Fundamentals for Victory

A Cosmotheist lecture given by Dr. William Pierce on October 24, 1976 at the office of the National Alliance in Arlington, Virginia

by Dr. William L. Pierce

I DON'T THINK I need to convince anyone here that what we are trying to do is very difficult. It is obvious from our own experience of the last few months that it is not easy to build up our numbers even to those needed for a truly viable organization, which I talked about a few weeks ago. It is not easy to bring new people to our meetings in the numbers we would like.

The difficulties we experience tempt some of us, I am sure, to place less emphasis on the fundamental Truth we express in our Affirmation and to turn instead toward gimmicks of one sort or another. If people will not listen to our Truth, some of us may think, then we should talk to them about things they are interested in: income taxes, school busing, pornography, abortion, the right to keep and bear arms.

Now, there is no doubt that, right now, we could win a greater response from the general public if we stopped talking about our Purpose, our Truth and concentrated all our efforts on one of those topics. We would also be more successful, in a certain sense, if we were careful not to mention the Jews or to talk about race. We could win more people, in other words -- we could be a bigger organization -- if we would behave like conservatives or right wingers.

The reason is that most people have always been more interested in concrete, personal things like money, sex, or their own safety and comfort than anything else. And they have always been shy of anything controversial, anything that might be inconvenient, or even dangerous, for them to get mixed up with. That’s why conservatism has always been more popular that radicalism. And it’s also why the two major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have always been even more popular. They appeal to the public’s basest instincts. They promise each segment of the population more of what most of them really want: more money, more comfort, more security.

Now, I’m sure no one expects us to try to out-Democrat the Democrats or out-Republican the Republicans. But we must also understand that, regardless of the difficulties it means for us now, we must not try to out-conservative the conservatives and right wingers either.

Because, while it is true that a conservative appeal, based on immediate self-interest, may win us more people in the short run, in the long run no appeal based primarily on self-interest can save us as a race. No ad hoc program, no matter how cleverly disguised, is going to achieve our long-range goals for us. We are not going to sneak a sack over the Jews’ heads under the pretense of an anti-busing or an anti-tax movement.

Cosmotheist Ethics

by Dr. William L. Pierce

THE PERSONAL CONDUCT of those who strive to follow the One Path is based on three foundations: Knowledge, Discipline, and Service.

First comes knowledge -- an understanding of the nature of man, of his relationship to the Whole, and of his purpose. Then must come action based on that understanding; we must put our knowledge to work. We must let it direct us in our daily lives, so that we live in accord with our ordained purpose, so that we serve the ends intended for us by the Creator.

Knowledge is our guide, and service is our object, but discipline gives us the indispensable means. Discipline allows us to actualize the potential strength which our knowledge gives us. Without discipline, our knowledge will remain sterile, our actions weak and ineffectual.

The gaining of knowledge, the attainment of understanding, is a lifelong process, but we have already taken the first steps toward it in the last six months. Let us now consider briefly the proper discipline for translating that knowledge into action in our daily lives.

In the most general sense, the disciplined man or woman is a person whose conscious intellect exercises the fullest possible control over his body and its subconscious needs and desires as well as over the controllable circumstances of his life. In contrast, the completely undisciplined person is a slave to his subconscious nature and to events around him. In view of what we have already learned, then, it is clear that a disciplined person, as the bearer of a higher degree of consciousness than an undisciplined one, is further along the One Path.

But we need more than generalities. We need to fill in all the details of the structure, of the means, which lies between our guiding knowledge and the object of that knowledge. We need a detailed discipline which will allow us to translate our knowledge into service.

Following the Upward Path

by Dr. William L. Pierce

LAST MONTH we received the first part of the answer we have been seeking. It did not seem to tell us much, but in reality it contained the essence of everything else we will learn. Let us think about it for a moment before we go on.

What we are seeking to discover is man's purpose, both individually and collectively. Throughout a billion years of evolution the answer to our question has slowly taken shape and has been written by God on our souls, just as a different answer to an analogous question has been formed in the deepest part of the being of every living creature -- and the non-living as well. (That is, the answers are different in detail, but they are all the same in a more general sense.)

In the words of one of our sisters in spirit [Savitri Devi -- Ed.], the sum of all these answers is the total expression of "that mysterious and unfailing wisdom according to which Nature lives and creates: the impersonal wisdom of the primeval forest and the ocean depth and of the spheres in the dark fields of space."

To each creature and to each race of creatures the answer assigns a role and determines its relationship to the Whole. We can have only imperfect knowledge to the answers which apply to other creatures, to other races, for, although our science can tell us much, we cannot see into their souls.

What is the role of the Negro? It is evident that for the last few hundred thousand years, at least, the Negro’s message has, unlike ours, told him to stop and rest. Does it also tell him that, like so many other creatures in the past, his role is finished? Perhaps we will know later.

Winning

Without a deep understanding of one key concept, all pro-White efforts will inevitably fail. But there is a way to win.

by Dr. William L. Pierce

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me, “Are we making any progress? Are we winning? Can you see victory ahead?”

I answer thus: “Yes, we are making progress, but not enough. The Enemy, despite a few setbacks he has suffered recently, is gaining ground faster than we are. Therefore, we cannot claim to be winning at this time. Nevertheless, I can see victory ahead -- far, far ahead, and the road to that victory is rocky indeed. It runs through a vale of sorrows the likes of which we have never yet experienced.”

Let me explain my answer, because a full understanding of it is essential to all of you who have made, or may soon make, the decision to travel that road.

