Why Academia is Important

By Dave Yorkshire. What always dismayed me about the British National Party, and often about British nationalism in general, is a sort of inverted snobbery with regard to any form of intellectualism. Certainly, one certain purportedly nationalist website, which I once sadly had something to do with, actively repudiates intellectual ideas in line with the class antagonism it often displays – a truly Marxist position.

The spirit of nationalism has always been to unite the classes, not to create enmity between them. I urge the founders of that website to consider this.

This aside, the mistrust of some street-level nationalist activists towards their more academic brethren is perhaps to be expected: most university educated members of society tend towards various forms of leftism after attending an indoctrination system during the years of life when they are at their most impressionable. Nevertheless, if nationalism is to thrive, or even survive, as a political ethos, nationalist scholarship is not only necessary, it is paramount.

The exclusion of nationalists from educational institutions has meant the rewriting of our history by Marxist pseudo-historians interested in undermining any form of national pride, or even national consciousness, has gone completely unchecked and unchallenged. One of the main overseers of this revision of our history has been Eric Hobsbawm, an Austrian Jew who was given asylum in our country during the Nazi regime in his own country. He has repaid us thus.

New historicism, the study of history through literature with ‘sensitivity to other cultures and lifestyles’ came hanging onto the coattails of Marxist historiography in the 1980s and was propounded unsurprisingly by militant homosexual and sado-masochist Michel Foucault. Its ideas of privileging ethnic minorities and alternative sexual identities (as they are now known) derive, of course, directly from Frankfurt School theorists.

What this has meant is that most students of history at university since the 1960s have left with (to use a Marxist term) a ‘false consciousness’ with regard to the history of the Occidental world. The ones that continued in the education system, either as teachers, professors or academics, have, in turn, infected the mind of the next generation of scholars and – crucially – voters, who sneer at the very ideas of national borders, culture and identity, religion and spirituality, and anything beyond the material and base.

Of course, I am by no means the only one to have noticed the ‘Marxification’ of our education system. However, in Britain, there seems to be an acceptance that there is little to be done. In France, however, there is something of a counter-revision of history. Historian Jean Sévilla has recently published a book Historiquement incorrect, which exposes many of the historical inaccuracies and outright falsifications created by leftist pseudo-historians, as well as the persecution faced by historians who have challenged the leftist establishment’s perversion of historical fact.

Speaking to Valleurs actuelles, a magazine for the Roman Catholic right in France, Sévilla recounts the polemic surrounding the publication Aristote au mont Saint-Michel (2008), in which the author, Sylvain Gouguenheim, shows how the Arabs were indebted to the Christians in their newly-conquered lands for the transmission of Hellenic knowledge that came back into Christendom during the Middle Ages. The leftist line, cow-towing to militant Islam as usual, has always been that the West is indebted to the Islamic Seljuk and Ottoman Empires for its rediscovery of Classical knowledge in the arts and sciences. Attempts were made not only to discredit Gouguenheim as a historian, but to ban him professionally.

The interviewer and author of the article in Valleurs actuelles, Fabrice Madouas, highlights some examples of the left’s deliberate subversion of history. Such fallacies and inaccuracies (which have all been propounded by the BBC) include the anti-white racial bias when discussing the slave trade and the claim the Church held back scientific progress.

Neither do Madouas and Sévilla shy away from the subject of Holocaust revisionism. They agree that historians ought to be free to investigate any period of history without state interference. The British historian David Irving knows all too well the problems surrounding frank discussion and historicising of the subject. Once a well-respected historian, he was imprisoned in Austria for the ‘offence’ of reporting his findings on the Holocaust as a historian and is now universally demonised and vilified in academic circles.

The irony is, of course, that we were told by our teachers and professors that we fought World War II for free speech, although now the rhetoric has changed. Now, apparently, we fought against ‘racism’ – revisionism again! France is now busy attempting to enact a law forbidding the denial of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. Should Turkey join the European Union, this would create the strange situation where in one EU state one can be prosecuted for denying the genocide and in another can be prosecuted for admitting it.

When Nick Griffin made that unfortunate appearance on Question Time, everyone ought to have known that the subject of Holocaust revisionism would be one of the primary points of attack by Dimbleby and the rest of the panel.

Had Griffin had any wits about him, he would have steered that conversation round to the subject of free speech and how the Holocaust justifies all kinds of evils in the present, such as those against the Palestinians and forced multiculturalism and the oppression of whites through discriminatory legislation in the Occidental world.

Racism, as ever, is only valid when non-whites are deemed to be the oppressed, and then it always carries political repercussions. In 2005, celebrations to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Austerlitz were marred by claims from ethnic minority historians, most notably from Guadeloupe, that claimed Napoleon to have been a ‘misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, fascist and anti-republican despot.’ The then President Jacques Chirac failed to attend the festivities in response.

The battle for history and academia in general is a battle for Western civilization itself. Communists know full well that if a civilization can be caricaturised as the sum of its unrepresentative infamies, the population of that civilization will reject said civilization wholesale, creating a vacuum to be filled by whatever the new ruling Communist elite wish to fill it with.

