Crossing the Thresholds
Crossing the Thresholds is a Cosmotheist lecture given by Dr. William Pierce on September 26, 1976 at the office of the National Alliance in Arlington, Virginia.
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At out previous meetings I have talked to you mostly about the nature of our Truth, as expressed in our Affirmation, so that we will have an understanding of our identity and our mission. Tonight we want to look ahead as far as we can into the future, in order to see where our mission will lead us in the next few years.
I have already said many times that our principal task now is carrying our Truth to others of our race who are capable of understanding it. That is, our job now is to continue waking up America.
But were do we expect these efforts to lead us in the next year or two? What do we hope to accomplish by continuing to bring new people to these meetings and by continuing to distribute newspapers and leaflets? Do we really expect America, as a whole, to wake up and rid itself of the Enemy? Of course not! Certainly, not in the next year or two.
There are two things we do expect our activities to accomplish, however. One, and it is the more immediate and pressing, is to continue to wake up individual Americans and to recruit them into our community. This is an open-ended goal. The harder and more effectively we work at it, the more people we will wake up and recruit, but we will still remain only a small minority among a largely indifferent and Jew-serving majority, no matter how hard we work. It may not be advisable to emphasize that fact in ATTACK! But it is essential for us to be completely and coldly realistic ourselves.
The second thing we expect our present activities to achieve is much longer range. It is the sowing of seeds, a sort of program of general enlightenment. When the average person reads one of our newspapers or leaflets, he does not become a convert, and the chances are he will never become a convert--at least, not until after radical changes have already taken place in our society and the Jew is no longer with us. And that is because the process of conversion to our cause is much more a spiritual process than it is an intellectual process. Providing the average American with facts about what the Enemy is doing to our race will not cause him to come running to join us. Instead, he will go back to his TV set and his funny papers.
But he will, never the less, remember what we have said, or part of it, even if it sinks deep into his subconscious and is only brought to memory at some later time by some other event or something else he learns. Spiro Agnew learned from somewhere about the Jewish domination of the news media as did General Brown, and it is doubtful that they learned this through independent research in a library. The chances are they learned it from reading an ATTACK! Or some other publication attempting to expose the Enemy, or they heard it from a friend who read an ATTACK! Or some other publication.
Learning about the Jews did not change either of these men’s lives. There is every reason to believe that Spiro Agnew is still basically a money-grubber. If he had not been stabbed in the back by his Jewish associates, he would still be serving them. And General Brown still apologizes profusely to the Jews every time he lets slip in public some of what he knows about them. Neither of these men is even a potential convert to our cause, and it is utter foolishness to imagine that they are. Nevertheless, it is obvious that it is important that they did learn from somewhere about the Jews. And it is important that others learn too, whether they hold high posts in the government or not and whether they are in a position to influence with their knowledge the whole nation, like Agnew, or only a few friends and neighbors.
And this task of sowing seeds, of public enlightenment, is also open-ended, just like our recruiting task. The harder we work at it--the more seeds we sow--the greater the harvest we will reap when reaping-time comes--even though we expect no more spiritual commitment now from the vast majority of those we enlighten than we expect from Mr Agnew or from General Brown.
So, where do we expect this recruiting and this public propaganda to take us in the next few years, if we don’t expect a mass-awakening of the public?
What we can see ahead of us are two thresholds which we must cross. The first of these thresholds is that which separates the struggling, scrabbling, hand-to-mouth, one-man organization which we are now from a truly viable organization. When I refer to us as a one-man organization now, I don’t mean in any way to belittle the invaluable efforts, the absolutely necessary efforts, of our many members and supporters, both here and elsewhere, who are working wholeheartedly for us. I am referring to the fact that if I were killed or locked up tonight I doubt that the Alliance would survive. A truly viable organization is one in which no single person is absolutely indispensable, an organization strong enough to carry our Truth onward undiminished and undistorted and to continue growing, even if the Enemy succeeds in eliminating me or other individual member or leader, regardless of his function.
