Un-Killing Whitey: The Achievement of Sam Francis
Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America’s Culture War
By Samuel Francis / Edited by Peter B. Gemma
Published by FGF Books (Vienna, Virginia), 2006; 361 pages with index
To those of us who knew and respected for years the journalism of Samuel Francis (1947-2005), it remains hard to believe that he is gone. The outlets that regularly published him – Chronicles, VDARE, The American Conservative, Middle American News and others – seem, as their editors would doubtless admit, strangely diminished without his copy. At least we now have what has long been lacking: a comprehensive Samuel Francis Reader, by which existing admirers can observe afresh his versatility, and (with luck) new readers can be lured on board.
Other authors’ obituaries have given numerous details of Francis’s background, idiom, outlook, and philosophical influences. Further details occur in this book’s shrewd accompanying tributes by Patrick Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, and Peter Gemma. Suffice it here to cite Francis’s lifelong love of English history -– seventeenth-century English history above all –- and literature: a love very different from the bemused ignorance so frequent among Francis’s compatriots, who all too often share the misconception lamented by Alistair Cooke, that almost every educated Englishman is “an eighth earl accustomed to whipping the peasants.” There was in Francis a quasi-Cromwellian contempt for genteel, debauched poseurs (the Prince Ruperts of our time), though also a most un-Cromwellian concision and breadth of scholarship.
Ultimately, nonetheless, what made Francis one of America’s most compulsively readable modern essayists was not his intellectual debt to Lord Clarendon and other protagonists of the English Civil War, but his courage, his stylistic sharpness, his frequent gallows-humor, and his total freedom from party-politicking. While he did work for two Republican Senators, John East and Jesse Helms, no American writer of recent times has more bracingly excoriated the delusion that vox G.O.P., vox Dei, or been less prone to credit such unlovely pro-abort, Caucasophobic specimens as Rudolph Giuliani with serious conservative principles. In one stinging sentence (p. 61), Francis – amid a 2003 article called “‘Movement Conservatism’ Now Irrelevant” – sees off “the Beltway Right, that dwindling and never-merry band of direct mail scam artists, ‘think tank’ czars, decrepit ‘youth leaders,’ journalists with phony British accents, and professional Family Values activists who haven’t seen their own kids for 20 years.”
Francis is equally scathing about the single most pernicious fantasy which American neoconservatism (and, let it be said, Australian neoconservatism too) preaches: the myth of Economic Man, thirsting for a perpetual materialist paradise, who thereby calls to mind the famous definition of a mule: “without pride of ancestry, or hope of posterity.” Francis himself traced this myth, in an American context, to the Lincoln regime: which, by accident –-since there is no evidence that Lincoln consciously thought through the implications of what he was doing –- led “to the unlimited expansion of centralized state power, the destruction of the power and authority of the states, and the enthronement of Economic Man as the summum bonum of human endeavor.” Given this development, there is (as Francis notes) no cause for surprise that “an American public expresses indifference to the moral conduct of the chief executive [Clinton at the time] and praises him for his successful management of the economy” (p. 201).
No commentator surpassed Francis in his awareness of Third World immigration’s costs to America’s social contract. One of Shots Fired’s longest pieces is Francis’s analysis (pp. 221-262) of the informal but brilliantly organized 1980s network known as Sanctuary. Dominated by almost 300 churches, which purveyed then-fashionable tripe about liberation theology, Sanctuary encouraged hordes of immigrants -– euphemistically known, of course, as “refugees” -– to flee from El Salvador and Guatemala (though not from such Marxist havens as Nicaragua) and to settle in America without the particle of a legal right. Accordingly, it is to this decade that the origins of America’s current immigration disaster can, and should, be traced. Francis has named names, shown how Communists infiltrated the relevant lawyers’ organizations from the start, and emphasized the millenarian hatred for the white Christian West which Sanctuary’s spokesmen displayed. Still, one wonders if even the overtly leftist Sanctuary could match, for sheer malevolence, the pro-immigration phantasms now peddled on Wall Street. Everything that Sanctuary recommended in terms of “creative destruction” -– the objects to be destroyed being, basically, you and me -– is today advocated by the entire American political and economic establishment from George W. Bush down. The vocabulary of this establishment differs from Sanctuary’s; in place of boilerplate Marxist lingo, we have bellyaching about the evils of “racism”, “fascism”, and “nativism.” Alas, the principles, as opposed to the lexicon, have not changed a jot.
