Sunday 23 October 2011

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.

16 comments:

  1. We too draw on several political traditions that can combined and focused in a Leader figure. I am proud to say that that Leader figure is David Lindsay. Nearly every day, we are treated to a post approaching this level of effortless erudition and insight. At least once every week, we are treated to the full works, as in this case. I know of nowhere else where it is possible to read anything like this. Rightfully a Prime Minister in waiting, and shame on Labour for ever having having preferred anyone else at any wrung of the ladder.

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  2. Thanks David.

    As usual I've nothing to add as I tend to spend my time here learning; but I like to drop the odd message of encouragement and thanks.

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  3. What about Alain de Benoist? And waht about the fact that there was a monarchy in Fascist Italy?

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  4. Alain de Benoist's Neo-Paganism would make no more progress over here than Hitler's ever did, and for the same reasons. His continuity with the Nazis in this regard stands in contradiction to his claim to represent a break with the Far Right ideology and practice of the twentieth century.

    Marine Le Pen has been influenced by de Benoist. Although intégristes and their fellow-travellers may have been attracted to the Front National, the victory of Marine Le Pen in securing that party;s nomination should have put paid to what was always that dangerous delusion, as indeed is intégrisme itself.

    As John (of Economics Is For Donkeys) wrote in a comment on a previous post touching on Mussolini and the Italian monarchy:

    "Many Italians had no sense of loyalty towards the House of Savoy. In many areas, and especially in the South, the Savoyards and their Piedmontese troops and officials were seen as foreign invaders, more French than “Italian.” For a long time after unification, it was not unusual to find Bourbon loyalists in the Southern provinces. This attitude also partly explains the poor performance of the armies of united Italy, which contained many Southern peasants.

    These peasants did not understand why they were fighting and could care less about much outside of their own locality.

    This attitude also applied to Fascism. When asked what he thought of the Fascists, one Southern peasant said that he barely knew anything about the Fascist regime in Rome, and didn’t care. All he cared about were his crops. I don’t know as much about Northern and Central Italy, but it was true that the monarchy was not popular everywhere.

    Some scholars have also argued that Victor Emmanuel III supported Mussolini as a safeguard against left-wing radicalism and as a possible bulwark of stability.

    There is perhaps some truth to that claim, but it should also be noted that Victor Emmanuel III was something of a weak man who did not even particularly want to be king. I believe he even went so far as to contemplate renouncing the throne in favor of his cousin, the Duke of Aosta.

    The personal defects of Victor Emmanuel III should not be seen as an indictment of the idea of monarchy per se. If I am correct, a number of monarchs opposed fascism in Europe during the World War II period.

    In any event, whatever opportunistic things they may have said in public, most fascists were privately very anti-monarchy. In fact, the entire idea of a monarch seems to defy some important aspects of fascist ideology.

    I mean, how can you support extreme, ethnocentric nationalism when your monarch’s dynasty may have originally come from another country, or whose members have the blood of many different ethnic groups? The whole idea of monarchy seems to fly in the face of racism."

    Indeed it does, and our own perhaps most of all, with its role in the Commonwealth and indeed in binding together what has always been our multiethnic Union, and in view of our Royal Family's descent, both from the part-black Queen Charlotte, and, via the part-Moorish Elizabeth of York, from Muhammad.

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  5. What about Troy Southgate and this bunch? http://www.rosenoire.org/

    Although they would dispute the label far right, last time I checked they believed in something called national anarchism.

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  6. They rather illustrate my point. Who in Britain is ever going to take that seriously?

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  7. Journal du Cercle de la Rose Noire? I think that sums up how British it is.

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  8. Quite.

    And check out that waving of a Norman flag as an expression of an Anglo-Saxon identity (never mind that waving of a Crusader flag, with the Cross on it, as an expression of a Pagan identity).

    But then, they all do that. That howler and a bit of sub-Tolkien nonsense do not constitute the intellectual vanguard of a Neo-Pagan Far Right on that site any more than they do on a football terrace.

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  9. Éléments and Rivarol are still better than anything in Britain at the moment, which denies any voice to the non/anti-capitalist, non/anti-globalist, non/anti-Atlanticist, non/anti-Zionist Right that believes the West is Christendom rather than liberalism.

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  10. Their own position is entirely a product of Modernity in general and of the Revolution in particular, whether or not they happen to acknowledge it.

    On the broader point, the Mail newspapers are not bad: Peter Hitchens, Stephen Glover, Peter McKay, Andrew Alexander, fairly frequent pieces by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. All a world away from Fascism, of course. The Mail has been far sounder than the Telegraph over Liam Fox.

    But both the Old Tory Right and what might be called the Old Labour Right (although few of them would thank you for usuing the term) are in general scandalously excluded from the national debate.

    I know how I'd fix that, though. If I had the money. Anyone with a lot of it, do please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com

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  11. I am sorry that you never got what you deserved at university. You were always so much cleverer than the Beautiful People you were passed over for.

    You were articulating this sort of thing even then, but it never made any difference. Maybe you should have applied to Oxford or Cambridge after all? Imagine where you could have been by now as a past President of an Oxbridge JCR or of the Oxford or Cambridge Union. Even there, how many people could have written this? As the first comment says, you produce material like this on a very regular basis.

    You always did. I remember you making speeches as erudite as this on every subject under the sun every week at the Union, or on any given night in Chad's bar or 24 if anyone asked you about something. You were no older than 22.

    Maybe Labour should be ashamed for never having used you properly and ultimately driving you away because they preferred football/pop music types to one of the most serious thinkers of our generation. But if so then they are not the only ones.

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  12. I know you had several family ties to your original college and you keep up good relations with it. But you should never have been hanging around a couple of boorish public school drinking clubs on the Bailey, full of boys whose schools had to put them up for Oxbridge because their parents were paying for it but who never stood a rat's chance of getting in. It is no surprise that you have found a much happier home on the Hill in recent years. By the time you stopped being a student, you were already a governor of two schools. You were always as clever and learned as this post suggests, the intellectual giant in our midst. You were viciously persecuted for it by the Flashman element. I still think of yours as the lost term at the Union, the great might have been. I know some people from your old college feel the same about the lost year of you as Senior Man. But like I said, public school drinking clubs for Oxbridge rejects. You should never have been in them.

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  13. You never tried to become Senior Man. Your prettier but less clever best mate did it for you. You were his wing man and he was your front man.

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  14. David is the lost leader to a lot of us. The cuts in the buses for Lanchester and Burnhope would never have happened if he had been a councillor above parish level, the removal of subsidised buses to St. Bede's and other Catholic schools would never have happened, either.

    That is why he is not one, the party machines that control access would never allow someone like that. On one famous occasion they volunatrily lost two district seats out of three by putting up a football-watching, pop-listening poseur who had been a party member for about 5 minutes and took a veteran councillor down with him.

    With a party's support, David would have held the seat and that veteran would have held his. But anything at all to keep out a man capable of writing this post or even reading it. Anything to keep the whole thing a club for people who left school at 14, 60 or 70 years ago. People who nod through things like the cuts in the buses for Lanchester and Burnhope and the removal of subsidised buses to St. Bede's and other Catholic schools.

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