Making a very rough estimate, I would say we need to increase our present numbers by a factor of approximately 10 in order to cross this threshold. I am talking primarily about our numbers here, in Washington, because it is here that we are building the nucleus of our movement. It is from the people here that we must find those capable of carrying on and expanding my work. Of course, it will also be helpful if our numbers across the country increase at the same time, because that broadens the base of our support and reduces the financial burden on our members here. I would estimate that we need a full-time staff of approximately 15 persons, supported by the general membership, to cross this first threshold.
Now, getting from here to there will require more work and more commitment and a greater sacrifice from all of us, but it is something we know we can do. It may take us only one year, or it may take two years or even five years, but there is no doubt that we can cross that first threshold.
There is quite a bit of urgency about this first threshold, because everything is in jeopardy until we do cross it. After we do it we can go on for quite a while, and the only way we can be stopped then is by an all-out campaign on the part of the Enemy. But, being reasonable, I think there is a pretty good chance the Enemy will not attempt such a campaign against us until it is too late for him to succeed.
Now, please understand one thing. Although we need the increased numbers I’ve mentioned to cross this threshold, numbers alone won’t do it. We need people for sufficient quality and degree of commitment to out Truth so that we can be absolutely certain that the Alliance--that our community of consciousness--will remain on the straight and narrow path, come what may. We must be certain that there will be no compromised, no yielding to expediency of the sort we’ve just seen in Rhodesia and South Africa. There must be no false directions, no tangential developments. Which means no conservatives and no right wingers in our leadership nucleus, even though such people may remain among our general base of support.
And it should also be understood that in addition to the very best people we can find we must also employ some extraordinarily organizational principles, which will make us rather different in our structure and in our method of operation from other organizations. I said it is unlikely the Enemy will launch an all-out , shoot-on-sight campaign against us in the next few years. But we can’t afford to gamble on this likelihood, nor can we allow any lesser campaign to imperil our existence. As individuals we will all be called on to take risks repeatedly. But we cannot expose the ultimate success of our mission to any avoidable risk. And that is why I say we will do some thing in extraordinary ways. But that does not change the basic fact that crossing this first threshold and having a viable organization is something we can do.
Our second threshold is one which takes us form a merely viable organization to an organization with the capability to begin carrying out our mission. It takes us from a community which embodies and safeguards our Truth to a community which begins clearing the way for the universal triumph of our Truth.
Now, it is a fact--an extremely important fact--that there is more than one was we can go about things after we’ve crossed out second threshold. Some of those ways I can mention now, but others I think it better not to mention.
We may do physical battle with the Enemy, or we may find it better to postpone battle and nevertheless begin implementing the victory of our Truth. Or we may do things in more that one way at once.
I know that many people think the Turner Diaries, which we are publishing in serial form in ATTACK! is a blueprint for the way in which I think we will do battle with the Enemy. I assure you, with all sincerity, that it is no such thing. It is simply an educational story. I hope that it will cause our people to think about some things they haven’t thought about before. That’s all. It is not our plan of action, even thought it is possible the future might, in some developments, resemble the Turner Diaries.
But the future may also develop in other ways. We are not committed now, nor are ready to commit ourselves, to any particular course of action to be followed after we cross our second threshold. Remember, neither tactics nor strategy are doctrinal matters with us. The only thing we are sure of is that we must win. How we win is not of fundamental importance. But it is not too early to begin thinking about various possibilities and even to take certain preliminary steps.
One of the things we really should do now is broaden our horizons by reminding ourselves of the nature of our problem: taking the control of the American government and the media away form the Jews and their Gentile stooges. Looking at it that way tends to be discouraging, because it is hard to see our way clear to a political victory, whether we choose to fight with ballots or with bullets. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just very difficult.
But there are other ways to look at our problem. We may look at it, for example, as a biological problem instead of a political problem. As conscious agents of the Creator, what we are trying to do is prevent the loss of a certain level of consciousness, which has been achieved after billions of years of creative effort, the loss of a certain evolutionary breakthrough--namely, our race and the consciousness, the Devine Spark, it embodies.
If we lose America; if we lose Western Civilization; even if we lose the earth itself--and still save our race and the consciousness embodied in our community, then we will have won.