For anyone seriously doubting the continuity between old-fashioned socialistic hatred and new-fashioned plutocratic hatred (to the limited extent that these phenomena differ from one another at all), Francis’s repeated discussions of the political class’s anti-Confederate obsession will constitute a tonic. It is instructive, although it is also nauseating, to read Francis’s accounts of how Big Business and its tame media appease the NAACP, in order to condemn not only the flying of Confederate flags, but every other manifestation (however mild) of pride in Southern heritage. Even the 1999 firebombing and defacing (p. 282) of a Robert E. Lee mural in Virginia—“White devil”, “black baby-killer”, and “kill the white demons” were among the more tasteful graffiti adorning this portrait—failed to inspire the smallest qualms among masochistic rich whites about the wisdom of such truckling.
The Church of Martin Luther King continues to be America’s established creed, backed up by a governmental infrastructure of terror and coercion that no Spanish Inquisitor in his most surreal dreams could have imagined. This, moreover, despite the fact that King’s plagiarism, sexual squalor, and Communistic fellow-travelling have been matters of public record for a quarter of a century, thanks in part to Francis’s own efforts. In one of his 2003 columns, “A Little Real Black History”, Francis not only puts King in his place (that place being somewhere between Che and Ho Chi Minh); he also reveals the similar Red sympathies of King’s female counterpart, Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks’s Stalinist minders knew that what mattered for their cause was not that Mr. and Mrs. Average White America be persuaded to believe in Stalinism—an unlikely prospect at the best, or worst, of times—but simply that they be taught to loathe their own history, their own culture, and finally their own race:
Immersed in white guilt, a vast number of Americans now accept that the entire history of their nation up to the 1960s was a dark age of repression and hatred, with only a few bright spots like Abraham Lincoln and the crusade against Hitler. Having lost their own history, Americans can no longer expect to keep the nation their history created and defined. That, of course, was the whole point .... It’s an amazing story, about how an entire people was bamboozled out of its own heritage and its own country (pp. 163-164).
Francis maintained the most robust pessimism about the prospects of America recivilizing itself, or even of learning to slouch (rather than continuing to hurtle) towards Gomorrah. Perhaps the best antidote to such pessimism—or, at any rate, the most appropriate reason for questioning it—is the very fact that this book can appear in the U.S.A.; that, instead of bearing all the typographical hallmarks of Crank Lit, it can be handsomely produced on good paper stock, with an agreeable font which encourages rather than deterring the reader; that it can be comprehensively advertised; and that authors of Buchanan’s fame can support it. Merely to compare Francis’s achievement with the craven adolescent chatter of Australia’s own mainstream “conservatives” is to grasp anew a central literary truth of our time. That truth is this: America might not be a good country for a courageous and independent-minded author to earn his bread in, but every other country is now still worse.
R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is a Contributing Editor at The American Conservative.
Comments
I had planned to get another 20 years of stimulating writing from Franices. The pattern of the good ones going too soon is so striking, it makes it look like a conspiracy. I can think of more than one person who would have liked to see this party pooper silenced.
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Nice review. One very minor correction: the American Conservative did not “regularly” publish Sam. Scott McConnell didn’t want him to appear very often.
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Another minor corection—Sam was also “pro-abort.”
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Where is the evidence that Francis was a pro-abort?
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Well done, Rob. You not only captured the spirit of Sam’s ideas but strategy of promoting them as well. Occasionally I hear rumbles from the marginal right that the compilation should have had more of one subject or less of another, specifically Sam’s investigative piece on the Sanctuary Movement. Yet, a May 10th Associated Press story begins “Churches in five large U.S. cities plan to protect illegal aliens from deportation ... as they pressure lawmakers to create a path to citizenship for the nation’s estimated 12 to 20 million illegals.” To appreciate the power and tactics of today’s open borders lobby, you must understand how we lost the initial skirmishes on the immigration front in America’s culture war. What’s past is prologue. ~ Peter Gemma, editor, SHOTS FIRED: Sam Francis on America’s Culture War
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F.C. Kelly—Sam told me himself he was pro-abort. Ask any of his close associates and friends. Also, a piece in Chronicles (in 1996, I beleive) was an anti-pro-life piece that all but declared that Sam was pro-choice. For the record, I am also pro-choice.
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Sam’s Chronicles piece on abortion was August 1996. It is online at Sam’s archived site.
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I don’t know who Bernie is, but he’s told F.C. Kelly to ask his close associates and friends, and he’s referenced Sam’s August 1996 article in Chronicles. I encourage everyone to read that piece, because if that’s a pro-abortion piece, I’ll eat my hat.
Sam was, like all the rest of us at Chronicles, a federalist on abortion. If there is ever to be real movement on the life issue in the United States, it will first need to be returned to the states. Sam’s analysis in the August 1996 issue is spot on: Republicans have refused to consider a federalist solution because it doesn’t provide them with a political advantage.
