There has been no shortage of blogging about Rocco Buttiglioni.  He is, or was, good copy.  He brought about a colourfully chaotic passage in EU life, and we should all be grateful for that.  No doubt, the focus will now quickly move on.  His honesty and principle will not be much remembered.  Probably, there was never much chance that he could succeed to the Commission.  But it was a stand worth making, if only to remind us how dominant, arrogant and wrong the left is.

That said, one shouldn’t get too carried away with Rocco’s heroism.  He wasn’t proposing to expunge cultural marxism from the face of Europe.  Quite the contrary -  as a modern conservative politician he was a realist on social policy in the same way that his more or less post-socialist persecutors in the European Parliament are more or less realists on economic policy.  And he wanted that justice job.

So, with this post I will not pile more words onto the mountain of them blogged about the erstwhile Buttiglioni crisis.  Instead, I am going to ask you to make three leaps of the imagination.  If nothing else that is, as my foolish generation used to repeat ad nauseum, something completely different.

Buttiglioni, a traditionalist Catholic in a marxised political world, operated through the medium of a chinese wall in his waking life.  “I may think that homosexuality is a sin.  This has no effect on politics unless I say that homosexuality is a crime,” he told his interrogators from the European Parliament.  In the political sphere it is not unusual for public and private to be kept apart (a feat accomplished more successfully in continental Europe than in Britain, btw).  These days it is an all too necessary separation and it applies to beliefs as much as to moral behaviour or the collective will of the party, cabinet, Nu-Labour cabal et alia.

Still, imagine for a moment that we live in a world in which Buttiglioni had no need of such artifice.  Imagine that he could test his views against his peers’ or against the prevailing zeitgeist without the world collapsing in on him, without even the most arch-socialist, mixed-race lesbian Equality Advisor and proto Euro MP running from the room screaming.  Indeed, imagine what such a solid, reliable world might be like.

Firstly, and most obviously, it would be a world without arch-socialist, mixed-race lesbian Equality Advisors, without marxists full stop … middle-class liberals, too (a minor distinction, anyway).  And, therefore, it would be a world without the special sins these damaged creatures have created for us.  Our groaning burden of state-enforced, social-revolutionary strictures would simply not exist.  Our Jewish friends would have to thicken their skins like the rest of us and manage without laws against hate speech.  Our petty minorities would have to accept the natural particularism of the majority in all avenues of life, exactly as it always used to be.

Right and left would obtain in some form.  But the poison of intra-societal warfare, ingested from twentieth-century Judeo-German political philosophy, would not be the stock-in-trade of left-wing politics.  And nationalism - the greatest sin of all in our world and, therefore, the key to our freedom - would be an unexceptional issue that is just there in the background, like woodsmoke in the air or the sound of waves breaking on a pebbled beach.  Accordingly, society would be ethnically homogenous as our - and every other - people desire.

Of course, such an implicit sense of nation does rather argue against the model of denationed, globalised bureaucracy to which Buttiglioni was apparently keen to nail his schizophrenic colours.  But this being an exercise of the imagination, I shall ask you to avert your eyes from that and say no more about it.

On the social front, Buttiglioni’s firmly traditional idealism would see men and women completing one another’s lives through marriage and protecting the interests of their children above all things.  Abortion as a means of birth control would be illegal.  Welfarism as a lifestyle would be replaced by the disincentive to negative choices afforded by personal hardship and social stigma.  Those unfortunates who desire their own sex would be neglected benignly in return for their discretion.  The indiscreet would earn common disapproval.  Crime, which I rather suspect would not include private sexual acts between consenting adults, would be punished according to its nature.  And so on …

Understand that I am not proposing this in any absolute utopian sense.  I am asking whether it would be a better world than the one in which we live.  Would it, furthermore, be a better world than the one we are likely to be saddled with in, say, another four or five decades?

Imagining, I’m afraid, is what things have come to for conservatives.  The aching question which attends their toothless, grovelling subservience to the left, appropriate only to the most cruelly beaten cur, is: how the hell did this rank disaster ever come to pass?

One can pick one’s fateful moment from a medley of possibilities.  Little Tommy Hobbes suckling at his mother’s breast is a good one.  Frau Hitler going into labour might also do, especially since, to my mind, it was the excesses of Nazi Germany that “did for” nationalism in old Europe.  After two world wars in a quarter of a century all the continental nations were defeated in fact and in spirit.  They fled from nationalism as the cause of their sorrows, never thinking that they fled only from themselves and towards transnational oblivion.

