To be powerful enough...

 

Joel Davis: We’re never going to live in a world where people treat it [ethics] as an absolute because it’s fundamentally incongruent with the human condition and with the political as such! The political is fundamentally a question of:

“What are you willing to fight for. On what basis can the state legitimate war? On what basis can the state legitimate putting people in prison? On what basis can the state legitimate organise men with guns, pointing them in people’s faces and potentially shooting?”

That’s what politics is about.

And so there is not going to be a world in which we all put down our guns and sit down and rationally negotiate some peaceful set of agreements. Now with our guns pointed in mutual directions, we can sit down and negotiate alliances or negotiate agreements to prevent us from engaging in mutually destructive conflicts. So we can have a limited negotiation, but we’re never going to have an absolute negotiation. So it’s not only like frivolous question that has no basis in historical or human reality!
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[As far as political reality goes, unfortunately Joel Davis is right. (With exception of the times of Universal Monarch, but even if Universal Monarch isn't myth but very real possibility, waiting for the next one may take some time 😌.) Of course such realistic political thinking should not be applied on individual level. The most fundamental difference: ariyan as the ethnic group strives (or should strive) to survive in space and time, ariya as individual aspires to cessation of his own existence in space and time😌. From this point of view entire discussion isn't of any value. But on lower level perhaps is no harm to be able distinguish between the two levels of ethical conduct and abandon the idea that we can't be treated as "enemy" simply because of our ethnicity. Joel Davis operates only within the question: "What should be done for survival of White Man Civilization", and his views may seem cynical and unethical, unfortunately history teaches us that politics is all about power, and one who promotes noble idea of pacifism (valid on individual level)  as valid for entire nation actually proposes suicide of entire nation.]

Greg Johnson: Will Germany and France fight it out?

Joel Davis: Well, I mean they probably will have antagonism, but you know, if they have a mutual animus of greater enemies around the world, that gives them a strong incentive to work out their differences and form a strong alliance. Right?

Greg Johnson: Yeah. I mean, it’s possible to come up with a simulacrum of human behaviour that’s entirely based on selfishness as a motivation. And liberals love to do that. Right. And foreign policy realists love to do that’s sort of what you’re doing now.

Joel Davis: It’s not based on selfishness though. It’s securing your national community and its future, that is not selfishness. That’s service to your people!

Greg Johnson: Well, but you’re talking about selfishness in terms of vis a vis other countries. And I, …

Joel Davis: Yeah. Okay. So obviously Germans care more about Germans than they care about Greek people. But there could still be a wider European fidelity as well. It’s not an either or.

Greg Johnson: Yeah.

Joel Davis: They can also care about Europe at large.

Greg Johnson: Yeah.

Joel Davis: Like if you’re really awake, you would realise that the particular national destiny of any one European nation is actually intimately tied to the collective destiny of the European people. And so you have to safeguard that to safeguard your own national interests as well.

So you can have concentric circles of identity. It doesn’t have to be one absolute identity to the exclusion of all others. There can be multiple layers of identity at play. Just like you’re a member of a family, you’re a member of member local community, you’re a member of a nation, you’re a member of a race. Like all of these things are important and have to be balanced.

The point of reducing it to selfishness, I mean, it’s just that only makes sense in your abstract theoretical model. It doesn’t actually make sense in the concrete humanity of what we’re discussing. Patriotism is not selfish. Patriotism is a love of the other, of the direct other of your blood!

Greg Johnson: Yeah. I do think it’s possible for there to be non-selfish relationships of amity and mutual respect between different peoples. And they’re.

Joel Davis: Yeah, of course that’s possible, but it’s still like, for example, Australia now has an alliance with the Japanese.

Greg Johnson: Yeah.

Joel Davis: Now there was one point in which we were massacring each other, in the Second World War and they were a great threat to us.

But now Australia and Japan, because of the strategic circumstances surrounding the rapid rise of Chinese military and economic power, well now we have common cause and we have very strong military agreements. Both of our militaries have permission to operate in each other’s sovereign territories, which is agreement that I think both countries only have with the United States and maybe we have similar agreements maybe with the British actually as well. But it’s a pretty like rare agreement for either country to have with another country.

