Which Way, Western Man?

The Ethnostate, Wilmot Robertson, Howard Allen Enterprises, 1992, 233 pp.

It is widely recognized that America is in decline but very few authors recognize the extent to which the loss of will among whites is central to that decline. Massive non-white immigration, schools that teach minority ethnic pride rather than facts, the refusal to recognize racial differences, constant attacks on Western civilization, racial hiring quotas — all are enormously damaging to our country and all continue only because whites let them continue.

Wilmot Robertson once believed that these corrosive forces could be brought under control and that the United States could regain the racial and cultural coherence that made it great. No longer. In The Ethnostate, he outlines a new form of statecraft that might emerge from the wreckage of 21st-century America. He argues that huge, multi-racial conglomerates are probably doomed, and that just as the Soviet empire has broken up along ethnic lines, so could Canada and the United States. In Mr. Robertson’s view, small, streamlined, homogeneous “ethnostates” are not only the last hope for keeping Western civilization alive in an increasingly non-white, anti-white world, they are also the best proving grounds for evolutionary improvement.

For Mr. Robertson, the goal of mankind should be not only the preservation of cultural variety but continual evolutionary advance. As he points out, there is a span of only 50,000 years between Neanderthal man and Isaac Newton. If the sun continues to burn for millions of years, there is no reason why our distant descendants should not be as different from us as we are from apes. Evolution requires genetic diversity and true diversity arises only in isolation. Therefore, any open-borders or one-world scheme will eventually lead to cultural and genetic uniformity, which would be both an esthetic and an evolutionary disaster.

If homogeneous ethnostates come into existence, their first duty would be to guard their unique genetic heritages against dilution and to improve upon them in every possible way. Such states would have the firmest possible foundations because they would “rest on the hard rock of genes and culture instead of the quicksands of proletarian myths, egalitarian fantasies and retouched history.”

15 Million People

The maximum size of Mr. Robertson’s ethnostate would be perhaps the size of Portugal, with a population no larger than about 15 million people. Scores of ethnostates could be scattered not only across America and Europe but around the globe. In the United States, where cities have become very mixed, neighborhoods could have firm boundaries and as much local autonomy as possible.

Political entities on such a small scale could be exceedingly homogeneous, and many strong arguments can be made for homogeneity. The most obvious is that race, religion, language, and culture are the natural fault lines along which peoples divide. Just as Japan benefits immeasurably because its people are similar to each other, ethnostates everywhere would enjoy a unity of purpose that is impossible in a pluralistic state.

Many of the advantages of the ethnostate are nothing more than the absence of the terrible conflicts that weaken the United States. A mono-racial society would have no need for the tremendous apparatus of race relations officials who make up one of our few remaining growth industries. It would not have to cope with the frustrations that result when differently endowed groups face the daily consequences of those differences. Its citizens would not have conflicting foreign loyalties that hamstring its foreign policy. It would have an authentic history rather than the formless mush or ethnic cheer leading that now pass for American history. It could honestly discuss eugenics without raising racial animosity. It would not have a justice system riven by racial loyalties or standards of physical beauty that inevitably value one race over another.

As Mr. Robertson points out, ethnostates could also be seed beds for a blossoming of culture. Elizabethan England, Renaissance Florence, and Weimar at the time of Goethe were exceedingly homogeneous, as were Japan and China in their periods of greatest cultural creativity. When it need not please every taste, art can be free and strong. Without morality art can degenerate into pornography, but in a coherent society without competing religions and moralities, the sense of duty or honor can likewise be strong.

Mr. Robertson points out that Government and the laws could be minimal in an ethnostate. People of the same stock and of similar expectations turn to custom and good manners to regulate their affairs. It is only in a society of competing customs and decaying manners that laws must intrude into every corner of life. A piling up of laws is a kind of moral prosthesis, and a sure sign that a society has lost its moral center.

For racial minorities as well, there would be great advantages in having their own ethnostates. They would no longer have to live by the standards of others, and could concentrate on their own progress rather than blame their failures on “racism.” Although some clear-thinking non-whites might realistically fear that their groups were incapable of maintaining civilized societies, others would prefer to be masters in their own homes rather than servants in the mansions of others.

