The first time I read Michael O’Meara’s “White Nationalism is Not Anti-Semitism,” published in October 2, 2011 at Counter-Currents, it confused me: On the one hand, O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic had made a profound dent in my thinking; on the other, by that time I still was under the impression that the Jewish problem was probably the main cause for the West’s darkest hour.
Now that I have read Tom Sunic’s latest book, extensively quoted in my previous post, I have finally made up my mind about that highly controversial O’Meara piece. In brackets I’ll offer my comments about that brief article originally written in 2010.
O’Meara wrote:
“White nationalism” is a much abused term.
Its defining tenet holds that European-Americans need their own ethnostate to prevent their destruction by the anti-white forces controlling the political and social systems of the United States and that such an ethnostate is the necessary precondition for re-asserting America’s European destiny. It is thus not an aspiration for racial supremacy or segregation, not a form of racial hatred or eugenic social engineering, but rather a movement of thought, akin to historic nationalism, which champions the New World’s “white nation.”
Relatedly, white nationalism has an important anti-Jewish facet because Organized Jewry is a powerful (some claim the most powerful) force compelling the present ethnocidal assault on European America.
This anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic facet, however, is but one aspect of white nationalism. The struggle—with ideas today, in the streets tomorrow, through force of arms in the end—to establish a European ethnostate in North America entails, by definition, resisting not just the alien forces threatening white life, but, more important, consciously affirming and asserting America’s European destiny.
As a critique of alien cultural distortion, anti-Semitism, then, may be a necessary part of the larger “national” struggle—but it is neither the aim of that struggle nor its essence.
A great many of those associated with white nationalism, however, not just fixate on the “inner enemy” to the exclusion of everything else, they tend to define their project in terms of the “Semitism” they oppose. The result, I contend, distorts or side-tracks white nationalism’s higher purpose.
* * *
If anti-Semitism is the natural “anti-body” that America’s cultural organism produces to defend itself, then to see white nationalism solely in its terms is to think that it is the opposite of the “body” it resists. This makes the “Aryan” the negative of the Jew, for anti-Semites assume not just a certain symmetry with their Semitic enemy, they inadvertently turn white nationalism into a sort of inverse Semitism.
[On this point I kind of disagree with O’Meara. As I pointed out in my essay-review of Kevin MacDonald’s second book of his trilogy, what we need is exactly a mirror-image of Judaism: National Socialism.]
More specifically, a Judeo-centric white nationalism promotes a strictly nullifying orientation in so far as it seeks to overthrow Jewish supremacy not on the basis of anything positive or native, but solely because of its destructive—“parasitic”—impact on white life. This negative orientation is supportable, though, only as long as its costs are ignored, for it leaves whites totally unconscious of what they are fighting for and, when exaggerated, fosters pathologies of another kind.
[One of the most infantile pathologies in the American white nationalist scene is the infatuation of many with ridiculous 9/11 conspiracy theories: “Mossad orchestrated the attacks!”]
A critique of Jewish power that serves white interest would inevitably go beyond negativity to stress the informing and transcendent values which Jewish interests (among other contending forces) threaten.
Judeo-centric white nationalism, however, rarely attains such levels and, as a dogma oblivious to every differing view, usually ends up discrediting the nationalist cause.
As such, this dogma knows the answer to every question before it is even posed—for every failing and misfortune we suffer is automatically assumed to be the fault of the Omnipotent Jew. No need, then, for laborious studies in history, culture, and political-social analysis—just “name the Jew” and everything is explainable.
[In spite of the fact that both William Pierce’s and Arthur Kemp’s histories on the white race constitute a literary treat, very few American white nationalists seem to have taken the trouble of reading them. Is this because Kemp’s and Pierce’s focus is not America?]
So positioned, it can’t see that Jewish power is aided, abetted, and made possible by the very principles undergirding America’s liberal order—that Jewish power involves “Aryan” compliance, and that this compliance, routinely venerated in America’s Low Church worship of Mammon, emphasizes quantifying factors indifferent not just to a man’s qualities, but to the “rights” of blood and spirit.
[I am not an American. But when I lived in San Rafael in California, my roommate Guy Palmer—no: I am not afraid of dropping names—told me that, although he professed no religion whatsoever, for him money was the closest substitute of religion. I was shocked.]
Worse, an inordinate number of Judeo-centric white nationalists tend to share the same antipathy to Europe (our Fatherland) as do the Jews and consider materialism, egoism, and democratic corruption, inherent to America’s liberal project, as something uniquely Jewish, and not, as the most cursory examination of the historical record shows, an organic offshoot of the liberal system created by Americans of European Christian (mainly Calvinist) extraction.