What does this Communist elite wish to fill this cultural and academic gap with? The answer is simply pseudo-intellectual theories that will bring about our extinction as a people. Look at the evidence: this is already the case. Over a hundred years ago, the drug-addled Communist Otto Gross was writing about the promotion of female promiscuity to undermine ‘bourgeois’ society. His vision of Paradise was the orgy. This is now in practice. Since then, we have had a complete inversion of the society we once had – a society that functioned and propagated. Birth rates in Europe tell us that this one does not.

It is no coincidence that these academics that have promoted leftist doctrine have been either ethnic minorities with some perceived or invented grievance against whites or whites who have some kind of psycho-sexual disorder (Michel Foucault again!), receive some form of personal gain, or are social outsiders for one reason or another. Personal gain is often the reason. Tertiary level students, predominantly from the middle classes, have traditionally taken their education seriously to ‘get on’ in the world. What better way to undermine an entire class than to simultaneously promote a hedonistic lifestyle free from morality (which would naturally appeal to adolescents), mixed with lashings of self-hatred? To get the one, one must accept the other and, since the 1960s, this has been the case. However, as opportunities for Caucasians are artificially and increasingly restricted, ‘getting on’ by accepting the dogma will no longer be viable.

Let us take the Frankfurt School: all the major theorists of the first generation of neo-Marxist ‘scholars’ were ethnically Jewish. Post-1945, the second generation were all ethnically German. What had happened was that the de-Nazification education programme in schools had meant that to ‘get on’ in academia, one had to accept racial guilt as an ethnic German and neo-Marxism as a moral good. Had Nazi Germany continued into the 50s and 60s, those self-same German academics would have furthered Nazi ideology without a second thought. De-Nazification was re-Marxification.

Some academics are now completely open about their mission for the genocide of the Caucasian race. Jewish ‘historian’ Noel Ignatiev openly advocates the ‘abolition of the white race’. His magazine, Race Traitor, is a vehicle for anti-white hatred and is backed by Harvard University, one of the prominent ‘Ivy League’ American institutions. Here is a synopsis, in Ignatiev’s own words:

The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in US society.

The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a predictor of behavior will lead to its collapse.

RACE TRAITOR aims to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race. It will encourage dissent from the conformity that maintains it and popularize examples of defection from its ranks, analyze the forces that hold it together and those that promise to tear it apart. Part of its task will be to promote debate among abolitionists. When possible, it will support practical measures, guided by the principle, Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.

There is the usual play with language to dress up what is (very) thinly disguised anti-white hatred and the promotion of genocide as something other than what it is. Let us imagine that a Caucasian academic talked about Jewish privilege in the same way and advocated the abolition of Jewry. How long would he stay in his position? Ignatiev himself was employed by Harvard while still an unqualified undergraduate. These instances only go to show who really has social privilege. Ignatiev trips himself up when he states:

However exploited the poor whites of this country, they are not direct victims of racial oppression, and “white trash” is not a term of racial degradation analogous to the various epithets commonly applied to black people; in fact, the poor whites are the objects of race privilege, which ties them to their masters more firmly than did the arrows of Vulcan bind Prometheus to the rock. Not long ago there was an incident in Boston in which a well-dressed black man hailed a taxi and directed the driver to take him to Roxbury, a black district. The white cab driver refused, and when the man insisted she take him or call someone who would, as the law provided, she called her boyfriend, also a cabdriver, on the car radio, who showed up, dragged the black man out of the cab and called him a “nigger.” The black man turned out to be a city councilman. The case was unusual only in that it made the papers. Either America is a very democratic country, where cab drivers beat up city councilmen with impunity, or the privileges of whiteness reach far down into the ranks of the laboring class.

Ignatiev is making a direct reference to skin colour – to biological evidence of difference – to make his point, while denying it to make his other. It is Orwellian doublethink in the extreme and duplicitous. He uses a single example to exemplify the actions of an entire race, outside of any statistical evidence that may support his argument. Neither has he acknowledged any statistical evidence to the contrary: the attacks by black gangs on whites; black on white rape that is unusually high; whites involved in black empowerment projects. From here, Ignatiev overtly suggests that the only way for whites to relieve themselves of their ‘whiteness’ is through death. Note here the use of the words ‘good fortune’ and the presumed impossibility of escaping ‘whiteness’, despite his alleging that it is only a ‘social construct’:

A traitor to the white race is someone who is nominally classified as white but who defies white rules so strenuously as to jeopardize his or her ability to draw upon the privileges of whiteness. The abolitionists recognize that no “white” can individually escape from the privileges of whiteness. The white club does not like to surrender a single member, so that even those who step out of it in one situation can hardly avoid stepping back in later, if for no other reason than the assumptions of others – unless, like John Brown, they have the good fortune to be hanged before that can happen.

