Beyond Prudery and Perversion

              Of the various manifestations of the egalitarian cultural revolution that has transpired in the Western world over the past half century, none have been quite so enduring or become so deeply rooted in the culture of modern society as the so-called “sexual revolution.” Indeed, it might well be argued that even the supposed commitment of Western cultural elites in the early twenty-first century to the ethos of racial egalitarianism is not quite as profound as their commitment to the preservation and expansion of the victories of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution itself brings with it many of its own manifestations. These include the now prevailing feminist ethos, the liberalization of both popular opinion and public legislation concerning sexual conduct, abortion and contraception, divorce, the normalization of homosexuality accompanied by the growth of powerful homosexual political interest groups, and the identification of an ever-growing list of “gender identity” or “sexual orientation” groups who are subsequently assigned their position in the Left’s pantheon of the oppressed.

              Of course, the ongoing institutionalization of the values of the sexual revolution is not without its fierce critics. Predictably, the most strident criticism of sexual liberalism originates from the clerical and political representatives of the institutions of organized Christianity and from concerned Christian laypeople. Public battles over sexual issues are depicted in the establishment media as conflicts between progressive-minded, intelligent and educated liberals versus ignorant, bigoted, sex-phobic reactionaries. Dissident conservative media outlets portray conflicts of this type as pitting hedonistic, amoral sexual libertines against beleaguered upholders of the values of faith, family, and chastity. Yet this “culture war” between liberal libertines and Christian puritans is not what should be the greatest concern of those holding a radical traditionalist or conservative revolutionary outlook.

Sexuality and the Pagan Heritage of Western Civilization

              The European New Right has emerged as the most intellectually progressive and sophisticated contemporary manifestation of the values of the conservative revolution. Likewise, the overlapping schools of thought associated with the ENR have offered the most penetrating and comprehensive critique of the domination of contemporary cultural and political life by the values of liberalism and the consequences of this for Western civilization. The ENR departs sharply from conventional “conservative” criticisms of liberalism of the kind that stem from Christian piety. Unlike the Christian conservatives, the European New Right does not hesitate to embrace the primordial pagan heritage of the Indo-European ancestors of Western peoples. The history of the West is much older than the fifteen hundred year reign of the Christian church that characterized Western civilization from the late Roman era to the early modern period. This history includes foremost of all the classical Greco-Roman civilization of antiquity and its legacy of classical pagan scholarship and cultural life. Recognition of this legacy includes a willingness to recognize and explore classical pagan attitudes towards sexuality. As Mark Wegierski has written:

The ENR’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality...ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations. However, while relatively more tolerant in principle, they still value strong family life, fecundity, and marriage or relations within one’s own ethnic group. (Their objection to intraethnic liaisons would be that the mixture of ethnic groups diminishes a sense of identity. In a world where every marriage was mixed, cultural identity would disappear). They also criticize Anglo-American moralism and its apparent hypocrisy: ” . . . In this, they are closer to a worldly Europe than to a puritanical America obsessed with violence. According to the ENR: “Our ancestral Indo-European culture . . . seems to have enjoyed a healthy natural attitude to processes and parts of the body concerned with the bringing forth of new life, the celebration of pair-bonding love, and the perpetuation of the race.”

In its desire to create a balanced psychology of sexual relations, the ENR seeks to overcome the liabilities of conventional conservative thought: the perception of conservatives as joyless prudes, and the seemingly ridiculous psychology implied in conventional Christianity. It seeks to address “flesh-and-blood men and women,” not saints. Since some of the Left’s greatest gains in the last few decades have been made as a result of their championing sexual freedom and liberation, the ENR seeks to offer its own counter-ethic of sexual joy. The hope is presumably to nourish persons of the type who can, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “make love alter reading Hegel.” This is also related to the desire for the reconciliation of the intellectual and warrior in one person: the reconciliation of vita contemplative and vita activa.¹

It is therefore the task of contemporary proponents of the values of conservative revolution to create a body of sexual ethics that offers a genuine third position beyond that of mindless liberal hedonism or the equally mindless sex-phobia of the Christian puritans. In working to cultivate such an alternative sexual ethos, the thought of Julius Evola regarding sexuality will be quite informative.

The Evolan Worldview

              Julius Evola published his Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex in 1958.² This work contains a comprehensive discussion of Evola’s views of sexuality and the role of sexuality in his wider philosophical outlook. In the book, Evola provides a much greater overview of his own philosophy of sex, a philosophy which he had only alluded to in prior works such as The Yoga of Power (1949)³ and, of course, his magnum opus Revolt Against the Modern World (1934)⁴. Evola’s view of sexuality was very much in keeping with his wider view of history and civilization. Evola’s philosophy, which he termed merely as “Tradition,” was essentially a religion of Evola’s own making. Evola’s Tradition was a syncretic amalgam of various occult and metaphysical influences derived from ancient myths and esoteric writings. Foremost among these were the collection of myths found in various Greek and Hindu traditions having to do with a view of human civilization and culture as manifestation of a process of decline from a primordial “Golden Age.”

              It is interesting to note that Evola rejected modern views of evolutionary biology such as Darwinian natural selection. Indeed, his views on the origins of mankind overlapped with those of Vedic creationists within the Hindu tradition. This particular reflection of the Vedic tradition postulates the concept of “devolution” which, at the risk of oversimplification, might be characterized as a spiritualistic inversion of modern notions of evolution. Mankind is regarded as having devolved into its present physical form from primordial spiritual beings, a view that is still maintained by some Hindu creationists in the contemporary world.⁵ Comparable beliefs were widespread in ancient mythology. Hindu tradition postulates four “yugas” with each successive yuga marking a period of degeneration from the era of the previous yuga. The last of these, the so-called “Kali Yuga,” represents an Age of Darkness that Evola appropriated as a metaphor for the modern world. This element of Hindu tradition parallels the mythical Golden Age of the Greeks, where the goddess of justice, Astraea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis, lived among mankind in an idyllic era of human virtue. The similarities of these myths to the legend of the Garden of Eden in the Abrahamic traditions where human beings lived in paradise prior the Fall are also obvious enough.

              It would be easy enough for the twenty-first century mind to dismiss Evola’s thought in this regard as a mere pretentious appeal to irrationality, mysticism, superstition or obscurantism. Yet to do so would be to ignore the way in which Evola’s worldview represents a near-perfect spiritual metaphor for the essence of the thought of the man who was arguably the most radical and far-sighted thinker of modernity: Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, it is not implausible to interpret Evola’s work as an effort to place the Nietzschean worldview within a wider cultural-historical and metaphysical framework that seeks to provide a kind of reconciliation with the essential features of the world’s great religious traditions which have their roots in the early beginnings of human consciousness. Nietzsche, himself a radical materialist, likewise regarded the history of Western civilization as involving a process of degeneration from the high point of the pre-Socratic era. Both Nietzsche and Evola regarded modernity as the lowest yet achieved form of degenerative decadence with regards to expressions of human culture and civilization. The Nietzschean hope for the emergence of an ubermenschen that has overcome the crisis of nihilism inspired by modern civilization and the Evolan hope for a revival of primordial Tradition as an antidote to the perceived darkness of the current age each represent quite similar impulses within human thought.

The Metaphysics of Sex

              In keeping with his contemptuous view of modernity, Evola regarded modern sexual mores and forms of expression as degenerate. Just as Evola rejected modern evolutionary biology, so did he also oppose twentieth century approaches to the understanding of sexuality of the kind found in such fields as sociobiology, psychology, and the newly emergent discipline of sexology. Interestingly, Evola did not view the reproductive instinct in mankind to be the principal force driving sexuality and he criticized these academic disciplines for their efforts to interpret sexuality in terms of reproductive drives, regarding these efforts as a reflection of the materialistic reductionism which he so bitterly opposed. Evola’s use of the term “metaphysics” with regards to sexuality represents in part his efforts to differentiate what he considered to be the “first principles” of human sexuality from the merely biological instinct for the reproduction of the species, which he regarded as being among the basest and least meaningful aspects of sex. It is also interesting to note at this point that Evola himself never married or had children of his own. Nor is it known to what degree his own paralysis generated by injuries sustained during World War Two as a result of a 1945 Soviet bombing raid on Vienna affected his own reproductive capabilities or his views of sexuality.

              Perhaps the most significant aspect of Evola’s analysis of sex is his rejection of not only the reproductive instinct but also of love as the most profound dimension of sexuality. Evola’s thought on this matter is sharp departure from the dominant forces in traditional Western thought with regards to sexual ethics. Plato postulated a kind of love that transcends the sexual and rises above it, thereby remaining non-sexual in nature. The Christian tradition subjects the sexual impulse and act to a form of sacralization by which the process of creating life becomes a manifestation of the divine order. Hence, the traditional Christian taboos against non-procreative sexual acts. Modern humanism of a secular-liberal nature elevates romantic love to the highest form of sexual expression. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable phenomena of the modern liberal embrace of non-procreative, non-marital or even homosexual forms of sexual expression, while maintaining something of a taboo against forms of non-romantic sexual expression such as prostitution or forms of sexuality and sexual expression regarded as incompatible with the egalitarian ethos of liberalism, such as polygamy or “sexist” pornography.

              Evola’s own thought regarding sexuality diverges sharply from that of the Platonic ideal, the Christians, and the moderns alike. For Evola, sexuality has as its first purpose the achievement of unity in two distinctive ways. The first of these is the unity of the male and female dichotomy that defines the sexual division of the human species. Drawing once again on primordial traditions, Evola turns to the classical Greek myth of Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite who was believed to be a manifestation of both genders and who was depicted in the art of antiquity as having a male penis with female breasts in the same manner as the modern “she-male.” The writings of Ovid depict Hermaphroditus as a beautiful young boy who was seduced by the nymph Salmacis and subsequently transformed into a male/female hybrid as a result of the union. The depiction of this story in the work of Theophrastus indicates that Hermaphroditus symbolized the marital union of a man and woman.

              The concept of unity figures prominently in the Evolan view of sexuality on another level. Just as the sexual act is an attempt at reunification of the male and female division of the species, so is sexuality also an attempt to reunite the physical element of the human being with the spiritual. Again, Evola departs from the Platonic, Christian, and modern views of sexuality. The classical and the modern overemphasize such characteristics as romantic love or aesthetic beauty in Evola’s view, while the Christian sacralization of sexuality relegates the physical aspect to the level of the profane. However, Evola does not reject the notion of a profane dimension to sexuality. Instead, Evola distinguishes the profane from the transcendent. Profane expressions of sexuality are those of a non-transcendent nature. These can include both the hedonic pursuit of sexual pleasure as an end unto itself, but it also includes sexual acts with romantic love as their end.

              Indeed, Evola’s analysis of sexuality would be shockingly offensive to the sensibilities of traditionalists within the Abrahamic cults and those of modern liberal humanists alike. Evola is as forthright as any of the modern left-wing sexologists of his mid-twentieth century era (for instance, Alfred Kinsey⁶ or Wilhelm Reich⁷) in the frankness of his discussion of the many dimensions of human sexuality, including sexual conduct of the most fringe nature. Some on the contemporary “far Right” of nationalist politics have attempted to portray Evola’s view of homosexuality as the equivalent of that of a conventional Christian “homophobe.” Yet a full viewing of Evola’s writing on the homosexual questions does not lend itself to such an interpretation. The following passage from The Metaphysics of Sex is instructive on this issue:

              In natural homosexuality or in the predisposition to it, the most straightforward explanation is provided by what we said earlier about the differing levels of sexual development and about the fact that the process of sexual development in its physical and, even more so, in its psychic aspects can be incomplete. In that way, the original bisexual nature is surpassed to a lesser extent than in a "normal" human being, the characteristics of one sex not being predominant over those of the other sex to the same extent. Next we must deal with what M. Hirschfeld called the "intermediate sexual forms". In cases of this kind (for instance, when a person who is nominally a man is only 60 percent male) it is impossible that the erotic attraction based on the polarity of the sexes in heterosexuality - which is much stronger the more the man is male and the woman is female - can also be born between individuals who, according to the birth registry and as regards only the so-called primary sexual characteristics, belong to the same sex, because in actual fact they are "intermediate forms". In the case of pederasts, Ulrich said rightly that it is possible to find "the soul of a woman born in the body of a man".

              But it is necessary to take into account the possibility of constitutional mutations, a possibility that has been given little consideration by sexologists; that is, we must also bear in mind cases of regression. It may be that the governing power on which the sexual nature of a given individual depends (a nature that is truly male or truly female) may grow weak through neutralization, atrophy, or reduction of the latent state of the characteristics of the other sex, and this may lead to the activation and emergence of these recessive characteristics. And here the surroundings and the general atmosphere of society can play a not unimportant part. In a civilization where equality is the standard, where differences are not linked, where promiscuity is a favor, where the ancient idea of "being true to oneself" means nothing anymore - in such a splintered and materialistic society, it is clear that this phenomenon of regression and homosexuality should be particularly welcome, and therefore it is in no way a surprise to see the alarming increase in homosexuality and the "third sex" in the latest "democratic" period, or an increase in sex changes to an extent unparalleled in other eras.⁸

              In his recognition of the possibility of “the soul of a woman born in the body of man” or “intermediate” sexual forms, Evola’s language and analysis somewhat resembles the contemporary cultural Left’s fascination with the “transgendered” or the “intersexed.” Where Evola’s thought is to be most sharply differentiated from that of modern leftists is not on the matter of sex-phobia, but on the question of sexual egalitarianism. Unlike the Christian puritans who regard deviants from the heterosexual, procreative sexual paradigm as criminals against the natural order, Evola apparently understood the existence of such “sexual identities” as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Unlike modern liberals, Evola opposed the elevation of such sexual identities or practices to the level of equivalence with “normal” procreative and kinship related forms of sexual expression and relationship. On the contemporary question of same-sex marriage, for example, Evolan thought recognizes that the purpose of marriage is not individual gratification, but the construction of an institution for the reproduction of the species and the proliferation and rearing of offspring. An implication of Evola’s thought on these questions for conservative revolutionaries in the twenty-first century is that the populations conventionally labeled as sexual deviants by societies where the Abrahamic cults shape the wider cultural paradigm need not be shunned, despised, feared, or subject to persecution. Homosexuals, for instance, have clearly made important contributions to Western civilization. However, the liberal project of elevating either romantic love or hedonic gratification as the highest end of sexuality, and of equalizing “normal” and “deviant” forms of sexual expression, must likewise be rejected if relationships between family, tribe, community, and nation are to be understood as the essence of civilization.

              The nature of Evola’s opposition to modern pornography and the relationship of this opposition to his wider thought regarding sexuality is perhaps the most instructive with regards to the differentiation to be made between Evola’s outlook and that of Christian moralists. Evola’s opposition to pornography was not its explicit nature or its deviation from procreative, marital expressions of sexuality as the idealized norm. Indeed, Evola highly regarded sexual practices of a ritualized nature, including orgiastic religious rites of the kind found in certain forms of paganism, to be among the most idyllic forms of sexual expression of the highest, spiritualized variety. Christian puritans of the present era might well find Evola’s views on these matters to be even more appalling than those of ordinary contemporary liberals. Evola also considered ritualistic or ascetic celibacy to be such an idyllic form. The basis of Evola’s objection to pornography was its baseness, it commercial nature, and its hedonic ends, all of which Evola regarding as diminishing its erotic nature to the lowest possible level. Evola would no doubt regard the commercialized hyper-sexuality that dominates the mass media and popular culture of the Western world of the twenty-first century as a symptom rather than as a cause of the decadence of modernity.

Originally published in Thoughts & Perspectives: Evola, a compilation of essays on Julius Evola, published by ARKTOS.

Notes:

¹ Wegierski, Mark. The New Right in Europe. Telos, Winter93/Spring94, Issue 98-99.

² Evola, Julius. Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. English translation. New York: Inner Traditions, 1983. Originally published in Italy by Edizioni Meditterranee, 1969.

³ Evola, Julius. The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way. English translation by Guido Stucci. New York: Inner Traditions, 1992. Originally published in 1949.

⁴ Evola, Julius. Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. English translation by Guido Stucco. New York: Inner Traditions, 1995. From the 1969 edition. Originally published in Milan by Hoepli in 1934.

⁵ Cremo, Michael A. Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. Torchlight Publishing, 2003.

⁶ Pomeroy, Wardell. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

⁷ Sharaf, Myron. Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. Da Capo Press, 1994.

⁸ Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, pp. 62-63.

Bibliography:

Cremo, Michael A. Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory. Torchlight Publishing, 2003.

Evola, Julius. Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. English translation. New York: Inner Traditions, 1983. Originally published in Italy by Edizioni Meditterranee, 1969.

Evola, Julius. Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. English translation by Guido Stucco. New York: Inner Traditions, 1995. From the 1969 edition. Originally published in Milan by Hoepli in 1934.

Evola, Julius. The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way. English translation by Guido Stucci. New York: Inner Traditions, 1992. Originally published in 1949.

Pomeroy, Wardell. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Sharaf, Myron. Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. Da Capo Press, 1994.

Wegierski, Mark. The New Right in Europe. Telos, Winter93/Spring94, Issue 98-99.

Codreanu and the Warrior Ethos

              European civilization of the early to middle twentieth century was characterized in part by the growth of political movements with a martial character. These included both the many variants of fascism from the far Right and revolutionary socialist currents from the far Left. The proliferation of such movements accelerated sharply in the interwar period. Particularly noteworthy were Mussolini’s Fascisti and the National Socialists of Germany, given the later success of these at actual achievement of state power, as well as the various factions involved in the Spanish Civil War. Romania’s Iron Guard, under the leadership of Corneliu Codreanu, was unique among these movements in that it was one of the few such tendencies with a strong religious orientation, and a highly eccentric religiosity at that. (Payne, 1995)

              The religiosity of the Iron Guard is ironic given that the rise of secular mass movements with a strong martial or even apocalyptic outlook during the twentieth century can easily be interpreted as a substitution for declining religious enthusiasms during the same era. Nietzsche had predicted that the twentieth-century would be a time of great ideological wars, and history has demonstrated the prescience of Nietzsche’s prediction. Yet, Nietzsche regarded the ominous cloud of previously unparalleled warfare he saw on the horizon as a consequential phase through which humanity must pass in part due to the “death of God” and the quest for new gods to fill the resulting void. While Nietzsche himself detested militarism, he also lamented the decline of the warrior ethos in the era of modernity. Like Ernst Junger after him, Nietzsche considered the comforts of bourgeois society to have brought with them an emasculating aversion to danger and a pervasive preoccupation with safety and security. These observations were the foundation of the underlying sentiments expressed in the Nietzschean adage that “a good fight justifies any cause.” (Preston, 2011; Junger, )

              The twentieth century certainly brought with it a myriad of causes which inspired their adherents to “a good fight.” While the icons of Race, Nation, or Class largely replaced “God” in the pantheons of twentieth century secularized religiosity, it was among the ranks of Codreanu’s Iron Guard (or the Legion of the Archangel Michael, as the Guard also referred to itself) that the older icons of God, Faith, and Church retained their traditional place. Indeed, it was perhaps among the Iron Guard that martial values achieved extremes that were unparalleled among other ideological revolutionaries of the era. Of all the extremist movements of the period, the Iron Guard surpassed perhaps even the German S.A. in the development of a cult of death and martyrdom. The similarities between German National Socialism and the Iron Guard were great. The particularly obvious parallels are the virulent nationalism, anti-communism, and anti-Semitism of both movements. Codreanu could fairly be said to have rivaled Hitler in the fervor of his anti-Jewish rhetoric. (Volovici, 1991)

              However, perhaps the most interesting dimension of the ideology of the Iron Guard was its approach to theology. The Legionnaires conceived of the Romanian nation as having a special relationship to God and its commitment to the traditional Orthodox Christianity of the Romanian people informed every aspect of their thought and action. Like Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the ruthlessly Catholic Jesuit order before them, the Legionnaires recognized no limitations on the ends to which they might go in defense of their particular variation of the Christian faith. The extremism of their cult of martyrdom is perhaps best exemplified by their belief that in order to defend the Faith and the Nation, a Legionnaire might at times be called upon to perform deeds that would result in his own damnation. In other words, not only an individual life but an individual soul must at times be sacrificed for the greater good of the struggle. This is likely the most intense form of cultic martyrdom ever devised. Religious movements which teach martyrdom typically promise reward in a future life for the faithful holy warrior who sacrifices his mere mortal life for the cause. Yet for the holy warriors of the Iron Guard, a soldier of faith could be called upon to lay down not only his mortal life but his immortal soul as well. (Payne, 1995) No cult of martyrdom could ever be more extreme. Their fervent Orthodoxy aside, one might be tempted to compare the theological outlook of the Legionnaires with that of Milton’s Lucifer. Just as Milton depicted Satan as having insisted that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, so might the faithful warriors of the Iron Guard be said to have believed that it is better to achieve Hell in the struggle for one’s nation than to achieve Heaven for having engaged in a less virulent struggle. The Romanian warriors took the martyrdom cults of the Islamic jihadists or the Japanese kamikazes still a step further.

              Because of their stalwart religiosity and fervent attachment to Romanian tradition, it is also tempting to dismiss the Legionnaires as mere reactionaries of the throne and altar variety rather than to recognize them as a manifestation of an authentic revolutionary force in European civilization of the time. Yet such a conclusion would be problematical. As early as 1919, Codreanu himself had joined Constantin Pancu’s National Awareness Guard, a right-wing anti-communist faction that simultaneously advocated for greater worker rights. Likewise, the Iron Guard itself was involved in the organization of cooperatives and, like many radical right movements of the era, voiced fervent opposition to both capitalism and communism. (Barbu, 1993) In many ways the Iron Guard might be considered an Orthodox counterpart to the Falangist movement of Spain’s Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. The ideological parallels are rather significant. Both movements espoused a radical nationalist philosophy that attacked communism, finance capital, liberalism, internationalism, and parliamentarism and while expressing support for the traditional faith of the people of their respective nations. Both maintained a primary orientation towards paramilitarism and armed struggle in a way that represented the evolution of the Right beyond the throne and altar reactionary current towards a genuinely revolutionary nationalism. (Rivera, 1936) Yet both movements maintained an outlook that was more traditional than the modernist influences exhibited by some radical right movements of the era, such as the anticlericalism of the German National Socialists, the avante garde influences on Italian Fascism, the Nietzscheanism of the Conservative Revolutionaries, or the Marxism of the National-Bolsheviks. In other ways, the Iron Guard resembled the now forgotten anti-communist Buddhist or Catholic militias formed in the nations of Indochina during the early period of the civil wars in those nations.

              The prevalence of so many forces exhibiting an uncompromising martial spirit throughout the Western world in the first half of the twentieth century is all the more remarkable given the near total disappearance of martial values in Western culture of the present time. The militaries of the contemporary Western nations are barely militaries at all but instead function as glorified police departments forever being deployed in the pursuit of dubious and never-ending “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” endeavors. Even the massive military-industrial complex maintained by the United States functions more as a corporate welfare scheme for legions of crony capitalists connected to the American state. American military personnel are careerist bureaucrats rivaling their counterparts in the civilian sectors of the state or the world of capitalist corporations. Indeed, even among the rank and file, the military forces of the United States are more a collection of mercenaries and fraternities than anything that could be said to exhibit a warrior ethos in the historic or traditional sense. The blending of modern warfare and high-technology has served in many ways to eliminate the truly martial aspects of warfare. Instead, the forces of the American empire and its allies drop bombs from the safety of the skies. “War” for these modern imperial legions is sometimes more comparable to a visit to a video arcade than engagement on the battlefield. Indeed, the American military now serves a primary force for the perpetration of Political Correctness as represented by its conscientious commitment to “diversity,” properly integrating women and homosexuals into its ranks, and upholding “human rights” on a global scale rather than cultivating a warrior ethos or upholding its own historic traditions. (Hunter, 2009)

              One is inclined to wonder what Western civilization might be today if its recent ancestors who did indeed exhibit such martial valor had not simultaneously squandered so much blood and treasure in internecine warfare over petty nationalisms, sectarian ideological squabbles, and class hatreds. Whether they were the Legionnaires of Romania, the Falangists of Spain, the Brownshirts of Germany, the Blackshirts of Italy, the Anarchists of Catalonia, or the Communist street fighters of the KPD, it seems a pity that so much blood was lost in struggles that were ultimately futile and meaningless and that these struggles eventually culminated in explosive and historically unrivaled warfare that ended the reign of Europe as the world’s premiere civilization in favor of the American hegemony that has dominated since 1945. One wonders if such martial spirit could ever again be recaptured and directed towards a more constructive vision. The decadence of modern society is illustrated by the apathetic nature of its population. The principal values of contemporary Western culture are the pursuit of material comfort, safety, and personal hedonism. Only a dramatic psychic sea change among Western peoples generated by necessity would likely reverse this prevailing trend.

              It appears that just as the torch of politico-economic dominance and cultural evolution is currently being passed from Europe to Asia, so is the torch of martial spirit and the warrior ethos being passed to the insurgent forces of the Third World. The spirit of the Legionnaires continues to thrive not among Western Christians but among Islamic insurgents originating from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and the remaining armed struggle movements of Latin America. Today’s holy warriors are Islamists rather than Legionnaires or Falangists. It is the Muslim insurgents who now raise the banner of the classical Anarchist ideal of “propaganda by the deed.” (Hari, 2009) It is the youth of the Muslim nations rather than Western youth who fight the institutions of decadent, corrupt and archaic authorities in the streets. Indeed, virtually the only elements demonstrating any sort of martial values in contemporary Western society are lumpenproletarian street gangs.

              The most advanced military theorists of the contemporary era have recognized the dramatic changes that are currently evolving on a global basis concerning the nature of war. Commonly labeled as “fourth generation warfare,” the new form which human martial endeavor assumes is that involving non-state actors. This is a genuinely revolutionary phenomenon that is essentially overturning the monopoly on the waging of war assigned to the state since the time of the Treaty of Westphalia. War is now waged not by states but by movements lacking state power or which have replaced state power in a situation of political collapse. Among the most prominent example of these is Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia which essentially serves as the defense force of the otherwise militarily impotent Lebanese nation, having successful repelled the Israeli invasion in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah has likewise assumed the domestic as well as external roles normally played by conventional states with its provision of public health, education, and welfare services. (Preston, 2006) Ironically, it might well be said that Hezbollah is the closest parallel to the Iron Guard of any contemporary political or military movement.

              It is clear enough the legacy of Corneliu Codreanu and the Iron Guard, like the legacy of so many comparable movements of the era, belongs to the past. However admirable the personal valor of Codreanu and his Legionnaires may have been, there can be no doubt that many of the ideas that fueled their movement have become increasingly archaic with the passing of time. For instance, their adherence to the model of the Jewish conspiracy outlined in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” now seems a bit primitive, and one need not be an adherent of the pieties of contemporary political correctness to recognize the anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions of the Legionnaires as inordinately extreme. Likewise, one may find the alleged mystical nature of the relationship between the Orthodox faith and the Romanian nation championed by the faithful of the Iron Guard to be dubious in nature. The era of such extreme fidelity to a particular nation-state has certainly passed and conventional patriotism of the kind assigned to historic nation-states becomes increasingly less prevalent in the contemporary world. Likewise, the decline of orthodox or traditional Christian religious belief of any kind among Westerners is well known. It is doubtful that either Christianity or national patriotism could ever again inspire the inhabitants of Western civilization in the way these inspired those of previous eras. Clearly, these things are relics from the past. Valuable relics they may be, perhaps, but relics nevertheless. (Van Creveld, 1999)

              Yet as Western civilization continues its process of decline, it is likely that its indigenous peoples will once again be in search of identity as a result of the dislocation generated by the collapse of their civilization. As the current century unfolds and Asian preeminence becomes ever more obvious and the demographic overrun of the West becomes ever more imminent, it is likely that the primordial spirits of Western peoples will once again awaken. At that point, the indigenous peoples of the West will become insurgents once again and may well come to resemble present insurgents of the Third World. When such an era arrives, indigenous Europeans will no doubt look to find inspiration from past figures representing the martial spirit and warrior ethos that Westerners once took for granted. It is certainly possible that Corneliu Codreanu will be one among many such figures.

Originally published in Thoughts & Perspectives: Codreanu, a compilation of essays on Corneliu Codreanu, published by ARKTOS.

Bibliography:

Barbu, Zeev (2003). "Romania: The Iron Guard", in Aristotle A. Kallis (ed.), The Fascism Reader. London: Routledge, p.195-201.

Hari, Johan (2009). “Blood, Rage & History: The World's First Terrorists.” The Independent, October 12, 2009.

Hunter, Jack (2009). “Casualties of Diversity.” Taki’s Magazine, November 15, 2009.

Junger, Ernst (1993). “On Danger.” New German Critique, No. 59 ( Spring/Summer 1993)

Payne, Stanley G. (1995). A History of Fascism 1914-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 277-289.

Preston, Keith (2011). “The Nietzschean Prophecies: Two Hundred Years of Nihilism and the Coming Crisis of Western Civilization.” The Radical Tradition: Philosophy, Metapolitics & the Conservative Revolution, edited by Troy Southgate (Primordial Traditions, 2011).

Preston, Keith (2006). Propaganda by the Deed, Fourth Generation Warfare and the Decline of the State: An Examination of the History of the Decline of the State’s Monopoly on Violence and Warmaking (archived here).

Primo de Rivera, Jose Antonio (1936). “Carta a los militares de Espana” (archived here)

Van Creveld, Martin (1999). The Rise and Decline of the State. Cambridge University Press.

Volovici, Leon (1991). Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991.

The Whole of the Law

              The fame of Aleister Crowley is principally derived from his reputation as a notorious occultist. It is this reputation that has made his name legendary in numerous counter-cultural and youth culture circles, ranging from contemporary enthusiasts for witchcraft of varying sorts to purveyors of certain shades of heavy metal music. Yet for all his status as a legendary figure, Crowley is not typically regarded as a political thinker. To the degree that his ideas are considered relevant to political thought at all, Crowley is frequently caricatured as a shallow nihilist or merely as a debauched libertine. Extremist political subcultures of varying stripes have attempted to claim him as one of their own. Whether they are neo-fascists, egocentric individualists, or nihilist pseudo-anarchists, many with an extremist political outlook have attempted to shock the broader bourgeois society by invoking the name of Aleister Crowley. This state of affairs regarding Crowley’s political outlook is unfortunate, because an examination of the man’s political ideas reveals him to be a far more profound and insightful thinker on such questions than what is typically recognized.

              It is indeed understandable that divergent political factions would attempt to claim Crowley for themselves, given that his political thought is rather difficult to classify and cannot be reconciled with any established ideological paradigm. His ideas and pronouncements on political matters have to be understood within the wider context of his thought and worldview. Merely citing a quotation or opinion on some matter issued by Crowley here or there is to invite the risk of misrepresenting the wider body of his thought by assuming his association with some particular ideology or philosophical stance with which he did not identify. Crowley’s ideas have been particularly misrepresented in the United States, a nation that differs from most other industrialized countries and virtually all other nations of the Western world in that it possesses a large population of religious fundamentalists. The large Protestant evangelical subculture in the United States includes within itself a substantial number of people who continue to believe in the reality of the powers of witchcraft and in the existence of Satan as a literal personal being who acts as an evil supernatural force within the natural world. This subculture contains within itself an abundance of sensational literature and small-time demagogues claiming to have identified some form of evil occult force operating in the broader society through secretive organizations or through the manipulation of forms of popular culture such as film, the arts, television, rock n’ roll music, pornography, and the like.¹ Within the literature and rhetoric of this subculture, the name of Aleister Crowley is often used almost as a synonym for evil and Satanic forces.

              The obscurantism and ignorance demonstrated by these elements often produces an ironic result. Parallel to the religious subculture of those warning of imminent dangers posed by occult forces of the kind supposedly represented by the likes of Crowley is a corresponding youth culture built up around an occult mystique utilizing many of the same names and symbols that figure prominently in the shrill hysteria of the Christian fundamentalists. The reigning principle of social psychology operating here is one where the occult mystique is presented by the demagogues and sensationalists in the standard manner of the “forbidden fruit,” which defiantly rebellious, independently minded, or merely curious youth subsequently seek to consume. Hence, the proliferation of such youth culture phenomena as heavy metal rock bands with demonic names and song lyrics, and displaying occult symbols as a logo. That Crowley never identified himself as a Satanist and that his religion of Thelema is hardly a variation of Satanic thought (even if some self-styled contemporary Thelemites also fancy themselves as Satanists) is a fact that is often completely lost to these cultural undercurrents.² Just as Crowley’s religious thought has been so badly misunderstood or misinterpreted, Crowley’s thought on political matters has suffered similar abuses.

Do What Thou Wilt

              Perhaps no aspect of Crowley’s thinking has been more misunderstood than his famous pronouncement: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”³ Widely cited by critics and supposed admirers of Crowley alike as an incitement to anti-social egocentrism or as mere nihilism manifesting itself as a kind of adolescent-like rebellion, this passage is given such amateurish interpretations by those who completely ignore or misunderstand the concept of “the will” in Crowley’s outlook. For Crowley, the notion of “the will” is something of a synonym for the destiny of the individual which is built into the metaphysical fabric of the cosmos. Yet, Crowley was not a fatalist, and “the will” should not be confused with “fate” in the sense of some inevitable outcome pre-ordained by a providential or supernatural force. The will is something an individual must discover for himself through introspective, spiritual, or esoteric pursuits. The Crowleyan concept of “the will” is remarkably similar to the Nietzschean idea of “the will to power” in that it involves a form of self-overcoming and ascension to a form of existence that is greater than concern with mundane human pursuits or enslavement to base desires. This aspect of Crowley’s spirituality might also be compared to the meditative pursuits found in the Eastern traditions. To find one’s “true will” is to find one’s “calling.” An elitist, Crowley regarded the discovery of one’s “true will” as something only the special few were capable of achieving. Such people are those who shine brighter than the rest of humanity. Crowley used the analogy of a star to describe the individual human personality. For Crowley, all people are stars, but some stars shine much greater than others.⁴

              One of Crowley’s most important works was The Book of the Law, which appeared in 1904. Crowley claimed that this work had been dictated to him orally during a stay in Egypt by a spiritual being called Aiwass, who became Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel and who was the messenger of the ancient Greek god Horus and two other deities. The Book of the Law is supposedly the record of that dictation.⁵ The mind of a contemporary Western intellectual would no doubt be inclined to immediately dismiss such a claim as mere quackery or charlatanry. However, it must be recognized that the claims of Crowley regarding his having received supposed revelation from Horus differ in no significant way from those of similar claims found in many of the world’s great religious traditions or in forms of popular or contemporary religion possessing substantial numbers of adherents. The Islamic tradition maintains similar claims regarding the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Mohammed. The evangelical Protestant tradition in which Crowley himself was raised likewise regards the Bible as having been revealed to its authors by means of divine inspiration. Crowley’s claim of having received special knowledge contained in The Book of the Law resembles as well Joseph Smith’s claim of having discovered the sacred text of the Book of Mormon. Lastly, Crowley’s supposed encounter with the being of Aiwass greatly resembles the practice of “trance channeling” common to some contemporary “New Age” religious practices. In other words, the spiritual claims of Crowley and his followers should not necessarily be dismissed as any less credible or fantastic than comparable spiritual beliefs held by persons and religious communities possessing greater numbers of adherents or higher levels of political or cultural respectability. Crowley’s religion of Thelema is properly regarded as a contemporary pagan, polytheistic counterpart to these rival religious systems.