The Alliance has gained new members in the past year, and we have increased our capability for generating and distributing the printed word, although our rate of growth has not been what we would like. The real progress we have made, however, is of a different sort. It is progress toward a correct assessment of our situation and of its necessary remedy, progress toward the new outlook and the new attitude and the new attitude we must have before we can begin winning, progress toward truth.

There was a time, 10 years or more in the past, when virtually all racially conscious, decent White Americans were “conservatives” or “right wingers,” and all “radicals” and “revolutionaries” were either Jews or degenerate Whites. Gradually, however, the realization has dawned on more and more White Americans that the situation in which our race has gotten itself admits to no “conservative” remedy.

A correct assessment of the implications of the biological time bomb which the Enemy has built in America is beginning to be made. Former “right wingers” are beginning to understand that the growing non-White army of occupation in America, now 40 million strong, cannot be made to go away by writing any number of letters to their Congressmen or by passing any Constitutional amendment or by undertaking any other sort of reform. It is a biological problem, and it requires a biological solution. There is no other way.

Knut Hamsun and the Cause of Europe

From National Vanguard magazine, Issue No. 116, 1996 By Mark Deavin

Knut Hamsun After fifty years of being confined to the Orwellian memory hole created by the Jews as part of their European "denazification" process, the work of the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun -- who died in 1952 -- is reemerging to take its place among the greatest European literature of the twentieth century. All of his major novels have undergone English-language reprints during the last two years, and even in his native Norway, where his post-1945 ostracism has been most severe, he is finally receiving a long-overdue recognition. Of course, one debilitating question still remains for the great and good of the European liberal intelligentsia, ever eager to jump to Jewish sensitivities. As Hamsun's English biographer Robert Ferguson gloomily asked himself in 1987: "Could the sensitive, dreaming genius who had created beautiful love stories ... really have been a Nazi?" Unfortunately for the faint hearts of these weak-kneed scribblers, the answer is a resounding "yes." Not only was Knut Hamsun a dedicated supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist New Order in Europe, but his best writings -- many written at the tail end of the nineteenth century -- flow with the essence of the National Socialist spirit and life philosophy. Born Knud Pederson on August 4, 1859, Hamsun spent his early childhood in the far north of Norway, in the small town of Hamaroy. He later described this time as one of idyllic bliss where he and the other children lived in close harmony with the animals on the farm, and where they felt an indescribable oneness with Nature and the cosmos around and above them. Hamsun developed an early obsession to become a writer and showed a fanatical courage and endurance in pursuing his dream against tremendous obstacles. He was convinced of his own artistic awareness and sensitivity, and was imbued with a certainty that in attempting to achieve unprecedented levels of creativity and consciousness, he was acting in accordance with the higher purpose of Nature. In January 1882 Hamsun's Faustian quest of self-discovery took him on the first of several trips to America. He was described by a friend at the time as "tall, broad, lithe with the springing step of a panther and with muscles of steel. His yellow hair ... drooped down upon his ... clear-cut classical features." These experiences consolidated in Hamsun a sense of racial identity as the bedrock of his perceived artistic and spiritual mission. A visit to an Indian encampment confirmed his belief in the inherent differences of the races and of the need to keep them separate, but he was perceptive enough to recognize that America carried the seeds of racial chaos and condemned the fact that cohabitation with Blacks was being forced upon American Whites. Writing in his book On the Cultural Life of Modern America, published in March 1889, Hamsun warned that such a situation gave rise to the nightmare prospect of a "mulatto stud farm" being created in America. In his view, this had to be prevented at all costs with the repatriation of the "black half-apes" back to Africa being essential to secure America's future (cited in Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, London, 1987, p.105). Hamsun also developed an early awareness of the Jewish problem, believing that "anti-Semitism" inevitably existed in all lands where there were Jews -- following Semitism "as the effect follows the cause." He also believed that the departure of the Jews from Europe and the White world was essential "so that the White races would avoid further mixture of the blood" (from Hamsun's 1925 article in Mikal Sylten's nationalist magazine Nationalt Tidsskrift). His experiences in America also strengthened Hamsun's antipathy to the so called "freedom" of democracy, which he realized merely leveled all higher things down to the lowest level and made financial materialism into the highest morality. Greatly influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hamsun saw himself as part of the vanguard of a European spiritual aristocracy which would reject these false values and search out Nature's hidden secrets -- developing a higher morality and value system based on organic, natural law. In an essay entitled "From the Unconscious Life of the Mind," published in 1890, Hamsun laid out his belief: An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed. Hamsun expounded this philosophy in his first great novel Hunger, which attempted to show how the known territory of human consciousness could be expanded to achieve higher forms of creativity, and how through such a process the values of a society which Hamsun believed was increasingly sick and distorted could be redefined for the better. This theme was continued in his next book, Mysteries, and again in Pan, published in 1894, which was based upon Hamsun's own feeling of pantheistic identification with the cosmos and his conviction that the survival of Western man depended upon his re-establishing his ties with Nature and leading a more organic and wholesome way of life.In 1911 Hamsun moved back to Hamaroy with his wife and bought a farm. A strong believer in the family and racial upbreeding, he was sickened by the hypocrisy and twisted morality of a modern Western society which tolerated and encouraged abortion and the abandonment of healthy children, while protecting and prolonging the existence of the criminal, crippled, and insane. He actively campaigned for the state funding of children's homes that could take in and look after unwanted children and freely admitted that he was motivated by a higher morality, which aimed to "clear away the lives which are hopeless for the benefit of those lives which might be of value." In 1916 Hamsun began work on what became his greatest and most idealistic novel, Growth of the Soil, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. It painted Hamsun's ideal of a solid, farm-based culture, where human values, instead of being fixed upon transitory artificialities which modern society had deemed fashionable, would be based upon the fixed wheel of the seasons in the safekeeping of an inviolable eternity where man and Nature existed in harmony: They had the good fortune at Sellanraa that every spring and autumn they could see the grey geese sailing in fleets above that wilderness, and hear their chatter up in the air -- delirious talk it was. And as if the world stood still for a moment, till the train of them had passed. And the human souls beneath, did they not feel a weakness gliding through them now? They went to their work again, but drawing breath first, for something had spoken to them, something from beyond. Growth of the Soil reflected Hamsun's belief that only when Western man fully