Posted on June 24, 2011

Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival

Samuel Francis, American Renaissance, March, 1995

The Oath of Horatii

It is all very well to say, as Richard McCulloch and Rabbi Schiller do in the February issue of AR, that racial separation is necessary for the survival of whites and the civilization whites have created. It is quite different to spell out exactly how separation could come about and be successful. Neither they nor most other advocates of separatism seem to offer much in the way of concrete proposals, perhaps in part because they know that racial separation involves problems that today are virtually insurmountable, and that until those problems are solved neither separation nor any other enduring solution to the racial crisis is possible.

I do not question the arguments for the desirability of separation that Rabbi Schiller and Mr. McCulloch have mounted. Even if the survival of whites as a people and a civilization were not threatened, I am willing to grant at least a pragmatic right of every self-conscious people to govern itself and to create and live within its own institutions — a right that liberal ideals of assimilation refuse to recognize despite their deference to the Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, I do question whether separation as Rabbi Schiller and Mr. McCulloch have described it can come about or even whether it should come about.

Racial separation means the relocation of the different races (let us limit the discussion here to the two main races in America, whites and blacks) either to areas of the country that would become politically independent and self-governing or to other countries. It can therefore take place in only two different ways: (1) as Rabbi Schiller seems to propose, through the establishment of “racially based nations within the territory of the United States,” “dividing the nation into racial zones” — in a word, the political breakup of the United States; or (2) through relocation of one race by its removal (voluntary or not) to some other territory outside the present United States. In either case, there are three problems: (a) Where is each or either race actually going to go; (b) How is separation going to be implemented; and (c) How are the separated races going to be induced to stay where they are once they get there?

If racial separatism is to be a serious movement and not just one more escape hatch for whites who refuse to deal with political and social reality, these questions will have to be answered. Avoiding answering them with responses such as, “It’s too early to tell how it’s going to happen,” suggests that separatism is just another fantasy for whites who refuse to face the threats to their survival.

Patriotic Loyalties

Rabbi Schiller’s proposal for breaking up the United States is one that whites ought not to embrace readily and at the present time will not embrace, since it involves surrendering large parts of their own country to non-whites. Most white Americans retain too much sense of nationality and too much allegiance to their country and their own communities to accept the proposal of giving up large parts of the United States to others (racially different or not). For defenders of the white race and its heritage to adopt this strategy at this point would simply increase their problems because it would place them in antagonism to the patriotic and nationalist loyalties of most of their fellow whites and would allow their enemies to brand them as literally “un-American.”

By embracing a strategy that involved breaking up the United States, not only would whites be abandoning their own country but also they would be forced to give up appeals to its history, its traditions, and its interests as a nation. We could no longer cite the words of Jefferson and Lincoln (and other American statesmen) on racial matters; we could no longer invoke the U.S. Constitution as an authority; we could no longer argue that immigration threatens our national interests because there would be no nation to have interests; we could no longer mention the settlement and conquest of North America by whites, if only because we would have confessed that that settlement and conquest have been failures from which we are now running as fast as we could. By consenting to national disintegration and separatism, in short, we would have to start all over in the project of constructing a culture, a country, and a political order. If only for practical reasons, it is much easier to stay with those we already have than it is to invent new ones that do not exist save in the mind’s eye.

Moreover, whites should not embrace this proposal because at the present time and for a long time to come, there is no need to. There may well come a time when partition is the only recourse left to whites, but that time is far off. The fact is that descendants of Europeans are still a large majority of the American population and still retain far more wealth, political power, and even cultural dominance than non-whites. If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow — by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on non-whites and encouraging a higher white birth rate, by refusing to be bullied into enduring “multiculturalism,” affirmative action, civil rights laws and policies; and by refusing to submit to cultural dissolution, inter-racial violence and insults, and the guilt that multiracialists inculcate.

Ending all of these threats to the white European character of the United States would involve no vast constitutional or political changes, but it would involve an uncompromising assertion of white will and identity. The fundamental problem with whites today will not be solved by giving away any more of what remains of their country and their heritage but by asserting their own will and identity in order to retain the primacy of their heritage in their own country. It is that lack of will and identity, that lack of racial and cultural consciousness, that must be remedied before we resort to any dissolution of the country (or indeed any other resolution of the racial crisis).

If national breakup is a plan that we neither can nor should accept, there remains the other kind of racial separatism in the form of the relocation of one race by its removal to some other territory outside the United States. Rabbi Schiller considers this contingency in his suggestion (and subsequent rejection) of white removal to Europe. He rejects this proposal, rightly, in reflecting that Europe would not particularly want another 100 million residents. While that is a powerful reason for rejecting the suggestion, there is another that is at least as compelling: However much they may deplore their accelerating dispossession, most whites might not want to jump ship from the nation they created, and live in countries where they have no roots.

