The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

The Ethnostate, by Wilmot Robertson (1992)

Reviewed by Thomas Jackson

A new form of political organization may be needed to save Western Civilization.

It is widely recognized that America is in decline but very few authors recognize the extent to which the loss of will among whites is central to that decline. Massive non-white immigration, schools that teach minority ethnic pride rather than facts, the refusal to recognize racial differences, constant attacks on Western civilization, racial hiring quotas – all are enormously damaging to our country and all continue only because whites let them continue.

Wilmot Robertson once believed that these corrosive forces could be brought under control and that the United States could regain the racial and cultural coherence that made it great. No longer. In The Ethnostate, he outlines a new form of statecraft that might emerge from the wreckage of 21st-century America. He argues that huge, multi-racial conglomerates are probably doomed, and that just as the Soviet empire has broken up along ethnic lines, so could Canada and the United States. In Mr. Robertson’s view, small, streamlined, homogeneous “ethnostates” are not only the last hope for keeping Western civilization alive in an increasingly non-white, anti-white world, they are also the best proving grounds for evolutionary improvement.

For Mr. Robertson, the goal of mankind should be not only the preservation of cultural variety but continual evolutionary advance. As he points out, there is a span of only 50,000 years between Neanderthal man and Isaac Newton. If the sun continues to burn for millions of years, there is no reason why our distant descendants should not be as different from us as we are from apes. Evolution requires genetic diversity and true diversity arises only in isolation. Therefore, any open-borders or one-world scheme will eventually lead to cultural and genetic uniformity, which would be both an esthetic and an evolutionary disaster.

If homogeneous ethnostates come into existence, their first duty would be to guard their unique genetic heritages against dilution and to improve upon them in every possible way. Such states would have the firmest possible foundations because they would “rest on the hard rock of genes and culture instead of the quicksands of proletarian myths, egalitarian fantasies and retouched history.”

15 Million People

The maximum size of Mr. Robertson’s ethnostate would be perhaps the size of Portugal, with a population no larger than about 15 million people. Scores of ethnostates could be scattered not only across America and Europe but around the globe. In the United States, where cities have become very mixed, neighborhoods could have firm boundaries and as much local autonomy as possible.

Political entities on such a small scale could be exceedingly homogeneous, and many strong arguments can be made for homogeneity. The most obvious is that race, religion, language, and culture are the natural fault lines along which peoples divide. Just as Japan benefits immeasurably because its people are similar to each other, ethnostates everywhere would enjoy a unity of purpose that is impossible in a pluralistic state.

Many of the advantages of the ethnostate are nothing more than the absence of the terrible conflicts that weaken the United States. A mono-racial society would have no need for the tremendous apparatus of race relations officials who make up one of our few remaining growth industries. It would not have to cope with the frustrations that result when differently endowed groups face the daily consequences of those differences. Its citizens would not have conflicting foreign loyalties that hamstring its foreign policy. It would have an authentic history rather than the formless mush or ethnic cheer leading that now pass for American history. It could honestly discuss eugenics without raising racial animosity. It would not have a justice system riven by racial loyalties or standards of physical beauty that inevitably value one race over another.

Many of the advantages of the ethnostate are nothing more than the absence of the terrible conflicts that weaken the United States.

As Mr. Robertson points out, ethnostates could also be seed beds for a blossoming of culture. Elizabethan England, Renaissance Florence, and Wiemar at the time of Geothe were exceedingly homogeneous, as were Japan and China in their periods of greatest cultural creativity. When it need not please every taste, art can be free and strong. Without morality art can degenerate into pornography, but in a coherent society without competing religions and moralities, the sense of duty or honor can likewise be strong.

Mr. Robertson points out that Government and the laws could be minimal in an ethnostate. People of the same stock and of similar expectations turn to custom and good manners to regulate their affairs. It is only in a society of competing customs and decaying manners that laws must intrude into every corner of life. A piling up of laws is a kind of moral prosthesis, and a sure sign that a society has lost its moral center.

For racial minorities as well, there would be great advantages in having their own ethnostates. They would no longer have to live by the standards of others, and could concentrate on their own progress rather than blame their failures on “racism.” Although some clear-thinking non-whites might realistically fear that their groups were incapable of maintaining civilized societies, others would prefer to be masters in their own homes rather than servants in the mansions of others.

All of these advantages of homogeneity are easily understood by anyone who has observed the United States. Mr. Robertson’s economic prescriptions for the ethnostate are more unfamiliar. It is true that just as different peoples build different cultures, they would build different economies. No model of central planning or free enterprise should be universal. However, Mr. Robertson suggests that for ethnostates to preserve their uniqueness, they should have as little foreign trade as possible. Striving for self sufficiency makes a people well rounded.

