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Response to The Obverse Observer (counterorder.com)

Anarchists Try to "Spin" Nihilism Into Its Exact Opposite

12/18/2008 20:12:06 CST
ANUS News

Greetings,

The following is a response to your article "The Obverse Observer" at http://www.counterorder.com/beyond.html , specifically the sections "Nihilism and Race," "Folly of Nationalism" and "The Problem of ANUS" (countered in sections I, II and III, respectively).

I believe you exhibit some misconceptions about nihilism, ANUS.com and reality in this article, and I am writing to correct them.

I.

In the section, "Nihilism and Race," you state:

"Nihilism does not uphold race as a value any more than it tells us one culture is arbitrarily better than another."

This begins a long series of non-sequiturs which completely sidestep the issue, which is the preservation of unique GROUPS of traits, and not the picking of one as superior or inferior. You, however, by your default argument for the invisibility of race, are arguing for the SUPERIORITY of mixed-race individuals. Yet no proof is offered.

What is the real argument? Here it is:

"The individual freedom to choose your strategy, ideally with serious thought and consideration involved in the decision, is critically important because otherwise the trouble arrives when one despot, or authority group, tries to impose their own values and strategy upon others. This inevitably leads to dictatorship, authoritarian brutality, and eventual social collapse."

I see. You've confused ANARCHISM with nihilism. The fact of the matter is that when error prevails, problems exist. Whether that error arrives through a dictator, or through a crowd of people repeating Pleasant Illusions to each other in denial of Difficult realities, is irrelevant. The error is what matters.

Nihilism is not anarchism. Anarchism is a belief that no rulers is superior to having a ruler; nihilism is a scientific outlook on the world where we reject all values, or human interpretations of reality, in favor of logical deductions from reality itself.

Science gives us many viewpoints on race, but many are there to sell a product -- a publication, a book, an author's reputation. Those repeat Pleasant Illusions to the crowd while real scientists mutter over Difficult Realities in an attempt to discern truth (a representation of reality uncolored by human interpretations).

Here's some science on race:

http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html

A nihilist will recognize this.

Second, if you had bothered to read the ANUS.com articles -- which you didn't, instead clearly skimming with CTRL-F looking for "incriminating" information so you could write an article supporting the Pleasant Illusion and denying the Difficult Reality -- you would see that our position on race is this:

Every ethnic group should rule itself, because pluralism is unworkable, and because each ethnic group will have a traditional culture which takes precedence over the rules of commerce, popularity, media, etc.

For more information, see:

http://www.pan-nationalism.org/

"Racism," by most definitions, is the ABSOLUTE preference of one race over another -- superior versus inferior. Nationalism, on the other hand, is the idea that every population should have its own space and genetic heritage untrammeled by the modern tendency to compromise, sell popular illusion over difficult reality, and turn every place into a USA-style mallculture.

A nihilist recognizes reality. Your article denies these aspects of reality.

II.

You start with a strawman:

"Traditionalists and nationalists selectively recall an idealized history in order to convince themselves that everything was better way back when, and that if we all just revert to the ‘simpler traditional lifestyle' everything will fit into place and be perfect again."

Incorrect. Traditionalists and nationalists believe that certain types of social order recur in healthy societies because they are SANE responses to reality; they are, in other words, good science. It's a pattern of thought derived from Plato's writings in The Republic.

And then you launch into the pseudo-science:

"But even more to the point, the fundamental problem with nationalism is that there are more groups of people calling themselves a nation than there is physical space to create their nations."

This isn't true. If you trace nations genetically, you can see that some populations have hosts in other areas and need to move back into that place. Palestinians are genetically descended from nearby Semitic populations; Jews are a distinct Semitic population. To argue that Jews should accept Palestinians or anyone else into Israel is to argue for the genetic destruction of the Jewish population, e.g. genocide.

Then comes the Dr. Phil:

"Nationalism is a characteristic disease of delusional authoritarian egomaniacs. "

You offer no proof or even argument to this effect. Nationalism is a choice that people make when they have intellectual freedom, probably because instead of reading dingy anarchist texts they studied history. Your slanders against it reveal just how paranoid, delusional and authoritarian you are -- you have a tantrum whenever someone suggests nationalism is viable!

III.

