John Zmirak

July 01, 2008

Well, it’s fun to be on a Web site where people take offense when I compare white racialists to a group as appalling as the neocons—in talking about the dangers of cozying up to “allies” who don’t share the fundamental moral principles of Christian conservatives. Evan McClaren rightly points out the intolerance which neocons with power show toward dissenters to their Right. (Paul Gottfried regularly reminds us how they positively suck up to the Left at the slightest excuse—see Christopher Hitchens.) He suggests that white nationalists would never act this way toward conservatives… because they are too “highly educated, civil, and civilized.”

Okay, just to be fair I won’t take as representative the vicious quality of the comments that appear on this site (though they are now thankfully filtered) every time the mildest criticism of white racialists appears. For instance, I posted a piece praising the Web site VDare to the skies, and noted in passing that there were three writers on the site (one of them a white nationalist) “with whom I disagree.” That’s all I said. This provoked a torrent of rage, accusations of “cowardice,” and the targeting of this site by a neo-Nazi Web site. On that site itself, one of the writers opined that he hoped that “Zmirak and his progeny find their faces crushed by the kike boot.” When I wrote another piece addressing racialism, an even bigger storm erupted—complete with nasty, anti-Semitic attacks on Paul Gottfried, until the site had to adopt its current policy of culling comments.

Of course, I’d never attribute to the courteous and thoughtful Mr. Taylor behavior of this sort. No doubt many of his colleagues are also gentlemen. But are we really to believe that if they came to control our splinter of the conservative movement (as the neos took over the creaky “mainstream” institutions) that they would be any more tolerant than the Pods, Frums, and Kristols?

The neocons were polite and deferential at first as well. They wrote detailed, even wonkish analyses of the failures of liberal social policy that read a lot like… Mr. Taylor’s well crafted piece at VDare. They played by the rules, pulled up their socks, and relentlessly promoted each other at the expense of real conservatives. That’s how you take over a movement from the inside. The ruthlessness and intolerance came later, a perk of power.

I don’t think white nats are any more immune to this temptation than Trots.

Speaking of neos and nats, David Frum wrote today in the NY Times about the role of racialism and religion in the birth of the American Right. For once, he seems to be on point—and he manages to make it through the whole review without libeling anybody.