Early Aryan thought reflects a conviction of the existence of an objective order of things independent of the beliefs or wishes of men, and even of gods. This mental background certainly contributed to later European achievements in science and philosophy. It also bore ethical implications. Recognition of an objective cosmic order “implies that human action has consequences—that you cannot do whatever you please and expect nothing to come of it—and that no matter what you do you will not be able to avoid your Fate.” Yet Aryan myth affirms the value of life and struggle even as it accepts the inevitability of death and other limits upon human ambition.
[Good quote, apart that true ariyan rejects the inevitability of death]
In 1984 Sam produced his first substantial book, Power and History, a study of the political thought of James Burnham (1905-1987). After some years as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, Burnham broke with Marxism altogether in 1941 with publication of The Managerial Revolution. This book’s thesis was that bourgeois capitalism had been superceded neither by proletarian rule nor by a classless society, but by a new ruling elite centered on those possessing expertise in important technologies and the control of mass organizations: the managers. Whether the resulting regime claimed to be socialist (as in the USSR or National Socialist Germany) or preserved the name and some of the appearances of free enterprise (as in Franklin Roosevelt’s United States) was of comparatively little importance.
Burnham was also a student of the Italian school of elite theory, whose main ideas he summarized in his next book The Machiavellians (1943). In contrast to classical political thought, which emphasizes the threefold typology of monarchal, aristocratic, and democratic rule, elite theorists asserted an iron law of oligarchy: in any political regime, including supposedly absolute monarchies and democracies, a closer look will always reveal a small minority of men who command and a majority who obey. Robert Michels, for example, spent years studying the inner workings of European socialist parties, all of which advocated for the spreading of power to the broad masses. What he found was that all such parties were in fact under the command of a very few men. This was not a matter of hypocrisy, as the parties could not otherwise have operated effectively. Their stated ideals made no difference at all; it is simply in the nature of human organization for power to remain the preserve of a small elite.
Italian elite theory, combined with Burnham’s concept of the managerial class as the elite governing the contemporary world, would become fundamentals of Sam Francis’s own political thinking. The managers and technocrats who rule us today seek above all a passive and compliant subject population unbound by any traditions and at the farthest possible remove from republican self-government. The goal of a realistic right under such circumstances must be the replacement of this deadening and out-of-touch elite with a new one more representative of ordinary Americans from the heartland and their best traditions.
Sam’s book on James Burnham was not widely reviewed. A favorable notice from Joe Sobran in National Review was one honorable exception.
At some not easily specified time in the 1980s and -90s, Sam worked on a book entitled Leviathan and Its Enemies, applying Burnham’s ideas to American twentieth century political history and developing a Burnhamist strategy for Middle American Revolution in far greater detail than Burnham himself ever had. This work was recovered from his computer and published following his death.
(...)
1993 saw the publication of Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, a collection of some of Sam’s best writing from the decade 1981-91. According to Scotchie, it remained Sam’s only book with the University of Missouri Press due to the scandal occasioned among the press’s faculty advisors by his essay on Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sam’s insistence on speaking forthrightly on the subject of race and racial differences would now come to play an increasing role in his career. American Renaissance, Jared Taylor’s monthly publication addressing racial issues from a white point of view, began publication in 1990, and by May 1994 Taylor felt confident enough to hold a public conference. Sam Francis was among the invited speakers. Of everything he said, the statement which caused the most widespread outrage was as follows:
The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.
This is hardly a radical thought and should not be controversial. After all, even a dog pound cannot exist apart from the genetic endowments of dogs. But it would be enough to get him fired from the Washington Times when brought to editor Wes Pruden’s attention fifteen months later.
Sam’s termination was a national news story, but he declined requests for interviews, seemingly experiencing the episode as something of a liberation:
My column has actually gained newspapers since my defenestration at the Times. It’s true I lost my job and my Washington outlet, and that’s a blow, but it’s far from death. In the coming years, the Beltway right may be amazed to discover how little it has to do with the direction in which the country is moving, and I plan to be there when it finds out that no one else is paying much attention to its precious “limits” on what you can say and cannot say.
When Sam got wind that certain well-wishers were planning a protest outside the paper’s editorial offices, he put a stop to it. He was as ready to leave the Times as they were to be rid of him. Sylvia Crutchfield, a tireless fundraiser for right-wing causes, quietly made it possible for Sam to remain in the Washington area, even providing him with personal office space at the Henry Lee House in Alexandria, VA. He remained as busy and prolific as ever.
Sam’s explicitness on race set him apart from some of his longtime colleagues. Before addressing the American Renaissance conference, Scotchie explains:
Sam showed a draft [of his talk] to Tom Fleming. The latter advised against delivering it. Sam had a key position at the Washington Times. Why risk it? Were the knives already out? […] In a talk with this author, Fleming said Sam was essentially going to give his head on a platter to his legion of enemies.
