Where: London, conveniently located near to train and Underground stations.
When: Saturday, December 16th
What: A chance to socialise with a wide network of decent traditionalist folks during the festive season. Tickets (£17 or Patrons £10) including buffet food. There will also be a speech, speaker tbc.
Who: A maximum capacity of 50 places makes this an excellent opportunity for an evening both intimate and with a good range of people to network with. Booking is open to all. As usual we reserve the right to ensure attendees are best intentioned.
How: Click here for our booking page!
Questions? info@traditionalbritain.org
We look forward to seeing a good many new and familiar faces at our Christmas drinks.
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– This is a ticketless event, names at the venue is sufficient (id for students)
– The dress code is formal smart casual (no leather or denim and at a minimum a shirt is required)
– We have now notified every one of the venue location. Let us know if you have not received anything.
– For new attendees, we require all guests to be respectful and courteous at all times. Those who we feel are not, may be asked to step out without refunds.
Any questions? info@traditionalbritain.org or message us on Facebook.
We look forward to welcoming you to a jam-packed agenda and guest list tomorrow.
There will be a social after the event at which all attendees are welcome to discuss the day, network and unwind. It’s a good chance to meet a wide range of people from across the political spectrum.
Join us at a prestigious venue in central London on Saturday, 21st October for the premier annual conservative and traditionalist event of the year – the Traditional Britain Group Conference.
This day-long conference will bring together members and supporters alike to listen to a range of speakers from across the traditionalist, conservative and identitarian spectrum, many of whom are new faces for the TBG.
Following the conference is an opportunity to socialise, have a drink and discuss the day’s themes with like-minded individuals in a friendly and stimulating environment.
***This Event Has Now Fully Sold Out***
Our speakers will include:
Lord Sudeley will be presiding.
Reverend Dr Peter Mullen will address the conference on the subject of “Has The Church of England A Future?” He is a priest of the Church of England and former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London. He has written for many publications including the Wall Street Journal.
Anne Marie Waters is the director of Sharia Watch UK was a candidate for the UKIP leadership, coming second. She will be a well-known face to many having made many media appearances as an outspoken critic of the creeping Islamification of Britain and the spread of Sharia Law. She has stood in both council and general elections for Labour and UKIP. No doubt Anne Marie will give us the lowdown on her campaign for the UKIP leadership, thoughts on the outcome and unpleasant comments from party seniors following this. Anne-Marie Waters’ ‘For Britain’ website can be viewed here.
Alexander Boot is a well-known conservative author who described himself as a “writer, critic and polemicist”. He will address us on the subject of “How modernity destroys our political culture”. He spends his time between London and Burgundy, where he is writing his latest book. His thought provoking essays and links to purchase his longer written work can be found on his website.
A leading continental Identitarian will speak to us as a representative of the growing European political grouping ‘Generation Identity’. They will outline the growth of their movement, the ideals behind it and the difficulties intentionally placed in their way. For exactly this reason, we are – for now, at least, with our pretend ‘Conservative’ government – not disclosing the individual concerned. An outline of the roots and beliefs of the ‘Identitarians’ can be found here.
Dr. Frank Ellis, a Russian expert, will address the conference on “The relationship between Russia and the West today”. He is a former lecturer in Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Vasily Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic (1994), From Glasnost’ to the Internet: Russia’s New Infosphere (1999), The Macpherson Report: ‘Anti-Racist’ Hysteria and the Sovietization of the United Kingdom (2001), Political Correctness and the Theoretical Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault (2004), Marxism, Multiculturalism and Free Speech (2006), The Eastern Front through the Eyes of Soviet and Russian Novelists (2011), The Stalingrad Cauldron: Inside the Encirclement and Destruction of the 6th Army (2013) and, most recently, Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire (2015). In September 2017 he produced a long essay for the TBG’s website deconstructing and demolishing Baroness Sayeeda Warsi’s book The Enemy Within:A Tale of Muslim Britain.
Bjørn Christian Rødal, is Vice-president of the newly-formed Norwegian party “The Alliance” (Alliansen). During the election, he held a dual position, both as initiator and leader for the party’s youth-organization and as a public front for the mother party. He is heavily engaged in organizing supporters and building the new party structure. Currently Bjørn is engaged with the Norwegian armed forces on a three-year contract as a part of a Quick Response Force, where he serves as an officer in the command staff.
The Alliance stands for Nationalism and Free Speech, National Identity and Culture. They argue that Europe’s current immigration crisis is inhibiting social progress and recommend removing the welfare incentives that lure immigrants to Europe. They are opposed to Norway’s EEA membership and condemn “destructive globalism”. They also stress the relevance of our ancient European culture to our contemporary struggle: “Norway first. Vote the Alliance”.
Tickets (sold out)
Tickets are only £35 (incl. PayPal fees) if booked before September 30th, and £40 thereafter, including morning and afternoon tea and coffee and full day access. Students are entitled to tickets at just £28 (incl. PayPal fees).
Patron Club Member tickets are only £30 if booked before September 21st and £35 thereafter. We have also absorbed the PayPal fees. This includes reserved seating if requested.
Patron club members are also invited to join our speakers and committee for lunch at a nearby restaurant on the day of the conference.
In the evening the conference will be followed by drinks at a nearby venue.
Venue details will be confirmed late afternoon on the day preceding the event. The venue is easily accessible via public transport and is located in central London in a pleasant and upscale area.
Dress code is smart casual. Gentlemen should wear a jacket, ties are not obligatory.
We look forward to seeing you on what will be an exhilarating and fascinating day of talks and discussion.
***Sold Out***
If you have any questions, we are at your service: info@traditionalbritain.org
We reserve the right to ensure our registrants are of best intent to ensure the smooth running of the day. To this end we very occasionally restrict entry.
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M. Gollnisch is a current university academic, a naval reservist and a senior member of the FN group in the European Parliament. He previously led the ‘Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty’ Group there and was a runner up to Marine Le Pen in the leadership contest. He now holds the position of Executive Vice-President of the FN.
His speech will cover many issues, including of course Brexit, the refugee crisis, the French presidential election, Islam and Europe.
The speech will be followed by a Q&A and then a social. The meeting will be held in a prestigious London location and the venue will have a cash bar.
The cost for the meeting is £8. This will cover the cost of the room hire and is inclusive of payment charges.
This is another great opportunity to hear directly from those at the heart of the European fightback, how they view the present situation, how it is being approached and what lessons there are for us in Britain.
It is also of course, another great opportunity to meet your traditionalist allies, network with patriots from across the country (and abroad) and have a sophisticated and edifying evening. One not to miss.
We look forward to seeing many patrons, members and general supporters at this event. Registration is open to all, although we reserve the right to refuse entry if we consider it ensures the smooth running of the event.
As ever, please contact us on info@traditionalbritain.org with any enquiries.
Dress code: smart casual (no tie required)
This year’s Traditional Britain Group Annual Dinner will take place in a grand location in central London on Saturday 20th May.
Our guest-of-honour is Dr. Johannes Hübner, the Austrian Freedom Party’s (FPO) spokesman on Foreign Affairs.
He is a Member of Parliament in Vienna, one of the most senior people in the FPO, and an intellectual of astonishing knowledge. When he is set to speak in parliament, the chamber fills up.
Last year the FPO’s leading figure, Norbert Hofer, came a close second (against a far-left candidate) in the Austrian Presidential elections, taking almost half of the national vote.
BOOKING FOR THIS EVENT IS NOW CLOSED
The FPO are on track to form the next government of Austria if polls are to be believed. This is an occasion to meet someone who would form a key part of that patriotic government, an opportunity not to be missed.
BOOKING FOR THIS EVENT IS NOW CLOSED
We look forward to seeing old friends and new faces at the venue. If you have any questions, do let us know on info@traditionalbritain.org Those with particular dietary requirements (or mobility issues) should contact us on this email too.
The Committee.
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2016 has been a momentous year for traditionalists and the highs have given added inspiration to the patriotic movement across the world, not just in Britain.
Therefore, join us and let us evaluate what might lay ahead and how we can help guide it along its path in 2017. There will be a buffet and a fine selection of real ales for you to enjoy with fellow traditionalists, conservatives and patriots. There will also be a speech in friendly, relaxed atmosphere to unwind and make new friends in.
Attendance is open to all, not just members or patrons, although we do reserve the right to vet bookings.
The cost is £16 which includes light food options and there is also a £1 Paypal surcharge*
Venue details will be sent to ticket holders nearer the date and you will be notified electronically of this. We can confirm that the venue will be near to the City of London.
If you have any questions you can always contact us on info@traditionalbritain.org.
*This price reflects the direct cost to the TBG and we will conduct an informal collection on the night, should you wish to help us by contributing to our ongoing expenses.
]]>This day-long conference will bring together members and supporters alike to listen to a range of old favourites and new speakers from the traditionalist, conservative, libertarian and European New Right.
Following the conference is an opportunity to socialise, have a drink and discuss the day’s themes with like-minded individuals in a friendly and stimulating environment.
Patron club members are invited to join our speakers for lunch at a nearby restaurant on the day of the conference.
Lord Sudeley will be presiding and the conference will be chaired by Vice President, Professor John Kersey.
David Keighley, former BBC news producer, BBC PR executive and head of corporate relations for TV-am, will speak on BBC bias. David is now the Director of News-watch.
Professor Ricardo Duchesne, will be speaking on ‘Why and when did Western Nations decide to Become Multiracial Places.’ Professor Duchesne teaches sociology and world history at The University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada. He is the author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, a product of 10 years research, released in February 2011. His book, Faustian Man in an Age of Multiculturalism, a study of the importance of race in the historical identification of Western civilization from prehistoric to contemporary times, has just been published by Arktos. He is now working on the the way Canadian history has been falsely rewritten as a nation created by diverse races to meet the current requirements of multiculturalism. He is also examining the Alt Right position on the historical legacy of Western Civilization in light of the suicidal path this civilization has currently taken.
Matteo Luini, who lives in Parma, is a 30 year-old graduate in Political Science, now studying law at the Catholic University of Sacro Cuore. He is International Relations Officer for the Rinnovamento nella Tradizione cultural and traditionalist group in Rome, Italy. His speech will centre upon what they see as the way forward concentrating on the historical and cultural roots across Europe.
Stuart Millson, a former member of the old Monday Club Executive Council, veteran radical traditionalist, music critic and writer, now a TBG Vice-President, on the ‘Why Brexit was necessary – the nationalist perspective.’
Isac Boman, with his roots in the Åland Islands in the middle of the Baltic Sea, has a varied background ranging from the banking sector, politics, NGOs and media. Lately he has become known as an economist who has gone against taboos surrounding monetary theory in contemporary economics. His master’s thesis in economics, Money Power – A Force for Freedom or Slavery?, was originally written in 2015 at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. It was published as a book in Swedish by Arktos Media in August 2016, and an English version is currently under way. Isac’s thesis will be the subject of his talk.
Dr. Selby Whittingham, a renowned art expert, especially on Turner, will address the conference on the importance of art to our heritage, culture and identity.
Tickets
Tickets are only £30 (+£1.50 paypal fees) if booked before October 1st, and £35 (+£1.50 paypal fees) thereafter, including tea and coffee and full day access. Students are entitled to tickets at just £25 (+£1.50 paypal fees).
Patron and Full Member tickets are only £29.99 for the day. We have also absorbed the PayPal fees. This includes reserved seating.
Patron club members are also invited to join our speakers for lunch at a nearby restaurant on the day of the conference.
In the evening the conference will be followed by drinks in the bar.
Venue details will be confirmed with paying guests on the week of the event. The venue is easily accessible via public transport and is located in central London.
We look forward to seeing you on what will be an exhilarating and fascinating day of talks and discussion.
The Earl of Burford, is a colourful character. He first encountered fame during a 1999 debate on Tony Blair’s House of Lords Act. After listening to the debate while seated on the first step of the Throne, as was his right as the eldest son of a Duke, he leapt to his feet, crossed the floor of the House, stood on the Speaker’s seat, the Woolsack, and declared the Bill a treason to the life and culture of Britain, insisting that hereditary peers should retain their right to sit and vote in the House.
Subsequently, the Earl stood as the first ever candidate for the short-lived right-wing Democratic Party at the 1999 Kensington & Chelsea by-election (a very safe Tory seat). His campaign manager, the almost legendary John Gouriet, former Monday Clubber and head of the group Freedom in Action, said that “My Lord Burford feels very strongly as a true patriot that the Conservative Party has failed completely to stop the revolutionary march of socialism.”
Through his father he is the heir of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and has played a prominent role in promoting the Oxford theory that his ancestor wrote the works of William Shakespear. He also claims that the Earl of Oxford was the real author of works attributed to other Elizabethan writers, including John Lyly, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Watson, and he regularly lectures on Oxfordian subjects in the United States.
In 2010 he published “Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth”, in which he espouses a version of the Prince Tudor theory which holds that Oxford was the lover of Queen Elizabeth 1st and that he fathered Henry Wriothesly, 3rd Earl of Southampton. He supports the most radical version of the theory, which adds the claim that Oxford himself was the queen’s son, and thus the father of his own half-brother.
Dress is strictly Black Tie and tickets are £60 each (£55 for patrons and full members) exclusive of wines, which guests may purchase upon arrival. Book early!
If you have any questions please email us on info@traditionalbritain.org
Venue details will be sent to ticket holders on the week of the dinner.
]]>The next ordinary meeting of the Traditional Britain Group will take place in central London on Friday, 11th March 2016. Our speaker will be Jacob Williams, founder of the Oxford magazine “No Offence”, a magazine banned by Oxford University Student Union for criticising abortion and defending the record of the British Empire. He is also involved with “Spiked” magazine.
Jacob’s address will will be on ‘Liberalism and Intolerance: The New Academic Censorshop.’ He will address the Traditional Britain Group on the growing tendency at British universities towards the intolerance and censorship of conservative viewpoints, arguing that the root cause is lack of exposure to conservative ideas, and suggest ways in which universities should be changed to address this problem.
Jacob Williams is concerned that “we have a generation who have grown up never having been exposed to ideas which contradict their ‘progressive’ and liberal assumptions” and who are therefore prepared to close down debate. He has been reported to police in the past by Politically Correct students opposed to his views.
The meeting will commence at 7.30 p.m. but members and their guests may arrive during the preceding hour. A full bar is available for drinks, and a collection to defray expenses will be taken.
The venue details will be sent to registered guests emails on the day of the meeting. It is located in the St James area, central London and is easily accessible via tube or bus services.
After a successful year and an extremely successful conference only a few weeks ago, we invite you to join us for the evening in a friendly, traditional London tavern on 12th December from 6pm for our Christmas Social.
There will be a buffet and a fine selection of real ales for you to enjoy with fellow traditionalists, conservatives and patriots.
Tickets are only £13 (including PayPal fees) and include food.
If you do not want to pay online and would prefer to send a cheque or make a bank transfer, please contact us via info@traditionalbritain.org
Patrons go free. Full members pay £11 (including PayPal fees).
Venue details will be sent to ticket holders nearer the date – although we can tell you the venue is located in Westminster.
If you have any questions you can contact us on info@traditionalbritain.org.
It is an immense privilege to be able to appear today at the Traditional Britain conference. I notice in the email notice which was distributed to our many supporters, that I was described as a veteran radical traditionalist and a former member of the old Monday Club council so I half expected to have some medals pinned to my chest by Gregory Lauder-Frost, the veteran antiquarian, Scot and traditionalist who has done so much to give us such a memorable and prestigious event today.
For those who do not know me, I was indeed a member of the old Monday Club executive, serving on that body in 1985, and it is good to see other veterans of those old campaigns in the audience today: men of great substance such as Sam Swerling, who in my view is one of the best speakers ever produced by the British Right-wing, and Adrian Davies, a long-standing friend and a very accomplished lawyer who struck out some years ago, with the Freedom Party a party which had some success in a pocket of local government in the West Midlands.
I was also the founder of the University of Essex Monday Club, and in 1985 travelled as a young student to Belfast, to join with tens of thousands of my fellow countrymen in Ulster in the huge rally against the then Anglo-Irish Agreement yet another example, along with the Common Market, the sell-out of Rhodesia and the Maastricht Treaty, of the Conservative Partys commitment to our country and way of life.
I will never forget, as an Englishman, the welcome I received from the people of Northern Ireland in the citys main square that morning folk patting me on the back, enthusiastically taking the University of Essex Monday Club leaflets that I had printed on an old photocopier when one of the student union commissars wasnt watching, and then carried over to Ulster with me in a battered hold-all. From the flagpoles of the Citys Hall flew the Union Jack, and all the flags of the British home-nations, and I felt pleased that the loyal people of the embattled province could see that at least somebody in England cared enough to stand with them in their hour of need.
As you can imagine, it was somewhat difficult being a right-winger and a radical traditionalist at the overwhelmingly Left-wing University of Essex. I can recall how I eventually left my Communism classes due to lousy Marx! However, the University despite its prevailing ideology had and has a very good politics course, so I hope they will forgive me for exercising my right to free speech!
In the Monday Club of 1985 to 1992, I believe that we achieved a high-water mark in political campaigning. And may I say that our greatest triumph of that period was down to Gregory Lauder-Frost. In 1991, the debate over the Maastricht Treaty was reaching a fever-pitch. The great journalist and writer, Paul Johnson, one of British sovereigntys most robust defenders had demolished the Treaty in his many articles for The Sunday Telegraph, describing the measure of which the Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, was all in favour as death by a thousand Brussels cuts and a farewell to the England he loved. More interestingly, he noted how, thanks to the grey, grim politically-correct bureaucrats of this new continental system, the culture of Europe itself was fading just as surely as that of our own country.
At the Tory conference of October 1991, Gregory had organised a fringe meeting which in characteristic Gregory style would dwarf not just the proceedings on the fringe, but of the whole conference. Booked at the Monday Club fringe meeting at the perfectly-named and chosen Empire Hotel, Blackpool, was Enoch Powell the greatest Tory Prime Minister that Britain never had. Mr. Powell had, in the 1980s, spoken to the Monday Club stating at one dinner how the new battle over (what has become) the European Union was as much a struggle for national survival as the Battle of Britain in 1940. Thanks to Gregory, Powells voice was heard loud and clear warning the delegates at the conference, the ministers of John Majors government, and the British people as a whole of what they stood to lose if the Government signed us into the irrevocable European Unionof the Maastricht Treaty. I would like to pay tribute at this conference to the late Enoch Powell, and to Gregory Lauder-Frost for his outstanding leadership at that time ensuring that the old Monday Club stood at the very centre of the storm.
However, I have been asked to speak on the theme of Englishness and the meaning of English nationhood, so you will forgive me for that short nostalgic interlude.
For Enoch Powell certainly, Englishness was a defining characteristic of his life and many of you may have seen television biographies of Powell, with those wonderful black-and-white films of Enoch, with cap and tweed jacket, his family dutifully following him, as he explored English country churches trying to enthuse his children by pointing out Norman or perpendicular arches, and the many curiosities of our ancient parish churches. Guard well, said Enoch at a meeting of The Royal Society of St. George: the parent stem of England and its royal talisman, for we know not what branches yet that wonderful tree will have the power to put forth His was a vision of England, past, present and future and isnt it interesting to contrast his moving use of the English language, with the slang-like management-speak of our present Prime Minister, a man who seems more interested in assisting the Chinese in their asset-stripping of Britain, than in reflecting and honouring our national history and preserving something recognisable and ancestral for our descendants.
Enoch Powell was a man of the West Midlands, the urban face of which has changed out of all recognition, and I wonder how that most patient, pipe-smoking Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin a man of the border country of Worcestershire would react to the face of England today? When not addressing Empire Day rallies in Hyde Park or the Empire Parliamentary Association, Stanley Baldwin seemed to be forever receiving the freedom of this or that city, or thanking one or other august body for making him an honorary Highlander or Welshman! On July 6th 1928, was given the freedom of the City of Winchester, and he responded with this remarkable speech dedicated to The Wealth and Glory of England.
I want to say a word or two to you this afternoon and there could be no more suitable place than Winchester to say it of my desire to preserve the beauty of our country. There is nothing meritorious in such a desire. It is the wealth and the glory of England, this beauty which has been saved through the centuries. There could be nothing more disastrous, nothing more wicked on our part, than to waste it, to dissipate it, and destroy in our profligacy a priceless and irreplaceable heritage. I have been asked, as all people in my position must be, to undertake many salutary reforms: to reform the calendar, to make the Channel Tunnel, to repay the National Debt. But you may reform the calendar without changing our climate; you may make a Channel Tunnel to enable people to go and buy dresses in Paris; you may pay off the National Debt and, as many economists tell us, you will be no better off when you have done it. But to preserve the beauties of our country, that is something worth living for. I read the other day the words of a well-known architect who said: It is no exaggeration to say that in fifty years, at the rate so-called improvements are being made, the destruction of all the beauty and charm with which our ancestors enhanced their towns and villages will be complete.”
Trim the lamp; polish the lens; draw, one by one, rare coins to the light. Ringed by its own lustre, the masterful head emerges, kempt and jutting, out of Englands well. Far from the underkingdom of crinoid and crayfish, the rune-stones province, Rex Totius Anglorum Patriae, coiffured and ageless, portrays the self-possession of his possession, cushioned on a legend.
A feeling for an ancient past, time out of mind, emerges in the writings of the modern critic and author, Peter Ackroyd, who has traced the origins of the English imagination in his magnificent work, Albion. In another of his books, Thames, Sacred River, he finds in the waters of the river and in the surrounding landscapes folklore and mythology, the threads from which England came. At Abingdon, Peter Ackroyd discovers a site of great antiquity, the remains of a circle signs of human activity, while the inner area seems to have been used for specific rites and ceremonies. At the core was worship. The defined space might also offer a special form of protection, blessed by the river. The connection between their ancestors and the Thames must have been well-known through folk myth and oral memory By the causewayed enclosure at Abingdon can be found a number of long oval barrows. These burial mounds were covered in soil and chalk. They would have gleamed white in the landscape.
Mr. Ackroyd also travels to Dorchester, just south of Oxford, whose Saxon and mediaeval abbey plays host to todays English Music Festival. Just beyond Dorchester are the Wittenham Clumps, a wooded ridge, which inspired the 20th-century English artist, Paul Nash, who died in 1946. The chalk downland and hill-forts gave the artist a spiritual, or even pagan inspiration. Nash said that the view here was of: A beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten.
The archaeologist, Charles Green, in tracing the people who worshipped those gods noted: It is a commonplace that in the veins of most modern Englishmen there runs the blood of many ancestral peoples. We may turn for example to Daniel Defoe who, in 1703, gave us “The True-born Englishman”
The Western Angles all the rest subdued A bloody nation, barbarous and rude, Who by tenure of the sword possessed One part of Britain, and subdued the rest, And as great things denominate the small, The conquering part gave title to the whole; The Scot, Pict, Briton, Roman, Dane, submit, And with the English Saxon all unite.
And then he [Defoe] goes on to satirise at greater length the Norman strain in the hotch-potch. But this mongrelism, as Green goes on to explain, can be and is often somewhat exaggerated: For Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, Danes and Norsemen were little more than tribal names of folk of closely-related stocks, of cognate speech and culture. Normans, too, were transplanted Norsemen, somewhat modified by admixture with Saxons and Franks, another northern tribal group. And though the ancient British element, itself compounded of many strains, has modified the Nordic mixture, it has still to be shown that its proportion is considerable in the English amalgam.