So we have very close military relationship now. And I admire Japanese culture. I think Japanese culture has a lot of very compelling things both historically and contemporarily and I think the Japanese people are very respectable people and I’m happy to be allied, and I think it’s a good thing for both countries for us to have an alliance.

But at the end of the day, if circumstances were different like in the Second World War where Japanese interests and Australian interests are diametrically opposed, then I am totally fine with killing Japanese people. Right. Because that’s actually what’s good for Australians. Those two things can both be true.

So it isn’t about that I respect their universal right to self-determination. I don’t! I don’t give a shit about this universal concept of self-determination! I care about the particularity of how is my region going to be organised and how can I secure a future for my people. If that means respecting the Japanese nation as our ally, then I respect the Japanese nation as our ally. I would also like it if the Chinese state was divided into like 10 states, because that would be fantastic for Australia because then it would completely weaken them and they could all be turned against each other and massacre each other. That would be in my interest as well.

So I don’t give a shit about the Chinese right to national self-determination because that right actually is very scary, if it’s practiced! And that’s, I think that’s a totally reasonable worldview. I care about my people more than I care about Chinese people or I care about Japanese people. So it’s all relative.

Greg Johnson: Well, I think that’s completely reasonable because there is this, but that’s a universal fact as well, namely that people have a love of their own and given that you have the greatest interest in your own people, it makes sense for you to take care of your own people first. But you also recognise that that’s true of everybody else on the planet. And again, you can posit an international order that respects that fact, …

Joel Davis: And I don’t support Aboriginal self-determination. There are people! Because that directly conflicts with my, the sovereignty of my people over this continent.

So I don’t actually respect the universal right to self-determination! That’s the thing. I will respect particular claims to self-determination where it makes sense, but I do not support an abstract universal. The abstract universal doesn’t actually exist! It isn’t based on anything. You’re proposing that we negotiate one into existence on the basis of our shared individual national interests.

Greg Johnson: We can raise the question like this. You can say, okay, let’s say that, let’s use this example. Let’s talk about property rights within Australia. You have private property rights. Now you could go through life negotiating and calculating all the whole time and saying:

“Well, you know, is respecting this person’s property rights in my interests in this particular moment?”

And oftentimes it might not be, but you might still recognise that as a general rule, having a system of private property in place benefits you as much as it benefits other people. And therefore you want to, you’re not going to go through life thinking:

“Can I steal this pen and get away with it?”

You sort of get beyond that because you recognise that you’ve got a general interest in civilised rules like respecting other people’s property. And you can go on to you broaden that out. Any kind of general civilised rules. You might be able to benefit yourself by violating these rules in particular circumstances. But in a broader sense you probably benefit from just having these rules.

Joel Davis: As a nationalist, I support seizing the property of foreign nationals. I support seizing the property of racial aliens. I support a taxation system that seizes a significant portion of everyone’s property in order to make arrangements for national defense. And the national interest in various other ways. And so I don’t actually respect the universal right to property. I respect the limited right to property.

Greg Johnson: It’s an analogy. Okay, I’m not saying, …

Joel Davis: That’s the same as what I’m saying on the international basis. I respect in a limited sense, the national self-determination of various other peoples, but I do not support it in an absolute sense.

Greg Johnson: Would you be safer in a world where people treated it as an absolute or treated it as something that they renegotiated in every particular circumstance.

Joel Davis: We’re never going to live in a world where people treat it as an absolute because it’s fundamentally incongruent with the human condition and with the political as such! The political is fundamentally a question of:

“What are you willing to fight for. On what basis can the state legitimate war? On what basis can the state legitimate putting people in prison? On what basis can the state legitimate organise men with guns, pointing them in people’s faces and potentially shooting?”

That’s what politics is about.

