Lawrence Auster, self-styled advocate of the “white” West, writes and blogs regularly about the West’s troubles. At first I found his analysis refreshing. Then I found it confusing. Now I see him as an obstacle. A false friend. A poseur.

Auster regularly exhorts Whites to reassert themselves, to call their enemies and problems by their proper names. But then he just as regularly peevishly denounces Whites who assert themselves in the wrong way or use inappropriate words.

Three months ago Auster was explaining why we shouldn’t capitalize White:

Lately more and more commenters have been capitalizing the words white and black, e.g., “White people,” “Black people,” which I have changed to lower case prior to posting. It has never been standard usage to capitalize these adjectives when they are used to denote race, and it is not VFR’s usage. While race matters, to make it matter so much that we capitalize the mere names of colors is to take race consciousness too far. I ask commenters to conform their spelling to standard English usage. Thank you.

Oh, I see. That must be why standard usage is to write “hard-working Latino”, “hard-working African-American”, and “hard-working white”. Because white is just a color. Just an adjective. That makes sense.

No it doesn’t. The standard usage is inconsistent. I assert that it’s wrong.

In the same post Auster explained why he thinks some words are capitalized and others are not:

All kinds of racists do this, to magnify their own group and dehumanize the group they hate. For example, many white nationalists capitalize “white,” a color which should not be capitalized, and put “Jew,” a proper name which should be capitalized, in lower case.

More transparent rot. If Auster were as concerned about Whites as he is about jews he’d insist on the same standards, regardless of conventions. He wouldn’t insult Whites by pretending the word is an adjective, and he’d argue that “white” is dehumanizing instead of making excuses for it.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but the way I capitalize words has nothing to do with hate. It has everything to do with consciousness. I am conscious of the anti-White convention. I consciously reject it. To drive home the point I invert it.

There are more symptoms of Auster’s sorta, kinda, half-hearted pro-“white” pose.

Just a few days ago, Auster asked, Why are white Westerners describing themselves as “indigenous” peoples?:

I protest the recent and expanding use of “indigenous” to describe white Western majority peoples, as Rick Darby used it innocently and in passing in another thread. Yes, in the simplest sense “indigenous” means “originating where it is found,” and therefore could, I suppose, be used to describe the British, since the white British population goes back to the Neolithic. But the word would not apply to white Americans, the earliest ancestors of whom came to this continent 400 years ago.

But there is a larger problem with “indigenous.” It doesn’t just mean native to a location. It also implies people in their original, undeveloped state. Traditionally, we never thought of a people in a developed society, with complex institutions and a national state, as “indigenous,” even if their ancestors had lived in that land for 10,000 years.

Further, indigenous is typically used by outside people who are studying or protecting some tribal group.

For majority whites to call themselves “indigenous” is exactly like whites asking for their “rights” under multiculturalism. It is an admission of surrender to multiculturalism, whites’ transformation of themselves into just another minority group needing protection, rather than being and asserting themselves as the leading and dominant people of our respective countries.

Western peoples thus gratuitously diminish and weaken themselves by referring to themselves as indigenous. As a self-description of white Westerners it is incorrect, unnecessary, demoralizing, and defeatist.

Then, notwithstanding his rationale for “white”, Auster writes:

The Brits seem to go out of their way to make themselves into nothing. They now even spell the the word “west,” as in “western civilization,” in lower case. They’re so wimpy they won’t even capitalize the name of their own civilization. Next they’ll be spelling Britain as “britain.”

He goes on to quote a Mr. Carpenter who tells us “That is pathetic”, “Quite disgraceful”, and “Very sad”. Auster says we must not call ourselves “indigenous” and we must write “West”, otherwise we are wimps. But we must write “Jew” and we must write “white”, otherwise we are haters.

Scolding. Lecturing. Constraining. Upbraiding. Insulting. Talk about demoralizing. We should assert ourselves as the dominant people of our respective countries, but by using the wrong words we gratuitously diminish ourselves. Please sir, if it’s not too much trouble sir, how and when may we “whites” assert ourselves?

Piffle. Why do “whites” write “west”? Come now Auster. Use your own logic. It’s nothing but a mere direction. Right?

