Amerika

On July 8th, 2005, less than six months after Sam Francis passed away, the Right lost another figure we are forever indebted to—Wilmot Robertson. As the editor of Instauration and author of The Dispossessed Majority, few did more to keep the torch going between the collapse of organized Southern resistance in the early ‘70s, and rise of American Renaissance and paleoconservatism in the ‘90s.

Kevin MacDonald, F. Roger Devlin, and the editors of The Occidental Quarterly have all written impressive praises of the man, but Robertson’s work speaks for itself—specifically one of the most impressive chapters in his seminal work Dispossessed Majority, “The Dissolution of Art.” Robertson wrote well on just about every topic conceivable, but his sharp mind shone brightest when examining the intertwined topics of art, culture, and taste—topics too often overlooked by American racialists, since mustering sophisticated philosophical defenses of western aesthetics is surprisingly difficult. Deconstruction of the Western aesthetic and replacement with postmodernism et al. isn’t ‘art,’ is absurd, disgusting, etc. But is there anything more than that?

Note how perfectly on-point Robertson’s observations are, even decades after they were first published in 1972.^[1]

Forbidden to explore the text and context of his collective consciousness, the Majority artist retreats to surrealism, science fiction, murder mysteries, fantasy, travel guides, and pornography. In the process he becomes the punching bag of the minority activist, who views “man’s essential struggle as social, against other men, rather than the moral one against himself.

Consider the wealthiest white authors of our time: James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, Stephen King, Danielle Steel, JK Rowling, Jim Davis (of the Garfield cartoon), Tom Clancy^[2], Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, Dan Brown, Janet Evanovich, Ann Rice, George R.R. Martin, Terry Pratchett, Harper Lee, Nicholas Sparks, and on and on and on. All of the above authors are of course white, as are their audiences, and in addition to the genres outlined by Robertson, one could add such pitiful sub-genres as: courtroom dramas, fantasy-pornography, thrillers, and children’s books.

Take a look at the highest grossing films in the U.S. Most are science fiction films of one stripe or another (E.T., Avatar, Hunger Games, etc.), plenty are sequels, prequels, or sequels of prequels (Star Wars, Iron Man, Shrek, etc.), but the far-and-away majority are films made for humans under the age of ten. ^[3]

This follows logically, since whites are currently forbidden to express even a modicum of self-interest in the realm of film. There is of course the obvious example of Mel Gibson’s downfall, but the landscape is filled with more nuanced instances of censorship. Consider how Leni Riefenstahl’s career was destroyed after the Second World War. Even when films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy show flavors of Nietzschean boldness, or depict different races in a different realm than our own, they are attacked as racist.

The hollowness of today’s white artist in great part explains, and may even somewhat justify, both the high-end snobbish (think Criterion Collection) obsession with films about the struggles of non-whites, and its more middlebrow counterpart (think Focus Features). 12 Years a Slave serves as an obvious and recent example, but anything close to a full list gets impossibly long: the filmography of Spike Lee, Amistad, Ali, Roots, The Color Purple, A Raisin in the Sun, A Bronx Tale, The Constant Gardener, Driving Miss Daisy, El Norte, Real Women Have Curves, Shoah, Life is Beautiful, A Serious Man etc.

Certainly the current state of ethno-masochism explains much of the interest in these films, but so too does their lack of competition in the realm of narratives that cover struggles, resistance, and triumph in any genuine way.^[4] And since white self-expression is expressly forbidden, must of us are left to sift through the backlogs of film’s history.

Imagining a world in which white artists in Hollywood would be free to examine their own identities proves difficult, as all counterfactuals are. I am reminded of libertarians who ask us to envision a world in which all the energies of tax collectors and tax lawyers, regulators and regulatory lawyers, etc., are instead directed to something more beautiful and productive. In the libertarian counterfactual, however, it’d be overly generous to assume that tax collector psyches and soulless bureaucrats could be redeemed by institutions, the power of the market.

Well, imagine a film industry in which films about Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty could be made. Or in which Arrested Development, a TV show that romanticizes and glorifies the neurosis and decadence of a wealthy Jewish family, couldn’t find an audience—instead of becoming an exemplar of the taste of contemporary whites.

Although the Internet has more or less killed travel guides, it has not (contra much heresay) killed pornography, an industry currently worth around 15 billion. Though the presence of non-whites in this industry is certainly higher than in the above two, it is still not altogether very high.

There is a fair number of “Mandingo” black male stars, and not insignificant numbers of mulatto, mestizo, and oriental women, but on the whole, whites run the industry,[5] and the majority of its performers are white as well. White women in particular have an undeniable monopoly.^[6] And indeed, the smear of racism is applied to all of the above, as implicit whiteness steadily becomes a more and more unforgivable sin. The Left regularly critiques pornography, despite being filled with glorifications of interracial sex. Jezebel, The Root, Ms, and Racialicious have all written published hit pieces on the racism of pornography, and even a few pornstars have leveled the same claim, both black and white.