All of these advantages of homogeneity are easily understood by anyone who has observed the United States. Mr. Robertson’s economic prescriptions for the ethnostate are more unfamiliar. It is true that just as different peoples build different cultures, they would build different economies. No model of central planning or free enterprise should be universal. However, Mr. Robertson suggests that for ethnostates to preserve their uniqueness, they should have as little foreign trade as possible. Striving for self sufficiency makes a people well rounded.

However, if the world were to split up into ethnostates no larger than Holland, autarky would impoverish them. As Mr. Robertson points out, cultural coherence and genetic diversity are more important than material wealth, but Holland’s domestic market would not support an automobile industry or even a basic electronics industry. Without foreign trade, most ethnostates would be very poor.

The Road to Dispossession

For the time being, however, what are the forces that keep whites in the United States and, to a lesser degree, those in Western Europe on the road to dispossession? One of the most obvious is widespread refusal to recognize that the races of man are not equivalent. Different races make cultures in their own images as much as they are made by their cultures. As long as whites are browbeaten into believing that race does not matter, they will continue to cooperate in their own marginalization.

Another potent factor is the widespread belief that homogeneous states would inevitably make war on each other. It is commonly thought that internal frictions are preferable to the immensely greater frictions of war and that the more nations resemble each other the less likely they are to fight. Mr. Robertson counters this view by saying that if any ethnically pure state made war on another it would be tantamount to genocide and that genocide is so terrible a crime no national leader would dare be charged with it.

Mr. Robertson’s more convincing argument is the one that justified the independent French nuclear force: A small nation can deter aggression from much more powerful nations as long as it can destroy the aggressor’s major cities with a few nuclear missiles. Whatever the merits of either of these arguments, if ethnostates were all that stood between whites and extinction of their culture, any but the most demoralized whites would choose the ethnostate even if it did increase the chances of war.

Another force that is pushing whites aside is their own altruism. No other race welcomes impoverished, diseased aliens into its midst or sends its soldiers around the world to feed people who cannot feed themselves. In Mr. Robertson’s view, this is partly the result of the excesses of Christianity, a religion, he says, which “can easily become an altruistic Trojan Horse.” Although altruism is a noble thing, he argues that it should remain within the ethnostate: “It should not be extended to fishing the muddy waters of other people’s problems.”

Another reason why the dismemberment of the United States seems farfetched is that political doctrine always lags behind reality. As Mr. Roberston points out, the Constitution and Bill or Rights were written by Englishmen for Englishmen in a sparsely populated nation of farmers. It was the product not only of its times but of the race and culture of its authors. How can we pretend that such a document still applies to a disorderly urban mix like New York City? Doctrine eventually catches up with reality, but if it lags too far, the adjustment may be violent, as the French kings, the Russian Czar, and the Shah of Iran all discovered. Mr. Robertson calls the veneration of dead ideas a kind of ideological necrophilia.

Though it is not yet the ally of Western civilization, the environmental movement soon could be. Anyone who is passionately concerned about the Snail Darter or the Spotted Owl should surely be concerned about the survival of the different races of his own kind. Eventually, it should dawn on environmentalists how disproportionate it is to do battle in the name of the human habitat but to say nothing about who will live in it. The Ethnostate is in many ways an extension of “green” thinking in that it proposes to allot to the different tribes of men an environment appropriate to each, so that each may prosper and none may interfere with his neighbors.

Although events in the former Soviet Union should be a lesson to us all, Mr. Robertson has no illusions that Europe or North America will divide neatly into ethnostates. He does not rule out the possibility that when non-whites become majorities in the United States they could do what the black Haitians did after their rebellion against the French: hunt down and exterminate all the whites who were left alive. The Ethnostate is remarkable and thought provoking, but it is an essay on what would be desirable, not necessarily what is probable.

It may be that whites do not have the will to save themselves. It may be that both in America and in Europe, they will let a flood of aliens push them aside and let their homelands be transformed into northern colonies of the third world. For Mr. Robertson, what may happen is less important than what we believe in and what we fight for. This is the frame of mind he proposes for whites who see the dangers that lie ahead: “I’m right, so I will go ahead, come what may. If no one listens, so what? . . . Yes, my ship of state, my West, may be going down, but if she goes, I’m going to make sure that at least one member of the crew is still hoisting sail as she sinks.”