Editor’s Note:
The following text is a transcript by Michael Polignano of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden given in London on September 8, 2007. The audio is available on YouTube here [2]. If you have any corrections or if you can gloss the passages marked as unintelligible, please contact me at editor@counter-currents.com [3] or simply post them as comments below.
I think ideas are inborn, and you’re attracted, if you have any, toward certain systems of thinking and sensibility and response. From a very young age, I was always fascinated about meaning and purpose and philosophy and those elements of religion which impinge on real matters.
And very early in life I was attracted to vitalist, authoritarian, and individualist ideas. And in my late teens I came across Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings in the 28-volume, Karl Schlecta edition. Now those ideas predate my interest in them, because I was drawn towards them in a particular way.
As we look around us in this society now, our people have an absence of belief. They’re very technically sophisticated. We still as a civilization bestride much of the rest of the world, like a sort of empty technological colossus. But if you peer inside, as to what we are supposed to believe, and account for, and what we think our destiny is individually and as a group, there’s a zero; there’s a nothingness; there’s a blank space for many people.
A hundred years ago, Christianity was an overarching system in our society, for those who went along with it socially, for those who believed in it in a deep core way. It’s now virtually — apart from small minorities — invisible. It’s extraordinary how a faith system that can shape a civilization in part for a millennium-and-a-half to two millennia, can disappear. Those who say that certain ideas and ideals are impossible should look at what’s happened to many of our belief systems.
A hundred years ago we had an elite. We actually had a government. We really haven’t had a government in this country, pretty much, for about 100 years. Not an elite that knows what it wants and understands its mission in life, and that will hand on to people after it, and that comes out groups that exist before it. We’re ruled by essentially a commercial elite, not an intellectual elite or a military elite or even a political one, but a commercial, profit-and-loss one.
And things have slid to such a degree now that if asked what does it mean to be British, probably about 8 million of our people will say Posh and Becks. That’s what it means for many people inundated to the tube, and its vapid nonsense.
Now there are many complicated reasons why much of what Western and white people used to believe in has gone down in the last century.
Nietzsche prophesied that the collapse of Christianity, for many people — even though he welcomed it personally — would be a disaster for them. Why so? Because it gave a structure and a meaning and an identity. A death without a context beyond it has no meaning. It’s meat before you. I believe that we’re hard-wired for belief, philosophical and religious, that we have to have it as a species and as a group. Look at the number of people who go completely to pieces when there is nothing outside beyond them to live for beyond instantaneous things right in front of them.
In France they teach philosophy from the age of six.
For the last couple of hundred years in the Anglo-Saxon and Anglophone world there’s been hostility to theory. There’s been a hostility to abstraction. There’s been a complete reaction against a thinker called Thomas Hobbes, who in many ways prefigures many events on the continent in the last century, many many centuries before. We had an extremely violent and convulsive political and dynastic revolution during the Cromwellian interregnum, and since then it should appear that we have a quiescence in this society. Yes we’ve had radical movements. But the last major political movement to occur was the forming of a party by the trade unions in 1900, which grew into the Labour Party after the Labour Representation Committee.
But the idea that nothing can ever happen in Britain and that we are asleep is false. English life is often depoliticized, yes, but culturally English life is always been quite vital, quite violent underneath the surface, quite emotional. In our Renaissance, which is really the Elizabethan period, we were renowned all over Europe for being vital, for being scientifically-oriented, for having our minds completely open towards the future. We were regarded as an aggressive and a powerful group that was coming of age. We created the greatest interconnected set of theater that the world had seen at that time since the Greeks.
We have lost our dynamism as a people: mentally and in every other way. Our people are still quite strong when it comes to the fist, and a bit of pushing and shoving. But what’s up here, is lacking. A thug is not a soldier, and a soldier is not a warrior. And it’s the strength which exists up here which is the thing that we have to cultivate. I believe that strength comes from belief, in things which are philosophically grounded and appear real to you.
One response that a critic would give to what I’ve just said, mentally speaking, is that it’s so individualized now and so broken down and everybody sort of makes it up as they go along — that’s called heuristic thinking, technically — and if everyone does make it up as they go along how will you ever have an organic culture again?
But I think this is to misunderstand Western society, and Western thought. When Blair says, when he used to be premier until couple of months ago, when Blair said that tolerance and equality and forbearance and humanism are our virtues, he was talking about, and turning against us, a tiny strand of our own civility which is part of our nature. English and British people often don’t like to impose their ideas on others, often will avoid conflict until it becomes actively necessary. Many of these characteristics have been turned on us and used against us.
