Drew Fraser at Inverell 2008

“What I do want to talk about is, essentially, the Anglo-Saxon identity crises, the source of Anglophobia, the sort of spiritual disorder that I believe Anglo-Saxons are suffering from. What I want to start with is the nature of the disorder, move on to talk about the deep roots of the disorder, and then conclude by discussing a possible remedy for it.

First of all, the source of the nature of this crises seems to me is in the official description called constitutional patriotism, or civic nationalism, which translates in real terms into the idolatrous worship of the state and the corporate system - in practical terms.”

So began a speech by Prof Andrew Fraser given last March at the Inverell Forum, Australia’s famously incorrect annual celebration of dissident opinion and free speech.  The Forum organisers produce DVDs of each of the speeches, and it is thanks to MR reader John Fitzgerald that the Fraser speech is now in transcribed form and I can quote from it.

In the first part of the speech, Fraser traces the roots of white racial consciousness through the period of slave-owning in the American South, the development of white skin privilege and white equality, and the emergence in the North of the fundamentals of modern human rights.

“In Australia,” he asks, “how can you run an immigration policy on the basis of discrimination between white and non-white, especially once you start to play around with the notion of white, because white is not synonymous with Anglo-Saxon.  Afterwards you get massive numbers of Italians, Greeks and Lebanese Christians.  Are they white?  Just where is the boundary of whiteness?  So then it became human-ness that really counts.  And so you have what came to be known as the non-discriminatory immigration policy.”

Now, Fraser had begun by using the term “spiritual disorder”, so it should be no surprise that from here on the speech focuses heavily on the, as he sees it, broad failure of Christianity in the crisis of Anglo-Saxon identity.  “It’s a mistake,” he tells us, “to do what a lot of people on the right would do; blame it all on the Frankfurt School, or the Jews or, as I hear here, the Illuminate.” Fraser roots the entire process in the Papal revolution which confined the action of kings to the secular world.  “The world becomes flattened, “he says, “God is a being, we are beings, he is an infinite being, we are finite beings ...  In that kind of context God, because he’s infinite, becomes very remote and only accessible to us through his will.”

This is not how it had been in earlier times.  Fraser says, “The ancient Romans, for example, saw a division of society between those who pray and/or ruled, those who fought and those who worked.  And each of these orders in society had their own divinities, their own Gods.  Each order participated in the divine in their own particular way.  Even after the conversion of Anglo-Saxons to Christianity that same tripartite order persisted.  King Alfred, the great Anglo-Saxon king, saw society in essentially those terms.  He saw Anglo-Saxon society like a three-legged stool, with those who prayed and those who fought supporting his position, and his role as king was to preserve and protect society as a whole.”

The ultimate expression of this divorce of the divine principle from everyday life is, Fraser claims, Darwinism. It “replaces the idea of God altogether with an even more impersonal force known as natural selection.  The fittest survives and passes on genes to the next generation.  Once again you have a world that operates and can be understood in terms of its own logic.  You don’t need God or the divine to explain it.”

This secularising process has proved disastrous for the modern Anglican church as demonstrated by Rowan William’s recent observation that the adoption of Sharia is inevitable in UK law.

“Why?” demands Fraser, “Because social cohesion demands it. Clearly, here is a guy who’s using the term social cohesion, which is a secular term.  Muslims don’t talk about social cohesion, they talk about Allah’s will.  So he’s concerned about the social cohesion of the Muslim colony in Britain, but in the very act of making that claim he’s destroying ... further weakening the social cohesion among Anglo-Saxons.  And any Anglo-Saxon who thinks England is the ancestral home of the English, and there ought to be an anti-colonial movement to get rid of the Muslim colonies, is absolutely a sinner in the eyes of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  So we need to get away from Anglican secularism.”

Where we need to get, in Fraser’s view, is back to “the Anglo-Saxon Volkgeist”.  It won’t be achieved by a continuation of secularism in any form: “We don’t need ... a white nationalist movement focussed on capturing state power to somehow serve the interests of white people because we know that the state won’t serve the interests of white people, much less the interests of Anglo-Saxons.  The state is embedded in a system of global corporate capitalism, and that’s what they are about.  They would be doing that, I’d argue, even if the BNP managed to form a government.  That false religion is just too powerful to go back.”

So Fraser proposes that Anglo-Saxons must resile from that salvation which comes “from the state and, especially, from the market”, and return to “an Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy ... we need to return to our ethnic roots through the Church of England. In the Church of England you’d see God’s gift to the Anglo-Saxon people, not as Henry VIII saw it, as an arm of the English state, nor would you see it as most Anglican Evangelicals see it now, as a movement to carry the good news of Christianity to the Third World.  Anglican Evangelicals should be engaged in a mission to the Anglo-Saxon people, today, now, here, and in every other former Anglo-Saxon country.  At least to create a solid core of orthodox Anglicans who would serve the same function in effect in our ethnic group or our ethnic culture as orthodox Jews do for Judaism.”