And this statement, ladies and gentlemen, is I believe what comes very close to explaining the true essence of England and when I say the name England, I am not simply referring to a country on its own, but England as a part of a united Britain; part of the unique culture of the British Isles and the United Kingdom, which our politicians have done so little to defend, nurture and celebrate. Writing in 1985, the historian David Cannadine (commenting on the idea of nostalgia, and of a particularly fine and well-presented exhibition held in Washington that year, devoted to the art of the country house). David Cannadine wrote:
For the argument in favour of museums rather than country houses as the best medium of display presupposes that English art galleries are in a position to acquire and to show such beautiful things in surroundings and conditions comparable to those available in Washington. Many British museums are almost as shambolic and uninviting as the most rundown country house. The Thatcher government is not much concerned about this: the idea that works of art may elevate the mind and lift the spirit, and that they should be freely and easily available for all, is not something which seems to concern her administration very much But of course, Mrs. Thatcher herself is no better disposed to the country-house world which is so valued and vaunted in this exhibition. She may approve of the tourist trade as a dollar earner, but her personal brand of radical and petty bourgeois conservatism has no time for the escapist syndrome, which she sees as anachronistically irrelevant to the Britain of 1985. Her heroes are self-made men (and self-made failures) like Clive Sinclair, Freddie Laker and Cecil Parkinson She hates the idea of Britain as a museum society, intent on embalming itself, whether the impulse comes from the left (in the shape of Scargill and the miners) or from the right (in the form of country-house owners and their propagandists).
Very little has changed, it seems, from the world of 1985, to the world of 2015. Led by a man who didnt even know what the name, Magna Carta signified, the philistine Conservative Party of today parrots the language of diversity and political correctness, the language of the Left. Meanwhile, the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn has abandoned the last strongholds of what was the industrial working class of Britain, upholding instead the slogans and demands of Marxist public-sector unions. In Scotland and Wales, separatist parties are seeking to make the people of these islands strangers to one another turning their backs on their natural neighbours in England, and yet reaching out to the EU, and telling people in Glasgow and Cardiff that they should welcome mass-immigration.
And so, in conclusion, we need to turn to the Britain inhabited by such figures as John Betjeman, the poet who looked to the peaceful suburbs of Metroland, to the country that existed before thoroughly English, human-scale buildings were replaced by what the poet described as rent collectors slabs. We can also regain some sense of confidence from some recent events, such as the widespread celebrations that accompanied the Queens Diamond Jubilee proof that one of the last remaining symbols of our identity still has the power to move us.
Stanley Baldwin, addressing the Junior Imperial League in 1928 stated:
So, every one of you, be ready in time to take up the torch from the hand of the generation that drops it. Make it a brighter light; carry it further with stronger steps. Let us feel, when our time comes to hand it on, that you will do your duty and in your turn pass it on to a generation instructed by you, which will be yet better, so that in time long distant, and after our puny lights have been extinguished, the kingdoms of the world may be flooded with the light which we only see to-day in our dreams.
We can only hope that by celebrating the culture of England, and fighting for our wider British identity, independence and traditions, the TBG may help to turn the tide against the current miasmic atmosphere of indifference, decay and loss.
Thank you.
Stuart Millson, October 2015
]]>This piece first appeared in The Quarterly Review.
There is no sound quite like it anywhere else in the world. A chorus of over seven thousand voices, all standing up and letting their lungs fill the vast spaces of the Royal Albert Hall. In mid-September, in the second half of the Last Night of the Proms, and partway through Elgars orchestral Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, the whole audience rises to its feet to sing Land of Hope and Glory to that great tune in the middle For a few brief moments, in that brilliant throng, sweltering in motley dress and waving banners under the hot television lights, it feels very good to be alive, and especially good to be in England.
– Barrie Hall, The Proms and the men who made them (George Allen & Unwin).
Writer, Proms enthusiast and Head of Radio 3 publicity from 1970 to 1980, Barrie Hall published (in 1981) a breezy and very personal history of the great concert series, established 121 years ago by Sir Henry Wood (with a little practical help from the concert promoter, Robert Newman). His account of the Last Night – from the era of conductors such as Sir Charles Groves, Norman Del Mar and James Loughran still rings true, although in present times, the formula for this unique concert has changed somewhat. It was often said that Last Night was jingoistic and insubstantial, and various attempts were made to change the course of the finale – including the introduction of semi-serious audience participation works, such as Malcolm Williamsons The Stone Wall (a fantasy of warring ancient British tribes). Today, a similar approach has been undertaken to broaden the community singing, but using instead the easy, familiar, not-strictly-classical melodies of (in 2014) the music from Mary Poppins, and this year, a medley from The Sound of Music. Pleasant, tuneful, good fun – but seemingly a world away from Eleanor Albergas (cultural) call to arms at the opening of the Prom: her newly-commissioned mantra for chorus, Arise, Athena!
For Proms Director, Edward Blakeman – the architect of a very fine Proms season indeed – the need to challenge preconceptions and defy categories of music is paramount, if more people are to be drawn into classical music. His aim is quite right: we have to reach out, to a generation of younger people – deprived of classical music, ignorant of the names Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Elgar, and – in so many state secondary schools – hardly educated in any form of music, or poetry or the arts at all. However, we must also be aware that categories, just like national borders, need not be exclusive, forbidding barbed-wire things, keeping people out. Categories can and do provide useful definition – something to aspire to, something which gives meaning and integrity. So it was very absorbing on the Last Night to hear, in the first half, Shostakovichs Second Piano Concerto, performed with complete elan by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, directed by returning Last Night conductor, the American Marin Alsop (one of the worlds few women conductors, the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, and an artist of forthright views – with possibly a slight tendency to overstate her case in relation to gender equality in classical music as a whole). Benjamin Grosvenor was the eloquent, bold and brilliant soloist – a strikingly youthful figure, and an example to the young to follow classical music and the arts. Of all the pieces in this final programme of the season, the Shostakovich – dating from 1957 – made the most incisive impact, with the BBC SO giving as good a performance on this out-of-the-ordinary night as they did during the last chapter of Augusts Sibelius cycle, in which they tackled the last three of Finlands greatest symphonies. The witty (it is often said, pungent and prickly) themes of the first movement make way in movement number two for a heartachingly noble and tragic theme, one of Shostakovichs great achievements – and a passage which seems to me to encapsulate a mood of suffering (the suffering, sorrow and endurance of a people) and all the emptiness and vastness of the landscape, steppes and wastes of Russia.
The presence of the Shostakovich reminded me of the inclusion on the 1983 Last Night programme of Szymanowskis Symphony No. 3 The Song of the Night – a mysterious and intoxicating work (proof of the evenings unjingoistic tendencies) and a serious prelude to the uplifting music which, traditionally, ends this concert and gives us that sense of belonging which so inspired Barrie Hall in 1981.
The previous evening, the Vienna Philharmonic performed Elgars The Dream of Gerontius, under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle – the much-loved and admired conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, who has scaled the heights of classical music from his time as a first-rate apprentice of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and then, the reshaper in the 1980s and 90s of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Sir Simon brought something of an operatic feel to Gerontius – his soloist, Magdalena Kozena (mezzo soprano) bringing an intensity and tension to the role of the Angel – and I began to wonder how this British oratorio would look as a semi-staged work. Roderick Williams – Priest and Angel of the Agony – was seated at the edge of the orchestra, and rose from the (conductors) right of the platform to join in the drama. J.S. Bachs Passions have been rethought and restaged by Rattle and Kozena: would Elgars great statement of fervour and faith lend itself to a similar treatment?
The influence of Wagner is also inescapable in The Dream of Gerontius – the opening (also associated with Ken Russells film of the Malvern Hills with the Crucifixion superimposed upon their ridges) feeling very much like the twilight, atmosphere of the Parsifal prelude. The Wagnerian Vienna Philharmonic generated a deeply-mellow, English, valedictory cello tone – with noble horns and austere brass writing underlining, not just the romanticism of Elgars native landscape, but a powerful sense of his natural place alongside the 19th-century romantic masters of the continent. At certain moments – such as the soft, almost whispered chorus of the Assistants, we were almost taken into the world of Choral Evensong – or the English church tradition of Tomkins or Byrd:
Job from all the multiform and fell distress (Amen); Moses from the land of bondage and despair (Amen)
– words sighing and drifting into space.
Interestingly, for this performance (a work all about death and the elderly figure of Gerontius), the vocal force deployed was the BBC Proms Youth Chorus, and it certainly made a difference to hear the massed voices of the emerging generation – somehow softer, with exact and impressive articulation, and an alive, broad, resounding tone. In the great chorus – Praise to the Holiest in the height – they scythed through any acoustic fuzziness which the Royal Albert Hall might reveal, with no sense of being overwhelmed by the stage and the space – and the Vienna Philharmonic. With the great organ notes surging through, underpinning and anchoring their singing, this was an Elgar performance of great virtue and solemnity, and not one that will be forgotten.
It seems irrelevant in some ways for me to mention that I was not always quite at one with Sir Simons determined performance. For this reviewer, the slower, unfolding, more self-consciously majestic approach of Sir Adrian Boult (his bearing and moustache very similar to Elgars) had more of the essence of Gerontius. And I felt that Rattle tended to enjoy the energy and disarray of the Demons Chorus, more than the pastoral, visionary, Nimrod side of the work – which was no disadvantage, as the demonic possession of this episode deserves the most audacious treatment. Without doubt (and the Last Night aside) a satisfying end to the summer at the Royal Albert Hall – giving everyone much to talk about at the capacity-audience BBC press party afterwards.
At the beginning of the week, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra under Yuri Temirkanov provided an evening of shimmering Russian magic, in the form of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakovs Scheherazade – a symphonic suite from 1888 steeped in orientalism, swashbuckling myth, the exploits of Sinbad, and the romance of the Kalendar Prince (the noble scion of a wandering race from the depths of Central Asia). Temirkanov also brought the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto (soloist, Nikolai Lugansky played with breathtaking style and command), and the lesser-known, Dante-inspired Tchaikovsky work, Francesca da Rimini – both of which brought to mind the sort of older Proms programme associated, perhaps, with the years of Sir Malcolm Sargent. The St. Petersburg orchestra played extremely well – in a very full-bodied, exciting manner – and although I did not feel that the audience had been given a unique performance, we nevertheless heard an ensemble in repertoire that fitted it like a glove. On home soil, on their ground, in their music, the Russians sounded and gave their best.
As Elgars orchestration of Parrys Jerusalem, the ancestral Auld Lang Syne, and Brittens arrangement of God Save the Queen gave their curtain call to summer, we can truly say: this was a great season for the Proms. But then again we tend to say that every year.
Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review.
]]>Imagine a European Community of 30 nations, ranging in their economic productivity from Germany to Ukraine, and in their political stability from Britain to Poland () Mr Chairman, such a body is an even more utopian enterprise than the Tower of Babel. For at least the builders of Babel all spoke the same language when they began. They were, you might say, communautaire.[1]
Despite the fact that the parable of the Tower of Babel may be seen as a fairy tale by many modern men and women, in my opinion should be perceived as a serious lesson for the European people, because it is connected with the story that changed the course of human history.
The city and the tower of Babel was part of the kingdom of Nimrod:
() 8Cush became the father of Nimrod; he was the first on earth to become a mighty warrior. 9He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunterbeforetheLORD.” 10 The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar ()[2]
In order to promote the integration of peoples and foster unity within his empire, Nimrod initiated great building projectsthe construction of fortified cities and massive public buildings like the Tower of Babel, however in the Bible we find proof that his motives were dictated by ordinary human vanity:
1Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” 4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth (…)[3]
Forging an empire of many cities enabled Nimrod to dominate the surrounding region militarily, economically and politically. Both Scripture and secular sources suggest that Nimrod aspired to a world empire.
The rise of Nimrods empire was a crucial turning point in world history. Nimrod set a pattern of rebelling against Gods instructions, and empire building through vanity-motivated conquest, subjugation and control that has continued down through history. This is why God intervened and confused the languages at the Tower of Babelwhich caused the construction process to cease. Nonetheless, the idea survived and was adopted on the ground of the European Union project.
The architects of the European Union recognize the parallel between the Tower of Babel and their efforts to construct a new Europe. The Council of Europe used a poster of the Tower of Babel to promote the construction of Europe. Tours through the EU Parliament chamber in Brussels hear an audiotape describing the multiple languages used by delegates as a modern tower of Babel.[4] This comparison, however, goes much deeper.
The basic attitude that motivated the builders of the city and Tower of Babel was a desire for power and glory. That same motive is deeply embedded in the desire to construct a unified Europe. In the years following World War I, Europe lost its leading position in the world to the U. S. and the Soviet Union. Intellectual elites on the continent saw unification as the only way to reverse Europes decline. The current effort at European integration is an attempt to regain a leading role on the world stage. Just as Nimrod organized great building projects to unite the peoples of his empire, the construction of Europe involves many projects under way at the same time: the creation of a common currency, a central bank, common laws, a continental judicial system and police force, a European army, a common foreign policy and a constitution. A major goal is the elimination of individual states by surrendering national sovereignty to supranational European institutions. The builders believe that the only way to guarantee peace and prevent future wars in Europe is to eliminate the nation state, by creating a European super-state.
Therefore, my question is: If Europe was created by history and America was created by philosophy,[5] does the United States of Europe project has its justification?
Builders of the New Europe seek to restore the unity of the Roman Empire. The Empire of Charlemagne, and the medieval Holy Roman Empire are also cited as models of continental unity.[6] Yet these empires were not exactly models of peace, harmony or unity.
The Christianity adopted by the Roman Empire was mixed with paganism, as doctrinal controversies divided both church and empire. Charlemagne expanded his Christian empire through military conquests, and conversions often came at the point of a sword. Medieval Christendom saw bitter rivalries between popes and emperors who waged wars against each other in the heart of Europe.
Napoleon also attempted to unify Europe under the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor. His goal was to redraw the map of Europe, establish a common legal system and bring peace to a troubled continent, by the force of French arms. What is more interesting, less than a century later, Hitler set out on a similar path using German military force.
In my opinion, the conclusion that should be drawn from the lesson of history is that all these attempts failed to bring lasting unity or peace to a war-torn continent. In fact, one reason for Europes blood-stained past is the recurring struggle to establish a single empire under one ruler and one religion, which is confirmed by these words:
What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.[7]
Footnotes:
[1]Thatcher, M. Speech in the Hague (“Europes Political Architecture”), 15.05.1992, Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Online 12 September 2015 <http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108296>
[2]TheBookofGenesis:Chapter10,Verses8-10(Genesis10:8-10).Online 12 September 2015 <http://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/genesis/documents/bible_genesis_en.html#Chapter%2010>
[3]Ibidem(11:19).Online 12 September 2015<http://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/genesis/documents/bible_genesis_en.html#Chapter%2011>
[4] Winnail, D. S. Europe: A Modern Tower of Babel, (in) Tomorrows World Magazine, July-August 2003, Vol. 5, No. 4, p. 23.
[5] Blundell, J. Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady, 2008, p. 137.
[6] Winnail, D. S. Europe: A Modern ibidem, p. 24.
[7] Thatcher, M. Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, p. 327.
]]>My Lords, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to address you tonight. I am going to address a few words on the current immigration crisis.
Let me begin with some considerations of principle. Freedom and civilisation are based upon a simple premise: that land should be privately owned. If we build a society based on the private ownership of land then there is no limit to our endeavour. For centuries, this was the foundation of the West; land was owned and managed by landowners who had a direct interest in its prosperity and an equally direct interest in the welfare of those who worked that land. If we seek the roots of the England we know and love, we find it most clearly in the private ownership of land.
In our time, this freedom has been challenged. Under socialism, and regrettably under governments that call themselves conservative, we have seen measures that have been designed to break the link between landowner and land, and instead to introduce a very different concept. This is the idea that sovereignty consists not in land but in the person. If the person is sovereign, then we will build a very different kind of society; indeed, we are unlikely to build a society at all, because individualism will cause that society to atomise into multiple and ever-changing identity groups.
Here, then, is the root of the immigration crisis. If we say that land is sovereign, then it follows that someone must exercise control over it. There are still substantial private landowners in Britain today, especially so in Scotland. But for our purposes, we should see land as it really is. There is no terra nullius in Britain today. Even that which is owned privately is subordinate to the Crown, and the Crown is effectively a surrogate for the people in its ownership and management of that land which is deemed to be held in common by the nation. I am not talking here of those private estates, such as the Duchy of Cornwall, which belong to the Crown, but instead of the vast mass of common land that we encounter every day of our lives and that is subject to the management of those who are, ultimately, servants of the Crown, whether as politicians, civil servants or local council workers. This is our land, and we are right to care about what happens to it.
This, then, is why as a propertarian, I find the immigration crisis so vexed by unclear thought. Land belongs to someone. If land belongs to the Crown, the Crown has a duty to manage that land in the best interests of the people of Britain, because it is on behalf of the people of Britain that the Crown holds that land in the first place. And that duty cannot be construed otherwise than to the people of Britain as they stand now. It cannot be a duty to foreigners or their governments, for how could that be in our national interest? Therefore we are faced with the prospect that the Crown and its servants believe that in permitting mass immigration to this country, they are actually acting in the best interests of the people of Britain. I believe they are quite wrong in this.
Let us now look more closely at what is going on at the moment. I believe that Janice Atkinson MEP has summed the situation up very well. Here is what she had to say,
Lets be clear about another thing: despite what the human rights industry and the massed ranks of taxpayer-funded charities and lobby-groups repeat, this is not a refugee crisis but a massive crisis of illegal immigration which must be resisted for what it is. A man who leaves Syria may be a refugee at the start of the journey. When he is illegally living in Calais and illegally attempting to enter Britain, he is an economic migrant and an illegal immigrant. The humanitarian consequences of the Syrian crisis are for the countries of the Middle East to manage. Not for Britain, not for France, not for Austria, not for Italy, not for the Netherlands, not for Poland, not for Romania. That cannot be said too often. Oil-rich, cash-rich petro-monarchies of the region must act. They claim to be our allies. Instead, some fund Islamic terrorism and allow hundreds of thousands to come to our countries against the wishes of our people.
It seems to me that we have, since at least 1997, suffered a concerted political attack on our immigration system. The driving force behind that attack seems to be the belief that the person is sovereign; that anyone who wishes should be able to come to Britain regardless of the skills or abilities they would bring to our country or their cultural compatibility with it, and that the settled population of these islands should simply put up with it. We do not need to look far to find the cause of this. The Labour Party saw that immigrants and their descendants were among their core supporters. They believed that the more they opened our doors to immigrants the more they would create a Labour client state and effectively pack Britain with Labour voters. Others, influenced by the ideology of multiculturalism, saw mass immigration in the same way as theorists such as the Frankfurt School as a means of destabilising opposition to socialism and making the lot of conservatives a miserable one. In an interview in 2013, Lord Mandelson said In 2004 when as a Labour government, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country.
Now we are seeing the distinction between legal and illegal immigration further weakened. Having encouraged mass immigration, we cannot then profess ourselves surprised when people from countries where life chances are extremely poor decide that any chance to get across our borders is worth taking. We are told that if we send millions of pounds in international aid, and indeed if we intervene militarily in foreign wars, that we will help these people stay where they are and stabilise their countries. Dont believe it. Those who are coming to Europe believe that the standard of living that their countries provide is inadequate by comparison with that of the West. They do not want mere safety, which is why they do not want to stay in Hungary. Rather, they see the prosperity that Britain and Germany represent, and they want to experience it for themselves.
What is happening to our immigration system is an erosion of its natural boundaries. Time after time, the Prime Minister assures us that we will get an immigration system that is tougher. When he says tougher, what he actually means is fairer; that is to say, fairer both to the immigrants and to those who are already here. And yet the changes made do not have the effect that is claimed for them, nor do they succeed in substantially lowering the numbers who enter Britain each year. I hear constant statistic-based arguments from both sides about whether immigration is economically beneficial. I do not believe that it is, because it artificially distorts our labour market. I certainly do not believe it is in anyones interest that we should have a class of super-rich international jet-setters employing an underclass of disenfranchised immigrants to do menial work that the existing population of this country is supposedly unwilling to do. But this is what happens when an aristocracy of land is replaced by an aristocracy of money. We should not think that Tony Blair and his colleagues are motivated by noblesse oblige or care for our society and our environment. Their motivation seems, by contrast, to speak all too plainly of short-term, materialistic, self-interested greed and tribalism in favour of their family and friends. Their interest is not so much in New Labour as in cheap labour. These are not the values we should have at the heart of our society and they are not values that have had any significant place in the Britain of the past.
But it is not the economic arguments that have the greatest impact on me, it is the cultural arguments. These are arguments that go largely unheard in the House of Commons. It is left to Hungarys Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, to voice them. He says Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders. His is not the only country to say that it cannot accept more Muslim migrants.
Is it not sobering that our own Prime Minister cannot mount a robust defence of the Christian heritage of our country in this way? It must be admitted that were he to do so, he would not get a lot of support from the Church of England. But this is the crux of the matter. We cannot allow mass immigration by people, whatever their personal merits and humanitarian need, whose cultural commitment is to values which are profoundly different from our own, without a heavy price being paid. And the countries where those values are naturally at home Saudi Arabia chief among them are noticeable by their reluctance to assist in the present crisis, even though it is they who should be bearing the heaviest burden. As those rich Arab countries look at Europe, they must be reminding themselves of the old saying, never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
A further argument which is extremely important is that we must learn the lessons of the past when it comes to immigration. The character of Britain depends in large part on the fact that our country is relatively underpopulated. Even our cities, which have always been cosmopolitan in nature, are having to bear a burden that is far greater than they were designed for. The NHS, the transport system and local services cannot be stretched beyond their limit without breaking. We are seeing property prices being inflated by an artificial scarcity, and new housing being built not only on brownfield sites but often as infill development on greenfield sites as well.
As our towns and cities become more packed, our quality of life suffers. It also suffers from the failure to assimilate migrants by enforcing our cultural values. It should be the norm that the English language is spoken on our streets, for example, and it should also be used in commerce, so that we do not have shop frontages entirely in a foreign language. Immigrants should learn English, and we should monitor their progress until they can communicate clearly in the language. We should have the courage to ban the burka and thereby defend the rights and freedoms of women which were hard-fought in this country. We must ensure that immigrants do not jump the queue for council housing or other public services at the expense of our settled population, but that they wait their turn like everyone else. We should also ensure that British values are taught in our schools and that Muslim propaganda has no place there. One aspect of this that I came across recently is that music singing or playing an instrument is regarded as haram, or forbidden, by most Muslims. We should be clear that every child should be allowed the experience of singing and the opportunity to learn a musical instrument during their time at school, regardless of their religious beliefs. And we should not hesitate to deport from this country those who use our hospitality to argue against Western values and to encourage terrorism and armed jihad. That has no place whatsoever in this country. If people want to go to Syria to fight with ISIS, they should not be allowed back and should be treated as undesirable aliens. As our recent experience has shown, it is very easy for the Home Office to keep people out of this country.
In short, where our cultural values and those of foreign migrants clash, ours should prevail and our national systems should enforce them. We cannot be equivocal about this. If we give in to cultural relativism, we are effectively signing our death warrant as a people and as a culture. We need to understand that the support of our culture requires its positive reinforcement at every level. It cannot simply be absorbed by osmosis, and certainly not if we allow ghettoes to form.
I do not want to deny or diminish the human cost of immigration from the migrants point of view. We would not be human if we were not moved by the plight of dead children or desperate people. Those scenes rightly evoke an emotional response in us. But political policy cannot be subject to emotion; it must be made with a cool head and in a climate of calm and reasoned judgement. The decisions we make about immigration, whatever they may be, will always have a cost to pay. My belief, though, is that the balance of those decisions must always be firmly towards the settled population of this country, who look to their government to defend their interests. We cannot accept everyone who wants to come here, and if we do, we will have acted to destroy this country, not enrich it. We must have the maturity and the courage to say, as Hungary has said, that there are good reasons to say no.
]]>Join us at a prestigious venue in central London on the 24th October for the premier annual conservative and traditionalist event of the year – the Traditional Britain Conference.
This day-long conference will bring together members and supporters alike to listen to a range of old favourites and new speakers from the traditionalist, conservative, libertarian and European New Right.
