The populist . . . and the commissar
BY DR. TOMISLAV SUNIC, PH.D.
WITHOUT QUESTION “JOE SIXPACK,” as the symbol of the general public in the West, has little or no sympathy for Marxism and its modern liberal avatars. The reason cultural Marxism keeps thriving, albeit under different logos and using different words, is simply the fact that there is seemingly no viable cultural alternative on the horizon now. Our job is to make populism that viable alternative.
Populists in America generally have failed to make a significant effort to enforce their own “cultural alternative.” The leftist cultural discourse, particularly in the media and higher education, reigns supreme. Only once populists manage to frame a discourse that sounds more attractive will populism be able to sway the masses into action.
For instance, the populist vocabulary over the last 60 years has been subject to semantic diversions with no effort on the part of patriot activists to stop the semantic trickery or to search for alternative language. Words such as “nationalist,” “race” or “white” have become synonyms for criminal behavior. To be sure, in the eyes of the American or European populists, the concepts “right” and “left” no longer have any political significance; but they do have a very specific significance for the leftist mudslinger when delineating “good” leftists from bad “right-wing” populists. It is not how I perceive myself that counts; what counts is how the enemy perceives me. “Fascism” has also been a trendy generic word, used far and wide to denounce everything and everybody that does not fit into the leftist body of thought.Therefore, the main goal of populist activists should be to “decriminalize” words that were hijacked from their arsenal or, short of that, search for synonyms with a less value loaded connotation. In America, for example, the word “nationalist” has much less of a negative impact than in the German mass media, where this word is automatically conflated with National Socialism.
The biggest issue white nationalists, along with other populists, need to address is the character issue amidst their rank-and- file activists. Be it in Europe or be it in the U.S.A., populists love to talk about the common good. In reality, however, nowhere is there so much egoism and vanity to be observed as among populists. Self-proclaimed leaders claiming to have finally found the formula for solving the white survival puzzle are a hallmark of populist history. Add to that tattooed individuals clad in strange attire and mimicking Hollywood “nazis,” and one can then come up with a scenario that would scare Heinrich Himmler out of his grave.
The first and foremost goal of each populist should be to put the interests of his community above his own ego and even above the interests of his own family. A rootless man, without racial and national consciousness, lacking a sense of community, is a non-entity. In the modern liberal system contaminated by instant gratification, any sense of
solidarity is a precious commodity. Therefore, even if, under surreal and hypothetical circumstances, modern populists were offered by their foes political power on a golden
platter, they would not know what to do with it. They would likely start a civil war among themselves.
Populists have still big problems with the definition of their identity. Recently, prominent European nationalists from Germany, Austria and Holland paid a pompous visit to Jerusalem. The reason for their belated atonement trips was a belief that if they cater to Jews and Jewish settlers in Palestine they could finally get a free ride for having criticized their own immigrants back home in Europe. If Islam were to be viewed as a dangerous religion and if Muslim immigrants were officially declared intruders in the white world, why not take a quick glance at the Old Testament or Torah, or at the Talmud? After careful reading of that prose one can conclude that Judaism is not a peace-loving ideology, either.
Illegal immigrants flocking to U.S. shores are mostly pious Catholics from Latin America. But they are not whites. Fawning over everything Jewish everywhere in Israel is a grotesque form of identity search whereby the same wishes to become the other by erasing his own self.
In 1990, the Communist system was not militarily defeated by outside forces; it broke up from within as a result of the exhaustion of its founding myths and loss of its cultural hegemony. Communist lies had been blatant on all wavelengths to the point that even commissars had a hard time believing in them any longer. Even American and West European intellectuals, to some extent, ceased to be energized by the Marxian mystique. Small surprise that former Communist bigwigs and their Western acolytes had to exchange the Marxist mysticism for liberal scholasticism.
The Communist message turned out to be more persuasive and more digestible in a liberal package once stripped of its crass terror. Communism fell apart in the East because its canons, in practice, were better implemented in the West.
Now, former Marxist scribes in the West, along with former East European commissars, are cobbling together new role models. This became obvious in their recent discovery of new places of pilgrimage: Once it was Moscow and Havana that were designed as locations for ideological recycling; today, in order to obtain a certificate of good behavior, they must embark on guilt-trips to Washington and Tel Aviv.
But the nature of the Marxist discourse, once upon a time destined to evangelize the masses about the idea of progress and provide them with lessons on cross-cultural miscegenation, is alive and well—albeit this time under the banner of “democracy” and liberalism.
What is the moral regarding the populist vs. his foe, the Communist commissar? The vast majority of people, including the overwhelming majority of white academics and intellectuals, just follow the trends on the marketplace of ideas, even if these ideas produce horrible results. If tomorrow the ideas of racialism or anti-Semitism become fashionable again, former leftist standard bearers would be the first to dump the old beliefs and adopt the “new” ones. Similar to the old Communist system, the modern liberal system in the U.S. and Europe is fragile. It will last only as long as populist thinkers believe in its infallibility and its longevity—while continuing to wallow in their own intellectual laziness.
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DR. TOM SUNIC is a translator, former U.S. professor in political science and a member of the board of directors of the American Third Position, a political party and activist organization dedicated to the interests of ethnic European communities within America. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald (2007). The third edition of his book Against Democracy and Equality; the European New Right, prefaced by Alain de Benoist, has just been released. See www.tomsunic.info 