And in the process, millions more unborn children have been killed.
Scott P. Richert
Executive Editor
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
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Sam was indeed a federalist on abortion. He thought – as I do – that the issue should be left to the states. But he was also pro-choice, mostly because of demographic reasons. Please do read his August 1996 piece: http://www.samfrancis.net/archive.html
Sam writes of “what the pro-lifers call the ‘slaughter of the innocents.’” Notice he didn’t say “we” pro-lifers.
More importantly, Sam writes of the “new abolitionists who demand the national imposition of their own moral obsession.”
That being said, can someone provide a pro-life column or article that Sam wrote?
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I have read the August 1996 column--I was here at The Rockford Institute when we first published it.
Here’s a line Bernie doesn’t quote: “Despite the presence of a loud pro-abortion faction in the party and the uncertain simpering of such pro-lifers as Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition, there is little prospect that the [Republican] platform [of 1996] will differ from earlier ones with respect to this issue. This is unfortunate, since that position is neither a sound one for the restoration of the kind of constitutionalism Republicans should support nor an effective one for curtailing the practice of abortion.”
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Sorry Scott. Not sure how that qualifies as being pro-life. I also agree that it should be curtailed. I repeat my request of someone sending me a pro-life column or article written by Sam.
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Sam Francis also promoted sterilization for non-whites. I don’t recall whether he thought it should be mandatory or merely “encouraged”.
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First, Bernie says, “Ask any of his close associates and friends.” Then he references an article that we, some of his closest associates and friends, published, and he misrepresents the point of the piece.
Now, when confronted with a quotation which say that “This is unfortunate, since that position is . . . [not] an effective one for curtailing the practice of abortion,” he denies that it says that.
He can keep changing the grounds on which he wants to argue, and he can read his own pro-abort sympathies into the August 1996 piece, but it was most emphatically not a pro-abortion piece.
Scott P. Richert
Executive Editor
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
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Mr. Richert:
I’ve never read anything overtly pro-abortion by Francis, but I’ve never read anything overtly against abortion either - astonishing for a so-called conservative thinker. What am I missing here?
In the August 1996 essay he comes across as contemptuous of pro-lifers and indifferent to their aims.
Certainly anyone who can promote the sterilization of non-whites in order to secure the racial hegemony of whites is not far from a pro-abortion position.
Here’s my best guess: If Sam Francis didn’t like abortion, he liked non-whites even less, and therefore he ignored the contradiction and went about slaying the dragon he feared the most, the expanding non-white population in the United States.
Racialists like Francis who are pro-life (if they actually exist) need to come to terms with something. If abortion were stopped tomorrow, the white proportion of our population would shrink even faster. In general non-whites have higher rates of abortion than whites. Non-whites also have higher birth rates. That means simply that whites are much better at contracepting: restricting abortion will therefore accelerate the growth of the non-white population.
If you’re a pro-life white racialist, the only way out of this conundrum is mass deportations of non-whites. Needless to say, that kind of solution isn’t going to get you very far this side of Stormfrontland.
I surmise that this probably explains why Francis never (to my knowledge) spoke out against abortion: he knew that its availability was working in favor of his racialist agenda.
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“This is unfortunate, since that position is . . . [not] an effective one for curtailing the practice of abortion,”
Translation: “If the GOP is going to oppose abortion, they might as well do a better job of it.”
That’s not pro-life sentiment at all. And I don’t think it very honest, since it all-to-conveniently gives pro-aborts (like Francis?) the possibility of sanctuary.
Francis admits that, if the 14th Amendment means anything at all, it “denies states the power to deprive persons of life ... without due process and gives Congress the power to enforce these rights”. And yet he still ridicules pro-lifers for insisting on adherence to the Constitution.
A federalist “solution” is unlikely to prevent any abortions: traveling across the border to an abortion-friendly state will not be difficult.
And Francis has nothing but praise for what he calls “a diverse set of state laws ... perfectly in accordance with the way in which the Constitution intended the country to be governed.”
It all smacks of a carefully-constructed way to be pro-abortion without ticking off one’s pro-life friends.
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Sorry, Mr. Culbreath. If one wishes to be pro-abortion without ticking off one’s pro-life friends, the best possible way is the one pursued by the Republican Party today: keep pretending that you’re committed to a national solution, while never actually doing anything about it because you don’t want to lose abortion as an issue in national elections.