Following the conference is an opportunity to socialise, have a drink and discuss the days themes with like-minded individuals in a friendly and stimulating environment.
Our speakers include:
Chaired by Vice President, Professor John Kersey
Theodore Dalrymple, the political commentator and author of numerous books including “Our Culture – What’s Left of It?”
Commander Paul Fisher, R.N., from the UK National Defence Association. Paul qualified as a Principal Warfare Officer (PWO) and specialised in Anti Air Warfare. He commanded a patrol boat in Northern Ireland and a destroyer in the Persian Gulf during the UN embargo of Iraq. Having played a key role in the BAE Systems element of the bid to build new aircraft carriers for the UK, he is interested in iconoclastic strategy development and naval futures.
Quinlan Terry, C.B.E., on why Traditional architecture matters and what it means for our culture.
John Morgan, Editor-in-Chief of ARKTOS, the principal publisher in English of the writings of the European “New Right” school of political thought.
Rev. Peter Mullen, on the State of the Church of England and its heresies.
Dr Sean Gabb, Leader of the Libertarian Alliance, will speak against the increasing ‘surveillance society’ of Britain.
Stuart Millson, a former member of the old Monday Club Executive Council, veteran radical traditionalist, music critic and writer, now a TBG Vice-President, on the ‘Meaning of English Nationhood.’
Tickets are only £30 (+£1.50 paypal fees) if booked before October 1st, and £35 (+£1.50 paypal fees) thereafter, including tea and coffee and full day access. Students are entitled to tickets at just £25 (+£1.50 paypal fees).
Patron and Full Member tickets are only £29.99 for the day. We have also absorbed the PayPal fees. This includes reserved seating.
Patron club members are also invited to join our speakers for lunch at a nearby restaurant on the day of the conference.
In the evening the conference will be followed by a drinks social in a nearby Victorian pub. Speak to a member of the organising team on the day to find out more. Details will also be announced at the end of the conference.
Venue details will be confirmed with paying guests on the week of the event. The venue is easily accessible via public transport and is located in central London.
We look forward to seeing you on what will be an exhilarating and fascinating day of talks and discussion.
]]>From the Forest to Ross-on-Wye, we move through the last of England, and slowly but surely Welsh names begin to appear although English voices can still be heard. There is even a village along with the way with a split nationality: English Bicknor, and Welsh Bicknor. And there is something interesting about the appearance of the towns along the route. They seem to be devoid of sprawl, self-contained, suggesting perhaps in this border country, an ancient past of stockades from which to observe the comings and goings along the roads and tracks.
Abergavenny, Brecon, Crickhowell and the road is now twisting at the edges of great ranges of hills. The gearbox of the car is used heavily as we keep up with the gradients, and sudden turns at the tops of those long stretches. But the eyes of the driver have difficulty concentrating entirely on the road: the Brecon Beacons and their valleys draw everyones gaze. It is the A40 which runs through this part of southern mid-Wales, and it is a relief to be rumbling along its course a more stimulating experience than the monotony of the M4, with its endless trains of lorries and sudden slow-downs, and often (apart from the hills of Wiltshire and the dramatic appearance in the distance of the bridges of the Severn) uninteresting views. The journey continues, and before long, signs for Carmarthen appear the town which marks the final few furlongs of this journey to West Wales. And beyond Carmarthen, a noble ruin in the green valley
The great castle at Dryslwyn is a fortress in the sky a stone monument to the power of almost-forgotten Welsh warlords and noblemen, such as Rhys ap Gruffydd and his feuding sons. Dryslwyn stands on the banks of the River Towey, some ten miles from Carmarthen. The river, rich in salmon and sea-trout, meanders in great bends and loops through a green valley and flood-plain where dairy herds and patient anglers may be found. All is peaceful today, in a land that was once known as the Kingdom of Deheubarth. However, in 1287, Earl Edmund of Cornwall laid siege to the castle in the name of King Edward l.
Rhys ap Maredudd, the lord of Dryslwyn, was in revolt against the King, and in the August of that year paid the price for his rebellion as 11,000 men besieged his fortress. Today, only the fragments of the once-noble fortifications survive, although archaeological excavation has yielded a wealth of artefacts, including two large 16-inch stone balls, the missiles of their time, which would have been hurled at the structure by a trebuchet, the deadly mediaeval siege engine. Other smaller projectiles were discovered by the archaeologists, alongside dozens of arrowheads, spears and even fragments of chain mail, penetrated no doubt by the impact of well-aimed heavy swords. The battlefields of those centuries were bloody, terrifying places.
Just over a century later the summer of 1403 to be precise and Dryslwyn was again at the eye of the storm of Welsh history, having been seized by the legendary Owain Glynd?r, a warrior-leader of his country a Hereward the Wake, or the equivalent of St. George or Robin Hood for a patriotic Welshman. How remote all these events seem to the modern mind ancient bones and the hardly-recognisable decaying relics buried in the soil so far away from our plasma, electronic, and comfortable, instantaneous world.
But there is another point to make here. Despite the ancient feuds between the Welsh and the English (and Scotland and England, too) the battles and sieges of antiquity speak of an ancestral, tribal sense of Britain; cultures which were, perhaps, different in nuance, but the same in essence. From this mixture grew the British nation the Welsh archers fighting for an English King at Agincourt, the Welsh riflemen at Rorkes Drift, the Highlanders advancing alongside English country regiments across the battlefields of 20th-century Europe. The culture to be found at places such as Dryslwyn castle is as much a part of the British identity as it is of the Welsh; and it must stand as a repudiation of those political parties, such as Plaid Cymru (and the SNP in Scotland), which seem to reject links with their natural kinsfolk in England preferring instead the lure of the EU and the diversity of large-scale immigration into Cardiff and Glasgow.
In the ruins of Dryslwyn on a summers day, looking out across Carmarthenshire, is as near as you can get to the experience of stepping out of a time machine. Red kites, buzzards, kestrels and ravens soar above the landscape of Deheubarth and in the distance, the standards and glinting shields of Edmunds army are just coming into view
Stuart Millson is a freelance writer based in Kent.
]]>At about the same time on the other side of the Channel, an illustration (actually, an engraving unsigned) was causing a degree of panic the artists imagination running wild as French invasion barges, supported by an air armada of hot-air balloons massed against the English coast. However, what is particularly notable about this panorama is the depiction of French infantry and artillery marching with ease through a Channel tunnel; a devilish subterranean passage offering the invader a sealed, protected route to the very heart of England.
One wonders what the early-19th-century British subject, clambering aboard a time machine, would make of that engineering wonder made real: todays Channel Tunnel, through which high-speed express and car-trains run, making the crossing of the sea to continental Europe a mere half-an-hour commute. Travelling via the Chunnel, however, is not quite as simple as it may seem If, for example, you are a British citizen taking your car across to France for the day, you have to make a formal booking ensuring that you keep your booking number available in order to pass through the barriers at Folkestone.
A number of Tunnel staff (in high-visibility jackets) are on hand to wave you into line, and then the passenger has to pass through the UKs Border Agency post the officers checking your passport details, and then allowing you to proceed to the train. And at the point of embarkation, another official is on hand to make sure that you are safely aboard, in the right carriage and in the right space. How strange, therefore, that we witness the almost daily spectacle of hundreds of people from the Calais side (without a booking number or valid documentation) simply clambering aboard Channel Tunnel trains, heading to Britain and (inevitably) claiming asylum. The system and the rules of passage clearly do not apply equally to everyone.
It is, perhaps, reassuring that the Channel Tunnel was not completed in the August of 1939 opened to great acclaim by the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain! A month later, and we were (again) at war with Germany the Tunnel possibly enabling an invasion force to avoid the bad weather associated with Operation Sea Lion (the code-name of the Wehrmachts invasion plan). Had the structure existed then, it is likely that the Battle of Britain would have been a battle fought at tunnel entrances, with hand-to-hand fighting in the town of Folkestone although one would hope that the British Government had the sense to block the entrance with as much concrete or high-explosive, or both, as possible.
Of course, the fault is not with the Channel Tunnel, or with any other man-made structure including our airports. The fault is with politicians and governments who fail to protect such facilities properly, or use them for the benefit of the country. As we survey the chaotic situation at our borders today, I am reminded of the immortal words uttered by John of Gaunt in Shakespeares Richard ll:
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
Stuart Millson is a freelance writer based in Kent.
]]>3rd August 2015.
]]>Moreover, how can you have EU Parliament when every State is supposed to have its own parliament which is sovereign? The obvious answer is that they are not sovereign, and no-where has this become more evident than Greece, where we have provisional acceptance of a deal with its non-Greek creditors and the EU even though the deal is actually worse than what the Greek people said no to in a referendum 9 days ago. Clearly Greece is not a sovereign State. During this Greek financial crisis we have seen the classic them and us fighting and virulent accusations, with claims going back to 1940, amongst the nations which the EU would have you believe are all partners. Then you have the United Kingdoms Westminster elites who also seem to think that this partnership is not what they freely signed up to (which it is) and who are demanding that the UK have some kind of special provisions that no-one else has. It is a bit like joining a London gentlemans club and, a few years after joining, saying that you dont like the rules and want special rules which apply just to you.
Naturally any normal person would have expected Greece to be either kicked out of the Euro, or the EU. But the bigger picture meant the federalist fanatics at the EU have prevailed, with another offer of billions of Euros for an already totally bankrupt state which cannot even pay the interest it owes on existing debts let alone repay capital. Germany, who the mad anti-Nazi camp with their conspiracy theories think runs the EU, was actually opposed to a further bail-out.
Lastly there is EU Foreign Policy. Until recently its Foreign Minister was the ex-communist, Labours Baroness Ashton. That should surely inspire us all. What did the UKs fake Conservative Party have to say about her? (or the Kinnocks!) The EU have now involved themselves in the affairs of the Ukraine and Russia. Moreover they have imposed multi-faceted sanctions against Russia and loaned billions to the Ukraine, which, like Greece, has no hope of ever repaying it. That the EU is becoming a dangerous leftist power bloc is clear. It will ultimately silence all opposition within, as we saw in Austria when its Freedom Party was elected into the coalition government by a free and fair totally democratic General Election. Even though Austria was an EU member, a partner, the EU told them they did not approve of their government and slapped sanctions on them.
The UK has a referendum on the EU coming up. We must get out while there is time.
Gregory Lauder-Frost.
Traditional Britain Group Vice-President
One must also refer to some well-known authors who dealt with the study of heroes, such as Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book still serving as a primer in religious science courses at universities in the USA, but also a book which influenced many Hollywood moguls. Although Campbell never addressed the notion of the hero from a racial perspective, the fact that he sat on the editorial board of the Mankind Quarterly and that he had once upon a distant time allegedly cracked a small joke in front of his colleagues about the Jews earned him the title of anti-Semite, , a label not usually associated with heroism.
Also worth mentioning is the book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by the 19th-century Scottish author Thomas Carlyle in which he sorts out heroes according to their religious, poetic and military endowments. Carlyles rejection of liberal democracy and his good knowledge of German culture predictably earned him a century later, in the aftermath of World War II, the label of an early fascist thinker. Moreover, one must emphasize that historically, the notion of the hero has been differently internalized by thinkers and masses in continental Europe and differently in Great Britain or in the USA. According to the German sociologist Werner Sombart, who was often quoted in anti-liberal and later on in nationalist academic circles in Germany prior to World War II, the Germans are the people of heroes, as opposed to the English being the people of merchants, displaying shopkeepers mentality: What is of interest here for us is not the swindling of crooked merchants who have always been popular in England, but the swindling of the merchant as such. What we really want to know is how to grasp the birth of entire England from this from this mercantile mindset. (p.38).
The word Held was very much in usage in Germany prior and during World War II. Sombart summarizes the notion of the classical Held hero, as embodied in the German man, vs. his counterpart, the modern anti-hero, as represented by the capitalist Englishman: Merchants and hero: they both make the two great opposites; two poles of all human directions on Earth. The merchant, as we saw it, approaches his day to day life with a question: what kind of a life can you offer to me? The hero enters life with a question: what can I offer to life? (p. 64).
Death Wish
The sense of sacrifice, the readiness to place the interests of his community above his own private and family interests, the sense of complete autonomy in carrying out his heroic deeds, have historically been the three main hallmarks of the hero. The hero may have his sidekicks, although his heroic deeds always need to rest solely within his own private and solitary domain. In the German medieval Niebelungensagas we encounter the hero Siegfried and his challenger the hero Hagen, both acting alone with no outside help, yet both willing at a short notice to lay down their life for the benefit of their community.
The same heroic and individualistic pattern of death-wish for the benefit of common good can be observed in Homers death challenger, the Greek hero Achilles who besieges the town of Troy and in the equally well death-driven hero Hector who defends his home town Troy.
Hector: For me it would be a great deal better to meet Achilles man to man, kill him, and go home, or get killed before the city, dying in glory. (Iliad, Book XXII, lines 108-110).
The future founder of Rome, Vergils mythical Aeneas during his interminable trials in the underworld, acted in a similar communal and death-braving fashion. So did his other mythical counterpart, the seafaring Homers Odysseus, always enwrapped in solitary musings, always having his life hovering on the brink of death.
His eyes were perpetually wet with tears now / His life draining away in homesickness. (Odysseus, Book V, lines 156158)
Thousands of similar heroic characters have become household names all over the West. Those mythical heroes stood as symbols for the survival of their tribal, racial or political community, yet strangely enough, all of them always attempted to stay above the fray, always shunning gregarious, communal and folkish behavior of their noisy kinsmen. Such a freewheeling and autonomous behavior may also help explain today the proverbial failure of modern White nationalist heroes who remain hopeful in search of a functional political or cultural movement. On the one hand all of them passionately speak about the importance of their community; yet on the other, their hyper-individualistic stance can hardly bridge the gap amidst scores of other dissenting would-be White heroes within their community.
This peculiar individualistic trait among Whites is largely inherited from the primeval ego-archetypes, as observed in the figures of the mythical Titan Prometheus and later in the young truth-seeker Faust, respectively. If one briefly observes the character of the hero Prometheus, whom Zeus had punished for heresy by chaining him to the rock for the next 30,000 years, one can spot a creature constantly complaining, perpetually carping at other mainstream gods, loudly cursing Zeus, and refusing to make any compromise even with his fellow Titans who had come to his rescue.
Prometheus: I know that Zeus is harsh and keeps justice in his own hands; but nevertheless one day his judgment will soften, when he has been crushed in the way that I know. ( Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, lines 189192).
The Titan hero Prometheus knows that the gods days, like the days of the mortals, are also numbered and that some eon again the immortal Titans will again rule the universe. Such a titanic-heroic and promethean-inflated ego is also visible in the would-be heroic young scholar Faust, who is constantly searching for diverse identities, always craving for the transformation of his self into a myriad of other selves:
Alas! Two souls within my breast abide / And each from the other strives to separate. (J. W. Goethe, Faust, lines 11121113).
Conversely, we have all been witness, especially over the last two hundred years, to the well-organized and highly communal political activity of the leftists and their offshoot, the modern antifa movements in Europe and America. Their sense of discipline is awesome; their commitment to their communal goals has helped them achieve astounding political and cultural breakthrough over the last decades. Witness for instance the well-organized Bolshevik revolution in early 20th-century Russia spearheaded by a handful of well-disciplined activists who had flocked to Russia from all parts of Europe and the USAand who subsequently changed the face of the earth. One must also emphasize the astonishing organizational skills of the modern antifas on US campuses and their skill in lining up at a short notice a violent crowd in any European city center.
One can tentatively substitute the word heretic with the word rebel or dissident. To be sure, the word rebel is not a synonym of the word dissident. There are many dissidents and many self-proclaimed rebels in the contemporary West, such as the bare-chested Femen women parading on the streets of Europe, or the Antifas, or the Anonymous, or even some prominent intellectuals critical of the regime, such as Noam Chomsky. These groups of people and individuals can be labeled as self-serving dissidents within, but not without the System. None of them wants to challenge the supporting egalitarian dogma upholding the System. A dissident usually aims at modifying the System by relying on the support of other System-affiliated countries; he never tries to remove the root causes of the System. A rebel, by contrast, rejects all modifications of the System. Writers and thinkers, such as the American Ezra Pound and the Russian Alexander Solzhenitsyn, can be tentatively described with the triple label: heroes-rebels-heretics. They both fought the System, whether in its liberal or its communistic form. Solzhenitsyn, after having denounced Soviet communism an act which earned him briefly a calculated praise from the US ruling class did not hesitate to denounce in turn the so-called freedom-loving USA. He returned from America to his post-communist Russia. Similarly, Pound, after having been sequestered for several years in an American lunatic asylum for his earlier rebel Fascist stance, when returning in 1958 to Italy declared upon his arrival that he had left America because all America is an insane asylum.
One must make an additional distinction, this time between the mythical heroes in Western literary heritage and the real heroes or heroes hopeful in Western political life. Thousands of mythical heroes, including Achilles or Hector, fighting alongside the walls of Troy, or better yet, the demigod heroes such as Hercules or Theseus, combating the monsters in the underworld, have had a distinct advantage so far of being exempt from modern re-educational process consisting of political criminalization and demonization. The System continues to use their names as positive role models, although, to be sure, the System thought police, with its increasing guilt-tripping process designed to alter the minds of White peoples, may some day remove these mythical heroes from the role model reading list as well. The conclusion one can therefore offer is that any would-be heroic act, any heretical or rebellious deed, regardless of its factual, fictional or factitious nature, is always subject to different reinterpretations in a different political epoch.
The same conclusion applies to literary heroes and their hero-crafting authors such as William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and hundreds more, each of them having received, or still receiving, a different accolade by a different ruling class at a different historical and political time. Thus Friedrich Schillers poem Ode to Joy (1785) is being widely and wildly used today as a trademark of the European Union. Schillers stanzas are being chanted today by multicultural transgenderists, pederasts and plutocrats as a call for a mandatory multiracial embrace and as a handy alibi for the free flow of non-European migrant labor.
Endure courageously, millions! /Endure for the better world/ Above the starry canopy/ A great God will reward you/.
By contrast, in National Socialist Germany the same Schiller was praised to the skies, albeit through differently worded official eulogies and different academic interpretations. In his drama The The Robbers (1781), Schiller depicts an armed gangs leader Karl Moor who is always eager to first dispense the stolen goods to the local poor, yet who by his sheer association with other violent gang members could easily pass off today as a modern terrorist or, short of that, fall short of some folkish road warrior Mad Max. Schillers other medieval hero, widely praised in academic circles all over Europe and whose name is used as an official state symbol of Switzerland, is the crossbow-toting hero from the same drama, Wilhelm Tell (1804) who could also be described as a perfect role model for modern terrorists. With his sneaky, ugly and cowardly weapon, Tell assassinates (from ambush!) the Austrian-appointed governor who rules over his native borough in Switzerland. Between 1933 and 1941 Schillers plays were performed all over liberal-weary, communist-scared Europe and particularly in Germany.
The next conclusion one can offer is that any White author, any poet, any writer, any White activist, regardless of his political beliefs or disbeliefs, always runs the risk of having his works or his exploits extrapolated and reinterpreted based on prevalent political whims of the System or the conventional lies of the scribes bankrolled by the System.
Quite different is the story when real historical and political figures, once hailed as finite destiny- ordained heroes, unexpectedly end up in the garbage can of the memory hole. A set of lucky circumstances made Thomas Jefferson and George Washington into American heroes, although, to be sure, if the English colonial troops had been somewhat more agile, Jeffersons and Washingtons bodies would have been dangling on the gallows in the summer of 1780 in front of London Tower Hill and their names would grace henceforth the European school books as marginal colonial road bandits. Of course, in the contemporary U.S., Jefferson and Washington are now mainly known to schoolchildren as slave owners.
Conversely, the famed politician Adolf Hitler was venerated as the ultimate European hero (Held) by many Europeans during his adult life time. Today, however, Hitlers name or even the two syllables hit-ler have become a synonym and a signifier for a peculiar extraterrestrial species representing an absolute metaphysical evil, surpassing all imaginable cosmic evils. It is therefore a waste of time to talk about Hitler as a hero or ab anti-hero because the two syllables of his name enter into the realm of modern demonology and not into the realm of dispassionate historiography. In modern liberal demonology, however, different rules and different value systems in regard to hero worship prevail.
Heros Weird Sisters
The hero is not a blank slate. He is often a self-centered and narcissistic figure who loves victimizing himself with endless neurotic self-justifying soliloquies, as seen in Shakespeares plays. The hero often imagines himself to be a man of destiny, although, when needed, he calls himself a man of free will. Hero faces a dilemma between these two notions. The factor of destiny carries always more weight for him when his free will is impeded or yields disastrous political results for his community. Usually, a would-be hero prefers to babble about his free will and indulge in an exercise of wishful thinking in the present or the future tense, yet he quickly reverts to the past tense when describing his bad luck and calls it destiny. His tragic destiny is then wished away by his invocations of witches, weird sisters, moirs, fates, or Germanic broom-riding Hexen. One must also note that virtually all Western mythical heroes are husky, good looking White males, with virtually no women ever assuming a role of a hero. However, during extreme emergency, or in the final death hour of the hero, it is no longer gods or good spirits who decide but always a death spell of a female witch.
Third Witch: All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter! (Macbeth; Act I Scene III)
There is more to that. Heros self-abnegation and his full-fledged idealism and commitment to superhuman goals often morph into fanaticism. Many mythical real or once-upon-a-time heroes, including the conventionally demonized and the proverbial Hitler, are depicted today in the System as certified fanatics and certainly not as heroes. In retrospect and from the modern liberal and rational point of view, the 10-year siege of mythical Troy, or thousands of real wars that have raged in European history amidst and between tribes and peoples that are virtually identical racially can be described as an exercise in White mans savagery. From the point of view of liberals, any war-exalting hero is an irrational psychopath other than when liberal theoreticians conduct wars in order to make the world safe for democracy. If we follow this liberal logic that wartime heroic dying does not make much sense, one must conclude that living does not make much sense either.
The line of demarcation between heroism, fanaticism and idealism is very thin, as observed on countless occasions in the intellectual and military history of the West. A heros sacrifice for a political or religious goal often clashes with an equally heroic goal he is poised to challenge. In Pierre Corneilles drama Polyeucte, Pauline, a pagan lady from a distant part of the Roman Empire in Armenia, is trying to dissuade her convert husband Polyeucte from sacrificing to an obscure Semitic deity known as Jesus Christ. The young nobleman Polyeucte, however, in his ecstatic fervor decides to lay down his life for his new heroic inspiration and renounce his community, his wife Pauline, and his entire family.
Pauline: Oh, leave illusions! Love me!
Polyeucte: Thee I love/ Far more than self, but less than God above! (Polyeucte: Acte IV, Scene III)
Moreover, Polyeucte does not hesitate to desecrate the statues of ancient heroic gods in a Roman temple a very serious political offense in the pagan Roman Empire. Polyeucte, like other early Christian heroes or would-be saints/martyrs, could not, however, anticipate that his self-serving heroic deeds on behalf of his newly discovered superhero Jesus Christ, would, over the next thousand years become a pattern for incessant inter-Christian, inter-White wars, Inquisitions and barbarism. At the moment when Corneille was in the process of finishing his play Polyeucte, a gigantic inter-Christian, inter-White carnage, known as the Thirty Years War, was taking place in the heart of Europe, resulting in millions of the German dead. Well, what counted for the poet Corneille was cozying up to his pious protector, the Christian King Louis XIII, and thus secure his literary fame on the winning side of the theological and political barricades in Europe.
