On the Offensive: William Pierce’s Last Editorial

This is William Pierce’s last editorial, written in spring 2002, approximately two months before his death on 23 July, and published in National Vanguard print magazine No. 118, September-October 2002, under the editorship of Kevin Alfred Strom.

by Dr. William L. Pierce

FIVE YEARS have passed since the previous issue of National Vanguard was published. For several years prior to that, issues were appearing at a rate of only one or two each year. In those days I not only was editing the magazine, but I also was writing well over half of each issue. Eventually I had to make a choice between continuing to publish National Vanguard or continuing to do my weekly American Dissident Voices broadcasts. I chose the latter because I believed that it was essential to be able to communicate with the public on current events while they were current.

Things were beginning to happen faster in America and in the world. The situation was becoming more fluid. I wanted to talk about what was happening and try to help other people make sense of it, but I couldn’t do the research and writing for a half-hour weekly broadcast and write and edit National Vanguard at the same time without compromising the quality of one or both of these undertakings. In addition, I had many other chores to do in connection with keeping the National Alliance going.

Well, things have changed in the past five years. The National Alliance is bigger and has a higher percentage of high-achievers in its ranks. I no longer have to do nearly everything myself. There are other members who are willing and able to do many of the things we need to do and who can do them as well or better than I. One of the things we want to do now with our new resources is begin publishing National Vanguard on a regular basis.

Just as it is essential for us to have in my weekly American Dissident Voices broadcasts a medium for commenting promptly on current events, it also is essential for us to have a medium for exploring fundamental ideas and issues and discussing historical, social, cultural, and political topics in greater depth and with greater precision than is feasible using the oral medium of radio. We need to understand not only what is happening today but also how we got into the present mess and where we want to end up after we get out of it. We need to be as certain about these things as we can be, and the printed word really is superior to the spoken word for this purpose.

While American Dissident Voices is aimed at an audience of people who at least care about what is happening to our world, National Vanguard aims for a readership that not only cares but also is willing to think. There are enough people willing to think now, I believe, to make the regular publication of National Vanguard a viable project. Certainly there are more such people today than there were five years ago.

Probably the greatest damage that has been done to our people by our enemies has been the systematic undermining of our morale, of our self-discipline and sense of responsibility, of our personal and intellectual toughness. For the past half century the media and the schools and the government have been softening up our people, making them intellectually lazy, less self-reliant, less responsible, more alienated.

On the one hand there has been a campaign promoting individualism — the idea that each person is an island unto himself and has no responsibility to anyone but himself — and on the other hand there has been increasing pressure to conform, to surrender one’s intellectual independence, to be Politically Correct, to accept the culturally, racially, and socially destructive message of television without question or dissent.

The schools, which in the past used to apply at least a little external discipline in order to help young people develop self-discipline, long ago realized how Politically Incorrect that was and gave up on it. It’s not just that teachers no longer rap inattentive students across the knuckles with a ruler; today problem-solving and rules and exactness and standards are out too, or are on their way out. Those things, far too Western, too White, don’t suit the needs of today’s multicultural classrooms at all.

Even if American classrooms hadn’t had to adapt themselves to the limitations of non-Whites, one could hardly expect the same sort of scholastic rigor we used to have before MTV took the place of homework. The consequences of the change in our schools can be seen most immediately in the nearly universal inability of today’s high school graduates to use or to comprehend the English language at a level that was commonplace 50 years ago.

There still are men and women able to comprehend clearly expressed ideas and facts and to think for themselves, however: enough of them, I am sure, to make up a sufficiently large readership for the publication of National Vanguard to be an economically viable undertaking. And there are more people today than five years ago willing not only to read the magazine but also willing and able to write for it.

People who can think systematically and with some degree of originality, organize their thoughts well, and express themselves clearly and cogently in good English always have been a small minority of the population, and their abilities always have been in great demand. Five years ago they were living too well to risk angering the Establishment by having anything to do with the National Alliance, or they simply were not interested: they thought of the National Alliance as an irrelevant fringe group if they thought of it at all. Today at least a few of them — a growing few — have been persuaded by events that warnings from the fringe sometimes may be relevant after all. Others have come to understand that living well at the moment is not the only proper concern of prudent and responsible men and women, and that angering the Establishment is not the only thing to be feared.

More of our most capable people understand now that the future is slipping away from them, that they no longer are masters of their own destiny; that their selfishness and timidity and shortsightedness and inaction are condemning their children and their grandchildren to a nightmare world controlled by their implacable enemies. And a few of those who understand are now willing to act, whereas before they were not. The readers of this and future issues of National Vanguard will be able to benefit from this change in attitude. For example, most of the authors in this issue are new to the magazine.

Our aims for National Vanguard are what they have been from the beginning: to provide a source of information, not readily available elsewhere, relevant to the struggle of our people to regain control of our destiny; and a forum for the exposition and elaboration of ideas fundamental to that struggle. I hope that you will join us in that forum, as either a reader or a writer.

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Source: National Vanguard magazine, No. 118