Zimbabwe and Foreign-Nationalism

Once again, as during most of the post-War period, we in Britain face two threats from foreign-nationalism in our midst, each with a small clique of hired help and a wider circle of fellow-travellers, commanding almost no popular support but enjoying enormous influence where power resides. Once again, each of these owes specifically patriotic allegiance, not to this country, but to something extraneous and indeed hostile. Today, one foreign-nationalism is neoconservatism, and the other is Islam. Not "a perversion of Islam", but Islam itself.

Neoconservatism entails strong support for America and Israel, and therefore also, as anyone reading the Statement of Principles of The Henry Jackson Society can see, for the American-sponsored project of European federalism, which is what that project has been ever since the 1940s, both in its American sponsorship and in its federalist intent. But that support does, up to a point, depend on American, and arguably even Israeli, adherence to certain explictly neoconservative policies.

And then there is Islam.

By contrast, there was no such vagueness about foreign-nationalism in its two older forms. One of those forms used to defend even the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, such was its devotion to the Soviet Union. The other used to defend even an act of high treason against The Queen, because the territory in question thus became a satellite and client of the Boer Republic, set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown by persons who had been interred during the Second World War because of their pro-Nazi activities.

Which brings us to Zimbabwe. For the treason in question was in Rhodesia, while Mugabe and others like him were Soviet-backed. I cannot help thinking that the present fuss being made on the British Right over Zimbabwe, justified though it is in many ways, is because of nostalgia for the days when pseudo-Tories were expected to worship at the altar, not of a foreign and rabidly anti-British ideology called neoconservatism, but of a foreign, rabidly anti-British, and very solid entity called the Republic of South Africa.

Likewise, I cannot help thinking that the British Government's lukewarm response is because so many of its members and closest advisors have their roots, not in the Labour Movement, but on the sectarian Left, where they were often active in the period between the Rhodesian UDI and formal Zimbabwean independence, a time when, again, things must have seemed so much simpler, for the very good reason that they were.