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lundi, 08 avril 2013

Pulp Fascism

Pulp Fascism

By Jonathan Bowden 

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Editor’s Note: 

The following text is a transcription by V. S. of a lecture entitled “Léon Degrelle and the Real Tintin,” delivered at the 21st meeting of the New Right, London, June 13, 2009. The lecture can be viewed on YouTube here [2]. (Please post any corrections as comments below.)

I have given it a new title because it serves as the perfect introduction to a collection of Bowden’s essays, lectures, and interviews entitled Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature, which is forthcoming from Counter-Currents.

I proposed this collection and title to Bowden in 2011, and although he wrote a number of pieces especially for it, the project was unfinished at his death. We are bringing out this book in honor of the first anniversary of Bowden’s death on March 29, 2012. 

jb_index.jpgI would like to talk about something that has always interested me. The title of the talk is “Léon Degrelle and the Real Tintin,” but what I really want to talk about is the heroic in mass and in popular culture. It’s interesting to note that heroic ideas and ideals have been disprivileged by pacifism, by liberalism tending to the Left and by feminism particularly since the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Yet the heroic, as an imprimatur in Western society, has gone down into the depths, into mass popular culture. Often into trashy forms of culture where the critical insight of various intellectuals doesn’t particularly gaze upon it.

One of the forms that interests me about the continuation of the heroic in Western life as an idea is the graphic novel, a despised form, particularly in Western Europe outside France and Italy and outside Japan further east. It’s regarded as a form primarily for children and for adolescents. Yet forms such as this: these are two volumes of Tintin which almost everyone has come across some time or other. These books/graphic novels/cartoons/comic books have been translated into 50 languages other than the original French. They sold 200 million copies, which is almost scarcely believable. It basically means that a significant proportion of the globe’s population has got one of these volumes somewhere.

Now, before he died, Léon Degrelle said that the character of Tintin created by Hergé was based upon his example. Other people rushed to say that this wasn’t true and that this was self-publicity by a notorious man and so on and so forth. Probably like all artistic and semi-artistic things there’s an element of truth to it. Because a character like this that’s eponymous and archetypal will be a synthesis of all sorts of things. Hergé got out of these dilemmas by saying that it was based upon a member of his family and so on. That’s probably as true as not.

The idea of the masculine and the heroic and the Homeric in modern guise sounds absurd when it’s put in tights and appears in a superhero comic and that sort of thing. But the interesting thing is because these forms of culture are so “low” they’re off the radar of that which is acceptable and therefore certain values can come back. It’s interesting to note that the pulp novels in America in the 1920s and ’30s, which preceded the so-called golden age of comics in the United States in the ’30s and ’40s and the silver age in the 1960s, dealt with quite illicit themes.

One of the reasons that even today Tintin is mildly controversial and regarded as politically incorrect in certain circles is they span much of the 20th century. Everyone who is alive now realizes that there was a social and cultural revolution in the Western world in the 1960s, where almost all the values of the relatively traditional European society, whatever side you fought on in the Second World War, were overturned and reversed in a mass reversion or re-evaluation of values from a New Leftist perspective.

Before 1960, many things which are now legal and so legal that to criticize them has become illegal were themselves illicit and outside of the pedigree and patent of Western law, custom, practice, and social tradition. We’ve seen a complete reversal of nearly all of the ideals that prevailed then. This is why many items of quite popular culture are illicit.

If one just thinks of a silent film like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915. There was a prize awarded by the American Motion Picture Academy up until about 1994 in Griffith’s name. For those who don’t know, the second part of Birth of a Nation is neo-Confederate in orientation and depicts the Ku Klux Klan as heroic. Heroic! The Ku Klux Klan regarded as the hero, saving the White South from perdition, from the carpet-baggers, some of whom bear an extraordinary resemblance to the present President of the United States of America. Of course, they were called carpet-baggers because they were mulatto politicians who arrived in the South primarily from the North with certain Abolitionist sponsorship and they arrived with everything they owned in a carpet bag to take over. And that’s why they were called that.

That film, which you can get in any DVD store and buy off Amazon for ten pounds or so, is extraordinarily notorious, but in actual fact, in terms of its iconography, it’s a heroic, dualist film where there’s a force of darkness and a force of light. There’s a masculine individual. There’s people who believe that they’ll sort out problems with a gun. The Bible, in an ultra-Protestant way, is their text. It’s what they base metaphysical objectivism and absolute value upon, and that film is perceived retrospectively as an extreme White Right-wing film although Griffith himself is later to do a film called Intolerance and actually, like a lot of film makers, had quite a diverse range of views irrespective of his own Southern and Texan background.

The thing one has to remember is that the methodology of the heroic can survive even if people fight against various forces in Western life. One of the great tricks of the heroic in the last 40 to 50 years is the heroic films involving icons like Clint Eastwood, for example, as a successor to this sort of archetype of John Wayne and the sort of Western stylized masculinity that he represented. Eastwood often plays individualistic, survivalist, and authoritarian figures; Right-wing existentialist figures. But they’re always at war with bureaucracies and values that are perceived as conservative. One of the ways it tricks, which has occurred since the 1960s, is to reorient the nature of the heroic so that the eternal radical Right within a society such as the United States or elsewhere is the enemy, per se.

There’s a comic strip in the United States called Captain America which began in the 1940s. Captain America is a weedy young man who almost walks with a stick and has arms like branches, and of course a friendly American scientist introduces him to a new secret program where he’s injected with some steroids and this sort of thing and immediately becomes this enormous blond hulking superman with blue eyes. Of course, he must dress himself in the American flag so that he can call himself Captain America. So you get the idea! He has a big shield which has the star of the United States on it and has a sidekick who dies in one of the 1940s comics, but of course these figures never die. They’re endlessly brought back. But there’s a problem here because the position that Captain America and a lesser Marvel Comics equivalent called Captain Britain and all these other people represent is a little bit suspect in an increasingly liberal society, even then. So, his enemy, his nemesis, his sort of dualist alternative has to be a “Nazi,” and of course Captain America has a Nazi enemy who’s called the Red Skull.

The Red Skull is a man with a hideous face who, to hide this hideousness, wears a hideous mask over his hideous face as a double take. The mirror cracks so why not wear a mask, but it’s not a mask of beauty. It’s a skull that’s painted red, and he’s called the Red Skull. He always wears green. So, it’s red and green. He always appears and there’s always a swastika somewhere in the background and that sort of thing. He’s always building robots or cyborgs or new biological sorts of creatures to take over the world. Captain America always succeeds in vanquishing him in the last panel. Just in the last panel. The Red Skull’s always about to triumph until the fist of Captain America for the American way and the American dream comes in at the end.

This mantle of the heroic whereby Right-wing existentialists like Captain America fight against the extreme Right in accordance with democratic values is one of the interesting tricks that’s played with the nature of the heroic. Because the heroic is a dangerous idea. Whether or not Tintin was based on Léon Degrelle there is of course a fascistic element to the nature of the heroic which many writers of fantasy and science fiction, which began as a despised genre but is now, because it’s so commercially viable, one of the major European book genres.

They’ve always known this. Michael Moorcock, amongst others, speaks of the danger of subliminal Rightism in much fantasy writing where you can slip into an unknowing, uncritical ultra-Right and uncritical attitude towards the masculine, towards the heroic, towards the vanquishing of forces you don’t like, towards self-transcendence, for example.

iron_dream.jpgThere’s a well-known novel called The Iron Dream and this novel is in a sense depicting Hitler’s rise to power and everything that occurred in the war that resulted thereafter as a science fiction discourse, as a sort of semiotic by a mad creator. This book was actually banned in Germany because although it’s an extreme satire, which is technically very anti-fascistic, it can be read in a literal-minded way with the satire semi-detached. This novel by Norman Spinrad was banned for about 20 to 30 years in West Germany as it then was. Because fantasy enables certain people to have an irony bypass.

Although comics are quite humorous, particularly to adults, children and adolescents read them, scan them because they sort of just look at the images and take in the balloons as they go across because these are films on paper. They essentially just scan them in an uncritical way. If you ever look at a child, particularly a child that’s got very little interest in formal literature of a sort that’s taught in many European and American schools, they sit absorbed before comics, they’re absolutely enthralled by the nature of them, by the absolute villainy of the transgressor, by the total heroicism and absence of irony and sarcasm of the heroic figure with a scantily clad maiden on the front that the hero always addresses himself to but usually in a dismissive way because he’s got heroic things to accomplish. She’s always on his arm or on his leg or being dragged down.

Indeed, the pulp depiction of women which, of course, is deeply politically incorrect and vampish is a sort of great amusement in these genres. If you ever look at comics like Conan the Barbarian or Iron Man or The Incredible Hulk and these sorts of things the hero will always be there in the middle! Never to the side. Always in the middle foursquare facing the future. The villain will always be off to one side, often on the left; the side of villainy, the side of the sinister, that which wants to drag down and destroy.

As the Hulk is about to hit The Leader, which is his nemesis, or Captain America is about to hit the Red Skull, which is his nemesis, or Batman is about to hit the psychiatric clown called The Joker, who is his nemesis, there’s always a scantily clad woman who’s around his leg on the front cover looking up in a pleading sort of way as the fist is back here. It’s quite clear that these are archetypal male attitudes of amusement and play which, of course, have their danger to many of the assumptions that took over in the 1960s and ’70s.

It’s interesting to notice that in the 1930s quite a lot of popular culture expressed openly vigilante notions about crime. There was a pulp magazine called The Shadow that Orson Welles played on the radio. Orson Welles didn’t believe in learning the part, in New York radio Welles, usually the worse for wear for drink and that sort of thing, would steam up to the microphone, he would take the script, and just launch into The Shadow straight away. The Shadow used to torment criminals. Depending on how nasty they were the more he’d torment them. When he used to kill them, or garrote them, or throttle them, or hang them (these pulps were quite violent and unashamedly so) he used to laugh uproariously like a psychopath. And indeed, if you didn’t get the message, there would be lines in the book saying “HA HA HA HA HA!” for several lines as he actually did people in.

The Shadow is in some ways the prototype for Batman who comes along later. Certain Marxian cultural critics in a discourse called cultural studies have pointed out that Batman is a man who dresses himself up in leathers to torment criminals at night and looks for them when the police, namely the state, the authority in a fictional New York called Gotham City, put a big light in the sky saying come and torment the criminal class. They put this big bat symbol up in the sky, and he drives out in the Batmobile looking for villains to torment. As most people are aware, comics morphed into more adult forms in the 1980s and ’90s and the graphic novel emerged called Dark Knight which explored in quite a sadistic and ferocious way Batman’s desire to punish criminality in a very extreme way.

There was also a pulp in the 1930s called Doc Savage. Most people are vaguely aware of these things because Hollywood films have been made on and off about all these characters. Doc Savage was an enormous blond who was 7 feet. He was bronzed with the sun and covered in rippling muscles. Indeed, to accentuate his musculature he wore steel bands around his wrists and ankles, as you do. He was a scientific genius, a poetic genius, and a musical genius. In fact, there was nothing that he wasn’t a genius at. He was totally uninterested in women. He also had a research institute that operated on the brains of criminals in order to reform them. This is quite extraordinary and deeply politically incorrect! He would not only defeat the villain but at the end of the story he would drag them off to this hospital/institute for them to be operated on so that they could be redeemed for the nature of society. In other words, he was a eugenicist!

Of course, those sorts of ideas in the 1930s were quite culturally acceptable because we are bridging different cultural perceptions even at the level of mass entertainment within the Western world. That which is regarded, even by the time A Clockwork Orange was made by Kubrick from Burgess’ novel in the 1970s, as appalling, 40 years before was regarded as quite acceptable. So, the shifting sands of what is permissible, who can enact it, and how they are seen is part and parcel of how Western people define themselves.

Don’t forget, 40% of the people in Western societies don’t own a book. Therefore, these popular, mass forms which in one way are intellectually trivial is in some respects how they perceive reality.

Comics, like films, have been heavily censored. In the United States in the 1950s, there was an enormous campaign against various sorts of quasi-adult comics that were very gory and were called horror comics and were produced by a very obscure forum called Entertainment Comics (EC). And there was a surrogate for the Un-American Activities Committee in the US Senate looking at un-American comics that are getting at our kids, and they had a large purge of these comics. Indeed, mountains of them were burnt. Indeed, enormous sort of semi-book burnings occurred. Pyramids of comics as big as this room would be burnt by US and federal marshals on judges’ orders because they contained material that the young shouldn’t be looking at.

The material they shouldn’t be looking at was grotesque, gory, beyond Roald Dahl sort of explicit material which, of course, children love. They adore all that sort of thing because it’s exciting, because it’s imaginative, because it’s brutal, because it takes you out of the space of normalcy, and that’s why the young with their instincts and their passion and glory love this sort of completely unmediated amoral fare. That’s why there’s always been this tension between what their parents would like them to like and what many, particularly late childish boys and adolescents, really want to devour. I remember Evelyn Waugh was once asked, “What was your favorite book when you were growing up?” And just like a flash he said, “Captain Blood!” Captain Blood! Imagine any silent pirate film from the 1920s and early ’30s.

Now, the heroic in Western society takes many forms. When I grew up, there were these tiny little comics in A5 format. Everyone must have seen them. Certainly any boys from the 1960s and ’70s. They were called Battle. Battle and Commando and War comics, and these sorts of thing. They were done by D. C. Thomson, which is the biggest comics manufacturer in Britain, up in Dundee. These comics were very unusual because they allowed extremely racialist and nationalist attitudes, but the enemies were always Germans and they were always Japanese.

Indeed, long after the passing of the Race Act in the late 1960s and its follow-up which was more codified and definitive and legally binding in the 1970s, statements about Germans and Japanese could be made in these sorts of comics, which were not just illicit but illegal. You know what I mean, the Green Berets, the commandos, would give it to “Jerry” in a sort of arcane British way and were allowed to. This was permitted, even this liberal transgression, because the enemy was of such a sort.

But, of course, what’s being celebrated is British fury and ferocity and the nature of British warriors and the Irish Guards not taking prisoners and this sort of thing. This is what’s being celebrated in these sorts of comics. It’s noticeable that D. C. Thomson, who has no connection to the DC group in the United States by the way, toned down this element in the comics as they went along. Only Commando survives, but they still produce four of them a month.

In the 1970s, Thomson, who also did The Beano and utterly childish material for children for about five and six as well as part of the great spectrum of their group, decided on some riskier, more transgressive, more punkish, more adult material. So, they created a comic called Attack. Attack! It’s this large shark that used to come and devour people. It was quite good. The editor would disapprove of something and they would be eaten by the shark. There was the marvelous balloons they have in comics, something like, “This shark is amoral. It eats.” And there would be a human leg sticking out of the mouth of the shark. Some individual the editor disapproved of was going down the gullet.

Now, Attack was attacked in Parliament. A Labour MP got up and said he didn’t like Attack. It was rather dubious. It was tending in all sorts of unwholesome directions, and Attack had a story that did outrage a lot of people in the middle 1970s, because there was a story where a German officer from the Second World War was treated sympathetically, in Attack. Because it was transgressive, you see. What’s going to get angry Methodists writing to their local paper? A comic that treats some Wehrmacht officer in a sympathetic light. So, there was a real ruckus under Wilson’s government in about ’75 about this, and so they removed that.

judge-dredd-1.jpgVarious writers like Pat Mills and John Wagner were told to come up with something else. So, they came up with the comic that became Judge Dredd. Judge Dredd is a very interesting comic in various ways because all sorts of Left-wing people don’t like Judge Dredd at all, even as a satire. If there are people who don’t know this, Dredd drives around in a sort of motorcycle helmet with a slab-sided face which is just human meat really, and he’s an ultra-American. It’s set in a dystopian future where New York is extended to such a degree that it covers about a quarter of the landmass of the United States. You just live in a city, in a burg, and you go and you go and you go. There’s total collapse. There’s no law and order, and there’s complete unemployment, and everyone’s bored out of their mind.

The comic is based on the interesting notion that crime is partly triggered by boredom and a sort of wantonness in the masses. Therefore, in order to keep any sort of order, the police and the judiciary have combined into one figure called a Judge. So, the jury, the trial, the police investigation, and the investigative and forensic elements are all combined in the figure of the Judge. So, if Judge Dredd is driving along the street and he sees some youths of indeterminate ethnicity breaking into a store he says, “Hold, citizens! This is the law! I am the law! Obey me! Obey the law!” And if they don’t, he shoots them dead, because the trial’s syncopated into about 20 seconds. He’s given them the warning. That’s why he’s called Judge Dredd, you see. D-R-E-D-D. He just kills automatically those who transgress.

There’s great early comic strips where he roars around on this bike that has this sort of skull-like front, and he appears and there’s a chap parking his car and he says, “Citizen! Traffic violation! Nine years!” and roars off somewhere else. Somebody’s thieving or this sort of thing and he gets them and bangs their head into the street. There’s no question of a commission afterwards. “Twelve years in the Cube!” which is an isolation cell. It’s got its own slang because comics, of course, create their own world which children and adolescents love so you can totally escape into a world that’s got a semi-alternative reality of its own that’s closed to outsiders. If some adult picks it up and looks at it he says, “What is this about?” Because it’s designed to exclude you in a way.

Dredd has numerous adventures in other dimensions and so on, but Dredd never changes, never becomes more complicated, remains the same. He has no friends. “I have no need of human attachments,” he once says in a slightly marvelous line. He has a robot for company who provides most of his meals and needs and that sort of thing. For the rest, he’s engaged in purposeful and pitiless implementation of law and order. One of his famous phrases was when somebody asked him what is happiness, and he says in one of those bubbles, “Happiness is law and order.” Pleasure is obeying the law. And there are various people groveling in chains in front of him or something.

Now, there’ve been worried Left-wing cat-calls, although it’s a satire, and it’s quite clearly meant to be one. For example, very old people, because people in this fantasy world live so long that they want to die at the end, and they go to be euthanized. So, they all queue up for euthanasia. There’s one story where somebody blows up the people waiting for euthanasia to quicken the thing, but also to protest against it. And Judge says, “Killing euthanized is terrorism!” War on terror, where have we heard that before? Don’t forget, these are people that want to die. But Dredd says, “They’re being finished off too early. You’ve got to wait, citizen!” Wait to be killed later by the syringe that’s coming. And then people are reprocessed as medicines, because everything can be used. It’s a utilitarian society. Therefore, everything is used from birth to death, because the state arranges everything for you, even though socialism is condemned completely.

There’s another bloc, it’s based on the Cold War idea, there’s a Soviet bloc off on the other side of the world that is identical to the West, but ideologically they’re at war with each other, even though they’re absolutely interchangeable with each other. But the Western metaphysic is completely free market, completely capitalist, but in actual fact no one works, and everyone’s a slave to an authoritarian state.

There’s also an interesting parallel with more advanced forms of literature here. A Clockwork Orange: many people think that’s about Western youth rebellion and gangs of the Rockers and Mods that emerged in the 1960s at the time. Burgess wrote his linguistically sort of over-extended work in many ways. In actual fact, Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange after a visit to the Soviet Union where he was amazed to find that, unlike the totalitarian control of the masses which he expected at every moment, there was quite a degree of chaos, particularly amongst the Lumpenproletariat in the Soviet Union.

George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting idea, and that is that the proles are so beneath ideology, right at the bottom of society, the bottom 3% not even the bottom 10%, that they can be left to their own devices. They can be left to take drugs. They can be left to drink to excess. They can be left to destroy themselves. Orwell says “the future is the proles” at one point. Remember when Winston Smith looks out across the tenements and sees the enormous washerwoman putting some shirts, putting some sheets on a line? And she sings about her lost love, “Oh, he was a helpless fancy . . .” and all this. And Winston looks out on her across the back yards and lots and says, “If there’s a future, it lies with the proles!” And then he sings to himself, “But looking at them, he had to wonder.”

The party degrades the proletariat to such a degree that it ceases to be concerned about their amusements because they’re beneath the level of ideology and therefore you don’t need to control them. The people you control are the Outer Party, those who can think, those who wear the blue boiler suits, not the black ones from the Inner Party.

TheIronHeel500.jpgThis interconnection between mass popular culture, often of a very trivial sort, and elitist culture, whereby philosophically the same ideas are expressed, is actually interesting. You sometimes get these lightning flashes that occur between absolutely sort of “trash culture,” if you like, and quite advanced forms of culture like A Clockwork Orange, like Darkness at Noon, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, like The Iron Heel, like The Iron Dream. And these sorts of extraordinary dystopian and catatopian novels, which are in some respects the high political literature (as literature, literature qua literature) of the 20th century.

Now, one of the reasons for the intellectual independence of elements in some comics is because no one’s concerned about it except when the baleful eye of censorship falls upon them. A particular American academic wrote a book in the early 1950s called Seduction of the Innocent which is about how children were being depraved by these comics which were giving them violent and racialist and elitist and masculinist stereotypes, which shouldn’t be allowed.

Of course, a vogue for Left wing comics grew up in the 1970s because culture in the United States, particularly men’s culture, is racially segregated in a way which is never admitted. African-Americans have always had their own versions of these things. There are Black American comics. Marvel did two called The Black Panther, and the Black Panther only ever preys on villains who are Black.

There’s another one called Power Man who’s in prison loaded down with chains and a White scientist, who might be Jewish, experiments on him. He’s called Luke Cage and he’s experimented on so he becomes a behemoth. A titan of max strength he’s called, and he bats down the wall and takes all sorts of people on. And yet, of course, all of the villains he takes on, very like the Shaft films which are both about James Bond films which are very similar, all of this material is segregated. It occurs within its own zone.

But you notice the same heroic archetypes return. Yet again there’s a villain in the corner, usually on the left side, Luke Cage has an enormous fist, there’s a sort of half-caste beauty on his leg looking up, staring at him. This sort of thing. It’s the same main methodology. It’s the same thing coming around again.

Although there have been attempts at the Left-wing comic, it’s actually quite difficult to draw upon with any effect. Because, in a way you can criticize comics that are metapolitically Right-wing, but to create a Left-wing one is actually slightly difficult. The way you get around it is to have a comic that’s subliminally Rightist and have the villain who’s the extreme Right. There are two American comics called Sgt. Fury and Sgt. Rock and another one’s called Our Army at War. Sgt. Rock, you know, and this sort of thing. And you know who the villain is because they’re all sort in the Second World War.

The attitude towards Communism in comics is very complicated. Nuclear destruction was thought too controversial. When formal censorship of comics began in America in the 1950s something called the Approved Comics Code Authority, very like the British Board of Film Classification, emerged. They would have a seal on the front of a comic. Like American films in the 1930s, men and women could kiss but only in certain panels and only for a certain duration on the page as the child or adolescent looked at it, and it had to be, it was understood so explicitly it didn’t even need to be mentioned that of course it didn’t even need to be mentioned that it was totally heterosexual. Similarly, violence had to be kept to a minimum, but a certain allowed element of cruelty was permitted if the villain was on the receiving end of it.

Also, the comics had to be radically dualist. There has to be a force for light and a force for darkness. There has to be Spiderman and his nemesis who’s Dr. Octopus who has eight arms. But certain complications can be allowed, and as comics grow, if you like, non-dualist characters emerge.

There’s a character in The Fantastic Four called Doctor Doom who’s a tragic figure with a ruined face who is shunned by man who wants to revenge himself on society because he’s shut out, who ends as the ruler of a tiny little made-up European country which he rules with an iron hand, and he does have hands of iron. So he rules his little Latvia substitute with an iron hand. But he’s an outsider, you see, because in the comic he’s a gypsy, a sort of White Roma. But he gets his own back through dreams of power.

There’s these marvelous lines in comics which when you ventilate them become absurd. But on the page, if you’re sucked into the world, particularly as an adolescent boy, they live and thrive for you. Doom says to Reed Richards, who’s his nemesis on the other side, “I am Doom! I will take the world!” Because the way the hero gets back at the villain is to escape, because they’re usually tied up somewhere with a heroine looking on expectantly. The hero is tied up, but because the villain talks so much about what they’re going to do and the cruelty and appalling suffering they’re going to inflict all the time the hero is getting free. Because you have to create a lacuna, a space for the hero to escape so that he can drag the villain off to the asylum or to the gibbet or to the prison at the end. Do you remember that line from Lear on the heath? “I shall do such things, but what they are I know not! But they will be the terror of the earth!” All these villains repeat that sort of line in the course of their discourse, because in a sense they have to provide the opening or the space for the hero to emerge.

One of the icons of American cinema in the 20th century was John Wayne. John Wayne was once interviewed about his political views by, of all things, Playboy magazine. This is the sort of level of culture we’re dealing with. They said, “What are your political views?” and Wayne said, “Well, I’m a white supremacist.” And there was utter silence when he said this! He was a member of the John Birch Society at the time. Whether or not he gave money to the Klan no one really knows.

There’s always been a dissident strand in Hollywood, going back to Errol Flynn and before, of people who, if you like, started, even at the level of fantasy, living out some of these heroic parts in their own lives. Wayne quite clearly blurred the distinction between fantasy on the film set and in real life on many occasions. There are many famous incidents of Wayne, when robberies were going on, rushing out of hotels with guns in hand saying, “Stick’em up!” He was always playing that part, because every part’s John Wayne isn’t it, slightly differently? Except for a few comedy pieces. And he played that part again and again and again.

Alamo_1960_poster.jpgDon’t forget, The Alamo is now a politically incorrect film. Very politically incorrect. There’s an enormous women’s organization in Texas called the Daughters of the Alamo, and they had to change their name because the White Supremacist celebration of the Alamo was offensive to Latinos who are, or who will be very shortly, a Texan majority don’t forget. So, the sands are shifting in relation to what is permitted even within popular forms of culture.

When Wayne said he was a supremacist in that way he said, “I have nothing against other people, but we shouldn’t hand the country over to them.” That’s what he said. “We shouldn’t hand the country over to them.”

And don’t forget, I was born in ’62. Obama in many of the deep Southern states wouldn’t have had the vote then. Now he’s President. This is how the West is changing on all fronts and on every front. American Whites will certainly be in the minority throughout the federation in 40 or 50 years. Certainly. Indeed, Clinton (the male Clinton, the male of the species) once justified political correctness by saying, “Well, in 50 years we’ll be the minority. We’ll need political correctness to fight that game.”

The creator of Tintin, Hergé, always said that his dreams and his nightmares were in white. But we know that the politically correct games of the future will be Whites putting their hands up in the air complaining because somebody’s made a remark, complaining because they haven’t got a quota, complaining because this form is biased against them, and this sort of thing. They’ll be playing the game that minorities in the West play at the moment, because that’s all that’s left to them. You give them a slice of the ghetto, you predefine the culture (mass, middling, and elite), in the past but not into the future, elements of the culture which are too much reverent of your past don’t serve for the future and are therefore dammed off and not permitted. This is what, in a sense, White people face in America and elsewhere.

One of the great mysteries of the United States that has produced an enormous amount of this mass culture, some of which I have been at times rather glibly describing, is why has there never been a mass serious Right-wing movement of the real Right in the United States. The whole history of the 20th century and before would be different if that had occurred. Just think of it. Not some sort of trivial group, but a genuine group.

Don’t forget, the real position of the American ultras is isolationism. They don’t want to go out into the rest of the world and impose American neo-colonialism on everyone else. They’re the descendants of people who left the European dominion in order to create a new world. Hence, the paradox that the further Right you go in the United States, the more, not pacifist, but non-interventionist you become.

Before the Confederacy, there was a movement called the Know Nothings, and this is often why very Right-wing people in the United States are described as Know Nothings. Because when you’re asked about slavery, which of course is a very loaded and partial question, you said, “Well, I don’t know anything about it.” And that was a deliberate tactic to avoid being sucked in to an abolitionist agenda or a way of speaking that was biased in the political correctness of its own era.

But it is remarkable that although the Confederacy didn’t have the strength to win, if they had won the history of the whole world would be different. The 20th century would have never taken the course that it did.

One of the interesting things about the American psyche, of course, is that many unfortunate incidents, the war that we fought with the United States in 1812, for example, have been completely elided from history. It’s gone! It’s gone! We almost went to war with them in 1896 over Venezuela. That still has slightly interesting intonations even now a century or more on when Joseph Chamberlain was Colonial Secretary. This is again [elided] rather like the Suez incident 1956. There are certain incidents that are played up. And there are anniversaries that are every day on the television, and that you can’t escape from. But there are other anniversaries and other events which have been completely air-brushed from the spectrum and from the historical continuum as if they never occurred.

One episode is the extraordinarily bad treatment of prisoners of war by Americans going way, way back. The Confederates and the Unionists treated each other that way in the Civil War, but the Mexicans certainly got the boot in the 1840s as did the Spanish-Cubans at the turn of the 20th century. Americans beat up every German on principle, including members of Adenauer’s future cabinet when they occupied part of Germany. They just regard that as de rigeur. This frontier element that is there, crude and virile and ferocious, not always wrong, but ultimately fighting in ways which are not in the West’s interests, certainly for much of the 20th century, just gone, is part and parcel of the heroic American sense of themselves.

