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This is Jonathan Bowden’s lecture on the conservative historian Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) of Cambridge University, the author of Mill and Liberalism, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933-1940, The Nature and Limits of Political Science, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (3 vols.), and many other works.

This is a very interesting lecture. Unfortunately, the sound quality of this recording is terrible. I have done my best to improve the sound, but it is still pretty rough. I will have the lecture professionally transcribed, which is the only way most people will “hear” it. (Please donate to help cover the cost.)

I do not have information on the date and location of the lecture. If any readers know, please leave the information in a comment below.

Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief

3,016 words

Part 1 of 2

Hopkins, around the time of Declaration and The Divine and the Decay (1957).

(Told in the discursive spirit, if not quite the style, of Jonathan Bowden.)

“The evidence of exhaustion stares out from the columns of the daily newspapers. The references to ‘Angry Young Men’ for example, record a general astonishment at the vigour of simply being angry. Another instance is the hero-worship of the late James Dean, who posthumously remains as the embodiment of Youth’s violent rebuttal of a society grown pointless. That the rejection is equally pointless does not appear to matter; the sincerity redeems it.”

— Bill Hopkins, “Ways Without a Precedent,” in Declaration, 1957 

1. When the Paddy Wagon Comes, It Takes All the Girls

Ain’t it a bummer, when you go back to a place where you used to live, and find that all the Interesting and Useful people you knew are dead? And not just dead; it’s like they all died recently, as though they were all in cahoots and knew you were coming.

This has happened to me twice.

The first time was about fifteen years ago, when I moved back to Manhattan after a decade away. Most of my contemporaries had got out of New York around the same time I did (1990), but there was still an older generation of hooligans I could ring up out of my old address books. Or so I thought. I called, but they didn’t answer. Maxwell V., an old Etonian and onetime investment-banking hi-flyer now living in a tatty part of Brooklyn, had just turned 70; I learned that he had celebrated this milestone by stepping off a curb in the path of a speeding truck. There was Ben Bagley, the wraithlike record-and-musicale producer (The Shoestring Revue) whose lungs suddenly ruptured so that he choked to death on his own blood (so his caretaker told me) about three days before I tried to phone him. There was the old lady near the Museum of Natural History, a longtime benefactor of David McCalden [1], as well as the first Savitri Devi enthusiast I ever met. She’d died, or disappeared, a month before. There were others . . . a Wall Street pair, husband and wife, who offed themselves in an apparent suicide pact. (They didn’t leave a note, so everyone’s still guessing.)

They all saw me coming.

The second time this happened was in the last year or so, when I decided to go back and visit London, where I’d lived on and off during the Nineties. One person I wished to reconnect with was Simon Hoggart [2]  of the Guardian newspaper. But it turned out he’d died of pancreatic cancer in January 2014. (Oopsie! Didn’t even know he was ill. But now that he’s gone I can drop his name here without causing anyone any embarrassment.) Simon had been Useful indeed. He knew editors who would buy my stuff, and furthermore the Guardian paid the tab on our expensive, and increasingly liquid, lunches.

Around the time Simon went, I was informed by a mutual friend that Tony Hancock—not the suicidal comedian but the rightist publisher [3] —had also passed on, after a couple of strokes. Another great loss. Tony had been a veritable portal to all kinds of interesting people and paradigms. When I first met him in 1993, at the Heidelberg, his family’s hotel-pub in Brighton, he was throwing a birthday party for someone, I forget who. Maybe it was his toddler son, whom Tony had care of that weekend. Later on we three visited Brighton Pier and the Aquarium, while Tony told me tales of the Blackshirt Tendency—his father had been a Mosleyite back in the days of BUF rallies in Earls Court, and Tony had known David McCalden in the 1970s when Dave was stirring up trouble in the National Front and National Party. Tony also seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of rail transport and the London Underground.

Also in attendance at this Heidelberg party was a young Italian named Roberto Fiore. Tony introduced him to me with some explanation like, “He’s a member of the Third Position Movement, based on the political writings of Julius Evola . . .” I hadn’t a clue about either. Nowadays (2015) Roberto is a Member of the European Parliament from Italy, where he heads the fascist Forza Nuova party, but twenty years ago he was in Britain as a political refugee. He’d been accused of involvement with the 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station (85 dead). He was convicted and sentenced in absentia. Antifa groups put it about that Britain wasn’t extraditing him because he was doing work for MI5 or -6. What is more likely is that the Italian government just wanted him to stay put for a while, because it was easier that way. In 1996 Roberto invited me to a gala reception-concert with Romano Mussolini, the jazz-piano-playing son of Il Duce; the event was co-sponsored by Roberto’s accommodation agency and the Italian Embassy.[4] But I digress . . .

The most memorable personality Tony Hancock ever introduced me to (drum roll) was the novelist, art critic and “Angry Young Man” philosopher Bill Hopkins. He was much older than Tony or Simon, in his mid-60s when I met him back in ’93. Could he be dead too now, in 2014, I wondered? I Googled. Indeed he was gone, died in 2011. Where? How? There were few details. I hadn’t spoken to him since about 2005. And now that Tony was dead, I didn’t have anyone to ask, other than Bill’s lifelong confederate and fellow Angry, Colin Wilson. But—surprise! Colin had gone west too! He died in December 2013, age 82.

So now I’m really working the search engines, trying to find a substantial obit. At the site of Wermod & Wermod, a small rightist publishing house in England, I come across an impressively detailed biography of Bill in an analysis of his novel The Divine and the Decay. It is written by one Jonathan Bowden. Who is this Jonathan Bowden, and how does he know so much about Bill Hopkins, and why have I never heard of him? I look for his e-mail, this Jonathan Bowden, but can’t find it. And then it turns out Jonathan Bowden is also dead.

They’ve killed them all.

But then I find this other little publishing site, in California, called Counter-Currents . . . and they seemed to have published a lot of Bowden’s stuff, including remembrances of Bill Hopkins. So here at last we are.

2. The Oracle of Kensington Park Road

Bill Hopkins was not a person you just stumbled across at a drinks party, or bumped trolleys with at Tesco. You had to be led to Bill Hopkins, admitted entrance. In the 1980s and ’90s, if you hung around far-right or Fortean circles in England, sooner or later someone would tell you, Oh you must meet Bill Hopkins! He was an Angry Young Man, you know, back in the 1950s! The dark, sinister one, the non-person, the one they never talk about anymore!

It all put one in mind of Aleister Crowley, the “Wickedest Man in the World.” Anyway, phone calls would be made, a date set, and then you’d go present yourself, generally at his house; or maybe you’d get lost after getting off at the wrong Tube stop (I did) and forgetting your A-Z. Pop in the phone box, ring up Bill, and there he is, shuffling out to meet you. Voilà un homme! Cigarette in hand, circles under the eyes, a slow-moving, misanthropic but hospitable toad.

Maybe not a toad. “Bill’s an old possum,” Tony Hancock said once, years later, when I complained that Bill wasn’t returning my phone calls. Bill Hopkins was not quite a recluse, but he was certainly sedentary, one of those people who seem to have been born in an armchair. I have been told that when he was young Bill ventured far and wide—Hamburg, Channel Islands, Covent Garden—but that was decades ago. The one time I dined out with him, we went to the Indian place across the street. Home was 21 Kensington Park Road, a stretch of terraced shopfront a little north of Notting Hill. Work was either at home (art criticism—under a pseudonym, evidently, as I heard he wrote it but I could never track it down), or a block or two away at the Portobello Road market, where he kept antiques stalls.

At one point, back in the 70s, he’d started a coffeehouse called Zog, which he’d tried to nurture as a 50’s-style espresso bar for artists and intellectuals, but instead attracted hippies and drug dealers. [5]

Nowadays there’s a bookshop and literary agency at 21 Kensington Park Road, in what I believe used to be the ground-floor storeroom where Bill kept his antiques and salvagings. This is sort of appropriate because in Bill’s day he generously allowed people of a sound political bent to use his house as an address-of-record when publishing incendiary, blackhearted books. For example, if you look inside the first edition (1981) of Revilo P. Oliver’s America’s Decline: The Education of a “Conservative,”you’ll see it’s ostensibly published by one “Londinium Press,” and the address of this selfsame imprint is none other than 21 Kensington Park Road. [7]

Sedentary old-possum Bill was not an admirer of enthusiasm, exercise, or religious observance. I learned to avoid such topics in conversation. If I ran six miles in Holland Park that morning, if I went to the 6pm Mass at the Carmelite Priory in Kensington Church Street, if out of sightseer’s curiosity I climbed to the top of the Monument—those were things I oughtn’t to tell Bill. Actually I did mention the Monument. He sighed and waved his open fingers at me in a crumb-brushing gesture: “Maaahrgot—please go have a good lie-down.”

He did not like America—or his idea of America, which was very scanty and cartoonish, based on the strange-as-it-seems American-news nuggets that have long been a staple of British newsprint filler (America Calling!). No doubt it was also due to some degree to the knee-jerk-leftist bias endemic to the chattering classes. Like many Englishmen, Bill understood America to be a land of mindless optimists, physical jerks, god-botherers, wowsers. Also a crooked, cruel place, where a sizable minority of the population lives in desperate, grinding poverty, because, you know, they don’t have a Welfare State in America! This has long been a prevalent delusion in Britain; as is the idea that if you visit America and you get sick, no doctor or hospital will take you in, unless you immediately fork over the equivalent of about fifty thousand pounds sterling.

Bill assumed, as a matter of course, that the Americans he met in London (generally through the same conduit that brought me to him) were of much the same opinion. They hated America too, presumably for the same reason Bill did. I did not disabuse him of this notion.

If Bill had ever had an interest in science or technology (or “geometry and theology”) he had long ceased to care about it. His technical knowledge basically consisted of the curious notion that Britain had had a railway system a good generation or two before the rest of the world (i.e., North America and France).

Bill had been a journalist for some years in the 1950s (London bureau of the New York Times) but that was back in the days of pneumatic tubes and yellow copy-paper. I told Bill that I was trying to file stories with a paper in California, but was having trouble because I didn’t have a modem, so had to pay a service bureau in Covent Garden to transmit my files. (This is 1993, but it’s sounding pretty antique itself!) I mentioned these technical details to Bill. They bored him to tears.

If you wanted to have a good conversation with Bill, you were always on safe ground with literary matters, particularly literary matters of the 1950s and 60s that were journalistic rather than academic. I’d been reading Osbert Lancaster’s memoir All Done From Memory, and told Bill that Lancaster’s childhood home was on Elgin Crescent, a five minutes’ walk away. This delighted Bill. (“Yesss . . . I’d see him around. His writing was always so very . . . luguuubrious.”)

He was even more delighted when I told him how the book opens. During the dark days of WW2, the author finds himself on a random stroll through a down-at-the-heels Notting Hill, and is shocked to discover he is standing in front of his family’s old house, now denuded (like the other houses) of all the wrought-iron railings that had surrounded all these grand late-Victorian and Edwardian manses. The railings had been torn out early in the war and donated as part of the War Effort.

This meant a lot to Bill because that’s how he made his living when his career as a novelist and journalist went south: he sold railings, doorframes, pieces of wrecked houses, at the Portobello Market.

* * *

One day Colin and Joy Wilson came up from Cornwall and stayed with Bill, and Bill invited me to drop by. Colin was giving a talk at the Shaw Society, as he occasionally did. It wasn’t about George Bernard Shaw. It was more of a typical Colin Wilson topic, something occult and Fortean, perhaps transhumanism, on which subject Colin Wilson practically held the patent. Colin once wrote that about this time he’d been giving a talk at the Shaw Society and his thoughts suddenly caromed off in a wild direction; he found himself declaring that mankind was on the verge of a great “evolutionary leap to a higher phase.” That could well be it. [6]

Apparently the Shavians had fed him, because Colin didn’t want the dinner Bill had prepared for him and Joy. So Bill offered the dinner to me (it had been kept warm in the oven) and I gobbled it up, with a lot of red wine. It was like eating at Grandmother’s: lamb, peas, and potatoes on a blue-willow plate.

Colin, around April 1993

I made Bill and Colin talk about the Angries and the Spartacans and the Mosleyites. Around my third glass of claret I suggested that something called Last of the Angries might make a good book proposal. Exactly how many of the Angry Young Men—I mean the people who contributed to Declaration in 1957—were still alive?

Bill and Colin booted this around and decided that they both were still alive and so was Stuart Holroyd, and probably Lindsay Anderson, though no one had seen him for years. And then there was Doris Lessing (though it wasn’t clear whether she should count as a true Angry Young Man inasmuch as she wasn’t a man). So there were at least five Angries still kicking. [8]

In later years, when I saw very little of Bill—often just phoning him up on the Vodafone from Paddington Station when I got off the Heathrow Express—he would sometimes mischievously send me off on wild-goose chases. Around 2000-2004 he often claimed to be curating an “Outsider Art” exhibit at a gallery in Bond Street or someplace. Bill claimed to have discovered the Outsider Art genre, and promoted it to the point where it was now taken half-seriously instead of being dismissed as inept, primitivist daubings on lavatory lids.

If I had the time, I’d make my way over to Bond Street or wherever to see what Bill was up to. But sometimes it would turn out the gallery didn’t exist. Alternatively the gallery would be there, but it would be full of brass Buddhas.

Maybe I had the address wrong. Or maybe Bill was just telling me to get lost. Once I said I’d try to get his novel published in America, but I never did (the Angry Young Man thing was not thought to have any traction in the USA, or so I was told). Was that the reason? I never knew.

Notes

1. David McCalden (1951-1990) was a young veteran of the British nationalist movement who moved to California in the late 1970s and founded the Institute for Historical Review with Willis Carto. He broke with Carto in 1981 and started a rival one-man “revisionist” entity called Truth Missions, which published the monthly David McCalden Revisionist Newsletter and, with the occasional assistance of the present writer, various bits of cartoon agitprop.

2. Simon Hoggart (1946-2014) was an English journalist who spent much of his career as “Parliamentary Sketch Writer” for the Guardian, specializing in light, humorous commentary about press and politicians. He also was television critic for The Spectator, a columnist for The Observer, a contributor to Punch, the author of several humorous nonfiction books, and a frequent television commentator in both the UK and US. His father was the noted academic Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957), and almost as famous for being the first person recorded as using the word “fuck” while giving expert-witness testimony (in 1960, during the obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley’s Lover).

3. Anthony Hancock, 1947-2012, published books under his own imprint, Historical Review Press, and also printed materials for nationalist organizations and such writers as David Irving and Revilo Oliver.

4. The Italian embassy’s involvement in the March 1996 Mussolini concert was not widely reported. Here and here, the Independent talks about “Anti-Nazis” picketing the Grosvenor Square Marriott and only mentions Roberto’s Meeting Point agency as the sponsor. But support by the embassy’s cultural section was clearly stated on the concert program. Furthermore, during the break I ran into an old boss, who told me that he was now President of American Express UK/Europe, and that he and his wife, who was Italian, had come to the concert through the express invitation of friends at the embassy! Q.E.D.

5. Recollection of Bryan Hemming in his blog.

6. I believe this talk at the Shaw Society was on April Fool’s Day 1993.

7. As I recall, Bill told me that the publication of this first edition was arranged by Sam Dickson of Atlanta, with the printing done by Tony Hancock’s printing house. Anyway, the second edition of the book, and the one you can read online, bears Hancock’s imprint, Historical Review Press in Sussex.

8. Colin Wilson himself got around to writing an excellent recollection of the Angries in The Angry Years (2006).

4,109 words

Part 2 of 2

Bill Hopkins

3. “The corrupt vigour of fascism.”

In early 1958, Time magazine ran a humorous squib titled “Sloane Square Stomp.”[9] It told how Colin Wilson (and presumably Bill) had attended a premiere of their friend Stuart Holroyd’s new play at the Royal Court Theatre. Bill and Colin’s onetime friend Christopher Logue stood up in the stalls with Kenneth Tynan, denouncing Holroyd and Wilson as fascists. During the interval, this led to a shoving match in a nearby bar. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, but since it involved Angry Young Men, the Royal Court and maybe Mosleyites as well, it made it into the tabloids and eventually Time.

I found this article in some library stacks in San Diego. I sent a photocopy to Bill.

He wrote back immediately, very amused. “I saw [Logue] in Covent Garden in early 1958. I said hello to him and he didn’t reply. I was with a lady friend and when we were out of earshot she whispered to me, ‘You know he hates you.’” Bill had no idea, apparently.

Christopher Logue and Bill had been great pals and fellow poets in Paris, in the early 1950s. Then in London, about 1957, Logue fell in with Ken Tynan, who informed Christopher that Bill Hopkins and Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd were proposing to start a new fascist political party, and should henceforth be avoided.

The whole idea was amazing, preposterous. Bill Hopkins, a hard-core political activist? It does seem that in 1957-58 he and Colin Wilson were batting around the notion of starting a new rightist political faction, to be called the Spartacan Party or Spartacan movement.

Both Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd have written memoirs that describe Bill in the 1950s, but Colin’s book, The Angry Years (2006), is strangely reticent when it comes to talking about the Spartacan movement. For that you have to go to housemate Holroyd’s memoir, Contraries: A Personal Progression (1975), wherein he gives us this rather comical snapshot of the Spartacans’ brief shining moment, c. 1958:

Oliver Moxon’s spacious Belgravia house seemed an oddly inappropriate setting for a meeting of a subversive political society. Everything about it proclaimed a vested interest in the class-structured, privileged-ridden order of society that the Spartacan philosophy as Bill [Hopkins] expounded it, regarded as a brake on the advancement and effectiveness of the man of genius and vision. But Oliver himself was quite a catch for the Spartacan movement with his wealth and political experience… 

About fifty people had gathered for this particular meeting which Colin [Wilson] was to address. The room was packed and a lot of us had to sit on the floor. I knew about half the people there and recognised several of Bill’s recent catches – a septuagenarian titled lady, a pretty actress, a publisher – and several writers and journalists, and there were others whom I couldn’t place although their faces were familiar . . .

Suddenly Bill was standing before the assembly with his arms outstretched above him, as if he were offering himself as a candidate for crucifixion or acknowledging the roar of a crowd after a boxing triumph. This gesture achieved the intended effect of reducing the loud hubbub of conversation to a low murmur . . . He [Bill] proceeded to introduce Colin . . . He [Wilson] started to talk about an American psychological researcher who had conducted experiments with rats and proved that only five per cent had leadership qualities and without them the rest became malleable and completely without initiative. The same applied to human beings . . . The implications were inescapable, Colin said. The effective political power ought to be in the hands of the five per cent minority who were equipped to use it . . . [10]

The Spartacans might have been dismissed as mere harmless eccentrics—like Greenpeace people or Fortean societies—except for one thing. Bill and Colin were already taking a drubbing from the lefties and the press because word got out that they had been friendly with Sir Oswald Mosley. (“I called him Tom. He called me Bill. Lady Mosley I called Diana,” Bill told me.)

It wasn’t much more than a nodding acquaintance, but it was catnip to the tabloid press.  First thing, the journos turned on Colin, whom they’d been lionizing for the past year. (24-year-old philosopher/critic—author of The Outsider [11]—wrote it by day in British Museum—slept rough in Hampstead Heath—etc. etc.) They savaged his second book, then aimed their sights on his best friend Bill Hopkins, and derided Bill’s soon-to-be-published first novel:

Recently (c. September 1957) the Daily Mail went so far as to warn people, a few weeks before the publication of a young author’s first book, that they were about to beset by “a new espresso evangelist, another seers of the Soup Kitchens, a fresh messiah of the milk bars . . . !”

(Editor Tom Maschler in Introduction to Declaration, 1957.)

Leading the charge against Bill, Colin, and their friend Stuart Holroyd was Stuart Allsop, a critic and TV presenter. In his 1958 book, The Angry Decade, Allsop lays into the trio, with particular rage at Bill Hopkins. Allsop belittles their motivating philosophy to be a kind of “Religious Existentialism which they say requires a higher type of man, a superman, to thrust humanity through to safety . . .”

[A]lthough all this may be thought to be public poppycock [Hopkins] is getting a public platform, he’s getting books published and that presumes an audience. It ought to be recognized that what would have seemed quite impossible fifteen years ago [i.e. 1943]—even five years ago—is happening. A cult of fascism has grown among a generation who were babies when Europe’s gas-chambers were going full blast, a set of under-privileged romantics in the coffee bar network, more formidable than Angus Wilson’s Huggett and the Crowd [see discussion of “A Bit off the Map,” below] who get their kicks in a low pressure culture from wishful thinking about torture, pain and killing. We seem to be on the edge of a new romantic tradition which is sanctifying the bully as hero. It is exceedingly strange, and profoundly disturbing, if the dissentience (the ‘anger’) in our present semi-socialized compromise welfare society is going to swing retrogressively to the mysticism which perished in its own flames. We know that there is political boredom and apathy in Britain, that the drive seems lost and blood runs thin. Can it be so intolerable that it is creating an ardor for the corrupt vigour of fascism? [12]

Of course by the time this criticism was gathered up between hard covers in 1958, Bill Hopkins’s “public platform” had disappeared.

Allsop’s remarks now read like over-the-top ravings, but such attitudes were very much in the air then and they would be for a long time to come. A few years after this, Anthony Burgess would write A Clockwork Orange, a slightly different sort of saga about lively young rowdies in the milk-bar and coffeehouse scene. Burgess went to great pains, when discussing the novel and subsequent Stanley Kubrick movie, to pretend that his story of Alex and the Droogs was inspired by a 1961 trip to the USSR as well as his wife’s brutal rape by American GIs in London in 1944.[13] A Clockwork Orange had nothing to do with kindling an “ardor for the corrupt vigour of fascism.”

So Burgess claimed. But Clockwork was almost certainly inspired by the controversy surrounding Wilson and Hopkins when Declaration was released, and Allsop’s criticism written, in 1957-58. This was a time when Burgess was mainly back in England, on and off, after stints of teaching in Malaya. It is inconceivable that Burgess would not have been aware of the fear of “fascistic” violence that seemed to accompany any discussion of Angry Young Men and disaffected youth.

When the Stanley Kubrick film of Burgess’s novel was released at the end of 1971, and some American film critics—two Jewish women, Pauline Kael and Judith Crist—openly described its narrative as fascistic, Burgess again found himself denying “fascist” intent. It was a weird, paradoxical situation. There aren’t any overt fascist symbols in the film A Clockwork Orange (unless you count the brief Triumph des Willens marching to Beethoven’s Ninth during the Ludovico Technique aversion-therapy scene . . . and those visuals are hardly intended as admirable or heroic).

It appears then that Kael, Crist et al. were commenting not on the properties and merits of the film itself, but were rather echoing Allsop’s 1958 denunciation of “under-privileged romantics . . . who get their kicks in a low pressure culture from wishful thinking about torture, pain and killing.” They were bleating a pre-packaged critical dogma, in other words, one that went back to the half-forgotten leftist criticism about some Angry Young Men.

4. Bill Hopkins, in Fact and Fiction. 

As I’d met Bill a full generation after Declaration, and had never read any of these denunciatory screeds from Allsop et al., I sometimes wondered if there weren’t something chimerical about Bill’s notoriety—this notion of him as a Dark Prophet ahead of his time, with his writings suppressed, his books pulped. It was all rather like the recent fulminations surrounding the “Neo-Reactionary” or “Dark Enlightenment” movement, with lots of gaseous innuendo but little substance.

“I’m a very serious writer,” he insisted to me on the phone before we met. (This was in reply to something I’d just said, girly and inane, e.g., “You sound like a fun guy.”) But whatever he was doing with his time, he never seemed to be doing any writing, serious or otherwise. I kept thinking he might an oversold fraud, a literary footnote to a footnote, prized mainly because some old Blackshirts liked him.

But the legend of Bad Bill did seem to  check out when I asked around. Old journos who remembered the late ’50s knew who he was. One of these, an editor and satirist who founded two humor magazines (both still going strong), was a very tall man with a long, stony face. Around 1996 I said to him, “R____, how’s about a ‘Still With Us’ piece about Bill Hopkins, one of the Last of the Angries?”

No need to explain further. I saw that huge Easter Island visage crumple into a grimace. “Oh, no . . . I don’t think any of our readers would enjoy that,” said R after a moment, his features settling once more.

Another thing that checked out about Bill was that he knew all the trivia he ought to have known, and more. For a while in the 1950s he (along with Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd) lived together in the same building in Notting Hill, 25 Chepstow Road. (Again, this is just a stone’s throw from 21 Kensington Park Road.)

25 Chepstow Road was owned by Peter Rachman, the notorious “Slumlord of Notting Hill,” who is popularly blamed [14] for turning that postwar shabby-genteel neighborhood into a squalid hellhole of rioting Caribbean Negroes. But the Jewish Mr. Rachman liked to think of himself as a patron of the arts and a sociable fellow, so he let Bill Hopkins and company live at 25 Chepstow Road rent-free. They were suspected of being fascists, yes, but they raised the tone of the neighborhood.

I gathered that Rachman also introduced Bill to the Stephen Ward circle, including Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, Bill Astor, and other Profumo Affair notables. Bill also knew Johnny Edgecombe [15] (a fellow Rachman tenant), the black drug dealer who shot up Stephen Ward’s flat in December 1962, and thereby began the unraveling of the spy-and-slut scandal that brought down Harold Macmillan’s government.

“And where is Christine these days?” I wondered.

“Oohh,” drawled Bill, with a puff on his Silk Cut. “World’s End Estate, I believe.”[16]

(I looked her up and indeed she was.)

* * *

Because he officially stopped writing in the late ’50s, Bill’s literary reputation rests entirely upon his notorious novel, The Divine and the Decay, and a dense philosophical essay, “Ways Without a Precedent,” in the book Declaration, both published in 1957 by MacGibbon & Kee. [17]

Declaration was a collection of manifestoes by young literati including Bill, Colin Wilson, Stuart Holroyd, John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson, Kenneth Tynan and some others. Along with Kingsley Amis (who chose not to participate), the contributors to the book are generally considered to constitute the “Angry Young Men,” a journalistic fad-term that everyone derided at the time but is now useful shorthand for the literary era.

The book was Bill Hopkins’s idea. Its proposed title was, approximately, Declaration of Intent by the Angry Young Men. “Angry Young Men” was then a fresh new journalists’ meme, meant to encompass John Osborne of Look Back in Anger (1956), Colin Wilson of The Outsider (also 1956), and anyone else who wanted to come aboard.

Editor Tom Maschler was very enthusiastic about Bill’s suggestion, and set the wheels in motion. Alas, he let his girlfriend Doris Lessing contribute a manifesto. This rather ruined the “Angry Young Men” aspect of the title. (Doris was smart. She knew there wasn’t going to be any anthology of  Angry Young Women. She got boyfriend Tom not only to include her, but to put her at the very front of the book.)

Since he came up with the whole idea, it’s fitting that Bill Hopkins’s manifesto is the best contribution to the book, or at least the most philosophical, and the one that stands up as more than a period piece today. The other contributors talked about postwar dreariness, or the need for socialism, or the tragedy of youth. Kenneth Tynan mocked journalistic criticism, reserving special scorn for the middlebrow pretensions of The New Yorker. (Clever career move. A few months later The New Yorker offered our Ken a job as drama critic, and he was on the next boat from Southampton.)

Bill’s essay, “Ways Without a Precedent,” eschewed fireworks and theatrics, laying out arguments calmly and methodically from the first sentence: “The literature of the past ten years has been conspicuous for its total lack of direction, purpose, and power.”

Then, sardonically:

The fact that the decade in question has shown the highest ratio of adult literacy in British history makes this inertia an astounding feat. So astounding, indeed, that the great majority of readers have turned their attention to the cinema, television and radio instead. Their reading talent has been commandeered by the more robust newspapers.[18]

From these observations Bill builds up his argument. “Our” ability to believe is exhausted. “We” have no transcendent goal or drive. “The truth is that Man, for all his scientific virtuosity, cannot defeat his own exhaustion . . . Man has become a rational animal; he rejects any suggestion of religiosity as scrupulously as an honest beggar denounces respectability.”

That last zinger about the beggar really drives the point home. You—we—are too proud to “believe”; you are too sophisticated to be an an enthusiast.

The word “exhaustion” appears nine or ten times in the essay, as Bill Hopkins makes his case. So what is the solution? Well, he spends a few pages toying with the idea of religiosity but (perhaps because he is exhausted and unchurched himself) dismisses traditional Christianity. Then he presents us with the three choices we have here in 1957:

• We can start a new religion. (However, the lack of tradition makes its success rather unlikely.)
• We can revitalize and reconstruct Christianity. (Here we at least have tradition. But the basic beliefs are ossified, Bill thinks, and the original visionaries are dead.)
• Finally (says Bill) we can trace belief to its original source and turn it our own, new, account.

And what is that “original source”? Bill believes it is a sense of both exhaustion and desperation. The problem “today” (1957) is not lack of energy, but lack of Drive and Will. It is not too hard to see why this point of view might have been scary to some folks in 1957 and 1958.

This was also the theme of Bill’s one novel, published about the same time, then swiftly withdrawn and pulped. It was a slim volume of dense prose called The Divine and the Decay.

Apart from its irritatingly oblique exposition, it is very hard for a first-time reader to see what was so scandalous about this book. There is little explicit ideology or politicking. Decay has scarcely more action than Waiting for Godot. Almost nothing happens until the very end, when the hero drowns (except, he doesn’t, quite!). To all extents and superficial observations, The Divine and the Decay is an experimental, philosophical novel.

It was reissued in the 1980s with a new title (The Leap), new dust-jacket (a painting of a white-stucco streetscape) and some indignant forewords by Bill Hopkins and Colin Wilson decrying the book’s suppression and its mistreatment in the press. Bill gave me a copy of this later edition, and I said I’d try to get a publisher for it in America, it being such a legendary banned book and all.

But of course I didn’t. I suggested it to Mr. Parfrey at Feral House—that imprint of the outré and arcane—but he made a verbal wince. “Oh no, urr, it’s so . . . British!”

Britishness was not the problem. The book needed illustrations—sinister line-drawings or Rockwell Kent-style woodcuts. Something to hold onto, a visual guide to what was happening in the book. Oh, this chapter is supposed to be scary. Oh, this character is having a nightmare. These two people are going to have Sex. That sort of thing.  I always say, long-form fiction has declined because novels don’t have illustrations anymore. Except of course for graphic novels, the huge popularity of which proves my point. Novels need illustrations; just ask Evelyn Waugh or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Future reprinters, please take note.

It’s hard to find a copy of The Divine and the Decay, original edition. In New York and even in London, if you wish to read it, you have to go to the library and read a non-circulating copy. I re-read it recently for the first time in twenty years and must say it went down much smoother second time around. But this may have been merely because I knew so much about the troubled histories of the book and Bill Hopkins. As I said, the story doesn’t have much action. It’s a long mood study in a depressing setting populated by depressing people. Clammy rocks, slate-grey skies, a sense of forboding disgust; with some free-floating anxiety and nausea thrown in for good measure. The central character, a fellow named Plowart, is taking a very un-jolly ‘oliday on one of the lesser Channel Islands, herein called “Vachau,” based upon Sark. [19]

Plowart has nightmares, he frets, he fights, he meets a collection of crippled or otherwise unattractive people, he has an unpleasant romance with the Dame of Sark, or rather Dame of Vachau. It gradually unravels that Plowart has gone to this island to provide an alibi that will cover his involvement in the murder of a political colleague, the co-founder of what seems to be a fascist or nationalist political party. The Dame attempts to drown him off the rocks, but he survives, desperate and triumphant, while the Dame drowns instead. “I’m indestructible!” shouts Plowart.

So why was the book controversial? So far as I can tell, the novel per se was not. It got good coverage in Books and Bookmen.[20] What was controversial was Bill Hopkins and his circle. No platform! the lefties and antifas would shout today, and that’s pretty much what happened then. MacGibbon & Kee were pressured to pull the book from the stands, and pulp the remainder.

* * *

By late 1957 a consensus had formed among the bien-pensants that the “messiahs of the milk bars” were little more than quasi-fascist hooligans. This comes out in a short story of the period, “A Bit off the Map,” title story of a collection by Angus Wilson (a friend and patron of Colin’s, but no relation).

It is a black comedy about London subcultures colliding. There is a dim teddy-boy male prostitute named Kennie, who has attached himself, mascot-like, to a gang of espresso-bar bohemians in Soho, known as “The Crowd.” As the evening progresses, they migrate to a birthday dinner at an Italian restaurant, and then to North London where some grandées of the lit world are holding court (Edith Sitwell, perhaps, and Cyril Connolly). The party dribbles off and Kennie ends up on a bench in Hampstead Heath, where he kills a crazy old man.

Leader of The Crowd is the philosopher Huggett (obviously modeled on Colin Wilson), while next in line is poet-novelist Reg (a stand-in for Bill Hopkins). Kennie describes them:

Reg believes in Power and what he says is Shit in the face of humanity—if millions have to be liquidated what’s it matter? most people are never alive anyway but Huggett believes in Power and Leadership for the Regeneration of the World.

Reg is writing a novel with a character named Rawston, who is supposed to personify of indestrucible “Heroic Will”  (this would be Plowart, of course, from The Divine and the Decay).

The Crowd is so transparently Colin Wilson and friends that the author feels obliged to “lampshade” the fact with this tongue-in-cheek disclaimer, spoken by teddy-boy Kennie:

The Crowd’s not the same as the Angry young men which you read about. Someone said it was and Huggett got very angry, because it’s by Love and Leadership that the Will works. And all these angry young men believe in democracy and freedom and a lot of stuff that Huggett says just gets in the way of real thinking.

Colin and Bill seemed to have enjoyed this cartoon depiction of them [21]. Technically, you might say, it wasn’t really about them. It was more of a “meta-caricature,” a send-up of the way popular journalism had been portraying them.

* * *

Not every caricature was friendly though. Bernard Kops, an interesting if under-appreciated East End Jewish novelist, put a wild and wacky caricature of Bill Hopkins into his Awake For Mourning, published in 1958—curiously enough by the selfsame MacGibbon & Kee publishers (perhaps to make back the money they lost when pulping The Divine and the Decay?).

Halfway through the book a character appears named Derek Bishop. Derek is an ex-journalist and the founder of the fascistic New Youth Party. He meets an ex-con pickpocket named Mike Lewis, whom he seeks to transform into Mike Rebel, teen idol and front-man for the New Youth Party.

LET’S GIVE THIS BLASTED, LOUSY, STUPID, BACKWARD COUNTRY A JOLT — FRIGHTEN THE SWINE IN WESTMINSTER

says the first-page blurb in the paperback edition. And just so you know that these are not meant as admirable sentiments, the blurb also describes Derek Bishop as a “bored and power-crazy homosexual”!

In the Kops version, the Hopkins stand-in doesn’t much care for his Angry Young Men associates, who are here called The Group (versus The Crowd in Angus Wilson’s version):

“They make me sick,” Derek cleared his throat and spat into a handkerchief. “I despise them, but no party is complete without them. They’re known as The Group.” He looked up to heaven expressing boredom.

“What do they do?” Mike asked.

“Two are playwrights, one is a novelist, and one is a philosopher, playwright and novelist. All very up and coming. All genuine geniuses. I hate them.” [22]

Notes

9. Time issue of March 24, 1958.

10. Stuart Holroyd, Contraries: A Personal Progression (1975).

11. Colin Wilson, The Outsider, originally published in 1956 by Victor Gollancz.

12. Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade (1958), pp. 186-87.

13. The rape story itself is highly doubtful, and was probably invented after Lynne Burgess’s death to create an inspirational backstory for the violence in Clockwork (Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess [2005]).

14. From 2010, “The Notting Hill Effect” in the Independent.

15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Edgecombe

16. A 1960s public-housing or “council flat” development off King’s Road in Chelsea, a mile or so west of Sloane Square.

17. MacGibbon & Kee became Hart-Davis MacGibbon in the 1970s and was eventually swallowed up by HarperCollins. Source: Wikipedia on Hart-Davis MacGibbon and William Collins, Sons.

18.  Declaration, 1957.

19. I thought the island sounded like Sark, and Bill told me it was indeed supposed to be Sark. It is the only Channel Island Bill ever visited, and that occasion was to research the book. But Jonathan Bowden firmly suggests the island was really Brecqhou, a small rocky outcrop off the west coast of Sark. Jonathan may simply have thought that the names looked more similar. To me, Vachau suggests wordplay: Vacation in Dachau.

20. According to Colin Wilson in The Angry Years (2005).

21. Margaret Drabble, Angus Wilson: A Biography (1995).

22. Bernard Kops, Awake for Mourning (1958). The novel, and its connection to Hopkins and company, are critiqued at length here.

34:46 / 84 words

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Because of the warm response to Jonathan Bowden’s “Tangmere Speech,” “Tameside Speech,” and “Newbury Speech,” we are presenting another of his British National Party “stump speeches,” where he begins by commenting on the news of the day and then builds from there. This speech was given somewhere in the North of England on September 17, 2009.