The Political and Social Context of Crowley’s Thought

              Aleister Crowley originated from the British upper-middle class. His father’s family owned a successful brewing business thereby making Aleister, born in 1875 and originally named Edward Alexander Crowley, a child of the classical British bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century. His parents were converts to a fundamentalist brand of evangelical Protestantism, a faith which Aleister became skeptical of and rejected while still in his teens. His father died when he was only eleven, and while Crowley later referred to his late father as his friend and hero, it is known that his relationship with his mother became rather strained, though the source of the family conflict is not specifically known. As a university student, Crowley became a sexual adventurer, pursuing sexual relationships with prostitutes and other promiscuous young women he met in seedy locations, and began experimenting with homosexuality as well. That Crowley would devote his adult life to the pursuit of activities regarded as extreme taboos by the sectarian religious environment of his upbringing motivates one to consider the question of to what degree his early family and religious experiences influenced his later outlook. A Freudian might be inclined to regard Crowley’s fascination with sex, drugs, and the occult as stemming from a compulsion to differentiate his own identity from the sacred beliefs of a mother he apparently greatly disliked. Likewise, the ability of sectarian religious communities to provoke rebellion on the part of those initially indoctrinated into their tenants during their formative years is well-documented. One can only speculate as to the nature of the impact of such experiences on Crowley.⁶

              Crowley’s thought on political and social matters resembles greatly that of a number of thinkers who emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as critics of the modern industrial era and its cultural impact. The industrial civilization of modernity had brought with it an exponential population growth, a greatly expanded middle class, an increasingly commercialized society, and a dramatic increase in urbanization. Political ideologies like liberalism, democracy, and socialism became increasingly influential and began to shape the nature of modern statecraft. The principal cultural impact of these developments was the uprooting or dislocation of many aspects of traditional society and the growth of a new kind of mass society comprised of workers, consumers, professionals, technicians, businessmen, journalists, and politicians. These dramatic changes were alarming to their critics for a variety of reasons. Conservatives of different types saw such social developments as undermining traditional forms of authority and social cohesion, and thereby generating anomie, crime, hedonism, impiety and the like due to the decline of the fixed social norms associated with more traditional social institutions. These criticisms were, of course, not unlike those of contemporary social conservatives. However, another criticism of modernity advanced by such thinkers is one that is now less well known and would likely be considered quaint, archaic, or even viciously retrograde by the modern liberal mind. Some were also concerned with the impact of the growth of mass society, commercialization, urbanization, and egalitarian political values on high culture and on the natural elites. Of course, one of the earliest and most profound critics of modernity of this kind was Nietzsche. Subsequent thinkers of this type included a number of individuals whose own thought was often markedly different from one another. Such intellectuals included Auberon Herbert, H.L. Mencken, Hilaire Belloc, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Vifredo Pareto, Julius Evola, Ernst Junger, Rene Guenon, J.R.R. Tolkien, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand De Jouvenal. Also representative of this kind of thinking were a number of French writers and intellectuals associated with a tendency that has been called “anarchisme de droite,” or “anarchism of the right.” Among these were Édouard Drumont, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Paul Léautaud, Louis Pauwels, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.⁷

              Different though their specific outlooks may have been, a common thread in the thinking of these critics of modernity was their rejection of the belief in innate human equality inherent in the rising ideological forces of the era. The advent of mass democracy, universal suffrage, and parliamentary politics was regarded by these thinkers as the replacement of statesmanship with mob rule. The trend towards universal education was seen not as a means of uplifting the ignorant masses but as a process of lowering those of superior ability and intelligence to the level of the mediocre. The commercialization of culture and society and the corresponding growth of the mass media were seen as diminishing the significance and prominence of traditional forms of high culture in favor of the lowbrow manifestations of popular culture that now dominate contemporary societies. Yet another concern advanced by this strand of thought was related to the effect of mass democracy, mass society, and egalitarian values on individual liberty. Contemporary liberals habitually assume that liberty and democracy are synonymous with one another, or at least share a complementary role. More cogent or perceptive thinkers have understood the inherent tension between egalitarianism and liberty. The modern democratic state, for instance, ultimately places the fate of the individual’s well-being in the hands of the shifting whims of popular opinion and equally shifting coalitions of fickle and narrowly-focused special interest groups. Efforts to eradicate inequality have led to the phenomenal growth of the state and the ever escalating intrusion of the state into areas of society where political interference was previously regarded as taboo. These earlier proponents of aristocratic individualism were often quite prophetic in their diagnosis of the predictable political consequences of radically egalitarian ideologies. It is to this strand of now somewhat obscure thought regarding political and social questions that Aleister Crowley himself belongs.

Crowley’s Aristocratic Radicalism

              Though of bourgeoisie origins, Crowley regarded the commercial values of capitalism to be incompatible with genuine elitism. Like others who shared a similar critique of modernity, Crowley regarded the elevation of the business class to the status of the ruling class as a form of social degeneration. Like Nietzsche and Junger, he championed the decline of bourgeoisie society and hoped for its replacement with a new kind of nobility. Crowley obviously differed from Christian traditionalists who objected to modernity mostly because of its success at undermining the authority of the Church. Indeed, Crowley predictably admired previous anticlerical tendencies such as Freemasonry and even declared the Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt to be one of the saints of Thelema. Yet Crowley’s outlook was hardly compatible with the egalitarian ideals of modernity that grew out of the French Revolution. No less than Julius Evola, for instance, recognized many of Crowley’s ideas as compatible with his own religion of Tradition.⁸

              Some of Crowley’s views resembled those of the Social Darwinists. Few statements of Crowley summarize the nature of his aristocratic radicalism with more clarity that these:

“It is the evolutionary and natural view . . . Nature’s way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress being hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the lions.⁹

“And when the trouble begins, we aristocrats of freedom, from the castle to the cottage, the tower or the tenement, shall have the slave mob against us.”¹⁰

“We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter, and delicious languor, force and fire are of us . . . we have nothing to do with the outcast and unfit. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings; stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong; this is our law and the joy of the world.”¹¹

Yet for all of his championing of the superior man over the mediocrities, the strong over the weak, and the special few against the inconsequential many, Crowley was not a proponent of tyranny or injustice. He opposed the totalitarian ideologies of Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism which arose during his lifetime.¹² Like many anti-modernist or anti-egalitarian thinkers of the time, including even the classical liberal Ludwig von Mises¹³ and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin¹⁴, Crowley engaged in a brief flirtatious fascination with Mussolini when the fascisti first emerged as a political force, but soon came to reconsider such sympathies. Indeed, Crowley had established a Thelemite commune in Sicily in 1920 which was subsequently closed by the Mussolini government three years later with Crowley himself being expelled from Italy.¹⁵

              Like many intellectuals who were concerned with the effects of modernity and a commercialized society on high culture, Crowley understood that the growth of human culture had historically been intertwined with the growth of a leisure class. In traditional societies, it had been the aristocracy that comprised the leisure class and therefore devoted much of its energy to cultural pursuits. Like comparable thinkers of the era, Crowley understood that the decline of traditional aristocracies in favor of a society comprised of businessmen and laborers devoted to the pursuit of mere profit or sustenance conflicted with the maintenance of a culture-producing leisure class. Therefore, Crowley became attracted to systems of economic thought that offered a third way beyond egalitarian socialism and the commercial values of capitalism. A number of ideologies of this kind emerged during Crowley’s era from both the Left and the Right. These included Guild Socialism, Syndicalism, Catholic Distributism, Social Credit, and the worker-soldier state promoted by Ernst Junger and the National-Bolshevik Ernst Niekisch. Crowley himself outlined a similar scheme for his ideal Thelemic state. Like the proponents of Guild Socialism and Syndicalism, Crowley favored a parliamentary system with representation based on profession and occupation rather than geography.¹⁶ Crowley described his proposed system in these terms:

Before the face of the Areopagus stands an independent Parliament of the Guilds. Within the Order, irrespective of Grade, the members of each craft, trade, science, or profession form themselves into a Guild, making their own laws, and prosecute their own good, in all matters pertaining to their labor and means of livelihood. Each Guild chooses the man most eminent in it to represent it before the Areopagus of the Eighth Degree; and all disputes between the various Guild are argued before that Body, which will decide according to the grand principles of the Order. Its decisions pass for ratification to the Sanctuary of the Gnosis, and thence to the Throne.¹⁷

The esoteric terminology in the above statement aside, the pagan occultist Crowley was essentially advocating the same system of economic governance as the Catholic traditionalists G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

              Regarding the structure of the state itself, like most proponents of aristocratic individualism, Crowley was a monarchist. He believed that the duties of government itself should be conducted by a non-elected Senate. The Senate would be chosen by an Electoral College appointed by the King. Crowley’s idea of the Electoral College was a conceptually interesting institution that was essentially a kind of political monastery. Members of the Electoral College would commit themselves to a vow of poverty, and be selected from the ranks of volunteers who had previously exhibited excellence in fields of scholarship, the arts, or athletics.¹⁸ One might guess that a man such as Crowley who engaged in so many pursuits that were in defiance of the social or even legal norms of his time would not favor a form of political government prone to arbitrary or intrusive interference in individual lives. Regarding matters of law, Crowley was for the most part a libertarian. He succinctly described this outlook in the Book of the Law:

Man has the right to live by his own law— to live in the way that he wills to do: to work as he will: to play as he will: to rest as he will: to die when and how he will. Man has the right to eat what he will: to drink what he will: to dwell where he will: to move as he will on the face of the earth. Man has the right to think what he will: to speak what he will: to write what he will: to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will: to dress as he will. Man has the right to love as he will:…"take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where, and with whom ye will." Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.¹⁹

While Crowley was clearly not an anarchist or a libertarian in the sense of a modern bourgeois liberal, the above statement is in its essence as much a libertarian-anarchistic creed as any ever issued. For Crowley, the chief aim of politics was to afford every individual the opportunity for the discovery and realization of their “True Will” tempered with cautious recognition that only the superior few will succeed in such pursuits. One might be tempted to compare the ideal Thelemic state of Aleister Crowley with Max Stirner’s idealized “Union of Egoists” or, obviously, Nietzsche’s hope for the ascension of an ubermensch.

              The political thought of Aleister Crowley retains its relevance to the present era in the same manner that the thought of his contemporaries who shared similar or overlapping views and critiques of modernity remains relevant. The ongoing process of decay of Western cultural and political institutions becomes increasingly evident with each subsequent generation. The currently reigning ideology in Western society is a synthesis of mass democracy, economism, and an increasingly nihilistic and absurdist form of radical egalitarianism. The political tyranny and cultural destructiveness inherent in such an ideological framework will continue to become ever more obvious to greater numbers of people. Two great questions will emerge from this crisis: “What went wrong?” and “What might an alternative be?” Aleister Crowley is yet another thinker from the past who saw the crisis in advance and who might be considered as yet another possible source of inspiration and guidance in the future.

Originally published in Crowley: Thoughts & Perspectives, Volume Two, a compilation of essays on Aleister Crowley, published by ARKTOS.

Notes:

¹ Victor, Jeffrey S. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Open Court Publishing Company, 1993.

² Rabinovitch, Shelley; Lewis, James. The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism. Citadel Press, 2004, pp. 267-270

³ Crowley, Liber Legis (“The Book of the Law”). Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1976, 2: 25.

⁴ Bolton, Kerry. Aleister Crowley as Political Theorist, Part I. Counter-Currents. Counter-Currents Publishing, September 2, 2010.

⁵ Crowley, Aleister. The Equinox of the Gods. New Falcon Publications, 1991.

⁶ Sutin, Laurence. Do What Thou Wilt: A Llife of Aleister Crowley. Macmillan, 2000; Kaczynksi, Richard. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Second Edition). Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2010.

⁷ Ollivier-Mellio, Anne. H.L. Mencken: Anarchist of the Right? Attack the System, November 24, 2009.

⁸ Bolton, Kerry. Aleister Crowley as Political Theorist, Part I. Counter-Currents. Counter-Currents Publishing, September 2, 2010.

⁹ Crowley, Aleister. The Law Is For All. Arizona: Falcon Press, 1985, p. 175.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 192.

¹¹ Liber Legis 2: 17–21.

¹² Aleister Crowley on Politics. The Arcane Archives (accessed April 5, 2011).

¹³ Mises, Ludwig von. Liberalism. 1927. Said Mises: “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.”

¹⁴ Anduril, Victor. Anarchic Philosophy. Attack the System (accessed April 5, 2011).

Said Kropotkin of Mussolini: “I am delighted by his boldness.”

¹⁵ Bolton, Kerry. Aleister Crowley as Political Theorist, Part II. Counter-Currents. Counter-Currents Publishing, September 3, 2010.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Crowley, Aleister. Liber CXCIV, “O.T.O. An Intimation with Reference to the Constitution of the Order,” paragraph 21, The Equinox, vol. III, no. 1, 1919.

¹⁸ Bolton, Kerry. Aleister Crowley as Political Theorist, Part II. Counter-Currents. Counter-Currents Publishing, September 3, 2010.

¹⁹ Crowley, Aleister. Duty (accessed April 5, 2011).

The Political Writings of Aleister Crowley

"An Account of A.'.A.'." In Gems from the Equinox. St. Paul, MI: Llewellyn, 1974, pp. 31-41. (All subsequent references to this work shall appear as Gems.

"An Appeal to the American Republic." In The Works of Aleister Crowley. Des Plaines, IL: Yogi, n.d., pp. 136-40.

Atlantis: The Lost Continent. Malton, ON, Canada: Dove, n.d.

The Book of the Law. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1976.

"Concerning the Law of Thelema." In The Equinox, Vol. III, No. 1, New York: Weiser, 1974, pp. 225-38.

The Confessions. London: Arkana--Penguin, 1989.

The Heart of the Master. Montreal, PQ: 93 Pub., 1973.

"An Intimation with Reference to the Constitution of the Order." In The Equinox, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 239-46.

"Khabs Am Pekht." In Gems, pp. 99-110.

The Law Is for All. Phoenix, AZ: Falcon, 1983.

"The Law of Liberty." In The Equinox, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 45-52.

Liber Aleph: The Book of Wisdom or Folly. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1991.

Liber Oz. Published as a single card in 1942.

"Liber Porta Lucis." In Gems, pp. 651-55.

"Liber Trigrammaton." In The Law Is for All, pp. 339-44.

"Liber Tzaddi vel Hamus Hermeticus." In Gems, pp. 657-62.

The Magical Record of the Beast 666. Montreal, PQ: 93 Pub., 1972.

Magick in Theory and Practice. Secaucus, NJ: Castle, 1991.

Magick without Tears. Tempe, AZ: Falcon, 1973.

"The Message of the Master Therion." In The Equinox, Vol. III, No.1, pp. 39-43.

"An Open Letter to Those Who May Wish to Join the Order." In The Equinox, Vol. III, No. 1, pp. 207-24.

The Scientific Solution of the Problem of Government. Ordo Templi Orientis, 1936.

The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. Publication information not available.

"Thien Tao." Konx Om Pax. Des Plaines, IL: Yogi, n.d., pp. 53-67.

Equality as an Evil

The dominant ideology of modern Western societies upholds equality as an absolute moral good, which must, therefore, be pursued for its own sake. The morality of egalitarianism is never questioned by the establishment power structure or by the vast majority of citizens; it is, in fact, a taken-for granted assumption that exists outside the scope of acceptable debate. Predicated on the arbitrary assertion that all humans are born equal in dignity and rights, and bearer of such rights by the mere fact of being human, able to reason, or endowed with dignity (note the circular reasoning) it makes of anyone questioning the moral goodness of equality into an individual of questionable humanity. Even conservatives dare not question the moral goodness of equality, focusing instead on critiquing the methods of application. Yet, equality, despite the high-flown rhetoric surrounding it, is far from an absolute moral good. On the contrary, when we examine the consequences of equality, it is an evil. This article will first explore some of the ways in which equality is an evil and will then put forth an alternative paradigm, founded on a theory of difference.

Unfair Distribution of Reward

The pursuit of equality’s most obvious consequence is the unfair distribution of reward. Because individual capabilities are always different, equality cannot be achieved without taking rewards from the deserving and reallocating them to the undeserving. Thus, talent, industry, thrift, diligence, discipline, initiative, and perseverance are penalised, while inability, idleness, profligacy, indifference, negligence, inertia, and inconstancy are rewarded in the name of social justice. This is egregiously apparent in the policies of universities in the United States, where the pursuit of racial equality has led to differential admission standards that privilege the scholastically inept at the expense of the scholastically apt. In the wake of unequal outcomes in SATs by different racial groups, millions of bright, hard-working students have been excluded from the universities of their choice, particularly where these have been ivy-league universities, in the effort racially to equalise outcomes.

The irony is that an argument for egalitarianism has been the need to combat the unfairness of what egalitarians commonly refer to as ‘privilege’. Egalitarians deem ‘privilege’ bad because it is unmeritocratic, allowing some to enjoy unearned benefits. Yet, since, as we have seen, egalitarian policies still create privileged classes of individuals, who unfairly enjoy unearned benefits, it achieves the opposite of its stated goal, merely transferring ‘privilege’ from one group to another.

Unfair Distribution of Resources

Closely related to the above is the unfair distribution of resources that accrues from pursuing equality. An example has been provided by recent a news report about universities closing or scaling down science departments to make room for diversity or equality officers. It seems the salary for one such officer would be enough to fund two cancer researchers. Being an absolute moral good, for egalitarians equality needs no logical justification, but the truth is theirs is an ideology that inflicts misery and costs lives. Let us be specific with the implications. Imagine you have a young loved one who has cancer or some other degenerative medical condition. Prognosis is early death in ten or fifteen years without a medical breakthrough. The research is making slow progress. You hope science will make the breakthrough before it is too late. Then, suddenly, the relevant research centres begin closing down or scaling down science departments, while, at the same time, these centres create positions for well-paid diversity or equality officers, allocating their departments generous funds. The research now moves more slowly, pushing back that medical breakthrough you are hoping for. Your loved one now faces a more protracted illness, possibly death before a cure or a more effective drug therapy is found. And what if you are a primary carer? Misery is thus inflicted upon you too, since the cure, or the new drug therapy, takes longer or comes too late. The worry and the sorrow also affect every close relative. It is difficult quantify the extent to which this is the case, particularly as no one seems to have researched this area, but the above scenario is not unreasonable. Can equality be a moral good when these are the consequences?

Negation of Difference

In recent decades, diversity has been a catchword among egalitarians, yet the affirmation of equality is simultaneously the negation of difference. The occasional phrase ‘different but equal’ has been the egalitarians’ attempt to have their cake and eat it, but it is a logical contradiction and therefore nonsense. The argument that the equality referred to is merely equality before the law does not hold, because were it so there would be no need for a policy of differential (unfair) treatment of university applicants. The argument that the equality referred to is merely equality of opportunity does not hold either, because were it so there would be no consternation at unequal outcomes in test results among students in different racial categories, and therefore no need for unfair admissions policies. The affirmation of equality is a straight negation of difference across the board, even to the point of denying the biological existence of one of the primary sources of difference—race and gender—and of pretending that these are pure, arbitrary fictions.

Diversity is predicated on difference. The elimination of one implies the elimination of the other. Modern egalitarianism’s celebration of diversity, and its proclamation of diversity as a good worth pursuing for its own sake, are, therefore, contradictory. What is more, by criticising opponents of diversity as immoral, egalitarians fail to meet their own professed standards of morality, making egalitarians themselves immoral.

The negation of difference implies, by extension, a negation of quality, both in the sense of distinguishing attributes and of superiority. The logical end product of equality is, therefore, sameness and mediocrity, a denial of all the things that make life good and worth living. A system of belief that takes the joy out of life, a system of belief that is, ultimately, anti-life, cannot be considered moral.

Negation of Individuality

Difference is what makes us individual. To assert that everyone is equal, therefore, is to negate individuality, because individuality implies uniqueness, autonomy, non-interchangeability. None are compatible with equality. The demand for uniformity— even when made in the name of individualism—entails a demand for conformity, a renunciation of the self, a demotion or degradation of the individual. This is not just another contradiction, but an affront to so-called ‘human dignity’, and since dignity is human, equality is inhuman. A philosophical outlook that simultaneously exalts and affronts dignity is not a coherent outlook.

There are two forms of collectivism: voluntary and imposed. The state- and institutionally sponsored pursuit of equality falls under the second category. Consequently, we can describe egalitarianism as imposing a degradation of the individual in service of an abstract collectivity—a collectivity that, because abstract and therefore dehumanised, does not exist empirically. Is this moral? Not in any way we could accept.

Agent of Oppression

As we have seen from the development of egalitarianism in modern Western societies, the logic of equality presupposes the equivalence of all humans. A result is that unrestricted immigration and racial diversity become ideologically unproblematic. Because humans are differentiated on multiple levels, racially diverse societies have become, by contrast, problematic, necessitating the proliferation of norms, regulation, laws, surveillance, penalties, bureaucracies, and additional taxation in pursuit of harmonious and continued functioning. The progressive limitation of freedoms never ends, because the above-stated measures address only symptoms, not the underlying cause: difference remains, and results in different responses to each measure, which in turn create the need for further measures. Worse still, because of the need to address an increasing number of areas in an increasingly disparate population with few or no shared values or assumptions, the regulatory effort becomes not only ever more invasive and prescriptive, but also increasingly ill-fitting for everyone. (Jack of all trades, master of none.) Freedom is also eroded economically due to the growing costs of regulating, policing, enforcing, penalising, and administrating social behaviour.

Modern Western societies provide innumerable examples of this process’ oppressive nature. This goes beyond the lost careers, ruined reputations, fines, and imprisonment that may result from expressing a politically ‘incorrect’ opinion, because being consequent with politically correct opinion can also result in adverse outcomes, such as rape, robbery, rioting, and murder, all of which are linked to and are a function of racial diversity. Forcing people—and specifically one class of people—to live under increased levels of personal danger lest they wish not to lose their livelihood, reputation, and freedom constitutes oppression. Since oppression is immoral, on this count too so is equality.

Cause of Apathy and Alienation

Robert Putnam linked racial diversity in communities to apathy and alienation: individuals in racially diverse communities tend to exhibit lower levels of community engagement, higher levels of mistrust, and greater reliance on television. According to Putnam’s study, the phenomenon becomes more pronounced with greater racial diversity. The conclusion is that individuals living in racially diverse communities enjoy a lower quality of life than individuals living in racially homogeneous communities, and that the greater the diversity, the lower the quality of life. The elevated levels of crime concurrent with a declining proportion of Whites in a community further accentuate this trend. Since racially diverse societies in the West have resulted directly from the pursuit of equality, equality is causally linked to declining quality of life, and not the opposite.

Equality is not immoral if pursued voluntarily, even if those pursuing it experience a decline in their quality of life as a result. However, it is immoral if it is imposed, by the state (with its implicit threat of violence) or through social pressure, upon those who have no wish to pursue it. And it is doubly immoral if the nonconformity of those in the latter group are, as a result, and as we have seen, denied their humanity.

Destructive System

As has become apparent by now, equality is a destructive force on several levels. Firstly, it is destructive of individual quality, since traits that contribute toward making individuals salient in some way, including activities or ways of behaving, are disincentivised, degraded, or denied. Secondly, it is destructive of the things that make life worth living, for the same reason. Thirdly, it is destructive of human dignity, even though it claims to be for it. Fourthly, it is an agent of oppression, even though it claims to be against it. And finally, it is destructive of quality of life and communities, even though it claims to aim at improving both.

Immoral Practitioners

Aside from the intrinsically destructive nature of the equality ideology, the latter is further tainted by the immorality of its practitioners, for equality activism almost invariably works—though this is not always explicitly stated or even acknowledged—to the detriment of one particular class of individuals: Whites. By their actions, equality practitioners can be safely assumed to have anti-White attitudes, or be anti-White, even though in most cases they are White themselves. It is, therefore, ironic that equality practitioners deem themselves highly moral, and even arrogate to themselves the preaching of morality.

Perhaps more egregious are the crimes of communists, who justifiably comprise the most notorious class of equality zealot. Communists have murdered, imprisoned, and condemned millions to a life of misery, including artists, writers, teachers, and intellectuals. Communists have deprived Europeans of some of the latter’s best people. Communist atrocities are, indeed, the worst in world history. Even on a smaller scale, communist and congenial egalitarians have often been prone to street violence, and as their breed of activist seems more eager than any other to engage in violence when faced with divergent opinions. This may be because egalitarianism has a terrorist history, beginning with the French Revolution, a movement comprising criminals, psychopaths, alcoholics, defectives, and sociopathic geniuses. This may also be because egalitarianism attracts the worst elements of any population, since they are the ones with most to gain by equality policies.

Psychopathology

From the above it is difficult not to see White egalitarians as suffering from an undiagnosed psychopathology, particularly when their equality activism’s long-term effect is to cause massive damage to their race, perhaps even its eventual destruction. Being perfectly analogous, such behaviour can be conceptualised as a collective tendency towards self-mutilation and / or suicide. In the case of Whites, it is reasonable, then, to treat egalitarianism as a moral defect or mental disturbance. (In the case of coloured people, egalitarianism is paid lip service in the interest of extracting concessions; in the case of a subset of Jews since the nineteenth century, egalitarianism is a strategy aimed at making Western societies more amenable to Jews.) Mental disturbance and defective morality are often linked.

The term ‘mental disturbance’ may seem disproportionate to some, given that many egalitarians sound and act like normal, well-adjusted members of society, and given also that, at least on the surface, egalitarianism represents the consensus opinion. It must be remembered, however, that this semblance of normality is a fairly common phenomenon. ‘Racism’ is now commonly considered the epitome of evil, but ‘racist’ attitudes and opinions, not to mention ‘racist’ legislation and government policies, represented until recently the consensus opinion, and were considered perfectly normal—so normal, in fact, that they were not always easy to identify, and even now new forms continue to be ‘discovered’. Identifying, and then changing, them has been the modern egalitarians’ self-imposed mission and raison d’être. We must not, therefore, allow ourselves to be deceived by apparent normality or by the apparently normalising effect of a consensus. Also, we must keep in mind that dominant ideologies always seek to perpetuate themselves by representing orthodoxy as healthy and normal, and heterodoxy as pathological and abnormal.

Difference

The pursuit of equality has been tied up with notions of social justice for so long that many may find it difficult to separate the two, and may therefore find an alternative unthinkable, or at least an evil to be avoided. Certainly, this is how egalitarians think and would like everyone else to think. We would propose, however, that the reverse is true, and that a superior paradigm might be one based on the desirability of difference.

A theory of difference is not ‘diversity’ as egalitarians understand the term. The ‘diversity’ of egalitarians refers to humans who may look different, but who, apart from individual personality and socially constructed differences, are essentially equivalent and interchangeable. This, of course, is too one-dimensional to constitute diversity, for it denies the validity of group attributes that contribute to identity. A theory of difference defines diversity as it is meant to be defined, and embraces the multidimensionality of human difference, both at the individual and collective levels.

Under a difference paradigm, therefore, we would expect individuals and groups to be different, even to diverge significantly from our own baselines, rather than expect them to be the same or to have failed when they showed no sign of convergence with us. We would respect difference as a matter of individual or group prerogative. And even where difference may result in instances that are repugnant to us, we would not for that reason cease to consider difference generally a font of riches, for the possibility of difference is a precondition for excellence and the extraordinary.

Sample Policy Implications

Alert readers who are familiar with my earlier writing on Haiti and Sub-Saharan Africa should immediately see the policy implications. Below are some examples.

Firstly, if difference is good and a matter of prerogative, it follows that allowing genetically and culturally distant settlers from the Third World to settle in Western nations is detrimental to the uniqueness of those nations. Immigration is not necessarily an evil, but under a difference paradigm immigrants would be immigrants, rather than settlers, and therefore appellants to the established authority, whose prerogative it would be to grant or deny admission on the basis of the incomers’ potential for assimilation. Diverse regions or nations would be seen as inimical to a diversity of regions or nations, for the ability for each to define themselves on their own terms would be a precondition for that diversity.

Secondly, an earthquake in a country like Haiti would not be a call for reconstruction. Haiti cannot be regarded as a Western nation, even if it is geographically in the West and was originally a European colony, for it is not populated or run by descendants of Europeans. At the same time it is right and proper, and often advantageous, that nations cooperate with one another. Under a difference paradigm, Haiti’s economic performance and political instability would not be seen as a failure, as it is under an equality paradigm, but rather the result of artificially imposing Westernisation on what is essentially a remote West African outpost. Any international assistance, therefore, would aim at de-escalating Westernisation and facilitating convergence with West Africa’s historical baselines. (I say historical, because West Africa is presently also still suffering from a European colonial syndrome.) Efforts would aim at environmental recovery and Haiti’s gradual, managed conversion to a sustainable non-industrial society. It would then no longer be measured or included in international corruption, transparency, or ‘development’ indices because these Western parametres would have become irrelevant. Should at any point Haitians decide to pursue a Western-style model, it would be their prerogative, but they would be left to do it—indeed succeed or fail—on their own terms, not by terms imposed by any Western nation.

Thirdly, while it would be possible for a Black African-descended student to apply for admission at any Western university, admission would be conditional on the availability of spaces and on meeting the same minimum standards of academic aptitude as those of the White European-descended students. The curriculum would be defined by Whites, for Whites, and it would be assumed that any non-White student attending the university was there to study that curriculum and to be measured against Western academic criteria. No effort would be made to increase the proportion of Blacks simply on the basis of statistical under-representation, as all else being equal this would be considered the result of difference, rather than a problem. Tests would be revised for accuracy of measuring the academic aptitude of Whites, not for improving the academic performance of Blacks or any other group’s. Conversely, Black-run universities would not be expected to meet criteria set up by Whites for other Whites, but rather to meet criteria set up by Blacks for other Blacks.

Finally, a non-Western nation’s success or failure would not necessarily be a function of their degree of Westernisation. A prehistoric society could well be considered successful if it thrived on its own terms; its prehistoric nature would not necessarily be seen as a deficiency, for it may well be that a recorded history, complex organisation, and techno-industrial development are not relevant to, or needed, in that society, in its particular environment. We would no longer use the euphemism ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ or even ‘poor’ to refer to nations that do not meet Western baselines of wealth and complexity. In fact, techno-industrial or economic development would not be an objective measure applicable to all nations, for difference theory would in many cases regard these as irrelevant. A desirable consequence would probably be the reduction of debt, for many regions of the world would eventually fall off the horizon of the money system—a matter with significant ramifications.

Concluding Remarks

This, and the theory of difference in general, is a big topic and I can only sketch it out here in very general—and for some perhaps vague or overly abstract—terms. It will need much more serious elaboration across a range of contexts and disciplines, so for now it will be up to the reader to tease out the talking points and formulate them in ways that resonate emotionally. The potential benefits, however, are huge, for if the morality of equality were to be dismantled completely, the egalitarian Left would be delegitimised in the public discourse as an untenable proposition, and the equality project would implode as evil and absurd.

The Cult of "The Other"

Academic freedom in Australia is dying before our eyes; another sacrifice performed in the now holy name of “The Other.”  In the universities, as elsewhere, public criticism of privileged minorities must walk a shaky legal tightrope.

Even the politically correct mainstream media can run afoul of the human rights industry by straying too far off the reservation.  Only recently, neoconservative journalist Andrew Bolt was successfully sued for articles scolding many “fair-skinned” people of predominantly European ancestry for accessing benefits intended for Australian Aborigines.

Unfortunately, in a mass-mediated wasteland of intellectual cowardice and political conformity, Australian universities are not an oasis of dissent. If my experience as a teacher, scholar, and, more recently, a first-year theology student is a reliable guide, academia is utterly hostile to free thought and frank discussion on race, ethnicity, and gender.

This situation does not exist because the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act, 1975 outlawed speech deemed to be “offensive” and “insulting” to a person because of his race, colour, ethnicity, or national origins.  Academic freedom was given formal legal recognition in section 18D(b) of the Act which protected “anything said or done reasonably and in good faith…in the course of any statement, publication, discussion or debate made or held for any genuine academic, artistic or scientific purpose or any other genuine purpose in the public interest.”

But critical legal scholars have long known that there may be a vast gulf between “the law in the books” and “the law in action.”  When I publicly criticized BlackBlack African immigration into Australia in 2005, my employer, Macquarie University, quickly exploited the large loophole in section 18D.  The Vice-Chancellor summarily suspended me from teaching, acting on the premise that remarks critical of BlackBlack African immigration could not have been made “reasonably and in good faith.”

Deakin University soon followed suit by ordering the editor of the Deakin Law Review to pull my peer-reviewed article on “Rethinking the White Australia Policy” from the issue that was about to go to the printer.  The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission provided legal cover for both universities by finding that my observations on African immigration were not made “reasonably and in good faith,” either as part of an academic debate or discussion “or any other genuine purpose in the public interest.”