The morale one can deduce from Polyeuctes iconoclastic behavior, irrespective of his love for his hidden Semitic mentors Yahweh and Jesus, may be a lesson for all contemporary self -proclaimed White heroic leaders tapping incognito on their computer boards, waiting for a miracle to happen without incurring any personal risk. Their alibis must be always ready. If a White hero hopeful goes viral with the display of his heroic insignia, his mama can raise hell, his lady can ask for divorce, or worse he may get fired, or even much worse his mugshot can be posted at a local police precinct. The seventeenth-century author Pierre Corneille was on the safe ground with his narrated hero Polyeucte, being himself already on secure Catholic turf in France. This was not the case with his cherished Christian hero model, the early third-century Polyeucte who had dared to rock the boat of political correctness and paid a heavy price for it in the pagan Roman Empire.
A bit later, in the eighteenth century, with conventional Christian heroes going slowly out of literary and political vogue, Polyeucte would no longer be considered a model for heroes. He would have likely ended up as a fanatical hero, as his counterpart from the Middle East, the Muslim prophet Mohamed did. Mohamed was described as such by the very anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic author Voltaire in his play, Mahomet:
Mahomet: On every side inglorious; let us raise/ Arabia on the ruins of mankind:/ The blind and tottering universe demands/ Another worship, and another God. (Mahomet; Act II, Scene V.)
With cultural mores changing, the notion of hero changes too. Today, in multiracial France, staging Voltaires Mahomet is already causing official concerns and increasing demands for its ban. Modern racial diversity oblige even if it requires the System to clamp-down on free speech.
Heros Genie Unbottled
With all heroes gods and home-grown spirits being well stored and secured, nobody can guarantee a hero that his invisible ghostly protectors may not take a sudden revenge on him. Even if a hero is absolutely devoid of hubris and truly thinks of himself as a man of character, his unbottled spirits may act out in an unpredictable fashion. And then the hell breaks loose which can last for eons. Even his best insights into the secrets of the stars, which the Habsburg warlord Albrecht von Wallenstein excelled at during the Thirty Years War in Europe, could not prevent him from getting assassinated by the very same people who days earlier had pledged to protect him from all political vagaries.
In fact, good spirits, if invoked by a hero too often, can speed up mayhem and chaos, as witnessed recently in European history. Different was the self-perception of nationalist heroes in Europe in 1933 from that in 1943. Conjuring up ones good White nationalist spirits, as many White nationalists often do, can easily lapse into the deadly opposite, with the White ghosts no longer wishing to return to the bottle or getting stored away in the back of Pandoras Box. In Goethes poem The Sorcerers Apprentice, the much invoked magic spell of the enchanted broom, designed initially to help the young hero apprentice in his domestic chores, after a period of fun time turns the whole world upside down:
Flow, flow onward / Stretches many / Spare not any / Water rushing / Ever streaming fully downward / Toward the pool in current gushing.
Can I never, Broom, appease you? / I will seize you / Hold and whack you,/ And your ancient wood / Ill sever / With a whetted axe Ill crack you. (transl. by E. Zeydel, 1955)
The hero is frequently invoked during times of extreme emergency. In real life his profile is elevated in times of war. He will forever be the subject of mutually exclusive beliefs, and the final assessment of his deeds will hinge on the spirit of different times. Some past historical hero may appear to future generations either as an idiotic individual or as a man of exceptional intelligence. Once upon a time, thousands of great European intellectuals were swayed by the hero model as put forward by the earlier Marxist mystique and its subsequent political institutionalization in Bolshevik Russia. By the late twentieth century, after the collapse of communism, few would take those heroes seriously today and even less people would bother reading Marxs books now.
Similar is the case with thousands of American and European intellectuals who thought that heroic life could be best achieved by embracing National Socialism or Fascism. Many outstanding authors projected their own autobiographic examples on a future world-improving hero. Many of those White writer heroes could masterfully handle both the pen and the gun. The authors George Orwell and Ernst Hemingway are still viewed by many liberal and leftist commentators as outstanding heroes who combined the soldiers prowess with literary talent in their fight against what were alleged to be the fascist dark ages. Conversely, the ideal of the heroic man was equally a trademark of thousands of talented nationalist writers and warriors, such as Lon Degrelle or Ernst Jnger, with each in his own peculiar way, depicting the coming end times of the European White man.
A renowned communist, the French novelist Henri Barbusse, the author of the novel Inferno, is an outstanding visionary source for a better understanding of the spiritual drama faced by a young couple on the treadmill of a merciless capitalist system. Barbusse, with his former soldiers skill and his literary background placed therefore high hopes in the communist super hero Stalin:
This is an iron man. His name depicts him: Stalin steel. He is as unflinching and as adaptable as steel. His power is his formidable good sense, the extent of his knowledge, his amazing internal skill of sorting things out, sharpness of passion, his relentless consistency, his swiftness, his self-assuredness, and intensity of his decision, as well as his constant obsession to choose the right people. (p. 311)
Amidst thousands of perceptive European and American thinkers who had embraced the figure of the nationalist hero, one must single out Kurt Eggers, a poet, an acclaimed essayist in National Socialist Germany, a political activist, but also a Waffen SS soldier who had chosen to die on the Eastern front. Eggers sees military combat as the father of all things i.e., the ultimate purpose of life, as opposed to the nothingness of bourgeois life that deprives White man of all sense of purpose.
Placid life creates its own standards of unreality: what brings pleasure is viewed as good; what causes unease is considered evil. (Man) is keen to wish away reality and through his wishful thinking he bans from his life: struggle, the sense of the tragic, bleakness and pain. (p. 37)
How then to figure out in our forthcoming titanic future the right role model of the hero? The self-perception of Shakespeares Macbeth, or the characters in the killing spree of his Titus Andronicus, or the behavior of the real historical Stalin or any historical or mythical hero, is often at variance with contemporary public perception of their former deeds. Prime examples are the many modern nationalist sycophants or Hollywood Nazis or for that matter, a number of cultivated White nationalist scholars and heretics in the USA and EU who are inclined to mimic their historical heroes not along the patterns of how those heroes actually were, but rather on the surreal patterns of how they wish to see those heroes behave today. Hypothetically speaking, and provided that the White nationalist hopeful hero was given power on a golden platter by the System, nobody can reassure us that all Whites will be happy thereafter. White mythical heroes or White real historical heroes have always been far keener about killing their own kind, starting with their own family members, than killing off non-European invaders. Civil wars among Whites, starting with the siege of Troy all the way to World War II, have been far bloodier than any single war fought by Whites against non-White intruders. Whites are rightfully concerned today about the big and scary racial replacement taking place in Europe and the USA. Yet they need to offer a more persuasive answer as to how to achieve their unity in front of the common threat.
]]>We proudly invite you to read the first issue of our biannual journal, Traditio. Intended to discuss ideas and principles of the Right, it provides a forum for elite, counter-revolutionary and traditional beliefs oppositional to the modern world. In this issue, we offer excellent essays by multiple contributors. Authors as talented and as varied as Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley, Dr. Alexander Jacob, Martin Grannenfeld and Graham Cunningham all discuss concepts of interest to our readership. Additionally, we also provide multiple book reviews on subjects as diverse as Germanic Christianity, British Conservatism and the European New Right. The Traditional Britain Group desires that our journal be of the finest quality and we look forward to hearing your responses. Thank you for your support and interest as we stand for enduring principles in a darkened age.
President:
Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley
Vice-President:
Mr. Gregory Lauder-Frost
Vice President:
Professor John Kersey
]]>The authority of the government rests on the consent of all the citizens in this country as individuals. All of us have an equal share of power in the body politic, since each of us has a vote. That principle which it has for so long now been fashionable to acclaim, springs ultimately from the Reformation. Whilst in mediaeval times our ancestors had sought their salvation through the Roman Catholic Church, during the 16th century, as the disciples of Luther or Calvin, they believed that it was within their reach as individuals. Salvation, they said, may come to us through the grace of our own hearts. Looking in on themselves, many heretics kept a diary as the record of their private religious experiences. The survival of these exercises in self-analysis is the reminder of a significance accorded to the individual in Stuart times that was much enhanced at the end of the 18th century by the birth of romantic literature. Romantic writers ignore the rules and values that have been handed down to them by older generations and are accepted by us; they will never, with the use of that tradition, give us an impersonal view of things; possessed of a profound conviction of their own importance and originality, they believe that the vision which they projects should be merely of themselves. Accustomed by the Calvinistic discipline to the most tortured introspection, Jean-Jacques Rousseau established himself as the archetype of the romantic sensibility. Rousseau wrote the most celebrated and original autobiography of all times. In the Contrat Social he translated the egotism of Puritans and Romantics into the political terms that were proclaimed during the French Revolution and are accepted now in this country.
Before 1832 England was not a democracy. There were elections. But the electoral system was so corrupt that a government did not lose the election. The passing of the great Reform Bill introduced the first stages of Rousseau’s ideal of government. The Whig government which sponsored that legislation drew much of its support from the Puritans, who as the adherents of Calvin in Geneva had lent money and made profits. These Puritans were our manufacturers and tradesmen at the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution. Now I shall be bold and say that a principle feature of the democratic form of government in which the tradesmen believed is that it should intervene hardly at all in the economy.
Disraeli said that as the representative of tradition the Tory party should stand for the cottage, the altar and the throne. Traditionally, before the passing of the great Reform Bill, an unelected administration had regarded the welfare of the ordinary working citizen as a chief article of its interest. In that light, and as a Fabian too, the historian R.H. Tawney used to commend the government of the Middle Ages. He told us that in regulating the price of food a mediaeval administration attached the same importance to the welfare of the consumer as would have been given in the 19th century to the making of profits. Middlemen like our Socialist peer and grocer Lord Sainsbury were chastised. The pattern was not altered very substantially by the money making of the Tudors. The Poor Law may never have been so well administered as under the personal rule of Charles I, before the Parliamentarians came into power.
In the last century, however, after the passing of the great Reform Bill, things became otherwise. The common people were taken in by their enfranchisement to political power. The appearance of the body politic in this country was as it still is in the United States, a lie, for in the matter of improving their economic welfare no power was handed over to them. Nothing then restrained the Puritan manufacturers who had introduced democracy from the abuse of the workers that they employed for the sake of profits.
Now much of the power has shifted from such manufacturers to the employed. The growth of the speed in communications helped the workers to combine, and in combining under Trades Unions they have learnt their power. Still our democracy does not intervene in the economy. The issue of the increase in wages and its consequence, the rise in prices, has been the subject of nearly every election, not excepting the last. Whichever party achieves office, however, is too weak to fulfill the pledges in this matter which put it there at the time of its election. Even with its majority in Parliament any government which attempted in one way or another to restrict the power of the workers and halt their rise in wages knows that it would break its own neck. The late government attempted a mere voluntary restraint on wages which failed. For the present government Lord Donovan has held out little hope wherever the bill on industrial relations has tried to enforce the agreements of workers to their wages. No government would dare to create massive unemployment. For if unemployment is allowed to reach any very large proportion, it is that rather than wages and prices which becomes the key factor at elections.
I will not say any more; it has all been said too often. Few, nevertheless, are willing to accept the obvious conclusions; which it is much better, necessary even, that we should avoid. Owing to the extent it has prevented us from building up reserves, our inflation has put us in a wounding dependence on speculators overseas. At the end of the war our dependence on American credit did much to break the Empire; in the past few years Harold Wilson could not introduce any widespread measure of social amelioration since he had to answer to a banking interest in Zürich. And that may not be the full measure of our curse. Once it has begun, the inflation may as in Germany, race out of control. at a rate quite out of proportion to the extent created in the first instance by an excessive demand for wages. That can happen very easily to an inflating currency like our own because the amount of money is a question, not merely of the quantity of specie issued from the Mint, but quite as much as that of credit, the amount of which depends on nothing more tangible than a degree of confidence that in a moment of real crisis must evaporate.
The conventional solution in this century has been a dictatorship, such as that upon which Salazar insisted to re-establish the finances of Portugal. Monetary problems may indeed be resolved by a dictator in his own lifetime. The question is who shall succeed him. Since power rests in his hands, it is most likely that he will appoint one of his own children. I know that the inheritance of political power is out of fashion just now. But the instinct to do best for our own family is foremost in all of us. It was for that reason that the holders of power in the past created a hereditary principle in politics–so that since the fall of the Roman Empire a hereditary principle has been more pervasive and lasted longer than any system based on elections.
Maurras and his disciple, who is the literary editor of this magazine, recommend that the inheritance of political power should be vested in the monarchy; I think that under such a regime too much would rest on the character of the king. Edward II was too weak; Richard II was overcome by paranoia like a figure in Jacobean tragedy; Henry VI was an imbecile. The monarchy ought to share its inheritance of power with the peers in the House of Lords. To be excluded from such an upper house would be the present element of life peers–the species the Spaniards would call hidalgos de la gutiera, the nobility of the gutter, because they did not inherit their titles.
So much is needed to make sure our house shall stand. There rests a subsidiary question, how much control under such a regime citizens should have over their own destiny. Men who believe democracy to be its harbinger would claim that freedom is quelled. So as to deny the charge it is necessary to state what is meant by freedom. Those who have paid the most powerful lip service to it do not know. According to the philosophers of the Enlightenment it should serve to overturn governments on account of its beauty as an abstraction. But that is not enough. We should think of it in particular terms in order to assess whether so-and-so is free. Tested in that way, freedom means what the Enlightenment would regard as it converse, a power or privilege of some kind. The most complete measure of liberty is the exercise of absolute authority. All such powers and privileges, apart from those vested in the head of state, are shared by classes of men with interests in common. Freedom, therefore, has to be conceived in terms of the various interests in the land, and how these may be reconciled and protected. The role of arbitrating, like an umpire, between one class and the next for their mutual protection should fall to the House of Lords and the monarchy.
For in a democracy such as our own we tend always to dissolve the practice and enjoyment of freedom as I have defined it. Because our democracy has no power in the economic sphere, the principal interests of the land have not been reconciled. Nothing matters so much in politics as industrial relations. Nowadays the directors of companies are the men who have risen to that position under the free workings of the economy. As they did not inherit their authority as gentlemen, such figures have no idea how to give an order. So those who sit on each side of the fence in the ground floor of industry regards one another with perfect hatred. Wherever there is a rivalry of interests under our democracy one party, and in terms of numbers it is the weaker, will go unprotected. The owners of capital in this country are put into as much danger as the negroes of the United States. A democracy must reduce all the differences which rest between us on account of our separate interests. Living in identical villas with central heating and unwanted carpets we shall be comfortable. But that is not a consolation if we may no longer taste the luxury of our present social differences. The removal of those differences will not create peace in our society. It will take away merely the symptoms of hatred, not the cause. In no society has there been prefect equality; the envy which arises out of our inequalities must always be with us; and Enoch Powell has so rightly remarked that it is the little difference between us rather than the others which provoke the strongest measure of our unrest. If we wish to diminish envy, it is necessary to widen the differences between one class of interest and the next. Many of us are deceived in politics wherever it is a game of words. As words the adjectives Fascist, Republican or whatever conjure in our imagination an excitement which an analysis of their meaning would never yield. Faced by whatever he may not like, therefore, a critic of politics can afford just to stock on his condemnatory label without giving reason for his prejudice. Because I am not a democrat, the rearrangement of power that I commend resembles that of some undemocratic regimes in this century. Merely by the use of a derogatory label, every reader who remarks on that resemblance can convey the impression, even though it is false, that my ideas are the negation of freedom. My plea is that instead of regarding my rearrangement of power in that contemporary context, which is deceiving, we should think of it in terms of the past. For whoever rejects what I have to say has turned his back on our own national history.
The principles of government for which I plead have flourished in this country to an extent which grows the further back we reach in time. By virtue of his heredity, the King was head of the government until the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832. William IV claimed that he could veto the decisions of the Cabinet. George IV offered posts in the Cabinet. It is true that he had to choose as his chief minister whoever happened, independently of himself, to command a majority in the House of Commons. Before Walpole became Head of the Treasury, however, the king exercised the power of patronage, and so enjoyed a large measure of control over the Commons. It was on that account that attempts were made to prevent the placemen of the Crown from making up a majority there. Going back yet further, to the years before the Reformation, we see that, under the central authority of the king, all Englishmen were reconciled in theory by their allegiance to a body which has been anathema to democracy, the Roman Catholic Church. For more than a century the Roman Catholic Church set its face against the civil fissures of democracy. Before Mussolini came to power, no more than 40% of the Italian electorate went to the polls, because the Pope excommunicated all who took part in the government of the Risorgimento. Pius XI stated in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “The demand and supply of labour [under a democracy] divides men on the labour market into two classes, as into two groups, and the bargaining between them transforms this labour market into an arena where the two armies are engaged in combat.” In his encyclical Rerum Novarum Leo XIII declared that it was the duty of men in political authority to intervene. At the time that all Christendom was Roman Catholic, our society did not subsist on any principle that a mass of individuals, who believed that of themselves they were answerable to God, should engage in economic combat so that the more successful of their number might make profits. Undeniably that was not altogether so in practice: there was much private greed. Our nature is so corrupt that laws are necessary to impose the code of conduct which rests a little above ourselves; the higher demands which Christianity made on our ancestors were too harsh, and secured no more than their partial acceptance. To correspond to our nature which, as Christian doctrine itself informs us, is corrupt, the enjoyment of freedom took the form I have advocated of rights and powers between the rival claims of which it was the function of the king to adjudicate. There was no House of Commons elected to represent the general will on a geographical basis. By virtue of an accident the clergy, with whom much power rested, did not sit in the Commons at all; they used to vote their taxes in convocation. A lower house, without clergy, represented two other specific interests in the land, those of the knights and burgesses.
Such was the organization of society in the Middle Ages; these two interests might have been represented in separate chambers. Yet other chambers might have been constituted to represent further interests in the land. Finland and Sweden had four chambers of Parliament. In this country there are signs that Edward I intended a House of lawyers. If they had been constituted, the separate chambers of clergy, knights, burgesses and lawyers might all have disagreed. An evolution from the mediaeval pattern of power which I have praised into the absolute rule of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great is not necessary. Our own history shows one form in which, under a hereditary regime, we may avoid such absolutism. The attempts of the monarchy in the 17th century to gain complete power were thwarted by the reading which our judges gave to the law. We are accustomed now to the idea that it is the function of the judiciary merely to interpret a statute as it is; that is to say, as it has been enacted by the overwhelming authority of an elected Parliament. A hundred years ago the judges were not so tame. It was a part of their role then to supply the omissions of the legislature by making a statute say what it ought. During the period of celebrated constitutional crisis in the 17th century, they went further still. Coke held he might declare that an act of the legislature was void.
]]>Introductory Note: Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (1939-2011) was an Austrian Catholic Traditionalist philosopher who was influential among conservatives and traditionalists in the Germanophone world. He is particularly well-known for his extensive corpus of works dealing with conservative, traditionalist, and religious theories and portraits of numerous thinkers involved in these philosophies. However, his works and thought are, unfortunately, not well- known in the Anglophone world. In order to help introduce Kaltenbrunner to the English- speaking world and to encourage further studies and translations, we have chosen to interview Martin Johannes Grannenfeld – a German Catholic Conservative and editor of the website Geistbraus – who is among those who have studied Kaltenbrunner’s works in depth and has been inspired by them.
Lucian Tudor: How did you first become acquainted with Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner and his work?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: It happened by mere chance. Around 2003, I read about the mythological figure of Prester John, a mighty oriental Christian priest-king during the Middle Ages, who was prepared to help the crusaders with a great army. I was somewhat fascinated by this figure, thus I looked for literature about him – and in the Bavarian State Library in Munich I found a book named Johannes ist sein Name. Priesterkönig, Gralshüter, Traumgestalt by an author I didn’t know then – Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner. From the very first sentence I was thrilled. Unlike many other scholars, Kaltenbrunner didn’t demystify the legend. Quite on the contrary, he revealed its metahistorical core, and outlined a fascinating, rich, and deeply symbolic cosmos of ways to see our world and the beyond. I understood immediately that I had found an author whose writings were different from everything I had read before, and who would certainly keep me occupied for quite a while.
Lucian Tudor: Kaltenbrunner has written extensive studies on Dionysius the Areopagite, Prester John, and Anne Catherine Emmerich. Can you tell us about these figures and what you found most significant about them in Kaltenbrunner’s books on them?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner wrote two large books about Dionysius and Prester John. His work about Anne Catherine Emmerich is much shorter and less complex. He intended to write another extensive study about Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king from the Old Testament, but there exist only drafts of this work.
His book about Prester John was written in 1989 and published in 1993. Its first sentence, “Prester John has never lived and is nonetheless one of the most influential figures of the Middle Ages,” can be regarded as a motto: the mystical, invisible world can be more real than the visible everyday life. Subsequently Kaltenbrunner drafted a complex picture of this metahistorical
“John” – comprising not only Prester John himself, but also his spiritual ancestors John the Evangelist, his disciple John the Presbyter, and the esoteric school of “Johannides” – which is not primarily meant as a historical fact, but rather as a “Johannide,” i.e. a mythologic-symbolic way of thinking. In the second half of his book, Kaltenbrunner linked Prester John with the other great myth of the High Middle Ages: the Holy Grail – and interpreted some of the Grail epics against the background of the Johannide philosophy.
The other book, Dionysius vom Areopag. Das Unergründliche, die Engel und das Eine, was published in 1996. It is even more voluminous, comprising more than 1000 pages. Like the book about John, it focuses on one figure – Dionysius the Areopagite – and draws a specific theology out of this encounter. Like John, the figure “Dionysius” is composed from several single persons by the same name: a) Dionysius the Areopagite from the Bible, b) the author of the famous writings, c) the bishop of Paris from the 3rd century, d) the Greek God Dionysos, to whom the name Dionysius is dedicated. Starting with multifarious reflections on the Greek and Christian spiritual background of these figures, Kaltenbrunner finally sketches – inspired by Dionysius’ negative theology – a great picture of a hierarchical world, which comprises everything from the ugliest scarab up to the nine spheres of angels, and above all, the inexpressible and incomprehensible God – the “One,” as Dionysius calls Him.
Lucian Tudor: From your reading, what are the most important principles of Kaltenbrunner’s religious philosophy?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: 1. The Invisible is real. 2. History is full of symbolic meaning. 3. Legends, myths and tradition are important keys to the Eternal. 4. The esoteric core of all religions converges.
How does Kaltenbrunner believe we should understand the Sacred and the mystical experience?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner is strongly influenced by negative theology and Platonism. God only discloses Himself through the hierarchy – the great Jacob’s Ladder where the angels descend and ascend, and our knowledge of the Eternal with them. We can ascend the Ladder, but we can never reach God: the inner core of His essence is beyond our thinking and our language. Kaltenbrunner insists that Buddha, Lao-Tse, Shankara, and Meister Eckhart would have been able to communicate, because they were very far in their hierarchical way of understanding the divine mysteries.
Lucian Tudor: Kaltenbrunner appears to have been very knowledgeable about a variety of religious beliefs and sects; what led him, in particular, to Catholic religiosity?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner, born 1939 in Vienna, was raised as a Catholic. However, after he grew up, his belief took a back seat, and his interest in politics, history and culture became more important. Catholic thinkers like Franz von Baader remained important for him, but it was only in the mid-nineties – after the publication of his Johannes and before his Dionysius – that he rediscovered his faith. Father Georg Alois Oblinger, a Catholic priest who accompanied Kaltenbrunner during his last years, told that one day, while strolling in his garden,
Kaltenbrunner suddenly understood that God really existed. He had always had sympathy for the Catholic Church (at least in its traditional form, since he didn’t like the modern liturgy and the Popes Paul VI and John Paul II) – but he had looked to it simply in a cultural way, not in the way of a believer. His Dionysius is a striking testimony of his newly discovered faith: For example (inspired by the Old Testament story of Balaam’s donkey), he asks in all naivety if some sudden, irritated movement of our domestic animals might be caused by sudden encounters with angels, invisible for humans…?
