Sailer reconstructs Francis

Steve Sailer is not just a casual nihilist who shrugs off the possible nuclear destruction of Israel by comparing it to a baseball game taking place in a different league from one’s own. He’s not just an amoral adolescent who plays with different combinations of “designer” interracial matings the way normal boys play with toy soldiers or erector sets. He is also a terminally shallow thinker who has no more feeling for the meaning of our civilization than a beagle has for algebra, and whose clueless, materialistic notions of human life and culture are destructive of the pro-nationhood traditionalist conservative movement of which he is supposedly a member.

Writing at vdare, Sailer argues absurdly that the late Samuel Francis actually supported Sailer’s race-blind “citizenist” approach to American identity over Francis’s own putative white racialism. Citizenism is a concept that strips from America, not just its racial or cultural majority identity, but any larger meaning, since it defines America as nothing more than the people who happen to be here at this moment. Denying that the society or the nation should be seen as consisting of anything beyond individuals and their desires, citizenism is the ultimate liberal reductionist view of culture. Sailer’s conclusion that Francis was really a citizenist is based on a forced interpretation of a couple of fragmentary quotes from Francis’s writings. For example, Sailer quotes Francis arguing for the end of multiculturalism and race preferences, and triumphantly concludes that Francis’s position is the same as that of race-blind neocons and citizenists. If Sailer were capable of real thought, which he is not, he would realize that being for a race-blind understanding of the Constitution and of basic human rights does not necessarily contradict being in favor of white racial consciousness and the reassertion of the West’s historical white majority culture.

Here, totally disproving Sailer’s ridiculous assertions, is a long excerpt from Francis’s article in the March 1995 American Renaissance, “Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival,” in which he addresses the crisis of multicultural America and recommends a bold program to restore America’s traditional majority culture. As the reader will see, Francis is not reducing America to just race; rather he sees America’s majority racial character as one aspect of the total fabric of our culture and civilization, while, as I noted above, Sailer’s citizenist view denies not just the racial dimension of our culture, which Francis believed in, but all the larger dimensions of our culture, which Francis also believed in. (I quoted the key passage from this article in the Fall 1995 Social Contract):

… though I am not convinced by their arguments, white separatists are correct that we do face what is probably the most serious and threatening crisis in our racial history, a crisis that, if it is not resolved in our favor, will almost certainly result in the loss of white control of the United States within half a century, the disappearance of white civilization, and eventually in biological extinction. If white separatism is not the answer, what is?

Reconquest

The answer is, quite simply, the reconquest of the United States. This reconquest does not involve any restoration of white supremacy in the political and legal sense that obtained under slavery or segregation, and there is no reason why nonwhites who reside in the United States could not enjoy equality of legal rights. But a white reconquest of the United States would mean the supremacy of whites in a cultural sense, or in the sense of what is nowadays called “Eurocentrism.” There are essentially three things that whites must do in order to carry out this reconquest of the nation and culture they have almost lost:

(1) Whites must formulate a white racial consciousness that identifies racial and biological endowments as important and relevant to social behavior, and their own racial endowments as essential to the continuing existence of Euro-American civilization. The formation of a white racial consciousness does not mean that whites should think of themselves only as whites, to the exclusion of ethnic, national, religious, regional, class, or other identities, nor that individuality should yield to the collective category of race. It means merely that we recognize racial realities, that we recognize that racial-biological endowments are necessary to certain kinds of human behavior (e.g., the political and civic behavior appropriate to stable self-government, the work habits and life-styles appropriate to a dynamic economy; the intellectual behavior that is necessary for science and scholarship, etc.) and that because these endowments are largely unique to whites, the behavior they make possible cannot be replicated by most nonwhites.

Nor does the formation of white racial consciousness mean that we should conceive of ourselves only as biological beings to the exclusion of religious or metaphysical identities. Racial consciousness means that we add recognition of biological and racial factors to our traditional concepts of human nature and modify both our biological and non-biological conceptions of what man is, as evidence and reason dictate. It may be true that some traditional religious and metaphysical conceptions would not survive recognition of the scientific realities of race, just as some did not survive earlier scientific discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology.

But the formation of white racial consciousness does mean that whites would recognize themselves as a race and their racially based behavior as legitimate, and hence it would mean the end of tolerance for nonwhite assaults on white people and the norms of white civilization. Whites would simply no longer countenance nonwhite aggression and insults or the idolization of nonwhite heroes, icons, and culture; white children would be raised in accordance with what is proper to being white, and norms openly recognized as appropriate to whites would be the legitimizing and dominant norms of American society as they were prior to the 1960s. Racial guilt and truckling would end.

(2) Based on this racial consciousness, whites must counter the demographic threat they face from immigration and nonwhite fertility and whites’ own infertility. This means (a) an absolute halt to all future legal immigration into the United States, deployment of the armed forces on the appropriate borders to cut off illegal immigration, and deportation of all illegal immigrants (and perhaps many recent legal immigrants); (b) the end of subsidies for the nonwhite birth rate through welfare programs, obligatory use of contraception by welfare recipients, and encouragement of its use among nonwhites, and (c) encouragement of increases in white fertility.

(3) Whites must correct the political and legal order to end the political power of nonwhite minorities and their white anti-white allies. This political effort would involve a radical dismantling of all affirmative action and civil rights legislation as well as a good part of the federal governmental superstructure that entrenches minority power. It also would require recovering an understanding of constitutional law that permits local and state governments to govern, and private institutions to function independently of government.

Under such an understanding, whites and nonwhites would enjoy equality of legal rights in the sense of those fundamental rights listed in the very first Civil Rights Act of 1866: “the inhabitants of every race … shall have the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property, and shall be subject to like punishment … and no others.” [cont.]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 28, 2006 11:43 PM | Send