There’s also a subtext to this country in the last 4 to 5 hundred years, and a lot of our Puritans and our obsessives and our fanatics and our extremists went abroad to found the United States. That’s where our Puritans went. Now many of them were gradgrind and the New Model Army banned Shakespeare in Newcastle, and flogged actors who dared to perform it. This is England’s greatest writer of course. So there’s a sort of Taliban self-destructivity, to that type of Puritanism. But we could do with an element if not a Puritanism, then of asceticism, of belief, and of asking foundational questions of what life is about.
To me this is what right-wing politics is really about. The issues that people campaign on at the level of the street are not incidentals. They are the expression of what’s happened when you are ruled by liberal ideas. We’ve been ruled by liberal ideas for many centuries but in their most acute form in the last 50 years. Liberal ideas say that men and women are the same and are interchangeable, that war is morally bad, that all races are the same and should all live together. That a population just exists, that a country is just a zone, just an economic area, that everything’s based on rationalism and materialism and is purely a calculation of economic self-interest.
Now there’ll be millions of our people who say “What’s this chap talking about? This is all abstraction.” Go out there on the street, and you see the example of the society that is based on these sorts of ideas.
Everybody’s mouthing somebody else’s ideas. Even Brown and Blair and the others. They are coming out with, in their own way, their 10th rate way, certain of the ideologies that they knew when they were at Edinburgh or Oxford or wherever. Because everybody speaks–unless they are a universal genius who takes hold of reality and reshapes it as a cosmos of themselves–everyone uses ideas that precede them and to which they are attracted. Even to say, “I haven’t got any ideas, and it’s all load of nonsense,” is an idea. Everything is ideological. Every BBC news broadcast is totally ideological, and is in some respects a soft form of communism, which is what liberalism is.
The last speaker today is a man called Tomislav Sunic, and his book Homo americanus, is about the American role in the world. And of course America is the model for much of the development that is going on in every continent and in every group on earth. America is the model. He said that, and don’t forget he’s a Croatian, and Eastern Europeans have lived under communism. Middle-class left-wing students in 1960s used to hold their fist in the air and talk about communism, but these people actually had to live under it. And that is a totally different formulation, in every respect. What was a protest against mummy and daddy, and a desire to smoke a bit of pot and do what you wanted, led to concentration camps and slavery and dysgenics and death in certain Eastern European societies. What was just the mantras of adult babies out of their cots in the West was terrorism in the East, and that’s what people don’t understand.
But in that book he said something very revealing. He said that communism kills the body, but liberalism rots the soul. And that’s exactly the case.
We face a situation in the West, where, paradoxically, spiritually we’re in a far worse state than the people who lived under communism. And this is one of the great ironies, because amongst its manias and the rest of it, communism froze things. It froze things glacially for 50 years in many respects. And much of the decay, the voluntarist decay, much of which we’ve imposed ourselves, because of ideas that successive generations of our leaders have adopted from themselves and from others, didn’t occur to the same degree in the East: the idea of self-denigration, that patriotism is the worst evil on Earth, that patriotism is one-stop from genocide, that you own group is always the worst group. This hadn’t been institutionalized and internalized quite to the same degree. It’s perverse that peace and plenty can produce more decadence and decay than hard-line Puritanism, artistic philistinism, queuing, and terror. But that’s what’s happened!
And in the East, of course, they now have the dilemma of westernization. And that’s joining us, because these are universal processes, and they won’t stop at the boundary between the old East and West Germany.
I was born in 1962. At the beginning of the 20th century, this country ruled large stretches of the world. We’re still relatively a normatively powerful country. The statistics say we’re between the fourth and the 20th most significant country on earth. But you also know, on all sorts of registers as you look around, that we don’t believe in anything anymore, that we’re in chaos, that a large number of our people are miseducated to the degree they hardly even know who they are. That patriotism, although it still exists in the blood and bone and in the consciousness of many people, has been partially indoctrinated out of many. That people look behind them before they make an incorrect remark, even if they’re in a wood! Even if they’re by themselves, they still look around! Because all these things are mental. They’re in the mind.
Five percent of all groups rule their own groups. And 80% always conform to the ruling ideology. If somebody says, “He’s a demon you know. He’s in one of those far right parties. He’s in the National Front.” That’s what they always say, because that’s the generic term amongst apolitical people for all right-wing groups, even though the BNP is by far the biggest group and has had by far as the greatest degree of electoral success, “It’s all the NF really.” And the mass attitude towards all this is it’s dangerous and threatening! It’s being a Catholic under high Protestantism. It’s something that’s a threat, and the masses are like this, and they always have been.
In Eastern Europe the present regimes would have you believe that the dissidents were loved. I tell you it’s a fact that under Soviet tyranny, if you saw Sharansky, if you saw Sakharov walking towards you, you’d say “Oh my God!” And you did everything to pretend that he was an unperson, that he didn’t exist, that you weren’t in the street with him. There could be a man in a watchtower watching you. Now everyone comes and says, “Oh we agreed with you all along.”