Lucian Tudor: We often encounter nowadays people who ask for “scientific proof” that God and the supernatural exist. How does Kaltenbrunner address this kind of mentality?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Mostly he ignores it. His Dionysius, the only major book he wrote after he became a believer himself, is obviously addressed towards an empathic, traditionalist reader. Kaltenbrunner’s concern was not primarily apologetics, but the conveyance of his spiritual insights to like-minded persons.
Lucian Tudor: Kaltenbrunner discussed in his works a vast variety of philosophers with differing viewpoints, some of them not even Christian. How did he reconcile his Catholic beliefs with his interest in the works of “Pagan” intellectuals such as Ludwig Klages and Julius Evola?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner had an exceptional knowledge of Occidental thinkers, writers, and artists – some famous, some less known, some virtually forgotten. He wrote several hundred essay-portraits about them, most of which have been collected in his six “Europe” volumes, consisting of two series: Europa. Seine geistigen Quellen in Portraits aus zwei Jahrtausenden (three volumes, 1981-85) and Vom Geist Europas (three volumes, 1987-92). Kaltenbrunner had always pled for an “inspired Christianity” (“geistdurchwehtes Christentum”) without any ideological blinders. This explains why even after his rediscovery of faith he continued to be interested in all the different thinkers he had known and portrayed before. However, Julius Evola and the “Traditionalist” school founded by Rene Guenon held an exceptional position in Kaltenbrunner’s philosophy. Their concept of Integral Tradition, the Sacred, kingship, and priesthood was very close to Kaltenbrunner’s own views. Leopold Ziegler, the Catholic exponent of the Traditionalist school, was especially influential to Kaltenbrunner. His book about Prester John can in fact be read as a transformation of Guenon’s and Evola’s philosophy into the spiritual cosmos of Christianity.
Lucian Tudor: What are essential principles of Kaltenbrunner’s theory of Conservatism?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner pointed out that conservatism cannot be a synonym for intellectual idleness. Referring to a poem by Goethe on breathing in and breathing out, he described conservatism as a sophisticated balance between things that stay and things that change. He thought that the real conservative has to be un-conservative in some matters, open to new solutions in order to prevent destruction of human culture and society as a whole. For example, nowadays, with war and poverty being absent from Europe, the contemporary conservative has to develop new ways of struggle, battle, heroism, and asceticism.
Lucian Tudor: How does Kaltenbrunner understand Tradition, specifically, and how does he believe that traditional values can be revived in the modern world?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: The concept of “Tradition” became important for Kaltenbrunner in the 80’s. As mentioned before, he got more and more influenced by Integral Traditionalism as taught by Guenon and his followers. Parallel to the shift from “conservatism” to “traditionalism,” Kaltenbrunner’s concern in changing today’s world declined. He focused more and more on the single, remote individual, who preserves Tradition during the “spiritual winter” – a human network scattered through space and time, but unified in spirit. During the last fifteen years of his life, he took the most radical consequence of this world-view, becoming a hermit, living on his own in the countryside, without a telephone, without even a door bell, just with his books and his large garden.
Lucian Tudor: Traditionalists are often associated with a “cyclical” view of history in which the world goes through lengthy stages, beginning with a Golden Age and ending in a Dark Age. This is opposed to the “linear” and “progressive” views of history, although there are arguably other perspectives. Considering his Traditionalist influences, could you tell us if Kaltenbrunner held the cyclical view of history or did he offer another view?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner certainly never held the cyclical view in a strictly “pagan” or “Indian” sense that after a huge fire everything starts again. Nevertheless, Kaltenbrunner was a cultural pessimist – his favourite centuries lay a long time in the past: the Greek antiquity, the High Middle Ages, the Baroque Period or the days of Goethe. Unlike Guénon and Evola, however, he was not very interested in speculation about a prehistoric “Golden Age.” As a literary person, an era without written documents did not concern him too much – with the only exception of the first chapters of Genesis, especially about the Nephilim and Melchizedek, with whom he dealt in his Dionysius.
Lucian Tudor: What are the fundaments of Kaltenbrunner’s theory of culture?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Kaltenbrunner never sketched an explicit theory of culture. Culture meant for him rather a never-ending dialogue with thinkers and poets from all times. He did not approach thinkers from a modern, patronizing, “enlightened” position, but as equals, at eye level, no matter how ancient and strange they may be. In the beginning of his Dionysius he even wrote a personal letter to his hero. Kaltenbrunner is certainly more attracted by non-mainstream authors, individuals, and often forgotten thinkers, but he also adored well-known and famous writers like Goethe, Novalis, and Angelus Silesius.
Lucian Tudor: What did Kaltenbrunner say about social ethics, the individual’s role, and holism?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: A common topos in Kaltenbrunner’s philosophy is, as abovementioned, the remote individual preserving knowledge for the society. Kaltenbrunner often mentioned that the world as a whole is threatened by nuclear, ecological, and spiritual destruction, and that the effort of an elite is required to prevent or at least attenuate the upcoming catastrophe. Hence his
sympathy for ascetics, hermits, mystics, monks, thinkers and writers in general. Particularly, the ecological concern is quite special for Kaltenbrunner and distinguishes him from many fellow conservatives, who abandoned environmental issues after the political left took possession of this complex in the late 80s. In his last years, living in harmony with nature became more and more important for Kaltenbrunner – he grew ecological food in his own garden and did not even possess a car. But all this was not condensed into a theory (he did not longer write texts during his last 15 years), but mere practical exercise.
Lucian Tudor: What did Kaltenbrunner conclude about the problem of secret societies and conspiracy theories?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: Frankly speaking, Kaltenbrunner did not see secret societies as a “problem” at all, but as an important means for the conservation of ideas rejected by the mainstream. He wrote a short text on the matter in 1986, entitled “Geheimgesellschaften als exemplarische Eliten” (“Secret Societies as Exemplary Elites”), which was included into the second edition of his book Elite. Erziehung für den Ernstfall. In this sketch, he did not only describe Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Illuminati, etc., but also secret societies which managed to grow large and usurp a whole state – like the Bolsheviks in Russia, or formerly the Jesuits in Paraguay. However, he pointed out that this can be a possible escape from the typical loyalty conflict between the secret society and the state which every member has to face; his true sympathies lie without any doubt with the small, hidden groups without any political power. Kaltenbrunner’s text about secret societies could be regarded as a link between his earlier “conservative” and his later “traditional” views: getting less and less interested in changing the world in respect to the political, and more and more concerned about its spiritual renewal.
Lucian Tudor: Can you please summarize Kaltenbrunner’s position on political forms (monarchy, republic, democracy, etc.)? What political form did he see as ideal and did he believe that political corruption could be minimized in a certain system?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: In his heart of hearts, Kaltenbrunner was an aristocrat. Although he was sceptical about a restoration of the traditional nobility, he felt the necessity of a skilled elite in government, culture, and warfare. He did not directly reject democracy, but warned of the mediocrity which often accompanies it. In his early works, no specific sympathy for republic or monarchy is visible – aristocratic republics like Venice are approved by him as well. In the 80s, however, culminating in his Johannes, he is more and more absorbed by the idea of a universal Christian monarchy, with a supra-national emperor exercising spiritual-metapolitical leadership over the occidental Christianity – like it used to be in the best times of the Middle Ages, e.g. under the rule of Frederick Barbarossa or Emperor Charles IV.
Lucian Tudor: We are aware that very little of Kaltenbrunner’s work is available in English and he is not well-known in the Anglophone world. In your opinion, what is the best starting point from Kaltenbrunner’s works? Also, what would you suggest is the best book to translate first out of works?
Martin J. Grannenfeld: I would suggest the same book which happened to be my first one:
Johannes ist sein Name – Kaltenbrunner’s great essay about Prester John. This is in my opinion his best written and most inspiring book, comprising everything that makes Kaltenbrunner so unique. It is shorter, more concise and also more optimistic than his later opus magnum Dionysius vom Areopag, and yet more intriguing and unconventional than his earlier political and cultural writings. I really hope that one day an English translation of this work (and of other works by Kaltenbrunner) will be available! This will be a big step to make this great thinker of our time better known.
Lucian Tudor: Thank you very much for the interview.
]]>Two books published in the early 1950s by two European aristocrats merit careful study by every contemporary European conservative since they express the authentic reactions of authentic noblemen to the revolutionary changes that Europe has for long suffered under the yoke of democracy and totalitarianism. These are Erik, Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Time (1952) and Barone Giulio Cesare Evola’s Gli Uomini e le rovine (Men among the Ruins) (1953). Both Evola and Kuehnelt-Leddihn were opposed to democracy for its levelling tendencies which they considered to be a mere transitional stage towards totalitarian systems communist as well as capitalist. However, while Kuehnelt-Leddihn focused on the democratic mania of equality – which he considered incompatible with liberty or true freedom – without clearly attributing this mania to the middle classes, Evola unequivocally identified the bourgeoisie and their innate mercantile nature – which militates against the warrior ethos of the earlier aristocratic societies – as the source of the evils of democracy.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909-99) was, as a member of the aristocracy of the Habsburg Empire, a monarchist and “arch-liberal” in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville. He devoted his career mostly to championing the liberties that he felt were threatened by democratic and socialistic doctrines. Between 1937 and 1947 he lived and taught in America, returning to America regularly after that time, from his native Austria, in order to lecture and continue his mission of improving American understanding of the mind and mentality of the Europeans. He was associated with the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and, before that, with the Ludwig von Mises Institute from which the Acton Institute had branched off as a Christian offshoot. He was constantly aware of the difference between the Catholic monarchical order to which he belonged and the various democratic and totalitarian systems that sprouted all around him in post-1914 Europe, and his principal concern was to combat the levelling impulse of democracy which leads to totalitarianism and the deprivation of liberties.
Already in 1943, during the war, he had written a work on political history called The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at large (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Pub. Co.) which discussed the defects of democracy and socialism in Europe, as well as in America and Russia. I shall restrict my observations mainly to the second of his political studies, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Time (Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1952), and refer to the first only for contextual substantiation. The first part of Liberty or Equality is devoted to an examination of the inextricable connection between democracy and tyranny. In his earlier work, The Menace of the Herd, he had highlighted the connection between the bourgeoisie of Europe and the development of capitalism. He pointed specially to the Protestant Reformation as that movement which liberated the capitalist spirit by strengthening the prestige of the usurious Jews in European society. The Protestant countries of northern Europe particularly developed with extraordinary speed into capitalist states while the southern lagged behind in more traditional societies:
“Jean Cauvin’s theocratic city state of Geneva had still a few aristocratic traits, but its soul was already essentially ochlocratic and bourgeois. At the time of his death we find a highly developed middle-class civilization and culture of a capitalistic and semirepublican character in the countries of the Rhine valley — in Switzerland, in the Palatinate, in Alsace, in Holland — but a similar process under the same accelerating influence can also be observed in districts further away: in southern France, in the British Isles, and in eastern Hungary.”
The problem of this new rule of money and technology was that, unlike the Catholic south, it was culturally sterile:
“Apart from a few poets we see these followers of Calvin contributing very little to the arts and letters. They lacked painters, musicians, architects of originality; hilarity was for them suspect and their humor was limited.”
There arose in the north also the dangerous slogan of “progress”:
“The old hierarchic and personal societies were hammered into shapeless masses by the two great products of “progress” — the megalopolis and the factory. “Progress” is (a) a collectivistic and (b) a purely urban ideal…”
And hot on the heels of this new-fangled idea of “progress” came the notion of “humanity”:
“Humanity as such scarcely existed as a living principle in the Middle Ages because man had in regard to eternity no collective existence. Individuals sacrificed themselves for their families, their manorial lords, kings, cities, rights, privileges, religion, their beloved Church or the woman they loved, in fact, for everything or anybody to which or to whom they had a personal relationship. The anonymous sand-heap “humanity” was unknown to medieval man and even the concept of the “nation” was not equivalent to a gray mass of unilingual citizens but was looked upon as a hierarchy of complicated structure … The collective singular “humanity” was only created after the Reformation as a living unit.”
The bourgeoisie responsible for capitalism and democracy however were not in sympathy with the lower classes, which were more closely allied with the aristocracy:
“The capitalistic bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century (mainly if we consider the upper-middle classes) stood for an election system which excluded the lower classes even from indirect influence in the government. The middle-class “democrat” frequently dreads the manual laborer, who often sided with the aristocrat, and he usually hates the peasant politically, partly on account of the ingrained loathing of the agrarian elements against the city, partly on account of the conservative- patriarchal structure and tendencies of the farming population.”
Thus the will-o’-the-wisp of “humanity” rendered men not more “fraternal” but less:
“Democratistic culture and civilization lowered them to the unhierarchic sand heap but, paradoxically, did not bring them any nearer to each other. The thought of a common creator and a common origin can alone unite human beings.”
This is indeed the source of the alienation of modern democracies:
“In the hierarchic Tyrol, people are much nearer to each other than in “democratic” New York, and even the Albanian practising his vendetta is more good neighborly than the inhabitant of modern Berlin or Stockholm.”
Interestingly Kuehnelt-Leddihn traces the beginnings of popular democracy or “ochlocracy” to the materialistic thought of Jean Cauvin and the denial of the next world by the Enlightenment thinkers who ushered in the French Revolution:
“There is little doubt that atheism, agnosticism, and the denial of the other world are partially responsible for the rapid technical development which gave us, apart from exquisite instruments for mass destruction, various means to bridge time and space.”
Mass distribution of commodities through technology makes everything available to everyone because “Nobody should have the right to pride himself on being the sole possessor of a specific thing” and the sociological result is a rapid collectivisation:
“Democracy in its first stages is intrinsically a struggle against privileges and later democratism continues this bitter, depersonalizing struggle against everybody and anybody with the help of the demoniacal magic of technique.”
Universal education too is identified by Kuehnelt-Leddihn as one of the “collectivist” features of democracy:
“Instead of sticking to the hierarchic principle in the most aristocratic of all domains — intellectual education — a whole corollary of compromises with the mass spirit were made in this field; education became thus finally nothing but another factor of leveling applanation side by side with industrialism.”
It is significant also that the middle classes were especially opposed to the Catholic Church on account of its hierarchical nature and its preoccupation with mysteries, which in a democracy had to be rationalised by the half-educated masses. As he notes,
“It must also be kept in mind that the class most antagonistic to the Church has been during the past centuries the middle class, or the bourgeoisie. It is the middle class in France, Austria, Germany, Bohemia, and Moravia which shows the greatest percentage of Protestants.”
Unlike Evola, Kuehnelt-Leddihn does not consider liberalism as a distinguishing characteristic of democracy but, rather, he considers democracy’s characteristic obsession to be the desire for equality, which as mentioned above contradicts the natural desire for liberty. Freedom itself he defines in Liberty or Equality as the liberty to develop one’s personality:
“The greatest amount of self-determination which in a given situation is feasible, reasonable and possible. As a means to safeguarding man’s happiness and protecting his personality it is an intermediary end, and thus forms part of the common good. It is obvious that under these circumstances it cannot be brutally sacrificed to the demands of absolute efficiency nor to efforts towards a maximum of material welfare.”
In this context, he takes particular care to distinguish Anglo-Saxon democracy from Continental, for the former is directed from above and retains the character of an “aristocratic republic”, whereas the latter tends to mass democracy.which leads to totalitarianism. He also reminds us that:
“Some of the best minds in Europe (and in America) were haunted by the fear that there were forces, principles and tendencies in democracy which were, either in their very nature or, at least, in their dialectic potentialities, inimical to many basic human ideals — freedom being one among them.”
The principal defects of democracy derive from its materialistic concerns, thus its mass production, militarism, ethnic nationalism, racialism and all tendencies toward “simplification” that tend towards uniformity and sameness, what he calls “identitarianism”. He quotes Lord Acton’s remark that “Liberty was the watchword of the middle class, equality of the lower”. This is however different from his own statement in The Menace of the Herd that “Liberty is the ideal of aristocracy, just as equality stands for the bourgeoisie and fraternity for the peasantry”. Indeed, if equality were the prime demand of the lower classes as Lord Acton had suggested, the levelling that Kuehnelt-Leddihn points to is clearly not due to them but rather to elites that organise them as “masses of men who are ‘alike and equal’ attracted by small and vulgar pleasures”. His quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville in Liberty or Equality indeed makes this quite clear:
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”
We see from this description of the workings of democracy that the latter is a maternalistic caricature of the paternalistic political ideal that we shall see is propounded by Evola. Even though Kuehnelt-Leddihn does not, like Evola, blame the bourgeoisie for this forced levelling of the lower classes, he does notice that capitalist mass production and nationalistic militarism are creations of the bourgeois capitalists rather than of the proletariat.
We may note also that he considers racial nationalism as a form of “proletarianism” where whole nations are elevated to pseudo-aristocratic status. However, it may be inferred from his own discussion of the different attitudes to nationalism and racialism among Catholics and Protestants (see below) that this nationalism and racialism are not so much characteristics of the lower classes as of those who exploit the democratic system, which must be principally the capitalist middle classes.
In general, Kuehnelt-Leddihn does not accentuate the dangerous revolutions of the bourgeoise in monarchical or aristocratic states nor their baneful effect on the lower classes, which it has little sympathy for. He does not also clearly relate the Jews in European society to the transformations from monarchies to democracies and collectivist societies that European countries have undergone in recent history although he cursorily hints at the Old Testament roots of the materialism and obscurantism that mark Protestant democracies. His main concern being the defence of individual and social liberty, he studies the gradual transformation of democratic governments into tyrannies. If in democratic states actual dictators do not emerge on the scene, totalitarianism manifests itself nevertheless in the bureaucratic apparatus of the state which caters to the social welfare needs of the lower classes. Here again he is, on the surface at least, rather lenient towards the middle classes since he does not remark that a benevolent state bureaucracy might cater to the genuine needs of the people while it may also interfere in the financial ambitions of the middle classes.
In the development of democracy into totalitarian tyranny Kuehnelt-Leddihn rightly notices the crucial role played by Protestantism. Unlike Evola who does not discuss the nature or dangers of Protestantism in his critique of modern Catholicism, Kuehnelt-Leddihn squarely places the blame for democratic degeneration on Protestantism. He notes that, ideologically, democracies depend on relativist principles which are themselves characteristic of the Protestant movements:
“Relativism, which the clear thinker and logician rejects, plays an enormous role in the political and spiritual realm of democracy. We leave it to the psychologist to determine the feminine implications of such relativism. But relativism and readiness for compromise go hand in hand, and an absolute refusal to compromise on fundamentals (a Catholic rather than a Protestant trait) would soon bring democratic machinery to a standstill.”
While Catholics are unpliable when it comes to dogma, Protestants are rather more subjective in their approach to doctrinal matters. Catholics are consequently more convinced of their principles and do not favour latitudinarianism. As he notes,
“Catholic dogma, except for an “increase in volume”, has remained unchanged, and commentary on it has varied only within certain limits. Protestantism, on the other hand, is in a constant process of evolution. Whereas the faith of Catholics can be exposed to the process of diminuation de la foi (“diminution of the faith”), that of the Protestant is also subject to the rétrêcissement de la foi (”narrowing of the faith”).”
On the other hand, Protestantism is a more fanatical religion that insists, in a mediaevalist and Old Testament manner, on God alone while Catholicism has always considered God and Man with equal care. This explains the wonderful artistic explosion of the Renaissance and the Baroque, which are relatively poorly represented in Protestant lands:
“Thus the key to the real understanding of the Catholic cultures of the European Continent and of South and Central America is, for the Protestant as well as for the Catholic of the British Isles and North America, an understanding and appreciation of the cultural, artistic and intellectual values of Humanism, the Renaissance and the Baroque.”
The Protestant insistence that “religion is a private matter” is completely opposed to the Church’s concern with the “totality of human culture” (39), culture itself being distinguished from civilisation, which caters to the merely material comforts of mankind:
“Yet while civilization is basically lack of friction, smoothness, comfort, and material enjoyment we have to look at traditional Christianity — with its violent opposition to euthanasia, abortion, contraception, pacifism, and individualism — as being something uncomfortable.”
Protestantism and Calvinism also posses an Old Testament tendency to take earthly success as sign of divine favour1 which is absent in Catholic nations, “where the beggar is a ‘useful’ member of society and commercialism is not highly appreciated.”
Protestants fearful of social fragmentation naturally tend to the lowest common denominator that mark collectivist systems. Catholics, on the other hand, are more personally developed than the Protestants, who through their tendency to compromise, solidarity, cooperation, neighbourliness tend to be more conformist than Catholics, and even more bigoted. In fact one of the distinguishing features of democracy itself – for Kuehnelt-Leddihn as well as for Evola – is that it is ‘anti-personalistic’ and ‘collectivistic’ and its tendency to exert “horizontal pressure” results in totalitarian systems.
It is not surprising thus that “Calvin established in Geneva the first truly totalitarian police-state in Europe”. The French Revolution too was of Protestant inspiration:
“It is also obvious that the ideological substance of the French Revolution is almost in its entirety the product of Protestant dialectics. Although there are some minor Cartesian and Jansenistic elements in the political philosophy of ’89 and ’92, the main impulses came from America, Britain, Holland and Switzerland.”
This is why also, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn reminds us, “Count Keyserling calls America socialistic in a deeper sense and arrives at the conclusion that “most Americans want to obey as no soldiers have ever done.”
Catholics, by contrast, are undemocratic by nature:
it is virtually certain that the Catholic nations, with their love for personal liberty, their earthly pessimism, their pride and scepticism,will never in their hearts accept parliamentary democracy.
Catholic countries deprived of monarchy tend to bureaucraticism, anarchy or party-dictatorships rather than to democracy:
“We have to ask ourselves whether in the most extreme cases, when violent temperament is combined with thorough ideological incompatibility (Spain, Portugal,Greece, South America), government from above on a bureaucratic basis is not the only safeguard against the alternative of anarchy and party dictatorship.”
Catholicism is essentially paternalistic and hierarchical, qualities that Evola too prescribes for his organic conservative state. Catholics favour patriarchs but not policeman, they can even often be anarchists and militate against the State. While the uniformity of the ruling political parties in Protestant countries facilitates nationalism as well as totalitarianism, Catholics are not popular nationalists nor do they favour centralisation, but rather federalism (201). Kuehnelt-Leddihn gives the example of the Geman federalist Constantin Frantz (1817-91) who opposed centralised totalitarian regimes and he reminds us that the Prussians too were not pan-Germanic but rather dynastic.
The political solution to the inherent problems of democratic government that is propunded by Kuehelt-Leddhin is a hereditary monarchy with local organs of self-government. Unlike dictators, monarchs are restricted by Christian law and here the doctrine of human imperfection, or “original sin” serves as a moderating influence in monarchies as well as it does in democracies. Monarchy, like Catholicism, is paternalistic and not “fraternal”. The reason of the superiority of such a parternalistic rule – typical also of Catholic orders – is that it obliges the ruler to be more responsible than democratically elected leaders are. Monarchies are not oligarchical, plutocratic or prone to corruption since money does not rule the state as in democracies. Further, the monarch not only represents political responsibility but also fosters ‘great’ statesmen within his government possessed of a comparable commitment to the duties of a state. A monarchy is also more efficient with its bureaucracy than a democracy is and more capable of undertaking grand ventures.
Monarchs are in most cases biologically superior and hereditary rule constitutes an organic rule which is contrary to variable party rule. They are trained for rule from childhood and have a moral and spiritual education for their office. At the same time, they have greater respect for subjects and protect minorities since they do not depend on any majority support. Monarchies also tend to be international and ethnically mixed thus serving as a unifying force.
As democracies depend on what the Jewish Socialist historian Harold Laski called a ‘common framework of reference’ or consensus, there is in fact less freedom of expression in democracies than in monarchical states. This is particularly true of Catholic states which are marked by different levels of enlightenment and thereby do not fall into the trap of Protestant utopianism. Catholicism does not believe that all are capable of the same education and understanding since it is constantly conscious of the notion of human imperfection or ‘original sin’. The liberality of the Catholic in general arises from generosity and not from relativistic reasoning that forcibly reconciles opposites.
