RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Wandering Scot

Sept. 20, 2014 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

48:26

The Wandering Scot

Wandering Scot Colin Liddell joins Richard to discuss the recent referendum for Scottish independence, the (ir)relevance of ethane-nationalism and proportional representation, and the tension between a European and ethnic identity. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Colin, welcome back to the program.
	Yeah, that does sound slightly strange, doesn't it?
	It does.
	It's good to talk to you again.
	Well, Colin, you are a wandering Scotsman, so you were not allowed to vote in the recent referendum for Scottish independence, but how would you have voted?
	Well, that's a tricky one, isn't it?
	Wow, what should I say there?
	No, I'd definitely have voted yes.
	Because I think if Yes had won, it would have had a lot of very, very interesting repercussions.
	For one thing, it would have shrunk the United Kingdom into being an insignificant state.
	It would have threatened the British permanent seat on the Security Council.
	It would have undermined the prestige of Britain and therefore lessened its power as a bridge between America and Europe.
	Therefore, it would have greatly undermined the transatlantic alliance.
	From a geopolitical point of view, it would have had a lot of big effects, even though it was quite a small vote involving only three or four million people.
	And I think it would have been better for the UK itself, like just ignoring all these kind of global impacts, it would have been much better for the UK because not only would it have helped Scotland, it would have helped England.
	Now in the case of Scotland, a lot of people say that Scotland would have just sheared off and become a kind of cross between North Korea and Sweden with lots of welfare and mass immigration and the rest of it.
	And, of course, you know, that sounds fairly plausible if you look at some of the political positions that the SNP and the Labour Party in Scotland take.
	But, of course, being a new country on its own, they would have soon had to confront reality.
	And then that would have obviously pushed the country in a much more rightward direction.
	I mean, the reason Scotland is.
	So, notoriously left-wing is because it's in Britain.
	Being in Britain makes Scotland left-wing.
	Do you think just because of a certain kind of chip on their shoulder of feeling like they're second-class citizens, or why?
	Well, yeah, it's sort of a complicated thing.
	First of all, a lot of the young people leave the country, and so you have a kind of older demographic.
	Older demographics, they tend to be more welfare-oriented, so they socialize medicine and stuff like that.
	You also have a kind of, Scotland's a kind of industrial, post-industrial country, and so throughout the decades of the 20th century, The country sort of adopted socialistic attitudes and partly as a way of a certain national identity.
	So if you look back in the early to mid-20th century, nationalism wasn't really a viable political option like it is more recently.
	So if you were nationalistic...
	The only expression for that would be the Labour Party, because the Labour Party had a lot of Scottish members, a lot of Scottish leaders, and the Conservative Party was almost totally English, and even those Scottish members of the Conservative Party sounded like English people.
	So there was a kind of, up until the 19...
	That's interesting.
	Just to chime in, you can see a lot of that in the United States as well.
	A lot of the Midwestern and Northeastern Catholic vote going to the Democrats as people who might have felt just a little, or Irish Catholics.
	And again, this is definitely changing because the United States' ethnicity is fading.
	Of any significance outside of St. Patrick's Day parades or beer festivals.
	But that being said, there was a very strong component to that of a certain kind of Catholic vote that tended towards the left wing, the underdog side, and so on and so forth.
	Even though you look at them, their social values or whatever were hardly leftist at all.
	Yeah.
	Also, Scottish working class politics, there's also a very large sectarian element.
	And, you know, this affected things in various ways.
	Like, up until about the 1950s, Scotland tended to actually vote more Conservative MPs in Labour, apparently.
	And, you know, the Protestant working class tended to be unionist.
	So it was in Scotland, the Conservative Party was always the Conservative and Unionist Party.
	And it was sort of tied into Northern Irish politics as well.
	So through unionism, you know, conservatism was sort of bolstered among the working class.
	But then as you sort of move out of the 50s into the 60s, Scotland starts to become increasingly Labour, and at the second time you start to see the rise of the National Party, the Scottish National Party.