And in this society liberalism has learned how to rule in a far more sophisticated way. Towards the end of the quasi-Stalinist state in Czechoslovakia secret policeman were looking under people’s beds for abstract paintings and jazz music and this sort of nonsense. The West allows people to dissent, just to think in their own little boxes, and don’t give a damn. Doesn’t bother to ban books because 40% of the population can’t read them anyway. This is how liberalism rules. It doesn’t allow the privilege of dissent, because it disprivileges dissenting ideas. And if people can’t think, and those ideas aren’t worth anything anyway, it’s invisible. And therefore you don’t even need to “persecute.” You can put economic pressure on people, so you got a choice to be sort of decanted from bourgeois life if you manifest in public certain types of opinion. That’s one of the pressures that’s put on people. That’s done deliberately to stop people who have education forming in the head, forming a brain, forming an elite with the fist. And that’s done quite deliberately, so that the leaders will be choked off.
If you go to the University–and Blair and Brown say everybody should go to university. At the University of Slough straight up the Thames Valley, there are 28,000 students, and they give courses in golf and tourism and hairdressing. It’s just mass training for a postindustrial society, for sort of semi-robotic nerds to do repetitive tasks in trained environments where they’ve been timed and watched all the time.
Now because I believe it’s thought which characterizes our race and our group more than anything else, I think thinking is cardinal for many people.
When the events of 1968 occurred, there were convulsive riots all across the Western world by left wing Western youth. They can raise hundreds of thousands in the streets, and in the key events in Paris and elsewhere, there were a million in the street. There were also very large riots in the United States on many campuses. Western people have always been convulsed by ideals and by ideas. The idea that it’s all in the past, that Fukuyama said that history is ended, and then 9/11 happened. History never ends, and things go on and repeat themselves and come back again, at times even more violently than before.
What our people are crying out for isn’t really a religion or a belief system, it’s a form of mental strengthening in and of themselves, to overcome the disprivileging mechanisms that don’t allow them to think and also allow them to reconnect with core areas of identity.
I’m not a Christian. And I never was. Although I went to a Catholic school, and they educated me very well. And almost every book in that library was by a dead White European male. And almost everything the one learnt culturally — from the rather gory sort of Grünewald-type crucifixion as you went in, to the Dali on the wall, the reverse crucifixion scene, in reverse perspective from above, that was next to the assembly point, and to everything else — everything was European. And that’s why people become Catholics. Did you notice many parents become interested when their child’s about 10? And that’s because they want to get them into these schools. Why do they want to get them into the schools? Because they retain the structure and the discipline. You don’t leave when you’re 16 and don’t even know what your name is, you can’t read or write, you speak like a Jamaican gangster, you have no respect for what you are and what you could become.
Now you hear about youth crime, and you hear a lot about the uncontrollability of many people in society. They’re not controlled because there’s no control up here.
One of the cardinal weaknesses of the contemporary West is the feminization of all areas of life. Masculinity is a sacred thing, and yet it’s been demonized and disprivileged in the Western world, regarded as just an excuse for brutality. Masculinity is about self-control. It’s about respect and power that’s ventilated when it’s necessary to use it. The only way in which you would cure many of the problems that presently exist with elements of lumpen and criminality at all levels of life is to reintroduce National Service, with maximum harshness in the initial period.
And a few would die because, they’d be too obese to get through those tunnels, and over those walls with serrated glass, with people screaming at them in an unpleasant accent. But you would need to do that. And the reason isn’t physical; the reason is psychological. Some of our Marines cried when the Revolutionary Guard in the Gulf took their iPods off them. This is where we’ve declined! This is the Green Berets! These are the Royal Marines! The Revolutionary Guard in Iran, the Quds brigade, which is the elite brigade which reports directly to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, couldn’t believe it when they saw that sort of thing. The post-imperial British truly have a tremble in the lip. But these things in the end are cultural, and philosophical, and psychological.
Now our civilization has had many religions and many dispensations of thought. But one of the things that we have forgotten is that open-mindedness to the future and respect for evidence does not mean woolliness and an absence of certitude in what we are.
There’s a thinker who existed two-and-a-half thousand years ago called Heraclitus, and my type of thinking is his linear descendant. He’s a pre-Socratic; he’s a sophist; he begins right at the beginning Western thought, when we actually write down what we think. He wrote a book on nature which Aristotle glossed, and which has survived in fragments.
What did he believe?