accepted that he was intimately bound up with Nature's eternal law would he be able to fulfill himself and stride towards a higher level of existence. At the root of this, Hamsun made clear, was the need to place the procreation of the race back at the center of his existence: Generation to generation, breeding ever anew, and when you die the new stock goes on. That's the meaning of eternal life. The main character in the book reflected Hamsun's faith in the coming man of Europe: a Nietzschean superman embodying the best racial type who, acting in accordance with Nature's higher purpose, would lead the race to unprecedented levels of greatness. In Hamsun's vision he was described thus: A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point to the future; a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and withal, a man of the day. Hamsun's philosophy echoed Nietzsche's belief that "from the future come winds with secret beat of wings and to sensitive ears comes good news" (cited in Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century). And for Hamsun the "good news" of his lifetime was the rise of National Socialism in Germany under Adolf Hitler, whom he saw as the embodiment of the coming European man and a reflection of the spiritual striving of the "Germanic soul."The leaders of the new movement in Germany were also aware of the essential National Socialist spirit and world view which underlay Hamsun's work, and he was much lauded, particularly by Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg paid tribute to Hamsun in his The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, declaring that through a mysterious natural insight Knut Hamsun was able to describe the laws of the universe and of the Nordic soul like no other living artist. Growth of the Soil, he declared, was "the great present-day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal, primordial form." Hamsun visited Germany on several occasions during the 1930s, accompanied by his equally enthusiastic wife, and was well impressed by what he saw. In 1934 he was awarded the prestigious Goethe Medal for his writings, but he handed back the 10,000 marks prize money as a gesture of friendship and as a contribution to the National Socialist process of social reconstruction. He developed close ties with the German-based Nordic Society, which promoted the Pan-Germanic ideal, and in January 1935 he sent a letter to its magazine supporting the return of the Saarland to Germany. He always received birthday greetings from Rosenberg and Goebbels, and on the occasion of his 80th birthday from Hitler himself.    Quisling in Nasjonal Samling poster  Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Hamsun was not content merely to philosophize in an ivory tower; he was a man of the day, who, despite his age, strove to make his ideal into a reality and present it to his own people. Along with his entire family he became actively and publicly involved with Norway's growing National Socialist movement in the form of Vidkun Quisling's Nasjonal Samling (National Assembly). This had been founded in May 1933, and Hamsun willingly issued public endorsements and wrote articles for its magazine, promoting the National Socialist philosophy of life and condemning the anti-German propaganda that was being disseminated in Norway and throughout Europe. This, he pointed out, was inspired by the Jewish press and politicians of England and France who were determined to encircle Germany and bring about a European war to destroy Hitler and his idea. With the outbreak of war Hamsun persistently warned against the Allied attempts to compromise Norwegian neutrality, and on April 2, 1940 -- only a week before Hitler dramatically forestalled the Allied invasion of Norway -- Hamsun wrote an article in the Nasjonal Samling newspaper calling for German protection of Norwegian neutrality against Anglo-Soviet designs. Hamsun was quick to point out in a further series of articles soon afterward, moreover, that it was no coincidence that C.J. Hambro, the president of the Norwegian Storting, who had conspired to push Norway into Allied hands and had then fled to Sweden, was a Jew. In his longest wartime article, which appeared in the Axis periodicalBerlin-Tokyo-Rome in February 1942, he also identified Roosevelt as being in the pay of the Jews and the dominant figure in America's war for gold and Jewish power. Declaring his belief in the greatness of Adolf Hitler, Hamsun defiantly declared: "Europe does not want either the Jews or their gold." Hamsun's loyalty to the National Socialist New Order in Europe was well appreciated in Berlin, and in May 1943 Hamsun and his wife were invited to visit Joseph Goebbels, a devoted fan of the writer. Both men were deeply moved by the meeting, and Hamsun was so affected that he sent Goebbels the medal which he had received for winning the Nobel Prize for idealistic literature in 1920, writing that he knew of no statesman who had so idealistically written and preached the cause of Europe. Goebbels in return considered the meeting to have been one of the most precious encounters of his life and wrote touchingly in his diary: "May fate permit the great poet to live to see us win victory! If anybody deserved it because of a high-minded espousal of our cause even under the most difficult circumstances, it is he." The following month Hamsun spoke at a conference in Vienna organized to protest against the destruction of European cultural treasures by the sadistic Allied terror-bombing raids. He praised Hitler as a crusader and a reformer who would create a new age and a new life. Then, three days later, on June 26, 1943, his loyalty was rewarded with a personal and highly emotional meeting with Hitler at the Berghof. As he left, the 84 year-old Hamsun told an adjutant to pass on one last message to his Leader: "Tell Adolf Hitler: we believe in you." Hamsun never deviated from promoting the cause of National Socialist Europe, paying high-profile visits to Panzer divisions and German U-boats, writing articles and making speeches. Even when the war was clearly lost, and others found it expedient to keep silence or renounce their past allegiances, he remained loyal without regard to his personal safety. This was brought home most clearly after the official announcement of Hitler's death, when, with the German Army in Norway packing up and preparing to leave, Hamsun wrote a necrology for Hitler which was published in a leading newspaper: Adolf Hitler: I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel for all nations. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally felled him. Thus might the average western European regard Adolf Hitler. We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death. This was a tremendously brave thing for Hamsun to do, as the following day the war in Norway was over and Quisling was arrested. Membership in Quisling's movement after April 8, 1940, had been made a criminal offense retroactively by the new Norwegian government, and the mass roundups of around 40,000 Nasjonal Samling members now began in earnest. Hamsun's sons Tore and Arild were picked up within a week, and on May 26 Hamsun and his wife were placed under house arrest. Committed to hospital because of his failing health, Hamsun was subject to months of interrogation designed to wear down and confuse him. As with Ezra Pound in the United States, the aim was to bring about a situation where Hamsun's sanity could be questioned: a much easier option for the Norwegian authorities than the public prosecution of an 85-year-old literary legend. Unfortunately for them, Hamsun refused to crack and was more than a match for his interrogators. So, while his wife was handed a vicious three-year hard-labor sentence for her National Socialist activities, and his son Arild got four years for having the temerity to volunteer to fight Bolshevism on the Eastern Front, Hamsun received a 500,000-kroner fine and the censorship of his books. Even this did not stop him, however, and he continued to write, regretting nothing and making no apologies. Not until 1952, in his 92nd year, did he pass away, leaving us a wonderful legacy with which to carry on the fight which he so bravely fought to the end.

