Listen, there’s a poem, it speaks in the voice of England’s past like a flame beyond the language of the living. It’s more than a thousand years old and yet it still speaks to us. It’s called Beowulf.
–Michael Wood, Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester
Long before I learned how to read it in its original form, I understood that the Beowulf manuscript was the foundational text of my people: a sort of Nordic Summa Theologica, and a glimpse of what a northern Homer might have produced. It is an epic oral tale of a Swedish hero which, ironically, defines what it means to be English. It is also a quintessentially Anglo-Saxon work of Germanic origin, spoken by warriors with swords gripped firmly in their hands as they sailed up the east-coast estuaries. Their scops stood to recite the poem before war bands who had their minds set on forging a nation:
Yes, we have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes’ kings in the old days
How the princes of that people did brave deeds.
Often Scyld Scefing took mead-benches away from enemy bands
From many tribes, terrified their nobles – after he was first found helpless.
He lived to find comfort for that
Became great under the skies
Prospered in honors until every one of those who lived about him
Across the whale-road, had to obey him, pay him tribute
That was a good king
Those dry vellum pages of the Beowulf manuscript – which only narrowly survived a devastating fire in Ashburnham House in 1731 – have provided a scintillating word-hoard that has dramatically impacted our indigenous British culture, society, and language. Of this, Merton Professor of Anglo-Saxon J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote, in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”:
The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends – who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done.
These expressions are as familiar to us today as the shadows we cast when we stroll our village lanes around Rendlesham in Suffolk, the home to the Wuffinga royal line. They are our ancestral stories, such as the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, perfectly encapsulating the notion of the arrival myth:
Since the Angles and the Saxons
Came up over the broad waves
It is literally our nation’s most precious relic, relating events of war, vengeance, and battling monsters in late fifth-century Scandinavia. Nevertheless, both its author and the location of its final composition are unknown. Scholars have speculated that it has East Anglian pagan roots, linking it to King Raedwald and Sutton Hoo. Others guess that its Christian overlay was added many centuries later, when it was copied into the Late West Saxon dialect in the scriptorium at Malmesbury.
The work’s descriptions of Anglo-Saxon material culture – ships, rich burials, inscribed swords, elaborately-decorated royal halls – and our ancient customs still resonate today:
Hrothgar presented Beowulf with a gold standard as a victory gift
An embroidered banner, also a breast plate
And a helmet and a sword carried high,
That was both precious object and a token of honor
Kingship was revered in those days, and the people’s trust and tribal loyalty had to be earned. This is symbolized in the poem by the Danish King Hrothgar’s establishment of Heorot:
Now it came into his mind
That he would command the construction of a huge mead hall
A home greater than Middle-earth had ever heard of
And share the gifts god had bestowed upon him with young and old,
There was music of the harp and sweet minstrels singing
Perfect in telling of the remote first making of the race of man
One way for a war-leader to earn such recognition was through acts of valor, an opportunity afforded to Beowulf when Heorot is assailed by a fen-dwelling creature called Grendel:
Gliding through the shadows the walker in the night,
The warriors slept all but one and this man kept an unblinking watch
Waiting pent heart swelling with anger against his foe,
And from off the misty moorlands eerie fells came Grendel stalking
He moved through the dark and saw with perfect clearness the gold plated hall
The mead drinking place of men
The door gave way at the touch of his hands
Raging flames wreckage bent he tore the hall’s jaws
Angrily advancing, from his eyes shot a light,
Before the wall he saw a host of young warriors
And in his heart he exulted, the horrid monster
All his hopes swelling for a glutinous meal,
As a first step he set his greedy hands on a sleeping soldier
He tore him and gnashed at his bone joints bolted huge gobbets
Sucked at his veins and soon had eaten the man down to his fingers and feet,
Then he moved forward to seize our warrior Beowulf,
Stretched out for him with his spite filled fist
But the faster man forestalling rose up on his arm and gripped that sickening hand,
Hateful to each was the breath of the other,
Gripping the giant shoulder frame
Shoulder muscles praised apart
A snapping of tendons, bone-locks burst,
The arm of the demon was severed from his side
And Grendel flew death-sick to his joyless den
Where he knew the end of his life was in sight,
Beowulf had cleansed Heorot
Saved the hall from persecution
And as a signal to all, the hero hung the hand, the arm torn off shoulder
The entire limb, Grendel’s whole grip beneath the soaring roof!
