Dixie

Mr. Wyatt’s blog has taken some of my criticisms of White Nationalism and elicited some substantial responses over at Counter-Currents.

Here’s my response:

(1) Ethnonationalism in America – Ethnonationalism exploded in Europe in the nineteenth century during the backlash to the French Republic’s civic nationalism.

In North America, the American Revolution had just established the dominance of the same type of eighteenth century civic nationalism – the union of “free men” against tyrants – in the United States.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the new ethnonationalism was busily carving Europe into the ethnostates of the twentieth century: Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Ireland were in the process of being born.

As I said above, Americans were significantly influenced by these transatlantic intellectual movements, so much so that the American Founders had modeled the United States on the popular European civic nationalism of their own times.

In the nineteenth century, Americans were still avid followers of fashionable European intellectual trends (as we always have been), and were significantly influenced by the ethnonationalism and romantic nationalism coming out of Germany and other parts of Europe.

Lajos Kossuth, John Mitchel, and Guiseppe Garibaldi were well known figures in America – what’s more, the Southern nationalists of the 1850s and 1860s saw themselves as being part of this broader fraternity of transatlantic ethnonationalists.

Prior to the nineteenth century, Americans hadn’t given much thought to dwelling on their ethnic origins and cultural differences, but the final climatic showdown with the Yankee in the 1850s stimulated an enormous amount of speculation on this topic in the South.

The South seemed like an obvious candidate for nationhood – it had its own peculiar climate and economic interests, it was settled by very different races of people, and the domestic institution of African slavery and created a major cultural and political divide with the Northeast.

“The Union of the South” had been threatened for decades, but it came to be seen as ever more logical and natural and inevitable in light of the parallel nationalist movements going on in Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Hungary.

So, the response to the shallowness of American nationalism is that ethnonationalism really isn’t that much older in Europe than it is here in North America – it was just blocked by the overwhelming force of the Yankee Empire in the 1860s.

In fact, the War Between the States was the bloodiest ethnonationalist conflict of the nineteenth century, and the result was that the emerging Southern ethnostate (like Quebec during the Seven Years War) was crushed and reduced to the subordinate status of Poland or Ireland.

There were many aborted ethnonationalist movements in the nineteenth century. Hungary and Ireland wouldn’t gain their independence until the twentieth century.

(2) Blended Stock – The European ethnostates aren’t timeless, primordial entities composed of ethnically pure races as opposed to a boiling American melting pot.

France, for example, is a composite of Latin, Celtic, and Teutonic races. In much the same way, Louisiana would be the Provence of Dixie whereas Kentucky would be the Brittany and South Carolina and North Carolina would be the Alsace-Lorraine.

Actually, this comparison doesn’t do justice to the reality of the situation, as there is probably more ethnic homogeneity, shared culture, and sympathy within the Southern states than there is wihin many established European nations.

White Southerners are already conscious of being a distinct ethnic group and vote and act ever more like aggrieved ethnic group.

(3) Generic Whiteness – The problem with WNs trying to unite White people on the basis of generic whiteness is that it as purely abstract and doesn’t capture the reality of the situation on the ground.

North America is aging. The frontier has been closed for a century now. The great waves of European immigration have been over for 50 to 70 years now and there has been a settling down and sorting out on the basis of cultural affinities.

Far from blending into a bland generic whiteness, “White Americans” are dividing along regional, cultural, and ideological lines into emerging ethnostates. The subcultures are becoming stronger and the political clashes within the consolidated Union are becoming ever more intense.

In California, there is a dominant West Coast sub-nation that is perpetually at odds with a rival Interior West sub-nation, and which is allied with the Brown Tide flooding across the border from Mexico.

As we saw in the Chick-fil-A buycott, the South is intensely conscious of its cultural, religious, and political differences with the Northeast and West Coast and sees the reelection of Obama in almost apocalyptic terms.

What is seen as “progress” in the Northeast and West Coast is seen as disturbing and threatening cultural degeneration in Dixie because of the lack of a shared culture and religion.

Thus, it is not true to say that the only choice we have is a nationalism based on a return to a lost primordial Indo-European solidarity. There are dividing lines in the real world. WNs just don’t want to acknowledge them.

(4) The Abstract Proposition Nation – As I have said above and elsewhere, WNs are committed to an abstract proposition nation that is based on racial grievances, detached from the real world, and operates as a kind of mental bomb shelter for alienated White Americans.

It only takes a few lines of questioning to reveal the nature of the project:

– So what is the name of the “White Republic”?

– Where in the real world does the “White Republic” exist?

– What is the ethnicity that is the basis of the proposed ethnostate?

– Can you tell me something about, say, its history or traditions and the things that we would normally associate with nations?

The keyword here is “proposed” because the “White Republic” is a fantasy that doesn’t exist. It is a purely abstract nation like the vague idea of a communist utopia. It doesn’t have a name or a particular people identified with the state or a flag or a history or even a physical location in the real world.

