Classic EssaysWilliam Pierce

What is Moral?

Dr. William Pierceby Dr. William L. Pierce (pictured)

A FEW DAYS ago I spoke with a friend who is a historian and a writer and is interested in many of the things we discuss on these weekly broadcasts. He congratulated me on the growing influence of American Dissident Voices. He said:

Many more people than you realize listen to your broadcasts. They mail the texts to many other people. I meet many people at universities and in other countries as well as here in southern California who listen to your broadcasts and talk about them with each other.

My response was: “Then where are these people when I need them? Why don’t I hear from more of them? Don’t they realize that I can’t continue doing these broadcasts all by myself forever? The country is going down the drain, and all that these people you mention are doing is talking about my broadcasts and sitting on their hands. Why don’t they help? Are they afraid that they’ll be kicked out of the country club if they associate with me?”

My historian friend said that it isn’t fear that keeps these people from contacting me; it is their moral concerns. In the past, he said, my broadcasts were very harsh, very brutal. I talked about ethnic cleansing and approved of genocide and other things that these people find shocking, he said. They won’t support any cause unless they feel that it is a just cause. They think that I am willing to hurt too many people. They feel that I have no Christian constraints. They would rather commit suicide than become associated with an unjust cause, my friend told me.

I responded to him: “Don’t these people believe that making a decent world for future generations of our people is a just cause? Don’t they believe that preventing the extinction of our race and our civilization is a just cause?”

My friend didn’t really have a good answer for that, but I gathered from his response that he believes my approach to our problems is too “rough,” too uncivilized, too un-Christian for the people he talks with, and it makes them uncomfortable. Then he congratulated me on becoming more acceptable in the last year than I was before. He says that I do talk now about the issues in a way that is easier for these people to relate to, and he thinks that has a lot to do with the fact that more people are listening to the programs now and discussing them with their friends.

Since this conversation with my friend a little more than a week ago I’ve been thinking hard about what he said. I believe that I understand what he said, but I don’t really agree with him. I don’t really believe that it is very meaningful to say that Christian constraints make the academics and other perceptive people he knows hold back from the necessarily unpleasant solutions to our race’s problems. In the first place, most of these people aren’t really Christians. They were raised in a Christian environment, and Christian moral doctrine may still have a subconscious effect on them, but most of them are fairly intelligent and sophisticated people. I believe that a reasonably high percentage of the pilots and other military officers that the Bush government, and a long line of governments before that, have sent to blast Afghan villages to smithereens or to bomb a European city like Belgrade or to carpet-bomb German cities are Christians: a higher percentage, anyway, than among the academics and other people that my friend talks with. I also think that most of them have no qualms of conscience about what they do for a living. And these pilots, most of them, are not Neanderthal rednecks or bloody-minded sadists. They are university graduates who are loving husbands and caring fathers. In the past, Christians — American Christians — repeatedly have shown themselves quite capable of doing the most atrocious and bloody things without hesitation.

The key, I believe, is social rather than religious or moral. The concern, I believe, is not about whether a cause is “just” or not, whatever that means, but whether it is socially acceptable or not: that is, socially acceptable in the peer group to which the person belongs who claims to be concerned about the justness of my cause. To tell the truth, I don’t believe that I have changed or moderated or “softened” my message during the past year. I always have tried to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I don’t hold back from stating unpleasant facts or conclusions any more today than I did a year ago.

I do try to avoid being unnecessarily offensive. I don’t ordinarily use the word “nigger” in talking about racial matters, for example, because it makes so many people flinch, and I can be completely clear in what I want to say without using that word. But that is no more true today than it was five years ago. I’ve always tried to avoid being unnecessarily offensive.

I think that what has changed is not my message but the social environment. I believe that the social environment of most of the writers and professors and others who talk about my broadcasts but won’t talk with me has shifted enough during the past couple of years so that hard facts about race and the Jews are a little more acceptable than before. I think that reality is not quite as déclassé as it was a year or two ago.