Where do all of these archetypes ultimately come from? That American popular culture which has gone universal because the deal is that what America thinks today, the world thinks tomorrow. When we allegedly ruled the world, or part of it, in the 19th century, Gladstone once stood in Manchester in the Free Trade Hall and said, “What Manchester thinks today, the world thinks tomorrow.” But now it’s what’s on MTV or CNN today, that the world would like to think is the ruling discourse of tomorrow.

American self-conceptuality is, to my mind, deeply, deeply Protestant in every sense. Even at the lowest level of their popular culture the idea of the heroic man, often a dissident police officer or a rancher or a hero of certain supernatural powers and so forth, but a man alone, a man outside the system, a man whose anti-Establishment, but he fights for order, a man who believes that everything’s settled with a weapon (which is why they always carry large numbers of weapons, these sort of survivalist type heroes). All of these heroes, the ones created by Robert E. Howard, the ones such as Doc Savage and Justice Inc., the Shadow, and all of the super-heroes like Batman.

Superman is interesting. Superman is Nietzschean ideas reduced to a thousand levels of sub-intellectuality, isn’t it? That’s what’s going on. He has a girlfriend who never ages called Lois Lane, who looks 22 now even though she’s about 88 in the trajectory of the script. There’s a villain who’s bald called Lex Luthor who’s always there, always the nemesis, always plotting. Luthor’s reinvented later in the strip as a politician who takes over the city. Superman’s clean and wholesome, you see, whereas the villain becomes a politician. You can see the sort of rhetoric.

luthor-1.jpgLuthor and Superman in the stories are outsiders. They’re both extraterrestrials. Luthor, however, has anti-humanist values, which means he’s “evil,” whereas Superman, who’s partly human, has “humanist” values. Luthor comes up with amazing things, particularly in the 1930s comics, which are quite interesting, particularly given the ethnicity of the people who created Superman. Now, about half of American comics are very similar to the film industry, and a similar ethnicity is in the film industry as in the comics industry. Part of the notions of what is right and what is wrong, what is American and what is not, is defined by that particular grid.

Luthor’s an anti-humanite. Luthor always has these thuggish villains who have several teeth missing and are sort of Lombrosian, and they’re ugly, have broken noses and slanted hats. This is the 1930s. And Luthor says, “I’m sick of the human. We’ve got to transcend the human.” They don’t have words like “transcend” in comics. They say, “go beyond” or something, you know. “We’ve got to go beyond the human. Humans have got to go! I’ve got to replace them with a new species.” And one of his thugs will say, “Way to go, Luthor! This is what we want!” If you notice, you have a comic called Superman, but Superman has liberal values and fights for democracy and the American way, and Luthor, although no one ever says he’s “fascistic,” is harsh, is elitist, is inegalitarian.

You know that the villains have a tendency to punish their own men? You remember Blofeld in the Bond films? One of his own minions will fail him, and he’ll sit in a chair and you know what’s going to happen. A hand strokes the cat with the diamonds around its neck. The villain likes cats, and the cat’s eyes stare on. The finger quivers over the button. And Blofeld, or Luthor, or Dr. Doom, or the Red Skull, or the Joker, or whoever it is, because it’s the same force really, says, “You failed me. There is only one punishment in this organization . . .” Click! The button goes, and there’s an explosion, the bloke screams, goes down in the chair.

There’s a great scene in Thunderball at the beginning where the chair comes up again. It’s empty and steaming, and all the other cronies are readjusting their ties. Blofeld’s sat there, and the camera always pans to his hands, the hands of power. You know, the hands of death, the hands of Zeus, the hands of Henry VIII. The closet would meet, and they’d all be disarmed by guards, but he would have a double-headed axe down by the chair.

It’s said, by American propaganda, that Saddam Hussein once shot his Minister of Health during a revolutionary command council meeting, and the same script had to be continued in the meeting by the Deputy Minister of Health. Just think of how the Deputy Minister felt! Let’s hope he wasn’t wearing gray flannels, because they might have been brown by the end of the cabinet session.

This idea of dualism, moral dualism (ultimately a deeply Christian idea in many ways as well as a Zoroastrian idea) is cardinal for the morality of these comics and the popular films and TV serials and all the internet spin-offs and all of these computer games. Because even when the hero is a woman like Lara Croft and so on, it’s the same methodology coming round and round again. Because adolescent boys want to look at somebody who looks like Lara Croft as she runs around with guns in both hands with virtually nothing on. That’s the sort of dissident archetype in these American pulps going back a long way. It’s just the feminization of heroic masculinity actually, which is what these sort of Valkyries are in popular terms.

Now, the dualist idea is that there’s a force for evil and a force for good, and we know who they are (they are the ones out there!). In The Hulk, the Hulk is green because he’s been affected by gamma rays. The Hulk alternates with a brilliant scientist, but when he’s in his monstrous incarnation—because of course it’s a simplification of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s myth—the Hulk, particularly early on in the comics, is incredibly stupid. If he saw this table in front of him he’d say, “Table. Don’t like table.” And he’d smash it, because Hulk smashes. That’s what he does! He smashes!

The villain in The Hulk is called the Leader. The Leader is the villain. The Leader is all brain. Indeed, the Leader has such a long head that he’s almost in danger of falling over because of the size of his brain. So, like children have to wear a steel brace on their teeth, the Leader wears a steel brace on his head because he’s “too bright.” So, the Leader—notice the Leader is a slightly proto-fascistic, Right-wing, elitist figure, isn’t he? The man who wants to dominate through his mind—is counter-posed by just brute force: the Hulk!

This idea that there’s a force for good and a force for evil and the one always supplants the other, but the one can never defeat the other, because the Leader in The Hulk, the Owl in Daredevil, the Joker in Batman, Dr. Doom in The Fantastic Four, Dr. Octopus and the Green Goblin (another green one) in Spiderman . . . They’re never destroyed. If one of them is destroyed, their son finds their mask in a trunk and puts it on and knows that he wants to dominate the world! And comes back again. They can never be destroyed because they’re archetypes.

The comics hint at a sort of pagan non-dualism partly because they insist upon this good and evil trajectory so much. That’s in some ways when they become quite morally complicated and quite dangerous.

In Greek tragedy, a moral system exists, and it’s preordained that you have a fate partly in your own hands even though it’s decided by the gods. In The Oresteia by Aeschylus, you have a tragedy in a family (cannibalism, destruction, self-devouring) which is revenged and passed through into future generations. So that the Greek fleet can get to Troy, a girl is sacrificed. Clytemnestra avenges herself as a Medusa, as a gorgon against her husband who has killed her own daughter. Then, of course, there’s a cycle of revenge and pity and the absence of pity when the son, Orestes, who identifies with the father, comes back.

In this type of culture, and obviously a much higher level conceptually, it’s noticeable that the good character and the evil character align, are differentiated, merging, replace one another, and separate over the three plays in that particular trilogy.

If you look at real life and you consider any conflict between men, Northern Ireland in the 1970s (we’re British here and many people here are British nationalists). But if you notice the IRA guerrilla/terrorist/paramilitary, the Loyalist guerilla/terrorist/paramilitary . . . One of my grandfathers was in the Ulster Volunteer Force at the beginning of the 20th century, but I went to a Catholic school.

Nietzsche has a concept called perspectivism whereby certain sides choose you in life, certain things are prior ordained. When the U.S. Marine fights the Islamist radical in Fallujah, the iconography of an American comic begins to collapse, because which is the good one and which is the evil one? The average Middle American as he sat reading Captain America zapping the channels thinks that the Marine is the good one, with a sort of 30-second attention span.

But at the same time, the Marine isn’t an incarnation of evil. He’s a man fighting for what he’s been told to fight for. He’s a warrior. There’re flies in his eyes. He’s covered in sweat. He’s gonna kill someone who opposes him. But the radical on the other side is the same, and he sees that he’s fighting for his people and the destiny of his faith. And when warriors fight each other, often there’s little hatred left afterwards, because it’s expended in the extraordinary ferocity of the moment.

This is when this type of mass culture, amusing and interesting and entertaining though it is, begins to fall away. Because whenever we’ve gone to war, and we’ve gone to war quite a lot over the last 10 to 12 years. Blair’s wars: Kosovo. There’s the bombing of the Serbs. Milošević is depicted as evil! Remember those slogans in the sun? Bomb Milošević’s bed! Bomb his bed! Bomb his house! And this sort of thing. Saddam! We’re gonna string him up! The man’s a war criminal! The fact he’d been a client to the West for years didn’t seem to come into it. Hanged. Showed extreme bravery in a way, even though if you weren’t a Sunni in Iraq, definitely, he wasn’t exactly your man.

There’s a degree to which the extraordinary demonization of the Other works. That’s why it’s used. The British National Party won two seats in that election but there was a campaign against it for 12 to 15 days before in almost every item of media irrespective of ideological profile saying, “Don’t vote for these people!” to get rid of the softer protest votes and you’re only left with the hard core. That’s why that type of ideology is used. Maybe humans are hardwired to see absolute malevolence as on the other side, when in actual fact it’s just a person who may or may not be fighting against them.

But what this type of mass or popular culture does is it retains the instinct of the heroic: to transcend, to fight, to struggle, to not know fear, to if one has fear to overcome it in the moment, to be part of the group but retain individual consciousness within it, to be male, to be biologically defined, to not be frightened of death, whatever religious or spiritual views and values that one incarnates in order to face that. These are, in a crude way, what these forms are suggesting. Morality is often instinctual, as is largely true with humans.

I knew somebody who fought in Korea. When they were captured, the Koreans debated amongst themselves whether they should kill all the prisoners. There were savage disputes between men. This always happens in war.

I remember, as I near the close of this speech, that one of Sir Oswald Mosley’s sons wrote a very interesting book both about his father and about his experiences in the Second World War. This is Nicholas Mosley, the novelist and biographer. He was in a parachute regiment, and there’s two stories that impinge upon the nature of the heroic that often appears in popular forms and which I’ll close with.

One is when he was with his other members. He was with his other parachutists, and they were in a room. There was The Daily Mirror, still going, the organ of Left-wing hate which is The Daily Mirror, and on the front it said, “Oswald Mosley: The Most Hated Man in Britain.” The most hated man in Britain. And a chap looked up from his desk and looked at Mosley who was leading a fighting brigade and said, “Mosley, you’re not related to this bastard, are you?” And he said, “I’m one of his sons.” And there was total silence in the room. Total silence in the room, and they stared each other out, and the bloke’s hands gripped The Mirror, and all the other paratroopers were looking at this incident. And after about four minutes it broke and the other one tore up The Mirror and put it in a bin at the back of the desk and said, “Sorry, mate. Didn’t mean anything. Really.” Mosley said, “Well, that’s alright then, old chap.” And left.

The other story is very, very interesting. This was they were advancing through France, and the Germans are falling back. And I believe I’ve told this story before at one of these meetings, but never waste a good story. A senior officer comes down the track and says, “Mosley! Mosley, you’re taking too many prisoners. You’re taking too many prisoners. It’s slowing the advance. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mosley?” And he said, “Sir, yes, I totally understand what you’re saying.” He says, “Do you really understand what I’m saying? You’re slowing the advance. Everyone’s noticing it. Do something about it. Do you understand?” “Sir!”

And he’s off, I guess to another spot of business further down. Mosley turns to his Welsh sergeant-major and says, “What do you think about that? We’re taking too many prisoners.” Because what the officer has told him in a very English and a very British way is to shoot German soldiers and to shoot German prisoners and to shoot them in ditches. What else does it mean? “You’re slowing the advance! You’re taking too many prisoners! You’re not soft on these people, are you, Mosley? Speed the advance of your column!” That’s what he’s saying, but it’s not written down. It’s not given as a formal and codified order. But everyone shoots prisoners in war! It’s a fact! When your friend’s had his head blown off next to you, you’d want revenge!

I know people who fought in the Falklands. And some of the Argentinian Special Forces and some of the conscripts together used dum-dum bullets. Hits a man, his spine explodes. So, when certain conscripts were found by British troops they finished them pretty quickly at Goose Green and elsewhere. This will occur! In all wars! Amongst all men! Of all races and of all kinds! Because it’s part of the fury that battle involves.

One of my views is that is that we can’t as a species, or even as groups, really face the fact that in situations of extremity this is what we’re like. And this is why, in some ways, we create for our entertainment these striated forms of heroic culture where there’s absolutely good and absolutely malevolent and the two never cross over. When the Joker is dragged off, justice is done and Inspector Gordon rings Batman up (because it is he) and says, “Well done! You’ve cleansed the city of a menace.” All of the villains go to an asylum called Arkham Asylum. They’re all taken to an asylum where they jibber insanely and wait for revenge against the nature of society.

I personally think that a great shadow has been cast for 60 years on people who want to manifest the most radical forms of political identity that relate to their own group, their own inheritance, their own nationality, their own civilizational construct in relation to that nationality, the spiritual systems from the past and in the present and into the future that are germane to them and not necessarily to the others, to their own racial and biological configuration. No other tendency of opinion is more demonized in the entire West. No other tendency of opinion is under pressure.

Two things can’t be integrated into the situationist spectacle based upon the right to shop. They’re religious fundamentalism and the radical Right, and they’re tied together in various ways. It’s why the two out-groups in Western society are radical Right-wing militants and Islamists. They’re the two groups that are Other, that are totally outside. The way in which they’re viewed by The Mirror and others is almost the level of a Marvel Comics villain.

I seem to remember a picture from the Sunday Telegraph years ago of our second speaker [David Irving], and I’m quite sure that it’d been re-tinted, at least this is my visual memory of it, to appear darker, to appear more sinister. I remember once GQ did a photo of me years ago when I was in a group called Revolutionary Conservative. That photo was taken in Parliament Square. You know, the square that has Churchill and Mandela in it, that square near our parliament, with Oliver Cromwell over there hiding, [unintelligible] over there hiding further on. That photo was taken at 12:30, and it was a brighter day than this. But in GQ magazine it was darkened to make it look as though it was shot at nine o’clock, and everything was dark, and because it involved so much re-tinting it slightly distorted and reconfigured everything. That’s because these people are dark, you see! They’re the force from outside! They’re that which shouldn’t be permitted!

Whereas I believe that the force which is for light and the force which is for darkness (because I’m a pagan) can come together and used creatively and based upon identity and can lead on to new vistas. But that’s a rather dangerous notion, and you won’t find it in The Fantastic Four when Reed Richards and Dr. Doom do battle, and you won’t find it in Spiderman when Peter Parker and Dr. Octopus (Dr. Otto Octavius) do battle with one another. You won’t see it when the Aryan Captain America is taking on his National Socialist nemesis, the Red Skull. You won’t see it with the Hulk taking on the Leader. You won’t see it in any of these forms. But these forms have a real use, and that is that they build courage.

Nietzsche says at the end of Zarathrustra that there are two things you need in this life. You need courage and knowledge. That’s why Zarathrustra has two friends. He has an eagle, which stands for courage, and he has a snake, which stands for knowledge. And if you can combine those things, and synthesize them, you have a new type of man and a new type of future. And Nietzsche chose the great Persian sage as the explicator of his particular truth, because in the past he represented extreme dualism, but in the future Nietzsche wished to portray that he brought those dualities together and combined them as one heroic force.

Thank you very much! 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/pulp-fascism/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bowden.jpg

[2] here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO0ak8G9KtE

lundi, 25 mars 2013

Chesterton the prophet of menacing Americanisation

GK-Chesterton-Large-640x480.jpg

1920: Chesterton the prophet of menacing Americanisation

 

 By Nicolas Bonnal

Ex: http://english.pravda.ru/

But to-day personal liberties are the first liberties we lose.

In 1920 Chesterton visits America where he gives some lectures. The British (yet Catholic) genius is intimidated by this great country which horrifies and amazes then many European writers. Think of Kafka or Celine who describe a curious mega-machine.

 

Yet America happens -at least for Chesterton- to be a problem, because this is the country that will become the matrix of globalization (we all agree that being that matrix ruin the ancient Americans as a people). And when the author of father Brown gets to the control area, he is asked some very indiscreet questions such as: are you an anarchist? Then the questionnaire asks him naively if he is "ready to subvert by force the government of United States!" And what would answer our poet? ''I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning'.

The questionnaire is not over. It asks then if the traveller is a polygamist! This time Chesterton is somewhat upset, like should have been the future travellers when asked if they are Nazis, anti-Semites or of course communists, Islamists or terrorists (what else, carnivores?). And he unleashes this terrible phrase:

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the ancient despotisms and aristocracies.

So, let us think of inquisitive America as the land of the modern inquisitors (I think of course of Dostoyevsky). And, as if he had known we were doomed to an endless clash of civilizations between Muslims and Yankees, Chesterton evokes his visit to Jordan and compares with bonhomie Arab administration to the American one: 

These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a polygamist himself.

Of course Chesterton, having quoted the Muslim world, had to speak of prohibition. That American prohibition too is hard to swallow for our drinker of beer (he deals with the subject -and with Islamism too- in the scaring novel the flying inn). And beyond the classical denunciations of hypocrisy and Puritanism, prohibition inspires him the following witty lines:

But to-day personal liberties are the first liberties we lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the right place, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the rights of man, if they do not include the normal right to regulate his own health, in relation to the normal risks of diet and daily life?

Chesterton knew he was entering in a no smoking area. The Americanization of the world would mean an exigent agenda of rules and orders to comply in all fields.  It is linked to the reign of the lawyers and congressmen, the cult of technique, a past but resilient Puritanism and of course the desire to homogenize all migrants. And he concludes on this matter with his sarcastic and efficient remark:

To say that a man has a right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the choice of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his hat but not a right to his head.

Another subsequent menace is the Anglo-American friendship. Chesterton guesses that the anglo-American condominium means a general police of the planet and a future world order. The end of his strange and genial book is dedicated to the future new world order, whose prophet and agent is the famous sci-fi writer H.G. Welles. The motivation of this world state is mainly... fear, the artificial fear of the machines (think now of gun control).

He tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else (and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made.

But America has given to Chesterton enough reasons to fear its matrix, its efficiency and its blindness too. This is why America is too the magnet of heretic and modernist H.G. Wells. A country founded by Illuminati and masons has to become the mould and model of all.

Now it is not too much to say that Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The World State is to be the United States of the World... The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World.

And although he speaks English and is an Anglo-Saxon, Chesterton, who is above all a Christian, a democrat and a humanist who mainly enjoys French and Russian peasants, then plundered by bolshevists, and he understands the American menace: the Americanisation of this planet, Americanisation that nothing will stop. The American menace consists in destroying any resisting nation in order to create the new united states of the world.

 The idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to americanise the Kamshatkan and the hairy Ainu.

Let us be more humoristic, but not optimistic. For the new American order will be established on the models of a nursery. This is where the blatant American feminism interferes:

And as there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as citizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all mankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its votes.

Our European commission works like this nursery. And of course our genius thus seizes American paranoia and the perils of modern pseudo-sciences, say for instance the theory of the gender. As if he was predicting infamous patriot act, Chesterton writes:

Now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is a danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made the excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. Anybody who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

That's not all. Why this American matrix imposes her strength so easily? Chesterton has already remarked that American political order incites citizens - or pawns- to be repetitive, trivial and equal: I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal personality. Thanks to fast-foods and commercial centres, business cult and universities, television and movies' omnipresence, this model has been applied in fifty years everywhere, event in the resilient Muslim countries, making the globalization more a mind-programmed attitude than a free will. But this is where we are. 

But friendship, as between our heroes,

can't really be: for we've outgrown

old prejudice; all men are zeros,

the units are ourselves alone.

Eugene Onegin

 

Chesterton, what I saw in America, the project Gutenberg e-book.

 

Nicolas Bonnal

dimanche, 17 février 2013

Some Sort of Nietzschean

Some Sort of Nietzschean

By Alex Kurtagić

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Wyndham Lewis in 1917 

Wyndham Lewis in 1917

Review:

Paul O’Keefe
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis [2]
London: Pimlico, 2000

In his acknowledgment pages Paul O’Keefe states that it took him a decade—not including the years of research already donated to him by another writer—to complete his biography of Wyndham Lewis, a project he began in 1990 while he was president of the Wyndham Lewis Society. And this is apparent, for this volume, holding 700 pages of tightly packed print, offers an indefatigably detailed and masochistically researched account of the British modernist artist and author’s life.

Biographies differ in emphasis, depending on the author’s biases, and the tone here is set early in the first chapter, which consists of a detailed description of Lewis’ bisected brain—now preserved in the Pathology Museum of the Imperial College School of Medicine—and the progressive destruction (through compression of the adjacent structures) caused by the growth of its pituitary tumor, medically known as a chromophone adenoma. O’Keefe’s narration is temperate and balanced in the extreme, abstaining from either celebration or condemnation, or indeed evaluation, of his subject. Instead, we are presented with unvarnished facts and restrained descriptions of circumstances, and, where records have not survived or never existed and witness memories were unavailable, with the most disciplined of inference.

Initially, the effect of this cold detective approach is a certain literary anhedonia: the narrative barely raises the pulse, despite Lewis’ turbulent social life, truculence, and extraordinarily difficult personality. One feels that another author would have been able to produce much more dramatic prose with the same information.

All the same, O’Keefe’s biography is impressive, and after a somewhat laborious account of Lewis’ Bohemian early life and career—which, ironically, includes his most significant artistic period, coinciding with Cubism and Futurism, and now referred to as Vorticist—the pace picks up once we get to 1930, the year Apes of God (London: Arthur Press, 1930), Lewis’ savage satire of London’s literary scene and the Bloomsbury Group, was published. We learn, as we race through the decade, that Lewis would routinely ridicule his friends and patrons in his novels, where they would appear thinly disguised under a pseudonym. Few were spared, which led to many a falling out, libel writs, and loss of patronage. This, plus Lewis’ quarrelsome, irascible, ultra-individualistic, cruel, secretive, litigious, and somewhat paranoid personality, kept him always on the verge of bankruptcy, despite his tremendous creative energy and productivity. Indeed, when a group of friends decided to contribute monthly to a fund so that Lewis could work without financial worries—for he was always in arrears and in debt—he very quickly and rudely alienated his benefactors. This was probably because he resented being beholden to anyone. Any well-meaning gesture was an affront.

The book is hard to put down as we pass through the 1940s. From the late 1930s, when Lewis travelled to North America, where he alternated between Canada and the United States and where he remained until after the end of the war. There we are taken to what was probably the most bitter and penurious period in his life. By this time he had difficulties finding a publisher, having become notorious for attracting libel suits, locking horns with his earlier publishers, and not delivering manuscripts for which he had been paid an advance. In the United States his books were deemed by some not the most marketable. Commissions for portraits and other art, which he desperately needed and assiduously sought, were scarce and not proof against upsetting his patrons. They were also not terribly popular—in 1938 his portrait of T. S. Eliot had been rejected by the Royal Academy [3]. And speaking engagements, greatly facilitated by the publicity efforts of friend and future media guru Marshall McLuhan, proved insufficient and disappointing financially—Lewis was no Jonathan Bowden, in any event. Thus, he and his wife survived in cheap hotels and grim rented accommodation only a dollar, sometimes a few cents, away from eviction until 1945.

Lewis’ situation improved marginally thereafter, though by this time his eyesight was in steep decline, owing to his as-yet-undiagnosed pituitary tumor compressing his optic nerve. His 1949 portrait of T. S. Eliot would be his last painting. All the same, Lewis marched on, continuing to author substantial and difficult books—including the last two volumes of his Human Age trilogy, the first of which had been published many years earlier—even after he went blind in 1951. In his final years, Lewis benefited from the radio dramatisation of his trilogy and from his Civil List Pension, which, though exiguous, provided him with a bare minimum of security.

O’Keefe’s narration continues through to a search of Lewis’ condemned flat soon after his death and to his final resting place inside a niche in a wall at Golder’s Green Crematorium.

Despite its comprehensiveness in all that pertains to Lewis, O’Keefe’s biography has two major deficiencies, which stem from the fact that all we learn is tightly circumscribed to the facts and events relating to Lewis and his immediate social periphery. Firstly, aside from a few clinical descriptions, we learn very little about Lewis’ art and writing, or their cultural significance. By the time he finally receives a modicum of institutional honors and recognition, it comes almost unexpectedly; it is as if there had been a sudden sea change and the invisible powers who had previously been critical, suspicious, or unimpressed suddenly decided to relent. Secondly, there is virtually no wider historical, cultural, or sociological context, leaving Lewis’ life and work somewhat abstracted; the points of reference appear shadowy, remote, and somewhat peremptory. One can go too far in the opposite direction, of course, which would detract from a work that aims to be objective, devoid of opinion and coloration, or about an individual as opposed to his times, but it seems O’Keefe was a little too careful to avoid this.

We do obtain some perspective through Lewis’ relations with (and on occasion anecdotes involving some of) the various and now illustrious members of Lewis’ circle—which included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and W. B. Yeats—but this perspective remains somewhat shallow, and the individuals concerned remain somewhat distant. This may well be because Lewis was a study in detachment; we learn that for him friends were there to be used, and were friends only in so much as they were useful. Bowden described him [4] as “a bit of a rogue” and “a rascal,” and one can see why.

Having said that, in this biography Lewis does not come across as the iron-hard Right-winger that Bowden made him out to be. It is admitted that Lewis wrote a book called Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), but he wrote it hastily and it seems he later regretted it, writing The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1939) and The Jews: Are They Human? (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939), the latter of which is an attack against anti-Semitism. (O’Keefe also documents the frustration with Lewis of German National Socialists visiting the United Kingdom in the early 1930s in the face of the British author’s refusal to identify Communists as Jews—although this may have been recalcitrant individualism on the part of Lewis, for an anecdote a few hundred pages later on in the biography suggests he was aware of the “Jewish question,” a state not necessarily incompatible with dismissing anti-Semitism as “a racial red-herring.”)

It is admitted that Lewis met William Joyce and Oswald Mosley (O’Keefe, p. 370), but any relations in this biography appear vague and non-committal, his article in the British Union Quarterly notwithstanding. It is admitted also that, he wrote two other books (Left Wings Over Europe [London: Jonathan Cape, 1936] and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! [London: Lovat Dickson, 1937]) which have been interpreted as in support for Mussolini and Franco respectively, but they are anti-war tracts. Later, Lewis would write Anglo-Saxony: A League that Works (Toronto: Ryerson, 1941), which is pro-democracy, and America and Cosmic Man (New York: Doubleday Company, 1949), where he pledges allegiance to a cosmic or cosmopolitan utopianism (Cosmic Man, p. 238).

Lewis’ politics were complex. Not Red, certainly, but not pure Black either. Now, Bowden, who knew O’Keefe for a time, described the latter as a liberal, and told in his 2006 talk about Lewis how, while being a member of the Wyndham Lewis Society, he told those present at an AGM that the society was “based on a lie”—proceeding then to accuse its members of revisionism, timidity, and denial. It may be that Bowden saw in Lewis want he wanted to see, or that his interpretation of Lewis as a Nietzschean metapolitical fascist owed to Bowden’s approaching his subject as a Nietzschean and a Stirnerite. Or that he focused only on the parts of Lewis that interested him, obviously the inter-war and then the late period.

In O’Keefe’s biography, certainly, Nietzsche does not figure in relation to Lewis. This is not to say, however, that Lewis was not a Nietzschean force or cannot be seen as such: aside from what can be gleaned from his prose or the conceptual elitism of his 1917 manifesto (“The Code of a Herdsman”), Lewis was certainly always against, always difficult and “rebarbative,” and always—despite his navigating a fairly wide circle of leading modernist artists and literati, alone against all, unabated by poverty and refusing to throw in the towel even after he went blind.

The reason for the above remarks is that I read this book as background research for a biography of Jonathan Bowden. Bowden mentioned Lewis frequently in his early writing, and among his effects after his death several books by Lewis were found, including Childermass (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), The Revenge of Love (London: Cassell and Co. 1937), Self Condemned (London: Methuen Press, 1954), Apes of God, Snooty Baronet (London: Cassell and Co., 1932), Tarr (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918; London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), and The Demon of Progress in the Arts (London: Methuen Press, 1954).

From the present biography of Lewis one can easily see the reasons why Bowden could have conceivably either identified with or seen something of himself in Lewis. Both lost a parent in early life. Both were prolific painters and writers, both of an experimental sort, though Bowden more than Lewis. Both identified with the politics of the Right, while also being aggressively individualistic, though, again, Bowden more than Lewis. Both were unafraid of—and indeed enjoyed—including friends and acquaintances in their prose, where these victims of cruel and often libellous psychoanalysis appeared quasi-cartoonified and only thinly disguised under pseudonyms. Both moved frequently during early adulthood and later lived closed off, hidden away at a recondite and obscure address. Both were secretive in their personal lives, which they strictly compartmentalized—in Lewis’ case, many of his friends were unaware of the fact that he had a wife and several children (by previous lovers) until Lewis was in late middle age; initially, he never mentioned her, few ever saw her, and no one was ever given access to the flat hidden behind a door below his studio, where she lived with him, until many years later. Both found wealth elusive, and were mostly interested in recognition. And there are other parallels. On the whole, however, Bowden was more consistent philosophically, harder politically, and a more extreme artist and writer.

Irrespective of your thoughts on modernism in general, Wyndham Lewis is sufficiently interesting on his own for this major biography to be educational and entertaining, though I suspect it will be those familiar with Jonathan Bowden’s oratory who will get the greater profit.