Here's what you say about ANUS.com:

"The ANUS website has changed over time but in its current manifestation it purports to promote an unusual mixture of heavy metal music and extreme nationalism packaged as nihilism and marketed to nihilists. It is true that both sites do have material that is thought-provoking and intelligently written, but that is precisely the point. If they were completely useless they would not serve their true purpose. In reality the façade of nihilism is distinctly disingenuous and only serves to mask a contemporary manifestation of what are widely considered to be very racist views."

Thank you for the kind words. But you have the order backwards. We started out as fairly mainstream liberals, voting Democratic through the 1990s, with some anarchist and ANTIFA tendencies:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980128060256/http://anus.com/

In fact, we refused to put nationalist bands on the site -- I'm thinking of Graveland, Infester and Burzum -- without a warning until 1998, ten years after ANUS started as an organization.

However, we became disaffected with liberalism. Why? It violates the principle of nihilism, which is to eschew human judgments for hard scientific analysis. We were influenced by a number of things, but most powerfully, we were influenced by Plato, Buddhism and Vedanta, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ted Kaczynski, Michel Houllebecq and Arthur Schopenhauer. These are thinkers and disciplines that recognize liberalism for what it is, which is an attempt to create a "social reality" of human judgments that always prefers Pleasant Illusions to Difficult Realities.

As nihilists, it is our job to explore Difficult Realities. One of these, according to our analysis, is that the problem with humanity is not big corporations, authoritarian leaders, Christianity, etc. but the human psychology in the individual -- we have become narcissistic, delusional, egomaniacal and shallow. Consequently, we infect every decision we make with our subjective fears and desire for convenience, which causes our civilizations to slowly decay, and from THAT we get the symptoms of the modern time. Blaming fascism, God, money, etc. is a dodge -- we need to look at the real problem, and that is: the problem is us (or more specifically, how we view the world).

We are not unsympathetic to anarchist and libertarian concerns. We believe government should be structured to achieve consensus on healthy forward motion, should stop destructive actions, and leave everything else unaffected. We do not like authoritarians -- those who use authority for authority's sake -- any more than you do. However, we recognize as did Plato that Democracy and Anarchy create a collapsing infrastructure that causes nations to select tyrants and descend into third-world levels of disorganization and corruption.

You probably missed these articles:

The Danger of Racism and Anti-Semitism
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/racism

Race is Important, Racism is Not
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/race

Why I am not a "White" Nationalist or neo-Nazi
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/nazi

Nobody Wants Your Apocalyptic Hate Cult
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/hate

You attempt to offer "proof" that we are a front for some massive Nazi conspiracy, and at that point you make an error that shows your unfamiliarity with the internet: you assume hosts at the same IP are related. We are not. We have in the past purchased hosting service from anonhost.org, which hosts everything from porn to Nazi sites to far-left sites, and we have done this in order to protect us from those who hate us for our opinions expressed on our most offensive page, The Altar of Unholy Blasphemy (http://www.anus.com/altar), which offends far-right religious groups.

If you are honest, you will print this rebuttal just as cavalierly as you posted the original article. We believe you are misguided on the nature of nihilism, which is more science than the kind of emotional reaction to a political problem that anarchy is; we believe you are misguided in your categorization of ANUS for the reasons above; and we believe you should consider re-assessing reality according to the matrices offered as well above. Thank you for reading, and we hope to open a dialogue with you on this topic.

Sincerely, ANUS staff

About ANUS

The American Nihilist Underground Society advocates nihilism, or a removal of interpretive layers from our perception of physical reality, as a means of transcending illusion. Nihilism denies value and purpose, which are byproducts of the human desire to judge reality and make a consensual "social reality" that by seizing on a single material factor misses the intelligible, or design-based, knowledge we need to adapt to reality. ANUS has been promoting nihilism since 1987.

http://www.anus.com/

About Nihilism

Nihilism is the belief that nothing we perceive has Absolute value; reality exists, but beyond its inherent meaning to us as the physical container of our existence, it has no significance outside of what we perceive. "The world is my representation," indeed. When we strip away all of the values projected onto physical reality and its outcomes, we are left only with personal ideal and natural ideal, and bringing the former into adaptation with the latter is the lifetime task to which nihilism is a gateway.

http://www.nihil.org/