Henry Williamson: Nature's Visionary

From National Vanguard magazine, Issue No. 117, 1997:

Henry Williamson: Nature's Visionary By Mark Deavin

The fact that the name of Henry Williamson is today so little known across the White world is a sad reflection of the extent to which Western man has allowed himself to be deprived of his culture and identity over the last 50 years. Until the Second World War Williamson was generally regarded as one of the great English Nature writers, possessing a unique ability to capture the essential essence and meaning of the natural world in all its variety and forms.

His most famous Nature book, Tarka the Otter, was published in 1927 and became one of the best-loved children's books of all time, with its vivid descriptions of animal and woodland life in the English countryside. It was publicly praised by leading English literary figures such as Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Hardy called Tarka a "remarkable book," while Bennett declared it to be "marvelous." Even T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, admitted that "the book did move me and gratify me profoundly."

Tarka was awarded the coveted Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 and eventually attracted the interest of Walt Disney, who offered a small fortune for the film rights. Williamson, however, was concerned that such an arrangement might compromise his artistic integrity, and he rejected the offer.

Seventy years later, however, Tarka, like the majority of Williamson's books, is relatively unknown and has only just become available in print again. The reason: Like several other leading European authors, Williamson was a victim of the Second World War. Not only did his naturalistic message conflict with the materialistic culture that has pervaded the Western world since 1945, but he himself was a political fighter who actively opposed the war on ideological grounds.

Born in Brockley, southeast London, in December 1895, Williamson was educated at Colfe's Grammar School, Lewisham. He spent much of his early life exploring the nearby Kent countryside, where his love of Nature and animals and his artistic awareness and sensitivity were first stimulated. Never satisfied unless he had seen things for himself, he always made sure that he studied things closely enough to get the letter as well as the spirit of reality. This enabled him to develop a microscopic observational ability which came to dominate his life.

Williamson joined the British Army at the outbreak of war in 1914 and fought at the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, where he was seriously wounded. It was this experience as a frontline soldier which was the redefining moment in his life and artistic development, stimulating in him a lifelong Faustian striving to experience and comprehend the "life flow" permeating his own, and all, existence.

His spiritual development continued after the war. In 1919 he read for the first time the visionary The Story of My Heart, which was written by the English Nature writer Richard Jefferies and published in 1893. For Williamson, discovering Jefferies acted as a liberation of his consciousness, stimulating all the stored impressions of his life to return and reveal a previously smothered and overlaid self. It was not just an individual self that he discovered, however, but a racial self in which he began to recognize his existence as but a link in an eternal chain that reached back into the mists of time, and which -- if it were permitted -- would carry on forever.

Williamson sensed this truth in his own feeling of oneness with Nature and the ancient, living, breathing Universe as represented by the life-giving sun. It also was reflected in his idea of mystical union between the eternal sunlight and the long history of the earth. For Williamson the ancient light of the sun was something "born in me" and represented the real meaning of his own existence by illuminating his ancestral past and revealing the truth of redemption through Nature. Like Jefferies before him, Williamson "came to feel the long life of the earth back in the dimmest past while the sun of the moment was warm on me ... This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness. From all the ages my soul desired to take that soul-life which had flowed through them as the sunbeams had continually found an earth." [1] 

After the war Williamson became a journalist for a time while beginning work on his first novel, The Beautiful Years (1922). Finally he decided to break all contact with London and in 1922 moved to an ancient cottage in Georgham, North Devon, which had been built in the days of King John. Living alone and in hermit fashion at first, Williamson disciplined himself to study Nature with the same meticulous observations as Jefferies, tramping about the countryside and often sleeping out. The door and windows of the cottage were never closed, and his strange family of dogs and cats, gulls, buzzards, magpies, and one otter cub were free to come and go as they chose.