That, in fact, is precisely what Sam was criticizing in the August 1996 issue and in other articles in Chronicles. If you doubt it, read carefully all of the articles that you find at this link: http://www.google.com/search?ie=utf8&oe=utf8&q=site:samfrancis.net+abortion
On another matter, you’ve twice now claimed that Sam promoted sterilization for nonwhites. Either provide a quotation to back that up, or withdraw that claim.
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Sam Francis felt that the federal government should have no authority regarding abortion one way or the other, and that the culture war is about more than just abortion. In other words, the paleoconservative position on abortion.
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Mr. Richert,
Thank you for the challenge. I’ve found a reference from one of his American Renaissance articles.
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/prospects_for_r.php
“If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow – by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites ...”
“(2) Based on this racial consciousness, whites must counter the demographic threat they face from immigration and nonwhite fertility and whites’ own infertility. This means ... obligatory use of contraception by welfare recipients, and encouragement of its use among nonwhites ...”
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Mr. Culbreath, I obviously don’t agree with Sam’s recommendations there, but there are two things to note. You claimed that Sam “promoted sterilization for non-whites.” You’ve also suggested that he may have been pro-abortion.
Neither the quotations, nor anything else in the article you linked to, back up either of those claims. Promoting contraception is wrong, but it’s not the same as “promoting sterilization.” In the context of that article, Sam--not a man to mince words--could easily have suggested a policy of forced sterilization or abortion.
Yet he didn’t.
You haven’t backed up your claim.
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“Sam Francis felt that the federal government should have no authority regarding abortion one way or the other ...”
And yet he wrote that “the 14th Amendment ... denies states the power to deprive persons of life ... without due process and gives Congress the power to enforce these rights”. What is abortion but depriving persons of life without due process?
“and that the culture war is about more than just abortion.”
Of course it is. But abortion is the 800 lb gorilla of the culture wars. There was more wrong with Stalinist Russia than the gulags, but what kind of person ignores the gulags?
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Mr. Richert,
With all due respect, this is hair-splitting. Are you seriously suggesting that, even though Francis encouraged contraception among non-whites, he would have drawn the line at encouraging sterilization?
OK. I acknowledge the distinction, retract the sterilization claim, and apologize for relying too much on a faulty memory. Replace sterilization with contraception. His views are there for all to see and I have no more to say about it.
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Mr. Culbreath, do you really believe that, if Roe v. Wade were overturned, we wouldn’t be better off? Because that is the logic of the argument that you are making. If a federalist solution is no solution, then, in fact, the Supreme Court was right to rule in Roe v. Wade--they just made the wrong ruling.
But once you’ve gone down that road, then you’ve legitimized the use of central power on an issue that was traditionally reserved to the states. And even if the Supreme Court had overturned all state laws by outlawing abortion nationally rather than allowing it nationally, it would only have been a matter of time before that situation was reversed by Congress or by the Court itself.
That’s precisely the point that Sam was making in August 1996, and it’s the point we make every month in Chronicles.
If you really want to protect unborn children, return the matter to the states. No, not every state will restrict abortion. But some will, and that will be better than what we have today--and better than anything that’s likely to happen if we all keep drinking the Republican Party’s Kool-Aid and dreaming of the day when cynical politicians will actually keep their promises rather than refusing to win moral battles for fear of losing electoral ones.
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He also wrote, in that very article: “The reader may be spared the theory of the Incorporation Doctrine, but she does need to know that it is through thepolitically shaped opacity of the language of the 14th Amendment that the Court has succeeded in imposing the hoax of the Doctrine upon an unwary nation, and it was precisely through the device of ‘incorporation’ that the Court invented a ‘right to privacy’ in its 1965 Griswold decision and not long afterwards used that fabricated right to legalize abortion throughout the 50 states in Roe v. Wade in 1973.”
What part of this is so hard to understand? Was the country better off before Roe or not? If so, and if the Republican Party is using the promise of a national solution to abortion as nothing more than an electoral issue, why wouldn’t true pro-lifers be better off pursuing a federalist solution? We could save a lot more babies that way…
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Jeff Culbreath, I am against abortion, but it is neither possible nor desirable for the federal government to enforce a law banning it. Such a law could be enforced if it were fully up to the states, but no practical mind can endorse some kind of federal “abortion task force” attempting to get involved in state and local decisions. It would not work, it would waste our budget and it would be a disaster that turned public opinion against any pro-life position. If more pro-life groups understood this and attempted to act realistically instead of simply demanding that politicians condemn abortion if they want an endorsement, there is no doubt in my mind that Roe v. Wade would have been overturned by now. Unfortunately, many of the pro-life activists are not realists and do not have the penetrating political insight a man like Sam Francis had, so they are useless in getting Roe v. wade overturned.
