Dr. Pierce Discusses the Novel Hunter and 1989's Degenerative Trends

Letter to NATIONAL VANGUARD subscribers (Publication date: September 19, 1989)

by Dr. William L. Pierce

---

Dear NATIONAL VANGUARD Reader.

 

            We have a number of new books – and, for the first time, videos – listed in the accompanying catalog supplement. I believe they will be of interest to you.

 

            I’m sorry there isn’t a new issue of NATIONAL VANGAURD with this letter. It’s been six months since the last issue, and it may be another three months before a new issue is published. The problem is that I’m trying to finish something I believe will be very important, and I haven’t had time to work on NATIONAL VANGUARD, which ordinarily takes most of my time.

 

            I don’t like to announce things before they’ve been accomplished, but I feel I do owe all of our subscribers an explanation. Six years ago – back in 1983 – when I saw what a stir my first novel, The Turner Diaries, was causing and I realized I was reaching and influencing many people who never would read a serious article in NATIONAL VANGUARD, I decided to write a new novel. I already had an idea for one in my head, and I was sure I could do a better job with it than I had done with The Turner Diaries. So in November 1983 I wrote the first chapter of Hunter.

 

 

            Then I had to put the new book aside and take care of other matters. From time to time during the following five years I was able to return briefly to Hunter and write another chapter or two, but it was very difficult to find the time to write. Finally, at the end of last year, I had enough of the new novel written that I thought I could finish it in a few more months. My target was March 1989. Unfortunately, I couldn’t meet that deadline: I had to stop writing in order to get the March-April issue of NATIONAL VANGUARD finished, for one thing.

                       

            By that time there were several books already written by other authors and waiting to be published as well. I had to decide what to do. For a long time I believed that the only way to reach most Americans, who have been softened by a lifetime of watching television, is through their recreational activity or viewing. They simply do not have the interest or attention span to read anything serious. It is necessary for us to develop our own entertainment media in order to get our message to them. The trouble is that a publisher ordinarily cannot break even financially when he publishes a novel which the controlled media will not review and the controlled chain bookstores and newsstands will not carry. Even with our specialized distribution channels, it might take us five or six years – perhaps even longer – to recover our investment when we publish a book. We just don’t have enough capital to do much of that kind of publishing.

 

            The exception to the rule was The Turner Diaries. It has sold so well that we were able to recover our investment in it almost immediately. Even after 11 years, it is still selling more than 300 copies a month. We need another hit like The Turner Diaries in order to subsidize the publication of other books which won’t sell as well. I believe that Hunter will be such a hit. It is every bit as hard hitting as The Turner Diaries, and it is much better written. Its message is extraordinarily powerful and will move many readers. I suspect it will provoke an even more hysterical reaction from the government and the controlled media than The Turner Diaries did.

 

            Considering all of these things, I decided this spring to put everything aside and finish Hunter. I’ve done 32 chapters and have about a dozen to go. I’ll have it in print in November, if there are no more interruptions. Then I’ll get your next issue of NATIONAL VANGUARD to you. If Hunter does well, that should encourage other authors to try their hands at novels which serve as a medium for our message. And then maybe we’ll be a step closer to having a viable book-publishing enterprise, with more people participating in the writing, the editing and the other work.

 

            I do hate to make you wait so long for the next NATIONAL VANGUARD, though, and so I want to use this opportunity to share a few thoughts with you and the situation in this country and how we ought to respond to it. These thoughts won’t be entirely new to regular readers of NATIONAL VANGUARD, but I believe recent events give them new urgency and make it worthwhile to restate them.

 

            There are a number of degenerative trends in America which should be cause for concern. I’ll talk about one which has been one my mind recently: it’s the gradual emasculation of America. And I’ll start with a news item that you may have missed. On June 14 the Department of Defense announced that the leading cause of death in the US Army is now AIDS. The public response to this announcement was negligible: no cries of alarm by news commentators, no speeches of outrage by politicians, not even threatening sermons by leading churchmen.

 

            This silence is, of course, understandable. AIDS is rampant in the Army because the Army is heavily overloaded with Blacks and members of other non-White minorities, who are especially susceptible to the disease. Furthermore, intravenous drug abuse and interracial sex, practices which tend to spread AIDS to the White underclass from which the armed services draw many recruits, are noticeably prevalent in the Army. No public figure would dare call attention to any of these things, except perhaps the drug abuse: he knows that if he did he would be greeted by a chorus of screams for his hide from minority-coddlers and the promoters of racial mixing.