You know, I believe that I know these people about as well as anyone. I never was very fashion-conscious myself, even before I began saying unfashionable things. I never worried much about whether I was wearing the latest style in cuff links or neckties, and occasionally my socks wouldn’t match. I probably would have been classified as a “nerd” by most fashion-conscious people today. But I was a university professor, and I generally behaved in a socially approved manner. I could even figure out which fork to use for the salad in most cases, and I didn’t slurp my soup or wipe my greasy fingers on my shirt or the tablecloth.

If there was a difference between me and most of my peers, I think it was this: they took the conventions and taboos by which we lived a little more seriously than I did. I think that I appreciate these things more now than I did then. Now I understand that conventions and good manners and politeness and gentlemanly behavior are important in a structured, well functioning society. But they are not the most important things. Honesty and facing reality without evasion are more important than politeness.

In the early 1960s, we all saw the society in which we lived coming unraveled. We all could look ahead and see that very bad things were likely to be encountered just down the road if present trends continued. But it was not entirely acceptable to talk frankly about these things. That is, it made many of my peers uncomfortable to talk frankly about where racial integration was taking America. It made them even more uncomfortable to talk about the Jewish role in the dangerous policies being pursued by the government. I think that social conditioning was more important than Christianity or any other ethical considerations in imposing these constraints.

We didn’t feel personally threatened by Blacks, and the people who were personally threatened were the White manual workers at the bottom of the White social ladder, who reacted to the threat in ways that seemed very vulgar and uncouth to us. To us, Blacks were still the underdogs, and it seemed uncharitable to most of my peers for Whites to attack Blacks for wanting to better their positions. The media-generated image of sweaty, unshaven Ku Klux Klansmen and other rednecks screaming insults at peacefully marching Black demonstrators was an unpleasant one that made us squirm. We certainly didn’t want to put ourselves in the same boat with the Ku Kluxers and other working-class Whites who were behaving in such an ungentlemanly manner.

I not only understood the feeling of my peers back in the 1960s; I shared it. Standing on a street corner and screaming insults at Blacks or shouting “White power!” while shaking one’s fist or giving a Roman salute was not only rude and impolite, it was low class. I believe that was what made us most uncomfortable. Despite all of the pretensions to democracy and egalitarianism, America was and still is a very class-conscious society. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. I think that in a well-ordered society it is reasonable to expect the more privileged and influential members of the society to have a stricter and more refined code of behavior and to hold themselves apart from those with less-strict codes. And in the early 1960s America still had a reasonably well-ordered society.

As I already mentioned, I was a little less reverent toward things such as the polite behavior expected of academics and professionals than most of my peers were, and so while many of them joined conservative think tanks and respectably conservative debating societies, I decided to say what I thought needed to be said, polite or not. The consequence of that decision was that the Jewish media immediately began doing a hatchet job on me, portraying me as the sort of person that any member of polite society would be ashamed to associate with. And so I spent the next 35 years as an outcast of sorts. It didn’t bother me a great deal, because the luxury of being able to tell the whole truth was a bit intoxicating. Of course, I always tried to persuade other professionals to tell the whole truth too, and a few of them did, but not many were willing to take that step.

That’s beginning to change a little now, but not, I think, because I have become more polite or more moral. I think that it’s because the threat that we all could see way back in the 1960s is no longer distant and theoretical. It is looming darkly over all of us now, not just over the manual workers at the bottom of the White social ladder. But I must say that, even as more professionals are screwing up their courage and choosing truth instead of the country club, I am becoming more impatient with those who still hold back from a full commitment to the struggle for the survival of our race and our civilization.

I don’t mean to seem condescending or offensive, but I do think that it is time to quit making excuses that claim moral reservations. It is time to face the fact that what is holding you back is not morality but fear: the fear of being labeled a “hater” or a “neo-Nazi” by the media, the fear of being thought uncouth or low class for finally admitting that those low-class Whites who were screaming obscenities at Black demonstrators in the 1960s and who were using the word “nigger” were right. We didn’t have to stand on street corners and do things in the low-class way the Klan did, but we were obliged to do something — we were obliged to do whatever our positions and our abilities enabled us to do most effectively — and most of us dodged that obligation.

