American Dissident Voices broadcast of August 8, 2015

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THE PHOTOGRAPH above is an aerial view of a small part of the National Alliance community in West Virginia. This month is the 30th anniversary of The Land, the intentional White community of the National Alliance, located in the beautiful countryside near Hillsboro, West Virginia, and founded in 1985 by Dr. William L. Pierce. On today’s program, I’ll be celebrating that anniversary, sharing with you Dr. Pierce’s words written on the founding of our community, some of which have never been made public until today, and looking toward the future as our community grows.

The large, two-story building you see in the photograph, with the Life Rune (an ancient European symbol of life, creation, birth, rebirth, and renewal) on its front is the community’s main office building; the house and outbuildings on the right are one of our staff residences. Also on the Alliance’s West Virginia campus, which covers nearly a square mile of wooded mountains and meadows, are the National Vanguard Books warehouse and offices, a meeting hall, maintenance facilities, and residences for staffers. (Further South, following the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains—which form a relatively racially-healthy “White belt” across eastern North America—stands the Alliance’s National Office complex built by Alliance Chairman Will Williams in eastern Tennessee.) Here in the unspoiled mountains, surrounded by the inspiring beauty and history of this place, White men, women, and families have worked for the cause of White renewal since 1985.

A few months after the move to The Land, Dr. Pierce wrote to National Vanguard subscribers and supporters in a letter, telling them about

…the relocation and reorganization of our entire editorial, publishing, and book-distributing activity. Our former offices, near Washington, DC, had become both too cramped and too expensive for us to remain there. Consequently, in August we moved everything except our editorial operation to Baltimore, Maryland, where we now have more room and lower overhead expenses. Our worldwide distribution of books and other printed materials has continued without interruption from the new location. And we have found and stocked a number of valuable new books, which will be listed in the latest edition of our book catalog, to be mailed to you later this month.

I and a few associates, however, did not move to Baltimore. Instead, we settled on a rugged, undeveloped mountainside more than 100 miles from any large city. We wanted an environment unlike any which can be found in what America’s cities have become, an environment conducive to thinking about and writing about the problems now besetting our race.

To anyone living in Washington or any other major city, of course, certain aspects of these problems are painfully evident. One’s nose is rubbed in them every day of the week. The effect — at least, the effect on me — is to generate a sustained state of barely contained rage. It is [enough] to make me so angry that I want to kill. Since that is not feasible, I write. Mostly I write about the things that make me angry: about the controlled media and the controlled politicians; about the perverse judicial system and the race-destroying churches; about official lies and official hypocrisy; about the malignancy of the educational system and the greed, cowardice, and irresponsibility of those with the power to make changes; about Jews and lawyers, feminists and homosexuals, sanctimonious liberals and mush-headed conservatives.

There was a time when I thought this rage such a good thing I made periodic visits to New York City — perhaps the only place in America more rage-provoking than Washington — in order to keep up my steam. But eventually I came to realize that more than rage is needed, that we must address ourselves to other matters than the manifest problems which so provoke us. We must better understand the failings in ourselves which made it possible for these problems to arise and fester unhindered. More to the point, we must learn how to cure ourselves before we can hope to eliminate the problems. This requires looking beyond the symptoms of our disease to its causes: above all, to its moral and spiritual roots. But when we are having our noses rubbed in the symptoms every day, it is difficult to look beyond them — and even more difficult to cool our rage enough to have clear vision.

So that is the reason — in addition to the increasingly onerous overhead expense and the lack of needed working room — we moved our editorial operation from a Washington suburb to a wild mountainside. We wanted to get far enough away from the problems about which we had been writing so that we could begin to see more of the forest, and see it in a new light.

To state it in more ambitious terms, we wanted to begin doing more than the analysis and criticism which has been the standard fare in National Vanguard. We wanted to begin developing some positive ideas about solutions, about new approaches to living. We wanted to establish a better basis for building the new consciousness — and eventually the new order from which a new people might some day arise — which has been proclaimed on its logotype as the aim of National Vanguard from the beginning.