 

            Unfortunately, this softness and squeamishness on the part of America’s leaders finds its counterpart among the country’s people. There is hardly a better recent example of this than the public’s ambivalent response to the current anti-gun campaign. The political argument of the gun confiscators is that life in America has become too dangerous. They cite statistics on murder, rape, and assault. They talk about heavily armed urban gangs and their violent ways. And blame it on the guns. The streets of American cities have become combat zones because people have guns. You would be safer if you surrendered your guns, they say.

 

            And far too many citizens believe them. Instead of reacting in a manly way to the threat of violence by checking to be sure that their powder is dry, so that they can defend themselves and their families if the need arises, they are opting to surrender. They are rolling over on their backs and baring their throats, saying in effect, please don’t hurt me; I’m unarmed.

 

            One can call a score of other recent examples to mind which illustrate the growing pusillanimity of our public officials and the dwindling collective virility of our fellow citizens. The news events of the last few month have showed it up as never before, but the fact is that during the past half century the spirit of America has been changing gradually from masculine-active to feminine-passive.

 

            Part of this change is the result of demographic shifts in the American electorate. For example, although women have been voting in the United States for nearly 70 years (since the ratification of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920), their influence in elections has increased substantially in recent years. They now cast approximately ten per cent more votes than men in Presidential elections, and they are less likely to vote the way their husbands do than their mothers were. Likewise, the participation of substantial members of Blacks and other non-Whites in the electoral process is a phenomenon which has developed since the Second World War.

 

            It is fair to say that voting by both non-Whites and women, on the average, has an emasculating effect on governmental policy in the United States. Which is to say that both groups tend to be more liberal in their voting habits – that is, more likely to vote for political candidates who favor confiscating firearms and giving more “rights” to minorities – than White male voters. Stating this differently, if the franchise were restricted to White males over the age of 30 who owned their homes and fathered at least one child, governmental policy undoubtable would be somewhat less liberal and more robust than it is now.

 

            Nevertheless, it is clear there has been a real decline in manliness among White males. It was, after all, White males who handed the franchise to women in the first place. And, before and after 1920, White males willingly gave up what once had been exclusively theirs by inviting non-whites to share political rights with them. There clearly is a real process at work which has sapped manly vigor, manly pride, and the manly sense of honor and individual responsibility. It has produced a White male population which today is more passive and more effeminate than it was a few decades ago. Perhaps it is the same process which has pushed so many young men all the way over the line into sexual inversion. In any case, the process has accelerated recently.

 

            The controlled media certainly have had a powerful effect in changing attitudes and styles. The great majority of men always – not just in the last 50 years – have been susceptible to the sort of influence the news and entertainment media are able to exert. Only a small minority in any era have had the strength and character to form and hold opinions which were truly theirs, rather than mere reflections of the views of their fellows – or since the advent of the controlled mass media in this century, reflections of the views the media have convinced them their fellows hold.

 

            The controlled media, for example, have done much to persuade a sizable minority, if not a majority, of White males that it is both unstylish and wicked to grimace when they spy a woman of their race in the company of a Black male or holding a mulatto offspring. But are the powers of the controlled media sufficient to make an otherwise healthy White male actually respond positively to such a sickening sight? If so, then perhaps the media also can be blamed for most of the men who have decided that they prefer other men to women, and not just for persuading normal men that it is unstylish and wicked to express disapproval of those who do so decide.

 

            That, however, is giving the controlled media more blame than they deserve, I think. The process of emasculation is not entirely artificial, directed from newspaper offices and television studios by scheming media masters plotting the demise of the goyim. It is, to a large extent, a natural process of decay, which the media masters did not invent, no matter how much they may be rejoicing over it and hastening it along.

 

            I won’t try and describe the causes of decay at length or analyze the process in any detail. Instead, I’ll just briefly mention a couple of additional things I believe cast a little light on it. Consider, for example, what television has done to our people, aside from the effect on their opinions and attitudes: It has made us a nation of spectators. We no longer do things; instead we sit on our couches and watch other people doing them. Probably the most striking aspect of this unhealthy phenomenon is the growth in the popularity of spectator sports. Tens of millions of us spends hundreds of hours every year watching teams of players throw balls of various sizes and shapes around, but very few actually engage in competitive sport. If we did, we might have harder bodies and tougher minds.

