Still nowhere

(See below, a rebellion against Thomas Fleming at the Chronicles website. I haven’t kept up with Chronicles since I ended my subscription in 1996. I wonder if anything like this happened before.)

I once wrote a post called “Thomas Fleming, Nowhere Man,” in which I said:

The one theme to be discerned in this and Fleming’s other writings is a poisonous, multi-directional resentment … held together by a free-floating relativism in which all things are equally bad: anti-Semitism and opposition to anti-Semitism, Hitler and Israel, Islamic terrorists and America are all morally the same and not to be distinguished from each other.

Well, the Nowhere Man is at it again. In a comment at the Chronicles blog (he’s identified as TJF), he unloads his multidirectional bile against every target under the sun, but especially at white men who “peddle their childish twaddle about ‘the survival of the white race.’” Such people, he says, “only give fund-raising material to the Southern Poverty Law Center and justify the disdain of mainstream ‘conservatives’ for anyone who dares to bring up the reality of race.” So, has Fleming said how he thinks race ought to be discussed? And are there any people today talking about race in a manner of which Fleming would approve? The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. Fleming believes in nothing (except the Confederacy and Serbia), and hates everything in the world since 1865 (except, of course, Serbia).

- end of initial entry -

Philip L., who sent me the Fleming item, writes:

It seems to me—and at least one of the readers—that the targets of Fleming’s outburst against “whining whites” would have to include paleos like his old friend Samuel Francis and pretty much any white person who makes a political issue out of affirmative action. This seems to be a call for unilateral surrender to the Al Sharptons of the world.

Dan McCulloch writes:

This is a very sad day for me. I’ve previously not agreed with your assessment of Fleming. Your past characterization of him as “insane” and “rabid” seemed extremely over the top to me. Well, in fact that still does, but your more reasoned characterization of him as manifesting a multi-directional bile, I must admit, now seems accurate to me. As with you, this man played an important formative role in my own political/philosophical development. This post of his at Chronicles unfortunately seems to be part of a pattern with both his own past statements, and those of others associated with him.

I thought that you perhaps deliberately missed the point of the quoted passage in the original “Nowhere Man” post. It seemed perfectly obvious to me that his point there was that murder is murder regardless of who is doing it, and that slavish attachment to and defense of one’s own group regardless of what is being done to whom, is a bad thing. He was not saying that there is no moral distinction to be made between Hitler and Israel, and would certainly deny this if asked. But perhaps you said what you did because you discerned a larger pattern in his writing and it was this to which you were reacting? This latest post by Fleming at least seems now to me to be part of such a pattern. It is indicative of a certain self-righteous, smarter and holier-than-thou attitude, which has finally become insufferable, even to a devoted learner like myself. He now wants to cut an extremely fine distinction between those who are allowed to discuss race, and those who, according to himself, are whiners and therefore right out. What a load of crap! And the reason he gives is that the SPLC might object to talk of a “white” (for lack of a better descriptor) race!

The other part of the pattern is the recent cowardly attempts by Richert, Zmirak, Purcell, Spencer et al to avoid association with the frightening term “racialist.” If they can only define it their own way, viz., that racialists are those who make race “the whole ball of wax,” then they can claim they have nothing to do with it! I think we can assume that this is now the official attitude of Taki’s and Chronicles. Perhaps they would say it always has been, but it’s only recently become a noticeable drift. It’s a mini-purge. This is sadder and more disturbing to me than the election results, and by far. These guys are trying for respectability in the eyes of the Left, for that is the only place whence respectability comes in this age.

I’m not prepared to write them off, but this severely limits their own usefulness. When the powers against which we struggle are specifically against us as “white” (not the color, but the civilization associated with us), our fight will involve, at times, opposition strictly in the same terms, i.e., as white. This does not mean that we are making an idol of our race, but merely that race matters.

LA replies:

I don’t think I’ve ever said that Fleming is insane. I may have said that he’s rabid.

Dan McCulloch replies:

Here’s the quote:

LA replies:

Right, this insane rabid individual—famous for being the angriest, most jaw-droppingly insulting person anyone has ever encountered—is going to tell the world about morality!