He then follows this up by killing Grendel’s malice-filled mother as well:
Then he saw among the armor on the wall
A great sword from former days,
This wonder was so enormous that no other man
would be equal to bear it in battle play,
The Geat champion shaking now with war rage
Caught it by the rich hilt and careless of his life
Brandished it in circles and brought it down
And thrust it into the neck,
The blade sheared through to the backbone
The sword was gory, he was glad at the deed
Beowulf’s actions bring him fame and glory amongst his own people. This set an example for the Anglo-Saxons, whose own royal houses claimed direct descent from the Danes, Geats, and Swedes such as King Hygelac, who the poem mentions as being one of Beowulf’s relatives, and who we know from other sources lived at the time the oral story is believed to have first been told.
Men and women would have listened intently to the beautifully lyrical evocation of their imagined past as they sat transfixed next to crackling hearth-fires. They would have felt the terror and excitement of their hero’s daring adventures, all the while learning what leadership and manhood really meant through the myth-making fable. The war captain and Bear-Warrior rallies his kinfolk and secures them from external threats, defending his realm in the face of mysterious beasts, which are really cyphers for much deeper psychological fears such as societal fracture, the breakdown of tradition, and the instinctive dread of the unknown other. The poem likewise explores themes of passing time, loss, and the inherent glamor and dangers of masculine societies.
The manuscript, which is the longest extant poem written in Old English, is kept in the Cotton Vitellius archive. It had first resurfaced during the Elizabethan period in the collections of antiquaries, and was translated into modern English by John Richard Kemble in 1837. Although it was always recognized as a classic of English literature, many scholars at first thought it to be too digressive and confusing. Itwas eventually championed during the Victorian era, when the vogue for all things Anglo-Saxon was at its zenith, due in part to the ethos of the British Empire’s administration attempting to rationalize their success at colonizing most of the known world by explaining their own uniqueness, both to themselves and their subjects.
The poem frequently references German legends that would have been known to its audience, but which are lost to us today. Exceptions are the allusions to Heremod, Finn, Offa, and Eormenric, and a poet at Hrothgar’s court praising Beowulf following his defeat of Grendel and his mother by comparing him to Sigemund. The story opening with reminiscences of Scyld Scefing, the father of Danish and English kings, and explaining how he “was a good King.” This is the key philosophical point underlying the whole poem: It is an exploration of kingship, condemning bad rulers who oppress their people by putting their own interests first while praising those who are generous and prudent, and who take the time to make considered judgments. It is a cogent thesis on power and how it is used in different ways – physical strength, mental determination, and political acumen – and recognizes how each can be used to either good or bad effect, as well as how power and influence grows and withers with time. It likewise acknowledges that despite the fact Beowulf has the strength of thirty men, nature, the seasons, and death will inevitably overcome such transient successes – and power, like the sea, will inevitably overwhelm a low sandy coastline.
This creates a poignancy that is even more effective when one considers that although the final written version is aimed at the sensibilities of a rapidly Christianizing community, and that it speaks of an all-powerful singular God – “God, the guardian of glory, may ever work wonder after wonder” – it was a God whose East Anglian, Northumbrian, and West Saxon armies, made up of recent converts to Christ, were thwarted by the pagan Penda in a number of bitter engagements in the mid-seventh century. Penda’s victorious Mercian men seized a bishop’s headdress, a portable shrine or reliquary, a golden garnet-encrusted cross, helmets, over one hundred fifty swords, and seax fighting knives. One piece bears the very telling inscription: “Rise up, LORD, and let thy enemies be scattered; and let them hate thee before they flee.” This indicates that it was used as a battle talisman during the internecine fighting between the rival early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. All of these were disfigured as war-booty and buried as offerings to Penda’s ancient gods, only to be discovered in Lichfield fourteen hundred years later as part of what has now become known as the Staffordshire Hoard.