But why did the victorious, un-European British also flee?  Our nationalism was no synonym for an absurd racial supremacy.  Racialism, anyway, was entirely separate from nationalism, and given form and tempered by our experience of Empire.  We had no war guilt to bear, beyond the fact that RAF Bomber Command blew the crap out of German cities a propos the designs of “Churchill’s Jew”, Lord Cherwell, and to the chagrin of his nemesis, Solly Zuckermann.  We did not behave ignobly towards our Jews.  Indeed there is said to have been some discord among long-established Jews when newcomers with a very different experience and an overt hatred of the gentile washed up here from Europe in the 1930’s.  Where, then, was the moral necessity to cast our gentle, conservative brand of nationalism into the fire and our own unique claims to identity and to our homeland with it?  How did our national will come to be so enfeebled?

This post is not the place to answer for our enfeeblement at the level of the general population.  That is a story about secretive and undemocratic government, culture war and globalisation.  But it has not yet, thank God, been finally written.

But a door to enfeeblement was opened early among the political elite.  Personally, I believe that it was the Allied occupation forces in post-war Germany that fashioned the key.  They did so via a process aimed at the establishment of German collective war guilt when the very existence of such guilt was much in dispute among the Allies themselves.  In the end it was the subject of an arbitrary political decision by the Americans.

Establishing as indisputable fact what could not actually be shown to exist required a heavier punitive model than the public school decency and fair play of the British officer class.  Accordingly, a special morality had to be brought to bear.  Specious and vague in its universalism though it was, it held Germans to standards of tolerance and humanitarianism that no people had been held to before - and were certainly not extended to them by the occupying forces.  German national feeling was utterly crushed beneath it.  Unfortunately for us, it turned out to be contagious.

So picture yourself standing amidst the ravages of Allied bombing and before the great, miraculously untouched edifice of the Kolner Dom.  It is May 1945.  You are a German and you are alive and, insomuch as any German can say so in these times, you are free.  At least, you are not in an Allied internment camp.

But you are not so free that you could skip the film they are showing all over the city.  Bergen-Belsen, shot by a sergeant in a British film unit.  Not pretty, no not pretty.  Really, not pretty at all.  And you are not so free that you can avoid being herded to stand here, in front of that great stone wedding cake, while a high British officer steps onto a wooden dais with a microphone planted in the centre of it.  Beside him is an army interpreter and behind him the City Mayor, a small, thin man new to you, and the Bishop, very grave and as grey as Dom stone itself.  About you and stretching away into the cleared spaces and the dusty streets that lead to this place are thousands of other ordinary Germans waiting dumbly, as ordered, for something to happen.  There are better places in the city to assemble.  But you understand that the Dom is the symbol of German spiritual continuity.  It was always bound to be here that they brought you.

The officer stoops toward the microphone and taps it twice with his right forefinger.  “People of Cologne,” he begins, satisfied that he will be heard, “I am not here to listen to stories of how you did not know what was going on in your country.”  He pauses and looks to the interpreter, whose routine monotone contrasts sharply with his own ringing clarity.  “You should all now have seen,” he continues, “film of the type of atrocities that have been committed in your name by your fellow Germans.  They did not merely murder women and children for you” … pause … “They did not merely destroy them as vermin are destroyed” … pause … “as beings of no consequence” … pause while the meaning sinks in … “They were of consequence.  So first they had to be debased and de-humanised as you have seen” … pause … “They had to be made into the sub-humans of Nazi propaganda to prove to the murderers and to you that extermination of the Jew is justified.”

You look about you.  Everywhere is surprise turning to shock.  You can almost feel the last vestiges of intellectual energy dissipating from the crowd.  This is not merely about the consequences of defeat.  It is much, much worse than that.

“This could not have happened,” the officer goes on, “without the support and encouragement of all of you.  Whether that support was tacit or active makes no difference.  You are regarded by me and my fellow serving soldiers and by every decent, tolerant human being as no better than criminals.  There are many standing among you today who will find out what that means to their cost.  The time of reckoning is at hand.”

What did he say then?  What did he say?  You want to turn to the men and women about you and shout out, “Criminal?  Me?  Would he have been satisfied, then, if I had got myself shot as a traitor?  Is that what I should have done?  Or is just being a German enough to damn me?  Well, fuck him.  I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

Perhaps the others feel like you.  Or perhaps they are still filled with high hopes for the occupation and expectations of liberality and a relaxed, un-German way of doing things.  But you can see as you look about you that something else is slowly sinking in.  You are not alone in your reaction.  Still, you say nothing.  You understand that silence admits of shame.  But an unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach tells you that you will be silent again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

“Though you are no longer our enemy,” the officer is saying, “you cannot be our friend.  We do not consider you fit to associate with decent people.  I have ordered that there shall be zero fraternisation between my men and a single one of you.”  Then he pulls himself up to his full height and announces with particular clarity, “Now let there be no doubt … the disease that was Nazism is dead and gone forever.  We govern in this zone and we will establish democracy here.  You will not be permitted to develop your own political expression.  We will rebuild your political life but we will also limit and control it to those ends we, not you, deem appropriate.  Germany shall never again be the belligerent.  We shall make you peaceful and productive.  We shall re-educate you all, adult and child alike.  No German will think or feel as he or she thought or felt in the past, not a single one of you.”