As for your claim that a racialist position is somehow incompatible with an anti-abortion position, that is a serious misconception. A race is one’s extended family, one’s clan, one’s tribe, and I think abortion defeats the very purpose of race. As for the other races, I don’t consider child-killing to be an acceptable tactic to use against a foreign tribe or anyone else. I have helped a woman reconsider her decision to get an abortion by making an appeal to racial survival, so I don’t see where you’re coming from with this supposed contradiction.
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We have unsubstantiated hearsay testimony from Bernie on the one hand and Mr. Culbreath, who cannot distinguish contraception from sterilization, on the other. Methinks Mr. Richert easily has the better of it thus far.
By the way, Mr. Culbreath, I will galdly concede that abortion is the most evil practice alive in America today (or ever, for that matter); but the 800 lb gorilla in the cultura wars is not Roe, but Brown, which indeed made Roe possible and which proved to be the vanguard of culture revolution. In retrospect, this should not be hard to understand, though of course the careful taboos we honor-themselves a legacy of the culture war-sometimes render clear vision in this area difficult.
I’d wager you a man alarmed by the relentless pounding the social fabric has taken these last fifty years. Well and good, but Same Francis’ racialism is nearer to your interests than your dismissive references indicate.
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Speaking of Stalinists, Sam (in Chronicles, in 1993) placed “abortionists” between “civil liberties Stalinists” and “common criminals”:
“The whole point of the U.S. Constitution as it was originally written and adopted was to enable the people of what was then one of the world’s largest and most diverse countries to govern themselves without coming under the centralized dominance of a particular interest, faction, or region. Throughout American history, it has been that very feature of the Constitution that has so profoundly offended and alarmed the legions of those armed with a Better Idea—High Federalists, abolitionists, Social Darwinists of the Gilded Era, Wilsonian apostles of the New Freedom, Rooseveltian peddlers of the New Deal, New Frontiersmen, Great Society social engineers, lunch counter liberators, civil liberties Stalinists, abortionists, common criminals, and overeducated freethinkers who feel oppressed because someone could read the Ten Commandments on the school bulletin board.”
His problem with ideological “pro-lifers” was that they reflect and contribute to the “Marxist false consciousness” of the Religious Right, and he recognized the Religious Right as “the current incarnation of the on-going Middle American Revolution . . . “ (Chronicles, Dec. 1994). As part of the MAR, the Religious Right is primarily (and justly) motivated by “the perception that the white middle-class core of American society and culture was being evicted from its historic position of cultural and political dominance"—the very dominance that kept abortion illegal and rare.
But he also believed that the Religious Right was flawed, because religious commitments alone are not enough to “codify the objective interests and needs of [the Middle American socio-political class].” The federalism of the Founders is necessary, given our diverse society, to sustain the generally Christian culture of America—a culture that rejects, among other things, abortion. Such federalism is not derived from religion, but from political thought that flows out of a concrete tradition. But the Religious Right/pro-lifers’ ignorance of the American/English political tradition (evidenced by their insistence on the Human Life Amendment) undercuts the very culture that supports their faith and their commitment to the sanctity of life. That ignorance allows them to appeal to the 14th Amendment on behalf of the unborn when, in fact, the 14th Amendment hurts the unborn by giving power to the Metropole, which has consistently opposed and degraded Christian culture and morality, and has promoted, in its place, a mass-culture of death.
In short, Sam’s criticisms of the Pro-Life Movement and the Religious Right were a far cry from praise for abortion or “choice.” Sam simply wanted Middle American Christians to realize that they could never restore their culture by feeding the Beast that was and is destroying it. But to claim that Sam was “pro-sterilization” and “pro-choice” would be to claim that Sam opposed the very Middle American morality he was courageously fighting for. His short-sightedness in 1995 on contraception can be attributed, in part, to the fact that he viewed that Middle American morality as being largely Protestant, and Protestantism (for the last 75 years, sadly) has not opposed contraception. Yet the federalism Sam defended would allow traditional Catholics and/or Protestants to ban contraceptives (as well as abortion and “gay marriage") in their localities.
Aaron D. Wolf
Associate Editor
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
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“In the August 1996 essay he comes across as contemptuous of pro-lifers and indifferent to their aims.” I share the former sentiment, though not the latter. Many pro-lifers think they can end all abortions with noble speech-making, and pro-life groups have no political vision beyond compelling political whores into noble speech-making about abortion. With all their money and influence, you’d think they could get Roe v. Wade overturned by now. Instead they insist on saying they can stop all abortions, just as the liberals can end all war, poverty, bigotry, and violence against women. It doesn’t occur to them that establishing some kind of federal “abortion task force” would be neither desirable nor possible, unlike restricting or banning abortion at the state and/or local level. While I absolutely loathe abortion and consider it a particularly repulsive evil, I have lost patience with many of these pro-life world-savers who might actually make a difference if they had even half the realistic and penetrating political vision of a man like Sam Francis.
