Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal arrived in our office early this year and I’ve had the great pleasure of slowly making my way through it over the last couple of months. (Website here). As promised, it is both powerful and beautiful (although the cover photo is a bit on the craggy, masculine end of beauty for my taste). Saying “’the Death of Print’ has become a tired cliché,” Spencer, the creator of Alternative Right and before that editor of Takimag, bucks the trend with Radix Journal by emphasizing it is designed as an actual physical publication based on trees, not pixels. This, of course, is the direct opposite of VDARE.com’s strategy and it will be interesting to see if hardcopy actually survives in our increasingly digital reader-scape.

This is the first edition of Spencer’s biannual journal. Each future edition will focus on a different theme. The theme of Radix Vol. 1 is “The Great Erasure: The Reconstruction of White Identity.” The Great Erasure is the title of Alex Kurtagic’s contribution, the first essay listed in the table of contents (and was also the title of Kurtagic’s shorter article featured on Amren.com in 2012). Unfortunately, I found his title piece for Radix academic and impenetrable (tl; dr).

Generally, though, Radix Journal hangs together very well. There is an emphasis on South Africa and the white farmer experience there, and for a good reason. In fact, this publication came at a good time for me, a moderately informed lay reader, since I recently became interested in the white struggles in South Africa after a friend of mine started sharing some of the (grossly underreported) horrors going on there. Radix provides an excellent overview of perspectives (K.R. Bolton, historical; Andy Nowicki, correspondence; Derek Turner, think-piece) on the issue. It wisely avoids the more graphic descriptions of the gruesome crimes to which Boer families have fallen prey—not because the details should be overlooked, but because their sickening cruelty is distracting from a sober discussion of the wider context that made the savage crimes possible.

The numbers alone are compelling, with nearly 2,000 murders of farmers and their families since 1991.

Andy Nowicki reports that “many have become convinced that the government is in fact behind the murders, whether through deliberate manipulation or as a result of irresponsible, vindictive anti-White rhetoric and propaganda.” Where “land reform” policies force white farmers to give part of their land to black employees after a certain number of years’ employment, the violence is worse.

Unfortunately, South Africa serves as our first significant example of what a post-white world can look like. I am reminded of some of Paul Kersey’s coverage of American cities as they fall under black-dominated government. It’s not pretty.

One thing I personally struggle with in the Alternative/ Dissident Right movement is a certain vein of pessimism—almost an eager anticipation of defeat—that I often detect in writings and conversations of movement junkies. On the one hand, they take great care to identify and bemoan the many injuries and humiliations the white race—especially white men—are subjected to. On the other, they, too, relish the ultimate demise of the West. It is as if they’re so hurt by the many battles fought and lost that they look forward to being completely overrun. And why? Perhaps because then, at least, it will all be over?

This attitude is detectible in much of Spencer’s work, Radix being no exception—particularly in Collin Liddell’s Anti-Civilization.

That said, the three reprises chosen for inclusion in the journal are Elizabeth Wright’s Old Time Religion, Sam Francis’s The Roots of the White Man and Kevin MacDonald’s The Dispossessed Elite, each of which offer at least lip-service to the possibility of regaining some of what has been lost. I hope it is not significant that two of the three reprises are posthumous.

Depression is, of course, understandable, given horrible state of things in the modern West. But it’s a fine line to walk, particularly since most normal people are not galvanized by defeat.

Call me naïve, but I actually love America. America is not South Africa yet. We’re Texians at the Alamo, not Confederates at Gettysburg.

There is a difference. And I have children to raise.