Let’s talk about morality and just causes for a moment. I believe that the most common “moral reservation” I hear from the shirkers is that the solutions to our problems that I talk about entail the punishment of the innocent with the guilty. Intelligent people tell me that they agree that we should have a separation of the races. But, they protest, not all Blacks will go voluntarily to some African country, and many of those who won’t want to go are hard-working, law-abiding Blacks. And the same is true for the mestizos who won’t want to go back to Mexico or El Salvador. And what about the mixed-race children, whose mothers were persuaded by Hollywood or MTV to let Blacks impregnate them? How can we possibly have a White society again without hurting millions of people?

And my answer is that we can’t, and you must decide whether it is more moral to stand aside and permit Western civilization and the race that built that civilization over the millennia to become extinct in the very near future, or to hurt many people, White as well as non-White, to ensure that both the race and the civilization survive.

When our ancestors arrived in America from Europe in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, they encountered intense opposition from the Indians, which was natural enough, since the Indians were here first and didn’t want us taking their land. But after the first few massacres of White settlers by Indians, our ancestors rolled up their sleeves and virtually exterminated the Indians, and I don’t think they had to do a lot of moral agonizing about it first. And it wasn’t a gentlemanly war either. We deliberately left smallpox-infected blankets for the Indians to find, knowing that the Indians had no natural resistance to the disease. When we raided Indian villages we killed everybody, young and old, male and female, just like they did when they raided a White settlement. To our ancestors, the choice was: get rid of the Indians, or give up and go back to Europe. I doubt that moral qualms led many to go back to Europe so as not to have to kill Indians. To virtually all of them it was more moral to conquer the land for their descendants and to increase the territory and the power of their race than to let the Indians keep the land. Theirs was the morality of survival, the morality of life.

A couple of things have changed since those days. First, we had a much stronger sense of identity, a much stronger sense of racial community, then than now. When it was a matter of Whites versus Indians, everyone knew whose side he was on. Second, we lived much closer to Nature then. We had not been softened by so much security and so many comforts, and reality was something we had to deal with every day in order to survive.

Actually, I’ve oversimplified this example of Whites versus Indians. By the 19th century some East Coast White liberals had decided they were on the Indian side. They were Whites who had been safely established in the cities for a couple of generations and softened thereby, and they didn’t have to face Indians on the frontier. They wrote books, gave lectures to groups of gentlemen, and preached Sunday sermons to the credulous that idealized the Indians as “noble savages,” ignored the horrible atrocities committed by the Indians against White settlers, and emphasized White depredations against the Indians. Fortunately, by the time their activities began to have much effect on public opinion or government policy, the Indians were pretty well finished; otherwise the population of the United States today might look much like that of Mexico.

Today the process is somewhat similar, but in reverse. Back in the 1960s nearly all of us already were too soft, too comfortable, too secure, and the propagandists for a new morality, the morality of surrender and death, already had poisoned our souls. We had to treat the Blacks fairly, we believed. We must not accuse the good Jews along with the bad Jews, along with the Zionists. We must not advocate anything that would punish the innocent with the guilty. We had to have a just cause before we could do anything. But now, with the hour of decision at hand, with the grim reality of racial extinction before us, some of us are beginning to understand that the morality of survival is a higher morality than the morality of fairness. I hope that the books I have written, and the lectures and sermons I have been giving, as unpolished and ungentlemanly as they are, have had some small part in bringing this understanding to some of our people.

It is time now for the polite chatter at fashionable dinners and cocktail parties to give way to hardheaded talk and planning aimed at saving our people and saving our civilization, no matter what it takes, no matter how unfair we must be in claiming this planet for our descendants. Perhaps the polite and gentlemanly Americans holding back now may find some much-needed courage in news of developments in polite circles overseas. In Britain, for example, the Jews and their hangers-on in the government and the media have been complaining bitterly for the past month about a remark the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, made at a very polite dinner party in London. Ambassador Bernard described Israel as “that shitty little country” and asked, “Why should we be in danger of World War Three because of these people?”

The Jews are bemoaning the fact that not only did Bernard have the courage to make that comment, but that others at the dinner party agreed with him. I’ll quote from a story in the December 23 issue of the London newspaper, The Independent:

Representatives of Britain’s Jews fear that “polite society” is embracing anti-Semitism and making it appear acceptable. It is being nurtured, they say, around the dinner tables of London’s “chattering classes” where Jew- and Israel-bashing has, according to some, become de rigueur. Jo Wagerman, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “Anti-Semitism is raising its head again. It has become acceptable for the first time in 50 years. People who have a respectable veneer can express these views in public and now get support rather than condemnation. I think much of what is expressed is anti-Zionist in content but within that is a very strong anti-Semitic element.”

