On Goals
by Dr. William L. Pierce (pictured)
IT IS WORTHWHILE, every so often, to review in our minds just where it is that we are headed and how we plan to get there. It may help to keep us from wandering off course — from forgetting, in the day-to-day bustle of events, what it’s all about.
Then, too, circumstances change, and if our work is to remain meaningful and to continue carrying us forward we must constantly re-evaluate our strategy and our tactics in the light of new conditions. Otherwise, it is all too easy to slip into the lazy habit of saying and doing the same things we have learned to say and do in the past, while failing to continually keep in mind how these things relate to both our short-term and our long-term goals.
Goals and Purpose
What are our goals? This is a tricky question, in that it has no unique answer. Short-term goals blend into mid-range goals, which become long-term goals, in a step-by-step progression, and they are all different.
Our purpose, our raison d’être, is to promote the security and welfare of Western man and his civilization. In a sense this is a dual purpose, one part biological and one part cultural, but they are closely interdependent.
Racial Survival
Biologically, our concern is to ensure the physical survival of our people by reducing or eliminating both external and internal threats to such survival.
The principal external threat is that of military aggression, and it exists because of the growing military capabilities of various non-Western peoples and the growing failure of will in the West.
The principal internal threat is miscegenation — an inevitable consequence of the multiracial policies now in effect in America, as well as in certain other Western nations.
Beyond these immediate threats, our biological concerns extend to everything which affects the physical health and the racial quality of our people: such things as contamination of our natural environment and dysgenic breeding patterns.
Race and Culture
In addition to preserving a biologically healthy and pure race — or, rather, intimately bound together with this — is our concern for the preservation and the advancement of Western culture.
Because a people’s culture is a reflection of their racial character, it is obvious that no culture can be maintained unless its biological basis has first been secured. But it is equally true that when a people’s culture succumbs to illness, then their racial constitution also loses its resistance to infection. The two things — racial health and cultural health — are inseparable in a multiracial world.
Culture binds together the members of a racially homogeneous community by providing them with a common heritage and a common viewpoint: a common set of values and a common understanding of the world. Today that heritage is being abandoned, those values perverted, that understanding clouded.
Stepping Stones to the Future
Our long-range goals are easiest to state, in a general way. They are the implementation of our purpose: the carrying out of all measures aimed at promoting the racial and cultural welfare of our people, destroying our enemies, and securing our future.
From this it is clear that our mid-range goal must be obtaining the means to reach our long-term goals. Our mid-range goal is power: political power, police power, military power, economic power — the power of the State.
Our short-term goals are stepping stones on the way to our mid-range goal: achieving new levels in recruiting, new limits in activism, new records in the quantity and effectiveness of our propaganda materials.
An Incorrect Strategy
This may seem obvious, but it is not: There are quite different ways of defining goals.
For example, there are people who believe that the proper way to proceed is to make a list of all the major changes they want to bring about in the world, assign priorities, and then begin working full bore to bring about their first priority, whether it be the repeal of the federal income tax or the resettlement of all Negroes in Africa.
The next goal will be the next item on their list, and so on — except, of course, that the whole program is certain to remain bogged down well short of item number one.
Total Approach Required
Nevertheless, this approach has a strong appeal for many, who are able to convince themselves that theirs is a very clever strategy: by concentrating all their energies on one problem at a time they think they have the best chance of accomplishing something.
What has not dawned on them is that all the problems they intend to solve, one by one, are simply different aspects of one large problem. It can no more be solved in a piecemeal fashion than a man infected with a deadly virus can be cured by first curing his right leg, then his left leg, then an arm, and so on.
The only way we can solve any of our problems — the only way we can bring about any of the changes we want — is by solving all of them.
First Things First
Thus we do not work directly at this time to reach ultimate goals: to regain control of our information media, to eliminate Zionist subversion, to prevent miscegenation.
Instead, we concentrate our energies on building our strength, on organizing, on recruiting, on disseminating our ideas, on breaking the chains whenever and wherever we can that bind our compatriots’ minds, and showing them a new way of looking at the world.
This very work of sowing ideas and recruiting means, of course, that we must constantly write about, talk about, and otherwise call attention to our ultimate goals. People do not join a revolutionary movement simply for the sake of helping it grow.
Striking a Response
This does not contradict what we said a few lines above. When we talk about mid-range and long-range goals such as smashing the System and building a new order based on racial idealism, we do it for the sake of attracting into our ranks persons in whom those things strike a responsive chord. That is, we always keep in mind that our immediate goals are all concerned with building our movement, and that until all these immediate goals have been reached we cannot realistically contemplate the actual achievement of longer-range goals.
Burn Anti-Western Films
That this distinction is not mere academic hair-splitting may be shown by a hypothetical example. Imagine that two groups each have as a goal the elimination of perverted and anti-Western motion pictures from America and that each group takes the direct approach of blowing up or burning down motion-picture houses which show such pictures.
