Self-Sufficiency: It Has Moral As Well As Physical Value

Editorial from National Vanguard Magazine Issue No.116, August-September 1996
Watching the News

I have friends who tell me that they don't like to watch television news broadcasts, because they find them depressing. I, on the other hand, look forward to watching the evening news every day. I usually find the news encouraging.

My friends are conservatives. I am not.

When they watch the news they see their world coming apart. They have been sacrificing and saving for years to send a son or daughter to Harvard, and what they see in the evening news gives them a nagging, subconscious worry about the ultimate value of their endeavor. Or they have been looking forward to retirement, to travel, or to a nicer home--to a time when they will be able to have a more enjoyable life--and the newscasters' images on their television screens have clouded their vision of the future, tarnished it, made it seem less attainable.

When I watch the news I see more evidence of the impending crackup of a system which has become terminally corrupt and which must be swept aside--not modified or reformed, but destroyed root and branch--before anything of lasting value can be built.

My friends depend on the system in one way or another, and so the daily portents of its imminent demise give them worry rather than pleasure. They agree with me about many of the concrete aspects of the system which are bad and which they would like to see changed: too many non-Whites, too much crime, too intrusive a government, too much environmental damage, too much Jewish power. Many even will agree about some of the more abstract problems: flawed values, flawed child-raising practices, spiritually debilitating life-styles. Their agreement is conditional, however: whatever pruning of the system is done to fix the problems must not cut off the particular limb on which they are sitting. Things need fixing, but not badly enough to jeopardize their own situations.

Thus, they felt a certain degree of embarrassment when the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was jailed for stealing public funds and the President of the United States was sued for attempting to extort sexual services from a civil servant, while I was elated: thank you, Paula Jones! The O.J. Simpson verdict gave them indigestion; it got a whoop of delight from me. They moan about affirmative action, quotas, and set-asides, while I regard these racial levelling policies as a boon--not only because such policies alienate from the government the sort of people whose collaboration and support I am seeking in my campaign against the government, but also because they undermine the morale and efficiency of such agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

I would love to see a week-long failure of the electrical power grid throughout the Northeast (or any other major section of the country), whereas my conservative friends, nearly all of whom are urbanites, must regard such a prospect with undiluted horror, for they know that it would put them and their families in a very real danger of being eaten.

I don't respond to the news the way I do because of some perverse delight in watching my conservative friends squirm--although that does provide a certain satisfaction. The news makes me happy more often than not because it is a continuing confirmation that the system is not working the way its advocates want it to work. If the system were working even moderately well, then the only possibilities for getting rid of it would be an unforeseen cataclysm--perhaps a large asteroid striking the earth (preferably about half way between the District of Columbia and New York City) and doing enough damage to create a clean slate, in effect, so far as mass media and governmental structures are concerned--or gradually persuading enough conservatives to saw off the limbs on which they presently are sitting so that they could constitute an anti-system bloc large enough to overturn the power structure by more or less conventional means. The chance of the former happening is not only unknown, but presumably quite small. The chance of the latter is much less.

People, in the mass, generally take the path of least resistance. They do not knowingly act against their own perceived interests, although they may be tricked by the mass media into perceiving their interests incorrectly or manipulated through their sub-rational urges into ignoring their real interests. In other words, if the system were working in a way that satisfied most of the needs of most of the people and gave them confidence that it would continue to do so, we revolutionaries would be reduced to waiting for a cataclysm--or doing something wild and desperate, with very little chance of success.

What I see in the news is not just the potholes in the road to the New World Order, but the fundamental structural flaws which assure me that the road will give way altogether and dump those depending on it into the swamp of chaos. It is built on the lie of equality. It is bedded in the crackpot assumption that one can take the diverse peoples and nations of the world, break down their ages-old institutions and customs, dissolve the bonds which have joined the individuals to their natural communities, obliterate their sense of racial or ethnic identity, and then pour the mass of indistinguishable "human" units so produced into a giant blender, which, with a heavy infusion of the right sort of propaganda, will yield the batter from which a strong and enduring New World Order can be cast.

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What I see in the news is not just the potholes in the road to the New World Order, but the fundamental structural flaws which assure me that the road will give way altogether and dump those depending on it into the swamp of chaos.