Unfortunately the greater liberties enjoyed in traditional Catholic monarchies have been curtailed in recent times by Protestant regimes. But Kuehelt-Leddihn reminds us that only 13 percent of the population of European continent are followers of Protestant creeds. And it should be borne in mind:
“That the countries of continental Europe all need a mission, a final end, a metaphysical goal—which even elections, increased exports, more calories and better dental care are not going to obviate.”
It is of vital importance therefore that one must “strive to help the European continent find its own soul”. Following Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s discussion of monarchism and Catholicism and their natural opposition to republicanism and Protestantism, we may assume that what is needed is a restoration, insofar as it is possible, of the Catholic monarchical system – “Only thus can the Continent hope to become again what it used to be, a tierra libre y real—a Free and Royal Land”
*
The political tenets of the Sicilian nobleman Julius Evola (1898-1974) have been somewhat obscured by his ‘traditionalist’ interests in esoteric systems such as Hermeticism, Zen Buddhism and Yoga. People have a general notion that he was a sympathiser of both the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist movements but a closer reading of his later works especially his major political work, Men among the Ruins (tr. Guido Stucco, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002) will reveal that he was closer to the Fascist ideology especially as represented by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile than to the racialist thinkers of the National Socialist Reich such as Alfred Rosenberg or Walther Darré.
More forcefully than Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Evola identifies the bourgeoisie as the source of the problems of the modern world since they are the chief representatives of the doctrines of Liberalism based on the primacy of the individual. Liberalism is a materialistic and utilitarian philosophy insofar as it takes into consideration only the material needs of the individuals that constitute society. Its feigned campaigns of liberty are belied by the fact that exploitative capitalism is a natural result of bourgeois materialism:
“The turning point was the advent of a view of life that, instead of keeping human needs within natural limits in view of what is truly worthy of pursuit, adopted as its highest ideal an artificial increase and multiplication of human needs and the necessary means to satisfy them, in total disregard for the growing slavery this would inexorably constitute for the individual and the collective whole.”
The individualism fostered by Liberalism results in an atomism and fragmentation of society that is then countered by forms of totalitarianism which are equally inadequate in their merely quantitative and economic concerns. Totalitarianism is, according to Evola, order imposed from above on a formless people. Marx was indeed right in attacking the bourgeoisies but erred seriously in forcing the proletariat to serve as the cornerstone of a utopian society that is characterised by sterile uniformity:
“Totalitarianism, in order to assert itself, imposes uniformity. In the final analysis, totalitarianism rests and relies on the inorganic world of quantity to which individualistic disintegration has led, and not on the world of quality and of personality.”
Thus totalitarianism destroys all the vestiges of organic development that previous bourgeois states may have retained from their aristocratic past:
“Totalitarianism, though it reacts against individualism and social atomism, brings a final end to the devastation of what may still survive in a society from the previous “organic” phase: quality; articulated forms, castes and classes, the values of personality, true freedom, daring and responsible initiative, and heroic feats.”
The exaltation of the “worker” in socialist as well as collectivist systems is also a universalisation of the essentially servile nature of liberalist economic thought. The solution to the problems inherent in any bourgeois ordering of society consists in the development of personality rather than individualism among the people. Among nations too autarchy should be encouraged rather than the internationalism of global commerce:
“It is better to renounce the allure of improving general social and economic conditions and to adopt a regime of austerity than to become enslaved to foreign interests or to become caught up in world processes of reckless economic hegemony and productivity that are destined to sweep away those who have set them in motion.”
The necessary control of the economy can be undertaken only by the State. The class conflicts focused on by Marx should be corrected by a corporative system or a system of estates such as in the Middle Ages:
“The fundamental spirit of corporativism was that of a community of work and productive solidarity, based on the principles of competence, qualification, and natural hierarchy, with the overall system characterized by a style of active impersonality, selflessness, and dignity.”
Of prime importance in the corporative system of earlier European history is the fact that
“The usury of “liquid assets”—the equivalent of what today is the banking and financial employment of capital—was regarded as a Jewish business, far from affecting the whole system.”
In other words, Jewish usury was, if utilised by states, always regarded as a feature of outcasts of European society.
Evola’s solution to the social injustice of capitalism focusses on the elimination of the parasitical capitalists and the deproletariatisation of the workers:
“The basic conditions for the restoration of normal conditions are, on the one hand, the deproletarization of the worker and, on the other hand, the elimination of the worst type of capitalist, who is a parasitical recipient of profits and dividends and who remains extraneous to the productive process.”
Unlike Marx who sought to turn the proletariat into owners and directors of companies, Evola maintains that the proper eradication of the evils of capitalism should begin with the curtailment of the rampant profit-motivation of the companies and their directors by the State. All companies should therefore, in general, be responsible to the State. All national economic issues should be dealt with in the Lower House of parliaments while the Upper House should be the sole representative of the political life of the nation. The latter body cannot be an elected one but must be appointed – and for life.
In fact this Upper House should act as what Evola calls the ruling elite or “Order” of a nation. He would like to see the core of this Order to be constituted of members of the old aristocracies that are “still standing … who are valuable not only because of the name they carry, but also because of who they are, because of their personality.” Aiding this core would be a class of warriors, who are naturally not the same as soldiers, who are merely paid military employees. Warriors are ruled by concepts of honour and loyalty to the nation, such as were found recently in the Prussian military echelons, and the strict subordination of the mercantile class to this warrior class is an essential feature of Evola’s political doctrine.
For the state is indeed essentially a masculine socio-political phenomenon in contrast to society, which is mainly feminine. The state formed by Maennerbunde or male ruling elites:
“Is defined through hierarchical, heroic, ideal, anti-hedonistic, and, to a degree, even anti- eudemonistic values that set it apart from the order of naturalistic and vegetative life.”
The reason for the exclusive position of ruling males in a state is that:
“Every true political unity appears as the embodiment of an idea and a power, thus distinguishing itself from every form of naturalistic association or ‘natural right,’ and also from every societal aggregation determined by mere social, economic, biological, utilitarian, or eudemonistic factors.”
This power is in its origins sacred, as it was for example in the concept of imperium in the Roman Empire for it expresses a transcendent order, a concept that will be familiar to students of the Fascist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile.
Democracy and socialism signal a dangerous shift from the rule of the masculine state to that of the feminine society and of the demos. A State is not a ‘nation’ either since a nation is typically a motherland, even if it is occasionally called a fatherland in some countries. The Romans, Franks, as well as the Arabs who spread Islam were all constituted of Maennerbunde at first, and only when they degenerated into democracies did they become ‘nations’.
Since any conservative revolution needs to restore the primacy of the warrior ethos it must begin by opposing the mercantile one of the bourgeoisie:
“The ‘conservative’ idea to be defended must not only have no connection with the class that has replaced the fallen aristocracy and exclusively has the character of a mere economic class (i.e., the capitalist bourgeoisie)—but it must also be resolutely opposed to it. What needs to be ‘preserved’ and defended in a “revolutionary fashion” is the general view of life and of the State that, being based on higher values and interests, definitely transcends the economic plane, and thus everything that can be defined in terms of economic classes.
This would also require the formation of a new elite or Order:
“The essential task ahead requires formulating an adequate doctrine, upholding principles that have been thoroughly studied, and, beginning from these, giving birth to an Order. This elite, differentiating itself on a plane that is defined in terms of spiritual virility, decisiveness, and impersonality, and where every naturalistic bond loses its power and value, will be the bearer of a new principle of a higher authority and sovereignty; it will be able to denounce subversion and demagogy in whatever form they appear and reverse the downward spiral of the top-level cadres and the irresistible rise to power of the masses. From this elite, as if from a seed, a political organism and an integrated nation will emerge, enjoying the same dignity as the nations created by the great European political tradition. Anything short of this amounts only to a quagmire, dilletantism, irrealism, and obliquity.”
Disregarding the norms of a socialistic state the organic conservative state must be a “heroic” one that is not based on the family nucleus but on the Maennerbunde which produce the leaders of the state. These men will even abjure a family life for a dedication to the task of ruling:
“As far as a revolutionary-conservative movement is concerned, there is a need for men who are free from these bourgeois feelings. These men, by adopting an attitude of militant and absolute commitment, should be ready for anything and almost feel that creating a family is a “betrayal”; these men should live sine impedimentis, without any ties or limits to their freedom. In the past there were secular Orders where celibacy was the rule … the ideal of a “warrior society” obviously cannot be the petit-bourgeois and parochial ideal of “home and children”; on the contrary, I believe that in the personal domain the right to an ample degree of sexual freedom for these men should be acknowledged, against moralism, social conformism, and ‘heroism in slippers.'”
The organic conservative state will be based not on individuals but on persons, whose raison d’être is their personality and its higher development. This realisation of the personality of an individual is equivalent to his freedom. The ‘free’ person is indeed free of the claims of his lower nature and demands a complete self-mastery. The most highly developed or differentiated person is the absolute person or leader:
“The ‘absolute person’ is obviously the opposite of the individual. The atomic, unqualified, socialized, or standardized unity to which the individual corresponds is opposed in the absolute person by the actual synthesis of the fundamental possibilities and by the full control of the powers inherent in the idea of man (in the limiting case), or of a man of a given race (in a more relative, specialized, and historical domain): that is, by an extreme individuation that corresponds to a de-individualization and to a certain universalization of the types corresponding to it. Thus, this is the disposition required to embody pure authority, to assume the symbol and the power of sovereignty, or the form from above, namely the imperium.”
Thus, unlike Kuehnelt-Leddihn who championed hereditary monarchy, Evola seems to favour an enlightened dictator or one who belongs to a new aristocratic order of men.
The state formed by this elite will be not only organic but also hierarchical and firmly based on the principle of authority. In fact, this principle is the core of any organic state, which must necessarily grow from a definite centre:
“A State is organic when it has a center, and this centre is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way; it is organic when it ignores the division and the autonomization of the particular and when, by virtue of a system of hierarchical participation, every part within its relative autonomy performs its own function and enjoys an intimate con-nection with the whole. In an organic State we can speak of a “whole”—namely, something integral and spiritually unitary that articulates and unfolds itself—rather than a sum of elements within an aggregate, characterized by a disorderly clash of interests. The States that developed in the geographical areas of the great civilisations (whether they were empires, monarchies, aristocratic republics, or city-states) at their peak were almost without exception of this type. A central idea, a symbol of sovereignty with a corresponding, positive principle of authority was their foundation and animating force.”
The basis of all authority is itself a “transcendent” quality, as Gentile had also insisted:
“Conversely, the organic view presupposes something ‘transcendent’ or ‘from above’ as the basis of authority and command, without which there would automatically be no immaterial and substantial connections of the parts with the center; no inner order of single freedoms; no immanence of a general law that guides and sustains people without coercing them; and no supra-individual disposition of the particular, without which every decentralisation and articulation would eventually pose a danger for the unity of the whole system.”
Only an organic state can absorb all the manifold differences and conflicts that may exist within a state:
“Even contrasts and antitheses had their part in the economy of the whole; as they did not have the character of disorderly parts, they did not question the super-ordained unity of the organism, but rather acted as a dynamic and vivifying factor. Even the “opposition” of the early British parliamentary system was able to reflect a similar meaning (it was called “His Majesty’s most loyal opposition”), though it disappeared in the later party-ruled parliamentary regime.”
Nationalism too should be avoided if it is of the popular sort rather than one based on the concept of a spiritual nation:
In the first case, nationalism has a leveling and antiaristocratic function; it is like the prelude to a wider leveling, the common denominator of which is no longer the nation, but rather the International. In the second case, the idea of the nation may serve as the foundation for a new recovery and an important first reaction against the internationalist dissolution; it upholds a principle of differentiation that still needs to be further carried through toward an articulation and hierarchy within every single people.
His vision of a regenerated Europe is one of an organic, sacred empire, or imperium, centred not on ‘the concepts of fatherland and nation (or ethnic group)’ which ‘belong to an essentially naturalistic or ‘physical’ plane’ but on ‘a feeling of higher order, qualitatively very different from the nationalistic feeling rooted in other strata of the human being’.
“The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) was previously displayed in the European medieval world, which safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around a unum quod non est pars (a one that is not a part, to use Dante’s expression)— namely, a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State. But the principle of the Empire can have such a dignity only by transcending the political sphere in the strict sense, founding and legitimising itself with an idea, a tradition, and a power that is also spiritual.”
The chief hurdles to the formation of a new Europe are American cultural hegemony, the yoke of democratic government, and “the deep crisis of the authority principle and the idea of the State”. But even though the task of unifying Europe may be a formidable one it must be attempted, with the planning and organisation undertaken from the top down, by the new elite ‘Orders’ of the various nations that constitute it.
As regards the religious foundations of a State or Empire, Evola is remarkably pessimistic in his estimation of the power of Catholicism to provide these since he considers it to be excessively committed today to a liberal democratic path which has deprived it of its traditional political force. In fact he considers the anti-Ghibelline or Guelfian movement of the Middle Ages to be the very source of the secularisation of the modern State. Thus it would be better:
to travel an autonomous way, abandoning the Church to her destiny, considering her actual inability to bestow an official consecration on a true, great, traditional and super-traditional Right:
In spite of his callous treatment of the Catholic Church and its potential as a religious basis for a conservative State, Evola does examine in greater detail the subversive effects of another international sect, Judaism, whose political ambitions were exposed in the so-called Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1903) which, even if not based on fact, would represent a literary depiction of the totalitarian goals of the Jews. As Evola explains:
“The only important and essential point is the following: this writing is part of a group of texts that in various ways (more or less fantastic and at times even fictional) have expressed the feeling that the disorder of recent times is not accidental, since it corresponds to a plan, the phases and fundamental instruments of which are accurately described in the Protocols.”
The principal evil of the design of the international Jews is their thorough economisation of modern life:
“The economization of life, especially in the context of an industry that develops at the expense of agriculture, and a wealth that is concentrated on liquid capital and finance, proceeds from a secret design. The phalanx of the modern ‘economists’ followed this design, just as those who spread a demoralizing literature attack spiritual and ethical values and scorn every principle of authority.”
Not only was Marxism a useful tool of the Jews but also those biological and philosophcal doctrines that fostered atheism such as Darwin’s evolutionary biology and Nietzsche’s nihilism. The Jews further employ various tactics of subversion, having recourse to counterfeit doctrines of so-called “traditionalism” and “neo-spiritualism”:
The content of this “traditionalism” consists of habits, routines, surviving residues and vestiges of what once was, without a real understanding of the spiritual world and of what in them is not merely factual but has a character of perennial value.
The effect on the individual of these various subversive movements is
“To remove the support of spiritual and traditional values from the human personality, knowing that when this is accomplished it is not difficult to turn man into a passive instrument of the secret front’s direct forces and influences.”
The most efficacious way of combating the subversion of international Judaism or Zionism is for the new warriors to learn to operate on the metaphysical plane, maintaining an ‘unconditioned loyalty to an idea’ since that is ‘the only possible protection from occult war; where such loyalty falls short and where the contingent goals of ‘real politics’ are obeyed, the front of resistance is already undermined.’ As he warns those who wish to undertake a conservative revolution or counter-revolution:
“No fighter or leader on the front of counter-subversion and Tradition can be regarded as mature and fit for his tasks before developing the faculty to perceive this world of subterranean causes, so that he can face the enemy on the proper ground. We should recall the myth of the Learned Elders of the Protocols: compared to them, men who see only “facts” are like dumb animals. There is little hope that anything may be saved when among the leaders of a new movement there are no men capable of integrating the material struggle with a secret and inexorable knowledge, one that is not at the service of dark forces but stands instead on the side of the luminous principle of traditional spirituality.”
*
We see therefore that unlike Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Evola focuses on the bourgeoisie as the chief source of the democratic degeneration of modern Europe just as his discussion of the “occult” dimensions of the ongoing subversion helps one to concentrate on the international Jewry as the principal agents of subversion that must be combated in a counter-revolution. Unfortunately Evola does not place much hope on either a hereditary monarchy or Catholicism as the twin foundations of traditional European society but instead seeks to build a new knightly Order that will yield strong enlightened leaders for the European states.
The lack of enthusiasm for Catholicism in Evola’s discussion of the State is however corrected by Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s perceptive analysis of the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. In strong contrast to Evola’s negative attitude to the modern Church, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s account of political history places a marked emphasis on established religion, and especially on Catholicism, in his formulation of the conservative state. Any contemporary attempt to return Europe to its natural pre-democratic vitality may therefore have to start not only from Evola’s warnings of the dangers of the mercantile bourgeoisie and of the surreptitious war of the Jews against the European aristocratic traditions but also from Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s revelations of the deleterious effects that the relativist and materialist temper of Protestantism has had on modern European society.
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The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity:
A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation James C. Russell
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994
$19.95 US
xiv + 258 pp. _______________________________________________________
Reviewed by Samuel T. Francis, Ph.D.
Oswald Spengler wrote many years ago, “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.” What he meant was that Christianity’s endorsement of such ideas as universalism, egalitarianism, peace, world brotherhood, and universal altruism helped establish and legitimize the ethics and politics invoked by socialists and communists. Socialists and communists don’t always agree, however, which is why another German scholar, Karl Marx, pronounced that religion is in fact a conservatizing force, the opiate of the masses, the drug that prevents the workers of the world from rebelling against their class enemies.
Both of these Teutonic heavyweights might have profited from reading James C. Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, since it speaks, at least indirectly, to the tension between their different views of Christianity, differences that continue to be reflected in political and ideological disputes on the European and American right today. The main question in the controversy is this: Is Christianity a force that supports or opposes the efforts of the right to defend the European-American way of life? Christians on the right argue that their religious commitments are central to Western civilization, while pagans and secularists on the right (especially in Europe) argue, with Spengler, that Christianity undermines the West by pushing a universalism that rejects race, class, family, and even nation.
Mr. Russell, who holds a doctorate in historical theology from Fordham University and teaches at Saint Peter’s College, does not quite answer the question, but his immensely learned and closely reasoned book does suggest an answer. His thesis is that early Christianity flourished in the decadent, deracinated, and alienated world of late antiquity precisely because it was able to appeal to various oppressed or dissatisfied sectors of the population—slaves, urbanized proletarians, women, intellectuals, frustrated aristocrats, and the odd idealist repelled by the pathological materialism, brutality, and banality of the age.
But when Christian missionaries tried to appeal to the Germanic invaders by in- voking the universalism, pacifism, and egalitarianism that had attracted the alienated inhabitants of the empire, they failed. That was because the Germans practiced a folk religion that reflected ethnic homogeneity, social hierarchy, military glory and heroism, and “standards of ethical conduct … derived from a sociobiological drive for group survival through ingroup altruism.” Germanic religion and society were “world-accepting,” while Hellenic Christianity was “world-rejecting,” reflecting the influence of Oriental religions and ethics. By “Germans,” it should be noted, Mr. Russell does not mean modern residents of Germany but rather “the Gothic, Frankish, Saxon, Burgundian, Alamannic, Suevic, and Vandal peoples, but also… the Viking peoples of Scandinavia and the Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain.” With the exception of the Celts and the Slavs, “Germans” thus means almost the same thing as “European” itself.
Given the contradictions between the Christian ethics and world-view and those of the Indo-European culture of the Germanic peoples, the only tactic Christians could use was one of appearing to adopt Germanic values and claiming that Christian values were really compatible with them. The bulk of Mr. Russell’s scholarship shows how this process of accommodation took place in the course of about four centuries. The saints and Christ Himself were depicted as Germanic warrior heroes; both festivals and locations sacred in ancient Germanic cults were quietly taken over by the Christians as their own; and words and concepts with religious meanings and connotations were subtly redefined in terms of the new religion. Yet the final result was not that the Germans were converted to the Christianity they had originally encountered, but rather that that form of Christianity was “Germanized,” coming to adopt many of the same Indo-European folk values that the old pagan religion had celebrated.
Mr. Russell thus suggests, as noted above, a resolution of the debate over Christian universalism. The early Christianity that the Germans encountered contained a good many universalist tendencies, adapted and reinforced by the disintegrating social fabric and deracinated peoples of the late empire. But thanks to Germanization, those elements were soon suppressed or muted and what we know as the historical Christianity of the medieval era offered a religion, ethic, and world-view that supported what we today know as “conservative values”—social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice. In being “Germanized,” Christianity was essentially reinvented as the dynamic faith that animated European civilisation for a thousand years and more.
Mr. Russell’s answer to the question about Christianity is that Christianity is both the grandmother of Bolshevism (in its early universalist, non-Western form) and a pillar of social stabilization and order (through the values and world-view imported into it through contact with the ancient barbarians). Throughout most of its history, the latter has prevailed, but today, as Mr. Russell argues in the last pages of his work, the en- emies of the European (Germanic) heritage—what he calls “the Euro-Christian religiocultural fusion”—have begun to triumph within Christian ranks. “Opposition to this fusion, especially as it might interfere with notions of universalism and ecumenism, was expressed in several of the documents of the Second Vatican Council,” and he sees the same kind of opposition to the early medieval Germanic influence in the various reform movements in church history, including the Protestant Reformation, which always demand a return to the “primitive church”—i.e., pre-Germanic Christianity. It is precisely this rejection of the European heritage that may have driven many Christians of European background out of Christianity altogether and into alternative forms of paganism that positively affirm their racial and cultural roots.
Whatever primitive Christianity or true Christianity or historical Christianity may or may not have believed and taught, what is indisputably happening today is the deliberate extirpation from Christianity of the European heritage by its enemies within the churches. The institutional Christianity that flourishes today is no longer the same religion as that practiced by Charlemagne and his successors, and it can no longer support the civilization they formed. Indeed, organised Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.
Mr. Russell has produced a deeply learned book that assimilates history and theol- ogy, sociology and comparative religion, and even sociobiology and genetics within its pages. Moreover, it is an important book that addresses a highly controversial and philosophically and culturally significant issue that few others will address at all.
Have you ever had those dark thoughts about what you would like to do to the idiot cognoscenti that have elevated a fad fashion brand like Damien Hirst to the status of artistic genius? I bet you have. That rag tag of pretentious collectors, useful-idiot journalists and incontinent money baggers; plus, sadly, those easily biddable types who will trot along to any old Tate Modern knickknack gallery theme park as long as it is billed as a tourist attraction.
One thing that has always struck me as particularly absurd about the avant-garde art world – all the way from the early 20th century ‘modernists’ to the current crop of ‘conceptual artists’ – is how, for all their no-holds-barred iconoclasm, they still take it for granted that there will always be a thing called an art gallery and an exhibition for them to play their self-consciously revolutionary games in. Why cling to this particular comfort blanket? If there is to be a root and branch re-imagining of the meaning of creativity, why not ditch the art galleries? Why not ditch the very concept of “art” for that matter?
End of rant…for now anyway…because to my mind, there is a mercifully effective antidote to all this nonsense; you don’t have to go there if you choose not to. Unless you inhabit the world of the metrosexual academy and of media luvvydom, you can simply pay no mind to all those grossly overrated darlings of what has been called ‘sham art’ – from Picasso to Hirst and beyond. And should you chance to stumble accidentally on some nauseating BBC celebration of one of them or some slavering journalist hagiography, you can simply switch off or turn the page. And of course it is the overrating that is the real problem here; no reasonable person in a liberal society would have any major problem with Picasso’s way of painting nor with whatever it is that Damien Hirst gets up to, were it not for the insidious Academy mission to break down our philistine prejudices and enthrone these characters at the heart of our cultural history. The real genius of today’s ‘conceptual’ artists, their ‘cubist’ et al forebears and – as we shall see later in this essay – the architects of the ‘Modern Movement’ has been their instinct for self promotion; all of them, albeit through the agency of their academia and media acolytes, have, in their heyday, so completely rigged the artistic terms of reference that any criticism of them, however intellectually compelling, is rendered axiomatically philistine, small-minded and out of touch.
