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The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds

...by Dr. Robert S. Griffin

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23 ____________

RACISM AND HATE

Pierce is dismissed by his opponents— and most others as well— as a racist and a hater. He dealt with the topics of racism and hate and the characterizations of him as a racist and hater in several radio programs and Free Speech articles. I will attempt to capture the essence of what he said on those occasions.

 

First, Pierce on racism. 1 Pierce believes that over the past forty or fifty years white people have been conditioned to feel guilty about their natural inclinations around race. He says the media in particular but also the schools, politicians, and mainstream churches have waged an all-out campaign to get whites to deny their natural— and Pierce contends, healthy— impulses. And what are these “natural” racial impulses or inclinations? In order to get at that, Pierce says, we must examine the way white people thought and behaved before the “conditioning program” began.

Pierce contends that in times past most whites accepted the fact that people of a particular race preferred to live and work and play with others like themselves. White people, he says, were curious about other races. They would study the lore of the Indians, for example. And indeed, whites found much to admire in other races and cultures— Chinese art for example. But still, according to Pierce, whites retained a sense of separateness and exclusiveness and pride in their own European heritage, in their own racial characteristics. They didn't feel it necessary to apologize for teaching the history of their own race to their children, that is to say, European history. They didn't feel the need to balance things out by giving equal treatment to other races and cultures. They left Japanese and Tibetan history to the scholars in those fields. And they certainly didn't feel a conciliatory obligation to invent a ‘false' black history to elevate the self-esteem of blacks or to persuade young whites that blacks were their cultural equals.

Did whites feel their race was superior to other races? In general, yes, they did, says Pierce, which is not to say that they were blind to the fact that other races and cultures could do some things very well, and in cases were better than they were at some things. But whites valued what they were good at, and so by the standards they set up they looked very good to themselves. They were confident in their abilities and accomplishments as thinkers and problem solvers and civilization builders, says Pierce. They liked their literature and art best. They valued their way of life— their concept of virtue and morality and their approach to family and work and so on. Basically, they believed they had a superior culture and superior race. In that sense they were what today would be called white supremacists. But, Pierce says, they were certainly not alone in feeling that way; it is natural for a people to think their ways are the best, that they are the best. The Chinese, for instance, have historically believed that they are superior to the ‘foreign devils,' notes Pierce. That the Chinese thought that way didn't bother whites, Pierce says. It didn't threaten whites' sense of their worth, their sense of their place in the world.

Pierce argues that an outgrowth of people's natural feelings of racial identification and favoritism is to segregate themselves from other people, to live among their own in the ways they prefer. That is their normal impulse, says Pierce. That way of living has been typical throughout the history of humankind. It may seem like a good idea for people to live mixed up with other peoples, Pierce acknowledges, but it doesn't work as well as we have been told that it does, and it isn't inherently a superior or a more elevated way to live. And in any case, says Pierce, living amid so- called diversity is not the only legitimate (that is, morally acceptable) way to live, and hardly an urgent moral imperative. It is only in recent years that whites have been pressured to think in those terms.

World War II brought big changes in this pattern of thought and conduct, says Pierce. (This reference to the impact of the Second World War is another example of Pierce's view of this period in history as a watershed event in human history.) Pierce says those who wanted Germany destroyed painted it as a war for democracy and equality. As it went, the Germans believed in a master race while we believed in the equality of the races. This rationale, argues Pierce, brought increased stress on an equality theme in American life in contrast to an emphasis on the qualitative differences among individuals and groups. The idea of the equality of whites and blacks went along with that theme. From the assumption that blacks were equal to whites it followed that if blacks were observed to accomplish less or conduct themselves less admirably, something external to them must be causing it. And that cause was identified— white oppression. Whites must have made blacks the way they were.

Pierce says that while white villainy seemed to make sense given the— as far as he is concerned— false notion of racial equality, it simply didn't square with the facts. The vast majority of whites, contends Pierce, didn't concern themselves with blacks and wasted no time trying to suppress them. The vast majority of whites didn't care what blacks did. They simply wanted to go their way and let blacks go theirs. But the facts of the matter aren't what is important here, maintains Pierce. What is important is to understand that World War II served to heighten the belief that if blacks had any problems at all, they could be laid at the feet of whites.