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/some-sort-of-nietzschean/

mercredi, 23 janvier 2013

T. S. Eliot reads "Journey of the Magi"

T. S. Eliot reads "Journey of the Magi"

mardi, 22 janvier 2013

"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot (poetry reading)

 

"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot (poetry reading)

lundi, 21 janvier 2013

Classical Modernism & the Art of the Radical Right

wyndham lewis-567455.jpg

Classical Modernism & the Art of the Radical Right

By Jonathan Bowden

Edited by Alex Kurtagić 

Editor’s Note: 

The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Bowden’s Heat. He wrote the text aged 30, between July and September 1992. The text is reproduced as it appears, only lightly edited for spelling and punctuation.

. . . this brings a particular dilemma to the surface, namely the division between political and literary extremism. This is the division or discrepancy, if one exists, between the expectation, thought, and expression of a particular desire and its political realization. Indeed, Stephen Spender was quick to point out in his introduction to Alistair Hamilton’s book The Appeal of Fascism: Fascism and the Intellectuals [2], that a large amount of guilt underlay the Leftist response to fascism in the thirties—namely, his own flirtation with communism, among others, could be explained by the proximity he saw between intellectual gestures and the irrationalism of the radical Right.

In a sense Spender had recognized that an enormous amount of anti-bourgeois emotion and Romantic conceit—the entire sweep of Romanticism, Symbolism, and the Decadence—had at root “fascistic” emotions. This was a somewhat sweeping statement, it had to be admitted, but it was not completely inaccurate. For as with the Symbolist and decadent liberal anarchist Octave Mirbeau and his Garden of Supplicants, a large amount of Romantic rhetoric was bourgeois anti-bourgeois. In other words, it was so radical it soon began to take leave of the class, namely the middle class, which had given it birth. It was Spender’s understanding (in a rudimentary way) of the thesis which George Lukács would later put in a more forceful manner (namely, in The Destruction of Reason) that turned this poet into a pansy-Bolshevik; a pink shade of red—a member of the Homintern. Yet Spender grasped a fundamental point, which is often overlooked, and this has to do with the educated antecedents of classical fascism. It is as if—at least at one level of consciousness—all work of a Romantic, pre-modern, anti-modern, illiberal, and anti-Victorian guise presaged a classical vision of the Right. It even penetrated into the early stages of modernism—where an attempt was made to clear away the “decadent” effluvium of High Romanticism with some sharp-edged early modernism, if not neo-classicism in modern guise. Hence, the fact that Lewis, Pound, Eliot, and Hulme were “soured” Romantics; cynical post-Romantics, if you will. Men who viewed Romanticism with a certain leavened sardonicism. It was a bitter and twisted form of modernism which looked to the past as it demolished it and to the future as it remonstrated with it on behalf of forms of the past. As a result, classical early modernism had two conflict strands within it. One of these went forward into an analysis of pure form—the architecture of formal misstatement—where all that matters is the consideration of a particular type of form; a formalist criteria, a logarithmic exercise in relation to the possibility of taste—whereby modern art produced through Surrealism and its aborted pre-birth/after-birth (Dadaism) to a consideration of color, tactility, and the instrumental nature of a form of vision. When there was nothing left to say—when art had been neutered by the nature of the photographic image, on the one hand, and the impossibility of expressing meaningful statement in a “bourgeois world,” on the other. (The latter in accordance with a particular type of minimalist Marxist aesthetic; the sort of thing which was an Adornoesque parody of itself.) While another tendency in modernism has yet to be explored and this is the proto-classicism which led early modernists to experiment with the possibility of a return to classical simplicity by virtue of a modernist aesthetic. This was why a large number of early modernists, like Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska (whose work outraged traditionalists), were so interested in the purity of classical form—its aesthetic simplicity and proportion. Likewise, modern classicists, of a highly modernist and individualist character, like Maurras and T. E. Hulme, preached a new form of art which was spare, linear, rectangular, and masculine. In some respects, this predisposition teetered on the edge of two conflicting cultural vistas. On the one hand, it wished to go back even to before Romanticism, on the other, it wanted to recreate everything again in a way which had never been done before.

 

machine age drawing.jpg

As can be seen from the projected career of various modernists, the modern aesthetic could only go so far, in that a large number would fall away before the vista of total modernity. This is in relation to a pitiful summation of complete modernism which entered into a form of reiterated stylization; sheer form in the pursuit of its absence, the formlessness of an aesthetic concerned with nothing but the possibility of misstatement. Hence, the fact that Lewis, Dalí, Marinetti, de Chirico, Roberts, Gaudier-Brzeska, and many more, gradually fell away from modernism—Dalí towards a symbolic, classical, neo-Romantic form of iconography, namely religious painting, and Lewis towards modernist figuration, expressive linearity, anti-abstraction, and blindness. Also, the latter was to repudiate a form of aesthetic futility, the abandoned purpose of nihilistic modernism—i.e., the sheer purposelessness of empty abstraction; the pursuit of a type of form which had nothing to communicate—in his book that was also a form of recantation, namely The Demon of Progress in the Arts [4].

So we can say that there was a form of arrested classicism within early modernism which later came to reject it. This type of art either put modernism at the service of a neo-classical state, i.e., futurism in Fascist Italy, or it embraced fully-fledged traditional neo-classicism à la Arno Breker and the return to a naturalist form of neo-Grecian art. This was a type of counter-revolution in relation to modernism; a reformatory form of counter-reformation—a type of European modernity that was anti-modernist, a modern form of non-formalist criteria, neither academic nor anti-academic. It was a form of anti-formalist, anti-Bolshevik revolutionary tradition in relation to artistic procedure. What became known—somewhat crassly—as “Nazi art.”

Indeed, it is interesting to note that after the war, after defeat, these various strands came together again, if only in the form of friendship between the various protagonists—namely, the practitioners of a form of pre-to-early modernism that had a classical bias and straightforward neo-classicists who were the radical and talented vanguard of a type of artistic traditionalism; revolutionary artistic traditionalism nonetheless. The people concerned were Breker, Dalí, Fuchs, Pound, Cocteau, Hauptmann, Céline, members of the Wagner family, Speer (if only retrospectively), and the gradual reconsideration of Vorticism and Futurism—as the political passions which had led to opposition against them began to fall away.

Source: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news110120131209.html [5]

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/01/classical-modernism-and-the-art-of-the-radical-right/

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samedi, 19 janvier 2013

Carlo Galli, "Leviatano di Thomas Hobbes"

Carlo Galli, "Leviatano di Thomas Hobbes",

16 settembre 2011

 

dimanche, 02 décembre 2012

Wyndham Lewis: Radical for the Permanent Things

Wyndham Lewis: Radical for the Permanent Things
 
by Stephen Masty
 
 
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), dead for more than half a century, may still take celestial delight in remaining so frustrating: he certainly tried hard enough.
 
Firstly, his enormous breadth of talent overwhelms today’s overly-specialised critics in their imposed pigeon-holes: some still call him England’s greatest Twentieth Century portraitist and draughtsman, his substantial shelf of novels could keep another league of critics busy, and his volumes of social criticism a third. Next, nobody could be so marvellously abrasive without lots of practice, so whomever you adore from the first half of the Twentieth Century, Lewis said something snarky about him at least twice. Lastly, he had an almost magnetic attraction to being politically-incorrect, giving any sniffy modern who has not read Lewis a good excuse to dismiss him out of hand. So he is largely ignored: a big mistake.
 
When Lewis is recalled apart from his paintings it is usually for his invective. In one book, he devoted a whole chapter called “The Dumb Ox” to Ernest Hemingway, who went berserk after reading it in the famous Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris, smashed a vase and ended up paying thousands of francs (but he got even and described Lewis as having the eyes of “an unsuccessful rapist”). Virginia Wolfe was scared to show her face in Oxford or Cambridge, the students were so impressed by the drubbing she got from Lewis. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” he described as “a suffocating moeotic expanse of objects” that would remain among the canons of literature, “eternally cathartic, a monument like a record diarrhoea” (if I go “halves” will anyone help get this carved in stone?).
 
While his best friends, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, called Lewis, respectively, “the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky,” and “the most distinguished living novelist,” he said the former lacked even “a trace of originality,” and accused the latter of “dogmatic insincerity.” However the context is lost to me, they remained friends nevertheless, and this entertaining gossip is still only the “People Magazine” of literary criticism, a nutrition-free distraction.
 
 
 
The man who taught Marshall McLuhan everything he knew about “the global village” (except for the phrase itself), Wyndham Lewis remains desperately timely in his critiques of the youth-cult and its cultural effluvia, the treachery of capitalism, the paucity of well-manipulated bourgeois democracy, and above all the dumbing-down of Western culture and society. If by your friends we shall know ye, think of T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell and Russell Kirk: in other words he was a conservative defender of The Permanent Things although an ultra-radical, avant-garde modernist, as contradictory as that sounds at first.
 
Born to an English mother and an American Civil War-hero father on a yacht off Nova Scotia, (Percy) Wyndham Lewis was later to write a novel in which, perhaps unique in literature, the heroine kills herself out of sheer hatred for Canada. Educated at Rugby School and The Slade School of Art, he painted and drew for several small groups attempting to forge Modernism out of the artsy-craftsy movements of the late Victorian era, culminating in Vorticism.
 
The Vorticists, England’s first indigenous avant-garde movement, were captivated by Cubism and were among the earliest to embrace abstraction, often with industrial themes. Vorticism rebelled against a populist fin-de-siècle fashion for the feminine, the floral and the facile but its thrusting and very masculine techno-optimism died in the trenches of the Great War along with some its talented members.
 
Its flat, mechanistic images were fine teething-material for Lewis’s draughtsman’s eye and unerring hand, and Vorticism proved a good marketing platform for the ambitious young artist at a time when various Modernist movements seemed to run a dime a dozen: Cubism, Futurism, Tubism, Suprematism, Expressionism, Verismus (may I stop now?) all trying to cram art into an ideological suitcase that was, of course, fully branded, wholly marketable and potentially lucrative. Ultimately, after a stint as an artilleryman, Lewis returned home and moved on, while Vorticism became what veteran art-critic Brian Sewell calls “in the history of western art, no more than a hapless rowing-boat between Cubism and Futurism, the Scylla and Charybdis of the day.”
 
Vorticism’s inspirations had been far from only graphic and Lewis developed them into a more coherent and visceral rejection of perceived decadence, with antecedents including Hegel and Nietzsche: the former in a belief that art is generated by a conflict resembling the dialectic, differing little from Eliot’s more sophisticated assertion that art progresses through clash but may achieve union, through tradition, with the timeless. Influenced by the latter, Lewis rejected the bourgeois effect on art, which today one might call “dumbing down.”

As Lewis began to write more and paint less, he looked beyond graphic art to see larger forces at work including science, united against individualism and excellence, and this separates him from futurist-utopians of the day such as H. G. Wells. He became, in effect, an anti-Modern Modernist, writing:
 
“The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of 'decency.' The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.”
 
Russell Kirk described their mutual friend, the poet Roy Campbell, as “a hot hater” and Lewis fit the description to the letter, so his objections are often clearer than his beliefs. But Lewis was, fundamentally, a conservator of social dynamism in the same sense that Eliot believed that modern art could be well-applied to defend The Permanent Things.
 
Even then, the Left’s thus-far relentless Long March to Cultural Revolution identified modernist reforms only with revolution, chiefly through an overly-simplistic notion that new graphics or literary styles somehow had to go hand-in-hand with new, ideologically-driven systems. Hence the startling originality of Lewis on canvas, or Eliot in print, must have confounded Leftist aesthetes who perhaps rarely fathomed how modernism can be part of traditionalism. As both men knew, Western values and vigour are worth conserving, not the delivery-mechanisms.
 
Propelled by his excellent choice in enemies but still a child of his age, Lewis echoed Oscar Wilde in charging Revolution with the high-crime of being a bore:
 
“Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a ''revolutionary'' review, or read a ''revolutionary'' speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly ''revolutionary'.' What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!”
 
Yet Lewis, in his diagnostic skills a political sophisticate, saw revolution as a mere con-job by ruling elites, part of the intentional process of dumbing-down that strengthened control. He wrote:
 
“A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere...The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.”
 
Lewis would have regarded today’s simplified political bifurcation, so essentially American, as hopelessly naive: Capitalism good, Socialism bad. He complained that, “In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of 'freedom,' like a bastard brother of reform.” He deplored:

“a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state."

The forces of feminisation, homogenisation and dumbing-down were many, while true artists manned the last barricade. Whether by cheap products, cheap art or cheap politics, the herd was stampeded by its clever masters, chiefly under the banner of equality:
 
“The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.”
 
Lewis flirted briefly with Italian Fascism as a means of redirecting society away from self-centred decadence, but soon found that Mussolini’s vainglorious strutting and attempting to replicate Roman glory were retrograde, backward-looking. Briefly in the early 1930s, he thought that Hitler might be a force for peace and cultural reinvigoration but he denounced Nazism in one book and Anti-Semitism in another, even though years before he had fictionalised Jewish characters unflatteringly. The twin verdicts may be that, as so many others, he entertained views now wholly and happily anathema, but he never feared to reverse himself honourably; a better record than many of his adversaries who pimped for Stalin until much later or unto the bitter end.
 
Meanwhile, Lewis had a remarkable gift for seeing far down the socio-ideological train-track.
 
In his 1928 “The Doom of Youth,” he described a cult that plagues us yet. A society that destroys faith in the hereafter can live only for earthly life, taking refuge from death in an unnatural fixation with youth and protracted adolescence; hence maintaining the appearance of youth until it becomes ludicrous. Since real youths lack experience, achievements and contacts, “official” public youths will be older and older. Politicians, he predicted, will jump onboard with bogus youth-wings, nevertheless controlled by middle-aged party-apparatchiks; presupposing the Hitler Youth Movement and even the fat, balding and comically-inept, 50-year-old, KGB “youth representatives” sent to international youth conferences to mingle with real Western and Third World teenagers into the 1980s. On to then-trendy monkey-gland treatments, more complicated cosmetics and foundation-garments, real and fake exercise regimens and the rest, until nowadays where in any Florida geriatric home (“God’s waiting-room,” my dad calls it) are toothless, pathetic wrecks hobbling around dressed as toddlers.
 
Lewis was by no means a systematic philosopher, he was an artist; but his draughtsmanship alone can imply an insistence on precision in thought. Taking art seriously, he saw creativity as a moment of intense thought looking ahead and essentially prescriptive, creating something needed and new yet influenced by tradition.
 
In his 1927 “Time and Western Man,” he attacked a decadent and romanticised aesthetic that sapped modern creativity of its forward-looking dynamism. Yale critic Kirsty Dootson explains Lewis and:
 
“...the 'time-cult,' which he perceived to be the dominant philosophy of the early twentieth century promulgated by Henri Bergson...and practised by authors such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Lewis condemned the demonising of 'space' due to the rise of the 'time-mind' as, for him, Bergsonian time stood for all that is degenerate in art: flux, change, romanticism, the crowd and the unconscious, whereas space represents all that is desirable: stability, fixity, classicism, the individual and consciousness...The former separates us and keeps us still, while the latter binds us all together and keeps us constantly moving.”
 
Time can be a muddle and a cul-de-sac: is the child the father of the man?  The focus turns inward to the self, its influences, conflicts and reactions, and can lead to navel-gazing, solipsism, inertia and paralysis. Space describes the road ahead, even though the artist travels with the essential baggage of values, culture and tradition that influence his every act.
 
Lewis’s friend Roy Campbell, says Professor Roger Scruton, “began to see the three aspects of the new elite—sexual inversion, anti-patriotism, and progressive politics—as aspects of a single frame of mind. These three qualities amounted, for Campbell, to a refusal to grow up.” For Lewis, the time-cult enabled the process.
 
A prescient collaboration between Lewis and Campbell resulted in “Satire and Fiction,” a 1930 pamphlet promoting the former’s savage, satirical novel “The Apes of God.” There the authors argue that satire becomes impossible in a rootless age lacking normative behaviour, for satire mocks things against an unstated but presumed cultural norm: Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” would not have succeeded satirically had Georgian Englishmen actually approved of eating Irish babies. Without shared values, satire cannot function: forty-two years later, Terry Southern remarked belatedly that satire became impossible after Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.
 
In the same decade Lewis returned to painting, establishing his reputation as being perhaps England’s greatest portraitist of the last century. Walter Sickert put him in an even bigger league as “the greatest portraitist of this or any other time.”
 
Critics attempt to analyse his ingredients of success, some saying that his draughtsman’s attention to detail, or his hybrid of portraiture and caricature, provided the impact. It may be something different augmented enormously by his technical mastery, namely his rare ability to perceive essences of character in those whom he portrayed. The sense of melancholy in his portrait of Eliot, so callously overlooked by the Royal Academy in 1938, is sometimes said to be modern Britain’s finest portrait. Or his picture of the aristocratic and aquiline Edith Sitwell in a cold room, wearing a vast turban and surrounded by her old books, is another example of many. The sparse sketch of a handsome and oddly lissome, young Roy Campbell, drawn with the disciplined, concise lines of a Japanese master of sumi-e brushwork, is one more.
 
Russell Kirk met Lewis in London circa 1950-1951, living in a condemned flat in Notting Hill that the artist referred to wryly as “Rotting Hill.” He soon gave up his job as art-critic for The Listener (clever it was, uniting his graphic-eye and writing skills for a radio-review magazine) because he began to go blind due to a pituitary tumour. Dr. Kirk memorialised him in a chapter of “Confessions of a Bohemian Tory,” recalling that the old lion feared sightlessness slamming shut a door that would nevermore be opened.
 
Lewis died in 1957, within a few months of his friend Roy Campbell who was 19 years his junior, and almost eight years before T. S. Eliot. Lewis was long interested in Catholicism but never converted, and his ashes are buried in London’s Golders Green Cemetery.
 
Besides his startling graphic talent and his socio-political prescience, Lewis deserves the attention of Imaginative Conservatives by blasting the still-prevalent notion that modern art needs be the private preserve of the Leftist, the revolutionary, the meddler and the moon-calf. He lived what he preached with relentless vigour, and in that sense his portrait-bust sits comfortably beside that of T. S. Eliot: two radical-conservatives, modernist-traditionalists and indefatigable champions of The Permanent Things.
 
Stephen Masty lives in Kabul and London.

dimanche, 14 octobre 2012

Derek Turner Interviewed by Craig Bodeker

Derek Turner Interviewed by Craig Bodeker

 

mardi, 25 septembre 2012

Aux sources du parti conservateur

Jean-Gilles MALLIARAKIS:

Aux sources du parti conservateur

Ex: http://www.insolent.fr/

120919Comme dans bien d'autres pays, la droite en Angleterre a été amenée, plusieurs fois dans son Histoire, à devoir renaître de ses cendres. Particularité de la vie politique d'outre Manche, depuis le XVIIIe siècle ce fut le même parti, les "tories" étant devenus officiellement "parti conservateur", qui sut opérer en son sein le renouvellement nécessaire.

Cette droite avait su se maintenir face aux "whigs", organisateurs de la Glorieuse Révolution de 1688, puis de l'arrivée de la dynastie de Hanovre en 1714. Elle avait su faire face à ces adversaires "de gauche", qui dominèrent le parlement et le gouvernement tout au long du XVIIIe siècle. Et elle les a aujourd'hui encore surclassés.

Agréablement traduit, et réédité par les peines et soins des Éditions du Trident, le roman de Disraëli "Coningsby" nous en livre le secret.

Le rejet des horreurs de ce que nous appelons jacobinisme a toujours joué, à cet égard, le rôle central.

Cependant on doit mesurer d'abord, que les forces qui, en Grande Bretagne se sont opposées à la Révolution française, ne venaient pas toutes du conservatisme "officiel" et "historique".

Deux exemples l'illustrent. Leurs noms sont relativement connus, de ce côté-ci de la Manche, leur histoire l'est un peu moins.

Ainsi Edmund Burke (1729-1797) avait-il pris conscience, dès les journées d'octobre 1789, de la nature inacceptable de ce qui s'installait à Paris. Dans ses "Réflexions sur la révolution de France", publiées en 1790 (1)⇓ il dénonce avec lucidité la logique implacable des événements.

Or, il avait siégé aux Communes depuis 1765 en tant que "whig". Il avait soutenu les "insurgents" américains, etc. Il ne rompra officiellement avec son parti, dont il refuse les subsides, qu'en juin 1791. Dès lors, ce "vieux-whig" sera considéré plus tard comme le doctrinaire par excellence du conservatisme.

De même William Pitt "le Jeune", est présenté aujourd'hui, jusque sur le site officiel du 10 Downing Street, sous l'étiquette "tory". Mais celui qu'en France nous l'appelons "le second Pitt" était lui-même le fils d'un chef de gouvernement whig, William Pitt dit "l'Ancien". À son tour il devint Premier ministre sous le règne de George III, de 1782 à 1801, puis de 1804 à 1806. La mémoire républicaine l'exècre comme l'ennemi par excellence. La propagande des hommes de la Terreur désignait tous ses adversaires comme agents de "Pitt et Cobourg". (2)⇓

En fait il n'entra dans le conflit que contraint et forcé. Au départ, au cours des années 1780, cet adepte d'Adam Smith (3)⇓ poursuivait le but d'assainir les finances et de développer l'économie du pays. Quand il rompit avec la France révolutionnaire, le cabinet de Londres pensait que le conflit serait rapidement liquidé. On n'imaginait pas qu'il durerait plus de 20 ans.

Ainsi Pitt fut contraint à la guerre à partir de 1793 et la mena jusqu'à sa mort. Une partie de l'opinion anglaise, et particulièrement les "whigs" avaient applaudi aux événements de 1789. Mais c'est au lendemain de la mort du Roi que l'ensemble de l'opinion comprit que les accords resteraient impossibles avec les forces barbares qui s'étaient emparées du royaume des Lys. Dès le 24 janvier 1793, l'ambassadeur officieux (4)⇓ de la République est expulsé.

Voici donc un adversaire irréductible (5)⇓ de la Révolution française : doit-on le considérer comme un conservateur ? Le terme peut paraître encore prématuré. Et Jacques Chastenet souligne même que jamais au cours de sa carrière William Pitt ne s'est déclaré "tory". (6)⇓

Après 1815 les forces de droite s'étaient agrégées autour du vainqueur militaire de Napoléon (7)⇓ à Waterloo, Arthur de Wellesley devenu duc de Wellington. Son nom rassembleur tient lieu de programme. (8)⇓

Or, à partir des années 1830 tout change. Wellington ne reviendra plus, que d'une manière très brève, qui se traduira par un échec. Car quand, laminés en 1832 les tories tentent en 1834 un nouveau "manifeste" [Disraëli qualifie celui-ci de "Manifeste sans principes"], ils vont certes réapparaître techniquement, du seul fait de l'incompétence des whigs. Robert Peel pourra former un gouvernement minoritaire avec l'appui du roi. Mais la "Nouvelle Génération", [c'est le thème de "Coningsby"] cette "Jeune Angleterre" dont Disraëli et son ami Georges Smythe apparaîtront alors comme les figures de proue, considère, et le programme de 1834, et Robert Peele, lui-même comme dénués de principes et voués à l'échec.

Voici comment il les décrit :

"Cet homme politique éminent [Robert Peel] s’était malheureusement identifié, au début de sa carrière, avec un groupe qui, s’affublant du nom de tory, poursuivait une politique sans principes ou dont les principes s’opposaient radicalement à ceux qui guidèrent toujours les grands chefs de cet illustre et historique mouvement. Les principaux membres de cette confédération officielle ne se distinguaient par aucune des qualités propres à un homme d’État, par aucun des dons divins qui gouvernent les assemblées et mènent les conseils. Ils ne possédaient ni les qualités de l’orateur, ni les pensées profondes, ni l’aptitude aux trouvailles heureuses, ni la pénétration et la sagacité de l’esprit. Leurs vues politiques étaient pauvres et limitées. Toute leur énergie, ils la consacraient à s’efforcer d’acquérir une connaissance des affaires étrangères qui demeura pourtant inexacte et confuse ; ils étaient aussi mal documentés sur l’état réel de leur propre pays que les sauvages le sont sur la probabilité d’une éclipse." (9)⇓

[Il s'agit de la droite anglaise d'alors, qu'alliez-vous croire ?]

Jusque-là les deux partis dominants avaient représenté des factions parlementaires, elles-mêmes issues des forces sociales qui contrôlaient les sièges, en particulier ceux des "bourgs pourris. Au total 300 000 électeurs désignaient le parlement. Les Lords dominaient les Communes. Sans évoluer immédiatement vers le suffrage universel la réforme avait supprimé les circonscriptions fictives. Multipliant par trois le nombre des votants, elle allait permettre aux représentants des villes de submerger les défenseurs traditionnels de la propriété foncière et de la campagne anglaise.

Ceux-ci allient donc devoir combattre sous de nouvelles couleurs, en s'alliant avec de nouvelles forces. On peut dire qu'en grande partie Disraëli les ré-inventa. Exprimant ses idées dans des romans, ce vrai fondateur de la droite anglaise conte cette aventure dans ce "Coningsby".

Beaucoup de traits de cette société peuvent paraître désuets. On les découvre dès lors avec une pointe de nostalgie. Mais, une fois dégagé de cet aspect pittoresque et charmant, tout le reste s'en révèle furieusement actuel. Nous laissons à nos lecteurs le soin de le découvrir.

JG Malliarakis
        
Apostilles

  1. Traduites en France ses "Réflexions sur la révolution de France" sont disponibles en collection Pluriel.
  2. Cobourg : il s'agissait du prince Frédéric de Saxe-Cobourg-Saalfeld (1737-1815), général au service du Saint-Empire.
  3. Écrite dans les années 1760, son "Enquête sur la nature et les causes de la Richesse des nations" fut publiée en Angleterre en 1776.
  4. Le roi ne voulait pas reconnaître le régime institué à Paris par le coup de force républicain de septembre 1792. Mais les dirigeants révolutionnaires n'étaient en guerre, au départ, qu'avec l'Empire, "le roi de Bohème et de Hongrie". À Londres se trouvait un ambassadeur, assez maladroit, le jeune François-Bernard de Chauvelin (1766-1832) qui venait d'être nommé par le gouvernement de Louis XVI.
  5. Il la combattra en effet jusqu'à sa mort en 1806. La Paix d'Amiens de 1802 ne fut qu'un intermède (mal négocié) sous le gouvernement Addington (1801-1804) quand Pitt, partisan du droit de vote des catholiques irlandais fut contraint de donner sa démission au roi George III.
  6. cf. Jacques Chastenet "William Pitt" Fayard 1942. On lira avec plaisir de cet auteur oublié mais de qualité son "Wellington" et son "Siècle de Victoria".
  7. Le vrai vainqueur politique de Napoléon avait été lord Castlereagh, ministre des Affaires étrangères, organisateur et financier de la sixième coalition, puis personnage central du congrès de Vienne de 1814-1815.
  8. À la gloire militaire près, le parallèle avec le gaullisme ne manque pas de pertinence. "Le Duc"... "Le Général"...
  9. cf. "Coningsby ou la Nouvelle Génération" page 89. Les lecteurs de L'Insolent peuvent se le procurer, en le commandant
    - directement sur le site des Éditions du Trident
    - ou par correspondance en adressant un chèque de 29 euros aux Éditions du Trident 39 rue du Cherche Midi 75006 Paris
    - votre libraire peut le commander par fax au 01 47 63 32 04. - téléphone :06 72 87 31 59- courriel  : ed.trident @ europelibre.com

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samedi, 22 septembre 2012

William Morris, l'arte e il lavoro

William Morris, l'arte e il lavoro

di Alberto Melotto

Fonte: megachip [scheda fonte]

WilliamMorris 20120917

La parola rivoluzione, che noi socialisti siamo così spesso costretti ad usare, suona in modo sinistro alle orecchie della maggior parte della gente, anche se noi ci affanniamo a spiegare che essa non significa necessariamente un cambiamento che si attuerà all’insegna di tumulti e di ogni specie di violenza, così come non potrà significare un cambiamento che si produrrà automaticamente e contro la pubblica opinione ad opera di un gruppo di uomini riusciti in qualche modo a impadronirsi momentaneamente dell’esecutivo. Anche quando spieghiamo che usiamo la parola rivoluzione nel suo senso etimologico, intendendo per essa un cambiamento nelle basi della società, la gente ha paura all’idea di un mutamento tanto vasto che ci supplica di dire riforma e non rivoluzione”. (William Morris)

Signore e signori, ecco a voi William Morris. Artigiano produttore di oggetti di arredamento, poeta, romanziere, affiliato alla confraternita artistica dei preraffaelliti, socialista utopista e profetico. Di rado nell’opera di uno studioso engagé di fine ‘800 si riscontrano, lucidamente evidenziati e confutati, gli snodi e le contraddizioni del movimento operaio novecentesco: il fallimento del modello del socialismo autoritario, l’acquiescenza socialdemocratica verso la rigidità di ruoli voluta dal potere borghese.

