William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume MC: Annotated Contents; The Moral Calculus; Index of Moral Actors; Annexes; Source Cited (San Francisco: McSweeny's Books, 2003) ("Rising up: A just act of violence. Both means and ends are legitimate. Rising down: An unjust act of violence. Means, ends or both fall to meet legacy's standard." Id. at 48-49.).
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume I: Three Meditations on Death; Introduction: The Days of the Niblungs; Definitions for Lonely Atoms (San Francisco: McSweeny's Books, 2003) ("If we cannot situate ourselves in history, if we cannot match ourselves against our moral peers now dead and gone, what good is history?" Id. at 48-49. "FREEDOM OF SPEECH: I myself happen to agree with the old black soldier. No one can convince me of my obligation to perpetually obey a social contract to which I never explicitly consented. Authority is ever ingenious in coming up with legalistic definitions of voluntarism: When we first left our caves and huddled together against monsters, we unanimously agreed to chain ourselves together and throw away the key! And then many epochs later, I was born into this situation, benefited from it and by receiving benefits gave my consent even though I wasn't of an age to understand what consent meant. This logic is precisely what is denied in prosecutions of statutory rape. Never mind. Let's say I agree--for now. I'm resigned to my government's attack on Iraq in my name; I'm resigned because I can't do anything about it. But I will never give up my right to speak our against it. If I'm not allowed even that much then I've not signed a social contract, I've become a moral slave. By all means weave a common law; but that law must never rise about debate. To the rights of the self in extremis, its rights when directly confronted with violence, I assert, as many better people have done before me, that the self retains the inalienable right to express itself as it chooses, on any topic that it chooses, the right to empathize with friend or foe (shall we call that treason?), to assent and to deny, to offend, to express its conscience and to express no conscience, to be offensive, vulgar, vicious and even evil in the object and manner of its expression, at any and all times, with the sole caveat that direct incitement to violence is action, not speech, and may be considered illegitimate to the extent that the violence it incites is illegitimate. I say it again: If we don't grant the self this paltry right, then our social contract is nothing more than hypocritical or naked coercion. The logical consequences: We must allow hate speech and pornography, including violent pornography; we must allow dupes, thugs, pimps and traitors to have their say." Id. at 223 (italics in original; citations omitted).).
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume II: Justifications: Defense of Honor; Defense of Class; Defense of Authority; Defense of Race and Culture; Defense of Creed (San Francisco: McSweeny's Books, 2003) ("At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems that while Emancipation and the civil rights movement have greatly furthered the cause of justice, white racists still employ violence, and white-dominated institutions operate by inertia or worse, to forbid blacks their full share at the common table. Defense of race is unjustified when it is based solely on the defense of a prohibition, privilege or compulsion in one's own group. Meanwhile, black racists do the same to other people of color. I think of black attacks on Korean businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles riot." Id. at 431 (citations omitted). Vollmann goes on to assert five situations where 'violent defense of race and culture is justified;" and four situations where "violent defense of race and culture is unjustified." Most important, he end this discussion with a clear assertion: "Proactive defense of race and culture is highly suspect." Id. at 432-433.).
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume III: Justifications: Defense of War Aims; Defense of Homeland; Defense of Ground; Defense of Earth; Defense of Animals; Defense of Gender; Defense Against Traitors; Defense Against Revolution (San Francisco: McSweeny's Books, 2003) ("One reason why in Rising Up and Rising Down I have been so careful to give white separatists and others of that ilk more than may seem to be their due is because, as stated for defense of race and culture, diversity is best served by local homogeneity and global heterogeneity. It is all too easy for an outsider to conclude that a given society's division of sex roles is improper or unfair. [] And so I believe very strongly that we ought to respect the inertia of another culture before we alter it, and that goes for sex role divisions and gender prerogatives." Id. at 334-335 (citations omitted).).
