Majorityrights Central > Category: History

“I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people.  I was doing it against my instincts.”

John Lennon, quoted just before his death.

At a brief lull during the Who’s performance of Tommy, [Abbie] Hoffman, who had ingested LSD after working the past few hours at the medical tent, abruptly walked onto the stage and began addressing the crowd from Pete Townshend’s microphone.  He shouted, “I think this is a pile of shit! ... While John Sinclair rots in prison ...”  Alerted to the disturbance, Townshend (who apparently had been too distracted to notice Hoffman ambling onto the platform), snarled at Hoffman, “Back off!  Back off my fucking stage!”  He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling.  As the crowd let out an approving roar, Townshend returned to his microphone to add a sarcastic “I can dig it!”  Following the conclusion of the next song, the short “Do You Think It’s Alright?”, Townshend issued a stern warning to those in attendance: “The next fucking person that walks across this stage is gonna get fucking killed, alright? You can laugh, [but] I mean it!”

From the Wikipedia entry on the Woodstock Festival

During last month, the fortieth anniversary of the Paris student protests, the press was well-populated with articles about the generation of 1968.  I am nearly but not quite one of them and, personally, I’ve found a lot of what was written to suffer from generalisation.  The spirited, no-nonsense attitude of Townshend and the coerced and manufactured gaucheness of Lennon were nowhere mentioned.  But they are both much closer to the world that I encountered as a (very) young man.

One does well to remember that, at heart, the 60s generation as a whole was probably no more interested in left-wing political activism than any other.  Rather, it was caught up in an historical moment in the West so coloured by cultural, religious and political exhaustion, and - something entirely new - so drenched with the images of an inexcusable, far-away war, that millenarianism and rebelliousness were a simple, mechanical response.

Many aspects of it were ineffably silly and lightweight.  But a few managed to turn escapism from the grey reality of our parent’s world into an adventure of self-discovery.  These were a pure intoxication of the spirit, the like of which I have not seen since.

READ MORE...

Here is the full text of Enoch Powell’s speech to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham on 20th April 1968.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.” Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries. After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

READ MORE...

The only programme of the five in the BBC2 White season which has garnered any kind of praise from right-thinkers is “Rivers of Blood”, a surprisingly sympathetic and rounded portrayal of the great and courageous Enoch Powell.  Naturally, it has found its way onto YouTube.  My thanks to wintermute for sending me links to all six parts.

Part 1

Part 2

READ MORE...

Last month I put up a brief post titled Leviathan Rising.  It speculated on the general policy direction by which the transformation to a Leviathan superstate might be effected.  Of course, the times would be characterised by trauma injury to European societies made raceless, and therefore loveless and powerless - for without love between the people there can be no strength in them.

The approach of this condition we can all surmise from the evidence about us.  We read and write about it every day.  But let’s venture beyond.

In my post I argued that the “detachment into domestic policy blandness and irrelevance, and the shift to action abroad” would be the sign that the totalitarian Rubicon had finally been crossed.  But actually, I’ve just come across a better formulation from Leo Strauss in writings about his teacher, the great German jurist Carl Schmitt: “[It] would be a world of entertainment without politics and the possibility of struggle.”  Recognise that?

Now, sixty-three years after the extinction of the system he helped to theorise, Schmitt is still the pre-eminent authority on matters of total dominion?  Addressing the riddle of how to despatch liberal democracy without triggering what Habermas has termed “the legitimation crisis”, he formulated a legal and philosophical legitimisation for dictatorship.  This he did through a number of influential works in the years up to 1933, when he finally joined the Nazi Party.  His thought, however, reduces to four core concepts:-

1. The concept of “Exception” from the normal restraints on state power in the absence of order.

2. The concept of “The Political”, as the dominion or theatre of action for the state (and the state alone).

3. The concept of “friend/enemy”.  In the racial sense applying in National Socialist Germany, this could be seen as the division into in-group/out-group from the standpoint of the state.  In our age, the “enemy” is European Man.  But it need not be racial, of course, and indeed is really just a means of defining the activism of “The Political” (or the interests of the elite).

4. “Nomos” or the historic dynamic out of which grew the European Age or Global Order of the 18th and 19th centuries, which Schmitt idealised and at the summit of which placed the development of the sovereign state.

