Race and Scriptural Theology

Gerald R. McDermott, who has just retired as the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Theological Seminary and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, has edited a book which is soon to be released by Acton Books entitled Race and Covenant: Retrieving the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation. The subject is remarkably timely, especially considering that the work on it must have begun long before the death of George Floyd sparked the present racial conflagration that threatens to raze all of Western Civilization to the ground. Will this book be an attempt to extinguish these flames or simply another pouring of gasoline onto the fire?

Judging from an article by McDermott that appeared on First Things website last week, I think there are grounds to expect it to be the former rather than the latter. He begins by saying that while Churches are "rightly trying to respond with compassion" to the death of George Floyd, "many church leaders and parishioners are adopting a race narrative that is empirically and theologically suspect." He then provides three examples of what he is talking about. The first is a letter addressed to the clergy of the ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) which was written by four of that body's clergy and published on the Anglican Compass website. A joint-statement by the presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and its seminary in New Orleans is the second. A twitter post from the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut is the third. McDermott says regarding these that "White Christians, many influenced by Critical Race Theory, are eager to demonstrate their virtue by confessing their 'white privilege'." He then offers arguments as to why the Critical Race Theory interpretation of Floyd's death, which is being pushed by well over ninety-nine percent of the mainstream media and which many people seem to think they are obligated to accept uncritically - note the irony - is dubious. The arguments are ones that my own readers will be familiar with by now - the evidence that American police are not in fact racist as an institution, the institutional discrimination in favour of blacks known as affirmative action, and that the narrative is harmful rather than helpful to its intended beneficiaries.

McDermott then goes on to say that "there are even better theological reasons to reject the mainstream narrative." The rest of his article is the unfolding of what those "better theological reasons" are.

Unfortunately, while well-intentioned, and generally aiming in the right direction, his exposition of this theology is flawed by numerous factual errors and a couple of serious misinterpretations of Scripture.

It is not true, for example, that "Nations (ta ethne), in the New Testament world were often multiracial." This would be true if predicated of cities and larger polities such as empires, but not of the term he uses here. His mistake seems to be derived from his equation of race with skin colour. These are related but not identical concepts. Race is derived from words that denote common descent, not skin colour, and until very recently this was still the predominant association with the word. This very much was an aspect of what it meant to be a nation. The general North American confusion regarding the distinction between "nation" and "state" undoubtedly also contributes to this mistake. It is extremely misleading to say "both Greeks and Jews came in various colors" in this context, for while this is true, the colours were not the hues that are commonly associated with races today. Indeed, if we were to speak of the ancient Greeks and Jews in terms of the races first identified as such by physical anthropologists but now generally spoken of as genetic populations for purposes of political correctness, both Greeks and Jews as nations, were members of a single race, rather than transracial entities.

The more important flaw, however, is in his interpretation of Scripture.

Take his interpretation of Acts 17:26 for example. He clearly understands it the same way in which prominent creationist Ken Ham explained it in his book One Blood. He says of it "Ironically, Critical Race Theory teaches something similar: that races as we conceive them are not rooted in biology or anthropology, but are socially constructed." This, however, is to torture the verse into meaning the exact opposite of what it says. This verse, which is part of St. Paul's address to the philosophers assembled at the Areopagus, says that God, and not man, is the author of the nations - ethnic groups not states, Who sets their boundaries, physical and temporal. The "one blood" in the verse identifies the material God used to fashion the nations, not the end towards which He was working. He started with one bloodline, and from it made the many nations. We all share in the common blood and therefore are of the race of Adam, but this is not stated in a way that can be rightly interpreted as consistent with Critical Race Theory's claim that the races today are socially constructed. It flat out contradicts it.

McDermott would undoubtedly recognize this to be true if it were applied to the sexes. Are man and woman not both made of "one blood" as well?

Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory in general, which also asserts that "sex", which it calls "gender", is a social construction. Would McDermott be comfortable with interpreting the Scriptural references to the common humanity of men and women as saying that the sexes are social constructs?

I am certain the answer is that he would not. Yet this directly relates to his main argument which pertains to the Pauline distinction between the old and the new creation. For just as the Scripture states that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek"(Gal. 3:28) it also, and in fact in the same verse, says "there is neither male nor female." Are we to interpret this as meaning that the distinction between male and female has no relevance in the new creation?

St. Paul himself didn't seem to think so. He made numerous distinctions between men and women when it came to authority and teaching in the Church. While some dioceses within the ACNA, like the older Episcopal Church and my own Anglican Church of Canada, do not follow St. Paul's restrictions, apparently interpreting them as being culturally particular rather than Catholic, which is the opposite of the Catholic interpretation if we define Catholicity in terms of St. Vincent's canon, the ACNA has not followed these older bodies in taking the elimination of the distinction between male and female to its logical, if absurd, extreme, which is that if there is no male nor female, then there is no reason to oppose men choosing other men, women choosing other women, or each choosing to decide that it is the other, or something else altogether. Sane and orthodox theologians recognize that this is a nonsensical extrapolation from what St. Paul actually said. This means that "there is neither male nor female" emphasizes the unity of the two in Christ, but not in a way that eliminates either the distinction or the importance of the distinction altogether. If this is true of the unity of the sexes in Christ, it is not logical to deny it of the unity of the races in Christ.

It is also interesting to observe what is curiously absent from his discussion. There is no mention of the Tower of Babel, which is the Scriptural account of how God took the one bloodline of Adam and made the many tribes, nations, and races out of it by confusing the tongues. Nor is there any mention of Whitsunday, the Christian Pentecost, on which people of a multitude of tongues each heard the Apostles proclaim the Gospel of Christ in their own, and were baptized into the one body, the Church. Since the former is the account of a judgement of God upon the old creation, speaking about how in the latter the curse of the former was lifted to establish the unity of the new creation in the Church is pretty fundamental to the topic. Especially since it points in the right direction. Since the Church is where the unity of the new creation is to be sought, her task is to invite people to enter that unity by believing and being baptized, not to support activists, let alone subversive radicals, who seek to impose an artificial substitute for it through political force.

The above criticisms having been lodged, McDermott is definitely on the right tack when he says:

As Green and others have noted, the new anti-racism has become a new religion with its own original sin (white racism), baptismal liturgy (confession of whiteness), and new birth (to wokeness). But there is no redemption, and its ethic encourages people to practice what Jesus condemned, “Do not judge, lest you too be judged” (John 7:1). It imputes motives to others based on skin color—bad motives to one skin color and good motives to other colors. This is racism by another name. It is also sinful judgment. (The "Green" to whom he refers is a black political scientist named Derryck Green whose contribution to the forthcoming book, McDermott had just quoted).

The reason this new religion offers no absolution - apart from the fact that it is a false religion and absolution is only to be found in the true religion of Christ - is because it serves the interests of a seditious and revolutionary ideology. Revolutions are the outcome of thinking that imperfection in society and civilization means that the whole thing must be torn down or burned to the ground so something new can be put in its place. Since the imperfection is inherent in fallen human nature, that which is rebuilt will be just as imperfect as what it replaced, and usually more so. Revolutions lead to nothing but needless and pointless violence, hurt, and destruction. In the false religion of wokeness, whites must perpetually abase themselves and give in to a never-ending list of non-white grievances, because the revolution can never achieve perfection, therefore the revolution can never end. This path leads to never-ending racial strife, not to the racial peace and harmony which is the true meaning of us being "one in Christ."

The Moral Cowardice and Idolatry Among Today's Christian Leaders

Almost a century ago, poet and critic T. S. Eliot famously remarked “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” This was in a Cambridge University lecture given in 1939, on the eve of the war that was precipitated by the short-lived alliance between these rival alternatives to God, the text of which would be included in the book The Idea of a Christian Society. Seventeen years earlier a young Eliot had decried the cultural and spiritual bankruptcy of post-First World War Western Civilization in the poem “The Waste Land.” Five years later he had found the roots he had been looking for – note that he would later write the forward to Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots – when he converted to orthodox Christianity, joined the Church of England, and swore his oath of loyalty to the Crown becoming a British citizen. He had found the true path and in the words quoted above warned those who were pursuing materialistic ends and placing their hope in democracy of where their path would ultimately lead them.

It is just under eighty years since Eliot spoke those words and Western Civilization has not turned back to God in the interim. Indeed, it has become far more godless, materialistic and secular than anyone could have imagined back then, and in the process, despite Stephen Pinker’s recent arguments to the contrary, become far more crude, vulgar, and immoral. Sad to say, much of the blame for the state of our civilization belongs to the leaders of the church. If you read the historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament you will be struck by the number of times a particular cycle recurs – the leaders of God’s people go whoring after heathen idols, the people follow them into sin, and judgement and a curse comes upon them and their land as a result.

That the leaders of the church in our day and age are just as prone to lead their flocks into worshipping the false gods of the day as the leaders of the ancient Israelites were is evident in the moral blindness or cowardice that so many have displayed in their response to the recent events in Charlottesville even while tooting their own horns about their great courage in daring to resist the evil of white racism. It requires no courage whatsoever to speak out and condemn white racism in this era. All you have to do is go along with the mob. The true test of your moral courage is whether or not you dare to condemn the anti-white racism that hides behind the mask of anti-racism. Those who do so risk incurring the wrath of both the mob and the corporate globalists. The vast majority of church leaders, even among the supposedly orthodox, have failed this test badly. This is because they have bowed the knee to the false deity that presides over today’s pantheon of idols – the idol of diversity.