	What is the history of that, of Scottish nationalism?
	Just before we went on air with this podcast, we were talking about the comparison to the 1980 referendum in Quebec, and you can see a real...
	You had a historical background for Quebec nationalism in the sense that these are French speakers, they have a connection to France.
	You had Canada as part of the British realm and having a very strong Anglo-Saxon, in some ways American.
	You know, a component to it and that the French Canadians felt that they were different and so on and so forth.
	That kind of makes sense.
	What is the history of Scottish nationalism?
	Where did this come from?
	I mean, when you were a kid, is this something that you would hear about or think about?
	Yeah, you would hear about the Scottish National Party quite frequently from about the 1970s onwards.
	They had an initial breakthrough in one of the by-elections, I think, in the 1960s.
	And then by the 1970s, they were kind of established on the political scene.
	But Scottish nationalism is sort of, I mean, the identity on which nationalism is always founded has always been there.
	Scottish nationalism is like, I mean, Scottish identity has always been there.
	It's never disappeared.
	And it was just because the British Empire was so successful and offered so many opportunities.
	And disproportionately, in a sense, to Scottish people.
	I think most of the viceroys of India were Scottish, you know, as one example.
	You know, because of that, it wasn't really an issue to make it into a kind of political thing.
	I mean, Scottish nationalism was expressed in other ways, you know, through military regiments in the British Army and through, you know, setting up places like Hong Kong.
	You know, all these kind of builders of empire.
	So, I think it only started to become a bit of an issue when the British Empire started to rapidly shrink.
	And then, you know, then it started to...
	Even more, it became an issue from about the late 70s, 1980s, because then you had this...
	The decline of British industry.
	And then you had a very unsympathetic conservative government that had just no interest whatsoever in trying to protect or invest or preserve British industry, mainly for ideological reasons.
	The old traditional industries is heavily unionized, which they were.
	But, you know, if you think about a country like Germany, you know, racially they're not that different from us, but they've managed to preserve a lot of their industries.
	And so, you know, Britain should have been doing something similar.
	They should have been investing in their own industries, improving everything, and keeping the quality up.
	And productivity is very high amongst British workers.
	But there was a kind of almost ideological decision to sort of turn away from that.
	And at the same time, that sort of fitted in with the interests of the city of London.
	So to move the economy much more to a kind of parasitical kind of banking financial sort of sector.
	And that particularly, you know, alienated a lot of Scotland because Scotland, many of the jobs we're in, things like shipbuilding and coal mining and steel making.
	And so from the era of Thatcher, the Conservative Party shrinks to about one or two MPs out of about 70 or 80 Scottish MPs.
	So you have this development of a very left-wing culture based upon being part of the United Kingdom.
	And so you have two quite distinct political cultures.
	Scotland leans left, even though it's not really essentially left.
	It's sort of almost forced to be left by being part of the United Kingdom.
	And then England tends to, you know, relative to Scotland, it's a bit more right-leaning.
	But then Scotland manages to pull England to the left.
	And so you get more socialism than you otherwise would.
	That's interesting.
	And I never really thought about how...
	The Labour Party and a certain kind of leftism could be an expression of nationalism.
	And certainly the Scottish National Party was, by all outward effects, a left-wing party.
	It sort of switched to the left, more or less in the 1970s.
	I mean, in the early days, the main jibe or insult used against the Scottish National Party was that it was just the Conservatives in a different guise.
	And there was a certain degree of truth to that.
	Interesting.
	The other thing that was interesting was that there was this...
	You know, you had an expression of Scottish nationalism that manifested in terms of these kind of labor left-wing kind of ideas, and that was in a way a reaction to this Anglo-Saxon-Thatcherite neoliberalism of, you know, unfettered capitalism and unending individuality and all this kind of stuff.
	So it's very interesting.
	It shows once you kind of dig into left-right divides.
	They become much more complicated and much more messy.
