Excellent 8-part essay by Dr. O'Meara, plus great comments afterward.
http://www.toqonline.com/2009/08/toward-the-white-republic/
The TOQ Secession Essay Contest Winner:
"Toward the White Republic"
Michael O'Meara
Editor's Note: It is a great pleasure to announce the winning essay of the first annual TOQ Essay Contest: Michael O'Meara's "Toward the White Republic." We had 20 entries. One was subsequently withdrawn. Of the 19 remaining, I judged this the best, but there was close competition, and in the end I hope to publish nine other entries in TOQ, beginning with the Winter 2009-2010 issue. The prize essay appears below without notes. The full, annotated version will appear in the print edition. For information on the second TOQ Essay Contest, click here. Congratulations, Dr. O'Meara, and thank you.
"Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land."
– Walter Scott
One.
Some time in the second half of the 1990s, a terminological change occurred in the racially conscious community.
Many who previously identified themselves as White Power advocates, segregationists, separatists, supremacists, survivalists, neo-Confederates, biological realists, etc. started calling themselves "white nationalists."
At the time (and I didn't know much about these things then), I thought this reflected a changing political consciousness.
For what began after 1945 as a "movement" to maintain the integrity of America's racial character and prevent alien races from intruding into its various "life worlds" had, by the 1990s, ceased to be a realistic project — 30 years of Third-World immigration, "civil rights" legislation, and various measures imposed by the federal government to subordinate white interests to those of nonwhites had irrevocably transformed the American people so that it was increasingly difficult to characterize them as even a majority-white population.
As a consequence, "white advocates" in the late 1990s started making traditional nationalist claims for secession and self-determination because the United States, in their eyes, had become a threat to their people.
Two.
This interpretation was not at all unreasonable. But, alas, it didn't quite accord with the facts.
I've since learned that those calling themselves "white nationalists" are not necessarily nationalists in the sense of wanting to secede from the United States in order to form an independent ethnostate. Most, I think it's fair to say, are racially conscious conservatives who want to work through the existing institutions to regain control of the country their ancestors made — in order, ultimately, to dismantle the present anti-white system of preferences and restore something of the white man's former hegemony.
By contrast, white nationalists in the strict sense (i.e., those favoring secession) have no interest in restoring the old ways, let alone regaining control of the central state, whose authority is already slipping and whose rule is increasingly dysfunctional. Indeed, the American state system, as its more astute supporters acknowledge, is now beyond reform.
Instead, white nationalists aspire to create a counter-elite to lead disaffected white youth in a movement to found a whites-only nation-state somewhere in North America, once the poorly managed enterprise known as the United States collapses in a centrifugal dispersion of its decaying and perverted powers.
Without an organizational presence in the real world and with a "public" largely of computer hobbyists, white nationalists at present have no hope of actually mobilizing the white populace in opposition to the existing anti-white regime. Rather, their immediate goal is to prepare the way for the development of a revolutionary nationalist vanguard to lead the struggle for white liberation, creating, in the process, a counter-elite capable of founding a White Republic. They aspire thus not to recapture the rotting corpse of the US government, but to free themselves from it — in order to be themselves, in their own land, in their own way.
White nationalists, as such, politically define themselves in wanting to create a sovereign state in North America. They endeavor, therefore, not to "put things back the way they were," as conservatives wish, but to rid themselves of them completely. A National Revolution, they hold, will alone restore "the white man to his rightful place in the world."
Inspired by the birthright handed down by the blood and sacrifice of ancestors, their project, relatedly, is not about restoring the Third Reich, the Confederacy, or Jim Crow, as leftists imagine, but about creating a future white homeland in which their kind will be able "to pursue their destiny without interference from other races."
Three.
White nationalism is a variant of historic ethnonationalism, what Walker Connor calls nationalism "in its pristine sense."
All three — racial, ethno, and pristine nationalism — define the nation in terms of blood.
The creedal or civic nationalism of the present regime, which makes loyalty to the state, not the nation, primary, is "nationalist" only in a narrow ideological sense, confusing as it does patriotism (loyalty to the state or affection for the land) with loyalty to the people (nationalism). It thus defines the nation in terms of certain abstract democratic principles, seeing it as a collection of individuals, each more important than the whole.
Though ethnonationalists privilege the nation's spirit above all else, they define it organically, in terms of blood, as an extended family, an endogamous kin group, or a genetic commonwealth.
