Classic EssaysWilliam Pierce

Fashion and Democracy

by Dr. William L. Pierce

ONE OF THE MOST appalling images to smite the consciousness of our people in recent decades was flashed around the world to 100 million television screens this past May. Thousands of people, some White and some Black, crowded a plaza in front of City Hall in Pretoria as the South African flag was lowered and the flag of the African National Congress (ANC) was hoisted in its place. The onlookers sang the ANC anthem together, and when the flag-changing ceremony was complete they hugged each other and shouted their glee. White women embraced Black males and began dancing on the pavement.

The cameras of news teams present at the ceremony zoomed in on individual White faces in the crowd. Tears of joy streamed down the cheeks of several of them.

In televised interviews White South Africans expressed the hope that henceforth their country would be able to have “normal” relations with the rest of the world. There was no sign of resentment, of determination to fight back, or even of resignation — just a fawning plea for “normalcy,” for acceptance. Some of them, looking a bit embarrassed, apologized for having waited so long to turn their country over to the Blacks. Apartheid, they said, had been wrong. In the past they had gone along with it because it was the accepted thing, but now it was behind them, and they were glad of it.

Most of these people were not Jews or Communists or members of some flagellant Christian cult. They were ordinary White South Africans, Afrikaner as well as English. To be sure, not all South Africans behaved the way these did. Some vowed to fight. Many, less militant, still hoped to have a portion of the former South Africa set aside for them as a White Volkstaat and were ready to negotiate with the Blacks for it.

The majority of White South Africans were represented by those in front of Pretoria’s City Hall, however: by the weepers, the dancers, and the fawners. The majority had gone to the polls two years earlier and voted, in a Whites-only election, to accept Black rule.

Of course, the issue was not presented to the White electorate in such straightforward terms. In a democracy nothing is really straightforward; obfuscation and deviousness always are favored above frankness. Nevertheless, it was clear enough to anyone with eyes to see that voting to continue the process of “power sharing” could lead nowhere but to Black rule.

The majority of White South Africans voted to give up their country, the country which their forefathers had wrested from the wilderness 350 years earlier, had fought savages for, had given their lives for. They voted for Black rule with the examples all around them of just what Black rule meant in practice: in Rwanda, in Angola, in Mozambique, in the former Rhodesia — indeed, in the Black townships of South Africa itself, where “necklacing” was the standard method used by African National Congress militants to discipline their fellow Blacks, the method enthusiastically recommended by the ANC’s “first lady,” Winnie Mandela. They voted, in effect, to have ANC chief Nelson Mandela as their President-for-Life, a Black who had spent 27 years in prison for terrorism, including bombings and assassinations.

Does the behavior of South Africa’s Whites seem like a singular departure from rational behavior? Consider, then, the behavior of America’s Whites. Overwhelmed by a growing tidal wave of violent crime by non-Whites, they have just voted, in effect, to deny themselves access to the weapons with which they might defend themselves and their families. That is, their elected representatives in the Congress have just voted for this, which is pretty much the same thing. Their forefathers fought a war to secure for them the blessings of liberty — not just in the poetic sense, but in the very specific and prosaic terms of the Bill of Rights — and they are voting to give up those blood-hallowed rights one by one.

As in South Africa, not all of America’s Whites have voted for surrender, but enough have so that when combined with America’s non-Whites they are able to elect the sort of filth which has populated our Congress and our White House in recent decades.

Why do White people behave in this self-destructive way? A few of them, of course, really are flagellants: unfortunates with some sort of psycho-sexual kink that leads them to wallow in self-abasement, or guilt-stricken Christians who believe that Jesus will be more likely to love them if they suffer for him. At the National Alliance we receive letters from persons identifying themselves as White males (but otherwise anonymous) who berate us for wanting to preserve a race which has enslaved and exploited other races. We stole America from the Indians, they whine, and so we have no right to talk of it as “our country”; we brought the Blacks over here from Africa against their will, and so it is presumptuous of us to complain about their destructive effects on our schools, our cities, and our economy; there is nothing that minorities can do to us which is as bad as what we’ve already done to them, and so we deserve what’s happening to us now; et cetera.

This kind of kinkiness explains the behavior of only a relative handful, however. Nor is it correct to simply write off the majority of White voters as too stupid to understand the consequences of their choices. The intelligence of the average voter is certainly nothing to brag about, but many Whites who regularly vote for their own destruction are smart enough to manage small businesses, teach school, write for newspapers, operate complex machinery, design computer programs, or figure other people’s taxes.

It isn’t carelessness or indifference, either, for most of them. To be sure, a monumental shortsightedness and selfishness characterize some voters. For example, South African Whites are even more addicted to the idiocy of spectator sports than Americans are, and a number of them viewed the international ban on South African sports teams as a cogent reason for scrapping apartheid. And in America we have voters who will forgive the grossest criminality in a politician, up to and including racial treason, as long as he brings home the pork for his district.