2,464 words

Jonathan Bowden
Demon
Edited by Alex Kurtagić
London: The Palingenesis Project, 2014

The Jonathan Bowden Project is not a progressive rock band, although transgressive might apply. Rather, it is Alex Kurtagić’s project to republish material from The Collected Works of Jonathan Bowden, in something of a respectable and reader-friendly format; the original having been, apparently, something of a self-published mess. I will discuss how well it serves this purpose later, but first, let’s look at the actual text.

As editor Kurtagić correctly says in his Note on this Edition:

Jonathan’s earlier writing was chaotic; it seldom stayed focused on a topic – or even a genre – for long. This does not make it less readable, but it does make it undefinable, except as a record of the thoughts and insights of Jonathan Bowden or his ongoing commentary on the various topics, events, and individuals that preoccupied him at the time of the writing.

 Or, as he says on the jacket flap, Bowden’s texts

Belong to no specific genre, the prose being allowed to roam where it may, drawing from many strands, finding unexpected links and collecting shrewd insights along the way.

Based on that description, this “essay” certainly fulfills our expectations.

Bowden begins by considering “one of the most notorious and disturbing cases of criminal malfeasance,” namely “the Ripper murders . . . a series of mutilations that were committed at the height of the Victorian period in the East End of London.” Having “touched a nerve in the Victorian sensibility,” it’s no surprise that they have continued to fascinate the Brits.

Thanks to the plethora of “history” and “chiller” cable channels, Americans are certainly at least vaguely familiar (vagueness seeming to be the state of all their historical knowledge) of the Ripper case, and that, as the murders stopped, and no suspect was taken, some mystery remains. However, I don’t think it quite has the same fascination on this side of the pond (consider the indifference according Johnny Depp’s From Hell), and I must confess I’ve never been all that intrigued myself, despite figuring in the work of such widely different folks as Colin Wilson and Chi Chi Valenti[1] (to say nothing of Spinal Tap’s never finished rock opera, Saucy Jack).

Bowden reviews the various theories and suspects, which gives him a chance to indulge in some of that “commentary on the various topics, events, and individuals that preoccupied him.” But right from the start, almost, Bowden insists that, contrary to the plethora of Dukes and Royal Physicians and even midwifes offered up as suspects, the Ripper must have been

A lonely, violent, fantasizing man of scant education; a piece of low-life – if not necessarily a piece of complete and utter dross – someone not particularly different (certainly not from a distinct social set) to the girls he murdered. Such an individual was poor and disabused, lacking in foresight and most probably alone. He may have been a drinker . . . he might possibly have had some rudimentary experience as a butcher [or] have worked in an abattoir . . . None of which is particularly crucial for the prosecution of this case.

Although Bowden doesn’t mention the connection, the search for the Ripper seems, to this Yank, to resemble the “Oxfordian” case against Will Shakespeare — surely the man capable of writing such dramas could not be an uneducated hick; surely he must have been, if not a royal, at least a noble; if not a noble, at least a titled professional; if not that, then at least a villainous Prof. Moriarty.

In American terms, the search for the Ripper resembles much “conspiracy” theorizing[2] in that the official perp is usually a patsy too stupid to possibly have worked alone.[3] In Oliver Stone’s JFK, based on the investigations of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, Oswald is disparaged as a “a creep” while Garrison’s investigation “uncovers” a CIA conspiracy led by rich, handsome, educated Clay Shaw (who is, to boot, a “butch john, not one of them limp wrists”).[4]

All this “Ripperology” sputters out to no particular conclusion, but it serves to illustrate his real interest, the notion of crime as a response by the superman (Wilson’s “outsider,” Evola’s “differentiated man”) to the crowed anonymity of modern society. This part of the book, roughly the second half, should prove more interesting to most American readers.

For, if we start at the bottom, why does crime exist? Quite literally, what is it for? Does it serve any meaningful purpose at all?

Unfortunately, Bowden stumbles right out of the gate; his πρῶτον ψεῡδος (first false step)[5] is the offhand claim that “homosexuality only occurs in captivity.” Here, he might have benefited from the sort of editor William Burroughs had for his first book, Junkie; rather than, as here, spending half a page explaining what a crinoline is, such an editor would have inserted a note to the effect that “This claim is not supported by reliable medical authorities.”[6]

This in turn leads some of his meanderings into dead ends; such as the suggestion that homosexuality is a product — by no means ignoble in itself — of civilization — thus decadence — somehow genetically passed down in some Lamarckian fashion; rather than androphilia being the source of culture, from the primeval Männerbund[7] to the SS Orden Staat,[8] with “family values” civilization being the product of Semitic culture-distortion.[9]

Bowden is definitely onto something, though, in linking deviance, whether it be criminal, sexual, or artistic, with elitism, true order, and the various concern of the Right.[10] Whether he agrees or disagrees with this, or any other Bowden’s other “probes,” as Marshall McLuhan called his own audacious essays, the reader will find both delight and profit in exposing himself to Bowden’s kaleidoscopic tour of the dark side of the imagination, the natural home of that exile from modern civilization, the Right.

The artistic sensibility has hit upon a salient fact: namely, that crime can be aesthetically understood, but it should not be appreciated – it can be reckoned with and judged, contrary to liberal diktat. For in truth, much liberal opinion does not respect anything enough o want to proscribe it. Yet, artistic and /or intellectual insight into criminality – more accurately, the recesses of the process of human destruction – is more than ever necessary. It is part-and-parcel of any understanding of what it is to be human.[11]

Now, we come to the role of this text in the Jonathan Bowden Project. According to editor Kurtagić, “in their published form [the aforementioned, self-published Collected Works of Jonathan Bowden] the texts were in sore need of line-editing.” Given Bowden’s writing and speaking style, and his lack of “access to a sophisticated word processor,” one can well believe it. But on the evidence of this edition, the original texts must have been one unholy mess, perhaps resembling the work of the Ripper himself; for the text presented here is not very good at all.

There are basically two problems here; first, the text is littered with typos, of the irritating and counter-productive make-you-stop-and-think sort:

. . . (to white: the Romantic agony) . . .

They reside in the archies of the New York Academy of Medicine . . .

. . . who was then an impoverished and Bohemian painted living in the . . .

For it we return to the case for a moment . . .

. . . with considerable gabs between each slaying . . .

All of which has a lot to do with the crowing together of human beings . . .

And with double marks for originality, take this one:

(This, at any rate, is how Coppola doubles meant it: the redundant American parable that had its originis in . . .

Now, some of these were perhaps simply not caught by the editors in the original text, messy as it was; however, as is the frustrating nature of the editing process, some are introduced by the editors themselves. Consider Kurtagić’s own statement of his goals:

The Jonathan Bowden Collection aims at making these obscure texts readily available for the first time, complete with annotations and indeces, so that they may be studied and / or enjoyed by present and future generations interested in the dissidents who were on the margins of British intellectual life in our troubled times.

Another problem is due to the nature of the text, which, though apparently not a transcript, reads like one. Since Kurtagić has brought what he calls a “light hand” to Bowden’s style, there are passages which, when spoken, or rather, performed by an orator of Bowden’s caliber, would likely be reasonably clear, but on the printed page become unnecessarily cryptic:

In a sense, to dream a ‘transgressive’ fantasy is the very alternative, the literal – if not the dark, morbid or transgressive side to the artistic imagination or intellect is merely a genetic displacement: a cauterizing of the nature of the human.

This might be useful to some future scholar — in Castalia, perhaps — seeking as pure a text from the Master’s hand as possible, with no editorial intrusions, but the un-readablility of this sort of thing makes it less likely that enough readers will grow among the general populace right now to result in any “future generations interested in the dissidents who were on the margins of British intellectual life in our troubled times.”

Now, as I’ve criticized several recent Wermod & Wermod publications for the same peccadilloes, perhaps I should insert some explanation/self-justification. Their publications of Yockey’s Imperium and Proclamation of London are expensive, but this is justified not only by the value of the contents, but the rarity of print editions and the high quality of the editorial material contributed by Kerry Bolton and Michael O’Meara; occasional errors are hardly relevant.

On the other hand, something like Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature,[12] which is widely available free, cheaply, or in extensively annotated editions, needs to be judged by stricter criteria. The Partisan is intended to present new fiction to a popular audience, and again, the presentation – despite the “book by its cover” cliché – needs to attract rather than frustrate the reader.[13]

In other words, I don’t intend these as niggling little criticisms but as attempts to judge these publications on their own terms; the text themselves being rather self-recommending anyway.

So in this case, you’ll recall this edition’s statement of purpose:

. . . so that they may be studied and / or enjoyed by present and future generations interested in the dissidents who were on the margins of British intellectual life in our troubled times.

Although the footnotes do help those hoping to study the text, the overall presentation is hardly conducive to enjoyment, although a lot of the problem could, hopefully, be corrected in future printings.

Notes

1. Wilson devoted many pages to the Ripper, along with other criminals, madmen and messiahs; after a lecture at the New York Open Center I met up with him (as part of a group of listeners) at a Greenwich Village “theme pub” called The Slaughtered Lamb. “Indeed, when these issues are brought up, you feel like a lamb led to the sacrificial slaughter” (p, 61). Chi Chi epitomized the sort of American who would think an interest in the Ripper denoted “class” and “sophistication”; her elegy “Whitechapel Girls (The Ripper Poem)” was published in her literary fetish ‘zine Verbal Abuse in 1993 (online here), and later recited at a Ripper themed night at her nightclub, Jackie 60 (see my “Fashion Tips for the Far From Fabulous Right” in The Homo and the Negro (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2112)

2. A term, it should be noted, invented by the CIA to demonize anyone questioning the Warren Commission; see the documents collected here.

3. Of course, the FBI’s post-911 “terror plots foiled” record shows a remarkably consistent narrative of half-witted Muslims approached by the FBI with a can’t miss plan to bring glory to Allah, so who’s reading whose scripts?

4. “People like you just walk between the raindrops” muses Garrison. Even the more louche conspirators are given a kind of sheen: David Ferrie “knows five languages, knows a lot about history, philosophy . . .” while even imprisoned rent boy Willie O’Keefe struts around shirtless for our admiration, paraphrasing Yockey (“You a liberal, Mr. Garrison, you don’t know shit ’cause you never been fucked in the ass. This ain’t about justice! No, this is about order! Who rules? Fascism is coming back!”) and explains his motives in confessing as “I hate to think they blame it on silly, fucking Oswald. Didn’t know shit, anyway.”

5. A favorite expression of Schopenhauer’s; see, for example, The Basis of Morality, Part II, Chapter II.

6. On the all-pervasive nature of homosexual – or rather, “ambisexual” — relations in the animal kingdom, especially primates, see James Neill’s The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies (McFarland & Co., 2008), as well as my subsequent kindle single (only $0.99, cheap!), A Review of James Neill’s “The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies.”

7. See “A Band Apart: Wulf Grimsson’s Loki’s Way,” here and reprinted in The Homo and the Negro.

8. See Julius Evola, Men Among The Ruins (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2002) and the reviews “René Guénon: East and West” and “East and West: The Gordian Knot” reprinted in East and West (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

9. See my “Welcome to the Club: The Rise & Fall of the Männerbund in Pre-War American Pop Culture,” here and in my forthcoming collection, Green Nazis in Space! (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

10. Aryan superman Elliot Ness, putting together his “Untouchables” (incorruptible, outcaste, and immortal) to renew order (dharma) in the chaos of Prohibition era Chicago, looks among the riff-raff of official police culture (rejecting one recruit, his guru Malone sneers “There goes the next Chief of Police”), and stubbornly insists “I don’t want any married men” (see my “’God, I’m with a heathen.’ The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables,” here and reprinted in The Homo and the Negro; while his opposite number, immigrant superman Ricco (Little Caesar) sneers “nahh, that’s soft stuff” when his buddy and partner talks about girls.

11. The modern “genius serial killer” is perhaps the American version of Ripperology, from Manson to Hannibal Lecter to The Black List. In Manhunter, Will Graham, the FBI profiler who can “get inside the mind” of such a one, due to his own latent superman tendencies (Will), achieves his own breakthrough when he becomes “tired of all you sons of bitches” and, however the Tooth Fairy was abused as a child, today he just wants to “shoot him out of his socks” — and does so; see “Will and Phil: Awakening Through Repetition in Groundhog Day, Point of Terror and Manhunter,” here as well as my review of Andy Nowicki‘s Beauty and the Least (Chicago: Hopeless Books, Uninc., 2014), here.

12. See my review, “The Original Weird Critick,” here.

13. Demon, by the way, has a very nifty cover illustration, of Bowden as Ripper, from Alex Kurtagić himself.

371 words

Jonathan Bowden
Axe
Edited by Alex Kurtagić
London: The Palingenesis Project, 2014
88 pages

Hardcover only: $25

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Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, Jonathan Bowden wrote 27 books, about which almost nothing was known until after his death. Combining cultural criticism with memoir, high journalism, and selected correspondence, these texts belong to no particular genre, the prose being allowed to roam where it may, drawing from many strands, finding unexpected links, and collecting shrewd insights along the way. More than anything, they are exercises in exploration and self-clarification, wherein one will find, as work in progress, many of the themes that would later emerge in his orations. The Jonathan Bowden Collection aims at making these obscure texts readily available for the first time, complete with annotations and indeces, so that they may be studied and / or enjoyed by present and future generations interested in the dissidents at the margins of British intellectual life at the turn of our century.

Axe begins with the Right and ends with conservatism, but it is largely a commentary on art, literature, and intellectuals on the Left. Bowden begins with a criticism of Wyndham Lewis and then builds a catena of digressions, whose topics include Andrea Mantegna, J. G. Ballard, Stephen King, a foray into personal memoir, Jean Baudrillard, the New Left, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Roberto D’Aubuisson. Throughout his commentary, Bowden compares the meaning and approaches of the Right against those of the Left in the intersection between modern politics and culture. This is not an essay in any conventional sense, but rather a succession of fervid and unpredictable snapshots that acrete into a grotesque panorama of Western civilisation in the 20th century.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Bowden, April 12, 1962–March 29, 2012, was a British novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, actor, and orator, and a leading thinker and spokesman of the British New Right. He was the author of some 40 books—novels, short stories, stage and screen plays, philosophical dialogues and essays, and literary and cultural criticism—including Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013) and Western Civilization Bites Back, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014).

Hardcover only: $25

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2,599 words

Jonathan Bowden
Axe
Edited by Alex Kurtagić
London: The Palingenesis Project, 2015

“Write as you speak!” is the cliché — second only to “Write what you know!” — given to the writer, professional or amateur, who finds himself at a loss. I suppose it may be good advice for some — clichés, like stereotypes, do, as we on the Right know, have at least some basis in fact.[1] 

Now, it was Jonathan Bowden’s gift — or curse — to be able to do just that: to write as he spoke. Sounds good so far, but a moment’s second thought reminds us of what we’ve read and heard about the considerable difference between the written and spoken word; how very different the two rhetorics are, how, in short, the same method — repetition, say — can be enormously effective in the one, while in the other producing boredom or the impression of imbecility, calling for the quite different method of “elegant variation.”[2]

So once again here, in the second volume to appear in Alex Kurtagić’s admirable project to reprint the essays appearing in Bowden’s self-published — and somewhat ironically titled — Collected Works, vol. I,[3] we find a written text that seemingly dares you to read it.[4]

This is the sort of writing that for years I found unreadable, as I perversely tried to grasp it by imposing the rigid structures of logic (If P then Q) that I had come to expect from reading too much philosophy “up at uni.” Then I realized that there was an entirely different kind of rhetoric at work here, and that one just had to lie back and enjoy it.[5]

Oddly enough, it was Dr. Deck who provide the clue (if only I had been clever enough to see it; how damnably Platonic of him!), way back in his own doctoral dissertation on Plotinus; who, he says, does not so much prove his conclusions as accustom us to them by talking around them:

His presentation . . . is “spiral” rather than linear.[6] In many places he does not so much prove his propositions and notions as accustom his hearers and readers to their truth. The result is that it often seems that he is proving conclusions by premises and premises by conclusion, when in fact he is elaborating an intuition . . . and rendering it plausible and acceptable.[7]

What the reader needs to do with such writing as this, is to learn to notice and appreciate two things, form and content; the amusing, intriguing, or useful nature of this or that point along the way, and the way the author spirals back, returning to earlier points now seen in a new light.

Bowden begins, strangely enough, with some remarks on Wyndham Lewis, whose presence and impact on my old school, the last place you’d expect to find an exponent of Vorticism, I’ve expanded on many times in the past.[8] But Bowden is interested in Lewis only to move from the particular to the general, and establish that artists have something to communicate, to transmit, and this gives us the ability to “comprehend and celebrate artists down the ages,” particularly in terms of the political division of Left and Right.

Bowden then swerves his attention to a painter I must confess was unknown to me: Andrea Mantenga. In fact, if it weren’t for Kurtagić’s annotation I would have guessed him a “modern” painter, not a contemporary of Leonardo, which makes Bowden’s point, the curiously modern nature of Mantenga’s work, which “infuses in stone the deliberations of politics,” his art being “about order and finite judgments in the mind as a prelude to chaos, and observance of extremity.” This Medusa-like quality reminds him of Beckett, for some reason, by which I mean that we will eventually find the connection — between stone, order, and Beckett — for ourselves.

Bowden begins to meditate a bit on the idea of animal or vegetative life mutating, “transmogriphing,” into stone or crystal, which leads him to the work of J. G. Ballard, especially, of course, his apocalyptic novel, The Crystal World (1966).

At this point one wishes Bowden would have chose, or been able to, bring in the work of Guénon, who, in The Reign of Quantity[9] expounds the significance of the move “From Sphere to Cube” as part of the increasing “solidification” of the world in the Kali Yuga; the post-apocalyptic New Jerusalem is a cubic city, composed of precious metals and jewels, the polar opposite of the original Garden, yet bearing the two-fold significance of petrification, pulverized into dust (“Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla”) on the one hand, and on the other, providing an encapsulation of raw materials for the reconstruction of the new cycle.

As Bowden circles — or rather, spirals — around various themes, from reminiscences of his mother’s (literally) Stalinist stepfather and their typically lugubrious British summer cottage, to the quarrels between Sartre and Camus[10] and the breakup and dispersion of the Sorbonne’s radical academic faculty, a theme gradually insinuates itself into the reader’s mind:
“the nature of meaning and its absence.”

That theme is expressed most powerfully in a passage bodying forth the modern worldview:

Life itself is little more than a programmatic spasm, a moment of contingency, meaningless, viduity [sic] and the absence of despair; a lake of mud, a plenitude of despondency, across which human beings drag themselves, talking to themselves, remembering certain absences from their past.

This is a remarkable presentation of the situation obsessively explored by Beckett, for example, particularly in his later works, such as The Lost Ones and others, where even the earlier tramps and cripples are displaced by nameless semi-hominoids crawling about various loathsome, post-apocalyptic or extra-planetary environments. And although Beckett is mentioned a couple of times, and already on page 3, he goes un-alluded to here, occluding his presence, the way Bowden makes his grand spiral back and leaving the reader to connect the dots.

The modern artist, then, is one who — correctly — perceives the modern world as nihilistic; to reach for another Traditionalist meme, the vertical dimension of value — what the Right calls ‘hierarchy’ — has collapsed, and man crawls about horizontally in the mud.[11]

The Left and Right then, can be distinguished, in their art as in their politics, by the one delighting in the mud,[12] or at least, like Beckett, finding some honor in Stoic steadfastness and refusal of consolation;[13] and on the other hand, the Right, the urge to fight on and re-establish, to the extent possible, the true Order.[14]

All of which climaxes with an unexpected and challenging defense of terror, but only as practiced by the Right. The Right is justified in the use of terror because only the Right both recognizes our immoral, or post-moral, condition, and understands that therefore remedial action can only take place outside the — anyway unavailable — concept of good and evil,[15] while the Left childishly and step-motherishly — and hypocritically — nags us about “good and bad,” “right and wrong,” “legal and illegal” in the midst of an apocalypse.

A challenging and provocative text, then, that more than repays the reader’s patient attention and thoughtful reflection. Of course, it only pays back as much as you can give it, and when some readers stare into the abyss of this text, they may only find the abyss staring back.

The problem, though, as I’ve noted before in reviewing these Palingenesis productions, is that the “light hand” Kurtagić brings to the editing results in a text littered with errors, many perhaps minor, but all distracting from a text that already demands the utmost attention from the reader,[16] thus losing the point of producing either a relatively expensive limited edition, on the one hand, or, equally, a text useful for future scholars, to say noting of violating the implicit compact with the ordinary reader, to produce a readable page.

Take that Beckett-esque quote up there. I was prepared to write off “viduity” as a misprint for “vacuity,” but turns out it’s a real word, meaning “widowhood.” So, I’ve learned a new word, perhaps, but is it the word Bowden wrote? And if so, was that a mistake? Widowhood would be an interesting way to present the state of being in a de-sacralized world, and a basic principle of textual analysis suggests keeping an odd word rather than smoothing it out (scribes are more likely to accidentally write a common word, or try to suppress possible heresy), but Kurtagić’s general performance leaves me doubtful. Just look at the very next phrase — “the absence of despair” — surely a mistake (possibly “excess” or the rather Bowden-esque “abscess of despair”), made by Bowden in writing or Kurtagić in reading, but who can tell?

Perhaps this is can be given a more positive spin; consider it just another challenge to the determined reader; or perhaps a way to set the reader off onto accidental tangents of his own (those future scholars be damned!). In any event, don’t let them scare you away from submitting yourself to that unique experience: an essay by Jonathan Bowden; you’ll enjoy it!

Notes

[1] My mentor, Dr. John N. Deck, once solemnly advised me to obtain “one of those pocket-sized cassette recorders” (this was the ’70s) so as to record the long treatises, diatribes, and arias I was wont to deliver in “the Coffee Department” (viz, the cafeteria), which somehow never seemed to materialize on exam books or term papers, but the technology was still too primitive. What I really needed was access to a young lady typist, like Henry James. I mean, he hired one, not that he was one. Today, modern word processing (what James might call “the dear, the blessed ‘cut and paste’ method”) and the internets have, like so much else, rendered such domestic help redundant. The resulting essays have been called “Gonzo Traditionalism”; how Hunter Thompson got similar effects with just an IBM Selectric and a fax machine (“the Mojo Wire”) suggest he was right about drugs: “They’ve always worked for me.”

[2] Hunter S. Thompson claimed to be a “Doctor of Journalism” not on the basis of class work but the hard school of professional sportswriter. Reflecting on the genius of Grantland Rice, Thompson notes that while Rice knew he was writing for simpletons — “Rice understood that his world might go all to pieces if he ever dared to doubt that his eyes were wired straight to his lower brain — a sort of de facto lobotomy, which enables the grinning victim to operate entirely on the level of Sensory Perception . . .” — he also knew he had to mix things up a little: “He carried a pocket thesaurus, so that “The thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen” never echoed more than once in the same paragraph, and the “Granite-grey sky” in his lead was a “cold dark dusk” in the last lonely line of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping stories . . .” “Fear And Loathing At The Superbowl: No Rest for the Wretched” by Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone, February 15, 1973; online here.

[3] See my review of the first, Demon, here.

[4] Just as Coleman Francis’ magnum opus, Red Zone Cuba, “dares you to watch it” (MST3k, Episode 619). In both cases, I suggest you make the effort, and will be rewarded, but as always on the internets, your mileage may vary: “I maintain that this is easily the worst movie MST3K ever did, and is in the running for worst movie EVER MADE (and, yes, I’ve seen “The Apple”). And for that reason, I LOVE this episode.” — MST3k Episode Guide, here.

[5] Like one of Saucy Jack’s victims? See Demon, note 3 above.

[6] Constant Readers know of my love of the spiral, and the contrast — fueled by the writings of René Guénon (Symbolism of the Cross; Multiple States of the Being) and Alain Daniélou (Music and the Power of Sound) of the Traditional spiral with the anti-Traditional circle; see variously here and especially the essays collected in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014).

[7] Nature, Contemplation, and the One: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Toronto: 1967), p. x; reprinted 1991 (Burkett, NY: Larson Publications), p. 16. That this method is applicable to Bowden as well can be seen by reflecting on Plotinus’ idiosyncratic style: “Plotinus is the most difficult of any recognized author to translate. The Greek that he uses is not of the best. His was of using it borders, at times, on the contemptuous. Add to that the fact that he came to composition very late in life and composed with an unreflecting swiftness that was the astonishment of his contemporaries and refused to reread what he had composed with a disinterestedness — or concern for his fading eyesight — that was their admiration.” – The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatises from the Enneads; selected and newly translated with an introduction and commentary by Elmer O’Brien, S.J. (New York: Signet, 1964; reprinted Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. viii. “Therefore,” O’Brien adds, “much reliance has been placed on the books, monographs, and articles that have appeared . . . from the piled desks of their small, wholly admirable, international group of authorities in Plotinian research.” Kurtagić’s editorial project, rescuing Bowden’s writings from obscurity and presenting them in cleaned-up, annotated editions “so that they may be studied and / or enjoyed by present and future generations” thus resembles that of Porphyry, who posthumously prepared Plotinus’ writings, creating the now customary division into nine sets of nine treatises (hence, the Enneads) and adding a biography, or rather, hagiography.

[8] As has Bowden; see, or rather, hear, “Jonathan Bowden on Wyndham Lewis,” here.

[9] Ghent, N.Y.: Sophia Perennis, 4th rev. ed., 2001; Chapter 20; see also Chapter 17, “The Solidification of the World.”

[10] The justification of the rather nifty cover portrait of Sartre, again contributed by Kurtagić himself, although I think we shall see that Beckett would be more representative of Bowden’s concerns.

[11] Mud, of course, is just wet dust, continuing the metaphor of solidification leading inevitably to brittleness and then pulverization and dispersal into dust. Can we note that that stepfather of the author’s mother is named Clay?

[12] “Zola, or the delight in filth” — Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols). Colin Wilson has remarked on Ulysses and other works of that modernist ilk, as products of the “urge to do dirt on Life.”

[13] At a rehearsal, an actor suggested that the lifting up of the sole character at the end of one of Beckett’s late plays suggested he had found salvation at last, to which Beckett replied, in his best Northern Irish accent: “Oh, no, he’s finished.”

[14] This is, then, the true meaning of Spengler’s image of Western Man being like the Roman guard buried alive at Pompeii rather than leave his post; not passive complicity but making the most of the hand you’ve been dealt in the Kali Yuga.

[15] I’ve explored this notion before, from the perspective of the Männerbund as the extra-societal creator and restorer of Aryan society, in “’God, I’m with a heathen’: The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, here and reprinted in The Homo and the Negro (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012). Whatever his actual involvement, both Italian Rightist youth and the authorities found justifications for terror in Evola’s writings, especially Men Among the Ruins, which contains his own account of the Männerbund. All of which provides, perhaps, some justification for the otherwise puzzling way Thomas Mann derives terrorism, in theory and practice, from the speechifying of his rather Evola-like Naphta in The Magic Mountain.

[16] For example, among too many: “pain and violent” (violence), “awash with finds” (funds), “on a part” (par), etc. To say nothing of a line of text repeated on p. 45.

105 words

Note: One of our readers has provided us with copies of the three missing Bowden speeches. We will run them on three consecutive Fridays. I want to thank our anonymous benefactor.

Jonathan Bowden’s website was taken down after his death. On the site, he had archived MP3s of a number of his speeches. I do not have copies of three of these speeches:

• Manchester, February 1, 2006
• Blackpool, June 21, 2005
• Blackburn, May 26, 2005

Please check your computers to see if you have copies of these files. If you do, contact me at editor@counter-currents.com, and I will make them available at Counter-Currents.

Thanks for your loyal readership and support!

Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief

8,541 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s lecture on Professor Maurice Cowling. Unfortunately, the sound quality of the source is absolutely terrible, and there are many unintelligible passages. Both V. S. and I have racked our brains over this transcript long enough. Now we are crowdsourcing it to people who have a better ear for Bowden’s accent and the background knowledge necessary to pull words that elude us out of the buzz. Please post your corrections below. If anyone knows the date and location of this talk, please post it below. To aid your work, I am putting both the cleaned up and the raw versions of the lecture below. Go team!

Cleaned up version:

To listen in a player, click here.

To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

Raw version:

To listen in a player, click here.

To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

I have been asked to talk about various things, but I would like to talk about Maurice Cowling, particularly, who I call an ultra-conservative extraordinaire. Professor Cowling’s dead now. But he was a very interesting man. He crossed all sorts of theoretical boundaries in his career as an academic and, I suppose, a sort of radical conservative journalist for many years.

I knew him about 10 to 15 years before his death, and he taught at Peterhouse. There’s a novel by C. P. Snow called The Masters about an election in a Cambridge college, Oxbridge college, on the intensity of the political passions at the microscopic level amongst these clever men. That is very much the sort of ambience in which this man moved. He was regarded in some ways as a little bit of a Thatcherite. He never was. And I always had the impression that like professor Roger Scruton, who he was different from, but who he resembled in certain respects, he is often wheeled out when people wish to damage the mainstream Conservative and Unionist Party.

It was well said that in the 1980s that Penguin, a book publisher not the friendliest to Tories, published two books, Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, the bible of Chicago-School libertarian capitalism, and Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism. And they did both of those in some ways to attack the Conservative Party of that time. But no one would to accuse you of attacking anything when you’re publishing intellectual material that is in some way adjacent to the party concerned.

Maurice Cowling was a very radical individual in all sorts of ways. I’ll say a few biographical things about him first, because he’s just an interesting man. The first thing is that Cowling lives at night, that Cowling would sleep in the day, and he’d sit up at night. When you had a university seminar with him, you’d go and see him at one in the morning. Everybody was sort of wrecked, essentially, when they climbed up to his tower to see him, and the mist would be coming out of the ???. And the porter would open . . . It’s like the scene in Macbeth after the murder and he’s got the chains on the door and you come in there, this leery, old porter looks at you and says, “Mr. Cowling is it, sir?” And you say, “Yes.” You go up this stairwell, and you open the door, and Cowling will be in this book-lined room. Straight out of scenes with Jonathan Harker in Dracula. You go into this room and there’s books on this wall and books on this wall and books on this wall, and Cowling’s lying on the bed dressed in green. You go in there and he looks at you, and says, “Oh, it’s you again.” In Cambridge, you have to read the SAR (???) Aristotle, Heraclitus, Plato to Hobbes, libertarianism, and John Rawls, in a way, but it’s that sort of spectrum.

And he would give you these essays that didn’t really related to the course as such, but you had to do a certain amount of work for it. In a way, you were more than educated to sort of get the degree. He wasn’t particularly concerned with ??? conventions. On Marx and Engels, he’d just invent an essay for you and say, “Karl Marx: ??? libertarian. Discuss.” And he’d have you go away and do that. Of course, what he’s talking about is the 1844 manuscripts, the early Marx, the differentiation from the scientific socialism that comes later.

Interesting thing about Cowling is that Cowling was a sort of archetype for the sort of dons depicted in Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe, because of course that comedy called Porterhouse means Peterhouse, and he’s talking about the ultra-reactionaries in Cambridge.

Now, Cowling was deeply un-English in certain respects and deeply English in others. When I say un-English, he was ultra-intellectual, had no time for small talk: drivel and garbage! [???] Now, if you made an interesting proposition or you ??? in your essay, because you had to read it out loud in front of him if he ??? it, he would attack everything you’ve said. He would attack every proposition and he would attack every idea behind it. He believed in dialectics. He believed that struggle is the meaning truth. So, you had this war with him basically between about 1:30 and quarter of 3 in the morning, and then you’d stagger down the tower, and another victim would come up to be impaled, and you’d see him sneaking up the stairs.

It was well known that female students had to be kept away from him. Not for the usual reasons, but because he was ??? merciless. The ??? had to be kept away from him as well. He used to throw them into the gladiatorial pit of combat, the ones who could take it. And this says a lot about Maurice, in that Maurice was a somewhat slightly dangerous man, certainly for the academic life of that era.

I remember George Steiner, the Emeritus Professor of European culture and civilization at Churchill and at Geneva University simultaneously, once said at a private party that he regarded Maurice Cowling as evil and a force for evil, and there are various reasons why he might think that, personal and otherwise.

Now, Maurice Cowling is unusual in that he was a deeply elitist and extreme conservative, and a very intellectually assiduous individual. The interesting thing about him is that he set himself in a more continental way against liberalism as a conception. He didn’t think of conservatism as a species of liberalism. He thought of conservatism as in some respects an anti-Enlightenment proposition. His thesis . . . He didn’t quite do a thesis or PhD in the usual way, but his basic thesis text, a bit like Nietzsche’s Tragedy, was about John Stuart Mill and was published again on ??? several years later. He sort of launched himself into an attack upon Mill. His argument about him is quite eccentric even from the perspective of people who don’t care for that particular thinker, because his view was that contrary to the idea that Mill was opening up towards tolerance and inclusion and freedom of thought and freedom of belief and secularity and a sort of plenitude of milky goodness, he regarded it as an implicit totalitarian, a prig, a man determined to impose his values and views on others and a militant destroyer of religion and an aggressive secularist.

One of Cowling’s theses is that liberalism isn’t a nice viewpoint as everyone imagines, but actually is a devouring viewpoint, particularly of prior religious ideas that uphold notions of hierarchy in society. So, his second book was on the use and misuse/limitations of political science. Cowling’s early books were very abstract, and were one of the reasons he basically resumed after a break in his academic career. His career was broken by war, the Second World, and by a perior in journalism. But he could never really get started in journalism because always had a tendency to write ??? reviews of ??? in print, and you can only imagine because he was such a cross-grained, “reactionary,” and  difficult individual. Very much like ??? as a journalist who in many ways resembles ??? 1974 arguing for a coup-d’etat in Britain. ??? Who wants to be popular? And Cowling was a bit similar. He was sacked, or “removed” the expression was, from the Express Group, because the editors said he was, “too reactionary, even for us.” This was in the early 1960s, which in many ways was quite prior to the cultural and social deluge which was to occur.

So, his academic career ??? these texts in the background on Mill and on the uses of politics. In a strange way for such a theoretical man, the belief that theory doesn’t impinge upon on the life and manners and mores of politicians very much.

Cowling was a very complex individual, because although he believed that intellectual ideas dominate life and direct the power class, even though they have no formal power in our society because everybody else is opened up and ??? another level their ideas. He believed that politicians are usually motivated by everything other than principles.

And Cowling is a strange individual, because although he had preferred beliefs of his own he was also a little bit of a nihilist. Essentially an attacker, he had a mind that is often more associated with the Left than the Right, because whenever you put a proposition to him his first idea will be to attack, to deconstruct, to break down, to sweep away and to see if your ideas could stand it. It’s a sort of slightly more aggressive version of the Socratic method whereby you don’t put forward your own proposition, you just chisel away at whatever anyone has said to you and remain somehow to one side, you know? Of course, he had no ?? even better than he made with a little time later, so he had to do that for himself.

So, you’ve got this strange tension in Cowling between an ultra-theoretical view of life and the view that politicians are deliberative rogues acting in microscopic ways particularly in relation to ??? that they have with each other within cabinets, within parties, and within bureaucracies. Like Enoch Powell, he believed, in particularly English and British terms, that party was very important, and he was completely dismissive of the modern idea that they’re all the same and what does it matter which party people are in. He liked the idea of the good party man, even though he didn’t associate with them, because they were a bore.

Cowling regarded most people as bores, including Michael Portillo, whom he educated and who many people think he groomed mentally for the leadership of the Tory party.  But when somebody would ask Cowling, “What’s your view of Michael Portillo?” He’d say, “Oh God, he made a middling bureaucratic ??? business.” He was always slightly condescending about everyone really, including most of his fellow dons. ???

One of his favorite sparring partners was Hugh Trevor-Roper, who committed a major faux-pas when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries. It was an enormous scandal that went around the world. Cowling set up a dinner party in Cambridge called The Authenticators, and everybody had to put up their hand when they went to his dinner party and say, “I ??? authenticate, with my heart, the proven efficacy of these texts. I know he wrote them, and I put my entire reputation upon it!” Which is some stupid bit that Roper had come out with ??? when 12 million Deutschmarks were paid to some elderly German forger, who forged multiple volumes of this stuff ??? in his garage. They paid millions and millions for it. The only historian, interestingly, who said they were fakes from beginning to end was David Irving. Life has a funny way of behaving, because a couple weeks ago I went to a garden party that Irving gave in which he talked about these and other matters, and I suddenly appeared [???] with many others appearing at this garden party. To go to a Buckinghamshire garden party ??? is the basest of all infamy isn’t it?

Now, Cowling had this sort of rivalry with Trevor-Roper, who of course was regarded as something of a Third Reich expert because he wrote the famous book about the bunker, the last days of Hitler. But he brawled with all other academics, really, because of his nature. Despite all the comedy and the element of a C. P. Snow reactionary don lookalike, he wrote three, four, five very, very serious intellectual books. So serious that most of his conservative students ???

