Right Thinking

Peter Hitchens devotes part of his column today to pointing out, almost in so many words, that the BNP has always been an MI5 front organisation filled with dupes and simpletons from Nick Griffin down, and designed precisely for the collapse in its own idiocy and incompetence that has now befallen it. To which one would add only that it would always have fallen apart, anyway. The British Union of Fascists made a lot of noise for a few years in the 1930s before fizzling out. The National Front did the same thing in the 1970s. The BNP has now repeated the pattern. With or without MI5, it will be 30 or 40 years before the next lot does so.

In the meantime, although it is not clear for how much longer, we have the EDL. Its endorsement, more or less, by the Daily Star gives Britain, for the first time, the sort of mass print voice of the Far Right that exists always, but only, in countries where the Far Right is an integral part of mainstream politics. The Star may not be Rivarol or even The Pioneer. But it is there. And that is what matters. As can also be said of our two BNP MEPs, who exemplify the deeply unpleasant elements to whose legislative will we are subject, frequently in the coalitions represented in the Council of Ministers, and always in the European Parliament.

But Griffin and Andrew Brons are a pair of silly stooges, while the EDL is just a bunch of thugs. Why are there no intellectuals? A ridiculous question? Why? There are FN intellectuals. There are intellectuals in the Austrian Third Lager. There are intellectuals on the Far Right in Italy and in the Iberian world. The lazy claim that the English-speaking world either does not have intellectuals at all or does not have right-wing ones has either never been true, in the first case, or, in the second case, has always had significant exceptions and is now totally false. But you will search the British scene in vain for The Thinking Man's Fascist, his effusions worthy or even capable of serious engagement.

Neo-Paganism never really took off even in Nazi Germany; attempts to redefine culture in its terms, with the Winter Solstice replacing Christmas and what have you, were spectacularly unsuccessful. So the whole thing would stand even less of a chance here, where we have a more highly developed sense of the absurd, which is good, and a tendency to see all manifestations of folk-culture in those terms, which is very bad, since we were rich in it to the point of extravagance at least until the Reformation, which, whether in Lutheran or in Calvinist areas, does not seem to have destroyed it on the Continent to anything like the extent that it did here.

We do have a Liberal Protestant movement such as, in its rootlessness and in its lack of specific doctrinal content, proved such easy prey to the Nazis. But ours, by something not less than a miracle, instead maintained close ties to the opposition that was figures such as Barth, perhaps because it saw in neo-orthodoxy its own fondness for retaining at least the vocabulary of historic formulations, however dangerously that vocabulary might be redefined in terms of the assumed priority of secular and atheistic modes of thought.

However, the heresy of intégrisme, so fundamental to the Fascism of the Latin world, is almost unknown to any of our Catholic subcultures, although the thankfully odd eccentric of that mind does exist here. I doubt that we had any more before Vatican II than we have now, although intégrisme is so pernicious precisely because it looks like, and very forcefully believes itself to be, traditional Catholicism. Whereas the intégriste Fascist in that tendency's French heartland can present himself, accurately or otherwise, as the true heir of the legitimate state overthrown in 1789 and of the very long-lasting tradition of mass resistance to that overthrow, no one here can really say that, accurately or otherwise, about 1688, and extremely few would wish to.

Much more perniciously, since they are vastly more numerous, we do have people who resemble those Bavarian Catholics who were active in the early Nazi Party in Munich. Looking back to Döllinger, they defined themselves as Catholics in the sense of belonging to a community of faith across the world and throughout the ages, rather than in terms of perfect submission to the Petrine See as that See requires. They strongly affirmed the purported autonomy of the German Church, including the control of Her affairs by the activist laity on the basis of their financial contributions (in Germany, the church tax system) and by means of quasi-parliamentary institutions. Does any of this sound familiar? Those of such mind were key to the emergence of Nazism until it was kicked out of Bavaria following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch. After that, it is true, Nazism became a movement and a party with its base in staunchly Protestant areas of Germany and within the fiercely anticlerical Third Lager in Austria.

This country retains a monarchy, and that monarchy commands the very intense loyalty of the lower middle class that is any Fascist movement's base, as it is certainly the BNP's and the EDL's; that party, at least, therefore has to keep quiet about its policy of abolition. Fascists do not like monarchies, and in fact the BNP wishes to abolish Britain's. But they draw equally on the absolutism of the bourgeois republic created paradigmatically in France, and on the princely absolutism developed out of pre-Revolutionary sources, especially Jean Bodin, in reaction against the Revolution and its many imitations.

It combines and focuses them both in a Leader figure who is neither a prince, nor drawn from and answerable to republican institutions (in the broader sense of a res publica) such as a strong Parliament. He characteristically bypasses such institutions by means of the referendum. And he performs the ceremonial functions that would have been performed by the abolished monarchy or local nobility, squirarchy or whatever. Had there still been all those kings, princes, grand dukes and the rest doing their stuff in their apparently funny uniforms across German-speaking Europe or the Italian Peninsula, then there would have been no gap for Hitler or Mussolini to fill. There is no such gap in Britain.

As with the monarchy, so with the War. Griffin had a photograph of Churchill next to him on his Party Election Broadcast. He is welcome to Churchill, but that is another story. Ridiculously, a party drawn from this country's tiny little world of Hitler-loving weirdoes and misfits has to electioneer by posing as the heir of the struggle of those whom Hitler blockaded and Blitzed. Griffin cannot say, even were he capable of doing so, that they should never have been put in that position, nor bemoan the collapse of morality during the War, since I find that his supporters warmly endorse that collapse and its consequences throughout (yes, throughout) the post-War period.

Nor can Griffin bemoan, even if he were capable of doing so, the loss of British power in the world, or the loosening of ties with former Empire countries, since the West Indians, in particular, came here on British passports from countries most of which retain the Queen as Head of State to this day and several of which remain British by choice. Whereas the Republic of South Africa was proclaimed as a specific act of anti-British revenge, while its Rhodesian satrapy was born in treason against the Queen. Just as there is no equivalent of the pro-Vichy tradition on which a BNP or EDL intellectual might draw, so there is no equivalent of the pro-OAS tradition, either. The pieds-noirs wanted to stay French. Ian Smith wanted to stop being British.

All in all, it is no wonder that there is no British publication comparable to Éléments. Never mind to Rivarol. Mercifully, there cannot be.