My Political Education

by Kevin Alfred Strom (pictured)

I WAS BORN on a Summer morning in 1956, in Anchorage, Territory of Alaska. My parents had moved to Alaska some five years earlier, shortly after they were married, since that was where my father, an Air Force Master Sergeant, was assigned. I was my parent’s first child.

Both my father and mother were of Norwegian descent, hard-working farm kids from Minnesota born during the Depression. They were just three generations removed from their immigrant ancestors. My father’s father, Alfred Strom, in the early part of this century, had cleared his homestead of several hundred acres himself, and built a very substantial two-story house, large barn, and numerous outbuildings with his own two hands. They still stand and are still in use by the family today.

In my mother’s family, Norwegian was the only language spoken in the home for many years. My mother only began to speak English when she started attending school at the age of six.

Growing up in Alaska, I came to love its wild beauty, its endless twilights, and its titanic scale. I developed an appreciation for wild animals which expresses itself today in my abhorrence for any mistreatment or unnecessary killing of my fellow Earth creatures.

My family maintained close ties with their kin in northern Minnesota. Some of my happiest memories were of our months-long visits to my grandparent’s farm, where the 1880s farm house stood in a commanding position on one of the few hills in that flat land of big skies. It was also a great adventure to travel by car from Alaska to Minnesota in those days, across the Yukon and western Canada on thousands of miles of curving gravel roads, including the Alcan Highway.

My father eventually left the Air Force and took a position with the United States Department of the Interior. After several years, he was promoted to a job in Washington, D.C. We moved to Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of D.C.

I became interested in electronics at an early age, spurred by an exposure to shortwave radio at the age of 11. I became an amateur radio operator at the age of 16. This interest eventually led to a career as a broadcast engineer, which I still pursue in addition to my patriotic work.

Patriotic Feelings

Even as a very young child, I can remember having strong positive feelings about America — both the grand and majestic land itself, and its optimistic, intelligent, deeply feeling, creative, and truly beautiful people. I might not have known how to put it into words at the time, but I loved my country and I loved my race. I was a born patriot.

The America I grew up in was the Old America, White America. Prior to the mid-1960s, when the social and racial and cultural fabric of America began to unravel, America was a very different place than it is today. With a few exceptions, the men were strong, sturdy, honorable and able. The women were feminine, nurturing, and beautiful. Everyone seemed to know who they were and where they were going. Identity crises were almost unknown. Everyone seemed to share decent values. There was a beautiful sense of optimism and almost innocence in the air. People trusted each other. They left their doors unlocked. They helped each other. There was a real sense of community.

I loved the Old America. I loved its art and its architecture. I loved its celebrations and its piety. I loved its civilized codes of dress and conduct. Even today, in the closing years of the twentieth century, you can still get a feeling of what the Old America was like in some small towns where the old buildings still stand, where the streets are still kept clean by the increasingly elderly White inhabitants, where the minority invasion has not yet made its presence known. Imperfect the Old America may have been, but it was, comparatively speaking, a wonderful place to grow up. I truly felt it to be my country, a place where I belonged.

Looking back on the 1950s and early 60s now, I can see that the people of that time were too carefree and innocent. They were foolish. They let the Old America slip out of their hands. They allowed alien mind-molders and subversives to take it away from them. They didn’t listen when patriots tried to warn them of the conspiracy against their freedom and their very race itself. They failed to understand that “Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty.” But that’s getting ahead of my story.

Washington and Social Turmoil

It was with eager anticipation and high hopes that I arrived in Washington, D.C. in November 1963. At first I loved the city. Crossing the Potomac River, I was filled with feelings of awe, wonder, and reverence as I looked upon the great gilt statues of Winged Victory, the great Classical-style monuments to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and the majestic Capitol and Supreme Court buildings, among many others. Here, I thought, are fitting monuments to America, the country I love! Here, I thought, is graven in stone the greatness and the unchangeable principles of my beloved nation! Here, surely, must work the great men, the leaders who will apply those principles and ensure that our nation, our people, and our freedom shall never perish from the Earth!

I was to be greatly disappointed.

By the late 1960s, America was being literally ripped apart by two interrelated battles: the so-called “civil rights” revolution and the Vietnam War.

