Whose Values Shall Rule?

"Whose Values Shall Rule?" is a commentary by Dr. William Pierce which appeared in the National Alliance Bulletin of June, 1980.

Dr. Pierce addressed a meeting of the Ridgewood Group, at the Estonian House in New York City, on May 27. He had been asked to speak especially about his book, The Turner Diaries (for which the nom de plume Andrew Macdonald was used). He spoke for about 45 minutes, first pointing out that the purpose of the book is neither to entertain nor to present a plan for a revolution. The book, he said, is intended solely to serve as a medium for certain ideas, some expressed implicitly and others explicitly. Those ideas deal with human behavior, motivation, and values. The following material has been excerpted from the latter portion of Dr. Pierce’s New York address:

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Whose Values Shall Rule?

by Dr. William Pierce

IT IS IMPORTANT for us to understand that one person is not a Methodist and another a Catholic and a third a Marxist as the result of any rational process -- at least, not in the vast majority of cases, although there are individual exceptions.

That is, one is not a Methodist because one sat down and studied the Methodist doctrine, compared it with other doctrines, and decided that Methodism was what made the most sense. One is a Methodist, generally, because one’s parents and neighbors were -- that is, out of an entirely unreasoning desire to conform, to believe what one perceives that one is expected to believe. John Wesley undoubtedly was an exception to this rule, but very few other Methodists have been.

There has been strong resistance to accepting the implications of this important facet of human behavior. People seem to want to believe that we are all quite rational, when most of us aren’t. For our purposes, the implication of the fact that most people are governed far more by herd instinct than by reason is this: Insofar as the general public is concerned, truth cannot fight its own battles. As long as Norman Lear, the Jewish television producer, has more kilowatts for reaching the public than we do, it will be his view of history and, more important, his view of what is moral rather than ours which will be generally accepted and which will govern the political process.

This means that we can realistically expect our educational efforts to be effective with only a rather small minority of our fellow citizens. We cannot expect to make a partisan for our cause out of the average man or woman who perceives, even unconsciously, that our cause is not popular, no matter how many books or leaflets we may coax that person into reading. We win only two types of people: One is the person who is already alienated to a certain extent from Mr. Lear’s world and does not fully feel himself a part of the herd to which Mr. Lear is preaching with his cleverly designed television sermons. Unfortunately, in many cases people are alienated for reasons which are entirely or partly wrong from our point of view. That is why protest movements and revolutionary movements always pick up lots of defective people. On the other hand, alienation is certain to remain a growth industry, as they say, and one can hope to see many more essentially healthy people becoming alienated from the mainstream in the years ahead.

The second type of person we are able to win with an educational effort at this time is the person who is one of those rare exceptions to the general rule, a person who is strongly motivated by ideas as well as by instinct, and who has already been groping in our direction. Our effect with such a person is primarily to help him clarify his ideas and to lead him more rapidly to their logical conclusions.

The Holocaust Problem

by Dr. William L. Pierce

A LOS ANGELES COUNTY Superior Court judge ruled last month that the so-called “Holocaust” — the alleged extermination of six million Jews by Germany’s National Socialist government during the Second World War — is a historical fact and “is not reasonably subject to dispute.” The ruling was the outcome of a lawsuit by a Jewish concentration camp “survivor,” Mel Mermelstein, now a successful Long Beach, Calif., businessman, against the publishers of a “revisionist” historical periodical, The Journal of Historical Review. (ILLUSTRATION: Buchenwald concentration camp, May 1945: Why were there so many “survivors,” if the German plan was to exterminate all Jews? Jews were put behind barbed wire in Germany during the Second World War for exactly the same reason Japanese were locked up in the United States: because they could not be trusted. Many American “liberators” of Germany’s concentration camp eventually reached the conclusion that the world would have been better off, however, if there had been no survivors, but few had the moral courage to say it. General George Patton was an exception. After becoming well acquainted with the nature of the people [officially called “Displaced Persons”] his troops freed from Germany’s concentration camps, he noted in his diary in September 1945: “Harrison [a U.S. State Department official] and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”)

The only real purpose of the periodical — the claims of its publishers notwithstanding — was to cast doubt on Jewish Holocaust claims, and that purpose has been reflected in the pages of each issue. As a promotional stunt The Journal of Historical Review rashly offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that a single Jew was killed in a gas chamber by the German government during the Second World War. Mermelstein accepted the challenge; sued when, he alleged, the publishers reneged on their $50,000 offer; and won his case.