Happily for us though, in the big scheme of things, these mind bending missions ultimately fail. For all the relentless hype, ‘contemporary art’ is of far less significance to the great majority of people today than the looked-down-on commercial art of advertising and graphic design. This is deservedly so in my view, for this is probably where most of the natural talent now ends up. Contrast this with the most celebrated works of 20th century popular music which – love them or hate them – are the fruits of a vibrant culture that has become embedded in the consciousness of most of us. [The perhaps puzzling differences between the various art forms in terms of their impact on society at large would make a very interesting study: why, for example, poetry is now an esoteric and moribund backwater whereas the novel continues to be – at its best – as vibrant as ever. I am guessing – albeit on the basis of a brief internet search – that this subject is largely unexplored territory.]
And then there is architecture… which is the main theme of this essay. You can escape bad art, bad literature and even bad music but you cannot escape bad architecture. You may even, if you are unlucky enough, have to live in it. Sometimes, when the sky has been grey for seeming weeks on end or when friends wax lyrical of their friends who have emigrated someplace where the sky is bluer and the spread of the political correctness virus supposedly less advanced – it is then that I am reminded just how much I love what remains of the traditional fabric of England. [I focus, in this essay, on England; Scotland, Ireland and Wales have their own traditions which, though similar in many ways, are quite different in others and would need a different essay.]
Even more than its green and pleasant hills and valleys, I love England’s built environment; its medaeval-to-1930s knitted tapestry of building types that still abounds in villages, market towns, provincial town centres and their better suburbs – and of course London – in spite of the ravages of mid 20th century architectural vandalism. This is neither merely narrow parochialism nor saccharine nostalgia; I can find architectural delight in many places on earth – from the picturesque Italian Renaissance hill town; to downtown Manhattan which can take your breath away; to the more beautifully engineered of the new Crossrail stations. Nevertheless there are some qualities to the English architectural tradition that are quite special, if not unique.
One example is the particularly strong tradition of landscaping; from the former great country estates, to the Victorian parks, to the Garden City Movement, to the humble domestic garden. And it has become a commonplace observation that much of England’s green and pleasant rural landscape is that delightful illusion – a substantially man-made creation that has aged so well that it seems to have simply grown like that.
A second example is the English suburb – perhaps quintessentially the Edwardian suburb. When middle class English people rave on, as they regularly do, about the unparalleled beauty that is Paris, I always wonder if they realise that, as you ripple out from its centre to the surrounding conurbation, you will find there, far more ugliness and less delight than in the case of the equivalently sized London conurbation. And Paris is, in this respect, more typical of the world’s great cities whereas London is the exception. It is pleasing to note that, in recent times, we seem to have rediscovered a pride in our capital city after decades of down-selling it to the rest of the world as just a Plain Jane grey town.
Thus far, I have referred to English architecture up to the 1930s. Then came the Second World War. And then came the Blitz; the three decade long blitz as the bombs of ‘modernism’, social engineering and town planning rained down on our poor war-weary land.
The only saving grace about this period in our architectural history – devastating and in some ways irreparable as it undoubtedly was – is that Britain did eventually recover from the madness that was the ‘Modern Movement’ in general and Le Corbusier worship in particular – he of the tabula rasa concept of urban renewal in which everywhere ‘must’ be ‘totally rebuilt’ using only concrete. The – from our perspective – mind-boggling power and reach of the totalitarian intellectual mindset in the first half of the 20th century is hard to overstate The literature – in the field of architecture alone – is as vast as it is dispiriting; the pompous, vacuous theorising, the ‘we must totally and utterly’ manifestos, the arrogant, ivory tower intellectuals casting themselves as champions of ‘the people’.
Unless you have – as I was at architecture school – been personally force-fed the Le Corbusier mythology, you might well struggle to comprehend just how bizarre is the basis of his fame. The man himself, according to a fairly typical 1988 assessment in the architectural literary canon, “ranks with Darwin, Freud (and) Einstein among major figures who have ever affected the world to which we belong.” His manifesto Vers une Architecture (1923), according to the preface to the 1946 edition, “probably had as great an influence on English architectural thought as any one publication of the last fifty years”. Now here are a few snippets of the great man’s thinking:
“the plan must rule, the street must disappear” (especially all those Parisian street cafes) “never undress in your bedroom”
“we must create a state of mind for living in mass production housing”,
“man must be built upon this axis….in perfect agreement with nature and probably, the universe.”
……Come again??
The fallacious nature of all such prescriptive moralising about architecture was laid bare in David Watkin’s seminal work: Morality And Architecture, first published in 1977; a ground breaking scholarly analysis of its whole history from Pugin, to Le Corbusier and to Pevsner. Almost everyone now understands that to give architects and town planners licence to decide wholesale what ‘society’s’ ‘needs’ are and then dream up megalomaniac schemes for the wholesale satisfaction of these ‘needs’ is akin to kitting your small child out with a set of power tools and a bag of cement and setting him loose to decide what your pride and joy home needs. Wiser people, of course, never stopped understanding this in the first place but their warnings were, as we know, dismissed and drowned out at the time as ‘reactionary’ and insensitive of the supposed utopian, collectivist, brave new 20th century zeitgeist.
And it should be cheerfully acknowledged that – in the context of what preceded it – the recent past, has not been such a bad time for the built environment in Britain, all things considered. The aesthetic and build quality of mass spec housing – typically ‘traditional’ brick clad boxes with pitched roofs laid out along residential roads and cul de sacs – may fall short of one’s ideal but it is probably as good now as in the 1930’s and certainly infinitely better than the 50’s to 80’s. It is important to remember that building, just like art and music, never has been of a uniformly high standard and the search for a ‘final solution’, aesthetically speaking, leads only to the nightmare from which we have only relatively recently emerged.
I would come to the defence of much of the most recent contemporary public and commercial architecture too, most of it by architects that the public is unlikely to ever hear of but also by the famous like Norman Foster. It is Foster’s verbalisations that irritate me, not his buildings. Sure there are also the misconceived and often perversely misplaced alien ‘carbuncles’ complete with impenetrable pseudo intellectual rationales – such as the Liverpool Ferry Terminal Building (‘angular fun’ we are told) or Drakes Circus in Plymouth.
We may be living in relatively sane times, architecturally speaking, but it is still important to keep in mind the salutary lessons of the not so distant past whilst, at the same time, not unduly dwelling on it. At least it’s over now? Well, yes and no. Certainly the collectivist totalitarianism itself finally crumbled in the 70’s (or at least is in long-term remission!) But two related – and cancerous – aspects of the faux radical mindset have survived in our schools of architecture: one is the idea that the architect aspiring to greatness must also aspire to novelty. the other is the idea that building design has sociological, psychological and macro-economic dimensions which the architect – simply by virtue of his being an architect – is competent to judge.
Almost everyone now understands that the Le Corbusier legacy was entirely malign, even if they have never heard of the man himself. Everyone, that is, except a majority of tutors in our schools of architecture. I had first-hand experience of this at architecture school in the late 1980’s.
The status of ‘Corb’ (as we were encouraged to affectionately call him) as your ultimate architectural hero was, quite simply, a given and dissenting from this position was a seriously bad idea if you wanted to pass the course. I am fairly reliably told that things haven’t changed much since my time. Such is the power of group-think and universities are sadly no less prone to it than anywhere else. To be fair, nobody was still plugging the megalomania aspect of their hero; his knock-down-the-centre-of-Paris side. And all those undeniably God awful tower blocks for ‘rationally’ housing ‘the people’ that sprang up all over Europe in his name? Well, we were assured, they could not be blamed on ‘Corb’; it was just that his more pedestrian architect followers hadn’t properly understood what he had meant. And anyway all must be forgiven on account of him being such an innovative ‘genius’.
Le Corbusier’s muddle-headed ramblings are so easy to dismiss as self-important drivel – like shooting fish in a barrel. So the question is: how does a man of such limited intellect and control freak personality characteristics as Le Corbusier continue to be such a hero of the architectural academy? The answer, I believe, lies in the nature of the architectural profession and is also the reason why the disastrous architectural group-think of the mid 20th century is a latent problem that could conceivably re-emerge one day, albeit in some modified form.
What really matters to your average architecture student is drawing. They love drawing; it is what drew them to the profession and many are indeed very talented at it. Le Corbusier himself was arguably very talented at it. But they are not sociologists, not psychologists and not economists and never will be because, for the most part, they are not sufficiently or deeply interested in these disciplines. Which is fine and just as it should be until that is, the idea is implanted in them that they have some kind of social mission to fulfil.
Actually there is an ancient and eloquent definition of an architect’s mission: Vitruvius’s famous aphorism – Firmness, Commodity and Delight – still stands, in my view as a sufficient theoretical basis for any architectural project. But on my course, a required part of a student’s design presentation had to include a rationale – often post hoc and invariably half-baked – of how the form, massing and materials of the design were expressive of such imponderables as the psychological ‘needs’ and ‘aspirations’ of the users and the wider ‘community’ which the building was to serve. I wish I could recall some of these comically glib and shallow rationales, for they were in abundance but, of course, the memory has a natural tendency to consign trash to its trash can. But the students were simply reciting a bogus language of the modern architectural academy in which buildings might be ‘fun’, ‘thought provoking’, ‘democratic’, ‘inclusive’ and so on.
To be fair again, awareness of architectural tradition was, by the late 1980’s, once again recognised as an important aspect of an architectural education – at least in theory. Of course, by then had come a visceral reaction in society against crass modernity – especially tower- block-utopia – and conservation and nostalgia were fast becoming the new vogue. But, in architecture school speak, respect for tradition does not mean quite what you might imagine; it might mean, for example, that you still propose to insert some manifestly alien infill development into the gap in a row of period terraced houses – perhaps even the proverbial upended shark, at least metaphorically if not literally. But crucially now, instead of bragging of your iconoclasm, you would go to verbose lengths to demonstrate that you were merely respectfully ‘reinterpreting’ the traditional forms. Architects now ‘must’ reinterpret tradition, with must being the operative word. I have known of architects who feel compelled to stick supposedly ‘contemporary’ bits onto what are, in all other respects, traditional pitched-roof, brick-walled dwellings, for no better reason than their belief that this somehow lifts them above the level of mere speculative housing and into the more rarefied realm of ‘contemporary architecture’. There is of course nothing wrong with innovation per se; it is the knee jerk compulsion to innovate, or ‘reinterpret’ – as a kind of moral imperative, that is the malign 20th century aesthetic legacy.
Perhaps the greatest of the ‘modernist’ fallacies was their lumping together of all building types into a single mould. Many people, including myself, are quite happy to be dazzled by steel and glass in their airport or railway station but not in their own home nor in their residential neighbourhood. A person’s relationship to their home is a unique and complex psychology, well beyond the grasp of crass architectural theorising. If an individual desires to inhabit a dramatic spaceship of steel and glass, that is fine – providing that is, that they don’t insist on plonking it on your cherished avenue of period Edwardian villas. I am fond of the print on my wall of Frank Lloyd Wright’s rendering of Falling Water and though I have not seen it in the flesh, can imagine it being someone’s dream home. For the great majority of the British, however, that is emphatically not what they aspire to; their dream of domestic bliss is located in some-or-other variant of an archetypal pitched roofed dwelling house – and it is this that deserves to be ‘respected’. To insist that the aesthetics of dwelling ‘must’ be ‘modernised’ to suit some perceived advancing zeitgeist is almost as absurd as proposing that fairytales or life’s simple pleasures ‘must’ be modernised; that maybe even sexual desire be modernised. Come to think of it though, I do believe there are some in our society today who may indeed be advocating something along those lines!
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London: Bloomsbury Forum, 1999
In the days of Cameron’s administration, any discussion of Great Britain’s imperial past often evokes nostalgia and a sense of regret by ordinary Britions. The past century witnessed Britain’s authority wane from a globe-spanning empire to a middle-ranked nation within the European Union. Monuments and equestrian statues of long-dead Victorian generals decorate English villages but many pass by unaware of their historical significances. Many schoolchildren grow up learning only of the nation’s history through Marxist and social democratic interpretations taught in comprehensive schools. Eric Hobsbawm’s stadialist interpretation of British proletarian advances utterly occludes the great figures who built the Empire and sustained it for King and Country. If the Right wishes to be successful in creating a genuinely popular movement, it must provide the people with a spiritual mobilisation that both legitimates and valorises Great Britain’s past. Such an intellectual effort produced the work Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right (1999). Originally published by the right-wing Bloomsbury Forum and edited by barrister Adrian Davies, Eddy Butler and the late Jonathan Bowden, this volume consists of selected essays on British heroes and adventurers.
Standardbearers begins with Eddy Butler’s excellent work on G.A Henty and his patriotic children’s novels. Rather than extolling the virtues of single motherhood or indolence, Henty’s heroes conquered African and Asian kingdoms in order to expand the empire. Henty’s literary output consisted of two hundred titles with approximately eighty written for juvenile audiences. During the 1880s, each of his novels sold an average of 200,000 copies annually. Titles such as With Clive in India, With Wolfe in Canada or With Roberts to Kandahar all thrilled puerile imagination and inspired public schoolboys to strive for the Empire’s glory. Still found in provincial libraries and school collections today, they are a reminder of Great Britain’s glorious past. Similarly, William King’s essay on John Buchan reinforces the role of literature in forming a cultural of national excellence. As an acculturated Scot and Brasenose graduate, Buchan’s rapid ascent into British politics allowed him the experiences needed in order to realise Great Britain’s history and potential. He desired to mobilise the Kingdom’s people in order to strengthen its world position. His prodigious writings included fiction thrillers such as Prester John and vivid biographies such as his Sir Walter Scott. Attempting to continue within a Disraelian Tory tradition, Buchan’s works are still in print for avid readers.
Besides the poets and bards of Empire, Standardbearers also discusses prominent statesman who can readily serve as models for our beleaguered present. Adrian Davies’s excellent essay on Andrew Bonar Law analyses the ‘unknown Prime Minister’ and his achievements. Likewise, Sam Swerling’s examination of Enoch Powell can rightly be said to be one of the finest short works on that remarkable man. Swerling correctly names Powells as a ‘Tribune of the People and a Prophet Unfulfilled’. Similarly to Simon Heffer’s official biography of Powell, the late Wolverhampton and Ulster MP benefited from having a sympathetic chronicler. Swerling rightly focuses on Powell’s unionism and romantic notions of the nation. For Powell, Toryism coalesced and materialised the national will organise in Crown, Lords, Confession and People. Such a political philosophy must by definition remain uniquely British. It was precisely on this point that Powell disapproved of Margaret Thatcher’s overweening fondness for the United States and its pervasive influence. He believed firmly that America possessed no ‘special relationship’ with Great Britain but only an alliance based on influence and temporal benefits. Powell’s ultimate legacy proved to be a prophet in a Great Britain controlled by his enemies and former allies but his jeremiads were beloved by the nation’s people.
Out of all the excellent chapters within Standardbearers, Derek Turner’s piece on Samuel Johnson is exceptionally good. As an accomplished novelist and prose stylist, Turner’s interest in Johnsoniana accords with his romantic Toryism. Combining legends of Johnson’s remarkable wit with a serious analysis of his political views, Turner provides an appropriate introduction to the Tory sage’s life and works. His fluid prose laced with Mannerist depictions provides an appropriate descant to this composite work.
Standardbearers provides a fine primer to intellectual antecedents for the British Right and those interested in their ideological forebears would do well to acquire a copy. It is an excellent introduction to half-forgotten figures whose lives and deeds can inspire us today.
]]>New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe
by Michael O’Meara
London.: Arktos Media Ltd., 2013
It tells us a good deal about the nature of contemporary American culture that Michael O’Meara’s important and often brilliant (but unfortunately sometimes opaquely written) account of the thought of the French “New Right” could be published in this country only by an on-line publishing house and not by a major firm. O’Meara’s book is neither a propaganda tract nor a mere regurgitation of books and writers but a careful and in many respects exhaustive examination of the major theoretical themes that characterize New Right philosophy and social and political theory. It is similar to but broader in scope than Tomislav Sunic’s book of 1990, Against Democracy and Equality, to which O’Meara acknowledges a debt. For Americans, who even on the hard right display little familiarity with the French New Rightists, O’Meara’s book is the place to begin to find out what and who the New Right is, what the writers associated with it think, and why they think it. But those who begin New Culture, New Right without adequate preparation may find parts of it forbidding and many of the ideas they encounter in it strange or even distasteful.
Readers should at once put out of their minds any connection with or similarity to the American “New Right” of the 1970s and 1980s, a collection of direct mail scam artists, religious nuts, and Beltway “populists” with six-digit salaries who were mostly semi-literate and proud of it. Nor is the French New Right, a school (or more accurately an “orientation”) that began to emerge around the same time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, associated with the nationalist movement of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the Front National. Indeed, the New Right as O’Meara uses the term is aloof from practical politics. Influenced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his concept of “cultural hegemony,” it concentrates almost entirely on cultural and philosophical rather than formal political conflicts, an approach for which it has adapted the term “metapolitics.” (In this respect it most closely resembles the “paleo-conservatives” around the Rockford Institute and Chronicles, or perhaps The Occidental Quarterly itself, although, as will become clear, there are many major differences.) “To wage its own anti-liberal version of Gramsci’s war of position,” O’Meara writes, the New Right’s “metapolitical strategy”
sets its sights on three long-range objectives. Through its publications, conferences, and various public engagements, it endeavors to engage the ideas “that inspire and organize our age” (Madame de Staël), recuperating from them what it can for its own project. Secondly, it seeks to undermine the liberal order by discrediting its underlying tenets and affirming those traditional European ideas supportive of the identities and communities it champions. Finally it aspires to cultural hegemony, if not within civil society as a whole, at least within the elite. From the beginning, then, its “Gramscianism of the Right” privileged culture, which was taken as the “infrastructural” basis of both civil society and the state. (p. 46)
The French New Right has centered largely around an organization founded in 1968 called the Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE, or “Group for Research and Study of European Civilization”), and its major exponent has been the journalist and author Alain de Benoist. Entirely unlike the American “New Right” (or for that matter the Old Right), the French New Right is anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-capitalist. Why then is it a “right” at all?
It is a right (a label Benoist and most of his colleagues have always hesitated to embrace) because it mounts a searching and virtually total critique and rejection of “modernity”— modern philosophy since Descartes, modern science and technology, modern materialistic values and culture, and the modern state and its tendencies toward global hegemony and technological regimentation—and it sees in Christianity the origins and underpinnings of modernity and in America and modern capitalism its most extreme representation. It affirms what O’Meara and the New Right itself describe as “traditional societies”—that is, the hierarchical, traditionalist, particularist, familistic and patriarchalist, communitarian, and usually agrarian and pagan societies that modernity destroys. “Traditional culture” as O’Meara explains in a footnote (55), “refers not to those primitive, tribal formations studied by anthropologists, but to the pre-modern formations that characterized Europe up to the seventeenth century—that is, to the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and Medieval forms of the European civilizational heritage.” As the name GRECE suggests, one of the archetypal societies of this kind that the New Right idealizes is that of the ancient Greek polis itself. “Reactionary,” a term usually employed to describe portly suburban dentists or literary monarchists who wear opera capes, does not quite fit la Nouvelle Droite.
But what is most significant about the New Right’s positions is less the positions themselves than its sophisticated and complex philosophical elaboration of them. It is O’Meara’s own intimate familiarity with this elaboration by a wide range of writers over a period of some thirty years (as well as with the ideas of earlier figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger) and in a variety of disciplines ranging from philosophy to social and political theory to mythology, anthropology, and history that makes his book especially valuable and especially fascinating.
At the core of the New Right’s critique of modernity is a rejection of the philosophical rationalism that drives the modern mind and of its principal source, the philosopher René Descartes. “In his quest for truth—that is, epistemological truth—” writes O’Meara,
Descartes concentrated on the length, depth, breadth, and velocity of physical objects, for these alone enabled him to quantify “the empirical unity of the world” and render nature into extensions whose measurements lent themselves to precise and predictable calculations . . . . His unprecedented success in reducing complex natural phenomena to simple mathematical explanations would, of course, do much to launch the career of modern science; but his success came at a steep price. Besides reducing reality to a simple expanse of matter, “understood” in abstract mathematical terms that did little to enhance man’s knowledge of his world and, in some cases, further estranged him from it, his quantifying reductionism had the effect of relegating the qualitative features of the European life—all those things associated with culture and heritage—to a secondary order of significance. (p. 58)
Once Cartesian rationalism was incorporated into not only eighteenth- century philosophy and science but also political and social thought—as it was through Locke (in an empiricist variation), Kant, and the philosophes of the continental Enlightenment—the result was to mandate in the name of “reason” and “progress” the “liberation” of human beings from traditional and “irrational” social bonds and relationships, thereby launching the war of modernity on tradition, buttressed by the ideologies of individualism and liberalism.
Because liberalism’s quantitative optic focuses on the immediate and simplistic, with everything leveled down to choices between appetite and aversion, it lent itself to the myth of homo oeconomicus—or, more accurately, was the premise upon which the myth [of Economic Man] historically arose. The myth has since become the paradigm for liberalism’s quantitative model of individualization. (p. 63)
In the New Right’s critique of modernity, individualism itself is closely linked to the other features of modern society:
For once the social world becomes a collection of monadic individuals, inherent distinctions and supraindividual designations take on a secondary order of significance. What counts for liberalism is the basic zoological unit, which—ideally—is a self-contained rational being. The qualitative attributes of station, character, and breeding (not to mention race, culture, and history), whose importance has prevailed in every previous civilization, are thereby ignored, for the individual—any individual—is looked on as an “instance of humanity,” worthy, in himself, of dignity. From this “naturalistic” notion of the individual, which denies everything in man that goes beyond his zoological nature, there emerges another of liberalism’s defining doctrines—that of egalitarianism and the contention that all individuals, irrespective of their inherited or acquired qualities, are bearers of equal rights and deserving of equal treatment. (p. 65)
It must be acknowledged that much of the French Right’s critique of modernity is not entirely new or unique to it—much of the critique of rationalism and the Enlightenment has been anticipated by anti-modernist Christian thinkers (C. S. Lewis comes to mind on the popular level) and philosophical conservatives like Richard Weaver. The latter argued that there is a straight road from the philosophical nominalism of the thirteenth century William of Occam to the behaviorism, Marxism, and relativism of the twentieth century. But, like Weaver’s argument, much of the New Right critique seems overdone. It is quite true that the Enlightenment put together an ideological construct that commanded the aggressive abolition of traditional social institutions and authorities, but that is not the only such construct that rationalism and naturalism can build. The early New Right in the 1970s was much attracted to such emerging disciplines as sociobiology, genetics, and ethology that were just as much developments from rationalistic and naturalistic worldviews as the behaviorism and blank-slate environmentalism the new disciplines rejected. As O’Meara writes, the New Right’s
initial challenge to liberal culture took place, for instance, in the realm of science and bore many characteristics, such as a positivist faith in scientific reason, that it later rejected. Science, however, was a “natural” starting point for its anti-liberal project. In the eighteenth century, the champions of liberal modernity had mobilized the New Science against their conservative foes and have since represented themselves as the political vanguard of the most advanced scientific ideas. Twentieth-century science, however, has proven to be far less amenable to liberal claims. The basic tenets of evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, molecular biology, sociobiology, and ethology, all, seem to contradict liberal notions of environmental primacy, natural “goodness,” the individualist nature of the social world, the irrelevance of race, or the plasticity and equality of human nature. Given liberalism’s vulnerability in this field, it was here that Grécistes staged their first critical assault on modernist values, targeting what the most recent scientific research revealed about the social, hierarchical, genetic, and hence anti- liberal foundations of human life. (pp. 26-27)
The French New Right, in other words, was heading toward what I have elsewhere called “counter-modernism” rather than the anti-modernism in which it eventually became involved. Counter-modernism is itself a form of modernism and accepts many of its metaphysical premises (including its naturalism) while rejecting the conventional implications and constructs (especially social and political) that the Enlightenment and its heirs have devised. Examples of counter-modernist thinkers in Euro-American thought would be Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, the Federalist Papers, the Social Darwinists of the nineteenth century, the classical elite theorists Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, and James Burnham. Yet unfortunately, the New Right was deflected from developing its counter-modernist tendencies, for reasons that are not entirely clear from O’Meara’s account. Quite frankly, it is impossible not to suspect simple expediency and safety, as the European Thought Police (both figuratively in the dominant culture and literally in the actual criminalization of the right through “race relations” laws) in the 1980s began cracking down on what were demonised as “racism” and “hate speech.” The New Right may have found it safer to abandon counter- modernism and science entirely than to pursue and elaborate the logical social implications of the new science of man.