It should be no surprise that for well over a decade now Carl Schmitt has been an object of study and fascination both on the liberal-left and the Straussian right.  I will explore some of his ideas in greater depth later on.  But to give you a flavour of the man I’m going to end this post with the transcripts from his interrogations at Nuremberg.

He was arrested by the Russians in Berlin in April 1945, interrogated and then released.  But six months later he was arrested by the Americans at the instigation of German Jews in OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States), and interned until March 1947.  He was then interrogated by a prosecutor for the War Crimes Trials, Robert M. W. Kempner, on three occasions.  Here are the full transcripts of those interviews:-

READ MORE...

From the Telegraph, a perfect and equable example of preserving genetic interests:-

Mixed-race babies ‘were sent to the US’

Thousands of illegitimate mixed-race children fathered by American GIs were given up by their British mothers and shipped across the Atlantic, according to newly released papers.

The issue of how to deal with the unwanted offspring of the illicit affairs divided the country towards the end of the Second World War and exposed the racial prejudices of the time.

The problem began to emerge in 1944, when increasing numbers of US servicemen were stationed around Britain.  Many of the women they fathered children with were wives of British soldiers fighting abroad.  The documents suggest that where the baby was white it was often possible for husband and wife to be reconciled and keep the child. However, this was rarely possible when the child was mixed race.

... The files, released today by the Public Records Office in Kew, include a letter from a Miss O. Clarke to her MP suggesting the babies be placed in West Indies mission schools.  However, a Whitehall official wrote to the MP in July 1944: “The proposed solution is high-handed and - if confined to coloured illegitimates - has a Herrenrasse (master race) flavour not now popular.”

By the end of the war pressure was mounting on the Government to take action.  In letters to the Ministry of Health in December 1945 and March 1946 Harold Moody, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, said Britain and the US must treat each baby as a “war casualty” and warned: “Our anxiety is to forestall a social problem which might not only affect the life of this country but which might also affect Anglo-American relations.”

In response Aneurin Bevan, health minister, said his policy was to encourage mothers to keep their children, or failing that to tackle the shortage of places in homes.

The Home Office, however, differed and one official wrote: “Provided it is clear that the mother does not want the child and there is a reasonably satisfactory home in the US the child will have a far better chance if sent at an early age to the US than if it brought up in this country.”

Well, let’s be clear.  For my parents’ generation illegitimacy carried a stigma scarcely conceivable among the dozy and reproductive today.  Lives were completely ruined by it.  But ... for tens of thousands of girls the American military man was just too glamorous and exciting, and too much fun in some very grey times, to ignore.  It wasn’t as if there were thousands of English boys around anyway.

Even so, giving oneself to a negro - American or otherwise, soldier or not - brought into focus a swathe of other, painful moral issues.  Irrespective of the elitist sensibilities of the Whitehall official with his Herrenrasse fears, the public had what might be termed a “direct” understanding of negroes.  As understandings go, it was a rather better and more honest one than the so vibrant, so-so enriching official bilge that gets pumped at people today.

It was also too implacable to be blown away by a few cries of “racism”.  For the family to rally round a daughter who produced an illegitimate white baby was one thing.  It was completely another if that baby was black.  No tales of a loved father lost at sea or in battle far away could be spun to the curious and to the growing child.  A black father meant one type of relationship only, with no thought in the moment the deed was done for self-respect or responsibility.  It was simply too great a burden to bear through life if there was any half-acceptable alternative - and, it transpires, there was.

In fact, the alternative was a very good one from a perspective of English genetic interests.  In so far as was possible, thousands of carriers of African genes were distanced from the English genepool, while English genes travelled back to the segregated negro population of America.

I am, though, intrigued by the Home Office statement that runs: “Provided it is clear that ... there is a reasonably satisfactory home in the US ...”  Did the British government fund orphanages in America?  Did they pay American couples to adopt the children?  How were these reasonably satisfactory homes secured?

We are not told.  But it is interesting to reflect on what can be achieved when the political will exists, as one suspects it must exist again some day.

Several years ago, when I was researching the post-war history of Germany and the establishment of the Federal Republic, I found a library copy of Aidan Crawley’s Spoils of the War: The Rise of Western Germany 1945-1972.  It’s out of print these days.  But it was a good read, an eye-witness testimony mostly of the administration of the British Zone of Occupation, where Crawley was stationed.