This was find so emblematic of our nation’s birth that it has breathed fresh life into the study of a period that has lain dormant for far too long; a six-hundred-year epoch that solidified an identity that still stands strong. It reiterates the importance of a poem in which Beowulf dies, and is commemorated by pre-Christian rites. His afterlife is forever dependent upon his memory being upheld by the traditions of his people:
A boat with a ringed neck rode in the haven
And there laid out their Lord and Master, the giver of gold
In the waist of the ship in majesty below the mast,
A mound of vast treasures from far countries was fetched aboard her
And it is said that no boat was ever more bravely fitted out
With the weapons of a warrior
Military accoutrement, swords and body armor,
High overhead they hoisted and fixed a gold signum
Gave him to the flood and let the seas take him . . .
This is why it is so important for our children to peer into the tunnel entrance of Wayland’s Smithy in Oxfordshire and to walk the footpaths between the great mounds at Sutton Hoo. Therein lies a lesson for us all, for the perpetuation of our folk-memory in poems, chants, and incantations is as important as the preservation of the blood of our race:
Then the people of the Weather-Geats built a mound on the promonotory
one that was high and broad, wide-seen by sea-farers
and in ten days completed a monument for the bold in battle
surrounded the remains of the fire with a wall
the most splendid that men most skilled might devise.
In the barrow they placed rings and jewels
All such ornaments as troubled men had taken from the hoard.
They let the earth hold the wealth of earls, gold in the ground
Where now it still dwells, as useless to men as it was before.
Then the brave in battle rode round the mound
Children of nobles, twelve in all
Would bewail their sorrow and mourn their king
Recite dirges and speak of the man.
They praised his great deeds and his acts of courage
Judged well of his prowess.
So it is fitting that man honor his liege lord
Love him in heart when he must be led forth from the body.
Thus the people of the Geats, his hearth-companions
Lamented the death of their lord.
They said that he was of world-kings the mildest of men
And the gentles, kindest to his people
And most eager for fame.
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Mr. Wilson begins his “inquiry into the nature of the sickness of mankind in the twentieth century” at the effective point of the writers who have most influence in the present intellectual world. They are mostly good writers; they are not among the writers catering for those intellectuals who have every qualification except an intellect. They are good, some are very good: but at the end of it all what emerges? One of the best of these writers predicted that at the end of it all comes “the Russian man” described by Mr. Wilson as “a creature of nightmare who is no longer the homo sapiens, but an existentialist monster who rejects all thought”, As Hesse, the prophet of this coming, put it: “he is primeval matter, monstrous soul stuff. He cannot live in this form; he can only pass on”. The words “he can only pass on” seem the essence of the matter; this thinking is a chaos between two orders. At some point, if we are ever to regain sanity, we must regard again the first order before we can hope to win the second. It was a long way from Hellas to “the Russian man”; it may not be so far from the turmoil of these birth pangs to fresh creation. It is indeed well worth taking a look at the intellectual situation; where Europeans were, and where we are.