Yet, if emigration to Europe is not practical for whites, emigration to Africa or other black majority regions is not practical for American blacks either. It is highly unlikely that very many black African countries would welcome large numbers of American black emigres and even more unlikely that very many American blacks would want to go. “Back to Africa” may have been feasible in the days of the American Colonization Society, when Africa was a diplomatic toy of European and American imperialism, but today, with independent and sovereign (however dilapidated and repressive) nation-states in Africa, mass migration there is not possible unless the African states were simply forced to accept it. Moreover, in the unlikely event that foreign nations were willing to receive large numbers of black American immigrants, none (except perhaps for other white majority nations) has the infrastructural capacity to assimilate them.

Maintaining Separation

Yet even if physical relocation (within or without the United States) were to occur, and even if it were voluntary on all sides, there remains the problem, which is hardly ever considered, of how the separated races would be induced to remain separate. Let us assume that Rabbi Schiller’s proposal has been implemented, that black and white “racial zones” have been established, and that democratically chosen representatives of both races have accepted such a partition. The brute fact is that there will still remain immense pressures for the breakdown of this separation — for the same reasons that the United States today finds itself practically unable to control its own borders. (These reasons, as I shall argue presently, are deeply rooted in the white race.)

Whites will want cheap labor, and many non-whites will want to supply it. If the black zone in any way resembles most of the black majority nation-states or American cities today (detailed accounts of which American Renaissance never fails to provide us), it will be unable to support itself, to control crime and social disorder, to supply elementary administrative services, or even to avoid the most brutal political repression. This kind of breakdown would undoubtedly generate both humanitarian and imperialistic designs in the white zone (as in Africa in the nineteenth century or Somalia and Rwanda today), but even if those designs were resisted, there would be other anti-separatist pressures in the white zones too.

Just as there would be immense pull pressure from the white zone for cheap labor, so there would be immense push pressure from within the black zone for emigration to the white zone. As the white demand for labor generated political and ideological forces favoring some immigration (you would see the replication of all the Jack Kemp-Julian Simon arguments that we now enjoy), the separation would gradually (perhaps quickly) dissolve. The fact is that the non-white world almost invariably beats a path to the white door, and the whites behind the door almost invariably open it. This is why there is immigration into this country and Europe today. This is why, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, there were some 100,000 illegal black immigrants every year. Because whites are almost always more economically successful than non-whites, non-whites almost always want to come in, and because the whites (aside from generosity and ideology) often seek cheap labor, they often let them come or even subsidize their coming. This, after all, is why there was an African slave trade.

The only possible solution to these problems, one that has always been possible but has never worked for very long, is simply for the white zones to maintain such a solidified and univocal racial consciousness that no non-whites are allowed to enter. But, unless we are able to rewrite the history of white civilization for these new white zones, casually omitting any legacies from liberalism, socialism, capitalism, or Christianity, it is almost inconceivable how that kind of racial solidarity could even come into existence.

The problems of separation are compounded by the geographical features of the North American continent: its lack of natural barriers that would serve as boundaries for autonomous political units or as obstacles to population movements, military invasions, economic integration, political and cultural absorption, etc. Europe, after all, has mountain ranges like the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Carpathians, a system of rivers, and various peninsulas that permitted the creation of geographically distinct nation-states. North America has nothing like these geographical features that would facilitate politico-racial separation.

But perhaps I exaggerate the willingness with which whites would compromise the founding principle of their separate entity. Assuming that a separate zone or state were established, would its existence not presuppose that its residents were sufficiently committed to white racial identity that they would not be tempted by the prospect of cheap labor or by the ideological pathologies that afflict us today? It is of course possible that such a racially solidified state could evolve, but on historical grounds it is highly unlikely.

White racial separatism presumably would center on race, pure and simple, as the basis of separation, and in all the history of the white race and its various civilizations there is no precedent for that degree of racial consciousness. Even the Confederacy did not make such a purely racial appeal but combined it (usually incoherently) with regional, cultural, economic, and political aspirations. Probably many Southerners did not seriously want to secede, or expect to remain out of the union for long, and virtually none of them thought of their new state as a racially pure nation. One of the few white Southerners who did advocate something like a racial nationalism, Hinton Rowan Helper, was forced to flee the South and take refuge in the North.

Nor indeed did the National Socialists, perhaps the most extreme racialists in history, rely on race to the degree to which a white separatist movement would. The National Socialists came to power only in part because of their racialist ideology; they also appealed to economic fears, anti-communism, and German nationalism. Only later did the Nazi government move more and more explicitly toward a purely racial doctrine as the basis of the state, and few Germans were ever committed to that doctrine.