And so there is not going to be a world in which we all put down our guns and sit down and rationally negotiate some peaceful set of agreements. Now with our guns pointed in mutual directions, we can sit down and negotiate alliances or negotiate agreements to prevent us from engaging in mutually destructive conflicts. So we can have a limited negotiation, but we’re never going to have an absolute negotiation. So it’s not only like frivolous question that has no basis in historical or human reality!

Greg Johnson: I don’t think it’s baseless, because the world has been working in one way or another for hundreds of years to create institutions that allow different states to come together and mediate conflicts and avoid conflicts.

Joel Davis: But that is the world underneath the domination of the United States of America. This idea of liberal nationalism has only actually been successfully implanted, implemented underneath American global power where the American led international order has been organised around these institutions. But without the American guarantee of power, sovereignty, etc, what the American Navy guaranteeing global trade, American participation in all these international institutions, they would crumble! They would no longer function! And insofar as states have become powerful enough to challenge the American led international order, they challenge these institutions and they’re, and at the same time America itself has destroyed the legitimacy of these institutions by also violating its dictates where it saw fit, for example, in the invasion of Iran.

Greg Johnson: Absolutely! Absolutely!

Joel Davis: So these institutions are fundamentally, as I said, I use the phrase “bullshit edifice”! It’s a very reasonable assessment. It’s a very reasonable assessment because what it actually is a form of American imperialism. And that’s all it is, basically.

But then with a very amicable negotiation, it’s a very good propaganda. It’s a very good way of bringing your junior partners in the empire in and giving them representation and giving them a voice and so on, which is a prudent way to run an empire. But what it isn’t, is what you’re describing it isn’t actually a respect for the abstract universal of self-determination because that same American empire has been utterly destroying in concrete terms our capacity as Western states to have self-determination by literally genociding our race and creating state sponsored programs to destroy our national self consciousness!

So according to the abstract universal, well we’re all in all these international organisations that respect Australian sovereignty or French sovereignty or German sovereignty or Italian sovereignty or whatever. But in concrete terms there’s a series of international institutions and organisations and the perpetuation of an international order that destroys the capacity of our nations to have a genuine seat at the table because we can’t even be self conscious. We can’t even assert our national interest within our own political process!

So we have a bunch of traitors that will go and sit at these international meetings and represent us. Well, isn’t that fucking fantastic? I feel:

“Oh my national self-determination is so respected when they send some communist traitor like Anthony Albanese to go sit at the UN and go and sit down with the Indian Prime Minister and negotiate how they’re going to bring more Indian immigrants into Australia so I can be genocided more quickly!”

That’s fantastic!

Greg Johnson: Well I was, last year I gave a talk at the Institute for Historical Review in Southern California and I gave this analogy that I’ve used for years about how institutions fail, how diversity hollows out institutions. And I talked about the fire department. It was just an arbitrary thing. I said imagine the fire department decides to go woke and diversify and you know, it’s all fine, it’s all well and good if you lower standards and you spend more time worrying about the gender and racial mix of the people on the department, so forth. It’s great, it’s great for parades, it’s great for propaganda videos. But what if there’s an actual fire?

And then as if on cue, [chuckling] right? As if God wanted to prove my point, Los Angeles bur burned down! And we found that part of the reasons why the fire department was so ineffectual was it was being run by a lesbian and it was full of lesbians and they were all doing TikTok videos showing off their diversity, but they weren’t paying attention to what was necessary to actually put out fires. And you can just say that this is an institution that’s been rotted out by a crazed idea. Right?

And this is the way I think we have to understand what’s happened with NATO and the EU, and things like that. The purpose of the fire department is to fight fires and the purpose of NATO is to defend its member states. And the purpose of the EU is to pursue conflict resolution and greater prosperity and mutual understanding and respect in Europe, blah, blah, blah. And these institutions unfortunately have been become infected with these insane ideas, this insane woke ideology.

But we have to understand that there’s a distinction between the institutions and its purposes and the bizarre destructive goals that they have been wrenched around to by these ideologues.

