Learning to Get Along

by Dr. William L. Pierce

I SPOKE recently with an Alliance member just back from a year in Zaire (the former Belgian Congo). He is a government scientist who is obliged to spend most of his time in rather odd places: African jungles, Arabian deserts, polar icecaps, and the like. While in Zaire he took advantage of every opportunity to avail himself of White company, which is all too scarce there, and he became intimately familiar with the attitudes and ways of thinking of the permanent White residents of that country. The story he told me about his experiences chilled my blood — the more so because it had the solid ring of truth and agreed with reports from other places, such as Rhodesia (now “Zimbabwe”). (ILLUSTRATION: Whites joining Blacks in cheering for anti-White policies in South Africa)

What our member said, in essence, is that the Whites in Zaire have “gone native.” After two weeks of work in the bush, our member would return to Kinshasa hungry for the sight of a White face. But the Whites, in the part of Kinshasa which used to be Leopoldville, outnumbered now more than 100 to one by Blacks, have managed to blend into the landscape so thoroughly that one can only pick them out of the Black crowds by the color of their skin; nothing else distinguishes them. One of them will pass another White on the sidewalk — perhaps the only other White he has encountered all day — without even a glance. To accost one of them is almost an affront; the attitude is, “Why should I stop to talk with you? You are nothing special to me.”

I suggested that, perhaps, this was merely an affectation employed to avoid arousing the suspicion or hostility of the Blacks all around them. Unfortunately, that is not so, he replied; the Whites who live permanently in Zaire have not only convinced the Blacks that they are no longer “White racists,” they have also convinced themselves. A common sight in the restaurants of Kinshasa is a blond Belgian with a coal-black African wife and a sickeningly multihued assortment of offspring; no one even looks up when racially mixed couples enter.

No Black country in Africa can operate without the presence of a White minority. By themselves, the Blacks cannot keep elevators or telephone systems operating, buses or taxis running, sewage systems or roadways in repair. Many of the Black countries have had a whole generation of political independence now, and they have sent tens of thousands of their citizens off to European or American universities for technical training. But they have learned the bitter lesson that, no matter how many diploma-holding Blacks an African country may boast of, it very rapidly sinks back into the jungle unless there is a tiny minority — often less than one-tenth of one percent of the population — of Whites present to keep things running, do the planning, and solve the problems which inevitably arise.

A Black may come back to Zaire from a White university with a degree in electrical engineering, but unless there is a White to tell him to do it, he seems incapable of so much as replacing a blown fuse on his own initiative. Even at such relatively non-technical occupations as farming, the Blacks are dependent on Whites. More than one-third of the agricultural output of Zambia (the former Northern Rhodesia), for example, is the product of White farmers there, who make up much less than one percent of the population. Because of this, every Black nation — even those which have indulged in mass raping and throat-cutting orgies against their White minorities in typically Black celebrations of independence, as was the case with the Belgian Congo/Zaire — tolerates a White minority. And because even a second-rate White man, who would be at the bottom of the social ladder in a White country, can live well and easily in an African country, the Whites who fled from the Congo during the bloody, anti-White paroxysms of the early 1960s have come trickling back.

But now there is a new social contract between Black and White. Before, the White was the undisputed master everywhere, and the Blacks — all of them — addressed him as such. They may or may not have loved the White man, but they thoroughly respected and feared him. Now the White man has voluntarily surrendered both his position as master and his claim to respect. He asks only to be tolerated, in return for the services he can perform.

The Blacks, however, have demanded one thing else of him; that he cease being a member of a race apart. They have demanded that he sleep with their women and give them his, that he give up his racial pride altogether, that he cut all his ties to his own race and sink down into theirs, that he accept them as brothers and equals. In Zaire that is what he has done.

And the White man is in the process of doing the same thing in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. In April of this year the United States, Great Britain, and other Western countries forced the White Rhodesians, outnumbered 20 to one by Blacks, to accept a Black government headed by the Black Marxist leader of a terrorist band which had spent years raping White women and butchering White children. Within days after the change of government the Whites who chose to stay in Rhodesia and submit to Black rule were obsequiously addressing their new president as “Comrade Mugabe.”