The events in Charlottesville as reported by the mainstream media seem to have produced a wide-spread breakdown in moral reasoning. Which is interesting because the disparity between the facts and the interpretation placed on those facts by the media is particularly glaring when it comes to this incident. We are told that because the “Unite the Right” rally was unambiguously pro-white and because neo-Nazi and KKK-types were unquestionably among the participants that all of those participating in the protest were white supremacists, and that therefore because of who they were, and because one of the counter protestors, Heather Heyer, was killed, it is the organizers and participants of the rally who must be singled out for blame and moral condemnation over the violence that occurred that day. This is morally bankrupt nonsense. It confuses consequences with culpability – just because the former were unevenly distributed between the protestors and counter protestors with the most severe consequence of death falling to one of the latter it does not follow in the slightest that in the allotment of blame the largest share must go to the former. Worse, it requires the premise that if a group’s views are regarded as repugnant or even if those views actually are repugnant, it is to be blamed for the violence that ensues when another group attacks them.

The facts of the case are these: the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally went through all the legal hoops to get a permit to hold a legal demonstration; the antifa showed up armed and masked with the intention of shutting the demonstration down with violence; the Charlottesville authorities declared a state of emergency and ordered the police to shut down the legal demonstration; the police forced the demonstrators to evacuate the park, leaving them only one way out – through the antifa; and the antifa then attacked the demonstrators with baseball bats, clubs, homemade flamethrowers, and projectiles of various sorts. The man, James Alex Fields, who drove into the crowd injuring several and killing Heather Heyer may very well have been acting out of fear for his life rather than homicidal malice – that remains to be determined. What is clear is that the bulk of the blame for this event going violent is to be divided between the Charlottesville authorities and the antifa.

Although the media have been consistently portraying the antifa as “counter protestors” it would be more accurate to call them terrorists. They do not show up to picket, hand out literature, and forcibly but peacefully express their disagreement with those they consider to be racists. They show up masked and armed, to intimidate, harass, and attack, to block access and shut down events. Although “antifa” is short for anti-fascist, in their tactics they bear a far closer resemblance to the thugs who followed Hitler and Mussolini than do their opponents, which can be explained by the fact that they are generally fronts for Marxist-Leninist groups, Marxist-Leninism or Communism being the parent ideology of which Fascism and Nazism were mutant offspring. They claim they are fighting racism but you will never find them trying to shut down a lecture by a Marxist academic who calls for the abolition of whiteness or a concert by a rapper who explicitly calls for violence against whites in his lyrics. They show no sign of comprehending either that a racist might not be white or that a white might not be a racist but instead treat racist and white as if they are synonymous. This is itself, of course, a form of racism.

The voice of moral clarity in the aftermath of Charlottesville has been that of American President Donald J. Trump of all people. He unequivocally condemned white supremacism and neo-Nazism, but rightly distinguished between white supremacists and neo-Nazis on the one hand and those who were neither but participated in the rally to protest the erasure of history and the changing of culture. He did not shirk from calling out the antifa and allotting them the share of the blame that they so rightly deserve. This refreshing moral clarity was sadly lacking among many Christian leaders.

Take Timothy J. Keller, for example. Keller is the founding pastor of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. An apologist and the author of numerous books, Keller has something of a celebrity status among evangelical Protestants. In an article for The Gospel Coalition that came out the same day that President Trump gave his press conference, Keller began by asking the question:

How should Christians, and especially those with an Anglo-white background, respond to last weekend’s alt-right gathering in Charlottesville and its tragic aftermath?

Note the words “especially those with an Anglo-white background”. Keller is guilty of the very racism that he condemns so vehemently in this article. Indeed, he is guilty of the worst form of racism possible – racism against your own people.

Later in the article, Keller commits gross eisegesis when he reads the modern political discussion of race into St. Paul’s address to the Epicureans and Stoics at the Areopagus in Acts 17. The Apostle was not addressing the Greek idea that other peoples were barbarian, when he said that God had made “of one blood” every nation on the earth, but rather was establishing that the God he was preaching and Whom he identified with their “unknown God” was not a tribal deity but the One True God Who created the universe and to Whom all people owe worship. Furthermore, I find it difficult to believe that Keller does not know this and that this was an honest hermeneutical error on his part rather than sheer mendacity in order to pander to the spirit of the times.

Keller makes reference to “the idolatry of blood and country.” Keller has written extensively about idolatry in his book Counterfeit Gods. There too he refers to the idols of blood and country or race and nation. Now, I have no objection to what Keller says about this form of idolatry. Obviously blood, country, race, and nation can be made into idols, as the history of the early part of the last century proves all too well. Let us return to the quotation from T. S. Eliot with which I began this essay. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” Hitler, was the very embodiment of the idolatry of blood, country, race and nation. Note, however, that Eliot saw another option for God-rejecters in Stalin.

What I don’t see anywhere in Keller’s article – or his book for that matter – is any condemnation of the idolatry of those who brought the violence to Charlottesville on August 12th – the antifa. Again, it is easy to rail against the idols of blood, country, race, and nation, for these are the idols of a century ago. These idols were popular in the early twentieth century, but when they devoured their worshippers in the bloodbath of the Second World War, twentieth century man rejected them. He did not, however, turn back to the true and living God, but erected yet another idol – the idol of diversity. It is this idol whom the Stalinistic antifa worship and barring a revival in which there is a mass turn back to the true God, she, by the time her cult has run its course, will have exacted more in the way of blood sacrifices from her worshippers than her predecessors ever did. It is this idol that the faithful and courageous man of God is called to speak out against in our day and age. This is precisely what Timothy Keller – and far too many other – Christian leaders refuse to do, preferring to bow their knee to the new idol, just as the “Positive Christianity” cult that Keller rightly condemns as heretical, prostituted itself to the idols of the Third Reich.

Orthodox Christian teaching is that God divided the nations at Babel but in the Kingdom of God outside of history (the Fall to the Second Coming) He will gather “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” before the throne of the Lamb. Within human history, the Kingdom of God is represented on earth by the church, the body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit, that accepts into its membership through baptism, anyone from any nation who believes in Jesus Christ. There is nothing in orthodox Christianity that requires us to support efforts to undo Babel politically, whether they be by dissolving the nations of the world into a global order of world federalism or by maximizing diversity within countries through mass immigration and then attempting to administer race relations bureaucratically. Indeed, to do this is to commit the utmost folly, to do the very thing most likely to exacerbate racial tensions, hostility, and violence. It is what the idolatry of diversity looks like.

Those who today are returning to the idols of blood, race, and nation are doing so because they have had a glimpse of the apocalyptic disaster that lies ahead of us if we continue down the path of the idolatry of diversity. Their solution is no solution – we must turn back to the True and Living God, through Him Who is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life.” It is not likely that this will happen, however, if Christian leaders continue, like Timothy Keller, to whore around with the idol of diversity, and to refuse to name the evil of anti-white racism disguised as antiracism, while hypocritically pretending to a moral courage they do not possess by reserving their vehement denunciations only for those evils the mob is howling after.

More Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- Sovereignty in its purest and most absolute sense belongs to God alone. To royal monarchs he has delegated a limited earthly sovereignty. The usurpation of sovereignty is the source of all tyranny. The first to attempt to seize sovereignty for himself was Lucifer. The notions of individual and popular sovereignty, which lie at the heart of liberalism and modern democracy respectively, are merely two more recent attempts.

- Anyone who claims to care about the poor yet who supports a carbon tax is either a moron or a liar.

- It is only those who claim a monopoly on hate for themselves who support laws against hate.

- Culture today is a complete fraud. Traditionally, high culture feeds the mind and soul, while popular culture unites the community. Most modern and post-modern “high” culture, however, poisons the mind and soul, while the “pop culture” manufactured for consumption by the masses in the studios of Los Angeles alienates individuals and atomizes communities.

- The most effective instrument of Cultural Marxism has always been corporate capitalism.

- To say that Communism is bad is not to say that capitalism is good. Communism is bad because it is subversive, egalitarian, revolutionary, atheistic, anti-royalist, anti-aristocratic, materialistic and tyrannical. Many of these things can also be said of capitalism.

- Vegetarianism kills brain cells.

- Reading the history of how regimes like the Soviet Union and the Third Reich sought to suppress dissent and control thought through secret police, charges against which there was no real defence, and the atmosphere of terror and distrust generated by the justifiable suspicion that anyone, even a close friend or family member, might be a state informer, is like reading the blueprint for everything that liberals have done in the name of “human rights” and “protecting vulnerable minorities.”

- The same people who ridicule evangelical Christians for advocating “conversion therapy” for people attracted to their own sex think that physical mutilation is a perfectly proper treatment for people who think that they belong to the other sex.

- We live in a day in which doctors routinely prescribe mood-and-behaviour-altering drugs to children, usually after diagnosing the ordinary rambunctious behaviour of boys as some sort of phony-baloney pathology, and then we wonder why so many kids are now shooting up schools and killing themselves.

- The same people who think that it is “cool” to smoke marijuana – the long term use of which turns the mind to mush, makes people into babbling idiots, and can induce paranoia and schizophrenia – and are demanding its legalization, demonize tobacco, which has been linked, like everything else on the planet, to cancer, but which has a beneficial effect on the mind.

- If all the hawks in the so-called “war on drugs” really wanted to do something about the plague of substance abuse and addiction, they would start by going after the pharmaceutical companies and their physician accomplices who push pills as the answer to all of life’s problems.

- Economists keep coming up with plans such as free trade and socialism, that on paper are supposed to increase human happiness but all they deliver when put into practice is an increase in misery.

- It is those who insist that race does not matter for whom race matters the most.