Let me give you the most extreme example I can think of. If, 30 or 40 or 50 years form now, one racially sound couple--one man and one woman form our community--are placed on the surface of the planet Mars, along with the necessary machinery for burrowing into the ground and establishing a pressurized, self-sustaining colony; and if the entire earth then yields to the Jews, though a combination of governmental force and succumbing to the Jewish spiritual disease of liberalism: and if it takes the colony on Mars a thousand years--forty or fifty generations--to grow and develop its resources while the Jew-dominated earth sinks back into a state of mulatto chaos and savagery; and if then, when the Martian colony returns to earth, its members are obliged to utterly exterminate the race of khaki-colored sub-humans lurking in the earth’s rewiring forest and in the ruins of the earth’s cities before they can begin building a new civilization; even if all this happens, then we will have won--then our Truth will have triumphed utterly and completely, because in the long run all the sacrifices of that thousand-year exile will be as nothing.
It is good to remember that, in the long run, no lives can be saved--only genes, and the consciousness of our identity and our mission, which, like our genes, can be passed from generation to generation.
Now, I do not mean for the little science-fiction story I just told you to be thought of as something we are actually planning. Its only purpose was to stretch your minds a little, so you can see that there are a great many possibilities ahead other than conventional political or guerrilla-war possibilities. In fact, we have no intention of conceding this planet to the Jews, nor, if we are forced to do that, do we have any intention of putting all our eggs in a single basket on Mars. But we do have every intention of winning our war for survival, no matter what it takes. And that means that we must eventually cross that second threshold, so that we have the capability of doing whatever is necessary.
If we have to do something as far-fetched as planting a colony on Mars (or infiltrating and taking over a colony planted there by the government), then we are probably talking about a time interval of 30 years or more to reach that threshold.
If, instead, events develop along the lines of the Turner Diaries, we may be talking about a time span as short as five years between the first and second thresholds which lie ahead of us.
But, in any event, there are certain general capabilities which we must plan on developing before we can cross that second threshold, whether we use those capabilities to establish an isolated colony somewhere, or to fight a guerrilla war against the government, or simply to continue growing by waging spiritual warfare against the Jews and, when necessary, going underground, like the early Christians in the catacombs, without interrupting our recruiting. That last possibility is more likely, at least as a starter, than many other possibilities we might imagine now.
Recruiting effectively and over a long period form underground requires a lot more resources that recruiting in the open, and we might reasonably expect to have to increase our numbers by another factor of ten or more, over what we will need to cross the first threshold-- that is , a staff of perhaps 200 or so full-time men and women, dispersed around the country and supported by the general membership. But, far more than an increase in numbers, such a development must represent an increase in will and dedication. A much more disciplined organization, a more totally dedicated organization, will be required for successful underground work than will be required for work in the open.
We will not plan on going underground unless we are forced to, of course. But we must build an organization with the strength and the hardness to work underground indefinitely, if it has to--if, for instance, the time comes when the government declares that it is illegal, a violation of the Genocide Convention, perhaps, to teach our Truth to others.
And there are other capabilities we must plan on developing. We must be able to operate a self-sustaining , self-contained, self-perpetuating community of consciousness for an indefinitely long period of time. That means, among many other things, that we must provide for the complete education of our own children. It means that we must be large enough so that all marriages of community members will take place inside the community. It means we must develop a high enough degree of economic self-sufficiency to avoid unbearable external economic pressures.
Most of all, we must develop, in a matter of a few years, the strength to quickly adapt our tactics and our strategy to the changing conditions we are bound to encounter and to take advantage of the new opportunities which are certain to arise--opportunities which we are far to weak to exploit in any meaningful way now. But developing this strength, developing these capabilities, is something which we can do. It is something which is far easier to do that voting the Jews out of power or whipping their troops and secret-police forces in a guerrilla war. It is something which every one of us should be capable of imagining and hoping for and working for realistically.
And that is what we should do, instead of allowing ourselves to become discouraged by trying to see our way all the way through to a final victory now, when we really have no idea what new developments the future holds for us.
But even more so, we should fix our attentions and concentrate all our energies on crossing the first threshold which lies ahead of us, so that we have a truly viable organization to serve as a vehicle for our Truth and carry us forward to the second threshold and everything which lies beyond