He believed that everything is a form of energy. “Fire” he called it; we would call it “energy” today. That it exists in all forms of organic and inorganic matter. That thought and the sentience of nature is what we are. Nature has become sentient in us which means we must incarnate natural law as a principle of being. It’s called becoming in my philosophy. The right, even if you don’t use that term, stands for nature and for that which is given.
What does that mean?
It means conflict is natural, and good. It means domination is natural, and good. It means that what you have to do in order to survive, is natural, and good. It means that we should not begin every sentence by apologizing for our past or apologizing for who we are.
Tony Blair made several interconnected apologies when he was Premier, but he didn’t apologize for being Premier. He apologized for the Irish famine. I’ve got Irish blood, but I’m not interested in apologies for the Irish famine. He apologized for the Shoah. He apologized for slavery. He apologized for almost everything going. These apologies are meaningless, as some of the groups that they were targeted on had the courage to say. It’s just temporizing sympathy.
In my philosophy sympathy multiplies misery. And if somebody’s in pain in front of you, you give them some options. And if they can’t get through it, suicide’s always an option.
Now, what does Nietzsche believe? He believes that strength is moral glory. That courage is the highest form of morality. That life is hierarchical. That everything’s elitist. There’s a hierarchy in each individual. And a hierarchy in every group of individuals. There’s a hierarchy between groups of individuals. Inequality is what right-wing ideas really mean.
Right-wing ideas aren’t just a bit of flag-waving and baiting a few Muslims. Right-wing ideas are spiritually about inequality. The left loves equality. It believes we’re all the same. We must be treated the same. And they believe that as a morality. As a moral good which will be imposed.
Under communism, Pol Pot shot everyone who’d read book that he didn’t approve of. Why did he do that? Because he wanted everyone to be the same, and everyone to think in the same way. Asiatics have a formal description. It’s called the tall poppy syndrome. They look at the plants. They decide one’s a bit out of kilter. It’s standing higher than the others, so you snip it down, so all are the same.
Pol Pot’s not his real name by the way. It’s a joke name; it means “political potential.” When he was very young, Maoists wrote down, “This man has political potential.” “Pol Pot.” And that’s where he took it from. This man is a terroristic psychopath. But when he took over his society with a teenage militia high on drugs, and almost everything had been blitzed and was defenseless, he put into practice in a cardinal way, what many of these Western idiots in the 60s with their fists in the air have been proposing. He sat in Paris, in salons listening to Kristeva, listening to Sartre, listening to de Beauvoir. And he imposed it implacably like the cretin he was. The family is immoral. Shoot all the village priests that got people married. Shoot people who are bit too keen on marriage. Shoot everyone who’s read books about marriage. Shoot everybody who ever said marriage is a good thing. That’s quite a pile of bodies, and you haven’t started yet.
That is communism in its rawest and its crudest form. It’s a sort of morality of bestiality, essentially. And it can’t even impose equality, because in the communist societies of yesteryear, the elite will have its own shops, and its own channels, and they will have their own corrupt systems to keep their children out of military service, and so on. Just like Clinton’s America, or Vietnam America before it. Every elite in that sense will recompose, despite the stigma.
Inequality is the truth. Because nature is unjust, but also fair in its injustice. Because there’s always a balance. People who are very gifted in one area will have grotesque weaknesses in another. People who are strong in one area will be weak in another. People who are at the bottom within a hierarchy have a role and have a place in a naturally ordered society. And will be looked after, because patriotism really is the only socialism. That’s why the right appeals to all parties. And to all groups within a culture. Because all have a place.
Now, I believe that in the Greek civilization, a peasant woman could kneel before an idol, and could have a totally literalist — it’s called metaphysically objectivist — view of the religion. She believes in it absolutely. A fundamentalist in contemporary terms. And you can go right through the culture to extremely sophisticated intellectuals, some of whom were agnostics and atheists who supported religion — yes they did!
Charles Maurras was believed to be an atheist, but he led a Catholic fundamentalist movement in France. Why? Because if you are right-wing, you don’t want to tear civilization down just because you privately can’t believe. You understand the discourse of mass social becoming. What does a wedding mean? What does a death mean? What does the birth of a child mean? Unless there’s something beyond it? What does a war mean? Just killing for money? Unless there’s another dimension to it
We are reduced: as White people first, and just as humans second. But we have to understand that belief is not a narrowness. Belief is an understanding that there are truths outside nature, and outside the contingent universe that’s in front of us, that are absolute. The left-wing view that it’s all relative, or we make it up as we go along, is false.
Nietzsche believes that we test ourselves here now in relation to what’s going on before us. And the more primordial we are, the more we live in accordance with what we might become, the more we link with those concepts which are eternal and that exist outside us.
So what appears with half an eye closed to be an atheistic, a secular, and a modern system, if you switch around and look at it from another perspective, is actually a form for traditional ideas of the most radical, the most far-reaching, the most reactionary, and most archaic and primordial sort to come back. To come back from the past.