Since my retirement in 2006, I have researched and written a book entitled The WASP Question.  My goal was to explain why white Anglo-Saxon Protestant political, academic, corporate, and legal elites in every country founded by their ancestors are so ready, willing, and able to aid and abet the toxic minorities determined to shut down criticism of mass Third World immigration.

In the course of writing that book, the spiritual dimension of Anglo-Saxon history acquired an altogether unexpected significance for me.  I began to wonder whether a Christian ethno-theology might help WASPs to recover from the ethno-pathology that I call “Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia.”

Throughout my academic career, I was an agnostic on religion and identified mainly with the secular traditions of civic humanism.  My research into the long course of English and American history led me to rediscover the Old Faith of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.  I was very much struck by the fact that it was the early Christian Church—not the State—which created the English nation.

Of course, I also knew that, in our own time, mainstream Christianity in general, and the Anglican Church in particular, works tirelessly to undermine the will of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to preserve their own homelands.  To understand how the church came to play such a destructive role, it became clear that I would have to study Christian theology in a more systematic manner.

Life in the Belly of the Beast

Accordingly, in early 2011, I enrolled in the Bachelor of Theology course at United Theological College in a Sydney suburb close to my home.  The College is formally affiliated to a public university, Charles Sturt University, but occupies land and buildings owned by the Uniting Church of Australia.

Now the theology of the Uniting Church is notoriously liberal.  But I hoped that as a mature student, I would be able to engage in academic debates and discussions in a comparatively free and frank manner.  I was not aware, however, that the College’s commitment to the political theology of multiculturalism is so powerful that the student body is now made up mainly of Pacific Islanders—especially Tongans—and Koreans, with an admixture of Indonesians and Black Africans.

Life as a student at UTC has taught me what it means to be a member of a (despised) ethnic minority.  A few weeks into the first term, I attended the seminar on “Myths of Whiteness” which featured Dr. Anthony Reddie as its headline speaker.  Proudly describing himself as a native Yorkshireman, Reddie is also a prominent “British” exponent of Black theology.

He found a receptive, predominantly non-White, audience at UTC.  The aim of the seminar, according to one organizer, Dr. Stephen Burns, was to show that for centuries certain people who described themselves as “Whites” subjected Black people to racism, de-humanized them, and treated them as animals.

Accordingly, the 100 or more people in attendance were treated to hours of anti-White rhetoric from Reddie and the eight non-White respondents who commented on his presentations.

When, at long last, I had the opportunity to ask how “racism” can exist if, as Reddie claims, there is no such thing as “race,” a College lecturer, Dr. Jione Havea, quickly appeared at my side.  He placed a red dot prominently on my name tag, a stigmatic ritual intended to signal to all present that I no longer had permission to speak.

“Anti-racism” was the watchword not just at the seminar but in the classroom as well.  My open dissent from the relentlessly leftist spin of courses such as “Introduction to Christian Theology” and “Introduction to Old Testament Studies” very quickly aroused the ire of several lecturers.  On 1 April 2011, four of them complained about my allegedly “racist,” “sexist,” “anti-Semitic,” and “supremacist” views to Professor Clive Pearson, Principal of UTC.

Only in late June 2011 did the Principal inform me that he had received complaints about me from both staff and students.  But it was not until mid-October that I learned the identity of the complainants or saw copies of the complaints.

When I did read the complaints, I was amused (and a little flattered) to discover that one tutor was worried that “numerous other students were quite taken with [my] ideas and wanted to hear more about them.”  He expressed “fear that [my] views may mar the theological formation of the other students.”

To avert that danger, Dr. Ben Myers, the lecturer in charge of the introductory theology course, segregated me from my tutorial group—together with the only other older Anglo-Saxon Protestant man.  We were directed to meet privately with Myers for the remainder of the semester.

Only one student, Ms. Radhika Sukumar, a woman of Indian descent, actually lodged a formal written complaint against me.  She is now an employee of the Uniting Church of Australia.  In the first semester of 2011, she studied part-time, taking only one course, “Introduction to Christian Theology.”  Her complaint was lodged with the College Principal on 4 April 2011, three days following the complaints filed by the academic Gang of Four.

Not until 16 November 2011 did the University complete its “investigation,” formally finding me guilty on three counts of academic misconduct: I was said to have (a) demonstrated intolerance for female and ethnic students; and (b) interfered with the studies of female and ethnic students; and (c) distributed an essay containing material that was offensive to female and ethnic students.

As a consequence, I was suspended from my studies for a period of one academic year.  I appealed both the finding of misconduct on my part and the penalty to the Student General Misconduct Appeals Committee of the CSU Council.  The Committee, composed of the Chancellor, Lawrence Willet AO, the Deputy Chancellor, Kathryn Pitkin, and the postgraduate representative, Dr Rowan O’Hagan, upheld both the finding of misconduct and the one-year suspension.

My experience at Macquarie University, Deakin University, and now Charles Sturt University demonstrates that section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act, 1975 has effectively been nullified.

Charles Sturt University, in particular, now asserts the power to impose a speech code in its classrooms which empowers female and ethnic students to short-circuit academic debates and discussions simply by claiming to be “offended” by “politically incorrect” ideas and arguments.

But militant feminists and ethnic students with chips on their shoulders are not solely or even mainly responsible for the collapse of academic freedom in Australian universities.  They are merely “useful idiots” pressed into the service of a globalized system of higher education; their role is to identify and root out the few remaining pockets of dissent from the multicultural orthodoxy governing contemporary academic discourse.

Other minority interests have an even more toxic influence on the corporate culture of Australian universities.  Most obviously, “progressive” academics are keen to set their current ideological hegemony in stone.  But top-heavy university administrations (staffed largely by deracinated, Other-directed WASPs) are no less desperate to maximize the revenue generated by the orderly throughput of undergraduate and postgraduate clients in an increasingly competitive and ostentatiously cosmopolitan academic marketplace.

Can Australian Universities Be Forced to be Free?

The situation is not utterly hopeless however.  It is just barely possible that the law in the books may yet force universities to be free.  My case does seem to offer some hope that the very expensive process judicial review might be invoked to reverse the university’s decision.

I believe that my case can be distinguished easily from Eatock v Bolt.  Andrew Bolt’s articles were not held to be public comments made “reasonably and in good faith.”  The judge characterized his language as so insulting and provocative, sarcastic and mocking, as to be unreasonable.  Therefore, the judge found, Bolt was not entitled to shelter behind section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act, 1975.

Such reasoning cannot be dismissed out of hand.  Significantly, Bolt’s employer, News Ltd, has not appealed the decision.

Bolt’s articles named many of the so-called “fair-skinned Aboriginals” alleged to be sailing under false colours.  The plaintiffs, in other words, were named and shamed.  Clearly, having been held up to public ridicule, they had the requisite legal standing either to sue Bolt in defamation at common law or to invoke the Racial Discrimination Act.

The CSU Appeal Committee cited the Bolt case in support of its own finding that my views, as expressed in class and in an essay that I distributed to some of my classmates were not made “reasonably and in good faith” in the course of academic debates and discussions.  But the facts of my case are very different from those in Eatock v Bolt.

I am alleged to have demonstrated intolerance towards female and ethnic students.  The Bolt case featured a small army of personally aggrieved “fair-skinned Aboriginal” plaintiffs.  In my case, there is only one formal written complaint from a female ethnic student.

Another female ethnic student, Katalina Tahaafe-Williams, one of my Tongan classmates, was interviewed during the sub rosa “investigation” of the complaints against me in September 2011.  In that interview, she asserted baldly that I am “really offensive, everything [I say] is offensive.”  In her view, I made “the classroom environment uncomfortable.”

Mrs Tahaafe-Williams is married to the General Secretary of the Uniting Church and was herself employed for years by that church and its UK affiliates.  She is also a militant feminist and a committed “anti-racist” activist.

Unlike Mrs. Tahaafe-Williams, the Principal of UTC frankly acknowledges that the complaints against me presented him with a serious conflict of interest.  His allegiance to the Uniting Church (which aims to inculcate its political theology of multiculturalism in the student body at UTC) conflicted with his position as Head of the Faculty of Theology in a public university forbidden to impose religious tests or to discriminate against students on political grounds.

The written complaint from my Indian classmate, Ms. Sukumar, cites only two examples of my “racially prejudiced and bigoted” attitudes.  The first arose out of a classroom discussion of the split between German churches in the early years of the Third Reich.  The second referred to my observation during one class that “racist is a code word for white,” made in response to Mrs Tahaafe-Williams’ claim that Kant was a “racist.”

It should be obvious that Ms Sukumar’s first example of my “racist” views had nothing to do with women, Indians, or even Tongans.  In my classroom comments, I merely suggested that the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, was himself lacking in Christian charity when he publicly charged that German churches supporting Hitler’s rise to power had betrayed their primary allegiance to Christ.

In Ms. Sukumar’s mind, such a view “implied that [I] believed the Holocaust never occurred (or at least was greatly exaggerated).”  Under questioning at the appeal hearing, Ms. Sukumar conceded that it requires a very long logical leap to equate criticism of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, largely written by Karl Barth, with holocaust denial.

In any case, neither as a woman nor as an Indian did Ms Sukumar have a dog in my classroom debate with Dr. Myers over the proper role of German churches during the first year or two of the Nazi regime.  (By coincidence—well before I learned of Ms Sukumar’s complaint—I wrote an essay in a second semester ecclesiology course on the issues raised during that classroom controversy.  It is available here and here.)

In late April 2011, after being removed from my tutorial group in “Introduction to Christian Theology,” I distributed another essay to some of my classmates (including Mrs Tahaafe-Williams who made an informal complaint about it to Dr Myers).

This allegedly insulting and offensive essay (which received a Distinction grade from Dr. Myers), entitled “Whiteness as a Problem in Theology” (available here), was not mentioned in Ms Sukumar’s written complaint.  Only at the appeal hearing on 6 February, 2012, did she opine that the paper was “racist,” “insulting,” and “offensive.”

During that hearing, I asked her whether the paper had anything to say about either women or Indians and she agreed that it did not.  I then asked her why she was insulted and offended by the paper, and she answered, “partly as a person, and partly as a person of colour.”

The essay in question reviews a book on whiteness as a problem in theology written by an American Negro scholar, J Kameron Carter, who contends that all people of colour should unite in a common struggle against racist White power structures in the USA and elsewhere.  In other words, it is a book that illustrates the truth of the proposition that “anti-racism is anti-white.”

Given the opportunity to “refresh” her memory of the paper at the appeal hearing, Ms. Sukumar cited the last sentence of that essay as an “insulting” and “offensive” example of “racism.”

Here is the offending sentence:

Indeed, Carter is doing the devil’s work when he finds something Christ-like in Black America’s descent over the past century into a dysfunctional and degrading culture of rampant welfare dependency, drug addiction, soaring rates of illegitimacy, escalating violence, and chronic criminality.

The appeal committee found that language to be so provocative and insulting that it falls outside section 18D of the Act.  But I ask: How can an Indian woman in Australia claim to be insulted and offended by an essay discussing a festering problem for which many thoughtful American Negroes hold their own people responsible?  (See, for example, this You Tube video produced by Pastor James Manning, or this article on rising BlackBlack pathologies by a prominent Negro journalist.)

Once again, neither Mrs Tahaafe-Williams nor Ms Sukumar has a racial, ethnic, or gendered dog in the academic debate between J Kameron Carter and me.  Under the Racial Discrimination Act, a person belonging to one protected minority cannot be insulted or offended vicariously on behalf of another racial or ethnic group.

In my own brush with the Australian Human Rights Commission a few years ago, a complaint against my comments on African and Chinese immigration lodged by an Argentinean man was dismissed summarily on the ground that he was not a member of a group reasonably likely to have been offended by my remarks.

Nothing I have done or said insulted or offended any named individual. Nothing mentioned by Ms Sukumar in her written complaint, or even orally at the appeal hearing ten months later, can be construed as insulting or offensive to women or Indians.

Significantly, however, Ms Sukumar did suggest that she was offended as a “person of colour” by the concluding sentence of “Whiteness as a Problem in Theology.”  Since she is not an American Negro, Ms. Sukumar thereby implies that “anti-racism” is indeed a code word for “anti-White.”

Given a racial/ethnic conflict between American Whites and American Negroes, Ms. Sukumar feels an immediate sense of solidarity with Blacks allegedly oppressed by White racism. Both Mrs. Tahaafe-Williams and Dr. Anthony Reddie display the same animus towards “Whites.”

Mrs Tahaafe-Williams, for example, has written an article on “multicultural ministry,” in which she holds Immanuel Kant, inter alia, responsible “for the systematic institutionalization of racism.”  The German Enlightenment philosopher allegedly helped to pioneer the scientific racism “whereby Europe’s (translation: White peoples’) sense of its cultural and racial superiority was systematized and institutionalized.”  Like J Kameron Carter’s book, Mrs. Tahaafe-Williams’ article strongly suggests that “anti-racism” really is just a code-word for “anti-White.”

For his part, Dr Anthony Reddie makes the same point explicitly in his book, Is God Colour-Blind? Insights from Black Theology for Christian Ministry.  Dr. Reddie writes that the meaning of the term Black is not restricted “to those who are of African descent.”  Nor does it “simply refer to skin colour.”  Rather, he “opens it up to all people who are non-White and who are struggling in solidarity for liberation over and against the forces of White, male-dominated power structures.”

Conclusion

A serendipitously ironic twist of fate led me to write, “reasonably and in good faith,” academically respectable essays elaborating on the two comments made in Dr. Myers classes which provided Ms Sukumar with the “worst” examples of my “racist” views.

One hopes that it will be as obvious to an Australian court as it is to me that in neither case did I say or write anything that can be adjudged “insulting” and “offensive” to Tongan or Indian women within the meaning of the Racial Discrimination Act.

If I am right in that assessment, and, more importantly, if a critical mass of Anglo-Australian activists emerges to help me mount a successful legal challenge to the CSU decision, academic freedom in Australia may yet arise from its deathbed with renewed vigour.

Opportunity knocks!  It is time for an Anglo-Australian Civil Rights movement to secure, by litigation if necessary, legally protected zones of free inquiry and free expression within the nation’s universities and colleges.  Even such small-scale struggles for liberation from the false gods of corporate neo-communism will inspire a home-grown ethno-patriotism in institutions (above all, churches and universities) now given over, body and soul, to the worship of The Other.

Why Conservatives Always Lose

In our modern Western societies, liberals do all the laughing, and conservatives do all the crying. Liberals may find this an extraordinary assertion, given that over the past century their preferred political parties have spent more time out of power than their conservative rivals, and, indeed, no radical Left party has ever held a parliamentary or congressional majority. Yet, this view is only possible if one regards a Labour or a Democratic party as ‘the Left’, and a Conservative or a Republican party as ‘the Right’—that is, if one considers politics to be limited to liberal politics, and regards the negation of liberalism as a negation of politics. The reality is that in modern Western societies, both ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ consist of liberals, only they come in two flavours: radical and less radical. And whether one is called liberal or conservative is simply a matter of degree, not of having a fundamentally different worldview. The result has been that the dominant political outlook in the West has drifted ever ‘Leftwards’. It has been only the speed of the drift that has changed from time to time.

This is not to deny the existence of conservatism. Conservatism is real. This is to say that conservatism, even in its most extreme forms, operates against, and is inevitably dragged along by, this Leftward-drifting background. And this is crucial if we are to have a true understanding of modern conservatism and why conservatives are always losing, even when electoral victories create the illusion that conservatives are frequently winning.

It would be wrong, however, to attribute the endless defeat of conservatism entirely to the Leftward drift of the modern political cosmos. That would an abrogation of conservatives’ responsibility for their own defeats. Conservatives are responsible for their own defeats. The causes stem less from liberalism’s dominance, than from the very premise of conservatism. Triumphant liberalism is made possible by conservatism, while triumphant conservatism leads eventually to liberalism. Anyone dreaming of ‘taking back his country’ by supporting the conservative movement, and baffled by its inability to stop the march of liberalism, has yet to understand the nature of his cause. The brutal truth: he is wasting his time.

Defeating liberalism requires acceptance of two fundamental statements.

• Traditionalism is not conservatism.
• Liberal defeat implies conservative defeat.

Much of our ongoing conversation about the future of Western society has focused on the deconstruction of liberalism. Not much of it has focused on a deconstruction of conservatism. Most deconstructions of conservatism have come from the Left, and, as we will see, there is good reason for this. It is time conservatism be deconstructed from outside the Left (and therefore also the Right). I say ‘also’ because neither conservatism nor traditionalism I class as ‘the Right’. Neither do I accept that ‘Right wing’ is the opposite of ‘Left wing’; ‘the Right’ is predicated on ‘the Left’, and is therefore not independent of ‘the Left’. Consequently, any use of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ coming from this camp is and has always been expedient; I expect such terms to disappear from current usage once the political paradigm has fundamentally changed.

Below I describe eight salient traits that define conservatism, explain the long-term pattern of conservative defeats, and show how liberalism and conservatism are complementary and mutually reinforcing partners, rather than contrasting enemies.

Anatomy of Conservatism

Fear

Proponents of the radical Left like to describe the politics of the Right as ‘the politics of fear’. Leftist propaganda may be full of invidious characterisations, false dichotomies, and outright lies, but this is one observation that, when applied to conservatism, is entirely correct. The reason conservatives conserve and are suspicious of youth and innovation is that they fear change. Conservatives prefer order, fixity, stability, and predictable outcomes. One of their favourite refrains is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. There is some wisdom in that, and there are, indeed, advantages to this view, since it requires less effort, permits forward planning, and reduces the likelihood of stressful situations. Once a successful business or living formula is found, one can settle quite comfortably into a reassuring routine in a slow world of certainties, which at best allows for gradual and tightly controlled evolution. Change ends the routine, breaks the formula, disrupts plans, and lead to stressful situations that demand effort and speed, cause stress and uncertainty, and may have unpredictable outcomes. Conserving is therefore an avoidance strategy by risk-averse individuals who do not enjoy the challenge of thinking creatively and adapting to new situations. For conservatives change is an evil to be feared.

No answers

We can deduce then that the reason conservatives fear change is that they are not very creative. Creativity, after all, involves breaking the mould, startling associations, unpredictability. Conservatives are disturbed by change because they generally know not how to respond. This is the primary reason why, when change does occur, as it inevitably does, their response tends to be slow and to focus on managing symptoms rather than addressing causes. This is also the primary reason why they either plan well ahead against every imaginable contingency or remain in a state of denial until faced with immediate unavoidable danger. Conservatives are first motivated by fear and then paralysed by it.

Defensive

Unfortunately for conservatives, the world is ever changing, the universe runs in cycles, and anything alive is always subject to unpredictable changes in state. Because they generally have no answers, this puts conservatives always on the defensive. The only time conservatives take aggressive action is when planning against possible disruptions to their placid life. They are the last to show initiative in anything else because being a pioneer is risky, fraught with stress and uncertainties. Thus, conservatism is always a resistance movement, a movement permanently on the back foot, fighting a tide that keeps on coming. The conservatives’ main preoccupation is holding on to their positions, and ensuring that, when retreat becomes inevitable, their new position is as close as possible to their old one. Once settled into a new position, any lull in the tide becomes an opportunity to recover the previous position. However, because lulls do not last long enough and recovering lost positions is difficult, the recovery is at best partial, never wholly successful. Conservatives are consequently always seen as failures and sell-outs, since eventually they are always forced to compromise.

Necrophiles

Their lack of creativity leads conservatives to look for answers in the past. This goes beyond learning the lessons from history. Averse to risk, they mistrust novelty, which makes their present merely a continuation of the past. In this they contrast against both liberals and traditionalists: for the former the present is a delay of the future, for the latter it is a moment between what was and will be. At the same time, conservatives resemble the liberals, and contrast against traditionalists more than they think. One reason is that they confuse tradition with conservation, overlooking that tradition involves cyclical renewal rather than museological restoration. Museological restoration is what conservatives are about. Their domain is the domain of the dead, embalmed or kept alive artificially with systems of life support. Another reason is that both liberals and conservatives are obsessed with the past: because they love it much, conservatives complain that things of the past are dying out; because they hate it much, liberals complain that things of the past are not dying out soon enough! One is necrophile, the other a murderer. Both are about death. In contrast, traditionalism is about life, for life is a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and renewal.

Boring

Fear, resistance to change, lack of creativity, and an infatuation with dead things makes conservatives boring. Dead things can be interesting, of course, and in our modern throwaway society, dead things can have the appeal of the exotic, particularly since they belong to a time when the emphasis was on quality rather than quantity. Quality, understood both as high quality and possessing qualities, is linked to rarity or uniqueness, excitement or surprise, and, therefore, creativity or unpredictability. Conservatives, however, conserve because they long for a world of certainties—slow, secure, comfortable, and with predictable outcomes. Granted: such an existence can be pleasant given optimal conditions, and it may indeed be recommended in a variety of situations, but it is not exciting. Excitement involves precisely the conditions and altered states that conservatives fear and seek to avoid. It thus becomes difficult to get excited about anything conservative.

Old

There are good reasons why conservatism is associated with old age. As a person grows old he loses his taste for excitement; his constitution is less robust, he has less energy, he has fewer reserves, he has rigidified in mind and body, and he is less capable of the rapid, flexible responses demanded by intense situations and sudden shocks. It makes sense for a person to become more conservative as he grows old, but this is hardly a process relished by anyone. Once old enough to be taken seriously, the desire is always to remain young and delay the signs of old age. Expressing boredom by saying that something ‘got old’ implies a periodic need for change. Conservatives oppose change, so they get old very fast.

Irrelevant

Preoccupation with the past, resistance to change, and mistrust of novelty eventually makes conservatives irrelevant. This is particularly the case in a world predicated on the desirability of progress and constant innovation. Conservatives end up becoming political antiquarians, rather than effective powerbrokers: they operate not as leaders of men, but as curators in a museum.

Losers

Sooner of later, through their refusal to adapt until they become irrelevant, conservatives are constantly left behind, waving a fist at the world with angry incomprehension. Because eventually survival necessitates periodic surrenders and regroupings at positions further to the Left, conservatives come to be seen as spineless, as people always in retreat, as, in short, losers. The effective function of a conservative in present-day society is to organise surrender, to ensure retreats are orderly, to keep up vain hopes or a restoration, so that there is never risk of a revolutionary uprising.

Liberalism’s Best Ally

With the above in mind, it is hard not to see conservatism as liberalism’s own controlled opposition: it may not be that way, but the effect is certainly the same. Conservatism provides periodic respite after a bout of liberalism, allowing citizens to adapt and grow accustomed to its effects before the next wave of liberalisation. Worse still, conservative causes, because they eventually always become irrelevant, provide a rationale for liberalism, supplying proof for the Left of why it is and should remain the only game in town. Liberals love conservatives.

Conservatism and Tradition

Conservatism does not have to be liberalism’s best ally: conservatism can be the best ally of any anti-establishment movement, since it always comes to represent the boring alternative. Conservatives defend the familiar, but familiarity breeds contempt, so over time people lose respect for what is and grow willing to experience some turbulence—results may be unpredictable and may indeed turn out to be negative, but at least the turbulence makes people feel alive, like there is something they can be actively involved in. In the age of liberalism, conservatism is fundamentally liberal: it does not defend tradition, since liberalism has caused it to be forgotten for the most part, but an earlier version of liberalism. In an age of tradition, conservatism could well be the best ally of a rival tradition, since conservatism always stagnates what is, thus increasing receptivity over time to any kind of change. Thus conservatism sets the conditions for destructive forms of change.

By contrast, tradition is evolution, and so long as it avoids the trap of conservatism (stagnation), those within the tradition remain engaged with it. This is not to say that traditions are immune from self-destructive events and should never be abandoned: hypertely, maladaption, or pathological evolution, for example, can destroy a tradition from within. However, that is outside our scope here.

Confusion of Tradition and Conservation

In the age of liberalism, because it has forgotten tradition, tradition is confused with conservation. Thus some conservatives describe themselves as traditionalists, even though they are just archaic liberals. Some self-described traditionalists may erroneously adopt conservative traits, perhaps out of a confused desire to reject liberalism’s notions of progress. Tradition and conservation are distinct and separate processes. Liberalism may contain its own traditions. Liberalism may also become conservative in its rejection of tradition. Likewise for conservatism, except that it rejects liberalism and does so only ostensibly, not in practice.

End of Liberalism

Ending liberalism requires an end to conservatism. We should never call ourselves conservatives. The distinction between tradition and conservation must always be made, for transcending the present ‘Left’-‘Right’ paradigm of modern democratic politics in the West demands a great sorting of what is traditional from what is conservative, so that the former can be rediscovered, and the latter discarded as part of the liberal apparatus.

In doing so we must be alert to the trap of reaction. Reactionaries are defined by their enemies, and thus become trapped in their enemies’ constructions, false dichotomies, and unspoken assumptions. Rather than rejection, the key word is transcendence. The end of liberalism is achieved through its transcendence, its relegation into irrelevance.

Given the confusion of our times, it must be stressed that tradition is not about returning to an imagined past, or about reviving a practice that was forgotten so that it may be continued exactly as it was when it was abandoned. There may have been a valid reason for abandoning a particular practice, and the institution of a new practice may have been required in order for the tradition successfully to continue. A tradition, once rediscovered, must be carried forward. Continuation is not endless replication.

After Liberalism

The measure of our success in this enterprise will be seen in the language.

We know liberalism has been successful because many of us ended up defining ourselves as a negation of everything that defined liberalism. Many of the words used to describe our political positions are prefixed with ‘anti-‘. This represented an adoption by ‘anti-liberals’ of negative identities manufactured by liberals for purposes of affirming themselves in ways that suited their convenience and flattered their vanity.

Ending liberalism implies, therefore, the development of a terminology that transcends liberalism’s constructions. Only when they begin describing themselves as a negation of what we are will we know we have been successful, for their lack of an affirmative, positive vocabulary will be indicative that their identity has been fully deconstructed and is then socially, morally, and philosophically beyond the pale.

Developing such a vocabulary, however, is a function of our determining once again who we are and what we are about. Without a metaphysics to define the tradition and drive it forward, any attempt at a cultural revolution will fail. A people need a metaphysics if they are to tell their story. If the story of who we are and where we are going cannot be told for lack of a defining metaphysic, any attempt at a cultural revolution will need to rely on former stories, will therefore lapse into conservatism, and thus into tedium and irrelevance.

After Conservatism

One cannot be for Western culture if one is not for the things that define Western culture. A metaphysics, and therefore ‘our story’, is defined through art. Art, in the broadest possible sense, gives expression to values, ideals, and sentiments that a people share and feel in the core of their beings, but which often cannot be articulated in words. Therefore, the battle for Western identity is waged at this level, not in the political field, even if identity is a political matter. Similarly, any attempt to use art for political purposes fails, because politics, being merely the art of the possible, is defined by culture, not the other way around.

In the search for ‘our story’, we must not confuse art with craft. Craftmanship may be defined by tradition, and a tradition may find expression in crafts, making them ‘traditional’, but the two are not synonymous. Similarly, craftsmanship may improve art, but craft is not art anymore than art is craft. Art explores and defines. Craft reproduces and perpetuates. Thus, art is to tradition what craft is to conservatism. This is why contemporary art, being an extreme expression of liberal ideals, is without craftsmanship, and why art with craftsmanship is considered conservative, illustration, or ‘outsider’.

Those concerned with the continuity of the West often treat reading strictly non-fiction and classics as proof of their seriousness and dedication, but ironically it will be when they start reading fiction and making new fiction that they will be at their most serious and dedicated. If tradition implies continuity and not simple replication, then it also implies ongoing creation and not simple preservation.

After Tradition

No tradition has eternal life. Ours will some day end. Liberalism sees its fulfilment as the end of history, but that is their cosmology, not ours. Therefore, liberalism does not—and should never—indicate to us that we have reached the end of the line. The degeneration of the West is tied to the degeneration of liberalism. The West will be renewed when the liberals come crashing down. They will be reduced to an obsolete and irrelevant subculture living off memories and preoccupied with conserving whatever they have left. Once regenerated, the West will continue until its tradition self-destructs or is replaced by another. Whatever tradition replaces ours may be autochthonous, but it could well be the tradition of another race. If that proves so, that will be the end of our race. Thus, so long as our race remains vibrant, able to give birth to new metaphysics when old ones die, we may live on, and be masters of our destiny.

Elite and Underclass

Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010

By Charles Murray
New York, NY: Crown Forum, 2012

Reviewed by F. Roger Devlin

At 416 pages, Coming Apart is Charles Murray’s most substantial offering since 2003’sHuman Accomplishment. It continues a theme familiar to readers of The Bell Curve: increasing American social stratification. Murray focuses on whites because otherwise the social trends he describes might lazily be explained away as effects of demographic change; he demonstrates that the trends are almost wholly unaffected by race or immigration. As he notes, a constant focus on how racial minorities ‘lag’ whites serves to distract attention from important changes in the benchmark population itself.

The author begins with a description of American life on the eve of the Kennedy assassination, highlighting everything which would shock the younger generation: just three TV channels; no Thai restaurants; ‘coffee’ meant Maxwell House. If you missed a movie when it was in the theaters, you would not get to see it at all.

The products of the entertainment industry still usually validated American norms. Subjects such as abortion and homosexuality were never touched upon in television shows, only rarely and disapprovingly in movies. Most liberals were willing to say that extramarital sex was wrong. Only three and one-half percent of American families were headed by a divorced parent. In many neighborhoods, houses were left unlocked and children could go about unsupervised.

But American women had “much to be outraged about,” the author tells us, such as being expected to marry and have children! If Murray gets portrayed as a ‘hard-rightist,’ it is only because presenting data honestly is now all such a designation requires or implies.

Such class differentiation as existed in 1963 was only reluctantly acknowledged: ninety-five percent of Americans described themselves as either working class or middle class. Poor people refused to think of themselves as lower class, and rich people were almost as reluctant to be considered upper class. A typical house in exclusive Chevy Chase, Maryland cost only twice as much as the nationwide average. People who could afford luxury cars often refrained from a fear of seeming ‘ostentatious’ – an old protestant pejorative which has now mostly disappeared from American English.

This was still recognizably the American society observed by Tocqueville one-hundred-thirty years before: “In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

The people who had risen to the top in 1963 had little in common except their success. Most had grown up in middle-class or working-class families, and they retained the preferences and tastes of those milieus. Their status was precarious, and often not successfully transmitted across even a single generation. In other words, America was ruled by a rapidly circulating elite, not by an upper class. (The “old money” families of Philadelphia, New York and Boston were an exception, but their numbers were tiny and as a class they had no influence on the nation’s destiny.)

Coming Apart tells the story of how this equilibrium was upset in the years that followed. Murray first discusses the rise of a new upper class; then, turning to the opposite end of the social scale, he shows how the white working class has deteriorated into a proletariat.

The new upper class is a product of our higher-tech economy, which relies heavily on people with exceptional cognitive abilities. A young person with outstanding mathematical ability might formerly have aspired to become a college professor; today he can make a killing writing code or managing a quant fund. Business decision-making has also become more complex and the stakes are higher. “Today, if a first-rate attorney can add ten percent to the probability of getting a favorable decision on a regulatory ruling worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he is worth his many-hundreds-of-dollars-per-hour rate.”

The more efficient exploitation of cognitive ability has created enormous new wealth, but the benefits have been concentrated heavily at the very top of the income distribution. For over half of America, income has remained flat in real terms since around 1970.

American Family Income Distribution

Economic change alone cannot explain how this new elite has become a self-perpetuatingclass. For this we must look at postwar developments in higher education.

At one time, geography largely determined where most people went to college; even the Ivy League catered to the Northeastern social elite rather than the cognitive elite of the entire nation. Since the 1960s, however, our higher education system has come to function as a sorting mechanism for grouping youngsters according to intellectual ability. An American’s cognitive ability can, with ever-increasing exactness, be inferred from the college he attended.

Murray defines the cognitive elite as the top five centiles of cognitive ability. By 2000, just forty-one schools took in half these students. Today, “the typical classroom in an elite school has no one outside the top decile of cognitive ability, and many who are in the top hundredth or thousandth.”

As the author notes, most Americans’ notion of meritocracy is that all the brainy kids scattered across the fruited plains should be offered the same chance to develop their talents. The social class of one’s parents is not supposed to matter. This is not how things worked out, for two reasons: 1) cognitive ability is significantly heritable, and 2) it is now the major determinant of social status.

College education occupies young people during their prime mate-seeking years. Combine this fact with the cognitive sorting now performed by the college admissions process and you get intellectual homogamy: people marrying those with similar cognitive ability. This level of ability tends rather strongly to get passed on to their offspring. Most children within the cognitive elite have parents with an average IQ of 117 or more. Only about 14 percent of them are produced by parents from the bottom half of the distribution.

So while the brilliant son of a plumber from Podunk will still occasionally break into the Ivy League, there will never be enough others like him to determine the character of those schools. Most of his classmates will come from affluent families, and a disproportionate number from the new upper class itself. American meritocracy has ended up producing something like a hereditary upper class.

As Murray acknowledges, this new class has its virtues: they are well-mannered, make good neighbors, seldom get divorced, are devoted parents, careful about their health, and make sincere efforts to be socially responsible. At times, such virtues are driven to comic excess. The obsessive parenting of the new upper class has earned them the nickname “helicopter parents” from harried college administrators. Certain members insist upon drinking their fair-trade organically-grown coffee only from recycled mugs. Others not only jog and take the latest vitamin supplement daily, but react with moral abhorrence to second-hand smoke and saturated fats. The author recommends David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise as a witty anthropological description of this new ‘bourgeois bohemian’ class.

“The culture of the new upper class carries with it an unmistakable whiff of ‘we’re better than the rabble,’” observes Murray. So, as a technical term to designate that class’s members, he suggests “Overeducated Elitist Snobs.” (The small-town Iowa boy still shows through Murray’s Harvard varnish.) He even includes a quiz by which the reader can gauge his own level of elitist snobbery. If you don’t know who Jimmie Johnson is, you may be in trouble.

Like everyone else, Overeducated Elitist Snobs prefer to live near others who share their background, tastes and concerns. Once they concentrate in significant numbers in any neighborhood, they inevitably begin to reshape it in their own image.

