Van Prinsterer on National Life

Kinists are often taken to task on the basis of our claim that there is a national life (and by extension a racial life), and not merely a tribal life. While it is true that the tribal social organization, being built immediately and directly out of near and intermediate relations is the primary component, commerce and interchange between tribes, based on shared characteristics, commonalities of law, unities of custom, among other traits, aggregate to bring into being a larger, more expansive existence. In the passage below from Gillaume Groen van Prinsterer, taken from his important treatise Lectures on Unbelief and Revolution, we find an eloquent expression of this conception:

Where several states form a close union as a result of origin,location and intercourse, unity of development cannot be absent. e.g. in Greece. What differences between cities and tribes, what antagonism between Dorians and Ionians! What contrast between Athens and Sparta! Yet there was a Greek nationality; and it would be possible to show that those diverse tribes, landscapes and localities all contributed — not just by imitating each other but also through their own proper development — to the progress, stagnation and decline of the national life.

And would there not likewise, after the fall of the Roman Empire, have been unity and coherence among the European states, a European nationality? There was unity of origin (through the melting or dwelling together of the barbarians with the inhabitants of the Roman domains); unity of development and vicissitudes (resistance to the continual migrations of nomadic peoples; feudalism; crusades; rise of the towns; recovery of royal power); unity of learning and culture (chivalry; the influence of Antiquity; the universal use of Latin); unity of religion (with respect to it, common participation in every change).

Especially the last three centuries. Thus Heeren is right in calling his work a History of Europe’s Political System and Political Association (preface, v; p. 18). (general criterion) Visible everywhere is the intermeshing or crossing of interests; shared turbulance and strife; the parallel development of learning, of culture; the diffusion of the same principles and ideas; even the blurring of the separate nationalities, so that Sterne compares them to worn-off coins. On what, then, would the hypothesis rest that the revolutionary current was proper well-nigh exclusively to France?

History confirms this reasoning.

Kinism is not an ideology, it is a life force arising out of the memory and investigation of the neglected traditions of our fathers, those pre-modern traditions that more closely resembled the mutual understandings of the ancient Western church. As such, there is a diversity of views on what degree of consanguinity and cultural resemblance constitutes an equal yoking of partners, and the conditions for stable, peaceable national existence. What is clear is that there has occurred in the geopolitical entity referred to as the United States a specifically national disintegration that violates any reasonable understanding of these conditions, and the result has not been the development of a post-national life, but strife, enmity, and mutual suspicion arising out of the violation of natural barriers, accumulated over ages. While it is also clear that national life is something that is in the eye of the beholder, that is precisely the point, and why Kinism insists on the principles of self-determination and voluntary association, incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, dedicated to the posterity of the people, and not the involuntary social engineering of governments and economic elites.

A. Kuyper on the “Advance” of Humanity through Racial Intermingling

It is becoming undeniable, through the tireless research of Kinists in the area of the orthodox doctrine of nations, that the scions of the Reformed Faith, a group encompassing all its significant pre-modern exponents, viewed nationality as rooted in natality, and as both the natural and scriptural basis of human polity. One such exponent, Abraham Kuyper, who was a major influence on the Theonomic developments within orthodox Calvinism leading up to Rushdoony, is below quoted in a passage bearing remarkable similarity to Kinist writings on the subject. His subsequent excursions from this solid ground form the basis of a deviation that reflects the gradual loss of Calvinist orthodoxy in the area of the doctrine of nations and the basis of polity. As our research progresses its effect will inexorably be the pressing upon modernist and post-modernist Calvinism (denying the reality of race, and the beneficial effect of racial unity and exclusion, God-ordained role in the redemptive-historical drama) of a stark dilemma: abandon the doctrinal/theological heritage that they claim as their possession, and declare themselves progenitors of a rootless and autonomous dogma of secular socio-political faith, or embrace the doctrine of nations that Kinism is, gradually, proving is the immemorial doctrine of the Christian church.