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume IV: Justifications: Deterrence, Retribution, and Revenge; Punishment; Loyalty, Compulsion, and Fear; Sadism and Expediency; Sadism, Masochism, and Pleasure; Moral Yellowness; Inevitability: Evaluations: Four Safeguards; Remember the Victims (San Francisco: McSweeny's Books, 2003) ("Lawrence's troops slew Turks whose victims' blood had scarcely yet called the flies. The Cossacks at Korsun'-Shevchenkovsky could see on every side a smashed, burned vista which their enemies had helped create. They spared no thought to deterrence, only retribution, which could be satisfied only by liquidation. To an ant queen among weaker rivals, as to a Molotov, liquidation is a matter of expedient course; the rivals of course have done nothing 'wrong,' but (so the liquidator assumes, if she makes any assumptions at all) they would have proceeded likewise had they been able: natural selection presupposes competition. Certain apes will kill the prior offspring of females they've wrenched away for other males, thereby protecting their own bloodlines. We explain these events in terms of sociobiology, not ethics, because the perpetrators are not human. Call it ape-ethics. Call it Hitlerism: The Jews were not human to him; deterring them from any particular action never formed the basis of the Fuhrer's policy. His purpose was to punish and above all to liquidate: the only proper retribution for the spiritual and biological pollution inflicted by the Jews over the ages ("was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without one Jew involved in it?') was the elimination of all Jews. Correlation forces, not ethical consideration, dissuaded the Nazis from their ends. Himmler vomited, Eichmann wept, but they did what their positions required, following the example of Hitler himself, who had yielded ground anti-Semitism sorrowfully, but with 'cold reason.' Here defense of race, ground, authority and all their kindred categories fade into defense of retaliation itself--an enviable state for the executioner, since then no justification is needed: this is simply comme il faut, how life has to be. Despite his cold reason, Hitler cannot refrain from lapsing into rages, but do the victims care? They lie dead, while habit treads upon their graves. Obedience can forget them, but this book's meditation is trapped by them." Id. at 39 (citations omitted).).
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume V: Studies in Consequences: Southeast Asia; Europe; Africa (San Francisco: McSweeny's Books, 2003) ("Need I explain why it is that a book that purports to help people judge excuses for violence, the case studies are accompanied by introductions only, not conclusions? The main reason, of course, is that I don't trust my knowledge and competence to apply my own calculus, which like all human productions must be awfully flawed anyway. If I reject the calculus of conquest in Deuteronomy, how dare I hold up my own moral calculus for your dismissal--especially when I admit that it could be better applied by those who know more facts than I, and differently applied by those who weigh any justification more or less heavily than I? Of course in my own second-rate world of armchair declamations, I get as opinionated as the next hindsighted or wall-eyed prophet. I know who's right and wrong in Colombia, and I'll tell you--if I can only trust you not to embarrass me with the shoddiness of my ideals and arguments. But I try not to put my foot in my mouth on the subject of southeast Asia, where Buddhism blunts the edges of right and wrong, and tradition devalues Rising Up and Rising Down's presuppositions--in particular, the right of the self, on which my requirement that legitimate authority be consensual are founded." Id. at 13 (citations omitted).).
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume VI: Studies in Consequences: The Muslim World; North America; South America; Perception and Irrationality (San Francisco: McSweeny's Books, 2003) ("FROM A BOOK FOR SALE AT THE ARYAN NATIONS COMPOUND (HAYDEN LAKE, IDAHO): "We have already discussed how a repel of the fourteenth amendment would reenable states and communities to effectively grapple, on a local level, with their problems regarding standards of conduct . . . the repel of the fourteenth amendment would assist in returning the citizenship status of nonwhites to that of the Dred Scott era, that is, nonwhites would again become non-citizens. . . The repeal of the fifteenth amendment fits into the overall scheme of the proposal of this text by removing the tight to vote regardless of race. It would be incongruous to repeal the fourteenth amendment which gives citizens rights to nonwhites, but not repeal the fifteenth amendment which gives them voting rights. Moreover . . . the fifteen amendment as well as the fourteenth amendment was illegally proposed and ratified by the radical at the end of the Civil War." Id. at 519 (citations omitted). QUERY: Imagine the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments being repealed, which would take an Act of Congress plus the ratification by a supermajority of the states. Nonwhites would, one suppose, no longer have 'federal' citizenship, and would have state citizenship if so recognized by their resident state. Would the states voting against repeal those amendments standfast in maintaining their nonwhites population "state" citizenship? I assume those states voting to repeal those federal amendments would also deny nonwhites state citizenship. If so, here is the question: Would America have crossed the tipping point to disunion? Thus, the ultimate endgame of American white supremacists is the collapse of the United States of America. Rewriting the outcome of the American Civil War. Trumplandia may be the nation's future in more ways than one anticipated.).