And why are White Westerners describing themselves as “indigenous”? This also isn’t a difficult question to answer. But Auster and his philo-semitic peanut gallery don’t want an answer. They are only interested in heaping shame and insults on “whites”. The behavior of these hecklers hints at the problem. They aren’t White. They want “whites” to do what they see as good and necessary to help jews, but they attack uppity Whites who think or act in their own interests.

The short answer these Austerites don’t want to face is that Whites no longer dominate their respective countries. Beyond broad swipes at vague “liberals” the Austerites also don’t want to discuss why.

Whites used to dominate not only their own countries, but most of the globe. Nowadays we’re indoctrinated that this was a monstrous crime. We’re reminded in many ways on a daily basis that everybody and anybody is more important than Whites now, and jews are on top. How did this happen? Well, in large part because Whites relinquished control. We’ve been badgered, harangued, brow-beaten, and guilt-tripped for generations, first by humanists and abolitionists, then increasingly by resentful, self-interested, culturally and economically revolutionary jews. Many Whites were convinced that giving away power and opening the borders was the right and noble thing to do. So now today we are inundated and assaulted by a broad coalition of resentful self-interested “minorities”.

I have referred to myself as indigenous several times in the past few years. I will do so again. The reason why is not difficult to explain. But I’m not surprised Lawrence Auster pretends it is a mystery.

Under the increasingly pro-jew, anti-White politically correct regime it has become the norm to extend preferential status to “indigenous” people. Like most everything in this upside-down regime the preference is selective and applies only to non-whites. Of course this violates the holy PC tenet of non-discrimination and reveals PC’s equalitarian claptrap for the steaming pile of manure it is. Just as in Animal Farm – where all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

The word indigenous has a common, biological sense. It means native, and that’s precisely what any decent dictionary says. The meaning that liberals prefer is deliberately contorted to serve their politics. For them indigenous means non-white native. How absurd it seems for anti-liberal Auster to accept and defend this definition. Unless we remember his philo-semitic imperative. Yes, Auster wants Whites to assert ourselves. Somebody has to do something about the muslims and blacks he’s freaked out about. He just doesn’t want us showing anywhere near the same consciousness for ourselves and our interests as jews do. Let’s avoid the whole native-alien can of worms. Somebody might make an argument that serial immigrant jews don’t want to hear.

But why should Whites avoid it? Let’s speak some truth to power. Immigrant invaders are the precious darlings of our academia, media, religious, business, and political leaders. Our institutions and lands are ever more thoroughly infiltrated by hostile aliens and their advocates. Sometimes it seems all we Whites have left is principled whining. That and an inexorable leftward slide is certainly all our sold-out mainstream conservatives offer. How depressing and defeatist it is to acknowledge this reality. Shame on me.

So a few uppity Whites reject the liberal definition and refer to ourselves as indigenous. Some, like me, may even intend it as a finger in our enemy’s eye. A White calling himself indigenous under the PC regime is like a cow calling himself a pig in Animal Farm. It’s a sure fire way to piss off the pigs. It’s also a perfectly apt and legitimate way to distinguish ourselves from the “undocumented migrants” that progressivists and globalists, neocons and neolibs, are all so fond of.

No, we’re not going to save the West with words. But neither is this why we’re losing it.

At Rick Darby’s Reflecting Light commenter Greg, referring to Auster’s protest against the use of indigenous, writes:

We are in a pickle, us Brits certainly. Sadly, our simplest road to freedom is blocked by some of those who say they are our friend.

The only absolutely non-negotiable policy uniting all ‘acceptable’ parties is support for Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. And all that we require not to go the way of the Garamantians is for our people to decide they are due equal consideration from their government in this respect as are the Jewish people.

But there’s anti-semitism you see, while there isn’t, for some reason, any anti-gentilism. And this double-standard includes people like Laurence Auster, who would quickly disavow the BNP if it were to propose that we Brits had (by necessity) equal grounds to consider ourselves as distinct from Jews as Jews do from us.

This heading us off at the pass-to-freedom, is also, I think, why he opposes the word “indigenous” applied to Europeans.

Greg makes a valid point, and I agree wholeheartedly. Auster, naturally, can muster only insults and evasion:

How pathetic is Greg in his miscomprehension.