I had been thinking about doing that, developing plans and accumulating resources, since 1977. And in August we made our start. I had hoped that the move might set back the publication schedule for National Vanguard no more than a month or six weeks. But new ventures generally produce new and unforeseen problems to overcome, and that has been the case with ours. Expenses in getting established at the new location mounted more rapidly than anticipated, requiring us to do many things ourselves that we might have hired someone else to do if there had been more money. And everything was harder and more time consuming than we thought it would be. So six weeks has dragged into five months.

I don’t want to get into an exposition in this letter of all the practical difficulties we have encountered and overcome in the past five months. except to say that this experience itself already has begun to yield some new — and, I believe, valuable — insights.

In his “Prospectus for a New Community,” sent to potential community members in 1985, Dr. Pierce writes of the spiritual basis of the proto-society that was to begin on The Land:

…The Cosmotheist Community began in 1974 as a religious discussion group which met weekly in the homes of interested persons in the Washington, D.C., area. These persons shared a concern for the fundamental values and goals — or lack thereof — on which the directions being taken by modern, American society depend. They felt that materialism, egoism, and a lack of any sense of responsibility to the future had become so widespread and so deeply entrenched that the spiritual and moral basis of Western civilization was being eroded dangerously.

In their meetings they explored the causes of this spiritual illness: the urbanization which has been growing rapidly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, with the consequent breaking of the bonds between people and land; the historical failure of Christianity to take the physical basis of man’s existence into consideration along with the spiritual basis and to build a community of blood as well as faith; the spread of democracy as a political doctrine, with the consequent decline in quality and responsibility of the leadership of the nations of the West, especially the United States. Underlying these trends they saw the common problem of wrong values, a problem made more intractable by an unnatural life-style.

…The Cosmotheist doctrine has been expressed in part by many men. The great British playwright, George Bernard Shaw, was a Cosmotheist, and he spoke through such characters of his as Don Juan (in Man and Superman), who declared man’s purpose to be the service of the Life Force in its eternal quest to know itself. The German giant of philosophy, Frederich Nietzsche, also was a Cosmotheist. His character Zarathustra expressed Don Juan’s truth in different words; he saw man’s purpose as preparing the way for a higher, more conscious, more nearly godlike man. And the English poet William Wordsworth was giving expression to his Cosmotheist awareness of divinity when he wrote: “And I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:/A motion and a spirit that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things.” Another English poet, Alexander Pope, summed up the Cosmotheist view very concisely in the words: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole/Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.” The Cosmotheist doctrine may be epitomized very briefly in the following statements:

There is only one reality, and it is the Whole — the purposeful, self-creating, self-evolving Cosmos, which has both material and spiritual aspects, inseparably conjoined. Thus, Creation and Creator, Cosmos and Theos, Whole and God, are but different names for the same reality.

Man is part of the Whole, and his consciousness is one manifestation of a universal, immanent consciousness.

Man’s ordained or natural purpose is the same as the Creator’s purpose, which is self-realization.

Man properly serves his ordained purpose by striving toward ever higher ever more conscious levels of existence, both biologically and spiritually. His ordained task is to advance, generation by generation, along the Creator’s path of evolving self-consciousness. In the past he advanced blindly, driven by the immanent urge toward self-realization, self-completion. Now he must guide his advancement.

This doctrine imposes obligations on those who accept it. Since man is not only an agent, but also a part of the Creator, he is obliged to conduct himself accordingly. Since his purpose is service of the Creator’s purpose, he is obliged to prepare himself to render service as effectively as possible. Effective service depends on knowledge, consciousness, and discipline. Each man and each woman has the obligation to know his identity and his purpose and to elevate that knowledge, through purposeful living, to an ever-present consciousness; furthermore, he has the obligation to be strong and fully in control of himself, so that he can apply his knowledge unfalteringly in his service.

Knowledge can be gained by diligent study almost anywhere, but consciousness is dependent on life-style and environment. And discipline is the product of lifelong training. The members of the church realized the impracticability of attempting to discharge their obligations in a satisfactory manner while living in an environment determined by values opposed to their own. They also recognized the formidable obstacles to raising children properly in such an environment.  With these problems in mind, in 1978 they began a building fund for the purpose of acquiring land where an environment more congenial to their needs could be established.