Inoltre, Morris sviluppò temi che i posteri non osarono nemmeno affrontare, senza dubbio per timore di sembrare ingenui, naif, poco allineati: la volontà di creare un mondo dove il lavoro sia gioia e creazione artistica, la critica disinvolta allo strapotere della scienza e della tecnologia, la rivalutazione dell’ambiente naturale, l’altra grande vittima, insieme all’uomo, del degrado e dello sfruttamento capitalistico.

Un suo grande ammiratore, Oscar Wilde, raccontava una confidenza fattagli dallo stesso Morris:

“Ho tentato di rendere ogni mio lavoratore un artista, e quando dico un artista intendo dire un uomo”.

Nato in un ambiente benestante, Morris trovò nella cittadella universitaria di Oxford il luogo ideale per lasciarsi affascinare da una miriade di diversi interessi culturali e artistici, e forse proprio per questo motivo non concluse nessun corso regolare di studi. Oltre al socialismo cristiano di Charles Kingsley, poi temporaneamente abbandonato in favore del radicalismo borghese di marca liberale, troviamo l’influsso determinante di John Ruskin, che gli instilla l’amore per l’architettura.

     1. Il lavoro – valorizzazione delle capacità umane, non più strumento di oppressione

In Lavoro utile e inutile fatica, Morris mostra di voler sgombrare il tavolo da tutta una serie di luoghi comuni riguardanti il lavoro, prima di procedere nella direzione del teorizzare una nuova concezione sull’argomento.

È sbagliato, dice Morris, affermare entusiasticamente che ogni lavoro è una benedizione in sé. Congratularsi con il fortunato lavoratore per la sua operosità fa comodo soprattutto a coloro che vivono alle spalle degli altri. Non tutta la popolazione, infatti, è dedita ad attività lavorative, al contrario sussistono enormi differenze al riguardo.

Vi sono i ricchi, gli aristocratici:

che non fanno alcun lavoro: sappiamo tutti che consumano moltissimo senza produrre nulla. Ne consegue che debbono evidentemente essere mantenuti a spese di coloro che lavorano, proprio come i mendicanti, e sono un puro fardello per la comunità”.

Vi è poi l’alta borghesia, la classe che Marx avrebbe definito come “proprietaria dei mezzi di produzione”, la quale è impegnata in una forsennata e feroce gara, in patria e all’estero, per l’accumulo della ricchezza, con l’unico fine di potersi astrarre dal lavoro, e divenire così improduttivi, come sono da secolo gli aristocratici.

Dopo la massa degli impiegati e dei soldati, ecco i lavoratori manuali, obbligati, e questo diviene il punto focale del ragionamento di Morris, a produrre:

articoli lussuosi e stravaganti la cui domanda è legata all’esistenza delle classi ricche e improduttive, oggetti che chi conduce una vita degna e non corrotta non si sognerebbe neppure di volere”.

Morris sostiene dunque che il gusto della sua epoca per gli oggetti della vita quotidiana – mobilio, tendaggi – appare stravolto, avvelenato dai nefasti meccanismi di sfruttamento economico dell’uomo sull’uomo. Questa adulterazione del gusto si diffonde in ogni parte della società, poiché i poveri producono per uso personale dei manufatti che sono ridicole imitazioni del lusso dei ricchi. Tale deformità nel modo di concepire e di conseguenza guardare alle cose che prodotte proviene dalla disarmonica strutturazione del corpo sociale: una classe oziosa di improduttivi che si fa mantenere da un gran numero di schiavi.

Morris 2 20120917

Quali caratteristiche dovrebbe, invece, possedere il lavoro per donare speranza all’uomo, invece che causargli pena e sofferenza? Dovrebbe garantirgli la speranza del riposo: per quanto possa essere piacevole, esso comporta tuttavia una certa sofferenza animale nel mettere in moto le proprie energie. Il riposo dovrebbe essere abbastanza lungo, più lungo dello stretto necessario al recupero delle forze, e dovrebbe essere libero da preoccupazioni e da ansie.

Vi è poi la speranza del piacere del lavoro in sé: concetto, questo, rivoluzionario al massimo grado; Morris afferma risolutamente che l’uomo che lavora davvero utilizza le energie della mente e dell’animo oltre a quelle del corpo:

“la memoria e l’immaginazione lo aiutano nel lavoro. Non solo i suoi pensieri, ma anche i pensieri degli uomini delle trascorse età guidano le sue mani, egli crea in quanto parte della razza umana”.

La dimensione della creatività viene valutata come componente fondamentale nel dar corpo e significato all’atto del faticare, dare sfogo alle proprie capacità creative potrà dunque, donare quel piacere che sarà una soddisfazione quotidiana, una quotidiana ricompensa, nella società socialista. In una società di questo tipo, non si assisterà più al fenomeno dello spreco, da Morris certamente detestato: ovvero la produzione di sordidi surrogati per la povera gente che non può permettersi merce di buona qualità, e la produzione di oggetti pacchiani di lusso per i ricchi. Nella concezione di Morris, lo spreco è il volto perverso e malato della ricchezza di pochi, il profitto nato da uno stimolo produttivo insensato e privo di vere ragioni che non siano l’avidità.

     2. Le opzioni di fondo – compromesso socialdemocratico, comunismo e anarchia

Eclettico come soltanto certe figure vittoriane seppero essere, simili ai grandi del rinascimento, William Morris non fu soltanto uomo di pensiero, ma fin dalla gioventù seppe coniugare la passione per l’arte (considerata a torto dal grande pubblico) minore, con una mentalità imprenditoriale decisamente controcorrente, sia dal punto di vista estetico che affaristico.

Morris 3 20120917

Nel 1861, all’età di 27 anni, fondò, nelle sue stesse parole, “una specie di ditta per la produzione di oggetti di arredamento”, alla quale si aggiunse col tempo una piccola ma originale casa editrice. La ditta Morris si dimostrò fedele al suo afflato iniziale, ovvero contribuire all’emancipazione economica e sociale dei suoi dipendenti. Gli operai poterono godere di un migliore salario e partecipare attivamente alla fase creativa. Tale volontà non era del tutto sconosciuta in terra d’Inghilterra, nella prima metà del secolo l’industriale Richard Owen aveva fondato dei laboratori dove i lavoratori potevano partecipare ai guadagni relativi ai frutti delle loro fatiche. L’iniziativa di Owen naufragò tristemente perchè i prodotti non incontrarono i gusti del pubblico.

Tornando a Morris, va detto che egli non si illudeva che iniziative come quella da lui portata avanti potessero influenzare la gran parte dell’avida classe imprenditoriale inglese. Lungi dal concedersi ad un paternalismo dickensiano, Morris riponeva le sue speranze in un’avvenire solcato da un cambiamento radicale nella struttura della società. Per questo avversava strenuamente ogni forma di compromesso socialdemocratico.

Morris seppe riconoscere quelle che sarebbero divenute le linee portanti, i binari della dialettica politica inglese per almeno un secolo a venire: una classe operaia poco interessata all’idea di un cambiamento strutturale di regime in senso socialista, ma attenta ad ottenere relativi miglioramenti in seno al luogo di lavoro (migliori salari, più sicurezza) e più garanzie sul piano della cittadinanza (sanità e istruzione pubblica, pensione). Questo compromesso socialdemocratico, inibitore del conflitto fra le diverse classi e portatore di pace sociale, veniva demandato dai lavoratori in primo luogo all’efficiente azione dei sindacati, delle Trade Unions, che seppero orientare fin da subito le politiche del Labour Party.

È cosa nota che una forte percentuale dei delegati del Labour venivano concessi per Statuto ai rappresentanti delle Trade Unions. Il nostro autore non nascose mai il suo dissenso, venato di disprezzo, per quelli che definiva come dei “palliativi”. Egli non era certo così insensibile da mostrarsi disinteressato a dei miglioramenti immediati nelle condizioni di vita delle classi più umili, ma temeva fortemente che queste limitate riforme venissero percepite come l’obiettivo finale. Questo apparente slancio avrebbe, in realtà, lasciati inalterati i rapporti di subordinazione, anzi di schiavitù, esistenti nella rigida società capitalistica inglese:

“Il fatto di dare a moltissimi, o anche pochi, poveri, una vita un po’ meno disagiata, un po’ meno miserabile dell’attuale, non è certo in sé un bene da poco: ma sarebbe un grave male se incidesse negativamente sugl sforzi dell’intera classe lavoratrice per la conquista di una vera società di eguali … quel che mi chiedo è se la terribile organizzazione della società civile commerciale non stia giocando al gatto col topo con noi socialisti; se la società dell’ineguaglianza non stia accettando il marchingegno pseudosocialista e non lo stia adoperando allo scopo di mantenere quella società in una condizione in qualche modo ridimensionata ma sicura”.

manifesto sl 20120917

Il nostro compito, scrisse nell’articolo A che punto siamo?, è quello di formare i socialisti, di creare i presupposti di una coscienza sociale nuova, una coscienza sociale liberata dall’idea stessa di sfruttamento e di dominio. Fare a meno dei padroni. La sua coerenza lo portò in questo senso ad opporsi all’idea di mandare rappresentanti socialisti nel parlamento di Sua Maestà. Così, quando la Social-Democratic Federation, della quale era membro, nonché tesoriere, si espresse in massa per la partecipazione alle contese elettorali, egli favorì una scissione interna alla Federazione, che portò alla creazione della Socialist League, nel 1884. Testimonianza ricca di pungente sarcasmo di questa divisione è la lettera che Engels scrisse a Bernstein, e della quale riportiamo un passaggio:

“I dimissionari erano Aveling, Bax e Morris, i soli uomini onesti fra gli intellettuali, ma anche i tre più inetti, dal punto di vista pratico (due poeti e un filosofo), che per quanto si cerchi sia dato trovare”.

Certo le parole di Engels si debbono attribuire a un diffuso pregiudizio anti-umanista nella sinistra dell’epoca, resta da dimostrare che il tecnicismo positivista abbia saputo raggiungere risultati pratici di rilievo, a giudicare del disastro organizzativo della Russia di Stalin, Kruscev e Breznev ciò non sembra vero.

Non fermarsi fino alla piena realizzazione del socialismo, questa l’aspirazione di Morris, la realizzazione del comunismo. Con questo vocabolo egli intende porre l’accento sul diritto della popolazione ad accedere all’uso dei beni comuni, ovvero le risorse naturali come la terra. Anche sotto questo aspetto possiamo riscontrare la vicinanza del pensiero di Morris al corrente dibattito in seno al filone del pensiero decrescista, Latouche in primis. Tali beni comuni, non devono essere posseduti da singoli individui:

“In caso contrario, i proprietari dei mezzi di produzione saranno necessariamente i padroni di coloro che non possiedono abbastanza da liberarsi dal bisogno di pagare con una parte del proprio lavoro l’uso dei mezzi di produzione medesimi. I padroni o proprietari dei mezzi di produzione possiedono quindi praticamente i lavoratori: molto praticamente perché possono imporgli il genere di vita che devono condurre .. quindi le risorse della natura e la ricchezza usata per la produzione di ulteriore ricchezza, tutto insomma, dovrebbe essere messo in comune.

Quanto ai meccanismi regolatori di questa futura società comunista, Morris si dimostra giustamente restio a fornire indicazioni troppo precise; in lui il desiderio di portare alla partecipazione diretta le masse popolari è così forte e convinto da non lasciar spazio a rigide direttive. Si può solo prevedere come quella società non sarà.

Non verrà abolita qualsiasi forma di autorità, con buona pace dell’ala anarchica più intransigente. L’esercizio di una qualche autorità è pur necessario, ma d’altra parte, i vincoli della futura società comunista saranno volontari. Una volta stabilite alcune grandi linee di principio, si lascerà grande spazio alla:

“varietà di temperamenti, capacità e desideri che esiste fra gli uomini in tutto ciò che non rientra nella sfera delle prime necessità”.


     3. Alcune considerazioni finali

William Morris scrisse un romanzo utopico, News from nowhere, tradotto nella nostra lingua col titolo Notizie da nessun luogo, col preciso intento di raffigurare la società delle donne e degli uomini liberi. S’immagina che il narratore, un uomo di fine ‘800 nel quale è facile individuare un alter-ego dell’autore, venga trasportato magicamente in un futuro distante un centinaio d’anni, in un’Inghilterra liberata, grazie ad un’aspra guerra civile, dal dominio del capitale, un paese dove il benessere e la serenità sono condivisi dall’intera popolazione.

Morris 1 20120917

Va detto che la critica non considera il romanzo fra le vette più alte raggiunte da Morris in campo letterario, forse a causa di una raffigurazione fin troppo idilliaca e manichea di un tempo dove la felicità regna sovrana, tanto da far somigliare l’esistenza ad un “amoroso picnic”.

Ciò non sminuisce la cristallina volontà di pervenire ad una sostanziale rivoluzione, in grado di liberare l’essere umano da ceppi che sono prima di tutto di tipo culturale e psicologico. Morris non si tirò mai indietro, e nonostante le facili ironie engelsiane, seppe partecipare a cruente manifestazione di piazza, pur di accrescere il livello di protesta sociale. In particolare, è nota la sua partecipazione ad una delle tante Bloody Sunday, le domeniche di sangue, di cui è costellata la storia britannica.

In Londra in stato d’assedio, che come gli altri scritti finora citati fa parte della raccolta di articoli intitolata Come potremmo vivere, Morris ci racconta dei fatti del 13 novembre 1887, quando il governo tory-liberale, s’ispirò all’amorevole insegnamento di Bismarck per attaccare i disoccupati che avevano occupato Trafalgar Square.

La sua capacità d’immaginare un futuro e una società diversa ce lo restituisce come un fratello che solo l’ottusità e la parzialità di molto marxismo ci avevano tenuto nascosto, un obiettore di coscienza decrescista ante litteram. Valgano per William Morris le parole di Michail Bakunin:

È ricercando l’impossibile che l’uomo ha sempre realizzato il possibile. Coloro che si sono saggiamente limitati a ciò che appariva loro come possibile, non hanno mai avanzato di un solo passo”.


Tante altre notizie su www.ariannaeditrice.it

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jeudi, 26 avril 2012

Jonathan Bowden, RIP

Jonathan Bowden, RIP


Ex: http://www.alternativeright.com/

This morning, I was devastated to learn of the death of Jonathan Bowden, the orator, artist, novelist, and writer.  Life on this earth is fleeting, and I am grateful for the fact that over the past three months, I collaborated with Jonathan on a series of podcasts that covered many of his intellectual passions, from  Nietzsche to the New Right to Spengler to Marx.

Around three weeks ago, we were planning an additional one on Ernst Jünger, when I suddenly lost touch with Jonathan.  Knowing he had suffered a breakdown in the past, I felt a definite angst as I would ring his number and receive no answer... In the end, my worst fears were realized.  According to a person close to him, who relayed the news to me, Jonathan succumbed to a cardiac arrest while at his home in Berkshire.

I first encountered Jonathan in 2009 at a conference at which he was the keynote speaker. We met over lunch on the day before he was to talk, and my impression at the time was of a man who was soft-spoken,  professorial, reserved, and a maybe a bit queer. He wore a necklace with a Life Rune etched into a wooden medallion, which gave hints of what was to come...

When Jonathan’s turn at the podium came the next evening, he strode confidently to the stage and announced, in a resonate and booming Heldentenor, that he would not be needing a microphone. Immediately, everyone in the room was on the edge of his seat. What followed was not a talk on a particular topic or issue, but instead a expression of a worldview—or perhaps a channelling of the life-force or the evoking of a demonic spirit.  As Louis Andrews noted afterwards, Jonathan Bowden’s doesn’t give talks or speeches; he gives orations. Perhaps a better descriptor would be performances.

In our age of CGI, virtual reality, and YouTube, it’s easy to forget the power of presence—of experiencing a great performer in person. Experiencing Bowden in 2009 has, for everyone who was there, been much like experiencing Maria Callas singing a Verdi heroine or an address by Mussolini from a Roman balcony. 

And while the first oration I heard was on nothing less than everything—the spiritual, geopolitical, and social condition of Western man in the 21st century—Jonathan could also speak on philosophic and historical topics with a scholar’s discernment and breadth of knowledge, as evidenced by our podcasts.  Indeed, I know of no other person who could combine Bowden’s gifts as a performer with a familiarity with the Western canon one would expect only in a monk.

When I eventually read Jonathan’s novels, I found them to be on the level of Finnegan’s Wake in terms of esoteric, cryptic complexity. On the other hand, in his public engagements, Jonathan could boil down to an essence the thought of difficult thinkers, such as Heidegger and Evola, and present their ideas in ways that were useful to nationalists.  

Though the two of us would have personal conversations, I never felt that I actually knew Jonathan, owing, no doubt, to his distant nature and the fact that I was always intimidated by the fire-breather I had encountered some two years earlier. Nevertheless, Jonathan deeply affected my thinking and I treasure our friendship, as short-lived and limited as it was.

I hope it is not an insult to Jonathan Bowden’s memory to say that he always lived on the edge of madness. This was the source of his power, and it seems to have predestinated that he would have all-too short a life.

Jonathan cannot be replaced, and his words will continue to inspire us. But as we weep, Valhalla rejoices.

 
Richard Spencer

Richard Spencer

A former assistant editor at The American Conservative and executive editor at Taki's Magazine (takimag.com), Richard B. Spencer is the founder and co-editor of AlternativeRight.com

Remembering Jonathan Bowden

bowden.jpg

Remembering Jonathan Bowden

By Greg Johnson

http://www.counter-currents.com/

The word on the web is that Jonathan Bowden, the formidable British right-wing orator, modernist painter, and surrealist novelist, is dead of a heart attack at age 49.

I hope instead that Jonathan is just the victim of a terrible online prank. (Lies have been spread about him before.) Or maybe he is playing a prank of his own. If anybody I know could fake his own death, it is Jonathan. I hope he is reading his obituaries right now . . . and roaring with laughter.

I first met Jonathan in Atlanta in October of 2009 while I was the Editor of The Occidental Quarterly. I was organizing a private gathering for TOQ writers and supporters, and I wanted Michael Walker to give the keynote address.

Unfortunately, the final decision fell to somebody who had been completely upstaged by Walker at the 2008 American Renaissance Conference. So, perhaps on the assumption that one Englishman should be as good as another, I was informed that the speaker would be Jonathan Bowden, someone I had never even heard of, much less heard speak. But I was assured that he had an excellent reputation as an orator.

I looked at Bowden’s website and had a good chuckle, imagining how his Nietzscheanism, paganism, and aggressive aesthetic modernism would play in the Bible Belt.

I liked Jonathan’s paintings enough to end up buying two of them and commissioning two more. But I thought his works of fiction were unreadable. The essays he had online, moreover, seemed half-baked. (He was later to write much better ones for Counter-Currents, but it was never his forte.) At the time, I had not seen his YouTube videos, and I foolishly inferred from his writings that he could not be much of a speaker — which, I suspected, was the real reason he had been invited.

The afternoon before the meeting, I received a panicked call from Jonathan. He was at the Atlanta Airport. The individual who was supposed to pick him up was more than 40 minutes late. Jonathan’s mobile phone did not work in the US, and the tardy party was not answering his, so he had no idea what to do. I gave Jonathan my address and told him to jump in a cab.

About 40 minutes later, Jonathan arrived in good cheer. He was wearing a rumpled black suit and tie. Around his neck was a wooden pendant inscribed with an Odal rune. He asked me how I thought it would go over in Atlanta. I suggested that if anyone asks, he simply declare it to be the sign of the fish.

He wore thick spectacles, but when he wanted to read something, he would study it under a magnifying glass he drew from his pocket.

[2]

Jonathan Bowden, "Adolf and Leni"

When he spoke, he gestured dramatically with a long, thin cardboard box labeled “Samurai Sword – Made in Taiwan.” I joked that it must have been a hit at airport security. Then he opened it up, and, with a flourish, unrolled two watercolors that I had purchased from him, “Adolf and Leni” and “Savitri Diva.”

“This is going to be interesting,” I thought.

What impressed me most about Jonathan was not his diverting eccentricity, but his intelligence, vast reading, and devastating wit.

On his own, he could be quiet and pensive. His face would take on an impassive mask-like quality, enlivened only by a penetrating, sometimes unsettling gaze. But when Jonathan had the right kind of audience, he would come alive. He had an endless supply of interesting stories, often told with hilarious impressions. He was one of the funniest, most brilliant, and most intellectually stimulating people I have ever known.

When the night of Jonathan’s speech came, I asked him what he was going to talk about. He said that he had no idea. My stomach tightened. “This is going to be really interesting,” I thought.

Mike Polignano has already told the story of how when Jonathan took the stage, he swept aside the shrieky, malfunctioning microphone and filled a ballroom with his unamplified voice, speaking extemporaneously and fluently for two hours. Jonathan’s speech that night was quite simply the greatest speech I had ever heard. He upstaged all of creation that day.

Naturally, he was not invited back. (He was invited to speak at American Renaissance and the National Policy Institute, although he cancelled both times.)

When Mike Polignano and I started Counter-Currents in June of 2010, Jonathan was very supportive. He wrote 27 original articles and reviews [3] for Counter-Currents. (He also wrote eight more pieces for Counter-Currents under a pseudonym.) He told me that he wrote most of these pieces from memory. He would go to a local public library where he could use a computer for an hour at a time, and he would write an essay as if it were a timed university examination. We discussed publishing a collection of essays on fascistic themes in popular literature to be entitled Pulp Fascism.

There were periods when Jonathan wrote for us weekly, but then he would turn his attention to literary projects. Many of these were available as free E-books on his website, which is no longer online. If anybody has copies of these E-books, we will be glad to make them available from Counter-Currents.

The last thing Jonathan wrote for us, just three days before his reported death on March 29, was a blurb for Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right.

The last time I saw Jonathan was in February of this year. We flew him out to San Francisco to speak at a gathering of Counter-Currents writers and friends. Jonathan was in high spirits during his visit to the Bay Area. He was bursting with ideas, plans, and funny stories. His speech, “Western Civilization Bites Back,” is available here [4] in recorded and transcribed form. I also recorded a two hour interview with him about art and culture, which I will make available if it can be recovered from a damaged flash drive.

[5]

Jonathan Bowden, "Medusa Now Ventrix"

He brought me a third painting, “Medusa Now Ventrix,” and accepted a commission to do a fourth (to be entitled “Meat in the Walls”). (He charged me mere tokens — “friend prices.”)

Jonathan Bowden was an enormous asset to our cause, and we at Counter-Currents did everything we could to encourage and aid him in making the most of his talents. The same donor who made possible the trip also allowed us to buy Jonathan a new laptop to make it easier for him to write, and Mike Polignano tutored him on how to use it. We also gave him a podcasting kit, hoping that he would start doing weekly shows.

But his time ran out.

Forty-nine years is not enough time. But we can take some solace in the fact that Jonathan spent his time well: he lived, created, and spoke in the light of the truth as he saw it. That is a fuller, richer life than 99 years of lies, compromise, cowardice, and conventionality.

When I heard that Jonathan had died, I remarked to a friend, “If it is true, we all have to work harder.” But another friend pointed out that this presupposed that we could take Jonathan’s place, and we can’t. He is an irreplaceable talent. All we can do is rejoice in the time he spent with us, and make the most of the time we have remaining. Forty-nine isn’t that far off for a lot of us. We have a world to win. Let’s make every moment count.

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/04/remembering-jonathan-bowden/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/bowden7.jpg

[2] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/adolf_and_leni.jpg

[3] 27 original articles and reviews: http://www.counter-currents.com/author/jbowden//

[4] here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/03/jonathan-bowdens-western-civilization-bites-back/

[5] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/bowden4.jpg

dimanche, 11 mars 2012

The Eviction of the Yeomen

The Eviction of the Yeomen

By Brooks Adams

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Editor’s Note:

The following is roughly the first 40% of “The Eviction of the Yeomen,” chapter 9 of Brooks Adams’ The Law of Civilization and Decay.

Reading Adams’ account of the forces that ultimately created the British empire and diaspora, it is hard to regard it as a glorious and civilizing process, but rather as a sordid and savage one, given that the conquest and settling of new lands, the extermination, enslavement, and dispossession of non-whites, and even the despoiling of nature and the extinction of entire species, appear to be mere extensions of the rise of capitalism in England on the ruins of a fundamentally more humane political order.

None of this implies, of course, that the heirs of these upheavals should surrender our lands and go home. Past wrongs cannot be redressed, and in any case, our primary focus should be on building a just social order for the future. And for that task, Brooks Adams offers us much food for thought.

The remainder of chapter 9 deals with the Church of England. It throws a great deal of light on the prevalence of religious cynicism and insincerity in the Angl0 cultural sphere. I will reprint it on another occasion.

010_1.jpgLike primitive Rome, England, during the Middle Ages, had an unusually homogeneous population of farmers, who made a remarkable infantry. Not that the cavalry was defective; on the contrary, from top to bottom of society, every man was a soldier, and the aristocracy had excellent fighting qualities. Many of the kings, like Coeur-de-Lion, Edward III, and Henry V, ranked among the ablest commanders of their day; the Black Prince has always been a hero of chivalry; and earls and barons could be named by the score who were famous in the Hundred Years’ War.

Yet, although the English knights were a martial body, there is nothing to show that, on the whole, they surpassed the French. The English infantry won Crecy and Poitiers, and this infantry, which was long the terror of Europe, was recruited from among the small farmers who flourished in Great Britain until they were exterminated by the advance of civilization.

As long as the individual could at all withstand the attack of the centralized mass of society, England remained a hot-bed for breeding this species of man. A medieval king had no means of collecting a regular revenue by taxation; he was only the chief of the free-men, and his estates were supposed to suffice for his expenditure. The revenue the land yielded consisted of men, not money, and to obtain men, the sovereign granted his domains to his nearest friends, who, in their turn, cut their manors into as many farms as possible, and each farmer paid his rent with his body.

A baron’s strength lay in the band of spears which followed his banner, and therefore he subdivided his acres as much as possible, having no great need of money. Himself a farmer, he cultivated enough of his fief to supply his wants, to provide his table, and to furnish his castle, but, beyond this, all he kept to himself was loss. Under such a system money contracts played a small part, and economic competition was unknown.

The tenants were free-men, whose estates passed from father to son by a fixed tenure; no one could underbid them with their landlord, and no capitalist could ruin them by depressing wages, for the serfs formed the basis of society, and these serfs were likewise land-owners. In theory, the villains may have held at will; but in fact they were probably the descendants, or at least the representatives, of the coloni of the Empire, and a base tenure could be proved by the roll of the manorial court. Thus even the weakest were protected by custom, and there was no competition in the labor market.

The manor was the social unit, and, as the country was sparsely settled, waste spaces divided the manors from each other, and these wastes came to be considered as commons appurtenant to the domain in which the tenants of the manor had vested rights. The extent of these rights varied from generation to generation, but substantially they amounted to a privilege of pasture, fuel, or the like; aids which, though unimportant to large property owners, were vital when the margin of income was narrow.

During the old imaginative age, before centralization gathered headway, little inducement existed to pilfer these domains, since there was room in plenty, and the population increased slowly, if at all. The moment the form of competition changed, these conditions were reversed. Precisely when a money rent became a more potent force than armed men may be hard to determine, but certainly that time had come when Henry VIII mounted the throne, for then capitalistic farming was on the increase, and speculation in real estate already caused sharp distress. At that time the establishment of a police had destroyed the value of the retainer, and competitive rents had generally supplanted military tenures. Instead of tending to subdivide, as in an age of decentralization, land consolidated in the hands of the economically strong, and capitalists systematically enlarged their estates by enclosing the commons, and depriving the yeomen of their immemorial rights.

The sixteenth-century landlords were a type quite distinct from the ancient feudal gentry. As a class they were gifted with the economic, and not with the martial instinct, and they throve on competition. Their strength lay in their power of absorbing the property of their weaker neighbors under the protection of an overpowering police.

Everything tended to accelerate consolidation, especially the rise in the value of money. While, even with the debasement of the coin, the price of cereals did not advance, the growth of manufactures had caused wool to double in value. “We need not therefore be surprised at finding that the temptation to sheep-farming was almost irresistible, and that statute after statute failed to arrest the tendency.”[1]

The conversion of arable land into pasture led, of course, to wholesale eviction, and by 1515 the suffering had become so acute that details were given in acts of Parliament. Places where two hundred persons had lived, by growing corn and grain, were left desolate, the houses had decayed, and the churches fallen into ruin.[2]The language of these statutes proves that the descriptions of contemporaries were not exaggerated.

For I myself know many towns and villages sore decayed, for it whereas in times past there war in some town an hundred households there remain not now thirty; in some fifty, there are not now ten; yea (which is more to be lamented) I know towns so wholly decayed, that there is neither stick nor stone standing as they use to say.