It floats above reality far up there in the clouds where you might expect to find St. Augustine’s City of God. You could find its ethereal alienated advocates congregating there in their perfected society.

Meanwhile, few people below in the real world (the proposed inhabitants of the WN “White Republic”) have ever heard of the concept and are puzzled by their inability to connect it with their own flesh and blood experience.

Sad as it is to say, Harold Covington really is the only White Nationalist who has tried to translate the proposed “White ethnostate” into the real world. The Pacific Northwest is at least a real world answer to the critical “where” question.

(5) Common Racial Grievances – What if I told you that gunowners worldwide were facing a common threat of disarmament by the United Nations? What if I told you that gunowners were a “nation” and the solution to this common threat was for all gunowners to congregate in a proposed Armed-N-Ready Republic.

It sounds absurd, right? You might find that gunowners lack a common culture, religion, ethnicity, and history. The Armed-N-Ready Republic might never get off the ground because the movement would be too heterogeneous to construct a viable separatist movement.

The proposed inhabitants of the Armed-N-Ready Republic might agree though to adopt the Gadsden flag as their nationalist symbol. They might even agree to base citizenship on gunownership and a martial spirit.

They might even have prominent spokesmen and a flourishing internet presence like White Nationalists and libertarians. Although not really much beyond that.

(6) Common Threats – Like the supporters of the Armed-N-Ready Republic, European ethnonationalists have cooperated to resist the common threats of mass immigration, multiculturalism, anti-racism, and demographic decline, but most are skeptical of the European Union and wish to rid themselves of their overlords in Brussels.

In much the same way, Southern nationalists can cooperate with White Nationalists to oppose these common threats, while drawing upon the strength of our own traditions and relative cultural and ethnic homogeneity to make greater progress in the real world.

We can do that without being submerged into any “White Republic” or “Imperium Europa.”

(7) Immigrants – The South is fully capable of absorbing immigrants and transplants and historically has enjoyed a lot more success in this due to the domestic institution of African slavery.

(8) White Nationalism In The South – If our fellow Whites in the North and West would SIMPLY STOP trying to force non-Whites on us, as they have done over and over again, then perhaps White Nationalism might have a future, but that is unlikely when the reality of the situation is that our fellow Whites are formally allied with blacks and Hispanics against us.

(9) Negro Slavery – Negro slavery made the South the racialist and conservative section of America.

The lack of negro slavery in the Northeast made that section into the present Jewish-dominated electoral fortress of liberalism and anti-racism that is dragging down the whole country.

(10) Southern Honor – By the 1860s, the South was significantly more aristocratic than the North, and its Cavalier honor based culture violently clashed with the Puritan guilt based culture of the Northeast – the classic example being the caning of Charles Summer by Preston Brooks, or the response to the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry, which illustrated the totally different moral universes inhabited by the two nations.

Of course it wasn’t always that way – unlike the sugar barons in the West Indies, who were considerably more wealthy, who attended Oxford and Eton, who built country manors in England, who acquired titles like Lord Beckford and married into the English nobility and who became a genuine aristocracy, and who physically relocated to England as absentee landowners, the tobacco and rice planters in the South were too poor to have such ambitions during the Revolutionary era.

The spread of cotton plantations across the Lower South and the soaring price of cotton and slaves had transformed the Southern planter class by the 1830s – it was not a genuine aristocracy yet, but it was quickly evolving into one like the sugar barons in the West Indies a century before.

In the 1860s, the Confederacy was created as a “Norman-Cavalier” ethnostate that was based on the self evident truth that some races and social classes are naturally superior to others, and are entirely justified in ruling over their dependents without consultation to ridiculous abstract Yankee notions like “human rights” and “liberal democracy” and “strongminded womanism.”

The new Southern ethnostate was going to be modeled on a combination of Norman England, the romantic nationalist movements in Hungary and Italy, the Old Republican states rights ideology, and the classical republicanism of Sparta and Rome.

Needless to say, it was a lot more thought out than the Republic of Whitemanistan with its national motto of 14/88 WPWW.

Note: As a final note, I will add here that “White Nationalism” doesn’t conflict with what we are doing here, in the sense that we recognize the existence of a common racial and cultural threat, and raising White racial consciousness and promoting secession only works to our advantage.

French nationalism and German nationalism or even “West Coast White Nationalism” doesn’t conflict with what we are doing here either – we wish our counterparts overseas success, and hope to be of some assistance to them should we ever triumph in our own ethnic homeland.

In the long run, there has to be something beyond “I am a White man” and “down with the Jew” and “niggers suck,” and one answer is that Dixie is our nation, we are a distinct ethnic group with clearly defined borders, a common culture, and a common history, and the perpetuation of the United States as BRA is incompatible with our national survival in the 21st century.

Dixie was the real “White Man’s Country” for centuries and we can easily knit the White Nationalist ideal into our own regional and ethnic social fabric in a way that connects with the historical memory and experience of our own struggle for autonomous national existence.

Good luck trying to do that elsewhere.