It was his experiences with the otter cub which stimulated Williamson to write Tarka. He had rescued it after its mother had been shot by a farmer, and he saved its life by persuading his cat to suckle it along with her kitten. Eventually the otter cub was domesticated and became Williamson's constant companion, following him around like a dog. On one walk, however, it walked into a rabbit trap, panicked, and ran off. Williamson spent years following otters' haunts in the rivers Taw and Torridge, hunting for his lost pet.

The search was in vain, but his intimate contact with the animal world gave him the inspiration for Tarka: "The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone. His fur was soft and grey as the buds of the willow before they open up at Eastertide. He was called Tarka, which was the name given to the otters many years ago by men dwelling in hut circles on the moor. It means Little Water Wanderer, or Wandering as Water."

Williamson never attempted to pass any kind of moral judgment on Nature and described its evolutionary realities in a manner reminiscent of Jack London: "Long ago, when moose roamed in the forest at the mountain of the Two Rivers, otters had followed eels migrating from ponds and swamps to the seas. They had followed them into shallow waters; and one fierce old dog had run through the water so often that he swam, and later, in his great hunger, had put under his head to seize them so often that he dived. Other otters had imitated him. The moose are gone, and their bones lie under the sand in the soft coal which was the forest by the estuary, thousands of years ago. Yet otters have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an instinct."

Williamson actually rewrote Tarka 17 times, "always and only for the sake of a greater truth." [2] Mere polishing for grace and expression or literary style did not interest him, and he strove always to illuminate a scene or incident with what he considered was authentic sunlight.

He also believed that European man could be spiritually healthy and alive to his destiny only by living in close accord with Nature. Near the end ofTarka, for instance, he delightfully describes how "a scarlet dragonfly whirred and darted over the willow snag, watched by a girl sitting on the bank ... Glancing round, she realized that she alone had seen the otter. She flushed, and hid her grey eyes with her lashes. Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld."

Williamson's sequel to Tarka was Salar the Salmon, which was also the result of many months of intimate research and observation of Nature in the English countryside. Then came The Lone Swallow, The Peregrine's Saga, Life in a Devon Village, and A Clear Water Stream, all of which, in the eyes of the English writer Naomi Lewis, displayed "a crystal intensity of observation and a compelling use of words, which exactly match the movement and life that he describes."

To Williamson himself, however, his Nature stories were not the most important part of his literary output. His greatest effort went into his two semi-autobiographical novel groups, the tetralogy collected as The Flax of Dreams , which occupied him for most of the 1920's, and the 15-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, which began with The Dark Lantern in 1951 and ended with The Gale of the World in 1969.

Williamson's experiences during the First World War had politicized him for life. A significant catalyst in this development was the Christmas truce of 1914, when British and German frontline soldiers spontaneously left their trenches, abandoned the fighting, and openly greeted each other as brothers.

Williamson later spoke of an "incoherent sudden realization, after the fraternization of Christmas Day, that the whole war was based on lies." Another experience that consolidated this belief was when a German officer helped him remove a wounded British soldier who was draped over barbed wire on the front line. He was thus able to contrast his own wartime experiences with the vicious anti-German propaganda orchestrated by the British political establishment both during and after the war, and he was able to recognize the increasing moral bankruptcy of that establishment. In Williamson's view the fact that over half of the 338 Conservative Members of Parliament who dominated the 1918 governing coalition were company directors and financiers who had grown rich from war profits was morally wrong and detestable.

This recognition, in itself a reflection of an already highly developed sense of altruism, meant that Williamson could never be content with just isolating himself in the countryside. He had to act to try to change the world for the better. Perhaps not surprisingly he came to see in the idea of National Socialism a creed which not only represented his own philosophy of life, but which offered the chance of practical salvation for Western Civilization. He saw it as evolving directly from the almost religious transcendence which he, and thousands of soldiers of both sides, had experienced in the trenches of the First World War. This transcendence resulted in a determination that the "White Giants" of Britain and Germany would never go to war against each other again, and it rekindled a sense of racial kinship and unity of the Nordic peoples over and above separate class and national loyalties. [3]

Consequently, not only was Williamson one of the first of the "phoenix generation" to swear allegiance to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, but he quickly came to believe that National Socialist Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, pointed the way forward for European man. Williamson identified closely with Hitler -- "the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is the happy child," seeing him as a light-bringing phoenix risen from the chaos of European civilization in order to bring a millennium of youth to the dying Western world. [4]

Williamson visited Germany in 1935 to attend the National Socialist Congress at Nuremberg and saw there the beginnings of the "land fit for heroes" which had been falsely promised the young men of Britain during the First World War by the government's war propagandists. He was very impressed by the fact that, while the British people continued to languish in poverty and mass unemployment, National Socialism had created work for seven million unemployed, abolished begging, freed the farmers from the mortgages which had strangled production, developed laws on conservation, and, most importantly, had developed in a short period of time a deep sense of racial community. [5]

Inspired to base their lives on a religious idea, Williamson believed that the German people had been reborn with a spiritual awareness and physical quality that he himself had long sought. Everywhere he saw "faces that looked to be breathing extra oxygen; people free from mental fear." [6]

Through the Hitler Youth movement, which brought back fond memories of his own time as a Boy Scout, he recognized "the former pallid leer of hopeless slum youth transformed into the suntan, the clear eye, the broad and easy rhythm of the poised young human being."

