Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, March 23, 2015

On March 22, I addressed the Russian International Conservative Forum, held in Saint Petersburg. Its purpose was to provide a forum for politicians and thinkers united in their support of national traditions and in opposition to globalism. There was a strong sentiment throughout the meeting of support for Russian sovereignty and European national independence in the face of pressure from the United States. As Yury Luybomirsky of the Russian National Cultural Center explained at the beginning of the meeting, the goal of all the participants was “to preserve national identity and culture,” and that independence from outside pressure and influence was essential for that purpose.

This was not a meeting that went unopposed. Demonstrators protested outside the conference site, and the meeting had to end early because of a telephoned bomb threat.

The meeting may have been an unprecedented assembly of European “far-right” groups, including Forza Nuova (New Force) of Italy, the National Independence Party of Finland, the Attack Party of Bulgaria, Golden Dawn of Greece, the National Democratic Party of Germany, and the newly-organized European group, the Alliance for Peace and Freedom. These parties have been tarred with the extremist labels, but are all dedicated to preserving European and national traditions.

Russia was represented by such groups as the Russian Imperial Movement, New Russia, and the editor of nationalist magazine Russian Observer. There was also a contingent of Cossacks, dressed in traditional military uniforms. The Russians strongly supported the effort to establish autonomous regions in Eastern Ukraine.

There were at least 30 speakers, all of whom gave remarks of about 10 minutes each. Most were in Russian, but the conference provided headsets for simultaneous interpretation into English. Here is a sampling.

Georgios Epitideios of Golden Dawn pointed out that 10 percent of the population of Greece is now composed of illegal immigrants, and that a mass influx of foreigners jeopardized national identity. He denounced the Greek government’s efforts–including imprisonment of party leaders–to “exterminate our movement.” He said that Golden Dawn opposes European sanctions against Russia and noted the common orthodox faith of Greeks and Russians.

Mikhail Remizo of the Russian Institute of National Strategy emphasized that Russia and Bulgaria would never join the European Union, which is in favor of globalization and opposes “the national project.” He also noted that Chinese economic pressure can be added to American political bullying as a growing threat to European autonomy. He argued that a healthy middle class was vital to national identity, and that the post-crisis collapse of the middle class is a grave concern for all patriots.

Ironically, he said, nationalists fighting globalization must have a global strategy. By this he meant that those who believe in national identity must cooperate as widely as possible. It is the Right and not the Left, he added, that will fight the leveling forces of globalization and defend the traditions and culture of the West. He concluded by quoting Arnold Toynbee–“Civilizations are not murdered; they commit suicide”–noting that the West is approaching this point.

Sam Dickson from the United States also spoke, and introduced himself as a representative of the real Americans who believe in peace with all countries and who want to preserve our race and civilization. He began with the old proverb, “one hundred repetitions make one truth:” the defenders of the truth can be overwhelmed by repeated lies.

He argued that one of the current lies is that Russia is a danger to the United States. He pointed out that it shares no borders with us, and has never fought a war with the United States. Indeed, it was Vladimir Putin’s solution to the problem of chemical weapons in Syria that spared the United States the costs and the casualties of military operations against Syria. He also praised Mr. Putin for encouraging higher birthrates in the West, while American rulers work for our dispossession by promoting Third-World immigration.

Davidson Yukka of the National Independence Party of Finland pointed out that in some respects Russia is freer than any other country in Europe. Some forms of speech have come under attack in countries such as Finland, where it is possible to lose one’s job for criticizing homosexuals or opposing gay marriage. “The European Union is an idea that has failed,” he said, “but the politicians are still riding this dead horse.” He concluded that if our enemies abuse and denounce us it is because we are right.

One of the Russian delegates, Vadim Zazimko, touched on another theme that was common throughout the conference: the importance of a national economy that serves the nation. He said that the state should be active in guiding the economy and that it was a myth to think that state-owned companies are always inefficient. He said that the Chinese model of government-directed economic growth is one worth studying, since the unbridled search for profits can have destructive results.

Olyvia Wyssa was the one French representative, and is a member of the Rhone-Alpes Regional Parliament. He said that he was active with the French National Front for many years but left the party when Marine Le Pen was voted in as its leader. He said that freedom of speech is in grave danger in France and that Miss Le Pen has been reluctant to fight the authorities on this point. All over Europe, he pointed out, people are in jail because of vaguely worded laws against “incitement of hatred” or for taking a dissenting view of historical events. In fact, he said, the situation is so bad that Russia is probably the only European country in which a meeting of this kind could be held. “Freedom of speech is the key to victory,” he concluded.