A Thin Reed

The reason for the lack of any precedent for a purely racial foundation of a white state, society, or culture ought to be clear. An appeal only to race selects the thinnest possible reed on which to base a movement. Race, as it is understood today in scientific terms, is largely an abstraction, and while it serves to explain much about society, history, and human behavior, it remains too much of an abstraction to generate much loyalty or motivate much action. The skeleton of race acquires concrete meaning and generates concrete loyalties only as it takes on cultural and political flesh, as race becomes tied up with community, kinship, nationality, territory, language, literature, art, religion, moral codes and manners, social class, and political aspirations. It is precisely such accretions that convert the biological abstraction of “race” into the concrete category of a “people.”

I agree with Rabbi Schiller (and for that matter with Father Ronald Tacelli in an earlier issue of AR) when he writes that “so much of our civilization’s crisis goes beyond race.” While race is necessary for an explanation of the civilization of European man, it is not sufficient. If race were sufficient, there would be no problem. If racial (biological, genetic) factors were sufficient to sustain a people, it would never experience a decline as long as its racial integrity endured.

Thus, whites did not descend to their present pitiable condition because their racial purity was somehow diluted but because they conceptually surrendered their will and identity — which they did well before they began to surrender their heritage politically and materially. If race were sufficient, that conceptual surrender would never have taken place. The conceptual surrender is leading to a situation where the biological survival of the race is threatened, and if that occurs, then — because race is necessary, because no other race or people seems able to replicate or adopt the concepts on which white civilization is based — the conceptual surrender will not be remedied, and white civilization, the whole conceptual corpus, will die with the race.

Moreover, with all due respect to any innate sense of racial solidarity, we all know that that sense among most whites today is largely non-existent. Even if it developed significantly in the near future (and it does seem to be developing), there are a great many other factors to be taken into consideration in setting up a separate political order for whites.

To name only the obvious, would John Kenneth Galbraith, Bill Clinton, Earl Warren (were he still alive), George Bush, Bill Buckley, etc., be admitted into the white separatist enclave? All of them are undoubtedly white, but if you did admit people like these, you would soon have all the problems that made you want to separate in the first place. There would be other debates: How about Eastern and Southern Europeans? The Irish? How about Jews? Could Yankees come into a Southern white separatist state? If there were several white racial states, would one or some ally with non-white states against the white states? My point in bringing up all these questions is that it is idle to talk about racial separatism without (a) a widely shared and well defined concept of race to which virtually all whites would rigorously adhere and (b) equally widely shared and well defined concepts of other criteria in addition to race that would prevent replication of the same errors and flaws that caused the problems in the first place.

The conclusion to which we are forced is that race by itself — and therefore a state or zone constituted on a purely racial basis — is not sufficient either to sustain the kind of society most AR readers would want or to prevent the perpetuation of the poisons that have helped weaken and now threaten the survival of both white civilization and the white race. Racial separatism is therefore not a solution to the crisis the white race encounters. There must also be other, non-racial, cultural and political remedies in addition to an awakened racial consciousness. I have to say also that Mr. McCulloch’s argument for separatism does not persuade me either. No more than Rabbi Schiller does he offer any concrete considerations about actually implementing a separation or how to make the separation work. But there is also a larger problem with his point of view. Mr. McCulloch argues, based on analogy with what ecologists and sociobiologists have discovered about animal populations, that unless races, subspecies, or populations are reproductively isolated, intermixture and therefore racial extinction is inevitable.

I do not doubt the truth of this claim, but the point is that it is true on an evolutionary time-scale. When we are talking about whether human societies should be monoracial or not, we are dealing with a human, historical time-scale, and the evolutionary scale is largely irrelevant to the limited endurance of historical human societies. North America has in fact been a multiracial region for some 300 years now, a significant period of time in human history (about 10 percent of the known history of the European peoples) but insignificant in biological time. Despite a good deal of racial mixture in 300 years, there is no prospect of the extinction of either the black or white races on this continent because of mixture. The threat of white extinction is due to non-white immigration and high fertility coupled with low white fertility.

Moreover, I think Mr. McCulloch comes close to contradicting himself when he writes, on the one hand, that reproductive isolation “requires geographic separation” and on the other hand that “tremendous advances in transportation . . . have reduced the main obstacles to separation.” If transportation is so easy these days (as it is), how can geographic separation persist? My own view is that the advances in transportation technology tend to render geographical isolation almost impossible, and certainly they have immensely facilitated immigration into Europe and North America.