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“imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites” is anti-Christian and anti-"Libertarian" as well - although, just like Marxists, Libertarians can rationalise just about any hypocrisy and any expedient atrocity if they’re really determined. As Whittaker Chambers wrote in National Review (long before NR became a neocon conventicle), in his review of one of Ayn Randers’ evil and unreadable libertarian screeds, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding ‘to a gas chamber, go!’”
Libertarians and their growing influence on the Right are beginning to alarm me. As Jefferson said of another impending horror, “I hear a firebell in the night.”
I can see, more and more, that in the long run there can be absolutely no conciliation between Libertarianism and Christianity. Libertarianism smacks of a kind of Christian heresy - very much like Marxism, it’s a Utopian creed whose aspirations are very close to those of Christianity, but its disregard of the superordination of Original Sin over Humans means that it’s an ultimately evil, accursed creed which will leave more destruction in its wake than most American conservatives have yet been willing to imagine.
It’s time to start thinking more about this unpleasant problem which for the moment is latent in Libertariansim. The Nazis seemed to make a lot of sense too, before they achieved power.
Hurl all the tomatos you want. Someone has to start raising these unpleasant questions.
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I am an anonymous Internet poster so take it for what it is worth. But I used to speak with Sam about once a month on the phone. We had dinner about once a month as well from roughly 1998-2002 (when I moved from the DC area).
Abortion was not a big issue for Sam. He said many times he supported it for demographic reasons. Many (though certainly not all) paleocons are against it so he didn’t make a big deal out of the issue.
Sam never wrote a pro-life column or article in his life. Strange for a man who didn’t mince words, eh? People should read the 8/96 Chronicles piece as well as the American Renaissance speech and judge for themselves. Final question: would a man who knew about the link between IQ and civilization and who was not exactly against eugenics really be a pro-lifer in the traditional sense?
Jared Taylor was Sam’s best friend. He was also tight with Paul Gottfried, Peter Brimelow, Sam Dickson and Gordon Baum. These men can best tell you his views on abortion. In fact, Prof. Gottfried has posted on this site before. Perhaps he can shed some light on Sam’s position on abortion.
The Sam Francis I knew was not pro-life and did not consider himself pro-life.
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I am an anonymous Internet poster so take it for what it is worth. But I used to speak with Sam about once a month on the phone. We had dinner about once a month as well from roughly 1998-2002 (when I moved from the DC area). Abortion was not a big issue for Sam. He said many times he supported it for demographic reasons. Many (though certainly not all) paleocons are against it so he didn’t make a big deal out of the issue. Sam never wrote a pro-life column or article in his life. Strange for a man who didn’t mince words, eh? People should read the 8/96 Chronicles piece as well as the American Renaissance speech and judge for themselves. Final question: would a man who knew about the link between IQ and civilization and who was not exactly against eugenics really be a pro-lifer in the traditional sense?
Jared Taylor was Sam’s best friend. He was also tight with Paul Gottfried, Peter Brimelow, Sam Dickson and Gordon Baum. These men can best tell you his views on abortion. In fact, Prof. Gottfried has posted on this site before. Perhaps he can shed some light on Sam’s position on abortion. The Sam Francis I knew was not pro-life and did not consider himself pro-life.
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Paul Gottfried was a close friend of Sam’s. Perhaps he can shed some light on this subject. The Sam I knew was not pro-life nor did he consider himself pro-life.
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My, my, what an interesting and revealing set of comments on this article reviewing and praising Sam Francis’s life’s works.
Since I first learned of it, I have asserted that Francis’s admiration for the Anglo-Saxon Puritans was the source for the unease with which I had read even much of what I most agreed from his pen. As I have said in comments to other articles on this site, the Anglo-Saxon Puritans were the most self-righteously murderous and culturally destructive spawns of the Reformation; they also were quintesential Judaizers.
It seems to me that putting the two together should make it obvious to everyone that any culture that was born of the Anglo-Saxon Puritans (and Yankee culture most assuredly was) would move inexorably toward its ethos: a theologically and culturally philoSemitic, permanently imperialist, revolutionary force trampling down virtually all residuals of Western Christendom.
