Time for the John Galt option?

Shrewsbury writes:

Shrewsbury wrote this screed a month or two ago, intending to withhold it until an appropriate tide in the affairs of men. Well, anyway, tide or not, it at least has some relation to your recent post “Revolution,” and he thought you might find it not utterly lacking in interest—or at least relevance, as we used to say. Power to the people.

THE SHREWSBURY MANIFESTO

In the late presidential election, the white people of the United States voted in a near-landslide against the nonwhite exotic Barack Obama. Yet Barack Obama is now president of the United States, because all the nonwhites trooped out to vote for the nonwhite. This is the latest and most glaring symptom that the United States of America has been stolen from its people by a New Class which over the last half-century has swollen ever larger, like a parasite feeding off an increasingly debilitated host. This New Class has thrown open the gates to the beautiful city, and invited in hordes of non-native people with the clear purpose of overwhelming its original citizenry, leaving the New Class in possession of most of its wealth, influence, and power. It never relents in its usurpations, which indeed still increase and always will. The New Class will instinctively work toward a totalitarian structure the sole purpose of which must be to cement forever its status and control over the society. Thus the people who built the greatest nation in the history of the world and who still today alone keep it thriving, will soon have no say in its governance. And now the New Class’s war on the old America has resulted in the grotesque Obama presidency, their greatest usurpation yet, achieved through population replacement and control of the mass media.

And yet … and yet … a parasite cannot survive without its host.

Amongst what we may call the yeomanry, the original populace of this land, one now hears dark mutterings of civil war—since they can see no other way of ridding themselves of the parasitic organism which has fastened itself upon their body politic. But civil war is entirely unnecessary—precisely because white men continue to have so much fundamental strength. It is this strength which would allow them to bring down the whole federal edifice whenever they wanted, simply by shrugging—the John Galt Option.

With automatic deduction of taxes from paychecks, the regime long ago cleverly forestalled any chance of a tax revolt by the working masses; but if only those 56 percent of white men (and whatever smattering of other ethnicities) who dared vote against the Obamanation were to do the John Galt thing, and cease supporting the state by their skills, craft, and industry, the entire Rube Goldberg contraption would come rattling down like a Coney Island roller coaster with its props kicked out. Or, to return to our previous conceit—it would starve the parasite until the bloodsucker was so weakened that its slack mandibles loosened their grip upon the host and the obscene insect dropped to the floor with a most unpleasant sound. How is it to be done? By doing nothing.

Let us all take a months’ vacation, every one of us: plumbers, mechanics, pilots—who will fly the famous liberals to their seminars and their $50,000 honorariums? Yes, and let the fireman, the emergency tech, and the doctor all hang their heads in shame that the white man’s greed runs a world in need—let them accordingly forego their paychecks for a month, let the ghetto denizens douse their own fires, staff their own trauma centers, and treat their own stabbing and gunshot wounds. Policemen, too: egomaniac feminists, trapped in their apartments screaming at their television sets, unable to set foot into streets now ruled by savagery, will at last have it inescapably shoved into their lemon-sucking faces that their prosperity, their lives, their precious overweening pride, are wholly dependent upon the brawny backs of the working-class white men they have so utterly despised. Let the New York Times attempt to publish their Sunday edition, that whopping five pounds of mendacity, bigotry, and obsessive celebration of female impersonators, as the third-Worlders who are now alone at the electrical stations frantically try to figure out some way to keep the juice flowing. Sacrifice a chicken? Let the prancing know-it-alls of Hollywood still primp and caper before the cameras—cameras without cameramen. Let President Obama go down to the ‘hood and round up some homies to serve as his security detail, now that the Secret Service guys have plucked the wires from their ears and gone fishing; while ex-felon ACORN employees can service and fly Air Force One. “Hey, man, where the muthahf****n’ autopilot switch at, yo?” And then let all the tillers of the soil and herders of cattle cease to send their harvests to market; and let us discover for how long our nation’s ghetto denizens can survive on Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, and Ho-Hos before the food riots begin (fueled by an humongous sugar-buzz); or our oh-so-superior elites on jars of caviar and tins of pâte de foie gras before they become so arugula- and endive-deprived and dangerously cranky that they begin to dash off frantic letters to the Times, demanding that the redneck racist farmers be forced to deliver all their produce to the seething cities. But the usurpers in government will know that they have not yet the coercive power to force the yeomanry to take their crops to the city; they will be obliged to come to an accomodation with the hated white producers of food, protectors of the peace, pilots of their aircraft, manufacturers of their Blackberries.

And when the entire country has come to a screeching, grinding halt, and revenue ceased to be sluiced into the illimitable federal coffers, the government, if it wishes to survive in any form, must at last pay heed to the demand of the yeomanry to defend the borders, to extirpate the criminal alien, and retroactively to abrogate the travesty of birthright citizenship.