No, the key to the self-destructiveness of White voters, in South Africa as in America, is not Freudian or Christian masochism, it is not stupidity, and it is not shortsighted selfishness; the key is the compelling need in most people, men as well as women (though not to the same degree), to be fashionable.

It has long been a truism that whatever appears on the editorial pages of a nation’s major newspapers in the morning (or, in this postliterate era, whatever is expressed by the most popular television talk-show hosts) becomes the opinion of most of the public by evening. Unfortunately, the depth to which this is so has not been understood widely enough. Fashionableness too often has been considered a superficial phenomenon, something which colors dinner-table conversation and which accounts for fads in clothing or recreation–bell-bottom trousers or frisbees, say–but which always can be overruled by reason. That is, no matter how fashionable bell-bottom trousers were, one always had a choice: one didn’t have to wear them if one didn’t want to.

The South Africans who voted for the dissolution of their country didn’t really have a choice, however; nor do the Americans who are voting to give up their freedoms. Doing the fashionable thing is more important to them than life or liberty.

Of course, they don’t see it in those terms. Americans will simply parrot what the controlled media have told them: “Having a firearm in your home doesn’t make you safer. It just increases your chances of getting shot. If you pull a gun on an intruder, it will just make him angry. Crime is out of control, and it’s largely due to the availability of firearms: especially those ominous-looking, military-style firearms with large magazines. The only way to be safe on the streets or in your home is to ban firearms.”

It matters not that these arguments are nonsensical. What matters is that voters choose to believe them, because they resolve the conflict between the urge to be fashionable and the desire to be safe. Faced with an explosion of violence and criminality by the non-White minorities, White voters are frightened. They want to feel secure again. In the face of such a threat, reasonable men would arm themselves and then demand that their government take whatever additional measures might be needed to suppress the criminal element.

For a substantial portion of the White population of the United States, however, taking up arms for self-defense is unfashionable. The “flower children” of the 1960s and 1970s have grown up now and are voting. Suppressing non-Whites, for any reason at all, is even more unfashionable. With fashions and taboos of this sort, it is easy for many White voters to let themselves be persuaded that suppressing firearms will give them the security they crave.

Readers who still favor stupidity over fashionableness as the explanation for the willingness of White Americans to give up their right to keep and bear arms should spend more time reading the published arguments of the anti-gunners: not the disingenuous arguments of the Schumers and Metzenbaums and Feinsteins, of course, nor of their Jewish kinsmen in the controlled media, nor of their kept Gentile collaborators, but the arguments of the men and women who really stand to lose by abandoning their rights and who think of themselves as honest people. Many of these White anti-gunners are obviously educated people. Their arguments are more or less grammatical. One senses that they are of at least average intelligence. Yet, there is a tortured quality to their reasoning, a careful avoidance of obvious conclusions, a painstaking circumnavigation of embarrassing facts. These are people whose thinking is fenced in by many constraints, people whose minds are not free because they dare not be. Their reason is not true reason: it does not seek the truth, but only fashionable answers, fashionable resolutions to conflicts.

In America we are close to our problems. We see all of the complexities and ambiguities of every issue. We hesitate to paint things in black or white, to make hard and final judgments. There are too many maybes and buts. We see the evidence, but we are reluctant to accept the conclusion that the majority of our fellow citizens are so susceptible to manipulation that the arbiters of fashion, the masters of the mass media of news and entertainment, can lead them, lemming-like, over the precipice of self-destruction.

If we look at the recent actions of our kinsmen in South Africa, however, distance gives us the advantage of being able to see the forest without being distracted by the trees. It is perfectly clear that they went to the polls and voted for their own destruction. They did it with proof all around them of the meaning of Black rule. They did it so that they could be fashionable.

My, how fashions do change! Or, more accurately, how fashions can be changed! Two decades ago the suggestion that White South Africans would voluntarily turn their country over to Black rule would have seemed utterly preposterous. What happened?

Well, two decades ago there was no television in South Africa. There was no television because the government forbade it, concerned that it would be a subversive influence on South African culture and morals. The government believed that the public, once its appetite was whetted, would demand a seven-days-a-week television broadcasting schedule, and that it was unlikely that South Africa’s fledgling entertainment industry could provide sufficient fare to meet that demand. They foresaw the poisonous products of Hollywood invading and corrupting their country, and they tried to prevent it.

They didn’t try hard enough, though. Part of the reason was that the opposition to television was built on the sand of fundamentalist Christian objections to the nudity and obscenity which characterize Hollywood’s productions rather than on the rock of racial consciousness. Television should have been opposed simply because it is Jewish, and therefore inherently and essentially anti-Aryan.

South Africans, however–at least, the Afrikaans-speaking majority–are much more under the thumb of their church than White peoples elsewhere, and the Calvinist doctrine of the Dutch Reformed Church still describes the Jews as “God’s People,” who must not be opposed.