 

            I believe that the whole trend in life-styles during this century has had a similar effect. Fewer of us than ever before work with our hands, actually creating or helping to produce useful things. Fewer of us are farmers, blacksmiths, glassblowers, toolmakers, engineers. The sort of work most of us do makes it more difficult to convince ourselves that our work is really useful or that we are serving an essential role in our society. This tends to reduce our sense of participation and our sense of responsibility.

 

            Finally, the greatly increased number of women in the American work force has had a demoralizing effect on the whole population by obliterating the natural division of labor between the sexes. Men who realize that they no longer are essential as the sole breadwinners for their families feel less manly as a consequence – just as women who realize that they do not really need a man’s protection and support become less feminine thereby.

 

            Which is not to deny the fact that there are women who are both intellectually and physically capable of performing many traditional male tasks as well as or better than the average man. Nor is it an argument that in a healthy society women ought to be kept barefoot and pregnant. But it is an indication that a society which pretends that men and women are essentially the same and should serve the same economic and social functions is in serious trouble.

 

            And just how serious is America’s trouble?

 

************************

[T]he feasibility of restoring a healthy, White America, 

by any means, without first descending into chaos and

dissolution, vanished decades ago.

************************

            I am afraid it is mortally serious. I believe that when our government within two months of its announcement of the AIDS mortality rate in the Army, appoints a Black general as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of our armed forces [Colin Powell], solely because he is Black; and announces that a 19-year-old girl has been given the post of cadet commanding officer at the US Military Academy, we all need to do more than be thankful that the Soviet Union is busy with its own problems now. We need to be thinking very seriously about a strategy for salvaging from this society what can be salvaged before the putrefaction has become so pervasive that there is nothing left worth saving for the future.

 

            That prognosis certainly will be judged too pessimistic, even by many readers of NATIONAL VANGUARD. Many will continue to grasp for political remedies: they will continue to believe that it is feasible to elect honest, capable, racially conscious men to high public office in the United States, and that if they can elect enough such men to the Congress – perhaps even get one into the White House – America will be healed. The patient will throw off his shroud and rise from his slab. His tissue and organs will be rejuvenated. There will be no more rot in his vitals, no more stench of death clinging to his skin. But I do not believe that. 

           

            I believe that the rot has progressed too far. I have written here, very briefly, about only one facet of that rot, a moral facet. And my purpose in doing that was only to call to mind the situation which faces us. Perceptive NATIONAL VANGUARD readers already are aware of many other facets and they do not need me to remind them.

 

            Readers who are now serving in one of the armed forces know that the facts I’ve cited here do not begin to show how bad the state of affairs in our country’s military sector is. Readers who live in metropolitan areas on either coast, where the flood of non-White immigration is most apparent, know the population has become so thoroughly mixed up racially that no President and no Congress, even if they wanted to, could un-mix that mess without having a full-scale race war on their hands.

 

            And by far the worst part of it is that half the troops on the other side would be Whites who don’t want the mess un-mixed, Whites who think it’s just wonderful that so many members of the Congress are openly homosexual and can still be reelected, that White women are having mulatto children, and that our cities have so much “cultural diversity.”

 

            I’ll say it again: It’s not just a bunch of crooked politicians and scheming media masters who are responsible for the mortal trouble that this country is in. The people themselves have degenerated morally to such a point that many of them are beyond any cure that might be effected by purely electoral means.

           

            Of course, it would be good if we could elect the right sort of government anyway. Better a race war now than later, when the odds will be worse.

 

            And it would be good if racially conscious White people could regain control of our news and entertainment media. Then we could not only change the government policy, but we might even shift public opinion and demoralize the opposition enough to proceed with un-mixing the racial mess without having a civil war.

 

            But I don’t believe these “ifs” are reasonable possibilities any longer. I believe that the feasibility of restoring a healthy, White America, by any means, without first descending into chaos and dissolution, vanished decades ago. I believe that dissolution is inevitable now.

 

            Again, I am aware that these few words and the inadequately discussed examples I’ve presented here hardly suffice to prove my point or persuade those who believe the situation is not as bad as I am sure it is. But I feel obliged to speak out now anyway.

 

            So what should we do?

 

            First, I believe we should face reality squarely. I believe we should soberly assess the situation around us and accept the fact that we can’t salvage all of it. We can’t raise the dead. We can’t halt a historical process which has proceeded as far as the decay of America has.