What the New Right on the Continent in the last 40 years has been is the reworking of certain ideas, including certain ideas associated with fascism, and their reworking so that they come back, into modernity, where we are now.
If you look at mass and popular culture, the heroic is still alive. It’s still alive in junk films, in comic books, in forms that culturally elitist society and intellectuals disprivilege.
Why the heroic treated at that level? Because liberalism can’t deal with the heroic. It doesn’t have a space for it in its ideology, so it decants it.
Nothing can be destroyed. Liberals think that they’ve destroyed the ideas in this room, but they haven’t: they’ve just displaced them into other areas. And they’ve found new ways to come up, and new syntheses that emerge.
Much of popular culture involves the celebration of men–iconographically, in films and so on–who are authoritarian, who are hierarchical, who are elitist. How many cinema posters have you seen with the man alone with a gun staring off into the distance? It’s the primordial American myth.
These are men who think “fascistically.” And they fight against fascism. They fight against authoritarian ideas of what the West once was and can be. This is always the trick: that they will use the ideology of the Marine Corps, to fight for a liberal, a humanist, and a Democratic purpose. That’s the trick. In every film, in every television program, in every comic, in every simple novel, in everything that the masses consume that isn’t purely about sex or sport, the heroic is there. And they always fight for liberal causes, and their enemies are always grinning Japanese generals, or Nazis. Used again, and again, and again, as a stereotype, of a stereotype, of a stereotype, to impose the idea that that which is core, primal, Indo-European, is morally wrong.
I must have spoken, in the four years I was in the British National Party, at 100 events, 120 events, 150 events, if you add everything together. Now, I’ve never mentioned this topic, which I’m going to talk briefly about now. And this is the topic known as the Shoah.
Now all my life, this has been used as a weapon. All my life. Against any self-assertion by us.
Whenever the most mild and broken-backed Tory starts to think, “Immigration has gone a little too far,” the finger will go down. And he will fall on the ground, and say, “Oh no, oh no, I may have made a minor complaint before I was going to leave office, but don’t drag me in that particular direction.”
And of course, many of the people who use this as a weapon don’t give a damn either way. It’s a weapon they can use. And it shuts people up, instantaneously. And it does so because it impinges, at quite a deep level, on what white and European people think about morality.
And this is a deep problem. And it’s a problem that all right-wing politics since the Second World War, which was in reality a Second European Civil War, the European equivalent of the American Civil War in some ways in the century before, of which in a very complicated way it’s both an attenuation and reverse reflex.
But this issue is very, very deep. And very complicated and important. And goes beyond methodologies about the figures for the number of purported victims involved. Many Western people feel that, because it is generally a given in the society and culture that they’re in, that variants of our group have committed atrocities, that our civilization is therefore rendered worthless, almost in its entirety.
Except when it apologizes before it even states that it has a right to exist. So every time Wagner is played on Radio Three there will be, there will be, a sort of 30-second health warning, like on a packet of cigarettes. It’s as literal as that! And because it’s an ideology. It’s got to. It imposes itself. Ideologies want to impose themselves, like liquid finds its own level in a tank.
If I was running the BBC, it would be slightly different from what’s on tonight. In fact those dumb people working at the BBC at the moment would hang themselves in their studios at the thought.
There is a degree to which the issue of the Shoah is very cardinal, because it has caused intergenerational hatred, particularly in Germany and elsewhere. It has caused degree of self-hatred among our own people, something that de Benoist, the French New Right a theoretician from France, talks about a great deal.
And this is the worst type of denigration, because denigration that comes from without is rain that bounces off, and can be withstood: you can put up an umbrella and get rid of it. But that which comes from inside is much more corrosive, much more deconstructive, much more disabling. And one of the reasons why this issue, as if this is the only event of brigandage that has ever occurred, but nevertheless, relativism, deep down, isn’t enough.
When the IRA commited an atrocity they said, “Never mind ours, look at the British! Look at the loyalists!” And people said, “What about this, what you’ve done?” They said, “No, no, no, look what they’ve done.”
Deep down, philosophically, that’s not good enough. The problem we have, is if you are very Christian or post-Christian in your morality, where there’s a total dualism of good and evil. And if you think and have been indoctrinated at school from a very early age that our group has committed some monstrous evil, you are “endwarfed,” to invent a word. You are semi-humiliated, from the start.
When you begin to assert yourself you suddenly begin to remember, “Oh, I need to apologize before I do.” And that’s not just a strange intellectual concept. Millions do that all the time.
They say, “I’m not this, but . . .”
They say, “I don’t want to make an extremist remark, but . . .”