Pierce views the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s as another important turning point in the development of the “whites-as-bad-guys” perception that has taken hold. During those years, says Pierce, the media showed us images of inoffensive blacks marching and protesting amid what looked to be white hooligans who were screaming at them, assaulting them, and in some instances killing them. After scores of television clips, news stories, and commentaries which painted this same picture, resistance to what the civil rights activists wanted became equated in most people's minds with KKK types and beefy Southern sheriffs and their German shepherds and waterhoses. It is understandable, says Pierce, how most white people came to sympathize strongly with the dignified demonstrators and their cause and to be repulsed by their boorish and brutal white attackers and what we were told they represented.

Pierce says that indeed there were white working-class people who saw their way of life threatened and acted in an undignified and intemperate and violent way. The media were quick to record it and place it in a context— in a story line— that appealed to what Pierce calls the “innate white sense of propriety and fairness.” The media then transmitted these carefully selected scenes of white resistance to racial integration along with particular interpretations of what was happening over and over and over again. The white people who saw on their television screens and read about what their own people were doing were embarrassed by it and felt guilty over it. Pierce says that the media made the whole idea of resistance to racial integration shame- and guilt-inducing to most white people.

Pierce says the media paired up names, labels, for what whites were seeing and hearing and reading and feeling during the civil rights revolution: racism, and racist. The media associated racism with white resistance to the civil rights organizations. Again and again and again they paired up white resistance to a single idea/explanation— racism. Again and again, the media paired the image of the roughneck white opponent of civil rights being portrayed on the screen or in print with a label/identity of racist.

After a time, Pierce says, the words themselves—“racism,” “racist”— came to evoke pangs of revulsion and guilt on their own, just as the sound of a dinner bell resulted in Pavlov's dogs salivating. The media had created a conditioned response to the word racism. Now, claims Pierce, all anybody has to do to get whites to turn pale, become apologetic, and give in is call them racist. People don't have to argue the facts with whites, he says; all they have to do is push the right emotional button. If they ring the "racist bell," whites— even the most rugged and proudest of whites— will bow their heads and put their tails between their legs and let people have their way with them.

Pierce says the media could have worked the conditioning the opposite way if they had wanted to by associating different things with white resistance to the civil rights movement. For instance, they could have presented interviews with middle class whites— professional people, academics, artists and writers, philosophers— who believed in white racial and cultural integrity and who would have pointed out the negative impact on countries like Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Portugal when the races were mixed together. The media could have shown what happened to white schools and neighborhoods after an infusion of blacks, the decay and disorder and crime. They could have interviewed white women raped by blacks. They could have presented case studies of whites girls who mated with black boys they met in school and shown us their mixed-race children and let us see how we really felt about that. But of course they didn't do that. That wasn't consistent with the program.

During this time and since, according to Pierce, the schools joined the campaign of re-shaping white attitudes. The curriculum kept students from understanding the rationale for segregation. Instead, segregation was linked to mindless hatred and oppression. History was de-Europeanized and infused with the real and imaginary accomplishments of non-whites. The churches also got into the act of decrying racism and promoting a multiracial society. And for their part, white politicians pandered to minority interests and lectured to their own people about how they must share their lives with minorities and to give them anything they wanted. All three of these segments of the society— the schools, churches, and politicians— offers Pierce, promoted the idea that anyone opposed to an integrated society was evil and irrational, that is to say, a racist. The only thing that operated against this wave of cultural re-shaping of whites, says Pierce, is the actual physical presence of blacks so that people could experience for themselves the glaring contradictions between the theory of racial equality and the reality of racial differences.

Pierce notes that race has become such a hot-button issue that it is very difficult to discuss it rationally at the present time. He says talking about race today must be how it was for Presbyterians to talk about sex a century ago. He says he gets letters and messages from white people who say he ought to be killed for advocating separation of the races and opposing miscegenation. As difficult as it is to do, whites nevertheless must think and talk about race rationally and honestly, Pierce asserts. They must not be embarrassed about it and feel guilty about it. They must be willing to entertain the idea that wanting to live and work among their own people is a natural, healthy feeling they were born with. Nature gave whites that impulse so that they could evolve as a race. Living among their own allows them to develop special characteristics and abilities that set them apart from every other race. Living with their own is essential to their survival as a race. What is irrational and destructive is the very thing that is being pushed upon them— a multiracial, culturally conglomerate society and way of life. It is going to take determination for whites to open up their eyes and their minds to reality, and more courage than they have shown in the past to begin to report to the world what they truly believe. But that is what whites must do.