Joel Davis: They’re not just “bizarre”, Greg. They’re not just like this random appendage of ideas that that spontaneously emerged within these institutions and just made them retarded! What these ideas are in concrete and historical terms is a social engineering project to actively destroy the national identities of the constituent states that make up this liberal international order. Because of the recognition that nationalism is an idea which contradicts this liberal international order and its fundamental premises itself, embodied in National Socialist Germany. So, but if you understand it historically and dialectically, then that is the case.

Like if you look at the motivations of these “woke” academics, so to speak, if you look at the motivations that they explicitly state themselves, particularly in that 1950s, 1960s period where these ideas are being formulated and they’re being actively supported and so on, their concrete motivation is directed specifically at the Third Reich and its conditions. And there was a mutation in Left-wing ideology around the recognition that:

“Well, when the White working class is empowered, they didn’t actually support socialism, they supported fascism and National Socialism. And so the Left needs to be reconstituted around a different set of clients as opposed to the working class.”

Greg Johnson: Absolutely, yeah.

Joel Davis: And so all of, all of these things are fundamentally relevant. And so the rehabilitation of the nationalist idea as something which can stand necessarily has to stand against the Liberal international order. The rehabilitation of a nation which asserts itself in its particularity that doesn’t need to justify itself within these, the shackles of these moral universalisms that you’re so partial to is fundamentally tied to the historical experience of the National Socialist regime insofar as it existed.

Now that doesn’t mean that every single illiberal nationalist is exactly the same as a National Socialist. But what it does mean is that nationalism has been fundamentally cucked and morally outmoded from our political process. It can’t represent itself correctly, it can’t assert itself, and in fact is being actively attacked pre-emptively and purposefully to make it harder and harder and harder for any for a nationalist movement to ever exist, that it has any concrete chances of success in any of our respective democracies. In order to preserve this liberal international order where no nation starts thinking about its own interests too hard and starts asserting them too directly and brings down this whole bullshit edifice as I called it, and starts challenging the American led liberal international order.

So this is all interconnected! It’s not just like oh, we had this great idea of liberal internationalism back in the 19th century and it went all wrong with wokeness. We could just get back to it. It’s completely non-dialectical, it’s completely ahistorical to think like that!

And it’s also just patently ridiculous when you think about how discourse actually works in the contemporary situation. That’s why it works the way that it does. That’s why whenever you start advocating for anything that sounds like White nationalism or ethno-nationalism in any White country, particularly in Western Europe or the English speaking world, immediately you start getting called the Nazi and all of these discussions around National Socialism start popping back up because it is all fundamentally tied. But there still needs to be a level of rehabilitation where we say:

“Okay, but the Germans asserting their national interest wasn’t some unique historical evil.”

Greg Johnson: My position still boils down to this. I think that National Socialism was the wrong kind of nationalism! It was the bad kind of nationalism in the sense that it was imperialistic, that it was aggrandizing itself at the expense of other primarily White European nations.

And basically I think that what nationalists need to do, and I’m going to put this in an intentionally provocative way, is that we need to solemnly swear that we’re not going to do that kind of shit again!

Joel Davis: I diametrically oppose you. I think it was the good kind of nationalism precisely because it didn’t cuck itself to these universalist moral limits that you want to impose upon nationalism, and actually took on a form that was actually capable of asserting itself in a totalizing way against the enemies of nationalism, which were foreign and domestic. And that in order for us to free ourselves as a race of all of these forces, whether it be the Leftists, whether it be jews, whether it be what have you, structures of international finance, capitalist elites that are diametrically opposed to nationalist goals, all the rest of it. We need to take on a similarly uncompromising ideological project that seeks to seize state power and then use state power to utterly destroy and eradicate them from our lands and push them back. Create an international order in which they fear us too much to attack us.

In fact it actually makes sense why they would react against liberalism, why they would react against Marxism, why they would react against jewish subversion in the way that they did, why they would find a necessity to take on the Soviet Union and the Anglo-American world order to try and assert a different idea for Europe and a different political order for Europe. All of this actually makes sense! And is actually things that we can sympathize with and you should sympathize with, particularly in retrospect after seeing what has happened after their defeat, if you actually care about the European race and its destiny.

