Recalling Lawrence Auster, Nicholas Stix asks:
In a land of almost 314 million “residents,” how important could one old, crotchety, heterosexual, white Christian man have been?
Only the most vile sycophants of this self-professed jewish fifth columnist continue to celebrate him. Tellingly, they do it either by ignoring or distorting what he really was or what he really cared about.
Lawrence Auster was a jew whose most fervent passion was sniffing out and denouncing “anti-semitism”.
Peter Brimelow, toward whom Auster expressed a downright poisonous jew-centric hatred, published a longer, more odious ode from Stix titled Remembering Lawrence Auster, After A Year:
For years, he argued what I considered to be a mistaken position, that the Left believes in “egalitarianism,” “tolerance,” and “non-discrimination.” In fact, as I have pointed out for years, the Left actually believes in power—and is willing to accept the most extreme inequality, intolerance, and discrimination.
Auster meticulously cultivated a constant but superficial discussion of symptoms, most of which he attributed to “liberalism”, a vague catch-all for anything Auster disliked but didn’t more specifically identify as “anti-semitism”. He disapproved of terms like “the Left” because he wished to obscure the jewish source of anti-White animus, not expose it. For this reason his view of race was similarly cartoonish. He usually maintained that jews are “white”, and “whites” are doing everything to ourselves. When push came to shove he not only saw the difference, he sided with the jews against Whites.
It was because of this position, and in spite of any prickliness when challenged on “mistakes”, that Auster attracted worshippers like Stix – a motley assortment of jews, crypto-jews, quasi-jews, wanna-be jews and jew-firsters who see “white” judeo-Christian “conservativism” as their greatest strength. They could imagine clarity and truth in their guru’s dissembling and dissumulation because in that guru and his double-talk they saw themselves.
Lawrence Auster: First Anniversary of His Death on March 29, 2013, at Saber Point, offers this synopsis of Auster’s early life:
Lawrence Auster was no stranger to controversy and aimed his criticisms not only at obvious targets on the left but also at those on the right whom he saw losing one battle after another. After Pope Benedict XVI apologized for his 2006 speech in Regensburg, which criticized Islam, Auster wrote, “As long as our own principles are liberal, as long as such liberal values as pluralism and tolerance, rather than traditionalist values such as nation and civilization, are our ultimate governing values, we will not be able to oppose liberalism and the liberalism-assisted takeover of the West by the Other. Mainstream conservatism is itself largely liberal. Only a belief system that is non-liberal at its core, namely traditionalism, can save the West.”
Mr. Auster was born in Union, New Jersey in 1949 to Sean Irving Auster, an early electronics whizkid, businessman, and real estate investor, and Charlotte Auster, a homemaker. From the age of 11 he grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, where his older siblings introduced him to classical music and Bob Dylan, both lifelong passions, along with poetry. He attended Columbia University for a year and witnessed the student riots in 1968. He did not like the Ivy League university, which he found too impersonal. He also attended Bard College for a semester before deciding that he needed to educate himself on his own before completing a bachelor’s degree.
In the 1970s, he lived a bohemian life in Aspen, Colorado, playing guitar, reading great works of literature, working at a book store, and, it amused him to recount later, wearing a sandwich board through the streets of Aspen with the menu of a local restaurant. For a while, he was a professional astrologer. He then earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. For a time, he was a follower of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba, traveling to India to visit his center there.
He then moved to Manhattan, rented a spartan studio apartment on the Upper West Side in which he lived up until his final weeks, and began an often frustrating search for the right career. He attended law school for a year, but decided he would never make a good lawyer. He worked as an administrator at a private school, drove a cab, read lots of books and worked as a temp. He referred candidly to his “odd and eccentric life.”
“I’ve never had any mainstream “moves” in my makeup. I’ve been a solitary intellectual seeker and spiritual seeker all my life, and a misfit in mainstream society,” Mr. Auster wrote, late in life. “I’ve never had a normal career. Even if I had wanted to, I could not have had a mainstream career as a writer, because writing for money or fame or whatever was simply not part of my makeup. Everything I’ve written, I’ve written because it’s been intensely important me to say something that I had to say. I can’t write any other way.”
He discovered his main subject when he was walking through Manhattan one day and, looking at the people around him, suddenly realized that whites were on their way to becoming a minority in America. He said that since he was so firmly convinced of the essential humanity of all people, he felt suited to writing about the controversial subject of race and challenging the crippling plague of white guilt.
How absurd and yet how stereotypical that this ex-hippie, this wandering jew, had the arrogance to proclaim his jew-first moralizing and pilpul “traditionalism”, not to mention deliver it from the very epicenter of cosmopolitan jewry, that Other who has taken over the West, whose poisonous influence he mostly pretended not to see.