 

            If we fail to face reality and continue to deceive ourselves into thinking that America can be turned around again via the electoral process or some other clever scheme, then we only postpone the personal disillusionment and “burnout” which will eventually be forced upon us. And meanwhile we fail to attract to our cause many of the hardheaded people who do not make a habit of self-deception.

 

            Second, I believe we should address ourselves to the task of salvaging what can be salvaged, and refine our strategies for accomplishing this task. This society, after all, is going somewhere. Eventually someone will inherit the wreckage. Eventually something else will grow out of the wreckage.

 

            We have got a lot of good genetic material and a lot of good minds left in America; a lot of racially and morally sound men and women with good character and good sense, who have remained immune to the poisonous influences all around them. It is absolutely essential to reach and orient this White elite, because some of these people will have both the will and the ability to participate actively in a concerted, disciplined effort to build a structure capable of sustaining and perpetuating itself in the dark years ahead; of preserving intact genes, values and goals which must become the basis for a new society in the future; and of exerting at least some influence on the interim course of events.

 

            That’s the broad objective. There are various ways of approaching it.

 

            One way is electoral politics – if we understand that we’re not trying to turn the government around, but simply using the electoral campaigns as forums for disseminating our message.

 

            Another way is lobbying on specific issues: opposition to affirmative action and other minority-favoring programs, support for citizens’ rights to keep and bear arms, opposition to further military or economic aid for Israel, etc. – again understanding that the principle aim is the lobbying and not to revive a moribund society, but to call attention to the issues and establish contact with like-minded people.

 

            The way I chose for myself when I left my university teaching position more than two decades ago in order to address myself to the severe social and racial problems I saw confronting my people was writing, publishing, and distributing educational materials – primarily books and magazines, and now videos. Over the years this activity has put me in touch with many fine people, and some of them have participated in my efforts.

 

            But now more is needed. We need more than a handful of dedicated people helping out with one project or another now and then. We need more than a membership organization whose members carry cards, pay dues, and occasionally lend someone else their copy of NATIONAL VANGUARD.

 

            We need an elite network of hardheaded, disciplined men and women who are both willing and able to use their skills and talents in a coordinated way for the benefit of our race; people willing to make a lifetime commitment to saving whatever is worth saving from the mess our race and civilization are in; people who in most cases will continue in their present professions, but will keep in touch with the network and will give priority to assignments and programs related to its purpose.

 

 I know what we need to do. I believe I know how 

to do it. But I can’t do it without more help.

            We have some excellent people now; but there aren’t enough of them. The work is done by too few. We have to get more capable people involved, so that when I’m finishing a new book the publication of NATIONAL VANGUARD doesn’t come to a halt. But my problems with getting publications out are only one example. There are dozens of other programs we should be working on, programs that require many different kinds of people with many different skills.

 

            I know what we need to do. I believe I know how to do it. But I can’t do it without more help. The details of what we will do depend on the specific people involved. I need to hear from those who are ready to help, so that we can discuss the details and make decisions.

 

            As for everyone else, I appreciate your continued patience and support.

 

Sincerely

 

 

William L. Pierce, NATIONAL VANGUARD Editor

Fichte & the German Nation

William Pierce

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of those rare men who are both thinkers and heroes. His challenging Wissenschaftslehre (“doctrine of science”) remains one of the most ambitious attempts to encompass the world and its meaning in a speculative philosophical system. In his elaboration of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of ethical idealism, Fichte achieved a compelling synthesis of the complementary values of freedom and duty. His conception of the world as the material projection of an ultimately all-embracing World-Ego exercised a seminal influence on the Romantic movement, that radical reassertion of Aryan racial values which in Fichte’s time was displacing the shallow rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Yet it is as the hero who called for a regeneration of the German spirit in an epoch-making series of addresses in a conquered Berlin swarming with hostile French troops that Fichte will live on in the memory of his countrymen. In his Addresses to the German Nation, the philosophus teutonicus, as the patriot-poet Ernst Moritz Arndt dubbed Fichte, revealed a vision of his people’s destiny which transcends national boundaries and still beckons to our own and future generations for fulfillment.

