Ordeals of Incivility

The Negro and the Birth of American Communism

We begin with the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan and the establishment of its overseas empire. The Spanish arrived in the New World to find civilization built there; wild, exotic, savage, hideously benighted and untutored to their eyes yes, but civilization nonetheless. Cortez' soldiers, well-traveled mercenaries themselves, find that Tenochtitlan compared favorably to Venice, but this did not abridge the Spaniard's natural feeling of superiority for having conquered such a civilization. A gradated caste system of limpieza de sangre came naturally to the resulting colonial rule, as the inherent abilities of the natives were themselves gradated, from the Inca who lived in great palaces and fought the Spanish with metal weapons to the most savage and inhuman piraha tribesman of the Amazon. South and Central America before the Spanish conquista were much like India in the variance of its natives from aboriginal to civilized, and they remained so afterwards, albeit with a white ruling caste that was slowly but not entirely adulterated. The Reconquista of Spain itself habituated it to ruling men of lesser race; it had a caste system ready-made for the task of colonizing the Americas and the Conquista itself followed the Reconquista without a single second of interruption; Columbus literally sailed past the burning city of Grenada and watched the smoke as it was put to the fire and sword from the deck of the Santa Maria on his way to the Americas. Is there a single image that conveys the notion of historical destiny as well as this?

But all this is merely to explain why the situation in North America was particular and colonization did not cause ideological spasms in the South as it did in the North. It is academically well-tread ground and many of you will wonder why I am restating the obvious. It is because, in contrast, there was not a single second in which the English settler's relations with the natives in North America was *not* informed by egalitarianism. The Mayflower landed on the shores of Massachusetts Bay to find it relatively depopulated. English fishermen had been visiting the shores of New England for several decades at this point; the diseases they carried reduced the native population in the area by something like 90% before a settler ever set foot on its shores. The pilgrims sailed past one abandoned village after another; the pitiful remnants of local tribes had merged with each other in desperation, leaving their previous habitations empty. It must have seemed a great sign of Providence that the way was thus cleared for them.

Indian society at the time and in the place had two modes of foreign relations. Tribes were at war, or they were at peace, two definitions which are misnomers in the white man's mind. If they were at war, war would continue until one side was wiped out or had fled; by wiped out, this involved the capture of women, who were sometimes to be savagely gangraped and tortured to death and sometimes to be made wives depending on the whim of the primitive. It also involved the capture of men, who were not enslaved but "adopted" by old matriarchs to replace sons lost in war, and the status of such men "adopted" was somewhere between whipping boy, slave, and legitimate member of the community. The mind of the Indian was truly a thing alien to our conception; one thing I strive to impress upon you is that our theories of mind are not sufficient to model the behavior of the most savage. But more or less, "war" meant genocide and ethnic cleansing, and "peace" meant a state of feuding. A young man raised his status in the tribe by going on raids, and the conclusion of a peace treaty with a chieftain did not mean immunity from "private war" waged by young men looking for booty or women; it was simply a promise that one side would not attempt to ethnically cleanse the other wholesale. Peace often involved tribute from the weaker party; a strong tribe might collect hefty taxation from weaker neighbors in exchange for not being wiped out, but even this did not preclude private warfare from members of the weak tribe against its "overlord".

Obviously, both states of "foreign relations" were intolerable for the white man. In his mind, private warfare was a breach of the peace; some young brave gathering up his boys to loot a puritan homestead, rape the women, and drive off the livestock merited retaliation as a breach of the treaty; this retaliation, which was of a far greater scope than a small raid, was in turn seen as a random and unjustified act of war by the Indians. The only two options were to either enslave the Indian or to remove him from the land. I have said that these relations were informed by egalitarianism. In the South, the Spaniard had no qualms at all about enslaving the aboriginals; to do so was in fact to "integrate" them into a society that had a place, at the bottom rung of its caste system, for brainless labor devoid of political rights. The puritan had no such place to "put" the Indian. His primary purpose in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony was to engage in collegial, democratic rule of independent landowners free from royal persecution of his sect and possessed an egalitarian spirit little different from Calvin's own rule in Geneva.

This sort of political arrangement is not at all historically unprecedented, in fact it is very similar to the government established by the settlers of Iceland eight hundred years before it; that is to say a settler-republic of farmer-patriarch-priests. Such is not inherently or necessarily left-wing, but is often in fact aligned with natural law. Their vote, or voice in the assembly, reflected real authority over their homesteads and dependants and their ability to organize actual violence in defense of that sovereignty. The “res” in “respublica” and the “thing” as the Icelanders called it have the same meaning. It is the same meaning as the “cosa” in “cosa nostra”. Similarly, the Republic of Rome and each polis of Greece began as assemblies of local clan-leaders; a group of mafiosos with real power who generally disposed of their own as they wished sitting around a table to hash out business and solve disputes. None of these societies were shy about enslaving others; in fact, a vast slave-caste is necessary for democracy or a republic to function and the North was not at all shy about importing vast numbers of indentured servants from Europe for this purpose, though they may have been shy about naming the institution correctly.