The quote below is taken from Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism -Six Stone Lectures: Calvinism in History (pps. 29-30 [65-66 in the PDF pagination]):

In China it can be asserted with equal right that Confucianism has produced a form of its own for life in a given circle and with the Mongolian race that form of life rests upon a theory of its own. But what has China done for humanity in general, and for the steady development of our race? Even so far as the waters of its life were clear, they formed nothing but an isolated lake. Almost the same remark applies to the high development which was once the boast of India and to the state of things in Mexico and Peru in the days of Montezuma and the Incas. In all these regions the people attained a high degree of development, but stopped there and, remaining isolated, in no way proved a benefit to humanity at large. This applies more strongly still to the life of the colored races on the coast and in the interior of Africa; a far lower form of existence reminding us not even of a lake but rather of pools and marshes. There is but one worldstream, broad and fresh, which from the beginning bore the promise of the future ; this stream had its rise in Middle-Asia and the Levant, and has steadily continued its course from East to West. From Western Europe it has passed on to your Eastern States and from thence to California. The sources of this stream of development are found in Babylon and in the valley of the Nile. From thence it flowed on to Greece. From Greece it passed on to the Roman Empire. From the Romanic nations it continued its way to the North-western parts of Europe, and so from Holland and England it reached at length your continent. At present that stream is at a standstill. Its Western course through China and Japan is impeded, meanwhile no one can tell what forces for the future may yet lie slumbering in the Slavic races which have thus far failed of progress. But while this secret of the future is still veiled in mystery, the course of this world-stream from East to West can be denied by none; and therefore I am justified in saying: that Paganism, Islamism and Romanism are the three successive formations which this development had reached, when its further direction passed over into the hands of Calvinism; and that Calvinism in turn is now denied this leading influence by Modernism, the daughter of the French Revolution.

And further… from pps. 30-31 [68-69 in PDF pagination]:

From the high-lands of Asia our human race came down in groups, and these in turn have been divided into races and nations; and in entire conformity to the prophetic blessing of Noah the children of Shem and of Japheth have been the sole bearers of the development of the race. No impulse for any higher life has ever gone forth from the third group.

Thus far, the historic doctrine is established, that national existence is properly based in natality, and that polity is established on this ground. This is the ancient and venerable doctrine. But here, Kuyper, like many immediate pre-moderns, goes astray, and, following the siren of eugenics, asserts that inter-mixture of blood is the harbinger of progress, and not of decline. Kuyper’s objection, then, is not to tribal, or racial, intermingling, but, like a true eugenics advocate, Kuyper only approves of the right blood to inter-mingle. The logical conclusion of the doctrine is one that lies unstated in Kuyper’s exposition, but is undoubtedly the inevitable conclusion. While he clings to the notion that this inter-mixture of blood brings in the beneficent characteristics of foreign types, he neglects to factor this principle in the the very decline (via modernism’s caricature of Calvinsm) that he decries. We then, after establishing the historic doctrine, enter realms of the specious with the importation of modern follies:

(Page 31 [68])

Thus on the one hand there are groups which have dominated exclusively their own inherent forces and on the other hand groups which by commingling have crossed their traits with those of other tribes, so having attained a higher perfection. It is noteworthy that the process of human development steadily proceeds with those groups whose historic characteristic is not isolation but the commingling of blood. On the whole the Mongolian race has held itself apart, and in its isolation has bestowed no benefits upon
our race at large. Behind the Himalayas a similar life secluded itself, and hence failed to impart any permanent impulse to the outside world. Even in Europe we find that with the Scandinavians and Slavs there was hardly any intermingling of blood, and, consequently having failed to develop a richer type, they have taken little part in the general development of human life.

This, of course, is nonsense, given the evidence we have of advanced navigation, metallurgical arts, mythology, and other signs of high civilization from the Scandinavian “race”. Kuyper here seems to conflate the imperial/progressive/gnostic impulse with the “advance of humanity,” and in doing so confuses materiality for spiritual and cultural development, knowledge for being. The relative isolation of the Mongolian, and the infusion of its developments into classical Chinese culture through the dominance of its elites, while failing to “advance humanity,” nevertheless attained a very high level -a level in comparison to which the modern Western malaise would appear to be a decline, on the basis of its refinements in the arts, in political character, in nobility. Further, Kuyper’s views fail to take into consideration contemporary (to him) advances in historical analysis, made by scholars such as Tenney Frank, that mark the decline of Greek and Roman culture to their respective imperial periods, during which the importation of foreign stock as domestic slaves, and inter-mixture with them, immediately preceded the historical symptoms of cultural decline and eventual dissolution. 

The sole egress from this dichotomy is the frank denial of decline, at which point the doctrine of advancement through commingled blood is shown to be hollow, and dependent on a false view of human “progress” that is equally flawed. In this Rushdoony departed from the view of his intellectual mentor, and departed from a novel “orthodoxy” that had secreted within it several of the presuppositions of the dogmas it would deny: namely those of the French Revolution, and the boon wrought by the unqualified “brotherhood” of man. Kuyper’s goal in these lectures is to free Calvinism of the guilt for, and the taint of, the French Revolution and its ideals. In doing so, he uses intellectual materials tainted by this very disorder, and undermines his case in a way that Van Prinsterer, before him, had not done.

