A Mad Weir of Tigerish Waters

And if the world were black or white entirely
        And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
        A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
        Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
        Road that is right entirely.

— Louis MacNeice, from “Entirely”

This morning we received an email from a relatively new reader who lives in Florida. He proposed a topic he would like to see addressed at Gates of Vienna:

The world is a busy place right now. I won’t blame you for not addressing this topic right away. Your articles on history have been very well done and interesting. As I’ve said in a comment I am not a good student of history like some of my fellows so those entries about Germanic, Scandinavian, and Norman peoples are good.

Primarily my praise is for the fact that you do not pretend to cover up the sins of America’s ancestors as many enemies in our world would love to accuse you of. But I wonder if you could spend some time discussing, for the benefit of any open-minded accusers out there, the difference between the views of the alert, EDL class, of groups out there and racism.

I know there is a difference and it is primarily to do with migration, adsorption, absorption, getting along in freedom. In other words why, Gates of Vienna, are you not an Aryan nationalist bigoted collection of white guys?

As I wrote out my reply to him, it kept getting longer and more involved. The essay below is a lightly-edited adaptation of it.


That’s a good question. My wife will probably answer it differently, since she and I come at the issue from different angles.

To me, race is not the important issue; immigration is. If we (the USA) or Australia or European countries stopped all immigration, or at least slowed it down to a trickle, in two or three generations race would no longer be an issue. This would especially be the case in countries that have not experienced a lot of mass immigration up until now. France is an exception — it has an Algerian population of long standing, going back more than a hundred years, so its problems will remain.

In addition to limiting immigration, two other policies would be necessary:

1.		Deport all criminal immigrants, revoking the citizenship of serious criminals if they are naturalized citizens; and
2.		Insist on assimilation.

These steps would keep race from being an issue in most countries. Unfortunately, no Western country is doing these things — Denmark comes the closest — so we are headed for catastrophe, probably within the next twenty years or so.

The United States is also a special case. Black people were brought here against their will beginning four hundred years ago. In my area (Central Virginia), the ancestors of many of the black people arrived on this continent before the ancestors of the most of the white people who live here now. Thus they have at least as good a claim to the territory as the whites. There can be no moral justification for solving the “race problem” here through forced relocation — we are going to have to muddle through with what we have now.

In my local area, which is rural, the blacks and the whites are split about 50-50, and the populations are mixed fairly evenly. Yes, there are clumps of each race, but those are small and interspersed among each other. There is also a lot of interbreeding within the lower class.

This means that radical ideas about racial separation — e.g. David Duke on the white side, Louis Farrakhan on the black — cannot be implemented in Central Virginia without massive, apocalyptic violence. People who have lived here for centuries and do not feel like moving will not easily be uprooted to satisfy the schemes of power-mad people in Chicago or New Orleans. If such a “solution” were attempted, the fabric of our society would be utterly destroyed.

Therefore I don’t view “white nationalism” as a solution to our problems, at least not in my little corner of the world. The situation I was born into will not be improved by such ideology; it will be made horribly worse. We will simply have to attempt to continue as we are, somehow, despite the fact that many blacks don’t like whites all that much, and vice versa.

But the mutual antipathy is not universal, not one hundred percent. My neighborhood is mostly black; I know a lot of black people. Some of them don’t like white people, and it shows. But most are normal, decent people, and some have been crucial friends to me.

There are many families here, black and white, that go back 100, 200, or 300 years. Some of those families have had relationships with one another since one of them owned the other as property. They know each other intimately. They are on good terms or bad terms, but are not strangers to one another.

This is a complex situation, just as conflicted relationships within families are complex. Race “problems” in such a milieu cannot easily be solved, and certainly not through ideological theories crafted by race-demagogues hundreds or thousands of miles away.

There are differences between blacks and whites. There is ill feeling. There are long-standing grievances. Yet these are my people; I was born among them. I will stand by them.

I don’t share the concern of the modern white nationalists with human biodiversity, but I have no quarrel with their work. They refer to themselves as “race realists”. My description above is also “race realism”. Those are the races. What I described is the real situation between them. Realistically, there is no “solution” to racial problems in my home country. We will simply have to get by, somehow, just as families do.

This is why I am not an Aryan nationalist.