Unlike European nations, formed around long-established ethnic cores (which had developed in the Middle Ages, as Germanic and other tribal confederations evolved into larger political, regional, and cultural identities), American national identity was, historically, defined in explicitly racial terms.
As Sir Arthur Keith characterized it: "In Europe the stock has been broken up into local national breeds; in America the local breeds have been reunited."
In both cases, a national identity grew out of a real or imagined blood relationship linking the nation's members to inherited customs and institutions.
Because the American form of racial nationhood lacks the ethnic dimension distinct to European nationalism, it is a source of some misunderstanding, especially in its purely negative expression as anti-Semitism or Negrophobia.
For example, even Euronationalists who struggle for a continental nation-state tend to reject white nationalism — because it seems to imply the typical American leveling of cultural and other identities by subsuming them under a homogenizing biological concept that negates the particularisms of European nationhood.
In this, however, our European cousins misunderstand the aim of white nationalism, though some white nationalists in their one-sided reaction to nonwhites may, admittedly, have given cause to their misunderstanding.
White nationalism is a distinctly American (or, better said, New World) nationalism, not a European one, and the two are analogous only at the highest level, where the national community, defined ethnically or racially, affirms it right to control its own destiny.
This is not to say that American racial nationalism — which makes white European racial ascriptions the basis of American identity — has no ethnic or historic component.
The country's original settlers were largely of Anglo-Protestant descent and this had a formative effect on American institutions and folkways.
The organic basis of the American nation, however, was less English ethnicity than "whiteness."
Even before the War of Independence, more than a quarter of the population was of non-English, mainly North European stock: Scots-Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenots, etc. By about the mid-18th century, the "American English" were increasingly referred to as "Americans," a people "selected by a whole series of ordeals which [had] killed off the weak and worthless" and conferred a distinct vitality on their laws, attitudes, and local institutions.
The bitterness of the War of Independence (the first American war of secession) and the War of 1812, US-British acrimony and rivalry, which lasted late into the 19th century, in addition to the nationalist compulsion to celebrate an American identity independent of the English — all tended to minimize the significance of the colonists' original national origins, as they were reborn as pure Americans. In fact, American nationalism arose on the basis of a certain popular revulsion against the English. Nevertheless, English-Americans were the original native Americans and all the rest of us have since become American by assimilating something of their ethos.
Though Anglo-Protestant ethnicity continues to animate the inner reaches of American culture, it wasn't, however, the genotypical basis of American identity. Rather, it was the racial experience of transplanted Englishmen in 17th-century Virginia, then the "exotic far western periphery . . . of the metropolitan European cultural system."
In the New World part of this system, the ever-looming presence of African slaves, considered "by nature vicious and morally inferior," and "savage" red Indians, who posed an ongoing threat, could not but foster an acute racial consciousness.
Given that economic opportunities, vast expanses of virgin land, and new fortunes prevented the old European social hierarchies from forming, these racial bearings acted as the one fixed hierarchy ordering colonial life.
Forged, thus, in conflict with nonwhites, the colonists' early racial consciousness served to mark the boundaries of the emerging American identity. The historian Winthrop Jordan claims that "Anglo-Americans" were already identifying themselves as "whites" rather than "Englishmen" as early as 1680.
National or ethnic differences in this racially mixed environment were simply less meaningful than differences between Europeans and non-Europeans.
When the American colonists at last declared their independence, they declared in effect their intent to become a self-determined people in the evolutionary sense, by becoming a nation, an organic body with its own sovereign state and its own laws of growth.
Then, following the revolution, as republican principles were gradually extended to all white males, the country's Herrenvolk democracy posed an insurmountable obstacle to the extension of these principles to nonwhites — for the new, explicitly white nation was based not on the liberal fiction of "humanity," but on the assumption that human nature is a product of blood and race.
Indeed, the white egalitarianism of the early republic, shaped largely in opposition to the Toryism of anglophile Federalists (who represented the bourgeois interests of liberal market society and its connection to British commerce) was premised on the Negro's otherness and the primacy of white racial ascriptions, all of which contributed to the nation's self-consciousness, coherence, and communality, as British and European Americans, largely under the leadership of Indian-fighting, pro-slavery, and expansionist Southerners, came to share not just the same horizontal sense of right and identity, but the same vertical qualities and dignities of their stock.