If one of the groups regards the aforementioned goal as direct and immediate, while the other regards it as a long-range goal which can be achieved only as one part of a comprehensive program requiring a great deal of preparation beforehand, then the two groups will likely go about their activities very differently.
One Down — 10,000 to Go
When the one group dynamites its first theater, it can count one down and 10,000 to go. It will probably want to keep its identity secret, in order to minimize legal difficulties as it proceeds with its campaign.
The other group understands that the demolition of one theatre — or 100 theatres — can have symbolic significance only, at a time when the group does not have the strength to maintain its demolition operation to a successful conclusion — a conclusion which would inevitably require warring down the combined forces of the entire System.
Getting Credit
Since it recognizes the symbolic value of its activism, it must be willing to accept the responsibility for it — otherwise it is largely meaningless. Thus the demolition must be combined with parades, picketing, and propaganda, so that the public will not only be able to guess who did it, but understand why.
In the first case lighting a fuse simply means destroying — temporarily — one ten-thousandth of the System’s capacity to corrupt and brainwash Americans via motion pictures. In the second case it means creating a graphic and dynamic demonstration for the public; it means generating an issue and polarizing the community; it means awakening hope for a better future; it means winning over more brave and action-minded men and women to a movement working toward a permanent solution, not only to the motion-picture problem but also to the most fundamental causes of that problem.
Apathy, Brainwashing
So we let the people know about our long-term goals while we work toward our short-range goals. But that is not enough.
What does it mean to the average citizen if we tell him our purpose is to promote the security and welfare of Western man? It has probably never even occurred to him that those things need promoting.
Suppose we tell him one of our goals is to end Zionist control of America‘s foreign policy? The chances are he doesn’t even know what a Zionist is, or believes it is someone being persecuted by the Soviet government for wanting to go to Israel.
And if we say that we want to drive the alien brainwashers out of our mass media and our schools; the culture distorters out of our churches, our concert halls, and our art galleries; the traitors out of our government — he will think we are crazy.
Gut Issues
He has not thought about these things, because they have never been mentioned on his TV or in his daily newspaper, and he does not understand them. Worse, even if we could hold his attention long enough to explain everything to him, in most cases it would do little good.
Men act on the things they feel in their bellies far more readily than on ideas in their heads. Hate and hunger and fear will move them — but the need to preserve the race? That is too abstract, not immediate enough for most of them. It is too easy a thing to rationalize away.
A revolutionary mass movement is worthless without its idealism, its long-range program, its spiritual goals — but it also needs immediate, gut issues.
Not All Fat and Happy
The System politicians pre-empt as many gut issues as they can: crime in the streets, school busing, inflation. They use these issues to manipulate the electorate by pretending to have solutions.
But there are other gut issues which, by their very nature, the System cannot pre-empt. And there are plenty of citizens who are not just fat and happy slobs who think only about their beer, their cars, their TVs, and their sex lives. There are millions of moderately worried, moderately responsible, moderately idealistic young people who can be made to respond to gut issues of the sort the System prefers not to mention.
Ramsey Clark and Portnoy
These are the people to whom we primarily direct our message: people who have the vague, uneasy feeling that America is in serious trouble — that there must be something fundamentally wrong with a society in which Ramsey Clark can be the Attorney General and in which a major box-office attraction (Portnoy’s Complaint) can be based on a Jew’s compulsive masturbation, photographed in living color.
Few will have thought it out or analyzed their feeling, and one of the principal tasks of our propaganda is to formulate for them, in clear and simple terms, the specific criticisms for which they are still groping.
Organizing Targets
At the same time our organizing effort must continually direct itself toward specific, immediate goals suitable for recruiting and mobilizing these people. It must be kept in mind, however, that these organizing goals are in a different class than our step-by-step objectives mentioned earlier. Their purpose is to involve potential recruits in activism with a gut appeal, activism that does not require the capacity for organic thinking or an understanding of our ultimate goals.
And that is the only purpose of such goals, or, to use a different term, organizing targets; i.e., they are means rather than ends. Nevertheless, they are vital, and they must be chosen wisely, so that those enlisted into their service can eventually come to understand fully our other goals.
An excellent example of an organizing target is the Western Guard’s current campaign against the large-scale immigration of Asians into Canada. This is a target easily understood by a substantial portion of White Canadians, who thoroughly resent the Trudeau regime’s plan to import thousands of the colored aliens now leaving Uganda.
Even Canadians whose racial feeling does not go much beyond a concern for job security or neighborhood safety and who would regard with indifference an idealistic call to fight for our long-term goals are responding to the Western Guard’s “White Canada” appeal in the face of the present threat. Once involved, they can gradually be taught a new outlook and come to fully understand the meaning of Western solidarity.
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From Attack! No. 15, 1972 transcribed by Anthony Collins and edited by Vanessa Neubauer, from the book The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard, edited by Kevin Alfred Strom