In Hitler's movement Williamson identified not only an idea consistent with Nature's higher purpose to create order out of chaos, but the physical encapsulation of a striving toward Godhood. Influenced by his own lifelong striving for perfection, Williamson believed that the National Socialists represented "a race that moves on the poles of mystic, sensual delight. Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance ... Everything is of the blood, of the senses." [7] 

Williamson always believed that any spiritual improvement could only take place as a result of a physical improvement, and, like his mentor Richard Jefferies, he was a firm advocate of race improvement through eugenics. He himself was eventually to father seven children, and he decried the increasing lack of racial quality in the mass of the White population. He urged that "the physical ideal must be kept steadily in view" and called for the enforcement of a discipline and system along the lines of ancient Sparta in order to realize it. [8]

In 1936 Williamson and his family moved to Norfolk, where he threw himself into a new life as a farmer, the first three years of which are described in The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941). But with the Jews increasingly using England as a base from which to agitate for war against Germany, Williamson remained very active through his membership in the British Union of Fascists in promoting the idea of Anglo-German friendship. Until it was banned in 1940, Williamson wrote eight articles for the party newspaper Action and had 13 extracts reprinted from his book The Patriot's Progress. He called consistently for Hitler to be given "that amity he so deserved from England," so as to prevent another brothers' war that would see the victory only of Asiatic Bolshevism and the enslavement of Europe. On September 24, 1939, for instance, he wrote of his continuing conviction that Hitler was "determined to do and create what is right. He is fighting evil. He is fighting for the future."

Williamson viewed the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France as a spiteful act of an alien system that was determined to destroy the prospect of a reborn and regenerated European youth. And his continued opposition to it led to his arrest and internment in June 1940, along with Mosley and hundreds of others. His subsequent release on parole was conditional upon his taking no further action to oppose the war. Silently, however, Williamson remained true to his convictions. Visiting London in January 1944, he observed with satisfaction that the ugliness and immorality represented by its financial and banking sector had been "relieved a little by a catharsis of high explosive" and somewhat "purified by fire."

National Socialism's wartime defeat, however, dealt Williamson a heavy blow. Decrying the death struggle of "the European cousin nations" he lamented that "the hopes that have animated or agitated my living during the past thirty years and four months are dead." [9]

Consequently, his first marriage broke up in 1947, and he returned to North Devon to live in the hilltop hut which he had bought in 1928 with the prize money from Tarka.

But it was not in Williamson's character to give up on what he knew to be true and right, and, as his most recent biographer makes clear, he never recanted his ideas about Hitler. [10]

On the contrary, he continued to publicly espouse what he believed, and he fervently contested the postwar historical record distorted by false Jewish propaganda -- even though his effort resulted, as he realized it would, in his continued literary ostracism.

In The Gale of the World, the last book of his Chronicle, published in 1969, Williamson has his main character Phillip Maddison question the moral and legal validity of the Nuremberg Trials. Among other things, he muses why the Allied officers who ordered the mass fire bombing of Germany, and the Soviet generals who ordered the mass rape and mass murder during the battle for Berlin, were not on trial; and whether it would ever be learned that the art treasures found in German salt mines were put there purely to be out of the way of the Allied bombing. He also questions the official view of the so called "Holocaust," stating his belief that rather than being the result of a mass extermination plan, the deaths in German concentration camps were actually caused by typhus brought about by the destruction of all public utility systems by Allied bombing.

In the book Williamson also reiterates his belief that Adolf Hitler was never the real enemy of Britain. And in one scene Phillip Maddison, in conversation with his girl friend Laura, questions whether it was Hitler's essential goodness and righteousness that was responsible for his downfall in the midst of evil and barbarity:

Laura: I have a photograph of Hitler with the last of his faithful boys outside the bunker in Berlin. He looks worn out, but he is so gentle and kind to those twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys.Phillip: Too gentle and kind Laura ... Now the faithful will be hanged.

Williamson also remained loyal in the realm of political ideas and action. When Oswald Mosley had returned to public life in Britain in 1948 by launching the Union Movement, Williamson was one of the first to give his support for an idea which he had long espoused: the unity of Western man. Contributing an article to the first issue of the movement's magazine, The European, he called for the development of a new type of European man with a set of spiritual values that were in tune with himself and Nature.

Such positive and life-promoting thinking did not endear Williamson to the powers that be in the grey and increasingly decadent cultural climate of post-Second World War Britain. His books were ignored, and his artistic achievement remained unrecognized, with even the degrees committee at the university to which he was a benefactor twice vetoing a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate. The evidence suggests, in fact, that Williamson was subject to a prolonged campaign of literary ostracism by people inside the British establishment who believed he should be punished for his political opinions.

For Williamson, however, the machinations of trivial people in a trivial age were irrelevant; what was important was that he remained true in the eyes of posterity to himself, his ancestors, and the eternal truth which he recognized and lived by. In fact, as one observer described him during these later years, he remained a "lean, vibrant, almost quivering man with ... blazing eyes, possessing an exceptional presence [and a] ... continued outspoken admiration for Hitler ... as a 'great and good man.'" [11]

Certainly, Williamson knew himself, and he knew what was necessary for Western man to find himself again and to fulfill his destiny. In The Gale of the World he cited Richard Jefferies to emphasize that higher knowledge by which he led his life and by which he was convinced future generations would have to lead their lives in order to attain the heights that Nature demanded of them: "All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me. I rejected it wholly. I stood bare-headed in the sun, in the presence of earth and air, in the presence of the immense forces of the Universe. I demand that which will make me more perfect now this hour."

Henry Williamson's artistic legacy must endure because, as one admirer pondered in his final years, his visionary spirit and striving "came close to holding the key to life itself."

He died on August 13, 1977, aged 81.