They say, “Well, I don’t really wish to go into the area of self-assertion, but . . .”
And the reason for all that garbage is because of this shadow. Or those that relate to it, in the background. And if you knock down one, another will emerge.
Every black group in the United States wants a holocaust museum about slavery in their own cities. That’s the next thing. And they say to their congressman, “We want our museum!” “Well, I don’t . . .” “If you want our votes you’re going to get us our museum.”
It’s as straight as that. Each group claims status for strength through victimhood. That’s what we face. “I can be strong because I’ve suffered, and I’m going to get back because I’ve been weak in the past. And my strength is revenge, and I’m morally entitled.” And lots of our people think, we were the primary and primordial and dominant group on Earth, for quite a long time, and now we’re losing it, in almost every area.
Oswald Spengler wrote Decline of the West after the Great War, which of course was a dysgenic war, which had a considerably destructive impact upon Western leadership, at every level. But as you look around you sense the decline, and if you have a decline and you have a desire to assert yourself to arrest the decline, and you have to apologize to yourself about even having the idea of assertion to arrest decline, you’re not going to get anywhere, are you?
And that’s what this weapon is.
Now, my view is the following. I’m technically a pagan. And pagans believe that creation and destruction go together. That love is fury. That whatever occurred, and whatever occurs, we don’t have to apologize. We step over what exists.
There’s a concept in my philosophy which is called “self-overbecoming.” Where you take things which exist at a lower level, that you feel uncomfortable with, and you sublimate them, you throw them forward, you ventilate them. You take that which you don’t like, and you transmute it alchemically, psychologically, and intellectually, and you change it.
And you step forward and say, “No!” to past humiliations, to past indoctrination and degradation of the German people, who are cardinal to the European identity. Both because of their cultural and linguistic specificity, and also because of the fact that they were over half of the European continent. If they have to apologize every day of the week, for being what they are, our group as a whole can never assert itself.
And my view is that when this is viewed as an issue: there are relativist dodges, [and] there are things you can say. The deputy chairman of the party that I was in was asked about the Shoah on a Channel 4 program. And he said “Well, which ‘Shoah’ are you referring to? Are you talking about the Communist Holocausts, many of which were inspired by Jewish ideas?”
Silence. A very radical statement for a contemporary BNP leader. Silence. Silence.
But of course, that’s a clever answer, and it’s a political answer, and it’s a relativist answer.
But my view is I would say, “We’ve overcome all of these events.” And we will stride on to new forms of glory. New forms of that which is implacable. We can rebuild cities again! Every German city was completely destroyed. It was like Grozny in Chechnya now: nothing at all!
I have a friend of mine who is a well-known right-wing intellectual. He’s almost 80 now. His name is Bill Hopkins. After the war he served in Hamburg, and during the summer in about 1948 when he was in the RAF, he said all the British troops used to go often outside the city, because the stench was so bad, because of all the bodies under the buildings that hadn’t been reached, that hadn’t been dragged out, or hadn’t been put into lime pits.
But everything has been rebuilt. Because everything can be rebuilt, and built beyond what even existed in the past. So if somebody says to you, “You’re descended from brigands.” Which is in a sense, individually, what that sort of contrary ideology is. You say, “I’m not going to bother about diggers and who did what to whom. I’ve overcome that!”
“Oh, well I don’t like the sound of that. That’s a bit illiberal.”
And I’d just say, you just say, “Liberalism is moral syphilis. And I’m stepping over it.”
“Well, I don’t like the sound of that! You sound like a bit of a Fascist to me!”
And I’d say, “There’s nothing wrong with Fascism. Nothing wrong with Fascism at all!”
Everyone now adopts a reverse semiotic and runs against what they actually think, in order to convince people who don’t agree with them anyway. Because democracy – and I’m not a democrat. I’m not a democrat. When I supported the challenge in the party that I used to be in, I did it for various reasons, but to encourage greater democracy wasn’t necessarily one of them.
But, authoritarianism has to have morality with it! Those who make an absolute claim and who don’t live up to the nature of that claim, or don’t even begin to live up to the nature of it, can’t advocate authority. Mosley, for example, was regarded as above the movements that he led, and therefore there was a degree of absolute respect: even if people disagreed with him totally on Europeanization and various other things. Because of the respect he had, as a man. And if you are to lead right-wing movements, you have to have that degree of character. Character is integral to that type of authority. It would be so in a military commander, never mind a political one. If it’s not there you can’t make authoritarian pledges and carry on in that sort of way, because you’re just involved in the grubby game, which consists of Labor-Liberal-Tory and different versions of the same thing.
To make an absolute claim and not live up to it is worse than being in New Labor. Because they don’t pretend, even though people have been fooled.