Pierce says that whites are being controlled by their fear of being smeared as racists if they disagree with the orthodoxy about race in this country. In a Free Speech article called "The Importance of Courage," Pierce talks about how he has dealt with the challenge of overcoming his own timidity when confronting the possibility of being called a racist.

I'm sorry to say that I've seen that same sort of timidity in myself. When interviewers have asked me whether or not I am a racist, I have responded by asking, “Well, what do you mean by the word ‘racist'?” I've tried to wriggle out of giving a direct answer to the question...

I have resolved not to try to wriggle away from saying exactly what I believe when someone asks me whether or not I am a racist [because] it's pretty clear what the interviewers have in mind when they ask me whether or not I am a racist. These days anyone is a racist who refuses to deny the abundantly clear evidence that there are inherited differences in behavior, intelligence, and attitudes....A racist is any White person who prefers to live among other Whites instead of among non-Whites and prefers to send his children to White schools. A racist is any White person who feels a sense of identity with, a sense of belonging to, his own tribe, his own people, his own race, and who shows an interest in his race's history, heroes, culture, and folkways... A White racist is a person who finds the members of his own race more attractive physically than members of other races and who is instinctively repulsed by the idea of racial intermarriage or by the sight of a White person intimately involved with a non- White... A racist is a White person who is disgusted with the multiracial cesspool that America is becoming....

Yes, I am a racist. 2

Pierce applies basically the same analysis to the hater label as he did to the racist characterization— that it is a product of conditioning, linking a label charged with a negative emotion to people or organizations in order to discredit them.

They [the media] always use the word “hate” in writing about me or the National Alliance.... What they are deliberately trying to do is create an association in the mind of the average reader or television viewer between any mention of me or my organization and the emotion of hatred.... It is an irrational, Pavlovian sort of thing, because the National Alliance is not a hate group but instead a group dedicated to the welfare and progress of our people. But clearly there are folks out there who feel threatened by such effort: folks who regard any activity aimed at building a sense of racial solidarity and racial consciousness among Europeans as a threat to themselves.... They don't come right out and say they are opposed to White people regaining an understanding of our roots and an appreciation for our own unique qualities in a rapidly darkening world and a sense of responsibility for the future of our people.... They attempt to use psychological trickery to keep our people confused and disorganized. They don't want us thinking clearly about what is in our own interest and what is not. They deliberately attempt to incite hatred against me and others who are concerned about the future of our people.... 3

Pierce claims as a matter of fact, and as ironic as it may seem, that he is the target of a hate campaign. He says that those who oppose him— and here I believe he is primarily talking about the mass media generally, and the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, and the Southern Poverty Law Center in particular— use the pretense of “combating hate” in order to create hate against him. He contends that they call him a hater to make him appear to be such an irrational and dangerous individual that it is all right for decent people to hate him for it. He says that he gets a significant amount of what he would call hate mail.

In one of his Free Speech articles, Pierce responded to the charge that he is a hater:

Whenever I look at what has happened to our cities and our schools during the past 30 or 40 years, I cannot suppress my feeling of hostility toward the Blacks, mestizos, and Asians who have made so much of our country an enemy-occupied wasteland. I feel a surge of anger every time I see a non-White face on television or in an advertisement. Thirty or forty years ago, before all the new civil rights laws gave them a privileged status and when there were 25 or 30 million fewer of them in the country, I didn't feel this hostility. I figured that we could each stay in our own communities and we wouldn't get in each other's way. But now I want them out of our country, out of our living space. But even so, my hostility toward these non-Whites who are overrunning my world is not the nasty sort of hatred, embellished with obscenity that I see expressed in the hate letters I receive....

My feeling toward the Jewish media bosses— and all the clever little Jewish propagandists who write news stories about so-called “hate groups” in an attempt to make ordinary people hate me— is much closer to real hatred. Over the years they have done enormous damage to our people with their poisonous propaganda, and they aspire to do even more....

But I reserve my most heartfelt hatred for the collaborators among my own people...who consciously and deliberately betray their own people, lie to their own people, in order to gain advantage for themselves— the politicians, generals, public officials, clergymen, professors, writers, businessmen, and publicists.... There is no fire in hell hot enough to punish these traitors, and there will be no place for them to hide when the day of retribution comes....