The BNP has a history as a seriously anti-Semitic organization that totally marginalized it. BNP’s own leader—on HIS initiative, not MINE—has led a serious intellectual effort over the last several years to reject that anti-Semitic past. I have consistently praised him for that effort. Sounds like Greg ought to complaining about Nick Griffin, not about me.

Second, the fact that Greg thinks my criticism of the word “indigenous” is aimed at WEAKENING the British people, rather than at STRENGTHENING them by getting them to drop a self-description that makes them sound like the equivalent of a third-world people, shows him as so stupid that he’s not deserving of being treated with minimal respect.

Auster’s criticism of words is beside the point. The point is Auster is a half-hearted part-time supporter of “whites”, but an ardent and unwavering supporter of jews. As Greg said, the problem is that Whites and Christians do not have “equal grounds to consider ourselves as distinct from Jews as Jews do from us”. To my knowledge Auster has never addressed this point, even though he constantly urges “whites” to assert ourselves and often argues that “we” can draw distinctions from muslims, blacks, and latinos. Faced with a White who wishes to distinguish themselves from jews he either ignores the point or devolves into a gibbering anti-anti-semitic robot.

But anti-semitism is the grandaddy of all the isms that have been used to deconstruct the West. Racism, sexism, homophobism, xenophobism, and islamophobism all derive from the same mindset: pathologization of the familiar and normal, glorification of the alien and abnormal. The most sacred principle is non-discrimination. The highest goal, diversity. None of it is honest. It all serves as cover for attacking anything European, anything Christian, and anything White. Anti-liberal Auster knows this well. He regularly echoes this view. Minus anti-semitism. When faced with criticism of jews Auster simply cannot help himself. Both his anti-liberalism and his intellect evaporate. What remains is primitive emotion and paranoia, which he then projects onto his stupid, evil, psychologically deficient enemies. There’s a name for jews who like to tell Whites how stupid and evil and psychologically deficient they are. Auster calls them liberals. They are, in his opinion, indistinguishable from non-jewish liberals and, by the way, it’s stupid and evil to try and tell the two apart.

When Auster criticizes liberal jews it is usually because he thinks they’re harming jews. Just in case anyone thinks he’s being anti-semitic he’ll point out how stupid and evil Whites are who think these jews also harming Whites:

The only group more out of touch with reality than liberal Jews are the white nationalist anti-Semites, who, following the theories of Kevin MacDonald, believe that the Jews are compelled by Darwinian evolutionary forces to destroy white gentile societies so as to advance their own power. These anti-Semitic idiots haven’t noticed that something like half the Jews of Israel (not to mention most Jews in the U.S.) support policies leading to the destruction of the Jewish state. How does THAT fit into the MacDonald thesis of merciless Jewish evolutionary competition against non-Jews?

There is a veritable army of jews in and out of Western universities who dedicate their lives to critcizing Whites and arguing about what’s good for jews. In comparison there are only a handful of Whites criticizing jews or discussing what’s good for Whites. And they are constantly harrassed for it.

Lawrence Auster, erstwhile defender of the “white” West and encourager of “white” assertiveness has a problem with liberal jews. Not to worry. It’s nothing that smearing assertive White nationalists and one of the few assertive White academics can’t fix!

Here’s a brain bender for you Larry. How does the extreme liberalism of the jewish state or its eventual destruction due to that, do anything but support the thesis that jewish “liberals” are also harming the West? How are MacDonald’s theories concerning how millenia of diaspora shaped jewish group evolutionary strategies invalidated by the failure of the six-decade old jewish state?

Why shouldn’t X’s discuss and debate the value of their relationship with Y’s? Why is this unspeakably stupid and evil only when X is White and Y is jew? Auster and his choir are worried about the violent jew-hating muslims flooding the West. They’re worried about the violent jew-hating blacks already in Crown Heights. They feel free to discuss what they’d like to do and why. As Rachel S. describes:

At that point our side would need unapologetic, respected voices as reinforcements to keep our burgeoning movement from being killed. Where are those voices? Where is the media to disseminate them in the same volume? We need slogans and imagery as well; built on a foundation philosophy, culture, arts; this movement will take decades to get going if it is to be done correctly. Each aspect of the fight could use a separate organization that was tied to the whole. We need the thinkers, the people who help them do the administrative work, the go-betweens who translate the ideas into graspable concepts for those “average” people who sense there is something wrong with America, but will be turned off by anything that seems extreme. AND we need to think about how any growing racial consciousness by whites will be seized upon by the neo-Nazi movement, and how we would nullify that “guilt by association” effect that would occur when the uninformed see an out of context media clip of David Duke championing this-and-that law as a victory for his side. I am reminded of an article you linked to awhile back about the need for a new conservative apologetics.