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Knowing that the present system will fail and being able to see the evidence of that impending failure growing day by day is the source of much of my optimism. The same evidence is the source of most of my conservative friends' pessimism.

There are other differences between me and my conservative friends: differences in temperament--and undoubtedly differences in values as well, despite their agreement with me on many issues. But the most important difference is one of situation: my conservative friends have structured their lives so that they are dependent on the present system in many ways, while I have deliberately made myself as independent of the system as I could.

When I left Washington, D.C., 11 years ago and began living on a mountain in one of the more primitive and remote areas of West Virginia, I tried to restructure my life in a way that left me with as little dependence on the government and the rest of the world as possible. My motivation was not fear of an imminent collapse of the system, but rather a desire to be able to do what I believed to be right without any strings holding me back. I wanted as little conflict as possible between my self-interest and my conscience.

I wanted to live on land on which I could hunt my meat and grow my own fruit and vegetables if I had to. I deliberately chose to heat all the dwellings on my mountain with windfall firewood and otherwise to minimize my dependence on outside utilities. And in fact, during massive power failures due to flooding in the valley below my mountain, one of which lasted four days and resulted in thousands of my low-lying neighbors seeking help from the National Guard and various Federal relief agencies, I was quite comfortable.

It is this difference in situations which, more than anything else, accounts for my optimism and my conservative friends' pessimism. Fortunately, some of my friends--the harder-headed ones--are beginning to draw some conclusions from what they see in the news and are beginning to look for ways to disentangle their own futures from that of the system. This is a development with very promising consequences.

I don't expect a mass exodus from the cities any time soon, with every White conservative headed for Idaho, Montana, or West Virginia. For most of them such a move is not economically feasible. Many have become too soft, mentally as well as physically, to end their dependence on the urban infrastructure. They wouldn't know how to handle a firearm or a chainsaw. They are too accustomed to paying a monthly bill for their water, their waste disposal, and their heat, and being able to telephone for the police or the fire department in an emergency.

The disentanglement I see developing is more a mental break with the system than a physical move away from it. A growing number of people now in their 20s and 30s who two generations ago would have looked forward to regular and dependable Social Security checks as the major part of their retirement income have stopped worrying about the impending bankruptcy of the Social Security system and have simply written off Social Security as their retirement mainstay; instead they are making other arrangements: investments which are more under their own control and less dependent on the solvency of the government.

Conservative parents, no matter how much they may worry about falling standards at Harvard, still haven't figured out an alternative to university training to keep their kids from slipping down into the proletariat. But more parents than ever before are postponing the exposure of their offspring to Political Correctness and the joys of multiculturalism by opting for home schooling--at least during the critical first few years.

Telecommuting, of course, is available to the fortunate few with the right skills. It frees them from the urban environment, but it still leaves them dependent on a monthly paycheck. Some, however, are able to go beyond telecommuting and achieve a greater degree of economic separation from the system by choosing self-employment. The balance between employee and free-lancer is shifting toward the latter with the ongoing erosion of the long-term economic security of employment, as the deindustrialization of America continues. It is more than the computer and economics which is driving the shift to self-employment, though: in many cases the person who chooses to be self-employed has made a conscious decision to minimize his dependence on the system.

Perhaps the most significant trend in this regard is the growing number of conservatives who are buying themselves a piece of mountain land as far away from the nearest urban area as possible and then spending their vacations building a cabin on it: not just a vacation home or a place for hunting, but a genuine getaway, a refuge to which they can retreat when life in the city is no longer feasible.

All of these uneasy conservatives who have made some sort of break with the system constitute only a minority so far. But the majority, lacking the skills or the savings or the initiative or the courage of the minority, are at least making an emotional break: more and more of them no longer become more worried when they see some new crack appearing in the system's structure: instead they become more angry. They can see their more fortunate or more able brethren packing their bags, in a manner of speaking, and the suspicion grows in them that they, the ones with no bags to pack, will be the ones left behind to satisfy the jungle appetites of the "equals" when the lights go off for good.

The promising thing about this process of loss of faith in the system and subsequent voluntary dissociation from it is that it is a nonlinear process: it feeds on itself and eventually reaches an avalanche stage. It is not necessary for me to urge my conservative friends to make the break: just seeing others do it will cause the pressure to build.