This union of mind and will, of intellect and emotion in the classic Greek, this essential harmony of man and nature, this at-oneness of the human with the eternal spirit evoke the contrast of the living and the dying when set against the prevailing tendencies of modern literature. For, as Mr. Wilson puts it very acutely: when “misery will never end” is combined with “nothing is worth doing”, “the result is a kind of spiritual syphillis that can hardly stop short of death or insanity”. Yet such writers are not all “pre-occupied with sex, crime and disease”, treating of heroes who live in one room because, apparently, they dare not enter the world outside, and derive their little satisfaction of the universe from looking through a hole in the wall at a woman undressing in the next room. They are not all concerned like Dostoievsky’s “beetle man” with life “under the floor boards” (a study which should put none of us off reading him as far as the philosophy of the Grand Inquisitor and a certain very interesting conversation with the devil in the Brothers Karamazof, which Mr. Wilson rightly places very high in the world’s literature). Many of these writers of pessimism, of destruction and death have a considerable sense of beauty. Hesse’s remarkable Steppenwolf found his “life had become weariness” and he “wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to the renunciation of nothingness”; but then “for months together my heart stood still between delight and stark sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged was the soul of wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations . . . this life of mine was noble. It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars.” Mr. Wilson well comments that “stripped of its overblown language,” “this experience can be called the ultimately valid core of romanticism — a type of religious affirmation”. And in such writing we can still see a reflection of the romantic movement of the northern gothic world which Goethe strove to unite with the sunlit classic movement in the great synthesis of his Helena. But it ends generally in this literature with a retreat from life, a monastic detachment or suicide rather than advance into such a wider life fulfilment. The essence is that these people feel themselves inadequate to life; they feel even that to live at all is instantly to destroy whatever flickering light of beauty they hold within them. For instance De Lisle Adam’s hero Axel had a lady friend who shot at him “with two pistols at a distance of five yards, but missed him both times.” Yet even after this dramatic and perfect illustration of the modern sex relationship, they could not face life : “we have destroyed in our strange hearts the love of life . . . to live would only be a sacrilege against ourselves . . .” “They drink the goblet of poison together and die in ecstasy.” All of which is a pity for promising people, but, in any case, is preferable to the “beetle man”, “under the floor boards”, wall-peepers, et hoc genus omne, of burrowing fugitives; “Samson you cannot be too quick”, is a natural first reaction to them. Yet Mr. Wilson teaches us well not to laugh too easily, or too lightly to dismiss them; it is a serious matter. This is serious if it is the death of a civilisation; it is still more serious if it is not death but the pangs of a new birth. And, in any case, even the worst of them possess in some way the essential sensitivity which the philistine lacks. So we will not laugh at even the extremes of this system, or rather way of thinking; something may come out of it all, because at least they feel. But Mr. Wilson in turn should not smile too easily at the last “period of intense and healthy optimism that did not mind hard work and pedestrian logic.” He seems to regard the nineteenth century as a “childish world” which presaged “endless changes in human life” so that “man would go forward indefinitely on ‘stepping stones of his dead self’ to higher things.” He thinks that before we “condemn it for short-sightedness”, ” we survivors of two world wars and the atomic bomb” (at this point surely he outdoes the Victorians in easy optimism, for it is far from over yet) “would do well to remember that we are in the position of adults condemning children”. Why? — is optimism necessarily childish and pessimism necessarily adult? Sometimes this paralysed pessimism seems more like the condition of a shell-shocked child. Health can be the state of an adult and disease the condition of a child. Of course, if serious Victorians really believed in “the establishment of Utopia before the end of the century”, they were childish; reformist thinking of that degree is always childish in comparison with organic thinking. But there are explanations of the difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth century attitude, other than this distinction between childhood and manhood. Spengler said somewhere that the nineteenth century stood in relation to the twentieth century as the Athens of Pericles stood in relation to the Rome of Caesar. In his thesis this is not a distinction between youth and age — a young society does not reach senescence in so short a period — but the difference between an epoch which is dedicated to thought and an epoch which has temporarily discarded thought in favour of action, in the almost rhythmic alternation between the two states which his method of history observes. It may be that in this most decisive of all great periods of action the intellectual is really not thinking at all; he is just despairing. When he wakes up from his bad dream he may find a world created by action in which he can live, and can even think. Mr. Wilson will not quarrel with the able summary of his researches printed on the cover of his book : “it is the will that matters.” And he would therefore scarcely dispute the view just expressed; perhaps the paradox of Mr. Wilson in this period is that he is thinking. That thought might lead him through and far beyond the healthy “cowboy rodeo” of the Victorian philosophers in their sweating sunshine, on (not back) to the glittering light and shade of the Hellenic world — das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchen — and even beyond it to the radiance of the zweite Hellas. Mr. Wilson does not seem yet to be fully seized of Hellenism, and seems still less aware of the more conscious way of European thinking that passes beyond Hellas to a clearer account of world purpose. He has evidently read a good deal of Goethe with whom such modern thinking effectively begins, and he is the first of the new generation to feel that admiration for Shaw which was bound to develop when thought returned. But he does not seem to be aware of any slowly emerging system of European thinking which has journeyed from Heraclitus to Goethe and on to Shaw, Ibsen and other modems, until with the aid of modern science and the new interpretation of history it begins to attain consciousness.