Still, this was the first time I had read in any detail of the rapine onslaught of the Red Army, and the terrible conditions in the West visited upon the German civil population.  Their daily ration of calories was lower than that fixed by the SS for camp inmates.  Yet the Army threw good food away because they could not eat it all, and forbade locals from scavenging for it.  Crawley witnessed the spread of tuberculosis among the ruins and, inadequately treated, the toll it claimed through the terrible winter of 1946/7.

He savaged the French administration to the north for their staging of insanely grandiloquent military displays, the purpose of which was to teach the German dogs how a cultured victor behaves.  Meanwhile, of course, the dogs were starving.

But the French, as always, were of passing importance.  It was for the Americans, and most especially the high American hand in policy for all three zones, that he reserved his greatest ire.  He deplored the treatment of German soldiers, and did not shrink from calling the worst of it torture.  He railed, too, at the American insistence on reparations - in effect ripping out every worthwhile industrial machine and denying the people any chance of much-needed, normal economic activity.

Crawley, an exceptional man, died penniless in 1993 and amid much personal tragedy, which has continued to stalk his family in the years since.  I am glad, though, that he wrote Spoils of the War and helped introduce me to this extraordinary time in Europe’s history.

In April this year, though, another, weightier book was published about the same period.  It is After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift by Giles Macdonogh.  The Telegraph reviewed it on 18th April:-

READ MORE...

By Tomislav Sunic

From the European and American media, one can often get the impression that World War II needs to be periodically resurrected to give credibility to financial demands of one specific ethnic group, at the expense of others. The civilian deaths of the war’s losing side are, for the most part, glossed over. Standard historiography of World War II is routinely based on a sharp and polemical distinction between the “ugly” fascists who lost, and the “good” anti-fascists who won, and few scholars are willing to inquire into the gray ambiguity in between. Even as the events of that war become more distant in time, they seemingly become more politically useful and timely as myths.

German military and civilian losses during and especially after World War II are still shrouded by a veil of silence, at least in the mass media, even though an impressive body of scholarly literature exists on that topic. The reasons for this silence, due in large part to academic negligence, are deep rooted and deserve further scholarly inquiry. Why, for instance, are German civilian losses, and particularly the staggering number of postwar losses among ethnic Germans, dealt with so sketchily, if at all, in school history courses? The mass media—television, newspapers, film and magazines—rarely, if ever, look at the fate of the millions of German civilians in central and eastern Europe during and following World War II. [1]

The treatment of civilian ethnic Germans—or Volksdeutsche—in Yugoslavia may be regarded as a classic case of “ethnic cleansing” on a grand scale. [2]  A close look at these mass killings presents a myriad of historical and legal problems, especially when considering modern international law, including the Hague War Crimes Tribunal that has been dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars of 1991-1995. Yet the plight of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans during and after World War II should be of no lesser concern to historians, not least because an under­standing of this chapter of history throws a significant light on the violent break-up of Communist Yugoslavia 45 years later. A better understanding of the fate of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans should encourage skepticism of just how fairly and justly international law is applied in practice. Why are the sufferings and victimhood of some nations or ethnic groups ignored, while the sufferings of other nations and groups receive fulsome and sympathetic attention from the media and politicians?

READ MORE...

One of the most obvious of human instincts is the desire to propagate our genes. We want to reproduce ourselves, which helps to explain not only our desire to have children, but also our instinct to live in continuity amongst our own racial kin.

At one level, the political class recognises this instinct to propagate genes. It is, after all, an aspect of the Darwinism to which the political class strongly adheres. For instance, when discussing human evolution, the Australian leftist John Bradford is happy to explain that,

“Both men and women are driven by the unconscious imperative to transfer as many of their individual genes, and in as great a number as possible, into succeeding generations.”

So what we have is a strong human instinct urging us to have children and to preserve communities based on kinship, with the liberal intelligentsia giving this instinct a strong recognition in terms of human evolution.

And yet, despite this, the Western intelligentsia acts directly against this instinct by advocating unrestricted immigration and racial diversity (John Bradford, for instance, later in his article mocks white men for their “nationalist resentment” in seeking to exclude a world of “others”.)

But perhaps this should not be so surprising. What if the problem that liberals have with the propagation instinct is exactly its importance to individual life? If you are seeking to create a “free” man, who authors his own self as he chooses, then it is exactly the strongest and most deeply felt instincts which will seem most limiting or oppressive and which the “liberated” individual will most want to prove his distance from.

READ MORE...