In December of 1807, it seemed that Napoleon and his all-conquering French armies had extinguished the last ember of German nationhood. In the year before, the Holy Roman Empire, the only tangible expression of the political unity of the German nation, feeble though it was, had been dissolved. More important, Fichte’s adopted homeland, Prussia, had reaped the fruits of over a decade’s timidity and indifference to the fate of its German neighbors. On October 14, 1806, at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Napoleon’s troops had all but annihilated the once matchless Prussian military machine. After fleeing to Königsberg in East Prussia, the well-meaning but irresolute Hohenzollern, King Frederick William III, had been forced to sign away half his country’s territory in the humiliating Treaty of Tilsit. Prussia was further obligated to pay a crippling indemnity, and Berlin was garrisoned by French troops.

A TRIUMPHANT NAPOLEON leads his troops through the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on October 27, 1806, thirteen days after annihilating the Prussian Army at Jena and Auerstädt. This pro-French painting, by Charles Meynier, scarcely exaggerates the acclaim turncoat Berliners showered on the emperor. Prominent among the supporters of the French conquerors were the members of a race synonymous with treachery. As one historian put it, “Only the Jews were wholeheartedly and unhesitatingly pro-French, since they knew that one of the [French] revolutionary principles was their political and social emancipation . . .”
Fichte, even when he had tended to support the ideals of the French Revolution, pointedly excluded the Jews from consideration as German citizens. In anticipation of the National Socialist program, he advocated their deportation from Germany.

 

More ominous than the military collapse of Prussia and the other German states was the concomitant decline in German morale. The purely dynastic patriotism which the various German princes had attempted to foster among their subjects had proved no match for the intense nationalism which spurred the French invaders. Although, predictably, Germany’s Jews had accorded Napoleon his most enthusiastic welcome, many a Berlin burgher had also cheered the triumphant entry of the French imperial army. Prominent citizens sought audiences with the emperor, and sycophantic writers wrote panegyrics to his genius.

In pointed contrast to Napoleon’s effusive admirers, German patriots had fallen silent, content to denounce the foreign oppressors only to their most trusted friends in the privacy of their drawing rooms. There was ample justification for their timidity. French spies and German informers in their service were everywhere, and the French censors had more than blue pencils at their disposal.

Little more than a year before, Johannes Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller, had been arrested in connection with the writing and circulation of an anonymous anti-French pamphlet entitled Germany in Her Deepest Humiliation. He had been betrayed to the authorities by a German policeman. On August 26, 1806, Palm had been shot in the little Austrian town of Braunau-on-the-Inn (which, 83 years later, was to acquire even greater cause for the veneration of German patriots).

In these desperate circumstances, the philosopher Fichte resolved to speak out publicly in the cause of the German nation. He had accompanied the Prussian court and the remnants of Prussia’s battered army to Königsberg in 1806. There, his reputation for radicalism had frustrated him in his attempts to be appointed field preacher to the troops. Disappointed but still overflowing with determination to rekindle the German spirit, Fichte returned to Berlin in August 1807.

He took up residence with his family in the secluded Georgengarten, in a section of Berlin rarely frequented by the French soldiers. In the following months, he immersed himself in the writings of Machiavelli and the Swiss educator Pestalozzi, but above all in the Annalsof Tacitus, in which the heroic deeds of Hermann the Cheruscer against the Roman legions find their echo.

Drawing on these writers for inspiration, Fichte began to compose a series of lectures which incorporated the spirit of Machiavelli’s and Hermann’s fervent patriotism, and drew on Pestalozzi’s concrete proposals for educational reform. Professor Fichte (who was at that time a member of the faculty of the University of Erlangen) announced the addresses in a brief notice in the Vossischer Zeitung, one of the leading Berlin newspapers of the day. According to the announcement, the lecture series was to be the continuation of a popular course Fichte had delivered in Berlin three years before, which he had titled The Characteristics of the Present Age.

The Berliners who crowded the amphitheatre of the Academy of Sciences at noon on Sunday, December 13, 1807, were doubtless drawn by more than intellectual curiosity. Fichte had never shrunk from controversy, particularly in addressing the vital questions of the day, nor did he show any qualms in skewering his intellectual opponents on the sharp prongs of his scathing polemics. Would he be as forthright in dealing with the French?

There was also the problem of continuity with the previous lecture series. Attentive students of Fichte could recall that in his Characteristics addresses, the philosopher had represented himself as something other than the fervent patriot he had revealed himself to be in the intervening years. In fact, Fichte had proudly boasted of a cosmopolitanism in which “we ourselves and our descendants can remain indifferent forever to the affairs and fates of nations and states.” How were these sentiments to be reconciled with Fichte’s present stance?