- Environmentalism is perfectly sane and sound when it insists that we ought to look after our world and conserve our natural resources and the beauty of our surroundings for the sake of future generations but it crosses over into total madness when it demands that we worship the earth and tells us that our burning of fossil fuels is altering the earth’s climate and threatens our survival.

- There is no such thing as progressive Christianity. To the extent that something is progressive it is not Christian and to the extent that it is Christian it is not progressive.

- Christianity is a universal faith in that the Gospel is a message of salvation for all people, anyone can be baptized into the Church of Christ, and the redeemed that shall gather before the throne of the Lamb will be taken from “every kindred and tongue and people and nation.” This does not mean that Christians should look in favour upon the mass immigration that is eroding the national identities of Western countries and bringing about White Genocide. On the contrary, the Christian who supports this is guilty of the sin of impiety and is, in the words of St. Paul, “worse than an infidel.”

For and Against

Before his retirement, Charley Reese was a conservative opinion columnist with the Orlando Sentinel. He believed that writers owed it to their readers to regularly give a full disclosure of their biases. He put this belief into practice by writing, once a year, a column in which he gave such a disclosure, generally around the time of New Year’s. I consider this to be a practice worthy of emulation and so began the last two years with essays in that style. In “Here I Stand” I stated my basic religious, political and cultural beliefs. In “The Testimony of a Tory – A Brief Memoir” I gave an autobiographical sketch that told how I came to my positions, beliefs, and prejudices.

Despite the predictions, based upon the Mayan calendar cycle, that the world would end last December, a new year is upon us, which means that it is once again time for one of these essays. This year I have decided upon a format of alternating positive positions with negative ones. First I will state in one paragraph something I am for, something I believe in. Then in the next paragraph I will state something I am against. I am arranging these in sets, so that the negatives in one paragraph will go together with the positives in the paragraph immediately preceding it, like opposing sides to a coin.

I am a small-o orthodox Christian. I believe the faith declared in the Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. I accept the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as the authoritative and unerring, written Word of God. I worship the One God Who is eternally the three persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I am a sinner, a member of Adam’s fallen race, who will be judged according to his works on the day when Jesus Christ returns in glory to judge the quick and the dead. My faith and hope, for today, for that day, and for all eternity, rest entirely in the love, mercy and grace of God, given to the world in the Incarnation, sacrificial Atonement, and Resurrection of our Saviour Jesus of Nazareth Who is Christ the Lord, the Son of the Living God.

I reject and oppose the arrogant, anthropocentric concepts of materialism, rationalism and positivism. Materialism is the idea that the physical world, which we know and experience through our senses, is all that is, all that can be known and/or all that matters. Rationalism is the notion that human reason, aided by empirical science, can sufficiently explain all things without recourse to divine revelation. Positivism is the belief that human knowledge has advanced from mythology through theology and religion to a materialistic and rationalistic understanding of the world, and that this latter understanding is superior to the “superstition” that preceded it.

I am a Canadian patriot and nationalist. I am an old-fashioned “blood and soil” kind of patriot, whose country consists of real people, living in real territory, with real institutions, rather than a set of abstract ideals about human rights and democracy, that anyone on the planet can theoretically subscribe to. My country is the Dominion of Canada which was founded by the Fathers of Confederation in 1867, out of the English and French speaking provinces and territories of British North America, which has her own Parliament under the Sovereign we share with the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth. I am proud that my country was not born out of rebellion and revolution but was founded by Loyalists within the established tradition they had received from their forebears.


I despise the phony “Canadian nationalism” of the liberal political, academic, and media elites who hate Canada’s British roots and traditions and dismiss our country’s history prior the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau as our “colonial past.” This pseudo-nationalism consists of little more than support for the socialism, multi-culturalism, and left-wing ideology in general that the Liberal Party shoved down our throats in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, combined with anti-Americanism of the crudest, most vulgar sort. I equally loathe the anti-Canadianism of many so-called “conservatives” in Canada, who love the United States but hate their own country, and never miss an opportunity to put down Canada and to compare her unfavourably with the American republic.

I am a conservative. I believe that man is a social animal and that it is therefore human nature for men to live together in societies. I believe that the flaw in human nature that theologians call “Original Sin” is the root source of the evils, injustices, and other ills human beings suffer from. It is because of this flaw that men need laws to govern and order their societies. Since governments, the institutions that make and administer laws, are themselves composed of human beings tainted by sin, governments have a tendency to abuse their power and authority and to become tyrannical. For this reason, I believe that government powers and laws should be limited to what is absolutely necessary to maintain order.

I am against both classical and progressive liberalism. Classical liberalism is individualism, which places the individual before the nation, society, community, and even the family and which in its most extreme anarchist form, would sacrifice order in the name of individual liberty. Progressive liberalism is a form of statism which regards the modern democratic-bureaucratic state as the agent of social progress, and believes that the state’s powers to tax and legislate should be used to eliminate the social and economic inequality that the progressive liberal regards as the cause of evil and injustice. Both forms of liberalism are based upon mistaken views of human nature. Classical liberalism wrongly thinks that people are first individuals who by mutual agreement form families, communities, and societies when, in reality, people are born into their families, communities, and societies and within the context of these, later develop into who they are individually. Progressive liberals wrongly think that social and economic inequality are themselves evil and unjust and are the source of other evils and injustices. The root error of both forms of liberalism is the idea that flaws in the organization of society rather than flaws in human nature are the cause of the evils and suffering that plague mankind.

I am a High Tory. I believe in the institution of monarchy, in particular the parliamentary monarchy that developed in Britain and which was inherited by Canada and other Commonwealth countries. I believe in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the organic community and organized institution established by Christ and His Apostles, which administers the Sacraments instituted by Christ and has been governed, since the Apostolic age by the bishop-successors of the Apostles, and especially the English branch of that Church which is both catholic and reformed. I believe that for there to be order in society, there must be hierarchy, and that a ruling class is inevitable, although the ruling class may govern poorly and often does. I believe that an essential task of the upper classes is to sponsor the creation and preservation of high culture. High culture is the true mark of a higher civilization, rather than technological advancement as is the assumption of most modern thought. Culture is the creative expression of a community, society, or civilization and the means whereby that community, society, or civilization transmits its understanding of itself and the world down through the generations. High culture is part of both a particular culture and a universal culture. It consists of the best literature, music, and other art produced within a particular culture, and what makes it the best is that it transcends its particular culture and speaks to all people, in all places, and at all times. It elevates a culture and society, by directing them upwards towards the classical and universal ideals of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

I disagree strongly with modern democratic theory. I do not object to public offices being filled by popular election when the established constitution and prescription call for them to be so filled but I object to the notion that popular election is the best way of filling public offices. It is, in fact, the worst, because someone who runs for public office by means of popular election, demonstrates in doing so that he seeks power and that he is willing to obtain power by means of a contest as to who can successfully deceive the greatest number of people with his lies. While I have nothing against the classical Greek republican ideal of government constituted so as to govern for the public good, I do not accept the Roman republican ideal of a government headed by an elected official rather than a king or queen. I most vehemently oppose that ideal when it is proposed by would-be reformers in Canada who wish to turn our country into a republic by replacing our hereditary head-of-state with a politician. I reject Rousseau’s concept of the General Will of the people, the foundational doctrine of both modern democracy and totalitarianism, and Jefferson’s idea that governments derive their authority from the consent of those they govern. Bottom-up theories of government are great for populist rabble-rousing, which I detest, but are irrational and unsound. All real authority is either intrinsic or delegated from above. In arguing against the Divine Right of Kings, John Locke, father of modern liberalism, rejected the only true check on the abuse of government power – the recognition that it comes from God (Rom. 13) and that the governor is therefore answerable to God for how he used or abuses his authority. I do not believe in secularism or the modern dogma of the “separation of church and state”. Church and state are distinct institutions with distinct functions but the idea of “separation of church and state” forbids government’s from acknowledging God’s higher authority and undermines religion by privatizing it. Belief is a private, personal, matter, but religion is not. From the Latin word that means “to bind together”, religion is organized, community, worship which cannot, by definition, be private, and which cannot perform its essential role in society, if it is declared to be private and personal. I consider most of the art funded by modern governments through bureaucratic arts councils to be fraudulent, especially that which is called “modern” and “post-modern”. I object to public funds going towards its creation, although I also strenuously object to the defunding and closing of institutions which make preserve and make available to the public, the artistic and cultural heritage of the past. I deplore the way genuine popular culture, i.e,, song, stories, and art produced by people for their own use, has been largely replaced by “pop” culture – canned culture, mass-produced in culture-factories in Hollywood or some other equally horrible place, to be mass-marketed for mass-consumption. If true high culture elevates a society, pop culture, which to be mass-marketed must appeal to the lowest common denominator and which is therefore oriented to the lowest part of human nature, drags us down into the mud.

I am a communitarian. I believe in community, which is more than just a group of individuals who happen to live in the same place at the same time. It is people who are connected with each other and the place they live in so as to form an organic whole. The ties that bind a true organic community together stretch into the past and the future so as to include previous generations and generations to come. The indispensable elements of an organic community are race and culture. Race is the biological descent of the present generation of a community from all preceding generations and its biological ancestry of all successive generations. Race is not absolute and pure – people can and do enter and become part of communities from the outside while other people leave – but a community cannot exist if it is altogether absent. Culture, of course, is everything non-biological that is passed down from generation to generation in a community. Together, race and culture form the commonality, which binds a community into an organic whole. Simone Weil explained best what community provides to its members: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” (1) The spirit of community is stronger in rural than in urban areas and in smaller rather than larger neighborhoods.

I oppose both the liberal individualism that breaks down and dissolves communities, alienating individuals and atomizing societies, and the collectivism that swallows up individuals and communities alike into large, faceless, masses.