Alexey Zhivov is a coordinator for Fight for the Donbass, an organization that supports Russians who are fighting in Eastern Ukraine to establish an independent republic. Like many of the speakers, he denounced the Ukrainian government, which he called “fascist” and under American control. American thinking is alien to that of Europe, he said, and Europeans must be free to pursue cultural and national independence. He called Russia the eastern pole of Western civilization, and said that it was prepared to help all Europeans.

Jim Dawson, a Scot, is head of an organization called League for Life. He opposes abortion, which is helping reduce the numbers of Europeans. “If you don’t have babies you have no future,” he said. “We need babies in order to survive.” He emphasized that Christianity is the traditional faith of the West and that without Christianity the West will not survive. He called it the vaccine against liberalism.

The only Ukrainian speaker at the conference was Victoria Shilova, who runs a humanitarian organization in the Eastern Ukraine called Antivoyna. She said she is a Ukrainian patriot, but that it is important to draw a distinction between the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people. She said that 90 percent of Ukrainians want peace and want to end the fighting on the basis of Minsk agreements signed by the two parties, but that there are forces in the Ukrainian government that want to keep fighting. She said that a more accurate count of the deaths in the Eastern Ukraine would be close to 15,000 people, of whom the majority are civilians. “Weapons will not solve our problems,” she said, “and this fighting could even lead to nuclear war, which would leave no place habitable.”

Nick Griffin is the former head of the British National Party and is now active in the Alliance for Peace and Freedom. He argued that Western leaders have the Midas touch in reverse: Everything they touch turns to blood. He predicted that Europe will either end up as a caliphate or there will be a civil war, and that it is now Russia’s turn to lead the world and prevent catastrophe. To this end, Russia should go on a media offensive to counteract the irrational hostility found in the West. RT television broadcasts are a good first step, but they must be supplemented with a strong social media campaign. Mr. Griffin also argued that Russia must help replace the dollar as the sole means of international exchange.

At about 6:30 in the afternoon, the meeting was cut short by a telephoned bomb threat. The entire hotel where the conference was being held had to be evacuated while police with sniffer dogs checked for explosives. The call was a fake, but it did succeed in breaking up the meeting before a number of interesting people had a chance to speak: I was sorry not to hear Nikolay Trushchalov of the Russian Imperial Movement and Orazio Maria Gnerre of the Italian Millennium Party.

It is common to think that there is a monolithic political position in Russia, but that is clearly not the case. The conference attracted about 40 demonstrators, some of whom made trouble and were arrested. Nor was the Russian English-language press keen on the meeting. The Moscow Times reported that leftist politicians had called on the governor of Saint Petersburg to cancel the meeting, which it described in these words: “The forum’s speakers collectively ticked off all the boxes of intolerance and anti-Western sentiment, egged on by the enthusiasm of the audience filling a conference room at the St. Petersburg Holiday Inn.”

It is common in the West to assume that Russia does not distinguish itself in support of free speech, but a number of the speakers were probably right: This meeting was an exercise in vigorous free speech that probably could not have been held anywhere else in Europe..

What follow are the remarks I made at the forum:

It is a great honor and a pleasure to speak to you today, and I am grateful to the organizers of this forum for inviting me.

We are all united here in our opposition to globalization and in our love of traditional societies. It is these traditions that make societies unique. They are the qualities that make Russia Russian and France French. These qualities are treasures that we have received from our ancestors and that we hold in trust for our children. If even a single generation fails in its duty to pass its traditions to the next generation, these treasures can be lost forever.

As you know, tradition is under attack. One way is to replace the people who created traditions with an entirely different people. This is happening in the modern world through immigration. If, through immigration or conquest, the Russian people were replaced by Chinese, for example, everything that is unique and beautiful in Russian culture would be destroyed.

Another way to destroy tradition is to try to undermine the traditions of a people and replace them with alien traditions.

So there are two main ways by which tradition is destroyed: by replacing or diluting a people with foreigners, or by persuading a people to accept alien traditions.

Today, one country leads the world in aggressively exporting its own ideas–most of which are vulgar or worthless or completely opposed to human nature. That same country also leads the world in promoting the replacement of Western peoples through immigration from the Third World. That country is the greatest enemy and murderer of all authentic tradition.

Alas, my friends, that country is my country, the United States of America.

But I can tell you this: When my country promotes Muslim immigration into France and Germany, when my country tells the European Union it must accept refugees from Libya and Syria and Somalia, it is not being hypocritical. It is destroying itself in exactly the same way it promotes the destruction of the West.

It was not always this way.

The United States began as an outpost of Europe, of the Christian West. Its language, culture, institutions, religion, and aspirations were all European and exclusively European. Its first law of naturalization, passed in 1790 allowed citizenship only for “free white persons.” Until 1965, it had an immigration policy that was carefully designed to keep the country overwhelmingly European.

