All of Sam Francis’ Town Hall Columns

 

Sam Francis (April 29, 1947-February 15, 2005), left, and Joe Sobran (February 23, 1946-September 30, 2010), Charter Subscribers’ Dinner for Sobran’s, December 4, 2004
 

By Nicholas Stix

Sam Francis at Town Hall.
 

These are all from 2000; one of my VDARE editors, James Fulford, has put together a list of links. My blog item quoting and linking to Francis’ prophetic columns from 2000 and 2001, in which he predicted that the black supremacist, anti-Confederate battle flag movement would expand to an anti-American flag movement, proved a big hit.

I started reading Sam Francis in Chronicles in 1992, after I was directed to it by two very different acquaintances—Nikos, of the eponymous, Greenwich Village Smoke Shop, and Paul Piccone, the editor of Telos magazine.

Nikos, a socialist of some sort, was the first magazine dealer to sell my magazine, A Different Drummer. Paul was an anarchist follower of fascist German political philosopher Carl Schmitt (and of Hegel, as I learned when he read my 29,000-word, anti-Frankfurt School, anti-Hegel, anti-Schmitt master’s thesis). Normally I would say, “fascist, not to be confused with Nazi,” but Schmitt, the Mephistopheles of the modern state, and the most unscrupulous intellectual of the past 100 years, went from being a fascist anti-Nazi to a Johnny-come-lately Nazi, as soon as Hitler seized power.

Francis wrote a column for Chronicles, “Principalities and Powers,” that was often much more theoretical than his newspaper column. Although I have all my old copies of Chronicles from 1992-1999, they’re stuffed behind this desk, and I only fish them out from time to time, to see one of my old articles. However, I do recall an article Francis wrote during the one semester in which I taught Introduction to American Government in an Orthodox Jewish-owned college that served (at taxpayer expense) non-religious Russian Jewish immigrants, and which I discussed in class. Francis posed a distinction between two opposing political tendencies that I found extremely fruitful: Consolidationism vs. secessionism. It is surely no coincidence that those were the two tendencies that were given flesh in the Civil War, but they apply to politics in general (the development and break-ups of the Roman Empire, British Empire, India, the Soviet East Bloc, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, the slow motion break-up of America, etc.).

Shortly after his death, someone edited a Web site with a great many of Francis’ articles of all lengths, but this is apparently long gone, though extant at The Wayback Machine, and the only Web sites I can now find under the names “Sam Francis” and “Samuel Francis,” are devoted to an artist. (See Peter Brimelow, Jared Taylor, Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran’s obituaries for Francis.)

As James noted already in 2005, Town Hall had purged Francis from its archives. Thus, he—James—had to hunt down these links at The Wayback Machine, better known as Archive.org. This is an arduous job under the best of conditions, since the site often stalls. Plus (or, that is because), its webmasters lead a tenuous, hand-to-mouth existence, living off donations, like the rest of us. Thus, the site could go out of existence at any time, so I advise readers to hit the links at VDARE, and download all of Francis’ columns, while they can.

At the risk of sounding either worshipful or feebleminded, I have read just about every Francis column archived at VDARE, in many cases, two or three times. I really ought to know them by heart, by now. His stuff is as relevant now, as when he wrote them, sometimes seemingly more so. Sam Francis was and remains one of the few modern American political writers worth the time it takes to read him. It’s no wonder that he was increasingly maligned, libeled, and isolated.
 

Sam Francis at Town Hall.

Sam Francis’ VDARE Archive.

Tributes to Sam Francis, at Sobran’s.

“The King Holiday and Its Meaning”

Helms, Jesse. “Remarks of Senator Jesse Helms.” Congressional Quarterly