The National Policy Institute’s 2013 Leadership Conference will be held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC on October 26th, with related events on Friday 25th and Sunday 27th. There is still time to register online at NPI's website
Though there’s much talk about “identity” in political debates these days, it’s not always clear what we are talking about. Is identity defined by Race? Language? Religion? Ethnicity? Nationhood?
The National Policy’s Institute (NPI)’s coming conference—After the Fall: the Future of Identity—will raise such questions and provide the audience with important perspectives.
While the entire Western world is facing similar and inter-related challenges nowadays—from mass non-European immigration to financial bankruptcy, from cultural debasement to social atomization—the identity of “the West” that is at stake is not clearly understood. Often, what is meant by “the West” is its neoconservative conception: liberal democracy, human rights, and cultural and religious pluralism. (Paul Gottfried has quipped that when neocons say “the West,” they seem to mean the Upper West Side.) Since this “West” doesn’t recognize race, or culture in the full sense of the word, it knows no border. It is all too often conflated with the actual Occident, which has a history of its own and is embodied by a particular people—the European people.
The “West” as defined by mainstream discourse is challenged by Third World immigrants today. They might be willing to benefit from the delights of a technologically advanced society, but for most of them, they keep seeing themselves as members of distinct cultures, with different and often competing interests. They rarely adhere to the liberal values that, we are supposed to believe, define our identity. Quite often, they can even outright reject them.
Third World immigration also represents an existential threat to the historic Occident. The “interesting times” ahead will thus require a reassertion of the historic Occident by European peoples, in place of the globalist “West” that makes them unable to resist their dispossession.
Indeed, the logical affirmation of their racial and cultural identity by non-European immigrants calls for a similar awakening among Western people. But before this development is possible, or even thinkable, we have to reflect on what exactly is threatening North American and European nations today, and what they should stand for. We also have to ask ourselves if the way Westerners have defined themselves since the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century (nationhood and citizenship) is still relevant today, or if something both wider in terms of civilizational unity and narrower in terms of local community is needed.
To help our audience in that reflection, French philosopher Alain de Benoist, one of the founders and leading thinkers of what is known in Europe as the New Right, will be the keynote speaker of the conference. He will speak on “False Identity,” and will thus address the problem of restricting European civilization to a set of abstract, uprooted and most often illusory “values.”
Croatian-American writer Tomislav Sunic, who has been the link between the European New Right and the American Alternative Right, will complete De Benoist’s lecture and outline a way beyond nationalism as defined by the current nation-states. Sunic is a long-time advocate of pan-European nationalism.
Another notable speaker will be Swiss author Piero San Giorgio, who gained fame in Europe for his book Survivre à l’Effondrement économique (Survive — The Economic Collapse), which has been translated into English by NPI’s sister organization, Washington Summit Publishers, and will be released this Autumn. San Giorgio, who was a successful businessman in Geneva, made a career move to study the global economic system and concluded to its unsustainability, given its dependence on ever-expanding populations, debt, and resource exploitation. The West, as we have known it since the end of the Second World War, seems to have extinguished all its resources, human, financial and moral, but the people who carry its heritage have to find a way forward and upward, beyond the likely difficult times they are going to live in the near future.
Alex Kurtagic, who delivered a memorable speech at our first conference in 2011, “Masters of the Universe,” will add on this issue with his talk entitled “What’s next?”. Though the collapse of the current prevailing system seems inevitable, Western people should act independently of it. Only by working on a resurgence of racial solidarity, regardless of the economic and social circumstances, will Western people have a future of their own. Indeed, in his novel Mister , Kurtagic imagined a not-so-distant world (Europe in the 2020s) where the economic collapse is unraveling without changing anything to the dispossession of Western people in their homelands.
Author of The Way of Men Jack Donovan will give his own, original perspective on the coming collapse, seeing in it an opportunity to reassert manly virtues and honor, a field in which he has become a renowned expert.
Other speakers include Sam Dickson, whose speech will be about “America: The God that Failed;” and Roman Bernard and Richard Spencer, co-host of the conference. Bernard will speak on the “generational problem” in nationalist movements.
Discussion panels will also feature John Morgan, editor-in-chief of Arktos Media; novelist Andy Nowicki, who is co-editor of Alternative Right; Matt Parrott, director of Traditionalist Youth Network and Counter-Currents.com contributor; and Mark Hackard, expert in geopolitics and foreign affairs and contributor to AlternativeRight.com.
Roman Bernard is a French journalist and blogger. Since 2012, he has been involved at the same time with the “Identitarian” movement in Europe and the Alternative Right in America. Richard B. Spencer is President and Director of The National Policy Institute.