 

The Secret of Oz? Value from Nothing.

So the Secret of OZ is money from nothing? Ever heard the term “not worth a Continental”? Supporters of value-from-nothing monetary schemes like Alex Jones and Bill Still can’t answer the obvious query: how do you get it into circulation? Their answer? Price and wage controls, and barrels of Continentals on street corners, free for the taking. This is supposedly an improvement on the current scheme: the issuance of credit by banks based on loans from the government. The U.S. monetary problem does not orginate in the means of issuance of currency, but in the creation of currency via Federal debt and in the fractional reserve regulations on banks that permit them to create “value” ex nihilo through the issuance of credit, which creates a systemic liquidity problem by creating more debt than can be repaid, thereby putting pressure on quantitative controls and concentrating money in banks, rather than in productive enterprises.

If the government spends money into circulation, then only rising government expenditures can inject enough liquidity into the economy. Result? A gargantuan state, and the concomitant statism. If you place it on street corners in barrels, you will require an enormous increase of government control over the economy (i.e. the central planning that libertarians say they oppose) needed to stifle spiraling inflation. Jones verbally opposes the “Weimar Republic” inflationary scheme of the Federal Reserves monetization, and yet then supports a monetary policy as a solution which proposes to end parity to metals altogether and simply issue currency “directly to the people.” And how is this supposed to cure inflation, pray tell? What it accomplishes is the sans-culottes dream of taking fake wealth from the banks and redistributing it to “the people.” But we knew that this is what Jones’s populism would eventually amount to: “Money for nothing and your kicks for free.” Money as mere symbol does not work. Money must have a function, that is, be valuable in and of itself. But this in itself shed light on the essential problems with monetary systems in general, that is, systems of abstraction by which all products are made symbolically universally fungible: the symbol detaches from the substance of the value that underlies it. When it does, it functions merely as scrip, and you have the essence of socialism without the name. The symbolic nature of money detached from any substantive value is required for the industrial capitalist economy, based as it is on abstract interchangeability, and it necessitates the eventual adoption of creatio ex nihilo of value to support its expansionist telos. The term capitalism was created to indicate a system in which “the few” who own the means of production, hire the many, who work for wages in an ever expanding economy based on consumption -an economy that enriches the few and eventually impoverishes the many. This is a very different idea from the market economy, in which all men (ideally) become not sellers of labor or skills on a market of buyers, but producers of value, for themselves and their families -owners of the means of production, reapers of profit.

So, with this brief thoguht exercise, we can easily see that Social Credit monetary policy (which is precisely what the Secret of OZ suggests we adopt) is either an inflationary spiral or a statist utopia. It is not a wonder that all Fascist economies (such as Nazi Germany and Italy under Mussollini) eventually adopt this policy, since they are statist in nature. And neither statism nor destructive inflation is God’s plan for money, which is gold and silver.

Alternative Right’s Saigo Appealing to the Neutral Angels of Our Natures

Apparently, Hanna Saigo at Alternative Right (a site we normally recommend) thinks that brushing up against White Nationalism is a bad thing. Her comments are made in the context of Glenn Beck’s craven obeissance to “conservative” King clan member, Alveda, the “civil rights” leader’s niece. To her credit, Saigo disapprovingly quotes an ABC News recap of King’s comments at the recent neocon Restoring Something Rally in which King disparages “white privilege,”

On the 47th anniversary of her uncle’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, politician and activist Alveda King has joined conservative commentator Glenn Beck at the same spot to bring people together in paying tribute to America’s soldiers and “restoring honor” to America…

While speaking in front of tens of thousands today in DC, King said that she hopes that white privilege will become human privilege and that America will soon repent of the sin of racism and return itself to honor.

Same victimhood, different day. King is regularly on display in Beck’s rhetoric as a self-identified “conservative.” Convervative King, liberal King, the culture of grievance is the same. At least she didn’t call for genocide, as other black “intellectual” leaders have done. Beck was not alone in his capitulation to the liberal view of the “sins” of our racist past. Neocon Sarah Palin (whose coup against the Tea Party is undoubtedly covertly underwritten by the GOP) called slavery our (meaning white people’s) “greatest national shame.”  So much for historical insight. But then again, no one would accuse Palin of the sin of intellectual nuance.