Well, I hope that these few quotes from John’s transcription have done justice to Drew Fraser’s thesis.  I want now to make a few observations of my own, which I hope Drew will take the opportunity to comment upon (although it’s been few years since he graced the MR threads).

My first point is a purely personal one, offered as somebody who has no glimmer of feeling for the worship of deity, whose parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts were all the same and whose progeny is too!  There is an important sense in which the optionalisation of religious observance has been a great liberation for, at least, a non-trivial minority of our people ... perhaps a quarter.  The evangelist’s notion that a religious conviction equal in force to his own lies at slumber in every man’s breast is, to my certain knowledge, a conceit.  From childhood, past generations of my family will certainly have taken their places on the stone-cold pews at Evensong, and exhibited all the usual outward signs of faith.  But if they ever believed it was only faintly and for the sake of expediency.  The communal life of the times demanded it.  For the faithless, faith was no field of choice but a narrow path hedged about by moral and social inadmissability.

Do we want to re-submit ourselves to the hegemony of the Christian faithful, even Drew’s Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy?  I don’t wish this hypocrisy upon myself or mine.  But I have to acknowledge that the faith-geners, by far the majority of whom have secularised and now profess the state-mandated religion of the individual, do enjoy the advantage of overwhelming numbers.  If they herd together in any direction - anti-fascism, anti-racism, or holocaustism every bit as much as some new Anglican orthodoxy - I will lose freedom of conscience.  That could be acceptable in the twin cause of my people living aright (ie, acting adaptively) and reclaiming their land (acting nationalistically).  But it would still be an intellectually regressive step.

This brings us to my second, much more interesting point.  Here we are deep in the Age of Knowledge.  Scientific Man, godless and European in every fibre of his being, has his attention fixed on unlocking all life’s mysteries.  He is bound to go forward, with no crisis of confidence, forever extending the realm of the “impersonal” and shrinking God’s, forever “flattening” the world.  He cannot pause to allow “Anglican orthodoxy” control over the historical process, which it would surely desire even if its hostility to the impersonal was directed primarily at the state and the market, as Drew proposes.

The long and fruitful era of faith was the era of the faith-gener.  It increased him so that, today, he is in the overwhelming majority in Europe as he is among all the races.  But now the game is done with us.  Faith is splintered and secularised and without national feeling, and its once all-conquering reproductive fitness is in terminal decline.  Who is to say it is not simply an anachronism?

But ... as an alternative, the pursuit of Knowledge has not increased us either, that’s the problem - and, of course, it is a disastrous problem if the invaders of our lands are the only ones to exploit the huge increase in carrying capacity which Knowledge has brought.  But that does not mean it can never serve our own genetic interests, as any assisted fertility clinician will tell you.  Which, then, would be the easier to engineer: a return to a pre-Papal revolution faith or a forging onward to a new eugenic Europe?  Well, which is closer to what you expect the future to contain, given current trends?

Of course, even given a more scientific approach to European fertility, the problem of acting nationalistically - the problem we blog about every day - remains.  Is Drew right that only religion can contain both racial consciousness and adaptive living?  Is he right about the impotence of “a white nationalist movement focussed on capturing state power”?

I, for one, wouldn’t be in this business if I thought that ideas held no sway.  I see the world wholly in terms of the ideas that are in it, not the expressions of belief.

I will close on a more colourful note, also from last year’s Inverell Forum - the moment when a faith-gener of the godless leftist persuasion demonstrated what has become of Puritanism in the postmodern West.

Helen Caldicott is, according to Drew, a national treasure in the eyes of the Australian left because she has devoted her life to the anti-nuclear campaign.  “After I spoke”, Drew wrote in an email to me, “Caldicott was spluttering with incoherent rage and couldn’t wait to accuse me of being a Nazi, full of hate, eager to start a war, etc.  It was intensely satisfying to see her lose her cool in that way.  I had been praying that she would attend my talk (she had been conspicuously absent from the session featuring an anti-vaccination activist) precisely because I was pretty sure she would do her nut - which she did.  I was highly amused, but many in the audience were outraged by her attitude.  I couldn’t imagine why since it was totally predictable.  She is, after all, a member of the secular theocracy and not one likely to stand by idly in the face of rank heresy.”

That, Drew, is your natural market for a new Anglican orthodoxy.  Believe me, the violence of her feelings is infinitely more fertile ground than the mystification of the faithless.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, January 4, 2009 at 11:05 PM in Christianity
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