I am a traditionalist and a reactionary. I believe in tradition, prescription, and continuity. Not all change threatens continuity and some change is necessary for the preservation of traditional order and institutions. Beneficial change is ordinarily slow and can only truly be said to be salutary after having been shown to be so through a long period of testing. If an innovation is harmful, however, this is often apparent almost immediately. When an innovation is shown to be harmful the wisest choice, when it is available, is not to continue down the path opened up by the innovation but to return to that which is known, time-tested and true.

I don’t believe in progress, the idea that man through reason, science, and innovation, will continually build newer, brighter and better futures for himself. The doctrine of progress comes in two varieties, technological and social, and I don’t believe in either one of them. The concept of technological progress is more than just the obvious fact that we invent new tools and techniques and improve upon old ones. It is the idea that by merging human knowledge with human innovation man will be able to solve every problem that comes his way as he extends his dominion over himself and over nature. Social progress is the idea that man, by leaving aside traditional social arrangements and institutions, and eliminating inequality between individuals, classes, the sexes and the races, can rationally design a new society, free from the evils of the past. Both versions of progress are doomed to failure and will only make things worse. Both are attempts by man, exiled from Paradise for his sin, to regain Paradise through the force of his own efforts, rather than through reliance upon the grace of God.


I believe in a class system with a high degree of social and economic freedom and mobility. For as long as human beings live together as families, in which fathers and mothers raise their children together, they will form classes. A class is a group of families with similar social and economic status. Sons, partly because they inherit half of their fathers’ genes and partly because they are raised by their fathers, have a tendency to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and take up their trades, crafts, professions, labour and careers. This tendency and the fact that human societies value and reward different kinds of work differently, make class inevitable. Neither of these factors, the human family or the fact that society places different values on different kinds of work, is something any sane person would want to change. Class is not a bad thing but a good thing, which contributes to the order of society. It is not absolute, however, anymore than race as an element of community, is absolute. The tendency of sons to follow their fathers is universal only in the sense that it is observable in every place and time, not in the sense of being true of every son without exception. Individual talents, strengths, desires, and ambitions vary greatly. Sometimes a son lacks the strength or talent to take up his father’s profession, at other times a son might be strongly gifted for a specific vocation that is different from that of his family. There should be social/economic freedom for individuals to pursue the work their talents best fit them for.

I disagree with those who wish to see either element in the balance of class and social freedom and mobility for individuals removed. I do not think that classes should harden into castes in which a person’s social and economic status, role, and labour are inflexibly predetermined from birth. Nor do I believe in the ideal of a classless society. I do not agree with the liberal individualist who would redefine class as “level of income” and otherwise have pure social mobility. I especially disagree with the Marxist who regards the existence of classes as the source of conflict and oppression and who holds to the ideal of communism in which both class and individual liberty are eliminated. In this desire for a classless society the liberal individualist and the Marxist communist are strange bedfellows.

I am a libertarian of sorts. While I do not believe in the underlying philosophy of libertarianism – the classical liberalism mentioned above – I generally accept the basic libertarian theory that the law should only forbid and penalize that which is actually and quantifiably harmful to other people. This is not the only input a society should have into how its members live their lives, but for the most part social and moral order is better maintained by other authorities and institutions than government. Too much government and too many laws actually harm the social and moral order because the concentration of control in the government weakens these other social institutions and authorities. For this reason I believe this kind of libertarianism complements rather than contradicts social conservatism and I also believe it to be the position most consistent with the emphasis upon personal freedom in the English tradition.

I do not like laws that are not necessary either for the maintenance of public and social order or for our protection against the violence of others.

I believe in property. A man has a right to that which he can legitimately and honestly obtain, whether as payment for his labour, as a gift, in exchange for other goods he already possessed, or by inheritance. If a man can honestly and legally obtain enough property that he can hire others to work that property and live off of the profits, there is nothing wrong with that and much to be praised in it for he provides a living to others as well as himself in doing so. If this right to what is one’s own is not secure and protected, no other right will be either. For this reason property ownership and the right thereof are the foundation of all other rights and of any true concept of justice.

I consider, therefore, all forms of socialism to be loathsome and evil. All nineteenth century socialisms, from Proudhon’s anarcho-syndicalism to Marx’s communism, were based upon the idea that property is the source of inequality and that inequality is the source of injustice and evil. However much they may have disagreed amongst themselves, they agreed that property must be done away with and replaced with a form of collective ownership. This idea continued into some socialisms in the twentieth century, but what we ordinarily call “socialism” today is something different. This kind of socialism calls upon government to play the role of Robin Hood, to rob from the rich and give to the poor. All forms of socialism are ideological expressions of the Deady Sin of Envy.

I believe in business. I agree with Dr. Johnson that “there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” (2) I think that a man’s business is his own, and that government should not try to run it for him. While I prefer small farms and businesses to large companies, I do not think that there is anything wrong with a business prospering and growing.

I disagree therefore with those who speak of business as if it were something dirty, and those who attack the profit motive. I disagree with those who think that government action should be taken to limit the growth of businesses within their borders or that the size and prosperity of a business is a reason for that business to be penalized. I think those people to be mentally and morally sick who think that it is right to place a larger portion of taxes upon people and business that have prospered and who actually have the audacity to call the tax burden they wish to place on the prosperous “their fair share”.

I am an economic nationalist. I believe that while government would be horrendously incompetent at running a man’s private business for him, it should be capable of administering the economic interests of the country as a whole. It is in the interests of a country that it have domestic production of essential goods so as not to be entirely dependent upon the importation of such goods from foreign sources. It is in the interests of a country that it not be stripped of capital and jobs. It is the government’s duty to look out for the country’s interests by protecting protection if necessary to maintain domestic production of essential goods and by penalizing companies that move capital and jobs out of the country. While no government should punish a business for growing and prospering within it’s borders, all governments have legitimate reasons to curtain the activities of companies that operate across national borders and which are accountable to the laws of no society being able to move activity that is illegal in one country into another where it is legal.

I detest globalism and the ideology of “free trade”, that seeks to integrate the economies of the world into one big market, that respects no borders, that dissolves national identities, undermines national sovereignty, and is effectively building a “new world order”, paving the way for the global government that liberals and socialists have dreamed of for centuries.

I believe in the “one nation conservatism” of Benjamin Disraeli and John G. Diefenbaker. The constitutional order requires broad support from every class and element of society in order to ensure its security and stability, and to have that broad support the order must ensure that belonging to the society and commonwealth is beneficial to all its members. For this reason, and in order to take the wind out of the sails of demagogues and revolutionaries, a social safety net to catch members of the commonwealth who are for whatever reason unable to meet their own basic needs and who do not have anyone else to do so for them, is necessary.

I do not believe that it is healthy to allow such a social safety net to grow too big, however. It should not have been allowed to grow into what we call “the welfare state” today. In the early twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc predicted that both capitalism and socialism would evolve into “the servile state”, in which the middle classes would shrink away, the vast majority of people would belong to a wage-labourer class which the government would agree to maintain in periods of unemployment, for when the small class of capitalists needed them again. Today’s “welfare capitalism” or “socialism” resembles Belloc’s “servile state” in many ways, and has other unattractive features as well. Welfarism kills the spirit of charity and compassion among those who are better off and kills the spirit of gratitude among its recipients. To raise the kind of government revenue necessary to support welfarism requires taxes on business or personal income, the former of which discourage enterprise, the latter of which are unjust and intrusive. Welfarism is the foundation of the “nanny-state”, in which the government, citing the fact that it is paying for people’s health, welfare, and upkeep as justification, intrudes into their lives and businesses and bosses them around “for their own good”.

I believe in environmental stewardship. God placed man upon a limited world with resources that are limited but mostly renewable if they ware watched over with care and wisdom. We have a duty to preserve and not waste these resources. We are to use them but not to use them up. We are to look upon God as the owner of the earth’s resources, and ourselves in the present as having been entrusted with the use and care of them, with the understanding that we will make sure that they continue to be available for future generations.

I have no use, however, for the kind of environmentalism that worships nature as a goddess, opposes human industry and activity, embraces a culture of death for human beings, and makes wild predictions about immanent global catastrophes.

I believe that conflict among human beings is inevitable. As individuals, groups, and as entire societies we frequently argue. While it is always preferable, it is not always possible that these disputes be settled peacefully. One of the basic functions government is the arbitration of disputes between individuals and groups so as to arrive at an agreement without violence. Government has the force of law to back up its rulings. The arbitration of disputes between governments and nations is more difficult and such disputes will, from time to time, break out into war. War is highly destructive of human life, liberty, property, and civilization and for this reason it is always deplorable. It is not, however, the supreme evil to be avoided at all costs. Sometimes it is necessary and right for a country to go to war. If one’s country goes to war, one has a duty to heed the call to arms, if and when it comes. War provides a unique opportunity for certain virtues, especially those of bravery and sacrifice to be exercised, and when such virtues are practiced they deserve the reward of honour.

