Grey Thinking?

What a ludicrous standoff at Grey’s Monument in Newcastle today, between people who wanted to march from it in honour of the man whom it depicted, as is custom and practice, and people who purportedly wanted to protect it in the name of everything to which he was opposed. Why are there no Far Right intellectuals in Britain? Is that a ridiculous question? Not at all.

There are Far Right intellectuals in France. There are intellectuals in the Austrian Third Lager. There are intellectuals on the Far Right in Italy and in the Iberian world. 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. Alain de Benoist or Dominique Venner would have no more success in Britain. 

Here, the whole thing would stand even less of a chance than it did in Germany. 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. 

We do have a Liberal Protestant movement such as, in its rootlessness and 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.

However, the heresy of intégrisme, so fundamental to the Fascism of the Latin world, is almost unknown to any of our Catholic subcultures. 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 became a movement and a party with its base in staunchly Protestant areas of Germany and within the fiercely anticlerical Third Lager in Austria.

Nick Griffin used to have a photograph of Churchill next to him on his Party Election Broadcast. He and his successors are 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 had to electioneer by posing as the heir of the struggle of those whom Hitler blockaded and Blitzed. Ridiculously, we saw today the Nazi salute in ostensible defence of a statue of Churchill.

Just as there is no equivalent of the pro-Vichy tradition on which a British Far Right 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, and that is before mentioning the Boers’ revenge republic.

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