Where many men had good livings, and maintained hospitality, able at times to help the king in his wars, and to sustain other charges, able also to help their pore neighbors, and virtuously to bring up their children in Godly letters and good sciences, now sheep and conies devour altogether, no man inhabiting the aforesaid places. Those beasts which were created of God for the nourishment of man do now devour man. . . . And the cause of all this wretchedness and beggary in the common weal are the greedy Gentlemen, which are sheepmongers and grazers. While they study for their own private commodity, the common weal is like to decay. Since they began to be sheep masters and feeders of cattle, we neither had victual nor cloth of any reasonable price. No meruayle, for these forestallers of the market, as they use to say, have gotten all things so into their hands, that the poor man must either buy it at their price, or else miserably starve for hunger, and wretchedly die for cold.[3]

The reduction of the acreage in tillage must have lessened the crop of the cereals, and accounts for their slight rise in value during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless this rise gave the farmer no relief, as, under competition, rents advanced faster than prices, and in the generation which reformed the Church, the misery of yeomen had become extreme. In 1549 Latimer preached a sermon, which contains a passage often quoted, but always interesting:

Furthermore, if the king’s honor, as some men say, standeth in the great multitude of people; then these grazers, inclosers, and rent-rearers, are hinderers of the king’s honor. For where as have been a great many householders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog. . . .

My father was yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep; and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness, with himself and his horse, while he came to the place that he should receive the king’s wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness when he went unto Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king’s majesty now.

He married my sisters with five pound, or twenty nobles apiece; so that he brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbors, and some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did of the said farm, where he that now hath it payeth sixteen pound by year, or more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor.[4]

The small proprietor suffered doubly: he had to meet the competition of large estates, and to endure the curtailment of his resources through the enclosure of the commons. The effect was to pauperize the yeomanry and lesser gentry, and before the Reformation the homeless poor had so multiplied that, in 1530, Parliament passed the first of a series of vagrant acts.[5]

ImperialYeomanryOfficer.jpgAt the outset the remedy applied was comparatively mild, for able-bodied mendicants were only to be whipped until they were bloody, returned to their domicile, and there whipped until they put themselves to labor. As no labor was supplied, the legislation failed, and in 1537 the emptying of the convents brought matters to a climax. Meanwhile Parliament tried the experiment of killing off the unemployed; by the second act vagrants were first mutilated and then hanged as felons.[6]

In 1547, when Edward VI was crowned, the great crisis had reached its height. The silver of Potosi had not yet brought relief, the currency was in chaos, labor was disorganized, and the nation seethed with the discontent which broke out two years later in rebellion. The land-owners held absolute power, and before they yielded to the burden of feeding the starving, they seriously addressed themselves to the task of extermination. The preamble of the third act stated that, in spite of the “great travel” and “godly statutes” of Parliament, pauperism had not diminished, therefore any vagrant brought before two justices was to be adjudged the slave of his captor for two years. He might be compelled to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise, be fed on bread and water, or refuse meat, and confined by a ring of iron about his neck, arms or legs. For his first attempt at escape, his slavery became perpetual, for his second, he was hanged.[7]

Even as late as 1591, in the midst of the great expansion which brought prosperity to all Europe, and when the monks and nuns, cast adrift by the suppression of the convents, must have mostly died, beggars so swarmed that at the funeral of the Earl of Shrewsbury:

there were by the report of such as served the dole unto them, the number of 8000. And they thought that there were almost as many more that could not be served, through their unruliness. Yea, the press was so great that divers were slain and many hurt. And further it is reported of credible persons, that well estimated the number of all the said beggars, that they thought there were about 20,000.

It was conjectured “that all the said poor people were abiding and dwelling within thirty miles’ compass of Sheffield.”[8]

In 1549, just as the tide turned, insurrection blazed out all over England. In the west a pitched battle was fought between the peasantry and foreign mercenaries, and Exeter was relieved only after a long siege. In Norfolk the yeomen, led by one Kett, controlled a large district for a considerable time. They arrested the unpopular landlords, threw open the commons they had appropriated, and ransacked the manor houses to pay indemnities to evicted farmers. When attacked, they fought stubbornly, and stormed Norwich twice.

Strype described “these mutineers” as “certain poor men that sought to have their commons again, by force and power taken from them; and that a regulation be made according to law of arable lands turned into pasture.”[9]

Cranmer understood the situation perfectly, and though a consummate courtier, and himself a creation of the capitalistic revolution, spoke in this way of his patrons:

And they complain much of rich men and gentlemen, saying, that they take the commons from the poor, that they raise the prices of all manner of things, that they rule the poverty, and oppress them at their pleasure. . . .

And although here I seem only to speak against these unlawful assemblers, yet I cannot allow those, but I must needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they be, which never cease to purchase and join house to house, and land to land, as though they alone ought to possess and inhabit the earth.[10]

Revolt against the pressure of this unrestricted economic competition took the form of Puritanism, of resistance to the religious organization controlled by capital, and even in Cranmer’s time, the attitude of the descendants of the men who formed the line at Poitiers and Crecy was so ominous that Anglican bishops took alarm.

It is reported that there be many among these unlawful assemblies that pretend knowledge of the gospel, and will needs be called gospellers. . . . But now I will go further to speak somewhat of the great hatred which divers of these seditious persons do bear against the gentlemen; which hatred in many is so outrageous, that they desire nothing more than the spoil, ruin, and destruction of them that be rich and wealthy.[11]

Somerset, who owed his elevation to the accident of being the brother of Jane Seymour, proved unequal to the crisis of 1549, and was supplanted by John Dudley, now better remembered as Duke of Northumberland. Dudley was the strongest member of the new aristocracy. His father, Edmund Dudley, had been the celebrated lawyer who rose to eminence as the extortioner of Henry VII, and whom Henry VIII executed, as an act of popularity, on his accession. John, beside inheriting his father’s financial ability, had a certain aptitude for war, and undoubted courage; accordingly he rose rapidly. He and Cromwell understood each other; he flattered Cromwell, and Cromwell lent him money.[12]

Strype has intimated that Dudley had strong motives for resisting the restoration of the commons.[13]

In 1547 he was created Earl of Warwick, and in 1549 suppressed Rett’s rebellion. This military success brought him to the head of the State; he thrust Somerset aside, and took the title of Duke of Northumberland. His son was equally distinguished. He became the favorite of Queen Elizabeth, who created him Earl of Leicester; but, though an expert courtier, he was one of the most incompetent generals whom even the Tudor landed aristocracy ever put in the field.

The disturbances of the reign of Edward VI did not ripen into revolution, probably because of the relief given by rising prices after 1550; but, though they fell short of actual civil war, they were sufficiently formidable to terrify the aristocracy into abandoning their policy of killing off the surplus population. In 1552 the first statute was passed looking toward the systematic relief of paupers.[14] Small farmers prospered greatly after 1660, for prices rose strongly, very much more strongly than rents; nor was it until after the beginning of the seventeenth century, when rents again began to advance, that the yeomanry once more grew restive. Cromwell raised his Ironsides from among the great-grandchildren of the men who stormed Norwich with Kett.

I had a very worthy friend then; and he was a very noble person, and I know his memory is very grateful to all—Mr. John Hampden. At my first going out into this engagement, I saw our men were beaten at every hand. I did indeed; and desired him that he would make some additions to my Lord Essex’s army, of some new regiments; and I told him I would be serviceable to him in bringing such men in as I thought had a spirit that would do something in the work. This is very true that I tell you; God knows I lie not. “Your troops,” said I, “are most of them old decayed serving-men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows; and,” said I, “their troops are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons and persons of quality: do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen, that have honor and courage and resolution in them?” . . . Truly I did tell him; “You must get men of a spirit: . . . a spirit that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go; — or else you will be beaten still. . . .”

He was a wise and worthy person; and he did think that I talked a good notion, but an impracticable one. Truly I told him I could do somewhat in it, . . . and truly I must needs say this to you, . . . I raised such men as had the fear of God before them, as made some conscience of what they did; and from that day forward, I must say to you, they were never beaten, and wherever they were engaged against the enemy, they beat continually.[15]

Thus, by degrees, the pressure of intensifying centralization split the old homogeneous population of England into classes, graduated according to their economic capacity. Those without the necessary instinct sank into agricultural day laborers, whose lot, on the whole, has probably been somewhat worse than that of ordinary slaves. The gifted, like the Howards, the Dudleys, the Cecils, and the Boleyns, rose to be rich nobles and masters of the State. Between the two accumulated a mass of bold and needy adventurers, who were destined finally not only to dominate England, but to shape the destinies of the world.

One section of these, the shrewder and less venturesome, gravitated to the towns, and grew rich as merchants, like the founder of the Osborn family, whose descendant became Duke of Leeds; or like the celebrated Josiah Child, who, in the reign of William III, controlled the whole eastern trade of the kingdom. The less astute and the more martial took to the sea, and as slavers, pirates, and conquerors, built up England’s colonial empire, and established her maritime supremacy. Of this class were Drake and Blake, Hawkins, Raleigh, and Clive.

For several hundred years after the Norman conquest Englishmen showed little taste for the ocean, probably because sufficient outlet for their energies existed on land. In the Middle Ages the commerce of the island was mostly engrossed by the Merchants of the Steelyard, an offshoot of the Hanseatic league; while the great explorers of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were usually Italians or Portuguese; men like Columbus, Vespucius, Vasco-da-Gama, or Magellan. This state of things lasted, however, only until economic competition began to ruin the small farmers, and then the hardiest and boldest race of Europe were cast adrift, and forced to seek their fortunes in strange lands.

For the soldier or the adventurer, there was no opening in England after the battle of Flodden. A peaceful and inert bourgeoisie more and more supplanted the ancient martial baronage; their representatives shrank from campaigns like those of Richard I, the Edwards, and Henry V, and therefore, for the evicted farmer, there was nothing but the far-off continents of America and Asia, and to these he directed his steps.

The lives of the admirals tell the tale on every page. Drake’s history is now known. His family belonged to the lesser Devon gentry, but fallen so low that his father gladly apprenticed him as ship’s boy on a channel coaster, a life of almost intolerable hardship. From this humble beginning he fought his way, by dint of courage and genius, to be one of England’s three greatest seamen; and Blake and Nelson, the other two, were of the same blood.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert was of the same West Country stock as Drake; Frobisher was a poor Yorkshire man, and Sir Walter Raleigh came from a ruined house. No less than five knightly branches of Raleigh’s family once throve together in the western counties; but disaster came with the Tudors, and Walter’s father fell into trouble through his Puritanism. Walter himself early had to face the world, and carved out his fortune with his sword. He served in France in the religious wars; afterward, perhaps, in Flanders; then, through Gilbert, he obtained a commission in Ireland, but finally drifted to Elizabeth’s court, where he took to buccaneering and conceived the idea of colonizing America.

A profound gulf separated these adventurers from the landed capitalists, for they were of an extreme martial type; a type hated and feared by the nobility. With the exception of the years of the Commonwealth, the landlords controlled England from the Reformation to the revolution of 1688, a period of one hundred and fifty years, and, during that long interval, there is little risk in asserting that the aristocracy did not produce a single soldier or sailor of more than average capacity. The difference between the royal and the parliamentary armies was as great as though they had been recruited from different races. Charles had not a single officer of merit, while it is doubtful if any force has ever been better led than the troops organized by Cromwell.

Men like Drake, Blake, and Cromwell were among the most terrible warriors of the world, and they were distrusted and feared by an oligarchy which felt instinctively its inferiority in arms. Therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, politicians like the Cecils took care that the great seamen should have no voice in public affairs. And though these men defeated the Armada, and though England owed more to them than to all the rest of her population put together, not one reached the peerage, or was treated with confidence and esteem. Drake’s fate shows what awaited them. Like all his class, Drake was hot for war with Spain, and from time to time he was unchained, when fighting could not be averted; but his policy was rejected, his operations more nearly resembled those of a pirate than of an admiral, and when he died, he died in something like disgrace.

The aristocracy even made the false position in which they placed their sailors a source of profit, for they forced them to buy pardon for their victories by surrendering the treasure they had won with their blood. Fortescue actually had to interfere to defend Raleigh and Hawkins from Elizabeth’s rapacity. In 1592 Borough sailed in command of a squadron fitted out by the two latter, with some contribution from the queen and the city of London. Borough captured the carack, the Madre-de-Dios, whose pepper alone Burleigh estimated at £102,000. The cargo proved worth £141,000, and of this Elizabeth’s share, according to the rule of distribution in use, amounted to one-tenth, or £14,000. She demanded £80,000, and allowed Raleigh and Hawkins, who had spent £34,000, only £36,000. Raleigh bitterly contrasted the difference made between himself a soldier, and a peer, or a London speculator:

I was the cause that all this came to the Queen, and that the King of Spain spent 300,000li the last year. . . . I that adventured all my estate, lose of my principal. . . . I took all the care and pains; . . . they only sate still . . . for which double is given to them, and less then mine own to me.[16]

Raleigh was so brave he could not comprehend that his talent was his peril. He fancied his capacity for war would bring him fame and fortune, and it led him to the block. While Elizabeth lived, the admiration of the woman for the hero probably saved him, but he never even entered the Privy Council, and of real power he had none. The sovereign the oligarchy chose was James, and James imprisoned and then slew him. Nor was Raleigh’s fate peculiar, for, through timidity, the Cavaliers conceived an almost equal hate of many soldiers. They dug up the bones of Cromwell, they tried to murder William III, and they dragged down Marlborough in the midst of victory. Such were the new classes into which economic competition divided the people of England during the sixteenth century, and the Reformation was only one among many of the effects of this profound social revolution.

[. . .]

Although the spoliations of Edward [VI] are less well remembered than those of his father [Henry VIII], they were hardly less drastic. They began with the estates of the chantries and guilds, and rapidly extended to all sorts of property. In the Middle Ages, one of the chief sources of revenue of the sacred class had been their prayers for souls in purgatory, and all large churches contained chapels, many of them richly endowed, for the perpetual celebration of masses for the dead; in England and Wales more than a thousand such chapels existed, whose revenues were often very valuable. These were the chantries, which vanished with the imaginative age which created them, and the guilds shared the same fate.

Before economic competition had divided men into classes according to their financial capacity, all craftsmen possessed capital, as all agriculturists held land. The guild established the craftsman’s social status; as a member of a trade corporation he was governed by regulations fixing the number of hands he might employ, the amount of goods he might produce, and the quality of his workmanship; on the other hand, the guild regulated the market, and ensured a demand. Tradesmen, perhaps, did not easily grow rich, but they as seldom became poor.

With centralization life changed. Competition sifted the strong from the weak; the former waxed wealthy, and hired hands at wages, the latter lost all but the ability to labor; and, when the corporate body of producers had thus disintegrated, nothing stood between the common property and the men who controlled the engine of the law. By he 1 Edward VI., c. 14, all the possessions of the schools, colleges, and guilds of England, except the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and the guilds of London, were conveyed to the king, and the distribution thus begun extended far and wide, and has been forcibly described by Mr. Blunt:

They tore off the lead from the roofs, and wrenched out the brasses from the floors. The books they despoiled of their costly covers, and then sold them for waste paper. The gold and silver plate they melted down with copper and lead, to make a coinage so shamefully debased as was never known before or since in England. The vestments of altars and priests they turned into table-covers, carpets, and hangings, when not very costly; and when worth more money than usual, they sold them to foreigners, not caring who used them for “superstitious” purposes, but caring to make the best “bargains” they could of their spoil. Even the very surplices and altar linen would fetch something, and that too was seized by their covetous hands.[17]

These “covetous hands” were the privy councilors. Henry had not intended that any member of the board should have precedence, but the king’s body was not cold before Edward Seymour began an intrigue to make himself protector. To consolidate a party behind him, he opened his administration by distributing all the spoil he could lay hands on; and Mr. Froude estimated that “on a computation most favorable to the council, estates worth . . . in modern currency about five millions” of pounds, were “appropriated—I suppose I must not say stolen—and divided among themselves.”[18] At the head of this council stood Cranmer, who took his share without scruple. Probably Fronde’s estimate is far too low; for though Seymour, as Duke of Somerset, had, like Henry, to meet imperative claims which drained his purse, he yet built Somerset House, the most sumptuous palace of London.

Notes

1. Agriculture and Prices, iv. 64.

2. 6 Henry VIII., c. 5; 7 Henry VIII., c. i.

3. Jewel of Joy, Becon. Also England in the Reign of Henry VIII, Early Eng. Text Soc, Extra Ser., No. xxxii. p. 75.

4. First Sermon before Edward VI. Sermons of Bishop Latimer, ed. of Parker Soc., 100, 101.

5. 22 Henry VIII., c. 12.

6. 27 Henry VIII., c. 25.

7. Edward VI., c. 3.

8. Brit. Mus., Cole MS. xii. 41. Cited in Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, Gasquet, ii. 514, note.

9. Eccl. Mem., ii. pt. i, 260.

10. Sermon on Rebellion, Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, 194–6.

11. Sermon on Rebellion, Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, 195, 196.

12. Cal. ix. No. 193.

13. Eccl. Mem., ii. pt. I, 152.

14. 5 and 6 Edw. VI., c. 2.

15. Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Carlyle, Speech XI.

16. Raleigh to Burleigh, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, Edwards, ii. 76, letter xxxiv.

17. The Reformation of the Church of England, ii. 68.

18. History of England, v. 432.

 


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URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/03/the-eviction-of-the-yeomen/

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mardi, 06 mars 2012

Jonathan Bowden’s “Western Civilization Bites Back”

New Podcast!
Jonathan Bowden’s “Western Civilization Bites Back”

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Editor’s Note:

This is an unedited transcript of an extemporaneous talk.

Well I don’t really speak to a topic, but you need something to fasten your mind on when you’re engaged in a speech. Speeches are about energy, and are about power, and about how you utilize power and how you channel it. I’m what’s called a mediumistic speaker, so I hear the voice instant by instant before I speak, and when you stand up you hear what you’re going to say a fraction of a second before it comes out of your mouth. What I’d like to talk about is Western civilization and how we can save it.

Now the crisis of the West is ongoing and everybody knows what it is. In the circumstances of the United States — I’ve only ever been here twice — the prognosis for decay is well-advanced. The people who created the United States are on the defensive: they’re on the defensive psychologically, and emotionally, and linguistically, and culturally. People are comfortable, at least those that are, and a lot hit by recession but everyone is worried about what the future will hold. Demographically, the people in this room could well be a minority in 40 years, maybe less than 40 years, maybe more than 40 years, maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s 40 years or 44 or 64 or 35.

What matters is that you’ve become a minority now. You’ve become a minority mentally, because these things happen to people mentally and psycho-spiritually before they have a physical impact. I think people are preparing to be a minority now, long before it happens. I was well aware that President Bill Clinton was once asked about his commitment to political correctness, and he said whites NEED political correctness. He said White Europeans, White Americans need it because they’re going to be a minority relatively soon, and you need to play all of those vanguard games whereby you play off each group against every other group, you make sure that your protest is in early whenever you’re insulted, or you feel there’s the prospect that you might be insulted

And an insult in this trajectory, in this terrain can mean anything. It can mean the denial of future prospect that you might have expected to own and honor. It can be the denial of something which is your right as you perceive it. Your right to dominate the cultural space here in the United States. That the United States is a post-European society. That all of its architecture — Judeo-Christian and otherwise — seems to have the impress of old Europe upon it. I speak as a European obviously, who doesn’t know the United States that well. But everything that’s glorious about the United States is largely created by the people in this room, and those to whom they relate.

Now, the problem that we’re finding is that people are giving away the inheritance that they brought up. It’s as if you have a family business, and you’ve inherited it from a grandfather, and you inherit it from a father, and you have this patriarchal chain of hard work and understanding and excellence and fulfillment, and it comes down to you through the generational sort of structures of the past — and you decided to give it away. You decided to squander it.

It’s very reminiscent of the aristocratic families in Europe: in the era before the Great War, there were big blowouts in aristocracy where people would gamble away their entire fortune, because they were bored. Because they were bored with the Third Republic’s lifestyle, in French terms, in Francophone terms, of endless summers in the sun where people were pining for the destruction which Europeans would wreak on themselves in the Great War, the War that was to end all wars: a war of such manifold destructiveness that people didn’t think there would be another one, and yet within a generation there was another one that was even more destructive.

And that war is the crucial event of the last century, because everything that exists now is a rebounded correction, as it’s perceived, of that struggle and what occurred in it. Even in the United States, it’s almost as if we as a group won that war and lost that war simultaneously, irrespective of what side our forebears fought on. In the United States you fought against Nazi Germany, you fought against Fascist Italy, you fought against Imperial Japan in the Pacific theater, and yet in a strange way you’re the losers of that war. You’ve turned into the apostates of that war, retrospectively, and you’ve partly done it to yourselves, as all continental European people and post-European people have all over the world. That war has been wrenched out of history, and is used as an ideological totem in relation to everything that occurs.

Whether or not the next 18 months or the next six months we’re going to see an attack on Iran, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, is in its own way an extension of post-1945 events. In all sorts of ways, the attack in Iraq which occurred a couple of years ago had as much to do in many people’s minds with the symmetries and the re-symmetries, of the 1939 through ’45 conflicts and everything that resulted from it, then it had anything to do with the dictator in the Iraqi desert. He was a Sunni nationalist, and he held the Kurds down in the North and the Shia down in the South, and America invaded — you remember all this? – America invaded in order to remake the world safe for democracy!

There’s no democracy in Iraq now. All that’s happened is the Sunnis have lost power and the Shias have come up, and the great new hatred, which is Iran, dominates post-war Iraq. America launched a war that cost $2 trillion in order to bring to power Iranian sponsorship and Iranian surrogates inside Iraq. So you have the odd situation now that Iran manifests power through conquered Iraq, conquered under American guns and aegis, with a bit of support from Britain in the South, where the Shia and oil are, and that power that Shia arc of power runs through Iraq: to Lebanon and the Israeli border.

And you’ll find that all of these disputes are intimately connected with the society that was created in 1948 in Israel, and which didn’t exist before. And the need to keep that society safe, the need to watch out for it, the need to prize open this prospect of villainy against it, the need to go to war –conceptually and actually — anyone against anyone who might threaten it in the future, nevermind in the present.

This war, if it ever were to occur with Iran, has been looming for many years. Many years. Ahmadinejad’s speech has almost nothing to do with the Iranian desire to destroy Israel, per se, although you could argue that an extraordinarily foolish speech in many respects. But all he said in Farsi was that the society that was created falsely, and to the detriment of the Palestinians, should cease to exist within world history. Which is a pretty nebulous and “student-fist-in-the-air” sort of speech, but it’s been seized upon to deny the Iranians the prospect of nuclear weapons and to enable the West, through the United States, in yet more warfare: more warfare for peace.

I remember Harry Elmer Barnes once edited a compilation in book form, called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. And since 1945, we’ve had war after war: confined to the zero-sum game of the Cold War and now extending beyond it — whereby all of these wars were are fought allegedly for us, allegedly for our betterment, allegedly for our safety, allegedly for our security, and always on the basis of our patriotism.

The bulk of patriotic people from the Right would regard what I’m saying as unpatriotic, because in a Sarah Palin sort of a way, they believe that once should stick up for the West — and our allies — against perceived enemies. Many of these enemies may not be friends of ours, but they are not enemies in the real sense. The enemies that we face here in the West, here in California, are internal. They’re internal to our own societies, they’re even internal to our own minds.

The greatest enemy that we have — to slightly adapt Roosevelt’s slogan about fear, that there’s nothing to be afraid of except fear itself — the greatest enemy we have is raised in our own mind. The grammar of self-intolerance is what we have imposed and allowed others to impose upon us. Political correctness is a white European grammar, which we’ve been taught, and we’ve stumbled through the early phases of, and yet we’ve learned this grammar and the methodology that lies behind it very well.

And we’ve learned it to such a degree that we can’t have an incorrect thought now, without a spasm of guilt that associates with it and goes along with it. Every time we think of a self-affirmative statement, it’s undercut immediately by the idea that there’s something wrong, or something queasy, or something quasi-genocidal, or something not quite right, or something morally ill about us if we have that thought. And this extends out beyond racial and ethnic questions to all other questions. To questions of gender, to questions of group identity and belonging, to questions of cultural affirmation, to questions of history.

Think about what it will be like when White Americans are 10% of the population of the United States — or 12% — 15% — or even 25%. Political correctness will not save you from the marginalization of your history and traditions, which will occur because it’s not much fun being a minority. Which is why all minorities seek through their vanguards to take majorities down. And they seem to take them down physically, conceptually, actually, legally, philosophically, and in other ways. And they form alliances with like-minded groups that wish to do to majorities what minorities feel that they ought to, because it’s a question of survival. Everyone’s interested in surviving, and even getting along with each other in a relatively quiescent and “PC” way is just another way of surviving. Maybe in the current circumstances it’s the only way in which multiple group-based societies can survive.

The Bill Clinton metaphysic is that everyone should mind their own business, and everyone should get along with each other. But it denies the crucial harbinger of identity, which is the heart of all existence and becoming – in Nietzschean terms, or in neopagan terms. All real identity is underpinned by what existed before you. The societies that are being created are tabula rasa societies, where you’ve got essentially a blank piece of paper, and what an American is is written upon this piece of paper, the way you ask a child to do a diagram or an image and they do a face with a smile. And that’s your new American: your new American is straight off the boat, he’s a face with a smile to two dots for the eyes.

Where is the history of what it means to be an American? Where is the historical trajectory which relates to what you are now and to what you have achieved? And if that tabula rasa is such that everything that you have ever achieved in the past is smoothed-down and removed, what will it mean to be an American? What will it mean to be an American – a de-hyphenated American, deconstructed to the degree that [hypenation] doesn’t even occur – because that is all that will exist in the future. “Americans” will be those that wish to be American.

Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network once did a poll in accordance with their own resources, and a third of the people who live in the Third World would like to come and live in the United States. That’s a third of the global population outside Europe, outside Japan, outside developed East Asia, outside the new Bourgeois India — 200 million out of the billion on the subcontinent who have raised themselves up to a middle-class standard of life and wish to stay on the subcontinent — but a third of those that are outside of those Bourgeois remits want to come here. And when they say “the United States,” they mean “the West.” They mean “Western Europe,” “Northern Europe,” “Southern Europe,” and the new Eastern Europe.

The new Eastern Europe is rather really interesting and will have a lot to say about the future of European man in the next century or so. Eastern Europe was preserved by communism from the decadence of the liberalism which has semi-destroyed Western Europe (and points to the west of that.) Communism was a strange non-exultation. Communism was a strange doctrine, because it preserved under permafrost many of the characteristic social chapters of what it means to be a European. Communism was pretty hellish to live under, particularly materially, and it was almost always the most deformed, the most warped, and the most degraded parts of the society that had been put in charge of you.

I remember someone I know was imprisoned in East Germany in a Stasi prison for putting a slogan on Lenin’s finger. Do you remember those statues with Lenin’s finger, where Lenin addresses the masses, like this? There were hundreds of them in all of the Eastern European societies. And they used to appear in mass posters in East Germany. And one of his friends – very stupidly given the society that East Germany was — put a bubble, a sort of Marvel Comics bubble, on the end of the finger. And the bubble said “Hitler was Right!” And he stepped back to observe — this was his Japanese cousin, and they were on a holiday in East Germany — which is an unusual type of a holiday even then — and he stepped back to examine his handiwork, and said to his relative, “what do you think about that, Bob?” And Bob turned around and there were eight Stasi, eight Stasi — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight — in their requisite leather jackets and trench coats, because they all had the same uniform. And he got 18 months in a Stasi prison breaking rocks and living on black bread and onions. And that Stasi prison was notorious in East Germany, in East Berlin. And that Stasi condemned him for “acts contrary to proletarian justice and the will of the Socialist Republic.” He was condemned for being out of kilter with the masses in history.

East Germany is now a state that no longer exists. It’s been agglomerated into Western and greater Germany. The Wall has come down, the Stasi have demobilized and are no longer evident, yet in a strange way a spirit of Marxism is abroad in the West. A spirit of Marxism is abroad in the United States, unbelievably so! The number of American Marxist-Leninists you could have gotten in a few taxis to a certain extent, and yet this element of cultural Marxism is abroad in the United States, as it is in Western Europe, as it is in Northern and to a certain extent Southern Europe, as it is much less evidently so in post-Communist Eastern Europe, where there’s been an enormous reaction against it.

It’s taken a little bit of time to examine why Marxism, of all things, has ended up culturally influential in the United States. It’s got little to do with economic theory; it’s got much more to do with self-hatred and negation. Guilt. The extending of your own mental remit into groups that don’t care for you, or that purposefully wish you ill. And it’s got a lot more to do with the architectonics of the Frankfurt school, and its ability to morph and to merge into the general Liberal currency of the last 50 years.

Since the Second World War, White Europeans have felt guilty about being themselves and have been made to feel guilty and are being encouraged to feel more guilty than they have at any other time in their history. There is no period in our history where we have faced such evident self-hatred and such evident insults upon ourselves which are harmful to the prospects of our children’s lives, and their children, and generations as yet unborn. Is this a phase that we’ve gone through, or is it something slightly more sinister and ulterior than that? These are questions which we need to analyze.

Why, here in the United States, is there such guilt about the majority identity when the United States could point to, in its own cognizance, an exemplary war record against Germany and Japan, being on the victor’s side, being on the victor’s table? And yet the guilt for alleged and prior atrocity is such that all White Americans feel ashamed about any push forward in relation to the prospect of their own identity. It’s quite shocking how, since 1960 — I was born in 1962 — the West has lost its fiber and has collapsed internally and morally in terms of its spirituality and in terms of its sense of itself.