I disagree, therefore, with pacifism, non-resistance, and other doctrines that forbid men from answering the call of duty. Such doctrines may be sincerely believed but they have the effect, if not the intention, of encouraging free riding – the enjoyment of the benefits of being part of a civil commonwealth without making the contributions to the commonwealth expected of its members. I am skeptical of plans for world peace. I regard the efforts to build a universal council/court in the United Nations to provide the arbitration between nations that national governments provide between individuals, as doomed to failure. Either the United Nations will be ineffective because it lacks the power to enforce its rulings, or it will have the power to enforce its rulings in which case it will have too much power and will cause a host of other problems. Powerful empires have served as efficient arbitrators between arguing nations and governments in the past, but they did not prevent all wars, no empire lasts forever, and empires are prone to waging war themselves. I am also skeptical of most things governments say in justifying their wars. I do not believe in sending the military to topple foreign governments we do not like if our own country’s people, territory, security, and other vital interests are not threatened. I do not believe war is appropriate as a means of attaining humanitarian ends. While I do not believe in appeasing bullying tyrants, neither do I believe in sabre-rattling and I think that many who practice the latter have drawn the wrong lesson from Neville Chamberlain’s experience at Munich. I have nothing but contempt for the doctrine of the American neo-conservatives who believe that their country’s war-machine should be used to bring liberalism and democracy to the utmost parts of the earth.

I believe that it is necessary for a society to have rules about sex. Sex is a fundamental fact of human nature. It is the division of the species into its two most basic categories, male and female, the internal force that attracts them to each other, and the relationship between them. The sexual libido is among the most powerful of the human passions. For there to be order and harmony in a society, people must be governed by the law. For an individual to be governed by the law he must himself govern his own passions and appetites. If he does not govern his passions, he will be enslaved by them rather than governed by the law. For this reason, and the fact that families, communities, societies, civilizations, and the species itself, unlike the individual, all have intergenerational lifespans and so depend upon sex, the means of reproduction, for their survival, society needs to have a say when it comes to sex. Society should uphold the pattern of a man and a woman marrying and raising their children together as father and mother as the expected norm, encourage behaviour that supports this pattern such as premarital abstinence, marital fidelity, and monogamy, and discourage behaviour that undermines this pattern such as promiscuity, adultery, and divorce. While these sorts of behaviour should be encouraged or discouraged among both males and females alike there are also roles appropriate to each sex which society should encourage. The role of motherhood – conceiving, bearing, giving birth to, and nursing children – has been biologically assigned to women by God and nature, and cannot be reassigned. It is in society’s own interests to encourage and expect women to perform this role. The role of fatherhood has only been biologically assigned to men in the limited sense of siring children. Society should encourage and expect men to perform the role of fatherhood in the fullest sense of taking responsibility for, providing for, and protecting their children and the mothers of their children, and raising those children in partnership with their mothers. These roles are what society should expect and encourage of men and women as groups. The roles are complementary and complementarity, not “equality” or “subservience” is the best word to describe the relationship between the sexes. Specific men and women may, for one reason or another, be incapable of fulfilling or unsuited for the role assigned to their sex. Such individuals should be accommodated and tolerated but not to the extent that society abandons the roles of wife-mother for women and husband-father for men as the general expectation and pattern. These roles, the pattern of the family, and rules regarding sexual behaviour, are best taught in the family, by fathers to sons and by mothers to daughters, with the support of the church.

I strongly disagree with the belief that all matters pertaining to sex are to be left up to the individual. This belief spread rapidly in the latter part of the twentieth century and has been taken to absurd extremes. In the decades after World War II, the sexual liberation movement pointed to the development of effective artificial birth control as the technological justification of its message that traditional moral rules concerning sexual behaviour were now obsolete, as if those rules had existed solely to protect the individual from inconvenient consequences of his behaviour, and not to guard society’s interest in human reproduction. The second wave of feminism, the so-called “women’s liberation movement”, declared that different societal roles for men and women were part of a conspiracy on the part of men to oppress women, that society should ignore sex and treat men and women only as individuals, and to ensure equality between the sexes and “women’s rights”, demanded that abortion be legalized and made accessible to all women, that universal public daycare be made available, and that marriage laws be re-written to allow for no-fault divorce, and encouraged women to put off marriage and motherhood and pursue careers instead. Yet that was only the moderate, liberal, branch of the movement! Both movements I consider to be despicable. They are the most significant contributing factors to the devaluation of human life and embracing of the “culture of death” that has swept Western civilization. A third movement, that demands that society cease to uphold marriage between a man and a woman as the norm, recognize same-sex erotic relationships as being of equal value with traditional, heterosexual, marriage, acknowledge as valid the decisions some individuals make that they are of a different sex – whether the opposite or a new one of their own creation – than their biology would indicate, and change all of its rules and traditions to accommodate the small minority of people who are attracted to their own sex or are in some other way confused as to their sexual identity, has arisen and is rapidly seeing Western societies give in to its demands. This movement’s advocates and defenders, who frequently profess ignorance of the existence of such a movement and pretend that these changes are just natural social evolution, like to ask questions like how expanding the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples will harm other people? Such questions miss the point. This movement and its success is the symptom, not the disease. It is an indicator of just how badly society, morality, and the institution of marriage have already been damaged.

An unapologetic man of the Right, I believe in the importance of race and nationality. Race is not a matter of morphological differences such as skin and hair colour, as progressives would have us believe, but is rather the biological succession of generations that is a fundamental element of every level of social organization, from the family up through the community to the nation, and which also exists at the level of the species, hence the expression “the human race”. Race is the factor that makes it possible for families, communities, nations, and even the species itself, to exist as groups across the lifespans of multiple generations. Nationality is our sense of identification with those with whom we share a common language, a common religion, common customs and manners, a mutual history, and the same stories and songs. Race and nationality are indispensible elements of our social existence and we should regard them as contributing positively to that existence rather than bemoaning them and dreaming of a world in which they are reduced to insignificance or eliminated.

There are two opposite dangers with regards to race and nationality, both of which I try to avoid. These are the dangers of attaching too much importance to race and nationality on the one hand and not attaching enough importance to them on the other hand. When we make race and nationality so important that we demand that all smaller loyalties and attachments, to family, for example, or to friends and neighbours, be sacrificed for the good of race and nation and do not recognize even the most basic sense of a shared humanity with those beyond our own race or nation, we have made idols out of race and nation, and no good can come out of this. On the other hand, when we insist that natural ties of race and nation be ignored, and that our loyalty and attachment to our own, race, nation, and people be sacrificed for the good of a greater human unity, we make the same mistake on a much larger scale. I am not a “white nationalist” for, although I agree wholeheartedly with white nationalism’s indignation at the way the progressive spirit of the age expects all white nations and only white nations to commit racial suicide through a combination of mass immigration and antinatalism, self-loathing and idolatrous worship of “the Other”, I do not agree with the way white nationalism – or any other kind of racial nationalism – demands that a man’s race be his highest or only loyalty, and I dislike it’s Nietzschean tendency to blame Christianity for the evils of liberalism. I also do not agree with the way some white nationalists revere Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, although I tend not to hold this against them because I detest the way self-appointed progressive thought police, whose own political soulmates worship Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, and “Che” Gueverra, insist that pariah status be conferred upon anyone who shook hands with someone who lived next door to the third cousin, twice removed of the college roommate of a person who once expressed the opinion that Hitler might have been something less than the absolute incarnation of all evil who makes the Antichrist look like a saint in comparison. Having said all this, it is clearly the opposite danger, that of undervaluing race and nation and making an idol out of a greater human unity, that is the threat in this day and age, at least in the Western world.

I believe that we have both universal and particular duties towards other people. I believe that while we have a general duty to treat all people with justice and mercy we have more specific duties to those to whom we are connected by ties of kinship, friendship, shared culture, faith, and citizenship, and propinquity. For example, we have a duty to respect our elders in general, but we also have a stronger and more specific duty to honour and obey our own father and mother. I believe that our specific duties to our family, friends, neighbours and countrymen must come first, before our general duties to all people.

I consider the thinking that is currently prevalent about inclusiveness and equality to be very harmful. Equality is not justice. To say that we should treat all people equally is to say that we should treat our friends like enemies, our family like strangers, our countrymen like foreigners. This is the reality of egalitarianism, lurking behind the ideal which is stated as the opposite of this, i.e., that we should treat our enemies like friends, etc. I abhor the recent phenomenon, now ubiquitous amongst Western intellectual elites, that Roger Scruton calls oikophobia, “the repudiation of inheritance and home.” (3) Oikophobia is a far greater evil than racism. Specific duties are more important than general duties and if racism is the evil of denying to other people, because of their race, the justice and mercy we are commanded to show to all people, oikophobia is the evil of denying to one’s own family, friends, neighbours and countrymen the specific loyalty, love, and duty owed to them. White liberal anti-racists are typically oikophobes, who accuse their own people of the evil of racism, whenever they practice the virtue of piety.

Recognizing that all men, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are sinners, and have their failings and weaknesses, I honour and respect the “dead white males” from Homer and Virgil to Dante and Milton, from Pindar and Horace to Tennyson and Kipling, from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes and Richard Hooker, from Sophocles and Aeschylus to Shakespeare and Marlowe, from Aristophanes and Juvenal to Dean Swift and Stephen Leacock, from Cicero and Cato to Edmund Burke, Lord Salisbury, Sir John A. MacDonald and Sir Winston Churchill, from Palestrina to Haydn and Mozart to Wagner, from Michelangelo and Raphael to Caravaggio and El Greco to Rembrandt and Rubens, the architects and builders of Western civilization, and all their achievements.

I refuse to bow my knee to the human idols erected in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whether they be rock stars and rappers, professional athletes, television and movie actors, or other media-manufactured celebrities like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

Happy New Year everyone and God save the Queen!

(1) Simone Weil, The Need For Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952), p. 41.This is a translation by A. F. Wills of a work first published in French in 1949.

(2) Quoted by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson, the entry for March 27, 1775.

(3) Roger Scruton, England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2006), p. 36.