But later in Saigo’s piece, in describing what Beck “could” have said short of damaging his position with Fox, we are surprised to find enumerated the platitudes of race “neutrality.” Has that really become the “paleoconservative” or “Old Right” position on the matter? To quote Saigo, what Beck could have utilized without jeopardy are,

“...constitutional, legal and moral arguments against affirmative action, enforced diversity and third world immigration which don’t brush up against white nationalism…”

So, white Nationalism throws off such a stench that one must not even brush up against it. Black grievance-mongering and explicit racial politics are, on the other hand, rose water in which we may douse ourselves without olfactory offense.Why is it that the case for “Middle America” must always be a passive case (non-discrimination) and the positive, pro-white case nugatory? It’s because “neutrality” isn’t really neutral. Rather, it has already capitulated to every demand of every petty black race demagogue to have been granted by God the inalienable right to a microphone, teleprompter, and cable coverage. Funny thing about racial pressuppositions, they tend to start you out on one side or the other of that imaginary neutrality line. And Beck’s already far to the left of it.

In Saigo’s advice to Beck, we are presented with the false dilemma of influence verus truth, and the accommodationist stance presented as, invariably, the price of influence. But politics really isn’t “a game of inches,” as Saigo says. The right hasn’t been moved to the right in decades. They aren’t interested in being moved to the right. We have become a country amalgamated by force out of largely intractable factions. When electoral politics produces representatives who cease being representative, then new alignments must be sought, and the nation’s founders made provision for just such an eventuality.The credulous “game of inches” is the game in the front of the house, the sucker’s game. The real action is in the back of the house, where the stakes are higher. Such a game assumes there is real debate taking place on issues that are, as yet, undecided. It is this very assumption that creates the illusion of political efficacy, since all questions of vital importance were decided long ago by other means than a ballot. But assuming that political action still matters (a very debatable premise) then we might offer that when perpetual numerical minority means that desired outcomes of the legislative process are politically infeasible, a people has a right to seek redress. This goes to the heart of our fabled national unity, a fiction which uses the theater of political opposition to hold instinctive enemies in suspension, vying for a social domination that will never arrive. 

For Middle America, racial politics is a game played by your opponents rules, a zero sum game, until you finally decide it’s rigged. And when that day of realization comes, you have to determine if you, yourself, will take the dias you have been afforded by careful compromise, and immolate yourself on it for something higher, something greater. The right to lead, perhaps? That something greater is not the “right wing” desideratum of neutrality. Yockey would have said that the death of neutrality is the beginning of politics proper. Everything else is positioning for the carrion of ideals. Beck should know this, and Saigo certainly does.

Pastor Brian Schwertley Bearing False Witness Against Kinism (Again)

One would think that some cursory familiarity with an opponent’s position would be a prerequisite to condemning it as “heresy,” an actionable offense under most denominational by-laws and standards. Pastor Brian Schwertley seems neither to have read the extant material on Kinism, as it has been promulgated at this and other prominent websites, nor to have interacted with any leading Kinists, in order to determine whether, indeed, he’s got it figured aright. Straw man arguments are far more appealing, as they do not require the effort of making a cogent case against an actual, extant position. Neither has “pastor” Schwertley, as Matthew 18 requires,  contacted any prominent Kinist that I am aware of in an attempt to have his questions answered, along with those of other “concerned” elders, nor has he presented a valid scriptural case that Christian ethno-nationalism and agrarianism are heretical positions. His attacks against the “sin” of racism do not come near addressing the case made by Kinism for the biblical supportability of ethno-nationalism as a valid system of human polity. Further, Schwertley reduces Kinism to a single dimension, when, in fact, it is an entire worldview,  addressing issues in the fields of sociology, economics, psychology, and church doctrine. His arrant reductionism amount merely to misrepresentation. Preaching to the choir about that ol’ debbil “racism” is certainly a blast when you have no opponent in the debate. It is our hope at the Kinist Institute that Mr. Schwertley continues to bring attention to our long-overdue and much-belated efforts to reverse the marginalization of whites, for the very reason of their whiteness, an active and present form of racism that the good pastor seems to care little about. We have our doubts whether the good minister has the intellectual or biblical tools to effectively refute the Kinist apologetic, and therefore, to remain relevant to his curious congregation, must resort to addressing beliefs that Kinists don’t hold -such as race factors that affect soteriology, or our so-called “hatred” for those of another color (as though the complex and multi-dimensional phenomena of race and ethnicity reduce to pigmentation of the epithelial tissues).

As a result of this, Mr. Schwertley is guilty of bearing false witness, and should be called to account by his congregation and his Presbytery. We pray imprecatory prayers against him that this end may come to pass.