Samuel Francis

Sam Francis died in 2005. From a memoriam on vdare.com:

With the end of the Cold War, he emerged as a type of white nationalist, defending the interests of the community upon which the historic United States was, as a matter of fact, built. This position, of course, is as legitimate as Black nationalism, Hispanic nationalism, or Zionism. It is, indeed, the inevitable result of multiculturalism that is being imported through public policy.

Although VDARE.COM is not a white nationalist site, we regarded him as an important part of the VDARE.COM coalition. And we will miss him very badly.

The Establishment, left and right, wasn't ready to listen to Sam. The logic of their own policies, however, means that eventually they will be forced to.

It was only some 18 months ago, but the very first bit of Francis' writing I encountered, Poll Exposes Elite-Public Clash On Immigration, had a profound effect on my understanding of the immigration invasion. After a lifetime spent marinating only in the sanitized worldviews of "polite society" I found Francis' explanation of the gap between the elites and the public on immigration both more shocking and yet more sensible than anything I had ever read. Referring to this poll he wrote:

Probably nothing in public life in recent years shows so clearly the vast differences between how elites and the public at large view mass immigration. It goes far to explain why nothing is ever done to control immigration: The people with power and influence don't regard immigration as a threat.

And indeed, why should they? The main problems that mass immigration brings are not those of terrorism but rather crime, job loss, educational chaos, cultural erosion and language barriers. Those are problems that middle class or working class people have to face every day, not those of the ruling class.

Elites, simply because they can afford to isolate themselves from the impact of these kinds of threats, don't feel them and don't see them even when they look at them. They can move to high-security, crime-free neighborhoods and dump their kids in well-protected private schools.

To them, the main impact of mass immigration is that it creates lots of cute little ethnic restaurants and cute little ethnic nannies that allow the up-scale young parents of the ruling class to dine regularly on Nepalese and Ethiopian cuisine.

As for the ethics of mass immigration, the ruling class has long since convinced itself that "we're a nation of immigrants," "the first universal nation," a "proposition country" or a "credal society" that has a duty to let in anyone who wants to come here, and that anyone who opposes mass immigration is a bigot, a nativist, a xenophobe.

The elite has managed to coin an entire vocabulary to demonize and discredit anyone who disagrees with its preferences and interests on immigration.

The poll shows that there is a vast gulf between the elite and the public at large on immigration, but more than anything it also shows that if the American majority that favors reducing mass immigration because they see it as a "critical threat" to themselves and their nation really wants to meet that threat, then they must first remove from power the entire class of "leaders" who are unable to perceive the dangers of immigration even when its dangerous consequences literally blow them out of their own skyscrapers.

One of Francis' most important observations was to recognize our society's ongoing slide into anarcho-tyranny:

. . . a combination of anarchy (in which legitimate government functions—like spying on the bad guys or punishing real criminals—are not performed) and tyranny (in which government performs illegitimate functions—like spying on the good guys or criminalizing innocent conduct like gun ownership and political dissent).

The result of anarcho-tyranny is that government swells in power, criminals are not controlled, and law-abiding citizens wind up being repressed by the state and attacked by thugs.

Ten days ago Jared Taylor's Introduction to Sam Francis’s Essential Writings on Race was, for me, a timely reminder and review of Francis' thoughts. From the links in Taylor's article I've exerpted two that seemed particularly insightful.

From Why Race Matters - The assault on our race and culture must be met in explicitly racial terms, American Renaisance, September 1994:

We see the transfer of power in almost every dimension of public and private life. Thus far, the transfer is more cultural than it is political or economic; it is clear in the rise of multiculturalism, Afro-centrism, and the other anti-white cults and movements in university curricula, and in the penetration of even daily private life by the anti-white ethic and behavior these cults impose. It is clear in the ever-quickening war against the traditional symbols of the old civilization and the elevation of the symbols of the new peoples who aim at their displacement.

It is routine also to display almost all criminals — rapists, murderers, robbers — as whites, though the statistical truth, of course, is that violent crime in the United States is largely the work of non-whites. A few years ago, political scientist Robert Lichter showed in a study that while during the last 30 years, whites were arrested for 40 percent of the murders committed in the United States, on television whites committed 90 percent of the murders.