Fifty years a blip historically; it’s a click of the fingers. And yet for fifty years we’ve see nothing but funk, nothing but a failure of nerve, nothing but a self-expiration, nothing but the degree to which the historical destiny of the European peoples has been traduced — and has been traduced by elements of themselves and their own leadership, who have accepted at face value the fact that much of what was wrong with the modern world is morally our responsibility and not that of any other group. And that if we ever dare to assert ourselves again in any meaningful way, that we are in turn co-responsible with some of the worst events of human history.

Now, let’s unpackage this a bit. Communism in the 20th century killed tens of millions. Tens of millions. When Mao met Edward Heath, who was the British prime minister, in 1972 in the Forbidden City, he said “I’m regarded as the world’s mass murderer in human history.” Of course he said this in Mandarin and this sort of thing, he had to be exhaustively translated by Foreign Office Sinologists and so on, and Edward Heath was rather shocked by this, and said “and what’s your view of this, Chairman?” – a politician’s answer, he just reflected it back upon Mao – and Mao said, after the laborious translation had intervened, “I’m rather proud of it, actually”; being the worst mass murderer in human history.

Don’t forget the Great Leap Forward, the enormous famine that devastated much of rural China and which was in fact a great leap backwards; claimed by mainstream historians to have claimed 46 million lives —  46 million lives – it’s so large that it’s that the human mind balks at it basically. Once you get beyond the body count of couple thousand, the brain falls silent and listens to these numbers and internal calculus almost in a fantastical way. But even if a scintilla of that is true, and the truth is most of the Communists atrocities and most of the worst sort of data that can be leveled against those regimes turns out to be quite true.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB figures for those that suffered under Stalin were halfway in the range between what the apologetic individuals in the West said about the regime — the sort of revisionists, if you like, of the Soviet sort — and the exterminationists in Western countries, who tended to be conservative and who tended to be religious. The actual body count was halfway in between. Whether communism killed 100 million in the 20th century is up for grabs. Whether it killed 20 million or between 20 and 100 million is up for grabs.

And yet everywhere one looks the soft Left, the Left untainted by communist atrocity, is everywhere apparent and appears to be everywhere triumphant.

The trick that the soft Left has learned is that if you disavow the hard edge of Leftist slaughter and Siberian camps and Stasi prison cells and you instead excel in the polymorphous rebellions of Herbert Marcuse and the student left of the 1960s, you can actually influence the whole soft spectrum from the moderate Right, through the Center, through the center-Left, through the general-Left/Generic-Left, through the soft Left, up to the softest accretions of the hard Left and to the moderate-hard Left. An enormous spectrum – two-thirds of the political spectrum — can be influenced by Marxist ideas shorn of their hard-edge Stalinist and Maoist filters.

No one wants to know about John-Paul Sartre now, even in France. Partly because he embraced Maoism at the end of his career. He embraced Maoism, with Simone de Beauvoir, and Gorz, and these other people right at the end of his career. He edited a Maoist paper. This was at a time when Pol Pot was wreaking extraordinary havoc in Indochina.

And yet the ideas that these people stood for: the idea that the family is a gun in the hands of the bourgeois class, the idea that humor itself is a gun in the hands of the bourgeois class, the idea that there’s something uniquely oppressive about being male, that there’s something uniquely oppressive about being a Caucasian, that there’s something uniquely oppressive about the Western historical destiny — all these ideas have been shorn of their human rights abuses in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and far Eastern Asia, and have been reflected back into the West and onto the West. To the degree that you can’t set up a student group in an American university now –unless you’re under relatively deep cover — to oppose this sort of thing because the ideas themselves are so hegemonic.

Why has this occurred? Why can’t Counter-Currents exist on American campuses? Why isn’t there a Counter-Currents group or something of a similar order at Berkeley, for example? Why is the idea that there could be such a group at Berkeley absurd, and almost risible, and produces a mild smile? Why is there? Because the physical danger that such a group would be in is largely exaggerated. It’s the moral, mental, and spiritual danger that afflicts our people and that afflicts the young and would-be radical amongst our people, that is the thing to look to.

Why has this occurred? It’s occurred because the radical Left with a culturally Marxian agenda, scorned by the Stalinist hard-line that they were quick to repudiate, marched through the institutions in the United States and elsewhere from the cultural and social revolution of the 1960s and has marched through those institutions for 50-odd years to such a degree that the whole of the media – mainstream — the whole of mainstream politicking outside of the Rightist and Libertarian allowed areas of dissent in the Republican Party and their European equivalents are controlled by nexus of ideas and interconnected thought processes which determine moral valency and morality.

Everyone in this room is regarded as immoral by the ruling dispensation in the United States, and that’s very important, because it prevents people from identifying with ideas which are, quite transparently, in their own interest. If people think an idea is immoral they will shun you, particularly in an era of media exposure. The idea that identifying with yourself and with your own past is somehow immoral is one of the chief factors whereby the identity of post-European people in the United States has been turned: turned back upon themselves, turned back in a vise-like constriction where it can be used to destroy people and disarm them. Because if you’ve disarmed yourself before the struggle begins, you’re easy meat and easy prey for what’s coming. And the future in America is darker than the past. Unless there is a desire amongst people of European ancestry to step outside of the vortex, the zone of chaos which they have allowed to be created for themselves over the last 50 years.

If people think that the circumstances of American life are ill-disposed to your future identity now, what’s it going to be like in 50 years? What’s it going to be like in 150 years? 150 years White Americans could be maybe 20% of the population. This is the future that faces you. And your culture will be disprivileged. Forget political correctness. Political correctness works when minorities aggregate together in a vanguard way. It doesn’t work when majorities fall and stagger into minority status and then look around for allies now that they are themselves a minority in the hope that somehow they will achieve fairness and equity because these things are not about fairness and equity. They are about who can set the standard and the tone for the cultural domination of a civic space. And if it’s not the White identity in the United States — if it’s not post-Europeanism in the USA — it will be other forms of identity. Some of them fractured, broken-down, mixed, and otherwise marginal.

To European eyes the Obama Presidency is the signification of America’s decline. You have a situation where it used to be only B-listed Hollywood films that would show a powerful Black executive President ruling in the Oval Office. Almost a psychic preparation for the real thing. And now the real thing has occurred. With the Obama Presidency, you see the future the United States writ large. And from an external point of view, it will be difficult to unseat Obama because the Republicans are doing all his work for him, it seems at the present time, and I speak as someone who obviously isn’t an American.

The Obama presidency epitomizes the willed decline of majority instinct in the society because if you don’t feel it’s at all offensive that somebody that does not relate to the majority — axioms, forms of entitlement, forms of belief, and historical precedent here in the United States — is actually President of your Union, is President of your society, is your Commander-in-Chief; if the Israeli planes need to be refueled over the Persian Gulf when they attack Iran at some time in the next year to two years to six months, Obama will give the order for that to occur. And he will do so in the name of everyone in this room; everyone beyond this room. And he will do so because he still speaks as the most powerful man in the world.

So the most powerful Western country is now led by a non-Westerner. Something which would’ve been unthinkable in the 1960s, I would imagine; unthinkable in the 1970s, but is now evidently thinkable and thinkable to such a degree that I think a lot of the anger about it which is manifested in Libertarian currents like the Tea Party movement, seems to have evaporated. I speak as an outsider obviously, but it seemed to me that halfway through the Obama presidency there was a mild cultural insurgency against his regime which found a way to channel itself so that it didn’t mention racial questions. And that’s what the Tea Party movement and Libertarianism was about.

And that’s what Libertarianism is. Libertarianism is the allowed Right wing for people who wish to make Ron Paul-esque points but can’t go the whole distance, and in many ways can’t go the whole distance under the present dispensation because many people feel constrained about who they know, and who they’re married to, and who did what their job is, in relation to how explicit they can be in terms of how they reject the current American and European power structures.

Our people are used to being in charge. That’s why they find it so psychologically and emotionally forbidding when they’re no longer in charge. That’s why they feel so bereft in contemporary Western societies, because to fall from a majority and a purpose and position of power, to a more desiccated and a more jaundiced view of oneself and one’s own capabilities, is quite a wrench.

Everything that I’ve said about the United States could’ve been said about my own country if one goes back 50 or 60 years. There was a time early in the 20th century when you could argue Britain was most powerful society in the world. Britain is now a shadow of a shadow of its former state. It is in a precarious and culturally quite a terrible situation. It has decided in its near-death throes to yoke its star to the contemporary United States. Everything about modern Britain is Americana taken to a different level and repositioned in Western Europe. Almost all of our models, speaking as a Briton, are American now. Almost all of our wars are American-led. We always tag along as a sort of surrogate or executive vessel.

All of our politically-correct trajectory has in some ways come retrospectively from the radical Left fringes of the 1960s, and has been filtered by both an indigenous, and a transatlantic, Left. And we’ve allowed all this to occur to ourselves because we have been inured to the prospect of suffering.

And we’ve been inured to it through plenty. There are many who believe that while Western people suffer no economic distress and while the fridge is full, and while there are several sort of four-wheel-drive vehicles in the yard outside, people will never resort to an anti-regime attitude and their default position will always be one of resignation in relation to what is coming. Particularly when they consider that they can negotiate their way out of what is occurring. The problem is that what may well occur in the future will be nonnegotiable, particularly when it hits.

There are those who believe that the white South African Boers or Afrikaners reposition themselves within their own society so as to have a sort of whites-only republic or an area of the country which is theirs. I think that’s an important yardstick that you put out there as a metaphorization. But my private view is more pessimistic than that. I feel that unless you can actually so soak a proportion or a quadrant of the union with yourself that to spit away from it at some unforeseeable time means that you’ve got a totally post-European enclave. I feel such things, such games are not really worth the candle because when you give up the control of a state for duration — particularly the control of the most powerful republic the world has ever seen — you’re partly doomed when you’ve done that. My view is you never restyle from the desire to be the governing echelon of one of the world’s most powerful societies.

It is true that the United States is in a radical — and from a European perspective, terminal — decline. Partly because the European empires of the past: British, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, German and elsewhere, can see the writing on the wall. All of the precedents: of indebtedness, of being beholden to China in relation to the manipulation of the debt and its economic management, by having an ally such as Israel that wags the tail of the dog to such a degree that it’s almost in charge of the Middle Eastern policy of the United States of America – you could say Cuban-Americans are in charge of America’s Cuban policy, yet the policy towards that tiny and redundant Stalinist island is not as important, by any stretch of the imagination, as the policy towards Israel in the Middle East is in relation to the crucible of world expectation.

The CIA don’t get many things right, but they predict a war in the Middle East involving nuclear weapons in the next 25 years, because the depth of the hatred on both sides is so great. No one can stop other countries getting nuclear weapons; this is the irony of the present Iranian situation. Thirty-four other countries are developing, thirty-four other countries are developing nuclear weapons as we speak, including Brazil, and South Africa, and Argentina, and Saudi Arabia, and so on. And there’s many societies, such as South Korea and Japan and modern Germany, that could develop these weapons overnight if they chose to do so.

The point of an increasingly destructive and an increasingly bifurcated and divided world is to reconstitute yourself in such a way as you are least threatened by its exigencies. If you are least threatened by them you have the biggest possibility of reviving your own culture. I regard the cultural health of the civilization to be the elixir of its development and its authorization, its preferment in its sense of itself. Without that cultural overhang and extension, you cannot be worthy of the inheritance of European identity. If you allow your culture to be transparently disfigured by forces which are external and internal to it, and which you could have controlled in previous incarnations, you will witness your own death knell. And you will witness it in your own lifetime.

But this is not necessarily to harp totally upon the negative, this speech of mine. Because I regard initiatives like Counter-Currents as very important. Counter-Currents is, to my estimation, a sort of right-wing university. A sort of free access right-wing University on the Internet, a radical Right-wing University. The whole point now is that higher education has locked off the Right end of the spectrum. You can learn about conservative ideas, you can learn about Liberal ideas, you can learn about Socialist ideas, you can learn about Marxist ideas in the University context; you can learn about all forms of pan-religiosity and so forth.

Bbut you can’t learn about radical Right-wing ideas in the University context unless it’s adversarial, unless you’re deconstructive, unless you’re against these ideas in a prior way. “I’m writing a thesis at the moment,” somebody would say, “about the far-Right in the United States.” But the premise for such a remark if they were talking to a fellow university lecturer, would be “I’m writing it from an adversarial point of view.” Because nobody can ever say that they were writing it from a friendly, or an effective, or non-adversarial point of view; because it’s a viewpoint to which you must must be opposed, because all right-minded people are allegedly opposed to it.

The truth is most right-minded people are only opposed to it because they believe that they ought to be. They believe that their own niceness and their sense of themselves and their sense of what their neighbors think of them is tied up with the reflexivity of reverse negation, as I call it. “We will not align ourselves with these haters,” “We will not align ourselves with these people who are depicted by the media in such a bad way,” “We will not align ourselves with people who could be held to be in some ways morally responsible for events in the past that we wish to have nothing to do with.” This is the majority sentiment.

Only when you can break through that permafrost — only when you can get into the majority sentiment and begin to turn it around — will there be a change here in the United States or elsewhere. One of the things that can force a change is the impact of more and more transmigration and migrations of peoples. All peoples indeed, which the future holds open for us. The degree to which the world is now shrinking, and although there are now more Caucasians than ever before, our proportion of overall mankind is going progressively downwards as we have one to two children per family and we do not replicate ourselves to the degree that other peoples are doing elsewhere around the world.

But it’s not necessarily something about which we should be completely negative. The prospect of negativity is so great with our people and with our predilections to look upon the worst side of things particularly when our back is against the wall, that we forget the advantages that we have at the present time. Technology and the creation by our group of many of the instruments of this technology is so fulsome and so extensive that we can communicate with almost everyone on Earth — and we can communicate amongst ourselves — instantaneously at the flick of a button or a switch.

Nobody who wishes to learn about Western civilization and is volitionally moving towards learning about it, cannot do so at the present time. It used to be that only a fraction of our societies could ever hold their minds anything about our past, certainly in an academic or vocational way. Now we have the prospect that vast millions of our people can access the Western tradition of the flick of a switch, and this is all to the good.

The problem is that they retain in their minds a mindset which filters out much of the excellence of the Western tradition. Because only when you realize that what we painted, what we built and what we wrote and what we self-dramatized and what we composed musically, had to do with concepts of our own strength, of our own becoming, of our own purpose of glory — only when you realize that that was the underpinning for much of what was valued, only then will you really accord value and respect to the precedence of the past. If you rip out, for the fear of being hostile to anyone else, all prospect of group identity that is based upon strength, you will end up with a very weak and very effeminate and a very fey doctrine of your own culture, and that is what is occurring at the present time.

Alex Kurtagic is a friend of mine who’s known to certain people in this room, and he wrote a very interesting article a couple of years ago about the decline of the modern face. The decline of the modern face. It was an article in physiognomy which is quite a technique of analysis in the 19th century. Have you noticed that most people when they’re photographed today wish to look as nice as possible, as reflexive as possible, as open-hearted as possible? They’re pleading to be liked. Whereas he dug up all of these photographs of missionaries from the late 19th century and Shakers from New England — remember that cult called the Shakers? — they used to have these ecstatic dances, they all died out because they were frightened of sexual intercourse — which of course will occur, because if you’re frightened of the one you will certainly meet the other. But the face of these Shakers was furious, even just to pose nicely for the camera they would look like this. They would look with a demonic intensity and ferocity and sense of themselves and sense of courageous purpose and that sort of thing.

Today you’re regarded as mentally ill if you look like that for your own portrait, aren’t you? And yet what they were doing is they were putting on a face. They were putting on the way in which they wish to be perceived by the world. It was like sitting for portrait, sitting for an oil portrait. You didn’t show your weakest or your most reflexive or your most kind-hearted side; that, if it existed, was for private use. This was a public face. And in the decline of the West’s public face you can see writ-large the decline in the spirit of ourselves which has occurred over the past last century, and which has accelerated over the last century.

People say today that men are less masculine than they used to be. That man have been emasculated by feminism. That maleness itself is so under threat that most men don’t even wish to mention the concept, certainly not in polite society. There’s nothing more fascistic than a recrudescent male, is the general idea. If you cannot even — and these are ideas that are outside of the racial box, outside of the culturally-specific area, still important ideas in relation to political correctness — but they are a softer area in which it’s possible to be more radical one would have imagined; and yet even here one sees funk and one sees decline and one sees an acceptance of that which will lead to the destruction of forms of identity which existed in the past and that need to exist in the present and the future, if there is to be a future.

To have a future people need to be aware of their past, and they need to be aware of the glory of that past. I believe there are celebrations at the present time in the United States — if celebrations is the word – about the Civil War. The Civil War is American experience of extraordinary intensity and drama, whereby the most elitist experiment ever decided upon on the North American continent was extirpated and destroyed by armed force.

Henry Miller is an unusual character in all sorts of ways, and ended up in Big Sur. Henry Miller wrote a book quite against type and against what you’d imagine his own predilections to be, called The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. He wrote it in 1942 after he had a car journey all around United States of America. In this book he makes several dissentient remarks, one of which he says the South — the old South — is to him the most beautiful part of the United States. People here around the Californian coast might not wish to hear that, but he reckoned that the old South was the only aristocratic society — based as it was upon slavery, of course — that was created here in the North Americas. And that it was an elitist society of an old European sort, the nature of which had to be extirpated if you were to have modern America.

What do you do about the Confederacy, and what do you do about the Civil War? You basically probably prefigure the Black and the female experience, you marginalize the White South, and you marginalize those who fought on behalf of racial consciousness at that time. You marginalize all those people in the North — weren’t they called Copperheads — the people in the North who sympathized with the South — a venomous snake, you see. Why is that when radical forms of White identity are dealt with in the historical tradition, they are always dealt with from a perspective of demonization?

When Haitian militants massacred the White population of Haiti, they would be considered by contemporary historiography to be more radical variations of Blackness, more radical variations of militaristic Republicanism in Haiti at that time. But they would not necessarily be condemned for what they did. There would be an attempt to evaluate and to explain and to provide extenuating circumstances within the discourse.

Why isn’t that done for the White South? Why isn’t there an attempted social experiment on the American soil perceived as one of the trajectories in White politics at that particular time? Why is the double standard of double moral jeopardy applied by the historians of our own group to more radical formulations of Caucasian identity here in the United States, or as then it was the dis-United United States? Why have people allowed a situation to emerge whereby our own historical reckoning and our own traditions of self are turned against us in such a radical way that it’s almost impossible — except by the recession to the absolute right — to defend oneself?

Let’s face it, many people do not want to come on to the Right end of the spectrum, and right at the end of that spectrum as well, in order to defend themselves. They would like to be in the middle. Most people are comfortable in the middle. They’re comfortable when they’re with their fellows, when they’re part of a crowd and feel that they’re mainstream. This is an extraordinary problem that we face: the degree to which people do not wish to stand alone. And it’s understandable that they don’t wish to stand alone, particularly at this time. We must provide them with the courage to do this, and Counter-Currents is one of the means by which people can educate themselves to defend themselves and their own honor and future prospects.

Counter-Currents is what I personally believe the best, most educative Right-wing site that I’ve come across, and it’s used by an enormous plethora of people who want information about their own past and their own future. There’s a great wealth of material on it, and it provides this tertiary education of the mind in a radical Right sensibility. I believe that this is crucial if we’re to have a future.

There are various other websites like Alternative Right and others, the Voice of Reason network, exist to furnish, in my opinion, in a more direct and concrete — and everyday and populist sense — the work that Counter-Currents does. Obviously one wants to see much more of this, and there’s no doubt that the Right has gravitated to the Internet in order to get around the censorship that exists almost everywhere else. Because these views are censored almost everywhere else.

Political correctness is a methodology and a grammar. It is designed to restrict the prospect of a thought before the thought is even enunciated. Chairman Mao had the idea of “magic words.” Magic words. “Racism” is a magic word. Use it, and people fall apart. People begin to disengage even from their own desire to defend themselves. All of the other “–isms”: sexism, disableism, classism, ageism, homophobia, islamaphobia, all the others are pale reflections, in other and slightly less crucial areas, of the original one: “racism.”

“Racism” is a term developed by Leon Trotsky in an article in the Left oppositionist journal in the Soviet Union in 1926 or 1927. It is now universalized from its dissentient communist origins — don’t forget Trotsky was on the way out of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as Stalin engineered his disposal and the disposal the Left opposition that he led — and that word has been extracted now to such a degree that it is a universal. It’s universal, it’s become a moral lexicon of engagement and disengagement. If you wish to condemn somebody in contemporary discourse, you say that they are a racist. And there’s a degree to which nobody can refute you’re saying in the present dispensation.

Only when people gain the courage and the conviction to read what is on Counter-Currents, to internalize it, and to defend their own possibilities — of development, biologically and culturally — will we see a change here in America and elsewhere. Only when people are prepared not to fall down and beg for mercy in relation to the past — or the Shoah, which is a sort of a Moloch, sort of a ceremonial device which is used in order to shame nearly all Caucasian, Aryan, and Indo-European people; it’s become a religious totem, a pseudo-religious totem, which is wheeled out and shunted around and made use of so that people fall down and beg for mercy even before they’ve opened their own mouths. They’re begging for mercy even for the prospect of opening their own mouths.

And although I’m saying nothing the people in this room don’t already know, it’s important to realize that these psychological constructs for the majority of our people are deeply crippling and deeply negative in their effects. You have a situation now where people have so loaded upon themselves the untrammeled forces of guilt and the absence of self-preservation that almost any healthy instinctual or virile capacity is beyond them, except as a reaction to a prior threat.

Only when we recover the sense of dynamism that we seem to have partly lost will we have a future: here in the United States, here in California, or in the Western World as a whole. Many other groups in this world wonder about what is happened to us; wonder what has happened to our energy. Don’t be surprised if you learn that many of the elites in foreign countries, in India and China and so on, view with bemused amazement the trajectory of the present West, the degree to which the West is so self-hating: about its own music, about its own art, about its own architecture, about its own military history — other groups in the world are amazed at this, but will seek to take advantage of it because why wouldn’t they? In the circumstances of group competition which this globe entertains, all groups are partly in competition for scarce resources against all other groups. It doesn’t have to be as merciless as all that.

But it is real, and it is extant, and it is ongoing.

Mass immigration into Britain began with the Nationality Act in 1948, which was passed by the [Clement] Attlee government. And Attlee, who was the-then Labor Prime Minister, in a landslide victory that Labor won immediately after the Second World War; said that, “if the races of the world are mixed together there will be no more war.” “If the races of the world are mixed together there will be no more war,” and he took that idea from the anti-colonial movement of the 1920s and the 1930s.

What you get instead, is you get the internalization of divisions and a bellyaching of a globalist sort inside societies instead of between them. So all that happens is the group dynamics which were Nation-State oriented and National in the past three to five centuries become internal, because human competition and the dynamics of group difference are such that they will always exist, no matter what you do. They will exist inside multiracial marriages. They will exist inside multiracial schools, they will exist inside multiracial cities, they will exist within multiethnic housing developments, and they will certainly exist within multiracial societies.

What then happens, is that each group creates a vanguard that negotiates with the other groups about how big a slice of the pie that they get. And the future politics of societies like United States is the negotiation that occurs electorally — and between elections — between the groups. Obama’s elections is a snapshot. The ball goes on, there’s a flash and he’s there for an instant because for that moment the trajectory of forces between working-class whites who vote Center-Left, between women who are more inclined to vote Center-Left than Center-Right, between Black Americans who will vote overwhelmingly for Obama — even though he is of mixed-race — because they consider him to be one of themselves; towards Latinos, who will vote for an alternative candidate from the Democratic Center-Left because they feel that they will get more of a space under the sun under such a dispensation than they would from a White Republican; together with the apathy of those who don’t vote or those who vote for other candidates; together with the trajectory at that moment of that particular electoral cycle where the Republicans were deeply depressed, where there was a deep alienation from the Jr. Bush second presidency, where there was deep malaise in the society because of the forced nature of the Iraq war, which had created convulsion and dissent within the society; and where you had an enormous economic depression which led to an economic vote for Obama, which may be partially repeated next time but was certainly evident then. That’s a snapshot. All elections are, are snapshots out of the forces that are in coalition at a particular time. And yet notice how broken down and how ethnically fractious that coalition is to be.

The prospect of White Republicans being elected — except to lower levels — probably decreases with each year of demographic change in the United States. Even the number of years Obama has been in probably changes the thing in a game-changing way to his advantage. For each year that goes on — my understanding is that America is now a third nonwhite? — essentially it’s a two-thirds/one-third society — but many Western Europeans still conceive of the United States as a White European society. There was even bemused surprise in parts of Western Europe that a non-White President had been elected. But anyone who knows the United States relatively knowledgeably, and who knows of the Kennedys’ desire to extend immigration out to the whole world, and to end the previous Europeans-only, Whites-only immigration policy which had subsisted from the 1920s, I believe. Everyone knows that realizes that the new political dispensation in the United States is contrary to — and hostile to — the indigenous majority that lives here.

Why won’t Caucasian and European people wake up to Eurocentric verities?  The truth is they feel there’s always an excuse to put off the prospect of that waking up, and they are always moments — particularly of media intrusiveness — that people fear in their own lives. One of the major halting elements in the re-energization of our own people is the mass media. And it’s the control of the mass media by forces which are uniquely inimical to our future development. The mass media plays upon every segment of the masses that exist in contemporary Western society — churns them up, holds them against each other, reroutes them, messes up the agenda of everyone that has his own subtext to begin with, which it is forcing and corralling the points of energy in this society towards.  Everyone can see this who watches the mass media with half a mind. Then there’s just the effect of “prole-feed” as George Orwell called it in 1984, whereby the masses are just fed a cultural industry of excess and exploitative infotainment and entertainment for their own edification, and which is an important part of the overall project.

Only when you can break through the carapace of the mass media, with all its multiple Gorgon-like heads and its Hydra-like amphitheater — only when you can break through that, using the Internet, have you a chance to embolden the necessary vanguard of our own population. All change and all radical and all revolutionary change is led by minorities. And it always occurs top-down, even though the minority may be the throwing-forwards of a focus or a group tendency that is more generic and more general.

What the Right has to do here in the United States is to build vanguards. Build as many and as purposeful ones as possible. Build them in such a way as they can’t be broken down externally and defeated internally. One of the uses of the Internet is it gets around the extraordinary backbiting and rivalry, even as it expresses it, that exists between different Right-wing individuals and groups. Because people who have a naturally decisive and quasi-authoritarian mindset always believe that they are right. This is why the Right is extraordinarily difficult to arrange and manage and bring forward. Everyone who’s ever been prominent in a Right-wing group knows it involves herding cats. And the reason for that is because of the bloody-mindedness of the maverick people who are part of these tendencies of opinion. Because you have to be bloody-minded in order to attack against that which is comfortable, and that which is “in the zone,” and that which is the managed expectation of mediocrity in decline that is going on at the present time.

The first speaker this morning, Greg Johnson, talked about decadence. And the debate as to whether it’s just a decline — whereas just as I drop this pad it falls to the floor — is it just a decline, or is it a willed decline? Is there a force which is moving this pad down to the floor, metaphorically, and keeping it there and putting a boot on it once it’s there so that’s it’s got no prospect of rising up again or a hand would creep forward and wrench it up from under the boot and raise it back up to the table. That’s a debate that one can have, but one of the things that is most important to realize is that we have our own destiny before us.

There are more of us than ever before, we are better educated than the mass than ever before, and unbelievable though that may sound. When the Boer war happened in 1899, the British did an audit of the slums in Britain, and found that a quarter of the working-class men who came forward to fight in that war were so riddled with disease, and had been so badly educated, that they were militarily of no use. And Winston Churchill said at the time that “an empire that can’t flush its own toilet isn’t much use.” One of very few radical social statements of any sort, glosses or otherwise, that Churchill ever made.

So we have enormous advantages that exist now. But we must not allow comfort and ease to sleepwalk us towards oblivion. Comfort and ease are the enemy of a decisive cultural breakthrough and a decisive implementation of the politics of the future. We have to forget the last 50 to 60 years, but remember the lessons that we should draw from it. And the lessons that we should draw from it is to believe totally in ourselves.

There’s an organization in Ireland called Sinn Fein, which in Gaelic means “ourselves alone.” And ourselves, we are the locomotive of our own destiny. We ourselves will determine what the role that European people have in the United States will be well into the next century. We must not allow other groups to determine it for us. Only when we are fit for power will we find the means to re-exercise it in our own societies. What is happening here and elsewhere in the West is the biggest test that Western people have faced for a very long period. In the past threats are always perceived as external. Another nation, another dictator, another aggressor, another imperial rivalry. In this filament of Empire, in the scrabble for Africa at the end of the 19th century, and so on.

All the enemies that we now face are internal. And the biggest enemies that we face are in our own minds. The feeling that we shouldn’t say this, shouldn’t write this, shouldn’t speak this, shouldn’t think this. These are the biggest enemies that we have. We’re too riddled with post-Christian guilt. We’re too riddled with philo-Semitism. We’re too riddled with a sense of failure, funk, and futility in relation to the European, the Classical, and the High Middle Ages passed. We’re too defensive. We’re not aggressive and assertive enough as a group.