A leftist is one who seeks to tear down established hierarchies out of personal greed or personal resentment. This line can become blurred when an established hierarchy has lost its cohesion and purpose and can no longer effectively wield power; often Nature reasserts itself against "sham-kings" as Carlyle put it. Some will argue with me about whether the Puritans back home in England were leftist or not. But what is undeniable is that, upon leaving England in fear as dissidents against the current order, the Puritan abandoned his leftism if he had any. To lay the foundation-stone of the first house, to plow the land, to drive off savages with the arquebus; these are inherently right-wing acts. The building of America was accomplished by the laying-down and forgetting of resentments that would, across the Atlantic, boil over into revolution and Civil War, and this was spurred on by the shock of contact with a vastly and obviously inferior race of savages.

Here is the Ordeal of Incivility, felt from the moment that the White Lion offloaded its cargo of Negro slaves on the shores of Virginia in 1619; the realization that the Indian or Negro who stands before you cannot be civilized, cannot be taught, cannot be improved; can only be made with great pain and effort to act out a fraction of the decency inherent to the lowest member of your own race. This is the "eldritch madness" that really concerned Lovecraft; not contact with a vast and alien intelligence but contact with a fathomless cthonic stupidity, and it struck the early settlers of America and forced a reckoning with egalitarian ideals. The prime driver of the major events of American history has been contact with the primitive races, and especially the Negro. The initial and ongoing contact of men holding egalitarian ideals of natural rights with the madness and stupidity of the “humanoid” savage shattered the idea of equality in most and caused a deranged-doubling down in others. Here is the birth of American Race Communism, the ruling world ethos of today and a problem that has been left unresolved.

For most, the logical conclusion is to simply abandon egalitarianism, and this is what most in fact did. "Natural rights and democracy for whites only" is the moderate compromise at first agreed to, but this position of moderation was ultimately untenable. The existence of mixed-race people of middling competence demanded extreme strictness in America where the Spanish caste system readily accommodated them. It was America that devised the "one-drop rule" under threat from the roiling madness of the savage, a threat that was not violent but rather the threat of degradation to the lowest "human" denominator. An Alexander Dumas of mulatto ancestry in France could be regarded as a curiosity; in America it was known that the inclusion of even a little savage blood into the delicate Anglo racial balance would upset the nation's social character and destabilize a government that was now claimed to only be effective for members of the white race, defined ludicrously by some early Americans as excluding their German racial cousins. Imagine if the King of England were to refer to the Holy Roman Emperor as a racial inferior; this would be laughably unthinkable in a Europe which never underwent an "ordeal of incivility". But even this moderate position was forced to lay down universal claims and thus became exclusionary to a degree that could be called paranoid. This black-and-white caste system had no room in it for even other Europeans, and this fact allowed it to be pushed down a slippery slope and helped along at every step of the way. First for the Germans, then the Scandinavians, the Italians, the Irish, the Jew, the Chinese, the Mestizo, and finally the Negro.

Even today there is a meme in right-wing circles about “liberalism for 130IQ Anglos only”. This was in fact the compromise position at the founding of the American republic, the compromise that followed the end of Reconstruction and the birth of the eugenics movement, where notions of racial and genetic purity were very briefly adopted by “Progressives”. That this position was fashionable for a generation and a half at most causes great consternation to all sides attempting to construct ideological geneologies. But again, a political movement based on the dissolution of hierarchies cannot for long tolerate “natural hierarchy” as expressed in Darwinist terms. This “natural hierarchy” was merely used as a shilleleigh against established hierarchies and discarded by progressives when no longer necessary; this compromise position of “liberalism and humanism for 130IQ Anglos” was always untenable.

At the same time, however, reckoning with members of the savage races caused a subset of Americans instead to double down on the inherent equality of man with a rabid fervor. The eldritch stupidity of the Negro was a force that threatened to annihilate the careful theology on which they had built an entire nation and staked their own souls; their existence could only be redeemed if they were to liberate and uplift him. In this lies the birth of American Race Communism; an instinct that was born within a minority but one for which its adherents, men of outstanding intelligence and ability, worked for tirelessly. Already the issue of slavery threatened to undo the Union at the Constitutional Convention, and compromise was barely achieved. Growing up in New England, I could walk down the street to the "Isaiah White Universalist Brotherhood of Man Negro Liberation Church", founded 1750, and read a quote from its founder about the inherent dignity of all peoples that would not be out of place were it to be printed in a Harvard student newspaper in 2023. Slavery was swiftly abolished in many northern states following the revolution, and the Unitarian capture of Harvard heralded the end of the moderate position as policy in the North, with violence against fellow whites now actively promoted in the Bleeding Kansas war and Harper’s Ferry incident. This in a nation that limited whiteness to those of English blood; the ordeal of egalitarianism meeting the hard reality of race caused a leftist derangement that killed a million men in the civil war.