The erasure and displacement of official cultural symbols and the similar process in elite-produced, mass-consumed popular culture represents the expropriation of cultural norms, the standards by which public and private behavior is legitimized or condemned and a culture defined. While the traditional norms that are being attacked and discarded were almost never explicitly racial, the new norms that are being constructed and imposed are, and they are not only explicitly racial but also explicitly and vociferously anti-white.

This is a calculated tactic aimed at seizing cultural legitimacy and cultural hegemony and ultimately coercive political power on behalf of non-whites at the expense of whites. At the most extreme, the anti-white racialist movement resembles the ideology of German National Socialism. It offers a conspiratorial interpretation of history in which whites are systematically demonized as the enemies of the black race, and a myth of black racial solidarity and supremacy. “Afro-racism” is the ideological and political apparatus by which an explicit race war is prepared against the white race and its civilization, not as part of “rage” nor as a response to “injustice” and “neglect” but, like any war, as part of a concerted strategy to acquire power. It is not confined to blacks but extends also to other non-whites who care to sign up.

Yet the war against the white race and its civilization is not new. It is part of a world-historical movement that began in the late 19th century, perhaps not coincidentally, around the time of the battle of the Little Big Horn, and which the American racialist writer Lothrop Stoddard called, in the frank language of the 1920s, “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” and which Oswald Spengler a few years later called the “Coloured World Revolution.”

The fraudulence of the liberalism espoused by the leaders of the racial revolution was clear to Spengler himself. “The hare,” he wrote in his last book, The Hour of Decision, “may perhaps deceive the fox, but human beings can not deceive each other. The coloured man sees through the white man when he talks about “humanity’ and everlasting peace. He scents the other’s unfitness and lack of will to defend himself… The coloured races are not pacifists. They do not cling to a life whose length is its sole value. They take up the sword when we lay it down. Once they feared the white man; now they despise him.”

What is happening in our interesting times, then, to summarize briefly, is this. A concerted and long-term attack against the civilization of white, European and North American man has been launched, and the attack is not confined to the political, social and cultural institutions that characterize the civilization but extends also to the race that created the civilization and continues to carry and transmit it today. The war against white civilization sometimes (indeed often) invokes liberal ideals as its justification and as its goal, but the likely reality is that the victory of the racial revolution will end merely in the domination or destruction of the white race and its civilization by the non-white peoples — if only for demographic reasons due to non-white immigration and the decline of white birth rates.

In the universalist world-view, there is neither history nor race nor even species, neither specific cultures nor particular peoples nor meaningful boundaries. Therefore there are no concrete duties to race, nation, community, family, friend or neighbor and indeed no distinctions to be drawn between neighbor and stranger, friend and foe, mine and thine, us and them.

In the happyland of universalism, we owe as much to the children of Somalia — indeed, more — than we do to the hapless citizens of Los Angeles, and Marines who could not have been sent from Camp Pendleton to Los Angeles during the riots of 1992 and who are not ordered to prevent violation of the Mexican border adjacent to their own installation in southern California are speedily dispatched to Somalia. Even to invoke “our” identity, our interests, our aspirations is to invite accusations of all the “isms” and “phobias” that are deployed to prevent further discussions and to paralyze the formation or the retention of a common consciousness that might at some point swell up into actual resistance to our dispossession. The principal white response to the incipient race war thus far, manifested in neo-conservative critiques of “Political Correctness” and multiculturalism, is merely to regurgitate the formulas of universalism, to invoke the spirit of Martin Luther King, and to repeat the universalist ideals of equality, integration, and assimilation. The characteristic defense of Western civilization by most conservatives today is merely a variation of the liberal universalism that the enemies of the West and whites also invoke. It is to argue that non-whites and non-Westerners ought to value modern Western civilization as in their own best interests. It is to emphasize the liberal “progress” of the modern West through the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of non-whites, the retreat from imperialism, the achievement of higher living standards and political equality, etc.

Instead of invoking a suicidal liberalism and regurgitating the very universalism that has subverted our identity and our sense of solidarity, what we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. The reassertion of our solidarity must be expressed in racial terms for two major reasons. In the first place, the attack upon us defines itself in racial terms and seeks through the delegitimization of race for whites and the legitimization of race for non-whites the dispersion and destruction of the foundations of our solidarity while at the same time consolidating non-white cohesiveness against whites.