My view of Cowling is that the idea that he was a mainstream historian, whereas someone like Irving is a demon, is in many ways false. I would say, in some respects, Cowling is to the right of Irving. This is one of the paradoxes that you face in late modernity, where certain people are regarded as beyond the pale of the pale of the pale, and other people are regarded as quite mainstream, and it’s actually partly because no one ever really looks at their ideas. Irving’s a nostalgic. He would love his country to be like the 1950s. His faux pas is that he’s sort of fallen in love with Adolf Hitler, which as a historian is not such a brilliant move, if you want to be published by Macmillan. ??? Irving career. ??? hates Hitler and loves Churchill, and he’s sort of inverted it, hasn’t he? He would have been with Churchill’s wife burning a prevalent modernist portrait of Churchill downstairs at the charcoal oven, chopping it up and using it as firewood. You know what Churchill said about that painting? He said, “It makes me look thick, and I ain’t.”

But Cowling is very, very Right-wing, but in a complicated way. He had no time for Continental Right-wing views. He believed that the key to the radical and absolutist Right in Britain is it never ??? and it must come from inside the brains of the Tory party, and he would educate those brains before they entered the cabinet. This is his central theory.

His first book was about the Labour government in 1924 leading to Labour’s involvement in the administration prior to the crash of 1929, the so-called betrayal of the labor movement and the emergence of some national Labour people ??? MacDonald and their adoption ??? in to what was essentially a Conservative administration. Now, Cowling was opposed to Labour’s influence in modern 20th-century life because he basically didn’t believe that the masses should have democratic representation in the way that we’ve got it. He wasn’t a democrat particularly, and he believed in the manipulation of state power by a little conservative elite. He believed that Labour would always push everything, even within democratic norms, further and further to the Left because it was the logic of their position.

By further and further to the Left, he means to make more equal. Cowling realized in the way that really only Continental far Right thinkers like de Benoist realized, that the real point about the Right isn’t concepts like race or religion or nationality, although these are very significant, it’s inequality; it’s the spiritual goodness, if you like, of inequality as the founding belief and structure. All the others are discourses–certainly this is how he configured them–or semiotics through which you or by virtue of which you build meaning through inequality. Therefore, he was the sort of conservative, or ultra-conservative, call it what you will, who believed that the maximization of inequality, not just material inequality which is a very low form of inequality, or equality, but immaterial forms of equality/inequality is what life is about. Hierarchies of beauty, of form, of intellect, of knowledge. These are of course aristocratic, pre-democratic, anti-middle class, anti-bourgeois class, illiberal conceptions; even though he comes from that background himself, a lot like Nietzsche in a differentiated way, he became spokesman for aristocratic mores in a British setting.

This book about the Labour administration in 1924, called The Impact of Labour, is incredibly detailed. The Left-wing historian, A. J. P. Taylor, said that, “Of all the historians of his generation, Cowling had the greatest mind, after my own.” You can’t beat them, can you? But Taylor who, of course, was one of the founding members of the CND [Committee for Nuclear Disarmament] and was on the Committee of 100, the most radical element of the CND with Bertrand Russell and all these people who all sat in front of the nuclear power plant, all standing in front of the American nuclear bunkers, all standing sat in front of the Ministry of Defence on ??? avenue. What they thought they’d achieve by sitting in the way rather than ??? one doesn’t really know. That’s what A. J. P. Taylor thought.

Taylor himself was a dissident, of course, who wrote his own soft revisionist book about the origins of the Second World War called, with devastating unoriginality, The Origins of the Second World War, which caused immense difficulty and was denounced from all circles. When the ferocious denunciations of Taylor came in, Taylor would run to the postbox and go, “Look, there’s another one!” Because he actively loved this sort of gadfly madness.

Now, his view of Cowling’s work is very interesting because it comes from the other side, politically, and Cowling would concentrate on the micro-politics of Labour figures: where they came from, which chapel they went to, what denomination within Christianity they did or didn’t believe in, whether they were an atheist or not, internally or externally, and whether their religious belief was just purely social or had a theological basis. These are key elements for Cowling, but also the alliances that people form. Unlike a lot of academic and purely theoretical historians ??? these are Marxist historians like Hobsbawm or E. P. Thompson for example are deeply empirical in relation to a lot of Continental writers, because that seems to be the British historiographical tradition, of which Cowling was definitely an exponent.

The interesting thing is the outer scope and texture of power and how these politicians behave, particularly under stress, because they are nearly always under stress in one way or another. His view is that when you allow a sentiment into the state, they will have to spend money; they will have to go off the gold standard; they have to introduce social provisions for the masses; they have to take care of the people that the Tories don’t regard sociologically as part of their nation. They are ??? to do that. This means there will be inflation. This means that the economic divisions between the classes will lessen. This means you will have a more egalitarian society whether you like it or not. Other people say that’s inevitable, given the access of the masses in modernity in the 20th century.

Later on, although they were in the same decade, Cowling writes another book after Impact of Labour and this is called The Impact of Hitler. This is British foreign policy. This is probably his most controversial book, really, and the one for which he’s widely known for outside of purely academic circles. The Impact of Hitler: British Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, 1933–1940. It’s a very provocative book in many ways. All of these books were published for the most part by Cambridge University Press or the University of Chicago, which brought out a well-known edition of this particular book.

The thesis of this book is that the British were reacting to the emergence of ferocious new Caesarisms, which is how Cowling looked at Fascism, on the European continent in the 1920s and 1930s in various ways. What really mattered was the national factions within the leadership of the Conservative Party. Don’t forget that everyone who knows anything about the history of this country in the 1930s knows, Churchill and his group were complete outsiders during that period and were regarded as semi-lunatics. And warmongers. It used to be said by ordinary Tories in the mid-’30s, “You’re not one of those ghastly Churchill men, are you?” when the met people who they thought that might be. Because Churchill was an outsider and he wanted to make trouble and wanted another enormous bloodbath with Germany, which much of that entire generation was determined to prevent occurring, given the fact that they might have fought in the first one between 1914-18 or lived through it or relatives of theirs died in it and so on.

What Cowling’s thesis is, which is deeply unpleasant in relation to mainstream center-Right opinion now, although he was never a man who was really bothered whether people thought he was pleasant or not. There was a degree to which he thinks the whole history of the Second World War and what followed it has been ludicrously sentimentalized and ???, and also that it’s been written from a Labour point of view. In other words, the view of the Atlee administration, the view of people who were opposition, and in quite minor opposition, up until the national government of 1939-40 essentially changed it ???. When they came in, the radicals in the Labour Party, people like the young Michael Foot, who wrote this book/chapbook/pamphlet called Guilty Men, the appeasers . . .  He thinks that Labour conquered the mental space in Britain long before they formed the absolute majority elected dictatorship, which is how he sees democracy, between 1945 and 1951. Labour, of course, through the Nationality Act of 1948 begins the process of mass immigration initially from the old empire or the Commonwealth, which results in the society we have now. So, Cowling believed that Labour is crucial in its replacement of the Liberal Party at the center Left opposition within the British state and its regime.

The interesting thing is that a lot of Cowling’s analysis of politics is Machiavellian in the sense that power and self-interest on behalf of wider groups are what politics is about. He doesn’t believe in any of the nicer and more moral constructions that people do it for others, that they do it for the esteem of others, or have for them, that they want to serve the public good, as John Major once said. He’d regard that as tawdry rubbish put forward by a miserable loser. So, his view of everything is sort of slightly ferocious and acidic.

But his analysis of this country’s decline, which he’s sort of internalized in microscopic version of ???’s thesis on the decline of British power, which views the same events in a more narrative-based, wider, less narrow, historical contingent. Very, very similar. Both upper middle class, but actually upper class men, both ultraconservative, ??? British culture, both outsiders in relation to the Britain that already been created by the middle of the last century never mind before.

Don’t be fooled by the fact, as many Leftists would, that there are lots of ??? people who still run much of society ??? is gone ??? Soviet Union or ??? but they’re gone, and it’s now a mass bourgeois, liberal society which has ??? has been ethically and culturally proletarianized, and that’s what you have, if you take away the cant and the soft words. So, that’s the thesis of that book.

The other thing about the book that shocked a lot of commentators at the time is that there is no moral judgment about Fascism. Hitler’s seen as a ruthless leader, growing up on the streets in post-war, post-1918 Germany, 6 million the German unemployed, men rpttiong in doorways, men without feet, men living in cardboard boxes. He offered them hope; he offered them vengeance; he offered them a little group to hate and blame it all on. He regarded it as axiomatic. ??? The Germans aren’t meant to have democracy anyway. These are views which are almost never even expressed now. There’s also the idea that in a sense that movement represented Prussianism from the street, a return of the Second Reich in a very virile, forceful way because it in some ways lacked the polish of the old elite.

In many ways, as a Briton, he was able to figure ??? of that era and of that particular movement, which in many ways ??? movement of the 20th century ??? even today. ??? 1945. Strange how it’s still alive at least in the mental state that swirls around. More people couldn’t tell you who de Gaulle was, couldn’t tell you who Roosevelt was. More people know who some supermodel is dating than who was Prime Minister in 1940. But they all know about that particular dictator. It’s quite strange how it’s gone outside history and become sort of part of the generalized psychopomp and mass culture. It’s always a sign for the historian if they don’t play those sort of demonic games and if they adopt a hard-headed, unsentimental attitude. Many liberals believe they adopt that attitude because they’re slightly ??? to it ???, that was not a completely uncharitable view.

Now, Cowling wrote this book in which he basically said we should not have forced Germany, and he later would be in ??? 1941 ??? we were defeated in France, we should have left to one side, ??? would have kept the empire ???  mercilessly against Communism and defeated it without another front. This was a revisionist, a soft revisionist, thesis, but a very ??? one for which he was demonized and subject to quite a degree of ???. If you remember, Maurice in a tower at the Cambridge College ??? enraged polytechnic ??? don’t really shatter your windows, do they?  ??? war at a distance, really.

That was certainly the most “demonic” and “near the edge” work Cowling ever did. It’s interesting to note that it was sold by all sorts of groups all over the world way beyond the portals of Chicago University Press or Cambridge University. The most extreme National Socialist organization in the United States called the National Alliance led by William Pierce actually sold Maurice Cowling’s The Impact of Hitler. He understood intellectually where it was coming from, even in a dissentient way. So, in a way, Cowling is prepared to be heretical. Cowling is prepared to do what soft Leftists do. They basically say, “No enemies on the Left.” When Clare Short once said when Communism had been destroyed, “Communism has gone down, but Marxism has not been beaten.” That, in many ways, is the difference between the Left and the Right. Moderate Leftists who do not like the politics of communism, its harshness, totalitarianism, viciousness, ???. But they are prepared to look at, to think about and to use the theoretical ideas of an enormous range of Marxists, from Gramsci to Adorno to ??? and so on. They’re not frightened of ideas. Whereas the conservative tradition, largely, you know, Scruton and Oakeshott are all right, but if you go further out from that it’s regarded as terrifying and you’re sort of wrapped up with the devil. You have to have a very ??? in order to do that. So, in a sense, he’s reacting against that type of hypocrisy, the idea that some ideas are respectable and others are not. Where ??? was concerned, they’re all ideas and many of them mask the urgency of power.

One particular point that certain liberals were not slow to make, they certainly were ??? life, , was that there’s a sort of nihilistic structuralism to this, that in a way one of the absolutes that he believed in . . .  I once said that he was a Tory ??? and he just laughed, which is sort of an endorsement, and there’s a complicated element going on there. Although he believed that socialized religion was inevitable, was necessary to hold civilization together, and its loss through secular erosion and relativism in this society was what led to what we’ve got, that was his view, how ??? in high Anglican Christianity is difficult to say, but of course there are Right-wing forms of personalized skepticism or atheism or just non-committal ??? private, which are different to the Left-wing and liberal versions of those forms.

The leader of French integral nationalism in the 20th century, Charles Maurras, leading a French fundamentalist neo-Catholicism really, he was in all proabability an atheist. Why? Because certain people of his temper who can’t believe themselves, they don’t believe that the structure of their civilization should be torn down just because they have a prior disbelief. So, they are constructivists. In other words, they don’t believe that all of history is reducible to my consciousness about it at a particular moment, because one’s part of an interconnected contingent that pre-exists one and that will post-date one and so although one’s own private views are preformed to ourselves and to our circumstances, they are not necessarily culturally determining factors. That’s an interesting attitude because it means that even people who are skeptical about Christian heritage, which is to say the vast majority of socially-minded and liberal-minded and ???-minded intellectuals and their feminist and other ??? all were, doesn’t necessarily mean ??? that you tear the whole thing down.

Enoch Powell, who had a little bit of a parallel career inside politics to Cowling, both ultra intellectual, both spare, both slightly Puritanical men, both ascetic, both very hard-minded in the nature of their personal discourse and thinking. ??? Powell could speak ten languages and wrote ten to twenty academic books and yet didn’t really have a proper academic career and just loved ??? people. His last book at the end about a ??? was just ??? all sorts of people he knew. Because they’re gadflies these sorts of people. They do like causing trouble, and that’s just part of who and what they are.

There’s an interesting parallelism at another level though. Powell was very influenced by Nietzsche when he was young. Very much so. And was ruthlessness and ferocity. in Cambridge and a certain appeal to emotion???, but he later softened and moved away from it. Cowling was never sort of formally influenced by Nietzsche, because part of him had a disdain for Continental Europeans in that very old English, sort of British, way even though mentally he was very aware of their achievements, but he would argue ??? Nietzsche ??? and that was part of his strength. So, he once said to me, “I don’t mind a spot of bigotry, you know? As long as it’s in a good cause.” There were always sort of John ??? that were always there in the background, because he regarded them as having nerve rather than just ??? sort of ??? definition of identity.

One of the things that’s very important about all these figures is that they’re great characters. One thing you’ll notice about English and British life now is how levelled down people are. The great monstrous characters of the past seem fewer and fewer, and many of the attitudes that they had–their crankiness, their difficulty, their indomitable character and so on–seems to have disappeared as well. Powell . . . It needs some particular mention how Cowling… You had these sorts of figures. ??? There’s just no way around it.

Now, on the positive side, not what you’re against and what you deconstruct, but what you build, Cowling went back to a Christian position. “Went back” may not be the correct… Cowling may not have really renounced it in the way Powell did earlier, so it was less of a mental moving back. But still his last three books which appeared in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first year of this decade (2001) were books about the Anglican Church and its ideas and its ideology as he perceived it, its theological praxis ??? church, which in many ways is a combination of different things ???, national compromise and the Protestant ??? element, contains rationalist ??? that’s establishmentarian and almost has no beliefs except the prism of power with ??? in the background, has an Anglo-Catholic wing, of course, some of whom have left for the Roman Church now, and it’s a medley from a hardline theological point of view. It’s a dog’s breakfast of an organization really for political reasons where the Catholics and the Protestants are at either end, but those that align against the liberals within the church dislike them more than each other. In some ways it’s a perfect organization to express Cowling’s view of life, where ideas are in the background. Some people are purely animated by them, but they are very rare and even most of them are lying to themselves and being sort of ???-like view of the way things happen.

But, in actual fact, his three books, which if I were to put all of them on the bar here would be at least this high, all three of them… And yet, it seems such a dry subject, the internal high, high politics of the semi-aristocratic leadership of the Anglican Church for 150 years. Most young undergraduates would be gagging just at that description, and yet it’s a fascinating collection of books, because the characters are being ???, the intellectual violence of their disputes, the belief that they influence the inner mindset of the inner ??? of the empire’s ??? and that’s what Cowling’s concerned about. He’s not concerned about what the masses believe. The masses believe what they are told to believe. He’s a pure elitist. Eighty percent of people have no ideas. They just conform to the political correctness of the hour. They conform to the liberal humanist PC rhetoric now ??? the media, because they are going to conform to whatever view. They would have conformed, as they did in the past, to a national, semi-racial, patriotic old style view of Britain, which is now regarded by many people as a slightly monstrous attitude, although probably in part it’s what people like Cowling and Powell really believed about this country in fact and was just a truthful statement.

Now, these books are deconstructivist texts, in my opinion. These books are his attempt to put forward his agenda. The dilemma he’s facing, of course, is almost complete liberal takeover of the mental space of the Anglican Church. But, of course, because he believes ideas dominate the mind and the mind is a subconscious of the brain and therefore what elite brains think is of importance way out of proportion to the small number of people they think and write for. Because he believes, rather like Shelley who said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, he believed that people who produced theories with which all the other middling minds speak and think control the agenda. They don’t control it in any personal way, it’s not their property, but they control the remit and the nature of the debate.

The total collapse of Anglican ???, the total collapse into secular humanism whereby almost any Christian element is completely removed were the important thing about religion to the Cowlings of this world is its mysticism, is its irrationalism, its appeal to that which is beyond and therefore can’t be argued about, its hieratic possibilities, that element that says, “Believe!” and is beyond the ???. So, you have the strange element, which is always the paradox of the intellectual ??? position, that a man who is as theoretical as anyone you could ever meet ends up justifying the organicism of belief and the leap into faith, as Kierkegaard would have it, beyond any possibility of complete rational gainsaying, denial, equivocation, or misstatement.

You come back irreducibly in all Right-wing thinking to, “What are you to base hierarchy upon?” What do you base the possibility of transcendence within hierarchy upon? Brute force? Law? Systems of faith? If a system of faith, what system of faith and why and how are people to believe in it at the level of the elite, an intermediate or middling group (very important in modern societies, of course; now dominant, culturally) and the majority? And how do you hold these people together? And what for? And Cowling would be Machiavellian enough to say, “And what lies do you need to tell them to hold them together?” Because he believed politics was partly about that.

He used to be get very pretentious of the idea that ???, but he would say, “Look, they are moving within a vortex of power where they have to face off against three or four different tendencies, some of which may result, certainly outside of this country ??? (he’s speaking ???), to physical violence.” And there’s no ??? of materials in that area. That’s not it at all. That’s the role of a philosopher or a philosopher-king to some extent, not a British cabinet minister in the 1930s.

I once asked him what his view of the extreme Right was, and he said, “What, you mean people like Mosley?” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, they are essentially movements that are cut off from what I consider the right to be. ??? And he said, “When you go outside Parliament, when you go outside the structures of the British establishment,” this is his thinking, you go into the working class, you go into the masses, and they never have any power. They can create a lot of force, but they never have come to power in our country. During the Revolution, the one of the political sort we had 400 years ago, the masses were in charge just for a small moment, and then a dictatorship came. Once the monarchy had been removed and once the dictator, wasn’t ???, but they realized he ??? a weakling ??? and they got the monarchy back very quickly.

Cowling approved that. These radical Parliamentarians and Puritans and ideologues of the day realized there was no strong man to hold it together, so they immediately opened up to the old order again and said, “Take it back. There will be no recriminations. There will be no show trials.” The man who stood for the execution of one king stood to salute another one coming in. That was the elixir of Englishness as Cowling regarded it. The ability to, even in the theoretical minds, people with very theoretical and intellectual minds, put that intellect on no account in ??? national ??? and to embrace the reasons which in a way are sometimes purely physiological and irrational, viewed in liberal, rational humanist terms where every decision that every person makes is based upon a rational calculation of utility, of outcome, the modern notion that is very consequent to liberal thinking now, philosophically and ethically or consequentialism, whereby all that ever matters is the consequences of a particular action. The total reversal of the prior religious view that what matters is intention. If you run a child over and you didn’t mean to, it’s manslaughter which is punished in most Western European countries in a quite minor way. Tell that to the mother of the child that’s been run over. Whereas, if it can be proven that intentionally the driver put his foot down because he’d been driving on a ??? alley just like that child and this sort of thing and there’s intention there then that’s completely different and is perceived as such. So, if you have intention ???? from the religious view everything is prior, and the more radical the religiosity, the more the meaning of life is determined before one even starts thinking about how one might agree or disagree with that.

The liberal view that you have a heuristic way of looking at things, you make them up as you go along, that everything’s relative in relation to everything else, that life is existential and not essential is the opposite of what we believe. So, in a strange way, you end up with very theoretical, very abstract ideas based upon empiricism, basically, on deep historical knowledge of texts and analysis of the ??? motivations of individual politicians and clerics, most of whom no one’s ever heard of.

Cowling died a couple years ago and got some major obituaries in The Times and The Telegram. A rare ???. He certainly, in my view, misunderstood that the libertarians who had largely taken over the Tory party in the post-war period, although he would have analyzed them quite correctly because their extremist liberals of a different sort. He didn’t quite realize that the ruthlessness and the ability to shapeshift and change positions which has seen Michael Portillo morph from an allegedly Right-wing Tory Defence Minister and patent figure of the Left ??? television studio. It’s a strange transformation to occur. Cowling would actually be amazed by the extraordinary cynicism in such a move for a man who professed hard-edged, no-nonsense, and a complete sort of spare, unshuffling attitude towards things. That’s an interesting ???.

The cynicism of what intellectuals call ordinary people can often take the breath away from intellectuals. That’s an interesting conceit. Just intellectuals can change their positions so quickly in a way that bedazzles people ???. I know I had to ??? salon when I was 18 and I realized that people who call themselves intellectuals had their own class system. They’d talk about intellectuals and ordinary people. Who are these ordinary people? I suddenly realized the word was divided for them into those that lived purely the life of the mind and the rest. All groups have their inclusions and their exclusions because you can’t have a discourse without it. All groups rely on ordering who’s in the group, who’s outside the group and so on.

So, I think he misinterpreted the changes in the Conservative Party, which in some ways was his great hope. His great hope was that the Conservative Party has been abused. The Conservative Party is ???, and therefore, in his way of looking at it, anyone can come to power in it. He ???. He’d say, “You’ve been a fool. You’ve been too honest. Honesty is never a good idea in politics ever.” This is his view. He said, “You should have completely hidden what your actual views are.” He said, “You’ve been mentally extreme as a politician. You’ve gone out to the brink consequently. You should have stayed inside and chiseled your way out.” This is his way of thinking.

But the problem with that view is that it leads to legions of Tory MPs and others that have their little groups like the Monday Club and so on on the Right-wing of the Tory party. Those views don’t even exist anymore. ??? party. They wanted it and then they realized ???, you know. ???. Don’t mind the ???. Don’t mind the public. ??? because he was just a bit ???? and ???.

In a strange sort of way, that sort of ???, the sort of politics that Cowling lived and breathed, but I think he misunderstood the importance of mass society. In late modernity, he overestimated the corridors of power and the influence of a tiny, little microscopic elite and the divisions between them. I think, possibly, before 1924, I think most of his books are written in a politics that precedes the modern world as we conceive it now. His way of looking at things was much more salient, but now I think increasingly democratic???. I consider this country as ruled by one party that has three wings and the little democrats in the middle then swivel and provide the ideas for the other two blocs, though they can’t ??? ???. And the blocs are class-based. Center-Right, the south of England and environs, the bourgeois class; center-Left the north of England, southern Wales, bourgeois petit (???) and so on. They move around each other. Ideologically, all of these parties pushed together believe in 80%???. They’re all secularists, they’re all humanists, they’re all egalitarian to a degree, they’re all in favor of the EU, they’re all in favor of multiculturalism, they’re all in favor of migration. You have multiculturalism because you have migration, not the other way around and so on. As you go out onto the margins of the Labour Party, the view that the American domination of the consensus as it is, that becomes more ???, that becomes more adversarial and most people just drop away then ???. There are other areas where that meme??? or model, because memes??? or models always break down in human affairs, but the point is ??? true ???. I don’t think he really grasped that.

So, like all political thinkers and political philosophers, there’s a sort of Wagnerian moment at the end. ??? Enoch Powell in ??? when he ??? Ireland ??? ??? because he ??? and an outsider and somebody who advocated fusion with the rest of Britain where he ??? Protestant power inside Ulster. All these divisions ??? crucial. Powell sat there, watching the votes, watching the ???? ???. He said that ???. Of course, that is true. That is ??? because all these people with the exception of the most radically totalitarian elements within fascistic ideas that ??? because you don’t believe ???, you know. ???. And all attempts to do that are ???, essentially, you know. ??? They use, ultimately, the most radical Left-wing mind ???. A slightly more pessimistic attitude towards human folly and the ??? of certain structures even if it’s Right-wing.

Cowling’s influence, I think, is interesting because despite the fact that very few people know about his academic life ???, despite the fact that these are difficult and cryptic ??? in life, he does point to one interesting thing and that’s the combination of metaphysical conservatism and Right-wing radicalism with pure theory, the rejection of ??? and anti-intellectuality, which are largely associated with conservatives to many people, particularly on the Left. Many people ??? joined Left-wing groups when they were young, because they thought the Right wasn’t interesting and wasn’t interested in ideas. ??? ????. Why do you think that ??? the Left dominated everything? Absolutely everything. Now the Left, in a hard Left form, is very small and very attenuated.

(Ambulance Siren)

. . . one of the most Left-wing institutions in Britain ??? in north London where all ??? all must have degrees even in ???, in hairstyling, in ??? peanut butter, you know. You fill out a form and get a PhD in nuclear physics back by a week. ??? 50% will have degrees soon. That’s what Brown wants. You know, that’s the way it’s going and, of course, if you look at it, the sort of academicism that Cowling represented was the complete reverse of that. He would have advocated for less universities. He said to me, “The colleges are training people to fix cars! Get rid of a few of these universities! If everyone can get a degree, it becomes meaningless.” Indeed, this is the new tendency, isn’t it? ??? ???? ??? degrees, because everyone’s got one, but he must not have one, you know? It’s the reverse of the thing. Now, Cowling… social critics would say, ????. So, there’s a degree to which that which everyone has doesn’t mean anything. Why ?? boxes in ??? all the time? And actually they’re an important resource for people, because no one owns them, no one talks about them, no one cares for them and they’re the first thing to be trashed. When wealth??? is socially based in that way, no one will look after it.

But I think Cowling is important, particularly for young people now who are interested in Right-wing ideas and interested in theoretical ideas. There’s ???? on the internet, recently respectable. And this idea that culture, civility and high intelligence go together with Right-wing attitudes, that’s very important.

The last thing I’ll say is that he believed in having a good time. He always believed in baiting the Left. He always believed in being a monster a bit, you know. People would say to him, “Don’t you feel we should apologize for slavery?” And these sorts of things and he would say, “Why!? In no way should we apologize.” ??? ???. This is what he was like. He’d say, “You want to be one of them?” And they’d sort of freeze. This is the kind of person he was. He was like the uncle at a family party that no one wants you to be introduced to. “Oh God, it’s him!” That was the sort of attitude that the world had towards him and I think that’s a good thing. I’ve known a few people in my life like him, but they’re very few and they’re people of great power. When they enter a room, everyone else knows they are there. When they say something everyone else listens even if they don’t like it at all. And when they leave the room, people say, “Did you hear what that chap said?” But they don’t forget the person, you see. He’s like a sacred monster.

Three people are out there in politics like him. One was Enoch Powell. One was Maurice Cowling. One was not very well known, a man called Bill Hopkins. He’s Welsh and he’s one of the Angry Young Men. He’s very interesting. What I’ll say is that the forms of these great, sacred monsters of the British intellectual Right… You won’t hear these lads on RadioTalk, you won’t hear these names in The Guardian, you won’t hear these names in The New Statesman. These individuals have been airbrushed out of history, but they’re still there and they do represent either a flame that can be lit for the future or they’re ??? ??? of what this society once was.

?????? The problem with populist discourse, though, is you have to deny that you’re a monster and you have to ??? things to such a level, but he even wrote for The Sun as ??? did, as Alan Clark did. Write for The Sun, write for The Times Literary Supplement. Why not? Nobody can write it any better ???. ???, of course, from The Mirror. Every sentence has to be comprehensible to a 14-year-old child. ??? ????. This is the general instruction, it’s on their screens. I was once taken around The Sun. I was walked in by Garry Bushell, who was well-known for certain attitudes and certain thoughts. ??? ???? ?????? ?????

The Sun was quite interesting. The ??? ???? ???? and half of them were working class White boys and ???? and in the background you had, you know, ??? or something. They had the famous front pages all around the office. ????????????????? Bushell took me around to look at these things, and it was quite interesting because Powell used to work for The Sun, Alan Clark used to work for The Sun, and The Sun has blue book, not red book like The Mirror where every sentence must be comprehensible to a 9-year-old and if you put script through to the staff that’s got ??? in it they send it back and say, “What are you doing!?” I must say, Maurice Cowling would have found that sort of atmosphere a bit difficult. But still, ????. He could be a ??? ???. You see, the brain’s up here, and most people live down here. They’re purely physical. So, what happens up here filters down there.

I’m very pleased to ??? a group of young, educated people, and the future is your generation. This society will either go with a bang or a whimper in the middle of this century, within 20 to 40 years. I will be 90 by then, and you’ll be sort of ???. A major tide is coming. If we were in 1909, not 2009, a mere century ago, no one could have predicted what is coming. The First World War was coming, the Depression was coming, the Second World War was coming. There was a collapse of traditional European society in this country that was coming. The social, cultural, sexual, psychological revolutions of the 1960s was coming. It’s all coming. And yet no one in 1909 would really know that. And I think here in 2009 changes, totally different changes, but radical changes are coming. Make sure your ideas influence them.

Thank you very much!

37:46 / 90 words

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Because of the warm response to Jonathan Bowden’s “Tangmere Speech,” “Tameside Speech,” “Newbury Speech,” and “Political Oratory,” we are presenting another of his British National Party “stump speeches,” where he begins by commenting on the news of the day and then builds from there. This speech was delivered in Blackburn, Lancashire (you know, where the holes are), on May 25, 2005.

46:07 / 82 words

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Because of the warm response to Jonathan Bowden’s “Tangmere Speech,” “Tameside Speech,” “Newbury Speech,” and others, we are presenting another of his British National Party “stump speeches,” where he begins by commenting on the news of the day and then builds from there. This speech was given in Blackpool, Lancashire, on June 21, 2005.

47:49 / 82 words

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To subscribe to our podcasts, click here.

Because of the warm response to Jonathan Bowden’s “Tangmere Speech,” “Tameside Speech,” “Newbury Speech,” and others, we are presenting another of his British National Party “stump speeches,” where he begins by commenting on the news of the day and then builds from there. This speech was given in Manchester on February 1, 2006.

6,216 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s May 25, 2005 British National Party stump speech in Blackburn, Lancashire. A few unintelligible words are marked ???. If you can make out what Bowden is saying, please post a comment below.  

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Well, I haven’t had an introduction like that before in any of the 40-odd party meetings up and down the country that I’ve spoken at before now, so thanks very much. I’d obviously like to thank Blackburn and the northwest region for having me up here this Thursday evening.

Now, we just had a general election and I think the first thing that came across to me on the night of the election and the day thereafter was how well the party did nationally. Obviously, there were a few poor votes. You know, on the margins and in regions where we’re not strong. But the advisory council said we should really stand in 110 seats plus. There was a bit of mission creep up to about 120 seats, but, broadly speaking, we got good solid votes particularly in areas where we’ve got support, where we’ve got canvassers on the ground and where we’ve got demography.

People know who we are and voted for us in an explicit way, because you have to face it: we weren’t going to get a single Member of Parliament elected, but people voted for us not because they wanted to vote against a party or because they wanted to protest or recycle their vote or cock a snook or stick two fingers up to another party; they wanted to vote directly for this party which was blacklisted and ignored for much of the election. A little bit of a response from the media 5 to 4 weeks in, but in the 3 weeks prior to polling hardly a dickie bird. There was a lot about the chairman’s court case in the run-up to the run-up of the election, but in the actual election period there was little concentration on us. Little on UKIP, to be fair, but they’re a single issue movement concentrated on Europe. Quite a degree of playing the Greens up. A little bit of attention to Kilroy-Silk and his Veritas party that bombed in the election like UKIP who virtually lost 80-90% of all of their deposits in the 500 seats that they stood in throughout the country. Whereas we got some very decent votes: 1,900, 2,000, 2,100, 3,500, 4,000, 5,500; 16.9%, 17% in Barking down in the overspill in London where our people have largely moved to in order to get away from what’s going on in and near London during the last 30-50 years and where, of course, we have councilors. One of the reasons for that vote in Barking and elsewhere is because there are councilors in Epping Forest, there are councilors in Loughton, there was a councilor in Thurrock. There is a councilor who got over 50%, an ex-taxi driver, in Broxbourne in Hertfordshire.

So, where there is support on the ground and where people know you can win and they see that it’s not a wasted vote, they vote for you because they know that you’re there and you can see even in certain of the fringe UKIP and Veritas folks, just occasionally, that people have looked down a list of candidates. They’ve seen New Labour, they’ve seen Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats, they’ve seen Howard’s Tories and they’ve looked for a Right populist party somewhere in the list and they haven’t found the BNP, so they vote UKIP or Veritas. But it proves that even nation-wide in relatively inhospitable areas there is a Right populist vote, a vote that is to the Right of the Tories, that crosses class, that’s based primarily at the moment on ex-Labour voters who feel completely betrayed by New Labour but can also draw in angry third, middle-class types, ex-Tories and so on because everybody knows that this country is societally and culturally, if not economically yet, in very grave decline and has been declining decade on decade and year on year and generation on generation since the late ‘40s and early 1950s.

Now, Blair’s in hospitable at the moment, apparently, with a slipped disc. What a pity, eh! Poor old chap! But he’s going to retire soon anyway and Brown is going to take over. Now, the difference between Brown and Blair is nothing, is just a tobacco leaf, a piece of paper that’s put between the two of them. It’s true that some of the old Labour types prefer Brown because he’s a bit more dour, he’s a bit more sort of comfortable from a Trade Union type background, but in actual fact there’s absolutely no difference between them and haven’t people realized that in every cabinet meeting that decided on the Iraq War, that decided on everything else, Brown was sat next to Blair at every vote and in relation to every discussion. There is absolutely no difference between them at all! And, if we notice that at the last election, the one before last, Labour got 44% of the vote and 1/3 to 40% of all people in this society didn’t even bother to vote anyway. This time 60% voted, 40% didn’t and Labour’s down to 35%. 35% of those who bothered to vote. They’ve got the lowest proportion of our people and of any people to vote for them to form a government and they’ve got a majority of 60-70, which governments in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s would have killed for a majority like that and they’ve got it again with 35% of the vote and grinding down.

Before Blair became Premier in ’97, Labour had 425,000 members nationally. It is now 235,000 and dipping. All of the parties, with the exception of the Liberal Democrats, who are growing because of Left hostility to the way Labour is in office and because of Muslim and ethnic votes, other than the Liberal Democrats, no party really in this society apart from ourselves have any energy.

I heard a debate halfway through the elections, it was about 2 weeks into the 3½ to 4 week campaign, although actually that campaign had been going on for six months. No wonder politics bores people to death! Except when it’s associated with this organization, primarily. Because it goes on far too long! And in some ways democracy is endless. We have too many tiers of government, and we have too many devolved assemblies, and we have too much plebiscitary democracy, and yet many of our people have actually no power to decide real issues like the composition of the population of Blackburn for example.

I was told on the way here that Blackburn is 20% Asian. Now, I didn’t realize that before I got here, but 20%. Did anyone in this room, did anyone who doesn’t share the politics of people in this room who is White and English or British, vote for Blackburn to have its ethnic composition changed to the degree that it has been since Labour passed under Attlee the Nationality Act in 1948? And the answer is: No, they did not! No one has asked for this. No one has asked for a great wedge of Liberal-Left reforms since the late 1960s on the family, on immigration, on law and order, on homosexuality, on membership in what is now called the European Union. No one’s asked for any of these. No one apart from small elites, Tory, Liberal and Labour at the top, in the Commons and elsewhere and in Europe, to a degree, since the early ’70s have ever voted for any of this.

And whenever any of these core matters come near democracy, the elite starts getting into a panic. This is what’s happening in relation to this European Constitution. It’s one of these few occasions where for essentially foolish reasons and because of the premises of Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party way back, actually, they decided to give us a vote on some of these core issues. Whether we have a constitution – boring, eh? – that federates us to a state in Europe that we never really asked to be a member of and they’re surprised that there’s a big British majority that says, “No! We don’t want to be part of this other state, because we’ve got a nation-state of our own!” And the political elite is running around saying, “It’s terrible, isn’t it? These ignorant plebs. We’re giving them a plebiscitary insight into our elite affairs. It’s disgraceful when these people know nothing about it.” As they perceive. And it will be the same on the currency, and it will be the same on hanging for murder, and it will be the same on the treatment that ought to be meted out to pedophiles, and it will be the same on family based issues, and it will be the same in relation to the mass ethnic demographic changes which have occurred in this society since 1948.

On all of these issues, you have a gulf between the population and the elite. Occasionally, there were people in the elite who were lightning conductors for sentiment from “below”: Alan Clark, Enoch Powell, and a few others, but essentially they are gone. Although each election every four years the Tories try – try, try, try – to reconnect with an element of their electoral base to get Blair and them out on the night and with a part of the general population. Don’t forget: they were in government between ’79 and ’97. They were in government between ’70 and ’74. They were in government between ’51 and ’64. They were in government for most of the period between 1880 and now, actually, although New Labour have encompassed an elite of their own which looks as though it’s going to go on and on and on, because increasingly the Tories are nowhere, and lots of people who used to join them because they wanted power. They didn’t give a damn what the party allegedly stood for. They wanted power in terms of middle-class economic welfare. That’s what you join the Tories for, and the Tories don’t offer people power anymore, which is why they’re stumbling from election to election. They’ve put on 30 seats and their own tame media, The Express and The Mail and so forth, said it was a great triumph because they weren’t devastated. A great triumph! To keep your vote from 2001 going back to ’97, to get your core vote out, to not put on one more vote and you remain flatlined where you were.

