Why We Fight

by William Pierce
from Attack!  #14, 1972


When they are desperate and have their backs against a wall, most men will fight, if they can see a chance thereby of relieving their plight.

In America today, desperate men are scarce.

We complain about taxes and about rising prices, but we are not desperate about either, despite imaginative rhetoric to that effect heard occasionally.

We denounce the treason in our government and the alien monopoly over our information media, but neither have made us desperate.

Discontent, Yes; Desperation, No. 

The busing of school children into integrated blackboard jungles makes us angry, but few have become really desperate as a result of even the most outrageous busing edicts.

Those who felt a strong attachment to their church or to some other traditional institution of our people which has been debased -- or has debased itself in recent years -- have responded with sadness or a sense of frustration rather than desperation.

Because we are not hungry, we are not desperate. Because we are not in immediate peril of our lives, we are not desperate. Because America, wallowing in the grossness of her decadence, in the stench of her corruption, in the vileness of her materialism and her liberalism, can yet provide bread and circuses aplenty, we are not desperate.

Where desperation is lacking, other incentives for fighting must be found, but there are few which serve so well.

Alienated Are Bought Off

Alienation can sometimes be pressed into service, in a negative way. But today even the alienated are so sated with material comforts that they fight only for a diversion, for excitement. Their destructive impulses toward a society and a civilization to which they feel no fundamental commitment are held in check by their continuing greed for the pleasures that civilization can supply them.

Almighty Public Opinion

The pressure of the herd can also make men fight. In the trenches of World War I, when the sergeant shouted, "Over the top!", men who only wanted to find a safe place to hide nevertheless swarmed out to do battle. Fear of the opinions of their fellows was stronger even than the fear of death.

The same thing can also be made to work on a mass scale. The fighting energy of a whole people can be mobilized, if there first has been created the public sentiment that each and every citizen should join the effort against a national enemy - real or imagined.

Pressure to Conform

One need not feel a sense of personal commitment or duty in order to be compelled to fight; he merely needs to feel that that is what is expected of him. Herd-pressure works equally well to prevent people from fighting or opposing a thing by holding out the threat of public disapproval of those who do so. Exactly such pressure today serves as the first line of defense for the System which is destroying America.

Power of Materialism

The lure of booty has always provided a powerful motive for men to fight, whether that booty was in the form of the spoils of a medieval city or the high salary, status and privileges which modern states provide for their elite secret policemen. Special agents of the FBI are generally recruited from the finest stock in the U.S., but, because they are paid handsomely to do so, they enthusiastically defend the System and wage relentless war against patriots who would throw off its shackles.

Patriots face, in addition, the negative prospect of losing whatever material possessions they might otherwise hope to acquire by going along with the destroyers of their nation. In times when treason doth prosper, the opposition to treason seldom does. Why then, since we are neither desperate -- in the ordinary, physical sense of the word -- nor alienated, nor urged by public opinion, nor lured by the promise of riches, do we fight?

Extraordinary Motivation

In order to carry on a demanding and unpopular activity over a long period of time; an activity which requires long hours of hard work with little or no financial reward and presents the constant danger of physical injury, imprisonment, or assassination; an activity which often alienates friends, neighbors, relatives, business associates, and employers and can result in loss of present employment with blackballing for the future - one needs an extraordinary motivation.

Since the ordinary physical rewards and threats which provide the incentive for ordinary activity are ruled out, the motivation must be of an idealistic or spiritual nature. It must transform one's whole outlook on life, so that ordinary temptations cease to tempt, and ordinary deterrents cease to deter.

Racial Idealism

We fight when others will not because we have recognized values and meanings that they have not.

Our central value, that which gives meaning to all the rest, is race. We understand and love the greatness which is in our race.

We are determined that those who want to drag that greatness down and smother it under alien filth shall not succeed.

The contributions of our great thinkers and creators, the beauty from our great poets and artists, the heroism and daring of our great warriors and leaders, the sacrifices of our martyrs -- the sublime dreams of the millions of our outstanding men and women through the ages -- must continue to have meaning and to give inspiration.

Their lives must not have been in vain. The heritage they have or created for us must be guarded and passed on.

Genetic Treasure

Even more important than this spiritual treasure is the biological basis without which it could never have been created. What God and Nature have wrought through millions of years of upward evolution is stored in the genes of our race. There is no treasure more precious, more profoundly significant, in the universe.

The life of any individual - the lives of all men now living are of insignificant value in comparison.

Sense of Identity

In such an attitude will be recognized a sense of racial identity. We understand that our own lives have real meaning only because we are parts of an infinitely greater whole. If the race dies, then no man's life has meaning or value. So long as the race continues to live, however, every member of the race, even those who have been buried ten thousand years, continue to share the life of the race.

In the race -- and there alone -- is immortality for those who will partake of it. If a thousand years from now, if the race no longer survives, then the life of all those now living will have been wasted, meaningless, in vain.