	I mean, think of it from this point of view.
	I mean, Scottish voters voting for a Scottish National Party MP to go to Westminster makes no sense whatsoever.
	Right.
	Because, you know, Scotland is like less than 10% of the population.
	So even if everybody in Scotland voted SMP, that would just create a group of about 70 Scottish National MPs in Westminster.
	What can they do?
	Nothing, obviously.
	But voting Labour, then there's a real chance of swinging the election one way or the other.
	So they become, in a sense, a sort of kingmaker position.
	So it makes sense to be a Scottish nationalist supporter.
	You tend to think Westminster, Labour, Scottish Parliament, SNP.
	Interesting.
	What do you think is the future of...
	The United Kingdom and federalism and so on and so forth.
	One interesting thing that I've come across when I've been researching this matter and reading about the referendum is that there's this double standard in a way with Scottish nationalism where Scotland at the moment has a large degree of autonomy.
	Well, I guess, whether it's large, I guess, depends on your perspective.
	But it has autonomy in questions of taxing and spending within Scotland.
	At the same time, in a way, the English don't have that benefit.
	You know, it kind of reminds me, there's something to the English soul.
	There was this movie that came out around 10 years ago.
	There was a kind of spy movie about the beginning of the CIA called The Good Shepherd.
	And the Matt Damon character was actually talking with this Joe Pesci character, who's this quintessential Italian.
	And he said, you know, we Italians, we have our food and family, and the Jews, they have their religion, and you, Wasp, what do you have?
	And he said, you know, we have the United States of America.
	The rest of you people are just visitors.
	And it was this, you know, kind of, a certain kind of Wasp feeling where, you know, the English are almost...
	There are kind of people without that national identity and without certainly a national autonomy, but then they almost feel like they're the ones who run the show in the UK, or at the very least the UK kind of represents them.
	So anyway, just to back up again to what I was saying, from one perspective you could say that the Scots are running the English, because the Scottish parliamentarians have the ability to...
	Basically have autonomy where they determine taxing and spending issues within their own realm.
	But then they can actually vote on taxing and spending issues within England.
	So it's quite a good deal.
	There's not so much taxing.
	It's more like spending.
	Yeah.
	Nevertheless, do you think that this is going to...
	I mean, I guess there could be a couple ways that this could go.
	I mean, one outcome of this could be that even though the vote was fairly close, that secession is defeated, that's a bankrupt ideology, what have you, you know, back to a more greater...
	Federal you know a great federal autonomy or you could say that this is kind of opened up a can of worms And that there's going to be maybe Welsh autonomy.
	There's gonna be English autonomy Well, the thing is, it hasn't really been defeated, you know what I mean?
	That's the thing.
	I think the plan was to defeat it by a much larger margin.
	And if you had, say, if it had been like 70-30, which was, you know, where the opinion polls were, you know, six months ago, then you could say, yeah, we've killed off.
	But because it's actually, you know, quite close, 45 to 55 will be considered very close.
	And especially when you take into account all the other kind of distorting factors.
	I mean, this was a heavily distorted vote for no.
	Like I mentioned already, the media was all on one side, except for the Glasgow Herald.
	And you had the companies threatening to pull out, and you had the EU saying, no, no, Scotland, you can't come in.
	Because the EU member states, they were very worried about the example that would be set, especially countries like Spain, which is basically shitting itself about what the Catalans will do.
	So, not only that, but then you had, at the last moment, you had the Westminster establishment sort of jetting up to the country and making lots of promises about additional powers and taxation powers and Devo Max.
	So, it's not really a kind of convincing electoral victory for the no side.
	So, that just allows Scotland and Scottish politicians to keep...
	In a way, blackmailing Westminster is threatening trouble and needing to be pacified.
	And that, of course, opens up an interesting dynamic with English voters and how they feel.
	Because there is a lot of, whether justified or not, I don't really think it's particularly justified, but whether justified or not, there's a lot of resentment at what is thought to be...
