By Active club Author and R. Rundo
Somewhere on the outskirts of a mid-sized modern city, an ancient Ritual is about to repeat itself. Plunged into a cauldron of fear and danger, a boy will die and a man will emerge in his place. This Ritual is a part of the archetypal pattern that makes up the undying world of our People, and it has echoed its eerie but crystal-clear horn blast countless times throughout the ages. From the endless steppes ruled by the horse-lords, to the deep forests where the wolf and bear cults conducted their mysterious Rites, to the harsh and alien cityscapes of today, the warrior ritual of Initiation recreates itself against all efforts to suppress and destroy it.
The boy in question sits in the back of a nondescript grey sedan as it pulls off of the freeway at the designated exit. He is a member of a local crew of pro-White activists, and today is his first banner drop. His hands shake as he puts on his gloves and pulls up his mask, following the example of his older companions occupying the vehicle’s other seats. His heart pounds and his mind races. He tries to force himself to think over the rehearsal and the plan. “All I have to do is grab my corner of the banner, climb to the top of the fence, and hook up the D-Ring” he reassures himself silently. “It’s quick and easy.”
But the fears inside leap up at him from his gut like demons, dragging his thoughts down into their depths. He’d helped make the banners before a few times, appreciating the opportunity to help his brothers and the cause as he spread paint inside the crisp, clean angles of the stencil. Last time he’d held the camera, filming the banner drop from a safe distance across the freeway. But now he would be on scene, unmistakable as a member of the group that had so many enemies with loud mouthpieces in the media. What if he were stuck on scene? What if he were doxed?
The car rolls to a halt and the other activists climb out of the car. He follows their lead mechanically, breathing hard as the trunk is opened. What if they get attacked? Would he be able to stand by his brothers? This was too much. “What was I thinking? Is it too late to run?” he thinks frantically.
A final demoralizing, taunting image flashes in his brain: the face of his mother, marked with fear and disappointment as a doxing call from some nasally and arrogant journalist threatens her with the loss of her job over her son’s activities.
“Hey. Come on, bro.” A reassuring voice snaps him back to reality as a strong hand rests on his shoulder. He looks up at a the taller activist who spoke, a veteran of several banner drops and countless sticker and flier runs. The younger man has always looked up to him. The veteran is consistently one of the top guys in sparring, patiently teaching others. And he has competed several times in amateur grappling and boxing exhibitions. His eyes reveal an understanding smile beneath the mask, and the younger activist is reassured by his presence. By his side, the younger man knew he would do his part and make it through safely.
The team unloads their gear and hustles to the drop site, a chain-link fence on an overpass sitting high above a busy eight-lane freeway. In the young man’s mind the eyes of every driver are glued on him, seeing through the mask, knowing everything about him. He imagines a wild and unlikely incident where the banner breaks free and obscures some windshield, causing an accident that leads to his arrest. But he pushes forward anyway, grabbing the anchor tie on his corner of the banner and climbing the fence. The results of several months of physical exercise with his crew surprise him. He’d never been very athletic before but now he finds the ascent easy, stretching out his arm far enough to secure the stout metal clip. Together, the team unfurls the banner, tossing it up and over the fence. It hangs proudly for the designated time, displaying a bold and inspiring pro-White message. As one, the team moves to bring the banner back in and roll it up. As they stride confidently back to the car, the young activist looks at the world through a new pair of eyes. The old fears that held him hostage to an alien way of life have died, burning away in the fire of his courage to face them. Though none of the thousands of drivers passing by seem to realize it, the whole world has changed. It is his world now, transmuted and uplifted into a world of courage, loyalty, and shared adventure.