The Fate of America

Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? By Patrick J. Buchanan, New York, Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, 2011, 488 pp, $27.99US

In the first half of the 20th Century the European powers clashed in two major conflicts that are remembered as World War I and World War II. When the second war ended in 1945, the nations of Europe were in ruins, their empires were lost, and two strong new powers emerged triumphant. The history of the second half of the 20th Century was largely the story of their rivalry. We called these powers the superpowers and they were the United States of America on the one hand and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the other. Both had nuclear arsenals, containing weapons of mass destruction far more powerful than the atomic bomb, the development and use of which had brought WWII to an end. These weapons kept the superpowers from waging a traditional war against each other and so their conflict came to be known as the Cold War.

The Cold War brought out tremendous differences of opinion among people. Some felt that the threat of nuclear holocaust, never before present, meant that peace must be achieved no matter the cost. Others believed that the Soviet tyranny, which already held millions in its clutches, had to be prevented from spreading.

It was at the height of the Cold War that Patrick J. Buchanan began his career in journalism. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, he also worked as a speechwriter and senior advisor to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. Both as an op/ed writer and a presidential advisor, he worked to promote America’s efforts in her struggle against the Soviet Union.

Then the Cold War ended, shortly after Reagan’s second term as US President. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The United States was now the sole remaining superpower. The question naturally arose of what America would do with its military might in the absence of the threat of he Soviet Union. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait then-US President George H. W. Bush gave his answer. The United States would lead a coalition of free, democratic countries that would police the world, establishing a new world order and keeping it safe against aggressors like Hussein.

Pat Buchanan had a different idea. Running against Bush, he sought the Republican nomination for the 1992 Presidential election. He opposed the Gulf War and in his campaign he called for America to close its overseas bases and bring her soldiers home. Invoking George Washington’s rhetoric about “entangling alliance” he called upon the United States to return to the older, non-interventionist foreign policy of “America First”.

This was not the only plank in his platform, of course, nor would it be the only time he would run for President. He sought the Republican nomination again in 1996 and in 2000 he ran for President on the Reform Party ticket. Apart from the “America First” foreign policy that was labeled “isolationism” by his opponents, he championed economic nationalism against free trade, an end to liberal immigration, and reversing the moral, cultural, and spiritual decline of America.

Mr. Buchanan’s campaigns were unsuccessful, but his books became bestsellers. In The Great Betrayal he argued for the Hamiltonian “American system” of economic nationalism. In A Republic Not an Empire he made the case for an “America First” policy by tracing the history of American foreign policy. In The Death of the West he discussed the impending demographic crisis of Western society caused by low fertility rates, aging populations and mass immigration. In State of Emergency he took a closer look at the immigration crisis the United States is currently facing.

In his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? he revisits each of these topics in the light of current state of the United States following the economic meltdown, the quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Obama presidency. Although the final chapter offers prescriptions as to how to steer America away from the brink of doom the overall tone of the book reflects the pessimism in its title. The main theme of the book is “we have lost the country we grew up in”.(1)

In a sense that is the theme of all of Mr. Buchanan’s books and that partly explains why so many of them have become best-sellers. As a writer, Pat Buchanan is excellent at articulating what is in the hearts and minds of countless numbers of his countrymen who are unable to or do not wish to express what they are thinking. It is a theme that conservatives and patriots of other countries can sympathize with as well.

Do not be fooled by the subtitle of the book into thinking that something huge is supposed to happen in the year 2025. The subtitle is an allusion to an essay by a Russian dissident who in 1970 predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. The predicted event which looms large in this book is actually scheduled for the year 2041. That is the year when, according to the most recent census bureau extrapolations, white Americans will become a minority in the United States.

The bulk of the book, from chapter four “The End of White America” to chapter nine “’The White Party’”, examines the question of what this will mean for America. The titles of both those chapters are quotations by the way, although only the second one uses quotation marks. The first borrows its title from an essay by Vassar professor Hua Hsu and the second from a gaffe by Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean. They seem to have been chosen to deliberately provoke the ire of the sort of people who think that emotional accusations of “racism” are a more appropriate response to people who do not consider multiculturalism and diversity to be unqualified positives than actually answering their questions and arguments.

The idea that a great deal of diversity and the absence of an ethnic core make for a stronger society is one of the sacred cows of the post-WWII, post-Civil Rights Movement, post-European colonialism/imperialism, post-apartheid South Africa world. There are no rational reasons to believe it and there is a great deal of evidence which contradicts it. When someone points out the lack of correlation between the idea and the real world that person is like the child in Hans Christian Andersons’ fairy tale who points out the obvious fact denied by everybody else that the emperor is running around buck naked.

This is what Mr. Buchanan does in Suicide of a Superpower. The attempt to transform a country from a country founded by and for a particular people with a particular language, culture, and religion into a country for all peoples of all languages, cultures, and religions, while remaining a stable, united, society with just laws protecting its citizens’ rights and liberties, is an experiment that has never been attempted before. There is little evidence to suggest the experiment will succeed and much to indicate that it is doomed to fail.

The impending demographic doom of white America has been brought upon by a combination of low fertility and high immigration. The decline in fertility resulting in rapidly aging populations that are not reproducing themselves is not strictly an American phenomenon and in chapter five we learn about how it is affecting other countries such as Russia, the UK, Germany, Israel, Japan and South Korea. Some of these have opted for high immigration like the United States. Others, like Japan and South Korea “appear prepared to accept their fate, a dying population and declining nation, rather than adopt the American solution: replacement of her departing native born with millions of immigrants.” (p. 169)

The American solution is no solution at all. In chapter nine, entitled “The Triumph of Tribalism”, Mr. Buchanan begins by borrowing a thesis from a 2008 Foreign Affairs article by Jerry Muller which challenged the conventional belief that the history of the 20th Century was one of nationalism being superceded by transnationalism after it led to the devastation of the two World Wars. The peaceful coexistence of the European powers after WWII, Muller argue, was not the result of the eclipse of nationalism but of its goals having been fulfilled. Ethnonationalism has actually been on the rise throughout the 20th Century.

Mr. Buchanan then walks us through the history of the 20th Century showing how this has been the case. From the ethnic conflict in the Balkans which ignited the first World War and started up again the moment the Communist regime in Yugoslavia fell, through World War II and the crisis in the Middle East, the renewed tribalism and nationalism in Africa and Asia after the end of European colonialism, to the nationalist movements that brought down the Soviet Empire, ethnonationalism has been a consistent factor in the history of the world in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

What this suggests is that the large-scale importation of immigrants from ethnic backgrounds widely different from both your own and from each other with no program whereby to assimilate them into a common national identity such as was signified by the “melting pot” metaphor in earlier waves of American immigration will not have the result of producing a stronger nation but of balkanizing your country. The tribal nature of mankind is the final unanswerable refutation of the idea that “diversity is our strength”, which Mr. Buchanan had ably debunked in the preceding chapter “The Diversity Cult”.

Mr. Buchanan does not just debunk the diversity myth though. He asks the question we are forbidden to ask:

Is ethnonationalism a genetic disease of mankind that all good men should quarantine wherever it breaks out? Or is this drive of awakened peoples to create nations of their own where there own kind come first a force of nature that must be accommodated if we are ever to know peace? (p. 327)

He reminds us that while ethnonationalism produced horrors “from Nanking to Auschwitz to Rwanda” it also “liberated the captive nations and brought down the ‘evil empire’”. It “was behind the pogroms of Europe but created the nation of Israel” (contrary to the lies Mr. Buchanan’s opponents constantly throw at him he clearly does not intend the former to be the good and the latter the bad in this juxtaposition).

Within all of this there lies another question, asked indirectly here, but which more and more people have come to ask in the last couple of decades. If ethnonationalism is tolerated among other peoples – and it is - why should it be forbidden to white ethnic groups?

Whatever the answer may be, Mr. Buchanan is surely correct in writing:

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. (p. 328)

In today’s climate in which the leftist orthodoxy on cultural and ethnic matters that is known as “political correctness” is rigidly enforced, this is not the safe way to write a book about the impending perils which face your country. Suicide of a Superpower is about more than just ethnicity, immigration, and race. It is also about the economic crisis, the ultra-expensive military fiascos in the Middle East, and the moral and spiritual decline of America. There is even a chapter about the problems the Roman Catholic Church is facing worldwide.

The demographic crisis of America is the ongoing theme of six of the books eleven chapters however. While it may not be a safe topic it is a necessary one. Countries can survive huge military disasters. Countries can survive economic collapses. They cannot survive the loss of a central ethnic identity. A country is more than just a set of laws written on a piece of paper. Its political and legal institutions rest upon the foundation of a people with a shared history and identity which binds them together as a community and a society. When that is gone those political and legal institutions cannot stand.

(1) Variations of this phrase occur at a number of spots in this book. Although I have placed it in quotations it is not intended to be an exact quote of any one of them but an approximation of all of them.

The Suicide Cult

On November 17, 1978 members of an American religious cult known as the “People’s Temple” who a year previously had followed their leader, Jim Jones, to a commune in Guyana committed suicide en masse after members of their group murdered an American congressman. In the decades since the incident it has come to take on cultural significance as a symbol of the dangers of uncritical groupthink. Variations of the now familiar phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid”, used to urge people not to blindly follow the crowd or some charismatic leader, are a reference to the poisoned communion which brought the sect and the lives of its members to an end.

Communities and societies, like individual persons, are alive, and like all living things in creation, can die. To remain alive, an organism must be constantly regenerating itself, growing new cells to replace the old ones that are dying. This is true of a society as well. The cells that make up a society, its people, are constantly aging and dying. For the organism that is a society to survive it must replenish those cells. It must be constantly reproducing itself.

