Cowardice and Individualism

by Dr. William L. Pierce (pictured)

IN VARIOUS Free Speech articles I've spoken about our problems with Blacks, with Asian immigrants, with mestizos, and of course, with Jews -- especially about our problems with Jews, in deference to their demand always to be at the head of the line. Now, I'd like to talk about our problems with ourselves, with European-Americans: about what's wrong with White people.

Actually, this is such a huge subject that I can deal with only a tiny part of it. In the organization which I head, the National Alliance, I've been talking with members about two aspects of the White problem: White cowardice and White selfishness. Here are some of our thoughts.

If most White people weren't such terrible cowards, we wouldn't have problems with Blacks, mestizos, Jews, or anyone else today. We would have solved all of those problems long ago. There are plenty of people who agree with us about the type of society we want, the type of future we want for our people. There are many people who are disgusted with the rotten politicians and the rotten political system we have in Washington, people who are angry about what non-White minorities have done to our schools and our cities, people who are sick and tired of seeing television and the other mass media promote everything which is sick, perverse, and destructive. Many people don't feel guilty when the media tell them to feel guilty. There are plenty of people who want a clean, decent, White society for their children to grow up in. But these people are afraid to say or do anything. Many are terrified even to have other people know what they are thinking. Why is that? What are White people afraid of?

I understand the difference between prudence or reasonable caution on the one hand and cowardice or unreasoning fear on the other hand. Prudence is no vice. Cowardice is. Imagine, for example, that you work in an office under a Jewish supervisor. You are close to retirement, and you can't afford to lose your employment. Your Jewish boss is a big supporter of Clinton, affirmative action, "diversity," homosexuality, feminism, racial mixing, and every other thing which is bad for our people. And the boss always is pushing these things, is making favorable comments about these things, around you and your fellow employees. He's always saying that Bill Clinton is a wonderful man and that all of the people who are attacking him are just a bunch of bigots who hate him because he has been so good to Israel. Every time your Jewish boss says something like that you bite your tongue and keep your mouth shut, even though you want to tell him what you really think. You consider the consequences to yourself and to your family if you speak out, and you decide that it's not worth it. So you grit your teeth and remain silent. What does that make you? Well, certainly you are no hero, but under the circumstances I don't think it would be fair to call you a coward either. You are just a prudent person.

The times we are living in tend to make cowards of us all. We are pressed to make moral compromises every day, and it becomes a habit. Certainly, if a man today tried to act honorably in all things according to the standards for honorable behavior 100 years ago he would very likely find himself in prison in short order. For all practical purposes we are living like a conquered people under an enemy occupation government. We adjust our behavior in order to get by without a lot of trouble. We do not act heroically, because heroism is out of fashion. We try to do what is prudent rather than what is heroic.

But some people go too far in this direction, and they must be judged as cowards even by today's lax standards. There are people, for example, who whisper to me that they agree with everything I say, and ask me for information about the National Alliance. I will offer to mail the information to them, and they will turn pale and tell me that I must not do that: the postman or a neighbor might see their mail. "So what?" I respond, and they will just look frightened and scurry away. There are other people who are afraid to talk with me on the telephone, because they are certain that the FBI is recording all of my calls.

I won't bore you with all of the details, but over a period of years I have been made aware repeatedly of the fact that there are many people in America -- White adults of reasonably sound mind -- who are so afraid of the government in Washington that their fear controls them; it dominates them. They are afraid that the government will find out if they send a letter to anyone who is critical of the government, such as me. They are terrified of being on the mailing list of a Politically Incorrect organization. They are terrified of having their telephone records show that they have made calls to or received calls from anyone who is on the government's blacklist. And these are people who themselves hate the government! But they are terribly afraid that the government will find out what they feel, what they think. There are, I am sorry to say, millions of such people in this country.

When I have spoken with some of these people in an effort to find out just what it is they are afraid of, what they believe will happen to them if the government discovers that they are thinking Politically Incorrect thoughts, I usually get a defensive reaction. Most of them don't have any precise idea of how the government might punish them. Some of them will express vague fears about economic retaliation -- an IRS audit or the loss of a pension -- and others worry that all constitutional rights will be suspended under some Presidential declaration of a national emergency, and all dissidents will be rounded up and put in concentration camps. In most cases their fear is irrational.

I think it likely that there always have been people who were dominated by irrational fears, people who were afraid of their own shadow, but I am sure that there are many more of them today than there were in the past. I believe that the type of life-style we have today is partly responsible for this prevalence of unreasonable fear. Men who have been sheltered from danger all their lives, who have grown up in a welfare state, and who have never faced physical danger or seen another man die a violent death may not be able to cope with the idea of risk or be able to overcome even the minor fears which beset all of us every day of our lives.

Another part of the reason for this fear is that the controlled mass media encourage it and exacerbate it. The media bosses all will tell you that they support the First Amendment, that they believe in free speech and the rest of the Bill of Rights, but they don't. They want the same sort of laws in this country they have lobbied for and gotten in other countries, such as Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, and a dozen others, where one can be imprisoned for Politically Incorrect speech. It's what they like to call "hate speech," and they've been lobbying quietly for laws against it for years.

Part of their campaign has involved persuading the more impressionable elements of the public that it's already illegal to say anything which is "racist" or "anti-Semitic." I'm sure that all of you have seen newspaper stories to the effect that someone was arrested for distributing "racist" leaflets, or that the police found "anti-Semitic" literature in the home of someone who was charged with a "hate crime." The way these things are reported they create the impression in the public's mind that distributing Politically Incorrect leaflets or having Politically Incorrect books in one's home is illegal in itself. And they report things that way deliberately. They deliberately deceive us. They want people who read these news reports to believe that having the wrong type of reading material on one's bookshelf -- or the wrong type of ideas in one's head -- can get one into trouble. They want the people who think Politically Incorrect thoughts to be fearful.