What has taken place in the Congo and Rhodesia is frightening not so much because it proves that some Whites are willing to crawl for their supper — we’ve known that to be the case for a long time — but for two other reasons: First, as our member observed during his year in Zaire, the Whites there are not just pretending to have forgotten their Whiteness and to have cut themselves off from their race; they have actually done it. Approaching them on the basis of shared blood and a common heritage not only frightens them, it also offends their new sensibilities. They want nothing to do now with anything which smacks of “racism.” Their conversion is complete. They have become White niggers.

Second, the phenomenon reveals a general characteristic of man’s nature. What has already happened in Kinshasa and is well underway in Salisbury is also beginning to happen in Johannesburg — and in every city in America as well. Americans who were adults during the 1960s and who have kept their equilibrium since then are aware of the enormous shift in White public opinion which has taken place in the United States in the past two decades.

In 1959 or 1960 an announcement by the Federal government that henceforth the racial composition of the students at all public schools in the country would be “balanced” by forced busing; that all employers must give preference to “disadvantaged” minorities in hiring and promoting; that White neighborhoods were to be broken up by the mass resettlement of welfare Blacks and non-White immigrants in them — would have caused an armed uprising in every region of the country and among all classes of the White population. Today, although such a program still causes a bit of grumbling, White politicians are able to campaign for office on platforms incorporating similar measures and entertain reasonable hopes of being elected.

In 1960 there were relatively few parts of the country where a racially mixed couple could appear in public without arousing open hostility. A daughter who brought a Black boyfriend home risked being disowned by her family — if her father restrained his urge to shoot her and the Black on the spot. In the last few years, however, miscegenation has spread like a metastasizing cancer throughout the nation, and few now raise their hands or their voices against it.

In part, of course, these changes have been brought about by armed compulsion. There has been resentment and resistance against them every step of the way, and were it not for the Federal government’s awesome firepower and massive use of police agencies, they would not have been accomplished — at least, not so quickly. But the fact remains that the White public has, by and large, adapted itself to the new order of things. A conversion has taken place — not as thorough a conversion as in the Congo yet, but a conversion of the same sort, nevertheless — in which many Whites who formerly regarded the old order as right and proper now regard the new order in that light.

I gave a speech in New York last summer in which I illustrated the tendency of people to adapt morally and spiritually to changed circumstances by using a rather far-fetched and hypothetical example: Suppose, I said, the Soviet Union launched a lightning invasion of the United States and, after a few weeks of fighting, subdued our armed forces. Suppose the Soviet victors, having set up a Marxist regime here, then brought two or three million English-speaking Russians over and settled them among the conquered Americans, for the purpose of spying on any malcontents or overt anti-communists and reporting them to the secret police.

Suppose further that, after three months or so of taking down the names and addresses of all potential troublemakers, the authorities rounded up all these people and put them into concentration camps. They might amount to as many as a couple of million Americans altogether: perhaps five percent of the adult, male Whites in the country.

The point I then made with my example was that it would not be necessary for the Soviet rulers to shoot these Americans or even keep them locked up in order to quell all resistance. The Soviets could instead proceed as follows: After explaining to the Americans that the old life they had known was gone forever, that there was no way for them to escape communist rule, nowhere left for them to flee, and no one to come to their aid, 100,000 sturdy Russians, each armed with a stout, oak table leg, would take the prisoners aside and beat each of them to within a quarter inch of his life, while those not yet beaten watched.

A good, five-minute beating, administered scientifically, should cause perhaps 10 percent of the prisoners to die from their injuries. Perhaps another five percent would turn out to be recalcitrant and would eventually have to be shot. But the remaining 85 percent of the pick of America’s manhood would see the error of their ways. Before they were even out of their bandages and casts they would be asking themselves how they could have failed to see that anti-communism (just like “racism”) is not only a thing of the past but is morally indefensible, wicked, and the mark of a loser. Within another month they would be enthusiastically parroting Marxist slogans — and believing them.