The reason that the Tories try to reconnect with their electoral base every election is because they know that there are many issues where the liberal elite, of which they are actually a part and a subservient member, are completely out of kilter and completely out of step with the people in general circumstances in this society, and they know it, and they also slightly fear it. Because the one thing that prevents all of the votes for the BNP (upwards of 200,000 in the last general election, upwards of 800,000+ at the European elections) from translating into seats in a national parliament is the absence of a proportionate system.

Many liberals, gnawing at the edges of things, desiring to almost sort of coil the rope from which they themselves could be done in at a later date, are campaigning rigorously for PR. Every day, or every other day, The Independent, a tiny little elite liberal paper that sells less than 100,000 copies a day actually, is campaigning for proportionate voting, which of course would allow and let in candidates from this party to most tiers of government within the United Kingdom, particularly within England and especially in Yorkshire. One of the reasons, I understand, The Yorkshire Post is so anti-this party is because there’s a big bedrock of vote there that if you get people in at local district level and can even begin to get up to +10% in many Westminster constituencies.

Halfway through the election campaign, Radio 4 had a debate amongst various political scientists, journalists, commentators, and others, and one of them said, “Why’s the turnout so low? Why do people hate politicians so much? Why’s there so much indifference and why are people bored rigid with this election?” And a few of them shuffled uneasily in their seats, you know. “This bloke’s had a few,” you know. They said, “Look, we’ve got the system that we have. People feel betrayed by Blair’s government.” And people said, “Oh yes, but there’s always the danger that they could vote for these Right-wing populist and anti-immigration parties, you know?” They didn’t specify which party: UKIP, Veritas, but in a sense they’re really talking about this political organization. “They could vote for them, you know!” And one of them pipes up instantly, “Well, thank God we haven’t got PR!” Because the Westminster Village election system of first past the post corrals everything into the Tory and Labour areas.

It always used to be the case that a wing of the Labour Party was actually socialist in belief, and a wing of the Tory party did have certain patriotic views, just, but both of those phalanxes have gone. They’re completely gone, and the reason why a 1/3 to 40% of our people don’t even vote, and the reason why people sort of feel trapped into voting for the big blocs . . .

And many people vote Liberal just to protest! My father votes Liberal. He said, “I don’t like the other two. You’re an extremist,” he tells me, “and I don’t like the other two.” And I say, “Well, dad, why do you vote at all then?” He said, “Well . . .” I said, “Look, the Liberals want to decriminalize A, B, and C category drugs.” He said, “I don’t want to hear that!” And I said, “They want sex education for 5-year-olds and above in primary school.” He said, “I don’t want to hear that!” I said, “They want to adopt the Euro and get rid of Pound Sterling!” He said, “Do they, really?” I said, “Well, you’re voting for them!” You know, and he said, “You’re just a troublemaker!” And I said, “Why didn’t you vote Tory like you always used to?” He said, “Oh no, I’m not voting for Howard. I don’t like him.” And I said, “Oh, OK. What about Brown?” Because if you vote Blair you’ll get Brown. He said, “No, I couldn’t tolerate Communism.” So, I said, “Kennedy’s Liberals are slightly to the Left of New Labour, actually.” He said, “It’s all so complicated. I just can’t stand it.” I said, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have a vote anyway.” Dangerous thought, you know. And he said, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t! We fought in the war for a vote!” And I said, “Yes, you did, Dad, and now you’re going to vote Liberal Democrat . . . But you don’t want homosexual marriage? You don’t want a federal Europe?” Kennedy was the only leader of a representative party in Britain who said mass immigration is a good thing. You never hear New Labour leaders, although they endorse it completely, say so too blatantly and the Tories say, “Come on in! Everyone can come in and work for the minimum wage as labor and capital moves around the world in a global system, but we don’t like it.”

And there are these appalling asylum seekers. Have you seen the cover of The Mail today? But the Liberals say it’s marvelous; it’s wonderful; it’s humane; it’s what we voted for when we set the UN up; it’s everything we ever wanted. “So, you vote for them, Dad. You feel free to do so.” But many people vote Liberal because they can’t stand the other two blocs.

My experience of this society is that there are fewer hardcore liberals than there are hardcore patriotic people. You find people in your own lives people who really think political correctness is a good thing. Yes! Who really think race-awareness courses and sexual identity courses for civil servants and related bureaucrats are good things. Who really think that policemen in the Metropolitan Police should be sent on these sorts of things, and we are paying for all of these things. You never find them! You never find them outside the mass media, small parts of the arts, small parts of the entertainment industry and essentially bits of the academy. Tiny, small elites in and around London, pretty much. But in the mass of the population you never find them. You never find people who say, “Mass immigration! Come on in! What a marvelous boon it’s been to us all!”

And there’s been a degree to which every popular instinct of our people has been channeled into areas such as football and drinking and having a good time and Friday and Saturday night as the society, as its level, as its culture, as its propensity for crime gets worse and worse and worse. Blair will say he’s going to stamp down on yobbery. Although yob is a politically incorrect term, actually. I don’t know if anyone’s told him. There’s a degree to which he’s going to do something about disorder in the streets. Disorder in the streets? We’ve sent a third of our army to Iraq. This week we’ve sent 500 more troops to Iraq to train the new client regime to hold their own people down at America’s bequest. We’ve spent I think it’s about seven and a quarter billion pounds already on our involvement in the Iraq War. The Blair regime doesn’t control the streets in south London! He doesn’t control the streets in south London, but we’ve sent a third of our army and a quarter of our tanks to Basra and southern Shia Iraq to control that situation when a million of our people of indeterminate political views, many of them Leftist and pacifist admittedly, marched against that war. And Tony said he was listening. “I hear you,” he said and then went straight in with Bush.

Now he’s in again, and he says from his bed, you know, as he lies there prone, holding his back, he says, “I’m listening! I’m listening!” This is his new thing. He’s listening to his MPs; he’s listening to his shadow cabinet; he’s listening to all of it. Well, why doesn’t he listen to us and say that our people never voted for a multiracial or a multicultural society; they didn’t vote for most liberal, allegedly progressive and reformist measures which have come in the last 40 years; they didn’t vote for the criminality which increasingly in the cities and elsewhere resembles the United States.

77,000 in prison now and yet prison, quite clearly, doesn’t work, does it? It doesn’t work! We’re going to have three categories for murder now, like in America up to a degree. A, B, first and second degree homicide and then a manslaughter residual category. There used to be a time, you know, in this country when a murder, particularly a sexual murder or murder of a child, for example, was absolutely shocking. Absolutely shocking! It would convulse the media for weeks, if not for months. There’s a murder a week in Bristol. There’s a murder a day in London. There’s a murder every other day in Glasgow. It’s become routine. It’s become routine throughout this society because drugs are everywhere, criminal gangs are everywhere. Because a psychopathic pedophile went mad in Scotland about 10 years ago in Dunblane they banned handguns all over the country. We can’t even have our Olympic and Commonwealth teams train with handguns. They have to go to the Channel Islands; they have to go to the Republic of Ireland. There are a million illegal guns in the possession of criminal gangs of multiple ethnicities since that came in alone, and many of those weapons have come in from Serbia and the ex-Balkans; they’ve come in from Northern Ireland as the paramilitary groups have got rid of their old spent gear; and they’re also replicas and all sorts of other things that have been stolen and adapted and used in various ways.

The reason that we have so much trouble and so much criminality and so many youth problems on the streets . . . And everyone sees it; people privatize themselves. If they’ve got money, they live behind walls, they live behind grills, they have private estates, they have things where you have to press multiple buttons to get into the corridor that leads to another one that leads to their flat somewhere upstairs. But they can all see it. Everyone from the roughest estate to the Albany in the center of London. They can all see it as the tide either wraps around their door or comes nearer to them and the reason that we have so much of it is because there is no discipline and no order in the society and the police are now firemen. If someone’s bleeding in the street and there’s glass around their heads, they’ll come and they’ll come when it’s over, because they don’t want any trouble. They come to pick up the pieces when it’s over. When it’s a really serious crime they’ll put a regional or national crime squad on it, and they’ll deal with it.

Right close to where my family lives, actually, there was quite a notorious case recently where two girls were abducted and gang-raped and tortured and killed (or one of them was killed) and dumped in a park in the Thames Valley to the west of London. They put the regional and national crime squad, our sort of sub-FBI, our FBI in the making, on this, and they got this Islamic gang of multi-ethnicity, some of them are Albanians, who are from south London. They got them within a week. But this was part of what is believed to be gang-related violence, because one of the girls was living in a hostel that had been firebombed by this group the week before, so obviously something is going on.

This proliferation of criminality around drugs, particularly around crack cocaine, is happening in towns and in cities and in provincial centers, including areas of the country where habitually it’s not really necessarily thought that that sort of thing goes on, but it is going on because it’s spreading out of London; it’s spreading down from Birmingham; it’s spreading out of cities in the northwest. It’s been here for a long time anyway in the center of Manchester and in other zones, and it’s because our state has lost its grip, and has lost its grip because it’s intoxicated with ideas that mean you can’t keep certain tendencies in society down. Because you have to be tough-minded about the nature of human nature.

A Labour MP, I forget his name now, but the one who’s influenced by certain Anglican and socially Christian ideas, said that for the first two terms of Labour’s government from ’97 to just about now Labour had a naïve view of human nature. That human beings are naturally good, called the Pelagian belief in philosophy. That human beings are naturally good and that all you need is to change a few structures and spend a bit of money and consult the community. Well, the truth is that human nature is not like this, and it has never been like this, and you have to have structures of order and discipline for people. You have to give people a space. Our people always demand the right to say what they think and, within limits, be who they are and that’s being restricted on all sorts of other fronts now coming from a different direction.

But there is a low level of chaos now in this society and we have a situation where the bulk of the citizenry are between the state and armed gangs. The only people who are armed in this society are semi-organized crime and the state. Everyone else is in the middle waiting, hoping problems won’t afflict them and theirs, because “We’ll be alright.” There are many people in my father’s generation, without personalizing it through him, and people slightly younger who say, “I’ll be dead in 20-30 years.” I hear this all the time from people! “I won’t be here to see it!”

I met a chap who’s a moderate Republican recently from Ireland. A non-violent one, a nationalist one. And he said, “In 50 years, Ireland” this is the Republic of Ireland, “will have a non-White majority.” In 50 years! It’s probably 60 or 70 actually, but, you know, who’s counting? The truth is if they have the immigration that south London’s had, in 60 years they’ll be a minority in their own country. All this IRA violence against us, all this fighting for their own independence, it won’t matter a damn! They’ll be a minority in their own country! What was it all for!? What was it all for?

But factoring it out from them to look at ourselves, more importantly, what has it been for if we become a minority in our own cities, in our own inner cities, in our own country and what will it do to our culture, which increasingly (I’m the sort of cultural officer of this party) vast numbers of our people know nothing about. Nothing about! Posh and Becks is not English culture or it’s not what it’s about. It’s just a sort of irrelevance fed by a mass media.

Many of our people go through school and they are taught to partly despise what they are and where they have come from. Anything which is cultured is posh, is elitist, is not for us, is against us. Median capitalist and low level trash is all what we want and we’ll get or are fit for. Our people do no national service; our people know nothing about the empire; many of our people know nothing of our great musicians and artists and writers or even prior political leaders. A quarter of all schoolchildren doing government in school from 14 to 16 (government, government!) can’t name the party in power: New Labour. We face everywhere a degree of blind ignorance in who and what we are, because if you want to basically break a population down you remove the mental tier first because then people are adrift and are aimless and are wandering about. That’s why politics bores them. That’s why Blair and Howard and Hague and Duncan Smith and Kennedy and Steel and Ashdown and Kinnock and the other Smith, who died hiking on a Scottish mountain, then Blair took over and Brown after him; that’s why they bore our people rigid.

There’s almost a manic depressive element to many of our people. I know loads of Labour voters and they hate Labour! And they voted them back! I met a chap before the election who said, “I can’t stand Blair. I absolutely loath the bloke’s guts, but I’ll vote him back.” And I said, “Well, why? Why do it?” He said, “Well, there’s nothing else. The Liberals are nothing. The Tories? Couldn’t vote for them. And you either don’t vote, or vote Labour.” It’s because, in a sense, people think that there is no other option that this party will continue to grow from the outside in.

The problem it faces is two-fold. The first problem is, “You’re alright, but you can’t win.” Which is what people say. And the second is demonization, that people are sort of frightened. I have people stand up in meetings and say to me, “Will they,” whoever “they” are, I suppose in a general sense the establishment, “will they know if I vote for the British National Party?” I say, firstly, “Who cares?” and secondly, “Tens and tens of thousands of people voting on plebiscites for parties at elections: the system’s not bothered about that!” It’s only when there’s enough people massed together that a representation ensues and then they’ll get worried. And they are worried. Even by that vote in Barking, Labour has had a special internal commission since the election about how they “roll that back,” as they would call it in inverted commas, within that borough. The MP says she going to relocate all of their offices from Westminster. She means these swanky offices that cost just under a billion pounds and are on the other side of St. Stephen’s Gate opposite Parliament Square. She’s going to relocate all of that back to Barking, because she says she’s going to plug into the white working class again. That’s what she said. She’s going to plug into the white working class again because “people feel let down,” she said. Well, people feel “let down” because we’re subject to endless changes in our borough and people who are old feel nervous about it.

The BBC did a Vox Pop. They went out into the streets of Barking and people said, “No, I never voted for them.” Quite clearly lying. They got some Irish chap who said, “Oh yes, I voted National Front.” But you know what he meant, you know. They had another woman say, “I’m not against anyone, and I haven’t said anything, but I voted for them.” It’s almost as if, “Put the chains on and lead me away,” you know, because the BBC were there. And the only reason that vote happened is because activists for about four months before the election went door to door. Tens of thousands of doors that were multiple occupancy and so on. They went door to door and they demystified the party and they de-demonized it at the level of the street and because that happened you then got the response that, “Oh, you’re not really like that then!” Because they expect no hair, sort of your knuckles on the pavement, you know. This is what they expect! This is what they expect and if they don’t get it the scales sort of drop and they say, “Oh, alright. I’ll vote for them then.” Because it’s the equivalent of voting for the flags behind the speakers here on this table tonight. That’s all. Of course, when that happens you will see the reversal. When all the people who put their St. George’s Cross flags out when England plays, when the people who supported the rugby team in the World Cup down in Australasia, you know, without really knowing the rules of that game, just because it was England and just because the team was almost all White subliminally, when people feel that they can vote for the BNP and it’s as normal as that, as normative as that, as given as that, when they feel that is normalcy for them, then you will almost have to restrain some of our own people in their own ardor, but that’s the other way around from the situation that we now face.

Because we face a population that’s cowered, that’s slightly afraid, that’s traumatized by the attention of mass media, that when they’re not with people they know look behind them slightly before they make a dangerous or illiberal or politically incorrect remark . . . It’s remarkable, you know. People who know nothing about politics, people who couldn’t name you half of New Labour’s cabinet, as if that’s of any importance, they’ll know what political correctness and incorrectness is. When they make a remark of some sort which they think’s a bit iffy, you know, at work or with somebody they think ought not know where they come from politically, even just a moment, they’ll look behind them. Even if they don’t look behind them physically, they’re doing it mentally and morally and emotionally, and this is from a country that once ruled a quarter of the world. Our people are frightened, except in certain gatherings and pubs at night and with their own family, to say what they think about how their cities and towns have changed since ’48, about how there are at least +6 million non-Whites in the country, at least 10% now. Whatever the statistics, whatever the last census said and didn’t say, that’s the fact. Just look around you.

We have a situation now where Blair sees no problem. Blair sees no problem in what has happened. The Oldham riots were all down to this party apparently and its satanic machinations. The fact that groups transplanted from different parts of the world will have different agendas, form different forms of culture, look askance at each other in certain situations, and will come into conflict in relation to scarcity even if that conflict is just democratic . . . That will happen, and has happened, and is happening.

All American cities are racially zoned. People know where they can go, and they know where they don’t go. All American police departments, basically, have different racial criteria for how they deal with and police different sections of their own urban and semi-urban spaces. We are going to follow that. It’s already begun in London. There are schools in Luton which are 90% Asian and 90% Muslim, and they teach their own way of looking at life, which is totally legitimate biologically and culturally for them. But it’s not legitimate for us, and we never wanted it in our country, and we never asked for it. Even when we ruled them we never imposed similar dispensations upon them, even under the Raj up to its disestablishment in and around ’48 when independent countries emerged on the Indian subcontinent. Because a people are what they are racially, and everything begins on from that.

Now, you meet liberals all the time that say that the greatness of culture, the greatness of science, the greatness of law, and of art and of everything high has nothing to do with race at all. “Nasty people. Horrible idea to say that.” But in actual fact, you will lose what you have and what you have been and what you are and what your children will be, if that connection is broken down. But our people are deeply worried about that. They are deeply worried about the politics of race.

If ever a BNP spokesmen appears, usually with some demonic lead-up, in the mass media, they will say, “Are you a racist?” “Nick Griffin, are you a racist?” Whoever it is, Doc Edwards, whoever is on the media at that time. The truth of the matter is, of course, that race is the basis of meaningful cultural and national politics. The term “racism” was coined by Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Communist leader, in 1927. That’s where it comes from. But it’s been used now to keep you out of the debate before you’ve even opened your mouth. The truth of the position is that all groups are in favor, ultimately, of the power of their own kind and of their own group and their manifold manifestations in culture, in art, in science, in law, in statecraft, in military power, in forms of the state, in just the building of a place to live like Blackburn here or any place else. Each group manifests itself in order to live and in order to survive and in order to have a natural habitat and a country and a land and a language and various forms of spirituality for itself, which is why when people around you and in your families and in the communities in which you live tell you that they are bored to the back teeth with politics and that they’re all the same you can tell them there’s one party in the country, and almost everybody, no matter how stupid, bluntly, knows the name of this party. They know the name of this party.

Many of them couldn’t even name your MP and know that he used to march against the Vietnam War and has now voted for the War in Iraq, which as Foreign Secretary he superintends in Blair’s regime, if he were a student he’d have to throw eggs at himself, as he once remarked . . . People who couldn’t even name him in this town. Those lads shouting outside that window, they probably couldn’t even name him and his departmental and ministerial responsibilities are. But they know what this party is!

And why do they? Because it’s the opposition to Straw, and he’s immaterial to what he represents in Blackburn and elsewhere. It’s the opposition to liberalism, to drift, to mass criminality, to homosexuality as a fake marital union, to mass immigration and the loss of our cities, to the denigration of our past, to merging our state into a nation-state in Europe that we don’t wish to be part of, although we wish no ill to White people living in Europe, but we wish to govern ourselves. But even the lads outside, for whom politics is sort of a football chant, know that this is the party that ultimately stands to them as the opposition to that which exists and governs us now and is gradually, painfully, slowly coming in from the margins of the society towards the center.

Because 50 years from now this party will be talked about as one of the movements which came out from the population to confront the decline and defeat which has gone on for 50 years and which will help, by itself or with others from amongst our people, to reverse its damaging effects.

I thank you very much for your indulgence and ask you to put your hands together for all our speakers tonight!

From Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, Tours or Paris 1503-1508

5,815 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s February 12, 2007 British National Party stump speech in Newbury. A few unintelligible words are marked ???. If you can make out what Bowden is saying, please post a comment below.  

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Well, thanks very much! Maybe after that introduction I should just sit down again and leave it at that. Could I ask people to turn their mobile phones off, please? I’m turning mine off now.

What I usually do is I pick out a few things that are in the news at the present time, and I highlight them, and I make a speech as I go along, because I never know what I’m going to say before I stand up, so it keeps the thing fresh and slightly near the edge, you see?

Now, there are various things that have been going on at the present time just over the last weekend. I’ll just pick two out which appear to be disconnected. One is Cameron’s revelations about his own early life, which is interesting actually because let’s look back a couple of decades. Would a leader like Eden or Macmillan or Douglas-Home have appeared, even metaphorically, in the media with a spliff out of the corner of their mouth? Well, the answer is no! Because the Tory party and other British institutions were a bit different in the 1950s and thereafter than today, and although people say what Cameron did when he was at school at Eton, a rather select sort of school, doesn’t matter and is of no importance, and we shouldn’t hold it against him, well, this is all very problematical. This is a man who uses his private life for electoral advantage. He invites the media in to talk to the wife, talk to the children, you could see how he washes up with dolphin-friendly washing up liquid on YouTube; he wants to be liked; he says he’s a nice man; but of course he’s got a private life when something negative turns up.

Another thing that’s interesting about drug usage is that in order to use these sorts of substances you’ve got to be pretty wet and pretty weak and pretty self-minded, and there’s a degree to which you can see it in Cameron’s demeanor. There is a limpness and a fluidity and an inability to stick to any one thing and an absence of decisiveness.

At the last election, he wrote the Tories’ manifesto with a few other people at Central Office, but he composed that manifesto, and that manifesto led on certain populist things, particularly immigration. If you remember, all over the country there were very big billboards paid for by some of the Tories’ relatively unknown financial backers saying, “Immigration: We Know What You’re Thinking.” Well, do they know what ordinary English and British people are thinking about this? They do deep-focus polling. They have various little groups that sit round in coffee mornings and discuss these things. And what are they discussing? They are discussing the fact that the country is now 14% non-White. 14%, that means it’s 86% indigenous and 14% not. Much of this occurred under Tory administrations, particularly Heath’s between ’70 and ’74 when large numbers of Asians were let in from Africa and elsewhere. Thatcher also let in a lot of primary immigration, particularly in and around Hong Kong when she said in ’79 that she had no intention of doing so.

Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, Avignon, before 1390

Well, why does this matter? It matters because when you go beyond a small town like this, when you go into London where I was earlier today, we are becoming a minority in large areas of these cities. In extreme West London, in Brent, we’re a statistical minority already. In the east of the city, in somewhere in Newham, we’re in a minority quite decisively. In parts of south London, we’re in a minority. In inner Birmingham, we’re a minority. In the whole city of Leicester, we’re in statistically the minority when you add up all the other groups.

The BBC did a program about Leicester when we became statistically a minority and they said, “Does it matter? Is Leicester any less English and any less British?” Well, it is! Because once a group gives up its finite and demographic character and becomes a minority in its own urban spaces the writing is on the wall for it. We can hide behind political correctness; we can say, “Don’t come for us”; we can say, “Don’t say anything that’s anti-White or negative or non-Caucasian or un-British or un-English.” We’ll play these minority games when we become one.

But when you’ve been a majority group in a society when it’s been yours forever, when you lose that, you’ll suddenly feel a very cold and bracing wind on the back of your neck. It’s not much fun being in a minority, particularly when you were once in a majority position, and these things are going to happen in about 60 years, maybe 100, maybe 110, maybe 45 to 50. There are many people who are alive now who said, “Well, I’ll be dead then. I’m not bothered.” And there are many of our people who are leaving. Three million have left in the last couple of years, and many of them are not coming back. They’ve gone to Canada; they’ve gone to the US, and they’ve gone to Spain. Even the Spanish don’t like the sort of Anglophone influx that’s occurring, because, after all, it’s their country.

But the truth of the matter is that you can’t really escape from what’s happening, and what I’d like to talk to you today about is some of the reason for why it’s been happening.

In the mass media, anyone from Enoch Powell on who says that this is a bad idea is demonized and is regarded as a reactionary or a bigot or as unprogressive or against the grain of the future, when in actual fact these are patriotic and national positions without prejudice which have been entertained by people in these islands for centuries. But our present political establishment has lost its nerve and has lost its will, and its become increasingly beholden to international forces.

Large numbers of immigrants are here of all colors and kinds, particularly from the Third World, to do residual and low-grade capitalist jobs in a service sector economy fueled by debt. Our citizens owe over a trillion pounds of debt. That’s a billion billion pounds worth of debt. That’s about eight-and-a-half to ten thousand pounds personally for every man, every woman, every adolescent, every child and every child that’s not aborted in the womb, and we carry this debt, and we keep on spending in order to keep our economy going because we service the services by which we’re employed and through which we live all the time.

You may have noticed that in the last 30 years we have ceased to make anything. We have ceased to make cars; we’ve ceased to make coal; we’ve ceased to build anything. Our entire economy consists of going to the cinema and having nice meals in restaurants and buying new cars and replacing everything we’ve got every three years and taking out more credit and paying more people to provide more bureaucratic input to taking out more credit, and we suck in labor just as we suck in capital or money from all over the world to keep this rather over-heated economy, which is largely UK-wide, based in the southeast of England. There are immense economic dislocations.

Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, Avignon, before 1390

As part of speaking on behalf of this party internally, I have gone all around the country. I’ve been into Wales; I’ve been up to the northwest of England, down into the West Country, into Birmingham. I was in Handsworth recently in the middle of Birmingham. Handsworth is 99.7% non-White. There are no Whites left in Handsworth. They’ve left. They’ve vacated these inner Birmingham areas! Christmas isn’t celebrated in Handsworth; it’s called Winterville, and all of the ceremonies for the Hindu religion, for the Sikh religion, for the Muslim religion, even the African New Year is celebrated, but Christmas is not. That’s because we’ve vacated the area. We’ve left it.

And there are people in the Midlands, people who’ve moved to one side of these areas, both inside the Birmingham conurbation and beyond it, who call these areas the occupied territories. That’s what they call them. No politician in the Midlands or on Birmingham City Council, a very powerful institution that spends a lot of tax payers’ money and not just local money either, would ever make a remark like that. It would cost them their career. But the fact is it’s the truth! And for the last 30 to 40 years large numbers of our people have been asleep and have not wanted to know and have felt that they can move. They can move from the inner part of a town to a suburb, they can move from the inner part of a suburb to the exterior end of a suburb. They can move from a suburb into a village or small sort of urban village or tiny little hamlet place. They can move from that to a smaller row of cottages somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

But in the end, parts of our people get trapped in the spokes of that sort of particular comb. They can’t move any further. They can’t get a mortgage which is 3 to 5 times their salary or, with a couple, five times their adjoined salaries and so on. There comes a moment when you can’t move anymore to avoid the demographic and racial changes which have gone on.

Millions of people have left London, where I was earlier today, to get away from what’s happening. The Evening Standard, the local rag in that city, worries and wrings its hands about why all these Londoners are leaving our capital city, not just England’s capital city, but Britain’s capital city, once an imperial capital. “Why are they leaving?” They’re leaving because they no longer feel at home there! Why do they no longer feel at home there? Because in many areas of the city they are in a minority. They feel like a stranger in their own urban space. Why is that? Because large numbers of people from Africa, from Asia, from Eurasia, from the Pacific Rim, from North and South America, from the Caribbean, from the Indian subcontinent, from the Middle East and elsewhere are living there. Why are they here? Because they are servicing the service sector economy that we’ve got. Why is that? Because the entire economy relies on over-heated services and immigrants keep wages down at the bottom of the economy, which is why they’re here.

Now, liberal-minded people say that, “He may be factually right, but he’s emotionally and ideologically wrong, because this isn’t a problem, and it can always be dealt with, and our politicians mean well, and we must be humane and there are no real problems except a few extremists who exaggerate things, and extremism takes various forms.”

I began this little talk by talking about the Tory leader, David Cameron. A week ago or two weeks ago, Cameron compared this party and the people who support it, attend its meetings and possibly vote for it as the moral equivalent of Islamic terrorism. He said, “These people are the White equivalent, the British equivalent” — “Without violence”; he did concede that — “of vanguard Muslims who want to blow up busses and blow up tube stations and blow up underground rail networks” as they did a couple of years ago in London.

Now, why are they doing that? They’re doing that because they are the tiny vanguard tip of an Islamist pyramid that exists in all Muslim communities in the West and throughout the world. They are at war with this civilization. We hear much in the media about the moderate Muslims who want nothing to do with this alleged extremism. Now, there are moderate Muslims, and there are Muslims who don’t really believe in their religion but go along with it in public, and there are all sorts of gradations in all sorts of groups. But the Islamic civilization is clashing very severely with ours, because there is a fundamental disagreement about values. They don’t agree with the nature of this society even though there are millions of them now living here, between 1.5 and 3 million depending on whose statistics you believe.

Immigration is itself a moveable feast. Legally: 5 million, 6 million. Illegally: 750,000 through 1.4 million. 17 million people pass through the country and go away year on year. Our borders are porous. 200 million people enter our air space every year and go out again. Increasingly, we have no control over our borders at all.

But one returns to the question of Islam. I have a lot of respect for Muslims, actually, because they agree with spiritual values that they posit as absolute. They control one whole crescent of the Earth. If you look up any of their flags, there’s a crescent on it and this signifies where they are on the globe from Morocco at one end to Indonesia at the other end.

Their indictment of us is that we’re materialist and that we’re lazy and that we don’t care about ultimate values. There’s an element of truth to it, because we’ve gotten very soft in the West. We’ve grown very lax everywhere. We’re weak on crime; we don’t control our own borders; we don’t seem to have solidarity too much among ourselves; patriotism is dimming; our future Prime Minister, allegedly, admits he sort of used drugs when he was a kid and so what;, homosexual civil marriage has just been legalized; we have mass abortion. Do large numbers of our people really agree with these things? Because they have voted for parties that have put these things into place. They have voted for the Liberal Party. They have voted for the Labour Party, new and old. They have voted for the Conservative Party. And although there are people of good will and patriotic intent in all of these groups, the truth of the matter is that every generation that’s passed this society becomes more broken down, more fluid, more spiritually empty, more filled up with foreigners, more decadent and moves further and further away from the wishes and desires of ordinary English and British people whilst there’s a quacking propaganda from the box in the corner, the television, and elsewhere that everything’s getting better and better and better.

One issue that the British people have never been consulted about is membership in the European Union. Increasingly, our politicians at Westminster and devolved politicians in Cardiff and Edinburgh in relation to Wales and Scotland don’t control the future destiny of our society. The better part of 60% of all our laws are decided in Brussels, and you only have to focus on one particular media issue and you see the whole vista revealed before you.

Look what’s going on with Bernard Matthews and his contaminated turkeys. We’ve been told variously, “Oh, the turkeys aren’t bad, really.” We’ve been told various things about what’s going on there for the last week or so. But the real pointed issue that cuts through all the flab and the lies and the propaganda is that our own government couldn’t apply restrictions on the movement of tainted meat, because it’s contrary to EU regulation, and because there would be counter-sanctions against us by European countries. So, even in relation to disease that portends to our own foodstuffs we do not any longer have the real sovereign power to impose our will on an area in the eastern part of our own country. That is the truth and that is something that the media forebears from telling us all as Bernard Matthews doesn’t appear before the cameras as he used to do 25 years ago saying, “It’s all beautiful.” And it’s not at the moment, in every respect.

Because the interesting thing, I think, about the media is that if you go through the media, the national media, the regional media, CNN, the satellite media and you stop, freeze the frame, freeze the page on any issue, all of the major issues that confront us are actually interconnected. Every paper and every journal and internet equivalent that’s worth anything, you look at it. The first page is crime: mugging, rape, murder, gun crime, gangsterism, drug usage, drug cartels. Then there’s ideological crime: terrorism, bombing, Islamic extremism, attacks on us from within and without. Then we have EU-related matters, which are basically because we can’t decide our own laws in our own place through our own political elite because the power has slipped outside the country and gone elsewhere. Then we have issues of pedophilia. It’s in the media all the time! Or, in a semi-permanent way. It’s page 4, page 5.

Thirty to forty years ago, although these crimes went on, they weren’t mentioned to the same degree. Then one has the sort of general looseness and chaos and fluidity. Have you noticed that many people who are over 50, certainly over 60, will not go into the centers of our towns and cities after about 6 in the evening, particularly on a Thursday, most especially on a Friday and in particular on a Saturday evening? Why not? They built this country. The future generations are facing a future without a pension, and there are current pensioners cannot go into the center, many of them, of towns and cities because they’re actually marginally afraid.

You do sense with many of our people that there is a fear. There is a fear of associating even with this party, which is radically disapproved of by the media locally and nationally and internationally. Why is it disapproved of? Why is it mildly condemned to extremely hated? Why when the man who founded this party, who died a couple of years ago, did The Daily Mirror, mass circulation tabloid rag, say to its readers that he should rot in hell? What is it about this party that upsets many of the people who are in power? They’re upset because it’s the opposite and advocates for the reversal of what exists now.

What we advocate is a more crime-free Britain, a Britain with national state sovereignty renewed and returned from the European Union to us in these islands, a Whiter society, a more organic society and community with illegal immigration removed with the floodgates closed and the taps turned off for a period. We advocate more re-industrialization. We advocate productivity at the point of production. We advocate making things again in our own country. We advocate not tolerating the presence in our midst of vanguards who wish to blow us up, but understand that a part of the world is theirs and we should have the symmetry of blocs where they return to build their concept of Islam in their own civilization and they leave our part of the world to us.

You have to understand that in a world that isn’t liberal, as the present one is, more hardline people in all groups would be in power, but they can deal with each other because they speak the same language and they understand each other. Muslim civilization despises weakness and sees the current West as weak and therefore partly as prey. Paradoxically, many of them would respect this sort of party because they would know where they are with it.

When I mentioned liberalism a couple moments ago, I’m not talking about the Liberal Democrat Party. I’m talking about the fact that when you turn your television on and you look at Cameron and you look at Blair and you look at Menzies Campbell and you look at Kennedy, who was the drunkard who was in power with the Liberals before Menzies Campbell, and you look at Tory leaders like Howard and Duncan Smith before the present incumbent, they’re all the same, and everyone knows they’re all the same.

Labour voters used to think the Labour Party was for them, that it was against the Tories, that it would look after them. Tory voters in middle class areas always thought that the blue ticket, the blue rosette was for them. But increasingly, all of our people in the two big classes look at the party representatives that they’ve chosen for generations, and they seem the same people mouthing the same platitudes and the same lies with slightly different terms of reference and slightly different colored rosettes. But they’re the same! On all of the big issues! They want to remain in Europe; they want to be beholden to the United States; they want to be inveigled endlessly into American and globalist and expansionist wars across the Earth. We’ve just lost our hundredth man in Iraq.

Why are we in Iraq? There are very complicated, interconnected reasons why we are in Iraq, but the real reason, ultimately, is absence of will and self-determination in our own national leaders. Forget the influences of American powerbrokers and rulers. If we were decisive about our own destiny in our own country on our own island and in our own nation-state, we would stand up to America and we would be a significant second-tier, independent, nuclear-armed power that would be widely listened to and respected both for its present strength, its past imperial glory and its future prospects, and we would decouple ourselves from this desire to make Israel safe in the Middle East and to steal as much Arab oil as possible and also to go around all the rest of the world inveigling into other disputes that have nothing to do with us.

We’re living in a very serious time as our people delude themselves with football and Big Brother and spend all their lives working and worrying about how they’re going to get their children educated and whether they are going to have a pension. We’re living in a period where in the next two years Iran may be attacked. It may even be attacked with nuclear weapons in certain scenarios. We are living in a very, very radical period. I think dimly more and more of our people are aware that we are between great firestorms for people who are alive now. Some of us will not see enormous changes which are happening worldwide and in our own society, but it’s a very unsafe and a very unstable period. In the next 20 years, nuclear weapons will spread all across the world and Islamist groups amongst many others will get those weapons. They’re 60 to 70 years out of date! It’s an old-fashioned technology. How to make them is on the internet. Any PhD student from a Third World country who goes to the University of Sunderland and reads physics knows how to make these weapons. There’s no great mystery anymore, and we have to decide as a nationality and as a people and as the peoples of these islands what our future is to be.

Will we gradually slip to 60% of the population when you agglomerate all the other groups together? Will we slip to 48%? Will we submerge ourselves into a European federal state? Will we sail over to the Americans to such a degree that we’re dragged into yet more conflicts as we gradually decline towards the middle of the century? Will we see crime increase and increase and increase? Will we see the ethnic dimension in criminality increase and become more fractured and more chaotic?

The United States of America has 300 million people. They imprison 2 million. We have 60 million and we imprison 80,000 and the prisons are bursting at the seams. They’re bursting at the seams because 10% of the bottom of the hierarchy in this society don’t want to work, don’t work, is on benefit, and a significant number are criminally minded. Many of them have money for drugs though, which gets them out of their boxes and make sure that they find a release in a society that they don’t otherwise like.

So, to begin the end of this speech, I’d like to go back to the beginning — It’s the endless return, you see? It’s a cycle — and talk about drugs.

Drugs are a very serious problem that affects almost every parent in this country whether they want to admit it or not both in the working class and the middle class, in rough areas and in bourgeois suburbs alike, because drugs are everywhere and penetrate everywhere. It’s possibly the fourth biggest industry on Earth. Fourth biggest industry. The other biggest industries other than primary manufacturing and military services are drugs, weapons, prostitution or the sex industry. These are some of the biggest industries on Earth now. It tells you a lot about the planet we’re living on.

