THE HOLOCAUST OF AMERICA
A White Nationalist Examines the Prospect of His People’s Demise
Michael O'Meara
I’m honored by this invitation to speak to you today. Honor, though, comes with feelings of trepidation—since my role at this conference is to report that the main threat to white American survival is not what the so-called Devil Theory of Politics would have us believe, but something far closer to home: namely, ourselves. For if we assume, like Joseph de Maistre, that every people gets the government it deserves, then the fact that we are governed by scoundrels and race traitors has more to do with who we are than it does with who they are. Based on the assumption that we must first look to ourselves to understand—and hence resist—the catastrophe threatening our people, I want here to look at several interpretations of the America experience that speak to the question of why our countrymen seem so indifferent to their impending demise.
THE NEOCONS’ CREEDAL NOTION
I would like to begin with an interpretation favored by our enemy: the liberals and especially their right wing, the neocons. In what is now the standard narrative of American history, the United States is portrayed as being unlike other nations in representing not a specific people, but rather certain timeless, universal ideas that have come to us from the biblical Zionism of New England’s early settlers and from the revolutionary political heritage of eighteenth-century liberalism. Constituting the country’s alleged essence, these ideas were early on associated with what is known as the American Creed and, in lieu of a foundation myth, served as the rationale for its national project. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Creed would assume various forms, animating the forces of Manifest Destiny, Progressivism, and other of the country’s quintessential ideologies. Then, in 1917, as Woodrow Wilson launched his crusade to Americanize the international order, it was codified in a statement that spelled out its exact principles. To this codification emphasizing equality, democracy, and other fictitious liberal abstractions, there have since been added principles of cultural pluralism and multiracialism. Yet whatever its form, the American Creed has always sought to define the nation in ideological or propositional terms dismissive of race, culture, and history.
In recent years, this creedal conception of America has become a hobby horse of the neoconservatives: that ”brood of liberals, social democrats, and ex-Trotskyists” who routinely appeal to the Creed to legitimate the Zionist direction of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. In their hands, the Creed acquires a particularly anti-foundationalist character. For example, the neocon hero, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in his farewell address at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York, near the fallen Twin Towers, describes the Creed in these terms:
It doesn’t matter if you came here rich or poor, if you came here voluntarily or involuntarily, if you came here in freedom or in bondage. All that matters is that you embrace America and understand its ideals and what it’s all about. Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your Americanism was not your family tree; the test of your Americanism was how much you believe in America. Because we’re like a religion really. A secular religion. We believe in ideas and ideals. We’re not one race; we’re many. We’re not one ethnic group; we’re everyone... So what ties us together? We’re tied together by our belief in political democracy.In Giuliani’s neocon rendering, American identity becomes essentially a matter of believing in the country’s democratic ideals (whatever they may be) and not a matter of having an ancestral affiliation to its people. Old stock or illegal, white or black—what counts for the neocon is belief in America’s democratic political heritage. Anyone, by this reckoning, can be an American. For if certain abstract political propositions constitute the nation’s essence, it cannot but follow that the race, culture, and history of its European founders are entirely incidental to what it means to be an American. Most of you, I realize, reject the notion that the American nation is based on a creed rather than a genetically/historically formed people. This creedal conception is not, however, without its historical antecedents and not, therefore, without a certain resonance in American life. Today, for example, it serves as an ideological justification for multiculturalism, globalization, and those disastrous policies premised on the belief that American democratic principles can, in the bloody civilizational wars of the twenty-first century, triumph over the insurgent forces of militant Islam. But given its present neocon appropriation, white nationalists are wont to dismiss it outright, as if it were just another shakedown and thus not something integral to the dominant forms of American identity. The argument I’m making contends, by contrast, that the creedal interpretation of American identity, contrived as it may be, says something defining about the American experience—and therefore something defining about why the impending destruction of white America leaves most American whites indifferent.
But instead of convincing you of this by looking at the actual historical role the Creed has played in American life, I want here to examine a transatlantic interpretation of American identity that offers a related, though more persuasive, explanation of the country’s creedal foundations.