He is acute at one point in observing the contrasts between the life joy of the Greeks and the moments when their art is “full of the consciousness of death and its inevitability”. But he still apparently regards them as “healthy, once born, optimists,” not far removed from the modern bourgeois who also realises that life is precarious. He apparently thinks they did not share with the Outsider the knowledge that an “exceptional sense of life’s precariousness” can be “a hopeful means to increase his toughness”. The Greeks, of course, had not the advantage of reading Mr. Toynbee’s Study of History, which does not appear on a reasonably careful reading to be mentioned in Mr. Wilson’s book.
But Mr. Wilson moves far beyond Sartre in regarding the thinkers of an earlier period; notably Blake. At this point he recovers direction. The reader will find pages 225 to 250 among the most important of this book, but he must read the whole work for himself; this review is a commentary and an addendum, not a précis for the idle, nor a primer for those who find anything serious too difficult. The author advances a long way when he considers Blake’s “skeleton key” to a solution for those who “mistake their own stagnation for the world’s”. Here we reach realisation that the “crises of’living demand the active co-operation of intellect, emotions, body on equal terms”; contact is made here with Goethe’s Ganzheit, although it is not mentioned. “Energy is eternal delight” takes us a long way clear o the damp caverns of neo-existentialism and
No men ever had a deeper sense of the human tragedy than the Greeks; none ever faced it with such brilliant bravery or understood so well not only the art of grasping the fleeting, ecstatic moment, but of turning even despair to the enhancement of beauty. Living was yet great; they understood dennoch preisen; they did not “leave living to their servants”. Mr. Wilson in quoting Aristotle in the same sense as the above lines of Sophocles — “not to be born is the best thing, and death is better than life” — holds that “this view” lies at one extreme of religion, and that “the other extreme is vitalism”. He does not seem at this point fully to understand that the extremes in the Hellenic nature can be not contradictory but complementary, or interacting. The polarity of Greek thought was closely observed and finely interpreted by Nietzsche in diverse ways. But it was left to Goethe to express the more conscious thought beyond polarity in his Faust: the Prologue in Heaven:
May we end with a few questions based on that doctrine of higher forms which has found some expression in this Journal and in previous writings? Is it not now possible to observe with reason and as something approaching a clearly defined whole, what has hitherto only been revealed in fitful glimpses to the visionary? What are the means of observation available to those who are not blessed with the revelation of vision? Are they not the thoughts of great minds which have observed the working of the divine in nature and the researches of modern science which appear largely to confirm them?