Now, why do people take drugs? No politician, who says they are liberal or libertarian or authoritarian, as John Reid professes, our present Home Secretary on these matters will ever answer the question, “Why do people take drugs?” They take drugs because they’re bored. Because they’re bored to death by this society. Because our religion’s gone.

Have you noticed this? One hundred years ago, this was a Christian society. I am not a Christian. I’m wearing this. [An odal rune pendant.] But our people once believed very firmly in this spiritual system, and it’s been a relative disaster for them now that it’s collapsed! Because it’s left many of our people bereft. If you don’t have a spiritual dimension to life, however you define it, and whatever philosophy you want to adopt, what does the birth of a child mean? What does the death of a relative mean? What does a marriage between a man and a woman [mean]? It’s a man and a woman, not a man and a man or a man and a lamp post or a man and a conservatory or a man and a child, but a man and a woman. What does a marriage mean if it doesn’t have a spiritual dimension?

This is the Muslim criticism of us, and we have to heed it if we are to revive, because a people goes forward if it believes in higher things. The right to shop and watch Premier League football and drink beer is not enough. We have given a quarter of our country away.

Enoch Powell spoke 40 years ago, and before and our people knew he was right. He’s dead and buried now, and he’s under the earth, and there was a big ceremony at Westminster Abbey when he died, and the political elite, all frightened of his legacy, gathered around to shake hands and say what a great man Enoch was, a poet, a linguist; he can speak ten languages; he was made professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Sydney when he was 24. A great man. One of the traditional leaders of our country, but they were also saying privately, “Thank God he’s dead.” Because when he spoke in 1968, he was regarded as the most dangerous man in the society, and what did he say? He said that we should think about our national revival, that we should not allow large sections of the Third World to come here and live, because the Third World is dying and splitting.

Those that remain, control their own space, because their societies are without a middle, just a top and a bottom, or they perish through disease and want or they’re coming here. Because like everybody, they want a life, and they’re right to. All groups are right. All groups want a place in the sun. All groups have a Left-wing, a middle, a Right-wing. All groups consist of people who are moderate and people who are less so. All groups have hard- and soft-liners. We have to choose as White people living in Europe and living in Britain and living in England and living in Berkshire where I am speaking to you tonight, we have to choose what we want.

Do we want to go on as we are and as we have for the last 50 years, or do we want to stand up again? Is our greatness behind us, and it’s all in the history books, which will be changed and attenuated and rewritten as we become a minority, or do we want to do something?

And what is this “doing something” that this chap’s going on about? What I’m talking about is engaging in political activity which is against the grain of what is regarded as “nice” at the present time, because to face what’s going on now in our culture in areas like Handsworth as it creeps towards you where you are is not to be pleasant. The Tories have done everything to re-route themselves and say that they’re the pleasant party not associated with harshness or negativism. But I’m afraid in life leadership involves confronting the dilemmas of your own society. You can’t face drug usage, if you can’t face mass breakdown of social forms, if you can’t face terrorism, if you can’t stand up to America, if you can’t separate yourself form European bureaucracy. You don’t deserve to be in power! And you will be swept away by other forces that will come up from beneath and some of the people might think what’s coming up from beneath is a bit fierce and a bit too strong and is, you know, a bit too much brownie in that cake and they’d prefer a thinner slice.

But this party stands for out of Europe, as English and as British a society as possible, zero tolerance for drugs and crime, the return of the death penalty for those who need it, the return of military service for those who need it, the return of discipline and order in our social structures, the return of glory to us and our kind. All we have to do is not go to war and not put on a military uniform and not fight as our forbearers did in Belgium and France and Germany and the Low Countries and Arabia and Singapore and Burma and the Far East and Malaysia and Palestine and Cyprus and the Falklands or Iraq or Afghanistan or Korea or any place else. What our people have to do is vote and leaflet and canvas and raise money and buy a bit of merchandise such as that over there and attend political meetings, because there is now only one political party that stands for the reshaping of this society.

There are two parties left in Britain now. One is the party of liberal conformism and centrism, and they’re called Labour in certain areas. They hardly have any presence here. They’re called Liberal in other areas. A bit of a presence around here. They’re called Tory. The ruling establishment in these parts of the country, but you go north of Birmingham and they hardly exist. In Manchester, there’s not one councilor that’s got a blue rosette. Not one. There are large parts of the country where they’ve virtually ceased to exist. And there are other areas where the red doesn’t cut the mustard either.

But there has to be a party that is red, white, and blue and that draws the two big parties in this society — the working class and the middle class — together, that draws English and British people together, that has the red, which stands for a degree of social conscience and understanding and paternalism and the need to look after your own people without illusions and without squandering one’s talents or denying the differences between people or necessarily dumbing down to the lowest common denominator, but has a responsibility which the Tories have always vacated in modernity for the people at the bottom tier who are still our people and still live on the worst estates and in the most run down areas. This is a social party that doesn’t just stand for one group and its interests within our people.

Then there is the blue which stands for social conservatism and tradition and prior dignity and patriotism and national feeling. It’s this sensibility, the blue, as part of the red, white, and blue, that says it’s not OK if the future leader of the country wants to have a few spliffs when he’s young. It’s not alright, because it indicates what he’s like, how wet he is, how indecisive he is, because those who take these sorts of drugs are amenable to almost anything and they betray by doing so a certain characterlessness. If they want to be private individuals all their life, it doesn’t matter, but if they want to lead a country they’ve got to be cut from something greater than that.

Just as you need red and blue, you need white between the red, the white and the blue. It’s the color of this flag behind me. It’s the color of our country’s banner and flag and emblems. It’s the colors of this party. It’s the colors of the British National Party for social need, Right-wing and conservative discipline, and the patriotism ethnically of the people who made these islands, who shaped them in their image, who are still the majority group here, and we can revive. All we have to do, in election after election, is vote for this party when they see it on the ballot. When you get a postal ballot and you go down to the station and you look at the thing and there’s a range of parties and there’s one called BNP, the one called British National Party, you vote for that whether it’s local, whether it’s regional, whether it’s devolved, whether it’s an English parliament in the future, whether it’s the British parliament, whether it’s the European Assembly. Each time you see that ticket, each time you see that flag, you put that cross and if more do it in each election and it ramps up and up and up and we begin to get the vote that similar but different parties on the continent get things will change and you will not in the future have your grandchildren as a minority in this society. It will be less crime-ridden; it will be more disciplined; it will be more ordered; it will be more patriotic; it will be a better place.

I ask you to vote for, to work for, to leaflet for, to canvas for, and to raise funds for the British National Party!

Thank you very much!

6,122 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s September 17, 2009 British National Party stump speech in from somewhere in the North of England. A few unintelligible words are marked ???. If you can make out what Bowden is saying, please post a comment below.

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Thanks very much! I always talk about what’s in the news and I advise people not to necessarily believe everything they read on the site called UAF.

Now, what’s been going on in the world since I was up this way last? Well, Trevor Phillips has announced that he wants to change the constitution of this political party. For those who don’t know, Mr. Phillips is head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is the successor body to the Commission for Racial Equality or what in the late 1960s was the Race Relations Board. It’s also merged with all sorts of other alleged oppressions in relation to gender, in relation to age to a degree — although that’s been enforced by the European Union — in relation to homosexuality, in relation to transsexuality, or persons of transgendered non-specificity; it’s concerned with disability; it’s concerned with all sorts of things. It receives a hundred million pounds a year, this organization, of your money, and Brown says he wants to cut the budget deficit, and he wants to reduce the overspends that he’s spent to get us out of this recession, which has been digging away for the last 10-12 years. I think he could start with the Equality and Human Rights Commission! Starting with Mr. Phillips!

Mr. Phillips says he is not an extremist, but in his office, in his bureau in the middle of London, he’s got a portrait of Karl Marx on his wall. So, what is he saying by that? He’s saying that he’s in favor of militant equality; he’s in favor of militant egalitarianism.

But there are certain groups that he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like the people who vote for this party. He doesn’t like white working class people, particularly in the north of England but elsewhere will do. He doesn’t care for anyone, irrespective of social background, who votes to the Right of UKIP.

He regards one of his jobs as preventing this party winning seats, and obviously he’s having a bit of trouble internally and bureaucratically for many reasons, one of which was the return of two British National Party members of the European Parliament in the last European election. One for the northwest of England and one for Yorkshire and Humber. I’m very pleased to see the reemergence of Mr. Andrew Brons, who is the former chairman of an organization called the National Front and has been involved in Right-wing British politics for many decades.

Phillips and his clique are attempting to impose a constitutional change on this party that will open the door, allegedly, to non-white members. Now, he’s been planning this for a long time, and it was first mooted the better part of 4-5 years ago. Philips himself is under a great deal of pressure because half of his executive board inside his bureaucratic group have resigned and there’s lots of scandals over where the money’s gone and over management practice and so on within this particular institution.

It has to be said that lots of these people fight in these bureaus like rats in a sack even though they are pathologically opposed to what this country once was, to a proportion of its indigenous population and to what it might be again.

There’s no need for Phillips, there’s no need for his bureaucracy, there’s no need for the boards and committees out of which they came, there’s no need for these politically correct laws and there’s no need to change this party’s constitution in my opinion. I believe the members should decide the constitution, and it’s quite clear what they’ve decided hitherto.

It is understandable that one of the reasons this sort of weapon has been fired at the party is to drag the party into the courts, is to entrammel it in legal procedure where only the lawyers win, where you rack up a case of £80,000 and then you get the cost against you because the case has been prior arranged so that you can’t win. So, a bear trap has been dug out in the sand, and the gravel before you, and like an idiot, like the charge of the Light Brigade, you go straight down into it. So, there’s a degree to which it’s quite obvious people want to tiptoe around the side and not go down into that tiger trap and be embroiled in the nets.

I personally think, though, that the case ought to be defended at least the first time around. I don’t think you can just wave your hand in the air and say, “We’re totally against it. Oops! We surrender.” I think you’ve got to actually do something even if you’re forced to do it. Partly because you’re seen to be acting then under distress, you’re seen to be pushed into it, you’re seen not to fire your pop-gun in non-anger and then sulk in the corner.

So, I think even if a senior party official defends it, which would obviate barristers’ and solicitors’ costs on the defense side, and even if you then go down to defeat, you budget for the nature of that defeat and spread it over a certain time. I think that would be better, personally, then just sort of dropping dead as soon as Phillips waves his bit of paper in the air.

But make no bones about it, various laws have been passed by New Labour since they came in in ’97. There’s probably been 8 through 10 acts which deal with militant equality of various sorts. There’s a degree to which anyone who speaks in public, or semi-public in relation to this meeting now, has to make sure that anything they say is well within the remit of all the laws that have been passed. This is why the language that people use is, in my case anyway, abstract to a degree and it has to be. The point of these laws is to prevent people from speaking emotionally or from the heart rather than in a philosophical or abstract or intellectual or semi-intellectual way. Freedom of speech to intellectuals who have illiberal opinions has been allowed. The point of these laws is to prevent particularly, but not exclusively, indigenous working class people from saying the truth as they see it about the way in which the country has changed around them in the last 40 to 50 years. This is why these laws have been introduced: the laws that created the Race Relations Board, the laws that portended the creation of the Commission for Racial Equality and its attendant Commission for Sexual Equality and this new hyper-ministry led by Phillips.

In the old days, white elitist liberals used to lead these organizations, lords and liberal peers, usually executive members of the Liberal Party, as it then was. Now, after Ouseley, we have Phillips, and Phillips is under pressure because the British National Party has risen. Ouseley, who of course was chairman of this commission or the CRE that preceded it before Phillips, criticizes Phillips because the British National Party’s won elections as if his remit is actually to stop one political party in the country. Phillips’ remit is to impose equality in relation to alleged oppression and/or “discrimination” in all areas of the society, but one of his prime textual, down-in-the-basement targets is to make sure that parties that stand for a different set of values, such as prior patriotism, don’t get anywhere.

The key test whenever the conservatives win, and most media pundits think that Cameron will be leader in under a year, is whether they will sweep away all this. Margaret Thatcher and Michael Portillo in the late 1980s did actually have a few internal governmental policy papers about abolishing these quangos, which are anti-white and anti-British and anti-English and anti-Welsh and anti-Ulster Irish and anti-post-Irish in Britain and anti-Scottish and anti-white proletarian and anti-bourgeois and anti-heterosexual and anti-disabled.

You see, these are quite discriminatory bodies! Even though they say they are for love and justice and inclusion and tolerance and they love everybody to death and they dislike nobody at all. But if you actually look at them in a different way and you cast the ideology that comes out of Phillips’ bureaucracy in a different light, you realize that they have groups to which they are antagonistic, they have individuals drawn from those groups to which they are even more antagonistic, and they wish to deny such persons freedom of speech.

Earlier in the 20th century, our fathers and grandfathers were told that they had fought, they fought against Germany, they fought against fascism, they fought against imperial Germany in the First World War between 1914-18, you may have seen some of the very elderly veterans who are basically dying now (93, 89, 96, 109, 106, 104). As these men went over the top in 1914-18, in Flanders fields, at the Somme, at Passchendaele, at Ypres and elsewhere, were they fighting for tolerance and inclusion? Were they fighting for Mr. Phillips to impose his bureaucratic remit upon future generations of this country? When men got out of their tanks and fried an egg on the side of it in the North African desert in the Second World War, were they fighting for tolerance and inclusion? Were they fighting for Mr. Phillips to impose laws upon them here in the north of England and elsewhere to describe what they can say even in private, even in a text message between friends, even in an office in the public or the private sector?

No, they weren’t fighting for tolerance and inclusion! They were fighting for glory! They were fighting for this country! They were fighting for England and Britain! They were fighting for what their old rulers had told them about what the future would be like if they lost. They were fighting for a degree of ethnic and racial pride that was unstated because the whole English conspectus that you didn’t really go on about that because it was accepted as a norm to begin with and therefore you didn’t need to illustrate it too much because it was a given before you even started. They were fighting for the flags that were behind them.

Many of them didn’t know what was coming and certainly didn’t know that the Great War was a form of mechanized death in which we would lose 800,000 men. 800,000! And look around this country now! What did they die for? And many more maimed and injured on top of that core 800,000, and that’s just in the First World War.

What did they die for? Did they die for a multicultural Britain? Did they die for a multi-ethnic Britain? Did they die for a politically correct Britain? Did they die for 200,000 abortions a year? Did they die for the absence of the death penalty? Did they die for liberal-Left censorship that denies the rights even of a private conversation up to a certain perspective? Did they die for the right of men to marry each other and adopt children? Did they die for all of these things? Or did they actually fight for something different?

I would hazard to guess that they actually fought for a society that we had a proportion of but which has now been dipped down to such a degree that even to mention it is incorrect, is transgressive, is anti-system, is mentally criminal or treated largely as such.

This society was once relatively free of drugs. Never free of crime, but freer than it is now. Look at the center of some of our cities like Birmingham and elsewhere, England’s second city. In the city of Handsworth in the middle of Birmingham, criminal gangs control large parts of the economy there. There are two gangs in Handsworth, both Afro-Caribbean gangs. One’s called the Johnson Crew, and the other’s called the Burger Bar Boys. They’re gangs. They have buildings in the center of Handsworth. These aren’t just lads sort of skulking around in car parks; they own property. They have criminal mafias. These things are developing in our cities fueled by the drug economy.

One in four youths between 16 and 25 is now unemployed. This country is technically bankrupt despite the actual coin that seems to be still in people’s pockets. Unemployment is 2.5 million, but will rise to 3 million by the turn of the year, beginning of the next. If you add in all the people who are claiming, all the people who don’t want to work, all the people who are on the sick, all the people who have been miscalculated as to whether they are unemployed or not . . . Don’t forget: Thatcher changed how you calculate unemployment 17 times between ’79 and ’90, and Major did nothing to change it, and Prescott and the others screamed and jumped up and down in the House of Commons, but they kept those statistical analyses when they came in in ’97. So, unemployment is well over 3 million now.

And don’t forget that at least a million Polish people have gone back to Poland, so there’s a degree to which there’s a certain element of unemployment that’s sort of been farmed out. They came because of EU laws that permitted such travel by persons across European boundaries in the last couple of years when the economy was booming.

But was it really booming? Or was it just a trash capitalist boom fueled by debt? You got up in the morning and there was 3 new credit cards on the mat. “Zero percent!” “Buy now! Worry later!” After six months the APR is 29.5%. Do you remember all those letters and all those cards? Everyone in this room is 55 grand in debt. That’s after the bail-out and in relation to the actual corporate debt. Add up the Waitrose and the debit and the co-op and the Tesco and the store cards and the debt that has been put in to save the banks, all of which crashed around a year ago, and we’re all in debt to this degree.

Brown was lying recently when he said that the Tories would only cut and they would invest prior to a form of non-cut. Labour will cut 10% off all budgets after the election if they win, and they’re not going to win, and the Tories will cut it deeper and harsher.

But I think that these depressive times, economically enable you to look at a broader and a wider picture: there’s all sort of things that could be cut in this society, aren’t there? The special hospitals cost a billion a year for large numbers of psychopaths and those who are the equivalent of the murderers of Baby P. Hang them, and close these institutions.

Get rid of every politically correct item on the governmental agenda at the local level: multiple language translations at the regional and sub-parliamentary and devolved level, similar sorts of bureaucracies, Phillips’ bureaucracy at a higher level. Get rid of all of the panoply of EU laws and regulation that restricts business, that denies the rights of English and British people to do what they want in their own country, leave the European Union, which frees you from an enormous forest of laws and which enables you to decide again who is British and who is not, who is English and who is not, who is patriotic and who is not, who is in favor of the country’s development and who is not, who has the best interests of the society at heart and who in turn does not.

Because the people who do not have the interests of this country at heart are running the BBC, are running the Labour government, are running the Commission for Human Equality. Some of them are running the NHS, some of them are running the Bank of England, fewer of them are in our armed forces, which is why our armed forces are always on the other side of the world, always fighting other people’s wars at the behest of the United States.

Michael Portillo was asked in the 1990s when he was Defence Minister, which is an important post in a Tory government to a degree, unlike a Labour government, “What’s our foreign policy?” and he once replied, “We don’t have a foreign policy. It’s decided for us by the United States.”

And the United States in particular, amongst many other initiatives all over the world, even though it’s in radical decline, is obsessed with the fate of a particular society in the Middle East and is determined that it must be defended at all costs, and we’ve had a war tangentially in Afghanistan and ruinously in Iraq in relation to a proportion of those measures, putting it as moderately as possible, and there are many who would like to attack Iran as a third option, as World War Four, as some people call it. We will be dragged into these disputes and into these wars on the tail end of American power.

I don’t need to tell you that America has changed a great deal. Since 1968-69, 70 million persons of color have entered the United States. 70 million! The election of Barack Obama isn’t a strange fluke. He is representative of most American cities and what they have become. America is teetering on the edge of not the Second World, but the Third World. When Obama became president, the CIA gave him a report. That report said that America will be in the Third World by the end of this century, that China and India will be more important by 2050, and that there will be a nuclear war in the Middle East in the next 25 years on present trends.

The CIA gets many things wrong and did not predict 9/11, but they did predict the war between Russia and Georgia a year ago, so they get the odd one right. If you throw enough darts at the board, you occasionally get a 180, you see what I mean? But Obama is typical of what that country has become, and we are such an Americanized society now, look around you, in the country and the culture as a whole that what often goes there happens here.

The gang culture which I mentioned in Birmingham proliferated in Los Angeles and other big cities in the United States and has come here after a lag of 10 to 20 years. Mass abortion, civil rights, rights for minorities, sexual and otherwise, partly an American prerequisite, came here, although there were Western European tendencies in that regard simultaneously with the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. The pressure to conform to international bodies, such as the EU and the United Nations, and to push us in various ways and deny nation-state sovereignty so that we can’t make independent decisions about our economy and about our military usage. This again imprisons us in various ways.

Most liberals believe it’s unthinkable to get out of these structures, unthinkable to think in another way about political reality. It’s not unthinkable at all! But our people need the will to grasp it, the will to not always reach for the beer in front of them, the will to turn Sky Sports off for a moment, the will to wonder why Cameron and Clegg and Brown always sound the same and always say the same things. They’re all in favor of these wars; they’re all in favor of US power; they’re all in favor of our troops being abroad in wars that are directly not in our ultimate self-interest; they’re all in favor of membership in the EU; they’re all in favor of bailing the banks out; they’re all in favor of the economics that led to those bail-outs; they’re all in favor of mass immigration. Why? Because they’re all liberals! And because liberalism is a system.

Most people look at the box and they think, “Why are Labour and Tories so near? Why are they so close? Why does Brown occasionally make conservative remarks, and Cameron wears a red tie and says he’s a progressive? Why is this political transvestism going on as they launch into each other and exchange garments?” And you’ve got Mandelson stood in between Brown and Cameron exchanging even more garments, because he wants to. People wonder, “Why are they there, and why are they similar? Why is the political tension that for previous generations between the red and the blue was very intense, where’s it all gone?” It’s all gone and all been dissipated because they stand basically for the same thing!

Can you imagine Sir Alec Douglas-Home, he was Tory leader the year I was born in the early 1960s, being a member of United Against Fascism? Can you imagine that? He would think that they were persons who needed a wash. When Alec Douglas-Home, who was regarded as being very “out of touch,” was asked on the equivalent of Panorama in 1963, “What do you think of the recent rise in unemployment?” Raising a stick, he said, “Oh, there’s room for a new gamekeeper on my estate.” That was when the Tories were something different, weren’t they really? Quite clearly living in another world to most of the people in this country, even in the early 1960s. But can you imagine him being, like Cameron, a member of United Against Fascism?

I saw a few pictures of the Red, White, and Blue which happened in Derbyshire a couple of weeks back in this year of the United Against Fascism, and it’s very odd. The first thing I noticed about them is that a new generation has emerged. The second thing I noticed was that they were very small in number. The third thing I noticed was that they all had red flags massed together in their paucity of their number, and many of those flags had the hammer and sickle on them. The hammer and sickle, yes! We haven’t seen that for a long time!

Now, what does that stand for? Militant egalitarianism, the destruction of Western society, death to everything this country once stood for, the desecration of what people basically fought for in both of those wars I mentioned earlier. This is what the sort of Communism that these people stand for is about! So, when people look at these sorts of sites and this sort of propaganda, they ought to remember this is Communist propaganda that is opposed to everything this country has ever stood for and has been and can be in the future and of which these people are totally unrepresentative.

As I looked on the internet in a local library, I saw various transvestites and people in bondage gear and this sort of thing leaping about. I thought I’d put in Liza Minnelli’s Cabaret by mistake. But in actual fact it was United Against Fascism down in Derbyshire with police looking tight-lipped as they sort of danced around them. Interestingly, there’s the odd sort of quite believing Muslim in the crowd. Not many, but there were a few. What they make of these sorts of shenanigans about which their religion is extraordinarily Right-wing and intolerant, one doesn’t know. They probably compartmentalize it and say it’s all a delinquent Western fun fair that their just observing from one side.

But the truth of the matter is that, to be serious for a moment, we have a mass recession. We have mass unemployment. And where is the Left? Where is the Left? The Left that represents the working man, the Left that represents the British working class, the Left that represents the international proletariat inside Britain? In the ’30s, they were in the streets! They were in the unions! They were thinking about how to take power in this society. Every time you had an economic dip in the early ’90s, to a degree . . . In the early ’80s under Thatcher, remember the Right to Work marches? “Right to work!” Many of the people on those marches never worked a day in their lives, but they wanted the right to work! They could mass tens of thousands in the streets. Where are they now? They’re finished. The Left is gone from history. The Soviet Union was an utter disaster, a genocidal disaster, and nobody, even radicals who are anti-system in the West, wants to touch them now.

The only way in which they can be radical is to oppose us, because the next 20 to 50 years will see the rise of the Right in various forms all over the world in all groups. What we have to make sure is that the Right that comes up in our society represents us and our values and our traditions, because we know who we are. We don’t need laws to describe who we are. We don’t need little a priori prejudicial statements which prevent us from saying what we are. We know who we are. Kipling once said, “The English deep down know who they are. The English that only the English know.” And we know what we are, we know what we’ve been capable of and we know what we can do again.

Nearly all of our people agree with us in a subtle way, but they’re afraid. They’re afraid, their establishment has betrayed them, and they wonder what to do. They feel helpless and bereft. An organization like this has to lift people up. It has to give them strength and hope in their hearts. This country can be changed. Only the democratic ballot box can do it.

The next census will reveal that the country’s only 80% indigenous now, but many of the people who have come in can go out economically as easy and quickly as they arrived. Things are going to change in the next 25 to 50 years very radically. Ecological damage, economic stress, the collapse of versions of capitalism without the Left as a safe and actual alternative. We’re going to see benefits cut in the next couple of years. We’re going to see the easy years, if they were easy, and they weren’t for many, in the ’60s and ’70s go. The idea that there are jobs to be had is going. There’s 200 who apply for every McDonald’s job now. That’s a job paying £5.65 to flip over an American burger that makes you obese and die of a coronary before you’re 60, and 200 are applying for each of those jobs and probably about a quarter of them aren’t European. So, there’s underneath the surface of Sky News and happy-clappy and Amy Winehouse snorting drugs there’s a great tension in this society and there’s a great sense of foreboding.

Deep polling by the BBC thinks that many people are deeply worried that there will be conflict in this culture, worried that there’s no one to lead them, worried about the collapse of our identity in various forms . . . And we are in considerable collapse. Go around many of our cities. You notice the decay in the infrastructure, you notice the amounts of blatant criminality . . .

Where are the police? Do you see the police? They drive around in their cars and they fly over cities in their numbered helicopters. They’re all dressed in yellow now, so you can see them from a distance. But they’re firemen! They come at the end! They come after it’s kicked off. They get out of the wagon when people are lying on the ground. They come at the end, not at the beginning. They’re just to put it out and dampen it down. They see their remit is partly preventing community tension rather than solving crime and dealing with some of the gangs that I’ve talked about proliferating in inner Birmingham and elsewhere.

So, this country’s in trouble, and Cameron has no solutions at all. He will cut public expenditure, because they don’t like spending money. The Tories will be a little bit more honest about that. But they’ll invest in wars like the coming one that might come over Iran and the one that’s already petering out into oblivion and defeat like the one in the 1890s before it in Afghanistan. He says he’s against the European Union, but will you have a vote on any of these treaties? At the last election, Brown said he would give us a vote on that constitution and he’s completely reneged. So, yet another lie from the man who said he would be straight. Do you remember when he came in? He said, “I’m Gordon Brown and I’m going to be sincere with you.” With his head on one side, you know. Every time I see Gordon Brown he looks older. One eyes up here, one eyes down here, the hair gets whiter and grayer, the chins get more brought to the left. He looks sadder and more alone, doesn’t he? Every time you see him you know he’s a man in decline.

New Labour has had it! Old Labour died before ’97, and New Labour is now in the dust bin! New Labour’s probably as hated now as Major was in ’97, but our people have got to stop moaning and switching from group to group and hoping that somebody new and cheesy like Blair back ten years will sort it out for them.

They’ve got to choose something new! They’ve got to choose something radical! They’ve got to cease being afraid! You say to people, “Oh, will you vote for this party over there?” And they say, “Oh no, no. They’re extreme. I didn’t like what I read about them in The Daily Mirror. I didn’t like this remark that this chap made about historical events that are 60 years old. I’m worried, I’m worried. I want to go and sit on the toilet.” A lot of our people, unfortunately, are like this. The spirit of the egg frying on the North African tank in the 8th Army in the early ’40s has, unfortunately, receded a bit, but deep down it’s because the English and British have been betrayed. They’ve always wanted to moan a bit, but otherwise trust their leaders and they realize now that they can’t trust their leaders.

If this country is to have any future and we are not to slide into the Second and into the Third World over this century, we have a choice to make and we have to create a new ruling group drawn from the body of the population, people who don’t just get into parliament so they can cheat on expenses the first day they’re in there. Because they’ve been cheating with those expenses for 30 to 50 years. Thatcher introduced those changes about 25 to 30 years ago. When Michael Foot was asked about pay… Remember Michael Foot? Duffle-coated at the Cenotaph, and that sort of thing, picking his nose. When Foot was in and Labour politicians said, “I need a bigger salary.” He said, “Oh, don’t bother about that. Just claim it on expenses.” So, they doubled up their pay on expenses and in comparison to the cheating over money that goes on in the city of London that parliamentary cheating is actually small beer. It’s their resentment over that and those sorts of things that leads them to behave in that way.

So, there’s a total disconnect now between the ruling group and the masses and the masses have got to show some stomach for once, and they’ve got to be prepared to vote for radical people who will clear out New Labour. Here in the north, in the south, in the east and the west outside England, within Britain and elsewhere. Clear them out! And the Tories will do no good either. You’ve got to clear them out. The Liberals are just a bloc in between the two that give the other two their ideas, all the sort of destructive ideas that Phillips is in favor of and that I talked about earlier. You’ve got to clear them out as well.

There needs to be a new start! And it won’t be UKIP and it won’t be the Greens, even though there are good ideas which are Green and the idea of leaving the European Union (the UKIP option) is an attractive one that should be supported. But there is only really one option for this country and that is to vote for a party that is patriotic, which is British, which is elitist, which is nationalistic, which believes that the only socialism or the only social concern that really is validated by history, by genetics, by identity is patriotism.

Patriotism is the only thing that ties together people within the group in their difference and it aligns people together to overcome the divisions of class within our society.

The blue of social conservatism opposed in shorthand to everything UAF says that they stand for. The red of socio-economic concern particularly for people at the bottom of the prior economic pyramid. The Tories have no concern about such people at all. The Conservative definition of patriotism excludes half the population from the very beginning. We must bring the two classes together. We must bring the North and the South together. We must bring the red and the blue together. And if you look at the Union flag, there’s plenty of white in the red, white, and blue.

I say, let’s have an all white party! Let’s have an all white world as we configure it within our own homelands in northern Europe and elsewhere. Let’s say to all of the politicians who’ve ruled us for 45 or 50 or 60 years that we don’t like Mr. Phillips and his Equality Commission, that equality in relation to others in relation to us is inequality in relation to us and we don’t favor it, that we don’t favor political correctness, that we don’t favor the ideologies that have been imposed on us, which are a soft form of Marxism peddled by New Labour and their friends whether they’re in the trade unions or even in the boardrooms of European companies that have friendly contacts in the European Union, that we don’t agree with what has been done in the last 50 or 60 years and there is only one way in which that can change. There is only one way in which our people can rescue the plight in which they find themselves and that is to vote for this political party to support tendencies of the Right and of patriotism and of national renewal. To realize what will this country be like in 120 years on present trends? What will the Health Service be like? What will the level of taxation be like? What will an average inner comprehensive school be like in 80 years, never mind 120? Look at what they’re like now!

In south London now, schools have 200 cameras inside them. Schools have metal detectors to take the coshes, the knives, and the guns off the students before they go in! And that’s before they’ve even got in! But as we’re told, GCSE and other standards rise every year. The standards go up, but they can’t read and write, and there isn’t a job for them to go to and when they arise from these pits they end up talking like Jamaican gangsters on imported US television programs! This needs to change! And the only way it will change isn’t through fantasies, isn’t through marching like the English Defence League in the city streets, it’s through voting and it’s through politics. It’s the only chance we’ve got and two thirds of our people won’t even vote in the European elections.

They can’t moan if they don’t vote! And the only vote that’s meaningful is for the British National Party! The only vote that threatens the establishment is for this party, is for the tendencies of opinion that it represents! And when you vote you’re voting against what Brown stands for, you’re voting against what Obama institutionalizes, you’re voting against what the European Union stands for, but you’re not just voting against, you’re voting for! You’re voting for what you are! You’re voting for this land! You’re voting for this village/town! You’re voting for this region! You’re voting for what your grandfather and father fought for! Vote for them! Vote for yourself! Vote for the generations who are coming! And always support strength and identity and freedom of speech and England and Britain forever!

Thank you very much!

37:26 / 6,526 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s June 1, 2006 British National Party stump speech in Tameside. A few unintelligible words are marked ???. If you can understand what he is saying, or if you have corrections, please post them as comments below.

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This meeting is being taped by one of our organizers here, so this what this camera is for, and if it’s any good it might be sold by Excalibur, the party’s cultural merchandise arm at a later date.

Now, I’d like to begin by talking about the elections. When Derek Beacon was elected in the early to mid-1990s in the East End of London, when the previous leader and founder of the party was still alive, the media ran it for weeks. There was 24/7 coverage for about seven days after that victory on the Isle of Dogs. Now we’ve won well over 50 councilors, although there’s been quite a lot of media coverage it’s been damped down and much of the liberal establishment has just shrugged their shoulders and said, “Oh well, it’s happened. It’s a bit of reaction to post-war mass immigration. The white working class people are alienated. It’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate what happened in Barking and Dagenham, but there we are.”

The truth is that there have been parties, movements, leagues, and groups to the Right-wing of the Tories since the 1920s, and until the ‘90s, with the exception of a couple of people in Blackburn when the Tories stood down, no one’s ever got elected at all. So, more has been achieved in about 5 or 6 years than has ever been achieved by the British Right, so to say, heretofore. So, 50 have been elected, and the truth is now that we are knocking at the door where 80, 150, 200, 280, 300, and more could be elected, and it won’t take that much more.

Let’s look at Barking and Dagenham. I know at least a third, maybe 40%, of the people who were elected personally. Now, that campaign in Barking was basically conducted by three people, one of whom was fanatical and basically has visited in one way or another, over a 2½ to 3 year period, the better part of 60,000 addresses in the Barking and Dagenham area, and he’s the chap who’s leader of the opposition group on that council.

When Hodge was accused by our own liberal media of betrayal and of letting the BNP fox in and this sort of thing, she was actually was actually just reacting on the door to something that was truthful. Indeed, the liberal media is split about her. Some say she shouldn’t have said it and the woman’s a fool and we should never have elected her an MP in that sort of area anyway, and other people are saying she’s just being an honest woman. The politicians lie all the time, the media accuses them of treachery and mendacity. When they tell the truth they don’t like it if people vote for this organization.

And Margaret Hodge had a bit of form before she became MP for a particular part of Barking and Dagenham. She used to be the head of Islington Council, which is where Blair and Cherie had their large house before he became Premier after the landslide in ’97.

Now, when she was in Islington there were several scandals that convulsed that borough, which is an inner city, sort of Labour rotten borough, Left, largely middle class, extreme Left rotten borough. There’s even a shrine, believe it or not, to Lenin in a side room in Islington town hall, the man who led the Communists to power after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. It’s a legacy of the Fabian past. But you can see, it’s got a shrine to Lenin in the corner for the sort people who are wandering around Islington town hall and its precincts.

Now, when she was in charge there was a major pedophile scandal in a number of children’s homes in the borough of Islington and this was used against her in her own constituency by the people who have ultimately become the opposition in Barking and Dagenham. Without going into all the gory details, she had a PC program whereby nobody could make any accusations against homosexual men. This meant that homosexual networks that had inveigled themselves into certain young people’s homes and half-way houses within the Islington area couldn’t be condemned. One of these individuals later died of AIDS when he became an education officer in Hackney, a neighboring red belt borough, several years later. She apologized when the weedy and liberal-minded Evening Standard, the local rag down in the capital, ran a campaign about this, but it was all a little too late really. Blair made her Minister for Children in the latter stages of the first Labour term, which certain mainstream media outlets had the temerity to oppose.

So, this is Margaret Hodge. But Margaret Hodge in some ways, when she’s knocked on 8 out of 10 doors in Barking, and they said, “We’re voting BNP.” And some of them may have even just said it to annoy her. Who knows? There’s a degree to which it fed into a terror that people like her have. Because amongst this largely sort of bourgeois Left that goes with Blair and that is called New Labour and whose project this is since ’97 — they’ve been in power almost a decade now — they fear that they’ve lost in part, certainly psychically and emotionally, the indigenous working class. They fear it. Their politics are almost entirely bourgeois Left and come out of the universities and colleges where they are. There was quite a bit of campaigning in the media before the Barking vote and elsewhere, but old Labour is losing the white working class to the British National Party. In actual fact, there were quite good votes in middle class areas, but it feeds a paranoia and it feeds a fear in Labour. Because for all their careers they’ve said they’re in favor of working people, that they’re in favor of their rights, that they’re in favor of trade unions and all the rest of it.

Well, I’m afraid that most of the people in Barking and Dagenham moved there because of the Ford Works, and many of them were bombed out of the East End of London during the war. It’s one of the largest, essentially but no longer, white council estates in the Southeast of England. And also, many of the people weren’t just bombed out of the East End. They left in the post-war period after Attlee’s government (’45–’51). And why did they leave the East End of our capital city? They left the East End of our capital city because whole districts and boroughs like Hackney, like parts of Islington, like Harringay, like Tower Hamlets, like Bow and Bethnal Green and so forth have been completely taken over by Third World immigration.

