The Law of Life

by George Avila

AS A first-year law student I have been thinking recently about “the law.” It occurs to me that playwrights could make better use of a law-school education than most law students do. For law students, by and large, use their education to become well-paid parasites; but a true White man’s playwright — a Sophocles or a Shakespeare — could take the cases law students study and fashion beauty from them, tragic or comic. Many of the cases lend themselves to such a treatment.

Take, for examples, the case of U.S. v. Holmes, an 1842 decision. In that case a ship carrying European immigrants struck an iceberg near Newfoundland and began rapidly to fill with water. A longboat was lowered, and 32 passengers scrambled on, along with three members of the crew, among them the defendant Holmes. Holmes, a manly and courageous seaman who had acted heroically throughout the catastrophe to save the passengers, threw some passengers overboard to keep the longboat from sinking. Holmes succeeded in saving the boat, but after it was discovered by a passing ship he was arrested for manslaughter and later convicted.

In my criminal law class the professor posed questions concerning Holmes, and I noted the responses. Most of the students, of course, didn’t really care: what, after all, did this have to do with getting a job? And those who did care — how conventional their minds were! Their responses reeked of pious indignation that a man should “take the law into his own hands.” Such “tyranny” was abhorrent to them: in their view “the law” prevails everywhere and at all times.

They’re right, of course. The law does prevail everywhere, at all times — only they have the wrong law. What these media-soaked yuppies fail to see, or rather lack the backbone to see, is that underlying the petty swindle they call “the law” is a Law of Life, of Nature, of Struggle, of Selection. The fact that at only critical points — such as in Holmes — does this law appear so forcibly that even cowards can no longer close their eyes to it does not mean this law is not always operative.

And is not the predicament of the White race today like that of Holmes and his swamped boat? For not all the teeming masses of humanity alive today can survive and procreate; choices must be made.

This is a hard truth. It is a tragic truth, a truth for playwrights and not for lawyers. But it is on hard truths, I think, that the National Alliance has built its program. And as Nietzsche once said, so it remains true today: the worth of a man and a people are measured by the question, “How much truth can you endure?”

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Source: National Vanguard magazine, No. 102, December 1984, p. 4; transcribed by Anthony Collins