America the Sleepwalker
America the Sleepwalker is a Cosmotheist lecture given by Dr. William Pierce on May 22, 1977 at the office of the National Alliance in Arlington, Virginia. It appeared in the National Alliance Bulletin. The original audio is here: [1]
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Recently I was looking again at the picture of DC Mayor Walter Washington in the current ATTACK! Again I found it hard to believe. I know it is real, and yet it seems like something form a nightmare.
Here we are, the descendants of the fierce Celts, of the warlike Vikings, and the others--here we are, in the most powerful nation on earth, which our forefathers built form a wilderness they took away from non-White savages--and the capital city of this nation, our nation, is governed by a crew of Black comedians straight out of Amos 'n' Andy, by a gang which no self-respecting troop of baboons would tolerate as their leaders for an instant.
Besides the head clown, who has managed to reduce the fiscal situation in the capital to a state of total chaos, to an incomprehensible shambles which not even the best auditors in the country can figure out--and he’s done this with a subsidy of nearly a million dollars a day from the Congress--besides Mr. Washington, we have a city council whose vice-chairman was convicted in court last year of biting a White man on the back three times in public--biting him hard enough to draw blood--when the White man momentarily blocked his parking space outside City Hall. And we have another prominent council member whose offices were used as a temporary morgue by some of his own employees who had organized a Black version of Murder, Inc. They would kill people and then hid the corpses in the councilman’s offices until they found a better place to dump them.
This absolutely grotesque situation in the District of Columbia might be more believable if America has been invaded by Africa and had lost a war, if we were a conquered nation. But we aren’t. Mr. Washington and his friends are all the descendants of our slaves. A hundred years ago they were all hoeing cotton and saying, "Yassah, mastah." We put Walter Washington in office. We made the laws which allowed a Black city council to be elected. We are supplying the money which keeps the whole farce afloat--more or less. That’s what’s incredible. That’s what doesn’t seem real.
And I know I’m not the only one who feels that everything that’s happening these days is just a bad dream, which will go away when we wake up. We received an order last week for some of our "Who’s Behind Busing?" leaflets, and the fellow who ordered them sent along a letter asking us to verify the authenticity of the photograph which appears on the leaflets. The photo shows White Federal; troops using rifles with bayonets to push young White girls into a freshly integrated school in Little Rock, Arkansas, back during the Eisenhower period. The fellow who ordered the leaflets said some of his friends are claiming we faked the photo. They just can’t believe that the action the photo depicts actually happened.
I also remember that we got a number of comments from skeptics a couple of years ago when we printed a photograph on the front page of ATTACK! showing Nelson Rockefeller marching arm-in-arm in a New York City parade with a Black militant carry a machete and wearing a helmet with the words "Mau Mau" painted on it. They thought that photo was a fake too. They couldn’t believe that the governor of the state of New York, an intelligent, cultivated, White man, would parade arm-in-arm down the street with a Mau-Mau leader carrying a machete--just as some people can’t believe that a President of the United States, a White man and a military hero besides, would order Federal troops to jam White schoolgirls in the backs with bayonets to force them to go to school with Blacks. They can’t believe it. The say it didn’t happen, that we just made it up.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced there are a lot of people like that, probably a majority of the White people in this contrary. They see with their own eyes what’s going on around them every day, but they don’t believe it. It’s just a dream, not real.
I think that explains a lot of things--in particular, why there has been virtually no organized White resistance to the takeover of America.
There are some White people, of course, for whom the dream is not a nightmare at all, but a pleasant dream--one might almost say a wet dream. They are the sick ones, the ones who get a little thrill of excitement every time they read in the newspaper some new instance of the proud White man being humbled by his former slaves. They tremble in masochistic ecstasy at the thought reducing, someday, the whole country--in fact, the whole White world, starting with Rhodesia and South Africa--to the status of Washington, DC, with Blacks being driven around in chauffeured limousines and holding press conferences in their air-conditioned offices, while the Whites work to support their Black rulers. In their twisted minds, that would be real justice. That would be true equality.
But the great majority of White people certainly aren’t like that. For them, just as for us, what’s happening is like a nightmare. The difference between them and us is that we know it’s real, and they believe it’s only a dream, only a nightmare, and that it’ll go away when they wake up. At least, that’s what they want to believe, because it excused them from having to squarely face all sorts of nasty issues and make all sorts of unpleasant decisions.
I think there is real truth in this explanation of the way people are behaving. I’ve mentioned people questioning the reality of the photographic evidence we have presented to them of what’s going on in the world today. But all of us, I’m sure, have had the experience of arguing with people--not the sick ones, but just ordinary people--who clearly don’t want to face the truth about our present situation, who are determined to believe it’s all just a bad dream.
You collar a man on the street, and you say to him, "Listen, our news and entertainment media have been taken over by Jews and are being used as weapons to destroy America." The chances are he’ll say, "Nonsense," or, "I don’t believe it." so you name the names for him, you show him clippings from the Jewish publications in which they brag about their control of Hollywood or of the TV networks, and he’ll look uncomfortable and say, "Well, so what? They are good businessmen. They worked hard to get where they are. This is a free country."
If you try to tell him about the race situation instead you’ll get a similar reaction. You say to him, "Listen, the Blacks in this country and all the non-White immigrants who’re pouring in, they’re destroying everything our ancestor worked so hard to build up. They’re wrecking our armed forces, our government, our schools, our cities. They’re going to destroy not only our civilization but also our race if we don’t get rid of them soon." And he’ll tell you you’re exaggerating. Things aren’t really that bad. And besides, Blacks are no worse than Whites. And so you give him the evidence. If you tell him about lower Black intelligence, he’ll parrot what he’s heard on TV about the intelligence tests being "culturally biased" against Blacks. If you talk about the Black crime rate, he’ll tell you it’s because they’re disadvantaged. No matter what argument you use, he’ll come up with a counter-argument--anything to avoid facing the facts and dealing with the problem.