Francis was correct in most of how he saw Lincoln and the original Republican Party (America’s original Jacobins with control of government, I assert), but he failed to understand that in promoting much of the Puritan revolution (often from a type of common man’s desire to stick it to the landed gentry, which would make him far more like Parson Brownlow and WT Sherman in their hatred of the South’s gentry than in the vast, vast majority of antebellum Southerners) he was promoting that which was indispensable to the very rise of Lincoln and the original Republicans that he saw as major blow from which the American Republic has never, and perhaps can never, recover.
Sam Francis’s blind spot was a major one, for those who come to see the English Puritans their fathers, spiritually and intellectually and culturally and politically, will, however slowly, begin to think and then act just like those they see as their fathers.
When the Union won the War Between the States, the myths and identities of New England and, to a lesser extent of Quaker (therefore anti-Trinitarian) PA, became the mandarin myths and identities of a new centralized nation. The new government and Yankee schoolmarms worked tirelessly to force the children of both Scots-Irish Southerners and Catholic immigrants to see themselves as having Puritan fathers. Once those children accpetd such, they would serve the basic goals of that culture.
Sam Francis saw many things, but he failed to see the one key thing that rendered the bulk of his work impotent, not merely in terms of popular politics but also in terms of the philosophical future.
Of course, Mike Jones’s speech at the Francis memorial (which is online at the Culture Wars site) noted that he had converted to the Catholic Church before sying. That might mean that he had come to undertsand, but it might mean nothing of the sort. The vast majority of Catholics in America are cultural Yankee WASPs, regardless of their surnames or church membership.
And it is no mistake that the Christ-hating SPLC and the Christ-hating ADL both work tirelessly to keep it that way.
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Speaking of Stalinists, Sam (in Chronicles, in 1993) placed “abortionists” between “civil liberties Stalinists” and “common criminals”:
“The whole point of the U.S. Constitution as it was originally written and adopted was to enable the people of what was then one of the world’s largest and most diverse countries to govern themselves without coming under the centralized dominance of a particular interest, faction, or region. Throughout American history, it has been that very feature of the Constitution that has so profoundly offended and alarmed the legions of those armed with a Better Idea—High Federalists, abolitionists, Social Darwinists of the Gilded Era, Wilsonian apostles of the New Freedom, Rooseveltian peddlers of the New Deal, New Frontiersmen, Great Society social engineers, lunch counter liberators, civil liberties Stalinists, abortionists, common criminals, and overeducated freethinkers who feel oppressed because someone could read the Ten Commandments on the school bulletin board.”
His problem with ideological “pro-lifers” was that they reflect and contribute to the “Marxist false consciousness” of the Religious Right, and he recognized the Religious Right as “the current incarnation of the on-going Middle American Revolution . . . “ (Chronicles, Dec. 1994). As part of the MAR, the Religious Right is primarily (and justly) motivated by “the perception that the white middle-class core of American society and culture was being evicted from its historic position of cultural and political dominance"—the very dominance that kept abortion illegal and rare.
But he also believed that the Religious Right was flawed, because religious commitments alone are not enough to “codify the objective interests and needs of [the Middle American socio-political class].” The federalism of the Founders is necessary, given our diverse society, to sustain the generally Christian culture of America—a culture that rejects, among other things, abortion. Such federalism is not derived from religion, but from political thought that flows out of a concrete tradition. But the Religious Right/pro-lifers’ ignorance of the American/English political tradition (evidenced by their insistence on the Human Life Amendment) undercuts the very culture that supports their faith and their commitment to the sanctity of life. That ignorance allows them to appeal to the 14th Amendment on behalf of the unborn when, in fact, the 14th Amendment hurts the unborn by giving power to the Metropole, which has consistently opposed and degraded Christian culture and morality, and has promoted, in its place, a mass-culture of death.
In short, Sam’s criticisms of the Pro-Life Movement and the Religious Right were a far cry from praise for abortion or “choice.” Sam simply wanted Middle American Christians to realize that they could never restore their culture by feeding the Beast that was and is destroying it. But to claim that Sam was “pro-sterilization” and “pro-choice” would be to claim that Sam opposed the very Middle American morality he was courageously fighting for. His short-sightedness in 1995 on contraception can be attributed, in part, to the fact that he viewed that Middle American morality as being largely Protestant, and Protestantism (for the last 75 years, sadly) has not opposed contraception. Yet the federalism Sam defended would allow traditional Catholics and/or Protestants to ban contraceptives (as well as abortion and “gay marriage") in their localities.