So my view is that we must return again to certain sets of ideas which suit us, that are cardinal for us, that are metaphysically objective and subjective, that see the flux and warp and weft of life, and its complicatedness, but know there are absolute standards upon which things are based.
If we can’t overcome the weapons which are used against us, we will disappear. These are the facts. And therefore we have to do so in our own minds.
Every other group that’s ever existed in human history has not had the albatross around it, that it only remembers as a form of guilt and expiation, and as a Moloch before sacrifices must be made, their own moments of grief and of slaughter and of ferocity. They configured the world in another way.
When the Greeks sacked a city in internal warfare, everyone would be enslaved. But they did not remember, when their bards sang of their victories, that they had denied human rights of other Greek city states.
No people can survive if it incorporates as a mental substructure an anti-heroic myth about itself.
This is why war is largely fought in the mind in the modern world. When Iraq was invaded and that regime was taken down, the precedents for everything which occurred had been done earlier in the 20th century. De-Baathafication, removal of the Army — but allowing them to keep their weapons; bad move, the Americans have learned the error of that, subsequently — the removal of the top of the civil service, trials for those involved, their moral degradation and expiation: hanging, in public, put on YouTube so the world can see it! A degradation of these villains, not foreign statesmen to which we were opposed and against in this war, but villains, criminals, that we must demonize and destroy!
Why is it done? Because it destroyed them morally, in the mind. And Iraqis think, “Well, Saddam was the one who [unintelligible]. Why would you say that, Abdul? “Well, I’ve seen it on the telly.” That’s what 80% of people are like. These extraordinary reversals because this is a mass age. In the past countries were ruled by elites. You shot up an elite and put another elite in place. Now the masses are allegedly in charge, you have to indoctrinate the masses. You have to stimulate them to fury: your enemies aren’t human, they’re beasts.
Beasts!
Milošević: beast, human rights abuser, genocidalist. Saddam: our man in the Gulf for years, now a demon, a demon! An anti-Zionist, ferocious apostate, and so on. But most of the chemicals that he used in the three-way war–Kurds, Iranians, and Iraqis, fought on the First World War level–companies in Berlin, Germany, and France, in Russia, in Belgium, in Britain, and in North America provided that. The gas was used by the Iranians as well, and the Kurds fought on both sides. Now that is the complicatedness that people don’t want to see.
And it’s also applicable to all groups. An American colonel in Fallujah will be fighting in his own mind, physically, in a courageous way. At the level of him on the ground with the sand around it, and the flies in his eyes. He’s not thinking about grand theory. He’s thinking about getting through that tour of duty and getting back to the wife and the kids in Maryland or something. That’s the level. We always have to understand that individual White Americans have absolutely no control over their elites, just as we have no control over ours. Because they’ve gone to a global level. And they think they’ve left us behind. They think England and Britain is a puddle, and they can step out of it to universality.
Well we can’t step out of it to universality, because if you’re not rooted in something, you don’t come from anywhere, there are no roots that go down into the earth. And you can be moved about like a weed which has very weak roots and just rips out. And somebody stronger will rip you out.
So my goal, really, in all these right-wing partisan groups I’ve been in, in one way or another, for the last 15 years is to preach inequality.
“Did you hear that? He says people are unequal.” People are unequal: 75% of it’s genetic and biological. Partly criminality’s biological; predispositions to drug addictions are biological; intelligence is biological; beauty is biological; ferocity or a predisposition to it is biological; intellect is biological. You can do a bit, but you’re born to be which you are, and we should celebrate what we were born to be. Because we have created 90% of value in modernity.
I am a modernist in many ways because I believe we created a modern world that has been taken away from what it could have been. The modern and that which preceded it are not necessarily in complete opposition. If people with our sorts of values ruled modernity, everything about the society would be, at one level the same, and in every other respect completely different. People would still drive contemporary cars; there’d still be jets; and there’d still be supercomputers, and so on. But the texture and the nature of life would be different in every respect.
How so?
Firstly, cultures would be mono-ethnic. Secondly, there would be a respect for the past glories of our civilization. Thirdly, we would not preface every attempt to be strong by saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry for what we have done.”
We’re not sorry!
And we’ve stepped over the prospect of being sorry.
Menachem Begin in his autobiography, which is called – is it called My Struggle? – it’s called My Life.
He was asked about the massacres of Palestinian villages, which was certainly instituted by his paramilitary group. And he said, “The sun comes up and goes down. It was necessary. We lived, we struggled, and they have died. Israel!” And we have to do the same. We have to do the same.
I once spoke at a BNP meeting, and this chap came up to me and said, “You’re a bit right-wing, aren’t you?” He said, “I used to be in the Labour Party.”
I said, “That’s all right.”