Note that I said “reproducing” not “replacing”. Today, through modern science, we can extend the lives of people by replacing entire organs with transplants or prosthetics. Our ability to do so is not unlimited, however. Suppose we were to develop prosthetic equivalents of every organ in the human body. We would still not be able to keep a man alive indefinitely by replacing all of his organs. If we were to attempt to do so, then at some point, we would actually kill the man rather than extending his life. Where the line is to be drawn is difficult to say, exactly, but if we keep replacing organs, until no natural organs are left, and it is just 100% prosthetics, even if they are working perfectly, you will have a robot and not the man you started with. That man will be dead.

This is true of a society as well. For a society to be a real, living society, it must reproduce itself. The present generation must be descended from all previous generations and all future generations must be descended from the present generation. This is true generally speaking. A society can survive having some of its members leave and join other societies. Likewise, a society can bring in new members from other societies and incorporate them into itself without losing its identity and dying.

At some point, however, a line exists. On one side of the line, a society is alive and healthy, and reproducing itself. Some people leave, some people move in, but the general sense that the society today consists of the descendents of past generations of the society and the ancestors of future generations of the society is not compromised. On the other side of the line, the society has ceased to reproduce itself and is relying entirely upon immigrants to replace its aging and dying members. This is a society that is dying. It is dying because it is replacing itself rather than reproducing itself.

It is difficult to say exactly where this line is, but it is also not necessary that we identify its exact location. A healthy, thriving, living society, is not interested in getting as close to the line as possible without crossing it.

Western societies today are not healthy societies. Western countries experienced a huge drop in fertility and birth rates over the course of the twentieth century. This was briefly interrupted, by a baby boom which began immediately after World War II and which extended into the mid-60’s in most Western countries, and in some as far as the mid’70’s. Following this boom, however, fertility and birth rates dropped below the levels needed to sustain a population and have remained dangerously low ever since.

In this same period the governments of Western countries have implemented liberal immigration policies. A country with a liberal immigration policy accepts considerably larger numbers of immigrants than a country without a liberal immigration policy would. A country with a liberal immigration policy will also accept far more immigrants from cultures and populations radically different from its core culture and population than a country without a liberal immigration policy. Indeed, a government with a liberal immigration policy, although it will nominally be a non-discriminatory policy, may actually encourage immigration from cultures and populations that are further removed from its core culture and population over immigration from cultures and populations that are closer to its core culture and population.

When a government implements a liberal immigration policy in a period of dangerously low fertility this indicates that a society has moved away from reproducing itself and towards replacing itself. It has started to commit suicide.

During this period of low fertility and high immigration, several movements and ideologies have sprung up encouraging Western societies to embrace aspects of this culture of death. The sexual revolutionaries sought to separate sexual intercourse from any and all sense of social responsibility and place it entirely within the self-enclosed sphere of personal physical pleasure. They were encouraged by the development of new and more efficient contraceptive technology. Then the feminists attacked society’s promotion of the wife/mother role for women as “patriarchal oppression” and demanded that society eliminate gender roles. This went hand-in-glove with the promotion of abortion on demand, for if women were not able to terminate pregnancy at will, all talk of eliminating gender differences and producing either an purely individualistic or an egalitarian society was meaningless. Then the gay rights movement came along and demanded that society affirm rather than discourage same-sex eroticism.

What all of these ideologies and movements have in common is that they place the physical pleasure or the emotional “fulfillment” (or some such nebulous concept), of the individual or a group within society, over the good and even the survival of society itself. They are all also manifestations of the general ideology known as liberalism.

Liberalism’s orientation towards death can be illustrated by comparing its positions on capital punishment and abortion. Liberalism tends to produce minds that are opposed to capital punishment but which favour abortion being readily available and even paid for by the state. Now, liberals come to each of these positions from separate chains of arguments which to them appear to have no connection with each other. A connection is there nonetheless which is plain to see.

Capital punishment upholds the sanctity of human life. It is reserved, or should be reserved, for crimes on the level of first degree murder – the deliberate taking of human life in defiance of social and moral law. By imposing the death penalty upon someone who has cold-bloodedly, in a calculating fashion, taken the life of another human being in defiance of law, society is saying that human life is so precious, that only the life of the murderer is acceptable as just payment for the crime of taking it. (1)

Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy. It results in the death of the fetus. The fetus is unquestionably a human life. The moment it’s father’s sperm and mother’s egg united to form a single cell, it possessed a complete set of human chromosomes making it fully human. Immediately, the process of growth through cell-division was started. It was fully human and fully alive. The fetus has not committed a crime that demands societal retribution in the form of death. Nor is the fetus an aggressor the killing of whom can be justified by self-defense. In the majority of cases abortions are committed because pregnancy imposes either a hardship or an inconvenience upon the parents of the fetus.

Allowing human life to be terminated for those reasons cheapens human life. So does the abolition of capital punishment. Liberalism is consistent in its low regard for human life which goes hand-in-glove with its embracing of societal and civilizational death.

The connection between liberalism and the death of the societies that make up Western civilization has been discussed in the past. The best treatment of the subject was probably James Burnham’s Suicide of the West which was originally published in 1964. (2) In this book Burnham described liberalism as the “ideology of Western suicide”. He did not mean by that that liberalism was an ideology created with the goal of bringing about the death of Western civilization. Rather he meant that liberalism served to rationalize after the fact the self-inflicted mortal wounds of Western societies.

Our focus for the rest of this essay will be narrower than liberalism in general. We will be looking at a specific ideology and movement within liberalism which has provided the other liberal ideologies and movements mentioned above with the rhetorical weapons and conceptual framework with which to make their arguments and which has also long served as a shield to protect the replacement-over-reproduction trend within our societies from criticism. This ideology/movement is the suicide cult of Western society.

The ideology/movement in question is anti-racism.

Before proceeding to examine anti-racism’s relationship to Western societal suicide we will first have to carefully define what is meant by anti-racism. To avoid confusion the first step in defining anti-racism will be to make clear what we do not mean by the term anti-racism.

The first distinction to be made is between anti-racism and non-racism. Anti-racism is not the same thing as non-racism. Anti-racism and non-racism are both terms which are defined negatively in reference to “racism”. Non-racism, however, is neither an ideology nor a movement. A person who is a “non-racist” is just someone who is not a racist. To be an anti-racist requires more than that, it requires active opposition to racism.

There is a sense in which everyone who is opposed to racism is an anti-racist. For the purposes of this essay however, we will be using a narrower definition of anti-racism. Another distinction needs to be made and that is between the person legitimately opposed to or even outraged at actual racial injustice and racial violence and the person we are calling an anti-racist.

There are two main differences between the two. The first, is that the “racism” an anti-racist actively opposes is a much broader category than actual racial injustice and racial violence. The second is that someone legitimately opposed to racial injustice and racial violence is opposed to these things no matter who the perpetrators are and who the victims are. Anti-racists, on the other hand, consistently oppose any expression of group solidarity on the part of one racial group no matter how benign while overlooking significant racially-motivated violence directed against members of that same group. The racial group in question consists of people groups descended from those who in classical antiquity were the Greeks, Romans, Germans and Celts, that are European in origin and who are most often just called “white” people.

So anti-racism is not just non-racism nor is it to be equated with opposition to actual racial injustice/violence. What is it then?

Anti-racism is the idea that injustice and violence towards people of other races is the inevitable result of believing mankind to be divided into races and treating race as being more than just a trivial difference between people. To see oneself as being a member of a race and other people as not being members of that race is the racism which anti-racists oppose. They insist that we see ourselves as individuals who are members of the human race and to attach no importance to groups intermediary between the individual and the species. To attach importance to such groups, the anti-racist declares, creates divisions which lead to injustice and threaten the future of humanity. Therefore, racism, is an evil which must be eliminated through extensive measures including the use of government power aimed at eradicating all sense of racial identity.

At least if you are white. Anti-racists have no objection to racial consciousness, identity, and solidarity on the part of other racial groups. When was the last time you heard of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People being denounced as a racist organization?

Anti-racism is one of many errors that arise out of liberalism’s root error. The core of liberalism is the idea that human beings are basically and essentially good therefore the evils which are manifest everywhere in the real world must be caused by something outside of human nature. If we can only identify the causes of evil and eliminate them, the liberal believes, we will achieve a just society, a paradise on earth.

In World War II racial violence was escalated to an extreme level. The horrors that Allied soldiers discovered in the concentration camps of the Third Reich as they liberated occupied Europe were photographed and filmed for the world to see and as the story came out of what had occurred there people were shocked, appalled and disgusted.

The liberal mind, presented with such glaring evidence of the falsehood of its most foundational belief, the goodness of mankind, desperately searched for an origin outside human nature. It latched on to the concept of “racism” as its explanation. Hitler had been famous for his theories of Aryan racial superiority. They were foundational to the ideology of the Third Reich. Therefore, the liberal mind concluded, racism is the cause of atrocities like those committed by Hitler and will always lead the racist to commit atrocities like Hitler’s. Racism must therefore be eliminated for society at all costs.

There are several problems with this idea.

First of all, its basic presuppositions are false. Evil does have its origins in human nature. Attempts to eliminate evil by political and social solutions aimed at the elimination of “causes” of evil that are external to human nature will always fail. The only way to eliminate human evil through such means is to eliminate human beings.

Secondly, the theory does not fit the facts it seeks to explain. Hitler believed in white supremacy – but so did Sir Winston Churchill, and indeed most, if not all, of the leaders of the Allies. Before, during, and after the time period in which Hitler was committing his atrocities, Joseph Stalin was committing even greater atrocities.

Finally, the anti-racist theory itself becomes a justification for injustice against two different groups of people.