When Murray was at Harvard between 1961 and 1965, he reports, the students and professors of Cambridge, Massachusetts did not command the necessary critical mass. The town had some funky bookshops and folk-music joints, but the local eateries still catered to the working class majority. Harvard kids still rubbed shoulders with ordinary Americans.

Over the following generation, the working class was driven out by high-tech professionals and research organizations. Greasy-spoon diners gave way to gourmet espresso bars. A geographical and mental bubble grew up around the inhabitants of Cambridge.

The same process has been occurring in other college towns, the Philadelphia suburbs, Austin, TX, Seattle and elsewhere. These places have become the ‘Bourgeois Bohemian Paradises’ where you can find asiago-encrusted focaccia served with tarragon-infused olive oil after midnight.

To define such neighborhoods objectively, Murray created a scoring system that combined average income with percentage of college graduates. Then he ranked zip code areas nationwide. Those with scores in the top five centiles he designated “SuperZips.” There are 882 of them in America.

As of 2000, the SuperZips were still eighty-two percent white (including Jewish), while the percentage of whites in the rest of the country had sunk to just sixty-eight. Asians were eight percent in SuperZips, three in the rest of the country. Blacks and Latinos were three percent each in SuperZips, but twelve and six, respectively, elsewhere. A second edition ofComing Apart will update these figures from 2010 census data.

SuperZips tend to cluster together. The four largest clusters surround New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which together account for thirty-nine percent of America’s SuperZip inhabitants. Smaller clusters are associated with Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Large swaths of America contain no such zip codes.

Why is the clustering of SuperZips important? “A class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else, but doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives, is vulnerable to making mistakes.” They think having cheap Central American gardeners and nannies is terrific. It doesn’t occur to them that the policies which provide their servants also result in Blacks shot dead in the streets of South Central Los Angeles or less affluent White families forced to flee to Colorado. (My example, not Murray’s)

It will come as no surprise that a class so alienated from the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans tends to be liberal. This tendency is especially strong in the four largest SuperZip clusters around New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Conservative SuperZips of a sort can be found elsewhere, but the inhabitants are readingThe Wall Street Journal, not The Occidental Quarterly. Murray emphasizes that the shared culture of the new upper class is remarkably constant across the political spectrum.

After a hundred-odd pages on Overeducated Elitist Snobs, Coming Apart shifts its focus to the bottom end of the social spectrum: the new lower class. In the older America, ‘lower-class’ referred only to blacks, “the broken down denizens of the Bowery and Skid Row, or the people known as white trash.” Apart from blacks, such people were numerically insignificant. The working class was something altogether different. Indeed,

for most of its history, working-class America was America. In 1900, 90 percent of American workers were employed in low-level white-collar or technical jobs, manual and service jobs, or worked on farms. Even in 1960, 81 percent of workers were still employed in those jobs.

Most of America’s ‘poor’ were simply working-class people who didn’t make a lot of money.

Since the 1960s, white working-class America has suffered a catastrophic decline in virtue. Referring explicitly to Aristotle, Murray defines virtue as the habits which people require to live satisfying lives and which communities require to function as communities. A well-policed authoritarian state may be able to carry on after a fashion, if not prosper, in the absence of the virtues. America, however, has traditionally allowed its citizens a large measure of personal freedom:

Americans were subject to criminal law, which forbade the usual crimes against person and property, and to tort law, which regulated civil disputes. But otherwise, Americans faced few legal restrictions on their freedom of action and no legal obligations to their neighbors except to refrain from harming them. The guides to their behavior at any more subtle level had to come from within.

Such internal principles are precisely what the now-unfashionable term ‘virtue’ signifies. Murray distinguishes four virtues which have been especially important in the history of America: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity.

Industriousness refers to “the bone-deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work, making a better life for oneself and one’s children.” Henry Adams pointed out that the spirit of industriousness affected those on the bottom of American society more powerfully than those on the top:

Reversing the old-world system, the American stimulant increased in energy as it reached the lowest and most ignorant class, whirling them upward as in the blast of a furnace. The penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was caught and consumed by it; for every stroke of the axe and the hoe made him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children.

America was understood by both natives and immigrants as a land of opportunity, and the most characteristically American of virtues was the industriousness which permitted Americans to take advantage of their opportunities.

Honesty is a necessary precondition for a republican constitution and a free market. One Scottish visitor remarked upon the tedious regularity with which Americans would ask him whether he did not admire “the extraordinary respect which the people pay to the law.” Our limited data indicate a very low crime rate in early America: one study of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, found an average rate of prosecution for theft of 2.7 per 10,000 population between 1760 and 1810. Tocqueville remarked upon how few public officers were charged with apprehending crime. Sympathy for criminals was nearly non-existent.

Marriage is properly an institution rather than a virtue, of course, but it involves the exercise of certain virtues: loyalty and sexual temperance at a minimum, usually patience as well. There is little explicit evidence for the importance of marriage in early American society because the matter was regarded as self-evident; indeed, our current confusion about the nature and purpose of marriage has no precedent in history.

Some observers, however, did remark on the seriousness with which Americans took their marital vows. Tocqueville wrote that Americans “consider marriage as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfill.” And the Austrian-born immigrant Francis Grund said: “I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principle source of all their other qualities.”

When Murray named his fourth American virtue ‘religiosity,’ I suspected it might be simply an unforthright way of saying ‘Christianity.’ Yet it is not specifically Christian doctrine he has in mind. In part, religiosity consists in the ethical monotheism bequeathed to Christendom by the Old Testament. John Adams, who was fully cognizant of America’s debt to Greece and Rome, wrote:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation [by propagating] to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

Religion is also a crucial source of what sociologists call ‘social capital.’ Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) has noted that “nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.” But this is not all: religious persons also account for a disproportionate share of social capital which is not explicitly religious:

People who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion and study groups; fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.

And Putnam is referring to religion’s role in society today!

The decline in the four American virtues was preceded, as the author points out, by a subtle change in American thinking:

The belief that being a good American involved behaving in certain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade [by 1950] and has not revived. It came to be tacitly assumed that the American system itself would work under any circumstances as long as we got the laws right.

Murray then documents that decline, restricting his study to white Americans between the ages of 30 and 49 (‘prime age adults’), who have normally completed their educations and are engaged in careers and/or raising families. Within this set, he defines the working classas those with no more than a high school diploma, who work in blue collar, service, or low-level white collar jobs, or are not working. In 1960, this class included sixty-four percent of prime age Whites; by 2010, it had shrunk to thirty. The author’s principle finding is that the decline in the four American virtues has been steepest among this class.

According to a widespread perception, more prosperous Americans have become highly secular, while those in modest circumstances have tended to remain religious. Murray’s data do not bear this out. According to the annual General Social Survey (GSS), unbelievers account for twenty-one percent of the working class, slightly higher than the figure for the upper middle class.

But besides outright unbelievers, there is a larger set of people who may feel they ‘ought’ to be more religious, and who state a religious preference, but also acknowledge they do not attend worship services more than once a year. Murray denominates this group the “de facto seculars.” It is here that the decline in working class religiosity becomes especially apparent. Adding the two classes together, we find the total level of secularization approaching sixty percent. For the upper middle class, the figure is still around forty, though also growing.

Of working class whites who remain religious, an increasing share has turned to fundamentalist denominations. Such groups are more inclined to wear their religious commitments on their sleeves. Murray believes the increase in these high-profile believers explains the misperception that the working class as a whole has remained religious.

Criminal statistics show a large rise in crime affecting the white working class. Murray computes the proportion of prisoners in the adult working class population and finds that between 1974 and 2004 it grew by a factor of five. The corresponding statistics for the upper middle class are extremely low and remained largely unchanged during the same period.

There has been a well-publicized forty percent drop in crime since 1991, but this does not necessarily reflect a decline in criminality. The American prison population has exploded during the same period. We may just be getting better at locking criminals up.

Criminal statistics clearly do not tell the whole story of the decline in honesty. As Murray observes: “It would be nice to know if there have been trends in the consistency with which people keep their word, insist on taking personal responsibility for their mistakes, and tell the cashier when they have been given too much change.” But it is not easy to find data of this type. He does mention that the “a quadrupling of personal bankruptcies over a period [1986-2005] that included one of the most prosperous decades in American history looks suspiciously like a decline in personal integrity.” He was unable to disaggregate this data by social class.

Murray illustrates his statistics with anecdotes concerning a largely white working class neighborhood in Philadelphia called Fishtown. Back in the early 1970s, the place was the despair of social workers, who could not understand why residents would be disinclined to have governmental ‘help’ administered to them; one concluded they were “psychologically unable to face up to their social, cultural and economic deprivation.” Unfortunately, Fishtown has made a lot of progress since then.

In earlier days, the neighborhood was strongly Catholic. Most children attended parochial school, and “the church’s teachings—among others, that the home is a domestic church—gave validation to the core values of Fishtown.” By the late 1990s, one sociologist described religious observance thus:

Typical attire for most men at mass [includes] blue jeans, sneakers, and “Eagles” jackets with hoods. Older people and some younger parents in their 20s and 30s genuflected before entering the pews. I did not see any children performing this ritual, or saying any prayers for that matter. Most were standing around with their coats on throughout the service; they looked rather blank.

One Fishtown parochial school closed due to low enrollment in 2006; a second followed in 2011.

Crime was not much of a problem in earlier days, when residents sometimes administered rough justice without resorting to the police. If you found your car broken into, “you went to where the [glue sniffers] hung out, bashed some heads and found out who did it easy enough.” Even the local gangs “were kind of like vigilantes—beat the crap out of thieves, dopeheads, etc.”

When intact families were the rule in Fishtown, there was a great deal of solidarity between them:

If a neighbor saw a child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence.

The increasingly common unmarried and divorced Fishtowners are less likely to behave this way today, and many parents try to curry favor with their children through lax discipline. One Fishtown woman’s apathy at the deteriorating situation has become so conspicuous that it has earned her the nickname “Not-my-kid Sue.”

Perhaps the biggest changes to come over white working-class neighborhoods like Fishtown in recent decades has been a decline in marriage. In 1960, over eighty percent of prime age working class whites were married; the figure has since plummeted to around fifty. Meanwhile, the number who have never married has risen from under ten percent to about twenty-five. He claims the increase “was driven mostly by the retreat of men from the marriage market.”

The decline in marriage has impaired the happiness of adults, but it has been catastrophic for the rising generation. Whether one considers delinquency, criminality, school problems, physical or emotional health or early mortality, children do best when raised by biological parents who remain married and worst when raised by a single mother (results for children of divorced parents fall in the middle).

The number of children born to white, unwed mothers has skyrocketed from three percent in 1960 to nearly thirty percent today. For mothers without a high school diploma, the figure is now around sixty percent. Many of these mothers are teenagers, and their children often end up being raised by the grandparents. Yet among mothers with a college degree, the proportion of unmarried births has yet to rise above three percent.

As marriage has declined, so has male industriousness. White men with only a high school education began dropping out of the labor force in the 1970s; the figure stood at twelve percent on the eve of the current recession. Since the 1980s, working class men have also become more likely than the American population as a whole to be unemployed (but seeking work), and twenty percent of them with employment of some kind are working fewer than forty hours a week. Murray sees no explanation for this, merely noting that it mainly affects the working class. I shall offer some thoughts of my own below.

One small but telling statistic concerns working class men who claim to be unable to work due to a physical disability. As the author notes, this figure must have gone down since 1960, given medical advances and the proliferation of labor saving devices. Yet it has risen from two percent to an utterly incredible ten percent. Disability has become a racket.

A time-use study cited by Murray reveals that “between 1985 and 2005, men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours a week.” The greatest share of this increase was devoted to television viewing, followed by sleeping.

Murray recognizes the strong correlation between the declines in marriage and in male industriousness. Unmarried men are over three and a half times more likely to be out of the labor force than married men, between two and three more times likely to be unemployed but looking, and at least half again as likely to be working fewer than forty hours a week. Some of this difference is due to the preference of women for hardworking men, but more is probably due to the effect on men of marriage itself.

These patterns are also apparent in the history of Fishtown. One local mother reported that her sixteen-year-old daughter had been to six baby showers in four months—just a modest fraction of her fifty-two pregnant classmates. The mother estimated the comparable number from her own youth at around four per year.

A nun teaching at this same Catholic school remarks that some women in the neighborhood are married to men who seem less like husbands than extra sons: “There are women with two bags of groceries in their hands, children hanging on to both sides of their coats, and the husband with his computer game walking behind her down the street. There’s something wrong here!”

One group of Fishtown men calls itself the Sunshine Club. They work summers on the Jersey Shore, then get “some stupid job for a couple of months just to get time in to collect unemployment for the rest of the year until summer rolled around again.”

Another set of men prefer to live off their girlfriends‘ welfare checks; they are known as ‘runners,’ because they must constantly move to keep one step ahead of child support collectors, the police, their girlfriends or their children.

Murray writes that “being a single mother is tough, and it is appropriate to sympathize with women who are in that situation.” He does not say it is appropriate to be sympathetic to the manchildren of Fishtown, and most readers will be left with the impression that what they need is a good kick in the pants. Yet I wonder whether the same factors did not produce the undesirable behavior of both men and women that he notes today.

In the America of 1963, a high school graduate might expect to find a job which would allow him to marry and permit his wife the leisure to stay home raising a few children. He could buy a freestanding house and a car, and still afford to take the family on a two week vacation every summer. The wife would have been reared with a view to preparing her for the duties of marriage and motherhood; she may even have taken ‘Home Ec’ in school.

Then gradually, beginning in the 1960s, women became convinced marriage was an imposition to be ‘outraged’ about. Helen Gurley Brown began whispering in their ears that an independent career path could be filled with exciting romances involving attractive men, free of the ‘drudgery’ to which marriage consigned their mothers. The family income was abolished in favor of ‘equal pay for equal work.’ The law was changed to permit women to divorce their husbands unilaterally and without grounds. (Wives are responsible for around ninety percent of divorces.)

None of this much affects the men at the top of the income and status hierarchy. They make enough money that even women with personal incomes perceive them as supporters and are willing to marry them. If a wife leaves after the baby is born, child support payments are manageable and a replacement wife is easily found.

The Fishtown girls who might have married working men in 1960 may well be earning more than such men today just by sitting at desks entering data. They can obtain higher quality sperm from more desirable men without submitting to the constraints of lifelong monogamy; the ‘ex’ and/or the taxpayer is made to provide for any resulting children. They even enjoy the sympathy of male commentators for the terrible hardship all this supposedly represents. Is it any wonder such women are reluctant to devote their lives to raising the children of ill-paid construction workers?

The contemporary Fishtown man, his wages reduced by female competition and the ever-decreasing market value of upper-body strength, has correspondingly slim chances of earning enough to make himself an acceptable suitor to any woman with an income of her own. These men are not ‘retreating from the marriage market’; they are being driven from it as a matter of deliberate policy.

Even if a particular working class man beats the odds and finds a girl to marry, he cannot expect the satisfaction of supporting her; she may well end up supporting him. And what self-respecting man wants to end up like that poor sap uselessly tagging along behind his wife who just bought all the groceries?

But this is still not the worst. Prospective husbands stand a good chance of losing everything in the divorce settlement within a few years of the wedding. Child support is not so easy when it must be paid through low-skilled labor. Even if you avoid being jailed as a ‘deadbeat dad,’ you will certainly not have enough left over to contemplate a second marriage.

In short, the American dream of a home and family through honest labor is now far out of reach for an increasing number of low-status men. Under these circumstances, what is such a man to do with his life? I’d say an unconstrained bachelor existence with plenty of time for amusements looks very much like a rational choice. The male commentariat may make you out to be a bum, but that sure beats years of performing all the hard work traditionally required to support a family and then not getting the family.

Aristotle understood that certain virtues have social presuppositions: liberality, for example, can hardly be expected from persons living hand-to-mouth. Male industriousness, I would suggest, also presupposes certain social arrangements. Monogamy and the family wage system give you the Irish immigrant who strives to make gentlemen of his children with every blow of his axe; liberated women earning equal pay for their equal work bring forth the men of the Sunshine Club.

So single motherhood and the decline in male industriousness our author describes cannot be spirited away simply by getting men and women to the altar. ‘Outrageous’ though it may seem to a generation steeped in feminist propaganda, the natural economic basis of marriage must also be restored. White men are programmed by evolution to be providers. If you deliberately rearrange society to render this function superfluous, do you have any right to complain when men stop knocking themselves out to perform it?

Murray goes on to describe “the selective collapse of American community”—selective because, so far, it has largely spared the upper middle class.

One of the best known passages in Democracy in America discusses how ‘Americans are forever forming associations,’ and a look at almost any American locality one hundred years ago reveals a complicated interweaving of fraternal, charitable, educational, civic and religious associations busily engaged in all sorts of activities. Biographies of eminent Americans of years gone by are apt to include so bewildering a variety of memberships that the modern reader is left wondering how anyone could have found time for all of them.

Another defining quality of American society was the extent of its neighborliness, i.e., voluntary assistance among unrelated people who happen to live alongside one another. This made the community in which one grew up an important aspect of an American’s identity. One reason the Fishtown of years gone by was so dear to the people who lived there was that neighbors helped one another, looking out for one another’s children and informally exchanging services.

By the 2000s, seventy-five percent of Fishtown residents were socially disengaged, meaning that they no longer belonged to any “sports clubs, hobby clubs, fraternal organizations, nationality organizations (e.g., Sons of Italy) or veterans groups.” Eighty-two percent were civically disengaged, meaning they belonged to no “service groups, youth groups (e.g., being a Scoutmaster), school service groups or local political organizations.”

Much of this decline is due to the erosion of social trust: the expectation that the people around you will do the right thing. Whites’ estimation of the trustworthiness, fairness and helpfulness of others has declined across the board, but that of working class neighborhoods has declined more steeply and from an already lower base.

Robert Putnam’s research has demonstrated that social trust erodes as ethnic diversity increases. This erosion occurs even within each particular ethnic group in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. (Putnam suppressed these results for several years, embarrassed that they contradicted liberal happy-talk.)

The author expresses the hope that the distrust which has accompanied ethnic diversification will diminish over time, but acknowledges that this is only a hope. Of course, we never had to take the gamble: it was decided upon for us by irresponsible elites who have bought their own way out of all the negative consequences.

Murray moves on to a fine discussion of happiness in the spirit of Aristotle. He identifies four principle factors that go to make up a successful human life: family, vocation, community and faith. It is not difficult to see how each of these components of the good life is related, respectively, to the virtues of marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity. Easy as it is to ridicule the old Stoic doctrine that virtue equals happiness, it is also easy to demonstrate a high correlation between the two, especially on the level of society as a whole. A hardworking nation of harmonious families actively involved with one another and living according to the tenets of a generally accepted religious teaching—this is about the closest approach to blessedness compatible with the human condition.

Crunching the data on reported happiness, Murray finds that marriage and vocation are the two most important factors. There is also a strong synergy between them: the benefit from a satisfying vocation (often but not always one’s paid employment) combined with a happy family life is greater than the sum of each considered separately.

It seems reasonably clear that religion plays a significant role in human flourishing, but the precise nature of its role remains elusive. In Murray’s data set, only twenty-three percent of those who never attend religious services describe themselves as ‘very happy.’ This figure gradually rises in tandem with frequency of attendance, reaching forty-nine percent among those who attend more than weekly. Mere belief does not seem to do anything for people apart from participation in worship services and the life of a congregation; on the other hand, Murray’s data do not support Pascal’s famous recommendation that merely going through the motions will cure unbelief.

I can think of one significant fact which seems to fly in the face of the religiosity-happiness correlation: Denmark, with the highest self-reported happiness in the world, is also the most secular nation in Europe. I have no explanation for this.

High levels of community involvement also correlate positively with reported happiness. Volunteering and charitable giving make the biggest difference, but group membership and activities, informal social interaction and even electoral politics also produce benefits.

Income, once it rises above the subsistence level, does not correlate well with reported happiness: “there is no inherent barrier to happiness for a person with a low level of education holding a low-skill job.” But all the virtues that do promote happiness are presently deteriorating among lower-income Americans.

Toward the end of the book, Murray integrates nonwhites into his data. “It was a surprise to me and perhaps it will be a surprise to you: Expanding the data to include all Americans makes hardly any difference at all.” From this he infers:

We are one nation, indivisible, in terms of whites and people of color. Differences in the fortunes of different ethnic groups persist, but white America is not headed in one direction and nonwhite America in another.

I don’t believe this optimistic conclusion is warranted, for two reasons. Firstly, it is contradicted by Robert Putnam’s evidence that racial diversity adversely affects social trust. Murray’s warning—“don’t kid yourselves that we are looking at stresses that could be remedied by restricting immigration”—is unconvincing in this context. Stopping and reversing ethnic diversification might not restore the American sense of community all by itself, but there is every reason to expect it would do a great deal of good.

Secondly, racial conflict tends to express itself politically, and hence tends not to show up in the sorts of social surveys from which the author derived his data set; in Murray’s terminology, it is an artifact of the study. It is true whites have begun suffering from a number of problems formerly associated with the black underclass, but this newfound community in vice and social pathology no more makes whites and blacks indivisible than our pre-existing solidarity in wearing shoes or watching television. If anything, a mutual decline in virtue is likely to intensify political conflict over government benefits.

America in the early twenty-first century is still a powerful and prosperous country but, as the author observes, it is rapidly losing the special qualities which made it a distinctive nation. He compares the process to the transition from republic to empire in ancient Rome:

In terms of wealth, military might, and territorial reach, Rome was at its peak under the emperors. But Rome’s initial downward step, five centuries before the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire, was the loss of the republic. Was that loss important? Not in material terms, but for Romans who treasured the republic, it was a tragedy that no amount of imperial splendor could redeem.

By analogy, the soul of America was the unprecedented freedom it granted private citizens to shape their lives as they wished, leaving them to face the consequences of their own behavior. The very fabric of American society grew out of such freedom, as Murray explains:

Marriage is a strong and vital institution because the family has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are strong and vital because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. [From such responsibility,] an elaborate web of expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that leads to norms of good behavior that support families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, the web frays [and behavior deteriorates].

In essence, this is what is happening to America, and the poorest, least educated class has been first to feel the effects. The disease is progressive, however, since the welfare state inevitably tries to palliate the unfortunate results it produces by assuming still greater responsibilities. But this process cannot go on forever, and eventually civilization becomes unsustainable.

Can America expect five hundred years of imperial grandeur before the final curtain? Apparently, Murray thinks so. Nothing in Coming Apart surprised me as much as the following passage which occurs early on:

The economic dynamics that have produced the class society I deplore have fostered the blossoming of America’s human capital. These dynamics will increase, not diminish, our competitiveness on the world stage in the years ahead. Nor do I forecast decline in America’s military and diplomatic supremacy.

I take this to mean that the new economy’s success in turning high intelligence to account more than makes up for the inefficiencies of the welfare state and military adventurism.

Many nationalists treat it as axiomatic that the Washington regime’s ability to squander its subjects’ wealth, courage and ingenuity will eventually overcome any possible economic arrangement. If Murray is correct, however, the post-collapse strategy recommended by nationalist luminaries such as Guillaume Faye and Yggdrasil could prove dangerously mistaken.

Murray has his own version of the ‘worse is better’ strategy, however, involving the increasingly obvious unsustainability of the welfare state. When the large nations of Northern Europe begin falling into chaos of the sort Greece has recently experienced, it is just possible that Americans will reconsider their options and change direction in time. Alternatively, the irrationality of our own welfare system may soon become apparent to even the dimmest social democrat. Whatever the merits of the welfare state’s core goal—providing a basic income for all American adults—it could now be achieved simply by cashing out all current income transfer programs. (See 2006’s In Our Hands for an argument that this could be done while leaving Americans responsible for their own lives.)

Murray’s final hope is for what economist Robert Fogel has called a ‘Fourth Great Awakening.’ Historians commonly speak of three “Great Awakenings” in American history: in the 1730s, the early decades of the 1800s, and the period 1880-1910. Each was characterized by charismatic revivalism and brought otherwise unforeseeable political change with it. The last Great Awakening ushered in the progressive era, whose message of uplift for the poor is repeated by liberals to this day. But, as Fogel says, such slogans have little resonance for an age when “even the poor are materially rich by the standards prevailing a century ago and where many of those who are materially rich are spiritually deprived.”

Amen to that. Murray remarks upon how many persons of our day seem to live according to the principle that “the purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to do so.” Many are happy to pay the taxes on which the underclass subsists as long as it frees them from any personal involvement with such people.

The author does not try to predict the specific form a new Great Revival would take, but he expects a return to civic engagement may form a part of it: “age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well-lived requires engagement with those around us.”

As Murray acknowledges, many among our elites behave reasonably responsibly on a personal level, including staying married and investing in their offspring. But a healthy and self-confident elite would do more: they would ‘preach what they practice’ and set a better tone for the rest of society. They would demand more of themselves than a life of eating health food and being ‘tolerant.’

If the present elite experiences no Great Awakening soon, perhaps some other class of men will. They might even end up providing America with its next ruling elite.

In the House of Pound

CasaPound is an Italian political movement that takes its name from the American poet and Fascist sympathizer, Ezra Pound. Although it is inevitably referred to as "extremist," "racist," and "neo-fascist," the movement, which was founded in 2003, is in fact more complex and interesting, especially from an alternative right perspective. It takes a holistic and grass roots approach to politics, focusing on culture, community, and a variety of activities for its members, as much as on traditional street politics. This is an interview I did by email with Gianluca Iannone, the movement's leader, in early 2011 for an article I was writing.

CasaPound is still not so well known in the English-speaking countries, even by those active in right wing politics. Could you introduce your movement to our readers and describe it? How big is CasaPound? How many members and how much support do you have?

First of all, linking CasaPound to the right wing is a bit restrictive. CasaPound Italia is a political movement organized as an association for social promotion. It starts from the right and goes through the entire political panorama. Right or left are two old visions of politics, we need to give birth to a new synthesis. CPI has more than 4000 members all over Italy but the supports and sympathy we gain days after days is far larger… Just think that the Blocco Studentesco, our student organization, obtained 11,000 votes in Rome and the Province for the students’ elections.

Please tell us a little about yourself personally and your background.

I was born in August 1973 and started political activism at 14 in the Fronte della Gioventù (Youth Front) in Acca Larenzia, one of Rome's downtown neighborhood. Since then I have never stopped to be part of this world. Journalist since 1999, I worked for TV and radio stations and also wrote for national newspapers on international conflicts, literature, cinema and music.

Why did you become politically active? Was there some event, action, or person that triggered your political activism?

To tell the truth, there is not one thing in particular. I think it was just fate.

What are main policies and objectives of CasaPound, both short-term and long-term?

CPI works on everything that concerns the life of our nation: from sport to solidarity, culture and of course politics. For sports, we have a soccer teams and academy, we do hockey, rugby, skydiving, boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, scuba diving, hiking groups, caving, climbing. For solidarity, we have first aid teams, we do fundraising activities for the Karen people, and we provide help to orphans and single-mums. A phone line called "Dillo to CasaPound" (tell it to CasaPound) is active 24/7 to give free advises on legal and tax issues. On the cultural ground, we host authors and organize book presentations; we have an artist club, a theater school, free guitar, bass guitar and drum lessons, we created an artistic trend called Turbodinamismo, we have a publishing company, dozens of bookshops and websites. Politically we propose various laws like the Mutuo sociale (social mortgage), Tempo di essere Madri (Time to be a mother) or against water privatization and so many more. Speaking about CPI is never easy because all these things are CASAPOUND. All of these represent our challenges and projects for now and the millennium.

Do you have any significant links with groups or parties outside Italy?

No.

The first thing that strikes people in the English-speaking countries is the name of your group, which, of course, refers to the famous American poet Ezra Pound. How important are Pound's ideas to your movement? Why have you chosen to include his name in your movement’s title?

Ezra Pound was a poet, an economist and an artist. Ezra Pound was a revolutionary and a fascist. Ezra Pound had to suffer for his ideas, he was sent to jail for ten years to make him stop speaking. We see in Ezra Pound a free man that paid for his ideas; he is a symbol of the "democratic views" of the winners.

Ezra Pound is also a name routinely associated with Anti-Semitism. Some will automatically see the invocation of his name as a rallying cry for Anti-Semitism. Could you clarify CasaPound's position with regard to the Jews and Israel?

To associate Ezra Pound and anti-Semitism is an absolute twist. It is the same for CasaPound, it has no sense. It is true that we are against Israel politics towards Palestinians, against the bombing of civilians, and the embargo on international help. To say so does not mean to be anti-Semitic, it means analyzing facts.

You are also known for anti-usury rhetoric. Most sensible people oppose excessive usury, but are you opposed to all usury? If not, where does constructive credit end and destructive usury begin?

Usury is the worst thing. It is the head of the octopus. It is it that initiated the wars that are starting around the Mediterranean Sea, which generates illegal immigration and destruction. It is it which creates unemployment, debts. It is it that threatens the future of our children, which make them weak and ready for the massacre.

My impression of CasaPound is that it is very much a grass roots organization that operates successfully in the "arena of street politics," with marches, parades and events that build identity and community, rather than through conventional elections. In Anglo countries right-wing street politics backfired in the past, allowing the mainstream media to paint very negative images of the National Front in the 1970s and the BNP later. Because of this the BNP now avoids the street as a political arena. Your group's success suggests that the street is a much more acceptable political arena for the right in Italy. Why do you think this is? What are the differences that make this possible?

First of all, England was never a fascist state. This creates a big cultural difference. Also, as I said before CPI works on dozens of projects and with various methods: from conferences to demonstrations, distribution of information, posters. The important thing is to generate counter information and to occupy the territory. It is fundamental to create a web of supporters other than focusing on elections. For election, you are in competition with heavily financed groups and with only one or two persons elected, you can't change anything. Politics for us is a community. It is a challenge, it is an affirmation. For us, politics is to try to be better every day. That is why we say that if we don't see you, it is because you are not there. That is why we are in the streets, on computers, in bookshops, in schools, in universities, in gymnasium, at the top of mountains or in the newsstands. That is why we are in culture, social work and sport. That is a constant work.

Because of the differences between Britain and Italy do you think it is better for the right-wing in the UK to avoid street politics? In this context, what is your view of the English Defence League, a group that obviously sees the street as its arena or forum?

I think that the EDL is going on the ground of the clash of civilization. For me and Casa Pound, this provokes a kind of disgust. If the British right is reduced to this, then let's speak about soccer, it will be better.

Bringing in the Bishop

Lincoln Cathedral looms above its locus like a celestial city of its own, its three towers on top of its lofty limestone cliff drawing all eyes for miles in every direction to focus on its perfection and their abjection.

It is one of the great buildings of medieval Europe, a perfectly-judged coda to the Steep Hill up which city dwellers and visitors have struggled breathlessly for centuries to Iron Age and even older forts, the Romans’ colonia of Lindum where the Fosse Way crossed Ermine Street, and a piquant parade of counts and chevaliers, serfs and saints, merchants, moneylenders and mendicants living, working and dying in round-arched, herringbone-patterned houses so strongly built by Norman masons that a few are still in use, some of the oldest domestic buildings in the West.

Roman roads lead to and from the city, often ruler-straight, always ruthless—north through the still-standing Newport Arch to the Humber, Yorkshire and Scotland—westward to the Trent and Nottinghamshire—south to Sleaford, Grantham and London (part of the actual surface, complete with cart-tracks, preserved under the Guildhall at the foot of the Hill)—east through lumps of hills tumbling eventually into the verdancy of the Lincolnshire Marsh, through which the ghosts of tide-dependent trackways wend towards the shadows of salterns.

We had come along that eastern road that morning, swooping through wisps of mild mist, past prehistoric barrows and undulating pastures full of Lincoln Reds, always under the eyes of buzzards—seeing the Cathedral grow before us from distant spikes to dizzying stronghold, struck into silence as ever by the sight, doubly aware of it today because of the occasion.

We were in Lincoln to witness a rare and significant event—a bishop’s enthronement on his cathedra in the fabulous choir beneath the famous fanes, the celebratory culmination of a politico-legal-magical process of Election, Confirmation, Consecration and Investiture. The Church of England was in its high day element, doing what it has always done best, what it was designed for—to bring all the great institutions of State into alignment with each other and with the politely expressed desire of God (and the other way around).

The Right Reverend Christopher Lowson is the 72^nd Bishop of Lincoln—the 72^nd in line since Remigius de Fécamp inaugurated the office in 1072—which was itself a continuation of the old see of Dorchester. Remigius, who was named in honour of the Apostle to the Franks, was almost certainly at the Battle of Hastings. He was probably also related to William the Conqueror, and his alliance with the King later led to damaging accusations of simony. He faced other difficulties unlikely to be faced by Bishop Lowson—being unusually short of stature, being deprived of his first bishopric because the Archbishop who had consecrated him had been removed from office by the Pope, and being accused of treason to William II, a charge of which he was only cleared after suffering “ordeal” by hot iron. (The new Bishop might however have a curious insight into the ordeal—because he was born into a metalworking family in Co. Durham and while studying worked at a steel-mill.) But despite these distractions, Remigius nevertheless played a major role in organizing the Domesday Book, and prepared the ground for the building of the present cathedral on the site of a Saxon church. He died two days before the first earth was turned, but the tower he designed is still partly intact, incorporated into the stupendous west front of the cathedral.

As if this were not enough to live up to, another of Bishop Lowson’s predecessors was a saint. As his various geographical honorifics suggest, Hugh of Avalon/Lincoln/Burgundy was a name to conjure with in 12^th century Europe, and became the second most popular English saint after Thomas à Becket. Apart from his reforms and his restyling of the Cathedral in the new Gothic taste, Hugh was literally a saintly man, his compassion attested by the tame swan that became his symbol—one that combined the idea of Christian purity with similar earlier archetypes.

The 9^th Bishop, the unfortunately-named Robert Grosseteste (1235-1254) was a renowned theologian and philosopher, even being described (by the scientific historian Alistair Crombie) as “the real founder of the tradition of scientific thought in medieval Oxford, and in some ways, of the modern English intellectual tradition”.