Auster never challenged “the crippling plague of white guilt”. That would have required acknowledging the distinction between the Whites being guilt-tripped and the jews, like himself, who perpetrate it. If Auster’s traditionalism meant anything, it meant only a reform of White guilt, redirecting and refocusing its benefits back to the jews alone. What irked Auster was not that Whites defer to anybody, but that Whites defer to anybody but the jews.
To commemorate Auster’s death his most vile sycophant, Laura Wood, excerpted a speech he delivered at the 1994 American Renaissance conference. The War Against White America captures Auster’s early posturing. It is notably less vague than the later, more superficial positions Stix mistakes for mistaken:
So before we recoil in horror or embarrassment from speaking explicitly about race, let us remember that America’s current politics is already a race-conscious politics, only it’s a politics based on lies about race. It’s a politics directed against whites and their civilization. And it pretends that it’s not about race at all, but that it’s race-neutral and universal. So instead of today’s race-conscious politics, which is based on lies about race, let us have a race-conscious politics based on truths about race.
These truths include the following propositions:
- Long-term harmonious relations between a racial majority and racial minorities are possible only when the minorities do not exceed a certain percentage of the population.
- While individuals of different races living in the same society can get along on a basis of equality and mutual recognition, entire races, living in the same society, cannot.
- In the right circumstances, individuals or small groups of one people can be assimilated into a host culture of a different people, but there are limits to such assimilation. Certainly if the entire people associated with the host culture is displaced or swamped by a different people, the host culture will also disappear. Even smaller shifts in numbers can be enough to delegitimize the host culture and produce chronic cultural conflict.
- Therefore, the culture, identity and traditions of white America and Western civilization cannot survive in any community or institution that becomes multiracial or white-minority.
- Because of the greater attractiveness, prosperity and openness of white Western societies, nonwhites will keep moving into them as long as they can. Therefore white America can survive demographically and culturally only if it recognizes itself as a threatened ethnoculture; if it ceases or drastically reduces, on a national scale, all non-European immigration; and if it assures, on a local scale, communities where its own institutions may survive.
- The large and enduring differences in average intelligence between blacks and whites mean, first, that blacks on their own can never be expected to maintain a modern, democratic, civilized society; and second, that blacks can never be expected to achieve collective economic equality and other kinds of parity with whites. The forced attempt to achieve such collective equality, through affirmative action and through endless attacks on white racism as the supposed cause of existing inequalities, can only break down all the institutions and standards of society and lead to race warfare.
- There are therefore only two sane options for black-white relations in this country. Either blacks accept the above facts; accept a society where white Western standards of law, behavior and intellectual life are dominant and where advancement will be open for blacks only on an individual, not a collective basis; accept their status as an ethnic minority and be grateful to be living in a white society where they have goods and opportunities undreamed of in a black society; or else, if blacks are not willing to accept these things, then to avoid race warfare there must be peaceful separation between the races.
These propositions have nothing to do with any notions of race-hatred of the other, or of race-worship of one’s own. White people are just as sinful and imperfect as any other people. Unlike ideologies such as Afrocentrism and Nazism, which are based on the deification of one’s own people and the demonization of others, this new politics is based on a Christian recognition of our human limitations, namely that we do not possess the godlike power to create a perfect world where everyone is equal, and where differences don’t matter. If there is any arrogance to be seen today, it is in our current immigration and affirmative action policies, which are among the greatest examples of hubris in the history of the world.
There are only two sane options for black-white relations in this country.
The irony is that whites are terrified that non-whites will hate them and even start a race war if whites stand up for themselves, while the truth is that many nonwhites will begin for the first time to respect whites. Currently minorities don’t respect whites because whites have defined themselves ideologically as nothing while, in personal terms, they still try to protect their self-interest. Whites thus seem both weak and hypocritical and therefore despicable, and nonwhites just keep moving into the vacuum left by white surrender. But when whites begin to assert their own civilizational and racial identity and their desire to preserve it, not in a hateful way but in a calm, intelligent and firm way, then nonwhites will begin to see whites, not as the “oppressors” of left-liberal demonology, but as human beings who have the same basic interests and concerns for their people and culture that the minorities have for theirs.
Classic. Auster discussed blacks and Whites and other Others in terms he literally found unthinkable to apply to jews. He spoke of “minorities” and “oppressors” and “left-liberal demonology” as if it is all a figment of the imagination of Whites and had nothing whatsoever to do with the jews.
The irony is that so many Whites are terrified that jews will hate them, even though jews already make their contempt plain enough. Auster went against that grain by advocating a “white” racial identity, but of course, it was only to the extent that he thought that would best serve the interests of jews, not Whites. Auster’s importance, if anyone wishes to recall it accurately, was in being even more condescending and less honest than usual for a jew.
