Our Weapon: The Truth
Hadding Scott
Some of our people seem to regard honesty as an impediment. More than that, they think it is clever, having ascertained the crooked practices of some of our racial adversaries, to do as they do. This is a wrong attitude.
The tactics that have been used by our enemies will not always work for us. This is, in the first place, because what our enemies have been doing is not what we are trying to do. Tactics that will work for corrupting and weakening a people are often not applicable for the opposite purpose. In the second place, we and our supporters are not like our enemies. We are a different kind of people with a different character. While Jews and Blacks and other non-White groups will put group-solidarity ahead of truth, the best of our people will only support a spokesman if he tells the truth. Finally, we can only have a significant impact with our small voice if what we say carries weight. We have to cultivate credibility; otherwise there will be no reason to trust what we say over and against the all-pervasive propaganda of the anti-White mass-media.
Counter-Propaganda
There are two different phases of the truth that we have to tell. The most fundamental truth for us will consist in debunking the system’s propaganda, to the extent that we can do this convincingly based on credible sources.
Modern propaganda as defined by Jacques Ellul is the systematic immersion of the public in a particular way of looking at the world. Modern propaganda can only be conducted by a state or quasi-state controlling mass-media and educational systems.
Immersion is necessary because strong and uniform belief can only be maintained (in a large, population) in the absence of contradiction. This is a great vulnerability for the system. It means that effective counter-propaganda is much less expensive than the propaganda that it disrupts. There is great power in that one small child who says that the emperor has no clothes.
The most obvious form of counter-propaganda is media criticism. Historical revisionism is another form of counter-propaganda. Actions such as public marches can also be effective, at a more basic level, insofar as they shatter the illusion of unanimity and set an example of nonconformity.
Ellul mentions that winning people over is not always the immediate goal of (counter) propaganda; often the goal is simply to soften the pre-existing convictions. As blatantly false and unpleasant in application as the doctrine of racial equality has been, if we can simply punch holes in the wall of fear about questioning it, we will have made an effective counter-propaganda, because perception and cognition will gradually accomplish the rest. The fact that somebody expresses a forbidden thought, and forces the system and the public to tolerate it, is already a victory that puts the system into a defensive posture.
The major effect of counter-propaganda will not be a swarm of recruits wishing to sign a dotted line and pay dues to a racial organization. Do not be discouraged when this fails to occur. Rather, take note of a more subtle and widespread effect, the increased willingness of the public that has been exposed to your position to regard it as worthy of discussion, or at least tolerable. The technique is to repeat the message in a civil manner until it no longer alarms anybody. This can be accomplished on a university campus, on a talk-radio station (if the approach be gentle and cautious), and elsewhere. In this way you can broaden the range of acceptable discourse so that others too will begin to say some of what they really think. Hence the desperate effort of our enemies to shut down AmRen conferences and vilify Pat Buchanan for appearing on James Edwards’ radio show. They know that small leaks can become a deluge.
Counter-propaganda is the form of truth-telling whereby we will encounter the greatest acceptance, because the majority of White people have not been in favor of what has been happening to our societies, and because counter-propaganda is not an attempt to generate belief, but to dispel a demonstrably false belief that causes discomfort.
Whom should we be trying to reach?
Getting more people to be comfortable with saying what they really think on racial matters is only the barest beginning. What most of our people really think is usually either too moderate or too unreasoned to solve our problems. In fact, you could say that what most of our people have in regard to racial matters are not really thoughts at all, but mere attitudes. What we need is a revolution in the thinking of our people, a revolution in which oft-repeated cant is smashed with well-grounded truth.
Reliance on the truth as our weapon dictates the kinds of people that we can reach. While no project can fare well long-term if it defies the truth, it remains the case that not everybody is equally committed to the truth. Not everybody is even equally equipped to recognize what truth is. We have to reach the people who are capable of being convinced through reason and presentation of facts.
We cannot win over the masses. Most people are more impressed with how often and from how many sources they hear a claim than with whether or not it makes sense—and that’s a problem because we do not own the mass media. Nor can we win the support of those calculating people who make their major decisions based on narrow self-interest rather than with an eye toward what is right, because we do not have vast quantities of money with which to tempt them.
Indeed, such people are not reliable even when they seem to have been won over, because the next gust of wind from big media will blow them in the other direction and make them forget whatever they said today. Consequently it is a terrible waste, when our cause has very limited resources, to aim specifically for mass appeal.