The 18^th, Henry Beaufort, was the second illegitimate son of John of Gaunt—who, doubtless through his own merits (!) rose to be Lord Chancellor, a Papal legate and a not wholly successful general of the Church Militant against the Hussites of Bohemia. His morals were notoriously lax, and in a story that is surely too good to be true, it is reported that as he lay dying he was so consumed with superstitious dread that he hallucinated the entrance of the figure of Death and offered it all England’s wealth if he could be suffered to live.

Then there were Thomas Wolsey, albeit only briefly until he got the better offer of York—William Fuller, friend to Pepys and Evelyn—Thomas Tenison, who as Archbishop of Canterbury would preach Queen Mary’s funeral sermon (when he would hear the world premiere of Purcell’s piercing Funeral Music) and crown Queen Anne and George I—and a plethora of others, varying in degrees of scholarliness and devotion, leading or following the Church as it argued with then broke from Rome, then veered between Highness, Lowness and Broadness and back again.

Even before the final break, there had always been whiffs of restiveness about the English Church. Britain’s geographical isolation meant that when the Papal emissary St Augustine landed at Pegwell Bay in Kent in 597, he had to compete not only with the Celtic Christian tradition long fostered by Irish monks, but also the remnants of the old Romano-British Christian tradition. It took until the Synod of Whitby in 664 to lock English Christianity into the Western orbit, and spasmodically ever after there were demands for greater autonomy and the publication of the Bible in English rather than Latin. The Hussites had their English equivalents in Wycliffe’s Lollards, who long persisted despite being suppressed with considerable brutality, and still feature as patriotic people’s exemplars in the iconography of the informed English left. When Henry VIII eventually declared himself head of the English Church, he was therefore building on certain precedents, and could count on a groundswell of nationalist feeling.

A more pragmatic political tone was set by his daughter, who said famously she had “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”. She sought a via media to reconcile the denominations trying to rip apart her realm—and there was a crucial contribution by Richard Hooker, whose 1593 book Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity asserted that scripture could be squared with custom and reason.

This meant that almost-Catholics and almost-Puritans alike could see in the new established orthodoxy whatever they wanted to see—terminological continuity and ceremonial to please those coming from Catholicism, patriotism and respect for individual conscience to please non-conformists. Even almost-atheists could be Anglicans, because this least mystical of denominations made only modest demands on their credulity.

The cunningly constantly revised Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552 and 1662) and the 1571 Thirty Nine-Articles provided conscience-salving balm for Christians from all traditions—room for different voices to commingle for a time, united in affection for a resonant liturgy, rousing hymns and in the combination of church and civic splendour that over centuries came to symbolize the quiet idealism of all England—a new Jerusalem being builded here among familiar fields, non-specific numinous feelings admixed with upholding the nation, the social decencies observed in uplifting surroundings where even the defaced monuments of the past became part of the calm charm. But even the strongly anti-Catholic emphasis of the King James Bible (1611) could not satisfy the wilder-eyed Puritans, or avert the vicious spasms of the Civil War and the mindless vandalism of the Commonwealth—during which buildings like Lincoln were regularly targeted by personal-Jesused Yahoos who sought to destroy their “Papistical” ornamentation. Lincoln suffered the destruction of the funerary effigy of Eleanor of Castile, queen to Edward I, whose viscera were interred in the Cathedral in 1290.

After the Restoration there was persecution of the defeated persecutors followed by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 when William of Orange landed at Torbay, a Protestant pendulum to reestablish equilibrium and dismiss finally the idea that even English roads lead ineluctably to Rome.

There followed almost another century of suppression of Catholics, at times hysterical, as was seen when Wren’s St. Paul’s was denounced as crypto-Catholic because it was domed. But as the Continental balance of power shifted and the Papacy lost much of its political power, these restrictions fell gradually into abeyance and most were lifted during the course of the 19^th century (although the 1701 Act of Succession, which states that no Catholic may be monarch, is still in place—a source of reassurance, anger or indifference depending on one’s perspective). Some Anglicans were greatly influenced by Pusey’s Tractarians (the Oxford Movement) who sought to reintroduce Roman practices—and in some cases, notably John Henry Newman, went all the way.

Always somehow managing to straddle these rival tendencies, the Church fused by degrees into the physical and the psychical landscapes, appearing in almost every actual or imaginative view of England—whether represented by metropolitan magnificence like Lincoln or by tiny, damp, almost barn-like buildings surrounded by sheep. Snug (and smug) in its insularity, it recoiled from ecstasy and vulgarity and was married to mildness—its clergy often either absent-minded scholars of apocrypha or huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ parsons of the kind celebrated in Surtees. Even its dreamers were figures like Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne and Christina Rossetti, specializing in melancholia rather than chiliasm. It gradually became a church no-one could possibly hate—a comfy church for a nation of shopkeepers. Spasmodic crusades—like the campaign against slavery—or rare moral revivals—like that which turned violent 18^th century England into Victoria’s incomparably placid realm—were led by a tiny minority of evangelicals, or from outside the Church altogether by the chapels.

Just as the Jesuits had followed da Gama and Columbus, the CoE went in the wake of Drake, setting up outposts everywhere amongst recent pagans who were probably rather puzzled to be informed that they were now “Catholic and Reformed”. These Anglican plantings diverged greatly in character and consequence, but they shared an emotional tie to Canterbury and fuzzy folk-imagery of St Augustine plodding along the old Roman road from the sea.

Often these Anglican inroads were resented, most bitterly in Ireland, where Spenser took time out from writing The Faerie Queene to advocate ethnic cleansing of the stubbornly Catholic Irish, and help impose the via media by dint of drawing and quartering. As part of this persuasive process, some of my family connections ended up somehow and somewhen in the Protestant Pale of the Irish east, some becoming Anglican clergy and one even Archbishop of Dublin. The CoE became the CoI, the devolved, decorous faith of the “Ascendancy”, taking all the handsomest churches (which they retain, including two cathedrals in Dublin) and doing all they could to maximize their status and marginalize Catholics—always suspected as both reactionaries and conduits for Continental subversion. Although they were rarely targeted for religious reasons, after Irish independence in 1922 the Church of Ireland went into precipitous decline, and slipped below 3% by the 1960s. The CoI seemed destined to extinction. Yet somehow it held on, and between 2002 and 2006 it grew by almost 9%, boosted by relaxation of the Ne temere rule that children of Catholic-Protestant marriages must be brought up Catholics, and the arrival of at least nominally Anglican incomers not just from England, but also Nigeria. The Church claims 390,000 communicants, of whom 115,000 live in the South.

In its homeland, Anglicanism has been in decline since the nineteenth century—a combination of the questioning of old assumptions, longer lives, and the possibility of different cultural choices. The Church of many strains and minimal commitment lends itself easily to indifference, a process not slowed by successive synods’ decisions to make Anglicanism immediately accessible to everyone by replacing wooden pews with plastic chairs, and familiar forms of words with bathetic child-friendly sentiments (except that children don’t like them either). Paralleling this jettisoning of tradition there has been an upsurge in Charismatic practices, almost certainly attributable to the newly-arrived African Anglicans. These latter often combine innovations in ritual with small-c conservative social attitudes, most notably on homosexual clergy—a controversy presently threatening to split the global Anglican Communion for good.

The present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has attracted opprobrium for real or supposed leftwing views, and sometimes it is difficult to sympathise with his opinions—at least as reported by the simplistic media. But even when he is reported accurately, it should be remembered that like the previous 103 occupants of his post often he may merely be being politic. His job is an almost impossible diplomatic balancing act and it becomes harder and more thankless each year. Like politicians, Archbishops should probably be judged by his actions (or inactions) rather than their words.

Many also blame him for the ongoing decline in Church attendance, but perhaps no Archbishop could have arrested decline in this culture that is so hostile to all sources of tradition and authority. It is even possible that strict adherence to tradition might have made matters even worse—although the Church might at least have sunk with all flags flying.

The Church claims 1.7 million attend services every month, but Sunday attendances are rather lower at just 852,000 on a typical Sunday, lower than the figure for Catholics (861,000). The number of regularly attending Anglicans and Catholics combined are now probably lower than the number of Muslims who regularly attend mosques. There are roughly 2.86m Muslims in Britain, and by the nature of Islam they tend to be more committed. They are also generally younger, so the divergence in devoutness is likely to become more pronounced. Every year the voices calling for disestablishment grow slightly louder, and have so far been held in check chiefly because disestablishment would effectively mean dismantling the entire state. But if the numbers keep falling, having an established church that hardly anyone attends may eventually become unjustifiable. The long term implications are so troubling for Anglicans that they tend not to think about them at all.

But we are back in the more pleasing present, waiting with 2,000 others in the nave, glowing gently in the refracted crimsons, golds and greens of Victorian stained glass that is excellent of its kind, but not nearly as good as the original medieval glass would have been. There is a buzz and chatter from all around from clean, kind, middle-of-the-road, middle-aged to old people, many with Remembrance Day poppies in their lapels to show that they think of the nation at least as much as they think of God. In all that crowd, most of whom probably profess strong ‘inclusive’ sympathies, there are perhaps three non-white physiognomies and probably no working class people.

Under each seat is an unexpected piece of profanity—a white cardboard box filled with a packed lunch provided by local firms in return for being able to put their names on those boxes and inside the Orders of Service now being read or waved by attendees from all across the county. While we are waiting, the Director of Music ascends the pulpit and schools the throng in some of the music and choruses they will be hearing—and the shy audience fidgets but acquits itself well.

At 11.10 it begins, with the superbly-vestmented Canon meeting some of the representatives of Anglican reason who are also links with the pre-Conquest see of Dorchester—officials from the Oxford colleges of Brasenose and Lincoln, plus a representative of Bishop Grosseteste University. These are followed by more vestmented and surpliced functionaries whose functions are more or less obscure to everyone except, presumably, themselves and experts in ecclesiastical organization—vergers, dean’s vergers, readers, visiting readers, sub-deans, canonici emeriti, suffragan bishops. These doubtless essential appointees augur the arrival of the representatives of the temporal powers—the Chairman of Lincolnshire County Council, the Mayor of Lincoln and attendants bearing the civic regalia, Her Majesty’s Judges in robes and horsehair perukes, the High Sheriff of Lincolnshire and Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of Lincolnshire. These sit and look about them and converse sotto voce, awed almost against their will by the place and the rareness of the rite. It occurs to me that the High Sheriff’s role—the oldest secular office in the realm after the Crown—once involved the imposition of the King’s Peace, and that the medieval predecessors of the kindly-looking man in the seventeenth century style blue velvet uniform with his sword, cocked hat and lace jabot were once tasked with ensuring that court sentences were carried out—including mutilations and mass hangings. When I voice this tasteless thought to my bird-like neighbour with the pearl choker and Remembrance Day poppy, our previously pleasant conversation falters and never quite recovers.

Musicians parade, preceded by the Bedel—a satisfactorily stern-looking tall man with a black beard carrying a staff even taller—lines and lines of chanters, chantresses and choristers, choral scholars and lay vicars, more vergers and readers, a priest-vicar, the heads of private and grammar schools connected to the Cathedral. The redolent roll-call continues in earnest, as the transepts disgorge endless gorgeously-attired celebrants, increasing in seniority and sumptuousness as they come on like a High Church high tide—canons’ verger, the Chapter Cross, the Clericus Fabricae, Deacons of the Rite, prebendaries, registrars, chancellors, archdeacons, the Bishops of Grimsby and Grantham, the Canterbury Vesturer, the Precentor and the Dean. The processors seem transfigured by the simple expedient of wearing robes which brush the nave pavement as they move in precedence set down centuries before, a few beaming but most looking very serious as they flow down the centre aisle towards the choir, clasping orders of service in their impeccable hands. It is a divinely-inspired display of dry-cleaning—albs, cassocks, surplices, stoles, copes, dalmatics, chasubles, embroideries of Hugh’s swan depending from the sleek necks of the canons and mitres crowning the minor bishops. The Dean speaks at last: “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” and the audience rumbles “Amen”, a deep and grateful sound that expands to fill even that gorgeous void.

Liturgical pedants would doubtless find fault with every aspect of what ensues, but the audience seems engaged as the legal officials read out and approve Rowan Williams’ Mandate, their wigs nodding as they approach and retreat in gowns and buckled shoes (I cannot help thinking of the Munchkins welcoming Dorothy to the Land of Oz). The parchmented preliminaries satisfactorily completed, the expectation builds very suddenly as there is a fanfare of trumpets and the organ rolls into powerful life, while we sing out lustily:

Glorious things of thee are spoken,

Sion, city of our God;

He whose word cannot be broken

Formed thee for his own abode:

On the Rock of Ages founded,

What can shake thy sure repose?

As the hymn echoes itself away into the resounding drum of the building, fading around the spandrels and corbels, there come three loud blows and everyone turns around to look. Thud. Thud. Thud. The Great West Doors are thrown open dramatically, to reveal the impressive image of the new Bishop silhouetted by sunlight, advancing into a venerable place to take up an ancient office, wrapped in an aura of the otherworld as well as all the trappings of state. “In the name of the Lord we greet you” we say together on the Dean’s cue, and many of the people present are not just being polite. The advent of the Bishop is like the start of a new chapter in a long and much-loved book, and while he kneels to pray the choir sings a Bruckner motet

Locus iste a Deo factus est,

aestimabile sacramentum,

irreprehensibilis est

On call-and-response cue, we answer the Archdeacon of Stow and Lindsey (a title from legend as well as the landscape), to assure him that we turn to Christ, we repent of our sins, we renounce evil and we believe and trust in God the father—our voices rising and falling, rising and falling again in solemn creed and cadence, while the grotesque carvings smirk down as if they know better.

The Bishop splashes water from Lincoln’s famous black marble Tournai font over his unworthy self and adjacent unworthy others, and we render an Englished Gloria in excelsis. And in that moment we all probably do wish “Peace to His people, peace on earth”—while many probably do hug themselves in the hope that the new Bishop somehow signifies new times, better times, a righting of wrongs and healing of ills.

Schoolchildren lisp through readings, their attractive trebles counterbalancing the earnest bathos of the New English Bible, and we sing a suitably schoolgirlish song by one “D. Lundy (1944-1997)”

I know that you are very young but I will make you strong:

I’ll fill you with my word;

And you will travel through the land fulfilling my command

Which you have heard.

We are told that this is the word of the Lord, and we say Thanks be to Him—although we sense that the Word has been percolated through many different filters and is still percolating. We are so grateful that we sing “Alleluia” severally.

At last the Enthronement, when the cathedra lives up to its name. The Bishop-Elect listens to the Declaration of Assent, which reminds him of all those historical compromises made by his predecessors—with its references to both the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” and the Thirty-Nine Articles. Then come the Oaths of Allegiance (to the Queen) and that of Due Obedience (to the Archbishop of Canterbury), whose order shows their relative importance. The Oath of Fidelity is followed by his procession to St Hugh’s Choir where he is inducted and installed at last in his cathedra. Although he is concealed from almost everyone’s view by masses of lovely masonry these sacred mysteries are beamed onto on the large TV screens placed at strategic points, while we sing, to a tune written for Westminster Abbey, a translation of a 7^th century Latin text, Christ is made the sure foundation, with a powerful final stanza that sets out the Church’s stance on the great Trinitarian controversy:

Laud and honour to the Father,

Laud and honour to the Son,

Laud and honour to the Spirit,

Ever Three and ever One,

One in love and One in splendour

While unending ages run.

The Bishop is enthroned and the Anglican order is thereby reaffirmed—as is England itself. So the choir strikes up Te Deum Laudamus to a score by Haydn, while the Bishop exchanges the Peace with the College of Canons and clergy. A surprising number of the clergy—almost half—seem to be women, but they all look sexless and similar in their canonicals. I feel slightly sorry for Bishop Lowson, as he shakes hands and smiles at a seemingly never-ending line of clerics, a couple of whom (presumably Anglo-Catholics) kneel and kiss his signet ring in a medieval gesture of homage. I smile involuntarily at the comical conceit that maybe these similar-looking vicars really are all the same and that just out of camera shot the same tiny number of people are going round and round in circles to give the semblance of many.

The Bishop finishing at last, perhaps with incipient Handshaker’s Elbow, the episcopal entourage returns to the nave, while we sing “O Holy Spirit, Lord of grace” to a tune by Tallis. He ascends the pulpit to preach his first sermon, and I have a fleeting fantasy that he is going to stand there for a long silent moment and fix us all with staring eyes before telling us that he would spend that night fasting in a stone cell and striving to pierce the veils of the universe to see the face of God. But no—in fact, he is going to watch Strictly Come Dancing, and he has already selected the trainee terpsichorean whom he wanted to see win. The folksiness is so folksy and the metaphor so strained that I cannot be the only person who winces and loses track of what the rest of the sermon is about. This is less Church of England than Church of Empty, and I feel sorry that the Bishop, doubtless a decent man, could not have come up with something more substantive. The Order of Service reads “After the sermon silence is kept for a few moments”, and so it is, but maybe not for the right reasons.

Prayers of intercession intercede—as children from the “BeAttitude project”, Methodist ministers and Air Vice-Marshals come one by one to the mike, each pious hope followed by the prayer’s “Lord in your mercy” to which we all chorus “Hear our prayer”. The Lord-Lieutenant moves to the front to formally welcome the Bishop to the county, the Mayor of Lincoln welcomes him to the city, and he is welcomed by the parishes and the diocesan staff. Then there are those ostensibly acting on behalf of less substantial corporate bodies—“ecumenical representatives”, “interfaith representatives” and “young people”—very few of whose members appear to have turned up in person.

We exchange the still controversial “sign of peace” with those nearby—it seems strange that this harmless-seeming idea of handshakes between congregants should have attracted such angry opposition. The bread and wine are brought forward to be prepared at the communion table, a collection is taken, to the choir singing Let all mortal flesh—

Let all mortal flesh keep silence and stand with fear and trembling, and lift itself above all earthly thought. For the king of kings and Lord or Lords, Christ our God, to be our oblation and to be given for Food to the faithful. Before him come the choirs of angels with every principality and power; the Cherubim with many eyes, and winged Seraphim, who veil their faces as they shout exultingly the hymn: Alleluia.

I wonder idly why exactly the winged Seraphim would veil their faces as they shout exultingly. But the Bishop is in full flow—

…he sent out his apostles and evangelists to preach the gospel to all nations and lead us in the way of truth…he founded his Church upon the apostles firmly to stand for ever…Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.

As he utters the last phrase, I am briefly transported back to that small and ugly Victorian church in south suburban Dublin where I endured Sundays as a boy, staring with bored incomprehension at the hideous 1890 glass showing a smiling Christ above those same words, and wondering what it was I should do, and why I should do it—tuning out the words, thinking mostly of trees to be climbed and a stream full of sticklebacks just a few hundred yards beyond the grey churchyard wall and these tedious tortures.

When the blood of the new covenant is finally absorbed by everyone, to music we aver our unwavering belief that “Christ is died. Christ is ri-sen. Christ will come a-gain”. Then the Bishop leads in The Lord’s Prayer, prefixing it frankly unbelievably with the words “As our Saviour taught us, so we pray”—unbelievably, because the words of this have changed even in my 47 years, and my wife and I (and others) find ourselves speaking rather different words in a similar sounding metre. Gone is “who art”—“thy” has become “your”—“this day “ is “today”—“trespasses” has become “sins”. I rue the sacrifice of the poetry as I stand waiting for my turn to eat the bread (gluten-free available) and drink the wine proffered by a female server so short and rotund that I cannot bend down far enough to actually ingest any liquid. But unable as I am to believe in the doctrine of the Real Presence, the whole thing is in any case a shadow of a symbol—a symbol of shared allegiance and identity. It is the ancient principle of sympathetic magic—by eating Jesus, we become a little like Him, as African tribesmen seek to become like lions by eating lions’ hearts.

The identity and ideal of England return after Communion, but only to be dismissed as we sing new, inferior words to the tune of Jerusalem—“Forth in the peace of Christ we go”. Blake was a madman, but he was an infinitely greater poet than either “J. Quinn SJ (b.1919)” or “J. Davies (b.1946)”, co-creators of this travesty of one of England’s great anthems.

And then it is The Dismissal with a capital D, as Bishop Lowson receives his crozier from his Chaplain, assures the Houses of Clergy and Laity that he will serve God’s people in this place, listens as his Grimsby and Grantham suffragans pray for everyone from “the truth” to “those who work in the health service”, then intones together with Grimsby and Grantham the hope that they might all find a voice to sing your praise. The procession returns to the Crossing to Stanford’s setting of Psalm 119 (“Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord”).

Everyone is standing, and the Bishop tells us of a city with eternal foundations prepared for us where there will be eternal and triumphant joy—and in these surroundings I cannot help thinking that this city might look a little like Lincoln, and that eternal and triumphant joy would get on my nerves quite quickly. But now the Deacon instructs me and all those others to “Go in the peace of Christ” and we answer “Thanks be to God”, before the fantastical procession starts to wind its way back down the nave towards the Great West Door—eventually back out of the recently hallowed space back into Vanity Fair, to the flash of tourists’ cameras, thrilled to have seen a segment of that rich English life they read about in their guidebooks, a great occasion of European state to relate to kin in Kansas or Kyoto.

We nod and smile goodbye to our late neighbours and co-pilgrims as everyone rustles and roots for coats or their lunches from beneath their seats. The Order of Service tells us we can eat in the Cathedral once the Bishop’s procession has left, but to us that seems in poor taste, so we take the boxes outside and around the corner to sit on a low wall in the Close. We eat local food and drink fizzy water while we look up at the wonderful walls of the Cathedral, talking over what we have seen and marvelling that, even now, and after everything that has happened, such sights can still be seen in England.

The End of Americanism

Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower is an apt follow-up to his 2002 volume, The Death of the West. Although the new book focuses on the United States, it restates and updates the narrative of the older book. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the former refers briefly to the latter early on.

Buchanan’s main thesis is this:

When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization.

Suicide has stirred some controversy in the mainstream media for stating what for many is, or should be, known and obvious, but which for the majority is either not so or taboo: the negative consequences of immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism.

Yet, the book has obtained wide coverage and seems widely available—last month, while travelling in the United States, I saw it prominently displayed in the bookshops of major airports. This is a significant achievement that must not pass without notice, for there are others who have been advancing identical theses without the same level of exposure.

Suicide, however, is not without significant limitations, and these merit detailed discussion, for they stem from an outlook that will need to be overcome if we are ever to move forward with an effective solution to the suicide of America and the rest of the West.

The Pluses

With 428 pages of meat in it, Suicide is divided into 11 chapters, each of which is in turn divided into shorter sections with lapidary titles. The chapters are: The Passing of a Superpower, The Death of Christian America, The Crisis of Catholicism, The End of White America, Demographic Winter, Equality or Freedom, The Diversity Cult, The Triumph of Tribalism, The ‘White’ Party, The Long Retreat, and The Last Chance.

In none does Buchanan flinch from presenting the facts as they are. And where there are lacunae, Kevin MacDonald has already filled them with his Culture of Critique. The first chapter is in tone apocalyptic, yet the sheer rapidity of the United State’s decline as a superpower justifies that tone; Rome’s decline in wealth and capability may have taken longer, but America’s is comparable and, as Buchanan presents it, suggests familiar buildings and everyday objects one day becoming ruins and broken artefacts in a continent abandoned to a dark age. Buchanan proposes solutions in the final chapter, but, besides flawed (and I get to that further down), they are conditional, which lends the trajectory of decline traced throughout most of the volume an aura of inevitability. This is not an indulgence on pessimism, because all previous empires eventually collapsed, and all previous great civilisations in history came to an end.

In his detailed discussion of Christianity’s role in the United State, and of the crisis of Catholicism, Buchanan acknowledges the importance of the transcendent. Many of the ills that afflict the West in our age are linked to, if not the result of, a materialist conception of life, and of the consequent subjection to a secular economist criterion of all matters of importance to a nation and a people. The dispossession and loss of moral authority of the White race in their own traditional homelands was to a significant degree achieved through, or caused by, economic arguments. It was not the so-called ‘civil rights’ movement in the United States that turned Detroit into a ruin; what turned it into a ruin was the reliance on economic arguments—so characteristic of the materialist liberal outlook—that enabled the decision to purchase Black slaves in African markets and ship them to North America. Similarly, the loss of moral and spiritual vigour, which has so enfeebled the White race and sapped its will to live, can be traced to the rise of secularism, to the severing of the race’s link to the transcendent. ‘Where are the martyrs for materialism?’ he asks.

To this Buchanan adds a helpful discussion about equality and freedom. He explodes the liberal conception of them as concomitant concepts, and convincingly presents them as polar opposites in a dichotomy: greater equality means less freedom, greater freedom means less equality. Buchanan makes clear that the only possible way to see these two concepts as concomitant is by ignoring human biodiversity, for, where inborn differences in physiology impose upper limits to human plasticity, equality—the elimination disparities in outcome—cannot be achieved without handicapping the cause of those disparities. Thus, the freedom to choose among the best universities is limited for bright White students when entry requirements are relaxed among less able non-White students in the effort to achieve equal outcomes among all racial groups.

The chapters on the diversity cult and tribalism re-state arguments that have for years been advanced by Jared Taylor. Taylor has done it in much greater detail, but Buchanan will reach a much wider audience, so this is a gain. Buchanan also echoes the Sailer Strategy—‘the idea that inreach to its white base, not outreach to minorities, is the key to future GOP success’—in his discussion of his party’s prospects as Whites decline in the United States. And, like Taylor, he ridicules those who see this decline as a cause for celebration.

Also like Taylor, but in the economic area, Buchanan reveals some astonishing facts. Apparently, the United States military relies on equipment that cannot be made without parts manufactured by potential enemies and economic rivals. Did you know that?

Another helpful discussion is introduced in the final fourth of the book, where Buchanan, following Amy Chua, deals with the fatal design flaw that afflicts multiethnic nations that have embraced democracy and capitalism:

Free markets concentrate wealth in the hands of a market-capable ethnic minority. Democracy empowers the ethnic majority. When the latter begin to demand a larger share of the wealth, demagogues arise to meet those demands.

This is a reply to the economic argument for the state-sponsored policy of immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism in the West, repeated without proof and refuted by empirical studies everywhere, that supposedly boosts economic growth because diverse immigrants ‘bring in skills’ and foster greater creativity. In fact, said policy leads to Whites becoming dispossessed minorities, as they already did in a number of other former European colonies. Buchanan points out that people like Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, use ‘principles invented by white men—universal franchise and majority rule—to dispossess white men’. He also quotes 19^th century Rightist Louis Veuillot to describe how democrats are dispossessed by non- (or ‘instrumental’) democrats: ‘When I am the weaker I ask you for my freedom because that is my principle; but when I am the stronger I take away your freedom because that is my principle’. He asks: ‘What does the future hold for the West when people of European descent become a minority in nations they created, and people of color decide to vote themselves proportionate or larger shares of the national wealth?’

In terms of solutions, Buchanan offers common sense advice: the United States should live within its means and actively take steps to cut its deficits. For him this means pruning government and government expenditure, including social security benefits and military bases overseas; and instituting a policy of economic nationalism, levying tariffs on imports and cutting corporation tax to zero, so as to revive manufacturing in the United States, attract overseas investment, and reduce reliance on imports. I do not think even economists will agree on whether this would yield the desired results, but at least Buchanan is making concrete policy proposals that place the interests of his country first, and is willing to accept that ethnonationalism is an inescapable reality of the human condition. 

The Minuses

There are fundamental flaws in Buchanan’s exposition.

Firstly, he equates European civilisation with Christianity. This is surprising, particularly coming from an American writer, advancing an Americanist position, given that some of the basic principles and practices upon which America was founded, such as the constitutional republic, originated or had their roots in Europe well before the dawn of Christianity. What about ancient Greece? What about ancient Rome? Were those not European civilisations? A more accurate statement is that the United States is a Christian country. This is defensible, even if the United States never had an established religion and even if not all Americans were Christian. Perhaps what Buchanan means is that Faustian civilisation—the civilisation of Northern Europe, of which North America is an extension—is a Christian civilisation.

Buchanan is correct to identify the decline of Christianity in America as one of the roots of its decline. In doing so, however, he has Edward Gibbon as his inverse counterpart, for Gibbon identified the rise of Christianity in Rome, that is, the decline of the Roman religion, as one of the causes of Rome’s fall. Gibbon would have sympathised, perhaps, with the statement, ‘When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die.’ Yet, given that the fall of Rome did not mean the end of European man, and that if the rise of Christianity was linked to Rome’s fall, the rise of Christianity was also linked to the rise of Faustian civilisation. All this tells us, therefore, is that we may be witnessing the end of a cycle involving Christianity. However, even if it is Christianity’s fate to pass, as have other religions, or to become a ‘Third World religion’, as Buchanan puts it, European man will still be there, at least for a while, and, provided he survives as a race, he will give rise to a new civilisation, traceable to the Greek, the Roman, and the Faustian, but founded on somewhat different principles. This will bring no comfort to Christians, nevertheless, and Buchanan, as a Christian, is justified in his alarm.

Gibbon would concede that Buchanan makes a powerful argument for Christianity. A monotheistic religion with a personal god can be a potent unifying force, eliciting much stronger commitments from its followers. The Roman pagans were easygoing, and vis-à-vis other religions, the pagan outlook, as expressed by Nehru in a conversation with the former Chilean Ambassador in India, Miguel Serrano, is generally ‘live and let live’. One can easily accept that it is not difficult to decimate a people with that outlook, for, in as much as it resembles the multiculturalists’ easygoing attitude to all religions except Christianity, it is proving daily in our society an agent of dissolution. It may well be that in a world of intense ethnic competition, a high-tension—even totalitarian and intolerant—religion is the more adaptive group evolutionary strategy. Buchanan’s discussion on the growth and endurance of evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, and militant Islam indicates he is of this view, and that is a plus consistent with his recognition of the importance of the transcendent. Yet he inadvertedly exposes a conundrum: if Christianity is a universal faith, accommodating every race and nationality, as he says, and if, as he also says, non-evangelical forms of Christianity have declined because they are accommodating, then, would this not suggest that Christianity will not survive in practice as the White man’s religion unless it becomes a non-accommodating faith?

Secondly, Suicide makes it clear that Buchanan cannot conceive of anything beyond the America of the 1950s. This is the most unfortunate aspect of this book. It is also the reason why Buchanan offers no real solutions, other than turning back the clock. Were his recommendations implemented in the United States, they would only retard the processes that are in place, achieving a temporary reprieve, a momentary stabilisation, before resuming their course, perhaps with renewed vigour and speed.

What Buchanan seems not to recognise is that, while the 1950s may have felt good for many, the conditions for the modern trends that he condemns were already in place then. They were simply masked by the transient prosperity, stability, and romanticism of the era. The 1950s led to the 1960s. And the upheavals of the 1960s had their roots in the academics of the 1930s, who in turn had their roots in Marxism, dating back to the 19^th century, which in turn had its roots in liberalism and the Enlightenment in the 18^th century. And this is not merely a question of there having always been a hostile faction within the American republic, seeking to undermine it with its insidious liberalism; the conservatives who opposed Marxism also had their intellectual roots in 18^th-century liberalism. Buchanan makes it seem as if the United States has been hijacked by liberals, but the fact is that it has always been in the hands of liberals, right from the beginning: the United States was founded and is predicated on the ideas of liberal intellectuals, and its Founding Fathers were liberals. If the United States seems to be spearheading the process of Western decline, bringing everyone down with it, it is because liberalism took stronger root there than anywhere else, due to a lack of opposition to liberal ideas.

From this perspective it can be argued that Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower is not the result of the United States’ being ‘far off the course set by [the] Founding Fathers’, but rather of the United States’ being exactly on that course, even if the Founding Fathers never anticipated that it would lead where it has led.

As a conservative in a republic founded by liberals, Buchanan is by definition a liberal, defending a previous stage in the development of liberalism. Hence his failure to see beyond liberalism’s event horizon.

Liberals have a linear conception of history. Thus Buchanan hopes that by prescribing better liberal policies (what he would call conservative policies), the American republic can be set back on course and resume its trajectory of endless progress and economic growth. Unfortunately, treating the problem as if it were a disease in need of a cure is futile when the problem is a congenital defect. In such cases the best hope is genetic resequencing, a form of death and rebirth. Most likely it will mean certain death and a possible rebirth, elsewhere, as something else, perhaps in North America, but at first, if at all, only in a part of it. Concretely this means the break-up of the union into regions and the emergence among them of a dominant republic among weaker ones, with strength or weakness being a function of the dominant racial group in each case.

Similarly futile is the attempt to revert a civilisation to an earlier stage of development. In the Spenglerian view this would be like trying to turn an old dog back into a puppy, or an old tree back into a bush. Technology may make it possible one day to reverse the physical effects of ageing, but it will not erase the memories and conclusions of a lifetime, and therefore not rejuvenate the spirit. This applies even in the non-organic realm: we may be able to restore an old mechanical typewriter so that it looks and works like new, but it will still be obsolete technology, and its reason for being will shift from usable tool to unusable antique.

Unfortunately for those living today, reality is more in accord with the organic conception of history, whereby things go in cycles and slow build-ups lead to rapid changes in state. Following Spengler, Francis Parker Yockey argued that attempts to cause a reversion into an earlier state of development will at best yield temporary results, introducing distortions that will be magnified as the next stage of development indefectibly follows.

One can sympathise with the argument that it would be worse if the current political leadership in the United States managed to stabilise the economy and perform plastic surgery on the face of America, as this would buy said leadership more time and permit existing trends to remain in place until the possibility of a White rebirth in North America, even without United States, became extinct. A Spencerian collapse sooner may open up avenues that may be closed later.

Buchanan wonders whether the United States will implode by 2025. This was my own scenario in Mister, where the United States disintegrates in a hyperinflationary chaos. But it is difficult to predict with accuracy and I would not want to speculate beyond a possible dismemberment along regional lines sometime this century. When it happens, whenever it may happen, those who remember the America we know today and who did not know better until it was too late will be amazed that people thought the United States would go on forever. They will also be amazed that people ever thought as they do now, despite the final outcome being so blatantly obvious. Buchanan’s diagnosis is mostly accurate, but his treatment, well intentioned as it is, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The Balance

Despite its defects, there is no escaping it: Suicide of a Superpower is a punishing indictment of the United States’ post-war political leadership, authored by a prominent conservative who speaks as part of America’s mainstream establishment. Any White American fed up with the way things have been going in recent decades and looking for new politics beyond Democrat or Republican will find here solid justifications for going beyond convention and eventually adding his muscle to the struggle for fundamental change.