	Sort of special treatment for Scotland.
	Scotland is seen as having certain unfair advantages with regard to the rest of the United Kingdom.
	There's a so-called Barnet formula by which more public money is spent in Scotland.
	And there are differences for tuition fees and other things which mean that it's Scottish.
	I think if you add up the Barnett formula over 50 years, it's like £80,000 per Scottish person over what the average English person gets.
	And then if you throw in something like tuition fees, I think that's something like £27,000.
	So just like doing the basic maths, you see that...
	The average Scottish person is subsidized by more than £100,000 during his or her lifetime relative to the average English person.
	So a lot of that rankles with the English, and the idea that now Scotland will be granted additional powers, that rankles even more, you see.
	There's a very interesting thing happening now, which is what will happen at the election going into next year.
	All the promises that Cameron made, he can't do anything to actually deliver on now because he has a general election to fight.
	But there's going to be some sort of bill.
	powers for the Scottish Parliament, but at the same time, you know, he's going to have to offer English voters something.
	And then this also becomes very awkward because if he, one of the ideas being floated is that Scottish MPs won't be allowed to vote on certain areas of policy that affect England, which are already covered by the Scottish Parliament in Scotland.
	Now, if you get a Labour government, which, you know, there's a very high probability that Cameron will actually lose the election and you'll get a Labour government.
	If you do get a Labour government, then you're going to have a, you know, they're not going to be very happy with that kind of arrangement because a Labour government will probably have a UK majority, but not an English majority.
	So if there's an arrangement that, you know, MPs in Westminster, The decisions in Westminster must exclude Scottish MPs if they only affect England.
	Then, you know, they won't be allowed to vote.
	So you'll have a very kind of almost unworkable situation in many cases because the Labour government will have a piece of legislation.
	Now, let's just sort of like see.
	Now, the Scottish Parliament covers certain areas.
	Let's see.
	There's sort of devolved matters and there's reserved matters.
	Now, the devolved matters are matters that the Scottish Parliament decides on.
	Reserved matters are, you know, that's the UK Parliament.
	So, for example, devolved matters are things like agriculture, forestry and fisheries, education and training, environment, health and social services, housing.
	I think we're good to go.
	Now if you had a Labour government after the 2015 election and they were going to pass a law in England, in Westminster on agriculture for whatever reason, Scottish MPs, Under the new kind of way of thinking, Scottish MPs would be excluded from voting on that because Scotland already controls its own agricultural policy.
	So it would be unfair to have Scottish MPs voting on England's agricultural policy.
	This is the sort of famous West Lothian question as it's known.
	And so then you'd have a Labour government which has a national UK majority unable to vote on agriculture in England.
	So you see how this whole process of kind of bribing the Scottish voters with additional policies, Yes.
	Yeah, exactly.
	That's what I was saying.
	I mean, I don't know where exactly it will lead.
	You know, I think a lot of people, you know, on our side got excited about Ethnonationalism, or this is going to be the new normal as ethnonationalism.
	I wasn't that excited about it at all.
	I just find it...
	I don't think ethnonationalism is really a very...
	At least politically speaking, is a positive thing that we should be putting forth.
	But again, it just seems to be an ethnonationalism of horse trading and worrying about who gets to...
	You know, spend this money on what and what have you.
	It's not a real kind of sense of traditional nationalism.
	Yeah, but it's because they're still sort of joined together.
	You have these two things that don't really fit together, which are politically quite distinct cultures now.
	The ironic thing is that the only way Scottish political culture can start to veer towards English political culture would be if the country was independent.
	By remaining part of the United Kingdom, Scottish political culture is doomed to always be It's a built-in paradox.
	That's an interesting way to think of it.
	I had really not thought of it that way, but I think you're probably right.
	Do you think that also, you know, I guess I'm going to move away from the timely matters and start to talk about bigger questions that this raises.
	Do you think that proportional democracy is really a totally outmoded notion in the first place?
	I mentioned at the very beginning of this program that You're a wandering Scot.