There is a very great advantage in not trying to win over the broad masses directly. It means that one may state the entire truth instead of tailoring one’s statements in accord with what our enemies have conditioned the general public to accept. By choosing not to dance around various taboos, one retains the ability to make sense, which is crucial for appealing to thinkers, and for bringing them to the necessary radical conclusions.
We have to speak to the deeper souls, the people driven by idealism. These are people with a conscience and a disdain for falsehood, people who have an inner voice that objects to following the crowd when the crowd is demonstrably wrong.
Counter-propaganda should be directed especially toward the people most capable of skepticism, toward thinking people and toward those whose experience tells them that they have been ill-served by the establishment and its propaganda, or people (like farmers and truckers, Robert Mathews’ favorite demographic when he was still strictly legal) who spend much of their lives away from social pressures, or whose daily lives provide experiences that contradict equality propaganda as a matter of course (like veterinarians and police).
Truth has to be paramount. The most significant figure in the American racialist cause since World War II —William Luther Pierce — was largely, perhaps primarily, motivated by indignation at the lies all around him.
Bearers of a New Worldview
Acceptance will be more difficult when we go beyond refuting attacks on White pride and identity, to the explanation of why these attacks occur and who does them, and even more when we affirm a new way of looking at the world based on the recognition of biological group-interests. Acquiring our worldview presupposes not only conscience but a fair amount of ability to reason. It is easy enough to demonstrate unfair treatment of White people by the mass media and the government and various institutions, and to debunk the anti-White messages that these institutions promulgate. But to adopt a new worldview, abandoning the traditional conservative assumptions that have allowed our situation to degenerate, requires some real independence of thought. While counter-propaganda will appeal to a significant portion of the general White audience, a smaller number will be open to the new worldview that we present.
Our cause is thus destined to have an inner and an outer circle, generally agreeing from the gut on earthly goals, because we are of the same blood, but using different metaphysical scaffoldings to make sense of this shared racial instinct. This not at all to say that the doctrine of the inner circle should be a secret: it should be candidly admitted, just as scientists state findings.
That inner circle has to be utterly convinced that what it represents is correct, with no reliance on anything dubious, and no attempts at deception, so far as the message itself is concerned. This clarity will facilitate unanimity within that core group, and also engenders idealistic persistence. A firm conviction of truth sets the soul on fire. People who believe in what they are doing and in what they are saying will be much more indefatigable than some cheap con-men lacking the conviction that what they say is right.
How a minority view can prevail
Directing efforts at persuasion toward the conscientious minority means that, instead of trying to build a mass-movement straight away, we are recruiting an elite cadre that will be able to wield influence over the multitude when it gains the requisite strength.
It has always been organized elites that have really been responsible for the choices made by multitudes, wherever those choices have in any way deviated from the immediate path of least resistance. It’s a democratic delusion that crowds exhibit any kind of decisiveness without having been accordingly trained or directed.
This is actually a source of hope for us, because it means that we only have to win a relatively small number of converts to our cause in order to be situated to prevail.
What we are building initially must be like the philosophical schools of ancient Greece, winning converts from the thinking minority, rather than a modern mass political movement that tries to win general popular support. Thus at this point at least, the role of the American Third Position is to spread the message of White advocacy as much as possible with the media available to it. This will have a huge effect on thinking people even in the absence of electoral victories.
Today’s ideological think tanks, which wield enormous influence, are like a cheap imitation of the ancient philosophical schools. Think-tanks are to philosophical schools what Ayn Rand is to Plato — but nonetheless they have been enormously influential. This is how laissé-faire economics made its comeback in the late 20th century, because somebody set up a think-tank, the Institute for Economic Affairs, to elaborate that idea, and to present it constantly until somebody started to take it seriously.
Men like Fisher and Smedley were at the very margins of respectability in the 1950s, and the media never bothered with them. They were ignored because practically all politicians and commentators from left and right believed in the Keynsian idea that the state should intervene to manage the economy. Everyone was convinced that left to itself the free-market led to disaster – as had happened in the 1930s…. To their opponents Fisher and Smedley were right-wing dinosaurs. But they both were convinced they were a part of the future….
So one day Fisher plucked up courage and went to see Hayek at the LSE in London where Hayek was a professor. Fisher asked Hayek for advice – should he go into politics to try and stop the oncoming disaster? Hayek told Fisher bluntly that this would be useless because politicians are trapped by the prevailing public opinion. Instead, Hayek said, Fisher should try and do something much more ambitious – he should try and change the very way politicians think – and the way to do that was to alter the climate of opinion that surrounded the political class. Fisher wrote down what Hayek said to him.