And it’s not just polite society in Britain and in France that is beginning to talk at least a bit more frankly about the world’s Jewish problem. Academics, journalists, government officials, and intellectuals throughout the Muslim world, from Iran to Indonesia, are showing increasing willingness to speak out not just about Israel and not just about so-called “Zionists,” but about all Jews, about Jews as a race whose monomaniacal scheming poses an enormous danger to the whole world. There always has been an undercurrent of anti-Jewish thought and feeling in most Muslim countries, but in most cases it was only an undercurrent. In official circles it was denounced. The Jews in America would complain to the U.S. government whenever an anti-Israel cartoon appeared in an Egyptian newspaper or the foreign minister of Syria made an anti-Jewish comment in public. The U.S. government would obediently threaten the offending country with unpleasant consequences if the offensive behavior continued, and the appropriate officials in that country would promise to crack down on it.

That situation has been changing during the past couple of years, however, and especially since September 11. Now the governments throughout most of the Muslim world no longer are trying to suppress criticism of the Jews but are participating in the effort to inform their people of the Jewish menace. The influential Saudi Arabian daily newspaper, Al-Watan, published a long, two-part article last month, on December 8 and 9, that I might have written myself. It talked about the Jews’ ambition to control the world, from Old Testament times to the present. It went into their scheming before the First World War to use the war to advance their interests, and it went into Jewish media control in depth, pointing out that the Jews everywhere work to undermine the racial and national solidarity of their host countries. Al-Watan, like all of the newspapers in Saudi Arabia, is financed by the government. And at least one major Islamic newspaper in the United States, Muslims, published in New York, has been reprinting the texts of several of these American Dissident Voices broadcasts. The chattering classes in America may be a bit behind those in France and Britain and Saudi Arabia, but I do have hopes that they will begin catching up — soon.

* * *

Source: Free Speech magazine, February 2002, Volume VIII, Number 2

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Walt Hampton
Walt Hampton
2 November, 2020 7:17 pm

To say that Caucasians – or any other race –
“took the Indians” land – is a non-sequitur.
These primitives had no idea of land as a
concept of ownership. Caucasians fought
for – and obtained ownership of the land.

If one is looking for a ‘moral statement,’
then here it is – mighty skyscrapers where
savages once roamed!

You want to know what is moral? Now, you 
know!

Walt Hampton
Walt Hampton
Reply to  Walt Hampton
3 November, 2020 6:36 pm

I should like to contextualize this 
item, as it was written by the founder
WLP, who was an innovator in a world
where few lacked fear to tread. Like
so many of us however, he was also a
human, and sometimes made a casual
error or two.  

The American Indians did have a sense
of proprietary in that the land was 
“there’s,” but much more on the order
of a tomcat who “marks” territory with
a spray. However, the concept of 
“private property” and “ownership” 
was totally alien to them. These ideas
were and are uniquely European and
 – perhaps to a lesser extent – some 
of the Asian ethnic groups.  

eah
eah
18 April, 2024 7:33 am

This is another excellent talk by Dr Pierce — in it he foreshadows the same thesis of class divisions among Whites (produced in part by media manipulation) covered by Charles Murray in this book Coming Apart.

It would be nice to add the audio, which I heard on the stream, to this page.

Jim - National Alliance Staff
Jim - National Alliance Staff
Reply to  eah
18 April, 2024 1:10 pm

“My response was: “Then where are these people when I need them? Why don’t I hear from more of them? Don’t they realize that I can’t continue doing these broadcasts all by myself forever? The country is going down the drain, and all that these people you mention are doing is talking about my broadcasts and sitting on their hands. Why don’t they help? Are they afraid that they’ll be kicked out of the country club if they associate with me?”” A call to action was made here, Mr. eah. We in the National Alliance are still doing so. Let’s do more than talk about the broadcast and get off our hands.