Thus, with Jewish billionaire Harry Oppenheimer, by far the richest man in South Africa, pushing for television, the anti-TV Afrikaners fought with one hand tied behind them. In any case, television broadcasting came to South Africa in 1977, and the unsuspecting South Africans rushed to buy television receivers in record numbers. The transformation from a non-TV society to a TV society occurred almost overnight. It was like a stampede into the abattoir.

White South Africans began seeing themselves, night after night, portrayed on their television screens as hateful bigots, scorned by the whole world because of their policy of apartheid. Almost immediately they realized that they were terribly unfashionable, and the realization made them very uncomfortable. Guilt and self-doubt began to corrode their souls. As their internal enemies, financed in part by Oppenheimer, began dismantling apartheid, brick by brick, they found their will to resist paralyzed. It took a mere 17 years to reduce a proud, self-confident, racially conscious White nation to a nation of kaffir-huggers.

What are the lessons for us in this?

First, whoever controls the mass media of news and entertainment–especially the latter–controls public opinion. In a mass democracy, whoever controls public opinion controls governmental policy.

Second, the presence of mass media in a society is incompatible with mass democracy: that is, it is incompatible with the idea of mass democracy–the actual determination of public policy by all the people–if not with its forms.

In any modern, industrialized society there will be mass media; they are practically unavoidable, and any scheme by church or government to ban them is unlikely to be successful for long. Furthermore, someone will control the mass media: if not the government, then a church or other institution; or an oligarchic clique, as in the United States today.

This means that democracy is no longer feasible as a system of government. It is, of course, still feasible to maintain the pretense of democracy by adhering to its external forms–campaigns, candidates, elections, and the rest–but the true rulers will be the masters of the mass media, who will decide on the policies they want and on the candidates for public office who are acceptable to them and then will push the proper buttons in the mass psyche to steer public opinion in the desired direction.

One of the pushbuttons on which the media masters have long had their fingers is that which has given the concept of democracy itself a quasi-religious aura in the public mind. The mere suggestion that democracy is no longer a suitable form of government seems almost sacrilegious. A substantial portion of the American electorate still can be persuaded that it is proper to go to war against any nation which has a non-democratic form of government in order to “restore democracy” to that nation.

In earlier times–in ancient Greece, for example–the situation was different. For one thing, there were no mass media for manipulating the attitudes of the people, and public opinion was rooted in tradition and long-held consensus. For another thing, during the brief periods when democracy actually worked–that is, when it resulted in government which served the needs of the nation–it was a much more elite form of democracy than is the style today: the rabble did not participate, and the men who were empowered to vote were somewhat less likely to be swayed by fashions.

There is some recognition of the weaknesses of democracy even among its supporters. The ongoing debasement of the electorate, as it has become more and more inclusive in this century, has made some well-meaning democrats nervous. They see education as a safeguard against the abuse of the democratic process, however: well-informed voters, they believe, will vote wisely.

Of course, every patriot wants well-informed citizens in his nation, regardless of its form of government. It is folly, however, to believe that education, even if the educators were able to operate independently of the arbiters of fashion, can teach the masses to think for themselves. The urge to be fashionable is innate. It plays a more nearly controlling role in the lives of some than others, but it is a facet of human nature, and we cannot educate it away.

The patriot in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere in the White world must understand that there is one essential for national and racial survival: that the mass media be in the hands of fellow patriots, preferably under the control of a patriotic institution designed specifically for the purpose. Then the mass media can be used as instruments for progress instead of self-destruction; and the human urge to be fashionable, instead of being the lethal weakness that it is now, can become a strength leading to greater social stability and cooperation.

To permit the present situation to continue, with the mass media in the hands of an alien minority, is tantamount to racial suicide. If the Jews continue to control public opinion in America, White Americans very soon will follow White South Africans over the precipice.

Taking the media away from the Jews and their allies will not be easy, for they understand as well as we do what is at stake. It almost certainly will not be done without a full-fledged revolution and much attendant bloodshed and suffering. Nevertheless, it must be done; otherwise we lose the future, and everything becomes meaningless.

* * *

Source: National Vanguard magazine, Number 114

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Dr. Doom
Dr. Doom
25 March, 2017 10:41 pm

Oh you too have fallen for this scam. Its called false consensus. The illusion of choice. Fake ballots and fake staged events. Take a close look at these “representative populations”. You see Whites, but I see dregs. Make no mistake, its the White Trash that (((they))) like. The addicts, losers, fatties, uglies, perverts, drunkards, and assorted detritus. There are no normals in that pile of fake assorted trash. The normal Whites were cheated. Stuffed ballots, open threats, economic blackmail and of course the (((Legenpresse))) carefully editing comments by choosing the worst of the worst of the opposition, and then flattering and pushing the loser trash as the “good Whites”. There is a reason these parasites try so hard to buy and control the media. They cannot control reality, but they… Read more »