‘Continue to Labor Towards Those Sunlit Uplands’

Credit Image: © Michael Interisano/Design Pics via ZUMA Wire

Morris van de Camp is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents, where he writes mostly about American history. His essays and reviews are always insightful and are often a refreshing break from horse-race politics and cultural esoterica. In this interview — the first he has ever given — he discusses religion, self-improvement, South Africa, the Civil War, and more.

Chris Roberts: You are well-versed in history. What five works on America’s past would you consider essential for dissidents?

Morris van de Camp: I got interested in American history after reading an article in Boy’s Life Magazine about Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York. This would have been around the time that Prince Charles married Diana. Since then I’ve gone to forts, visited old battlefields, seen ghost towns, museums, etc. It’s been a lifetime of study. I probably made big advances around fourth grade when I discovered a series of history books that were written at the junior high school-level about historical events. One was called The Story of D-Day. I think they were published in the 1950s or so.

Fort Ticonderoga (Credit Image: Mwanner via Wikimedia)

So, the five most important American History works are:

1. Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer. This book shows that America’s regional differences go all the way back to English regional differences in the 17th century. There are other books that follow up and improve on this theme, but this book is the foundation.
2. Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson. The best Civil War historian is Bruce Catton, but Prof. McPherson’s book is a really good overview. I’d recommend this book to a foreign person who wanted to know about the Civil War. The Civil War is America’s greatest disaster and it is an important to study it. Perhaps the most interesting thing Prof. McPherson says is that Southern society was really not that unique. It was the Yankees who were unusual. Almost nobody else was building an innovative industrial society quite like theirs.
3. From Sea to Shining Sea, by Robert Leckie. This is a great overview of American expansion up until the Mexican War.
4. I’ll drift off here to talk about historical fiction. James A. Michener wrote some great stories about American history — and the history of others. The best American-focused one is Centennial. His historical fiction about other places that are outstanding are Poland, The Source, and The Covenant. I think The Covenant, about South Africa, is his best work overall. Colleen McCullough wrote an excellent series about the late Roman Republic in the 1990s too. Roman history is important.
5. The End of the Myth, by Greg Grandin. I wrote a review of it for Counter-Currents.

I try to write about some event in American history that helps readers come to a pro-white position and/or helps them understand the present. I wrote an article about King Philip’s War because that conflict is so much like modern dilemmas. The New England colonists had made a great many accommodations to the Indians before the conflict. There were white virtue signalers, and much Protestant purity spiraling, but race war ended all that. I won’t write an article about Lord Dunmore’s War. Virginians knew there would be racial trouble, so they captured the most important terrain feature — Point Pleasant, West Virginia — and then beat the Shawnee with superior firepower and numbers. It was just a question of tactics.

CR: Unlike most Counter-Currents contributors, you don’t write about philosophy very often. Why is that? Do you have any philosophers/philosophies that shape your worldview?

MvdC: I don’t have much formal education in philosophy. I took a college class in logic called “Philosophy 101,” but that was mostly categorical reasoning, very basic. I know Plato’s allegory of the cave. I’ll leave philosophy to the others and play to my strengths.

Jan Saenredam’s rendition of Plato’s allegory of the cave (1604).

CR: Just about every American spends a lot of time streaming movies and TV shows, and yet it’s often hard to find anything worth watching. Can you recommend anything?

MvdC: I think everything by Ken Burns is outstanding except for the series about baseball — too long, too boring. His movie about the Vietnam War is really good. While many will laugh at me, I’ll admit that I really liked Downton Abbey. There really are some good British TV shows.

Elizabeth McGovern, Hugh Bonneville, Allen Leech, Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and Fifi Hart in Downton Abbey (Credit Image: © Carnival Films / Album / Entertainment Pictures via ZUMA Press)

I also like the American Experience series that PBS does. Netflix did a good mini-series about the Afghanistan War called Turning Point: 9-11 and the War on Terror. Probably my favorite miniseries ever is now an oldie. It’s called Masada and starred Peter O’Toole, among other great actors. In Homeland (Iraq Year Zero), I got to see the war I fought from the other side’s eyes. That was illuminating.

CR: Do you think there is a historical model for the state white advocates are trying to build?