Secondly, we need to assert a specifically racial identity because race is real — biological forces, including those that determine race, are important for social, cultural, and historical events. I do not suggest that race as a biological reality is by itself sufficient to explain the civilization of European man — if race were sufficient, there would be no problem — but race is necessary for it, and it is likely that biological science in the near future will show even more clearly how necessary racial, biological, and genetic explanations are to understanding social and historical events more fully.

In 1994 Sam Francis already saw clearly the anti-White regime - that the many slights putative conservatives have alternatively fought, ridiculed, and averted their eyes from are in fact just pieces of an agenda they dare not see as a whole. For recognizing and writing about the racial dimensions of this assault Sam Francis was banished from "polite society".

In An Infantile Disorder, Chronicles, February 1998 he argued for unity in facing the threat, and to set aside distractions such as neo-confederate secession:

But even if secession were possible, it would be a bad idea. Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain in columns in this magazine and many other places for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultiara1 dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard. Today, the greatest immediate danger to Middle America and the European-American civilization to which it is heir lies in the importation of a new underclass from the Third World through mass immigration. The danger is in part economic, in part political, and in part cultural, but it is also in part racial, pure and simple. The leaders of the alien underclass, as well as those of the older black underclass, invoke race in explicit terms, and they leave no doubt that their main enemy is the white man and his institutions and patterns of belief.

The only prospect of resisting the domination of the ruling class and its antiwhite and anti-Western allies in the underclass is through Middle American solidarity, a solidarity that must transcend the differentiations of region, class, religion, party, and ideology. White Southerners are a vital part of the Middle American core, as are their Northern counterparts, and neither is the enemy of the other. Both regional sections of Middle America face the same threats, experience much the same problems, and ought to be joined in the same political-cultural movement to meet the threat together.

These are observations I find extremely useful as I struggle to understand the West's revolutionary transformation. Francis recognized that race matters. In such a world my kith and kin would be wise to realize: White matters.

UPDATE 13 Feb 2008: From Steve Sailer's review of Francis' book Race and the American Prospect:

In the Victorian era, the Great Taboo was sex. Today, whatever the label we attach to our own age, the Great Taboo is race. The Victorians virtually denied that sex existed. Today, race is confidently said to be "merely a social construct," a product of the imagination, and of none too healthy imaginations at that, rather than a reality of nature.

Sailer, like my commenter Flippityflopitty, is not hostile to White consciousness, but is certainly pessimistic about White nationalism and separatism. In their stead Sailer advocates citizenism, which he describes as being based on the belief that:

Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners.

This was the rationale for US immigration policy until 1965. Forty years of influx have pushed the population from 200M to over 300M, growth of more than 50%, most of it non-white and upwards of 10% of it illegal.

Unfortunately, citizenism will not keep the US from becoming a banana republic shithole. In fact, as the invasion continues citizenism, or at least the deracinated sentiments that label aptly describes, has actually lent the transformation credibility. The legal immigration and many amnesties since 1965 have introduced more anti-White citizens.

Just like those who only oppose illegal immigration, citizenists play right into the hands of the open border advocates who have shown great skill in subverting and twisting our laws to their desires. The US senate, for example, brazenly tried to elect a new citizenry last May. They continue to work on behalf of their prospective zitizens by amending all and sundry legislation with bits of stealth amnesty. By hook or by crook they will eventually legitimize the invasion. They will do so by declaring the invaders legal. President Obama will almost certainly do even more for the invaders than Bush has. We will find that the constitution's "separation of powers" has an entirely different meaning when liberal judges are asked to interpret a liberal president's executive orders. If they are even asked.

The dispossession of Whites has so far been accomplished by double-talk and trickery, without plebiscite, without legitimacy. It is becoming a fait accompli, trumping the too-little too-late fearful indignation of deracinated White citizenists. They think White consciousness is folly, doomed to failure. Well what then of their own deracinated, citizenist arguments? Have they not failed? From this point on aren't they likely only to serve the invasion status quo?

Francis' insight is that other groups do not hesitate to advocate policies they believe to be in their own interests, despite the ill consequences for Whites. Whites must recognize this hostility and counter it directly with their own race-conscious advocacy. Duty does not calculate the chances of success. Right and wrong are not determined by the laws of usurpers. The legacy of slavery and forty years of non-white immigration are clear: race trumps citizenism.