years later (IV)
Even on that same day, 23 September 2009, I read the Prozium article that Johnson reposted on TOQ Online, “Myths, Facts, Self-Interest”, from which I quote the following passages:
Americans are not analytical / empirical / objective. I have mentioned elsewhere that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series
[LaHaye was a Christian fundamentalist —Ed.]has sold 65 million copies. Even within academia, the progressive mythos dominates entire disciplines, especially in the culture sensitive humanities. I just can’t see an appeal to science winning out (without substantial culture wind behind it); look what happened to James Watson (with all his prestige) when he stepped across the line of political correctness. Geneticists bend over backwards to avoid using the word “race” in lieu of Watson’s fall from grace. Most try to avoid it altogether (smart career move there). They bend to popular opinion and the progressive party line. Remember all that talk about how the Human Genome Project had discredited racialism? That and God talk has done wonders for Francis Collins’ career.What can be said for self-interest? In our current political environment, it reinforces the LDC
[Liberal-Democratic Capitalist] system. The career-minded, family-minded selfish individual prefers to go along with the flow. He is content to live in his whitebread suburb, shop at the Big Box stores for plasma televisions, pull the (R) lever at the ballot box in November. The first rule of conservative politics: Number One always comes first, second, and last. If such an individual is feeling really brave, he might go teabagging or do something really radical like visit a paleo website.Just think about it: the tide of self-interest against us is so strong that White Nationalists have to cheer for a national catastrophe like a Second Great Depression, Hurricane Katrina or Kunstler’s Long Emergency to disrupt the status quo. Self-interest will come into play whenever our success appears plausible (think of the NSDAP) or catastrophic circumstances intervene. That’s when the opportunists and conservatives will flock into our ranks.
Looking at our situation objectively, even with the eye of an analytical empiricist (a bent of mind I share with GuessedWorker), what is needed right now (in the embryonic stage) is fanaticism
[emphasis added by Ed.].There are few incentives to join our movement. Racially conscious Whites are the most despised minority in America. I’m willing to wager we are hated even more than the atheists.We need myths that are powerful enough to move a vanguard beyond their own rational self-interest. An alluring vision is needed comparable to the colorblind utopia that animates the left. It has to be expressed in art, literature, music and film; vehicles more accessible to the masses than academic texts… This is a task for artists, not intellectuals.
Regarding what Benjamin asked today (“Do you think part of this catastrophic regression has been because of the shift away from keeping personal libraries?”), I don’t think so because Prozium apparently reads a lot of books. “Prozium” was his old pen name. His real name is Brad Griffin, and since then he has been blogging on Occidental Dissent under another pen name, Hunter Wallace.
The point is: sixteen years ago Prozium was a self-proclaimed white nationalist and his blog’s subtitle, if I remember correctly, was “Western cultural and racial preservation”. Compare that to Occidental Dissent’s subtitle today: “Nationalism, populism, reaction”. What caused the shift to a reactionary mindset?
The European image that Occidental Dissent flaunted when that webzine defined itself as a “white nationalist” site.
For sixteen years I have followed the blogging career of Prozium, now known as Hunter Wallace in racialist forums. When he had bitter arguments with white nationalists, he repudiated the term “white nationalism” to define his position. As he confessed at the time, he became a “Southern Nationalist”. Years later, he decided that the best term to define his ideology was “Christian Nationalist”.
So, to answer Benjamin, I would say that it is not a large personal library that makes one wise (this man claims to have read hundreds of books). When one finds oneself in the middle of the psychological Rubicon, with water up to one’s knees, a dilemma arises: either one continues to cross the river to the other side, National Socialism (see above where Prozium himself mentioned the NSDAP), or one retreats back to the lands of Normieland (remember that on one occasion, after Prozium / Wallace took steps back, he called himself a “neo-normie”).
As I mentioned in my previous post about Greg Johnson and the vanguardist literature he used to publish in TOQ Online, the same can be said about Prozium / Wallace / Griffin: the pull that Normieland exerts on the minds of American racialists is so powerful that they rarely cross the river. To put it in a nutshell, the exterminationism on the other side scares the hell out of them!
Likewise, Andrew Anglin originally used a lot of Nazi paraphernalia on his site, The Daily Stormer. Then he Christianised his site and has been using Christian symbols. No more love for Uncle Adolf… On this side of the Atlantic, only racists like William Pierce (1933-2002) crossed the river to the extent of embracing exterminationism. So I’m glad, Benjamin, that you recommended Pierce’s book, Who We Are, to your friend. That book should be available in print! (as our anthologies were available before Lulu Press deplatformed us).
If we remember that Greg Johnson used to deliver pious homilies in his church in San Francisco as late as 2010, and that Griffin and Anglin remain openly Christian, it is clear why the magnet of Normieland moved them to retrace their steps as they were about to cross the Rubicon.
3 replies on “Sixteen”
Prozium used to write so well in 2009 that even Trainspotter, with whom he would later distance himself, praised him highly because of the article cited above.
Thanks again for an in-depth explanation. Yes, this makes sense to me now. In a way, I empathise with them (or at least can understand part of the mindset of why they turned back). Back in 2020 I released on small-scale self-publishing/PDF an awful, rushed, pamphlet-tier ramble of a ‘book’, titled Blight. It was a mixture of topical/political poems, massed current affairs links and monocausalist/holocaust denial content (albeit vaguely anti-Christian).
Though it itself was a terrible, thoughtless release, rushed and fiercely amateurish, at least it was full of the sort of content that could be considered low-brow modern white nationalism, as I was, after all, fresh on the ‘scene’ and just getting my bearings. Bizarrely, one person complimented me on it.
Then the year after, under duress from some new Christian associates in real-life (who even succeeded in manipulating a tiny doubtful strand of my long extinct Catholicism back into me), I re-wrote that monstrosity utterly, not to improve it, but instead to add in ‘easier’ segments, pandering to right-wing Christianity (I think SSPX-esque), in a vague, psychologically-inhibited attempt to fit in.
It was only when I made the firm decision on my own to shake off the last of my religious belief in my personal life that this sort of impulse to get along with other co-religionists and assorted inept hangers on faded. I had too much bitterness against Christianity at that point, having seen through their manipulation of me at one of my lower periods.
Of course, later, having found your website (after floating in limbo for a couple of months, disaffected, and disillusioned with white nationalism in general and all the idiots I’d engaged with, however tentatively), I had some space to distance myself from both these idiot publications, which I regret writing very much, and could launch instead into reading and learning from your vast work.
So I understand, to a degree, the desire for acceptance (which I think is what dragged me back to accepting the wretched Christians’ offer of community). I was always more interested in understanding true National Socialism though, as an ideal, beyond the necessity to keep friendships in polite company. It didn’t scare me the way I take it scares some others, including the ultimate mass-violence ramifications these days. Perhaps I’m just too asocial – hermetic, despite company – for it to bother me too much. That’s a way in which I do differ from Brad and the rest. To my mind, the historical release of my two ridiculous early books works as almost a full analogy for the similar ridiculousness of all modern, regressive white nationalism.
I’m glad that I think I’ve crossed the river. The hardest part for me these days is gazing back across trying to get others in real-life to see me, and understand they could cross also, if they put the full effort in.
A while back I used a metaphor: today’s racialists seemed like human statues left stranded in the middle of the Rubicon. And a while later, I wrote that those who manage to cross the river find themselves in a new world, albeit alone, under the redwoods.