Notes

1. Ann Williamson, Henry Williamson: Tarka and the Last Romantic, (London, 1995), 65.

2. Eleanor Graham, "Introduction" to the Penguin edition of Tarka the Otter (1985).

3. Higginbottom, Intellectuals and British Fascism , (London, 1992), 10.

4. Henry Williamson, The Flax of Dreams (London, 1936) and The Phoenix Generation (London, 1961).

5. Henry Williamson, A Solitary War (London, 1966).

6. Higginbotham, op. cit., 41-42.

7. J. W. Blench, Henry Williamson and the Romantic Appeal of Fascism , (Durham, 1988).

8. Henry Williamson, The Children of Shallow Ford, (London, 1939).

9. Higginbotham, op. cit., 49.

10. Ann Williamson, op. cit., 195.

11. Higginbotham, op. cit., 53.

---

Out of the Darkness

American Dissident Voices broadcast of July 31, 2004:

Out of the Darkness

by Dr. William L. Pierce
introduced by Kevin Alfred Strom

As I record this week's broadcast, it has been two years since the untimely death of the founding chairman of the National Alliance, my friend and certainly one of the profoundest thinkers of the 20th century, William L. Pierce.
 
Dr. Pierce told me that his greatest goal in life was to build the Alliance into a vehicle for the survival and advancement of our people that would transcend his own leadership, that would endure beyond his physical life and beyond the lifetimes of any of its leaders.
 
There were times that Dr. Pierce agonized over whether the Alliance would survive at all, and even more times when he felt almost alone, certain that without him to keep pushing forward, the organization and the ideas it embodies would disappear and be forgotten. In the early 1980s, Dr. Pierce instituted several dramatic changes in the Alliance. The blustery street-revolutionary rhetoric of the tabloid newspaper was superseded by the equally radical but more intellectually rigorous articles in the new National Vanguard magazine. The issue-oriented approach of the past was de-emphasized and the all-encompassing racial-biological worldview that was the basis of our ideas was brought to the fore. Attracting the masses was abandoned in favor of attracting a high-quality elite.
 
On today's broadcast, I'm going to remember Dr. Pierce by letting you hear his own words on these very subjects. Offered here to honor the man and to disseminate his prescient words, and never before heard by any but the Alliance members and participants at the Alliance's General Convention in 1983, this is Dr. Pierce's banquet address -- 'Out of the Darkness.' 

Listen to this inspirational Cosmotheist sermon by Dr. Pierce here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI07LkGOu9c#t=19

* * * 

Two thousand years ago the poet Ovid wrote that night is a sadder time than day. I know that's always been true for me. When discouraging thoughts come, it's usually at night.
 
Actually, I'm pretty cheerful most of the time. But it used to be that, occasionally, when I was working alone in the National Office late at night, a black thought would come into my mind -- always the same thought. It was that there's not enough time to do what I must do. It was that something will happen to me before the Alliance is strong enough to survive and continue growing without me.
 
Then a feeling of desperation would come over me and I would have to fight off an almost overpowering urge to do whatever I could to speed things up -- to go back to the quick and dirty methods that I had tried in past years. Now, I didn't yield to that urge because I had already found out the hard way that the quick and dirty methods don't yield lasting results. I knew that we had only one shot at winning this war we're in, and it has to be a good shot. We can't miss. We can't build something that is flimsy or false. We have to do it exactly right, or it won't work. But doing it right sometimes seems painfully slow. And it would be futile, self-defeating, if in my care to do it right I didn't get enough of it done so that others could carry on before I was overtaken by disease, or by an accident, or even by an assassin.
 
Now, in a sense, this black thought which used to creep up on me late at night, was the thought of death, the fear of death. We're all mortal. We all know that we have to die -- though no one wants to. The way we've dealt with this fear of death in the past has been to identify ourselves with something immortal, to think of ourselves as part of something in which we can continue to live after our bodies are gone. Patriots have identified themselves with their countries -- often so strongly that they were almost eager to die in order to advance the interests of their fatherland: the land of their forefathers. It was easier to be patriotic, of course, when our country still belonged to us, when we were able to associate a particular village, or farmstead, with our ancestors for several generations back; when the graves of our fathers, and grandfathers, and great great great grandfathers, were around us -- and so were their works: the fields that they had cleared, the buildings that they had built, the trophies they gathered in their lifetimes, the records they left behind them. We could easily fit ourselves into the pattern of generations and centuries, and be content in the knowledge that our own works, and trophies, and records, would also be preserved, and would become part of the lives of our descendents. We would fight anyone who threatened that pattern. We would die in order to preserve it, so that we wouldn't be forgotten, so that we would always have a little niche in the memory of all the generations which were to come.
 
Today the whole pattern has been smashed to bits and ground into the mud. We've lost our roots, our sense of belonging, our connection with the past and with the future. We can't count on being remembered. In fact, if current trends continue for a few more years, and Martin Luther King's dream of "full equality" is realized then our grandchildren won't even know who their fathers are, much less their grandfathers. So patriotism provides little comfort for mortals these days.
 
And it's no wonder that many people are searching for something else, besides their countries, to identify with. For me that something has long been the whole universe. My life is part of its life and I know that the larger life of the evolving universe will go on no matter what. That's my religion, or part of it. But it's a rather impersonal religion, and on dark, lonely nights at the office, it does not by itself provide enough comfort to keep dark moods away. There is in all of us, I believe, a need for a more personal identification with something immortal. We need more than merely the knowledge that each of us is a momentarily glowing spark of individual consciousness in a conscious cosmos -- a cosmos which, even as its overall brightness grows, witnesses the winking on and then out again of billions of individual sparks.
 
