The Right of Whites to Organize

As clear as the First Amendment is, some citizens still must struggle for the right to exercise it. Here are three responses to recent attempts to selectively deny the right of free speech and association to a portion of the American population.

From the Capital Region branch of the Council of Conservative Citizens:

The National Capital Region Chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens is dedicated to restoring the civil rights of white Americans and preserving America's culture and traditions. We do not advocate theories of white superiority.

White Americans face systematic job discrimination in the form of affirmative action and quotas. They are disproportionately victimized by violent crime and forced to pay exorbitant taxes to fund others. Immigration policies threaten to make whites themselves a minority by 2050 and to sacrifice English as the language of their nation.

So harsh is the discrimination against whites, that when an organization such as the Council of Conservative Citizens dares to speak up for the majority, they are attacked and marginalized by the mainstream press. If anyone ever questioned why organizations supporting the rights of white Americans are virtually unheard of, take witness to what they see now.

The C of CC has never advocated violence--and few would accuse them of it--but recent news articles reveal that a leftist fringe group has placed an informant in our local Washington chapter. This fringe organization annually provides reports to the police and media that describe us as a dangerous "patriot group" despite our very traditional approach to grassroots activism.

In time, one comes to realize that it is virtually against the law for whites to gather in defense of themselves. Other political organizations should look upon the way we are treated with horror. When standing up for the majority becomes a subversive activity that places envelope-stuffers and letter-writers on a police list, no one will be immune from persecution.

No one can blame politicians for distancing themselves from the C of CC in light of the slur campaign against us. But when the media and leftist hate groups were busy spreading innuendo elsewhere, politicians and citizens got to know us for what we were--a mainstream organization standing up for the America we love.

We realize that no lambasting from any source and no rash denunciations from beleaguered politicians will stop our cause. Our power does not come from Washington or the media, but from descendants of a people who won a continent and brought democracy and the rule of law to the world. Most of us have become long-immune from such attacks, and in the end we will win.

From Jared Taylor:

It is natural and moral for people to prefer the society and way of life of people like themselves. Non-whites take this for granted. Blacks do not apologize for forming black caucuses, celebrating the openly racial holiday of Kwanzaa, electing black candidates, wanting black police officers, taking pride in their race and preferring the culture and company of blacks. Many blacks make race the centerpiece of their identities, as do many Hispanics. Blacks want America to be more "black" and Hispanics want it to be more "Hispanic." It is only whites who are forbidden to have an explicitly racial identity, and when they express loyalties non-whites take for granted they are accused, as Washington Post columnist Colbert King accuses me, of "bigotry."

Immigration is central to any debate about race. Every year we accept approximately 800,000 legal immigrants and uncounted numbers of illegals into this country. Ninety percent are non-white. Why should we add yet more racial fault lines to a country whose greatest tragedies have been bound up with race? And why should whites hand over the country to people unlike themselves? If millions of whites were pouring across the border into Mexico, celebrating July 4th rather than Cinco de Mayo, demanding school instruction in English rather than Spanish and pushing the ethnic demands of an organization called the National Council of the Race (La Raza), could Mexicans be tricked into thinking this was "cultural enrichment"?

Whites are cheerfully exhorted to "celebrate diversity," but this is only asking them to celebrate their dwindling numbers and influence. Only a people bent on suicide would do this. Non-white organizations and the populations of non-white countries could never be browbeaten into welcoming their own displacement.

No one denies that as Miami has become overwhelmingly Hispanic it has lost its Euro-American character. No one denies that those parts of our cities that have become black are alien to most whites. Why should I celebrate this? Miami and Detroit have lost the things I love most: the culture and way of life of my people. That is why whites leave. Although they may mouth praise for "diversity," they don't want it next door. And they are not running away; they are going back to the America they grew up in and in which they hope to rear their own children.

Colbert King ridicules me for saying that only whites will carry the civilization of Europe forward in a meaningful way. What would he say if whites were displacing Nigerians, with soothing assurances that the Nigerian way of life was only being "enriched"?

Demography is destiny. As those parts of the country with non-white majorities demonstrate, when population changes, everything else changes. Whites have the right -- they have the duty -- to resist unwanted change and to preserve for their children the culture and way of life of their ancestors.

-- Excerpted from "Preserving the Ways Of My Ancestors," Op-Ed published in the Washington Post, February 6, 1999. Jared Taylor is editor of American Renaissance newsletter and serves on the board of directors of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

From H. Millard:

It appears that freedom of speech, one of America's most sacred tenets, is coming under fire these days. It was no luck of the draw that the Founding Fathers put freedom of speech as the First Amendment to the Constitution, because they knew that without this freedom no other freedoms could exist. People need to be able to express their views and not fear either the heavy hand of government or of petty private sector dictators. This is basic. All else flows from this.

Consider: Certain political groups have formed partnerships with certain internet providers to keep speech that these political groups don't like off the Internet. To accomplish this, these organizations follow the usual pattern of labeling anything they don't like as "hate," and then let the appellation substitute for critical thinking and the ability of the public to decide for itself.

Once the term "hate speech" has been defined by the extreme example, it is an easy thing to convince the public that anything that bears this label is unfit for them to hear or read and that the censors have a right to keep them from hearing or reading it. To name a thing, which is to say give it a label and define it, forever conjures up an image in the minds of those hearing this label. For this reason we must be precise in how we define things. To do otherwise is to engage in prejudice, based on labels, rather than on fact.

Censorship must be resisted whether it comes from the right, the middle, or the left. The people themselves must be allowed to read and hear various points of view, and not have petty tyrants decide on whether any particular speech is acceptable.

The Founding Fathers were well aware that petty tyrants would pop up in our society in every age, and they were also well aware that such petty tyrants would often make persuasive and compelling arguments for the censoring of what the petty tyrants didn't like.

Consider. The Council of Conservative Citizens, a genuine and legitimate grass roots organization, that legally acts to put many ideas out where citizens in our free nation can see and think about them, has been labeled with the usual hate terms by those in our society who seek to prevent free speech. One lame excuse of those trying to prevent free speech is that, since the preventing of this speech is not coming from the government, it's okay. This is nonsense. What's actually happening is that certain individuals and groups with quasi-government connections, and with fame and prestige built through a nexus with the major media, are behind much of this trampling on free speech. Their main weapon is to smear and then, they hope, let the smear keep good, decent people from reading the words and ideas that the petty tyrants want stopped.

Free speech is either free or it isn't, and it matters little if the tyrants who stop it march in with jack boots supplied by the government or by the private sector.

So long as the people have free speech and the access to the means to spread ideas, tyranny will not prevail. All good, decent people should consider the nature of those who would stop free speech and ignore their name calling in favor of reading all points of view for themselves and forming their own opinions.

-- Excerpted from a commentary entitled, "The New Censorship."

Copyright H. Millard, 1999

[February 1999]

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