The Cleft In Our Soul

But it can hardly be denied that the White man today is in a desperate plight. Catastrophe hangs over us. For those who have eyes to see, the danger signs are everywhere. But it is not of complete human extinction I am thinking: so complete a catastrophe, whether by pollution, disease, famine, or atomic fission, seems to me unlikely. The catastrophe that now weighs upon me day and night is one that most deeply, immediately, and especially hangs over Western man, the Nordic White man. And, even here, I see it not as a menace of extinction but as something ultimately worse—not so much the menace manifested in the deterioration of the White man’s societies and of his status among the nations of the world (which, after all, is only a symptom), but rather in what is ultimately at the bottom of it all—the sickness, the shakiness, and the disintegration—of the White man’s own innermost being.

And one had only to look about the Earth to see what had occasioned the comment. Every well-informed and thoughtful man, reflecting upon the series of cataclysms and revolutionary changes that have overtaken humanity in this century, or upon the general course of events for the past sixty years or so, must have been struck by the steady downward trend in the Western world of the White man. Prior to the First World War, and even for the preceding 500 years, his affairs had been in the ascendant. In large part, his very empires reflected his self-confidence, his boldness in every sort of exploration, his will to rule, and his accepted authority. But after the shattering and devastating effects of two world-convulsing White civil wars, all this became changed. Everywhere the White man’s world has been sickening and dying. In a single generation his empires have withered and disappeared almost as if an evil genie had passed a magic wand over them. The British, the French, the Dutch and the Belgians have fairly fallen over themselves in hasting to disavow their empires and withdraw from all parts of the world. This is especially astonishing in the British, founders of the largest and most civilizing empire ever created by the genius of man, who seem to accept almost supinely their “being reduced from [their] imperial splendor to the rank of a minor power.”

But the vast drop in the White man’s prestige and status in the modern world is by no means the whole story, nor the most disturbing and ominous part of it. When, in casting about for the causes of the enormous decline in the White man’s dominance, we turn our scrutiny inwards, we discover that his own societies are obviously racked with dissension and shaken with some hidden feebleness that has left them unable to take themselves in hand. Often, they seem to be fairly rotting down and on the verge of falling to pieces. It hardly needs to be argued that Britain, Scandinavia, France and even Germany are sick, though in no country of the White man’s world is the sickness so obvious or dissolution so far advanced as in the United States.

At the same time that this disturbing change was taking place in the complexion and in the genetic substance of the American population, the White man’s awareness of who and what he is and of what he has behind him, was being undermined and shaken in yet another way. For all of two generations a very skillful, highly financed, and steadily intensified campaign has been concentrated on so messing up his insides, his basic conceptions, his emotions and his loyalties, as to render him confused, divided, frustrated, and finally powerless, even as the wasp first paralyzes the victim that it intends as food for its young. Slowly, the very foundations of the White man’s belief in himself have been undermined. Into his hands has been thrust a new book of right and wrong, whose commandments he does not understand. Ideals have been put into his head and emotions kindled in his breast that come into head-on collision with the inherited values, the treasured traditions, and the very inborn instincts that have made him what he is. Though he was born to conquer and has an immemorial record of conquering behind him, “conquest” has been made a discredited word, almost a “dirty” word, and the thing itself, a crime. Thus the White man has been left not only split and confused but frustrated and even ashamed of himself—ashamed of his mastery, ashamed of his empires, ashamed even of the very ancestors to whom he is supremely indebted for all that he is and for all that he has. He, the White man, sprung from one of the greatest warrior races of history, instead of leaping to assert himself, and to defend himself, and to press firmly for what he needs for his survival and for the realization of the greatness that is in him, sits in a corner, and hesitates, and mopes, and apologizes not only for being what he is but for what his ancestors were, and dutifully tries to put on the mincing manners of the one-worlder and the Christian pacifist, which his would-be subverters enjoin upon him.

All this has had its consequences. Of these, the less obvious have been the most deadly, for they struck to the very root of Nordic man’s being. Once he is disturbed in his sureness of himself and his footing, he can no longer strike with telling force, he is shorn of his strength and reduced to something approaching impotence. And this consequence was forced to the limit, and to a crisis, when the manipulators of mankind went on to assert and to insist that race is of no consequence, that in fact no such thing as race exists, and that in any case all men have the same potentialities, without regard to what they look like, where they came from, or what record (or lack of record) they have behind them. In the last few decades, virtually all race consciousness has been drilled out of the heads of White people everywhere and almost entirely scared or shamed out of their hearts. In our orchestrated society, with the prostitute, traitorous professor beating time from his podium, and the politicians, publicists, playwrights and preachers, news commentators and labor leaders playing principal parts, our people as a whole—even our grown-up men—have learned, with the docility of children and the meekness and weakness of slaves, to chant in unison, as if hypnotized or under the spell of an African tom-tom, “All men are equal. All men are brothers.” Dissent is smothered. Anyone who dares to change the tune, or the key, or the words, is forcibly thrown out and branded a pariah, a moral leper. Not only must every man subscribe to the doctrine, but he who fails to treat all other men as his equals proves himself mentally retarded and spiritually depraved, a creature hateful and contemptible.