[Again, see Sunic’s most recent book.]
For this reason, I often wonder if obsessing about Jews doesn’t cause certain culture-distortions in those so involved and that the white nationalism of these obsessives neglects, as a consequence, all that is positive and life-affirming in our own project—naively assuming, as they do, that a solution to the Jewish problem is all it will take to ensure a future for white children in North America.
[Is it what makes them blind that a final solution to the Jewish problem was not enough for the inquisitorial Spaniards and the Portuguese? After all, they failed to ensure a future for Iberian white children in both the Americas and the Iberian peninsula itself.]
Totally oblivious, then, to the fact that America’s shallow, latently anti-European culture favors Jewish methods and Jewish concerns, these blinkered anti-Semites prefer to indulge in fairy tales about “cultural Marxism” and the Frankfurter bogey man—unconscious of or uninterested in the larger subversion.
Knowing only their caricature of the inner enemy, they also either ignore the outer enemy (the colored world), treat it as a friend, or consider it a mere adversary. The West’s 1400-year conflict with Islam and its various conflictual relations with the non-white world are thereby reduced to Jewish machinations, dismissed, in effect, as an actual danger to Europe’s destiny and to the True America born of Europe.
[Counter-jihadists have a point here, in spite of the fact that they’re blind to the Jewish question. Those who want to expand their voyages beyond the strait waters of “orthodox” white nationalism could start by watching Craig Bodeker’s interview of Srda Trifkovic as a previous step for becoming familiar with Trifkovic’s work on Islam.]
This unbalanced, all-consuming Judeo-centric white nationalism is above all politically timid, emphasizing Jewish machinations, but neglecting the ways in which the American project itself betrays our European destiny. It thus conveniently ignores the revolutionary changes that whites will need to make, in themselves and in the larger order, if they are ever to throw off the alien, anti-white forces governing the United States and resume their European destiny. In this sense, Judeo-centric white nationalism is just another variant of the prevailing country-club conservatism.
In sum, Jew-obsessed nationalism:
• is purely negative and potentially distorting;
• fosters a Manichaeism that neglects every other factor responsible for white dispossession;
• ignores that the culture of critique and other anti-white stratagems are inherent to America’s modern liberal order;
• neglects the outer enemy;
• threatens to turn white nationalism into an inverse Semitism;
• and, in the last instance, has no real idea of what white nationalists are fighting for.
♣
[In the heated comments section of the Counter-Currents thread, O’Meara criticized even further those who believe in the single Jewish cause for our problems. He said:]
I think their ignorance, reductionism, and resentment are a disgrace to everything associated with nationalism.
[O’Meara, by the way, is also the author of the essays “The Psychopathology of Judaism” and “Evola’s Anti-Semitism.”]
Kevin MacDonald, unlike his epigones, knows how to make an argument and support it with substantiating evidence. Nevertheless, his argument proves nothing (except his own intelligence), for with the same methods but in reference to different facts, I could make an equally convincing argument to “prove” that corporate capitalism (or the Cold War state, Catholicism, Protestantism, or a half-dozen other factors) were far more influential in legalizing the formal de-Europeanization of the American people.
[Isn’t it a shame that O’Meara is not presently sponsored, and that he has to do blue-collar jobs for a living? If American white nationalists were a little more responsible, the movement might count by now with a scholarly work that rivaled MacDonald’s paradigm in the sense of proving that capitalism and a form of evangelical Christianity enabled the empowerment of the Jews.]
I think it’s significant that in the years I posted at VNN [Vanguard News Network], I was less offended by the numbskull things said by obviously badly educated types there (who at least had the virtue of saying them with some wit), than I am by the numskull things said so often by so many middle class intellectuals associated with a site ostensively aimed at the higher IQ types [i.e., the commenters at the Counter-Currents webzine].
[This reminds me that the owner of a Jew-wise blog, whose working hypothesis is also that Jews are the main factor, has stated openly and unabashedly that he and his audience must focus on the US. This is exactly the wrong approach insofar as America is just the product of bad European history.]
A final comment.
To my critics: Misread my piece and make me into a philo-Semite if you like—that way you won’t have to abandon your virtualist understanding of things (which, I realize, is the normal, comfortable de-Aryanized approach favored in America’s Low Culture—the real source of our predicament).
To Greg: You know I’m not a New Rightist. I call myself a “revolutionary nationalist,” but my identitarianism is closer to the [European] NR than your appeasing anti-Semitism, which tries to couple that which cannot be coupled. If you don’t get this, your NANR [North American New Right—Greg Johnson’s term] is likely to end up in the same historical garbage can as Rockwell’s ANP and all the other pseudo-NS follies of the last half century.
