by Dr. William L. Pierce (1978)

In the face of treason and criminal irresponsibility on the part of the politicians, of apathy and ignorance on the part of the White masses, and of cowardice and selfishness on the part of most intelligent Whites, what is to be done to save our race, in spite of itself?

The answer is not difficult to state, although a bit of argument is required to present a convincing case that it is the only answer.

The answer, in brief, is that an organization must be built which satisfies the following requirements:

It must be, first of all, not an ad hoc organization, but an organization based on fundamental principles, an organization with a world view, essentially religious in nature, shared by every member of the organization.

It must be, in structure, a hierarchical organization, like an army — or a religious order — with the degree of understanding, of commitment, and of discipline increasing with the level of responsibility in the organization.

It must be, in scope, an all-encompassing organization, an organization which not only generates propaganda and which recruits and trains new members, but which becomes eventually a community unto itself, self-sufficient spiritually and materially, providing all the functions and capabilities needed for carrying out its task — ultimately a separate state within the state.

And it must be an organization which, in time, incorporates within itself the best elements of our people, developing from this elite minority a majority of will and determination, so that, at an exceptional moment, sufficient historical leverage can be exerted by the organization to effect a permanent change, in the desired direction, in the course of history.

Now we will begin looking at the way in which the organization satisfying the above requirements can be built, and we will at the same time see why the various alternative answers to our original question which have been put forward by others are incorrect answers.

The first thing to understand is that there is no shortcut or clever trick which will achieve what we want: no tax revolt, no slyly worded Constitutional amendment, no Pentagon coup d’état, no secretly racist Presidential candidate disguised as a Ronald Reagan. These shortcuts have a fatal fascination for right wingers, but none of them will work, and the reasons why they won’t are both specific and general.

Consider, for example, the scheme of some of the tax-revolt enthusiasts, who are quite numerous at the moment. The great majority of the tax rebels, of course, are not right wingers and have no goal beyond reducing their own taxes. But some see the general dissatisfaction with high taxes as an opportunity for bringing about a shutdown of some of the Federal government’s least popular programs.

They reason that if enough people can be persuaded to refuse to pay their income taxes, the government can be brought to its knees. Then the tax rebels can dictate certain reforms: no more Federally enforced school busing, no more welfare payments or subsidized housing for Blacks, no more weapons and money for the Zionists, etc.

But the System doesn’t work that way. In the first place, most of the government’s money comes from paycheck deductions and from other taxes over which the individual taxpayer has no control. Only the self-employed person even has the option of refusing to pay his income tax.

In the second place, the government will always find the money to enforce its various race-mixing programs, to buy off the Blacks, and to support Zionist ambitions. The politicians will dismantle the U.S. Air Force before they will hold up the welfare checks or shut down the subsidized housing.

If necessary they’ll just print more money. When they are really squeezed they’ll push through whatever legislation they need to counter a tax revolt, and the Federal judges — who feed at the same trough — will back them up.

In the third place, if a tax revolt ever seems to be really catching on, the System will delegate one of its own to “lead” it, and the controlled news media will obediently “legitimize” him. Remember the man the media masters crowned as official spokesman for the “support our President” conservatives during Richard Nixon’s Watergate crucifixion? It was Caiaphas himself: Rabbi Baruch Korff.

This danger of pre-emption exists so long as most members of any movement receive the majority of their information and attitudes regarding the movement through System-controlled channels. It can be avoided only by a movement which is so tightly organized that members look to the movement itself for information and guidance.

There is just one thing that a tax revolt might accomplish, at the very most: it might cause temporary and superficial changes in the System’s way of doing things. If the natives become restless enough, the politicians and the media masters will certainly seek to appease them. They will even risk a little Black unrest in order to ameliorate White anger and resentment. They might even change the tax laws — perhaps even substantially.

And that would be the end of the tax revolt, because 95 percent of the rebels would feel they had accomplished their purpose — which, after all, is merely to reform the System, not to do away with it altogether.

The most lethal weakness of the tax-revolt movement is that it is an ad hoc movement, with nothing other than anger to bind its adherents together, and always subject to being pre-empted by the System. If it were a front or an auxiliary for a movement based on fundamentals, then it might have some tactical value — in stirring up public discontent, in breaking down the public’s awe of the System, in generating internal stress in the System — in helping to prepare the way for permanent and substantive change. But by itself, with nothing fundamental behind it, with no meaningful, long-range goals to further, it is only a trap for fools.

Conservative and right-wing racists work up a perennial enthusiasm for Presidential candidates who, they convince themselves, are secretly on their side. A few years ago their hero was George Wallace. In 1980 it will probably be Ronald Reagan.

Never mind that any politician who has been a state governor in these United States has already compromised himself thoroughly and repeatedly. The right wingers tell themselves he had to say those things to get elected, he had to appoint that Black judge in order to keep his job, he had to wear a yarmulka to that Israel Bonds fundraiser in order to fool the Jews. When he becomes President, they say, he’ll turn the tables on the rascals.

Suppose that, through divine intervention or some other extraordinary means, a U.S. Presidential candidate remained pure in heart up to the day of his inauguration, uncorrupted by the inherently corrupt process which brought him to the White House. Suppose he really were the man his right-wing boosters thought him to be. Suppose he really did want to overturn the System, clean out the entrenched Federal bureaucracy, and restore America to strength, honor, and White precedence (which is about as radical a program as the right-wing imagination can encompass).

How would he do it? He might conceivably have a large enough circle of trusted and true personal friends, also uncorrupted and sharing his secret aims, so that he could pick a cabinet from among them.