I well remember the marches, the assassinations, and the riots. I particularly remember the so-called “Moratorium” marches on Washington, which the largely Jewish New Left leaders had organized around 1969 to 1970. I didn’t attend them, though many of my schoolmates did. Many of those who didn’t attend wore black armbands to school to show their solidarity with the marchers. At the time, like many American patriots, I believed that the war in Vietnam was a righteous war against Communism. I made my own red, white, and blue armband to wear to school to show my defiance to the New Leftists and the others who were, in my view, pro-Communist and anti-American. What really disgusted me was the fact that so many of my fellow students supported the New Left and wore the black armbands not because of any reasoned opposition to the war or political ideas, but merely because it was the fashionable, “in” thing to do.

Like millions of Americans, I watched these so-called “anti-war” marches on television. I was revolted by the spectacle of half-naked young people of my generation carrying Communist flags and publicly using drugs, declaring that the country that gave them birth was evil. If their opposition to the war had been based on the fact that it was a waste of young American’s lives (which I now realize it was) or on the fact that it was a sham which wasted our country’s resources and demoralized us while a corrupt, criminal, and pro-Communist establishment made a pretense of “fighting Communism” (which I now realize it was), then perhaps I would have listened with interest to the protesters. But these protesters, who flouted all standards of civilization and patriotism, were openly declaring that their opposition to the war was based on the fact that a few darling Asiatic Communists were being killed. They were carrying the red flags of Communism in the streets of our nation’s capital. They were chanting “Ho – Ho – Ho – Chi – Minh, Ho Chi Minh is going to win!” — along with various obscenities.

And I noticed, with growing amazement, that the major newspapers and television commentators, whom I, along with most other Americans, had regarded with respect as icons of the American establishment, were siding with the Communist swine who had openly declared their hatred for — and intention to destroy — America. It was at this point that I first began to sense that something was profoundly wrong with this country. I began to see that the problem was far deeper than just a few obvious Communist revolutionaries in the street. I began to understand that the Establishment itself, the institutions of money and power in America, were themselves aligned with the subversive forces that were destroying us.

I began to see that decent Americans were being squeezed from both above and below; from below came the Black and Communist rioters in the street and on the campus — and from above came the news media, mainline churches, Liberal think-tanks, foundations, and other powerful institutions promoting a “social change” agenda. From both above and below came the push to change America from an outpost of European civilization and the traditional values that that implies, to a multiracial province of a one-world “utopia” ruled by all-wise and all-powerful “social planners.”

My awakening was reinforced when, not much later, our heretofore rather conservative Lutheran church began praising the virtues of Black Communist “freedom fighters” in Rhodesia, singing “We Shall Overcome” after Sunday School in solidarity with “Martin Luther” King’s “civil rights” movement, and condemning those terrible right-wing extremists who dared to criticize King, Communists, or the United Nations. When the parents weren’t around, the assistant pastor even told the high-school Sunday school class that “If Jesus came back to Earth today, he would be called a Communist.”

I knew something was wrong. I began to look for answers.

A Very Special Teacher

I must give credit for part of my awakening to a courageous and patriotic history teacher at my junior high school. He encouraged his students to look beyond the clichés and the headlines for the real forces at work behind the scenes. Though he never preached in class, he did present patriotic pro-American ideas as one point of view to be considered in the ongoing political and social revolution that was taking place. I inwardly resonated with and gravitated toward those ideas. As an antidote to the leftist bias of most of the other teachers, my history teacher brought into his classroom a number of books, newspapers, and magazines with a pro-American, Rightist, or pro-White point of view, for his students to read after they had completed their assignments or to borrow and read at their leisure. How many other 12- and 13-year-olds were reading The American Mercury, American Opinion, Western Destiny, Richard Cotten’s Conservative Viewpoint, or H. L. Hunt’s Lifeline? My history classes were a welcome island of intellectual freedom and patriotism and sanity; a refuge from the anti-White, anti-Western, and anti-American influences that were almost everywhere else at the school.

Inspired by my courageous teacher, I began to seek out the truth on my own.

The Birch Business

Eventually this quest for truth led me to a group known as the John Birch Society. The Society was attractive to me for many reasons. It was forthrightly and unashamedly pro-American and anti-Communist. It claimed leadership in the field of patriotic endeavor, with some justification. It had a long and, I thought, honorable history of exposing and fighting internal subversion, which, in America, has always been a much greater threat than external conquest. It was not saddled with a lot of irrelevant religious baggage, as were far too many patriotic groups. It exposed those high on the ladder of the American establishment who were working to destroy this country, whom the Society called “insiders.”