Moldbug hints at this but cannot take the final step; his “Puritan hypothesis” is now as widely maligned among the Right as it is wielded as a memetic cudgel by third-worldist “traditionalists” to malign the Anglo-American. As I have alluded to prior, the vast bulk of “Puritans” were forced to abandon their leftist predilections by the hard necessity of taming a wild continent and fighting its natives. Because Mr. Yarvin does not want to take the final step of racist thoughtcrime, he will not notice or at least will not say that it was the existence of the Negro that spurred on elements of American protestantism (that were regarded by mainline congregationalists as deeply heretical) to essentially engage in jihad against their fellow whites. It is easier to blame the nebulous “puritans” than to point at specific sects of Quakers and Universalists and their specfic motives for taking power. The Universalist capture of Harvard, as I mentioned earlier, is where things kicked into high gear. That history, of how Universalists appropriated priestly power by taking over the prime American seminary, deserves to be investigated meticulously. But the hour is late for historians.

Marxism never took root in America because America had discovered a purer and harder form of communism long before Marx ever put pen to paper. To dismantle the social hierarchies of Old Europe is one thing; a holy war against a hard and cruel Nature that makes men vastly unequal is a project to occupy the fullest of human abilities until the end of time, and with it as an organizing principle against a backdrop of rowdy and chaotic democratic politics, the race communists slowly got their way.

In the South, the economic necessity of labor spurred the mass importation of Negro slaves. It is common knowledge that the profitability of the African farmhand was far past its peak by the Civil War, and that the “institution” was on its way out. But similarly to the North, contact with the African caused the Southerner to abandon egalitarianism in a broader and deeper way than those who had less contact with him. Most of the elements of prewar Southern culture that are today described as “aristocratic” are remnants of the 1800s itself; this was a young culture that grew as its proponents slowly moved away from the ideas of the Founding. A republic is naturally a slave-society, and there was no need for this shift except as a reaction to the growing forces of egalitarianism in the North. Unconsciously the South began to adopt the pre-modern aesthetic and spirit of medieval feudalism in an ongoing process that was not at all complete by the beginning of the Civil War. Unlike the “compromise position”, this was a wholesale rejection of egalitarianism itself; Moldbug points us toward several Southern thinkers producing defenses of hierarchy in this period.

Unfortunately for American civilization, the true nature of Norman feudalism eluded the Southerner; its ideals were pastoral and agrarian where the Norman knight’s management of his domain reflected the use of advanced mechanisms of finance and technology. Currency manipulation to incentivize investment was in widespread use under the Wessex Dynasty in the 900s. Modern accounting was invented by Duke Robert the Devil of Normandy; we still reflect profits in black and expenses in red because he used a checkerboard to keep track of them. The shareholder-corporation was invented in Germany in the 1300s at latest, and the “feudal” lord was often a part-owner of mercantile ventures. The purpose of this society was to maximize profit from land and legal entities in order to procure and equip one’s troops with the finest military technology available; huge horses, strong armor, tempered monosteel swords, and tall castles. It was entirely oriented towards war as its telos; had the Southerner grasped this, the plantation aristocracy of the American South would be building warships and foundries, factories in which standardized tooling could crank out masses of identical pieces of field artillery, repeating rifles, and railroad engines. This was the true nature of the aristocracy of old, not some agrarian romance. But lacking the cutting-edge of military technics and logistics, it was destroyed by the North. Its superior troop quality availed it well at first, but its fine soldiers eventually crumbled under wave after wave of FoB Irish and Italian cannon fodder supplied by an industrial society.

What followed was a “Reconstruction” during which a campaign of racial terror in the name of equality was waged against the southern White by the northern. The liberties, social status, and wealth redistribution granted to the freed slave in this period were no different from the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against American cities in the 1960s and 70s. They are the exact same thing. Naturally, this is one of the most buried, lied about, and underdiscussed periods in American history, even on the “right”. But anybody who thinks that our problems are “20th century problems”, or caused by a certain minority capture of institutions by fanatics in fairly recent times are sorely mistaken. This problem, and our enemy, is very old; it has been ceaselessly attempting to overthrow Nature since it first locked eyes with the Negro in 1619 and its ideas of equality were shaken to their core. It conquered the entire world for this aim, and will drag every bit of excellence down into the gutter if it means equality, the equality of the global slum.

When the Ku Klux Klan successfully waged its campaign of guerilla warfare against the Reconstruction regime, it forced America back into a period of moderate compromise. Jim Crow was passed, an institutionalized racial caste system that would form the basis of Hitler’s exclusion of Jews. Eugenics and concern of racial quality became fashionable among even the Progressive elite. This looked like a fantastic victory. And yet the Ordeal of Incivility still smoldered. A hundred years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction regime picked up exactly where it had left off, with military occupation of the South and Civil Rights Law. Today we all live under the Reconstruction regime; all of our cities have been plundered in its name. And the capacity for domestic resistance a la the KKK has been degraded to near-futility. As the first go around shows, the solution needs to be final, and it must first involve the wholesale, unreserved rejection of egalitarianism.