THE NEW RIGHT’S VIEW
Anti-Europe
The European New Right—arguably the most formidable postwar school of antiliberal thought—has worked out a critique of American civilization that shares certain of the neocons’ creedal premises (even if it draws far different conclusions from them). At the core of its critique is the contention that the United States is not a real nation, but rather a collection of disparate individuals without cultural cohesion and common ancestry. American national identity consequently comes to rest on a civil rather than an ethnic designation of nationality—that grants no special status to the country’s origin as an organic offshoot of Europe and hence no significance to those racial, cultural, and historical ascriptions distinct to nations in the European sense.
New Rightists point out that from the moment the Pilgrims stepped ashore at Plymouth and at Salem, they turned their backs on their homeland, imagining the wilderness that was then North America as a New Israel, pure and uncorrupted by the compromised moral order they had fled. Given their biblical culture and what David Gelernter calls “their uncanny tendency to think like Jews,” John Winthrop, the first New England governor, was made out to be a Moses-like figure who had led the visible saints out of Egypt to the Promised land, where their City on the Hill was to be a beacon to the rest of humanity, a “light unto the Gentiles,” “morally superior to all others...and closer to God.” England in Puritan discourse was accordingly depicted as “awash in thieves, drunkards, idlers, prostitutes, and blasphemers,” while New England was conceived as “the pivotal battleground for the eternal fate of all mankind.” In this spirit, the country’s Calvinist founders rejected those customs and institutions which had offended God in the Old World, doing away with “church courts and tithes, bishops and archbishops, church weddings and ales, Sunday sports and maypoles, saint’s days and Christmas.” At the same time, their colony was seen as a Promised Land, its settlers as a Chosen People, and its creedal principles as part of a divine mission to conquer the world. New Rightists claim the implicit anti-Europeanism of these beliefs could not but turn America into a sort of anti-Europe.
That the Puritans’ godly-wise commonwealth was founded in opposition to a spiritually corrupt Europe also meant that it wasn’t long before the land of their former kinsmen slipped from memory and European life and custom became a “matter of ignorance, indifference, and contempt.” The hazardous Atlantic crossing that had brought them to America’s shores was thus soon imaginatively refi gured as something other than a geographic separation from their former homeland: It became a symbol of their moral-ontological rupture with it. Of course, this does not imply that European and English folkways did not continue to have a major impact on American life or that the arguments David Hackett Fischer and Grayson Allen make about the transplantation of European folkways and institutions are unfounded. There’s no getting away from the fact that New England’s settlers were people of European extraction, however much they sought to minimize it. The New Right’s point is that, despite its European antecedents, America developed in opposition to Europe—and thus, implicitly, in opposition to its ancestors’ blood and heritage.
The Puritans’ anti-traditional, anti-European convictions quite naturally came to affect everything else. Thus it was that the American struggle against British imperial reorganization at the end of the eighteenth century was framed not simply as a colonial dispute with the Mother Country, but as a world crusade against “the traditional ethnic, religious, and tribal loyalties of the Old World” (Gordon Wood). In this vein, Tom Paine proclaimed the American cause to be “the cause of all mankind,” part of the same Divine Plan that had led the Israelites out of Pharaoh’s Egypt and into the Promised Land. And it was not just Tom Paine but the entire Masonic-Enlightenment generation of 1776 that thought every step toward American independence was prompted “by some token of providential agency” (George Washington). The founding documents thus speak to a project whose values and beliefs were to distinguish Americans from the rest of humanity (exceptionalism), yet at the same time make them champions of humanity’s highest aspirations (universal-ism). Even in its original whites-only form, this propositional defi nition of the nation all but dismissed its European origins. A neocon today can thus plausibly argue that “We have no biological fathers to provide an ethnic basis for American nationality. For us the [Founders’] ideals must do the work.” America’s ideological defi nition of nationality, New Rightists conclude, could not but transform it into “the living negation of all specifi city”—insofar as it dismissed the racial, cultural, and historical character of its European origin. At no point in its development, they claim, is it even possible to speak of its disparate population as a specific ethnonational entity.
The Homeland of Modernity
The country’s anti-Europeanism was not, however, simply a facet of its Calvinist founding. America’s emergence as the foremost exemplar of modern liberal civilization also played a role in undermining its identification with Europe. This gets us to the second critique the European New Right makes of America.