I read Chronicles from 1997 until after Sam’s death, and I well remember how Sam’s racial views contrasted with those of the other editors and contributors. Sam called for whites to organize on the explicit basis of race and pursue their collective interests without apology. Tom Fleming preferred to accuse anyone who demonstrated knowledge of or interest in race of being a “biological determinist.” This was, of course, a straw man. All informed racialists know that racial differences are statistical in character, not determinative. Moreover, racial identity politics has very little to do with the theoretical question of how much human behavior is explicable by biology. Fleming even took a couple of rhetorical pokes at American Renaissance before Sam asked him to desist. Other Chronicles writers were not above dismissing the importance of “skin color,” an infallible sign of cluelessness in racial matters. Sam’s racialism continued to be tolerated, however, as it almost certainly would not have been from a newer or younger contributor. Moreover, reader surveys revealed that a large percentage of the magazine’s audience subscribed mainly in order to read Sam. They needed him more than he needed them.
(...)
Perhaps Sam’s most important statement on race is the essay “Roots of the White Man,” published in the November and December 1996 issues of American Renaissance. It was written in response to Jared Taylor’s argument that Western culture gives “priorities to considerations of fairness over the exercise of pure power.” Sam did not disagree, but thought Taylor came too close to identifying the white man’s distinctive character with its modern liberal expressions. Looking back farther into history, to the days of the earliest Indo-Europeans or Aryans, he found our ancestors to be marked especially by three traits: belief in a cosmic order, a restless dynamism, and greater individuation that the other races of mankind.
Early Aryan thought reflects a conviction of the existence of an objective order of things independent of the beliefs or wishes of men, and even of gods. This mental background certainly contributed to later European achievements in science and philosophy. It also bore ethical implications. Recognition of an objective cosmic order “implies that human action has consequences—that you cannot do whatever you please and expect nothing to come of it—and that no matter what you do you will not be able to avoid your Fate.” Yet Aryan myth affirms the value of life and struggle even as it accepts the inevitability of death and other limits upon human ambition.
Furthermore, Aryan man is marked by a restless Faustian dynamism “clear enough in their earliest and most obvious habit of invading other people’s territories and conquering them.” Later this expressed itself in a more general love of travel, maritime exploration, colonization and discovery, the drive to uncover the secret workings of nature. Aryan man’s descendants
have cured diseases, shrunk distances, raised cities out of jungles and deserts, constructed technologies that replace and transcend human strength, restored lost languages, recovered forgotten histories, stared into the heart of distant galaxies, and reached into the recesses of the atom. No other people has even dreamed of these achievements.
This dynamism, in Francis’s view, explains the relative resistance of European man to despotism and enslavement. The typical Aryan political form is a broad aristocratic republic of arms-bearing citizens in which everyone is free to state his opinion, and rulers are constrained by the need to maintain the consent of those they rule. Aryan man “resists and rebels against any effort to induce the passivity that allows despotism to flourish.”
Aryan man is also marked by a greater degree of individuation that the other races of mankind. This is true even in their bodily traits, but more importantly in the variety of character reflected in their myths and literature. Such individuation should be distinguished from modern “individualism” which justifies the neglect or even betrayal of the larger social formations of which each individual is a part.
Western man today suffers from the excess or misapplication of his traditional virtues. He has succumbed, e.g., to the belief that his values are universal and that his outlook and achievements can be extended to the entire human race. Hence modern liberal enthusiasm for “exporting democracy” and inviting immigration from the entire world. We should respect the right of non-Aryan people to live according to their own very different traditions, but also insist on their exclusion from our territories.
If America’s political right was not ready for such racial explicitness, there were growing signs in the 1990s of a new willingness at least to reconsider the prudence of allowing mass immigration. In 1992, National Review published Peter Brimelow’s “Rethinking Immigration,” later expanded into the book Alien Nation (1995) and brought out by a mainstream New York publisher. In 1999, Brimelow would establish the website VDare.com, which carried Sam’s columns.
(...)
In 2002, David Frum published “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” an attack on right wing opponents of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sam responded as follows:
The paleos in general are disaffected not from the country itself but from the determination of the US government to wage unnecessary wars that either border on the unjust or go well over the line of injustice, wars that are unprovoked and not clearly in the interests of the nation, and wars that, even if victorious, may lead to so many entanglements, complications, injustices and costs (human, economic, diplomatic, technological) that they are better avoided regardless of their moral character. What most paleos have written about the Iraq war has been along these lines—lines that are perfectly consistent with and indeed reflect a serious patriotism, as opposed to the kind of sophomoric chauvinism that demands blind obedience to whatever wars the government launches.
F. Roger Devlin
https://counter-currents.com/2025/10/a-first-biography-of-sam-francis/
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