This blog post is a review of the short story “The Last White Man” by Robert Howard. For the “The Last Man” Master Blogpost see here.

I don’t Want To Be The Last White Man

The main reason why this blog exists is that I don’t want to be the last white man. I hope there is never a last white man. Not only do I think that White people have just as much a right to exist as any other race, but it is the White man that carries humanity into the future. Virtually all progress in science and culture have come from White people, and in particular from White men. So, I go come into reading this story from a perfectly sympathetic viewpoint. You would expect I would appreciate a story from such a well-known writer as Robert Howard that directly tackles issues of the extinction of the White race and what that means for humanity. After all, I wrote The Last Blonde which addresses very similar themes. Unfortunately, this just isn’t a good story.

A Young Robert Howard Was On To something, But He Couldn’t Write

The story simply fails Storytelling 101. The story starts out with our titular Last White Man hiding out on the side of a mountain while a nameless and faceless black horde pursues him – they being hell bent on the destruction of the White race. So far so good. The part of the horde wanting to destroy Whites by any means necessary is certainly true – look at the crime statistics of black men raping White women and compare that to the number of White men raping black women.

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But then Howard pauses the action on the mountainside, and we get the real story. The real story is a long history lesson of how the White race fell from its natural superior position to one inferior to the black conquering horde from Africa. There isn’t much explanation for why this happened. There’s no showing how it happened but only telling that it happened. The supposed reason is the White race fell into various vices and pleasures. But that explains nothing. After all, blacks have just as much if not more vices than Whites, not to mention that blacks are just generally more pleasuring seeking and less forward thinking than Whites.

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(If you doubt that statement, consider South Africa: where there’s an ungodly amount of luxury cars on the road compared to South Africa’s average income. Black culture just wants nice shiny things and doesn’t think of building a life and providing for the next generation. They want the Porsche and the Ferrari.)

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So, Howard hadn’t learned how to write yet. Not only is he telling instead of showing – which matters not just because it’s some “Rule” of writing, but because telling just doesn’t convince the reader – but he also lacks the sharp-edged, energetic prose that is a hallmark of the Conan stories. But he still did grasp at some issues that are relevant today. For instance, he blames Whites fighting Whites as one of the reasons for the White race’s fall from grace. That was true in the early 20th century when this was written, and it is true now with the never-ending infighting within the various White right-wing political movements.

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Howard does make one great artistic choice. He makes the ruler of the black African horde a mixed race Arab and African. That’s smart and it reveals that Howard grasped the nature of non-whites who will fight amongst themselves occasionally (the blacks move northward into Arabia) but when push comes to shove the non-whites will put aside their differences and band together against the Whites. Arabs and blacks, by virtue of being non-white, have more in common with each other than Whites will ever have in common with any non-white race. This holds true today.

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There is a certain conservative/libertarian who wants to import infinity Indians and thinks that because those Indians have lower crime rates than other non-whites and have more education and income than most non-whites they will somehow act differently than your standard black or brown guy. But that’s a fantasy. If you want to see how that plays out, just look at the NYC election. A majority of the foreign-born New Yorkers voted for the Indian guy from Uganda, while the US-born New Yorkers voted for the White guy from Italy. The non-whites will simply band together and vote the Whites out of existence.

Verdict

If you’re looking for a well-written entertaining story (like the Conan stories) then I don’t think Howard’s The Last White Man is for you. It’s an early amateurish effort that failed to get published in Howard’s for a reason. The only reason to read it today is if you are a Howard completionist or if you want to see how earlier White authors dealt with race so you can improve on them in your own writing. I fit in the second category so I don’t regret reading it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.

The Last Blonde

I wrote a story on similar themes as The Last White Man. I called it The Last Blonde. I like that title because Blondeness is a stand-in for general Whiteness and because the title has a certain sex appeal to it. You can find it at www.blackflagliterature.com