1,828 words

Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of our readers. So far this year, we’ve raised $66,365.84 of our $300,000 goal. I want to thank everyone who has donated so far. (Please donate here!) But first, Mark Gullick explains why your support is so crucial given what we are up against today.

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As they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender.
This I could not do.
I took my gun and vanished.
— “The Partisan,” Leonard Cohen (translated from the original, “La Complainte du Partisan,” by Emmanuel d-Astier de la Vigerie, a leader in the French Resistance)

Your governments have no good intentions. You cannot comply yourself out of a tyranny. For God’s sake stop complying. Start rebelling. — Member of the European Parliament Christine Anderson

There is something of a joke in the south of France that everyone had a relative who was in the French Resistance. Doubtless there are histories both realistic and fanciful, but that there was such a resistance movement during the Second World War is not in doubt. The maquis fighters — not to be confused with the Spanish maquis who took up arms against Franco in 1939 — were undoubtedly brave men and women who refused to acquiesce to the occupation of their territory by a malevolent invading force, and did not recognize their Vichy government. Sound familiar?

I am not comparing those of us on the political Right to townspeople with revolvers fighting Nazi soldiers in anything more than the broad similarities: There is an invasion going on of what should be our territory, we don’t recognize government as anything but malevolent, and if we are not a part of the resistance, I am not sure who is.

The invasion is literal in the form of mass migration, and cultural in the form of a neo-Marxist, “woke” orthodoxy which is making its way from the groves of academia to the corridors of power, from seminar room to legislative chamber. In the United Kingdom, migration is a strange partnership between a globalist government, immigration lawyers, the European Commission on Human Rights (ECHR), activists, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and human trafficking cartels — a vast and interlocking industry which delivers, as effectively as UPS or Amazon, the cheap labor the elites require to maximize profits. As for “woke,” this is a complex psychopathology, but its current dominant role for the Left makes it an ever-present danger to civilization. In the universities, the public sector, the NGOs, and the schools, it is the same. All I see is occupation of the Right’s natural territory by barbarians from the Left.

If that’s what we are going to call them, what to call ourselves? The terms “Left” and “Right” are what Jonathan Bowden — practically a patron saint here at Counter-Currents (CC) — called “intellectual shorthand.” These terms are not ideal or sufficient, but by using them we can orient ourselves, and we know roughly where we are. The same applies to the word “woke.” It is a suitably infantile term for a childish ideology; it even sounds like it could be a baby’s garbled first word. We know what it is when we see it, we know what it is we are resisting, we know what separates us from the parallel universe of critical race theory, gender theory, pronouns, diversity, and ethnic quotas for surgeons and airline pilots.

One of the most audacious moves among many the Left have made was labelling themselves the “resistance” after Donald Trump’s election (on Twitter at least). Resisting what? Trump wasn’t allowed to govern; the Deep State and their media task force saw to that. The “Brexit” vote produced the same sense of bravery and resistance among those who voted to stay in the European Union. But these people have nothing to resist, for all they tell themselves they have. Western governments are committing to everything the activists want, in every area of society, which makes that activism look like nothing more than the showing off of compliant and pre-fabricated virtue. If anyone is doing any resisting, it’s us and those like us.

We are part of a mob which elects not to riot, loot, and burn, but to try to produce something genuinely counter-cultural — a counter-current, a place to go for the heterodox, for those for whom the modern world and its anodyne, unidimensional cultural sideshows are tiresome. How things change. We are broadly conservative people, most of whom grew up in broadly conservative times and cultures. Now we wonder what there is to conserve.

Here, at least, you are free, whether you read CC or contribute. And freedom is being chipped at, eroded, worn away like the denomination on a coin long used. The United States, however, has one line of defense the rest of the West lacks, and governments are starting to harness the full power of the control of speech — or writing, as it usually is — by those who dissent.