Now, people from the Third World are coming in such large numbers that Americans of European origin will become a minority in just 25 years. Because non-Europeans have so many children, a young white child is already a minority in his age group.

It is impossible to maintain any kind of tradition in what America is becoming. No country that is a mix of Africans, Asians, and Central Americans, and a dwindling remnant of aging Europeans can have an authentic culture and authentic traditions. My country is committing suicide.

The religion of America is no longer Christianity. It is “diversity.” We are not to believe in Jesus Christ. We are to believe that a crazy mix of races, of languages, of habits, of religions, of manners is a great and wonderful thing.

The slogan of America is “diversity is our greatest strength.”

In 2007, General George Casey, who commanded the American troops in Iraq, announced, “I firmly believe the strength of our Army comes from our diversity.” What is this? Does the strength of an army not from good training? From good weapons? From love of country? No. The US Army is strong because it has soldiers from Guatemala and the Philippines and Haiti and Mexico. This is insanity. But this insanity of diversity is the new religion of America.

But my country is not content just to commit suicide. It wants every Western country to commit suicide. When the United States was dropping bombs on Serbia in 1999–America loves to drop bombs–General Wesley Clark explained why the bombing was necessary:

There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. We are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.

And for Americans, multi-ethnic does not only mean Serbs and Croats and Bosnians. It means Arabs, Africans, Asians, Muslims, Hindus–anything and everything. That is what my country wants for you! Diversity!

And, of course, diversity is the great assassin of tradition, of identity, of everything that makes a society authentic and unique.

On the cultural level, when my government is not able to force a country to replace its own people with aliens, it lectures and browbeats them and tries to destroy their ancient traditions. It claims moral authority on matters that are none of its business.

My country tells the world that traditional marriage is a prison for women. That any government unlike its own is tyranny. That abortion is a sacred right. That homosexuals should marry.

My government seems to forget that the last American laws against homosexuality were overturned only in 2003. Homosexuality was illegal in my country for 400 years, but now we say to the world: “We were wrong. We were wrong for 400 years. But now we are right, and you must be like us or you are hateful scum.” This is astonishing arrogance.

But there is worse. Sometimes my government exports its ideas by force. It sees the world in terms of good and evil, and of course, America is the number one good country. Americans think of themselves as the Hollywood heroes of history.

Did you know that until this year the recruiting slogan of the United States Navy was “a global force for good”? That’s right: This concentration of tremendous destructive power called itself “a global force for good.”

This mentality of good and evil leads to war. I have lost count of how many nations my country has bombed in just the last few years. We bombed Afghanistan and the result is chaos. We bombed Iraq and the result is chaos. We bombed Libya and the result is chaos. We almost bombed Syria, but your President, Vladimir Putin, helped save us from that madness. Our policy seems to be that if we kill enough Muslims the survivors will believe in Jeffersonian democracy and wear bikinis.

I know it is tempting to think that the rulers of my country are evil, but they are not evil. It would be better if they were evil because it would be easier to unmask them and replace them. No, they genuinely believe that they are bringing enlightenment, modernity, freedom, and happiness to the world.

Of course, the United States government is not the same as the American people. There are many Americans, like me, who are dismayed by the arrogance and blindness of our government. Our voices are seldom heard, but we are there. And we support a strong and sovereign Russia that defends its traditions against all attacks. We support a Europe of nations and of regions, each with its own wonderful, irreplaceable traditions.

Let me close with a word about us, about the world brotherhood of Europeans of which we are a part. I support authentic tradition everywhere, whether in Japan or India or Persia or Ethiopia. But our greatest love must be for our own traditions, for the spirit and genius and destiny and people of Europe.

My ancestors have lived for 350 years in North America, but I am a European, as much as you, whose ancestors have lived on this continent for ten thousand years. The same is true for all the Europeans who built outposts overseas, whether in North America or Australia or New Zealand or South Africa. We are all brothers and sisters, members of the same great family of Western Man.

But we are a small minority on this planet. Our numbers are shrinking while those of every other group are growing. That is why we must have territories that are exclusively ours, which are for us alone and for our children for ever. Without this, everything we love will be washed away.

We Europeans are one people. We have the same heritage and the same destiny.

That is why your struggle is my struggle. So long as the light of the West still shines in Russia, or in Sweden, or in Italy or in Spain, it shines for all Europeans, even for us, far away in North America.

And so, my brothers, may you have courage. May you have wisdom. And may you have the success you deserve, not just for your own nation but for all your European brothers and sisters everywhere.