But if, now and then, one of the more vigorous and intelligent of White men does thus suddenly find himself in the grip of a great disgust, an indignation and an anger which he cannot control, and is moved to rise up and fight the smothering sense of blackness that has settled down upon him and all he loves, and try to arouse others of his own kind to fight it with him, in most cases it proves to be little more than steam, a passing emotion, which soon subsides.

There are two reasons for this. One is that cleft, already referred to, which has been created in the White man’s mind and soul. His traditions, his record, his instincts, his respect for his own thought processes and his own judgment as to what is true and false, right and wrong, have come to be shaken by the conflicting indoctrination he has undergone, by the prestige and the apparent authority of those who declare with an air of absolute certainty and moral superiority, that his instincts are untrustworthy, belong to the past, and must be repudiated and stepped on—or better yet, torn out by the roots. The inevitable result in the White man’s soul tends to be indecision, doubt, moral paralysis, inability to make a firm judgment or to take any stand, a surrender to a disposition to drift, to go with the crowd, to avoid any fight over what, after all, may be an uncertainty. Such a man has in effect been knocked out. He may be one of “the dispossessed majority,” who have let their country pass out of their hands into the control of aliens and enemies, but rarely will he be able to rouse himself to do anything about it.

The other thing that keeps him from acting upon his disgust, his indignation and anger when they seize upon him, is the fact that he does not know where or how to lay his hand, with any certainty, on those who are of his own kind, his own race, who could be counted on to stand with him. Actual effort to find them may only batter it into his consciousness that not one Nordic man in a thousand has even any awareness that he so much as constitutes a distinct biological type, or what the features are that distinguish this type from all others. And if they meet an exceptionally noble specimen of their own type— tall, long-headed, with hair like burnished gold and eyes as clear and blue as the cloudless sky, nothing so much as stirs within them. Or if something did stir, and pride made their hearts to beat faster, would they not stifle the feeling? Has it not been drilled into their heads, and most of the way even into their hearts, that race is nothing, that feeling for race and pride in race are a mark of degeneracy and to be ashamed of? Very few indeed have any glowing knowledge of how supremely glorious the Aryan-Nordic record is, or any sense of themselves as heirs and trustees of a rich and wonderful heritage, or any vital realization of a flesh and blood bond with those who created it. They never think of themselves as connecting links between a great past and the possibility of an even greater future, which waits upon them for its fulfillment. 

My reader must now realize how literally desperate, in my view, the plight of the White man, and in a special sense Nordic White man, is. In what I have been saying, I felt no concern, and no need, to fit my conclusions into the theories of Spengler, or Toynbee, or James Burnham, or anybody else. I have not been trying to form any general interpretation of history. I am confronted with a body of indisputable facts. Something has gone wrong with the White man’s world, and with the White man himself. He is sick, and his world is falling to pieces. And my primary concern has been to find out what is at the bottom of it all, and what we can do to pull things together and save ourselves. I have felt this concern from the beginning of this book, and in every chapter of it that I have written. Much of what seems to me to have gone wrong, I have already laid bare. It remains now to try to go to the bottom of our principal racial problems. The problems of the Negro, of the Jew, and within ourselves are absolutely crucial. In wrestling with them, as already plainly stated, I have not been looking for, and can have no patience with, any mere palliatives or alleviations. I am too much the realist to be very confident that our people, in their confused and spiritless state, will still have the strength to impose on themselves the measures necessary to their salvation, or even that they will have time to carry out such measures before the direst of catastrophes will sweep them into subjugation and slavery. But whether it be for action within the time still left us, or for the later time when we may have broken our chains and are struggling to accomplish a resurgence, it will be of absolutely crucial importance that we have completely realistic understanding of those basic racial problems which have played so large a part in our present undoing. And surely our people, as long as there is any hope left in them, once they have realized that if they do not find a real solution they must die, will find a solution—and put it into effect.

-excerpted from “Which Way Western Man” By William Gayley Simpson