First, it is a justification for injustice against those who are labeled “racists” by the anti-racists. People generally do not apply the label “racist” to themselves. It must therefore be attached to them by others, by the anti-racists. The label itself creates a stigma resulting in a presumption of guilt against the person labeled a “racist”. If the person denies being a racist, the anti-racist replies “all racists deny being racist, therefore you must be a racist”. People who have been accused of racism in Canada alone have been charged with violating “hate speech” laws, subjected to long inquisitorial trials before the Human Rights Tribunal, issued life-time gag orders, fined thousands of dollars, had their homes and property vandalized, had their persons’ violated, had their children taken away from them, been subjected to harassment, stripped of their jobs and careers, and turned into social pariahs. The treatment a “racist” receives at the hands of the anti-racists shows some remarkable resemblances to the treatment Jews, gypsies, and others received at the hands of Nazi Germany.

Secondly, it is a justification for injustice against the various ethnic groups that are collectively referred to as “white people” and particularly against specific groups within that broader category that are particularly associated with “racism” in the mind of the anti-racist – groups such as Southern whites in the United States, Germans, and Afrikaners (South African whites). Countless examples of such injustices could be discussed but there is one major injustice that overshadows all others. Namely that anti-racism requires that people groups within the category “white” commit collective suicide and disappear from the earth by replacing themselves with immigrants rather than reproducing themselves.

To restate our definition of anti-racism it is the idea that racism is the recognition of the existence of races within humanity and the attributing of significance to the category of race, that racism leads inevitably to horrible racial injustice, and that therefore racism is an evil to be eliminated through repressive government measures if necessary. Anti-racism also refers to the movements and organizations which act upon that idea.

To say that anti-racism, as described above, is the suicide cult of Western civilization is not to say that anti-racism is the cause of the factors contributing to Western suicide. It would be absurd, for example, to argue that anti-racism is the cause of low birth rates and low fertility among Western societies. It is, however, foundational to several of the ideas which serve to justify, if they are not themselves the cause of, anti-natal behavior. Feminism, which encouraged women to place careers ahead of motherhood, is an anti-natal movement which borrowed many of its concepts from anti-racism.

While anti-racism is not the cause of low birth-rates and may not be the primary cause of Western governments having adopted policies of multiculturalism and liberal immigration, it is certainly a justification invoked for the latter policies. More importantly, it prevents those policies from being abandoned.

How does anti-racism do so?

One way is by providing officials who don’t want to change those policies for whatever reasons with an easy means of justifying their actions and smearing their critics. “You don’t like what we are doing? You must be a racist!”

Another way, related to the last one is by stifling political discussion and marginalizing people and organizations that seek immigration reform and an end to multiculturalism. Even if the spokesmen for an organization seeking a more restrictive immigration policy and an end to multiculturalism express themselves in irenic tones and try to make a positive case for their people that does not reflect negatively on other people groups, the anti-racists will seek to marginalize the organization. The organization that is trying to argue its case positively will be condemned as a “hate group” by anti-racists who certainly do not disguise the loathing they feel for the organization, its leaders, and members, and anyone who happens to agree with it.

The anti-racists will justify this by explaining to us that “racists” speak in code language. For this reason, they must be marginalized, and their words banned from public forums where everybody has easy access to them, such as the internet. Otherwise uninformed people might be misled by them. People should only have access to the thought of “racists” as carefully filtered through anti-racist “experts” who understand the code language. Otherwise we might hear a “racist” say something like “white people have rights too” and think that that is a reasonable position without realizing that it is an “old canard” that really means that all other people should be enslaved or slaughtered.

There is one more way which we will consider in which anti-racism prevents the suicidal policies of western societies from being reversed. That is through instilling in us, from our earliest childhood, the idea that “race is only skin deep” and that is a great evil, if not the greatest of all evils, to treat people differently because of something like race. This is what makes anti-racism’s marginalization technique so effective and it is carried out with the full cooperation of the government, media and educational system.

If all the public schools, and public service announcements, and diversity and sensitivity seminars, were doing was telling us that we need to treat everybody fairly and justly, regardless of their race, there would be no problem with it. Instead, however, they are telling us that treating people justly means treating them the same and they are telling us that race is only a matter of skin color. Both of these things are falsehoods.

Note carefully that there is a difference between the idea that we should treat all people fairly and justly and the idea that we should treat all people the same. A person should be fair and just to both his father and to a complete stranger. That does not mean that he should treat his father and a complete stranger in the same way. Indeed, because of a man’s relationship with his father, justice demands that he treat his father differently than he would treat a complete stranger. Thus the idea that treating people justly means treating them the same is a falsehood.

So is the idea that race is only a matter of skin color. In fact, not only is race more than skin color, skin color is not even essential to the meaning of the word race.

The English term “race”, when applied to human beings and not used to mean the sport of competitive running or an election campaign, comes through a French derivative, from the Old Italian word “razza”, which refers to lineage, ancestry, or stock. Race, when applied to people, refers to a line of biological descent. We use it this way in a number of sense. Sometimes we speak of the entire human species as “the human race”. What this expression means is that if we go back far enough, all human beings are descended from the same original stock.

Another use, one which is now rather archaic, is to refer to a particular family’s ancestors as it’s race. “The race of the Smiths” or “The race of the Joneses” would be examples.

The use however, that is most relevant to discussions of racism and anti-racism, is to refer to large human populations whose descent from a common ancestral stock is indicated by a set of shared physical characteristics which is common to the members of the population and which distinguishes them from other people. Two things should be noted about this use of the word race.

First, it is a set of characteristics, and not one particular trait like skin color that distinguishes one race from another. A dark-skinned Australian aborigine might share the same skin color with a man from a sub-Saharan African tribe. They are not of the same race, however, nor would the albino son of either of them be of the same race as an Englishman or a German.

Secondly, even here, it is common ancestry that is the essential meaning of the word race. The physical traits associated with race are only racial insomuch as they indicate common ancestry.

It is important that we grasp this. The groups of people that we call races, are races because they are descended from a common ancestral group, not because they have distinct physical characteristics. The reason members of a race have distinct physical characteristics in common is because they are of a common stock. It is ancestry that is the most important part of the meaning of the word race.

Ancestry, however, is not something trivial like skin color. Anti-racists wish to trivialize. Hence their reducing race to its most trivial accident and speaking of it only in terms of skin color. They wish to eliminate any sense of loyalty to a group that is grounded in that group’s shared ancestry. Such loyalties stand in the way of their vision of a world where the individual’s only loyalty is to mankind. Therefore, they tell us from an early age that race is inconsequential that it is not important because it is only about skin color. We believe them because we recognize that group loyalty based upon something as shallow as skin color would be incredibly silly.

Our acceptance of their doctrine, however, hinders our forming a proper, natural attachment to our own people, even though such an attachment would not be based upon skin color but upon something far deeper. The anti-racist switch-and-bait has proven to be a remarkably effective brainwashing tool. We have drunk deep from the poisoned chalice containing their Kool-Aid.

Ordinarily, when he does not have something like liberal, anti-racist ideology being shoved down his throat since he was in diapers to hinder him, a man will form an attachment to his people. This attachment, this sense of loyalty, develops out of his first natural affections which arise out of relationships. He grows to love his parents and his siblings, to form bonds with his friends, to develop various relationships with his neighbors, and all of thee relationships form the basis of his loyalty to his community as a group. From this loyalty to his community his patriotic affection gradually spreads to encompass his country and his people. It is only out of such love for his own that any real love for mankind as a whole can arise, as Edmund Burke pointed out years ago.

The people, for whom a man develops this patriotic attachment, is not his “race” in the sense in which I have defined the term above. That meaning of the word “race” is only really useful for scientists and political ideologues. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to call the people which is the object of a man’s patriotic affections his “nation”. A “nation”, like a race, is a people group with a common ancestral identity. A nation, however, is smaller than a race, which is a continental population, and a nation is distinguished from other nations by cultural distinctives – a common language, usually a common religion, common customs, habits, manners, dress etc.

This kind of patriotic affection for one’s people, for one’s nation, rooted in one’s first affections for ones family, friends, neighbors and community, built upon a foundation of blood, relationship, and shared experiences is the lifeblood of an organic society.

The racialist and nationalist ideologies and political movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries committed the fatal error and the deadly sin of ignoring the source of patriotic affection and demanding that race and/or nation replace family, home, friends, kin, neighbors, community and even God in people’s hearts and affections. Human loyalty and affection have to start with the small and grow towards the big. When you put the nation or race ahead of the family and community in the chain of affection you develop unnatural affections which breed fanaticism.

Liberalism in its anti-racist manifestation commits the same error and sin on a much larger scale. It demands that our first loyalty be to all of Humanity. All other loyalties are regarded as threats and hindrances to the goal of eliminating hatred and injustice and finding salvation for mankind through the establishment of a unified, just, peaceful, new world order. This sort of fanaticism demands a sacrifice – the sacrifice, through suicide, of the white peoples and Western societies in this world.

Perhaps it is time we put the Kool-Aid down.

(1) Having said that, I shudder to think of the power of life and death being in the hands of modern liberal governments composed of democratically elected politicians and administered by self-righteous bureaucrats. On principle, capital punishment is necessary for justice. Modern governments are the wrong kind of governments to administer justice. This is a subject for another essay however.

(2) James Burnham. Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. The John Day Company: New York, 1964. Although this book stands on its own it can also be read as part of a series that began with the author’s The Managerial Revolution and continued in his The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. A good profile of the author and overview of his thought can be found in James Burnham by Samuel T. Francis, published as part of the “Thinkers of Our Time” series in 1999 by The Claridge Press in London.