Different in ways from ethnicity, race forged the psychological bonds that joined American whites and differentiated them from nonwhites, just as the language, customs, and early institutions of the original Anglo-Protestant settlers established the cultural-linguistic framework in which white Americans became a self-conscious nation.
cont'd...
http://www.toqonline.com/2009/08/toward-the-white-republic/
The TOQ Secession Essay Contest Winner:
"Toward the White Republic"
Michael O'Meara
Editor's Note: It is a great pleasure to announce the winning essay of the first annual TOQ Essay Contest: Michael O'Meara's "Toward the White Republic." We had 20 entries. One was subsequently withdrawn. Of the 19 remaining, I judged this the best, but there was close competition, and in the end I hope to publish nine other entries in TOQ, beginning with the Winter 2009-2010 issue. The prize essay appears below without notes. The full, annotated version will appear in the print edition. For information on the second TOQ Essay Contest, click here. Congratulations, Dr. O'Meara, and thank you.
"Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land."
– Walter Scott
One.
Some time in the second half of the 1990s, a terminological change occurred in the racially conscious community.
Many who previously identified themselves as White Power advocates, segregationists, separatists, supremacists, survivalists, neo-Confederates, biological realists, etc. started calling themselves "white nationalists."
At the time (and I didn't know much about these things then), I thought this reflected a changing political consciousness.
For what began after 1945 as a "movement" to maintain the integrity of America's racial character and prevent alien races from intruding into its various "life worlds" had, by the 1990s, ceased to be a realistic project — 30 years of Third-World immigration, "civil rights" legislation, and various measures imposed by the federal government to subordinate white interests to those of nonwhites had irrevocably transformed the American people so that it was increasingly difficult to characterize them as even a majority-white population.
As a consequence, "white advocates" in the late 1990s started making traditional nationalist claims for secession and self-determination because the United States, in their eyes, had become a threat to their people.
Two.
This interpretation was not at all unreasonable. But, alas, it didn't quite accord with the facts.
I've since learned that those calling themselves "white nationalists" are not necessarily nationalists in the sense of wanting to secede from the United States in order to form an independent ethnostate. Most, I think it's fair to say, are racially conscious conservatives who want to work through the existing institutions to regain control of the country their ancestors made — in order, ultimately, to dismantle the present anti-white system of preferences and restore something of the white man's former hegemony.
By contrast, white nationalists in the strict sense (i.e., those favoring secession) have no interest in restoring the old ways, let alone regaining control of the central state, whose authority is already slipping and whose rule is increasingly dysfunctional. Indeed, the American state system, as its more astute supporters acknowledge, is now beyond reform.
Instead, white nationalists aspire to create a counter-elite to lead disaffected white youth in a movement to found a whites-only nation-state somewhere in North America, once the poorly managed enterprise known as the United States collapses in a centrifugal dispersion of its decaying and perverted powers.
Without an organizational presence in the real world and with a "public" largely of computer hobbyists, white nationalists at present have no hope of actually mobilizing the white populace in opposition to the existing anti-white regime. Rather, their immediate goal is to prepare the way for the development of a revolutionary nationalist vanguard to lead the struggle for white liberation, creating, in the process, a counter-elite capable of founding a White Republic. They aspire thus not to recapture the rotting corpse of the US government, but to free themselves from it — in order to be themselves, in their own land, in their own way.
White nationalists, as such, politically define themselves in wanting to create a sovereign state in North America. They endeavor, therefore, not to "put things back the way they were," as conservatives wish, but to rid themselves of them completely. A National Revolution, they hold, will alone restore "the white man to his rightful place in the world."
Inspired by the birthright handed down by the blood and sacrifice of ancestors, their project, relatedly, is not about restoring the Third Reich, the Confederacy, or Jim Crow, as leftists imagine, but about creating a future white homeland in which their kind will be able "to pursue their destiny without interference from other races."
Three.
White nationalism is a variant of historic ethnonationalism, what Walker Connor calls nationalism "in its pristine sense."
All three — racial, ethno, and pristine nationalism — define the nation in terms of blood.
The creedal or civic nationalism of the present regime, which makes loyalty to the state, not the nation, primary, is "nationalist" only in a narrow ideological sense, confusing as it does patriotism (loyalty to the state or affection for the land) with loyalty to the people (nationalism). It thus defines the nation in terms of certain abstract democratic principles, seeing it as a collection of individuals, each more important than the whole.
Though ethnonationalists privilege the nation's spirit above all else, they define it organically, in terms of blood, as an extended family, an endogamous kin group, or a genetic commonwealth.
Unlike European nations, formed around long-established ethnic cores (which had developed in the Middle Ages, as Germanic and other tribal confederations evolved into larger political, regional, and cultural identities), American national identity was, historically, defined in explicitly racial terms.