	You're a rootless Scot.
	In exile, you go and subvert other societies or something like that.
	But you were not able to vote in this election despite the fact that you have a tremendous family history in Scotland.
	And some non-white immigrant who has lived in Scotland for six months was able to vote in this election.
	And I don't even know how.
	I've seen some geographic backgrounds.
	I don't even know how a lot of these new immigrants did vote.
	Perhaps they voted yes just to say fuck you to England or something.
	You never know.
	But at the same time, it is kind of meaningless.
	And also, we live in a world of, you know, everyone's, well, I would say Europeans are coming together.
	I mean, when I look at Salmond, I don't see some foreign person who is, you know, just totally different than I am.
	Like I might if I saw a Chinese politician.
	I might see someone who is just radically different than I am.
	Or David Miliband.
	Or David Miliband.
	Joseph Lieberman or something.
	These people are other.
	But I don't see...
	I see Salmond as...
	I probably don't agree with Salmond on spending and taxing or whatever political issues, but who cares?
	That stuff's not important in any ways.
	I see him as just a person who is language.
	I think you're slightly better looking, Richard.
	Thank you, Colin.
	That's true.
	Objectively speaking, that's probably true.
	But, you know, yeah, he's just like me.
	And so, I don't know, I mean, don't you think, I guess what I was getting at, just to summarize, proportional democracy seems to be outmoded on a couple of different levels.
	A, we're moving around a lot.
	We go to different places.
	Just modern capitalism makes people move around.
	People aren't as rooted in one.
	And maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing, but it just is.
	And so this idea that we have to have a local representative, that he represents us, our interests, I think that is a little bit outmoded.
	And as I was getting, again, we just seem to be coming together.
	There seem to be all these forces that are pushing us together.
	And this notion that Scotland just needs to be independent...
	Coming from my perspective, again, I don't live there.
	I'm not a Scot.
	And I'm putting aside some geopolitical things like this could weaken this horrible unipolar world of Washington and NATO that we live under.
	I'm putting that aside and just saying, you know, what is this in itself?
	And it just strikes me as...
	Scottish nationalism strikes me as meaningless to be as blunt as I can.
	It just strikes me as...
	It's a kind of throwback notion that isn't really relevant.
	But anyway, so that's...
	What do you think about that perspective?
	Well, it's not like everybody's always on the move or living overseas like I am.
	Most people are...
	I mean, Scotland is one of the countries that is most known for...
	You know, people leaving and going out into the world and making a career elsewhere.
	And it's certainly been the case with my family, with their various members in Florida and Spain and China and, you know, elsewhere.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	And you also grew up in South Africa for a time as well.
	That's right, yeah.
	So I could have ended up there, you know.
	So you guys have just, yeah, you're really like the Rothschild family or something.
	You've got a little...
	I don't have their money, but some of us might.
	You've got a man in China and a man in Tokyo.
	Yeah, but we don't really synchronize things as well as the Rothschilds do.
	But yeah, it's just that Scotland is kind of notorious, well, I don't know if notorious or famous, famous or notorious for that kind of tendency.
	So, yeah, Scotland's one of the most...
	Kind of rootless nationalities in a way.
	There is a sort of similarity to the Jews in many ways amongst the Scots.
	They tend to blend in and colonize certain other bigger societies in various ways.
	You see a lot of that in places like London and Hong Kong and elsewhere.
	But I do think that despite all that, most people do tend to kind of, they're born and they kind of grow up in the same area and they tend to marry somebody from the, you know, they met in high school or whatever.
	So I still think the fabric of life still exists on a kind of national basis for most people.
	And therefore, I do think that, you know, these forms of nationalism are important.
	I think the problem is if you have too many nationalisms rising up in Europe and then they all start quibbling about little things.
	For example, in the case of England and Scotland, we could start...
	Getting all shirty about Beric.
	And we can say that Beric belongs in Scotland and it shouldn't be part of England.
	And then it's much worse on the continent where you have parties like Jobbik who basically want to take back Transylvania and bits of the Ukraine and half of Slovakia.
	I mean, so all that kind of petty nationalism is...
	Definitely a danger and something that has to be really considered and countered by this sort of alternative right movement.
	But I think there's good nationalism and bad nationalism.
	I wouldn't write nationalism off entirely.
	And in the same way, I wouldn't entirely write off democracy.
	I think most people...
	They tend to have a certain degree of common sense, and they recognize their interests.
	And so, yes, that can be subverted in lots of ways, as we constantly see.
	But I think if you kind of purify things, for example, in the case of the United Kingdom, if you did separate out the Scots from the English, then the Scots would be able to discover a much more authentic sense of who they are, and the English likewise.
	And the United Kingdom, it's one of these kind of like, it's sort of like a mini imperium.
	It's sort of like, it's still an empire.
	And because it's an empire, it involves, it has a kind of ruling elite of sorts, or several kind of ruling elites.
	And then it has all these kind of groups that have to be kind of placated.
	And so it sets up all sorts of like dirty deals.
	Yeah, counterbalancing this with that.
	And so you end up...
	It's like American democracy is a bit like that as well.
	You have to build the coalition.
	And so you have to give everybody something, which means you give everybody nothing finally.
	So I think if you get away from that and you're able to create a more organic community, then...
	In theory, that kind of community should start to behave in a more directly representational way and express their own interests.
	But multiculturalism, globalism, the way we interconnect the world really cuts across that.
	So democracy requires nationalism.
	You can't have democracy without nationalism.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I agree.
	And I just, I think in a way some of these things are being outmoded.
	And again, I don't have just one answer.
	This is what we need.
	But I think it is clear that we need another political philosophy, you know, a fourth political theory or something.
	There has to be something new that isn't just a throwback to something, you know, before the Second World War or...
	Or something, in a way, ethno-nationalism is not new at all.
	It's almost a 19th century romantic conception.
	But we need something different that reflects these realities.
	And, yeah, that avoids certainly these pitfalls of petty nationalism.
	You're not advocating the Russian model here, are you?
	An imperial model?
	Well, maybe that is what we need.
	There's a sort of Russian multiculturalism, isn't it?
	You saw it in the Soviet Union, but you see it beforehand.
	I mean, there's a multiculturalism to all these empires.
	There's a multiculturalism to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And in a way, you have also this dynamic that I was mentioning before of the, let's say, the host ethnicity.
	Feeling like they have the most invested in the empire, but then also, in a way, being abused by the empire.
	And I think that clearly goes to, for white Americans, particularly southern white Americans, who kind of feel like, you know, when you wave the flag or, you know, put it up in your white picket fence yard, oh, you know, that American flag, that is you.
	And, you know, America, we are the greatest.
	We are America, blah, blah, blah.
	We love the soldiers, but in a way, it's white Southerners and white people in general who are most abused by the regime, and yet they're the ones who paradoxically love it the most.
	You can kind of see that with, say, the English and the UK, and you can see that even with Germans in the Austro-Ingarian Empire.
	There was a kind of multiculturalism that was not really serving them, and yet they're the ones waving the flag for the...
	For the emperors.
	So, yeah, there's a strange thing.
	And you can also see that certainly in the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire with the Russian people.
	So, I don't know.
	Maybe we actually do need a kind of...
	I mean, again, this is ridiculous speculation that I'm engaging in.
	But maybe if we, in terms of the future, we do need to form a certain kind of cosmopolitan multiculturalism within a European empire.
	I mean, maybe that is...
	Yeah, I mean, I know what you mean, obviously.
	I do think, you know, Scotland could...
	We could work with Germany better than we could with England.
	But if the Germans were running Europe, I think you'd have a problem with the southern Europeans.
	There is a kind of basic difference, I think, between northern Europe and southern Europe.
	So you might have to have a southern European imperium and a northern European imperium.
	Yeah, no, we see that with the Euro, because in a way, you know, Germany, which is a, you know, highly productive society, they like a weaker currency so that they could sell their goods to other people.
	And Germany, I mean, they're still making cars, they're still making microphones, and, you know, all this kind of highly skilled industrial engineering.
	So they kind of like a little bit of weakness.
	I mean, obviously, Germans have a fear of hyperinflation and things like that, but they like a little bit of weakness so that it feels cheaper so the world can buy their goods.
	But then, you know, the Southern Europeans, they liked the idea of this strong currency, like a German currency, so that they could borrow on it.
	It's like, oh, wow, look.
	Yeah, so you have a kind of distorted symbiosis between the two things.
	Yeah, but then they also like a weak currency, I mean, you know, for tourism or something like that.
	So anyway, yeah, there's just a lot of weird, you know, things pushing in different directions.
	And maybe, I don't know, I mean, maybe, I think it can work, but maybe they're just, it's always going to be hard.
	I mean, because we just have so much...
	When we say, like, I'm a white nationalist or whatever, to a degree, it's, you know, what white people are you talking about?
	Are you talking about, you know, American Southerners or the English or the Italians or Spanish, Russians?
	Well, the problem with being white nationalist is that nobody's more diverse than white.
	If you think about it, the white bell curve, it's more like a walk, isn't it, rather than a proper bell?
	Yes, yeah.
	Well, I was going to say something.
	It might actually be turning into kind of two bell curves.
	Well, I won't go into that.
	But yeah, there's a lot of assorted mating.
	We're dividing.
	Yeah, no, I agree.
	I mean, maybe uniting the white race is such a difficult project, it just shouldn't even be attempted.
	Petty nationalism is the way to go.
	Up with petty nationalism.
	And then start looking around and thinking how you can cooperate with your neighbors.
	No, no, you might be right.
	I mean, I obviously, I'm on the other side of that argument, but I definitely see the point.
	I think that's what America was originally for, wasn't it?
	To kind of bring the white race together.
	They fucked that up somehow.
	Well, but they kind of achieved it in a way.
	Because I agree.
	America was this big frontier and it was just this...
	There was a kind of natural equality to America because there was a lot of space, there was a lot of room.
	You could kind of do your own thing and you didn't really have to even cooperate with others.
	I think I mentioned this earlier.
	For now, to be...
	Certainly at one point there was an Irish wasp divide and all that kind of stuff.
	I mean, again, to be Irish nationalism does not extend beyond a St. Patrick's Day parade.
	We even have German beer festivals.
	That is as far as it goes.
	And beyond that, there's just nothing.
	there really is a kind of whiteness in America.
	So, you know, it's possible.
	Arctic whiteness stretching in all directions.
	Well, we know.
	We're the last man.
	but um I've been thinking about this because I'm actually going to talk a little bit about this at our upcoming conference, but I think we have to admit that there's a last man within all of us.
	We're consumed with consuming and making and spending and blah, blah, blah.
	We think more about Hollywood movies and the next iPhone than we probably think about our indigenous folkways or tradition.
	We should just admit it.
	But in a way, that homogenous European man that has been created in America and is being created in Europe...
	That might ironically hold a potential for a European empire.
	I mean, Nietzsche wrote about this in Beyond Good and Evil.
	You know, we're creating this European.
	We're creating this good European.
	And he is the last man.
	But, you know, you need rulers to rule the last men.
	And so, in a way, this good European might give birth to a higher type as well.
	Yeah, I mean, it sounds good in theory when you put it like that, but just imagine how it works out in practice.
	Oh, everyone wants to be an American.
	Don't you know that?
	There was a great line in Stanley Kubrick's full metal jacket.
	Within every gook, I see a goddamn American.
	It's a really classic line.
	Within every gook, I see a goddamn American, and we've just got to come over here and shoot them until they recognize the truth.
	It was some kind of horrible line like that, but that actually kind of got at this psychological truth.
