Reclaiming Conservatism: Challenging The Henry Jackson Society

Signatories to the following are sought, for release as soon as possible, and very preferably by the evening of Sunday 29th April 2007. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. The list is as given on the website of The Henry Jackson Society. General comments also welcome, of course:

To Rt. Hon. Michael Ancram QC MP, Gerard Baker, Paul Beaver, Prof. Paul Bew, Prof. Vernon Bogdanor, Nicholas Boles, Damian Collins MP, Colonel Tim Collins, Prof. Paul Cornish, Sir Richard Dearlove OBE, Major-General John Drewienkiewicz, Mark Etherington, Sir Philip Goodhart, Michael Gove MP, Jonny Gray, Robert Halfon, Fabian Hamilton MP, Oliver Kamm, Jackie Lawrence, Prof. Andrew Lever, Dr. Denis MacShane MP, Fionnuala Jay O'Boyle MBE, Stephen Pollard, Greg Pope MP, Lord Powell of Bayswater, Andrew Roberts, David Ruffley MP, Dr. Jamie Shea, Dr. Irwin Stelzer, Gisela Stuart MP, Rt. Hon. Lord Trimble, Edward Vaizey MP, David Willetts MP, Prof. Alan Lee Williams OBE, Brendan Simms, Alan Mendoza, James M. Rogers, Gideon A. Mailer, Matthew Jamison and every other signatory to, supporter of or sympathiser with The Henry Jackson Society:

We believe, as we hope and expect that you at least sincerely profess to believe, in such good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, the Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West, family life, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, mass political participation within a constitutional framework, and the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. In a word, we are conservatives, regardless of party (if any), as is the overwhelming majority of the British People, which now finds that the conservative position is no longer represented or articulated by any party, at least in Great Britain.

As conservatives, we cannot be in favour of “free” market capitalism, which corrodes to nought all these things and more, both directly and by driving despairing millions into the arms of Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism. Since we oppose the decadent social libertinism deriving from the 1960s, so we must also oppose its logically inevitable, and not unwitting, development into the decadent economic libertinism deriving from the 1980s; and vice versa. And since we oppose the erosion of our self-government and culture (and other countries’, of course) by the European Union, so we must also oppose that erosion by American hegemony and global capital, closely connected as all these three are; and vice versa.

Marxists (including neoconservatives) are obviously correct that the family, private property, and the State have a common origin, and that ecah exists in order to defend the other two. But any conservative, properly so called, must regard Marxists (including neoconservatives) as profoundly and dangerously mistaken in their desire for the withering away of any one or more of the family, private property, or the State. To desire any one or more such withering away is to be a Marxist, not a conservative. Rather, the conservative position is as expressed by Belloc: “Those who have least power in the decline of a state are priests, soldiers, the mothers of many children, the lovers of one woman, and saints.” It is also the position articulated in the words spoken by the Archbishop of Canterbury on conveying the Sword of State to the newly-crowned monarch: “With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order.”

We therefore present you with all that follows.

First, it is not possible to affirm “clear universal principles such as the global promotion of the rule of law, liberal democracy, civil rights, environmental responsibility and the market economy,” since the last of these is incompatible with the other four.

Secondly, we strongly dispute that “the Western policies of strength and human rights,” whatever might be said of either or both of them, “hastened the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship,” since that dictatorship would have collapsed anyway.

Thirdly, “the failures in the former Yugoslavia (especially Bosnia)” were indeed “more than just moral,” although the moral dimension must not be overlooked. It was both a moral and a strategic catastrophe to support the dismemberment of a multiethnic emerging democracy outside the global hegemony in the interests of a Holocaust-denier (Franjo Tudjman) who re-created in 1990s Europe the full panoply of 1930s Fascism, in the interests of a Saudi-backed Wahabbi rabble-rouser and erstwhile recruitment sergeant for the SS (Alija Izetbegovic), and in the interests of the black-shirted Wahabbi Nazi-nostalgists (the Kosovo “Liberation” Army) who now run Kosovo, on the UN’s watch, as a Mafia fiefdom and as the heroin-smuggling capital of Europe. “The early interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone” most emphatically do not “provide an appropriate model for future action.”

Fourthly, the European Union has indeed been “instrumental in expanding its ‘Grand Area’ on the continent since the fall of the Iron Curtain,” as has “NATO, through the process of eastern enlargement, and various initiatives engaging the Soviet successor states.” However, since the EU and NATO are anti-democratic, their expansion is most heartily to be deplored. To support the “furtherance of European military modernisation and integration under British leadership, preferably within NATO” is in fact to support a unified European defence capability under overall American command. We most certainly do not support any such thing. Why do you?

Fifthly, it is one (truistic) thing to say “that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate,” but quite another, and utterly fallacious, to say “that any international organisation which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.” It depends what we want any such organisation to do. The UN could exist, without, for example, China. But what would be the point? Furthermore, to advocate the position criticised here is to advocate British withdrawal from the Commonwealth, a move to which we could not be more strongly opposed.

And sixthly, “the market”, at least as you understand that term, simply cannot “serve the Democratic Community,” nor can it be “reconciled to the environment.” Such is the understanding of authentically conservative traditions such as High Toryism in the United Kingdom and the Old Commonwealth, paleoconservatism and Agrarianism in the United States, Gaullism and French monarchism, Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism, and so forth.

These traditions rightly reject the theory of the perfectibility of human nature by its own efforts alone and in this life alone. That rejection, so staggeringly vindicated in the twentieth (as in every previous) century, is perhaps the most important conservative insight of all. Have you attended to it? In other words, have you, with everything thus entailed, accepted the doctrine of Original Sin, always denied outright in Judaism, and always at least downplayed to the same practical effect in the Liberal Protestantism that, through the reception of neo-orthodoxy in popular Protestantism, and through the secularisation of much Catholic thought and practice after (but not because of) the Second Vatican Council, has so heavily influenced neoconservatism?

No one who accepted that doctrine, and thus the whole Augustinian patrimony of the West to which it is integral, could possibly have any part in the purely human attempts to make the world anew advocated by the likes of the American Enterprise Institute or the Project for the New American Century. In a word, neoconservatism.

How do you respond?