In October 1984 the Church purchased a 360-acre site on a mountainside in east-central West Virginia. The site was virtually in a natural state, with only one 100-year old farmhouse on it and no utilities. At the time of the purchase, one family moved into the farmhouse and began the preparatory work for bringing other families and single people onto the land. Wells were drilled, septic tanks dug, power and telephone cables brought in, and an internal road improved. A bathroom was added to the farmhouse, and mobile homes were brought in for additional  dwelling space. A second family settled on the land in mid-1985, and a large building was erected to serve as a church/community center, with a central area for meetings and religious services, a 7,000-volume reference library, shops, offices, and room for classrooms and other facilities. At this time the construction of the interior of the building, the improvement of dwelling units, and the development of other community facilities are ongoing projects.

…The most immediate need of the community is for suitable [individuals and families] to become members. The basic building unit of the community is the nuclear family, and so couples and a sexually balanced mix of single men and women are being sought. The aim is to integrate four or five new couples into the community each year, with an ultimate limit of perhaps 50 families (200-300 people, including children).

…Persons who become members of the community are expected to be full-time members, without outside commitments or activities. …Every adult member will be integrated into the economy of the community, by participation in the community’s income-producing activity, its food-producing activity, its educational or construction activity, or a combination of these.

…The most essential attribute of the community is its purposeful, religious nature. It does not exist primarily for the sake of its members, but to serve the Creator’s purpose. Therefore… each member of the community is required to subordinate certain personal prerogatives to the community purpose. Commitment to the community’s goals, obedience to its rules, and adherence to its doctrine are obligations for every member….

I was there for most of this work and, together with Fred Streed and Will Williams and Robert Pate and others, we built new structures, dug six-foot-deep trenches across rocky hills and ravines to run power and communications cables between the residences and new buildings on The Land — and kept the publications, book orders, and radio programs on schedule at the same time. I remember the long treks between Baltimore and Arlington and Hillsboro, gradually bringing Dr. Pierce’s library, workshop,  typesetting equipment, laboratory, inventory, and other necessaries onto The Land. I was working on The Land when my first two children were born. I remember Dr. Pierce’s regular hikes to the summit that some called Pierce’s Peak, where he would look out on a sea of fog that seemed to extend to infinity; and the nights we would look up at the Milky Way, bright as a silver half-moon in those dark hills, and contemplate our race’s place in the Universe.

Not all of Dr. Pierce’s ambitions for the community on The Land were realized in his lifetime. The size of the community has not yet reached 50 families. Gardens were and are grown there, and much of the fuel for heating comes from local timber, but total self-sufficiency in food and fuel, without dependence on purchases, was never achieved. But there was another kind of self-sufficiency — which was reached. The Land has hosted innumerable gatherings of racial idealists who come together to further our work, the largest of which have filled our meeting hall to overflowing. The Land supported itself through the help and participation of thousands of like-minded men and women, National Alliance members and supporters, who subscribed to the publications and recruited others to help in our community’s consciousness-raising work.

After Dr. Pierce’s death, The Land went through a period of serious decline. But it did not die. After the founder’s unworthy successors finally gave up what they did not deserve and did not even understand, Dr. Pierce’s close associate William White Williams became Chairman of the National Alliance. And he is working unceasingly to restore our community, both physically and spiritually. In the last few months, there have been numerous meetings and significant gatherings on The Land, repairs to the infrastructure there are ongoing, permanent residents have moved in, and a Chief of Staff — National Vanguard‘s Michael Olanich — has taken charge there.

We’ll be continuing our series celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Land soon. But first, starting next week, be sure to be listening as we remember the 100th anniversary of the execution of Jewish sex killer Leo Frank, right here on American Dissident Voices.

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You’ve been listening to American Dissident Voices, the radio program of the National Alliance, founded by William Luther Pierce in 1970. This program is published every week at Whitebiocentrism.com and nationalvanguard.org. You can join and support us by visiting natall.com — or write to National Alliance, Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. We welcome your support, your inquiries, and your help in spreading our message of hope to our people. Once again, that address is Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. Until next week, this is Kevin Alfred Strom reminding you to keep on thinking free.