They are masters of psychological manipulation. I reported to you about the nine schoolchildren in Florida who were thrown into jail for producing a Politically Incorrect pamphlet which lampooned a Black principal at their school. The children had done nothing illegal. The purpose of putting them in jail and making a big thing of it in the newspapers was to intimidate the children -- and everyone who read about what happened to them. And unfortunately, this sort of intimidation all too often works. It works because many of our people already are too timid, too cowed, to fight back.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of my favorite authors. In one of his books, the first volume of Gulag Archipelago, he wrote about how the communists in Russia, who consisted of only the Jews and a tiny minority of Russian criminals, amoral opportunists, and welfare rabble -- the sort of people who support Bill Clinton in America today -- were able to maintain their grip on all of Russia by keeping the Russian majority, which hated them, too frightened to resist.

Solzhenitsyn writes of the period in 1934 and 1935, when the Jewish commissar Genrikh Yagoda headed the Soviet secret police, and Yagoda's black vans went out every night in St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, to round up "class enemies": former members of the aristocracy, former civil servants, former businessmen, former teachers, professors, and professional people, any Russian -- any real Russian -- who had graduated from a university. A quarter of the population of the city was arrested and liquidated by Yagoda during this two-year period.

Solzhenitsyn laments that the citizens of St. Petersburg cowered behind their doors when the black vans pulled up at their apartment houses night after night to arrest their neighbors. If only the decent Russians had fought back, Solzhenitsyn says, if only they had ambushed some of these secret police thugs in the hallways of their apartments with knives, pickaxes, or hammers, if only they had spiked the tires of the police vans while the thugs were in the apartments dragging out their victims, they could easily have overwhelmed Yagoda's forces and forced an end to the mass arrests. But they didn't fight back, and the arrests and liquidations continued. And so, Solzhenitsyn concludes, because of their cowardice and their selfishness the Russians deserved what the communists did to them. Do we deserve better?

The other problem White people have that I want to talk about is selfishness or individualism. Every week I receive letters accusing me of being a "collectivist." The people who write the letters are indignant because I suggest that all of us have a responsibility for the future of our race, that we should put the welfare and security of our people, of our race, ahead of personal considerations. What happens to our people is more important than what happens to any individual.

This kind of talk irritates the individualist, and he tells me that although he agrees with my criticisms of the government, he doesn't agree with my racism. Racism is a form of collectivism, which in his mind is akin to communism, and so I am just as bad as the communists. His only concern is for himself, and he believes that everyone else should feel the same. He resents being told that he has a responsibility to his race. He tells me that he knows some Blacks, Jews, or Asians who make better neighbors or better employees than some White people, and he is just as resentful of White welfare bums as he is of Black welfare bums, and so he rejects my call for him to think of himself as a White person or as a European-American. He makes all of his decisions on the basis of what is good for him, and he thinks everyone else should do the same.

The individualist responds to my warnings about the overwhelming Jewish influence in the mass media by saying, "So what? The Jews are smart businessmen. That's why they control the media. If you don't like it, buy yourself a television station and compete with them."

If I complain about the media promoting interracial sex or homosexuality, the individualist doesn't understand what I'm concerned about. To him the choice of a sexual orientation or the race of one's sexual partner is strictly an individual matter, and no one has any right to say that one type of relationship is inherently better than another. If a White person wants to marry a Black and have mixed-race children, that's okay with the individualist. The more extreme individualists also believe that the government has no business making laws against abused drugs. He believes that it should be up to the individual to decide whether or not he wants to use drugs, and he doesn't care about the consequences to society of the widespread use of harmful drugs. That's not his responsibility.

You know, if we were living in a White world I wouldn't worry much about individualists. I still would deplore their selfishness and their refusal to accept responsibility for anyone or anything but themselves, but I wouldn't consider them a major threat. As it is, with our people under assault by organized minorities on every front, I consider individualists to be worse than communists. Their way of thinking is really a mental illness: an illness which can infect others. And like cowardice it has been deliberately encouraged by the controlled media, because it weakens our people, it destroys our solidarity and makes it easier for the media bosses and their allies to keep us under control.

I doubt that there's anything we can do to make a man out of a coward. However, at least some individualists may overcome their illness and change their ways as our social and political situation continues to deteriorate.

Perhaps some of them will read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and they will understand that the reason the Russian people fell victim to the tiny communist minority was not just their cowardice but also their unwillingness to take responsibility for the welfare of their people and to stand together as decent Russians against the Jews and the rabble. And perhaps they will see the parallel between what happened in Russia in the 1930s and what is happening in America now.

Perhaps some of them will come to understand that the reason our race is in peril now is because we are the only race which has tolerated individualism. The Jews certainly have not achieved their position of dominance by being individualists: they have achieved it by supporting each other against the rest of the world, by putting the welfare of their race first. Any Jew who collaborated openly with non-Jews against Jewish interests -- the way White politicians habitually collaborate with minorities against White interests -- would be ostracized and condemned by his fellow Jews. He would become an outcast.

Blacks have achieved their own measure of political power because they think and act as a group: they think of themselves as Blacks first, and they use their organized strength to demand special treatment and special favors from the government.

Perhaps some of our individualists will realize that their own lives can have no lasting value or meaning, no matter how rich or famous they become, unless they are part of something larger and more enduring than themselves. Perhaps some of them will realize that the limb they've been sawing off by supporting Jewish policies at the expense of their own people is the limb they're sitting on. Perhaps when they contemplate the extinction of their own race they will realize that, despite all of its faults, it's all they have. Perhaps we can help them realize that.

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Source: Free Speech magazine, June 1998, Volume IV, Number 6