No matter how innocuous, a-racial, or even explicitly liberal, Cultural Marxists will find the tiny transgressions in anything not made by (and for) them and attack it: it’s less a matter of genuine philosophical difference than rationalization for hostility to western thedes and aesthetics. As another counterfactual, envision a world in which beautiful white women perform ballet to appreciative audiences instead of starring in “Blacks on Blondes.”

[T]hey [liberals and Marxists] treat as a paradox the fact that a disproportionate number of all modern Majority literary lights are Southerners: James Agee, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, James Dickey, Stark Young, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, Tom Wolfe, to name a few.

Here we have a sin by omission. With the exceptions of Flannery O’Connor and Tom Wolfe, the academy, the media, and the blogosphere simply do not discuss the above authors. The only circles in which they still carry any weight or recognition are the moribund publications of paleoconservatism: Chronicles, Anamnesis, First Principles, etc. Tom Wolfe’s ability to stay both relevant and incredibly subversive is genuinely amazing, but the exception proves the rule. Meanwhile, though Flannery O’Connor has stayed in the public’s eye, all of the hipsters who adore what they misinterpret to be her existentialism, they also agonize over her “racism.” Her writing has also become an unfortunate meme in the cannon of “hip” and nominally Catholic “conservative” pundits like Andrew Sullivan, John Zmirak, and the American Conservative crowd.^[7]

The surrealist painters, atonal jazz musicologists, prosaic poets, emetic novelists, crypto-pornographers, and revanchist pamphleteers say they are searching for new forms because the old forms are exhausted. Actually they are exhuming the most ancient forms of all-simple geometric shapes, color blobs, drum beats, genitalia, four-letter words, and four-word sentences…. All Majority artists necessarily experience the wrenching depression that comes from enforced cultural homelessness. Of all people the artist is the least capable of working in a vacuum.

Examples of this phenomenon between 1972 and now are countless. Keith Haring was maybe the most perfect example, as a White man who slept almost exclusively with black and mestizo men, and whose “art” consisted of aerosol spray renditions of cave paintings, but eventually came to be considered avant-garde. For years his art communicated nothing but shallow joy (e.g. stick figures dancing, animals playing), but when AIDS hit and he received the deadly diagnosis, all his work became commentary on “gay cancer,” often, by way of dancing condoms.

Other white junkies and degenerates of New York City’s Lower East Side embody what Robertson described as well. The purposeful atonality of the No Wave music scene (complete with a jazz influence), and the sophomorically pornographic Cinema of Transgression movement were both in full swing as the city its adherents inhabited began to look more and more like wasteland somewhere in the third world.

The nihilism, decadence, and aesthetics of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s would morph, evolve, and take us through grunge music, emo culture, all the way to today’s hipster.^[8] These whites living at the end of History have no sense of time or place, much less a culture to grasp, and are thus left with nothing but cyclical irony, references to anything outside of the present, and vulgarity.

Only in the sector of aesthetics, through the pervasiveness of the idealized Nordic biological type and its continued acceptance as the national template of physical charm and attractiveness, has the Majority been able to mount a small but successful holding action in the present-day racial melee.

But if there is one thing whites can rely on, it is the near universal and complete acceptance of their beauty. Even in the most self-obsessed and uninteresting hipster films, the dullest of political thriller novels, the openly and proudly ethno-masochistic plays, the most mind-numbing Hollywood action films, and the vilest pornography, there is no getting around the presence and beauty of whites in all of them—and everyone’s interesting desire to keep it that way, aside from bitter attempts at eradication, as otherwise we will always linger as reminders of an unachievable aesthetic quality.

For these passages, and so many more, and for all of the thoughts—and actions—they inspire, the white world owes Wilmot Robertson a great deal.

 

^[1] See too the April 1994 issue of Instauration, “What is Happening to Beauty?”

^[2] For a spectacular examination of Tom Clancy’s quintessentially American faux-conservatism, see James Kirkpatrick’s Tom Clancy’s American Dream

^[3] While it can be said that film has not been on “our side” for about a century, and that children’s films have always done well, taking a look at box office records by decade is truly illustrative. Taken as a whole, the highest-grossing films of the first half of the last century, while not terribly intellectual, are hardly anti-White.

^[4] For more in-depth analysis of films from a thoughtful and pro-White perspective, see the archives of Edmund Connelly on The Occidental Observer and Trevor Lynch on Counter Currents

[5] While there is some truth to the “Jewish pornographer” stereotype, gentile presence is not to be underestimated: Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Bob Guccione, John Stagliano, Gerard Damiano, etc.

^[6] Consider that only White women have had any breakout success as well: Jenna Jameson, Sasha Grey, Marilyn Chambers, Tristan Taormino, etc.

^[7] While the last of these three is still much better than something like National Review, it has been some time since they have published even moderate nationalists like John Derbyshire or Roger McGrath. The archives of former editor Richard Spencer were purged long ago as well, and they have even begun publishing attacks on race realists.

^[8] The analysis of today’s “hipsters” seems to have no end, but an excellent primer comes from the surprising source of Adbusters, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”

Tags: conservatism inc., hipsters, wilmot robertson