LA replies:

Ok. I said it.

Gintas J. writes:

Fleming said in his first comment,

“I hope this comment elicits the response I am expecting because it will enable us to block the whiners–white in face only–from our site.”

and if you’ve tracked the comments, there are a few folks taking Fleming to task. These “whiners” must be blocked. Here they are so far:

Tom Camp:

Just playing devil’s advocate, but is Pat Buchanan whining? Was Sam Francis whining?

lemon:

You have been very free with the name calling, but you have yet to explain how one thing that I said that was not true. By the way I am not Mr., it’s Mrs. I did read your magazine for years, but I quit.

Bernie:

“The most hilarious cases are the anti-semitic racists who go to Taylor’s conferences to receive instructions from people like Levin.”

Does this include people such as Paul Gottfried, Joe Sobran, Roger McGrath, Sam Francis, Derek Turner and Michael Walker (to name just a few) who have spoken at American Renaissance conferences and/or written for the publication?

If so, how do you defend publishing these people in Chronicles?

If not, why are so many of your contributors willing to risk their careers to speak before such a “racist” group?

John Brompton:

TJF’s attitudes, typified by his embarrassing rants here, are the principal reason I cancelled my Chronicles subscription.

I simply can’t abide these smug pseudo-intellectuals looking down their fat, gravy-stained noses at ordinary whites who are increasingly frustrated at their marginalisation and dispossession. It would be absolutely grand if every European-American were a degreed genius like TJF or Wilson, but that is not the case.

Further, as all Southerners and Southron-wannabes such as TJF know, regionalism and particularism barely exist outside the South. So if white Americans—even Yankees!—latch on to a form of white racial identity politics, it is not because they are poor, ignorant, or evil, it is because there is no alternative. Not every white man is fortunate enough to have been born in the South.

To put it crudely, over the years I have concluded that TJF and his ilk are self-righteous, out-of-touch eggheads who enjoy nothing better than ridiculing white racial activists in order to make themselves feel more important. “They’re all tiresome liars”—apart from the degreed genius TJF, of course.

HappyFace:

TJF is whining about whining. Sam Francis and lots of the fine folk on Vdare are included among the whiners.

Prozium (short section):

Umm, I hate to burst your bubble here, but “white racialists” and “the South” were synonymous up until the 1960s. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the majority of white Americans were willing to say they were comfortable with black/white intermarriage. Millions of Southerners still haven’t reconciled themselves to this aspect of our culture.

To be perfectly honest, I have always found your cheerleading for Catholicism rather tiresome. The “fine white folks of the North” who imposed integration on the South were your fellow Catholics. The U.S. Catholic hierarchy is one of the biggest supporters of amnesty for illegal aliens. Pope John Paul II said on numerous occasions that migration is a “human right.” So please tell me where was the Vatican and its minions back at Selma and Birmingham? They certainly weren’t on our side. That much is for sure.

Your preening about “racism” is risible. My ancestors have roots in the South that go back to the seventeenth century. One in particular, John Gill Shorter, served as Governor of Confederate Alabama. Not a single one of them would have cared a whit about what “mainstream conservatives” like Bill Bennett, William F. Buckley, of William Kristol have to say about “racism.” They were unabashed racialists and states’ rights men. “Conservative” was another word nowhere to be found in their vocabulary.

Conservatism is failure. The entire conservative movement from beginning to end has been nothing but one gigantic fraud. Southerners are worse off in every way since we started listening to those people. They have done nothing with their power except magnify our problems: immigration, “civil rights,” affirmative action, multiculturalism, cultural degeneracy. Not only have “conservatives” aided the radical left on these issues, they have even one upped them!

That doesn’t even begin to touch upon all the favors that conservatives have done for the rich friends on Wall Street or the warmongers at the Pentagon. Fortunately, “conservatism” in 2008 is a movement in terminal decline. It’s now being ripped apart from the right and the left; sheer demographics will eventually bury it. Eight years of Bush/Cheney and the legacy of 30 years of Reaganomics has completely discredited “conservatism” in the eyes of my generation. Good riddance.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 15, 2008 05:20 PM | Send