Yes, I hate traitors, I hate liars and deceivers, and I cannot say that I feel at all apologetic about the fact that I hate them. Hate may be an unpleasant sort of emotion, but it can serve a good purpose, and that is why Mother Nature gave us the capability to hate. It is one of the faculties which protects us from traitors and deceivers by ensuring that we will weed them from our midst when we catch them, instead of forgiving them and giving them a chance to betray us again.

Nevertheless I reject the label “hater,” with which the real hatemongers have tried to brand me. I spend very little of my time hating and a great deal of my time spreading understanding with the hope that it will benefit my people. 4

Pierce calls the current crusade against hate an attempt to shut up dissenters and to criminalize political thought.

They invented the terms “hate crime” and “hate speech” only a little over a decade ago— unless one wants to give the credit to George Orwell, who popularized the essentially identical concept of “thought crime” in 1948, with his futuristic novel 1984.... The idea of a hate crime is a crime defined by what the offender was thinking when he committed an act rather than the act itself.... Once they forced the country to accept the idea of thought crimes, they found it much easier to have actual legislation passed which set penalties for various acts depending on what the offender was assumed to have been thinking at the time. And in order to establish what the offender was thinking, the government could examine his private correspondence. They could examine the ideological content of any books or magazines found in his residence. They could explore his religious, social, and political associations. All of these things could be used as evidence against him in court.

It's hard to see how new laws against vandalism or beating up homosexuals can accomplish much, since vandalism and assault already are illegal and have been for a long time. It doesn't really help their campaign much to elevate these offenses from the realm of ordinary crimes to the realm of political crimes— and you know that is what all of these so-called “hate crimes” are: they are political crimes. 5

What Pierce thinks the campaign against hate crimes is really about is to get the public in a mindset such that they will go along with hate- speech laws that would deny him and others like him the right to express their social and political views. He points to laws against hate speech in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland as the kind of thing that his adversaries want to enact in this country. He says their aim is to silence people like him who are critical of the social and racial policies the government is adopting. If these kinds of laws were passed in this country, Pierce believes his radio program, Free Speech, and his web site would be shut down. In late 1999 I was with Pierce in Munich, Germany, where he had traveled to give a speech at a rally of the National Democratic Party (NPD). As I listened to his speech, I was taken by Pierce's lack of any explicit reference to Jews. Instead, he spoke of “the enemies of our people” and the like. After his speech, I asked him why the euphemisms. He replied that he felt he didn't dare directly refer to Jews in a negative way lest he run up against Germany 's hate speech laws.

Pierce believes that all the hate-crime talk and the examples that are cited— always the crimes are whites against minorities, never the other way around— and the cries for tolerance are a "white guilt" campaign designed to intimidate and soften up the "average Joe," as he calls the typical white person. In a radio program called "Odysseus' Way,” Pierce refers to a magazine editorial that he has kept in his files since 1955 entitled "Should Hate Be Outlawed?". (How many of us keep editorials on file for forty-five years?) Pierce said the editorial is by an "unusually bold Gentile writer" and is as applicable today as it was when it was written nearly half a century ago. Pierce offered an excerpt to his listeners:

On billboards, on bus and subway posters, in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television broadcasts, Americans are being assured and reassured, both subtly and boldly, that "Bigotry is fascism... Only Brotherhood can save our nation... We must be tolerant of all!" The long-range effects of this [anti-fascist propaganda] campaign are even now evident. It is producing the "spineless citizen": the man who has no cultural sensibilities; who is incapable of indignation; whose sole mental activity is merely an extension of what he reads in the newspaper or sees on the television screen; who faces moral disaster in his neighborhood, political disaster in his country, and an impending world catastrophe with a blank and smiling countenance. He has only understanding for the enemies of his country. He has nothing but kind sentiments for those who would destroy his home and family. He has an earnest sympathy for anyone who would obliterate his faith. He is universally tolerant. He is totally unprejudiced. If he has any principles, he keeps them well concealed, lest in advertising them he should seem to indicate that contrary principles might be inferior. He is, to the extent of his abilities, exactly like the next citizen, who, he trusts, is trying to be exactly like him: a faceless, characterless putty-man. 6

Pierce says the "anti-fascist" and "tolerance" campaign has been carried on unabatedly since the time of this editorial and has been very successful. The degree to which Americans live a spineless and principle-less existence out of fear that they will be considered haters has reached what Pierce calls a "terminal state." 7 The average white person has been remodeled into a deferring, passive, tolerant-of-whatever-he-is-told-to-tolerate... putty-man.

 

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