Dr. Pierce on the Meaning and Importance of Loyalty
by Dr. William L. Pierce (pictured)
The Meaning of Loyalty
AN OFTEN MADE comment by students of human behavior is that soldiers in combat do not fight for their general or their country or their god or any other impersonal entity; they fight for each other, for those with whom they are in immediate, daily contact. This comment certainly is correct for most, though not all, soldiers. Their mental horizon, normally very limited, becomes even smaller in the face of death. All abstract principles fall away, and only the most primitive instincts remain. When fear of imminent death looms large, all impersonal loyalties lose their meaning, and the individual is controlled only by his bond to his immediate fellows in the same situation. He may risk his life to protect one of his fellows, but not to comply with an order from headquarters. He would rather take a bullet in the gut than be seen as a coward or a shirker by those immediately around him, but he doesn’t really care what headquarters thinks.
All successful armies are organized with this facet of human nature in mind. The structure of the army must be such that headquarters can count on the individual soldier doing what headquarters wants him to do rather than what he is inclined to do by his instincts. That is accomplished by training and by having a well designed chain of command. The army’s noncoms are a cut above the rank and file; they have somewhat more distant horizons. They are close enough to the men in their squad or platoon to bond with them and demand loyalty from them, but they also are able to identify their interests with those of the lieutenant and the captain. And the officers must be a cut above the noncoms, with even more distant horizons. And so it goes, all the way up to headquarters.
This behavior undoubtedly is something we have inherited from our ancestors who belonged to hunting bands a million years ago. Success and survival depended on a strong bonding among the dozen or so members of the band. Because this behavior is natural, we cannot deplore it — but, like any army, we must understand it and take it into account in planning for any objective bigger than bringing down the next wooly mammoth we encounter.
We don’t have some of the advantages that an army has. Our members are much more widely dispersed, and our organization is much less developed than any army’s, with a much more tenuous chain of command: relatively few of our members out in foxholes have any noncom to whom they can bond. Furthermore, we cannot throw people in the brig or put them up against a wall when they don’t behave the way I want them to.
We have to make up for these disadvantages by having members with somewhat broader horizons than those of the average citizen. We need members with at least the expanded sense of loyalty of a noncom. Until we have developed a structure much more like that of an army, we need to beware of having too many members whose loyalties are limited to their drinking buddies.
This expanded sense of loyalty is mentioned on page 11 of our Membership Handbook, and it would behoove every member to re-read that page now. This is not merely a theoretical matter; it is something which affects us whenever we engage in any activity with other members, and every day we can see the destructive consequences of ignoring it.
The only reason that the Alliance has survived and continued to grow while other organizations have self-destructed is that we do have members who are a cut above the average White person: more intelligent, better disciplined, more racially conscious, and with a more impersonal sense of loyalty. But this is true only on the average. Inevitably we also recruit people lacking in maturity, responsibility, self-discipline, and the ability to be loyal to the Alliance and the purpose which it serves. We see this whenever a member observes some destructive behavior on the part of a fellow member which is of such a serious nature that I or someone else in the National Office needs to know about it, but the member observing this behavior doesn’t tell me about it because he doesn’t want to “rat on a buddy.” He places his loyalty to the misbehaving member with whom he is in immediate, personal contact above his loyalty to the distant and impersonal Alliance. We simply cannot afford very much of that, because we are not a neighborhood gang, for which such a limited concept of loyalty might be appropriate.
I have been prompted to bring this subject up now, because I recently was obliged to expel several members from the Alliance whose very limited sense of loyalty had led them to engage in activity harmful to the Alliance. We are a diverse organization, with many types of people among our members. But one thing every member must have if he is to remain with us is a sense of loyalty to the National Alliance and the idea served by the National Alliance which is above his loyalty to any other entity, including his “buddies.”
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Source: National Alliance BULLETIN, 1997
This level of commitment seems hard at first. But once you realize the stakes involved — once you realize that your real comrades are those who have accepted responsibility for our race’s future — once you realize that you have a part to play in all this (and you aren’t truly living if you shirk your duty) — then nothing is more natural, and nothing is more fulfilling.