That is ultimately the only way in which we can genuinely have self-determination as a race is to become powerful enough to do that, to actually defeat our enemies! And actually be sovereign over our own territories. And that’s what those are the principles in National Socialism, not necessarily the, … Now German Chauvinism I, from the perspective of culture, I do think the Germans had the greatest culture of any nation in Europe. They are the cultural and spiritual Guardians of the European race, particularly in the modern world. You could make historical arguments as well, but particularly in the modern world because okay, you want to cry about Poland. Where’s Poland’s Beethoven? Where’s Poland’s Wagner? Where’s Poland’s Hegel? Where’s Poland’s Nietzsche? Where’s Poland’s Heidegger? Where’s, … The list goes on. The Germans and their contribution is exceptional without equal in the modern world.

And also it is antagonistic directly to the ideas of which have destroyed Europe. The Germans were the great power in Europe that actively, on a cultural and political basis provided the most resistance to the development of this hellscape that is what has become of modernity.

So the Germans should be Chauvinistic to a very large extent. They should see themselves as superior because they actually are on a cultural basis. But I don’t necessarily mean that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be genociding the other European peoples. It doesn’t mean though that the other European people should be looking to German culture for leadership as opposed to looking to Anglo-American culture for leadership, which has been a total disaster! Which is what has actually happened due to our imposition. And what that means is jewish cultural subversion and leadership to a very large extent because we’re infected with this.

So that’s what has actually become of Europe’s destiny, which has been a total disaster! So I think Germanophilia is actually necessary for the White race because the Germans did provide, in their political thought, in their philosophical thought, in the development of their particular nationalist movement, the most spiritually powerful refutation of all of these forces. And then they then created, in a political form, the most politically powerful opposition to all of these forces.

And so, of course we defend it. Absolutely!

Greg Johnson: And yet they were defeated by liberal internationalism. Is there any lesson in there?

Joel Davis: Yeah, they were defeated by an ideology that is genociding our race. So you could say:

“Hey, this ideology that is genociding our race won against an ideology that was trying to defend our race. So maybe we should side with the ideology that genocides our race!”

No! That’s not the lesson to be taken away.

(...)

Joel Davis: But also, you also have the other side of that coin, which is that. Well, yes, like often major conflicts can be quite shocking to the communities involved in them and they can retreat into a more pacifistic set of doctrines for a period of time.

But then there always comes a point as well in history where a particular paradigm becomes so intolerable and a different idea in opposition to it becomes so compelling that eventually you get another major conflict. And that’s part of the human condition.

And right now our race is being genocided! Right?

So this is existential. This isn’t just a battle of ideological preference or something on the basis of these values or those values. This is a fundamentally existential question. Are we going to continue to exist as a race or not? And that is in a very precarious position. And the entire establishment of the Liberal international order is basically in an agreement that. Yeah, that this is either unimportant or that they actively support it. Right. In most cases.

So under those conditions, an ideology that is violent or that has violent potential is actually alluring. An ideology which limits itself purely to moralizing and rational discourse and so on lacks appeal because we do not have a rational and sympathetic interlocutor with whom we’re negotiating our survival. Here we have an existential enemy. And an existential enemy can only be confronted through force, through active resistance.

Joel Davis: Yeah, yes and no.

Greg Johnson: That is why my ideaactually has incredible relevance to the contemporary situation, because I do not believe that we’re going to negotiate our survival under this order. I think we’re going to need to assert it.

Greg Johnson: I disagree with you on this because what we have is we’ve got an existential enemy that’s a rather small party, a rather small number of people spread around the world in key positions. But these people depend upon a large number of other people who are basically just goofy liberals. And these goofy liberals can be persuaded. Especially because even from their point of view, there’s something ridiculously unjust about, say, the idea that:

“It’s okay for China to be for the Chinese, and Africa for the Africans, but White countries are for everyone.”

There are things about this ideology that’s promoting and greasing the way towards White genocide. They’re just flagrantly immoral by liberal universal standards!