There are 45,000 Asian Muslims in Tower Hamlets alone irrespective of any other minority. And that is why when Respect stood in Tower Hamlets they got in, because you basically have a white ultra-Leftist linked to old-fashioned Communism competing against a half-caste Jewish New Labour MP who supported the Iraq War, and the Muslims even though they have parties of their own will say they have nothing to do with Western democracy and must organize within their own community against ours within this country as part of an international nation, campaigning against Respect, Respect with Galloway still got in. This was in his phase when he wasn’t pretending to be a cat and wearing red slippers and all the rest of the nonsense he usually gets up to.

What’s happening is that more and more of our people, irrespective of region, irrespective of class and social background, are becoming radically alienated from the political system in this society, north, south, east and west. It used to be said that the BNP was just a Northern party. Liberals, amongst themselves, would say it’s the party of ghettoized people who can’t get out into the suburbs. They said it would never get out of the northwest and go into Yorkshire; that happened. They said it would never get anyone voted in the Home Counties; that happened. They said it would never get anyone voted in the south of England, nevermind the southeast of England; that happened. And so on. There are regions or parts of the country that are neglected like the southwest, for example, where UKIP is strong and East Anglia and so on. But we have representation now in the north of the country, the south of the country, and the middle of the country.

If you’ve been to Cardiff, and Glasgow recently, you’ll discover that the problems they have are identical to things that are going on in Manchester and Leeds and Hull and Bradford and Liverpool and Newcastle and London and Southampton and Norwich and Bristol and elsewhere. The center of Glasgow has largely been “taken over” by immigration from the sub-continent of India and beyond.

So, it’s happening everywhere, and although the party is quite underdeveloped in Wales and Scotland, New Labour have handed to various interests there, and they’ve introduced devolved assemblies, much of which are second rate, second tier, rotten borough assemblies which considerable proportions, particularly the Welsh, actually voted against, but they’re there. And Labour is in love with democracy. There are elections all the time. When he had time for it, Prescott wanted to introduce a quack assembly in the northeast of England. 90% of Geordies voted against it.

Liberals are in love with democracy! But they won’t allow plebiscitary or direct democracy. They wouldn’t allow people to vote through their televisions on hanging, for example. They wouldn’t allow people to vote on immigration or membership in the European Union or having the IRA in government or the castration of pedophiles or the dealing with drug dealers or the deportation of foreign criminals. They wouldn’t have plebiscitary mass democracy and direct democracy for that sort of thing. They’ll have representative elite democracy with small little groups, largely of a liberal dispensation, controlling things from above.

Have you seen what the Tories have been up to recently? They’ve elected an ex-Etonian David Cameron. They’ve shifted the party to the Left. They actually are actually more to the center-Left now within their own spectrum of allotted opinion than they have been since Heath and before. So, we sort of reverse 30 years of Tory drift and the Thatcherite period which was part and parcel of that. Why has Cameron done this? He wrote the last Tory manifesto. Do you remember those billboards where they said, “We know what you’re thinking. We’re thinking what you’re thinking about immigration.” People in United Against Fascism and similar groups used to creep out late at night and deface Tory posters and say, “Don’t vote racist!” That manifesto that Howard fronted was written by Cameron who now says he doesn’t believe in any of it! That was only 6, 10 months to a year ago! He’s now become Tory leader. He says they favor everything green.

Believe me, Tories are not green. It gets in the way of their Jags. This party is actually more ecologically minded philosophically, if one wishes to concentrate on that particular issue, than they are.

And the irony is that there are two ways of looking at Cameron. Because Cameron is just a sniveling, Left-wing Tory without any ideas who will say anything to get in. But if he was in a fantasy world and in a sort of virtual reality zone, a secret patriot, he’s doing everything right to alienate a part of his core vote and to leave a wider and wider spectrum of opinion for something to the right of the Tories. So, forget Veritas and the Golden One, forget the United Kingdom Independence Party, there’s now essentially one party to the right of the Tories that stands for everything they said that they stood for in the 1960s when people like Enoch Powell were making a bit of a fuss. So, this whole area is opening up for us, and in a sense this is the best chance a radical Right party has ever had in contemporary British history.

You have a sordid social democratic regime led by Blair, who’s going on and on and on with increasing back-biting from his own, with fighting around him. He looks sort of dull; he looks aged; he looks slightly sordid and broken down. He wants another job in the EU or the United Nations within a year to two years. You see him in the House of Commons, Prescott to one side of him, dumpy, thinking about the ex-affair, thinking about his loss at croquet recently, thinking about the Grace and Favour residences, worrying whether his working class or middle class, because he has these debates with people all the time, but no one else is bothered. And on the other side there’s Brown. Dour, sullen, plotting, against Blair but agreeing with him on everything, saying he’s now tacitly against the morality of the Iraq War when he helped finance it, saying he’s less Right-Left Labour than Blair but he was on the cabinet for all of his decisions, and they’ve really been running the country together for nine years.

They did a deal in a restaurant (Yes, in Islington!) that we mentioned before. When Blair became leader, Blair was considered to be more English, more southern, more amenable to Daily Mail and Daily Express readers, Tories, middle class people they needed to convert to New Labour to get them in, to get 44% rather than the 36% that they had under Kinnock and Smith. Remember them? And now we have a situation where Labour is being ground down by the alienation and hostility of the indigenous population of these islands, which means the white population, largely but not exclusively of British towns and cities, particularly within England. The situation is open. The door is essentially halfway open.

Although this party is still “demonized,” it is less demonic than it ever was. It’s more semi-mainstream to mainstream than it ever was. I spoke at a meeting in Huddersfield six months ago. There were 250 people there. It was an utterly mainstream audience. Labour couldn’t get 20 people in Huddersfield. The Tories had two or three old ladies in a coffee morning in Huddersfield. The average age of a Tory activist is 67 and a half. Labour had 420,000 members before Blair came in. It’s now 220,000, and they lied to the electoral commission about their membership a couple of years ago.

These are dying political elites, but many people come up to me and say, “Why has this happened in our country since 1945?” We once ruled, in 1902, a quarter of the planet and a fifth of its population, and we were the most powerful country on Earth, and now we’re the lackey of the Americans, 14 to 15% of England is non-white. Yes, 14 to 15% of England under present the census, which is probably a partial underestimate given illegals and others, is non-white. 10, 11, 12% of the population is non-white. 17 million people enter the country every year, half of them white, half of them not. They move around, they leave. 200 million people pass through our airports and related space each year. We’ve become a transient zone. There are 6 million immigrants at least. Between 600,000 and 1.2 million of them here illegally. These are people that are settled and in a sense are now part of population.

How did they come here? They came here because the Nationality Act was passed in 1948 when 50,000 passports — that’s all — were distributed in the West Indies, Caribbean, and in the Asian subcontinent. But they then brought their families, and they brought more of their families, and they brought extended families, because liberals both by intent and by disregard didn’t realize that these cultures on the whole, West Indians excepted, had extended families. A family can be 300 people. It’s a clan. So, people come here and then they begin to create economic structures for themselves, and more people come in, and yet more people come in.

We also signed, in the wake of the Second World War, into a raft of interconnected pieces of legislation. These were called refugee, economic migrant, and asylum pieces of legislation. It was part of the Never Again culture of the immediate post-war era that Attlee’s government bought into. This means that if you are suffering oppression you can come here, and you can claim that you are seeking asylum. There are people here who are Iraqi Communists. We are now occupying Iraq, but they won’t go back, because they’re in danger of militants that we’re fighting against even though we’ve occupied Iraq. We can’t even send people back to a country that we’re occupying, because we signed bits of paper after the Second World War saying that their rights can’t be infringed.

At present, there are people at Belmarsh Prison, although many of them have sort of open access, a revolving door sort of principle, with Belmarsh. There’s 13 of them. Many of them said on tape, on their own phones, on their own emails that they want to kill British people; they want to blow up parliament; they want to assassinate the Queen, although some say she’s representative of a non-Caliphate Caliphate faith, and therefore they question that. But they want to blow up almost everybody else.

But they can’t be imprisoned, because it’s against their human rights, and they can’t be sent back to, on the whole, Algeria, because they might be tortured by the militaristic regime in Algiers and Oran. We can’t have that, so we have a memorandum of understanding between our government and them, but they get their lawyers to challenge that in the European court because we’re a part of the European Union. So, we can’t deport people that have said that they want to bomb, and when they go into court they say they want to bomb again, but we can’t deport them because their human rights could be infringed.

The Home Secretary says “Ahh I’ve got a cunning plan!? It was Blunkett’s plan, then it was Clark’s plan. Now it’s “tough-talking” John Reid’s plan. Let me tell you something about John Reid parenthetically. John Reid began in the Socialist Labour League, which was a Trotskyist party which was a forerunner of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. He now claims he’s the “hard man” of the Labour Right. Well, ho ho ho! There’s a degree to which he has introduced via Clarke his immediate predecessor, who left because of the foreign prisoners scandal that we’ll come on to in a moment, he has instituted this idea whereby people can held under 24-hour, 24/7, permanent home arrest. Their email is watched; their mobile is listened to; their terrestrial line, if there exists one, is listened to; their fax is watched, and there’s somebody typing the colloquial Arabic out into passable English to see what their saying. Da di da di da. Because most of these people are Algerian.

Why are they Algerian? Because they’re members of the Armed Islamic Group. What is the Armed Islamic Group? It’s GIA, which is the paramilitary wing of the ??? inside Algeria. There’s been a civil war going on in Algeria over the last 20 years, and over 160,000 have died. We allowed these militants to come here because the French wouldn’t have them. France was the old colonial power in Algeria. There was a deal done with these militants in the 1990s when Major was Premier. Don’t bomb here, but you can stay here even if you export what you want. But that was rescinded a couple of years ago when it is believed that Osama bin Laden said all bets are off and Britain is a target as well because they have supported the Americans and the Zionists in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq and a looming war that could be coming with Iran.

So, we have a situation where we can’t deport people who say they want to bomb us because their human rights might be infringed, and regimes that we’ve set up might infringe the rights of people, and we therefore can’t deport them. The logical thing to do, of course, would be to resile from all of these post-war liberal treaties and endorsements and codicils, and say, “We’ll make a big bonfire of all of them, and we’ll take control of our own law and the jurisprudence, which is the philosophy of law, in our own island and in our own country and in relation to our own state, and you’ll go back on the next plane, double-quick time, and if you don’t like it well there we are.”

Now let’s go on to the foreign prisoners scandal. This scandal has been going on for 20-30 years, all the time when Thatcher was talking tough and all the rest of it. The interesting thing about the Home Office is it’s an enormous department, because it consists of several in one: immigration and nationality, and prisons, and what in America would be called Homeland Security. It’s all bodged in and pushed together in one great colossus.

When Hurd, who was a sort of liberal, patrician Tory under Thatcher, became Home Secretary, in his autobiography, the first day in the department the chief civil servants said to him, “Afraid minister, you can’t do anything about crime.” He said, “Pardon?” He said, “I know you’ve got some big ideas and big things and all the rest of it, but crime is exponential, you know? It is due to inequality in society. There’s nothing we can do about it.” He said, “Look, I just got here! Don’t tell me there’s nothing I can do about it!” He said, “Well, its in the statistics. Don’t argue with me minister.” It’s Yes Minister, this sort of thing, isn’t it? “Don’t argue with me. We can’t do anything.”

Occasionally, they have spasms. Howard put quite a lot of people in prison. He chained pregnant female prisoners to beds and all this and got Widdecombe to front for it because it was controversial with the media, which is what politicians do. They get the deputy out in front when it’s difficult, and they’re hiding and all this. But still, nothing occurred, and the truth is that this will have little effect because prison is a soft option, and if you want to actually reduce crime in this society you have to do certain salient things. One is you have to look at certain areas of crime, which almost no main politician, and certainly not the David Camerons of this world, would ever go near.

A third of all crime is committed by immigrants, irrespective of race, ethnicity, and culture. A half of all crime is committed by the same number of people who go round and round and round again in the criminal justice system. It’s called recidivism. Your old man was a lad; his dad was; their auntie ran an escort agency out of a mobile phone. You know, it’s in the family. They’re used to doing it. They go round and round and round in the courts. Your first conviction at 16. You get a tagging, and you boast to your mates, “Look what I’ve got!” and this sort of thing. So, half are committed by the same people going round and round, a third is committed by immigrants, and a half of all fiscal, economic (look at your wallet), opportunistic crime is drug-related. So, you’ve got immigrants, drugs, and old lads doing it again and again and again.

So, what in my opinion we need to do is ship a large number of these immigrants out so crime will reduce. That’s point one. Point two, you need to look at drugs. Now, why do people take drugs? They take them at every level. David Cameron has refused to answer questions as to whether he may have taken cocaine when he was a student. But he was part of a set that made a lot of money in the 1990s in the cash boom, the bomb boom that occurred in the City of London when Merrill Lynch types could earn 460,000 in a year in 1994 before the big dip in the stock market at the end of the ’90s, and cocaine was part of that culture. And he won’t say that he didn’t take it, which is politician speak for the possibility of the contrary, so he’s hardly going to be too tough on drugs, is he?

The way you deal with drugs essentially is as follows: people take them because they’re bored out of their minds by the nature of this society. You have to make this society more interesting for them! You have to reintroduce things like national service. You have introduce ideas of patriotic fervor. You have to make sure that people in their recreational time do something which is constructive for the society. You have to channel the energies of people.

Another thing that you could do is random drug testing. In many American schools, particularly in black areas, but not exclusively so, when they go in through the doors they have metal detectors to take the coshes and the knives and the guns — yes, the guns! — off these gang members, because in their puffer jackets without their being filled up they’re not quite as hard as they were when they’re prancing about with these sorts of things. You do the same for drugs. You introduce random drug testing in the private, the public sector, in the military, in prisons, where drugs are actually the currency – inside prison.

And there’s another thing you can do. You take some of the key drug barons, the ones who are behind the people who are behind the people who are behind the people who stand in the streets and on the street corners in these places like Camden. I’ll tell you a fact, if you go to Camden tube station on Friday or Saturday evening, there will be five blokes that come up to you at least in a quarter hour period if you’re getting money out of a cash dispenser in a public space. This is supposed to be policed. And they’ll say, “Want any pills, mate?” And they’re not talking about aspirin. A lot of them will be Kosovars, and there will be other people.

Now, what you do is take five of them, ten of them, who have got forms as long as your arm, you find out they have a couple of murders either here or abroad, and you execute them on television. You execute them on television and you say that you’ve done it and you show it to the people. After you’ve done it you will find that the middling level of drug dealers and people who are into this culture and people who think it’s cool and people who think they can get a lot of jewelry, a lot of bling and so on out of it driving around in their cars, they will dip down very considerably.

Liberals will say it’s cruel and harsh, and you’re not respecting their human rights. But in Saudia Arabia, I know a chap who works in Saudi Arabia, and three Bangladeshis on a plane heading to Riyadh were found with drugs inside their mouths, taped inside their mouths and they were taken out, an imam was present, they were given a sharia trial, and they were beheaded in front of the airport two hours after touchdown in Riyadh. This is a key ally of the West, Saudi Arabia.

There’s a degree to which we have to toughen up in this society because at every level — in the courts, in the police, in the judiciary, in academic life, in the media — we have become softer and more reflexive and more liberal and more decadent. And there is a degree to which when a vanguard group like Muslims look at us from the outside in, they see a society which in some respects is there for the taking. They see weakness. They see the absence of a warrior society, irrespective of the stuff that gets on CNN and on international network news about what’s going on in Iraq. That’s the tough edge of the West, but internally here they see wetness. They see a population that believes in nothing. They see a population that’s mired in materialism. They see a population whose cities are changing out of all recognition.

When our men fought in 1914-’18 and 1939-’45, did they fight for the society that we are now living in? Did they fight for becoming a minority in Leicester, which has already happened if you add all the other groups together in an aggregate sum? Did they fight for the fact that Birmingham, England’s second city, will have in a finite period — could it be 5, could it be 8, could it be 13 years from now? But it will happen on present trends — a non-white majority? There are parts of London where that’s gone already where white liberals, for example, lawyers and other people, are elected by these ethnic groups to arbitrate between them because they all dislike each other up to a certain extent. They all have beefs with each other.

All Asian groups in this society come from India and the Indian subcontinent. In 1948, they committed large genocides against each other. They’ve brought all those tensions, particularly Sikhs and Muslims, here. They look at each other, and they in turn are looking at us. No one really knows what’s going to happen, because liberals have theories about life which are false.

When Blair was at college his first political act, other than being in a silly rock band and this sort of thing, was to go on an anti-National Front march. Because Blair knows what he is against far more than he could be said in some respects to know what he’s for. All these people know what they’re against and they’re against this organization pretty much and what it stands for. But if you ask them what they’re for – “Well, you know, what are we for . . . ?” Blair was asked recently, “What is Britishness?” And he said, “Tolerance.” Tolerance. Fair play. When you don’t hit the ball at cricket, snick, and it goes through to the wicket keeper, you walk. Well, I’m afraid it’s not that that’s not admirable in its way, in an old school sort of way, but that’s not what it’s about!

Britishness is about glory and power and heroic vitality, and being male or female, not some combination of the two. It’s about being proud of being white, because you have to be white to be British.

Now, in the 1960s, which of course Blair’s generation came out of, they all came out of that generation, they rebelled against their parents; they rebelled against traditional Britain; they said the family was old hat, and that men and women were interchangeable, and you didn’t need to hang criminals and you didn’t need national service. And, as Attlee said in ’48 when the Nationality Act was passed, all the races of the world all need to be mixed together because then there would be no wars. Well, I’m afraid that if you actually mix all the groups in the world there will be endless war, conflict, strife, civil disorder, mental disorder, and general unpleasantness for all, including others as well as ourselves! Because you will internalize conflicts within societies that are no longer coherent social groupings anymore — they’re just zones where people happen to be living! We’re in a sort of British part of an international zone because the whole world has come here to live.

Because capital moves around the world — a bloke in the City of London presses his thumb on a screen, 400 million dollars and pounds and Euros circle around the screens in other markets in the world. But if capital moves, labor moves. And immigration is labor because there are 6 billion humans on Earth. 2 billion are economically alright in comparison to the others, 2 billion are in the middle, 2 billion are in utter misery. Utter misery! And a significant number of the 4 billion who aren’t “in the West,” which technologically includes Japan, want out. They want to get into the West. They want a bit of this action. They want to take it for themselves. They regard others in their group who can’t or won’t do it as weedy, and they regard people who stand in their way here as something to respect if they stand up to them, but weedy if they are allowed to come in and push. They’re coming here because they want into the West.

Although a third of Pakistani men name their children Osama as one of their names, after Osama bin Laden, in a way he’s partly lost with his own group, because polling that the UN has done indicates that half of the people in “the south,” half of the people in the Third World want to come here. Not just to Britian, to the whole of the West. They want in.

But to have the lifestyle of a middle class American person – two fridges, obesity, pizzas on tap, 56 channel TV, four cars, all the rest of it – you need three worlds. You need the economic and ecological substructure of three planets, and so we’re not going to get that and, as always in life, it will not be fair, it will not be equitable, it will not beyond the remit of one’s own family and immediate circumstances be too pleasant, but in this life you need to stand for your own group. Charity begins at home! It begins in your own family and your own nationality! It’s not about hatred of the others, it’s about standing for one’s self. This is something that, in a sense, the radical Right has to learn. One of the reasons it’s never got anywhere in the United States is partly because laws haven’t been passed and people can come out with any old tosh.

What people have to understand is that we are now in a situation where just moaning about immigration and other related matters isn’t enough. The immigrants are here because of liberalism and because our leaders believe in a philosophy that allows them to come here. Everything is ideological. Gay marriage is ideological. Abortion is ideological. Not having the death penalty is ideological. Fighting in Iraq is ideological.

Blair and I disagree about the meaning of life. That’s why we’re in different parties. And if his ideas triumph our people will over time go down. They will become a minority in their own society; they will de-culturalize; they won’t be able to manifest what they are racially.

When I was at university, everyone said racial ideas are very dangerous, you know, we can’t have any of that. But what they don’t understand is that even our intellectual elite has cultural interests which are based upon race and ethnicity. Because people create spiritually out of what they are. It’s not high-faluting nonsense! If you don’t have a society which is based upon what you are, you don’t know who you are. Many of our young people wander around in a fog, in an alcohol-induced haze. They have no idea who they are. They think that British culture, English culture is Posh and Becks. They’ve been miseducated for 40 years in comprehensive schools and told almost nothing about their own culture. Blair sends his children to different schools, the sort of school I went to.

Now, these comprehensives were introduced by Left-wing idealists who said they were in favor of the working class, but they didn’t want any hierarchy, they didn’t want any exams, because people fail exams, and it’s unequal. They didn’t want any competitive sport, because it’s unduly masculine, and people who are crippled can’t compete. It’s all very sad.

Well, life isn’t like that! Life is unfair! We’re all the sons and daughters of nature. When you have a child, you walk around the ward, and there are children born without eyes and without limbs. Life is unequal and hierarchical! And liberals have developed interconnected theories about why isn’t it so and why is it not nice to say so. Well, who cares about being nice when one’s society and the existence of one’s family and when one’s future prospects are threatened?

Do you think we ruled a quarter of the world once by being nice? We had a certain grandeur; we had a certain noblesse oblige, but we were out for ourselves as a nation and a group. We had a ruling class that was snobbish, that was socially exclusive, that was inbred. But they had a bit of patriotism to them. Now there is a ruling class that has no patriotism at all, has no identification with the indigenous population at all, is ashamed to say what British culture is. If you said to Blair, “Are you proud of being white?” He’d say, “Well, you know, I don’t really want to get into that.” He doesn’t want to get into it, because he is frightened of his own people. He is frightened of his own identity. He would only come into this room with bodyguards. They go everywhere with these sorts of people, because although they say they love the Muslims, they’ve alienated them because they killed over 100,000 of them in Iraq, but they invaded the country to give them democracy. We have democracy in Birmingham, but ballot-rigging is endemic in the central areas of Birmingham to such a degree that the electoral commission said it’s like a Third World society, a banana republic in England’s second city.

People think that things can go on as they are without a political response. Well, ladies and gentlemen, this party is a political response. People have to reject Labour. When you canvas, you knock on a door, you get the eye of the person, you say, “I’m campaigning on social issues in your area.” Once you’ve got their attention, the TV fog is lifted for a moment, you’re talking to them Englishman to Englishman, Briton to Briton. You say, “I’m from the British National Party.” People come out, and grab hold of your hand, and say, “Yeah, I’m with you!” Because they are fed up with what has happened to this country and they want a change! Whether they are middle class or working class, whether they are Northern or Southern, all of our people are ultimately the same nationality. We care for them, we care for our own, and we want our culture and our state and our nation back, for us, in our own land!

Support this party, vote for it, and work for it in the future!

Thank you very much!

10,238 words

Savitri Devi in 1925

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by R. F. of Jonathan Bowden’s lecture on Savitri Devi, delivered to the 29th New Right meeting in London on, Saturday October 23, 2010 — one day after the anniversary of Savitri’s death on October 22, 1982 in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England. I have eliminated some false starts and provided corrective notes. To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” Please post any corrections — and any recollections of her concluding words, which are missing from the recording — below as comments.

Savitri Devi was born in September of 1905 and died aged 77 in 1982. Now Savitri Devi is extraordinarily radical and is amongst one of the most extreme and militant individuals that I’ve ever discussed. I’ve had talks about Julius Evola, and I’ve had talks about Friedrich Nietzsche in the past. I’ve had talks about metapolitical and cultural figures who have overlapped with the radical Right. Probably you couldn’t really begin to imagine anyone more militant than her, so I think it’s best to step back from the immediate biography and the welter of detail and look at the thing philosophically.

She was half-English, which is rarely thought or mentioned on the internet and elsewhere, and she died here en route to a provocative meeting, we’ll say, in the United States. One of the things that’s most abiding about her, and that interests me a great degree, is the degree of her intelligence. This is one of the most extraordinary things. Extremism and militancy in contemporary liberal societies are often associated in the mass mind with stupidity, or ignorance, or bigotry, and this sort of thing. This woman could speak 8 languages, read 8 languages. She had 2 Masters Degrees, one in chemistry and one in philosophy, and she had a PhD in mathematics,[1] which, given that her future career, if you like on the political margin, so to speak, mathematics is quite interesting.

But I think also cardinal for the type of radicalism/extremism she would develop later in her life and ideological course. Now, in many forms of mathematics, of course, you’re looking for X; you’re looking for what the sort of alternative middle-rank thinker Colin Wilson called Faculty X. You’ve got an equation, and you have to find X and maybe balance a particular equation, a particular quantity on either side of the equals sign. And in a sense mathematical truth is pushing prognosticated truths to the absolute limit of their efficacy. It’s the truth within the truth, beyond the truth, and at the edge of a particular dispensation of thinking.

Her idea, which may or may not have been drawn from her mathematical studies when she was a young student at the University of Lyons, was the idea that if you take various forms of equation and you make a graphic form, the idea is that the line which penetrates the circle furthest away from the arc of a circle is the point of truth, is where X is, is one way of looking at it. And the idea, that the truth lies at the most extreme part of the axis, the idea that rather than the safe middle, or the comfortable middle ground, truth is radical extremity, is something that she would essentially live through for most of her life.

Her father was French but of largely Italian descent and Greek descent, and she was strongly influenced by Greek thinking and supported Greek nationalist positions up until around the Great War when she first became reasonably politically conscious. She then moved on from that afterwards. It’s noticeable that because of her sort of mixed European ancestry—bit Greek, bit French, bit Italian, half English—she considered herself to essentially be European. And that judgment for, rather than linked, to any particular nationality or nation state, and that judgment formed early on.

Now, her first political and ideological positions were: a return to Greece, an exemplification of the Aryan culture and Indo-European culture of the ancient Greeks, a belief that the Greeks had much to tell to modern civilization. Notice this was way before any a movement or regimes formed by those movements had been formed in the 20th century. The return to Greece, the recognition of the importance of Greek thought and open-ended identity, the culture of beauty of the body, the culture of serenity, the culture of proportion and form, classicism. Very very important for her. And the belief that a pagan society should be a living identity, should actually be alive rather than tiny little groups, fringe little tendencies of opinion and identity in the Western world.

She made some radical decisions after her education basically came to an end, and one of them was to go to India where she became a Hindu and was widely associated with the Hindu nationalist movement in India and fascistic forms of the Hindu nationalist movement in the 1930s and ’40s. Now the figure of the white Hindu had certain resonances in Indian life, which are quite paradoxical and often militant and extreme.

What Western societies do in relation to 2nd and 3rd and 4th world countries about which they know nothing—whilst professing to love and adore them to the end of time—is to take leaders who can be adopted and successfully acclimatized to the norms of a particular Western establishment. Like America’s chosen leader of conscience who now has a day named after him as a public holiday in the United States, is Martin Luther King. But other leaders like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammed and these sorts of people are largely forgotten and deliberately moved to the side so that all of the light can fall upon “Dr.” King.

Similarly, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela has gone through a secular canonization whereas the Pan Africanist Congress, and militant Communist cadres within the South African ANC—militant links with terrorist organizations in the paramilitary and military wing of the ANC, Spirit the Nation—are all elided and removed.

Hindu Nationalist Politics is largely seen for westerners today through the retrospective prism of Gandhi: Gandhi’s non-violence, Gandhi’s pacifism, and Gandhi’s desire to have the British leave India, as indeed occurred in 1947 when the Raj came to an end and when the flag was hauled down by Mountbatten. But she looks for harder and more resonant individuals within Hindu nationalism.

There’s always been a Hindu fascism of course, namely the RSS. And the BJP, which certain Indians within Britain secretly behind their hands call the BNP of India, is a populist and democratic split from the RSS. It is also important to point out that all these organizations were involved in enormous and sub-genocidal communitarian violence at the end of the 1940s, when the Raj came to an end.

Her early publications were in favor of Hindu unity, and essentially a mainstream Hindu nationalist position. She later moved to essays discussing the roles of non-Hindus in India, which is always complicated in relation to a Hindu national consciousness. She knew virtually every leader of what would become post-war India. She also knew very well those Indian leaders who were pro-Axis and pro-German, of which there was a wide number.

Bose for example, and his paramilitary army, the Indian National Army, is almost not mentioned at all in British historiography of the Indian subcontinent of that time, partly because he led a militant, subcontinental IRA against British rule and allied himself with Nazi Germany and with imperial Japan against our interests. Very interestingly, in the last couple of years, documents have come to light where Bose was sentenced to death by the British cabinet, to be killed on sight by the Special Operations Executive or the SOE, if ever caught in British gunsights. Because he worried us, because he was aligned with core British statal enemies, the alleged Arab decision for Britain in 1939-1940.

The Hindu phase for Savitri Devi/Maximiani Portas, is her belief that there should be a living paganism rather than a dead one, and her belief in certain primal Hindu beliefs which are mainstream, completely mainstream in Hindu society and in the Asian subcontinent: the belief that Hinduism is a partly racial religion,  the belief that whites or partly-whites formed it; the belief—semi-mythological, to mythological, to semi-actual—to be believed in the minds of tens and tens of millions, that certain tribes came down from the Caucasus a certain number of years, thousands of years ago, millennia ago, placed a caste religion within India whereby you can’t breed with people outside the caste that you’re in. This was later to completely break down and become endlessly confused. But these elements and these tendencies—the use of the fire wheel, the worship of the sun, the belief in polytheism of the most militant sort, which has one flame possibly behind it, a sort of secret, semi-monotheism within a religion that appears to be anything but that.

Her position in Hinduism is slightly complicated and in some ways she is a perennialist, like Evola who called himself a Catholic pagan. If you want a religion as the basis of your political attitudes; if you want something that you consider to be absolute, or a system of belief; not Tony Blair saying, “These are my views, what are yours?” Not the views of contemporary politicians. If you want something that is absolute and as she conceives it, things that people will live and die for, and fight for, in real historical time, you have to have things that are above and beyond man. You have to have things of metaphysical veracity and objectivism. In where theology merges in with their philosophy, there’s this idea of metaphysical objectivism: truths that are believed to be outside man and are taken as absolutes.

The contemporary mind finds a lot of this way of proceeding and of looking at things extraordinarily difficult, not just because of the possible political and ideological and social consequences that can emerge from it, but also because of the mindset that it involves. When Evola talked about being a Catholic pagan, he basically meant that if you look into my face, you see ancient Rome. The name of his religion is Roman Catholicism, and to him he sees antiquity and the pagan world peering straight out of Christianity. Many people believe of course that Protestantism and the Protestant Reformation is the more Judaic form of Christianity within Christianity. Whereas Catholicism does retain in its architecture, in its aesthetics, in the Renaissance, certain elements of the restitution of the ancient world, which is really what people like her wanted.

The decision to become a Hindu is very very radical, and very absolutist, and at one level cuts you off from most white people, including quite white politically militant people elsewhere in the world. But one of the things that’s rather interesting about her radicalism is the divorce between how the far Right is perceived by much of the rest of the contemporary world and many of the people who’ve actually been leading individuals within it.

There is the view that the radical Right exists only against—against other groups—against groups that it blames modernity and liberal egalitarian leveling for. Against ethnic, racial, sexual, and other minorities and so on. Her view of course, is pretty much the other way round, in that these radical tendencies of opinion exist for things, and by virtue of being for things very radically, you will inevitably disprivilege and move slightly to the side that which you don’t really approve of. So there’s a degree to which her desire for an absolute culture that was non-Christian, and that was still a living culture that hundreds of millions adhered to, shows the depth of her extremity and the depth of her radicalism.

There’s also a degree to which she was very uninterested in Mussolini’s Italy, or Franco’s Spain, or Salazar’s Portugal, or movements elsewhere. There was a certain comment, and there was a certain interest, but it’s noticeable that when she later came to adopt the view that German National Socialism was the recrudescence of extreme paganism in the Western world for man then and today and tomorrow, she came to that view unerringly because her viewpoint always goes to the most extreme and the most militant option. In some ways because of her motivation is in many respects primarily religious, she’s opposed to all forms of political temporizing.

What’s called populism[2] is the desire that you meet people half way with the predilections that they already have. Radical Right parties in Europe and elsewhere go to the population after 60 years of liberal beliefs when virtually everyone has some sort of liberal belief system, no matter how marginal, even if it’s only 2% of their beliefs. Populism goes to them as a political gesture and tries to hook the individual or group concerned, and bring them in to a more rightist, traditional, perennial, authoritarian, semi-democratic, patriotic nexus, and so forth.

Her view is very much anti-political in one sense. She believes in going for the most extreme and the most radical option in all areas. If she wants to be a pagan, she becomes a Hindu; if she wants to be a pagan in political modernity, she becomes a National Socialist; if she’s a National Socialist, she supports the SS, as the most militant part of National Socialism. Always with her the most extreme, the most radical option, but not as emotional fervor—although there is a certain fervid quality to her prose that can’t be denied—but almost with a degree of mathematical logic and forethought whereby the most radical position leads logically and inescapably to all other positions.

Now, why did she reject Christianity in such a militant way? Essentially because it doesn’t accord with her nature and essentially because of her view of both ethics and natural process. When the New Right was formed, quite a few Christian people came along early, and we had an Orthodox Minister or even a bishop, I think, in the first meeting. Radical Right groups that have had a cultural struggle element such as this one. Nearly always have a split, where they’re either designated as pagan, and the Christians leave; or Christian, and the pagans leave. Or there’s an uneasy sort of co-relation between the two of them.

Now she believed in a total return to that which was before Christianity. She believes that essentially Christianity is not just a Jewish religion but a universalist faith, and she’s quite hostile to Islam as well, although later she would know certain individuals who settled in Nasser’s Egypt and who converted to Islam and were ex-members of the Freikorps and ex-members of NSDAP both in the ’30s and ’40s and going back to the Freikorps in the early l920s and late second decade of the last century. For those who are not aware, the Freikorps were of course those paramilitary organizations formed in June in defeat to prevent Bolshevik revolution spreading across the German heartline, to engage in fighting in the Baltic, and also just to impose order in a totally chaotic, defeated, hungry, and demoralized nation that had lost the first World War in human history, certainly within modernity.

So Savitri Devi’s radicalism and the religious urge which exists behind it is evident from the very beginning. Many believe that she is attempting to create a religion out of Nazism, and indeed many spokesmen on the radical Right like Revilo P. Oliver said that after the war. “I do believe that a Hitler cult is being created,” Revilo once said, “by a knowledgeable woman of Greek ancestry.” And there is a degree to which you can see part of the logic of her progression in that way.

She produced a whole series of books after she came back to Europe after the German defeat in 1945. Before she left, and in the mid- to late-’30s she married an Indian Brahmin called Mukherji. And the marriage is believed to be celibate because he was a yogic individual who believed, as ascetics do and as puritans believed in our national revolution in the 1600s, that if you deny excess or sensuality in one area you redirect that power into another area

Also Indian groups published most of her pro-Axis material after the war, when virtually nobody on earth would have published that sort of material, apart from tiny little NS networks in the United States and maybe in South Africa. Virtually no one else would have published this material. She moves from the Hindu Nationalist position of the late 1930s to adopt, after a break, a strident pro-Nationalist Socialism position.

She goes to Germany immediately after the Second [World] War in the mid- to late-’40s when Germany is in total chaos. Germany is being occupied. The eastern zone which she couldn’t particularly visit because nobody from western origination could, was under Ulbricht’s control.

The statistics vary, as all of these exterminationist cum revisionist ones do. The German parliament has declared two million Germans died as a result of the devastation after 1945. Hundreds of thousands of German women were raped by Soviet troops in the eastern zone as a direct order which came from above. Mass armies rarely engage in rape unless it’s ordered from above, or unless the restrictions upon it are ameliorated and withdrawn by an officer caste that gives approval to it. There will always be men who don’t engage in those sorts of activities of course, in any army, but if it is permitted from above, the adoption that women are part of the booty of war will take hold, particularly in a group that desires radical vengeance.

The interesting thing is that in order to stop the mass raping, which was demanded by pleas of east German communists so that they could form a state in the devastated eastern zone of Germany that was occupied by the Red Army, large numbers of men had to be shot because they had become addicted to rape essentially, and the commissars needed to re-impose order.

This doesn’t also account for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands who went through de-Nazification process, at the top of the hill and at the bottom of the hill. Lower ranking people— orderlies and people in the state and so on, people in tiny little party organizations—were let off with slaps and fines and ruined careers and sort of a political reorganization, re-imposed political correctnesses and ideological conformisms to the post-war hour.

The elite of the old party apparatus were either killed, and many were tortured, there were institutes for their torture and destruction—many which would be used against Communists later on. We had them in Berlin, long denied. They weren’t very extensive, but British armies have always used these methods contrary to the idea that we’ve never done so.

And so virtually all of the radical non-humanism which is attested against in this particular regime retrospectively was committed, directly and indirectly by Allied power in the years after 1945 through 1948. The suffering of the Germans, which was extensive, has rarely ever been revealed; the vast majority of people who are alive now have almost no knowledge of it, and rather like other defeated peoples—the white South and the Confederacy in the United States for example, much of whose history has been consigned to a sort of convenient Orwellian memory hole—few people today know anything about that; or even wish to know.