Suicide will not awaken the complacent, induce the fearful to speak up, or cause ideological enemies to change their views. The complacent is comfortable in his ignorance and does not want his world disrupted by inconvenient truths; in most cases he has the means to avoid them by insulating himself economically. The fearful, who knows but remains silent, will not be emboldened by Buchanan’s confirming him in his views; he will wait, as he has always waited, and then side with change once it looks like it is going to win. The ideological enemy is beyond convincing; the only solution is to crush him thoroughly.

Should you buy Suicide of a Superpower? The answer is yes. Not only is it brave, but it contains many helpful insights and bewildering facts to fuel a healthy debate. The fact that the book is everywhere has also infuriated the radical Left, who have renewed their efforts to have Buchanan fired by MSNBC. The radical Left does not want this kind of discussion to take place in a mainstream media forum. In fact, radical Leftists would like Buchanan to be banned from the networks, shunned by his publishers, phlebotomised by the taxman, prosecuted by the ICC, and sent to the gulags, to spend his old age in poverty, obscurity, and hard labour—surrounded, of course, by politically correct diversity. To his credit, Buchanan has not buckled in to criticism. Therefore, every copy that is sold is a kick to the radical Left, and added impetus for the book to reach more persuadables.

With enough manpower and talent it will be possible to survive the cataclysm and make it through to the other side. The other side is something entirely new; traditional, but different—it is not the White America of the 1950s, nor Reagan on steroids, nor is it a linear extrapolation of what is good about the 2010s minus what is bad. For Whites to survive in America, Americanism must end. Those who survive will be the architects of what comes after Americanism; they will not call themselves Americans—the designation may not even make sense for them. Viewed from the other side, with the old certainties gone and new ones in place, it will be impossible to think as we do today, even if future generations carry forward much of our knowledge, traditions, and cultural legacy.

The Shock of History

A propos:
Dominique Venner.
Le choc de l’Histoire. Religion, mémoire, identité.
Versailles: Via Romana, September 2011.

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –Nietzsche

Conservative thinking, Karl Mannheim notes, is essentially historical thinking—in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time.

Some anti-liberals are wont thus to situate their ‘conservative’ project within the frame of Europe’s historical destiny and the higher design informing it.

The most renowned of such historical thinkers (representing what Carolina Armenteros calls the ‘the French idea of history’) was the father of European anti-liberalism, Joseph de Maistre—though he is not our subject.  Rather, it is the foremost contemporary avatar of anti-liberal historical thought: Dominique Venner.

The 75-year-old, French-speaking European of Celt and German descent, father of five, Venner is a historical scholar, a writer of popular histories and of various works on firearms and hunting, as well as the editor of two successful, artfully illustrated historical journals.

But whatever his genre, Venner bears the knightly (or legionnaire) standard of Europe’s multi-millennial heritage—the heritage, he claims, that took form with the blind poet, who is the father of us all—the heritage whose Homeric spirit knows to honor the brave, bare-foot soldiers of the Confederacy and the social banditry of Jesse James—and, most insistently, the heritage that expects a future commensurate with Europe’s incomparable past.

Venner is not your average academic historians; indeed, he’s not an academic at all. His life has been lived out on the last of France’s imperial battlefields; in Parisian street politics, in the outlawed OAS, in prison, and in laying the conceptual foundations of the European New Right; and finally, since his early thirties, in the various libraries, archives, and communal memories he’s searched to produce the 50 books he’s written on the key historical upheavals of the last century or so.

Unsurprisingly, his historical sense is ‘over-determined’—not solely by an  intelligence steeped in the life of the mind, but also by disciplines acquired in those schools of initiands known only to the political soldier.

His latest book—Le Choc de l’Histoire—is not a work of history per se, but a series of meditations, in the form of a book-long interview (conducted by the historian Pauline Lecomte) on the historical situation presently facing Europeans. These meditations approach their subject in parallel but opposite ways: 1) one approach surveys the contours of Europe’s longue durée—those centuries of growth that made the great oak so venerable—and, in the spirit of the Annales School, reveals her ‘secret permanences’, and, 2) a very different but complementary approach that silhouettes the heroic individuals and individual events (Achilles and the Iliad foremost) exemplifying the Homeric spirit of European man—disclosing his possibilities, and offering him thus an alternative to his programmed extinction.

Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now—however slowly—beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious.

Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself—the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind.

The Sleep

The Second European Civil War of 1939-1945, however it is interpreted, resulted in a cataclysmic defeat not just for Hitler’s Germany, but for Europe, much of which, quite literally, was reduced to mounds of smoldering rumble. Then, at Yalta, adding insult to injury, the two extra-European super-powers partitioned the Continent, deprived her states of sovereignty, and proceeded to Americanize or Sovietize the ‘systems’ organizing and managing the new postwar European order.

As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization—believing, as they were encouraged, that they were simply one people, equal among the world’s many peoples.

Worse, for their unpardonable sins—for what Europeans did to Jews in the war, to Blacks in the slave trade, to non-White peoples in general over the course of the last 500 years—for all the terrible sins Europeans have committed, they are henceforth denied the ‘right’ to be a ‘people’. In the Messianic spirit of Communism and Americanism, the Orwellian occupiers and collaborators have since refused them a common origin (roots), a shared history, a tradition, a destiny. This reduces them to a faceless economic-administrative collectivity, which is expected, in the end, to negate the organic basis of its own existence.

The postwar assault on European identity entailed, however, more than a zombifying campaign of guilt-inducement—though this campaign was massive in scale. Europe after Jahre Null was re-organized according to extra-European models and then overwhelmed with imported forms of mass consumerism and entertainment. At the same time and with perhaps greater severity, she was subject to an unprecedented ‘brain-washing’ (in schools, media, the so-called arts, public institutions, and private corporations)—as all Europe’s family of nations, not just the defeated Germans, were collectively made to bear a crushing guilt—under the pretext of the Shoah or the legacy of colonialism/imperialism/slavery—for sins requiring the most extreme penance. Thus tainted, her memory and identity are now publicly stigmatized,

Venner’s Europe is not, of course, the Soviet/New Class-inspired EU, just as she is not the geographical entity labeled ‘Europe’. Rather than a market, a political/administrative structure, a geographic category—rather even than a race (though in a certain sense it is all about race in the end)—Europe for him is a multi-millennial community of closely-related national families made up of Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others, having the same ancient (Indo-European, Borean, Cro-Magnon) roots of blood and spirit: that is, having the same Thirty-thousand Years of European History and Identity.

This makes his Europe a community with a common civilizational heritage that stretches back to the depths of prehistoric time. Historically, the tradition and identity of this heritage has informed Europe’s representations and values in ways distinguishing/identifying her and her peoples from other civilizations and peoples.

Tradition, though, is not  for Venner the metaphysical abstraction of the perennialists or the historical repository of the Burkeans: it is not something outside history nor is it something forged once and for all in the night of time.

Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass.  It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out.

Tradition may originate in Prehistory, but Venner claims it is preeminently contemporary—just as every origin represents a novel outburst of being. It serves thus as a people’s inner compass. It directs them to what and whom they are. It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. Life lived in reference to tradition, Venner insists, is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies—the ideal of ‘who we are’.

In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century. But he is no knee-jerk anti-American (though the French, in my view, have good cause to be anti-US). He’s also written several books on the US War of Secession, in which much of America’s Cavalier heritage is admired. Knowing something of the opposed tendencies shaping American ‘national’ life, he’s well aware of the moral abyss separating, say, Jesse James from Jay Gould—and what makes one an exemplar of the European spirit and the other its opposite.

Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World, Venner claims America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents—which meant disowning the idea (old as Herodotus) that Europe is ‘the home of liberty and true government’.

Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired—as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity—to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Hence, the bustling, wealth-accumulating, tradition-opposing character of the American project, which offends every former conception of the Cosmos.

New England, to be sure, is not the whole of America, for the South, among another sections, has a quite different narrative, but it was the Yankee version of the ‘American epic’ that became dominant, and it is thus the Yankee version that everywhere wars on Americans of European descent.

Citing Huntington’s Who Are We?, Venner says US elites (‘cosmocrats’, he calls them) pursue a transnational/universalist vision (privileging global markets and human rights) that opposes every ‘nativist’ sense of nation or culture—a transnational/universalist vision the cosmocrats hope to impose on the whole world. For like Russian Bolsheviks and ‘the Bolsheviks of the Seventeenth century’, these money-worshipping liberal elites hate the Old World and seek a new man, Homo Oeconomicus—unencumbered by roots, nature, or culture—and motivated solely by a quantitative sense of purpose.

As a union whose ‘connections’ are essentially horizontal, contractual, self-serving, and self-centered, America’s cosmocratic system comes, as such, to oppose all resistant forms of historic or organic identity—for the sake of a totalitarian agenda intent on running roughshod over everything that might obstruct the scorch-earth economic logic of its Protestant Ethic and Capitalist Spirit. (In this sense, Europe’s resurgence implies America’s demise).

The Shock

What will awaken Europeans from their sleep? Venner says it will be the shock of history—the shock re-awakening the tradition that made them (and makes them) who they are. Such shocks have, in fact, long shaped their history. Think of the Greeks in their Persian Wars; of Charles Martel’s outnumbered knights against the Caliphate’s vanguard; or of the Christian forces under Starhemberg and Sobieski before the gates of Vienna. Whenever Europe approaches Höderlin’s ‘midnight of the world’, such shocks, it seems, serve historically to mobilize the redeeming memory and will to power inscribed in her tradition.

More than a half-century after the trauma of 1945—and the ensuing Americanization, financialization, and third-worldization of continental life—Europeans are once again experiencing another great life-changing, history-altering shock promising to shake them from dormition.

The present economic crisis and its attending catastrophes (in discrediting the collaborators managing the EU, as well as de-legitimatizing the continent’s various national political systems), combined with the unrelenting, disconcerting Islamization of European life (integral to US strategic interests) are—together—forcing Europeans to re-evaluate a system that destroys the national economy, eliminates borders, ravages the culture, makes community impossible, and programs their extinction as a people. The illusions of prosperity and progress, along with the system’s fun, sex, and money (justifying the prevailing de-Europeanization) are becoming increasingly difficult to entertain. Glimmers of a changing consciousness have, indeed, already been glimpsed on the horizon.

The various nationalist-populist parties stirring everywhere in Europe—parties which are preparing the counter-hegemony that one day will replace Europe’s present American-centric leadership—represent one conspicuous sign of this awakening. A mounting number of identitarian, Christian, secular, and political forces resisting Islam’s, America’s, and the EU’s totalitarian impositions at the local level are another sign.

Europeans, as a consequence, are increasingly posing the question: ‘Who are we?’, as they become more and more conscious—especially in the face of the dietary, vestimentary, familial, sexual, religious, and other differences separating them from Muslims—of what is distinct to their civilization and their people, and why such distinctions are worth defending. Historical revivals, Venner notes, are slow in the making, but once awakened there is usually no going back. This is the point, Venner believes, that Europe is approaching today.

The Unexpected

History is the realm of the unexpected. Venner does not subscribe to notions of historical determinism or necessity. In contrast to Marxists and economic determinists, anti-Semites and Spenglerians, he believes there are no monocausal explanations of history, and unlike liberals such as Fukuyama, he believes there’s no escape from (no ‘end’ to) history.

In history, the future is always unknown. Who would have thought in 1980 that Soviet Russia, which seemed to be overtaking the United States in the ‘70s, would collapse within a decade? Historical fatalities are the fatalities of men’s minds, not those of history.

History, moreover, is the confluence of the given, the circumstantial, and the willful. This makes it always open and hence potentially always a realm of the unexpected. And the unexpected (that instance when great possibilities are momentarily posed) is mastered, Venner councils, only in terms of who we are, which means in terms of the tradition and identity defining our project and informing our encounter with the world.

Hence, the significance now of husbanding our roots, our memory, our tradition, for from them will come our will to power and any possibility of transcendence. It’s not for nothing, Dominique Venner concludes, that we are the sons and daughters of Homer, Ulysses, and Penelope.

The 'Shit Happens' Foreign Policy

"The West is the best and we'll do the rest," sang Jim Morrison on that damning 1967 indictment of poor parenting and pharmacological excess, The End. Despite it's intended irony, the lyric nevertheless reflected the realities underlying US foreign policy at the time, which consisted of believing in the Western way, stepping up to the mark when challenged, taking responsibility for what happened on one’s watch, and trying to win in the cold light of day and with the world’s media watching. Heck, America still gets it in the neck for that famous photo of one gook shooting another gook in the head.

With the Soviet Union doing such a good job of being a shining beacon of progress in those days with its cheap shots against post-colonialism, inequalities of wealth, and mean differences in height and body mass, America had to do its best to fight the good fight and to go down with the ship when holed below the waterline, as it did in the 1970s, a decade which can be likened to one enormous session of navel gazing: cue Apocalypse Now.

After the US took its bumps, the 80s and the 90s saw Uncle Sam getting a more comfortable ride on his high horse, with overseas adventures like Panama, Grenada, and the Lebanon, that were over almost before they began, although the Lebanon, it has to be said, didn't quite go according to plan.

Even the more drawn out set pieces like Gulf War I and Serbia/Kosovo went well with plenty of allies, UN support, and idiot villains from central casting to provide easy piñatas for a crusading US foreign policy, although there were also some worrying signs.

In Iraq there was much less of a glasnost feel than in Vietnam as the press were kept at arms length in case some towelhead offed another towelhead and someone won a Pulitzer again with the US getting it in the neck; and in Serbia, the US was too chickenshit to commit ground forces until after the bombing had finished the war, but at least the façade that the West was morally better, braver, and stronger than everyone else was maintained.

By the time 9-11 came along, the Neocons were firmly in charge with all their starry-eyed, crusading zeal, but while it took an earlier incarnation of an ascendant America several decades (1941 to 1973) and four meatgrinder wars against bitch opponents (Japan, Germany, North Korea/ China, and Vietnam) to lose its bounce, Neocon America was looking bedraggled after a few rounds with some part-time camel jockeys.

The weakness of Neocon America had many sources, among which were corrupt contracting, the Hollywoodization of reality, the flabbiness of a society whose economic function had been reduced to mere consumption, and most importantly a flawed universalist morality.

Many on the Left and the Alternative Right prefer to see the Neocons as Machiavellian moral vacuums. But, even though corruption and self interest is the fuel that runs the machine, the machine itself is a moral construct of sorts. The main tenet is that everyone everywhere has the potential to become American, with the possible exception of the Jews, who seem to be reserved for a higher loyalty in the Neocon system. If only enough bombs can be dropped and local contracts made tying the subject economies into the Wall Street matrix, then Walmarts, Hooters, Disneylands, and the other signs of materialist Nirvana will automatically sprout up overnight.

Goofy as it is, this is nevertheless a universalist system, plus it even echoes the lyric of the Lizard King that the West is unquestionably the best, with the possible exception of Israel, which seems to be reserved for an unacknowledged higher status in the Neocon system.

Of course, such stupidity has its costs, and the contradictions of the system are there for all to see. The only thing that might make it more apparent would be to actually open a Hooters on the outskirts of Kandahar right now; the floor would be covered in amputated breasts before we even got to Happy Hour.

Moral standards, any kind of standards, in fact, require discipline, consistency, and the ability to reformulate ideas to take account of empirical inputs. Having principled foreign policy can pay long-term dividends but it also means that immediate interests and pragmatism need to be sacrificed.

The intellectual foundations of America's ruling establishment are now so firmly Leftist and therefore based on a completely mistaken view of humanity, sovereignty, and international relations, that to base any kind of consistent foreign policy on them is highly dangerous. Honestly admitting empirical inputs and changing the policy is also impossible as that would destroy the intellectual foundations to which the ruling establishment is inextricably tied.

Deep down the foreign policy goons, like Hillary Clinton, are aware of these problems. Recently there is a tendency to comment on Ms. Clinton’s increasingly eccentric facial expressions as an outer sign of her inner lunacy, but a simpler explanation is that the poor woman is merely contorting her face in a desperate attempt to suck up all those rolls of fat that seem to be congregating round her jowls like "heroes of the Libyan revolution" with smartphones round the bloody corpse of Colonel Gaddafi.

Hillary may look crazy, but she's sane enough to realize that under present conditions the West certainly isn't the best. It is militarily weak, morally inconsistent, and also deeply worried about pissing off anyone really important, like North Korea.

This has led her in her gurning genius to formulate the West's new win-win foreign policy, which after the effective way in which Gaddafi was disposed of, with an ingenuous shrug of the shoulders and a graceless guffaw from Hilary herself, we can now christen the 'Shit Happens' Foreign Policy.

A few months ago AR ran an interesting article by Igor Shishkin, translated from the Russian, which said that the US was applying Chaos Theory to its foreign policy. According to Shishkin, this was founded on a rejection of "linear deterministic process," a view of the world as "a complex dynamic system, consisting of nations, states, religions, etc., which, in turn, are also complex dynamic systems," and the realization that "dynamic systems never reach equilibrium."

Based on these premises, Shishkin described a US foreign policy that rejected the maintenance of stability and instead adopted a cost-effective, flexible approach that sought to "navigate between the islands of order in the global world of political chaos."

Shishkin pointed to the way the US was increasingly using information warfare, e.g. using "Twitter technology" to accumulate "protest energy," as well as a certain amount of ambivalence and cap-changing in the Libya campaign, switching from a US-led operation in the early days to a NATO-led one as if that somehow lessened US involvement.

Using chaos as a cloak for foreign policy ends of course predates official Chaos Theory by several millennia with many states resorting to such pragmatic shenanigans throughout history. Shishkin's theory nevertheless is a plausible fit with the facts and interesting in the way that it allows the flailing, weakening attempts of late empire American geopolitics to be presented as a cunning dangerous new threat. This has natural utility in a Russian context. However, as with Hillary's facial gymnastics, I think a simpler explanation can be suggested.

America is in a state of retreat both physically and morally. The recent fashion for "just wars" and "humanitarian interventions" threatens America with a major loss of face, as it has perhaps suffered in the case of Syria, where Russia and China vetoed its attempt to escalate anti-Assad activity with a UN resolution.

Being a humanitarian interventionist is like being pregnant; it can't be a question of degrees. Once you start abandoning one set of people to starvation or dictatorship, you start looking bad. Your principles look like what they are – pragmatic hypocrisy. Furthermore, imposing 'humanitarianism' through bombs makes you an easy target for criticism.

America's foreign policy wonks are now starting to realize these inherent weaknesses and contradictions and have started to adjust to them, but in a way that will not threaten the ruling elite's Leftist intellectual foundations. This is why Hillary and Co. have gone with the 'Shit Happens' Foreign Policy.

This involves stirring the shit with a very long stick, so that when things go wrong as they did in Syria you stay well back and pretend not to notice, hoping all the time that the wind doesn't blow in your face. Then, when things do go right, like with the silencing of Gaddafi, you pretend that, hell, you're so glad it happened, but that, hey, it would have happened without you anyway, because, like, y'know, shit just happens!

William (Brown) the Conqueror

British children’s writers usually find favour in America—from A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame to J. K. Rowling and Nick Park—but one who has never quite captured American hearts is Richmal Crompton, author of the classic Just William stories.

Why this should be is unclear, because at their best the stories combine the period charm of The Wind in the Willows with the mischievousness of Roald Dahl and the wit of Wodehouse—while her hero has been likened (admittedly not entirely convincingly) to both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The 11-year-old likeable scapegrace William Brown is an imaginative institution in England and in many other countries; the Sunday Times said of the stories that they are “probably the funniest, toughest children’s books ever written”. Yet for some reason Hollywood has not come calling—although perhaps this is just as well (1).

As well as telling delightful tales, Crompton incidentally charts revolutionary changes in British life from the time the first story appeared in 1919 until the author’s death in 1969, as seen through William’s half-wise, half-innocent eyes. Although the stories should be read for their own sake rather than any philosophical content, they have therefore also attracted considerable interest from cultural historians, and occasionally even controversy.

Richmal Crompton Lamburn was born in Bury, Lancashire, in 1890, the daughter of a schoolmaster of Anglican and Liberal views. She had an older sister, Mary, and a younger brother, John, and some of William’s exploits would be based on her memories of John’s youth.

She won a scholarship to London’s Royal Holloway College, from which she graduated in 1914 with a BA in Classics. She taught Classics in Cheshire before relocating to Bromley High School on the southern edge of London in 1917. She beguiled her leisure time by writing, and the first William story appeared in Home Magazine in 1919, illustrated by Thomas Henry, who was to illustrate the stories until his death in 1962 (he died whilst working on a William picture). Henry’s perfectly-judged drawings have helped to define William as much as E. H. Shephard’s drawings fixed the public visualization of Winnie the Pooh.

The supposedly ephemeral stories swiftly overshadowed what Crompton always regarded as her serious work—40 novels and collections of short stories aimed solely at an adult audience, now virtually forgotten, while William eventually ran to 39 books (some posthumous) and still sells millions of copies worldwide, not to mention numerous TV and radio adaptations. (2) Yet although the stories are ostensibly written for children, they are perhaps best savoured by adults who can appreciate the author’s recondite references and “unsystematic satire” (3).

She was able to retire from teaching, which was fortunate because after 1923 she went down with polio, eventually losing the use of her right leg. Despite this, she led an active life, getting around in a specially adapted car and having all kinds of cultural and charitable interests (she was a noted campaigner for paralyzed children). She never married and died much mourned.

Her fictive force of nature is a middle-class 11-year-old living in a village between the fictional towns of Marleigh and Hadley, the location of which is a subject of agreeable but fruitless debate amongst keen Cromptonians. William’s village is clearly an amalgam of southern English Erewhons. In 1962, Crompton wrote “The village in which William lives is entirely imaginary…a small country village in Kent—or perhaps Surrey or Sussex, within easy reach of London” (4).

The earliest stories see William living with his parents and older brother and sister in a substantial Victorian or Edwardian villa, complete with library, morning-room, stables, cook, housemaid, and gardener. Later, the family is downsized by economic and social pressures and the domestic staff disappear, but the Browns always contrive to be comfortably off and stalwarts of community life.

Mr. Brown works in the City, and comes home every evening to sit aloofly reading newspapers and occasionally giving vent to unexpectedly vitriolic political reflections, such as “I tell you he’s bleeding the country to death. He ought to be hung for murder”. His outbursts contain a clever echo of his younger son’s purpler expostulations—and there are other occasional hints of a tacit understanding between the two that no-one else in the family can share. But most of the time, Mr. Brown is like a smoking volcano in the background of an ordered Italianate landscape—something to be tiptoed around, and which only comes to life at times of crisis—such as to pay some enraged neighbour for damage caused by his errant offspring.

By contrast, Mrs. Brown is not at all menacing; like most mothers she is the pivot of the household and the chief source of its respectability, stability, and comfort. Her chief roles are to darn socks and make excuses for William.

William’s sister Ethel is beautiful and always has a string of suitors—many of whom William irritates or frightens off, usually without meaning to or even while trying to ‘help’ them.

William’s older brother, the irascible and insecure Robert, is a mirror of the fashions and follies of every generation, from dancing the Charleston to toying with Bolshevism, and from experimental poetry to sports cars. He is always trying to find a girlfriend, and whenever he is making headway William usually ruins it—again often with the very best intentions. Like many 11-year-olds then and now, William regards girls as an utterly distinct (and generally inferior) species, and his lack of susceptibility can drive Robert to distraction. In “William the Intruder” (1922), Robert is telling his mother about his latest pash:

‘She’s different from everybody else in the world’, stammered Robert ecstatically. ‘You simply couldn’t describe her. No one could!’

His mother continued to darn his socks and made no comment. Only William showed interest.

‘How’s she different from anyone else?’ he demanded. ‘Is she blind or lame or sumthin’?’

There is also a plethora of aunts and uncles, most of whom find William wholly antithetical to their preferred pastimes of crochet-work, church-going, and snoozing off their lunches in the library.

Beyond the constraints of the family circle lies a huge world full of colour and adventure. William owns a devoted mongrel called Jumble and he also leads the Outlaws—a close-knit gang of boys, Henry, Ginger, and Douglas, similar in background and tastes but with slightly paler personalities. Beyond the Outlaws there are manipulative or adoring girls, and many other children more or less in thrall to William’s abounding personality. Inevitably, he also has enemies—ranging from epicene, immaculate, golden-curled, lisping sneaks with names like Cuthbert, to rougher would-be Williams with whom he has to physically contend for mastery of the village space.

Then there is the adult world, whose roster of characters alters as the stories dash through the decades—flappers, spiritualists, vegetarians, painters, academics, aristocrats, teachers, ex-majors, vicars, spinsters, nouveau riche businessmen, beatniks, burglars, protest marchers, pop-stars—most of whom seem to William to lead dull lives full of pointless rules. In “William Below Stairs” (1922), he muses that when he is grown-up,

“He’d have rooms full of squeaky balloons and trumpets in his house, anyway—and he’d keep caterpillars and white rats all over the place too—things they made such a fuss about in their old house—and he’d always go about in dirty boots, and he’d never brush his hair or wash.”

He in turn exasperates most grown-ups, which is scarcely surprising, because through sheer joie de vivre he exacts a heavy toll on their possessions—trampling their flowerbeds, ruining their lawns, scrumping their apples, falling through their roofs, shooting arrows through their windows, eating their food, tormenting their cats (twice actually killing them), covering everything with dirt, ruining their sleep, and leading their children astray. Some have even worse experiences, such as Aunt Emily, a generously-proportioned woman who disturbs the whole household with her deafening snoring, who wakes from an afternoon nap to find her bedroom full of wide-eyed local children who have paid William to watch her sleep, below an ill-lettered label reading:

“Fat wild woman

Torking Natif

Landwidge.” (5)

He may be noisy, unkempt, destructive, dictatorial, aggressive, opinionated and indignant—but he is also good-hearted, chivalrous, imaginative, brave and generous and has a strong sense of natural justice. In 1962, Crompton said William had:

“…the spirit of the inventor and pioneer…the stuff of which heroes are made…at the state of the savage—loyal to his tribe, ruthless to his foes, governed by mysterious taboos, an enemy of civilization and all its meaningless conventions…that threaten his liberty.” (6)

William is always prone to nostalgie de la boue. He is fascinated by ne’er do wells, real or imagined; he longs to leap his bourgeois traces and embrace what he sees as freer modes of living—down and preferably dirty amongst the working classes, the poor, criminals, subversives and exotic foreigners. William’s fascination with what she calls “horrid, common, rough boys” is a source of exasperation and incomprehension to the supremely class-conscious Mrs. Brown. Asked by her who he wants to invite to his Christmas party, he scandalizes her by replying “I’d like the milkman” then “I’d like to have Fisty Green. He can whistle with his fingers in his mouth”. She almost wails in reply, “But he’s a butcher’s boy! You can’t have him!” He listens enraptured to the Cockney accents of London children visiting the village on a day trip—

“He decided to adopt it permanently. He considered it infinitely more interesting than that used by his own circle.”(7)

William also envies “savidges”. Watching an amateur-dramatic production of Christopher Columbus with the Indians, he looks yearningly at the blacked-up white boys playing the Indians—

“…how different—how rapturously different. Browned from head to foot—a lovely walnut brown. It made their eyes look queer and their teeth look queer. It set them in a world apart…he saw himself, browned from head to foot, brandishing some weapon and dancing on bare brown feet in a savage land.” (8)

Like most boys then and now, he has fantasies of super strength and global domination—fighting his way out of ambuscades against impossible odds, consigning cities or countries to destruction with an imperious wave, being “Dictator of England” (9) or “World Potentate” (10)—accepting the imaginary homage of imaginary masses as he imagines multitudinous “stachoos” of himself.

Crompton is sometimes likened to the equally unsentimental “Saki” (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870-1916) whose short stories have been described as evoking “Pan beyond the drawing-room windows”. There is a similar quality in William. He may be fey, but he is safely fey. The solidity and stability of William’s background is the ideal backdrop to his adventures, which lampoon authority but never undermine it. He may be “Dauntless Dick of the Bloody Hand” out in the fields and woods, but every evening he is once again Master William Brown, subject to the iron dictates of what he calls contemptuously “Civilizashun”—obeying his parents, saying please and thank you, washing his face, wearing his Eton suit, and being forced to go to school and Sunday school. William has a disdain for education, as he tells his reform-minded Uncle George:

“When I was a boy, William, I loved my studies. I’m sure you love your studies, don’t you? Which do you love most?”

“Me?” said William, “I love shootin’ and playin’ Red Indians.” (11)

He is aggrieved by the way his parents react to his school reports—

“I keep tryin’ to explain to them about that. What’s the good of us usin’ up all our brains at school so’s we’ll have none left when we’re grown up an’ have to earn our livings? I’d rather keep mine fresh by not usin’ it till I’m grown up an’ need it.” (12)

The other Outlaws are almost as unintellectual, with the partial exception of Henry who can always be relied upon to give informed opinions on even the most complicated subjects—

‘They were always killin’ people for one thing’ said Henry.

‘Who were?’

‘People.’

‘Why?’

‘They had to. How’d you think there’d ‘ve been any hist’ry if they hadn’t?’ (13)

Crompton was, remembered her friend Joan Braunholz, “a true-blue Tory…a temperamental Conservative” (14). She belonged to her local Conservative Association in Bromley—which was unimaginative enough to utilize the bestselling author solely to stuff envelopes with campaign ‘literature’. One cultural commentator has called Crompton “a species of conservative modernist” (15), while another has defined her outlook as “defending the private against the public and the individual against the demands of society and the state” (16).

Her conservatism is implicit but always apparent—in her High Anglicanism, pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature, ridicule of idealists, and belief in the necessity and durability of the class system. It was for this last reason that her books were removed from some libraries between the 1960s and 1980s by librarians trying, rather like Robert Brown, to be real and relevant. Today, the sensitivities more often surround race, with casual phrases like “rather more swarthy than the average boy” and “not an English cast of countenance” (17) causing consternation amongst the easily frightened.

Through William, Crompton constantly exposes the pomposity and hypocrisy of the complacenti. There are the advocates of “Higher Thought”, a coterie of sharp-chinned spinsters who hurriedly abandon their meeting when William’s cache of centipedes and spiders gets loose. Then there is the League of Perfect Love, ‘animal rights’ ignoramuses who have an instant change of heart when rats invade their living room (this 1935 story is rarely reprinted now, because it shows a rat-killing competition). There are the adopt-a-poor-family agitators who baulk at admitting the self-same poor into their own circles, or contributing financially towards these schemes (18). There is the teacher

“…with a startling taste in socks and ties, whose ‘modern’ methods of teaching had left the minds of his pupils completely but not unpleasantly befogged.”

Later, the same individual

“…transferred his gifts and his person to a small but exclusive repertory company that specialized in performing ‘experimental’ drama to a limited audience of leftwing intellectuals” (19)

“William and the Protest Marchers” (1965) contains the egalitarian students of “Newlick University”, marching to demonstrate against “those moth-eaten old relics of antiquity” Oxford and Cambridge—only to give up their march and forego their principles as soon as they get hot and they find a place to get a drink without having to mix with what their leader calls “riff-raff”. In the same story, an animal rights lecturer gets pushed into a lily-pond by a pig whose saintliness he has just been extolling.

William always reflected what was going on in the wider world (his creator often reminded herself in her diaries to “be topical!”) and the 1930s accordingly saw William setting up his own paramilitary formation after seeing a Mosleyite demonstration (20). Like (presumably) many adult Mosleyites, the Outlaws are intoxicated by “the salutes, the shouting” and fashion themselves green armbands, whereupon William harangues the townspeople:

“You’ve gotter have a dictator…you’ve all gotter to be Green shirts same as us…We’re goin’ to fight everyone that isn’t…We’re goin’ to fight everyone in the world…We’re going to conquer the world…We’re goin’ to be dictators over the world.”

This address and the subsequent clashes with a blue shirted gang over which will have the largest “col’ny” with the most doughnuts is a brilliantly funny commentary on contemporary Europe, already self-immolating at the hands of much less excusable orators.

The 1934 story “William and the Nasties” is frequently singled out for criticism and indeed it does leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, to the extent that it is no longer included in collections. Yet it is congruent with the fantasy psychology and immature knowledge of boys of that age. The Outlaws are talking about the new “Nasty” regime in Germany:

"They rule all the country" said Henry "an’ make everyone do jus’ what they like an’ send them to prison if they don’t."

"I’d be one of them if I was in that country’ said William.

"Jews are rich" explained Henry, "so they chase ‘em out and take all the stuff they leave behind. It’s a jolly good idea."

"Ole Mr. Isaacs is a Jew" said Ginger. They stared at each other with sudden interest.

(Mr. Isaacs is the unfriendly owner of the sweetshop whom they suspect of giving them short-measures of bulls-eyes and “cokernut lumps”.)

“’There came to him [William] glorious visions of chasing Jew after Jew out of sweetshop after sweetshop and appropriating the precious spoils."Henry explains the Nasties’ modus operandi—“They’ve got people called storm troops an’ when those Jews don’t run away they knock ‘em about till they do.”

They plan to break into Mr. Isaacs’ shop, but as they are so doing, their basic decency rapidly reasserts itself:

“A strange distaste for the adventure was creeping over the Outlaws.”

They never attack Mr. Isaacs, obviously, and in fact inadvertently do him a favour which brings about friendly relations between them and him. A recent study (21) acknowledges that Crompton was “probably trying to make pro-Jewish points”, but concludes that the story was unusually clumsily constructed. The story is genuinely disturbing, as if something hideous had briefly broken the surface of the still pond of English life, to sink again almost immediately but leaving behind a shivery memory. Needless to say, when war does come, William “does his bit” to ‘help’—and in “William Takes Charge”, which appeared in May 1940, our hero’s ineptitude is an obvious swipe at Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous diplomacy.