It’s a bizarre situation. It’s quite plain that the public is suffering from much more than a severe case of misinformation. It’s quite clear that they have somehow convinced themselves that all the unpleasant things going on around them aren’t real and that they’ll never have to actually face up to them and do something about them.
It reminds me of a cartoon we once printed in ATTACK! An automobile with a little boy and his father is broken down beside the road in a pouring rainstorm. The hood is up, and the father is out in the rain, soaked to the skin, struggling without success to change a flat tire. The little boy, about five years old, had just asked the father a question, and the very wet, very exasperated father replies to him: "We can’t switch channels. This is real. This is life."
That cartoon suggests something to us, and it is this: perhaps we are trying too hard to tell people that America has engine trouble, that Western civilization has a flat tire, and that all sorts of troubles are raining down on our race. After all, they have eyes too. They should be able to see what’s happening as well as we can. Perhaps instead we need to try harder to convince people that no Big Daddy up in the sky is going to switch channels for them before things get too much worse. Perhaps we need to spend more of our time trying to wake people up to the fact that they cannot escape form the consequences of their foolishness, their cowardice, their selfishness, their laziness: that there is only one Reality, and they are part of it.
Perhaps instead of presenting people over and over again with Black IQ scores and crime statistics; instead of rubbing their noses in the bizarre antics of the DC city government: instead of quoting for them the chilling things the Jews are saying about Gentiles in their private publications--instead of presenting all these unpleasant facts, perhaps we should be thinking of ways to make people realize that this is life--their life--and that with life comes responsibility. Perhaps we should be trying harder to show people that they are not mere spectators at the sideshow of life, but that they all have a role to play themselves, they all have a Purpose.
Spectators at a sideshow--that sums up the attitude, the orientation, of most of those who are not sleepwalkers. And the common missing element, whether one is a sleepwalker who doesn’t believe that what he sees is real, or whether one is a spectator who believes it’s real but thinks it’s not his problem--the common missing element is the sense of responsibility which comes form an understanding and an acceptance of our great Truth, which is that there is but one Reality, and that Reality is the Whole, and we are of the Whole.
In plain language, that means that what those soldiers in Little Rock did to those schoolgirls at Eisenhower’s order they did to us; it was we who were betrayed by Rockefeller when he put his arm around the Mau Mau leader in New York: we are the ones who are being humiliated and made fools every day that Blacks preside over and misgovern Washington, DC: and it is our future against which Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Andrew Young are conspiring when they demand that the White Rhodesians and the White South Africans turn over their countries to Blacks.
We may think we are only spectators, that all these things are only scenes in a dream, but that is not so. We are intimately involved in and responsible for these things. They do not happen by themselves; they happen because of what we do or because of what we fail to do. There is very little which happens in this world for which we are not responsible, either through our action or our inaction. And there is nothing in which we are not involved, nothing which does not affect us.
When a White schoolchild is beaten and robbed of his lunch money in Pittsburg, we are involved: it is our flesh which suffers.
When a White girl in Settle is persuaded to date a Black, we are involved: it is our blood which is defiled.
When the gang on Capitol Hill votes to give another squadron of F-16’s to the Jews in the Middle East, we are involved: is our honor and our security which are undermined.
That’s true--but here are an awful lot of wise guys, an awful lot of smart alecs in the world today who’ll try to tell you it isn’t They’re the fellows who have taken to heart the do-your-own-thing philosophy of alienation which is preached for the TV pulpit. They have learned that it’s still possible to make a fast buck these days, to wear the latest styles and drive the newest car, and so far as they care, what happens to the kid in Pittsburg is too bad--but it’s his tough luck, not theirs. And what the girl in Seattle does is nobody’s business but hers. And as for the gang on Capitol hill, well that’s just the way it is in politics.
The wise guys think they aren’t involved in these things. What’s real to them is the money in their wallets--the rest is just a dream.
If a sleepwalker never had to wake up, that would be one thing. But there is an awakening coming, and the awakened sleepwalker is going to find himself in a very awkward situation. All the little problems--in Pittsburgh or Seattle or Washington--which he thought he could ignore or argue away because they weren’t real, because they didn’t involve him--by the time he finally realizes they are real, that he is involved, these problems will have grown and multiplied a million fold. He will find himself in a world which has been made almost unlivable, a society which has been totally corrupted, an environment which has been irretrievably plundered, a racial milieu which has been irreversibly polluted. That is the danger in sleepwalking. A few minutes ago I said there is a difference between us and most people, in that we know that the things happening around us are real and that they do involve us, while most people don’t. And yet a lot of us act as if we’re sleepwalking too. We say we know what’s going on and that we’re concerned about it, but all we’re willing to do about it is talk, and even then only to those we think will be sympathetic. We succumb to the temptation to play it save.
When the Alliance asks people to get involved, to make a commitment, to participate in our program to reach other Americans, too often we hear in response the telltale sign of the sleepwalker: the excuse that one needs to think about it some more, or that one is in a sensitive position and has to be careful not to offend the government, or that one is too busy at the moment with one’s business or personal affairs or whatever.
All I can say to the people who make these excused is--look again at this picture of the mayor of your nation’s capital. It’s real. It’s no dream. Whether you like it or not, you’re involved.
And if you wish someone could switch to another channel for you, I’ll tell you this: If there’s to be any channel-switching, we’ll have to do it ourselves. No one else will do it for us. And the only way we can do it is by working together, by participating actively in the Alliance’s program of education and recruitment.