American readers may not fully appreciate the importance of the First Amendment. The UK is currently going up through the gears with its “hate speech” legislation, in line with the Anglophone countries of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland in particular — possibly as a dry-run for the whole of the European Union — putting into place stringent new laws affecting freedom of expression. America should keep an eye on this development, as the First Amendment would be a rich prize for the globalist Left.

The United Kingdom is not a free country. It had been noticeably changing for the worse for a decade, but since the start of Covid, that change has received an accelerant now that government has learned in its social laboratories what it is capable of. The British police have famously gone “woke,” which all looks like fun and pride parades until they arrive at your house to discuss a tweet and you find yourself accused of — and judged for — a “non-crime hate incident,” which leads to no court cases or suspended sentences, but does stay on your record in perpetuity. Comments that would once have been cheery banter go unsaid in the office when you know you could talk yourself out of not only this job, but the next one. Interviewees will not be worrying whether their CV, or resume, is any good — or at least good enough — but whether the interviewer has seen their retweets of those classified videos.

As a media environment, there is no fresh air in Britain. There are some maverick YouTubers, who have to walk between the raindrops with what they say and show, avoiding certain words and phrases to evade the prowling watchdogs of the algorithms, and there are a few British writers who, like myself, write freely concerning matters which have had a cordon sanitaire placed round them. But we all write for American magazines, because there is nothing for us in the old country. The media, both mainstream and dissident, is still predominantly white there, and yet there is no white media. That is why need CC, and our fellow institutions in the resistance.

Subscribing to Counter-Currents is an investment in what is left of white culture. As the only ethnicity which is not only forbidden from celebrating itself, but also mandated to celebrate every other ethnicity, we would rather have somewhere to go, a separate peace. You can try the television if you like; the advertising is still quite informative. Watch this one, for example, from the office of the Mayor of London, the Muslim Sadiq Khan. Watch the avuncular black man advising an arrogant white not to bother a girl in the street. This is the new semiotics of advertising. Expect to see many more virtuous negroes teaching whitey how it’s done — morally, socially, and culturally. The message is always, like a tom-tom drum, exactly the same: The white man must try harder not to be like the black man, but to be taught by him.

But freedom, for a dissident journal swimming against the strength of the media tide, is far from being for free. The lifeblood of advertising is not available to dissent publications. Powerful governmental advisers such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League in America, and HOPE not Hate and Stop Funding Hate (they do like their hate) in the UK are very much aware of those institutions they variously describe as “White Nationalist,” “racist,” and “white supremacist.” Guilty as charged. That’s why I read them and that’s why I write for them.

I am a White Nationalist because my fleeting acquaintance with history tells me white nations have been the highest achievers in the modern world, and I have the same right to pride in my whiteness as the black man is encouraged to take in his blackness. I am a racist because I believe in the power of practical racism — that the aim is not to denigrate blacks (they manage that well enough themselves), but to live apart from them. And I am a white supremacist in the rather desperate sense that I would like to see white people use the last of that white supremacy, like waning power in a video game, to secede and restore civilization worth the name.

There is no need to prove your credentials to join the resistance. If you are reading this — and provided you are not taking notes for the SPLC and the rest — then you are already pushing back. The last time I was on Facebook, I was unable to link to my pieces at CC. The last time I was in England, the pub I was sitting in — or rather their Internet provider — had blocked access to certain sites, CC among them. If someone doesn’t want you reading something and you go ahead and read it anyway, welcome to the resistance. Help yourself to some samizdat.

The late Guillaume Faye, French philosopher and one-time member of the French New Right, is rightly revered at CC, and is one of the many writers I have discovered here. You might expect, in a book of his entitled Why We Fight, to find many maxims we would do well to live by, but this speaks directly to us in the spirit of, and with the voice of, resistance:

In times of indoctrinated lies and well-bred civil cowardice, the courage to tell the truth mutates into a cardinal sin, as the few who take on the challenge must share the heretics’ hopeless fate of banishment.

Secession before banishment, separatism before exile. Above all, resistance.

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Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief