Il Ragno
12-12-2004, 05:02 AM
That's me I'm referring to. And while I don't relish saying the following, I'd be grossly dishonest if I didn't.
Although I do not agree with, or approve of, a lot of Fade's most recent positions - the time has come to admit he is, and has been, right about Linder & VNN.
I've spent little time at the VNN site these past few months, but what time I have spent there has been almost 100% the main (spintro) page and the Reader Mail. I'd never warmed up to the Forum and always considered it misbegotten. Although I've posted to it ten or twelve times over the past year or so, it was generally to test the waters, which I usually found unsuitable for consumption. Still, I was there the other day and the handful of threads I scanned seemed to be of a higher quality than the swill I'd found six months, a year, 18 months back.
I generally avoided any thread that involved the endless internecine circle-jerk of Glenn Miller, David Lane, The Order, etc, etc, etc. Although I was vaguely aware of who they were/are, and that Alex had aligned himself with Miller in some fashion, to me it was all old, stale news that didn't have fuck-all to do with present-day America. None of these names meant anything to me; moreover, I couldn't fathom why I (or anyone) should even care about what appeared to me to be a gaggle of retread ex-cons who are notable only for blowing their significance way, way, WAY out of proportion to their actual impact on society (zero) or white Americans (ditto). In much the same way I give religious-type arguments a pass if I can help it: I found this whole traitor/not-a-traitor jazz boring and interminable and of no earthly value whatsoever to a neutral observer.
This recent 'war' described in Nuclear Thoughts' post featured a hyperlink and I clicked it, figuring that perhaps this would be a concise thread that synthesized all that sturm und drang into a brief, coherent and easily-grasped form - the whole ball of wax in a page or two.
It was like losing my footing and falling into a septic tank. I finished it hoping - hoping - that Alex is actually working with the federal authorities as a deep-cover plant. Because otherwise he's dead and doesn't know it yet.
Apparently - and someone please correct me if I have this wrong - Miller took cash from The Order to finance his 'political party', and The Order 'raised' this cash through bank robberies during the commission of which bystanders were shot and killed. Then everybody got taken into seperate rooms by the cops or the Feds or whomever, were persuaded or volunteered to roll on each other, did varying amounts of time and are now denying they betrayed each other before the others had betrayed them.
For some reason, the entire focus of the infighting is who did or didn't squeal and why. The notion that this is utterly unimportant compared to the fact that these people are murderous felons is never even raised. The idea that no viable grass-roots movement is even feasible with a brain-trust and hierarchy of bottom-feeding scumbag desperadoes with a proven track record of ignominious failure, stupidity and treachery calling the shots apparently has occurred to no-one. Poor Alex is in so far over his head with such human offal he's like a doomed character out of film noir: a talented writer but essentially a small-timer seduced by some crackpot dream of revolutionary glory he's too insulated from reality to see is unattainable, cornered by his own rhetoric into making common cause with unprincipled sharks, compounding each foolish decision with a far worse one, and an even worse one after that.
I feel for the guy, I really do. I have never fallen into the trap of judging a writer the way I would an actor or politician - a bullshitter who's all front and no back. When the scuttlebutt began about his drinking I didn't not believe it; I just didn't think it was in any way important. Writers quite often have fucked-up & chaotic personal lives, substance-abuse demons, trails of debt behind them. These are serious demerits if you intend to sell toothpaste on tv or run for State Senate, where image is everything because nobody expects you to have any substance beyond a rote hunger for power and gelt. They are, however, not necessarily germane to an appraisal of the writer's work, vision, or imagination. (This is why all the 'criticism' of Nietzsche around here - his mental problems, his family-life nightmares & deadbeat tendencies - is meaningless. The writer and the writing are rarely interchangable... unless he's a surpassingly mediocre one.)
Alex, if you're reading this by any chance - and I doubt this will do any good if you are - you're worth more than this. Save yourself and get out. Shut down VNN - you can always relaunch it in a year or two. For Christ's sake, get a job of some kind, even temporarily - even one clearly beneath you. You don't need to repudiate a jot of what you've written over the years and you have nothing to apologize for, but you need to wake the fuck up and get out before your 'friends' drag you below the waterline altogether. Nobody with a middling two-digit iq is ever going to take seriously a 'movement' made up of depraved has-beens so far beyond the pale - and more importantly, you are getting yourself in deeper and deeper with vendetta-minded losers who have nothing to offer either you or white American society except a laundry-list of scores they've been waiting two decades to settle.
I'm not even going to wax morose over the talent you're wasting because you have shown a lethal inability to make sound decisions. But these fucking people will get you incarcerated or dead. Bill White was a bonehead move but he was essentially a nuisance you could put behind you. Likewise, Kevin Strom - another ill-chosen opponent - might've returned your rhetorical fire shot for shot, but rhetoric is where his ammunition begins and ends. Now, however, you're smack in the middle of the kind of simmering vendetta that can end with a prison sentence like that, if it doesn't end with a Nathan Gale on your front porch. The bottom line is that - even should neither come to pass - you are marginalizing yourself into insignificance. What VNN once was - deliberately provocative, hilarious and galvanizing, an air-horn blast of the kind of truth that we all feel in our bones but dare not say out loud - is no more. You pissed it away. You came to the fork in the road and chose the wrong turn. The why of it is immaterial - where you are is where you are. I wish you well and bear you no ill will, but unless you rip out the wiring and start clean, your moment has passed and the kingdom you now preside over is the kind ruled by one-eyed men. Like that house in Amityville said to its occupants: Get out.
As for the rest of us: while I'm not ever going to venerate FDR and Honest Abe - let alone Poddy and Kristol - or repudiate National Socialist thought and theory as a kneejerk sop to the sorts of people who cry at diaper commercials, obviously other messages must be sent and other tactics tried. But most of all, we need authentic and far-reaching vision that speaks to and embraces a much wider cross-section of white Americans than we've had thus far. If that means reaching out even beyond purely racial lines, we should at least contemplate alliances of mutual benefit with something besides nominal lip service. We simply can't afford inflexible ideological purity - not with the hour so late and the numbers so daunting.
I don't pretend to know what will work, but it is a dead certainty that a phalanx of failed bank robbers (and successful murderers), deer-poisoning busted valises and rhetoriticians on the skids have nothing to offer the America that we still can be - except more of the America that currently is.
Although I do not agree with, or approve of, a lot of Fade's most recent positions - the time has come to admit he is, and has been, right about Linder & VNN.
I've spent little time at the VNN site these past few months, but what time I have spent there has been almost 100% the main (spintro) page and the Reader Mail. I'd never warmed up to the Forum and always considered it misbegotten. Although I've posted to it ten or twelve times over the past year or so, it was generally to test the waters, which I usually found unsuitable for consumption. Still, I was there the other day and the handful of threads I scanned seemed to be of a higher quality than the swill I'd found six months, a year, 18 months back.
I generally avoided any thread that involved the endless internecine circle-jerk of Glenn Miller, David Lane, The Order, etc, etc, etc. Although I was vaguely aware of who they were/are, and that Alex had aligned himself with Miller in some fashion, to me it was all old, stale news that didn't have fuck-all to do with present-day America. None of these names meant anything to me; moreover, I couldn't fathom why I (or anyone) should even care about what appeared to me to be a gaggle of retread ex-cons who are notable only for blowing their significance way, way, WAY out of proportion to their actual impact on society (zero) or white Americans (ditto). In much the same way I give religious-type arguments a pass if I can help it: I found this whole traitor/not-a-traitor jazz boring and interminable and of no earthly value whatsoever to a neutral observer.
This recent 'war' described in Nuclear Thoughts' post featured a hyperlink and I clicked it, figuring that perhaps this would be a concise thread that synthesized all that sturm und drang into a brief, coherent and easily-grasped form - the whole ball of wax in a page or two.
It was like losing my footing and falling into a septic tank. I finished it hoping - hoping - that Alex is actually working with the federal authorities as a deep-cover plant. Because otherwise he's dead and doesn't know it yet.
Apparently - and someone please correct me if I have this wrong - Miller took cash from The Order to finance his 'political party', and The Order 'raised' this cash through bank robberies during the commission of which bystanders were shot and killed. Then everybody got taken into seperate rooms by the cops or the Feds or whomever, were persuaded or volunteered to roll on each other, did varying amounts of time and are now denying they betrayed each other before the others had betrayed them.
For some reason, the entire focus of the infighting is who did or didn't squeal and why. The notion that this is utterly unimportant compared to the fact that these people are murderous felons is never even raised. The idea that no viable grass-roots movement is even feasible with a brain-trust and hierarchy of bottom-feeding scumbag desperadoes with a proven track record of ignominious failure, stupidity and treachery calling the shots apparently has occurred to no-one. Poor Alex is in so far over his head with such human offal he's like a doomed character out of film noir: a talented writer but essentially a small-timer seduced by some crackpot dream of revolutionary glory he's too insulated from reality to see is unattainable, cornered by his own rhetoric into making common cause with unprincipled sharks, compounding each foolish decision with a far worse one, and an even worse one after that.
I feel for the guy, I really do. I have never fallen into the trap of judging a writer the way I would an actor or politician - a bullshitter who's all front and no back. When the scuttlebutt began about his drinking I didn't not believe it; I just didn't think it was in any way important. Writers quite often have fucked-up & chaotic personal lives, substance-abuse demons, trails of debt behind them. These are serious demerits if you intend to sell toothpaste on tv or run for State Senate, where image is everything because nobody expects you to have any substance beyond a rote hunger for power and gelt. They are, however, not necessarily germane to an appraisal of the writer's work, vision, or imagination. (This is why all the 'criticism' of Nietzsche around here - his mental problems, his family-life nightmares & deadbeat tendencies - is meaningless. The writer and the writing are rarely interchangable... unless he's a surpassingly mediocre one.)
Alex, if you're reading this by any chance - and I doubt this will do any good if you are - you're worth more than this. Save yourself and get out. Shut down VNN - you can always relaunch it in a year or two. For Christ's sake, get a job of some kind, even temporarily - even one clearly beneath you. You don't need to repudiate a jot of what you've written over the years and you have nothing to apologize for, but you need to wake the fuck up and get out before your 'friends' drag you below the waterline altogether. Nobody with a middling two-digit iq is ever going to take seriously a 'movement' made up of depraved has-beens so far beyond the pale - and more importantly, you are getting yourself in deeper and deeper with vendetta-minded losers who have nothing to offer either you or white American society except a laundry-list of scores they've been waiting two decades to settle.
I'm not even going to wax morose over the talent you're wasting because you have shown a lethal inability to make sound decisions. But these fucking people will get you incarcerated or dead. Bill White was a bonehead move but he was essentially a nuisance you could put behind you. Likewise, Kevin Strom - another ill-chosen opponent - might've returned your rhetorical fire shot for shot, but rhetoric is where his ammunition begins and ends. Now, however, you're smack in the middle of the kind of simmering vendetta that can end with a prison sentence like that, if it doesn't end with a Nathan Gale on your front porch. The bottom line is that - even should neither come to pass - you are marginalizing yourself into insignificance. What VNN once was - deliberately provocative, hilarious and galvanizing, an air-horn blast of the kind of truth that we all feel in our bones but dare not say out loud - is no more. You pissed it away. You came to the fork in the road and chose the wrong turn. The why of it is immaterial - where you are is where you are. I wish you well and bear you no ill will, but unless you rip out the wiring and start clean, your moment has passed and the kingdom you now preside over is the kind ruled by one-eyed men. Like that house in Amityville said to its occupants: Get out.
As for the rest of us: while I'm not ever going to venerate FDR and Honest Abe - let alone Poddy and Kristol - or repudiate National Socialist thought and theory as a kneejerk sop to the sorts of people who cry at diaper commercials, obviously other messages must be sent and other tactics tried. But most of all, we need authentic and far-reaching vision that speaks to and embraces a much wider cross-section of white Americans than we've had thus far. If that means reaching out even beyond purely racial lines, we should at least contemplate alliances of mutual benefit with something besides nominal lip service. We simply can't afford inflexible ideological purity - not with the hour so late and the numbers so daunting.
I don't pretend to know what will work, but it is a dead certainty that a phalanx of failed bank robbers (and successful murderers), deer-poisoning busted valises and rhetoriticians on the skids have nothing to offer the America that we still can be - except more of the America that currently is.