MvdC: I don’t know about ethnostates that other white groups want to set up. The Ukrainian situation is vastly different from America’s, which is different from Croatia’s, etc. I think in the United States there needs to be an accommodation like in Switzerland. Each native Swiss group has its own state and government. There is a large foreign population that comes and goes, but it doesn’t naturalize and lobby the Swiss to send troops to wherever. I’d really like to see the USA with a 90 percent-plus white population that identifies with the Anglo-Dutch-German founding stock.

CR: Where do you think the political correctness, racial egalitarianism, and anti-whiteness you so despise come from? The theories seem endless: atheism, the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, Marxism, feminism, the Boasian school of anthropology, Jewish influence, perverted Protestantism, Christian slave morality, etc.

MvdC: Before getting answering, I will critique the concept of Christian slave morality. It doesn’t matter what Friedrich Nietzsche said Christianity means. It matters what most people think it means and that means rejecting the statements of Jesus Christ in the New Testament about turning the other cheek or forgiving your brother seven times seventy. In most day-to-day circumstances I’ve found that forgiveness and being mellow are good. If someone makes you angry, walking with your six shooters down the main street to confront him at the OK Corral is usually not an option. Also, forgiveness can mean that you come to an accommodation with some other person and work together to solve a mutual problem. The other person might not even realize he offended you.

The Sermon on the Mount by Carl Bloch.

That being said, most political theories are a form of ethnic or racial warfare. It is obvious that Critical Race Theory is that. The Frankfort School, postmodernism, Marxism, and the Boasian school of anthropology are Jewish ethnic aims shrouded in a veneer of a universalist theory.

Much leftist thought isn’t just Jewish ethnic aims, though. The event that empowered destructive leftism was the French Revolution. The Frenchmen who started it really thought they were liberating all of humanity. There were even British MPs who supported it. So, leftism has a broad appeal. That’s the problem: Leftism is appealing until the danger is at your throat.

Perverted Protestantism is a big factor also. I’ve come to understand the Biblical concept of graven images since writing for Counter-Currents. If you put an image of something alongside that which is genuinely hallowed, many people will mix up the two. The abolitionist struggle was carried out within a Protestant framework and I think that putting sub-Saharans alongside genuinely sacred things produced “Negro Worship.” This idiotic pseudo-religion is why criminals such as George Floyd become saints.

Kelly Latimore’s painting Mama as seen in the Episcopal Church of Holy Communion in St. Louis, MO. (Credit Image: Kelly Latimore via her website.)

If you want to see Negro Worship caused by perverted Protestantism carved in stone, take a look at photos of the Anglican Cathedral in Zanzibar. Its alter is said to be where a slave whipping post once stood, and there are idols of enslaved sub-Saharans all around the grounds. It is graven images in action. On that note, Zanzibar was the scene of a massacre of Arabs by black Africans in 1964. So the witches covens at this perverted cathedral had a very negative and very real impact.

CR: Sam Francis admired Christopher Lasch, Gregory Hood reads CounterPunch, Paul Gottfried profits from Noam Chomsky. Do you have a leftist thinker or publication you learn from?

For the most part leftist thought leads to disasters, and many leftist writers are wrong about the facts, so if I start reading them, I usually put the book down. I do find that the Nation of Islam produces some good content. (But are they leftists and are they really Islamic?) Ta-Nehisi Coates is a pretty good writer. When doing research on an article about Hezbollah, I discovered that Hassan Nasrallah had many insightful things to say. There are some good white mainstream academics that write usefully about the history of white advocacy from a semi-hostile perspective. I am driven mad with frustration by mainstream academics who seem to try to not understand why people would be white advocates. They lock their car doors in bad neighborhoods, too. I just admit I do, and then argue for social policies that deal with reality.

Hassan Nasrallah (Credit Image: Khamenei.ir via Wikimedia)

CR: After Pat Buchanan’s failed presidential runs, most on the Dissident Right gave up on electoral politics and were focused on laying the groundwork for an ethnostate. Donald Trump shifted the movement back into politics. But now, after Mr. Trump’s many failures and the collapse of the alt-right, there isn’t a consensus on what to do next. What do you propose?