Fichte was not unmindful of Palm’s fate. Later, during the course of his lectures, he wrote to his friend, the Prussian counselor Beyme: “I know full well what I am risking; I know that I can be shot just like Palm. But I have no fear, and would gladly die for the realization of my goal.”

Elsewhere Fichte wrote: “The only decisive factor is, can you hope that the good to be accomplished is greater than the danger to be risked? That good is inspiration, exaltation. My personal danger doesn’t matter; rather, it could be extremely advantageous. My family and my son would not lack the nation’s assistance; my son would reap the benefits of his father’s martyrdom. That would be the best outcome. I couldn’t make better use of my life.”

Fichte dedicated his life not only to finding the truth but to proclaiming it to the world, regardless of the consequences. His stirring Addresses to the German Nation, delivered at the risk of arrest or even death at the hands of the French authorities, marked the dramatic high point of his public career, but his contributions to the philosophical basis of the Romantic movement were even more valuable to his posterity. Fichte stressed the importance of intuitive knowledge, that deep wisdom which lies in the race-soul and is sustained by the Universal Consciousness.

It was in this spirit that Fichte inaugurated his Addresses to the German Nation. On the podium of the packed amphitheatre, he presented a commanding appearance. Short but robust, his sharp features radiated firmness of purpose. As Immanuel Hermann Fichte, his son and biographer, later wrote, “Fichte’s words in his lectures sweep along like a storm cloud that sheds its fire in separate strokes. He does not move, but he uplifts the soul.”

Fichte immediately established the connection with his lectures on The Characteristics of the Modern Age. In the Characteristics, Fichte had developed a scheme of five successive ages, somewhat similar to that propounded by the great German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing some years before. According to Fichte, human history was a process of evolutionary progress, yet during the Enlightenment the all-too-rapid supersession of the age of blind faith and obedience by a human reason not yet anchored in a foundation of a real knowledge had ushered in an age of “completed sinfulness.”

Now, Fichte proclaimed, the age of completed sinfulness had come to an end, and it was the task of the Germans to lead all mankind to a new epoch of liberation. Despite his universal aims, Fichte made clear that he spoke “only of Germans and only for Germans.” It was only the German people who had the qualities of character demanded for initiating the new era. But first it was necessary “to avert the downfall of our nation, which is threatened by its fusion with foreign peoples, and win back again an individuality that is self-supporting and quite incapable of any dependence on others.”

From time to time as Fichte spoke, the blare of martial music reached the ears of his listeners. The broad Berlin avenue Unter den Linden ran past the Academy of Sciences, and Napoleon’s officers staged frequent parades to maintain the élan of their troops.

Within the amphitheatre itself there were Berliners whose attentiveness was neither the product of patriotic ardor nor of a thirst for philosophical enlightenment. They were well known to be informers to the French authorities, and they pricked up their ears to catch any hints of rebelliousness against the rule of the heralds of the “Rights of Man.”

Fichte had cleverly anticipated them. It was not his purpose to castigate the French so much as to promote a German national revival. Besides, as he pointed out, it was not at that time possible to dislodge the conquerors by merely military means. Despite his surface disavowal of anti-French aims, however, Fichte never missed an opportunity, all through the Addresses, to belabor the French and, indeed, Napoleon himself, with a characteristically French irony, which evidently eluded the French military government’s journeymen snoops.

The solution which Fichte offered to the ills which beset the German nation, both at the hands of the French and in the context of the self-seeking which had pervaded all classes in Germany even before defeat, was “a total change of the existing system of education.” In its place was to be instituted a system of national education (Nationalerziehung), to apply to “every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation, simply as such and without excepting any of its individual members.”

Fichte concluded his first address with an inspirational evocation of his purpose in speaking out: “The dawn of the new world is already past its breaking; already it gilds the mountaintops, and heralds the coming day. I wish, so far as in me lies, to catch the rays of this dawn and weave them into a mirror, in which our grief-stricken age may see itself; so that it may believe in its own existence, may perceive its real self, and, as in a prophetic vision, may see its own development, its coming forms pass by.”

Fichte’s own life and intellectual development uniquely qualified him for his role as herald of Germany’s awakening. The philosopher’s career provides ample evidence of his own possession of those qualities of mind and will which he sought to instill in others, in sharp contrast to certain other world-betterers (Rousseau and Marx spring to mind).