As Sir Arthur Keith characterized it: "In Europe the stock has been broken up into local national breeds; in America the local breeds have been reunited."
In both cases, a national identity grew out of a real or imagined blood relationship linking the nation's members to inherited customs and institutions.
Because the American form of racial nationhood lacks the ethnic dimension distinct to European nationalism, it is a source of some misunderstanding, especially in its purely negative expression as anti-Semitism or Negrophobia.
For example, even Euronationalists who struggle for a continental nation-state tend to reject white nationalism — because it seems to imply the typical American leveling of cultural and other identities by subsuming them under a homogenizing biological concept that negates the particularisms of European nationhood.
In this, however, our European cousins misunderstand the aim of white nationalism, though some white nationalists in their one-sided reaction to nonwhites may, admittedly, have given cause to their misunderstanding.
White nationalism is a distinctly American (or, better said, New World) nationalism, not a European one, and the two are analogous only at the highest level, where the national community, defined ethnically or racially, affirms it right to control its own destiny.
This is not to say that American racial nationalism — which makes white European racial ascriptions the basis of American identity — has no ethnic or historic component.
The country's original settlers were largely of Anglo-Protestant descent and this had a formative effect on American institutions and folkways.
The organic basis of the American nation, however, was less English ethnicity than "whiteness."
Even before the War of Independence, more than a quarter of the population was of non-English, mainly North European stock: Scots-Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenots, etc. By about the mid-18th century, the "American English" were increasingly referred to as "Americans," a people "selected by a whole series of ordeals which [had] killed off the weak and worthless" and conferred a distinct vitality on their laws, attitudes, and local institutions.
The bitterness of the War of Independence (the first American war of secession) and the War of 1812, US-British acrimony and rivalry, which lasted late into the 19th century, in addition to the nationalist compulsion to celebrate an American identity independent of the English — all tended to minimize the significance of the colonists' original national origins, as they were reborn as pure Americans. In fact, American nationalism arose on the basis of a certain popular revulsion against the English. Nevertheless, English-Americans were the original native Americans and all the rest of us have since become American by assimilating something of their ethos.
Though Anglo-Protestant ethnicity continues to animate the inner reaches of American culture, it wasn't, however, the genotypical basis of American identity. Rather, it was the racial experience of transplanted Englishmen in 17th-century Virginia, then the "exotic far western periphery . . . of the metropolitan European cultural system."
In the New World part of this system, the ever-looming presence of African slaves, considered "by nature vicious and morally inferior," and "savage" red Indians, who posed an ongoing threat, could not but foster an acute racial consciousness.
Given that economic opportunities, vast expanses of virgin land, and new fortunes prevented the old European social hierarchies from forming, these racial bearings acted as the one fixed hierarchy ordering colonial life.
Forged, thus, in conflict with nonwhites, the colonists' early racial consciousness served to mark the boundaries of the emerging American identity. The historian Winthrop Jordan claims that "Anglo-Americans" were already identifying themselves as "whites" rather than "Englishmen" as early as 1680.
National or ethnic differences in this racially mixed environment were simply less meaningful than differences between Europeans and non-Europeans.
When the American colonists at last declared their independence, they declared in effect their intent to become a self-determined people in the evolutionary sense, by becoming a nation, an organic body with its own sovereign state and its own laws of growth.
Then, following the revolution, as republican principles were gradually extended to all white males, the country's Herrenvolk democracy posed an insurmountable obstacle to the extension of these principles to nonwhites — for the new, explicitly white nation was based not on the liberal fiction of "humanity," but on the assumption that human nature is a product of blood and race.
Indeed, the white egalitarianism of the early republic, shaped largely in opposition to the Toryism of anglophile Federalists (who represented the bourgeois interests of liberal market society and its connection to British commerce) was premised on the Negro's otherness and the primacy of white racial ascriptions, all of which contributed to the nation's self-consciousness, coherence, and communality, as British and European Americans, largely under the leadership of Indian-fighting, pro-slavery, and expansionist Southerners, came to share not just the same horizontal sense of right and identity, but the same vertical qualities and dignities of their stock.
Different in ways from ethnicity, race forged the psychological bonds that joined American whites and differentiated them from nonwhites, just as the language, customs, and early institutions of the original Anglo-Protestant settlers established the cultural-linguistic framework in which white Americans became a self-conscious nation.
cont'd...
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