Separatism v. Supremacy

But there is also a deeper problem with the strategy of white racial separatism. I have the impression that at least some of its advocates support it because they think the alternative of white supremacy is simply unacceptable, that white separatism as opposed to supremacy sounds nicer, less threatening, less dominative, and may be more palatable to liberal orthodoxy. Moreover, I suspect that many who regard themselves as white separatists are unwilling or unable to assert a moral foundation for white supremacy and that in this respect they share, however unconsciously, the liberal and egalitarian abhorrence of any assertion of power, dominance, or hierarchy. Some (perhaps most) white separatists renounce white racial supremacy because they genuinely have ethical problems with one race ruling another.

In this respect, white separatism is somewhat analogous to neoconservatism, which also seeks to avoid invoking more radically anti-liberal ideas and values in order to make itself acceptable to the dominant liberalism. The flaw of both separatism and neoconservatism in these respects is that they do nothing to challenge liberal premises but try to work within the framework established by liberalism. Hence, neoconservatives are continually being dragged to the left by the implications of their own hidden premises. I expect something similar would happen to white separatists, especially as they tried to make alliances with non-white separatists. I already see tendencies toward this, specifically, an unwillingness to assert unequivocally that since the United States is a white creation, whites should not willingly accept its political destruction through separatism.

To put this problem of white separatism more bluntly, the history of the white race is one of conquest and domination of non-whites. This has been true since the prehistoric Indo-European invasions of Europe and the Near East. The tragedy of this history of conquest is that there have almost never been enough whites to avoid being absorbed by the conquered peoples, either racially or culturally. Only when whites have wiped out those they conquered or when the conquered non-whites were a small population did absorption by indigenous non-whites fail to occur. Even the Romans were eventually overcome by Asiatic populations.

One reason for this pattern of the conquered giving laws to the conquerors is, as I noted with respect to the probable breakdown of a white racial state, that whites need (or at least want) the conquered peoples — as slaves, cheap labor, concubines, etc. Hence, even the most racially conscious white states (the early American Republic, the Confederacy, South Africa) used or planned to use the labor of subjugated races, and eventually (if the regimes lasted long enough), those races overcame their masters, at least indirectly.

My point is that this urge to expand and conquer seems to be biologically rooted in whites, manifesting itself also in Spengler’s Faustian spirit of the West: science, architecture, mathematics, etc. The passivity and timidity of today’s whites are clearly temporary though suicidal aberrations, due to historical causes; not to consider them so is to deny one of the central characteristics of a people. White separatism, as some of its exponents describe it, because it would involve the deliberate dissolution of a white-created political and cultural order, appears to be radically at odds with this innate dynamism of the white race. Therefore, the concept of a separate white state composed of the fragments of a disintegrated and surrendered United States would not work and ought to be deeply repugnant to what I take to be an instinctual white proclivity.

My bet is that no sooner should a white separatist state establish itself than it would begin to import non-whites for labor and other forms of exploitation, and the whole history would begin to repeat itself. Moreover, my bet is that non-whites would eagerly lend themselves to this, as they have in the past, since the standard of living and political conditions in the white areas would be so much more attractive than in the non-white areas.

Racial separatism, then, does not impress me as a realistic strategy for the survival, let alone the flourishing, of the white race and any civilization it would be likely to build, at least at the present time. To summarize, it fails to identify any physical area for the relocation of either race; it fails to anticipate the likely pressures for recombination of the races; it relies almost entirely on a supposititious white racial consciousness that has no historical precedent and would be inadequate by itself, even if it existed, to sustain a real society, culture, or government; and it involves the deliberate surrender of part of a territory, political order, and civilization that were created by whites and remain theirs. Until the advocates of separatism can provide answers for these objections, I cannot see that what they advocate is anything more than a desperate and fantastic effort to avoid grappling with the real roots of our racial and cultural decline.

Nevertheless, though I am not convinced by their arguments, white separatists are correct that we do face what is probably the most serious and threatening crisis in our racial history, a crisis that, if it is not resolved in our favor, will almost certainly result in the loss of white control of the United States within half a century, the disappearance of white civilization, and eventually in biological extinction. If white separatism is not the answer, what is?