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born on May 19, 1762, in Rammenau, Upper Lusatia, in what was then the electorate of Saxony. His origins were humble. His father was a weaver, his mother a woman of simple piety. When Fichte was nine, his quick intelligence caught the eye of a local nobleman, Baron von Miltitz, who decided to sponsor his education. After two years of instruction at a neighboring parsonage, Fichte was enrolled in the renowned Schulpforta, a private boarding school which today numbers, in addition to Fichte, the poet Klopstock, the historian Ranke, and the philosopher Nietzsche among its illustrious alumni.

The education which Fichte acquired at Schulpforta qualified him for membership in Germany’s intellectual elite without estranging him from a consciousness of himself as a man of the people. When Fichte was forced to abandon his university studies after only a year, due to his patron’s death, his democratic feelings were reinforced by nearly a decade’s experience as a tutor to the sons of the noble and wealthy. Treated as little better than a servant by his wealthy employers, Fichte gained a life-long contempt for the aristocracy.

The turning point in Fichte’s life came with his introduction, by a university student whom he was tutoring, to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Fichte immediately embraced Kant’s rejection of the shallow rationalism and materialism in vogue in German and French philosophy during the 18th century, as well as his “intuitive” justification of God and the immortality of the soul. Fichte quickly mastered Kant’s philosophy and in 1791, with Kant’s approval, anonymously published A Critique of All Revelation, which was immediately taken to be Kant’s own work. When Fichte’s authorship became known, his reputation was assured. Shortly thereafter, at the urging of Goethe, Fichte was appointed a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena in Saxe-Weimar.

While at Jena, Fichte evolved his Wissenschaftslehre, in which he dispensed with Kant’s concessions to a reality capable of being objectively apprehended in favor of a world view based entirely on the supremacy of the mind and the will. Among the students he decisively influenced were the poet Novalis, the philosopher Schelling, and the Schlegel brothers, who were both to become outstanding philologists.

In 1799, Fichte was forced out of Jena following a controversy worked up by his opponents around the specious charge that Fichte was an atheist. Departing the allegedly tolerant Saxe-Weimar, he found a ready reception in absolutist Prussia.

In Prussia, Fichte began to develop his philosophy in a direction which took more cognizance of the importance of the nation and the state in providing the conditions under which knowledge and virtue might be attained and cultivated. In 1800 he wrote The Closed Commercial State, which sought to harmonize the exigencies of economic justice and the needs of the state. As the first description of a national socialism in other than utopian terms, The Closed Commercial State had no small influence on future political thought in Germany.

By 1806 Fichte had evolved the essentials of the ideology of German nationalism which animated the Addresses to the German Nation.

Despite Fichte’s situation of the Addresses in the context of his complex Wissenschaftslehre, their central thesis—that Germany’s rebirth was to be accomplished through a program of “national education”—is relatively easy to grasp. The ideas which underlie this thesis, however, require a certain amount of elucidation, especially for the modern reader.

Those who approach the Addresses in anticipation of a supercharged distillate of anti-French, patriotic fustian will doubtless be disappointed. Fichte’ s purpose in delivering the Addresses was not so much to excoriate the Corsican tyrant and his French (and German) minions as to galvanize his fellow Germans into effective thought and action.

Americans weaned for two generations on propaganda depicting the Germans as frenzied chauvinists will have difficulty in visualizing the degree of indifference to Germany’s political fortunes which prevailed among German intellectuals in Fichte’s time. During the previous 50 years the leading writers and thinkers of Germany had emancipated the nation’s literature and philosophy from their slavish imitation of French models. Yet, in the political sphere, the ideal of men such as Goethe and Kant remained a hazy cosmopolitanism.

Goethe, in particular, affected an Olympian detachment, going so far as to receive Napoleon cordially when the emperor passed through Weimar. As we have seen, even Fichte was long able to delude himself in the notion that he, too, was a “citizen of the world.”

The special task which Fichte set himself in the writing the Addresses to the German Nation was to imbue educated Germans with a sense of national mission. To that end, he played on the feelings of cultural and linguistic pride which German intellectuals had developed over the preceding decades.

Fichte argued that the German Volk was superior in character to those peoples in Europe, often originally German, who had abandoned their original languages for new ones derived from Latin. Drawing heavily on the theories of the philologist and literary critic August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Fichte differentiated between German, a “living language” or “original language” (Ursprache), able to form an intellectual and philosophical vocabulary from its own roots, and the Romance languages, which were forced to draw their scholarly words from a dead language.