Though the Society had the grandest of intentions, and though it did do a limited amount of education and awakening of the public, it really didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I later discovered that this was because members of the group were forbidden to discuss a certain topic, a topic that is crucial for a full understanding of our nation’s dilemma. This topic was race. Ultimately, I came to realize that the Society was a dead end, a cul-de-sac where patriots expended their precious time, money, and energy going in circles while America’s real enemies smiled from a distance, secure in their safety because of the Society’s self-imposed censorship.

While a member of the John Birch Society, I continued to maintain friendly contact with patriots in other groups. One day in 1981, while I was visiting with a lady who led a weekly patriotic forum in Arlington, Virginia, I noticed a newspaper on her coffee table with the provocative headline “Equality – Man’s Most Dangerous Myth.” The newspaper was edited by Dr. William Pierce, a man I was to meet and with whom I began working just a few months later.

Racial Awakening

Though I had long felt that the “civil rights” agitation was destructive and served the purposes of America’s enemies; and though I had instinctively chosen to associate mainly with members of my own race; and though the art, architecture, and music which I loved were all the creation of White Western Civilization; and though I had sympathized with White Rhodesians and South Africans as they tried to protect their world from a Marxist-led savage onslaught; the truth is that before 1981 I had never thought really seriously about race. If you had come up to me with the idea of the primacy of race in all things I would have dismissed it. I, like so many right-wingers today, was enamored of the theory that gives primacy to ideas, to what a person or a society believes. What patriots were fighting for, I thought, were the ideas of freedom and liberty and order that undergirded America and the Western world. Although in a limited sense I was right, what Dr. Pierce forced me to see was that what a person or group believes is not nearly so important as what they actually are. For what one believes is mutable, and often changes throughout one’s lifetime. But what a person actually is, all of his potential for knowledge or ignorance, understanding or obtuseness, kindness or cruelty, altruism or selfishness, achievement or failure — all of these things are graven into his body and soul by the immutable and unchangeable patterns of his genetic inheritance.

Dr. Pierce expanded the horizons of my understanding from a narrow political-ideological point of view to an all-encompassing biological view of the world and all life in the world.

I learned that America, and indeed Western civilization itself in all its aspects, was a result of the genetic inheritance of its creators, the European race. So also was Oriental civilization the product of the tendencies and potentials inherent in the Asian race, and so on. This was not a doctrine of “hate,” as its detractors had painted it. It was a doctrine of respect for Life and Nature’s laws. I felt as though a cloudy film had been peeled from my eyes and I could for the first time see my surroundings with crystal clarity. The racial world-view puts patriotism in its proper place in the natural order of things. I saw that patriotism is not a mysterious concept to either be accepted without question or jeered at by sophisticates who see its lack of logical foundation — patriotism is simply loyalty to one’s kind, one’s tribe, one’s race. And those who created Communism and who are, under a thousand guises, subverting America, were exposed for the vicious parasites they always were, whose loyalties have never been with America or with the West — and never can be, because of what they are.

The biological world-view of Dr. Pierce expanded my horizons in other ways as well. I now thought not just in terms of years or decades, or just in terms of solving temporary political or social problems, but instead in terms of millennia, and in terms of the gradual development of my people from their earliest origins to their ultimate destiny.

This is the way in which Americans must begin to think if they are to remain a viable nation, if they are to have descendants who will be Americans in anything else but name. If we are to survive, we must not only have a burning desire that our descendants will carry on in the land our ancestors conquered and built; but we must also have an unshakable conviction of who we are. This is the contribution that the racial point of view makes to the patriotic struggle. Without a sure sense of our own identity, all else is for naught.

If the enemies of America and the West manage to destroy all of our cities — if they raze them to the ground and with them destroy all our libraries, all the knowledge that prior generations of our race accumulated over thousands of years; if they destroy every work of art and science that has ever been created — it could all be built again, even greater than before. There could be another Athens, another Parthenon. There could be another Caesar, another Shakespeare, another Poe, another Darwin, another Edison, another Shockley. Our entire civilization could be built again from scratch, and our outreached hands could still grasp the stars, as long as the germ of our civilization — the gene pool of our race — remains intact. But if the evil or the thoughtlessness of a single generation corrupts that gene pool through racial mixing, or attenuates it through childlessness, what is lost can never be regained.

If such evils persist much longer than a generation, the race will cease to be what it once was, and we and our kind will no longer walk the face of this planet. These are the truths that William Pierce and my other mentors taught me. They are hard truths. Perhaps I was, in some sense, already prepared for them. I hope that I am preparing the way for a generation who will carry the Truth, and our uniquely beautiful and noble race, to victory.

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Source: American Dissident Voices program of June 19, 1993