This timeless and increasingly common scenario illustrates some important truths about White Nationalism 3.0: activism as a lifestyle. The first is that Rites of Passage are essential to the development of individual activists and thereby the crew as a whole. The second is that the opportunity to go through these Rites and Rituals is a big part of the appeal of WN 3.0. And the third is that the Hierarchy established when an activist gains prestige through conquering in these Rites is a force multiplier not just for the victor, but for those who will look up to him and follow his example. In recognizing these truths, crews can also see the advantage of consciously choosing to shape these Rituals, to create Rites of Passage that aim their own evolution toward the higher men they wish to become. They can also see the danger posed to this ancient way of life by the toxic online remnants of WN 2.0 culture.
In a typical activist crew, the discerning eye can see the resurrection of the cultic warrior brotherhoods that gave life and character to the world of our ancestors. Like Odin’s furious Mannerbund, the wild koryos of Rudra or the stalwart legionnaires who venerated Mithras, the muscle and bone that makes up today’s activist crews is young White men. These men have a variety of motivations for joining a WN 3.0 crew, but some that seem common to all are a restless dissatisfaction with purposeless modern life, a desire to prove themselves and make their own mark on the world, and a yearning for the company of like-minded brothers. These motivations, when channeled into constructive activity, can drive the activists to feats of courage and endurance they never felt themselves capable of in their old life.
The life of the warrior brotherhood or activist crew itself seems to naturally produce moments that serve as Rites of Passage, as if drawing up from the well of creation the patchwork pieces of the resurrected world of our ancestors. But too often the inner power of these Rituals is lost in the wilderness of the wider movement, as the endless backbiting, critiquing, and navel-gazing of the online WN 2.0 sphere feeds negativity back into the crew and dilutes the transformative force of the experience.
The hierarchy established by the demands of daily life as an activist is threatened by the ability of online actors and personalities to don the unearned mantle of authority with a free media platform like a livestream. Motivated by the envy that often fills the heart of the untested, some streamers who seem online like comrades of the crew sow doubt and dissension in the minds of the youngest activists by heaping scorn onto their elder brothers and even the Rites of Passage themselves.
It is perplexing that this trend is so prevalent within the movement, as a similar thread of personal resentment can be detected in the obsessive doxing articles written by the White male journalists who cover the movement. A recent scan through a series of articles written about a WN 3.0 personality reveal a thwarted desire for recognition and prestige by its author. Over and over again the journalist slipped into the first person to beg for recognition of his writing skill as a victory over the pro-White activist. “I revealed” this, “I discovered” that causing the reader to cringe in recognition of the sad inner resentment the author reveals. After a lifetime of choosing non-confrontation like a “good little white boy” is expected to by the oppressive system, the warrior that journalist might have been lies caged inside of him, and every verbal dart he slings at the activist he is obsessed with strikes within his own being. Over and over again he carelessly wounds a neglected piece of himself in trying to hurt a stranger across the ocean. Instead of recognizing his own suppressed desire for a life of risk and adventure, his lack of self-awareness causes him to disparage the very idea of it. It is no wonder that addiction, depression, and even suicide rates are so high among mainstream media journalists.
This tendency of media personalities to disparage the free and noble lifestyle of an activist crew may seem strange, but it is certainly not new. The settled peoples who provided the boys to be Initiated into the cultic warrior brotherhoods of the past often had fear and resentment for the intimidating warbands they relied on for protection. The Rites and Rituals of that lifestyle were kept secret and mysterious, and seemed otherworldly and terrifying to the people who lived and died within the confines of the village. This ancient internal rivalry is repeated today by self-styled movement intellectuals who prefer to confine their activities to the online realm. In over-compensation for the inadequacy they feel about this disparity, the intellectuals will often disparage the Rites of activism by calling for unrealistic, cartoonish, and counter-productive violence. With nothing concrete or real to test their claims by, media personalities can claim unearned prestige by demonstrating the false “daring” of saying things for shock value, contrasting the risks they claim the crews should take with the calculated and far less damaging risks that careful, skilled activists take.