And he said, “Don’t you think this party is a bit too nationalistic?”
And I said, “Well, what, do you object to these flags?”
And he said, “Well, I’m just being honest.”
And I said, “Okay.” He’s willing to stand, and this sort of thing. I said, “Why does it upset you?”
And he said, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if we presented ourselves as the victims?” I don’t want to caricature the bloke too much. He said, “I’m obsessed by the case of the red squirrel.” And I gave him a very strange look.
But what he meant, what he wanted to configure, was that we are the victims. And the problem with that is that it’s what everyone else does. And it can be done, because there are many white victims in this society now, in the way that it’s going. But if you concentrate on pain and defeat, you will breed resentment. And I believe that resentment and pity are the things to be avoided.
Stoicism should be our way. Courage should be our way. When somebody pushes you, you push them back. When somebody’s false to you, you’re false to them. When somebody’s friendly to you, you are to them. You fight for your own country, and your own group, and your own culture, and your own civilization, at your own level, and in your own way. And when somebody says, “Apologize for this, or that” you say: “No. I regret nothing.” As a French singer once said. “I regret nothing.”
And it’s a good answer! I have no regrets.
One’s life is a bullet that goes through screens. You hit your final screen, and you’re dead. What happens after, none of us know. There’s either a spiritual world, as all the cardinal and metaphysically objectivist religions of every type for every culture and every group say there is, or there’s not.
In my philosophy, the energy that’s in us goes out into everything which exists. That there is an end after the end, but it’s not finite or conscious. That’s what I think.
That’s why believe in cremation. Because I believe in fire, and the glory of fire. I remember when my mother was cremated. If anyone’s ever been to a cremation, there’s a bit of ghastly simpering and this sort of thing, and they have a curtain because they don’t want you to see the fire. Because it’s a furnace, an absolute inferno.
And I said to the Vicar, “Look, I’ll even give you some money. I want to see the fire.” And he went “Ahh, ahh, ahh . . . Pardon?” “I’m a pagan. I want to see the fire.” He said, “Good lord, are you one of those?” I thought he was going to say he’d take 20 quid more. But no.
And I was allowed to stand near the coffin as it went in. And it’s just a blazing furnace, it opens, the sort of ecumenical and multi-dimensional curtain that they have over it, which has a peacock and various multi-faith figures on it, goes up.
And you see this wall of flame. This amazing wall of flame, that’s like the inside of a sun. And you see this oblong box go into it. And the flame finds every line, and every plane, and every sort of mathematical conceit in the box. And soon it’s completely aflame. And then the gate comes down.
And I believe that’s what life’s like. I believe that’s what happens when a sun forms, when a galaxy forms, when one ends, when a life begins, and when a life ends. That for me is life. Fire, energy, glory, and thinking.
Thinking is the important thing. Being white isn’t enough. Being English isn’t enough. Being British isn’t enough. Know what you are! In this book to read about your own culture is a revolutionary act. People are taught to rebel at school and hate our high culture, hate our folk culture – it’s all boring.
I heard a Manchester Club leader who I vaguely knew earlier in my life who died recently. And he was in charge of Factory Records. Very left-wing. That’s why he produced bands called New Order and Joy Division, to make money out of it.
He said, “I didn’t like ’80s New Romantic music,” and the Radio 5 jockey said to him, “Why is that?” And he said “Because it’s too white.” Too white! Because its bass wasn’t black enough, he said.
Now, if you have these sorts of ideas you will mentally perish over time, and you will physically perish as well over time.
But you have to know about our own forms to be able to deny the postulation of these people who would deny them. Knowledge is power. Listen to high music, go into the National Gallery. It’s free. You can stay hours in there. Look at what we’ve produced as a group.
This is what the Muslims teach their people. To be totally proud of what you are in your own confirmation of identity. Because identity is divine. It’s just like that fire, that consumed the box when I was younger.
Nietzsche’s philosophy isn’t for everybody. It’s too harsh and too forbidding for many people. But it is a way of thinking which is reflexive and absolute. It’s a way of thinking which is primordial and extraordinarily Western. It’s a way of thinking that enables people to be religious, in the sense of the sacredness of life, but also to be open to fact, and to evidence, and to science. It combines those things that lead to glory. And express themselves through tenderness and ferocity.
I urge all white people in this era to look into the mirror and to ask themselves, “What do you know about what you are?” And if you don’t know enough, put your hand on that mirror, and move towards greater knowledge of what you can become.
We’re all going to die. Make use of that time which remains.
Greatness is in the mind and in the fist. The glory of our tribe is not behind us. We can be great again. But the first thing that we have to do is to say, “I walk towards the tunnel, and I’m on my own, and I’m not afraid. And I have no regrets.”
Thank you very much!
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