Many White people feel bereft because the leadership that we look to, the upper Bourgeois tier — the most educated part of our own society — seem to have left the majority. The elite has gone global and sees itself as part of a global elite, and the traditional brokers of power from the university lecturer to your senior businessman, to your senior lawyer and so on, always seem to be on the side of giving the line away. And that’s because in the present day it suffices and works for you to be on the side that gives away what the past has bequeathed to you.

What will it take for the bulk of people who leave Western universities to have the middle or common denominator view of the people in this room? It will take an earthquake. But it’s not that difficult to achieve, once you get people thinking in a dissentient way. This involves very much raising the game.

In some ways we have no freedom of speech in Europe. There’s no First Amendment “right” in Europe. Everyone who speaks in Europe and wishes to avoid a prison cell has to adopt in some ways a stylized and rather abstract form of language. Anti-revisionist laws exist in most of the Western European societies. Britain is slightly unusual in not having them. But that is also rather like the old Hollywood censorship which improved a lot of filmmaking because people had become more indirect and more artistic in the way in which they treated things. It can cause people to raise their game. And I’m very much in favor of Right-wing views being put in the highest — rather than the lowest or the median-way. I’m very much in favor of appealing to new elites, and getting them to come forward rather than making populist appeals when we’re not in the right electoral cycle for that.

I was involved with a nationalist party in Britain for quite a long time. With a project that has seemed to failed and have come to nothing, even though people were elected to the European Parliament. But at the end of the day people are only changed when their cultural sensibilities shifts. And when there is a release of energy, and a release of power, and a release of self-assertion. That is the change that you seek. Electoral change and advantage results from that, rather than the other way around. Getting a few people elected will not suffice, in my view, at the present time. What will suffice is a counter-current, and a counter-cultural revolution, which reverses the processes of the 1960s.

The Marxians have marched through the institutions of the last 50 years because the doors were swinging open for them. They hardly had to kick them down because they were swinging open for them.

All the doors are shut to us. We must find ways to work our way around these doors and reconnect with the new minds of our upcoming generations.

One of the reasons that this will happen is that people in the Western world at the moment are chronically bored. There’s a boredom that has settled upon our people. You can sense it. There’s a spiritual torpor out there. And the most exciting ideas, the most threatening ideas, the most psychopathological ideas, the ideas which are beyond all other ideas, are the ideas which are in this room. They are the most dangerous ideas and therefore they have a subtle attraction to radical and dissident minds.

Don’t forget that everything which has occurred in the last 50 years was once so dissident that the people in the 1920s — those who advocate the ultra-Liberalism of today — had to meet in secret because they were frightened of revealing what their views were to the generality, and to their own families, and to work colleagues. See how the entire notion of what it was to be “progressive” or “reactionary” or “unprogressive” or “traditionalist” or otherwise has changed around in a hundred years.

We are now the people stalking. We are now the people who are afraid of media revelation. We are the people who are taught to be frightened and ashamed of our own views. The whole thing has been reversed in a hundred years.

But there is a natural tendency to kick; there is a natural tendency to kick against the system which is in place. And politically correct Liberalism is an enormous target to be attacked. And it is fun to attack it. And it is life-affirming to attack it. And to traduce it and to kick its bottom and to run round and to be chased by it and to be opposed by all these po-faced zealots and that sort of thing.

It’s entertaining, and that’s one of the things that people have to realize that will attract many people to our side. The bloody mindedness of it; the useful cantankerousness of it. Everyone likes a rebel up to a point, as long as they’re not personally and they’re not adversely affected by the consequences of such radicalism. And what we need to do is position ourselves in the way that the International Times and 60s radicals did the other way around.

If we become the lightning rod for cultural revolution in the West, you will see, in the future, student movements that are loyal to the Right rather than Left, even if these terms break down and in increasingly group-based societies no longer have any meaning, as is occurring. But we still use them because it’s an affordable shorthand.

But never forget the thrill of transgression. Right-wing ideas are transgressive.  And are therefore interesting, and sexy. Herbert Marcuse once wrote about the eroticism of the Right. Susan Sontag did as well. And the Right is more erotic than the Left, is more exciting than the Left. The Left is boring, the Left is extraordinarily grungy and erotically unexciting, you know, despite its prevalence and its penchant for decadence, there’s a degree to which it is not as radically outside the box.

And my view is that people will be attracted in the future not by reason. They will read up with their reason once they have decided to emotionally commit. The important thing is to get people emotionally. And it’s to appeal to the forces and wellsprings in their mind which are eternal, and which underpin rationality. The power of irrational belief as spiritual codification, of mystical belief, of belief in identity, of the need for communitarianism, and the need to belong, is immensely powerful. Far more powerful than the anything the Left can offer.

If you can tap these forces of — in some respects — codified irrationalism,  if you can bring them to the surface, if you can bottle them, and if you can then add on reason and add in the discourse on Counter-Currents, you will tap the energies of future generations of majority Americans. And you will do so because it appears to be extraordinarily interesting. More interesting than anything else. More threatening than anything else. More shocking than anything else. And that is something that the Right should actually in my view heighten, in a civilized and persuasive way.

One should never lose sight of the reason that people are opposed to the our ideas is because they are thrilled to be frightened by them. They are thrilled to be appalled by them. It is the political equivalent of Satanism to many people. I’m saying nothing that is at all original. And in doing so we actually make ourselves tremendously attractive at certain levels of consciousness — not to some Southern Baptist chapter, admittedly. But you make yourself tremendously psychologically appealing. You may not have a halo over your head but you are transfigured in a sort of dark and sepulchral light, which makes you deeply spiritually ambivalent to people who exist now. And that contains the prospect of growth and the prospect of renewal.

I personally believe people agree with ideas long before they moved towards them. They have an instinctual saying of “YES!” They say “YES!” to the idea before they completely have worked out all of the formula for themselves. The Counter-Currents of this world exist to provide the formula for people after they’ve said “YES!”; after they’ve put forward their first step upon the route to identity, and the politics of identity, and the religion of identity.

If I can mention something about that, all the religious divisions that exist amongst people of European ancestry don’t really matter. All that you do is you format a doctrine of psychological inequality. If people believe in equality they can come to it in terms of whatever spiritual system they want. As long as they believe in orders of European inequality, all of the traditions of all of our people can be contained in that.

Thank you very much!

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/03/jonathan-bowdens-western-civilization-bites-back/

vendredi, 10 février 2012

The Coming Battle of Britain

The Coming Battle of Britain

The secret coalition that will ensure Scottish independence

by Colin Liddell

Ex: http://www.alternativeright.com/

This article was originally published on the website of Civil Liberty, an organization in the UK dedicated to fighting the tyranny of political correctness.

David Cameron's stint as prime minister has been dominated by four main political narratives:

1. Britain's opposition to the ongoing Franco-German centralization of Europe
2. The maintenance of financial credibility
3. The "Big Society"
4. The question of Scottish independence

The government's inability to stem the rising tide of immigration and the ongoing economic and social chaos this is spreading throughout the land has, in the absence of a potent British nationalist party, largely fallen off the political stage.

But back to the four main political narratives, it is easy to see a synergy between these. The "Big Society," essentially the concept of volunteerism writ large as an alternative to the state doing everything, is an aspect of the government's attempt to curtail public spending in order to maintain financial credibility. This in turn is linked to Britain's supposed opposition to Euro centralization, which is how the main EU countries are dealing with similar problems created by their public sector bloating.

Of course, it could be pointed out that the "Big Society" is nothing more than aspirational hot air and a political device to offload onerous responsibilities, while also stealing easy credit for successful private, charitable, and communal initiatives.

Likewise, Cameron's opposition to the Evil Merkozy that lies at the dark heart of Europe is, on deeper analysis, rather hollow; certainly as long as voters are denied a referendum on Europe, and Pan-European institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights continues to interfere in British affairs. Also, although the Euro may be temporarily weakened it is clearly not dead. There is a very real sense that once it recovers, the pound and Britain’s partial economic independence will be the next item on its ongoing project of financial gleichschaltung.

What is significant about these political narratives is not the actual level of achievement, which is minimal or non-existent, but the extent to which Cameron has dominated them and turned them to his political advantage, even in the case of the "Big Society." Although this has an increasingly hollow ring with the British public, it still allows the PM to posture as a compassionate anti-statist.

Cameron is apparently on top of all these political narratives except the last one, the issue of Scottish independence. This is the joker in the pack, both because of its complexity and unpredictability and because of its potential to far outweigh all the other political narratives put together.

Scottish independence is the game changer

While the Euro-stropping, "Big Society" posturing, and budget balancing bickering will all fizzle out in the usual political and technocratic compromise zone and slide slowly into the swamp of political amnesia, Scottish independence could be a real game changer.

There are several aspects of this issue that do not get much publicity but probably should. First of all, there is no doubt that both the EU and David Cameron would benefit enormously from it.

Although the EU has been badly winded by recent financial events, the vested interests involved mean that it will probably weather this storm and emerge even stronger and more set on its long term goals of European economic and political integration. It should be noted that this tendency seems to progress regardless of whether European voters are electing centre left or centre right politicians, and there is every possibility that even if 'far right' or even 'far left' candidates were elected in significant numbers a similar modus operandi could be maintained as the EU seems to have power political and economic benefits that appeal to any ruling class.

Scottish independence would strengthen the EU hand vis-à-vis Westminster, reducing England to a smaller and weaker entity, and one that would also be demoralized from the loss of a vital component of its identity and power. In cultural semantic terms, the name "Britain" is the name of a conquering entity that has straddled the globe and proved invincible. The vestiges of this greatness are still what power the vision of a Britain independent from the EU. The name "England," by contrast, is historically that of a smaller, weaker entity, rather easily conquered by Dane and Norman, and only saved from the Spaniard by the vagaries of the weather. At least that's the mythic image or perception, and such factors will work like a Fifth Column to reduce the resistance to the warm, all-enveloping embrace of Europe.

Given that the EU would benefit from Scottish independence, we must expect some tangible support for it at some stage.

What form this will take is hard to predict, but possibly it will take the form of economic guarantees when the unionist campaign raises questions of Scottish economic viability in the absence of the Barnett Formula.

The second main point, that David Cameron would benefit greatly from Scottish independence, is perhaps more counter-intuitive but just as rational. This is based on the widespread loathing for the Conservative Party that has existed in Scotland since the tenure of Margaret Thatcher. In addition to her de-industrializing economic policy that hit Scotland (and my family) particularly hard, her personification of bossy, middle-class, Margot Leadbetter, WI-style Englishness did not go down particularly well in a society that has always been dominated by a tough male, working-class ethos.

People see Scotland as a Labour country and this is easily 'proved' by the results of almost every Westminster election over the last several decades, but the recent rise of the SNP, which is politically more centrist, reveals the true story. The main reason that Scots have voted overwhelmingly Labour in the past has simply been because it was the most effective way to hurt another party that was indelibly linked in the Scottish mind with domineering Englishness.

The political side effects of Scottish independence

Scottish independence would have powerful effects on each side of the border. With Scotland freed from Westminster, there would be much less reason for Scottish voters to vote Labour. This would effectively result in the collapse of Labour in Scotland. Of course, the SNP, having fulfilled its historical purpose, might also face a serious drop in support as a range of new parties rose up to take advantage of the new political ecosystem.

In England, the removal of approximately 50 Labour MPs to the one Tory that Scotland still sends to Westminster would have a cataclysmic effect on Labour's prospects of ever winning outright power again.

A large part of the support that a major political party receives is not because of agreement with its policies, but because it has the capability of winning. Voters are rather like London-based Manchester United fans. As long as Man Utd are the big club, these fans, with no real connection to the city of Manchester, will continue to associate themselves with the success of the club, but once the club starts losing championships these fans quickly move on. The same phenomenon can be observed in politics. Americans tend to vote overwhelming Republican or Democrat because these two parties are the only ones that can grant access to representation through the extremely undemocratic American system.

The Labour Party is essentially the expression of the class politics of the early 20th century, but has managed to trade on the electability created by those limited conditions to draw out its political life long past its sell-by date. The very name of the party, which has an unpleasant, antiquated ring for voters in a post-industrial society, reveals this very clearly. The sudden removal of its contingent of Scottish MPs from the political equation would very likely deliver it a death blow.

With the Labour party removed or truncated to midget proportions, British politics would start to resemble the present governing coalition, while in the remaining White working class areas we could expect to see a post-Griffinite BNP or a new English nationalist party hoovering up votes on an identitarian basis of both race and class.

Given that the Tory Party would benefit from Scottish independence, we must expect some tangible support for it at some stage.

This is despite Mr. Cameron's professions of unionism. What form this will take is hard to predict, but possibly it will take the form of Mr. Cameron earnestly entering into patronizing Lord-Snooty-style debates with that wee ghillie Alex Salmond. With Cameron and the Eurocrats secretly or not so secretly on Salmond's side, the unionists are probably marching to the political equivalent of the Second Battle of Bannockburn!

Roll on 2014!!

mardi, 24 janvier 2012

How the British Constructed a New Woman’s Movement

How the British Constructed a New Woman’s Movement

A Book Review of Feminine Fascism

 

Julie V. Gottlieb
Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923-1945
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003.

“Feminine fascism” is a phrase that Julie V. Gottlieb uses to describe the forward-thinking, yet traditionally influenced, ideology embraced by Britain’s fascists. Their objective was not a return to the past, to a time when women were solely mothers and homemakers. Instead, the fascists in England combined traditional roles with the advances made in women’s suffrage and the workplace, and added a fascist bent of discipline and integrity.

Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement is a chronological account of fascism in Britain, starting in 1923 with the country’s first fascist group, the British Fascisti, founded by Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a woman. The BF remained the predominant fascist organization until Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BU) was established in 1932. Feminine Fascism discusses the role of women in these two groups, details the unique form of feminism embraced by members, and ends with an account of the internment and trials of women fascists during World War II. The last quarter of the book provides brief biographies of the many women in fascist Britain.

Gottlieb, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield, has trouble wrapping her head around what attracted so many women to fascism, especially those who had campaigned for women’s suffrage. How could women embrace such seemingly different ideologies: women’s rights, on the one hand, and anti-democracy on the other? The answer is that fascism offered women the best of both worlds.

Britain’s fascists encouraged women to be traditional in many areas. Motherhood was valued and respected, as was homemaking. In fact, the Corporate State would include a Home Corporation, in which homemakers would have representation just like any other trade. An article in The Blackshirt explained, “only when women represent women will womankind attain its rightful influence.”

A primary goal of the fascist platform was allowing women to once again be homemakers, but they used forward-thinking methods to advance their ideology. Many British women were essentially forced into the workplace due to wage variances between the sexes. Employers preferred less costly female employees, which pushed many men out of jobs. All too many families experienced the trials of having a working mother, with the father at home tending the house and children, unable to secure a decent wage. The fascists knew that in the modern world, a platform that appeared to regress women’s rights would hold no sway. Thus, they supported equal wages for women, since equal pay would mean that more men could return to the workforce. As explained by Fascist Week:

Under Fascism women will not be compelled to resign, but encouraged to do so by the fact that, under Corporate State and the scientific methods of raising real wages, men will be able to afford to marry women—and women will not be compelled to earn their own living as they are at present. (125)

However, the fascists never insisted that career-minded women remain at home, recognizing that there were not only occupations suited to women, but also situations in which women would desire a career and need equal pay. Rosalind Raby, for example, claimed that fascism would allow the unmarried mother “to earn an honest living for herself and her child.”

March_2

But the biggest innovation in British fascism was its emphasis on character. Men were encouraged to have values of courage, strength, honour, and integrity. The aristocracy of money and class would be replaced in the Corporate State with a meritocracy. Likewise, British fascism presented an alternate form of femininity: one that included strength, courage, and fearlessness. During marches, women were not permitted to wear lipstick or wave at friends as if in a beauty pageant. These feminine fascists were described as healthy, attractive, charming, intelligent, and of strong character. They were motherly, but as wary of sentimentality as Julius Evola. A male writer described the women Blackshirts:

Nothing silly or soft about these women. They are nothing if not practical . . . and the happy carefree way in which they made themselves at home, was so refreshing after one has had their fill of the simpering little brats that democracy and Jewish films have produced. (95)

The combination of traditional and modern was seen in the BU women’s uniform of: a black blouse, grey skirt, and black beret. It was against regulations for women to wear trousers while on active duty.

Integrating Fascism into Everyday Life

 

British fascists grew in numbers, in part because they didn’t relegate their philosophy to just the political sphere, but participated in almost every aspect of members’ lives. Weddings included fascist regalia, and at some funerals a fascist flag was draped over the coffin. The Fascist Week printed the names of wedding guests just like the society pages of The Times.

wedding

Members of the BF organized Fascist Children’s Clubs, in which children were taught history, songs, patriotism, and given awards for homework. Other women had brooches designed with the BU lightning symbol, and made dolls dressed in the blackshirt for children. There also was a BU Women’s Choir. According to Gottlieb:

By celebrating each phase of life within a fascist framework, the BF in fact appropriated the functions once carried out by the Church and this substantiated their claim . . . that fascism was akin to a religion. (28)

In addition to the accolades given to real women, there were fascist heroines as well. The most notable was Queen Elizabeth, for her command of the nation and exemplary oratory skills. Another heroine was Lady Hester Stanhope, who worked as a housekeeper before traveling through the Middle East. E. D. Hart wrote:

Those women who, whether from choice or, as in the case of Lady Hester, from necessity, explore other walks of life, will find both assistance and encouragement. When, like her, they display the Fascist virtues of courage, self-reliance, and tenacity of purpose, we ascribe to them the honour which is their due. (97)

Blackshirts also banded together to disparage several less attractive types of women. One was the feminist with mannish, short hair, called the “bleating Bloomsbury.” Another was the “Mayfair Parasite,” who usurped the nation’s wealth and vitality by sleeping late and devoting her life to superficial pleasures. Being fit and healthy was considered a moral duty, for as one writer put it: “Far too many women consider it their privilege to be ill . . . just ill enough to pamper themselves and evade their share of the family work.” Communists often were referred to as “submen” and “subwomen.” Titled women did not escape criticism either. Those who earned money by advertising products were publicly chastised by BU members for degrading both themselves and their class.

Women’s Duties in Fascist Organizations

Women were involved in almost every area of Britain’s fascist groups, and made up about 25 percent of the membership. The Women’s Section of the BU was established in March 1933, under the leadership of Lady Maud Mosley. She said, “When my son married Lady Cynthia [Mosley’s first wife], she took her place by his side. Now she is dead and there must be someone to help him in this work and I am going to do my best to fill the gap” (52).

Mosley’s second wife, Diana, and her sister Unity Valkyrie Mitford became two of the best-known female fascists, but Feminine Fascism only lightly touches on their stories. Their aristocratic parents were extremely Right-wing and anti-Semitic, but when the 2nd Baron Redesdale supported England during the war, he and his Nazi-sympathizing wife permanently separated.

Diana_MitfordDiana was married to Bryan Guinness when she met Mosley, and soon became his mistress. Mosley’s wife died suddenly of peritonitis in 1933 (though he was plagued the rest of his life that infidelities and political stress might have been the cause). Mosley and Diana were married at the home of Joseph Goebbels in 1936, with Hitler as guest of honor.

Unity debuted the same year her older sister became Mosley’s mistress. The next year, Diana and Unity went to the 1933 Nuremberg Rally as part of the BU delegation, and saw Hitler for the first time. Unity returned to Germany the following year, eating at the same restaurant as the Führer for 10 months, until he finally asked her over. Unity wrote to her father of their meeting: “I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit, dying. I'd suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world. For me he is the greatest man of all time.” Hitler, in turn, described Unity as “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood.” Their affections might have escalated, if not for a suicide attempt by Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. Though in love with Hitler, Unity devoted herself to making speeches, writing letters, distributing propaganda, and being one of Hitler’s intimate confidantes. On September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, Unity took a pearl-handled pistol (a gift from Hitler for protection) and shot herself in the head, unable to bear the thought of the two countries she loved at war. She survived and was eventually able to walk again, but never recovered her full mental capabilities.

While Unity was helping the cause on the continent, women Blackshirts in England spoke at meetings, organized children’s groups, sold newspapers, and participated in marches and canvassing. Study groups about fascism were established for women speakers, and women participated in public debates. But women did not forsake their traditional duties either: One woman reported that it was the fair sex who kept the BU headquarters clean and brewed tea for the men. Members who did not give five nights a week to the movement were denied the privilege of wearing the coveted blackshirt.

A relatively large number of women participated in local elections. In 1936, the BU ran 10 women candidates (10 percent of their parliamentary candidates), from a variety of backgrounds. (Six were unmarried, five were professionals, three were in their 20s, and two were from gentry families.) The various women received between 15 and 23 percent of the votes in their respective districts.

speaking

Women’s most valuable talents were said to be in public speaking, and numerous BU women were praised for their excellent oration and ability to move crowds. Other women were lauded for their ability to use personal stories in their speeches, which proved more powerful than simple recitations of facts. During a 1936–37 campaign, women decided to censor their speeches for tactical advantage. No speaker was allowed to use the word “Jew.” Instead, plain-clothed members were scattered throughout the audience to use the word instead, as the message was thought to be more rousing if coming from the public.

Women had roles to play in security and self-defense as well. Female members of several organizations were trained in ju-jitsu, for as Fascist Week reported, “no male member of the BU is permitted to use force upon any woman, and women Reds often form a highly noisy and razor-carrying section at fascist meetings. Thus we counter women with women” (66).

The Fallout During the War

As early as 1938, a division of MI5 was formed to place agents in subversive organizations. Three women agents provocateurs successfully infiltrated the popular fascist group, Captain Ramsay’s Right Club. After Britain entered WWII, the country started to resemble a totalitarian dystopia for fascist sympathizers. In October 1939, Anne Brock Griggs was charged with “insulting words and disturbing the peace” for saying in a speech: “If Germans don’t like Hitler they can get rid of him themselves. We do not need to send our sons to fight them. If ever a country wants a revolution now it is Great Britain” (236). She quit her BU post, but was still interned during the war.

Defense Regulation 18B(1A) went into effect in September 1939, and it allowed the Home Secretary to detain anyone suspected of being a threat to national security. That category included anyone who was a leader or member in a group that might be under foreign influence. Under 18B, 1,826 people were interned, including 747 BU members (96 of them women).

Sir Oswald Mosley was arrested in May 1940, the day after the Defense Regulations were passed. The BU was outlawed in June, and his second wife, Diana, was interned shortly after. She was denounced by both her sister Nancy (later a famous novelist and biographer) and her former father-in-law, and had to leave without her 11-week-old, still-nursing baby boy. Although the English public called for Unity Mitford to be interned as a traitor, she was allowed to return to the family home with her mother, since she was weak from her suicide attempt.

Interned women were given no special treatment in prison. When Miss L. M. Reeve was arrested, a group of armed guards came to take her from her home. One officer asked if he could have her dog, since she was “probably about to be shot.” One woman’s infant died while staying with her in prison, and another woman’s infant was pulled from her arms and placed in an institution. Part of the evidence against another woman was a photograph of her on vacation in Germany in 1939, seated at a table with bottles of German wine.

Fascists on the outside, though their organizations were banned, were still able to help their comrades via a registered charity founded specifically to help those interned under 18B. The charity helped pay for legal and medical services, provided assistance to detainees’ families, provided post-release counseling, and helped people find employment. Trials could only be held for those who could be charged with a tangible offense, so many men and women fascists were imprisoned for years.

The Impact of Feminine Fascism

 

The much-anticipated Corporate State never became a reality, and its philosophies and ideas were forced to the margins of history. Yet the lessons that can be learned from the events detailed in Feminine Fascism remain relevant to the leaders of future generations.

Eighty years ago, the fascists recognized that it would be impossible to shed the gains made in women’s rights. Rather than fighting against women’s “emancipation,” with which they ideologically disagreed, the fascists used it to their advantage. The result was a philosophy for women that honored the traditional, yet considered the needs of modern women. Fascists didn’t need to force women into the home or sell them on an ideology that contradicted the propaganda of the modern world; they realized that the moment women didn’t have to work the majority of mothers would return gladly to full-time homemaking. And given the precarious nature of homemaking as a profession, they planned ways for women to have representation and security in the Corporate State. The result was a platform that united women of various political persuasions, ages, and classes. Because it details the fascists’ unique outlook and strategy, Feminine Fascism makes a relevant handbook for those looking to learn from the successes and failures of history.

vendredi, 16 décembre 2011

Le mystère des Anneaux


Le mystère des Anneaux

lundi, 28 novembre 2011

Royaume-Uni : La tension monte entre Britanniques au chômage et immigrés au travail

Royaume-Uni : La tension monte entre Britanniques au chômage et immigrés au travail

Par Michèle Tribalat

Ex: http://fortune.fdesouche.com/

La crise n’a pas réduit l’afflux de travailleurs étrangers outre-Manche, notamment non Européens. Ni leur capacité à trouver du travail : plus flexibles sur les horaires et les salaires, ils sont toujours plus nombreux à exercer une activité, alors que de plus en plus de Britanniques se retrouvent eux au chômage.

L’immigration au Royaume-Uni n’a guère faibli pendant les années de crise avec, cependant, moins d’entrées au motif du travail mais un accroissement très important des entrées d’étudiants.

David Cameron avait promis de traiter la question migratoire dans son ensemble pour qu’il n’y ait pas de report et éviter l’abus du statut d’étudiant. Il n’a manifestement pas réussi. Entre juin 2009 et juin 2010, le nombre d’étudiants ayant reçu un visa est passé de 268.000 à 362.000, soit une augmentation de 35 %.

Si la migration en provenance des nouveaux entrants dans l’Union européenne s’est ajustée à la crise – le solde des entrées et des sorties est désormais très faible -, il n’en va pas de même pour le reste de l’immigration étrangère. Le solde migratoire annuel des étrangers, en moyenne mobile, était encore supérieur à 200.000 en mars 2010, soit un niveau comparable à celui observé en mars 2006. Le repli de l’immigration en provenance des nouveaux entrants de l’UE a donc eu peu d’effet sur le niveau d’ensemble des flux.

L’Office national de la statistique vient de publier une statistique qui fait scandale. En un an, l’emploi des personnes nées à l’étranger s’est accru de 181.000 alors que celui des Britanniques nés au Royaume-Uni s’est effondré (- 311.000). La motivation et l’acceptation d’horaires et de conditions de travail pénibles seraient plus grandes chez ceux qui viennent de l’étranger. Les employeurs trouvent les jeunes Britanniques trop feignants et démotivés.

 

Ces arguments ne sont pas nouveaux. Les employeurs préfèrent recruter des immigrés plus qualifiés que les natifs, ou alors plus disposés à accepter les conditions de travail et les salaires que ces derniers refusent. En 2008, le rapport de la Chambre des Lords sur l’impact de l’immigration faisait déjà part de ses craintes que ne « se développe une demande spécifique des employeurs pour des immigrants aux exigences faibles en matière de salaire et de conditions de travail ». Nous y sommes. En période de crise, la situation semble sans doute encore plus choquante.

Par ailleurs, une pétition lancée par Migration Watch UK demandant à ce que l’immigration soit progressivement réduite afin de revenir à un solde migratoire ne dépassant pas 40.000 a été signée, en une semaine, par 100.000 personnes. Avec les statistiques publiées sur les créations d’emploi par l’ONS, nul doute que la pression va s’accroître sur le gouvernement britannique pour faire baisser l’immigration étrangère.