In short, white men need do nothing to triumph—they can triumph by doing nothing. Nothing except, of course, to snap out of that deadly hypnosis, which leaves them trembling with dread lest someone somewhere accuse them of “racism”—while they remain insensible to their own cultural and even physical destruction.

LA replies:

The central plot idea of Atlas Shrugged, that liberal society rests on the productivity and virtue of the productive and the virtuous, even as it demonizes them and makes their situation impossible; that the productive and the virtuous keep this situation going by going along with it; and that they can end it by ceasing to go along with it, is as valid as ever—more than ever. And, of course, in multicultural, officially anti-white America, the America that is waging war against his historic majority people, Rand’s idea takes on a specifically racial aspect.

But is it a viable idea? Could it be done? Has anyone ever thought this out?

LA writes:

It looks like the homosexuals had the same idea as Shrewsbury:

Calling in ‘gay’ to work is latest form of protest

By LISA LEFF

SAN FRANCISCO (AP)—Some same-sex marriage supporters are urging people to “call in gay” Wednesday to show how much the country relies on gays and lesbians, but others question whether it’s wise to encourage skipping work given the nation’s economic distress.

Organizers of “Day Without a Gay”—scheduled to coincide with International Human Rights Day and modeled after similar work stoppages by Latino immigrants—also are encouraging people to perform volunteer work and refrain from spending money.

Sean Hetherington, a West Hollywood comedian and personal trainer, dreamed up the idea with his boyfriend, Aaron Hartzler, after reading online that a few angry gay-rights activists were calling for a daylong strike to protest California voters’ passage last month of Proposition 8, which reversed this year’s state Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage. [cont.]

Shrewsbury replies:

Just when the economy is reeling, now we have to go an entire twenty-four hours without a single cabaret show with female impersonators. It’s just too much. I mean, people have their limits.

This is going to be sheer hell for dinner theatres all over this great nation of ours.

John Hagan writes:

I can’t say that I have had a John Galt plan, or a John Galt moment, but I have owned property in northern New England for many years that I frequently use even though I live and work in a large metropolitan area. I’m well aware that where I am in northern New England has essentially no minorities. And that is, and was, an important consideration in my purchasing this property in this part of the country. Obviously, there are many places with better weather that I could have picked for a second home.

I’m attracted to the demographic fact that the area is 98 percent white, and in many respects, outside of several difficult months in the winter, it is much like the area I remember growing up in. It’s a safe, low-crime area, and violent crime is almost non-existent. So is this my John Galt statement…. perhaps ? It may have not started out as such, but as the demographics have rapidly changed over the years in southern New England and New York I have spent more and more time in northern New England, and expect to retire up there.

So, though I have a presence in a major metropolitan area I also have one foot out of that urban door. So I guess you could say that like John Galt I’m voting with my feet. I not only bypassed suburbia, but exurbia, and have made sure that I’m on the edge of the grid. I suspect the thousands and thousands of people who have moved to this area over the last ten years share many of the same feelings as I do.

LA replies:

Sounds very nice up there. However, having a second home away from it all while continuing one’s normal career and planning ultimately to move to one’s second home is not a John Galt-type strike. A John Galt-type strike means ceasing to contribute the work of one’s mind to the existing society. Most of the strikers in Atlas Shrugged retired from their jobs and disappeared. They did actually continue to work, but not in the known society, and none of their efforts went to help the known society.

John Hagan replies:

Lol, I hear you:) But if you asked me even several years ago if I ever thought of living this far north of Boston I would have laughed it off, but things have changed so fast that it is something I feel compelled to do. So yes, that’s why I don’t consider this quite a John Galt moment in my life…..but it’s not quite how I thought things would turn out either.

JH continues:

It’s a sort of slow-motion Galt:) It’s amazing to see just how many people have started to move up here from everywhere in the USA as opposed to the past when it was very rare to see much population growth in this area. Get to know people, and scratch the surface, and you will find out that it was often race issues that took them this way.

RB writes:

Mr. Shrewsbury’s heart is certainly in the right place. However, I think we will have to begin with something a little less ambitious. How about a one day general strike; shades of my late 60s days on campus—as we used to chant: “On Strike, Shut it Down.” Or maybe a five million (white) man march on DC. Even these less drastic actions will require some major provocations by the new Obama administration. But, patience, we are only in the first days of the Maquis. However, it’s going well; first we had Mumbai and now we have a major scandal involving O’s Illinois political machine—and he’s not even in office yet.

Mark Jaws writes:

The Galt Option is a pipedream. It will never happen. Revolutions are led and fomented by a small and organized minority which can concentrate its force at the right place and the right time. Look at our own American Revolution. Out of a free white population of 2.5 million people in 1775, no more than 75,000 men took up arms during the entire seven years of that struggle. In other words, less than 10% of able American white men participated. Same could be said for most power grabs or movements for freedom or independence.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 08, 2008 10:52 PM | Send