At some point the spirit, the soul — call it what you will — is ignited by some spark of the divine and moves without necessity; yet, again it is a matter of common observation that this only occurs in very advanced types. In general it is only the “challenge” of adverse circumstance which evokes the “response” of movement to a higher state. Goethe expressed this thought very clearly in Faust by his concept of evil’s relationship to good; he also indicated the type where the conscious striving of the aspiring spirit replaces the urge of suffering in the final attainment of salvation: wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen. In the early stages of the great striving all suffering, and later all beauty must be experienced and sensed; but to no moment of ecstasy can man say, verweile doch, du bist so schön until the final passing to an infinity of beauty at present beyond man’s ken. Complacency, at any point, is certainly excluded. So must it be always in a creed which begins effectively with Heraclitus and now pervades modern vitalism. The philosophy of the “ever living fire”, of the ewig werdende could never be associated with complacency. Still less can the more conscious doctrine of higher forms co-exist with the static, or with the illusory perfections of a facile reformism. Man began very small, and has become not so small; he must end very great, or cease to be. That is the essence of the matter. Is it true? This is a question which everyone must answer for himself after studying European literature which stretches from the Greeks to the vital thought of modern times and, also, the world thinking of many different climes and ages which in many ways and at most diverse points is strangely related. He should study, too, either directly or through the agency of those most competent to judge, the evolutionary processes revealed so relatively recently by modern biology and the apparently ever increasing concept of ordered complexity in modern physics. He must then answer two questions: the first is whether it is more likely than not that a purpose exists in life? — the second is whether despite all failures and obscurities the only discernable purpose is a movement from lower to higher forms? If he comes at length to a conclusion which answers both these questions with a considered affirmative, he has reached the point of the great affirmation. The new religious impulse which so many seek is really already here. We need neither prophets nor priests to find it for ourselves, although we are not the enemies but the friends of those who do. For ourselves we can find in the thought of the world the faith and the service of the conscious and sentient man.
Brute impériale, raciste humaniste, boutefeu impertinent, affameur et bombardier de civils, phraseur creux et politicien incapable en temps de paix, américanophile pathétique, Winston Churchill est naturellement le modèle de cette époque eschatologique et de ses néocons russophobes (Churchill recommanda l’usage de la bombe atomique contre les russes à Truman). On laisse de côté cette fois Ralph Raico et on évoque cette fois le brillant historien John Charmley qui l’analysa d’un point de vue british traditionnel : Churchill anéantit l’empire, choisit le pire et a guerre, varia d’Hitler (le moustachu puis Staline) et humilia l’Angleterre transformée en brillant troisième des USA. Autant dire que Charmley n’est pas bien vu en bas lieu. Il écrit en effet que l’Angleterre ruina deux fois l’Europe pour abattre une Allemagne qui finit par la dominer économiquement ! Niall Ferguson a reconnu aussi les responsabilités britanniques dans la Première Guerre mondiale.
Les Britanniques devaient livrer leur or eux-mêmes :
Churchill a multiplié les mauvais conseils et les mauvaises décisions, rappelle Charmley :
Un peu d’antiquité alors ? Charmley :
The connections between the organic movement and the radical Right are often overlooked. To the chagrin of liberal environmentalists, the early organic movement had close links to both fascism and National Socialism. Among the leading pioneers of organic farming was Jorian Jenks, a high-ranking member of the British Union of Fascists who served as the party’s agricultural advisor. Farming, Fascism and Ecology is the first biography of Jenks to appear in print. It is an amply researched and surprisingly even-handed study that details Jenks’s oft-neglected influence on the organic movement and sheds light on the long-standing ties between environmentalism and the far-Right.[1]
Written under the pseudonym “Vergilius” (a tribute to the celebrated farmer-poet), his articles in the fascist newspaper Action were his most notable contribution to British fascism. He later also published a collection of his poetry, most of which deals with agricultural themes, under this pseudonym.
Europa als dritte Kraft
Dies geschah mithilfe der deutschen Edition seines Werkes The Alternative, das auch in anderen Sprachen erhältlich war und sogar das Lob General Francos in Spanien gefunden hatte. Mosley pflegte Umgang mit der Familie Otto Skorzenys, des Mussolini-Befreiers und vertrat die Auffassung, die internationalen Formationen der Waffen SS gegen Ende des Krieges hätten seine Idee eines gesamteuropäischen, antikommunistischen Nationalismus vorweggenommen. Persönlich reiste Mosley nach Spanien, Portugal, Italien sowie nach Südamerika, stets unter dem wachsamen Auge des britischen Geheimdienstes MI6.