And there's nothing the evil creatures running this show from behind the scenes can do to stop the process. No amount of "fine tuning" can repair a system which is founded on false premises and is fundamentally unworkable. They can hardly abandon their egalitarian theory; if they did, their whole coalition of perverts, non-Whites, moral cripples, and other "equals," all of whom owe their free ride to the theory, would turn on them. Nor can they relax their grip by permitting any responsible or honorable man or any man not firmly in their control to attain high office. They really have a tiger by the tail. When potholes appear, all they can do is patch them with ever larger doses of the same lies and crackpot assumptions.

So, if watching the news is often depressing to my conservative friends, imagine what it is like for the liberals! Day by day they see the system on which they depend not only for their physical sustenance but also for their spiritual sustenance coming unraveled. They worry, like the conservatives, but in addition to worry a burning hatred grows in their souls. The conservatives have at least some degree of understanding that the system is failing because of its false basis, but to the liberals egalitarianism is as sound as gravity. Since the system cannot be failing due to its inherent falseness, the problem must lie with its external enemies: heterosexual White males must be conspiring to cause the system not to function properly, the dirty dogs!

The more they think about it the more hateful they become. How dare those White racists criticize the O.J. Simpson verdict! It's obvious that that racist cop, Mark Fuhrman, framed O.J., and the Black jury was smart enough to figure it out.

How dare those working-class Whites complain about affirmative action employment programs or about government programs to relocate Blacks from the inner cities to the White suburbs! They're nothing but haters and bigots, and they should be locked up for opposing our efforts to "equalize" them with African-Americans.

And how dare those militias and Freemen not love our government! Don't those stupid rednecks realize what a wonderful instrument of progress the government is? How could we ever get to the New World Order without the government?

The unanimously venomous attitude of the controlled media toward the Montana Freemen, a harmless bunch of hard-luck farmers with whacky religious ideas and whackier ideas about economics and finance, was revealing. The Freemen never hurt anyone and never intended to hurt anyone, but they refused to accept the authority of the government--the government upon which the liberals depend to implement ideas far whackier than anything dreamed up by the Freemen--and so editorial writers raged at them and urged the FBI to advance on them with machine guns and flamethrowers blazing.

One of the most powerful indicators of the way in which liberals are responding to the news these days has been their reaction to the burnings of Black churches across the South. No sooner had the controlled media declared the church burnings to be a major issue than Mr. Clinton was on television announcing that he "knew" that organized White racism was responsible, and it wouldn't be tolerated.

I wondered at the time whether or not Mr. Clinton had some inside information, because I wasn't sure at all that the burnings were an organized effort by White racists. It may yet turn out that way, but I strongly doubt it: I know lots of White racists, organized and otherwise, and this just isn't their style. A boozed-up Ku Kluxer might have torched a Black church here or there, but the multi-state string of burnings just doesn't have the feel of the work of a White racist organization.

Apparently the secret police figured that too. They learned in school that most cases of arson are associated with insurance fraud, and so they began questioning Black parishioners and asking Black preachers to take lie-detector tests, causing an outburst of liberal indignation in the controlled media. The racist cops are blaming the victims! Quit investigating Blacks and start arresting White racists!

A typical case was an editorial in the Charleston Gazette (June 18), a raving-liberal West Virginia newspaper which is an embarrassment to an otherwise decent state:

Raw racism seems to be the motive.

As we've said before, Americans generally are decent, compassionate people who don't feel racial hate. But the nation still has a vein of bigotry--and a few racists are brutal enough to join hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Freemen.

Extreme bigots presumably are starting the fires, even though investigators haven't yet found evidence of an organized conspiracy. Our guess is that a few white rednecks, half drunk in a Southern roadhouse, see a TV report of a Black church burning and decide to inflict the same punishment on Blacks in their vicinity.

Churches are a natural target for race-haters. . . . Just because they're idiots doesn't mean they aren't disgusting criminals who must be locked in prison. The wave of black church fires has gripped the conscience of America. Leaders and groups at every level are calling for a national crackdown. Decent Americans who feel no hostility should lend their voices to the outcry and exert pressure until all the arsonists are prosecuted.