Remember that Ignatiev is not just some crank; he is a Harvard professor. This is by no means an isolated case. The most well-known came in 1967 when the prominent Jewish academic Susan Sontag wrote in the Partisan Review, a largely Jewish academic magazine founded by recent Jewish American immigrant scholars:

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

While I have mentioned several Jewish scholars, I by no means wish to castigate their entire tribe. For balance, I ought to mention one Otto Weininger, an academic who was so full of self-hatred as a Jew (see the thirteenth chapter of his study Geschlecht und Charakter, entitled Das Judentum for his negative views on Jewry) that he committed suicide in the former home of his idol Beethoven. Yet imagine a Caucasian academic saying that Weininger ought to serve as an example to all Jews and that it does not matter if the world is rid of them, as they are, in any case, only a social construct. That academic would probably find himself in the Austrian cell David Irving once inhabited, but for a much longer stretch.

I do, however, wish to show that there are those among the ethnic minorities (and Jews are an ethnic minority) that work for the good of their own tribe and to the detriment of others. We used to have the same in ours. With negroes and others of third world origin, actions to our detriment tend to be in the form of physical attacks; with Jews, who have, on average, a higher IQ, the attack tends to be cerebral. These ideas, if left unchecked, spread like a mental cancer in the weak-minded.

The question remains: what is to be done about it? Some things have already been done. Websites like the Alternative Right and Counter Currents provide scholarly and informative articles that serve as a valuable resource for nationalist academics (whether one agrees with the point of view of the author or not), especially when discussing ‘right-wing’ writers of the past who would otherwise be put down the memory hole by the leftist establishment. For this reason, equally important is Arthur Kemp’s Ostara Publications, which keeps many of these bygone writers in print. (I hope Mr Kemp does not feel embarrassed about my advertising his products and I must stress I do not know the man, except in passing!) This is a valuable service.

In France, following the attempted prosecution of the historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau by an alliance of various lobby groups, after he dared to suggest negroes were not the victims of attempted genocide during the slave trade, the association Liberté pour l’histoire was formed in order to protect historians from both state and legal persecution. Such an association is required for academics in Britain. One remembers Dr Frank Ellis’ persecution and forced retirement from his position at Leeds University in 2006 after his battles against Marxist indoctrination at the institute.

Certainly, nationalists who are capable (also in a financial sense) ought to go into higher education and attempt to infiltrate the institutions from within. Such a ‘long march back through the institutions’, to paraphrase the father of Western neo-Marxism Antonio Gramsci, will inevitably be a long an arduous one, yet necessary. At undergraduate level, one must toe the line with regards ideology and keep one’s real opinions to oneself. Yet, while at university, one must form academic cells of nationalists who would help each other into positions of power and influence within the institutions.

Once in these positions, and carrying such influence as it would be impossible to expel individuals, articles can be written that overtly further nationalist ideology. In any case, if one has a modicum of wit, nationalist ideology can be sneaked into essays about a perceived oppressed people: the Irish pre-1922, for example. Here, one can talk of a ‘justified’ nationalism, legitimating nationalist ideology in general. Many leading Fenians saw Britain as Jewish-led, a notion which is often worth exploring.

One thing I hear repeatedly from nationalists is that ‘It is too late!’ for any long-term plan, such as the one laid out. It shows fear and panic and is unproductive. It is, in any case, plainly wrong. History is filled with instances of sudden changes in systems of governance, some peaceful, others not. In most cases, from 1789 onwards, these changes have been brought about by the ideas of academics. Think about Robespierre with his books by Rousseau tucked under his arm. Change comes about because the masses are given to want it. The longing for change comes to the middle classes via academia, who filter it to the working classes via pop culture. All we need is an idea to catch on. To do this, academics must frame the discourse.

However, nationalist academics must be supported politically. It is good for neither the nationalist academic nor the nationalist politician if the politician will not publicly support the academic, preferring to distance himself in the hope that appearing like any of the other parties will win a few more votes. It will not. All it will do is to alienate the core voters for nationalist parties and make nationalist viewpoints in both academia and politics untenable. As shown, the one impinges and is dependent upon the other.

If a nationalist politician adopts a liberal position, then he is no longer a nationalist; he is a liberal. It means he has also adopted a liberal ideology instead of defending his own. Even if that politician does so dishonestly, hoping later to revert back to his former nationalist position after acquisition of power, he will be unable to do so, for he will find that he himself has undermined that position and all those who attempted to further it. He will find himself adrift without anchor and that the only haven will be the liberal prison he sprang from.

For far too long, British nationalists under Griffin have been afraid of exposing who our enemies are because of the party’s ‘modernisation’ programme. The failure to bring academics who attack and injure the cause of nationalism to account merely because of their ethnicity displays a slavish fear of political correctness and perhaps a fear that our politicians cannot argue a valid point cogently. This is because many at the helm of the BNP under Griffin do not read the theory behind the politics. They are thus unprepared and unequipped for debate, as Griffin himself was on Question Time.

One thing I will say about Marxists is that they know their theory inside-out. It gives them strength. Their theory is their god. I do not suggest it should be so for us, but if nationalism is to survive as an ideology, nationalist politicians must back and read up on their academics. Knowledge is strength.