Nowherelands: Impossibilities of Virtual Nationalism

Han Fei says:

It is very easy to dismiss the thoughts and behavior of the Atlantic Westerners as being not worthy of serious consideration, in particular of Americans. However as the Germans trapped in the Falaise pocket or the Japanese bled dry at Saipan can attest, this is a very perilous thing to presume. The behavior that you have described, and unfairly trivialized, is from my perspective a ‘feature’ not a bug of the very nature of the Americans as a people. Refuting it is one thing, but treating it as an entirely insignificant matter is another. Never underestimate your enemy if you hope to stand a chance against him.

The question of nationalism needs to be analyzed not from a political perspective but from its roots in the difference between a hereditary and territorial commonality between people that emerges over the course of historic ethnogenesis. I think we can move straight into an example by asking what exactly constitutes the spirit animating American identity as a nation. One one hand it was the highly aggressive and prolific puritanism and on the other hand, the politically chiliastic, Masonic, Hamiltonian principate favored by the New England banking and industrial oligarchs. The former characterized the masses and the latter its rulers. Such a seemingly dichotomous relationship is nothing unusual for Imperial societies, of which this New Atlantis is the prime example.

The war of the North and South was fought over the question of the national spirit of America, between the genteel aristocratic and slave-owning southern agrarians bound to the land and its means of economic sustenance as well as the subsequent localized and hereditary mode of existence, and the northern scientific-commercial Yankee overclass oriented towards mass mobilization the resources of society for the purpose of dominating global trade. Slavery, as an institution, limits not only the global reach of industry, but also the extent to which the worker can be motivated (exploited) in terms of industrial output, hence it presented a stumbling block to the rational organization of society according to commercial-technocratic methods. This is the real reason why the Brits and Yankees sought the universal abolition of this admittedly revolting institute, since it creates a localized impulse for the fulfillment of cheap work and productive needs of the economy independent from global distribution of labor and trade. This is a very relevant point that needs to be made in distinguishing between a localized an cosmopolitan national identity, since almost all autarkically oriented societies have practiced slavery to some extent. Soviet Russia and North Korea are the most stark examples of societies generally cut off from the rest of the world where slavery played a major role in the economy.

American stupidity and pig headedness, as infuriating as it may be, doesn’t change the existential realities of their functioning as a nation. Americans as a general rule, do not think – but they act according to higher level philosophies that have been instilled in them from childhood. It is a grave error to contend that the superficial and buffoonish nature of American civilization somehow “exempts” them from the energies that underlie the historical processes by which nations exist.

This forms the crux of my criticism against American white nationalism from the perspective of the right. It is the reason why I have linked to those articles of Collin Cleary a while ago. That article wasn’t too bad actually in comparison with the farthest of the far right places like National Vanguard where most activity consists of anti-Christian diatribes. A good chunk of these dissident right places seem to serve as nothing but an outlet for advocating Promethean or OTO-linked screeds masquerading as European ethnic paganism. Again, not surprising, considering the state of the civilization from which these kinds of ideologies emerge. The bottom line is that these people not only reject such a thing as a “given” they in fact aggressively fight against any notion of such. How can they possibly call themselves nationalists while rejecting the very spirit in which the life of nations commenced for centuries? They are not dissidents, they are the vanguard. In so far as Americans are incapable of separating an abstraction from an essence and an institution from a community, they can never possibly be a part of a hereditary based community in the manner of European peoples and states that still retain a segment of national consciousness (and dare I say, conscience).

Perhaps at a future date, I will write a *few* words about Russia as well, which in its mirrored semblance to America, also suffers from a very similar predicament.