Mosley wie Evola konnten über die Verbrechen des Faschismus und seiner extremen Ableitung des Nationalsozialismus schwerlich hinwegsehen. Oswald Mosley verfiel in dieser Frage in eine dunkle Erlösungs-Mystik, die er sowohl bei Nietzsche fand, als auch seiner Lektüre von Goethes Faust zu verdanken hatte. Das Böse sei für den faustischen Menschen, zu dessen Gattung die Deutschen nun einmal gehörten, die unvermeidliche Finsternis auf dem langen Weg zum Licht. Ganz gleich, ob man sich zu solcherlei esoterischen Spekulationen hingezogen fühlt oder nicht, beide Autoren kamen nicht umhin, die Verbrechen anzuerkennen, sie aber zugleich vom Ur-Faschismus zu trennen. Nur so glaubten sie, den lähmenden Schuldkomplex überwinden zu können. Denn an die Mobilisierungs-Energie dieses frühen Faschismus sollten auch zukünftige Generationen wieder andocken dürfen.
Today is the birthday of Henry Williamson (Dec. 1, 1895 – Aug. 13, 1977)—ruralist author, war historian, journalist, farmer, and visionary of British fascism.
Blackshirt sympathies are really a side-note with Williamson, as they are with Yeats, Belloc, and Wyndham Lewis. If he is largely forgotten today, this is not because he went to Nuremberg rallies (nobody forgets the Mitfords, after all), but rather because of the peculiar nature of his output. Apart from his war memoirs, most of his writing consists of highly detailed close observation, with little direct commentary on the world at large. (The newspaper column at the end of this article is a good example of Williamson’s work. Taken in large doses, such detail tends to become tedious.)
The romance of the country permeates his other fiction. In one novel after another, Orwell’s human characters rouse themselves, suddenly and unaccountably, to go tramping through meadows and hedgerows. In A Clergyman’s Daughter the title character gets amnesia and finds herself hop-picking in Kent. The superficially different stories in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Keep the Aspidistra Flying both have romantic episodes in which a couple go for long hikes through idyllic woods and fields, where they marvel and fornicate amongst the wonders of Mother Nature. The middle-aged narrator of Coming for Air spends much of the novel dreaming of fishing in the country ponds of his youth, but when he finally takes his rod and seeks down his old haunts, he finds that exurbia has encroached and his fishing-place is now being used as a latrine and rubbish-tip by a local encampment of beatnik nature-lovers.
The Iraqi nation grew increasingly wealthy, as oil revenues rose from $500 million in 1972 to over $26 billion in 1980, an increase of almost 50 times in nominal terms.
In the last stages of the campaign we had the tragic assassination of Jo Cox MP. The Remain camp cynically seized on this to boost their campaign. Anyone who voted Leave was a ‘hater’ and the language they had used to criticise immigration and the political class had led to a ‘climate of fear’ which in turn led to her death. Her two children were taken to Parliament to hear MPs pay tributes, and also to a big rally in London’s Trafalgar Square. This attempt to manipulate our emotions also failed. In fact many I know were disgusted by the shameful attempts to use the tragedy to boost a Remain vote. They were also angry at the way that their views were being falsely categorised and denigrated. If anything it made them more likely to vote Leave. I even had some friends who had voted Remain by post earlier, saying that they would have switched to Leave because of the disrespect tht had been shown, had they been given the chance! The ‘love versus hate’ theme has caused a lot of bitterness, anger, and division within our nation. Many Remain supporters are dismayed because it seems as if ‘hate’ has won. That’s one consequence of making the argument seem like a battle between good and evil – something the smug, condescending Left likes to do.
Pat Harrington
Phillips explique que depuis le discours d’Enoch Powell en 1968 qui valut à celui-ci sa mise à l’écart de la politique, tout le monde a retenu la leçon : « Adopter toutes les stratégies possibles pour ne pas parler de race, d’ethnicité (et plus tard de religion et de foi), sauf de manière anodine et plate. »
