Excerpted from
William Pierce’s novel
Hunter:
“You said there must be lots of others like you out there, but there aren’t. You’re unique. You don’t like the race mixing that’s going on in this country, so you did something about it. You started blowing away mixed couples. You strangled the biggest promoter of race mixing in the Congress. You blew a committee of race-mixing celebrities to smithereens. There are millions of other people out there who don’t like race mixing either. The last Gallup poll I saw said twenty-seven per cent of White Americans disapprove of marriages between Whites and Blacks, and I personally think that the actual percentage is a good bit higher than that. But what have any of those folks done about it? Nothing. Not a damned thing. Not even the ones who really get steamed when they see a White woman with a nigger. They’ve got no balls. They’ve got no imagination. They’re constitutionally incapable of doing anything original.
”Do you really believe this country’d be in the mess it’s in today if its citizens could think? I mean really think and then act accordingly, like rational individuals. They wouldn’t even have to have balls; all they’d have to do is act rationally in the privacy of the voting booth. What you don’t understand, Yeager, is that they’re not rational individuals; they’re a bunch of fucking animals, and I’m talking about the Ph.Ds and the corporation executives as well as the cab drivers and the housewives. They don’t think; they only feel and react according to a batch of conditioned reflexes.”
“Are you trying to tell me,” Oscar came back with incredulity and defiance in his voice, “that there is no point in trying to educate people, that it does no good at all to point out their errors to them and give them facts?”
“I’m trying to tell you that you can’t educate them—that is, you can’t change their behavior—with pamphlets. The only way to persuade the population of this country that they need to change their ways is to give them a good, hard boot in the ass—about 600 times. They need to be reprogrammed, and that takes order and discipline, not books or leaflets… If you like to read books, then you should be grateful that most men aren’t rational, because it takes a pretty big herd of irrational animals to provide the infrastructure for just one printing press. To be able to afford one philosopher we need a million drones operating on their conditioned reflexes. So be happy that people have to be manipulated instead of educated. That’s the way the Lord designed things. The government accepts that and acts accordingly—at least, this part of the government does,” he said, tapping his chest with his thumb.
“If it offends your humanist sensibilities to reform the behavior of the American people with hunger and the toe of a boot and the threat of a bullet, then there are gentler methods, more ‘educational’ methods. If you had the television networks under your control you could feed the public a new brand of pablum and accomplish in twenty or thirty years a part of what needs to be done. That is, you could change the content of the ‘ideas’ that they parrot back and forth to each other. You could have them wringing their hands over what’s happening to the Palestinians and demanding a boycott of Israel, instead of demonstrating against South Africa. You could chase the queers and the other freaks back into the closet. You could cut race mixing down to almost nothing. Ryan placed his hand on Oscar’s arm and assumed a fatherly tone. “Anyway, since you don’t control the television networks, we’re going to have to do things my way. Be glad that you have a chance to help. It’s not often in history that two rational men are able to work together on a project so worthwhile. And, for Christ’s sake, forget about pamphlets.”
* * *
He paused again, “A couple of minutes ago you estimated that fewer than one per cent of the White people in this country are interested enough in what’s happening in the world around them to read a pamphlet. That’s not far off the mark. Most of our fellow citizens have absolutely no sense of civic or racial responsibility. It’s as if they believed that the world outside their own skins is only a sideshow for their personal amusement. What do you call that—solipsism?
”Anyway, nearly all the ones who do get involved politically are just conforming to the social pressures on their particular segment of society; they shout the same slogans that the people around them are shouting, and just as mindlessly. Almost no one is involved in a cause because he has carefully considered the situation, decided that something needs to be done, and taken upon himself the responsibility to do it, either independently or as part of a group. To me that’s what defines a human being: his acceptance of responsibility. By that standard most people are simply animals—thinking animals, but still animals, without the essence of humanity.”
Oscar felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck as Harry’s words recalled those he had so recently heard from Ryan. It was uncanny, he thought, that two men as different as William Ryan and Harry Keller—one a sworn defender of the regime, eager to use the most extreme measures against its enemies, and the other dedicated to the overthrow of that regime because of its racially destructive policies—should express the same, shockingly unorthodox view of the great bulk of their fellow men. While Oscar marveled to himself over this coincidence, Harry continued speaking:
“Our task now is to educate and recruit human beings—only human beings. We don’t need a mass movement for that. In fact, we can’t build or control a mass movement until we have a much stronger organization of responsible people… ah, excuse me again, until we have many more responsible friends working together. So it’s that fraction of a per cent we’re after now, the few who’re a little closer to the threshold than the rest.”
“Threshold?” Oscar asked. “In the Nietzschean sense,” Harry replied. “The threshold between animal and man—or between man and higher man, if you prefer. In any case, between the unconscious and irresponsible on one side and the conscious, responsible preparers of the way for the Superman on the other side.”
“I see,” Oscar nodded. “But I suppose the Nietzschean term which seems to me more fitting is ‘abyss’—the Abgrund which man must cross between the animal and the Superman. My impression is that the transition is not so sharp as ‘threshold’ implies, but rather that it’s more strung out, like Zarathustra’s ‘rope over an abyss.’ In myself, for example, I recognize a mixture of the unconscious and the conscious. Sometimes when I’m searching for the truth I feel as if I’m groping through a dense fog. Everything isn’t completely dark; I’m conscious of some things. But other things are so dim that I can hardly make them out; I can’t quite grasp them in my consciousness. I suspect that there are a lot of other people out there to whom it would be inaccurate to refer as ‘animals,’ because they have at least the barest glimmerings of consciousness, the barest beginnings of a sense of responsibility—some more and some less.”
As Oscar spoke, a broad smile lit Harry’s face. “So! A fellow Nietzschean!” He grasped Oscar’s arm, genuinely pleased. A momentary smile flitted across Oscar’s face in response to Harry’s reaction, but it immediately gave way to a frown, and he said, “I believe also that I prefer to think of the more irresponsible members of our race as children instead of as animals. You say that the possession of a sense of responsibility is what distinguishes the human being from the animal, but one can make the same distinction between adults and children instead.”
“If you wish,” Harry waved his hand. “But a child normally grows into adulthood. Most members of the generation alive today will go to their graves with no more sense of responsibility than when they were born.”
Ex libris 