“He explained his view that the decisive influence in the battle of ideas and policy was wielded by intellectuals whom he characterised as the ‘second-hand dealer in ideas’.” [Adam Curtis, The Curse of Tina]
The purpose of the “scholarly institute” that Fisher and Smedley formed was not to influence the general public directly, which they had no possibility of doing, but to convince members of the opinion-forming elite that their ideology made sense. Over the course of several decades the prevailing assumptions in economic policy have been completely reversed as a result of these efforts.
Radical social change begins with the efforts of a few fanatics who have an idea that attracts like-minded others. Revolutions in general have been accomplished by conspiracies numerically equivalent to mere single-digit percentages of the population. Even the normal electoral process in the United States, which is supposed to represent the public will, is in fact heavily influenced by militant minorities with their own channels of communication for maintaining their worldviews and coordinating their actions, like the Christian Zionist faction in the Republican Party that made George W. Bush the unassailable frontrunner more than a year before the presidential election of 2000. This faction also gave Rick Perry an instant, undeserved frontrunner status in 2011 (which he fumbled). Likewise, the influence of the far left in the Democratic Party during the 20th century was far out of proportion to their numbers among registered Democrats.
It is always a militant minority that makes history. The majority simply waits to see what happens.
We have the truth on our side, and with this we should be able to win idealists and thinkers as converts and build an effective cadre. The only other factor needed is money — not huge amounts of money such as the system has at its disposal, but enough that the organization can continue to function and grow. There are certainly people with healthy racial instincts who have money. With a solid message respectably presented and a stable and responsible leadership — which unfortunately has been all too rare in the racialist cause — some of that money is likely to be forthcoming.
Since we are relying on reason, we do not need to be able to saturate the general public with our messages. We only need a bit of publicity to attract the right people to our cadre, because alert and intelligent people will take note and seek us out if our message is right and we don’t spoil it with dishonesty or some other egregious display of faulty character.
Our Careful Rhetoric
The fact that we do not control mass-media means that we cannot lie the way our enemies lie and make it stick, if we were so inclined. We cannot use questionable sources either. We have to be careful about what we say, because anything of importance that we say, if it gets much attention at all, will have to survive intense criticism.
The beginning and foundation of our rhetoric must consist of facts that are either self-evident, or at least public knowledge that anybody can access. Such facts are to be found in news-reports, and on government and academic web sites. Sources should always be named so that the argument will not depend on the personal credibility of any White racialist but on the credibility of a mainstream or otherwise authoritative source. This is the only way that any intelligent person not already having faith in what we say can be brought around to our view.
The weekly racialist sermons of Dr. William Pierce exemplify this kind of cautious rhetoric. (Some relevant examples: The Destructive Media, 13 April 1996, contrasting coverage of shootings at Fort Bragg and Fort Pendleton; The Lesson of Amy Biehl, 8 August 1998; The Fayetteville Murders, 29 August 1998; Hate Crime, 10 October 1998; A Trial in Jasper, 6 March 1999; Jewish Democracy, 4 September 1999; Hardheaded Altruism, 2 October 1999, contrasting crimes of Augusto Pinochet and Ehud Barak.) A common formula that he used was to contrast some atrocious crime against normal White people that for some reason did not become a subject of widespread reporting, with the disproportionate coverage of some offense committed against a favored minority that, upon comparison, was really not as deserving of attention. In both instances, mainstream media are the sources, because their reporting is what is under scrutiny. Thus a convincing demonstration of anti-White media-bias is constructed.
As a result, the audience also learns about the agenda of those who control the media. In this phase of the argument the facts may be a little less well known, but still publicly verifiable. Thus within a single 20-minute speech, Dr. Pierce progressed from counter-propaganda of the most basic kind to radical criticism of the central institution upon which this democracy depends, without ever asking his listeners to take a leap of faith. This is the kind of message that can be taken seriously by serious people.
The fact that we do not have mass-media in our hands means that instead of appealing to the irrational multitude, our initial appeal must be to the deep souls who are capable of preferring what is correct over what is ubiquitous. It means that instead of an irrational propaganda, we have to respect our audience and give them the undiluted truth that they desire, and educate them through channels of communication separate from the mass-media that are hostile to us. As this organization of dedicated, capable, and likeminded White people develops, the possibilities for affecting mass-opinion and events in general will increase.
Conclusion: Reasons for Optimism
- The fact that multitudes are guided by dedicated minorities means that idealistic White people can be such a minority.
- We can generate this dedicated minority at much less expense than what it will cost the system to try to prevent it from arising.
- The force of the idealism of intelligent White people is on our side if we don’t throw it away by failing to respect the truth.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/12/02/our-weapon-the-truth/