	And you think that's true?
	Well, again, I think it's...
	Maybe it's kind of horribly true.
	No, look, I obviously think that kind of vision is pretty horrifying.
	It sounds a little bit like Freemasonry.
	Maybe.
	But at the same time, you can't deny that there is a...
	A coming together of Europeans.
	And we are so much more alike than we are different now.
	I mean, just the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that we're having this in two weeks, we're having an English-language European conference.
	And actually, sign up now.
	Tickets are still available.
	But, you know, just the fact that that's happening, I think, is expressive of something, that we're coming together.
	And so I think, you know, within every gook there's an American.
	That's the kind of horrifying version of this reality.
	You need that kind of double identity, though.
	I don't think you can just have this one standard, you know, white identity.
	You have to have your own...
	white racial identity.
	You know, there's got to be culture and there's got to be civilization.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, what you're talking about sort of sounds like an erasure of ethnic and cultural identity.
	And then we sort of come together around a shared appreciation of the iPhone and the English language.
	And, you know, I mean, so, yeah, I can see how that sort of works from an American point of view, because in America, you know, you have, as you said, you've kind of raised ethnicity to a very high degree.
	Is that, you know, we have to wonder, is that really healthy?
	Well, maybe there has to be a dialectic.
	Because, you know, when I was, it's funny, I didn't expect to do this, but I'm kind of getting into what I'm going to talk about at the conference.
	I think, and again, I don't like giving a talk where I'm like, here's our new policy agenda.
	I like bringing up dialectics or really, you know, things where there's a lot of tension, because that's when things get interesting.
	In my opinion.
	So I think maybe there has to be a kind of dialectic or tension.
	And, you know, Americans...
	Because I was asking myself while I was writing this, I was like, what can we learn from Europeans?
	And actually, what can Europeans learn from us?
	Not to be too overconfident or arrogant.
	But I think what Americans desperately need to learn from Europeans is that rootedness and that culture.
	But maybe actually Europeans need to learn a certain something from Americans, and that is not to allow ethnicity to define political or, God forbid, violent conflicts.
	And maybe we need that tension between being a Scotsman and being a white man.
	Because, again, vis-a-vis the rest of the world, to a Chinaman, you're not a Scotsman.
	You're a white person.
	A Scotsman, that's like some funny tie that you wear.
	That's meaningless.
	You're a white man.
	And so we have to recognize that.
	And maybe there could be a real productive tension between culture and civilization, as you put it.
	Yeah, but you're always going to have groups that are...
	That actually use a dual identity in such a system that you're proposing.
	You always have groups that will use a dual identity.
	On one level, they'll be part of this greater unified identity, but they'll also have their secret identity.
	Whom could you be referring to?
	The Irish?
	The Scots!
	And maybe one or two other ethnicities, you know what I mean?
	So, Scots have been playing that game for ages.
	I mean, you have the Anglo-Scot, you know, you don't know him from anybody else down at the St. James Club, you know.
	But, you know, you do have this kind of dual identity with certain highly intelligent races.
	It is Scottish Freemasonry, after all, isn't it?
	Yeah, basically, that's where it comes from.
	Kilwinen, the oldest lodge.
	Yeah, well, it has a very diverse history and there's a lot of European currents in it as well.
	I was just reading Jan Nassmann's Religio Duplex recently, which goes into a lot of the detail of Freemasonry from a European perspective and how it feeds into this greater cosmopolitan Yeah.
	So that might be something worth looking at from the perspective of the Congress that Yeah.
	some ideas you're floating, so I'd sort of recommend you have a quick look at that.
	I definitely will.
	I don't know that book, so I will look at it.
	But actually...
	Colin, why don't we, I think we actually got to a really interesting place, so why don't we just put a bookmark in this conversation, and let's pick it up again, because this was a lot of fun.
	Okay, yeah, there should be a lot of interesting ramifications from this campaign and the moves made to stem Scottish independence.
	Thank you.

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