As I said, that example is rather far-fetched, but the phenomenon it illustrates is all too real. Indeed, physical violence is not necessary to bring about the type of conversion described. The mere threat of violence, provided it is credible and is combined with sufficiently intense moral pressure, works quite as well. What is happening in the Republic of South Africa today provides an excellent example of this.

Whites have been living in South Africa since the 17th century — approximately as long as they have been living in North America. The aboriginal inhabitants of the land which became South Africa were Hottentots and Bushmen, members of the yellow-skinned Capoid race, who now constitute only a small minority there. The ancestors of most of the Blacks (Bantus) in South Africa, who now outnumber the Whites five to one, entered that area during the 19th century. For nearly 300 years the Whites ruled the land as masters, first over the Capoids and then over their Bantu successors. Now the Whites are questioning their own right to rule, and, step by fatal step, they are abandoning all their former prerogatives.

Now that apartheid has fallen, a number of White South Africans are now stricken with poverty, some living in cabins meant to be garden sheds. White genocide is now taking place across southern Africa -- with murder, rape, and torture taking place at alarming rates.

White South Africans have suffered no physical violence to speak of, but the threat is clearly there, as Black terrorist groups launch their occasional raids from neighboring, Black-ruled areas or stir up local Black workers and students to stone-throwing riots. Even without the riots and bombings, the mere physical presence of the Black majority is threatening. It is a regrettable fact that most soft, city-bred Whites, whether they pretend to like Blacks or not, fear them.

The moral pressure in South Africa (as in America) is provided by the Christian churches and the Jewish media working in tandem. The Dutch Reformed Church, Calvinist in doctrine, has always had an extraordinarily strong influence over the Whites of Boer, or Dutch, stock, while the Whites of English origin have allowed virtually all their news and entertainment media to slip into Jewish hands. (South Africa has twice as many Jews per White inhabitant as the United States.)

From the earliest days of White settlement in southern Africa, Christian missionaries have played a destructive role there. Virtually every Black terrorist leader in Africa has been educated in a Christian mission school and incited by priests or parsons to demand “equality” for Blacks. Today the White Rhodesians who remain in Black-ruled Zimbabwe are being told by their preachers that it is “the will of God” for them to be ruled by Blacks, while the White citizens of the Republic of South Africa read each day in their newspapers a slightly different variation on a single theme: They must “change their ways before it is too late,” meaning they must accept Blacks as equals or terrible things will happen to them.

Already there are South African student organizations, businessmen’s organizations, and church-related organizations acting on this threat by working to undermine the nation’s system for keeping Blacks and Whites from mixing (apartheid) while the government either gives its blessing or looks the other way. Judging from these groups’ public statements, some of them seem to believe that if they’re sufficiently generous and apologetic toward the Blacks now, when the Blacks eventually get the upper hand the latter will be grateful for past favors and will tolerate the continued presence of Whites in Africa — perhaps even allowing them to keep their wealth and continue their comfortable lifestyles. Others, especially the church-related groups, seem almost to hope the Blacks won’t be grateful, but will allow Whites to remain anyway, perhaps as menials. The thought of being punished for their past “racism” brings on a delicious shiver of anticipation.

The worldwide sickness of the White race — the loss of pride, of virility, of honor, and of contact with reality — is rooted in several things. In part it comes from ignorance, which in turn is the consequence of the breakdown and subversion of our educational systems, so that they no longer provide White men and women with historical roots; and in part it is merely an aspect of the general spiritual malaise of the times — in particular, of the prevalent egoism and materialism, which lead our people to place prosperity, comfort, and immediate personal safety ahead of all else.

But it also has a distinctly Pavlovian aspect, as illustrated by my hypothetical story of the Soviet invasion, and that is an important fact for us to keep in mind.

The meaning of this fact for the short term is that our race is in even greater peril than we might otherwise have realized.

The long-term significance is this: Only a relatively small minority of the White population has any absolute sense of direction, of right and wrong. The majority can be conditioned to do or to approve of anything.

That’s just one more reason why democracy is such a catastrophe.

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From Attack! No. 79, 1980, transcribed by Anthony Collins and edited by Vanessa Neubauer, from the book The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard, edited by Kevin Alfred Strom