William is essentially apolitical. Long before being a Fascist, he had also been the sole member of the junior branch of Reformed Bolsheviks. He had to form his own organization because Robert will not let him join the Bolshevik club to which the Outlaws’ older brothers belong. Once again, William’s oratory ridicules fringe folly—

"All gotter be equal" he pronounced fiercely. "All gotter have lots of money. All ‘uman beings. That’s sense, isn’t it?... Well, then, someone ought to do somethin’!"

And William does do somethin’; he and the other Outlaws expropriate the belongings of their older brothers, who in consequence have a change of heart. As Robert admits ruefully to his father,

“It’s all right when you can get your share of other people’s things, but when other people can get their share of your things, then it’s different.” (22)

In “William—The Bad” (1930), there is a mock election between the Outlaws. Standing as the communist candidate, Ginger sets out his stall,

“Ladies an’ Gentlemen, Communism means havin’ a war against all the people that aren’t Communists an’ conquerin’ an’ killin’ them.”

In “William, Prime Minister” (1929), Henry explains more lucidly than many real-life commentators the true nature of politics:

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.”

In a thousand such effortless-seeming asides, the wide-awake William and his chums unmask the pretensions not just of communism, but of all adult existence.

Yet howsoever revelatory about society, William is first and foremost the boy all boys wish they had been and who all girls adore—and we like to read about his escapades because they conjure up the intoxicating essence of childhood. Through Crompton’s timeless thaumaturgy, with a laugh and a pang we suddenly remember the texture of youth—the energy, the curiosity, the visions, the passing loves and hatreds, the resentments and rapprochements, the fears and guilt, the first times and sudden insights, the wonder and the acceptance, the long imaginative journeys inside one’s head or across fields of sun-striped grasses on afternoons when reality seemed contingent and time appeared to have no end. Like William, we have all lived “crowded hours”—and thanks to his immemorial ebullience, even now we can recover our pasts for a time.

Notes

1. According to the Summer 2011 edition of the Just William Society Magazine there have been three British films—Just William (1939), Just William’s Luck (1947) and William at the Circus (1948). Recordings are extremely rare

2. In her other novels, Crompton “sought to attack the cosy conventionalism of Victorian thought. Her novels are thronged with adultery, illegitimacy, divorce, suicide, child abuse, and homosexuality” (Classes, Cultures, and Politics, Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin, edited by Clare V. J. Griffiths, James J. Nott and William Whyte, 2011, Oxford: OUP). Ironically enough, Crompton’s brother John, the original inspiration for William, earned a reputation for ‘serious’ writing with his natural history works, especially 1948’s The Hunting Wasp, which was deservedly praised by John Betjeman, Harold Nicolson and others

3. Classes, Cultures, and Politics, op. cit.

4. “Meet William”, Collectors’ Digest Annual, 1962, cited by Mary Cadogan, in Richmal Crompton—The Woman Behind Just William, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1986

5. “The Show”, 1922

6. “Meet William”, op. cit.

7. “Not Much”, 1923

8. “The Native Protégé”, 1923

9. “William the Persian”, 1935

10. “A Present from William”, 1935

11. “William’s Hobby”, 1922

12. “William the Conspirator”, 1935

13. “William the Conspirator”, ibid.

14. Cited by Cadogan, op. cit.

15. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, London and New York: Routledge, 1991

16. Classes, Cultures, and Politics, op. cit.

17. “The Native Protégé”, ibid.

18. “William—The Showman”, 1937

19. “William and the Holiday Task”, 1965

20. “What’s in a Name?”, 1938

21. Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War, Edinburgh University Press, 2007

22. “The Weak Spot”, 1924

Whatever Happened to Our Old Friend?

Here in the bars, bazaars, and dens of iniquity that make up the ex-pat Far East, you run into your fair share of cads, chancers, and rum fellows – the sort of chaps whose eccentricities and slight quirks go unnoticed amid the teeming masses of Asia. The broad-minded and perpetually distracted Oriental, it seems, has a nasty habit of lumping all White men in together and glossing over the subtle codes and hierarchies by which we define ourselves.

It was no surprise, therefore, when on a recent trip to Singapore, I ran into an old European acquaintance, whom, I had been reliably informed, had died and been buried a long time ago back in his native Europe, a place where he had never really fitted in, leading, on occasion, to unfortunate excesses of behaviour that saw him blackballed from most of polite society.

As he pressed me for news from home over cocktails at the Raffles, I could see that he had done extremely well for himself out here, and seemed far, far younger than he had any right to be.

The bartender and waiters were clearly in awe of him; while, from across the room, came the deferential glances of the city's movers and shakers, and the realization that I myself could not be a complete nobody to be in such exalted company.

"It's really all down to my old chum, Lee Kuan Yew," he told me warmed by his fifth daiquiri. "Without Harry's help, god knows what I'd be doing."

After I had checked into my hotel – definitely not the Raffles on my budget, but somewhere cheap and cheerful with geckos on the wall and Russia Today on the satellite TV – I wondered how he had managed to pull off such a remarkable recovery. Back in the old country he had been reviled, but these people clearly loved and venerated him.

I thought no more of this impenetrable conundrum and spent the next day visiting the sights – Sentosa Island and Changi Prison Museum. Towards evening, after the usual short, intense tropical downpour, I made my way to the famous Merlion Statue, the symbol of this rootless city state that was created by the British as a convenient coaling station and anti-pirate base for their worldwide web of trade. And there he was again!

He was standing next to a gaggle of Western tourists, dressed unbelievably in his trademark black under the still broiling sun, but looking as cool as ever. With my right arm upraised I hailed him from the distance. He turned to look at me as if disturbed from a reverie, then quickly resumed his trademark look of smug strength that always reminded me of a bank manager who had just turned down a loan.

"I often come down here at this time of the day," he said in a slightly breathy voice. "I seem to be strangely effected by the sight of the sun departing west."

There was something uncanny about his appearance. While I was drenched in sweat from my touristy exertions, there wasn’t a single bead of sweat upon his pale skin. The only sign of the tremendous heat was the glistening sheen of the melted wax in his neatly groomed moustache. Inevitably we resumed our conversation of the night before. I asked him point blankly why he had made so good out here.

"Well, as you know, the movement with which I am associated grew out of the class conflict of the early twentieth century; an antidote to both Communism and the excesses of global capitalism, and a movement at whose heart lay the idea of perpetuating the harmonious interaction of the various classes in society," he said, starting to relentlessly roll one wordy phrase after another, as if speaking to a large hall of people who had foregone a night at the cinema in order to listen to him.

"Well, I'm sad to say that we were all barking up the wrong tree," he continued without a pause. "The class conflict, about which so many of us got excited in those far-off, heady days, was a mere mirage, an insane illusion, a tragic misreading of the wider situation. Class, it seems, was not the ultimate factor and only seemed to be so because the preceding political state had been the highest development of ethnically-based national centralization. By positing our whole existence as an antidote to imaginary or temporary class conflict, those of us in our movement historically limited our relevance."

Since he was speaking voluminously, the tourists, who had been taking pictures with the Merlion, now backed away and started looking askance.

"But why here, in Singapore?" I asked, keen to dampen the ardour of his tirade with the occasional question.

"I said that class conflict, as a historical phenomenon, has been grossly exaggerated, but this does not mean that we live in an inherently peaceful world," he resumed at slightly reduced volume. "There is still plenty of conflict in the world, but class conflict is the exception; not the rule. The real seed of conflict is race! Hence I am here. Singapore is not riven by potential class conflict – everybody here is just keen to make money to the best of their differing abilities. No! The real danger in a place of this nature, with Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Arabs, all living cheek by jowl, is racial conflict. That's where our movement, with its ethos of suppressing group conflicts, really comes into its own! Our fellow Westerners are always sniffy about the strict censorship here, the lack of pornography, the draconian anti-litter laws, the birching, et cetra, as if they were referring to the quaint conservatism of a childishly backward Asian state. They don't realize that this is their own future. Each of these measures reflects the central goal of avoiding mass, brutal, and bloody race riots. Just imagine a Malay reading a pornographic magazine featuring a Chinese girl on a train, or an Arab spitting out chewing gum in front of a Hindu temple, and you will understand why Singapore has to be the way it is; and the rest of the world, too, as each country gradually becomes more and more ethnically diverse and more crowded. Singapore is a rather upmarket version of how the rest of the world will ultimately become, and it will be a world ruled by the spirit of F…”

"Sir Oswald, sir," a voice cut in. We both turned to see a couple of smartly dressed men backed up by two other, bigger, less smartly dressed men. On the lapels of their suits they all wore badges showing a red streak of lightning bisecting a blue circle that looked vaguely familiar.

"Sorry to interrupt, sir," the smartest dressed man said, "but their Excellencies require your advice on a most important national question and have sent the limousine."

"Duty calls!" my old acquaintance said, then turned and walked towards the waiting limousine, followed by the four attendants. Alas, that was the last I saw of him.

The Assassination of Pyotr Stolypin

After a series of pogroms tore through Russia in 1886, the young philosopher Vladimir Soloviev would exercise his prophetic impulse. Neither a slave to social fashions nor a stranger to controversy, Soloviev was a friend to the Jews out of sincerity rather than any calculation. Two years prior, he had published an article asserting the intertwined destinies of Christendom and Jewry as part of his greater vision of a “free theocracy.”¹And so in the pogroms’ aftermath, Soloviev wrote in a letter to his acquaintance, the Talmudic scholar Feivel Getz:

What are we to do with this disaster? Let pious Jews pray intensely to God, that He set Russia’s fate in the hands of religious and also sensible and brave men, who would want and could dare to do good for both peoples².

Such a man would be granted to Russia, if only for a time. As the Romanovs’ empire was swept into a ruinous war with Japan and the 1905 Revolution, Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin would stand against the maelstrom. Stolypin was ruthlessly suppressing rebellion as governor of Saratov oblast when he was called by Nicholas II to national duty. Within months, the new prime minister would proceed to re-establish order in Russia and undertake challenging political, economic and agricultural reforms. Just as Soloviev had hoped but would never see, Stolypin also attempted to improve the acrimonious Russian-Jewish relationship at the level of nationalities policy. This premature effort, however, was unlikely to satisfy any interested party, much less radicals of any persuasion.

Stolypin would resign in March of 1911 from the fractious and chaotic Duma after the failure of his land-reform bill. His peace in this world would be short-lived, though; he was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House on September 14 in the presence of the emperor. Upon being shot, Stolypin stood and declared his willingness to die for the Tsar, whom he then blessed before collapsing. In a eulogy for the fallen, the conservative monarchist Lev Tikhomirov would praise his nobility and strength of heart, all of which he devoted to the service of his fatherland:

The blood of his ancestors spoke in him, and his soul was deeply Russian and Christian. He believed in God as the Lord may grant belief to the servants before His altar…In such a way did he believe in Russia, and in this we can only admire him. And from this faith he drew vast power³.

Stolypin’s killer was 24-year-old Dmitry Bogrov (Mordechai Gershkovich), a leftist revolutionary who had also moonlighted as a provocateur for the Okhrana, Imperial Russia’s secret police. The otherwise unremarkable Bogrov harbored a burning animosity toward the autocracy, and as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will show in the following passage, his sentiments were shared at the time by many other Russian Jews. With moral, political and financial support from the Diaspora (especially in America), the Jewish community was radicalizing to unprecedented degrees, and Russians were bristling back. There would be no reduction of inter-ethnic tensions. Bogrov acted “extravagantly,” as he put it, to prevent Stolypin from instigating pogroms, but in doing so he murdered perhaps the one man capable of implementing some measure of a just peace between Russians and Jews⁴.Too often in history the victim narrative is a convenient pretext for aggression. Chauvinism and hatred cut both ways, and the atrocities they inspire can wreak consequences far beyond what their initiators might have imagined.

Pytor Stolypin may well have been mistaken in the formulation of key policies. Tikhomirov had earlier criticized the prime minister for his adherence to a failed Western-style parliamentarianism, and urged him to first uphold the integrity of the Great Russian ethnos and its culture before tackling any other “national questions” within the empire. It would be better, said Tikhomirov, that subject peoples prove themselves worthy of the rights bestowed them by the Tsar.

Yet Stolypin was also an adept statesman with unmatched force of will. Had he eluded his assassin’s bullet, he quite possibly could have guided Russia intact past the next catastrophic round of war and revolution that awaited her. In his work 200 Years Together, Solzhenitsyn dedicates considerable space to Stolypin’s death and its implications. Step by terrible step, the drama unfolds as his murder at the Kiev opera will facilitate revolutionary tyranny over Russia. The curtain only descends upon our witness to the most “extravagant” effect of Bogrov’s exploit, the enslavement and near-extermination of both Jewry and the Slavic tribes.

***

Text taken from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together, Chapter 10: In the Time of the Duma (pp.462-467).

Translated from Russian by Mark Hackard.

The first Russian premier who faithfully set and carried out the task of Jewish equal status, despite the will of the Tsar, died—was this History’s mockery?—at the hands of a Jew…

There had already been seven attempts to kill Stolypin by entire revolutionary groups of varied composition; none had succeeded. And then a loner would ingeniously manage it.

Still young and of immature mind, Bogrov himself could not grasp in full Stolypin’s public significance. But from childhood he had seen the everyday degrading sides of political inequality and was inflamed, for his family, colleagues and himself, to hatred of the Tsarist power. And clearly in Kiev’s ideologically progressive Jewish circles, there would be no softening toward Stolypin for his attempts to remove anti-Jewish restrictions. Among the well-off, the scales were tipped by memory of his energetic suppression of the 1905 Revolution and displeasure over his efforts toward the “nationalization of Russian credit,” i.e. open competition with private capital. Among groups of Kievan Jewry (and those of Petersburg, which the future killer also frequented), was active the ultra-radical Field, where the young Bogrov considered himself right and even obligated to kill Stolypin.

So strong was the Field that it permitted such an arrangement: the capitalist father Bogrov ascends and prospers under the monarchical system, while Bogrov the son commits to the destruction of that system. And the father, after the assassination, expresses pride in such a son. It turns out that Bogrov wasn’t so alone: he was quietly applauded by those in well-to-do quarters, those who had earlier remained unconditionally loyal to the regime.

And the gunshot that struck down Russia’s recovery could have been directed against the Tsar. But Bogrov thought killing the Tsar impossible, because (in his words) “this could have provoked persecution of the Jews” and “brought about constraints on their rights.” By murdering only the prime minister, he foresaw correctly that such a thing wouldn’t happen. Yet he thought—and was bitterly mistaken—that this act would favorably serve the fate of Russian Jewry…

And what happened in “Black Hundred Kiev,” populated by a great number of Jews? Among Kievan Jews in the very first hours after the murder, there arose a mass panic, and a movement to abandon the city began. “Terror seized the Jewish population not only of Kiev, but also of the most remote localities of the pale of settlement and inner Russia."⁵ A club of Russian nationalists sought to collect signatures to deport all Jews from Kiev. (It wanted to collect them, but didn’t.) There came to pass not the slightest attempt at a pogrom. The chairman of the youth organization “Double Eagle” Golubiev called for the storm of the Kiev Okhrana section that failed to stop the assassination and for beatings of Jews; he was reined in immediately.

The newly sworn-in prime minister Kokovtsov at once called Cossack regiments into the city (all these forces were on maneuvers and far away) and sent all governors an energetic telegram: prevent pogroms by all means, including force. Units were deployed to an extent not done against the revolution. (Slizoberg: If pogroms broke out in September 1911, “Kiev would have witnessed a slaughter not seen since the times of Khmelnitsky.^"6)

And not a pogrom took place in Russia, not one, not in the least. (Although we often read dense volumes how the Tsarist government dreamt only of arranging Jewish pogroms and was always seeking a way to do so.)

It stands to reason that the prevention of disorder is a direct duty of the state, and in successfully carrying out this task, awaiting praise would be inappropriate. But after such a shocking event and on such grounds—the murder of the prime minister!—the avoidance of expected pogroms could be noted, even if in passing. But no—no one heard that intonation, and no one mentions that.

And what’s even difficult to believe—Kiev’s Jewish community did not issue a denunciation or an indirect expression of sorrow over the murder. Just the opposite—after Bogrov’s execution many Jewish students, male and female, brazenly dressed in mourning.

Russians at the time noticed this. It has now been published that in December 1912 Vasily Rozanov wrote: “After [the murder of] Stolypin, I’ve somehow broken with them [the Jews]: as if a Russian would dare kill a Rothschild and more broadly one of their great men.”⁷

From the historical viewpoint there come two substantial thoughts on why it would be folly to write off Bogrov’s deed as the “action of internationalist forces.” The first and central of these: it wasn’t so. Not only Bogrov’s brother in his book, but also various neutral sources point out that he had reckoned to assist Jewry’s fortunes.⁸ The second thought: to take up what is inconvenient in history, to think it over and to regret is responsible, while to disavow a matter and wash one’s hands of it is shallow.

However, the disavowals and hand-wringing began almost immediately. In October of 1911, the Octobrist faction requested an inquiry on the murky circumstances of Stolypin’s murder. And at that moment parliamentary deputy Nisselovich protested: why did the Octobrists not conceal in their request that Bogrov was a Jew?! That, he said, was anti-Semitism!

I’ve also become familiar with this incomparable argument. After 70 years I received it from the American Jewish community in the form of a most severe accusation: why did I not conceal, why did I also say that Stolypin’s killer was a Jew? It does not matter that I described him as fully as I could. And it wasn’t important what his Jewish identity meant in his motives. No, non-concealment on my part—this was anti-Semitism!!

Deputy Guchkov with integrity would answer at the time:

“I think that a much greater act of anti-Semitism lies in Bogrov’s very action. I’d propose to State Duma member Nisselovich that he addresses his ardent words of admonition not to us, but to his co-religionists. Let him convince them with the power of his oratory to stay further away from two shameful professions: service as informants in the Okhrana and service as agents of terror. By this he would render a much greater service to his tribe.^9"

But what is that worth to Jewish memory when Russian history has permitted this assassination to be wiped clear of its memory? It has remained some insignificant, collateral blemish. Only in the 1980s did I begin to raise it from oblivion, and for 70 years it was unacceptable to remember that murder.

As the decades recede, more events and their meanings become visible to us. I’ve often fallen to thinking over the capriciousness of History and the unforeseen consequences it visits upon us, the consequences of our actions.

• Wilhelmine Germany loosed Lenin upon Russia to demoralize her; 28 years later Germany would be divided for a half-century.

• Poland would facilitate the strengthening of the Bolsheviks in their most difficult 1919 for a quick defeat of the Whites—and received in return 1939, 1944, 1956 and 1980.

• How zealously Finland would help the Russian revolutionaries, and how she could not abide her advantageous liberty as a component of Russia. She received from the Bolsheviks 40 years of political debasement (“Finlandization”).

• England in 1914 thought to crush Germany as a global competitor, but tore itself from the ranks of the great powers as all of Europe was crushed.

• The Cossacks in Petrograd were neutral in February and October [1917], and in a year in a half would reap their own genocide (and many were even those very Cossacks).

• In the first days of June 1917, the Left Social Revolutionaries gravitated to the Bolsheviks and gave them the outward appearance of a “coalition” and a widened platform. A year later they were squashed in a way that no autocracy could have managed.

Foresight of these long-term consequences is never granted to us or anyone. And the only salvation from such blunders is to be guided by the compass of God’s morality. Or in simple folk-language: “Don’t lay traps for others—you’ll fall into them.”

So it was with the murder of Stolypin—Russia endured brutal suffering, but Bogrov didn’t help the Jews. However others may see it, it is here I sense the gigantic steps of History, the results striking in their unexpectedness. Safeguarding Kiev’s Jews from persecution, Bogrov killed Stolypin. Had he survived, Stolypin would soon have been dismissed by the Tsar, but without question would have been called again into the leaderless musical chairs of 1914-16. Under him, Russia would not have come to such a shameful end, neither in the war nor in the Revolution. (If we would have even entered that war under him.)

Step 1: A murdered Stolypin meant shot nerves in the war, and Russia fell under the jackboots of the Bolsheviks.

Step 2: The Bolsheviks, for all their savagery, turned out to be even more incompetent than the Tsarist government, and in a quarter-century would quickly give away half-Russia to the Germans, including Kiev.

Step 3: Hitler’s forces easily entered Kiev and then destroyed the city’s Jewry.

The same Kiev, also in September, and only 30 years after Bogrov’s gun blast.

_____________

Notes

1 -- Toward the end of his life, Soloviev would come to repudiate his hopes for a free theocratic state. His last work, A Short Tale of Antichrist, reflects his disillusionment with the possibility of a perfected temporal order. Soloviev models the Antichrist’s earthly kingdom upon his earlier ideal.

2 -- Mochulsky, Konstantin. Gogol, Soloviev, Dostoevsky. Respublika. Moscow, 1995.

3 --  Tikhomirov, Lev. “U Mogily Petra Stolypina”. Moskovskie Vedomosti. 1911. No. 207

4 -- During the Second World War, Orthodox theologian Father Sergei Bulgakov wrote on the world-historical struggle between Judaism and Christendom: “Israel’s form in this state is fateful and terrible. On the one hand, it is persecuted namely by Christian peoples, and this persecution takes from time to time cruel and ferocious forms- oppression and hate to the point of extermination; such are Jewish pogroms to this day. On the other hand, Israel itself remains the overt or hidden persecutor of Christ and Christendom to the point of its direct and dire oppression, as in Russia.” In accordance with Church tradition, the tragedy will only be resolved at the end of time with Christ’s Second Coming, when through a holy remnant “all Israel shall be saved” (Romans XI: 26).

5 -- G.B. Slizoberg, Volume III, p. 249

6 --G.B. Slizoberg, Volume III, p. 249

7 -- “Correspondence of V.V. Rozanov and M.O. Gershenzon”. Novyi Mir, No. 3, p. 232

8 -- Bogrov, Vladimir. Dmitry Bogrov and the Murder of Stolypin: Exposing Secrets True and False. Berlin, 1931.

9 -- A. Guchkov. Speech in the State Duma on 15^th October 1911 [inquiry into the murder of Chairman of Council of Ministers P.A. Stolypin] // A. Guchkov in the Third State Duma (1907-1912): Collection of Speeches. St. Petersburg, 1912, p. 163

Coventry

Fragments of angels, segments of saints, pieces of people, broken birds, refracted sunbeams, tumbled landscapes, jumbled inscriptions, unidentifiable blocks of time-worn colour—I looked for a long time at the medieval glass so carefully but meaninglessly re-set in Holy Trinity church beside the Cathedral at Coventry.

These disjecta membra of former didactic decorations spoke of the violent iconoclasm of the Puritan revolution, when God’s self-appointed gatekeepers had smashed irreplaceable works of art in an orgy of ignorant glee. But because this was Coventry, it also hinted at much more recent ordeals—the Luftwaffe’s rawly-remembered raids of 1940-2, which killed 1,250 Coventrians, laid waste what had been a well-preserved medieval city, and gave rise to the dark slang “coventration” to signify indiscriminate eradication.

Seen in conjunction with the 15^th century “Doom” painting that stretches superbly across Holy Trinity’s chancel arch, with the just entering the Celestial City on Christ’s right and the damned going down to perdition on His left, while a bare-breasted Virgin intercedes in pity, the crazed glass seemed emblematic of deep dislocation—as if all of Coventry were a study in interrupted histories and partial reconstructions.

Dissatisfied with its own suffering, Coventry is twinned with Dresden, Warsaw and Volgograd (Stalingrad) and commemorates Hiroshima Day every August, while in the centre of the city is Lidice Place, to commemorate the mass murders that followed the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Even the radical rebuilds of the Fifties and Sixties that were supposed to refocus the city on the future look troubled to modern eyes—blank, brutalist cliffs as impersonal, impractical and impermanent as they are unpopular.

And beyond the tortured compactness of the city a ghostly hinterland unrolls to all sides. The ninth largest city in England is also the furthest from the sea, landlocked “far in the country of Arden”—the legendary super-forest of central England in which a squirrel could proverbially leap from tree to tree for the whole of Warwickshire’s length.

In England, woods once symbolized freedom, and their fastnesses are peopled by anti-establishment avatars—wodewoses, Wild Hunts, Queen Titania, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, Robin Hood and his Merry Men holding out for the return of the King. Medieval masons carved “Green Men” into thousands of ostensibly Christian churches—demonic faces forming capitals and roof-bosses, their eyes darting danger while their mouths vomit swags of oak, as if the forest was trying to break into the brash new buildings of this abstracter idol from the East.

Of all these archetypal forests, Arden was one of the greatest. Elm has the country-name of “Warwickshire weed” and into recent times the shire bore the soubriquet—part topographical description, part tourist attractant—of “Leafy Warwick”. Arboreal imagery even features in local heraldry, with the overreaching Earls of Warwick adopting the image of a bear supporting a tree as their armorial crest. This sparsely populated territory was attractive to opportunists as well as outlaws, and in 1540 John Leland found

“the ground in Arden is muche enclosyd, plentifull of gres . . . and woode, but no great plenty of corn”.

But despite economic depredations, Arden long remained a bosky wilderness evoked piquantly by Warwickshire writers Michael Drayton in his 1622 patriotic epic Poly-Olbion and his more famous contemporary William Shakespeare:

“Under the greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note

Unto the sweet bird’s throat.

Come hither.”

Shakespeare set As You Like It in the Ardennes (the Celtic word-root “high place” is the same), but he clearly had in mind the southern fringes of Arden around his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon 20 miles south of Coventry. His mother’s maiden name was Arden, and she belonged to one of only three English families which can trace themselves back directly in the male line to the Anglo-Saxons (1)—so the name is freighted with more than remembrance of a vanished landscape. In the 17^th century, Arden was still at least partly forested; the antiquary William Dugdale recorded ruefully, presumably from personal experience of frustrated forwanderings, “the ways are not easy to hit”. The countryside surrounding Coventry—the name tellingly derived from “Cofa’s tree”—is therefore central not just to English geography but also the English imagination; it rustles not just with phantasmagorical foliage but also unnumbered dead. (2)

Warwickshire has existed as an entity since the tenth century, but it is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 1016, as under attack by Canute’s Danish marauders. The county claims to contain the centre of England at Meriden, between Birmingham and Coventry (3), and the Mercian dialect that was spoken in Warwickshire is the one from which standard English is mostly derived. It spawned the Anglo-Norman romance (circa 1300) of Guy of Warwick, who fought in the Holy Land, and killed the Dun Cow of Dunsmore (near Coventry) and a dragon in Northumberland so he could marry the Earl’s daughter—only to die in poverty outside the castle gates, but acknowledged by her before he died.

In 1312, Piers Gaveston, homosexual lover of Edward II, was murdered just outside Warwick, and in the following century the then Earl Richard Neville—“Warwick the Kingmaker”—played a history-changing role during the Wars of the Roses. For all these reasons and others, Henry James dubbed Warwickshire “unmitigated England”, but this city that has hummed for so long at the county’s core has been—to put it mildly—very much mitigated.

A nunnery was founded on the site by St. Osburga in the 8^th century, whose memory is perpetuated in the name of a local Catholic school. “St. Augustine’s arm” was presented to an unspecified local church in 1022, which hints at ecclesiastical importance. Then in 1043 Leofric, Earl of Mercia and one of England’s three most powerful nobles, and his wife Countess Godiva (Godgifu) founded a Benedictine priory whose walls were “enriched and beautified with so much gold and silver that the walls seemed too narrow to contain it.” (4) The Domesday Book (1086) only mentions agricultural holdings at Coventry, although there must have been a town because it became a bishopric in 1102.

Leofric’s black eagle helps hold up the city’s coat of arms, but his wife’s naked ride on a white horse to protest her husband’s oppressive taxation of the poor has become one of the great traditionary tales of the Middle Ages. Whether it really happened is immaterial, because Godiva embodies ancient attributes and imagery and, like Boudicca before her, became a potent symbol of self-sacrifice and the liberties of the English. Roger of Wendover, whose Flores Historiarum is the earliest account (around 1230), believed the ride had occurred and in any case obviously enjoyed visualizing it:

“The Countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil, and then, mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the marketplace without being seen, except her fair legs, and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked.”

In his treatment of the legend, Tennyson evoked the shuttered but watchful town with its frowning gables and worked in the moralistic accretion of the tempted tailor “Peeping Tom”:

“And one low churl, compact of thankless earth, 
The fatal byword of all years to come, 
Boring a little auger-hole in fear, 
Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will, 
Were shrivel’d into darkness in his head, 
And dropt before him.”

In Hertford Street there is an early 19^th century head and shoulders effigy supposedly of Tom, a writhing and agonized image, its mouth open as if shouting in pain, set incongruously on a modern wall facing a newsagents with the appropriate name of Peeping Tom News.

While successive earls made war on successive kings, economic life carried on. There were a dozen mills by the 12^th century powered by the River Sherbourne that passes west to east through the basin of the city on its way to the Avon—now mostly gurgling sadly underground, although I found one exposed segment near Spon End that bursts with greenery, damselflies and yellow wagtails, crossed by a graceful 1850s iron bridge.

Wealthy trade guilds funded the building of Holy Trinity, St Michael’s (which became the Cathedral), St John the Baptist’s, Christchurch and St. Mary’s Guildhall. They sponsored the Coventry Mysteries, a cycle of miracle plays acted at Coventry for two centuries until suppressed by devout killjoys in 1591. The Pageant of the Shearsmen and Tailors, which recalled Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents”, is the source of the Coventry Carol, one of the earliest extant pieces of English music, a lovely evocation of a mother’s love for her endangered infant:

“Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.”

The 13^th century saw disputes between the “Prior’s Half” and the “Earl’s Half” of Coventry for control of the wool trade. (The expression “true blue” comes from the non-fading qualities of Coventry thread. In Michael Drayton’s 1593 Shepherd’s Garland, the pastoral hero wears “breech of Cointree blue” to symbolize his steadfastness.) In 1345, Coventry was freed from religious control to become the county’s first free city. The new Corporation promptly erected city walls in the local red sandstone—a small stretch of which still stand beside the Swanswell Gate, their eroded evocativeness marred by a recent foot-bridge that leaps arrogantly over, a wonder in structural steel sadly disfigured by blue glass panels.

The Bablake Free School for Boys was founded in the reign of Queen Isabella and, according to a believable tradition, endowed by an ironmonger who had ordered steel from Spain, but was sent by mistake a vastly more valuable cargo of cochineal and silver.

Isabella’s grandson (Richard the Lionheart’s son) Edward, nicknamed the “Black Prince” because of his black cuirass, stayed frequently in Cheylesmore Manor House, part of which survives as the city’s register office, a touching relic unhappily blocked in by ugly offices and a car park, where old confetti swirls sadly around in eddies of exhaust from New Union Street nearby. The rooms that once housed princes of the blood royal are heaped with teetering boxes of stationery and broken computers. Yet so proud was the city once of the connection with the hero of Crecy that its motto is still Camera Principis (“chamber of the prince”) and Edward’s heraldic “cat-a-mountain” surmounts the city arms.

In the 15^th century, Coventry acquired county status and even held parliaments—the Parliamentum Indoctorum in 1404, the “lack-learning parliament” which lawyers were forbidden to attend, and the Parliamentum Diabolicum of 1459, when the man who would become Edward IV two years afterwards was attainted.

Coventry’s loyalty to the Lancastrian cause persuaded Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou to set up court in the city during the Wars of the Roses—her strategic “secret harbour”, where her husband could manage the wars while she managed his mental breakdowns. Their sojourn here is marked by a stupendous piece of tapestry made in Tournai between 1495 and 1500 that still hangs on the wall for which it was designed in St. Mary’s Guildhall. Columns stitched in the tapestry align with real stone transoms behind, separating saints, symbols, monarchs and courtiers into six compartments patterned with interleaving diamonds, knots and leaves.

The Guildhall is one of England’s most miraculous medieval survivals, considering that is just a few feet away from the blasted Cathedral. When you go through its arched gateway, see the tapestry for the first time, stand in the Ante Room with its disturbingly sloping floor or look out of a leaded window into its courtyard you could be in Bavaria or Saxony. The Great Hall with its tapestry and oaken angels has seen three King Henrys and even played a joke on James II, who was splashed with custard when his table collapsed during a banquet. In an oriel window bay there is a 19^th century plaster statue of Godiva being disapproved of by 16^th century stone saints but surveyed with friendlier interest by a medieval glass man re-set in a strategic position, whose hand appears to be reaching out to take liberties.

The city dwindled and by 1520 the population had more than halved. Dissolution of the monasteries removed the principal employers, and John Leland recorded plangently, “The glory of the city decayeth”. Coventry had also long been a locus of Lollardism and this led to public burnings of those residents found guilty of the atrocious crime of having the scriptures in a language they could understand. Coventrians still take gloomy pride in this latitudinarian legacy.

Ironically, Warwickshire later developed a reputation for Catholic recusancy. Robert Catesby was an Arden as well as an ardent man, and in 1583 Edward Arden—distantly related to Shakespeare’s mother—was executed for plotting against Elizabeth I. Mary Queen of Scots killed time in Coventry in 1569 in comfortable confinement while Elizabeth wondered what to do with her inconveniently Catholic cousin.

Almshouses for the elderly poor were founded during the 16^th century, and two still function in the buildings in which they were founded—Bond’s Hospital and Ford’s Hospital. Other small patches of the Middle Ages have also survived, especially in Spon Street where there are facing rows of handsome shops and houses supported by frames of local oak, but as everywhere in Coventry these sit uneasily with the postwar period’s often hideous heritage. These sturdy buildings, once so workaday with their large families and weavers’ lofts, now give room to prissier businesses—boutiques, wedding planners, financial consultants—while just behind them smile the broken teeth of Sixties office blocks.

In the Civil War Coventry sided with Parliament, and even the city’s women helped to fill in quarries to avoid them being used as cover by Cavaliers:

“[T]hey assembled in companies, and marched in military array, with mattocks and spades, headed by an Amazon who carried an Herculean club on her shoulders” (5)

With civic sinews bolstered by such sisters, in 1642 the city refused admittance to Charles I. The Coventrians treated Royalist prisoners of war so rudely that “being sent to Coventry” passed into the language as shorthand for being neglected (6). The prisoners were kept in St John the Baptist church, whose banked-up graveyard leans conveniently on the walls of Bond’s Hospital. Bulbs burn in busy rooms that abut tombs topping centuries of Coventrians. Coventry paid for its democratic zeal after the Restoration, when Charles II cast down the city walls so they could never again be held against a King.