According to Fichte, this reliance (in the case of the German language) on native words with concrete connotations to depict the “supersensuous” insured a clarity and honesty of expression sadly lacking in such languages as French and Italian. In fact, the Germans owed their “honest diligence and earnestness in all things” solely to their language.

Unwieldy as this sort of bold reductionism strikes us today, Fichte made good use of it in stirring national pride. Despite his ignorance of the biological factors underlying group differences, Fichte was unerring in delineating the strong points of the German character. In a memorable passage, he described the German spirit as “an eagle, whose mighty body thrusts itself on high and soars on strong and well-practiced wings into the empyrean, that it may rise nearer to the sun whereon it delights to gaze,” in contrast to the less inspired Latin peoples, whose genius he likened to “a bee, which with busy art gathers the honey from the flowers and deposits it with charming tidiness in cells of regular construction.”

Having established at length the worth of German culture and character, Fichte emphasized that the German language, the basis of character and culture, was in danger of disappearing in a Germany dominated by aliens. (“Where a people has ceased to govern itself, it is equally bound to give up its language and coalesce with its conquerors, in order that there may be unity and internal peace and complete oblivion of relationships which no longer exist.”)

The system of national education which Fichte proposed to insure the future survival of the German language—and, thus, of the German people—embodied a far more radical conception than is perhaps evident at first glance. The idea of inculcating in an elite a virtue which can only be acquired through knowledge goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic. Fichte revised this idea by boldly mandating such an education for the entire youth of the nation.

In the words of Fichte, “So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation, simply as such and without excepting any of its members. In this, that is to say in the training of man to take real pleasure in what is right, all distinction of classes which may in the future find a place in other branches of development will be completely removed and vanish. In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education.”

The educational system which Fichte envisioned was indebted to the theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss who had made his life’s work the education of the children of the poor. In contrast to the force-feeding of the intellect which was the staple of rationalist educational practice, Pestalozzi laid stress on the development of the child’s character. To this concern Fichte added a special emphasis on the training of the will, which he felt had long been greatly neglected by German educators. Briefly, Fichte’s conception of national education was “the art of training the whole man completely and fully for manhood.”

According to Fichte, “When once the generation that has been formed by this education is in existence—a generation impelled by its taste for the right and the good and by nothing else whatever; a generation provided with an understanding that is adequate for its standpoint and recognizes the right unfailingly on every occasion; a generation equipped with full power, both physical and spiritual, to carry out its will on every occasion—when once this generation is in existence, everything that we can long for in our boldest wishes will come into being of itself from the very existence of that generation, and will grow out of it naturally.”

Fichte concluded the Addresses with some of the most stirring oratory in the German language. He threw down a challenge to his German hearers in these words: “Review in your own minds the various conditions between which you now have to make a choice. If you continue in your dullness and helplessness, all the evils of serfdom are awaiting you; deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of your conqueror; you will be driven and harried in every corner, because you are in the wrong and in the way everywhere; until by the sacrifice of your nationality and your language, you have purchased for yourselves some subordinate and petty place, and until in this way you gradually die out as a people. If, on the other hand, you bestir yourselves and play the man, you will continue in a tolerable and honorable existence, and you will see growing up among you and around you a generation that will be the promise for you and for the Germans of most illustrious renown. You will see in spirit the German name rising by means of this generation to be the most glorious among all peoples; you will see this nation the regenerator and re-creator of the world.”

As is well known, Fichte’s Addresses helped fan the dying embers of German national feeling into a raging inferno which swept the French invaders from the fatherland in the Wars of Liberation five years later. Yet Fichte’s radicalism in demanding a united Germany organized along the lines spelled out in his Addresses waited a century and a quarter for its brief realization. In the short period of Germany’s resurgence under National Socialism, Fichte’s ideal of a generation of German youth steeled in character and will first began to take shape.

Fichte’s courage in saying what had to be said at the risk of his own life in 1807 should serve to embolden White men and women in possession of the truth today to speak out unhesitatingly. The philosopher’s vision of a national education cutting across class lines and embracing the whole people to mold young men and women into principled members of their nation and race will remain a beacon urging us on to the future reality.

Originally published in National Vanguard, no. 58, 1978; reprinted in The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard Tabloid, ed. Kevin Alfred Strom (National Vanguard Books, 1984). This format from: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/06/fichte-and-the-german-nation/#more-40286