Serving Nature's Purpose

Of what significance are all our bodily pleasures, all our satisfactions of ownership, of accomplishment, of status -- a thousand cocktail parties or banquets, a hundred seductions, a dozen expensive automobiles, credit cards, bank accounts, luxurious houses -- what do all these things count when compared to the privilege of being a part of the same immortal race as Arminius and Newton and Shakespeare; more so, of being a part of Nature's great upward striving toward the Infinite?

That is the meaning of everything and the worth of everything, our lives included: being a part of the Grand Scheme.

Of all things in the universe, only men are able to choose, in some degree, what that part shall be. What an awesome responsibility that is!

Poisonous Doctrines

The understanding of these fundamental truths may be badly obscured in our times, when the cancer of neo-liberalism has eaten out the soul of our people with its poisonous doctrines of egoism and equality.

In earlier times they were widely understood. A thousand years ago our ancestors taught their sons a proper perspective toward life and death. Say the old sagas:

"Cattle die, and kinsmen die, And so one dies oneself. One thing I know that never dies: The fame of a dead man's deeds."

As late as 1945 this outlook persisted in Europe, where youth learned the same lesson, paraphrased in the motto: Ewig ist der Toten Tatenruhm.

The Long View

This is the long outlook, the impersonal outlook, without which the self-denial and self-sacrifice necessary for our ultimate victory cannot be maintained. If it seems too hard, we do not need to think in terms of eternity; we only need to think ahead a few years, when each of us must face the end of his individual existence.

What will the record show: a life of self-indulgence, without a contribution to the race, without anyparticipation in history, a life without meaning or worth, just another human organism returning to the dust whence it sprang? Or will it show a life of striving for those things which, in the long run, are the only things which count -- and, hence, life which counts?

Seizing Greatness

How terrible that last moment must be for one who can see only emptiness behind -- and ahead! How much easier for one who, through a life spent in striving for his race, can feel a sense of identity with that race and can, therefore, look ahead into a future filled with a greatness and achievement of which he has become a part, even if only an infinitesimally small part.

Shared Feeling

There are hundreds of thousands of our people in North America alone, who, in a sense, share the feeling of racial idealism we have described.

If we include those who, even in this era of ironclad thought-control, have retained some feeling of Western racial identity who, despite the incessant admonitions of the brainwashers, feel a faint stirring of racial pride when a Neil Armstrong walks on the moon or a slight flicker of racial indignation when a Henry Kissinger announces a major foreign-policy decision - the number is in the millions, perhaps as many as a quarter of the White population of the continent.

But this, for the vast majority, is racial idealism only in a very restricted sense. It does not dominate their lives. It is a largely passive part-time sort of thing. It remains subordinated to self-interest.

Idealism Must Dominate

Racial idealism can only serve as the incentive for building our movement, for carrying on our struggle, when it has filled and transformed our lives, when it has excluded every other feeling and consideration and determines our every thought and action.It must possess us; it must drive us; it must allow us no rest and no peace.Then, although we retain all our human imperfections and weaknesses of will and character, these things cannot keep us from the fight, however much they may still slow and hinder us in that fight.

No Alternative

A single, burning sense of our mission allows us no choice; it has robbed us of the privilege of a deciding whether we shall fight or not; it has destroyed any possible alternative for us. We can no longer decide: I will quit, because this fight is too difficult; I will go back to enjoying life's material and sensual pleasures again, because I am too weak to resist their temptation; I will give up, because so few are willing to help me. We keep up the fight because we must; otherwise life loses its meaning and its value.

American Tragedy

If it were not so, how could we retain our resolution when we see tens of millions of people -- and not just the credulous, the venal, the depraved, but also the perceptive, the idealistic, the upright -enthusiastically supporting as their "leaders" scoundrels so base and corrupt that they would be summarily hanged in any healthy society: Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower: the Kennedy gang, Johnson, Nixon, McGovern and the rest? Even Hubert had among his followers a number of otherwise sound and decent young people! Or when, addressing an auditorium full of students, we see in the front row two or three interracial couples ostentatiously fondling one another in order to "rattle the racist" while, smirking behind them and whispering instructions is some swarthy, alien creature with a nasal accent whom we learn the other students have freely chosen to be president of their student government?

Garden of Man

Idealism is hard to keep under such circumstances. If it were possible to give up -- if there were any way out -- we would run.

Instead, we fall back on our long view. We remember that we are not fighting to save a single generation, but ten thousand future generations; that in the sea of weeds around us there are a few flowers, and that the garden consists of those flowers rather than the weeds. We see, in our mind's eye, that garden as it can be some day, when the weeding is done: a beautiful and healthy thing, a credit to its Creator.

Doing What Is Necessary

This, then, is the vision we keep before us: our people as they can be; a people who, despite their present affliction, carry the seeds of unlimited greatness; on whom, alone among all the creatures of earth, has been bestowed the divine fire. If we fail in our mission as keepers of the sacred fire, then the light of the universe will flicker and die.Thus, regardless of the difficulties, the discouragement, and the sacrifices we must face, we know that what we do is necessary. That is all we need know.The greatest man of the West expressed this outlook when he said: "We must not ask whether it is possible to attain our goal, but whether it is necessary. If it is impossible, then we shall try our best and perish in the attempt; but if it is necessary and proper, then we must believe that it is possible."