Suppose his new secretary of health, education, and welfare then proceeded to halt all racial busing programs.

The media would tear into the new President with a fury which would make their Watergate assault on Nixon seem like good, clean fun in comparison.

The Congress would not approve his budget.

The courts would declare his anti-busing moves unconstitutional.

The entrenched, lower-level bureaucrats would sabotage his programs.

If all that didn’t make him back down, George Meany, Jerry Wurf, and the other labor bosses would paralyze the country with a general strike.

And, of course, the Blacks would riot.

Suppose a couple of top generals in the Pentagon were in cahoots with the President. They could order out the troops to begin arresting the media masters and the Federal judges and the labor bosses and to machine-gun the rioting Blacks.

But the troops wouldn’t go out — not the troops who make up today’s U.S. Army! And there would be any number of officers down the chain of command who would understand what was happening and who would countermand the generals’ orders. There might be quite a bit of confusion for a few hours, even a bit of shooting, but there would be no successful coup d’état.

It is hardly necessary to paint the whole picture, even for the right wingers. The idea of a one-man revolution, or of a revolution by a small group of conspirators, or of any other sly trick which amounts to sneaking up on the System and slipping a sack over its head, is sheer nonsense.

In addition to the myriad specific reasons why such schemes will not work, there are two general reasons which apply to all of them.

First, the System which rules America is a massive, many-headed thing. Those who would change it must be prepared to replace not only the President and his staff and his department heads and the top military leaders, but also tens of thousands of people at the intermediate and lower levels of government.

It is not sufficient merely to shoot the top executives in the TV networks and in the editorial offices of the big-city newspapers. It is necessary to have people immediately at hand to replace them, people who are not only reliable but also competent. And it is likewise necessary to have replacements for the police chiefs of the major cities, for the superintendents of schools, for the Federal and state judges.

No revolution can be carried through successfully which leaves the nation’s legislators, teachers, preachers, labor leaders, business leaders, newsmen, and the leading members of every other segment of society unchanged, still loyal to the old order, still under the influence of old ideas. One must have not one man and not a small group of conspirators, but a revolutionary army which can supply from its ranks an entire social superstructure for the nation to replace the existing superstructure. And the members of this new superstructure must be not only ideologically reliable but also strong and capable people, willing and able to do what is demanded of them.

The second general reason why there is no shortcut to the new order is that America is far sicker than the right wingers realize — or are even capable of understanding. Their general tendency to oversimplify the problem confronting them by thinking in terms of replacing a small number of evildoers with good men, as outlined above, leads also to a failure to see the extent to which the problem is rooted in the general population.

The right-wing tendency is to put all the blame for America’s ills on a few people: on a clique of powerful conspirators (the “insiders”), on the Jews, on the international bankers, on the “trilateralists,” or what have you. (This also happens to be a left-wing tendency, if one excludes the Jews as potential culprits.) The masses of the people are seen as basically healthy but unable to put their sound instincts and their good common sense to work because of the control exerted by the evil conspirators at the top.

Such a view is sheer fantasy.

There are, to be sure, conspirators and conspiracies of various unwholesome sorts. And there most assuredly are Jews, who wield a great deal of power and use it to the enormous detriment of our race. But there is also a disease abroad in our land, and it extends far beyond the Jews and their conspiratorial henchmen. It permeates our whole society and afflicts the great majority of our people.

It does little good to complain about the thieves, the traitors, the Jew-fawners, and the incompetents in the Congress without taking into account the fact that the great, White masses of this country elected them to the Congress because they liked their smiles and their folksy ways. And they keep re-electing them, even after their treachery and their crookedness is revealed.

The late Hubert Humphrey was one of the vilest pieces of filth to foul this world with his presence. He unabashedly groveled at the feet of the Jews and sold out the interests of his race over and over again during the more than three decades of his political career. And yet the good people of Minnesota — a nearly all-White state — repeatedly chose him as their senator in Washington.

Nor can the blame be put entirely on the System’s control of the political process for what the Minnesotans did. They may not have been allowed much of an alternative to voting for Humphrey, but it is clear that they did it voluntarily rather than under protest. When Humphrey descended to his just deserts early this year, many a White Minnesotan blubbered mawkishly for the TV cameras about how much “heart” good, old Hubert had.

Right wingers bemoan — and rightly so — the jungle music and the race-mixing TV programs which the Jew-controlled networks broadcast to poison the minds of our people. But they conveniently forget that White Americans listen to that music and watch those programs, not just voluntarily, but enthusiastically. Any right winger who tried to take their Jewish poison away from the White masses and give them something healthy in its place would be in danger of being lynched by those same White masses.

And it does no good to make excuses for the people, to blame their mores and their voting habits on alien influences. Changes in the public’s behavior and attitudes which may be wrought a generation after the overthrow of the System are of little help in overthrowing the System.

What must be taken into account are the facts as they exist now, and one of those facts is that there is no strong, general sentiment in favor of the changes which right-wing racists want to bring about. There is precious little concern even about saving the White race.

Anger at the government’s taxing policies, resentment at being forced to mix with Blacks, dissatisfaction generally with the flabby, inefficient, and corrupt government in Washington are all potentially useful phenomena, of course, but one must be careful not to read too much into them. In particular, one must not nourish with them the false hope that the White people of America will of their own accord rise up against the System — when things have become a little worse, when the confidently predicted “economic crash” comes — and set things right again.

Successful revolution and permanent change can only come through organization, and that is a matter we will examine in National Vanguard next month.

Source: Attack! No. 64, 1978, transcribed by Anthony Collins and edited by Vanessa Neubauer