However, if the world were to split up into ethnostates no larger than Holland, autarky would impoverish them. As Mr. Robertson points out, cultural coherence and genetic diversity are more important than material wealth, but Holland’s domestic market would not support an automobile industry or even a basic electronics industry. Without foreign trade, most ethnostates would be very poor.

The Road to Dispossession

For the time being, however, what are the forces that keep whites in the United States and, to a lesser degree, those in Western Europe on the road to dispossession? One of the most obvious is widespread refusal to recognize that the races of man are not equivalent. Different races make cultures in their own images as much as they are made by their cultures. As long as whites are browbeaten into believing that race does not matter, they will continue to cooperate in their own marginalization.

Another potent factor is the widespread belief that homogeneous states would inevitably make war on each other. It is commonly thought that internal frictions are preferable to the immensely greater frictions of war and that the more nations resemble each other the less likely they are to fight. Mr. Robertson counters this view by saying that if any ethnically pure state made war on another it would be tantamount to genocide and that genocide is so terrible a crime no national leader would dare be charged with it.

Mr. Robertson’s more convincing argument is the one that justified the independent French nuclear force: A small nation can deter aggression from much more powerful nations as long as it can destroy the aggressor’s major cities with a few nuclear missiles. Whatever the merits of either of these arguments, if ethnostates were all that stood between whites and extinction of their culture, any but the most demoralized whites would choose the ethnostate even if it did increase the chances of war.

Another force that is pushing whites aside is their own altruism. No other race welcomes impoverished, diseased aliens into its midst or sends its soldiers around the world to feed people who cannot feed themselves. In Mr. Robertson’s view, this is partly the result of the excesses of Christianity, a religion, he says, which “can easily become an altruistic Trojan Horse.” Although altruism is a noble thing, he argues that it should remain within the ethnostate: “It should not be extended to fishing the muddy waters of other people’s problems.”

Another reason why the dismemberment of the United States seems farfetched is that political doctrine always lags behind reality. As Mr. Roberston points out, the Constitution and Bill or Rights were written by Englishmen for Englishmen in a sparsely populated nation of farmers. It was the product not only of its times but of the race and culture of its authors. How can we pretend that such a document still applies to a disorderly urban mix like New York City? Doctrine eventually catches up with reality, but if it lags too far, the adjustment may be violent, as the French kings, the Russian Czar, and the Shah of Iran all discovered. Mr. Robertson calls the veneration of dead ideas a kind of ideological necrophilia.

Though it is not yet the ally of Western civilization, the environmental movement soon could be. Anyone who is passionately concerned about the Snail Darter or the Spotted Owl should surely be concerned about the survival of the different races of his own kind. Eventually, it should dawn on environmentalists how disproportionate it is to do battle in the name of the human habitat but to say nothing about who will live in it. The Ethnostate is in many ways an extension of “green” thinking in that it proposes to allot to the different tribes of men an environment appropriate to each, so that each may prosper and none may interfere with his neighbors.

Although events in the former Soviet Union should be a lesson to us all, Mr. Robertson has no illusions that Europe or North America will divide neatly into ethnostates. He does not rule out the possibility that when non-whites become majorities in the United States they could do what the black Haitians did after their rebellion against the French: hunt down and exterminate all the whites who were left alive. The Ethnostate is remarkable and thought provoking, but it is an essay on what would be desirable, not necessarily what is probable.

It may be that whites do not have the will to save themselves. It may be that both in America and in Europe, they will let a flood of aliens push them aside and let their homelands be transformed into northern colonies of the third world. For Mr. Robertson, what may happen is less important than what we believe in and what we fight for. This is the frame of mind he proposes for whites who see the dangers that lie ahead: “I’m right, so I will go ahead, come what may. If no one listens, so what? . . . Yes, my ship of state, my West, may be going down, but if she goes, I’m going to make sure that at least one member of the crew is still hoisting sail as she sinks.”

The Ethnostate, by Wilmot Robertson (1992)

Reviewed by Rich Brooks (19 January 2005)

In my review of The Dispossessed Majority, I was mildly critical of Robertson for not providing practical solutions to the problems he so brilliantly analyzed. Now, in this later book, The Ethnostate, published in 1992, the author proposes what his subtitle calls “An Unblinkered Prospectus for an Advanced Statecraft.” Robertson would replace the large but crumbling multi-racial nations with small, monoracial states. Lest his proposals be considered too utopian, it should be noted that this process of devolution is actually starting to occur in the former republics of the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, as well as in Great Britain, with increasing independence now being given to Wales and Scotland.

Robertson turns the concept of “diversity” on its head by showing how a world made up of many small, racially and ethnically homogenous states actually provides more cultural diversity than when there is a large racial “melting pot.” In fact, he drew his inspiration from proposals by some environmental activists to create bioregions where flora and fauna are of a similar kind and protected within these boundaries. These ecologists are usually careful not to mention race, however, and fail to take their proposals to their logical conclusion by applying them to homo sapiens.