Dr. Pierce on Christian Morality

Letter to editor in National Vanguard magazine - December 1982:

Hellfire and Brimstone

Dear National Vanguard:

In the October issue Dr. Pierce has, indeed, shown that his "A New Morality for Us" is more unequivocally on the side of our race than is Dennis Whiting's "One Morality for All," but one must wonder if his appeal to an "underlying purpose of all life" is less of a theological concept than Whiting's Christian deity. Most people of our race, after they have lost their Christian faith, are not ready to be bemused by any notion of evolutionary purpose; rather, they quickly devolve to the kind of mad-dog individualism, extolled by libertarians, which is as much to blame for failure to defend our race as is misplaced altruism.

Christianity, at least, was brutally blunt in its reason for commanding faith: Believe or your soul will endure eternal torments in hell. What threat (or promise, for that matter) can be presented to those who do not see why they should care about the fate of their race now or ten years from now, much less, say, a hundred years after their deaths?

-B.N.
Little Rock, AR

Editor's Reply:

Two interesting points are raised: To what extent has the Christian theology of punishment and reward been responsible for the moral behavior of Whites in the past, and how can a new morality be imposed without a similar theology?

It is true that a century ago, when the West was almost entirely Christian -- and most Christians were White -- a generally higher standard of personal conduct was met than today, when Christianity has lost both its status as a predominantly White religion and a substantial portion of its former White adherents.

It is also true that many of those who have shucked off the old Christian superstitions today are worse-behaved than their contemporaries who still adhere to Christianity. Everyone has observed those unlovely individuals who have used their liberation from Christianity as an excuse to "liberate" themselves from every moral restraint on their behavior and every responsibility to anyone but themselves. Most of these call themselves "libertarians" or "elitists," but, unfortunately, some have attached themselves to our camp, where they clearly do not belong.

I do not believe that this problem is primarily one of theology, however. In the past, fear of fire and brimstone may have had some effect, but it was almost entirely restricted to ritual. That is, visions of hellfire may have helped church attendance a bit on Sunday morning and persuaded believers that it was important to memorize the Lord's Prayer or to know when to genuflect. But it was not the principal determinant of their behavior.

Morality was much more strongly supported by social rather than by religious sanctions. A man felt it was important to keep his word because he wanted self-respect and the respect of his neighbors, not because he feared eternal damnation. Sexual behavior was more discreet for the same reason: A girl valued her virginity, not because she thought it would improve her chances on Judgment Day, but because she was concerned for her reputation in the community and her marriageability.

The same principle holds today: It is social custom and peer pressure, not Christian doctrine, which directly determine the morality of Christians; doctrine acts only indirectly.

As an example, consider the U.S. tobacco industry, which is centered in the Bible Belt. No Christian theologian can sincerely condone the production and sale of a habit-forming, carcinogenic drug, knowing that such activity condemns tens of thousands of other Christians to an agonizing death every year. Yet I would bet that close to half of the tobacco company executives who lobbied vigorously to keep cancer warnings off the cigarette packages they sell are churchgoing Christians. I know that most of the farmers who grow tobacco and sell it to the cigarette producers are.

These people, many of whom consider Playboy magazine sinful, go about their deadly business with apparently untroubled consciences. They do so because the community, primarily for economic reasons, tolerates it, and the churches, unwilling to buck long-established custom, have not explicitly condemned it. Fear of hellfire might keep a lot of them from spitting on a Bible or wearing hats in church, but not from earning a living in a way which is enormously harmful to the health of their fellow citizens.

One may condemn them for moral obtuseness, but that misses the point. Most men are and always have been morally obtuse.

The point is this: Morality suffers today, not because many Whites no longer believe in the heaven and hell of Christianity, but because the social order is crumbling under the impact of "pluralism." A religion may supply the basic moral imperatives to a society, but it is the society itself which translates them into the behavior of ordinary men and women. If Western society were still racially and culturally homogeneous and the social order strong, people would guide their behavior according to the accepted social norms, whatever they happened to be, with or without the threat of hell.

Likewise, until a new social order is established which institutionalizes a race-based morality, many who pay lip service to such a morality will, in fact, not actually guide their lives by it, but instead will continue to live amorally. Once such a morality has been institutionalized, however, theology will play a relatively minor role in determining behavior.

In conclusion, religious doctrine is of fundamental importance in determining which values, beliefs, and behavioral norms become institutionalized in a society, but social instincts are much more important than any theology of reward and punishment in compelling men and women to lead moral lives.

W.L.P.