MvdC: I don’t think it is a good idea to stop building on Pat Buchanan’s works or even to call him a failure. I am old enough that I voted for Mr. Buchanan in the 1996 primary and didn’t vote for Bob Dole in the general. Since then, I’ve seen Mr. Buchanan’s ideas continue to build steam. Donald Trump was a Buchanan presidency without the Roman Catholic ideology. President Trump had several successes that we should not discount. He did secure the border, he did defeat ISIS, and he did raise awareness of trade issues and manufacturing problems. 

President Trump’s didn’t have enough qualified people who agreed with him who could fill cabinet positions. In my view, his greatest lieutenant was Stephen Miller, and he was pretty junior. We need to be the qualified people that a Trumpist/Buchananite type of President can rely on when such a president returns to the White House. It is up to us to become qualified so that we can step into that role when called upon.

Senior Advisor for Policy Stephen Miller looks on as President Donald Trump addresses reporters in the Oval Office of the White House after receiving a briefing from law enforcement on “Keeping American Communities Safe: The Takedown of Key MS-13 Criminal Leaders” in Washington DC, on July 15th 2020 (Credit Image: © Anna Moneymaker / CNP via ZUMA Wire)

What to do next? Metapolitics matter. We need to have a large body of intelligent work that argues the case for white advocacy. Things seem really bad now with the statues of Confederates torn down, the George Floyd riots, and other things like that, but often when human institutions seem their most powerful, the foundations have shifted and soon there is change.

I think you should work hard at whatever you are doing, be a good citizen, and support the cause to the greatest degree with which you are comfortable.

CR: When you think of “victory” what do you see?

MvdC:

1. I’d like to see the 1964 Civil Rights Act stuck down.
2. Immigration policy as it is needs to end. We can have a large population of foreign workers from Latin America that come and go, but they should be handled by the Department of Labor and given a ticket home after a certain time. I don’t want them abused, and I’d like to see the areas from Mexico to Colombia prosperous enough so that you don’t see migrant caravans of desperate people coming here. With that in mind, I doubt that Bolivia or Haiti will ever be functional, so guarding America from those migrants will never stop.
3. I’d like to see an industrial policy that brings back industry from Asia. We need to have trade arranged so that ordinary blue collar working whites can benefit from it — not just Wall Street stock jobbers.
4. The expansion of white numbers by natural birth in all parts of the world.
5. Re-segregate and de-feminize the military.
6. I’d like to see a migration of non-whites back to their homelands.
7. I’d like to see a re-evaluation of all of America’s alliances. We have security guarantees to many nations that give nothing in return. No further expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe.

CR: Do you have any final thoughts?

MvdC: I think we should consider supporting the Cape Independence Movement in South Africa. The western half of South Africa is totally different from the Johannesburg area and the eastern part. The Cape’s population is mostly Coloureds and whites. The majority speaks Afrikaans. The political and business elite tend to be English speakers.

Proponents of the Cape Independence movement attending a march. (Credit Image: Stuffy69 via Wikimedia)

Cape independence would establish something of a white ethnostate in South Africa and it would be the first time since the “civil rights” movement that any people in the greater Anglo world rejected Negro Worship by rejecting black rule. The positive ripples could change everything.

Giving South Africa over to Bantu rule was a disaster. I feel that it was caused by Negro Worship and lingering anger over the Boer War. An independent Cape wouldn’t be a white ethnostate in the purest sense and it would remain something of a caste society, but it would be much, much better than what is happening now.

CR: Free advice?

I have written many self-help articles for Counter-Currents — everything from when to fire a person to how to manage rental property. These articles have been written based on hard-won experience.

I’ll add that one really needs to discern that which is important from that which is trivial. There is some judgment and experience required to know which is which. I have an army buddy who clearly didn’t understand the difference and was killed in a preventable accident. I think about him often and wish now that I’d been able to convince him that he was focused on trivial matters.

To explain, when I was in the military, I got tasked with organizing a training event where artillerymen would get some infantry training. This was after 9-11, and we were on the cusp of the Iraq War, so it was clear to me that this training would be very important. Indeed, artillerymen did serve as infantry in Iraq shortly after all this happened, so this project was ahead of the curve.