Got that? They need us “average” people, but they don’t want us “seized upon” by “neo-Nazis”. Oh and by the way, we need to do something about that guilt by association effect. You know, that nasty liberal tactic where, for instance, you call anyone who doesn’t put jews on a pedestal a “neo-Nazi”.

Auster dubs his choir’s plan An incrementalist strategy, which to me seems sickeningly similar to the cultural marxist “long march through the institutions”. There seems to be no appreciation for what we have already lost, or that it cannot be restored by destroying what destroyed it. Mark Jaws (who is jewish) writes:

Those of us over 50 can remember when whites could talk openly about black crime and other assorted social pathologies associated with blacks. However, by 1975 Stalinist-type PC thought control made such discourse taboo. If we are to alter the unacceptable status quo, we must adopt the tactics and strategy used by our adversaries which brought us to this sorry state of affairs.

When we study the incremental approach used by civil rights activists we see an effective method that applied pressure on the white Southern power structure one obstacle at a time. In the early 1950s the civil rights movement focused on overturning school segregation. As soon as Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education was settled in 1954, attention was drawn to the Montgomery bus boycott in early 1955, and only the boycott. There were no accompanying demands for affirmative action or for banning the Confederate flag. But when the white power structure gave way on one issue, the civil rights movement quickly moved to the next target of opportunity, and so on.

We must adopt a similar strategy if we are to dismantle the liberal PC multicultural stranglehold on our culture. First, we must concentrate on toppling the weakest tower of this complex by breaking the long-imposed silence on black-on-white crime. We can do this with a tide of letters to our newspapers and to our politicians, and, more importantly, with calls to radio talk shows. By such a show of concentrated, unapologetic force we can bring black-on-white crime out in the open and put blacks on the defensive, especially given the candidacy and likely election of Barak Obama, which I believe is a gift from heaven. If Barak and Michelle Obama can sit their butts in a racist church for 20 years, then how can it be racist if we talk about black-on-white crime? If Barak and Michelle had no problem with black liberation theology which calls for “the destruction of the white enemy,” then why can’t we talk about white victims of black crime? If Michelle can claim her husband “as a black man is in danger just by going to the gas station,” then why can’t we talk about white men in comparable–and real–danger, and from whom? If Michelle and Barak want an open and frank discussion on race, then let’s give it to them–but from a direction which they do not expect and cannot deal with.

The first step we must take in restoring white racial consciousness is to assert our right OPENLY to discuss our concern, dismay and outrage at the staggering amount of black-on- white crime the past 40 years. We must make it acceptable for whites to engage in such discourse, period. No need to use disparaging racist talk or hyperbole. Just stick to the facts–and we have plenty at our disposal in “The Color of Crime” and other government statistics.

No.

The first step is for self-righteous jews to step off their pedestal. Show Whites the respect you demand for jews. Stop pathologizing us. Stop smearing us. Stop insulting us. Stop blaming all the West’s ills on us and stop downplaying jewish control and responsibility.

For Austerites all of the above applies, only moreso. We don’t need another long march of destruction. And we don’t need “friends” obsessed with manipulating us. You make distinctions – stop telling Whites we cannot. You say you like Whites – act like it. Treat us as equals. You can start by capitalizing White.

UPDATE 9 Aug 2008: On 19 July Auster provided a non-answer to this post titled Am I an orthographical fifth columnist?, though he doesn’t quote me or link here. He asserts that “[c]apitalization is governed by the nature of the word, not by a political or racial agenda”.

Today, in An Orwellian spelling change, Auster shows: A) that he recognizes “the makers of these rules–liberals all” have an agenda, and B) that his own agenda can motivate him to defy those rules on occasion.