The irony is that this information is there. If you type into Google “massacres of Germans post 1945”; if you type into Google “German suffering post Second War,” masses of material comes up. The problem is not that the material is censored. The problem is that masses of the people have been taught that to even look at it is morally evil. And therefore they don’t want to look at it, and it’s as if it has not occurred. And it’s only for archival and specialist interest. It is not where one wishes to put one’s gaze.

The revelations about the post-war camps were largely because the Allies took the static photographic cameras of the newsreels of that day to the camps because they had not to show the world the devastation of the German cities. These beautiful cities all over Germany—north, west, south, and east—that were totally obliterated and totally bulldozed. Destroyed more than Grozny by Russian power. Whole cities and towns devastated, and people lived in the rubble for years after 1945.

An old friend of mine, the elitist and non-humanist intellectual Bill Hopkins, served with the RAF after the war as a sort of national serviceman in Hamburg in 1948. His wife is German. They had to pitch the RAF camp outside of Hamburg in the summer because of the stench of the bodies under the rubble. Because the smell of the corpses was so nauseating, they couldn’t have the camp inside the city.

Eventually, of course, what the Germans would do—and the German economic miracle of the post-war period—which sees the emergence of an economic superpower and a political castrato and pygmy, that is frightened even of its own shadow, in contemporary Germany is rooted in these events. Don’t forget many Germans had seen their society smashed to pieces twice: in 1918 and in 1945-46. So it’s a sort of double whammy.

Now you know why Germans don’t want to put their fighters into Afghanistan and elsewhere. It’s not because they’re cowards and worriers and are afraid. It’s because they, in a sense, have lost the spirit that was destroyed in certain respects in 1945.

The Jewish New York writer Norman Mailer once said that the real victims of the Second World War are the Germans. And not the group, his own group, that’s always talked about. And spiritually someone like Savitri Devi would have agreed with that, because it appears to me as an outsider—despite the Germanic nature of English identity in part—that Germany is self-lost, self-loathing, self-defeating, self-defeated. There’s probably no nationality that hates itself more in life than the contemporary Germans.

There are many films about the Left-wing terrorism that emerged out of the ’60s and ’70s generation, which is seen as a revenge upon the fathers. Waves of hatred of young Germans directed against older and more elderly Germans because of what they did, or more accurately couldn’t be said to have done during the war.

The irony is that Savitri Devi is such an extremist that she identifies even with the SS prisoners. Even SS prisoners who weren’t in the Waffen-SS, but served in the camps. She regarded those as heroes of anti-humanist struggle. People outside time, beyond good and evil, struggling against titanic forces, and going down gloriously and being martyred thereby.

This is essentially a religious view. A powerful and primordial religious view. I see no logical connection, but I sense this. In Shia Islam, there is a ceremony where people beat themselves and mutilate their foreheads and this sort of thing, and it’s a threnody and a paroxysm. And, in a way, she considers these sorts of political movements to be the white equivalent of that. That’s how she sees it. The powerful primordial tragedy of the ancient world returned with modern technology in modernity. And that’s why, in a sense, her passion for the most hated regime in the 20th century, as commonly perceived, is primordial and against time.

She went to Germany and distributed handbills almost in a desire to get arrested. A couple of thousand largely [unintelligible] style leaflets of a pro­Axis and pro-restorationist and pro-Hitlerian type, and she was immediately arrested and tried and sentenced to four years I think. But ultimately served the better part of two under the allied controlled area.[3]

Don’t forget, the French, the Germans, and the Americans occupied one sector, and the Soviets the other, and they were already splitting into two entities. As the West moved towards the institutionalization of a secondary political class in Germany, led by mild technocratic administrative conservatives like Adenauer who erected the post-war set-up dominated by American power.

Don’t forget, there are large British bases and even larger American bases in Germany today. Germany is still partly an occupied country that can’t entirely be trusted. Even within the EU, even bound in so much, it still can’t entirely be trusted. Although the West in a way wants a democratic Germany to be strong with them in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. But Germany is paralyzed and spiritually defeated by what occurred in the aftermath of 1945.

Now German suffering at the end of the war is not seen by Savitri Devi in the way that it normally is. You do sense by liberals you have a sympathy for the other side, such as James Bacque in his books about German suffering at the end of the Second World War. He in a way is playing a humanist game. It’s just he has a new section of victims: German women, German children, people who suffered in the rubble.

In a sense, he feels sorry for them in the way he feels sorry for legless Angolans, or he feels sorry for African AIDS victims, or he feels sorry for the victims of Cortez or for the Haitian earthquake. You see what I mean? It’s a new group about which one can have sympathy, and I can write and make a career out of sympathizing for those who were regarded as untouchable before, and I’m a general humanist.

She sees it very differently. She sees it as a suffering and a fire and a threnody which Germans should go through until they can renew themselves again in strength and in glory.

And this leads her in her most famous, infamous, and notorious book, The Lightning and the Sun, to essentially engage in the deification of Hitler. A truly extraordinary situation if you consider the mass narrative of the post-war world in the 20th century. She basically inverts the semiotics. She inverts the narrative of the 20th century. The greatest villain, the greatest evildoer, the greatest hatemonger, the greatest monster, and she turns him into an avatar of the god Vishnu and says he’s divine, and he’s beyond human.

Because in the Hindu aristocratic and warrior tradition there are men of impersonal violence. Titans who walk the earth, who walk beyond good and evil, and are unrestrained, whose cruelty and ardor are impersonal, non-material, for idealistic purposes, and is never done for human gain or for their own gain, or for that of their families and their tribes except in the most indirect of ways. So you sense the extremity of her passion in this way.

In some ways she synthesizes religious ideas together that were quite new in certain respects and are rooted in her view of nature.

What’s the difference between paganism and Christianity? Is it the worship of polytheistic gods? Many pagans actually believe there is one source, and the gods and goddesses are metaphors. Pagans believe everything that exists is divine, in all of the systems. This means that destruction is divine, as well as creation. It also believes that femininity is divine, and therefore there is no problem with the masculine-feminine polarity in all things. There are priestesses in these religions, there are goddesses in these religions, because they’re half of what it means to be mortal.

All humans die, go back into eternity, go back into nature, come again. Everything comes again. If we’re evolving it’s very slow, and on the whole, evolution is the advance of a tiny proportion ahead of the others who can barely keep up.

Now, ethically most pagan systems are very different. Paganism tends to believe in retributive violence. It tends to believe that if you push me I’ll push you back. It tends to believe even in violence and aggression as the forethought before being attacked oneself. It tends to have an honor-based system whereby morality is perceived hierarchically. So the more noble you are, the more beautiful you are, the more intelligent you are, the more well-proportioned you are, the more knowledgeable you are, the more courage you have, the more favored you are by the gods. The higher you are in a particular hierarchy. This of course have a converse: the uglier you are, the shorter you are, the less well-favored you are, the less courageous[4] you are, the more defective you are, the lower you are in this particular hierarchy.

This does not mean in accordance with these very ancient precepts that the lower element is cast off or done in or massacred or done down. What it means is that there is a hierarchy in all forms, both within an individual, between individuals, between families of individuals, between groups of individuals—the hierarchy is everywhere, and no one’s at the top in every[5] one of the myriad hierarchies.

Notice in all of this discussion, money and finance and how well you’ve done and how much money you’ve got, is way way down in the scale. And mercantile and purely successful forms are not despised because they’re part of the whole. Every society has to have a merchant class. Every society has to have a small bit of trade and banking and so on.

But the worship of money and the belief that life is based upon making money, is the inverse of her view, and for most of her life she lived as an ascetic. In other words she lived almost without any property at all and just stayed in the houses of some of the most notorious people on earth at that time. Some of them living in Egypt, some of them living in Paraguay under General Stroessner, some of them in Perón’s Argentina. Rudel, Johann von Leers—who I believe converted to Islam—Otto Skorzeny, and these sorts of people. They were all her friends, and she lived with them in Madrid, and she visited them in the United States later on.[6] And she travelled all over the world on multiple passports, because she could use Savitri Devi, she could use Mukherji, she could use her mother’s maiden name. She could use her Greek nationality. Increasingly she became banned from country after country.

After the publication of The Lightning and the Sun, I believe she wanted to visit John Tyndall, who’s widely known of course. He was essentially the founder of the British National Party. John Tyndall, who was in the National Socialist Movement a long time ago, was an old friend of hers. He used to say: “They just want to keep out a little inoffensive Greek lady who is a friend of mine.” But in actual fact it was Savitri Devi really, you know. But that’s what he used to say to the BBC when they came asking.

Now, in Germany she was imprisoned, and she wrote a book called Gold in the Furnace [and Defiance], about the treatment meted out to her, and to the other prisoners, and the demoralization of the German people post-war. There’s a mass of Germans adopted a self-forgetting strategy for the Second [World] War. In the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s, some of them pricked by the growing Left-wing revolutionism in Germany among student minorities. The older generation blanked it out and concentrated solely on the rebuilding of the society, and everything was rebuilt. If you go to Germany now, you’d never know that American bombers devastated whole sections of cities—although most of the bombing was done by the RAF—deliberately so.

Indeed as the war progressed, our Air Force became more and more militant, and more and more ferocious. Our crews were told “Remember Coventry, remember Southampton.” Extraordinary warriorship was shown. In Nietzsche’s terms, you never condemn the warrior. The men like Harris and so on, covered with hands of blood, and so on. But show me figures in any nationality they were not like that. David Irving met Harris after the war, of course, and in some ways thought he was a fine warrior, a bulwark, a man who wants to virtually destroy and rend for his people. Not the image the English have of themselves.

Fifty-thousand of our air crew died in the air. Unlike the Serbs and the Iraqis, the Germans were able to fight back against this mass terror bombing, and killed an enormous number of the pilots who went over, many of whom didn’t survive three to four missions in the air.

But on the ground, hundreds and hundreds of thousands were killed, and incendiaries were deliberately used to create firestorms due to the wind that was created in these cities. In Hamburg and in Dresden, most famously, which still causes a quiver of conscience in contemporary liberal England and Britain. “Dresden” is a naughty and a dangerous and a dark word, and there is an almost a semi-apology on the British lips for Dresden—but not quite.

Stalin ordered Dresden. He ordered Churchill to take these primitive means. There were mass refugees in these cities. He wanted them completely killed and burnt out by the creation of mass firestorms and devastation. The interesting thing is Speer in his autobiography, says that if the British and the Americans had concentrated on ball-bearing production, or economic and high value industrial targets, they could have ended the war from their point of view quicker. But no, the decision was made to devastate urban and suburban and city center areas. Not just a few bombs, but total flattening, total devastation of these areas. And when areas were not smoldering enough, when the photos were taken, you went back and smashed the area to pieces again, and you put incendiaries on top to make sure it burnt, and good and proper.

When Dresden occurred there was outrage in the non-aligned world. In Latin America, sympathetic to the Axis of course, because of the hostility, geopolitically to the United States, and also in the Arab world. And there’s an interesting thing that occurred which Irving reveals in his book Dresden: Apocalypse 1945—the later and the earlier editions—this is that the cabinet, the war cabinet, which was Tory, Labour, and Liberal, don’t forget, tried to force responsibility for Dresden onto the RAF High Command. But they, in their excessive zeal to conduct the war in the air against the Axis, the idea which Orwell uses in Nineteen Eighty-Four of Airstrip One, that Britain is an unsinkable aircraft carrier to devastate Europe, flying bomber after bomber from our territory. The RAF were going to be blamed by the political elite. The RAF leadership made the politicians sign a declaration that they had ordered Dresden and that they were responsible for it, because the warriors will not take the responsibility for ordering these things. They were acting on behalf of the political class in most Western societies.

And the interesting thing is that the devastation of middle Europe, which is part of the current malaise and part of the modern crisis that we all live in, and that exists around us, is the crucial issue for our civilization in the 20th century. What it’s led to is self-hatred and cosmic and spiritual defeat on almost all levels. Caucasians, broadly speaking, are taught to loathe themselves almost more than any other group, and there’s a degree to which it all results from these events.

The 20th-century version of what Joseph Conrad in relation to the scramble for Africa in the Belgian occupation of the Congo called “The Heart of Darkness.” The heart of darkness in the 20^th-century is these events. And Savitri Devi went straight into that heart of darkness by religious-ising, by hypostatizing, by making an absolute of the things which are considered to be the worst elements in the modern West.

The modern West is now defined by tolerance, by inclusion, by egalitarianism, by hostility to everything that those previous governments represented. That is the definition of citizenship. That is the definition of personal morality. That is the definition of modem Britain. The political class and the media class of today would say that anyone who does not accord with that, is actually a traitor, not to a particular ideology but to humanity, and to the mainstream, and common mean of what it is to be human.

This shows you that many people will not assert themselves if they believe that assertion to be wrong. Millions and millions of our people don’t agree with what’s happened to this country since 1948, but they feel traumatized about doing anything about it because of the aftermath of these events, and how they’ve been formed into a narrative in relation to almost everyone who grows up now.

I had a chat once with a 26-year-old who’d been to Hackney, a comprehensive in Hackney where the whites are about 50%. I said: What did you do in History? He said: We did black studies and slavery; we did the Holocaust and the Shoah and Western guilt; and we did a bit about British History—sort of residual third. So increasingly large parts of western populations—and it’s more acute in Germany than anywhere else and spreads out from the center of Europe—grow up with funk, defeat, self-hatred, the belief that one is descended from nationalities that are amoral, that are immoral, that have produced the most satanic events of the 20th century. No other nationality feels this way. No other people feels this way.

Putin’s partial, complicated, and revisionistic reinterpretation of Stalin is all about making sure that the Russians don’t adopt that tack. Even though he massacred millions of Russians, inside Russia he will still be slightly heroicized as a martial leader, whilst allowing Solzhenitsyn’s works to be studied at school. What they’re doing is dialectical. They’re not allowing their past to focus upon them in the way that the Western media would perhaps like them to, and say: Look at what you did! Look at what you should be responsible for! You should hang your head in shame forever.

And it’s interesting that probably of all the nationalities, there’s few Italians indeed who are fundamentally opposed to the government which existed in the ’20s and thereafter, who feel about their own nationality and the pitilessness of their own honor and glory, the way that contemporary Germans do. Most of the contemporary Germans I met—apart from hardliners and residual anti-system types if you like—are traumatized by guilt, live with the guilt in a sort of cosmic way.

The Germans have a strong metaphysical postulate. They’re not empiricists and semi-relativists like us. They don’t think heuristically. They don’t make it up as they go along. A German always wants his theory first, and then he thinks from the theoretical propositions in a sequential way. And if you put before a people the view that they were right to be defeated, and that the fire-storms of their cities were in a sense part of their immorality of purpose for which almost semi-divine punishment was meted out—which is some of the cultural register that does exist—you will find that a growing generation, one, two, three generations of people who loathe their own civilization to such a degree that a few of them will take arms against it. Which is what Baader­ Meinhof and the other groups were. They were people taking up arms against their own civilization, from within it, in accordance with doctrines that they had been fed in relation to the aftermath of the last war.

Now Savitri Devi’s basic political books are The Lightning and the Sun, which deals with three historical figures: Genghis Khan, Akhnaton, and Hitler. She sees the one as a man of peace and the sun. Another as a warrior and a killer without any greater idea. And Hitler as a sort of a god and a devil combined. As a sort of superman, outside history. He is against time. He is sort of inhuman. He’s considered as something semi-divine.

The irony, of course, is that is how he’s perceived in Western culture. The number of films, the number of plays, the number of ideas that feed on him, retrospectively, as a sort of force; as a force of negation. As a force of anti-divinity. Because of course, in a dualist system evil is very powerful, and the idea of the diabolical is extraordinarily provocative and interesting. And he is presented in diabolical colors. Indeed, there is nothing more diabolical. So in a way her configuration, and her spiritual cosmogony, and that which has occurred, are identical in the way that a photographic negative and a photographic image, a positive, is the same image reversed, the one from the other. She has the absolutist view, albeit in reverse, of the contemporary society about him and his dictatorship.

Virtually no one else in the rest of the world who has lived under Mao, who has lived under Ho-chi Minh, who has lived under Choibalsan in Mongolia (Stalin’s protégé), who has lived under Stalin, who has lived under Pol Pot: none of them have the view of their own nationality demonically transfigured and embodied by one individual in the way that the Germans do. And in a sense their attitude toward their own re-education and indoctrination post-war is religious. They had a pre-war adoration of him and his regime that was semi-religious. And they have a post war diabolical instantiation and demonization of the very same things which is almost semi-religious, both ideologically and in its fervor, and in its ability to affect people.

I certainly believe that the West will never revive until these events are internalized and overcome. Nietzsche talks about “self-over-becoming.” The idea that you take pain, and loss, and grievance, and agony, and you supplant it, and you rise above it. And you take it into yourself wash it, and turn it around, and step through it and beyond it. It’s a warrior attitude essentially applied to civic, mental, and other factors. The only reason that we are, as a culture, in the state that we’re in, is because of the way in which we think, have been taught to think, and the morality that most of our people have imbibed.

Our people could be incredibly strong, and incredibly militant, if they stepped forward out of the quagmire of moral guilt about events, which, is paradoxical now, extend way beyond Germany. The irony is that the entire West has partly indoctrinated itself to feel responsible for things which people in certain nationalities—British nationality for example, Russian nationality (not the same), American nationality—have no physical responsibility for, and even destroyed retrospectively, the governments alleged to be responsible for these actions. So you have this strange situation where the United States has enormous, quasi-religious memorials to the Shoah which are quite theological and sort of theophanic.

I was in Miami about this time last year, and there are enormous memorials to the Shoah in Miami. Enormous memorials! The hand in the center of Miami with the bodies falling from it—which is the Shoah memorial—is as big as a quarter of Trafalgar Square and is a place of worship, sort of reverse worship. It’s not just a tourist icon and something that’s been stuck there. It is a symbol of ontological malevolence in our times before which all must kneel. All know the presence of malevolence and death when they see this. And there’s another memorial which we don’t see actually, which is actually somewhere else, I think down near the beach, with twisted figures and sort of nautical names on a black sort of plinth, which is rather like the memorial to the Vietnam Dead in Washington, DC. And these exist for a purpose. That sort of philo-Semitism and self-hatred is virtually semi-religious.

It’s interesting that it’s so acute in a Protestant society, like the contemporary United States, but maybe it’s been concretized in that society, but it exists elsewhere, everywhere. It exists in the minds of the people who defeated Germany. They are responsible as well. It’s left national borders and it’s become sort of cosmic, and it’s what I call the cloud: It’s the cloud that appears: the cloud of knowing rather than unknowing to readapt to sort of idealistic religious text. And it falls upon virtually all Caucasians and to a certain extent certain other groups just outside us like a pall. It falls upon us like a miasma, like a sort of moral hectoring and semi-plague. It’s only when it’s corrosively dealt with that we will revive, because if we remain beholden to this . . .

And there are signs that the onus is beginning to leave us as these events are more and more historicized. You can sense that some of the things made about these events have a shudder running through them. They’re not revisionist films in any sense. They’re not revisionist books in any sense. But you notice that some of the quasi-religious passion stirred by the Second [World] War are dying as the generation that fought it dies out. More complicated and reflexive and artistically truthful presentations of Germans in struggle during the last war. More complicated presentations of Allied actions during that war. In other words, not presented purely as a crusade against evil.

The truth of the matter is, is that the great unknown guilty consciousness in our own society is we should have made peace in 1941. We should have allowed it. We should have turned towards ourselves and towards our empire, which is essentially have taken the deal that in a roundabout sort of way he was basically offering us: which is that he dominated Europe and we kept the Empire.

After the war a few figures: A. J. P. Taylor—yes and no; David Irving—yes; Maurice Cowling—yes; Professor Charmley—yes, a few people, most of them historians, not all, have said these things, but no politician will say them. No politician will say them. And yet everything about this society has been semi-blitzed and destroyed as a result of the choices that were made then, and the morality that’s been erected upon the nature of the choices that were both made and not made then.

The importance of someone like Savitri Devi is her extremism, because she is unafraid. She was disappointed that she wasn’t given the death penalty for distributing these handbills in Germany, because you see, she’s a martyr! It’s a sensibility that in a sense, people are so far away from now, they can’t even begin to understand essentially.

Robespierre and these Leftists at the end of the 18th century had a streak of it. Robespierre was always talking about martyr me, martyr me, if you don’t agree. And of course eventually they dragged him to the guillotine, and he went down, and the head went in the basket, and his brother who had a broken jaw from a bullet, and so on, he went down under the basket as well, with Couthon, Saint-Just, and the other terrorists.

But this feeling, that one is even prepared to die for a cause—beyond warriorship, which is partly paid mercenary work now—doesn’t exist. It virtually doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s truly extraordinary, and in some ways it takes an outsider like her: a woman who goes to India, and becomes a Hindu, and rejects Christianity, who’s a fundamentalist pagan. Notice how many British she’s crossed in relation to Western normalcy just to do all that. It’s almost the energy that that sort of arcane and slightly occultistic path of extremity will lead you to, that allows a woman like this to adopt these sorts of positions.

I think the reason why a lot of these elderly SA and SS and Wehrmacht and bureaucratic people who’d served the government and other allies in other countries who felt totally demoralized and totally dispirited and totally crushed many of them post war. Many of them were the pariahs. The pariahs of pariahs of post-war life. What they say in her—and she was an outsider really, even in relation to them—what they saw in her was somebody who defended them morally. That’s why they responded to this little Greek woman in the way that they did. Because she defended them morally when they were regarded as the worst people of all. And that’s probably the extraordinary thing: that she affected this sort of ethical reversal. Because what’s gone on is more than propaganda.

Enormous propaganda now about Iran in the Western media, you see it everywhere. What are doing with those plants under the mountains? Are they a threat to us? We need to take action. Neutrality is objective traitorousness. We need to take action. Blair said at the Chilcot Inquiry that any country that worries us, any country that sort of causes us concern, we must crush it, crush it down with mass bombing and American power and we’re their auxiliary.

This rather shakes liberals, you know, because people like Blair is a believer. Blair is a believer in this liberal system, and that’s why the taint of immorality, the taint of political Satanism, the taint of evil has been projected onto people who have radically European views.

The analytical and psychological school that gentile Europeans like more than Freudianism is Jung’s theories because they’re more artistic, more reflexive, more appropriate to gentile consciousness. As Freud once said, “He’s the most important man in the psychoanalytical movement because he’s the only one who isn’t a Jew.” And Jung’s theories involve the idea of the shadow. The shadow is the negation that you project onto the other. The other becomes the custodian of all immorality. Not me. Not me. The other, the one over there, the wretch over there, not me! I admit I’m not a saint.  I’m—you know—united. I know what’s what! But there, him, them over there. The projection of the shadow and the inability to realize that we all cast a shadow, and therefore that we all have one of our own.

One of the great traumas of the 19th and 20th centuries of course, is the absence of an alliance between Britain and Germany, which, if it would have occurred, would have changed the whole world, just as the victory of the Confederacy in the Civil War in the United States would have certainly changed the whole world and the 150 years that we’ve been through subsequently.

When Joseph Chamberlain was colonial secretary in the 1890s he wanted a treaty or a binding agreement with Germany, so that they would essentially and over time become the overwhelming power on the European continent, and they would have to concordats with France to one side and Russia to the other, because that’s the reality of Realpolitik. But we would have our empire to the side of it. And possibly with the Americans in an isolationist mode, the sort of Charles Lindberg version of the United States rather than the Bill Clinton version of the United States, the US could have remained a power in the Americas, which is their natural role.

Britain, America keeping to its business, essentially in the Caribbean and the generalized Americas, Germany dominating Europe. No First [World] War, no Second [World] War, and no version of the society that we have now. That was something that was postulated by British leaders like Chamberlain, again an outsider and an establishment radical who comes from the liberals, and yet in some ways was more energized and Right-wing than many of the Tories with whom he was associated. If these ideas had prevailed, the present travail would have not occurred.

Savitri Devi is important to me for two reasons. One is that she says that the people who are thought to be the most immoral on earth, in contemporary jargon and argot, may not be. And she provides philosophical and theological reasons for that. And even if you don’t agree with that—as many of our people would not—there’s a secondary position: and that is that the culture of self-hatred and funk and defeat must come to an end.

If you look at many young white people now, they’re interested in nature. They’re interested in ecology. They’re interested in animals, even animal rights, of which she was an early advocate, being a Hindu of course. She didn’t believe is using fur. She didn’t believe in eating meat, or eggs, or fish. She was absolutist. As Hitler was. All vivisection was banned in Germany, and the most green and ecological laws were just passed. Business had to obey them. They were just passed. There was no discussion. And they worked around them, you know, as businessmen always do. But primordial green laws were passed. Enormous forests were planted around German cities and so on.

The interesting thing is the emergence of the Green movement in post-war Germany which tacked culturally to the Left. Because communism can’t exist in West Germany, because there’s an invidious communist state in East Germany. So Leftism takes a Green form in West Germany. And yet, Green ideas are not Left wing. Deep Green ideas, as they’re called, are primordial and pagan (with a small “p”) and very very Right wing.

She wrote a book called the Impeachment of Man which is—again, because she’s always so extreme—one of the most extreme vegetarian—she wasn’t a vegan, technically—but quasi-vegan works that you could ever imagine.

I remember once, when I was 18, sitting and watching a film called Animal Auschwitz, which is a film by the Animal Liberation Front. It’s an illegal film; it’s an underground film. Animal Liberation Front was formed in relation to a book called Animal Liberation by the Jewish university professor from Australia called Peter Singer. Which is a totally other debate, and we won’t get into that.

But the interesting thing about the ALF is that I think the ALF was formed by Ronnie Lee from Leeds, or he was certainly instrumental in creating it. Or one of its leaders, because they were anarchist thing and didn’t have a structure of leadership formally. And he said that fascists or extreme Rightists were welcome in the Animal Liberation Front as long as they didn’t bring their politics into it. Which is a sort of strange way of putting it, really. But everyone knows that in those movements, in those alternative and counter-cultural verities, there are interconnected Right wing ideas.

One of her most interesting attitudes towards National-Socialism is the belief that there are two forms of it. There’s the exoteric form that the masses understand, which is a particular group that’s responsible for postmodernity, and one doesn’t like in an a priori way. Certain attitudes toward nature, hierarchy, militarism, extreme patriotism, semi-worship of the state, that the nation and the state are considered to be contiguous, hostility to Modernism in art, Green ideas, and so on. Those are the views that when they are viewed in a very negative way, the present anti-fascist society has: it’s all negative. They don’t like persons of color; they don’t like homosexuals; they don’t like this, they don’t like that; they read genesis and disgenesis, da, de, da, de da.

She also believes or posits the idea that there as an inner version. And that is the achievement of something that’s beyond man as he presently is. And this is the idea of the Superman.

Now, various academics such as Goodrick-Clarke have expatiated at great lengths about the occult roots of National Socialism and pagan and magical ideas, irrationalist ideas, objectivist philosophical ideas which are theological and regarded as irrational by contemporary modernity.

Don’t forget, these sorts of notions act upon the will. Bernard Shaw, the Left-wing Nietzschean and playwright at the beginning of the 20th century and Fabian idealist, said that a man with a crucial idea is worth 50 other men. And essentially that is the fact.

The reason the Islamic world is so strong now, and the reason that some whites, even underneath their hostility, have an attraction to it, is because people are prepared to believe and to kill and die for their beliefs. And that gives a power; it gives a power; it gives a resonance.

When Blair says that we’re prepared to fight for tolerance—I’m not prepared to fight for tolerance. But I’m prepared to fight for the people that existed on this island before me. And I’m alive now, and I’m a continuation of that. So one is prepared to fight for certain things and not for others. And I think that will, identity, spirit, and idealism in a woman who will be considered to be essentially insane by mainstream modernity—I mean let’s not beat about the bush—is very instructive, because in her sort of messianic post-sanity there lies a redemptive element.

I’ve always been an extremist, ever since I was very young, and that’s quite unusual. My father was a bank manager. I came from a very ordinary bourgeois background. When I was 18 he said: “Keep your head down, son. Never get in the papers. Never do anything that will cause any trouble. Never do anything that will cause people to dislike you, and spend your entire life making money.” That was the advice I was given. And I’m not demonizing him; he’s a representative of thousands and thousands of other people saying exactly the same thing. And I have never believed that that’s what life is about. I’ve never believed that that’s what life is about.

Life is about death. I’m essentially a religious person in an atheist age. The religions of my society have collapsed. That’s why I’m a Nietzschean, you see, because you begin to rebuild from yourself, because there’s nothing else left. There’s nothing else left. And with somebody as extreme as her–even I don’t concur with necessarily all of their views–the power and the purity and the obsessionality of her religious belief in the redemption of this civilization is very instructive, and very revealing, and is a sort of moral dynamite in comparison to everything that’s taught in every school and every college and every university now.

I’ll leave you on this thought. Remember that film, that French film about the men who carry the nitroglycerine across the desert—Wages of Fear—and the slightest bump and the slightest crevice, and there’s some tiny pittance of a wage for doing this you know, for some pitiless boss who never really appears. And they’re there in the sun and the heat and the dust. And the slightest thing can cause the thing to blow up. They’ve got the courage to go on because they must go on, because to stop is to be defeated by the thing, and it might go off then anyway. And you keep on going, and you keep on pushing.

And I personally think that she’s a redemptive sort of acid or alkaline solution to reverse it, to everything you’ve been taught, and everything that your history teacher said to you at pre-A level. And everything you see on the BBC. Her sort of work is like watching the news on the BBC, attacking the TV with a hammer, then attacking the cathode-ray oscilloscope inside the TV—pre sort of those ones that you hang on the wall—and then seeing that blow up, and then kick the cathode-ray oscilloscope round the garden. And then getting some boffin in to reconstitute it in a totally rewired and completely different way.

As if the Germans just didn’t conquer the Channel Islands but had actually won the war. You turn on the set again after having smashed it and gone through this extraordinary sort of convoluted process of reorganization. And you sit there, and you watch the news, and there’s a bloke in a German uniform, and you go: “What is going on?” And that’s the sort of kinetic, sort of silent film, sort of Eisenstein in reverse that she creates. It’s like the coldest of cold baths after liberal wetness and warm-heartedness for so many years. You know, it is a redemptive tonic.

There are various fringe groups about which academics like Goodrick-Clarke make a good career postulating that, you know, the eclipse of the sun is a new swastika, and there’s a dark sun, and these groups are out there, and she’s their priestess, and she’s a source of semi-worship for them, and so on. And if you go on You Tube there’s pictures of her and accounts of her speeches and writings and so on that call her a Daughter of the Black Sun.

But she is very, very interesting, because she has taken the tiger by the tail and twisted it around. And if you want to morally shock the people who are alive now don’t introduce them to Tarantino’s films. Don’t introduce them to Sarah Young’s pornography. [Introduce them to Savitri Devi, Daughter of the Black Sun.][7]

Notes

1. Savitri’s Ph.D. was in Philosophy, but her dissertation was on the philosophy of mathematics.

2. Bowden is using “populism” to mean something like what is called in nationalist circles “mainstreaming.”

3. Savitri was sentenced on April 5, 1949 to three years in prison, but she was released on August 18, 1949 at the request of the Nehru government in India.

4. Replacing “cowardly.”

5. Replacing “any.”

6. Savitri never visited the United States or Paraguay, although she was en route to the United States when she died.

7. The last words are cut off, but I have provided the gist of the conclusion.

145 words

Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Ed. Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies
Foreword by Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999
190 pages

Paperback: $17

Standardbearers seeks to root the contemporary New Right in the British past by collecting 20 essays by 15 authors on British figures of enduring Right-wing significance. See Margot Metroland’s review, “The Search for a Usable Past,” here.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1–Henty (Eddy Butler)
Chapter 2–Penney (Mike Oldsea)
Chapter 3–Buchan (William King)
Chapter 4–Disraeli (Eddy Butler)
Chapter 5–Burke (Ralph Harrison)
Chapter 6–Wilson (Adrian Davies)
Chapter 7–Blatchford (David Reynolds)
Chapter 8–Bonar Law (Adrian Davies)
Chapter 9–Belloc (Jeremiah Wilkes)
Chapter 10–Carson (Ralph Harrison)
Chapter 11–Chesterton (Jeremiah Wilkes)
Chapter 12–Chamberlain (Adrian Davies)
Chapter 13–Bax (Peter Gibbs)
Chapter 14–Powell (Sam Swerling)
Chapter 15–Morris (Tom Garforth)
Chapter 16–Johnson (Derek Turner)
Chapter 17–Palmerston (Steve Smith)
Chapter 18–Keynes (Mike Oldsea)
Chapter 19–Salisbury (Steve Smith)
Chapter 20–Hopkins (Jonathan Bowden)

Paperback: $17

Enoch Powell

1,659 words

Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies.
With a Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999

Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. Whether or not it really exists, contenders keep trying to fill it.

The most recent is Nigel Farage’s UKIP, which officially backs a program of ultra-Tory economic nationalism (anti-EU) but now finds that its main appeal is really to regional anti-immigration Labour voters.[1]  Sir Oswald Mosley tried to strike a middle way with his Union Movement in the 1950s and ’60s, but that venture was doomed (of course) because Mosley means not-mainstream.

The Monday Club in the Conservative Party seemed to fill the gap well for a good long while in the 1960s-’80s: it opposed Kenyan independence, supported Rhodesia, opposed nonwhite immigration, and generally took a staunchly nationalist, anti-Left stance on the things that mattered. However, the experience of Thatcherism and Political Correctness in the ’80s and ’90s pushed the Monday faction into a kind of dotty irrelevance (“I really cannot bear the Monday Club. They are all mad . . .” wrote Alan Clark in his diary)[2], until the Party finally cut ties to the Monday Club in a “purge of rightwing extremists.”[3][4]

The volume at hand, Standardbearers, seems to have been assembled in the late 1990s to help forge a new middle-way Rightism. It was the early Tony Blair years. The Conservatives were in the wilderness, in thrall to Political Correctness, and the respectable Right had lost its way. Tony Blair had a way of dismissing his opponents’ arguments by describing them as “the past.” As Antony Flew describes in the Foreword:

[A]t the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Edinburgh in 1997 everything traditionally Scottish was out. No Scottish regiment marched up the Royal Mile with its band playing. Instead the visiting ministers were shown a video announcing: “There is a new British identity,” and displaying pop stars and fashion designers.[5]

This corrective to national amnesia and Cool Britannia is not a collection of political tracts. It doesn’t assail broad issues of race and culture, or ride obscurantist hobbyhorses about IQ standard-deviations or Austrian Economics, or explain how Free Markets are the backbone of a Free Society. It has no specific axe to grind. It is merely an old-fashioned collection of profiles of eminent men, in the manner of Plutarch or Strachey or JFK. If it has any overarching objective, it that of moral rearmament by finding a usable past. The writers look at discarded national aspirations, and take a keen look at half-forgotten or misremembered Englishmen from the 18th century onward.

G. A. Henty

We begin by rehabilitating the spirit of national and imperial greatness, and this is done with studies on G. A. Henty and John Buchan (by Eddy Butler and William King, respectively). The first was the originator of the “ripping yarns” genre of derring-do and imperial adventure that filled Boys’ Own type of magazines in the latter 19th century and had enormous influence on popular and serious literature. Kipling’s fiction, and Buchan’s, and even some of Hemingway’s and Orwell’s, derive in part from Henty.

John Buchan’s influence in turn is even more marked today because Buchan (journalist, speechwriter, and at one point Governor-General of Canada) wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was the ur-espionage thriller, giving rise both to the novels of both John LeCarré and Ian Fleming. Thus, George Smiley and James Bond both have their roots in the high noon of the late 19th century British Empire. Though the memory of that Empire has been derided as something embarrassing for the past 60 or 70 years, its ultimate product, Mr. Bond, still stands, exciting and new.

John Buchan

The book’s authors find nationalism flowering in odd places. There is a short, fascinating essay called “Bax” by Peter Gibbs, and while it initially appears to be a tribute to the 20th century orchestral composer Sir Arnold Bax, it quickly moves on to a kind of rhapsody to exemplars of English (or “British”) national culture. Two whom Gibbs prizes the most are the composer Ralph Vaughn Williams, whose “folk-song settings and arrangements certainly reveal a nationalist outlook”; and the wildly romantic and mystical cinema of filmmaker Michael Powell (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale).

Some of the book’s portraits are very predictable for a rightist anthology (Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton), while others are unexpected and appear to reflect an author’s expertise or passion (Benjamin Disraeli, John Maynard Keynes). One curious cultural figure well known to Counter-Currents readers but otherwise obscure, is the final portrait in the book, Bill Hopkins, here profiled and interviewed by the late Jonathan Bowden. Bill Hopkins was perhaps the most obscure of the Angry Young Men of 1955-59. As he recounts here, he was a working journalist who was given a contact for a novel, The Divine and the Decay, which was eventually withdrawn and pulped, because someone at the publishing house bad-mouthed him as a subversive of the fascistic tendency. Thereafter Hopkins lay low, wrote under pseudonyms, edited the very first issue of Penthouse in the mid-1960s, and slowly amassed a fortune. The one true rebel and bohemian in the book, he is also the only character who was alive in the 1990s and able to tell his story in his own querulous voice.

Bonar Law

On the political side, I was glad to see the almost entirely neglected Bonar Law here (in a brief biography by Adrian Davies). Law was perhaps the last Conservative PM to be truly conservative. The main reason we hardly ever hear of him today is that there were so many sparkly and opportunistic Liberal politicians on the scene (Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, H. H. Asquith) when he was in opposition; and when Law finally succeeded to the premiership in 1922, he served only a short time before succumbing to throat cancer. Here and in his treatment of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Adrian Davies spends a good deal of space describing the Home Rule crisis on the eve of the Great War: how Army officers were threatening to mutiny if asked to put down rebellions in Ulster, and how Asquith and the Liberals exploited the whole Home Rule issue for political gain. (A portrait of Sir Edward Carson, by Ralph Harrison, covers parallel ground.)

As this is partisan history, these retellings are sometimes tendentious. Bonar Law, Edward Carson, and the Unionists/Conservatives were at least as pragmatic and opportunistic as the Liberals. After all, their opposition to enactment of Irish Home Rule 1912-1914 rested upon the odd position that the little patch of Ireland around Belfast was a sanctuary, a special spot, which must never be ruled by a Dublin parliament, unless and until Belfasters give their collective permission. (Presumably Ulstermen had not made such special pleading back in 1800, when the Act of Union was passed and the Dublin parliament abolished.) The writers’ reference to the northeast corner of Ireland as “North” and the remainder of the island as “South,” is a quaint example of political cant, but a useful and enduring one.

Another Englishman whose career got snagged on the Irish problem was the classics scholar Enoch Powell, here profiled by Sam Swerling. For most of his long tenure as MP, 1950-1987—first for the Conservatives, then for the Ulster Unionists—Powell was a steady, unswerving champion of national integrity and self-reliance. “He regarded the Commonwealth as a farcical institution and the United Nations as a vehicle for American aggrandisement and sabre rattling.”[6] Powell was perennially suspicious of America and even more so of the EEC, Britain’s membership in which he considered to be a political question, not an economic one.

Today he is largely remembered for his April 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, decrying nonwhite immigration. Although this made screaming headlines and caused Edward Heath to dismiss Powell from his shadow cabinet, the speech was not the watershed it is usually made out to be. Powell was not the first Conservative to speak out on the Caribbean black problem, and his concern was not race per se but rather preservation of national integrity. Nevertheless, with his oratorical verve and his mustache, Enoch Powell excited some nationalist hearts longing for a new Mosley.

But that role was quite inapposite to this poet/classicist’s tastes and abilities. “Powell never quite saw himself as a latter-day Mussolini marching on London with nationalist legions in his wake.”[7] Moreover, any racial-nationalist movement that might have been aborning in 1968, was effectively smothered in its crib. As though on cue, civil-rights marchers began agitating in Belfast, and by accident or design, these new developments so distracted Powell and the Conservatives that nothing more was heard from them on the New Immigration issue.

One useful figure I wish had been in here and is not, is Alan Clark MP, the arch-Tory historian, diarist, animal-lover, and cabinet secretary who never let political expediency get in the way of his wit, and died the same year this was published.[8]

I highly recommend this book to all who search for foundations for a New Right.

Notes

1. Financial Times, 30 August 2015.

2. Alan Clark, Diaries: Into Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), p. 337.

3. Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith broke ties with the Monday Club in October 2001 because of its “inflammatory views on race, such as the voluntary repatriation of ethnic minorities.” http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/19/uk.race

4. A few months later, in May 2002, IDS publicly sacked a minor shadow minister, Ann Winterton, for telling attendees at a rugby dinner a mild joke about a Cuban, a Japanese, and a Pakistani. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/may/06/race.conservatives

5. Standardbearers,  p. v.

6. Ibid., p. 128

7. Ibid., p. 126.

8. When someone called Clark a fascist in the Guardian, he is supposed to have written the editor: “I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers. I am a Nazi.” (Alas, I have been unable to locate the letter.)

Charles Maurras

7,556 words

The following text is the transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s last lecture, delivered at The London Forum on March 24, 2012. The original title was “Charles Maurras, Action Franҫaise, and the Cagoule,” but since he does not mention the Cagoule, I dropped it from the online version. I want to thank V. S. for transcribing a largely unlistenable audio track, and Michèle Renouf and Jez Turner for making the recording available. 

French Action was largely a newspaper, but it extended out into a political movement between the First and Second World Wars and to a certain extent the second decade of the 20th century just passed, so after the first of those two wars. What made Action Franҫaise so special was the theoretical and literary contribution of Charles Maurras.

Maurras was born in Provence. He was an intellectual who was drawn to a kind of revolutionary tradition in French life. France had always been characterized until the later 19th century by a significant quadrant of the population who rejected the logic of the French Revolution. The French Revolution, which lasted from 1789 until Napoleon’s essential conquest of military power in the French Republic in 1796 and his full dictatorship in 1799 thereafter to 1815, was a period of extraordinary and grotesque change the likes of which European civilization had not seen before. Considerable parts of France, like the Vendée and elsewhere, also fought against the revolutionary tyranny of that time. These were known as the Whites, or the counter-revolutionaries. This tradition of regretting the French Revolution was part of High Catholicism and part of the deep social conservatism of sections of the bourgeoisie that existed in France throughout the existence of the Third Republic.

The Third Republic was created after the collapse of France’s military honor in 1870 when the Prussians badly defeated France in the territorial war between two major European states. The emergence and unification of Prussia on the disemboweled and disinherited torso of modern France was something the French took very much to heart. Particularly in 1871, there was a communistic uprising in Paris known as the Commune which started in a particular period and which French troops put down in an extremely bloody and savage way with the sponsorship of German arms behind them in the rear.

Now, Maurras believed totally in what he called “integral nationalism” or nationalisme intégral. This is the idea that France came first in all things. Regarded as a “Germanophobe” for most of his life, Maurras escaped death after the Second World War during the period of purification when a large number of politicians, collaborators, Vichyites, revisionists, quasi-revisionists, independently minded Right-wing intellectuals, and many people who fought in the Middle East and were involved in some way or another with the Vichy regime were put to death or were hounded from the society. The trial that Maurras had at this particular time was truncated and was laughable in terms of French statute then or since.

The Resistance was very much enamored with the prospect of guillotining Maurras, seeing him as the spiritual father of Vichy. However, there was a degree to which this was an incorrect assessment, because de Gaulle had sat at Maurras’ feet during much of his early life. The interesting thing about Maurras is that he did not just influence the French radical Right, he influenced the entire French Right and he provided all of the families of the French Right, particularly those who looked to a more Orléanist monarchical replacement, those who looked to a Bourbon monarchical replacement (this is the Republic, of course), those who looked to a Napoleonic claim, and those that wanted a different type of Right-wing republic. All of these found in Maurras’ theories sustenance for the soul.

Maurras was released from prison into a hospital in the early 1950s and died soon after. He died in a degree of disgrace, and yet there’s also a degree to which that disgrace was not complete nor did it totally fill the sky. Maurras was removed from the Académie Française, the French Academy, which is the elixir of conservative and reactional and literalist and neo-classical standings in French intellectual life, yet he was reposed by somebody who was almost identical to him given the aged and conservative conspectus of the academy.

There is a degree to which Maurras identified four enemies of the French nation as he perceived them from early on in his political career and before the creation of the Action Française movement, which was an anti-democratic movement and which never took part in parliamentary elections. We shall come on to the view that politics was primary for Maurras, unlike spirituality and religion, in a moment.

Maurras believed that these four “anti-nations” within France were Protestants, Jews, Masons, and all foreigners living on French territory. He perceived all of France as essentially sacred and universal in expectancy and energy. He believed that the Third Republic was a rotten, bourgeois counterpace that needed to be ripped down and replaced by absolutist, legitimist, and monarchical tendencies. Unlike the post-war radical Right in France which has made peace with the Republic for reasons of electoral viability, such as the Front National for example which never even intimates that it would like to restore the monarchy if it was ever put anywhere near power, Maurras and his associates were obsessed with monarchical restoration. This gave their type of Rightism a deeply reactionary and deeply counter-revolutionary cast of thought, but it is important to realize that these things were significantly popular in large areas of French national life. Large areas of the unassimilated aristocracy, the upper middle class, most of the upper class, and even parts of the essentially middle bourgeoisie, retained a suspicion of the legacy of the French Revolution and wished to see the recomposition of France along monarchical lines. These policies even lasted well into the 20th century, even beyond the Second World War. Even into the 1960s a better part of 5% of the French nation rejected the logic of the French Revolution, which is a quite extraordinary number of people given the fact that the revolutionary inheritance had lasted so long and had been re-imposed upon the country after the revolutions, themselves abortive, in 1848.

Maurras believed that France needed a strong and social Catholicism in order to be viable. This is complicated given his own tendentious hold on religious belief. Maurras, though never an atheist, rejected the early, comforting Catholicism of his childhood youth and was an agnostic for most of his life. This did not prevent him from adopting a viewpoint which was fundamentalist in relation to Catholic rigor and in the belief of what would now be called traditionalist Catholicism since the Vatican II settlement of the early 1960s, which in Catholic terms began to liberalize the Church and adapted it to a modern, secular age inside of France and beyond its borders.

Maurras believed that spirituality was intensely important for a people and without it a people rotted and became as nothing. He therefore supported radical religion as a maximalizing social agenda whilst not believing in it himself. Indeed, he implicitly distrusted much of the Gospel message and found the Old Testament disastrous in its pharisaical illumination.

Maurras believed that Christianity was a useful tool that an elite would make use of in order to create a docile, happy, contented and organic society. This means that the papacy was deeply suspicious of Maurras despite the fact that politically he seemed to be a drummer boy for what they might have been perceived to want. This led to the prorogation of the Action Française movement by the Vatican at a particular time. I believe this occurred in the 1920s and was not rescinded until 1939 by which time Maurras had been elected to the Académie Française. The Vatican was concerned at the agnosticism from the top and the synthetic use of Catholicism as a masking agent and cloaking ideology for Right-wing politics inside France that it otherwise found quite a lot to support in. There were enormous numbers of clergy in the Action Française as a movement, and they were shocked and horrified by the removal of papal support which undercut support for the Action Française from key sectors of French life at a particular time.

Maurras believed in anti-Semitism as a core element of his ideology and beliefs. He believed that Jews should have no role in national life and no role whatsoever in the sort of France which he wished to see. Although they had not been responsible in any sort of way for much of the events of the French Revolution, he believed that their emancipation, as the emancipation had occurred in Germany, Britain, and elsewhere during the 19th century, had led to a collusion of interests which were detrimental to the sacred nature of France.

He was also strongly anti-Protestant and anti-Masonic and had a view of nationality which is regarded almost as simple-minded today. He basically thought that to command a status within the French nation you had to be French in word, in deed, and in prior cultural inheritance. It wasn’t any good to claim that you were French. You had to be French in terms of the self-limiting definitions of what it was to be national. This meant that there were radiating hierarchies within France as within other European societies inside modernity. This was the idea that some people were more French than others and this implicit elitism was always part and parcel of the nature of his movement.

It’s important to realize that there was an intellectual complexity about French Action which commands a considerable degree of respect, especially from a distance. French Action appealed to an enormous number of intellectuals across the spectrum even though it was sold by quasi-paramilitaries in the street. The youth wing and the radical wings of the Action Française movement were known as the Knights of the King, Camelots du Roi, and they sold these publications in the streets, often engaging in ferocious fights with Left-wing street gangs who attempted to crowd the same pitches, particularly in Montmartre in the center of Paris and the centers of other urban areas.

Maurras believed in action in the streets as a part of politics and disprivileged voting, which he thought was sterile, bourgeois, majoritarian, and anti-elitist. One wonders if there was ever a coherent structure to come to power in the Action Française movement and the only way in which this can be corralled with the historical evidence is to see the Action Française as a [inaudible] group for a particular type of restorationist, social conservatism, and Catholicism inside France.

If Maurras’ vision had been successful, you would have had a national France with an extremely strong and powerful monarchy and an extremely strong and powerful, even hermetic Catholic clergy at the heart of the nation. You would have had strong military and other institutions that ramify with other elements of this traditional French power as expressed in Bourbon restorationist and pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Romantic royalist France.

Maurras believed that to be happy people had to be content in the structures of their own livery and their own inheritance. The inheritance of the French nation was all-important, and this is why he collaborated with Third Republic politicians such as General Boulanger towards the end of the 19th century. He did this in order to undermine the nature of the liberal republic and lead to reforms and authoritarian constitutions within it which would have served his purpose. He supported a large range of bourgeois, radical, and liberal politicians at the time of the First World War, which he thought was a national surprise of glory and a chance for France to redeem herself on the battlefield against a traditional enemy, which he always perceived as Germany.

This is the area where Maurras is most disprivileged by contemporary nationalist thinkers across Europe and even beyond. His obsession with Germany and with Germany’s strength and his belief that France was belittled by any strength in Germany led him to support French arms in both the First World War 1914-1918 and the Second World War 1939-1945. Initially, he supported de Gaulle and de Gaulle’s use of tank warfare in the early stages of the Second World War. Of course, by the time de Gaulle became supreme commander of French forces, France would be decimated on the battlefield and there was nothing left to repair or even to defend. Guderian, who had read all of the theory which de Gaulle had based his own warfare predictions upon, had already trumped that particular card, and the Germans used British and French ideas about tank warfare to defeat both the British Expeditionary Force and the French army in France. Seizing with revolutionary energy the generational gap in the conduct of warfare, the Germans routed and humiliated the French, who had fought them to a standstill in the past in the Great War, in a matter of weeks, by maneuvering around the Maginot Line and by passing through the allegedly impassable Ardennes Forest to appear behind French lines with roving and energetic Panzer squadrons backed by Stuka bombers.

This catastrophe became a divine and a national surprise to Maurras. Maurras never actively collaborated although nearly all those in his circle would find themselves involved in the Vichy government at one time or another. Vichy began an institutionalization of a revolution from above and a national revolution within France largely permitted under German auspices, particularly in the early years before the radicalization and momentum building of what became the French Resistance under British artillery and the Gaullist movement in opposition and exile.

Maurras believed that the only true purpose of a Frenchman was to enhance the glory of France and all other was tackle and blither. He believed that during the German occupation it was best for French ideologues such as themselves to retreat to his family estate and live there in quietude even though many of his philosophical children collaborated openly with German arms both within and beyond Vichy. People like Laval and Déat with his neo-socialist movement and people like the founder of the French Popular Party, Doriot, the Parti Populaire Français (PPF) all collaborated in various degrees and were influenced by an attraction or repulsion to Maurras’ ideas in one form or another. He was truly the great old man of the French Right by this time.

After the war, the resistance sought to blame Maurras for much of the collaboration that had gone on, including the expulsion of some Jews from France, the international humiliation, as they perceived it, of French subjection to German arms, and the neo-colonial aspects within Europe of German policy in the French nation-state. It’s true to point out, however, that German military rule in France was surprisingly liberal and even benign in comparison to the full-on fury that could be exercised elsewhere in accordance with radical ideologies that had little to do with the calm, cultural intensity when Colonel Abetz met Robert Brasillach for coffee and croissants in a bar in Paris during the French occupation. There was intense collaboration between the young, former students of Maurras like Brasillach, who edited a fascist magazine called Je suis partout which means “I am everywhere,” and cultural Germans such as Abetz who were part and parcel of the German regime that had been installed over Vichy and to one side of it to allow Right-wing Frenchmen to run their own country albeit under German auspices. The relationship was probably somewhat similar to the relationship of American imperialism and its client states in the Third World such as Karzai’s regime in Afghanistan which controls Afghanistan though ultimately beholden to American power in that particular society.

Maurras wasn’t guillotined after the war because he significantly told at his trial, “Nobody hates the Germans more than me.” And this is what saved him from the guillotine, because the Resistance, although they were dying to guillotine him and would have given their eyes and teeth for it, because this gnarled, knotty Frenchman was irreducible on that point. So, they gave him life imprisonment instead which, as an old man, was effectively a death sentence in and of itself. When it was read out to him in the court, a steaming Maurras leapt from his seat and declared that, “It was the revenge of Dreyfus!” An otherwise obscure reference, which for those who are culturally knowledgeable about the entire extensive life of Maurras would have realized refers to the Dreyfus case at the end of the 19th century.

This is again an important disjunction between Maurras and much of the rest of the Right. Maurras was not concerned whether Dreyfus was guilty or not of passing secrets and engaging in espionage, of helping a foreign power, and so on. What he was concerned with is the dishonor done to the French judiciary if he was not found guilty and done to the French army and national state society if he was now to get away with this. This idea that an individual could be found guilty for connective and social-organic reasons irrespective of whether they were actually guilty of the offense one-to-one and in the customary nature of normal life is anathema to liberal ideas of the sovereignty of the individual that should be placed in a premium position in relation to all social actions.

Maurras was a fundamentalist anti-Dreyfusard and was part of a campaign spearheaded by elements of the revanchist Catholic Church and post-Boulanger elements in the French Republic to the extent that Dreyfus should be found guilty and executed if possible. For many like Maurras, the actual condemnation of Dreyfus which ensued and his being sent to Devil’s Island in the Caribbean was a minor punishment in comparison to the ingloriousness of the episode for France and what it told you about the conduct of the French national general staff at that time.

The Dreyfus case divided France between brother and brother, between father and children, between man and wife like no other case that had convulsed the nation in the course of its late 19th century/early 20th century development. It was truly one of those instances which define a generation. When Zola wrote J’accuse…! And accused the French police, army and courts of essentially fixing on an unfortunate man and blaming him for the sins of others and deporting him to Devil’s Island as a result of a false charge, he laid an explosive mound at the bottom of French national life which men like Maurras were determined to defuse.

Maurras believed that the English were always perfidious and were always against the divine France, although there were moments when he sought collaboration with English and British figures but always against the more dreaded bogey of Germany. It could be seen from a distance that Maurras’ nationalism has negative and anti-European features, although its simplicity and its purity about who belongs and who doesn’t belong is very clear and is easy to sustain. His views were not particularly racial beyond the fact that France was the leading light of world civilization and had to be treated as such. It was quite clear what he meant by who he was and who he was not, a Frenchman or a French woman, in the era in which he lived. You inherited genealogically what you were from the generations that had lived in the society prior to you and you were a Catholic and you were, to all intents and purposes, a reasonably pious one and you yearned for the return of the monarchy in France as against the secular republican institutions which replaced the monarchical structures of the Bourbon era after the Revolution and again after the Restoration which followed after the Revolution. You were not Protestant and you were not a Mason and you were not a Jew and you were not a foreigner and you were not of foreign mixture, namely of non-national French admixture. These things are quite clear and quite capacious in their reasonableness.

There’s a degree to which Maurras’ intense nationalism has fueled an enormous amount of the radical Right that exists in the south of Europe and the southeast of Europe and further in Central and Latin America where its ideas have been taken to heart by many Dominican, Costa Rican, Brazilian, and Argentinian nationalist writers and thinkers and academics. His thinking is also most crucial to the development of Catholic societies and, of course, he has little social interplay with the Anglo-Saxon world. Maurras seems to have little to say to Anglo-Saxony, though much to say to the integral nature of the nation which is always the defiant and unyielding France.

Where did Maurras get his opinions from? A strong bourgeois background and an affiliation with the French provinces led to an identification with the rural ideal of France as a place touched by the glory of God, even a deity that he didn’t subscribe to for much of his active life. Maurras believed that France had a new destiny amongst all of the nations on Earth not to bring people together, not to supervise people and not to be loyal to Swiss institutional ideas, as he dismissed the ideas of Rousseau, who was Swiss and strongly influenced by Calvinist and Protestant thinking which he blamed for the French Revolution.

Rousseau once declared in the first line of his social contract that in the prisons of the future men will have “Libertas,” “liberty,” stamped upon their chains. This uniquely Protestant idea whereby even the social organs of direction are there to free the individual from bondage. It’s a notable instant where in Louisiana, in the southern state of the United States, the steel batons that American police use for riot control have “liberty” inscribed upon the baton. This means that there’s the head of a rioter being broken by a riot policeman. You are being beaten over the head with freedom. You are being beaten into freedom! And this uniquely, sort of sado-masochistic and ultra-Protestant view whereby you are being punished in freedom, for freedom, by freedom is a uniquely American take upon the French Revolution. Indeed, handcuffs wielded by many American police forces have “freedom” written upon them. So, as you are handcuffed and beaten you are receiving both liberty and freedom. These are very important ideas which come from the French Revolution.

When you stand before a French court you have to prove your innocence. As everybody knows, the British idea, which transcends the Atlantic and is visible in the jurisprudence of the United States, is that you are innocent before the bar of the courts and you have various barristers there to defend your rights. In France, the opposite is true. In accordance with revolutionary jurisprudence, the state knows best. The state has divulged religiosity to itself. The state is the residual legatee of all ideas of liberty and dispassionate justice. You have to prove your innocence to the state, because if the state argues in a prior way for the possibility of your guilt you must be guilty of something or why else would the state dare to accuse you.

Maurras’ ideas come quite close to certain Anglo-Saxon ideas in his rejection of this idea of the martial, republican and even Protestant French republican state. This means that Maurras seeks help from German and English intellectual critics even as he is unmasking French intellectual culture for its support and tolerance of the French Revolution.

The French Revolution remains the most cardinal event in history as regards the modern history of France. The French Revolution characterized an enormous range of change in European society and in the lifestyle of European man. If you remember, the revolution had quite timid beginnings with the desire for bourgeois reformism and the integration of politicians like Mirabeau in 1789. It then morphed into a more legalistic liberal assembly with a legislative assembly in 1790-1791 which then became the much more revolutionary Convention in 1792-1794. This is the period associated with the Terror and the dominion of Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre had his rival, Danton, who he sent successfully to the guillotine, but he only preceded him by a matter of a few months, was convulsed by the idea that he was imposing with revolutionary violence the implementation of justice upon France and that he’d been given the right to do so not by God but by a new-fangled Deist cult or religion called the Cult of the Supreme Being. This attempt is the height of the Revolution’s attempt to replace Catholicism with an atheistic cult, whereby reason was worshipped as a goddess and a naked virgin was placed in the [inaudible] with a liberty cap on the high altar in Notre Dame by French revolutionary Jacobins, deeply shocked the sensibility of Catholic France that it had never forgiven Paris for its revolutionary energies which were disliked by much of the rest of society.

For much of French history, Paris had always been the center of revolution even though the French revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise, came from Marseille to Paris in order to save revolutionary Paris by adding fuel from the most revolutionary and violent part of the provinces who were then fighting against the Whites, or the counter-revolutionaries, as they came to be known.

Napoleon Bonaparte was an equivocal figure for Maurras. He liked the authoritarianism, he liked the glorification of France, but he also saw the extension of French imperialism under Bonaparte’s agency to be anti-French and to ultimately portend to national dishonor. This meant that there was if not a pacifist then a limit to national aggrandizement in Maurras scheme of things. If the nation was crucial to all social development, the nation had borders, and the nation had limits, and authoritarianism inevitably put constraints upon social action, which reminds people that Maurras remains a sort of radical or revolutionary conservative.

Regarded retrospectively as something of a French fascist, Maurras was never fascistic, although his conservativism contained strongly sublimated elements of fascism and quasi-fascism and certain beliefs in the corporate state and certain methodological axes which he would share with movements in Salazar’s Portugal, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain. All of these three regimes were endorsed by Maurras and by the Action Française. Hitler’s movement in Germany and its successful breakthrough there was in no sense endorsed. Indeed, he supported de Gaulle, and he supported mainstream Third Republican politicians who were anti-Hitler just as he supported Clemenceau in the First World War because he was anti-Kaiser.

The threat to France from Germany and the helplessness of France in the face of German military might were abiding themes for Maurras who saw the possibility of defeat on the battlefield as a moral and spiritual defeat for France, although like all quixotic and intuitive nationalists, Maurras believed that France could never be totally defeated. A political system had gone down under the Panzers, a political system had gone down under the Stuka bombers, but France itself was irrational and eternal and would always spring up again.

Initially, he supported the de Gaullist fight against the Germans. He immediately switched to Vichy and national liberation when he saw that much of what he wanted in policy terms could be instituted under German aegis. The fact that it was under German aegis caused him great psychic pain and wanton disregard. He therefore retreated to his own estates to cover the dichotomy of supporting Vichy at a distance without wishing to be seen to champion its German precursor.

Maurras lived in an era of tumultuous change and violent excess. None more so than the events of the 6th of February 1934. These events, unlike the Paris events of 1968 which have been emblazoned in world history and have counter-parts in Berkeley, California and the streets of Britain and the streets of West Germany as it then was and elsewhere throughout the Western world, have largely been forgotten and have been deliberately dropped down the memory hole, collectively and historically. Maurras, however, was deeply involved in the events of 1934 which were nothing more or less than an attempt to overthrow the French Third Republic by revolution from the Right-wing.

Riddled with scandal and approximating to extreme decay due to the economic lashings of depression from the United States and elsewhere who were beginning to humiliate the French exchequer, the radical Right decided to depose by going onto the streets the French Third Republic in early February 1934. This was awful rioting, and it was very serious and very destructive social rioting by about 100,000 demonstrators from all of the French combat action leagues that then existed in the country. These included the Action Française and the large veteran association from the First World War called Cross of Fire or Croix-de-Feu. It also involved large apolitical veterans’ organizations and smaller, more targeted Right-wing combat veterans’ leagues.

All of these movements marched on Paris and marched on the National Assembly and marched on the presidential buildings in an attempt to overthrow the Third Republic with violent revolutionary activism from the streets. It’s quite remarkable that these events have been excised from history to the degree that they have, particularly as they were to force catalytic change in French political life. Daladier’s regime, which was part of a Left front and Left coalition government collapsed and was replaced by the more general government of the Right.

One of the interesting examples of this period is the fact that, unlike today where the radical Right is shunted off to the side and all the areas of political thought including the moderate Right strive to have nothing to do with it whatsoever, in that era the radical Right infused the mainstream Right and even liberal, center Right elements of the Right were not immune to radical Right-wing ideas. This shows you that politics is about energy and about how you corral and contrast various forms of energy over time. There is no earthly reason why radical forms of opinion, as occurred in the 1960s the other way around on the Left, can’t influence more moderate, more statist, more staid, and more centric forms of opinion. It all depends upon the timing, the character of the men involved and the secondary forces which they can put into play. No one knew this better than Maurras who influenced these structured, highly controlled Right-wing mobs, which is what they essentially amounted to, in their assaults on French liberal bourgeois power at this time.

Sixteen died as a result of the rioting, and over 2,000 were injured, which is a large number of injuries to be sustained in endless fighting with French riot police and French police who turned out en masse to defend the Third Republic. Communists and socialists and trade unionists of the Left also mobilized large counter-demonstrations. Very much akin to events which occurred in Dublin in not too distant a period when there was a concertedly disconcerted attempt by the Civic Guard movement of Eoin O’Duffy to overthrow the post-IRA Fianna Fáil movement which then dominated the Irish Republic. It should be noticed that both societies had a penchant for political violence and for the rhetoric of extremism in the street and both were Roman Catholic societies unlike Britain, which existed of course halfway between these two polities.

The Right failed in both Ireland and France to replicate what had occurred in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, never mind Germany. However, the radical Right had an enormous transforming impact upon the entire Right wing which led a large element of the pre-collaborationist cabinet in the mid- to late-1930s to collaborate once the Vichy government was set up.

Vichy is always described as a regime by historians in an attempt to discredit it in relation to a proper government which is so described. Yet there is a degree to which the Vichy government had the support actively of at least a third of the French. De Gaulle, through a remarkable piece of political [inaudible] to make after the war, said that no one ever collaborated. This is after the purification, of course, which killed many thousands of those who were alleged to have done so. But the trick of saying that no one collaborated allowed the post-war generations to unite over the fact that there was a German occupation, no French collaboration except for a few purists and traitors and a Resistant movement activated from home and abroad. It was a clever and intellectual and ideological start to enable France to recover more quickly after the war and settle differences without being too hawkish or squeamish about it. But there is a degree to which it was a lie and a blatant untruth.

France bore quite a large price for its staunching of social peace after 1945. You have to remember that after 1945 there was no effective Right in France, because the whole of the Right had been allegedly discredited by collaboration. This meant that there was an enormous gap and only classic centrist, conservative movements fielded candidates against the center and Left in the immediate post-war elections.

De Gaulle, of course, was trying to capture the market for existing Right-wing opinion with his movement [inaudible]. De Gaulle had subliminally fascistic credentials for some of his policies and went back to yearnings for a hard man and a strong man to govern France with an iron hand. These go back to General Boulanger and back to the Bonapartism of the 19th century. De Gaulle’s movement with his endless personality cult and military drills and obsession with the cult of the leader certainly had strong fringe associations with the radical Right which he’d never the less repudiated and excoriated both in action and in print.

No internal warfare on the Right has been more striking than the one in France between the legacy of de Gaullist historical tradition and the legacy of collaboration. This again is to be seen in the Algerian War long after Maurras’ death in which the two wings of the French Right fight fanatically with each other. The government and the Civic Action Service movement and the Barbouzes fighting with the official French army against both the Algerian nationalists of the FNA and the ultra Right-wing Secret Army Organization or Organisation de l’armée secrete, which was formed by revolutionary members of the paratroopers and other French regiments firstly in Indo-China and then in Algeria to prevent the removal of Algeria from the French nation.

France and Algeria, of course, were joined at the hip in accordance with the Napoleonic doctrine of Algérie française. In the end, the division had to occur, but at least a million French Algerians, who were totally French of course, pieds noirs, black feet, came back from North Africa to live in the south of France where they became the bedrock for the Front National vote in the deep south of the country in generations to come.

There is also a degree to which Maurras’ influence on the French Right is pervasive, and this is the influence of social Catholicism. At every large FN event there is a ferverous mass. For those not in the know, this is a traditionalist type of Catholicism that rejects Vatican II and settlements around it in the contemporary Catholic Church. It is essentially an old-fashioned, in Protestant terms, smells and bells mass whereby the priest turns hieratically to God and doesn’t look at the congregation and the congregation look at him, or look at his back, and he’s looking up because he’s looking up at that which is exalted and beyond him. This type of social Catholicism which exists in the FN on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, because if you don’t believe in it you don’t have to go along with it, it part and parcel of their appeal to all of those national constituencies which were not buried in 1945 and were not buried in 1789 and were not buried in 1815 but have continued to exist as a vital part of the French nation and of the French national whole.

Maurras’ belief in the integral France – organic, unified, militarized, Catholicized, and hierarchical – was never achieved during his lifetime, but his influence on the French Right-wing and on neo-Bourbon, legitimist, Orléanist, and Bonapartist tendencies of opinion was profound. His influence on French military thinking was also profound, although his influence on Catholicism became strained when Catholic humanists like Jacques Maritain, who had been close to the Action Française for a considerable period, moved away from it in the 1920s. The Papacy moved against Maurras and Action Française because of his doctrine of politics first. Maurras believed that if politics was put first all the other problems that beset France and lead to spiritual difficulties could be changed retrospectively.

However, there was a degree to which this put the cart before the horse. By making himself a declared agnostic and being relatively open about this fact, he played into the hands of certain radical Catholic traditionalists who didn’t like a mass movement that used Catholicism synthetically to cover over political differences of opinion inside France.

He was also guilty of the anti-legitimist claim put forward by many deeply conservative apolitical and asocial French Catholics. This was the view that they should have nothing to do with the bourgeois Third Republic and that they should remain French and Catholic forever irrespective of a wicked regime that could not be stopped from sinning in its own right. Maurras would have nothing to do with this and believed that politics first, second, and third was necessary for the redemption of France.

The idea of monarchical restoration and a return of the French monarchy was not a quaint political ideal as far as Maurras and his immediate supporters were concerned. They believed that only by repudiating the Republic, only by ripping out the accretions of what could be described as the French version of the Bolshevik regime, namely the latter day inheritance of the French republican, revolutionary tradition and all its structures, could the France that he wanted be brought about.

Although post-war forms of the radical Right-wing in France have had to make peace with republicanism in order to survive and contest democratic elections where they have had considerable support, more so than in most other Western European countries, there is a degree to which Maurras was quite technically direct in the issue of the French republican experiment and the mass terror that it induced between 1792 and 1794 which cast the shadow of a guillotine across French revolutionary rhetoric.

Most of the great Right-wing figures, such as Abel Bonnard, look back through Maurras to the great ultramontanist figure, Joseph de Maistre. Joseph de Maistre, who wrote in the late 18th century and earlier, is responsible for the doctrine of papal infallibility up to a point at least in terms of its theoretical mark when it was introduced quite late in the day in 1870 in recognition of extra-Catholic and intra-Catholic disputes.

Maurras was determined to see Catholicism revived within France and put at the heart of the French nation, and he did residually return to the Catholicism of his childhood near to his own deathbed. Whether this was just an insurance policy or was a genuine conversion to the faith with which he had always lingered is open for his biographers to contest.

Maurras was a peppery individual with a sort of reynardical moustache and trimmed beard. He was splenetic and outrageous in debate and commentary. He called for the assassination of many public figures from the editorial mouthpiece of his magazine for which he was given many suspended sentences. When a French politician argued that all of the Right-wing combat leagues should be disarmed in France because he saw the danger of the events of 1934, Maurras called for his assassination in print, which as the calling for an execution of a government minister he was jailed 8 months for his transgression.

Maurras was never afraid to speak his mind about any of the problems that beset France from the Dreyfus case through to the French armies in the First World War to the conduct of the Treaty of Versailles. He also wanted France to impose more rigorous and more judgmental and more harsh and caustic sanctions on Germany, long considered by most historians to be a disastrous maneuver. But there is nothing in relation to what it is to be French beyond which Charles Maurras would not go.

Maurras saw himself as the quiet leader of a counter-revolutionary force in French life that would lead to the institution of an integral nation and an integral nationality above sectional interests and above party interests, which he always despised. The interesting thing about his form of Frenchness is that everyone could have a role in it. All of the minorities which he effectively despised as foreigners, métèques, would actually always have a role within France. It’s just that role would be lesser proportional to who and what they are in relation to the role of the French. Ultimately, his vision was conservative. If you were more French than somebody else, you had more of a say and more of a role. If you were Catholic rather than Protestant or Jewish or something, you had more of a role in France. It is not to say the others would have no role, but they would have a severely restricted and reduced role in relation to those who would supervene over the goddess. The goddess was one of his private terms for France and for the French nation, which was always perceived as a feminine creation and identity by all of its proponents and detractors.

Charles Maurras is so French a figure that he is largely ignored in the Anglo-Saxon and Anglophone world because he’s seen to have little to teach to the rival Protestant, national, and imperial trajectories of these societies. This is arguably true. Maurras has to be seen and judged in French terms and in French terms alone.

Although he never succeeded in the most radical of his aims, part of the regime that existed under Vichy can be seen as the endorsement of many of his ideas although the resistance groups would pitch and the Allied invasion pulled back upon Vichy and led to the end of the collaboration. The irony of Maurras’ tradition and career is that the sort of France he wanted was brought about under the arms and vigilance of the nation he hated more than any other, namely the Germans. This is part of the irony of history, which would not be forgotten on somebody as literate and carefully minded as Charles Maurras.

One of the things that is most striking about Maurras is that the Action Française was read intellectually right across the spectrum. A young, homosexual Jewish author called Marcel Proust, who was later to write one of the most famous books in French literature called Remembrance of Things Past, used to literally run every Friday down to the Camelots du Roi paramilitaries who sold Action Française on the street in order to buy Action Française. When he was asked by a certain dumbfounded bohemian who had met his acquaintance why he did this, he said he did it because it was the most interesting paper in France. This is something which is key to an understanding of people like Maurras and the radical Right cultural tradition that they represented. They were admired by all sorts of people who didn’t share their opinions at all, and that was part of the elixir of their power and their cultural influence. This is why he was elected to the French Academy, the most august and antiquated of French cultural institutions.

So, I think it falls upon us, as largely non-French people, to look back upon this traditionalist philosopher of the French radical Right with a degree of quiet appraisal. Maurras was a figure who could be admired as somebody who fought for his own country to the last element of his own breath. He was also somebody who’s own cultural dynamics were complicated and ingenious. To give one cogent example, the Greek play Antigone deals with the prospect of the punishment of a woman by Creon because she wishes to honor the death sacrifice of her brother. This becomes a conflict between the state and those who would seek to supplant the state’s momentary laws by laws which are regarded as matriarchal or affirmative with the chthonian or the fundamental in human life. George Steiner once commented in a book looking at the different varieties of Antigone that most critics of the Left have always supported her against Creon and most socially Right-wing commentators like T. S. Eliot have always supported Creon against Antigone. And yet Maurras supported Antigone against Creon, because she wished to bury her brother for reasons which were ancestral and chthonian and came up from under the ground and were primeval and were blood-related and were therefore more important and more profound than the laws that men had put together with pieces of parchment and bits of writing on paper.

Charles Maurras: hero of France, national collaborator with excellence, we salute you over this time, we remember your contribution to the [inaudible] of a rival nationality!

Thank you very much!