Aaron D. Wolf
Associate Editor
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
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Speaking of Stalinists, Sam (in Chronicles, in 1993) placed “abortionists” between “civil liberties Stalinists” and “common criminals”:
“The whole point of the U.S. Constitution as it was originally written and adopted was to enable the people of what was then one of the world’s largest and most diverse countries to govern themselves without coming under the centralized dominance of a particular interest, faction, or region. Throughout American history, it has been that very feature of the Constitution that has so profoundly offended and alarmed the legions of those armed with a Better Idea—High Federalists, abolitionists, Social Darwinists of the Gilded Era, Wilsonian apostles of the New Freedom, Rooseveltian peddlers of the New Deal, New Frontiersmen, Great Society social engineers, lunch counter liberators, civil liberties Stalinists, abortionists, common criminals, and overeducated freethinkers who feel oppressed because someone could read the Ten Commandments on the school bulletin board.”
His problem with ideological “pro-lifers” was that they reflect and contribute to the “Marxist false consciousness” of the Religious Right, and he recognized the Religious Right as “the current incarnation of the on-going Middle American Revolution . . . “ (Chronicles, Dec. 1994). As part of the MAR, the Religious Right is primarily (and justly) motivated by “the perception that the white middle-class core of American society and culture was being evicted from its historic position of cultural and political dominance"—the very dominance that kept abortion illegal and rare.
But he also believed that the Religious Right was flawed, because religious commitments alone are not enough to “codify the objective interests and needs of [the Middle American socio-political class].” The federalism of the Founders is necessary, given our diverse society, to sustain the generally Christian culture of America—a culture that rejects, among other things, abortion. Such federalism is not derived from religion, but from political thought that flows out of a concrete tradition. But the Religious Right/pro-lifers’ ignorance of the American/English political tradition (evidenced by their insistence on the Human Life Amendment) undercuts the very culture that supports their faith and their commitment to the sanctity of life. That ignorance allows them to appeal to the 14th Amendment on behalf of the unborn when, in fact, the 14th Amendment hurts the unborn by giving power to the Metropole, which has consistently opposed and degraded Christian culture and morality, and has promoted, in its place, a mass-culture of death.
In short, Sam’s criticisms of the Pro-Life Movement and the Religious Right were a far cry from praise for abortion or “choice.” Sam simply wanted Middle American Christians to realize that they could never restore their culture by feeding the Beast that was and is destroying it. But to claim that Sam was “pro-sterilization” and “pro-choice” would be to claim that Sam opposed the very Middle American morality he was courageously fighting for. His short-sightedness in 1995 on contraception can be attributed, in part, to the fact that he viewed that Middle American morality as being largely Protestant, and Protestantism (for the last 75 years, sadly) has not opposed contraception. Yet the federalism Sam defended would allow traditional Catholics and/or Protestants to ban contraceptives (as well as abortion and “gay marriage") in their localities.
Aaron D. Wolf
Associate Editor
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
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I am an anonymous Internet poster so take it for what it is worth. But I used to speak with Sam about once a month on the phone. We had dinner about once a month as well from roughly 1998-2002. Abortion was not a big issue for Sam. He said many times he supported it for demographic reasons. Many (though certainly not all) paleocons are against it so he didn’t make a big deal out of the issue. Sam never wrote a pro-life column or article in his life. Strange for a man who didn’t mince words, eh? People should read the 8/96 Chronicles piece as well as the American Renaissance speech and judge for themselves. Final question: would a man who knew about the link between IQ and civilization and who was not exactly against eugenics really be a pro-lifer in the traditional sense?
Jared Taylor was Sam’s best friend. He was also tight with Paul Gottfried, Peter Brimelow, Sam Dickson and Gordon Baum. These men can best tell you his views on abortion. In fact, Prof. Gottfried has posted on this site before. Perhaps he can shed some light on Sam’s position on abortion. The Sam Francis I knew was not pro-life and did not consider himself pro-life.
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Shortly before he died, I had discovered the Slate debate between Steve Sailer and Steve Levitt’s coauthor on abortion cut-crime (This is before freakanomics came out) and I e-mailed it to Sam Francis and asked what he thought.
He told me that regardless of the merits of the study, it was clear that blacks disprportionately commit crimes and have abortions so that it would logically reduce crime.
He also made some comment about how pro-lifers should think about what this country would like demographically were it not for Roe vs. Wade.
Now I’m sure you can dissect this to say he did not explicitly support legalized abortion, but I find it hard to believe that you can think he was pro life in light of that.
I can also attest that a number of his close friends (some of whom have written for this site) had told me he was not pro life.
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Face it, this is white supremacism.
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GIBBERISH and 1 issue nay sayers are sick....out of SAM’S many ideasss sam projected, you foozebag elitists elect to choose abortion as your vomitorium as a means to YOUR end.....WHO AEE you jackoffs behind the mask, the American Medical Association Prostitutes ??
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cool
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