As virtually every student of modernity holds, the “modern condition” entails more than a process of secularization, structural differentiation, industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of science. More fundamentally, the modern condition introduces a civilizational ethos entirely unlike that of traditional or premodern civilizations, for basic to this condition is the separation of past from present: that is, the separation of present endeavors from the heritage preceding them. The modernist consequently favors an ideology of progress that rearranges the world in ways indifferent to established hierarchies, ancient authorities, and accepted truths, assuming, in the process, that its deracinating rationalisms apply to all mankind. This subjects everything to a process of unceasing change and accepts every change as an improvement. Modern liberal civilization thus imagines that it has attained a higher level of human achievement, though actually the opposite seems to have happened, as it sinks “to the lowest elements in man and...to the needs inherent in the material side of his nature” (René Guénon). Relatedly, the crass materialism of such a devolution concerns itself only with industry, commerce, and finance, and with materialism’s corollary, the nation-killing principle of equality.
Nowhere did modernization go farther and faster than in America, which lacked a deeply rooted tradition. Like the founding generation of Calvinists, the revolutionaries of ‘76 disclaimed those time-encrusted hierarchies and authorities associated with Europe’s “corrupt” moral order. In fact, their break with the past was even more decisive, for the struggle they waged against their British Motherland dictated that American national identity shed its past affiliations—and redefine itself in the bloodless postulates of its revolutionary liberal ideology. Jefferson, accordingly, thought the key to the country’s exceptionalism was its “escape” from “history’s nightmare.” In contrast to Europeans, who saw themselves in terms of past glories characteristic of their higher modes of Being, he celebrated the open, dynamic, and forward-looking spirit of the new republic, free as it was of historical encumbrances and free thus to realize a glorious future ex nihilo. This has led one French observer (Jean Baudrillard) to note that “America avoids the question of origins; it lives in a perpetual present.” To live in such an ongoing here-and-now means, however, to live in isolation from former and future generations. Indeed, it is this very absence of a common ancestral tradition that seems to account for the fact that there is no real organic cohesion, no deeper value, or felt principle to knit the American people together—only certain ideological ones, such as the Creed provides.
And though it was Europe that gave birth to modernity, it was the United States that zealously remade the world in its modernist image. For given the absence of a native aristocracy and the hegemony of its business class, there was little in the New World to obstruct modernity’s irrepressible onslaught. Modernizers, progressives, reformers, developers, and speculators had the field almost entirely to themselves. Thus it was that, in the decades following the revolution, the former colonies were swept up and carried along by a wave of social scrambling and economic development that shocked most European observers. Even certain of the Founders were taken aback by the restless, self-seeking changes that marked the national life of the new republic. One historian reports that in his old age Jefferson himself, once he realized the vices of commerce had achieved a decisive victory over the virtues republicanism was to nurture, began to despair of the democratic society born of the revolution. Instead, then, of becoming more virtuous, the American people seemed to become more materialistic, more egoistic or self-centered, and hence more indifferent to the rights of blood and heritage.
Leviathan State
There is a third New Right critique that converges—again negatively—with the neocons’ creedal view. This one is based on geopolitics and the geopolitical view that America is preeminently a maritime (or thalassocratic) power. Geopolitics, as you might know, is the study of environmental influences, physical as well as economic, on the evolution of peoples and their territories, particularly as such infl uences affect the strategic actions of states. One student calls geopolitics “the political grammar of world politics.” Within this grammar’s interpretative frame, America’s creedal notion of nationality is not simply an offshoot of its Puritan heritage and liberal-modernist foundations, but also of its seafaring civilizational forms.
The great German jurist Carl Schmitt, who died before the New Right’s birth but who continues to influence it, writes that “World history is the history of the struggle between the maritime powers and the continental powers.” This idea is key to virtually all schools of geopolitical thought. The Ancient World’s Punic Wars, in pitting maritime Carthage against land-based Rome, represents the purest paradigmatic expression of this land-sea conflict. In the modern era, the “Anglo-Saxons” (the British, succeeded by the Americans), assume Carthage’s role and the great continental land powers—principally Germany and Russia—that of ancient Rome.