Atlantico

lundi, 17 octobre 2011

The Sunic Journal: Jonathan Bowden

The Sunic Journal: Jonathan Bowden

dimanche, 16 octobre 2011

Identità umana e pregiudizio etnico ne «I viaggi di Gulliver» di Jonathan Swift

 

gulliver1.jpg

Identità umana e pregiudizio etnico ne «I viaggi di Gulliver» di Jonathan Swift

 

di Francesco Lamendola

Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

 

Da quando è apparso nelle librerie di Londra, nel 1726, il capolavoro di quella mente satirica e paradossale che fu Jonathan Swift (in una sua opera minore, la «Modesta proposta», del 1729, aveva suggerito, con la impassibile seriosità dell’economista, che i bambini poveri venissero utilizzati come cibo per i ricchi), ossia «Gulliver’s travels», esso non ha finito di dar luogo ad equivoci e fraintendimenti.
Basti dire che, per anni ed anni, di esso, o piuttosto di una sua edizione ridotta e “normalizzata”, si è voluto fare un classico per la gioventù; cosa ancora più amaramente paradossale di quel che avrebbe potuto immaginare il suo stesso autore, dato che tutto si può pensare de «I viaggi di Gulliver», tranne che sia un romanzo adatto ai bambini.
Se bastasse il fatto che il protagonista, a un certo punto, capita nel paese di Lilliput, dove tutto, a cominciare dagli abitanti, è quindici volte più piccolo che nel nostro mondo; oppure che, nella sua successiva avventura, egli finisce nel paese di Brobdingnag, ove il rapporto delle grandezze è rovesciato a sfavore dell’uomo, e lo stesso protagonista finisce rinchiuso in gabbia come un canarino, per il trastullo della gigantesca figlia del re; se bastassero tali aspetti puramente esteriori, allora vorrebbe dire che noi attribuiamo ben poca importanza a ciò che diamo da leggere ai bambini, oppure che non abbiamo capito nulla della terribile serietà di questo libro.
Che cos’è che non passa attraverso la macina della satira impietosa di Swift, misantropo inguaribile e scatenato pessimista? Non si salva nessuno: i suoi strali colpiscono con infallibile cattiveria i filosofi, gli storici, gli inventori (e questo in piena ideologia del progresso, in pieno secolo dei Lumi!); l’avidità e la brutalità degli Europei, protesi alla conquista degli altri continenti (e ciò nel Paese europeo che più di tutti si stava impegnando in questa sedicente “missione di civiltà”, la Gran Bretagna, dopo aver ridotto alla disperazione i vicini Irlandesi); la sete degli uomini di vivere eternamente; il primordiale istinto di sopraffazione proprio della natura umana, che viene significativamente contrapposto alla olimpica saggezza e all’esplicito disprezzo ad essa riservato dai nobili cavalli parlanti.
Dal punto di vista filosofico, «I viaggi di Gulliver» sono una vera e propria miniera di spunti per la riflessione, almeno quanto lo sono altri classici ammirati sotto il profilo letterario, ma, di solito, poco considerati in questa prospettiva, quali la «Divina Commedia» di Dante, il «Don Chisciotte della Mancia» di Cervantes e i «Promessi Sposi» di Manzoni.
Una miniera addirittura inesauribile: al punto che, se volessimo non già trattare, ma anche solo sfiorare, le principali tematiche filosofiche sottese al romanzo di Swift, avremmo la necessità di riempire parecchi volumi; qui, pertanto, vogliamo limitarci a toccare uno solo di tali aspetti, vale a dire quello riguardante il problema dell’identità e del pregiudizio etnico.
Formidabile accusatore dell’etnocentrismo, Swift insiste continuamente, lungo tutta la sua opera, sulla estrema difficoltà, anzi, sulla radicale impossibilità di superare i pregiudizi culturali della propria civiltà, nel momento in cui ci si trova alle prese con una civiltà diversa, i cui presupposti materiali e spirituali siano totalmente differenti dai nostri e anche da quelli che potremmo teoricamente concepire.
È ovvio che, così impostata la questione, la soluzione non può consistere nel generico e velleitario cosmopolitismo illuminista, benché tanto decantato da Voltaire e dagli altri “philosophes” francesi, a cominciare da Montesquieu: come si fa ad essere cittadini del mondo, infatti, se risulta per noi insormontabile la barriera culturale entro la quale siamo nati e cresciuti e dall’interno della quale tendiamo a giudicare, con arbitraria sicumera, altri modi di essere, di sentire e di pensare, del tutto diversi ai nostri?
Più sensato, semmai, appare un atteggiamento di scettica tolleranza, simile a quello già mostrato da Montaigne e del quale abbiamo già avuto, a suo tempo, occasione di occuparci (cfr. il nostro articolo «Michel de Montaigne e il cannibale felice», apparso sul sito di Arianna Editrice in data 13/12/2007).
Ha scritto Gianni Celati nel suo saggio introduttivo a «I viaggi di Gulliver» di Jonathan Swift (Feltrinelli, Milano, 2004, pp.  XV-XVI):

«Che si tratti di meschini lillipuziani o di magnanimi giganti o di cavalli virtuosi, le abitudini dei vari paesi  dipendono sempre da una fissazione su certi assiomi, definizioni nominali, dogmi o giudizi a priori; e sono una cecità che impedisce di vere oltre i limiti di una cultura, anche dove si tratta di cose osservabili a occhio nudo. Non solo nei comportamenti, ma anche nelle percezioni e nei pensieri intimi, la natura umana sembra ineluttabilmente dipendente da condizionamenti ambientali. Per cui il passaggio da un regime di abitudini all’altro corrisponde sempre a un lavaggio del cervello; e Gulliver non fa che subire lavaggi del cervello passando da un paese all’atro e adeguandosi a sempre nuove situazioni.
Se tutti i comportamenti e i pensieri dipendono così strettamente  da condizionamenti esterni, viene da chiedersi  dove ci porti questa lezione di relativismo radicale. Come si chiede Patrick Reilly:  “che ne è della vantata libertà della mente, l’inviolabile santuario dell’io”? Spesso è stato detto che Swift  porge un orecchio all’uomo perché si riconosca. Ma guardiamo Gulliver, che sembra un automa in balia della relatività , alieno in tutti i paesi dove capita e anche nella sua amata Inghilterra: se lui è l’uomo in cui specchiarsi, l’uomo è l’alieno del mondo, che appena fuori casa diventa  come Gulliver una specie di “freak” da baraccone, alla maniera dei selvaggi che erano esibiti per lo svago delle folle o dei potenti. Dal libro risulta che l’identità umana viene riconosciuta attraverso “leggi di Natura”; le quali però sono giudizi a priori, abitudini di pensiero per discriminare  l’indigeno dall’estraneo. Ad esempio, nella prima parte Gulliver si trova subito a essere classificato dai dotti lillipuziani come un uomo caduto dalla luna, in base a supposte “leggi di Natura”; e per gli stessi motivi i dotti di Brobdingnag lo classificano come un embrione abortivo, poi uno scherzo di natura; e i matematici lapuziani lo disprezzano perché non ha le loro stesse attitudini demenziali; infine i cavali lo espellono dalla Houyhnhnmland perché lo considerano una bestia irrazionale. Sempre le “leggi di natura” servono a definire la differenza  tra l’indigeno e l’estraneo, e hanno il risultato di esporre Gulliver a sanzioni, a condanne al rischio della vita, all’espulsione.
Inoltre va notato che la consistenza di questi giudizi a priori si fonda  soprattutto sulla boria dei sapienti, sui luoghi comuni della cultura, e in nessun altro libro  la scienza dei dotti viene così collegata alle forme universali dell’etnocentrismo. È questo che impedisce di riconoscere  nell’alieno Gulliver un’identità umana;, facendone appunto un “freak”, uno scherzo di natura: perché, nella scienza dei dotti, i valori differenziali diventano  modi del pregiudizio etnico che decide  l’identità dell’individuo; sicché i luoghi comuni  d’ogni cultura rappresentano i criteri ultimi  per distinguere gli individui umani al resto delle creature sensitive.
Questa  una lezione che Swift ha imparato da Montaigne, uno dei suoi grandi ispiratori;  e il «Gulliver»» sviluppa la visione di Montaigne sulla relatività delle opinioni e abitudini e di tutti i popoli. Una battuta nella quarta parte riassume il pensiero che attraversa il nostro libro: “dov’è mai un essere vivente non trascinato da preconcetti e parzialità per la sua terra natia?”: Bisognerebbe citare i tratti del pregiudizio etnico negli omiciattoli di Lilliput come nei cavali della Houyhnhnmland : pensare alle idee dei capi lillipuziani di macellare  o accecare il povero Gulliver, ricordare le proposte nell’assemblea dei cavalli  di castrare gli Yahoo. Che si tratti dell’untuosa crudeltà  dei lillipuziani, della crudeltà orientale  del re di Luggnagg, di quella olimpica dei cavalli, o di quella  degli europei impegnati in guerre e massacri coloniali, la cultura delle nazionalità sembra che debba sempre confermare  le proprie abitudini ricorrendo a sistemi di crudeltà.
Ogni cultura risulta un modo violento di marchiare gli altri, di segnare i limiti tra noi e l’estraneo.  Perché chi è fuori dai limiti d’una cultura, l’alieno, sembra appartenere alla natura brada come le bestie,  dunque dovrà essere domato, marchiato o castrato come le bestie. Questo mi sembra il succo delle disavventure di Gulliver, e fa venire un mente un celebre passo di Montaigne: “Noi non abbiamo altro punto  di riferimento per la verità e la ragione che l’esempio e l’idea degli usi e opinioni del nostro paese. […] Perciò gli altri diversi da noi sembrano selvaggi, allo stesso modo in cui chiamiamo selvatici i frutti  che la natura ha prodotto nel suo naturale sviluppo” (“Essais”, libro I, cap. XXXI).»

Abbiamo detto che la constatazione della irrimediabile limitatezza e dell’insuperabile condizionamento degli individui da parte della società fa sì che Swift propenda per una visione relativistica e scettica della condizione umana.
La sua satira, che assume talora i toni di un feroce sarcasmo, non sa o non vuole individuare una”pars costruens”  sulla quale far leva, in tanto pessimismo antropologico; egli è un formidabile distruttore, ma non si pone nemmeno il problema di come l’uomo possa tentare di uscire dal condizionamento cui sempre viene sottoposto, senza neppure rendersene conto.
Non si può dire che ne abbia l’obbligo: Swift non è un filosofo, ma uno scrittore; il fatto che abbia saputo vedere e criticare, dietro la vuota retorica del cosmopolitismo illuminista e del progresso illimitato, il vuoto presuntuoso di una cultura incapace anche solo di comprendere i limiti della sua stessa ideologia, sta a significare che il grande demistificatore era di parecchie lunghezze più avanti dei suoi contemporanei, senza però spingersi innanzi fino a raggiungere, o almeno a intravedere, un terreno solido su cui poggiare i piedi.
Proviamo, dunque, a riprendere il discorso là dove l’autore de «I viaggi di Gulliver» lo lascia in sospeso, e vediamo a quali conclusioni si possa arrivare.
Oggi che la globalizzazione sta rimescolando le culture, le riflessioni di Swift appaiono di particolare urgenza, perché è ovvio che una mescolanza culturale, realizzata in tempi brevissimi e con l’unico denominatore comune del profitto economico di pochi, non può che portare a incomprensioni, tensioni, conflitti.
Non ci sembra, però, che l’appartenenza a una determinata cultura debba connotarsi prevalentemente in senso negativo, come Swift sembra pensare: al contrario, l’identità culturale è un elemento essenziale al buon vivere, perché consente all’individuo di interagire positivamente con l’ambiente, di comprendere gli altri ed esserne compreso, di condividere con essi valori, strumenti di pensiero e sensibilità. Un individuo senza identità è come una pianta secca e senza radici; una cultura senza identità è, a sua volta, come un deserto pietrificato, dove ogni cosa diviene anonima e intercambiabile.
È chiaro che l’identità culturale, se si chiude su se stessa e degenera in esclusivismo intollerante, finisce per rendere un pessimo servizio all’individuo, espropriandolo della sua unicità e precludendogli la via di ogni possibile arricchimento spirituale; ma, fino a che questo non avviene e la società si limita ad offrire all’individuo dei saldi punti di riferimento e una rete di relazioni armoniose con l’altro, non solo non ne limita la creatività, ma gli offre un insostituibile punto d’appoggio, sul quale far leva e con il quale orientarsi.
Il problema è che, oggi, da un lato le culture tendono ad abdicare alla propria autonomia e a lasciarsi omologare in un generale appiattimento, ciò che produce un gravissimo impoverimento anche per il singolo individuo; dall’altro, tendono a svuotarsi dall’interno e a dimenticare le proprie radici, trasformandosi in quelle “società liquide” di cui parla Zygmunt Bauman, dominate dalla smania del cambiamento e caratterizzate dalla riduzione del cittadino a consumatore compulsivo di beni sempre più inutili, senza i quali, però, egli si sentirebbe povero ed escluso.
Il grande pericolo, perciò, al giorno d’oggi, non è tanto l’etnocentrismo, quanto l’anonimità e la degradazione delle culture, in nome di un “progresso” incontrollabile e di un tecnicismo esasperato che relegano sempre più l’individuo nel ruolo di semplice accessorio di un sistema efficiente, ma impersonale, dominato dalla sola dimensione economica.
E non ci sembra si possa dire che i pregiudizi dell’economia siano più accettabili di quelli di origine culturale: al fanatismo identitario si sostituisce il non meno temibile ricatto dello status economico-sociale.
Nel romanzo di Gulliver, “freak” è lo straniero in quanto diverso, ridotto a fenomeno da baraccone; nella società globalizzata contemporanea, ove imperano la tecnoscienza e le leggi del profitto, “freak” è colui che non può o non vuole consumare secondo le modalità totalitarie del consumismo imperante: chi, per esempio, si accontenta di essere fruitore di beni e servizi e non più di marchi, di firme, di simboli legati all’industria.
“Freak”, abnorme, è, oggi, colui che voglia essere se stesso e rifiutare le maschere dell’avere e dell’apparire: egli viene guardato con sospetto e disprezzo, proprio come i lillipuziani guardano Gulliver, così ingombrante nella sua diversità.
Ma tale diversità è un bene, non un male, sia per il singolo individuo, sia per la società intera.
Potrebbe una società permettersi di fare a meno di quel cinque per cento creativo, di quella piccola minoranza di persone che non si adeguano passivamente a tutte le mode e a tutti i pregiudizi, ma che coltivano in se stesse la preziosa, inestimabile pianticella dell’originalità, della consapevolezza, dell’apertura esistenziale?


Tante altre notizie su www.ariannaeditrice.it

mercredi, 21 septembre 2011

Schockierende Wahrheit über London-Krawalle: Zwei Drittel der Randalierer waren Intensivstraftäter

Schockierende Wahrheit über London-Krawalle: Zwei Drittel der Randalierer waren Intensivstraftäter

Udo Ulfkotte

 

Erinnern Sie sich noch an die »sozialen Proteste« in London? So jedenfalls nannten unsere Systemmedien die Plünderungen und Brandstiftungen im August 2011. In den seither vergangenen Wochen haben britische Gerichte über viele der angeblich »sozial benachteiligten Protestierer« urteilen müssen. Und nun kommt die schockierende Erkenntnis: Zwei Drittel der »Demonstranten« waren kriminelle Intensivstraftäter, die eigentlich im Gefängnis hätten sitzen müssen.

 

Die Fakten: Drei Viertel jener Randalierer, gegen die nach den schweren August-Unruhen in britischen Städten ein Ermittlungsverfahren eingeleitet wurde oder die schon abgeurteilt wurden, haben eine kriminelle Vergangenheit. Geheimdienste und die britische Polizei hatten das ja schon vor einem Monat öffentlich behauptet – nur gab es bislang keine Beweise dafür. Und deshalb ignorierten es viele Medien und sprachen von »sozialen Protesten«. Doch nun liegen offizielle Statistiken nach tausenden von Verurteilungen vor: Die Täter haben demnach VOR ihrer Beteiligung an den Plünderungen und Brandstiftungen schon jeweils durchschnittlich 15 Straftaten begangen, für die sie auch verurteilt wurden. Doch zwei Drittel dieser Intensivstraftäter erhielten immer nur Bewährungsstrafen. Jeder vierte jugendliche Randalierer hatte mehr als zehn Straftaten vor den London-Unruhen verübt, jeder zwanzigste schon mehr als fünfzig!

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/europa/udo-ulfkotte/schockierende-wahrheit-ueber-london-krawalle-zwei-drittel-der-randalierer-waren-intensivstraftaeter.html

lundi, 12 septembre 2011

Racial War & the Implosion of the System

 

London-Riot-2011-Fighting-W.jpg

Racial War & the Implosion of the System

by Pierre Vial

Translated by Greg Johnson

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Burning buildings, stores and shopping malls robbed and vandalized, streets strewn with debris, blackened carcasses of buses, cars, police vehicles . . . These images of London, Birmingham, Bristol, and Liverpool have been beamed around the world on television. They evoked what Labour deputy Diane Abbott called “a war zone” (a theater, said Le Monde on August 10th, of “urban guerrilla warfare”).

The French media immediately wanted to set the tone for interpreting these events: it is the fault of social tensions due to cuts in public funds for the most vulnerable; it is the fault of unemployment and thus idleness; and it is the fault, of course, of the British police force (“the blunders of the police force” according to the conservative daily Daily Mail, just as false as the French newspapers). All is explained . . . and the hooded rioters are “youths” with restless hearts. Well-organized, all the same (one is thus far from the spontaneous and superficial reactions of hooligans), with a communications system well-enough developed to sustain the assault waves for several successive days.

But what about the government? Prime Minister Cameron, the Minister of the Interior, the Minister for Finance, the mayor of London were all . . . on vacation (Cameron in Italy). The rioters were definitely ill-bred to choose such a moment. They could have awaited their return.

It is undeniable that the social climate deteriorated by unfettered liberalism has caused much discontent. But that was merely grafted on a will to racial confrontation. The death of a West-Indian delinquent during a police operation against the West-Indian gangs was the pretext of the outbreak of the riots. The first nucleus of revolt was the district of Tottenham, euphemistically described as “multiethnic,” the majority of its population being of West-Indian origin. The rioters wished to show—and they succeeded—that they could rule the streets in defiance of white power and order. Even Le Monde, in spite of its ideological presuppositions, recognized in passing (August 9th) that it was “about the most serious racial confrontation in the United Kingdom since the Oldham disorders of 2001” and that there was thus indeed a “race riot.”

The shine has come off multiculturalism, which has long been presented as the British answer to racial tensions, and which Cameron recently admitted is a failure (as did Angela Merkel of Germany). It was based on the irenic conviction that various racial communities could cohabit harmoniously in the same territory. This illusion is due to the ideological presuppositions that one finds on the right as well as on the left among intellectuals who simply deny the burden of reality. Realities so disturbing to their mental comfort that they must be stubbornly denied. Until the day they catch up with you . . .

This day has come for many Britons. As Libération (August 16th) notes, they are following the advice being reproduced on large placards posted by the police or painted on the plywood covering broken shop windows: it is necessary to locate and denounce the “rats in hoods” (in England as in France the immigrant delinquents like to hide their faces). In particular, self-defense militias are setting themselves up to ensure order and safety in the threatened districts. To mitigate the inefficiency of a police force paralyzed by politically correct taboos (as admitted by a bobby quoted in Le Monde on August 12th: “The order was to intervene with caution to avoid the charges of brutality, of racism.”)

The present System, sapped by its internal contradictions, is in the process of imploding. Racial warfare is now bubbling beneath the surface in many European countries. Now is the time to denounce without respite the devastations of liberal capitalism and to preach a realistic, that is to say, a racialist, conception of a society in order to free the minds and will to resistance and reconquest or our European brothers.

Source: http://tpprovence.wordpress.com/ [2]

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/racial-war-and-the-implosion-of-the-system/

Racial War & the Implosion of the System

By Pierre Vial

Translated by Greg Johnson

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Burning buildings, stores and shopping malls robbed and vandalized, streets strewn with debris, blackened carcasses of buses, cars, police vehicles . . . These images of London, Birmingham, Bristol, and Liverpool have been beamed around the world on television. They evoked what Labour deputy Diane Abbott called “a war zone” (a theater, said Le Monde on August 10th, of “urban guerrilla warfare”).

The French media immediately wanted to set the tone for interpreting these events: it is the fault of social tensions due to cuts in public funds for the most vulnerable; it is the fault of unemployment and thus idleness; and it is the fault, of course, of the British police force (“the blunders of the police force” according to the conservative daily Daily Mail, just as false as the French newspapers). All is explained . . . and the hooded rioters are “youths” with restless hearts. Well-organized, all the same (one is thus far from the spontaneous and superficial reactions of hooligans), with a communications system well-enough developed to sustain the assault waves for several successive days.

But what about the government? Prime Minister Cameron, the Minister of the Interior, the Minister for Finance, the mayor of London were all . . . on vacation (Cameron in Italy). The rioters were definitely ill-bred to choose such a moment. They could have awaited their return.

It is undeniable that the social climate deteriorated by unfettered liberalism has caused much discontent. But that was merely grafted on a will to racial confrontation. The death of a West-Indian delinquent during a police operation against the West-Indian gangs was the pretext of the outbreak of the riots. The first nucleus of revolt was the district of Tottenham, euphemistically described as “multiethnic,” the majority of its population being of West-Indian origin. The rioters wished to show—and they succeeded—that they could rule the streets in defiance of white power and order. Even Le Monde, in spite of its ideological presuppositions, recognized in passing (August 9th) that it was “about the most serious racial confrontation in the United Kingdom since the Oldham disorders of 2001” and that there was thus indeed a “race riot.”

The shine has come off multiculturalism, which has long been presented as the British answer to racial tensions, and which Cameron recently admitted is a failure (as did Angela Merkel of Germany). It was based on the irenic conviction that various racial communities could cohabit harmoniously in the same territory. This illusion is due to the ideological presuppositions that one finds on the right as well as on the left among intellectuals who simply deny the burden of reality. Realities so disturbing to their mental comfort that they must be stubbornly denied. Until the day they catch up with you . . .

This day has come for many Britons. As Libération (August 16th) notes, they are following the advice being reproduced on large placards posted by the police or painted on the plywood covering broken shop windows: it is necessary to locate and denounce the “rats in hoods” (in England as in France the immigrant delinquents like to hide their faces). In particular, self-defense militias are setting themselves up to ensure order and safety in the threatened districts. To mitigate the inefficiency of a police force paralyzed by politically correct taboos (as admitted by a bobby quoted in Le Monde on August 12th: “The order was to intervene with caution to avoid the charges of brutality, of racism.”)

The present System, sapped by its internal contradictions, is in the process of imploding. Racial warfare is now bubbling beneath the surface in many European countries. Now is the time to denounce without respite the devastations of liberal capitalism and to preach a realistic, that is to say, a racialist, conception of a society in order to free the minds and will to resistance and reconquest or our European brothers.

Source: http://tpprovence.wordpress.com/ [2]

 


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/racial-war-and-the-implosion-of-the-system/

mercredi, 31 août 2011

Guerre raciale et implosion du système

Guerre raciale et implosion du système

Pierre Vial

Ex: http://tpprovence.wordpress.com/

Immeubles incendiés, magasins et centres commerciaux dévalisés et vandalisés, rues jonchées de débris, de carcasses noircies de bus, de voitures, de véhicules de police… Ces images de Londres, de Birmingham, de Bristol, de Liverpool ont fait, en boucle, le tour du monde par télévisions interposées. Elles évoquaient bien ce que la députée travailliste Diane Abbott a appelé « une zone de guerre » (théâtre, reconnaît Le Monde du 10 août, d’une « guérilla urbaine »).

Les media français ont tout de suite voulu donner le ton pour interpréter ces événements : c’est la faute de tensions sociales dues à la réduction des financements publics en faveur des plus démunis, c’est la faute du chômage et donc du désoeuvrement… et c’est la faute, bien sûr, de la police britannique (« les gaffes de la police » a titré le quotidien conservateur Daily Mail, tout aussi faux cul que les journaux français). Tout s’explique… et les casseurs cagoulés sont des « jeunes » ayant du vague à l’âme. Bien organisés, tout de même (on est donc loin de la réaction spontanée, épidermique, de hooligans), avec un système de liaison bien au point pour relancer les vagues d’assaut pendant plusieurs jours.

Mais que faisait le gouvernement ? Le premier ministre Cameron, le ministre de l’intérieur, le ministre des finances, le maire de Londres étaient…en vacances (Cameron en Italie). Les casseurs sont décidément bien mal élevés de choisir un moment pareil. Ils auraient pu attendre la rentrée.

Il est incontestable que le climat social détérioré par un libéralisme débridé a de quoi susciter bien des rancoeurs.  Mais celles-ci sont venues se greffer sur une volonté d’affrontement racial. La mort d’un délinquant antillais au cours d’une opération montée par  la police contre les gangs antillais a été le prétexte du déchaînement des émeutes. Le premier foyer d’insurrection a été le quartier de Tottenham, qualifié gentiment de « multiethnique » et dont la majorité de la population est d’origine antillaise. Celle-ci a voulu montrer – et elle a réussi – qu’elle pouvait se rendre maîtresse de la rue, en défiant un pouvoir et un ordre blancs. Même Le Monde, malgré ses a priori idéologiques, a reconnu au passage (9 août) qu’il s’agissait « du plus sérieux affrontement racial au Royaume-Uni depuis les troubles d’Oldham en 2001 » et qu’il y avait donc bel et bien « émeute raciale ».

Ce qui fait voler en éclat ce multiculturalisme, présenté pendant longtemps comme le modèle britannique de réponse aux tensions raciales et dont Cameron reconnaissait récemment (tout comme Angela Merckel pour l’Allemagne) qu’il était un échec. Il était basé sur la conviction irénique que des communautés raciales diverses pouvaient cohabiter harmonieusement sur un même territoire. Illusion due à des présupposés idéologiques qu’on retrouve tant à droite qu’à gauche chez des intellectuels qui refusent tout simplement le poids des réalités. Des réalités trop dérangeantes pour leur confort mental et qu’il faut donc nier obstinément. Jusqu’au jour où elles vous rattrapent…

Ce jour est arrivé pour beaucoup de Britanniques. Comme le reconnaît Libération (16 août) ils suivent les conseils figurant sur de grandes affiches placardées par la police ou les inscriptions peintes sur les panneaux de contreplaqué remplaçant les vitrines brisées des commerces : il faut repérer et dénoncer « les rats à capuche » (en Angleterre comme en France les délinquants immigrés aiment pouvoir se dissimuler le visage pour éviter d’être identifiés).  Surtout, des milices d’autodéfense se sont mises en place pour assurer ordre et sécurité dans les quartiers menacés. Pour pallier l’inefficacité d’une police paralysée par les tabous du politiquement correct (aveu d’un bobby publié par Le Monde du 12 août : « L’ordre était d’intervenir avec circonspection pour éviter les accusations de brutalité, de racisme »).

Le Système en place, miné par ses contradictions internes, est en train d’imploser, la guerre raciale montrant qu’elle est désormais sous-jacente dans nombre de pays européens. C’est donc bien en dénonçant sans répit les ravages du capitalisme libéral et en prêchant une conception réaliste, c’est à dire racialiste, de la société que nous pourrons contribuer à la libération mentale et à la volonté de résistance et de reconquête de  nos frères européens.

Pierre Vial

mardi, 16 août 2011

Grausam und unsolidarisch

London-Riot-2011.jpg

Grausam und unsolidarisch

Von Thorsten Hinz

 
Die multikulturelle Gesellschaft ist hart, schnell, grausam und wenig solidarisch“, verkündete vor 20 Jahren der Grünen-Politiker Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Die Bürgerkriegsszenen in London und anderen britischen Städten geben ihm recht. Die Gewalt wird von überwiegend farbigen Zuwanderern aus den ehemaligen Kolonien verübt, die gegen die weißen Briten klar im Vorteil sind: Den einen gelingt es, in Minutenschnelle eine große Zahl kampfbereiter junger Menschen zu mobilisieren, die anderen verfügen über solch ein demographisches Potential überhaupt nicht mehr.

Großbritannien, das noch vor hundert Jahren über ein riesiges, heterogenes Empire herrschte, ist in den großen Städten selber zu einem ethnischen Flickenteppich geworden. Das großzügige Einwanderungsrecht gehört zu den Sonderbeziehungen, die Großbritannien zu seinen ehemaligen Kolonien pflegt; und zum politischen und ideologischen Kalkül der Linken, die ihre Herrschaft demographisch zementieren will. Loyalität zum Mutterland und Treue gegenüber seinen Gesetzen und Gebräuchen haben sich daraus nicht zwingend ergeben.

„Dieses Europa ist das Werk der Dritten Welt“

Ohne Frantz Fanon, den Theoretiker des Antikolonialismus, gelesen zu haben, handeln die Plünderer, Prügler und Brandstifter in seinem Sinne: Europa muß zahlen! „Denn dieses Europa ist buchstäblich das Werk der Dritten Welt.“

Die Medien in Deutschland weigern sich standhaft, das Offensichtliche, den Kultur- und Rassenkonflikt, zur Kenntnis zu nehmen. Sie bleiben gefangen im Sozialarbeiterjargon: Es seien Proteste von „Benachteiligten“, von Angehörigen der „Arbeiterklasse“ oder einfach von „jugendlichen Briten“, die man versäumt hat, sozialtechnisch zu integrieren. Eine Realitätsverdrängung, die an den Irak-Krieg erinnert, als Saddams Informationsminister die nahende Niederlage der US-Invasoren verkündete, während in seinem Rücken amerikanische Panzer das Bild durchquerten.

Eine harte, schnelle, grausame und wenig solidarische Zukunft

Stärker als die Verblendung treibt die bundesdeutschen Funktionseliten die Angst um. Nicht vor dem angeblich drohenden Terror von „Rechtspopulisten“, die in Wahrheit kreuzbrave Bürger sind, sondern davor, daß deren Bestehen auf Loyalität und Rechtstreue den hereingelassenen, mühsam befriedeten Tiger reizen und ein Chaos wie in Großbritannien losbrechen könnte. Deshalb die Gesinnungsgesetze, die Sprachverbote, die Gehirnwäsche durch die Medien.

Man kann die Entwicklung vorerst nur – wie ein Arzt, der es mit Delirikern zu tun hat – als Krankheit zu analysieren und zu ergründen versuchen. Zur Krankheit gehört, daß die Deliriker sich selber den weißen Kittel übergestreift haben und partout nicht von ihrer Rolle lassen wollen. Also taumeln Europa und die Bundesrepublik kopflos einer harten, schnellen, grausamen und wenig solidarischen Zukunft entgegen.

JF 33/11