I went to the operations office of the infantry battalion tasked with carrying out this training to start coordinating the details to make it all happen. It turns out the critical staff officer in the infantry — the “action officer” — was totally against the idea of the training. He held the infantry as an elite and couldn’t imagine artillerymen doing such a job. (He didn’t seem to realize that such a thing has happened many times before.)

There were other issues, too. This guy didn’t like the way the artillerymen were wearing the uniform — I won’t go into this in depth, suffice to say it was an issue. As a result of all of this, he didn’t do much to make this training go smoothly. During a meeting to determine transportation requirements, he got on his soap box, read regulations about the wearing of qualification badges, and obsessed over the trivial. When it came time to put troops and equipment on trucks, his battalion wasn’t ready and his boss had to scramble to resolve the situation.

I don’t wish to make light of his death at all, I was actually friends with this guy outside of this drama, so I’ll say only that he didn’t carry out basic safety procedures when maneuvering an armored vehicle and was killed when his vehicle struck a tree. When I got word of the manner of the accident, I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen him focus on trivial things in a harmful way before, so ignoring basic safety protocols while doing dangerous work was within the scope of his behavior.

Another story about trivial versus important is to look at a big airline crash in the Canary Islands in the late 1970s. The main airport was shut down due to a bomb and planes were diverted to a smaller airport. At that smaller airport, there was a collision on the runway after one aircraft crashed into another because the captain of one of the airplanes wrongly thought he was given clearance to takeoff. Hundreds of people were killed.

Remains of the two Boeing 747 airliners that collided on March 27, 1977 on the island of Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, killing 583 people. KLM 4805, taking off on the only runway of the airport, crashed into the Pan Am aircraft which was taxiing in the opposite direction on the same runway. The accident had the highest number of fatalities (excluding ground fatalities) of any single accident in aviation history (Credit Image: © EFE / ZUMA Press)

It turns out that captain was concerned that they would violate crew-rest rules and be forced to stay overnight on the Canary Islands, so he was rushing in an unwise manner. Obviously he was focused on the trivial. I’ll argue here that he should have recognized that due to the bombing, things were not going to go according to plan and he needed to focus on safely transporting his aircraft and passengers. Another way to phrase all of this is the “normalization of deviance.” Here is an article I wrote about that idea.

Otherwise, if one is embarking upon a campaign of self-improvement or improving one’s spiritual life you shouldn’t let setbacks derail you. If, for example, you wish to cut back on drinking, and the timing belt breaks on your car and you now have a setback, don’t reach for the six pack. Keep your hand on the plow. 

I’ve found that the older I get the more I realize the advice from the older, often unpleasant men I got as a youngster was sound. I’ve found that the minister who I thought was really un-charismatic and dull as a teenager was telling important truths about working hard and keeping on the straight and narrow. There was a colonel whom I worked for who was a real jerk — he was just like Henry Fonda’s character in Fort Apache — but when I deployed to Iraq I kept thinking about what he had said. The list goes on.

Henry Fonda in Fort Apache

In my career I’ve found that people who tell you when you’re doing wrong are often not lying but are being helpful. It is always uncomfortable to be criticized in this way, but it is never in your long-term interest to not see yourself as others see you. Your jokes at work might be too edgy, your clothes might be too tight or too loose. Your briefing might be too long or too boring or off subject, etc. If I get valid criticism I always adjust and get over any hurt as soon as I can.

Now, with that said, there is criticism that is invalid. An example of this is some sort of explosion when you raise an issue. I was once working on an engineering project and I asked a number of questions to the head of a different department. The department head started to get very angry with me. It turns out that they were behind and having major problems.

On the whole, criticism is gold. You don’t want to continue doing the wrong thing. Dress well, keep the weight off.

You should not try to fix broken people. There really are people who are hopeless and you should walk away from them.

I like to write articles about right-wing activists of the past. The most successful ones, be they in America or elsewhere, weren’t only nationalists. Their primary focus was a spiritual one. They were seeking the broad, sunlit uplands. They really thought about deep and eternal matters. They were prophets first, advocates for their people second. Here are three examples.