This inherent antagonism between land and sea touches everything else. In this spirit, the Russian New Rightist, Alexandr Dugin, writes “Through the experiences of land and sea, earth and water, man enters into contact with the most fundamental facets of his existence. Land is stability, gravity, fixity, space as such. Water is mobility, softness, dynamics, time.” These two basic geopolitical concepts, land and sea, cannot, then, but affect man’s other relationships. Maritime empires tend thus to sustain complex commercial societies that are open, innovative, and cosmopolitan, as well as plutocratic, materialistic, and individualistic, while land or continental powers tend toward traditionalist sensibilities privileging communal relations, honorific commitments, and well-defined social hierarchies.
Given this opposition between sea and land, island and continent, America’s maritime supremacy—and I should remind you that from the very beginning the country’s republican principles were premised on America’s maritime preeminence and the need to ensure unimpeded access to foreign markets—has been possible only at the expense of Europe. Since the dawn of the American Century in 1945, U.S. maritime power has consequently pursued not only Britain’s former geostrategic logic, but also its antitraditionalist, anti-identitarian policies toward the European mainland. Historically, America’s continental island has known no delimited spaces and hence no rivals with whom coexistence is possible. Today, America’s New World Order, premised on global markets and creedal civilizational forms, continues to rely on its maritime supremacy to project its military power into every corner of the globe and to use its capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms. This money-based order, with its multiculturalist ideology, international labor markets, and missionary impulse to impose American modernist forms on other peoples, is, of course, something far different from the older white America, with its independent yeoman producers and its republican forms of governance, but it too has its roots in America’s liberal rejection of its biocultural heritage.
CONCLUSION
Let me conclude by drawing the strands of my argument together. I began by suggesting that our greatest enemy is ourselves—and the American system in which we operate. I then suggested that the liberals, and especially the neocons, exploit the system’s creedal principles for the sake of their anti-white agenda. I next looked at the way the New Right’s view of American civilization negatively overlaps the liberal-neocon one. For like them, New Rightists believe the American experiment has never been about the growth and identity of its white settler population, but rather about certain Hebraic ideas, modernist principles, and maritime practices dismissive of all that culturally, historically, and genetically defines white Americans as a people of European extraction. In the optic of this New Right representation, the holocaust whites face today is less the consequence of their ever expanding managerial state (as the late Sam Francis thought) or of the Jews’ invidious culture of critique (as Kevin MacDonald suggests), than of a civilization founded in opposition to blood and heritage.
Yet while it discloses a reality we white nationalists tend to neglect, this is not the conclusion with which I want to leave you. For however much America affronts its European origins (the main point of my argument), the country’s essence is nevertheless not reducible to a single monolithic interpretation, especially one whose geopolitical, modernist, and historical assumptions are less than certain. Indeed, the neocon and New Right interpretations seem especially disputable given that they ignore the most important consideration of all: America’s biocultural fundament. In this context, it bears recalling that the philosophical tradition of our race—as it stretches from Heidegger’s clearing pathways to Greece’s pre-Socratic dawn—teaches that every origin anticipates its future in the same way that every life-enhancing future is realized in reference to its past.
Given America’s European birth, its possibilities are thus only meaningfully attainable if it remains “true” to the essence of its original European being. Despite the Hebraicism of its Puritan settlers, the anti-identitarianism of its liberal modernity, and the cosmopolitanism of its maritime tradition, the fact remains that America’s roots are European and will always be so, even if the mafia, Zionist and otherwise, in control of its political and social systems succeeds in forsaking its original predestination. Indeed, the present universalizing cosmopolitanism of the American polity, as it endeavors to make the country into something it was never destined to be, is very much a product of Europe, representing one of the purest distillations of our race’s millennia-long flirtation with nihilism.
If white Americans, then, should ever draw back from the racial-cultural abyss to which they seem headed and recommence the possibilities latent in their existence, they, like their transatlantic cousins, will have no alternative but to reclaim that which lies both nearest to and most distant from them: the destining origination born of their ancestors’ blood and heritage.
Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and modern European history at the University of California. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (2004).
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