We need, in addition to that, the knowledge that we as individuals make a difference. We need the knowledge that we can make a mark on the world through our own efforts, and that the mark we make will last. We need to know that our personal contribution to the life of the universe will be remembered after we are gone -- that others will add to it and help it grow -- so that ten generations from now, or even a hundred generations, the record will still be there. There will be someone then who will be able to say: Back during the great struggle, ages ago, when the race nearly perished, there were a few men and women who were on the right side; a few who did what had to be done; a few who made the difference; and even today, centuries later, we remember their names and their works.
 
That's the sort of knowledge which is able to overcome the fear of death, the sort of knowledge which gives each of us a personal connection to the infinite. It's true that the self-consciously evolving cosmos, of which I am a part, is the ultimate reality. But it's also true that the Alliance provides my personal connection with that ultimate reality. The Alliance is the means by which I, and many others, can make individual contributions to the future. The Alliance not only magnifies our efforts -- gives us leverage that we wouldn't have if we were working on our own -- but it also provides a safe repository for our contributions, makes them into lasting contributions. And as it keeps them from being washed away in the growing tide of chaos on the outside, it keeps them in place long enough for another member to add his own contribution on top of ours, and then for another to build on top of both, and so on.
 
For example, if one of our members writes a book which is a valuable contribution to our overall effort -- say, member William Simpson and his Which Way Western Man? -- then he doesn't have to worry that it will immediately disappear into oblivion when he dies, or is no longer able to promote it himself. He knows that even after he is gone, the Alliance will remain to continue distributing his book, continue reprinting it, magnifying its effect, until another member is able to build on that work with a book of his own, which advances the Cause still further. 

 
That, of course, is the theory. The trouble is it has been a pretty shaky theory in the past, primarily because far too much was dependent on a single individual: me. Who could be sure whether I would last from one month to the next? Who could know whether or not all of the hard work, and money, and time, he was putting into the Alliance would be wasted? Because I might, at any minute, give up and announce that I was tired of butting my head against the wall, and that would be the end of it.
 
From my own viewpoint things were a little different, but still not particularly encouraging. I knew that I wouldn't give up, but I could see others giving up all around me. It seemed that every time we would manage to struggle ahead a step, we would slide three quarters of a step back again. And I knew that we were not strong enough to keep going at all if I quit, which meant that I had to hang on and keep on pushing things forward until we reached a critical point where I could stand aside and things would keep moving without me, because there would be the right people, ready and able to take over all of my responsibilities. My concern was that nothing must happen to me before we reached that point. From a purely selfish standpoint, I didn't want my spark to wink out without making a difference, and the black thought that kept coming to me late at night was that I was losing the race, that I couldn't reach that critical point soon enough.
 
It was never a matter of quitting. I never worried that all of my hard work was being wasted in the sense that I could've been spending my time more enjoyably. From the time I started, there was only one thing that I could do -- even if there were no hope at all of winning. I couldn't stop even if I had wanted to. Nevertheless, whether I was working willingly or unwillingly, the occasional late-night feeling that it was all for nothing was quite distressing.
 
Fortunately, daylight generally had the effect of dispelling my gloom, and so I was able to present a cheerful face to the world. Now, the only reason that I'm making this confession to you is that my black thoughts are a thing of the past. If I still had them, I certainly wouldn't tell you about them. But the fact is that I have not been gloomy about our prospects for at least the last year-- and I still work late, alone, in the National Office at night. What's made the difference is the results of our recruiting during the past year.
 
For the task that the Alliance must accomplish, quality is everything. In the last year we have been winning commitments from people who have what it takes to get the job done. Attendance at our convention this year may be up only forty per cent. over last year, but the number of people in the Alliance who have what it takes has doubled. We're finally getting the good ones now substantially faster than we're losing them -- and, really, we've just started.
 
For years, we were bogged down in the childishness -- the make believe -- the buffoonery -- the stupidity -- of the right wing. That's no one's fault but my own, of course -- because I knew nothing else but the right wing approach. I really thought that populism, an appeal to the dispossessed, an appeal to the so-called White masses, was the way to proceed, the way to gain strength.
 
And I was often in despair, when I finally realized that it wasn't; when I saw how few people we were winning in whom I could have any confidence at all. Changing our approach was difficult. It meant breaking some bad habits that we had acquired. It meant alienating a certain clientele that we had attracted, whose continued support I was then convinced that we really needed.
 
But we did change. And, within the first six months, I could begin to see a real improvement. The right wing kooks stopped coming around, and in their place came people that I could be proud of -- people in whom I could have confidence. That's when the late night despair disappeared.
 
We have a long, a difficult, and a dangerous road ahead of us yet. There will be many casualties along the way. We'll make more mistakes, certainly, and we'll have to correct ourselves many times. We may yet be overwhelmed by the enemy, or we may be too slow and be overtaken by circumstances -- but I'm now convinced that we can reach our goal.
 
I can foresee the time now when it will no longer make any difference what happens to me, because there will be others who will keep the spark glowing, and will make it grow brighter and brighter with each passing year. I foresee immortality, for all of those who have nourished the spark and who will nourish it in the future. I see more people -- like you who are here with me tonight -- joining our Cause every month, and every week. I foresee a growth, and a strength, and a capability for the Alliance, much greater than we have ever known before. I foresee it not in the distant future any longer, but in the time immediately ahead of us, as you go forth tomorrow and recruit for our Cause other men and women like yourselves. Thank you.