Perhaps some of this resentment comes from all of one’s instinct for Hierarchy and advancement being subsumed by a lifetime of online gaming. RPGs like World of Warcraft were specifically designed to subsume this instinct to build honor and reputation through deeds. With the first players raised on these games approaching middle age, perhaps some resentment at seeing young activists turning their real life into an RPG in service to a higher cause strikes a jealous nerve inside of certain terminally online WN 2.0 figures.
Regardless of its effect on enemy journalists, the counter to the poisonous and resentful presence of the ghost of WN 2.0 lies in extending the reach of the Rites and Rituals of the street-level activist crews across the wider movement. By encoding these pieces of the warrior brotherhood’s DNA into WN 3.0 as a whole, the hierarchy that is naturally established by the performance of these Rites removes the ability of the outsider, the fearful, and the timid to speak with the voice of the brotherhood. The courage needed to fulfill the challenges of the Rituals is what has always separated the “us” of the Border Riders from the “them” that is the settlements under their protection.
The establishment of a broadly-accepted set of standards for activist crew Initiation is likely to be a fluid and evolving thing for quite some time, but an examination of the Active Club brand reveals a potential outline for what a system of Rites of Passage could look like. In the credo “Activism, Athletics, Identity” the tenets of a three-pronged system of guided evolution can be seen. A set of Rites or Achievements to be recognized by the movement as a whole might look something like this:
Activism
1. Place stickers
2. Place flyers
3. Participate in a banner drop
4. Plan and execute a unique activist operation
Athletics
1. Complete an initial strength and endurance test
2. Participate in a sparring session
3. Compete in a sanctioned combat sports competition
4. Achieve victory in a sanctioned combat sports competition
Identity
1. Read three books from the crew’s reading list
2. Analyze a book of importance and present your analysis to the crew
3. Create a piece of media to inspire or educate people inside the movement
4. Create a piece of media to reach out positively to people outside the movement
The three pillars of this system of Rite and Initiation echo the trifunctional hypothesis of French Mythographer George Dumezil, who identified in Proto-Indo-European society a three function system of the Sacral, the Martial, and the Economic (or Priest, Warrior, and Tradesmen). Activists pursuing the goals of such a system could then undergo a natural sorting process into a strong, positive caste system.
Some young activists who join the movement lacking a sense of direction might discover a talent for the Identity branch of the tree, and pursue advancement in reading, writing, and public speaking. At the same time, trying out the initial few challenges of the other branches will build a confidence and a healthy respect that will color the content they produce, stifling the current trend of movement media personalities disparaging comrades for clicks and chat donations. Other activists may have a great aptitude for combat sports, but will find ways to use and refine this skills in support of the other two branches. And a few select elite may be driven to master all three branches of the hierarchy, making themselves excellent candidates for leadership roles as “Total Men”, avatars who embody the brotherhood as a whole.
In acknowledging the power of the Rituals that accompany any purpose-driven brotherhood of young men, the movement gains the ability to drive their own evolution by selecting and encoding the shape these Rites of Passage will take. When activists set out on their first tentative steps on this path of Initiation, they offer themselves up as raw material for the construction of the new world they long to live in. Through the refinement process of the Rites of the brotherhood, that material is sculpted into something resembling the heroes of the past that inspired their first steps. In his excellent book “The One-Eyed God: Odin and the Indo-Germanic Mannerbunde”, researcher Kris Kershaw provides a strange and enticing insight into this process when he quotes Louis Gernet: “It is from the cult itself that the god derives his being.” In re-establishing the order and traditions of the cultic warrior brotherhoods of our ancestors, we give the forces that drove them new life to shape our material reality. One need not believe in old gods to gain inspiration from this thought. In looking for inspiration at the cultic warrior brotherhoods of pagan ancestors or the chivalrous Knightly orders of Christian ones, the common denominator in Rite, Ritual, and a Hierarchy of true merit. The Ancestor-Heroes resurrected on this renewed Grail Quest will be our own selves. The honorable, challenging, and adventurous way of life we create on this Quest will be the torch we pass on to the next generation of pro-White activists.