Gerald L.K. Smith

He was a Disciples of Christ minister who created a right-wing movement that was pretty successful in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After reading his material, I realized that his ideas influenced the Trump administration. For example, Smith proposed that the US should buy Greenland from the Crown of Denmark. President Trump proposed that. This idea is not irrational. The United States has more soldiers defending Greenland than Denmark, and it is an important piece of ground between the Russian bomber base at Murmansk and the East Coast. Additionally, Smith was suspicious of America’s alliance system and President Trump certainly felt same.

Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith addressing members of the press on August 7, 1936 in Washington, D.C.

Smith started his career as a minister and focused initially on moral issues. He got into radical politics only after Huey Long was assassinated. In his long career as an activist, he had his material translated into Polish – thereby paving the way for the Reagan administration’s support for Poland during the Cold War. He later created a publishing empire, and eventually made a dying small town in the Ozarks a tourist mecca by moving there and starting a museum and Passion Play. Basically, everything he touched turned to gold, though he was something of a Billy Sunday/Elmer Gantry sort of character.

Ian Paisley

I don’t really want to take sides in the Northern Ireland mess and I’m not an Ulsterman or whatever. (I was accused of this after I wrote an article about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.) The article grew out of research from an earlier article I wrote about Woodrow Wilson. After reflecting on the situation, I realized that the Unionists won the conflict. I decided to find out why.

After reading a great many books and watching a number of documentaries relating to the matter, I determined that the Unionists, as a group, made considerably better and more grounded decisions during the Troubles. The most effective Unionist was Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian minister. Paisley decided to become a minister while cutting peat and thinking about moral issues as a teenager. He didn’t get into politics until he was in his forties in the late 1960s. So Paisley had decades of experience in moral and spiritual thought before he organized a political movement.

Feb. 2, 1969 – Rev. Ian Paisley launches election campaign. Photo shows the Rev. Ian Paisley, accompanied by his wife walking at the weekend in procession through Lisburn, Co. Antrim to launch his campaign. (Credit Image: © Keystone Press Agency / ZUMA Wire)

Two of his rivals were Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. I realized that both of those men made poor decisions compared to Paisley and the Unionists. Neither man was able to use the IRA bombing campaign to effect a political change — attitudes only hardened. The bombing of a dog breeder’s convention in the late 1970s was so horrific that they lost the war because of it. It just took two more decades before they noticed. Meanwhile, the IRA’s security chief was a British informant and there were IRA murders of suspected informants all the time. You could say this was counterproductive.

I even watched McGuinness go to a mosque in Northern Ireland and virtue signal in one TV program. This was after 9-11. I found it baffling that McGuinness would do this after he had been involved in an insurgency partially based on sectarian issues. In his writings, Gerry Adams writes a great deal about leftist unicorns, apologizes for “gendered language,” etc. There is very little focus on the vast job of uniting Northern Ireland with Ireland. He has no thought about what to do about the Protestant Unionists if he won.

Hassan Nasrallah

I mentioned Nasrallah of Hezbollah above, and I’ll say here that the Shia of Lebanon had developed a considerable body of spiritual metapolitcal work prior to the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon in the early 1980s. The Hezbollah fighters eventually drove Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 and then fought them to a standstill in 2006. This was the first time that Arabs had driven the Israelis out of their territory and was a remarkable achievement.

So Smith, Paisley, and Nasrallah. All advocates for their people who thought hard about moral and spiritual issues prior to their involvement in politics. During their careers they all made decisions that led to successful outcomes. I think that there is something to thinking about moral and spiritual matters first and worldly matters second that create a framework of thought which leads to positive outcomes.

I’ll leave off this item by comparing the careers of two US Secretaries of State: William Jennings Bryan and Colin Powell. The former thought about moral matters and although he was never elected president, his ideas for reform were eventually adopted. Colin Powell was merely a ticket-punching affirmative action hireling that lied about weapons of mass destruction to get Americans to invade Iraq.

I’ve written more than 100 articles for Counter-Currents but I still don’t think I’ve matched the spiritual truths in George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord, or my Boomer parents who taught Sunday School, or T.S. Eliot, John Milton, William Bradford, John Wesley, and Pope John Paul II. But, I suppose there is nothing to do but continue to labor towards those sunlit uplands.