In any case, the New Right certainly did not take its rejection of modernism from the Christian or conservative right but from the movement known as “post-modernism,” associated with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, et al., a movement usually involved not with the right of any sort but with the extreme left. The logical implications of post-modernism are radically relativistic and skeptical, even nihilistic, and affirm little of anything. As O’Meara writes:
Against the rational, objective, and universal claims of the modern narrative [i.e., the modernist worldview], as it applies the timeless truths of mathematical reason to man’s contingent world, they [the post-modernists] argue that the narrating subject is never autonomous, never situated at an Archimedean point beyond space and time, never able to perceive the world with detachment and certainty. Rather, representations of all kinds are entwined in sociolinguistic webs of signification that know no all-embracing truth, only their own truths, which are indistinguishable from the will to power . . . . All forms of human action, even (or especially) the most lofty, inevitably shatter before an elusive, polymorphous reality, represented by a now self-conscious throng of incompatible discursive traditions. This leads postmodernists to a “radical pluralism” that “deconstructs” modernist notions of truth, value, and justice in the interests of a wider field of localized representations and practices. (pp. 22-23)
Post-modernists usually apply their “deconstruction” to white, Christian, patriarchal, heterosexual Western society, arguing that its claims to truth, justice, rationality, normality, and even scientific and philosophical certainty are mere myths concocted and deployed for the purposes of buttressing the power of those who benefit from them. This position is in some respects close to those of such thinkers as Pareto and Nietzsche, at least in implication, and one that the New Right has embraced—up to a point.
The point at which the New Right breaks with conventional post-modernism is in the latter’s endorsement, as a practical matter, of the “individualistic tendencies of liberal politics. In many respects they [the post-modernists] are, in fact, simply more philosophically sophisticated liberals, although ones whose principal reference is no longer the ethnically homogeneous nation-state, but rather the rainbow world of the global market.” Given the zealous antagonism of post-modernists to any and all European identities and their passion to dissolve them, as O’Meara writes,
B and D groups, racial minorities, trance freaks, lesbian bikers, squatters, immigrants, and grunge rockers all register in their count, while Basque nationalists, Swiss Communards, and Lombard regionalists, whose communities are ancient and intergenerational, are generally suspected of being “closed” or repressive variants of the Great Narrative. (p. 23)
In fact, it is never clear in O’Meara’s account why anyone who embraces post-modernism, whether on the left or the right, would retain any logical grounds for affirming any social fabric or philosophical commitment whatsoever. Despite O’Meara’s somewhat tortured account of how the New Right tries to eat the post-modernist cake while at the same time salvaging traditional identities that post-modernism rejects, the New Right’s position appears inherently arbitrary and contradictory. “Based on a recuperation of postmodernism’s anti-liberal core,” O’Meara writes,
identitarians claim the only viable narratives for Europeans—and hence the only viable communities and identities—are those posited by the cultural, historical, and racial legacies native to their heritage. Unlike the New Left, then, whose rebellion in 1968 ostensibly targeted the America-centric order founded in 1945, the New Right fights this order not in the name of a postmodernism that extends and radicalizes its underlying tenets, but for the sake of freeing Europeans from its deforming effects. (p. 26)
Nevertheless, the latent nihilism of post-modernism appears to render any such “identitarian” commitments on the part of Eurocentric New Rightists logically and ethically impossible. The preference of one side for “lesbian bikers” and of the other for “Lombard regionalists” or the ancient Greek city-state seems to be merely that—an arbitrary preference, rooted in no logical or ethical soil, though perhaps grounded in material interests, psychological peculiarities, social habits, or the will to power.
While the New Right, like the post-modernists, rejects capitalism, it does so from a rejection of the Economic Man ideology that derives from modernism and not from the post-modernist and far left distaste for whatever is Western. “Unlike the anti-capitalists of the far Left,” O’Meara writes,
New Rightists do not oppose free enterprise per se, only a dog-eat-dog capitalism “unaccountable to anything other than the bottom line.” As Benoist writes, “I would like to see a society with a market, but not a market society.” Against both the liberal creed of laissez-faire and the left’s statist concept, New Rightists favor an organic economic system in which market activity is geared to the general welfare. For this reason they advocate a “recontextualization” of the economy within “life, society, politics, and ethics” in order to make it a means rather than simply an ends. (p. 68)
In contrast to both the classical liberal and modern libertarian (and Marxist) view of an autonomous Economic Man divorced from social and cultural reality, driven solely by rationalistic and individualistic profit motives, and indifferent to race, culture, nation, and tradition, the New Right seeks to construct an economic vision that sees human beings as social creatures with both motivations and obligations derived from their social and historical context.
In rejecting both the principle and the intent of liberal individualism, New Rightists assume that the individual is never sufficient unto himself, but an expression of larger affiliations, of which he is not the constituent element, only the function. The whole, as Aristotle, says in reference to the human community, is necessarily anterior to its parts. Failing to recognise the individual as a bearer of such larger attachments, liberal individualism is wont to rebuff those traditional or substantive values associated with family, ethnos, nation, and hence those identities constituent of social cohesion and the capacity to make history. (p. 63)
Moreover, the New Right views modern capitalism as the logical descendant of the early modern bourgeoisie’s adoption of Cartesian rationalism as an ideological buttress of their economic aspirations. “Rationalism’s triumph, then, implied not merely a victory of quantity over quality in the realm of science, but of reason and money over culture and tradition.” (p. 60)
The current incarnation of Cartesian Economic Man is the hegemony of what Catholic counter- revolutionary Thomas Molnar has called the “monoclass” of “déclassé administrators . . . charged with implementing the liberal managerial principles of the American conquerors” that has “assumed control of the government, the media, and the major corporate structures.” This class is in fact simply James Burnham’s “managerial elite” behaving according to its group interests and the dynamic of its rationalism. Whatever the label, “New Class,” “monoclass,” “technocracy,” or “managerial elite,” the system over which the modern ruling class presides is one of mass consumption, a managed and manipulated mass culture of instant gratification and sensory thrill, a “global democracy” waging virtually genocidal war against whatever remnants of traditional cultures and ethnostates it can locate and pulverizing any manifestations of traditional racial, sexual, religious, or class identity, and a massive and anonymous bureaucratized state coupled with a twin economic structure that engineers and manages the global order in the interests of its elites.
The New Right’s critique of modern capitalism, as eccentric as it may seem to most on the post-New Deal American right, is in fact entirely consistent with both historic European (and some American) rightist traditions and with the New Right’s general critique of modernism and of modern social and cultural tendencies in sex, race, and nation.
The New Right rejects contemporary feminism and endorses social differentiations of sex and sex roles.
[W]hile subjecting feminism to their anti-liberal critique, New Rightists by no means hypostatize existing sexual roles. They fully accept that these may change over time and differ from culture to culture. They do, however, argue that sex-specific roles complementing the innate biological differences between male and female are inherently healthy. In fact, such designated differences have always existed, because they express differences found in nature. As Benoist puts it, sexual roles are “a feature of culture grafted onto a feature of nature.” That men are aggressive, competitive, inclined to abstraction, and enterprising and that women are nurturing, seducing, patient, and receptive is not, he insists, the result of a repressive patriarchal imposition or a misguided
process of socialization, but of an evolutionary process that balances and compliments the difference between each sex, for without the feminine, a masculine society would be one- sided and dysfunctional, just as the opposite would be true. (p. 73)
The New Right’s positions on sex and male-female relations as O’Meara describes them are rather more sophisticated than the sort of simple-minded 1950s prudery masked as Old Testament moralism that we get from the American evangelicals and their sermons about “family values.” As O’Meara remarks, “Conservatives . . . often react to feminism’s contractual and anti-naturalist view of the family by extolling what they assume are traditional familial roles (but which are actually those of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie), unconscious that several models, with different sexual roles, appear in the historical record.” The New Right therefore can less easily be accused of “perpetuating the subjugation of women” than more conventional Christian and conservative critics of feminism.
Much the same is true of their views of race. O’Meara unfortunately does not dwell on this aspect of New Right thought, though he does make plain that New Right racial thought has moved from an early endorsement of modern biologistic accounts of race to one that today has sought to synthesize racial biological realities with anthropological theories of culture. The principal exponent of this new trend was the late anthropologist Arnold Gehlen.
Gehlen, O’Meara writes, “singles out man’s culture-making capacity as his defining characteristic” but does not deny the existence of some, though very limited, biologically given instinctual drives. Culture builds on these drives so that it becomes a “second nature” in addition to what Gehlen argued was a thin biologically endowed nature.
Virtually every conscious realm of human activity, Gehlen holds, comes to be affected by culture. In his anthropology, it is virtually inseparable from man. For without it, and the role it plays in negotiating his encounters with the world, man would be only an undifferentiated and still unrealized facet of nature—unable, in fact, to survive in nature. Contrary to a long tradition of rationalist thought (the anthropological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss being the foremost recent example), there are no “natural men.” Free of culture, man would be a cretin, unable even to speak. Given the inescapable character of his culture, Gehlen argues that man is best described as a biocultural being: for although culture and nature are two distinct things, in him they form an indivisible unity. (p. 47)
Gehlen’s view of the necessity of human cultural endowments and his rejection of the concept of a pre-social “natural man” outside society and culture resemble the Aristotelian view of human nature as inherently sociable, man as the “creature of the polis” or political society (a concept that lies at the root of philosophical conservatism), rather than the “state of nature” fictions of such thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Like Aristotelian anthropology, Gehlen’s view rejects the individualism that underlies classical liberalism as well as the social determinism pushed by Franz Boas and his school. O’Meara remarks in a footnote to the passage quoted above, “It is this emphasis on the culture-nature link that distinguishes Gehlen’s anthropology from the ‘cultural determinism’ of the [sic] Boas’ school, which ignores man’s animal nature, posits an idealist concept of culture, and relies on a good deal of fraudulent research.” (p. 54, n.28) Yet, if Gehlen differs from Boas and the environmentalist and egalitarian theories he and his followers have inflicted on this country and the world for the last century or so, he may also save contemporary biological racialists from a simple- minded genetic determinism that almost entirely ignores culture as a formative force.
Gehlen’s emphasis on culture does not lead him to racial egalitarianism or universalism. Indeed, on the contrary, it implies a highly particularistic, almost tribalistic, view of cultural differences and cultural mixture.
Since different families of men, in different times and environments, respond differently to the limitless choices poised by their world, their cultures grow in different ways . . . As an organic unity with forms congruent with its distinct vitality, a culture, then, is understandable only in its own terms. For its essence lies neither in rationalist nor objectivist criteria, but in the conditioned behaviors and beliefs constituting the interrelated patterns and categories specific to it. As a consequence, there is no specific Culture, only different cultures, specific to the different peoples who engender them . . . There can, it follows, never be a world culture, a single primary consciousness, a single mode or distillation of life common to all men. For the heritage of choices that goes into making a culture and giving it its defining forms is distinct in each organic formation in those cycles of growth and vitality distinct to it. (pp. 47-48)
Gehlen’s ideas have been used to mount arguments against immigration, multiculturalism, and the fantasies of “one world” and globalism, and legitimately so, but since Gehlen died in 1976 he was never aware of the major findings of the 1980s in twin studies and psychometrics that show clearly the existence of major genetically grounded differences in personality and intelligence between individuals as well as races. The biology of race and personality does not perhaps refute Gehlen’s “biocultural” approach, but it does suggest that regardless of his concessions to biological factors in the shaping of culture, he nevertheless continued to underestimate its importance.
. . . The New Right itself in recent years has moved away not only from its early attraction to a biological view of human nature and society but also from its opposition to multiculturalism, if not to immigration as well. The earlier position, as O’Meara explains, offered a firm rejection of multiculturalism:
In contrast to liberalism’s homogenized world of fractured cultures and peoples, New Rightists advocate a heterogenous world of homogenous peoples, each rooted in their own culture and soil. Every people, they claim, has a droit à la différence: that is, the right to pursue their destiny in accord with the organic dictates of their own identity. They see, moreover, no convincing reason why Europeans should feel obliged to abandon their millennial heritage for the sake of a dubious cosmopolitan fashion. (p. 77)
But the new position has changed course radically.
Recently, however, GRECE’s opposition to multiculturalism has undergone a significant shift. Until 1998, it consistently opposed multiculturalist efforts to recognize immigrant communities as separate legal entities, for it claimed these efforts threatened the integrity of French identity. Then, rather unexpectedly, it reversed course, adopting a “communitarian” position favoring the public recognition of non-French communities—so that immigrants could be able to “keep alive the structures of their collective cultural existence.” To some, this shift constitutes nothing less than an identitarian betrayal, for others a recognition that Europe’s enemy is not the immigrant per se, but the system responsible for immigration. (p. 77)
The shift was not without controversy, with New Rightists like Guillaume Faye and others rejecting it. As O’Meara comments:
When Grécistes first sloganized the droit à la différence, they sought to rebuff liberal efforts to stigmatize European identitarianism as a form of racism. At a certain point, however, its defense of cultural/ethnic difference took on a life of its own . . . This eventually led to a qualified form of multiculturalism, as the GRECE reversed much of its earlier argumentation and joined the liberal chorus demanding the institutional recognition of the immigrants’ cultural identity. The problem with its metapolitics, however, did not end here, for its defense of European identity has consistently been waged on the Left’s cosmopolitan terrain—in that it fought not for the primacy of their own people, but for the application of pluralistic standards to support Europeans in the defense of their heritage . . . . Le droit à la différence ended up, then, parroting the ideology of liberal pluralist society and its relativist values. Needless to add, this augurs badly for the future of the GRECE’s identitarianism, for it now tacitly acknowledges the right of non-Europeans to occupy and partition European lands. (pp. 77-78)
Interestingly the same trend and its implications appear on the American hard right, as advocates of territorial secessionism and proponents of “Euro-American” identity present themselves not as the rightful heirs of the European civilization in North America but merely as one more chip in the multiculturalist mosaic demanding (or in the case of the right, begging for) recognition. One would have thought that French intellectuals intimate with Gramsci and Nietzsche would have avoided this trap.
The withering of the New Right’s opposition to multiculturalism is one of the major flaws of the movement from the perspective of the American right. Two other problems that most Americans will find troublesome are the French Rightists’ anti-Christianism and their anti- Americanism. Actually, both positions have a good deal to be said for them, but both are also problematical.
The New Right’s distaste for Christianity owes little to the conventional rationalist and secularist critique associated with figures like Bertrand Russell and T. H. Huxley and far more to the ancient pagan criticisms of Christianity before its acquisition of power under Constantine. The New Right argues that Christianity, and more generally monotheism itself in the forms of Judaism and Islam, have been destructive forces that have spawned intolerance, dogmatism, and a narrow-minded dualism in the European mentality and have authorized massive persecutions, exterminations, and cultural genocide of its victims. Christianity did not emerge from the European folk tradition and identity but was adopted as a theological construct shaped by its Semitic origins and its underclass adherents and was then imposed by the state and the church, often through repression of its rivals and critics. Only through a long process of “Germanization” (O’Meara here cites James Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or “Aryanization” did early Christianity become at all compatible with European identity. New Rightists share Nietzsche’s critique that Christianity represented a slave revolt against the aristocratic paganism of ancient Europe and under the sway of its otherworldly and universalist beliefs rejected “national and cultural particularisms” and promoted the destruction and amalgamation of distinct peoples. They argue that by substituting its “logos” for the ancient pagan view of nature as suffused with many divinities and supernatural beings Christianity “desacralized” nature and prepared the way for the advent of modern rationalism and the secularized depredations of modern capitalism and mass democracy.
For nearly fifteen centuries Christianity dominated the continent. In disenchanting the world, associating faith with reason, and fostering individual subjectivity, Benoist claims it prepared the present “eclipse of the sacred.” As a result, Europeans now lack the spiritual references—the transcendent certainties—that once inspired them, for a post-Christian world, in which science or liberal ideology has been substituted for the church’s discredited teachings, is a world that knows only life’s material properties and the existential groundlessness that dooms the individual to impotence. Spiritually adrift, Europeans seem to have dissipated even their instinct for survival, as ethnomasochism becomes foremost in their hierarchy of values and effeminacy renders them defenseless before larger dangers. Faced with the nihilism born of this void, New Rightists call for “a return to ourselves”—and to the primal sources of their heritage—advocated not for the sake of some pre-Christian Golden Age, but as a means of reviving the European project —and hence Europe’s will to power. (p. 98)
It has to be said that there is a good deal of truth in much of the New Right’s attack on Christianity, especially as Christianity appears today, whether on the political left or the political right, with its support for an egalitarianism and universalism that reject race and nation in general and the historic European (especially pre-Christian) identity in particular. Nevertheless, the New Right’s critique is also somewhat overdrawn, as O’Meara notes in his last chapter, which offers a critique of the New Right itself. Christianity, whatever its origins in the Near East and the deracinated proletariat of the late Roman Empire, was in fact “Germanized,” as Russell argues, assimilated itself to much of the heritage of Europe, and played a major role in creating the European civilization we have known since the early Middle Ages, including its art, music, philosophy, and even science. It is simply vacuous to claim that the actual Christianity of history displays the character Benoist describes. In any case, Christianity has been the religious identity of European man for some two thousand years, and to argue, as the New Right does, for the resuscitation of paganism as the “real” tradition of Europe is simply a posture, even if it is not intended literally.
In appealing to the pagan heritage, New Rightists do not actually seek a restoration of ancient pagan practices, just as they distance themselves from New Age pagans, whose eclectic mix of ancient cults and postmodern hedonism are no less anti-identitarian than the Christian/modernist practices they oppose. Instead, their paganism strives to resuscitate Europe’s ancestral concept of the cosmos, its classical ethical principles, its notion of time and history, and its affirmation of community. It thus affirms the integrity of the European project and “all the inscrutable creative powers manifested in their
nature,” rejecting, in the process, a misanthropic religious conception that leaves man begging forgiveness from a god forged in the image of a Near Eastern despot. Above all, the New Right’s paganism aims at transvaluing the Judeo-Christian values that have inverted all that is strong and noble in their heritage. (p. 99)
Christianity today is virtually extinct, at least in Europe among real Europeans, and it is not that much more alive in America, which is why American churches are so zealous in their support for a mass immigration that replenishes the stock of an institution whites have abandoned. But apart from the pop paganism of the New Age cults, there is no real sign of a revival of a serious paganism of the kind the New Right talks about at either the popular or higher levels of culture. Whatever the merits of its critique of Christianity, the New Right’s neo-paganism seems to have born little fruit.
New Right paganism looks to the studies of Indo-European mythology and social structure of the late Georges Dumézil and invokes “mythos” as a pagan counterpart to the Christian “logos.” The latter, as O’Meara acknowledges, may
be a more logically, analytically, and clearly developed form of thought, but cognitively it is not superior to mythos and often less suggestive and encompassing. More important still, logos—especially in its modern form—empties the world of those mythic truths that once constituted the essence of the European project. Against this “disenchantment,” which leaves the European powerless before the great challenges threatening him, a revival of Europe’s mythic heritage holds out the prospect that the true sources of his being might be recovered and the European project reborn. (p. 102)
Just as problematic as its hostility to Christianity, at least for many on the American right, is the French New Right’s outright hatred of America itself. While the New Right is surely correct that both contemporary “mainstream” (and even “conservative”) Christianity and the hegemonic forces of contemporary America are the enemies of European Man, it insists on pushing its critique of them far beyond contemporary manifestations.
In the case of America, its critique is not confined simply to the modern post–World War II managerial regime in which state, corporation, and mass culture coalesce to dominate and deracinate the world as well as traditional American culture, but extends to America as it originated and developed. In the New Right’s view, the current American regime is merely the logical and natural extension of America as it was founded and is the most complete expression of modernity itself.
The New Right’s critique of America is in fact a mirror image of what the left thinks about it or would like America to be—the “proposition country,” “creedal nation,” or “first universal nation” of liberal and neo-conservative folklore. Pointing to the millennialist and utopian language of the early Puritans in New England, the egalitarian and universalist slogans of the Declaration of Independence, and the anti-European fulminations of Mark Twain and other progressivists in American history and culture, the New Right claims that this and the political and economic system reflecting it are all that exists in America. As such, it regards this country as the main enemy of European Man and his tradition and identity (as well as of the Third World peoples whose cause the New Right increasingly seems to champion).
As an anti-Europe, the United States represents the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity. Nowhere else, the Grécistes argue, were the Enlightenment principles—of equality, rationality, universalism, individuality, economism, and developmentalism—more thoroughly realized than in this new land “liberated from the dead hand of the European past.” The country’s constitutional Framers, it follows, were steeped in eighteenth-century liberalism—which “blended with the earlier ecclesiastical culture of New England” (Carl Bridenbaugh) and later with the Emersonian ideals of individualism. This led them to adopt a political system whose ideological underpinnings rested on rationalist abstractions exalting the individual rather than the history and traditions of its people. The federal state was thus conceived not as an instrument of its people’s destiny—nationality in the European sense did not exist in America— but as a cosmopolis, potentially open to all humanity.
Contrary to the contention of certain paleo-conservatives, as well as the arguments of those historians associated with the school of “civic republicanism,” this propositional notion of the American state was not the invention of latter-day Jacobins, of whom William J. Clinton and George W. Bush are the descendants, but inherent to the country’s original constitutional project. (p. 145)
The hostility of the New Right to America and its global hegemony leads it to sympathize with the Soviet Union, as O’Meara notes. “Given the nature of the existing geopolitical realities, the GRECE has long sympathized with Russia, even during the Cold War.” The sympathy was not due to any affiliation with Marxism but to the New Right’s belief that Marxism-Leninism penetrated into and deformed Russian society far less than liberal modernism permeates American and contemporary European society, that the Russians are an Indo-European people and thus share a racial and deep-cultural identity with Europe, and that their imperial identity is derived from what Rightists like to call “tellurocratic” (based on land power, like Sparta, Rome, and Germany) rather than “thalassocratic” (sea-based power, like that of Athens, Carthage, Britain, and America). Moreover, if Russia recovers economically, it would be capable of mounting political and military resistance to the global hegemony of American liberal modernism.
If European capital and know-how continue to penetrate eastward, contributing to Russia’s recovery, the ex-Soviet Union holds out the prospect of becoming a vast continental power, with an abundance of natural resources (especially oil), an immense reservoir of human talent, and a will to power. A Eurasian rapprochement (which is already occurring in numerous areas of trade, research, and development) would thus portent [sic] an empire of unparalleled immensity and a possible “staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution” . . . . It would not be at all “unnatural,” then, if European and Russian destinies should merge and an “Empire of the Sun” stretching across fourteen times zones, arise. (p. 193)
The New Right’s anti-Americanism is not confined to a political critique but extends also to American culture or what the critics claim passes for culture in this country. O’Meara cites a recent special issue of the New Right periodical Terre et peuple that ridiculed America as the “Planet of the Clowns,” taking “particular delight in emphasizing the absurdity of homo americanus.”