"Raw racism seems to be the motive." "Extreme bigots presumably are starting the fires." What the editor really means is that he hopes White racists are burning the churches, so that they can be caught and punished. He's praying that a racist conspiracy will be discovered, so that it can be stamped out, hopefully with a high body count. And as for "Americans who feel no hostility," he clearly is not among them.

Or consider this bit of rabid commentary by Washington Post columnist Carl Rowan. It was in the June 13 edition and was titled "Church Bombers and The Turner Diaries":

I think that there is a grotesque conspiracy to "save the white race" afoot in America, and that the church bombings [sic] are part of a plot to provoke blacks to react violently, thus giving all the hate groups in the land an excuse to uncover their caches of weapons and use them against blacks and against whites who sympathize with blacks.

I have turned anew to The Turner Diaries, the revolutionary "bible" of the Montana Freemen, the Aryan Supremacists, and the militiamen and others who threaten to "solve the race problem" by killing Blacks, Jews, and liberals. This little 210-page book written by West Virginia professor William Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald is the most diabolically violent plan for solving America's racial and social problems that I have ever read.

 Rowan follows with a long extract from The Turner Diaries to prove his point and concludes:

The bigots who seek to destroy "the system" clearly believe that even if they burned 10,000 black churches, most of "the white race" would side with them if outraged blacks or their federal protectors took up arms against the arsonists. Federal authorities know this; thus their caution, even timidity, in cracking down on the Freemen, or the rash of new hate groups, or the weird souls who are stockpiling weapons they expect to use against their state and federal governments.

The church bombings reflect a race madness that is far worse than we want to think it is. A lot more people are in grave danger than those who worship in black churches.

Hatred and hostility, stemming from fear, in the Charleston Gazette ; galloping paranoia, stemming from fear, in the Washington Post. And these two examples are pretty typical of the liberal response everywhere to the church burnings.

The facts are not yet all in, but the arson cases which have been solved to date suggest something quite different from Bill Clinton's or Carl Rowan's assumption of a White racist conspiracy or even the Charleston Gazette's assumption of groups of White rednecks wanting to punish Blacks.

Alabama Fire Marshal John Robison has investigated 38 cases of arson or suspected arson of churches in Alabama, 15 of them Black churches, since 1991, and he's found no evidence of racial motives in any of them. In one case, that of the Antioch A.M.E. Church in Fort Deposit, the Black minister was charged with burning her own church. "The pastor was upset with the congregation about money; she felt she didn't get paid enough," said Robison.

On June 18 four Black children, aged 12 and under, were arrested for setting a fire in a Black church in Florence, South Carolina. Of 27 church fires which have been investigated in South Carolina since 1991, 15 of them were in Black churches, and a total of six Whites and six Blacks have been arrested in connection with those 15 cases.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has investigated seven church burnings in Georgia during the past 18 months. Six of the seven churches had White congregations. The one Black church which was burned, in February 1995, was torched by a Black juvenile.

On June 19 two Black men were arrested in Columbus County, North Carolina, and charged with burning a building on the grounds of the Black Mount Tabor Baptist Church. The previous week a 12-year-old White girl was arrested for setting a fire which destroyed an abandoned building on the grounds of a Black church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Pretty inconclusive evidence, it seems to me--although I wouldn't bet that Mr. Clinton's BATF goons can't find some kind of conspiracy, if they try hard enough to please their boss.

The hysterical reaction of liberals to all of this suggests several things. First, liberals want there to be a White conspiracy behind it, because that would tend to confirm their theory about race relations generally: namely, whenever things don't work the way liberal theory says they should work, the reason is White racism. Second, they really believe there is a White conspiracy, because so many of their plans have been going off the rails lately that they're becoming a little paranoid. Third, they're frightened; it's clear that more and more people are turning against the government, or at least losing faith in the government, and the government is the only protection which stands between them and the wrath of the heterosexual White males they have treated so contemptuously for so long. It is their fear, I believe, which explains the increasing level of viciousness and hatred we are seeing in liberal condemnations of the government's enemies.

Yes, watching the news these days is hard on my conservative friends--but it really must be killing the liberals!

W.L.P