Reconquest

The answer is, quite simply, the reconquest of the United States. This reconquest does not involve any restoration of white supremacy in the political and legal sense that obtained under slavery or segregation, and there is no reason why non-white who reside in the United States could not enjoy equality of legal rights. But a white reconquest of the United States would mean the supremacy of whites in a cultural sense, or in the sense of what is nowadays called “Eurocentrism.” There are essentially three things that whites must do in order to carry out this reconquest of the nation and culture they have almost lost:

(1) Whites must formulate a white racial consciousness that identifies racial and biological endowments as important and relevant to social behavior, and their own racial endowments as essential to the continuing existence of Euro-American civilization. The formation of a white racial consciousness does not mean that whites should think of themselves only as whites, to the exclusion of ethnic, national, religious, regional, class, or other identities, nor that individuality should yield to the collective category of race. It means merely that we recognize racial realities, that we recognize that racial-biological endowments are necessary to certain kinds of human behavior (e.g., the political and civic behavior appropriate to stable self-government, the work habits and life-styles appropriate to a dynamic economy; the intellectual behavior that is necessary for science and scholarship, etc.) and that because these endowments are largely unique to whites, the behavior they make possible cannot be replicated by most non-whites.

Nor does the formation of white racial consciousness mean that we should conceive of ourselves only as biological beings to the exclusion of religious or metaphysical identities. Racial consciousness means that we add recognition of biological and racial factors to our traditional concepts of human nature and modify both our biological and non-biological conceptions of what man is, as evidence and reason dictate. It may be true that some traditional religious and metaphysical conceptions would not survive recognition of the scientific realities of race, just as some did not survive earlier scientific discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology.

But the formation of white racial consciousness does mean that whites would recognize themselves as a race and their racially based behavior as legitimate, and hence it would mean the end of tolerance for non-white assaults on white people and the norms of white civilization. Whites would simply no longer countenance non-white aggression and insults or the idolization of non-white heroes, icons, and culture; white children would be raised in accordance with what is proper to being white, and norms openly recognized as appropriate to whites would be the legitimizing and dominant norms of American society as they were prior to the 1960s. Racial guilt and truckling would end.

(2) Based on this racial consciousness, whites must counter the demographic threat they face from immigration and non-white fertility and whites’ own infertility. This means (a) an absolute halt to all future legal immigration into the United States, deployment of the armed forces on the appropriate borders to cut off illegal immigration, and deportation of all illegal immigrants (and perhaps many recent legal immigrants); (b) the end of subsidies for the non-white birth rate through welfare programs, obligatory use of contraception by welfare recipients, and encouragement of its use among non-whites, and (c) encouragement of increases in white fertility.

(3) Whites must correct the political and legal order to end the political power of non-white minorities and their white anti-white allies. This political effort would involve a radical dismantling of all affirmative action and civil rights legislation as well as a good part of the federal governmental superstructure that entrenches minority power. It also would require recovering an understanding of constitutional law that permits local and state governments to govern, and private institutions to function independently of government.

Under such an understanding, whites and non-whites would enjoy equality of legal rights in the sense of those fundamental rights listed in the very first Civil Rights Act of 1866: “the inhabitants of every race . . . shall have the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property, and shall be subject to like punishment . . . and no others.”

But, as the Northern enemies of slavery who drafted and enacted this language recognized, equality of legal rights, equality before the law, does not mean political equality, the right to vote, or the right to hold political office, let alone social and economic equality, nor the “right” to attend the same schools, to serve on juries, to marry across racial lines, to serve in the armed forces, to eat at lunch counters, to ride on buses, to buy a house or rent a room or hold a job, to receive welfare, to be admitted to colleges and universities, to take academic degrees or to be promoted.

All these are phony “rights” that have been fabricated through the corruption of our constitutional law and our understanding of it, and no citizen of any race is entitled to them. Under a proper understanding of constitutional law, states and localities could differ as to whether they recognized such “rights” or not, but the federal government would not, and the only legal rights that either the U.S. or state governments would be required to recognize and enforce equally would be those Blackstonean rights of personal security, personal liberty, and property mentioned above. Those citizens of either race who found these rights insufficient for the satisfaction of their ambitions would be free to depart. (For an exposition of the constitutional history and theory of this conception of rights, see Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Harvard University Press, 1977.)

In order to achieve these goals and the reconquest of the United States they involve, there must be an immense amount of cultural and intellectual reconquest beforehand, a long march through the dominant institutions and apparatus of power by which the incumbent elites exercise control over the state, the economy, and the culture of the United States. I have outlined the theoretical framework of such a long march elsewhere (see “Winning the Culture War,” Chronicles, December, 1993). Recent political developments encourage me to believe that such a movement remains possible and is indeed beginning, though the danger is that it will be captured and betrayed by agents of the incumbent elite.

However great that danger may be and however remote the chances of victory today may seem, it remains a strategy that is far more likely to succeed than the strategy of surrender that racial separatism involves. What white Americans must do is get on with ensuring that it does succeed before they lose their country, their heritage, and their posterity forever.