Now only Claire Fox argues that culture can be a political change agent.  The ex-BNP gamblers are, of course, long gone, their shirts lost.  Pragmatic Man is most vocally represented today in the person of the gangling conventionalist Laurence Fox.  His party, Reclaim UK, champions “your right to disagree”.  Even with Black Lives Matter.  It’s helpful, of course.  But nobody would call it nationalism.

The failure of pragmatism calls into question the working relation of electoral politics to revolutionary politics.  While he exercised control over his party, Tyndall’s refusal to trade principles for popularity preserved the purity of the revolution.  From the moment that policy was reversed, Tyndall’s revolution, which was post-war nationalism’s revolution, began to lose its soul.  In the end, it was all for nothing.  Pragmatism played itself out without lasting gain to anyone.  But, then, as things were before 1999 the party was moribund anyway, and the revolution mired.  There’s the catch.  Perhaps pragmatism had to be tried.

In any case we can ask today: is there a golden mean?  From our position, is there any way in which to combine authentic nationalist philosophy … so, its model of Man and Being, its definition of good, its imperatives, its design for the future, and the like ... with party-political professionalism and vigour?  Which movement, you may ask, and which philosophy?  Because nationalism in this land has a split personality.  It still has a head that is Tyndallite on a body that is nativist, and the body simply will not recognise or respond to the commands from the head.  This is not only because the surviving post-war thinking is Nietzschean and thus cruelly dismissive of nativism’s naturalistic concern.  It is also because nativism is non-philosophical.  At the best of times, there are vanishingly few philosophically-trained nationalists.  But, as a mass and in all the ways that matter … that distinguish nationalism from liberalism ... nativists are gutsy, fierce autodidacts who tend to anti-intellectualism without really knowing what real philosophy is or why it is necessary, and why their hard-won understanding of the world is not enough.  They take critical analysis of liberal modernity (which is ten a penny) and the occasional lyrical history of our people (which is near worthless except as a charming read) for real answers to the grand philosophical questions of how to live.  That is their limit, and it is a problem given that an holistic revolution, positively undertaken, is first philosophical.  Nativism must re-find itself within a wider account of human being, potential or existent.  Speaking for myself, I believe that is possible even in our state of decline, and I believe it can come only via the latter, ie, through the naïve experience of being and identity, because naïvety is closer-to-hand for the masses than the knowledge of a thing … a spiritual goal, say … as its representation in thought.  In times past when the crisis of the people was moral and not existential, and when political goals were things barely considered by the mass of men, it might have had to be otherwise.  But in our time the imperative is to live, and that is accessible to all.

So there must be a philosophy of nation and that must be accessible to all.  But the narrow, intellectually incompetent reading of Nietzsche which made him the central philosopher of National Socialism, and which survived the total destruction of its world in 1945 to animate European nationalism here and across the continent, is in no way fit for the task.  Nativism and the native principle is anathema to the life of glory it commends.  The existential imperative is anathema to it.  It is a design for military aggression and for empire, for expansive, not defensive, genetic interests, for elitism in an age of anti-human global elites.  It is not, and never will be, a philosophy of our people.  Neither is its heroic subject … Nietzschean Man ... any more of our essence, any more inhering and real to us than, say, the triumph of a Roman general.  Behave in a certain, morally-decisive way, it says ...be contemptuous of the weak, the ordinary ... and you will become the master of men and all things.  Until, of course, the men determine to tear you down for your arrogance and audacity and for their own freedom, as they will.

To illustrate all this we can look at some elements of the stated credo of the late, great Nietzschean of British nationalism, Jonathan Bowden:

What our people are crying out for isn’t really a religion or a belief system, it’s a form of mental strengthening in and of themselves, to overcome the disprivileging mechanisms that don’t allow them to think and also allow them to reconnect with core areas of identity.

…  Now, what does Nietzsche believe? He believes that strength is moral glory. That courage is the highest form of morality. That life is hierarchical. That everything’s elitist. There’s a hierarchy in each individual. And a hierarchy in every group of individuals. There’s a hierarchy between groups of individuals. Inequality is what right-wing ideas really mean. Right-wing ideas aren’t just a bit of flag-waving and baiting a few Muslims. Right-wing ideas are spiritually about inequality.

…  What the New Right on the Continent in the last 40 years has been is the reworking of certain ideas, including certain ideas associated with fascism, and their reworking so that they come back, into modernity, where we are now.

…  Nietzsche’s philosophy isn’t for everybody. It’s too harsh and too forbidding for many people. But it is a way of thinking which is reflexive and absolute. It’s a way of thinking which is primordial and extraordinarily Western. It’s a way of thinking that enables people to be religious, in the sense of the sacredness of life, but also to be open to fact, and to evidence, and to science. It combines those things that lead to glory. And express themselves through tenderness and ferocity.

…  Greatness is in the mind and in the fist. The glory of our tribe is not behind us. We can be great again.

Right from the first line here we enter a fantasy world in which “strength” as ““moral glory” plays some role in thinking and selfhood.  It isn’t true.  The getting of understanding of self and the world has been the grand preoccupation of nationalists and proto-nationalists in Britain ever since news of that fateful June day a lifetime ago penetrated the public mind.  Nativist Man, not Nietzschean Man, is the natural result of that understanding.  The glorious hero is a gratuitous confection from the late 19th century and a vanity; when the need of us nativists is for our own and our people’s raw truth.  It is that … always and only that … and not tunes of glory which afford the possibility of detachment from liberal modernity, and which will ground us in the revolutionary but political war for preservation which we must carry to all the blind and profane, homogenising forces without us.

Even so, right now it is Nietzschean Man standing bestride our nationalism, right now as he has for nine decades.  He was a flush busted on the Westwall and in Berlin in 1945 but he’s still writing articles for Patriotic Alternative and making videos for Odysee and Gab.  Yet he hasn’t the first idea how we make a revolution now.  He doesn’t have the answer to the question of how we fill the philosophical gap between nativism and ethnic nationalism.  I’ll be saying something about that in part three.