The Ethnostate is a very different book from The Dispossessed Majority, as it is only 233 pages and contains no footnotes. It is indeed a long essay about culture, politics and government and is prescriptive rather than descriptive. It also represents an evolution in the author’s thinking about the future of the United States of America. As he says in his forward,

…the author was hopeful, but not too hopeful, that a sharp white backlash to minority racism and cultural degeneration might save what appeared to be a doomed United States. Twenty years ago he still believed it possible that his moribund country could revive, clean out its political and cultural Augean Stables, and establish a Pax Americana that would herald a new age of peace, plenty and progress. Now that more than two decades have passed, events are proving that America, as we have known it, is beyond saving. The Majority, that is, the Northern and Western European elements of the population, has lost whatever chance it had to recapture the country it ruled for more than two centuries. Defeatist as it may sound, this does not mean it is too late to save the Majority as a people.

There have been some feeble attempts to encourage a “northwest migration” and secession, but these movements have been woefully lacking in strong and trusted leadership. On the other hand, the continued flood of Mexicans — legal and illegal — into Southern California may make an Aztlan ethnostate here a reality sooner than we might think. White Californians are indeed being forced to flee into rural areas, an incipient movement toward an ethnostate in which Robertson sees positive benefits. With the advent of modern communications it is no longer necessary to concentrate large populations in cities.

Robertson is a strong proponent of economic self-sufficiency and would drastically curtail foreign trade. While he acknowledges the economic benefits of an economy of scale, he abhors the extreme specialization it brings to the manufacturing process. While he is definitely not a Luddite (as William Gayley Simpson was at heart), this author would accept a lower material standard of living as a tradeoff for a more humane economy in which citizens are encouraged to become “jacks of all trades.” While he is certainly no fan of socialism or large bureaucracies, Robertson has some equally harsh words for laissez-faire capitalism as an ideology. He says, almost heretically, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a “managed economy” in spite of its failure in the Soviet Union. In fact, with computers now so powerful, programs could be devised to smooth out the inevitable booms and busts of a capitalist economy. At any rate, the ethnostate’s economy and government would be geared to the needs of its monoracial citizens, not speculators. Celebrity actors and sports stars would not be permitted to draw obscene salaries, nor (I assume) would CEO’s. For one thing, there would be no jews; they would have to form their own ethnostate, but one more economically viable than Israel at present.

If there is one glaring omission in both of Robertson’s books, it is National Socialist Germany. Although he mentions Hitler occasionally and not unfavorably, it is usually only in passing when discussing international issues. To me, Hitler’s Germany was the most notable attempt to create an ethnostate, although a Greater Germany would be much larger than Robertson’s ideal. He would devolve Germany to its constituent states, actually the antithesis of Hitler’s desire to unite all Germans in a single Reich. While I understand that there is a lot of emotional baggage attached to any discussion of Hitler and Nazism, the Nazis did address many of the author’s concerns and I think he should have included some acknowledgement of this in his book. Many of his ideas, however, are quite compatible with National Socialist ideology.

If you are looking for disparaging remarks about non-White racial groups, you will not find them in this book. The author is even careful to disclaim any “white supremacy” beliefs, and even goes so far as to say that higher IQ scores do not prove any overall superiority. His goal is live and let live, and to have each racial group separately develop its own culture in its separate ethnostate.

Of course, there would have to be some overriding international authority in such a mosaic of small ethnostates covering the globe. He is somewhat vague here, but the problem as I see it is that this would seem to open the back door for a re-emergence of globalism, something Robertson would definitely wish to avoid. His chapter on foreign policy is thoughtful and addresses many concerns of skeptics. “One way of ending family bickering,” he notes, “is for contentious members to move out and live apart. That same advice holds true for a family of nations.” (p.60)

The Ethnostate is as beautifully written as The Dispossessed Majority, somewhat remarkable because the author must have been well into his eighties when he wrote it. Practically every page contains a quotable passage I could use as a “thought for the day.” The discerning reader, however, is left with many questions as to how and when and under what circumstances these ideas are to be implemented. This book, then, is really a text that should be used as a beginning of a discussion or dialogue, a much more pertinent and useful topic to discuss on WN forums than whether or not a forum member is a fag or a jew or a traitor. Wilmot Robertson has left us with a valuable body of work. Above all, he has refused to cede the moral high ground to the multiculturalists who claim to be “humanitarian,” and for this we should be most grateful.

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“If our buildings, our highways, our railroads should be wrecked we could rebuild them. If our cities should be destroyed out of the very ruins we could erect newer and greater ones. Even if our armed might should be crushed, we could rear sons who could redeem our power. But if the blood of our White race should become corrupted and mingled with the blood of Africa, then the present greatness of the United States of America would be destroyed and all hope for the future would be gone forever.” – U.S. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo (1947)