Coventry re-built its reputation for skilful workmanship and by the 18^th century it had become a centre for silk weaving and clockmaking. Textiles again became economically important, and the population more than quadrupled over the 19^th century. There was a burgeoning middle-class, whose lives and modern mores were captured by Mary Ann Evans—better known as George Eliot. (Coventry is thought to have been the model for Middlemarch.)

Engineering came because of good coal and connections (just 95 miles to London, and convenient for Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Liverpool, Wales and Ireland). The city was reamalgamated into its historic county (in 1974, it was taken out again and crammed against the locals’ will into the insipid “West Midlands”.) Coventry became a proto-Silicon Valley, the ideal place for local boy James Starley to make his patented Rover Safety Bicycle to replace the more dangerous penny-farthing. His nephew then designed motorbikes and automobiles under the brand name Rover. He rapidly had rivals, ranging from the Great Horseless Carriage Co. to more serious contenders like Humber, Riley, Standard, Triumph, Daimler and Jaguar.

Coventry became Car City, clever with its hands, in love with wheels, dependent upon and devoted to rapid transit, with the 20^th century even throwing up reports of spectral coaches and trucks to reflect modern superstitions, replacing the monks and nuns of the pre-engine past. Even in the pleasantest suburbs, or in attractive Green Belt meadows, one can always hear vehicles passing and re-passing endlessly on the ring-roads, roundabouts, bypasses and motorways. Because of the cars, there came aircraft and armaments factories—and because of them the Luftwaffe, dropping death and disaster on the high-tech city as the Royal Air Force would soon do in its turn on equally lovely cities in Germany.

An archetypal clever Coventrian was jet pioneer Frank Whittle, born in the suburb of Earlsdon in 1907 and captivated by seeing a plane on Hearsall Common in 1916. His bronze shades its eyes with an over-long arm below the Whittle Arch—a huge aluminium X in front of the Transport Museum, a suitable place to reflect on British car manufacturing then and now. Almost all the marques have gone, probably never to return. Jaguar’s design HQ is still here, but manufacturing has moved elsewhere. The last fully Coventry-made cars were the London black cabs made by LTI, but in March 2010 they outsourced manufacturing to China. The last major machine tool manufacturer was also foreign-owned and went out with a bang—Matrix Churchill, secretly belonging to the Iraqi government, which was attempting to supply a “supergun” to Saddam Hussein notwithstanding UK sanctions.

There was a final flurry of hopeful innovation during the short-lived “New Elizabethan” period, which lasted for about a decade until the early 1960s—a period in which romanticists likened the young Queen to her iconic predecessor and predicted a similar effloresence of Englishness, informed by technology taught in bright new schools just as the earlier Elizabethans had been informed by Reformed theology preached in clear-glassed churches.

Modern Coventry is a monument to their misplaced idealism. There is a list of the Redevelopment Committee on a building at Broadgate House, the first major building of the redevelopment, opened in 1953. It is slightly surreal to read Anglo-Saxon titles like Alderman and unvarnished surnames like Grindlay, Swain and Binks affixed to a dank office that has not resisted time half so well as Cheylesmore—and to imagine what utopian will o’ the wisp took hold of all these bowler-hatted Binkses. They were led by Donald Gibson, CBE, visionary author of the “Gibson Plan”, who combined the roles of Chief Architect and Planning Officer in what could be construed as a conflict of interest. Probably he saw himself as a chummy “Chris” Wren for the Britain of the beatniks.

The Council had been planning massive redevelopment even in the 1930s, and the Mayor said on the morning after the first raid:

“We have always wanted a site for a new civic centre, and now we have it.”

Gibson’s chief innovation was to introduce large pedestrian precincts with cars diverted onto an inner ringroad, which may make central Coventry more walkable but also encircles the centre in an unwelcoming envelope of steel railings, stained concrete and charging cars, with flyover supports co-opted for cringe-worthy artworks and messages of solidarity from Tito’s Belgrade.

Gibson wanted to remove most of the surviving old buildings, leaving little except Coventry’s landmark “Three Spires”—but some of these were saved because of protests, doubtless to Gibson’s disgust at such sentimentality.

The compromise city is full of surprises and strange juxtapositions, with sudden views of huge Perpendicular spires along half-timbered and sandstone streets—these giving way without warning onto motorized mayhem or raddled rectangles of flaking concrete and tinted glass. The apparent attitude of the Redevelopers reminded me of the name of a house I had noticed out in the suburbs—“Itlldo”.

An early Sixties film shown in the city museum shows BBC journalist Raymond Baxter interviewing one of these planners, perhaps Gibson himself—a stocky man in brown three-piece suit with a heavy moustache, like an Ealing Studios character actor. The film is a relic in itself, with its well-dressed and well-spoken participants looking at photos of new and nasty edifices while they shake their heads at the stuffiness of those “homesick for the overcrowded medieval city they knew” and nod approvingly at those who “thinking of their children, and the future, will say ‘It’s smashing!’” The results were indeed “smashing”, although not always in the way intended.

Some of Gibson’s schemes are now being put into reverse as the city undergoes another renovation, and some of this will be an improvement—because the council consulted the public, an approach the opposite of that which prevailed in the 1950s and 60s, when it was assumed that the man from Whitehall really did know best. The best idea is the re-opening of stretches of the Sherbourne right in the middle of the city. It is pleasant to think of the wrecking ball as possible liberator.

One building that will not be altered is Coventry’s most famous landmark—the Grade 1 listed St. Michael’s Cathedral, re-imagined by Sir Basil Spence to win a 1951 competition, filled with the products of some of the period’s finest craftsmen and consecrated in 1962 to the strains of Benjamin Britten’s specially-commissioned War Requiem.

Spence’s bold conception was to leave the 14^th century shell standing as its own grave-marker, and build beside it at right angles a whole new cathedral, connected to its predecessor by a concrete canopy. This structural syncretism is not wholly successful, but the ensemble is both evocative of the period and extremely atmospheric. Occasionally, the local newspaper even carries stories of impressionable visitors who say they have heard the droning of aircraft over the old building—memories of the first great raid of 14 November 1940, which the Germans called with gallows humour “Operation Moonlight Sonata”—yet more motorized ghosts to make the city twitch and grumble in its sleep.

Post-modern pilgrims enter through the western porch into the roofless skeleton of the old St Michael’s, with the miraculously surviving tower rising up and up—at 300 feet “a sight to make one’s eyeballs turn about”, as John Russell put it in his 1942 Shakespeare’s Country, repining for this place “where the air is singed with the sudden denial of adoration”. All around are imprints of calcined chapels, and the glassless ghosts of windows—just enough to give some idea of what was lost. Office workers eat lunches on benches and sparrows hop around in hope as school field trippers roam through the remains on their way to the Brave New future as visualized by Sir Basil.

If we follow them, we come into what feels like a 1980s conference centre, then past a desk where a cashier relieves each visitor of £7, and an indeterminate space of stacked chairs and vestment lockers. It is an inauspicious introduction, but then you climb stairs, passing the poignant crucifix of charred roof timbers that was placed defiantly on the high altar the morning after Moonlight Sonata, and pass into a 270 foot by 80 foot rectangle, crepuscular even by cathedral standards. The darkness is caused by the ‘saw-tooth’ shape of the walls and the abstract stained glass which transmutes even the strongest sun into subdued pulses and mood-zones. But at different times of day it is brighter, because almost the entire south wall, the one that looks out onto the ruins, is a huge window, the Screen of Saints and Angels, with engraved figures by John Hutton. With their ever changing background of sun and cloud beyond the old walls, these are ethereal but unconventional representations of heavenly beings, which the artist has made no attempt to render beautiful. With their empty eyes, gnarled hands and knuckles, and the sky shifting through them, they are striking and slightly troubling—ideal angels for an age of angst.

Facing them is the 75 foot high tapestry of “Christ in Glory” by Graham Sutherland that fills the opposite wall, a tiny and undifferentiated man standing straight but insignificant between Jesus’ colossal feet. Some of the fittings are bland or ugly, almost like shop fittings, but they are redeemed by reminders of suffering, like the iron “Crown of Thorns” made by the Royal Engineers that frames a giant silver-winged angel in the Chapel of Gethsemane. There are altar cloths embroidered with the names of World War 2 battles and thick books of remembrance, and the centerpiece on the High Altar has as its centerpiece a cross made of 15^th century nails from the bombed building. Coventry is the centre of a global network called Communities of the Cross of Nails, all 160 of which display a cross made of old nails from Coventry—and whenever the Royal Navy has an HMS Coventry it carries an identical cross. The last ship of this name was sunk during the Falklands War, and Navy divers went down especially to salvage the cross—which has since been seconded to HMS Diamond, a ship with links to the city.

For a building concerned with conciliation, outside on the east wall there is a surprisingly martial touch in Jacob Epstein’s large 1958 bronze of St Michael standing skinny but strong, with a giant spear in his clenched fist and trampling down the naked and cloven-footed Lucifer.

Like their city, Coventrians themselves have also been in a state of flux in their recent history. In a slightly preposterous but revealing 1968 book called British Tastes, advertising agent D. Elliston Allen takes time out from discussing the beer-drinking habits of the north-east and the body-shapes of women in the Home Counties to remark,

“In going out today into the streets of any central Midland town or city, the first reaction of any normally perceptive person can hardly fail to be one of momentary surprise, even shock. Almost everyone, it seems, looks remarkably similar.”

If that was true then—he was relying largely on a 19^th century book called Races of Britain, unlikely source material for an advertising executive even then—it is much less true now. Thanks first to industrial demand and more recently two universities (plus a higher birthrate) out of a total population of around 310,000 the city has an estimated ethnic minority population of over 25%—although some of these are members of easily assimilable white minorities. Coventry has a relatively low black population (just over 3%) and fewer Muslims than has become usual in English cities. Rather surprisingly, the largest non-Christian religion is Sikhism and I saw a Sikh road-mending crew, elderly men with long wagging beards and yellow turbans to complement their fluorescent safety tabards—although such anecdotal evidence is even less scientific than D. Elliston Allen’s saloon-bar sociology. It is not only bombs or wrecking balls that have changed the city; in a way, Coventry is all of England condensed and speeded up.

An atypical Coventrian was Philip Larkin, born here in 1922, whose father somehow rose to become City Treasurer, despite combining manic depression with literary sensitivity and an admiration for Hitler. The Larkins’ commodious family house in Manor Road (that name itself evoking vanished buildings and vanquished orders) was demolished in the 1960s to make way for some road ‘improvement’, and such casual vandalism could have coloured the poet’s controversial politics.

In “I Remember, I Remember”, he passes through Coventry in 1955 for the first time in years, on a train “coming up England by a different line”. At the station:

“I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign 
That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’ 
So long, but found I wasn’t even clear 
Which side was which . . .”

As the Binkses continued their ruthless work, in their way as zealous as the Luftwaffe or the Puritans, Larkin would probably have found it even harder to know “which side was which”. But then, as now, all such ‘judgemental’, ‘conservative’, ‘classist’, ‘reactionary’ concerns are generally dismissed as impossible, High Tory, quasi-fascistic fantasies of crowd control and ‘turning back the clock’.

Larkin’s poem ends on notes of self-deprecation and acceptance, with him settling back in his seat as the train pulls out of Coventry, smiling as he brushes off the subject with the mock-flippant line—

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”.

The “nothing” Larkin pretended to discount was an intense early life lived in places now largely vanished, and that is also Coventry’s special “nothing”—a history that is simultaneously unique to the place and representative of the whole of England. Despite all the travails of her history, despite the Puritans, planes, planners, and other progressives, Coventry has narrowly succeeded in holding onto some segments of herself—precious particular pieces, a sense of being somewhere rather than just an abandoned “anywhere”.

NOTES

1. According to James Lees-Milne in the 18^th edition of Burke’s Peerage, vol 1

2. Some historians have disputed the notion of huge expanses of unbroken ancient forest, pointing out that human habitation in Warwickshire go back at least 5,000 years and therefore there must have been extensive clearance early on. See, for example Terry Slater, The History of Warwickshire (1981). There is a commendable project to reunite central England’s relict tracts of forest with a scheme called the National Forest

3. Unhappily for Warwickshire loyalists, satellite mapping has identified the real centre of England as being near Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire

4. William of Malmesbury, writing circa 1130

5. Samuel Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of England, 1840

6. It has been surmised that the phrase, like so many others, has Shakepearean origins—cf. Falstaff on his scruffy foot-soldiers: “I’ll not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat” (Henry IV, Part 1) 

Banking and the Confederacy

Introduction

The goodwill towards the Southern states that one might expect from monetary reformers has been clouded by the claim that the War of Secession was instigated by international bankers for the control of the USA, and specifically that it was the South that was for this purpose backed by the Rothschilds and other European banking dynasties in Europe. While monetary reformers often allude to Abraham Lincoln having issued state credit in the form of the “Greenbacks,” and therefore Lincoln has become something of an icon among those who advocate alternatives to the usurious world financial system, seldom realized is that the Confederacy issued its own “Graybacks,” and did not have any type of fellowship with international finance. The condemnation of the South often includes an anti-Semitic element, because the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah P Benjamin, was Jewish, and from there flights of fancy roam free, including the claim that Benjamin was a “Rothschild agent” and even a that he was a “Rothschild relative.” This paper examines the claim as to whether the Rothschilds and other banking dynasties supported the South, and in particular examines the manner by which the Confederacy was really funded.

The “Grayback” served the Confederacy as the “Greenback” served the Union, and perhaps moreso, as the Confederacy was shut out of financial markets. It was a pragmatic move and one that better served the Confederate States of America (CSA) by force of circumstances than by going cap-in-hand to the international money-lenders, as most states then did and still do. Hence, the “Grayback” is an example of state credit used on a wide scale that allowed the functioning of an economy without recourse to usurious debt, and stands with other examples such as the use of Reserve Bank state credit by the 1935 New Zealand Labour Government.[i] Given the present widespread economic tumult caused by the compound interest intrinsic to the debt-finance system that controls much of the world, a concentration of alternative systems of banking and finance are of vital importance, but are presently problems seldom understood by the “Right.” This was not always the case, as exemplified by the writings of Ezra Pound[ii] and the “Social Justice” movement of Father Coughlin,[iii] et al.

Origins of a Myth

One of the first, if not the first, to circulate the allegation that the Confederacy was controlled by the Rothschilds as a means of weakening the Union and of taking control of the banking system was the Czarist émigré Count Cherep-Spiridovitch, who cites an alleged interview with German Chancellor Bismarck in 1876:

The division of the United States into two federations of equal force was decided long before the civil war by the High Financial Power of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economical and financial independence, which would upset the financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds predominated. They foresaw tremendous booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies indebted to the Jewish financiers for the vigorous republic confident and self-providing. Therefore they started their emissaries in order to exploit the question of slavery and thus to dig an abyss between the two parts of the republic....[iv]

The alleged quote from Bismarck goes on to praise Lincoln for being conscious of the plans of the “Jewish financiers” and for bypassing them with his own credit, for which he was assassinated.

The Czarist Count’s interest in this matter might be accounted for by:

1. His tendency, common among Czarist émigrés in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, where Jewish involvement was regarded as predominant because of the conspicuousness Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Uritsky, Sverdlov, et al, to seek out explanations for all upheavals by tracing their origins to the Jews. The Count’s book, The Secret World Government, ascribes much of history to the “hidden hand” (sic) of Jewry. The Count sees the same “hidden hand” that killed Czar Nicholas and his family after the Bolshevik seizure, as being that which also assassinated Lincoln.[v]

2. The historically good relations that had existed between the United States and Czarist Russia. Cherep-Spiridovitch alludes to Russia being “friendly to the Union cause and in 1863, when the success of the cause looked doubtful, a fleet of Russian war ships came into the harbor in New York.”[vi] Cherep-Spiridovitch states that Czar Alexander II’s orders were for the Russian fleet to be ready to “take orders from Lincoln.”[vii]

These accounts have been repeated ever since, especially among Right-wing conspiracy theorists, but are incorrect. The circumstances of the Russian Atlantic Fleet’s entry into New York harbor are related by Marshall B Davidson, who captures the imagery of welcome and jubilation among New Yorkers at the arrival of the Russians. Davidson states that at the time there were many rumors as to why the Russians had arrived, chief among them being that they were there to assist the Union against the South.

. . . In any case, New York seems generally to have assumed that this was a “friendship visit,” and must indicate Russian support for the Northern cause—a legend that lost nothing in its retelling, over the years, and that was not finally put to rest until 1915.[viii]

The reference by Davidson that the matter was “finally put to rest” in 1915 is optimistic as the legend has remained firm among certain quarters, Cherep-Spiridovitch’s 1926 book being one such example. Marshall states that at the time the Russian ships sailed into New York and San Francisco, a potential for conflict had emerged between Russia and England, Austria and France over Russia’s suppression of the Polish revolt. In 1915 Dr Frank A Golder, having had access to official Russian records, wrote in the American Historical Review that the Russian visits were not ones of “friendship,” but had been highly secret manoeuvres to get the best of the Russian ships into safe ports, the concern being that they would be trapped in the event of conflict with the European powers.[ix] New York and San Francisco were the only convenient ports for the best ships of Russia’s Atlantic and Pacific squadrons. From here the Russian ships could harass British commercial routes. The manoeuvre seems to have succeeded, states Davidson, as there was no ultimatum against Russia. “That they came as interested supporters of the Northern cause was a notion concocted and nurtured by the Unionists who were only too happy to imagine it to be true,” writes Davidson.[x]

However, ninety-five years on from the article by Dr Golder, and the image of an alliance between Lincoln and Czar Alexander against “international financiers” and/or the Jewish “hidden hand” is still being nurtured. While those with what one might call a cynical attitude towards Jews see the presence of Judah P Benjamin as Confederate Secretary of State as sufficient reason to consider the South as nothing but a Rothschild contrivance, monetary reformers see Lincoln in heroic terms for his having issued the Greenbacks as state credit to bypass plutocratic interests. What is overlooked is that the Confederacy issued its own Greenback equivalent, known as Graybacks. Hence the scenario is that, for example, according to Rochelle Ascher, a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, Lincoln fought the “British-backed New York banking system” bringing banking under control and issuing $450 million state-created Greenbacks to fund the war.[xi]

The very fact that the Confederacy was not supported by international finance caused the necessity of the Confederacy to generate its own credit. While an examination of the efficacy of government currency issue is not the subject of this essay, what should be noted is that price-inflation was caused in significant part by large-scale counterfeiting of Graybacks from the North, and was also affected greatly by public confidence or loss of confidence, depending on the development of the war. State currency amounted to 60% of the CSA revenue during the war.[xii] Marc Wiedenmier states that the money issued by the CSA was interest-free:

. . . [N]on-interest-bearing money remained the predominant medium of exchange in the Southern Confederacy despite the existence of large quantities of interest-bearing money…. state and Confederate governments forced banks to accept both types of money through de facto legal restrictions.[xiii]

The diehard manner by which myths about the Confederacy persist is accounted for by the presence of Judah P. Benjamin, more than by any other factor. Such a “Court Jew” (sic) can only be explained. So it goes, by the existence of a high-powered conspiracy that placed him in that position. We have previously seen how this attitude was taken up by the Czarist émigré Count Cherep-Spiridovitch, in 1926. The White Russian émigrés were to become very influential in shaping anti-Semitic ideologies outside Russia. Two obvious examples are Alfred Rosenberg who was to have a major input into the ideology of the National Socialist party in Germany; and Boris Brasol, a Czarist jurist who had been a member of a Russian trade delegation in the USA when the Russian revolutions destroyed his world, and who maintained influential contacts and was instrumental in popularising the Protocols of Zion in the USA. At any rate, the anti-Southern attitude was taken up by leading American conservatives whom one might normally expect to support the aristocratic and agrarian virtues and states’ rights of the South against Northern industrialism and plutocracy, and might have done so if it was not for the pervasive bugbear of Judah P. Benjamin.

One of the most prominent of the American conservatives was Gerald L. K. Smith, a force in his day first as aide to Louisiana’s Huey Long, then as an eloquent “America Firster” along with Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, et al.[xiv] During the course of his long career attacking Communism, Zionism and Judaism, including what he states was his campaign in the South that was instrumental in the creation of the “Dixie Party,”[xv]Smith published an article on the War of Secession in which he states that,

. . . if we look behind the scenes we will find that the “slave question” was but the surface issue. Below the surface ran a current of intrigue that ended with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln because he was determined that the United State be free from the bondage of the international bankers.[xvi]

Smith cites a passage from a book by John Reeves, who was said to have had access to the Rothschild archives, in which Reeves states that the division of the USA was decided by the Rothschilds at the wedding of Leonara, daughter of Lionel, to her cousin, Alphonse, son of James of Paris, at the family gathering in the City of London, in 1857. British Prime Minister Disraeli is reported to have said that it was here that a plan was devised to divide the USA into two, split between James and Lionel.[xvii]

Be that as it may, Smith jumped to the conclusion that, “Judah P Benjamin was chosen by the Rothschilds to do their work in the United States and he was the first adviser to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Southern Confederacy…”[xviii] The claim is repeated that Czar Alexander knew of the Rothschild plans for the USA and that this was the reason for his dispatching ships to New York and San Francisco harbors. The article concludes with the often-used alleged material from Bismarck. Other articles attempting to relate the Confederacy to Rothschild domination follow the same pattern to the present time.

Judah P. Benjamin: Davis’ “Court Jew”?

As indicated by the several references above, the CSA’s alleged subservience to Rothschild interests centres around Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate Secretary of State, who is called by friend and foe alike the “brains of the Confederacy.”[xix]

Benjamin has been described not only as a “Rothschild agent,” but also as a “Rothschild relative.” Benjamin’s association with Rothschild agencies is said to have started early in his career. The LaRouche-sponsored “Modern History Project,” which sees the conspiratorial apparatus as of Anglo-imperialist[xx] rather than Jewish pedigree, for example, states:

Judah P. Benjamin (1811-84) of the law firm of Slidell, Benjamin and Conrad in Louisiana was a Rothschild agent who became Secretary of State for the Confederacy in 1862. His law partner John Slidell (August Belmont’s[xxi] wife’s uncle) was the Confederate envoy to France. Slidell’s daughter was married to Baron Frederick d’Erlanger in Frankfurt who was related to the Rothschilds and acted on their behalf. Slidell was the representative of the South who borrowed money from the d’Erlangers to finance the Confederacy.[xxii]

The conspiracy theorist Commander William Guy Carr wrote without evidence or references that, “Judah P. Benjamin, a Rothschild relative, was appointed as their professional strategist in America.”[xxiii] There does not appear to be any evidence of, or reason for believing, that Benjamin was a “relative of the Rothschilds.”

The attitude of Rothschild’s actual agent in the USA, August Belmont, who was also National Chairman of the Democratic Party, was, however, avidly and fanatically pro-Union. The attitude of the Rothschilds towards either side was cautious, but Belmont warned that if it were not Rothschild funding that was provided to the North, which Belmont was convinced would win any conflict, the Rothschilds’ rivals would take their place. The bankers who did emerge best from the war were J. and W. Seligman and Company who, “had been the main financial stay of Lincoln’s administration during the war and they reaped the benefits afterward.”[xxiv]

Diplomatic Failures with Europe

While it is generally held by friend and foe alike that the Rothschilds reigned above all in Europe, logic would suggest that Britain, France, and other states heavily influenced by Rothschild lending, would be inclined towards formal support for the Confederacy, if the CSA was a client state of the bankers. This was not the case, despite much being made of supposedly pro-South sentiments among some quarters in England and France.

Despite Benjamin’s efforts, diplomatic recognition by Britain was not forthcoming. Moreover, in 1863 Benjamin closed the CSA mission to England, and evicted the remaining British consular agents from the South.[xxv] This latter expulsion was at the direct instigation of Benjamin when he called a Cabinet meeting while Davis was en route to Tennessee, an action that nonetheless brought prompt agreement from Davis.[xxvi] Efforts to secure French recognition were also unsuccessful. Indeed, in a breach of supposed British neutrality, by 1863 around 75,000 Irishmen had volunteered to fight with the North, as did Germans and other foreign recruits.[xxvii]

Loans Not Forthcoming

As mentioned above, Seligman provided the North with its financial wherewithal, despite the claim that the Union stood against international finance, while the South was in thrall to usury.

The primary claim in regard to the “Rothschild” (sic) funding of the Confederacy is that an important loan was secured from the Erlanger bank in Paris. This financial arrangement was not however favorable to the Confederacy; it was nothing other than a typical money-lending deal that did the South no favors.

Much is made of CSA emissary and Benjamin’s former law partner John Sliddell’s daughter being engaged to Baron Erlanger; and of Slidell’s niece being married to August Belmont, the Rothschild representative to the Northern States.[xxviii] Despite the family connections, the Erlangers showed the Confederacy no support outside of a single usurious business deal. Benjamin personally negotiated the $2.5 million loan with Baron Emile Erlanger when the latter visited Richmond, Virginia. Benjamin hoped that involvement with the banking house of Erlanger and Cie, and with the Erlanger family, who were close friends and advisors to Emperor Louis Napoleon, would secure diplomatic relations with France,[xxix] having failed to make any headway with Britain. The original plan had been for a loan of $25 million to be repaid with bonds and the sale of cotton, with the Erlangers reaping a huge profit from a 23% commission and an additional 8% for handling the bonds.[xxx] Ironically, it was Benjamin who regarded the terms with outrage, as “usury.” Intensive face-to-face negotiations by Benjamin with Erlanger reduced the rate from 8% to 7%. Speculators and investors in Europe bought up the bonds and the Erlangers made a quick profit.[xxxi]

The seminal study on funding and diplomacy during the American Civil War is Jay Sexton’s[xxxii] Debtor Diplomacy.[xxxiii] Sexton does not try to obfuscate the role of international finance in politics. He states that the desire of the American states to gain European capital influenced foreign policy, and that the primary influence was that of Britain, and this influence was particularly evident during the Civil War. “Furthermore, the financial needs of the United States (and the Confederacy) imparted significant political power to an elite group of London-based financiers who became intimately involved in American foreign relations during this period,”[xxxiv] which Sexton describes as: “The unprecedented power of an elite group of international financiers.”[xxxv]

The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the great British-based banking houses reach the pinnacle of their power and influence in American affairs. Led by Baring Brothers, the Rothschilds, and George Peabody and Company (the predecessor to the house of J P Morgan), banks in the City of London were the architects of nearly every facet of the Atlantic economy. In addition to negotiating loans and marketing American securities abroad, banks such as the Barings and Rothschilds underwrote transatlantic trade, provided insurance, exchanged currencies, and compiled influential market reports. During the westward flow of capital across the Atlantic, however, remained the central function of the leasing transatlantic banks. Ninety percent of the United States’ foreign indebtness in 1861 was of British origin.[xxxvi]

The financial and commercial power of these banks “extended to them significant political and diplomatic influence on both sides of the Atlantic,” adds Sexton, and he alludes to the poem “Don Juan” by Lord Bryon, where it is stated that the Barings and the Rothschilds are the “true lords of Europe.” [xxxvii]

In the USA these bankers also exercised considerable influence through the connections of their emissaries; in particular August Belmont, and Thomas Ward and Daniel Webster acting for Barings, in Massachusetts, whom Sexton describes as “highly influential politicians and lobbyists.”[xxxviii] “These transnational banks established a network of high finance and high politics that connected Britain and the United State and merged international finance with international relations.”[xxxix]

Hence, Sexton confirms what so-called “conspiracy theorists” are often scoffed at for by academe and media; that there was—and is—an international elite of bankers who weld political power through their use of money and trade. This is also how another eminent historian, Dr Carroll Quigley of Harvard, described these same international bankers when he wrote that they are, “devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence on political life.”[xl] Quigley described their aim as being:

[T]o form a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers.[xli]

Amidst the power of the financial elite over much of Europe and the North, the most that can be said for CSA relations with the supposedly pro-Confederate England is that Confederate emissaries secured Enfield rifles from the London Armoury, which also provided arms for the North.[xlii]

The only bank that was sympathetic to the Confederacy was Fraser, Trenholm, and Company, Liverpool, under the directorship of Charles Prioleau, which became the Confederacy’s “unofficial bank.” This hardly amounts to collusion between international finance and the Confederacy, let alone with the Rothschilds. As Sexton observes, “the bank was far from a financial powerhouse by most estimations,” but by 1860 had become a leading cotton importer.[xliii] Charles Prioleau was a South Carolinian, “who had long attempted to free the South from, as he viewed it, the economic hegemony of the North.”[xliv] Hence the motivation of the firm, headed by a Southerner, was not only one of Confederate sympathies but that the primary individual concerned, Prioleau, wanted to assist the South in opposing the plutocratic interests centred in the North. The company was responsible for arranging for the ships that ran the Northern blockade, and its own ships even flew the Confederate Flag. In 1861 CSA President Jefferson Davis authorized the use of the bank as the Confederacy’s depository.[xlv] However, the agency of this relatively modest bank could not compensate for the lack of credit from international finance, and already by 1862 the CSA’s account with Fraser, Trenholm, and Co. was in severe overdraft.

Considering the disruption of the cotton trade to England as the result of war what is remarkable is the lack of support that Britain showed the Confederacy, despite turning a blind eye to the supply of ships from Britain. What the international financiers of The City of London sought by 1862 was a quick diplomatic solution to the war. However, Sexton emphasizes that:

It is important to note that the Rothschilds, whose holdings of Southern states securities were minimal and were only tangentially involved in the cotton trade, did not financially nor politically support the Confederacy. Rothschild records clearly reveal the firm’s disdain for slavery. Nor, despite the myth, did the bank loan money to the Confederacy during the war.[xlvi]

Sexton states in a footnote in regard to the “myth” of Rothschild funding of the Confederacy that there is only one instance when the bank brokered (as distinct from purchased) a sale of Confederate bonds, for only $6,000, on behalf of Joseph Deynood in 1864. “This sole instance pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Union bonds that the bank brokered in the same period.”[xlvii]

It was amidst this dire financial situation, denied the financial bloodline of international finance, that the Confederacy resorted to the issue of its equivalent to Lincoln’s Greenbacks, the Graybacks, for which Davis is seldom acknowledged by those who present Lincoln as a champion of banking reform against usury.

---

[i] K R Bolton, “State Credit and Reconstruction: The First NZ Labour Government”, International Journal of Social Economics, Issue 1, Volume 38. 2011.

[ii] The great poet’s pamphlets on banking and credit are particularly cogent, and are written in a style from which present day monetary reformers could learn. Pound’s pamphlets of the subject include: A Visiting Card, Gold & Work, Social Credit - An Impact, The Economic Nature of America, What is Money for?, The Revolution Betrayed.

[iii] The 6^th of the 16 points of Fr. Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice reads: “Abolition of private banking, and the institution of a central government bank.” Point 7: “ The ‘return’ to Congress of the right to coin and regulate money.” 8. “Control of the cost of living and the value of money by the central government bank.” However, private property was affirmed in point 4, other than the nationalization of strategic utilities and resources of national importance (3). The policy was, as one would expect, based on the Papal encyclicals on social justice, and the church’s historical repudiation of usury. The Church has long since obfuscated its sound “social doctrine” in favor of a banal type of “liberation theology.”

[iv] Maj. Gen. Count Cherep-Spiridovitch, The Secret World Government (New York: the Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association, 1926), 180. The alleged quote was published in La Vieille France, N-216, March 1921, according to Cherep-Spiridovitch.

[v] Ibid., 181.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Marshall B Davidson, “A Royal Welcome for the Russian Navy,” America and Russia: a century and a half of dramatic encounters, edited by Oliver Jensen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 64.

[ix] Ibid., 69.

[x] Ibid., 70.

, 1992, http://american_almanac.tripod.com/ascher1.htm

Marc Weidenmier, “Money and Finance in the Confederate State of America,” E H Net, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/weidenmier.finance.confederacy.us

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Gerald L K Smith, Besieged Patriot: Autobiographical Episodes Exposing Communism, Traitorism and Zionism (Eureka Springs, Arkansas: Christian Nationalist Crusade, 1978).

[xv] Ibid., 37.

[xvi] Gerald L K Smith, “Abraham Lincoln and the Rothschilds: Civil War was not fought over slavery but financial freedom,” The Cross and the Flag, Arkansas, June, 1971. Also published as a leaflet.

[xvii] Smith, ibid., citing John Reeves, The Rothschilds: the financial rulers of nations, 228.

[xviii] Smith, ibid.

“The Brains of the Confederacy,” Jewish-American History Foundation, http://www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/judahpb.html

, August 8, 2010 <http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/08/08/dont-blame-the-brits/>

[xxi] August Belmont was Rothschild emissary for the Northern states.

[xxii] The Modern History Project, Chapter 2.1 “The Bank of the US.” http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=FinalWarn02-1

The claim that Slidell arranged the Erlanger loan is incorrect.

[xxiii] William Guy Carr, Pawns in the Game (California: Angriff Press, n.d.) 53.

[xxiv] Derek Wilson, Rothschild: the story of wealth and power (London: André Deutsch, 1988), 188.

[xxv] Albert N Rosen, op.cit., 294.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] Robert Douthat Meade and William C Davis, op.cit., 296.

[xxviii] Robert N Rosen, op.cit., 79.

[xxix] Ibid.

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] Ibid.

[xxxii] Oxford University Lecturer in American History.

[xxxiii] Jay Sexton, Debtor Finance: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837-1873 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[xxxiv] Ibid., 1.

[xxxv] Ibid., 12.

[xxxvi] Ibid.

[xxxvii] Ibid.

[xxxviii] Ibid., 13.

[xxxix] Ibid.

[xl] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: MacMillan Co., 1966), 52.

[xli] Ibid., p. 51.

[xlii] Jay Sexton, op.cit., 142.

[xliii] Ibid., 144.

[xliv] Ibid..

[xlv] Ibid.

[xlvi] Ibid., 151. Sexton’s references to Rothschild disdain for slavery: “N M Rothschild and Sons to [August] Belmont,” 7 May, 9 July 1861, Rothschild Archive, London.

[xlvii] Ibid., 151; footnote 44.