And frankly, what we have to do to beat the enemy, which is an existential enemy and is not going to be persuaded, but to beat them, we have to start reducing the number of people who are on their side! People who take their phone calls and take their money and make this shit happen! We have to reduce the number of people on their side. And the way we can do that most easily is not playing into the stereotypes of the 1930s, but by using patient arguments that appeal to moral universalism, ideas of fairness and things like that. Because there’s nothing unfair about nationalism for all people.

Joel Davis: What you’re now appealing to is, first of all, a quantitative rather than qualitative argument. You’re saying:

“Well, if we remove the moral barriers to entry for the largest number of people, this is going to ultimately be what best serves the nationalist movement.”

I believe in quality over quantity. I believe that what is actually necessary is to cultivate a spirit of radicalism and of sacrifice.

Because the reality is in politics, there is a Pareto distribution of political influence. A very small amount of people have pretty much all the influence.

Greg Johnson: Absolutely.

Joel Davis:: And most people are not that politically active at all! They maybe vote once every four years, if that. And they don’t really have a very well developed political worldview. Only a very small minority of the population is politically engaged enough to even have an ideological worldview, and is engaged enough to be participating in the political process in a more direct way.

And those people fundamentally set the paradigm. So going for broad spectrum mass appeal with people who are largely indifferent towards politics is not going to be that successful. We already have the opinion polls, right? In basically every White country. Nationalist political policies are more popular than their alternatives on basically every metric. What actually will create political power is a committed group of radicals who are willing to devote their life, their resources, their time, their efforts to struggle for political victory. An ideology, …

Greg Johnson: I absolutely agree with that.

Joel Davis: Inspiring those people with an ideology like mine. An ideology like yours, the spirit of compromise, the spirit of kind of reducing oneself to achieve mass appeal is going to actually turn off those who seek after ideological coherence, those who seek after purity of thought, those who seek after purity of principle.

And also your worldview is fundamentally already conceding defeat in many respects to the enemy. It is fundamentally lacking in confidence in our own people’s innate capacity to assert our collective will.

Greg Johnson: I absolutely have enormous and reasonable doubts about that! Until they are given, … I mean, people. This is a very cynical thing. People are only as good or bad as they are, … You know, basically, they’re as good as they’re permitted to be, or they’re as bad as they’re permitted to be. What permits them? Well, ultimately it’s going to be their consciences.

But there’s another thing about the sort of political process as I understand it, that needs to be brought in here. I do think that most people are politically passive. I do think that our enemies are highly, politically, active. But they exist in tiny numbers. But around them is a group of people who are more politically engaged because they’re cogs in the machine. And it’s those people. And that would include, you know, educated people with above average social capital, people with above average incomes. These people count more. And these people are being held in bondage basically, to the woke idiots who are running our race to ruin by certain moral principles that they hold. I think that that moral consciousness has been hacked and distorted and turned against our interests and that we can, by appealing to them, change things around. And we can’t do that by enacting 30s fascist stereotypes.

And there’s no way of doing that!

Joel Davis: Let me respond to that though, because number one, what you’re basically saying is that, yes, the issue is the moral state of our people. What I believe the solution then is to create an inspirational, romantic, idealistic notion in direct opposition to those moral values. Because frankly, the vast majority of Whites do not go along with Left-wing ideology, or Leftism gone mad, whatever it is. This ideology of White self-erasure on the basis of its internal compunction and they’re like deeply committed to it, to its values. It’s simply a product of social inertia and a fear of social exclusion and other social penalties. It’s easier to just internalise and believe the prevailing worldview to basically go along to get along. There’s only a very small minority of Whites that are actually active Leftists that really, truly and deeply and viscerally believe in these principles. And they’re obviously largely motivated by themselves being very spiritually and psychologically defective to the point of a collective self hatred which I diagnose as most fundamentally being a consequence of seeing this ideology as a way to drag down their superiors within our own race.

[Remainder of Transcript in Progress]

https://katana17.com/2025/10/28/counter-currents-radio-no-629-joel-davis-and-the-ns-question-mar-26-2025-transcript/