And that, dear reader, must suffice to show how, when and more or less where the blow to the British body politic was struck.  It was felt first as a troubling suspicion that tolerance, if it meant anything, must surely apply to all.  Expressed national sentiment was its opposite and might be the seedbed of genocide anywhere, including here, just as it had been in Hitler’s Germany.  No matter that this special Jewish-American morality was designed solely for the latter.  No matter that what might be lost by us as a result of it had hitherto been a centuries-old bulwark of the nation.  No matter that our nationalism was synonymous with identity, pride and love and with a commonsense understanding of human nature.  No matter that it was not Nazism nor anything to do with it, for God’s sake.  No, a historical process was in train, irresistible in its momentum and attended by a marxised left quick to insist upon its moral authority.

It is the left today, still, that is delivering-up our sense of being to an unwanted cosmopolitan future.  But it did not originate the process.  Neither, really, did “the Jews”.  We did it ourselves.  The context in Britain was difficult, of course.  The old political elite of the right must have seen the socialist straws in the wind in 1944, when Parliament passed the Education Act.  The world was changing.  Their ways of doing things belonged to the past.  Everybody said so.

One way or the other, the elite lost sight of what unites us or became too faint-hearted to fight for it.  The ideological grifters of the left, gentile and Jew alike, were eliding our island nationalism with the worst excesses of the Master Race.  Perhaps a few faithful Tory souls were chafing at the bit.  But in the end they capitulated, probably concluding that they couldn’t fight it with memories of the war still so fresh.

To compound this, over the next decade or so the old paternalist elite resiled from most of its remaining beliefs.  They were inexpedient to a Party searching to remain relevant and in the political centre.  True, it hung on to its electability for another three decades through the application of Keynesianism, corporatism and a deathly silence on Commonwealth immigration.  But that only validated the left’s social egalitarian prescription, which proved to be killing to paternalism.  By 1975 a neoliberal revolution had taken place within Toryism.  But on social issues conservativism lapped at the bowl of liberal-marxian universalism, equality and tolerance.  By the mid 1990s, once the Labour Party “modernised” by adopting neoliberalism itself, the Tories ceased even to be worth electing.  And so, today, this modern, post-socialist left – or call it liberal, progressive, marxian, Blairite - can talk confidently of the postnation, and not a whimper from the benches opposite will be heard.

It follows, then, that we are actually living in the age of the post-conservative, a most cowed and nervous animal.  The saintly Enoch was the last Tory to loose a really good rasp of defiance at the minority-mongers.  Probably, the rest now view even the possibility of barking as a deeply regrettable personal flaw as well, of course, as a sure loser at the polls.  Bark and be damned in the media.  Bark and be distinctly uncomfortable in the presence of one’s dusky-hued constituents.  Bark and be everything the political foe on the left and, worse still, in one’s own Party says one is.  Bark and stand down at the next election.  Bark and be yesterday’s mutt.

But for our third leap of the imagination, let’s play with the idea of what kind of canine it would take not merely to bark despite all this, but to bite a few left legs?

Well, imagine a conservative who understood, first and foremost, that the function of our country has been divorced from the interests of its people.  Imagine a conservative who understood that the ruling elite considers us collectively guilty in very many ways … that it has assumed absolute control and means to re-form us into a (quite literally) different and, of course, equal people.  Imagine a conservative who understood that we cannot practise our politics to useful effect unless we openly espouse our own worldview and our own interests.

Our worldview is not universalist.  It is particularist.  Therefore we espouse particularism.  It is not predicated on civic values like respect for diversity and tolerance but on nation and country.  Furthermore, we are not transnationals nor will we ever want to be.  Therefore we espouse nationalism.  We are not cheer leaders for multiculturalism or diversity or inclusiveness or any other term that means egalitarian since we are not marxists.  Therefore we espouse freedom.  Our people are not raised up by moral relativism, welfarism or by the professional victimologists of the rights industry.  Therefore we espouse social conservativism.

If we do not do so we cease to be, first, conservative in any real sense of the word and, second - in time - we shall cease to be an identifiably English people.  It is as stark as that.

I will finish on a disturbing and dangerous irony, which Sean Gabb touches upon at the close of his prodigious Free Life Commentary linked above.

The deeper we get into the racial-egalitarian mire the more probable it is that a reaction, if and when it comes, will be closer in character to the German model of nationalism.  The left may wind up creating the very phenomenon it most despises, known by the very name it so readily hurls at its opponents.  It would be only fitting, I suppose.