Majorityrights Central > Category: Political Philosophy

A long article by Tim Johnstone - almost 3,500 words - has been posted at Welf Herfurth’s New Right Australia/New Zealand blog on Welf himself.  This “standard-issue, 21st century German nationalist” has led an interesting life, including a stint in One Nation Party politics trying to “break the barriers to left-right thinking, attract people of different political camps, and unite them on the issues that concern them.”

After the Australian federal election of 1998, when One Nation “won a million votes but not one seat” and began to self-destruct, Welf withdrew from the political coalface.  Instead, he:-

began to look around for an alternative. He had long been interested in the ideas of Third Positionism and National Anarchism, and now began to apply them to his own activism

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What more shall I say about them ?  I cannot and need not say much more. In externals, they were two unobtrusive women; a perfectly secluded life gave them retiring manners and habits.  In Emily’s nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet.  Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero: but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage.  An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.  Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her interest.  Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending.

Anne’s character was milder and more subdued; she wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister, but was well endowed with quiet virtues of her own.  Long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.  Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass.  I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great.

Charlotte Brontë, writing of her sisters Emily and Anne in the preface to the combined edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey which was published in 1850, just over a year after their deaths.

The amazing, sad story of the Brontë sisters needs no retelling from me, and it is not my purpose to dwell on it here.  But these three remarkable women were a testament to native intelligence, as well as that creative font which intelligence may bestow: an interior life.

Native intelligence is much in vogue in British political circles.  As The Times’ Eleanor Mills wrote last week:-

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In our corner of philosophical life I seem to be the only person using this particular six-syllable word to characterise the mind of Man.  Now, that could be because it is a very bad characterisation.  Equally, it could be that I’m very bad at characterising my characterisations.  In the pitiful belief that it must be the latter, I am going to set forth precisely what these six syllables mean, and why they are important.

Readers who wish to live out the rest of their lives in peace and contentment look away NOW.

To the stoics who remain, my commiserations ... and the sincere hope that you will never be the same again.

There are a couple of much-used words - propositions really - that trouble me a lot.  They are, respectively, “freedom” and “will”.  These are the most dangerous ideas in the world.  They are the seat of a political fire that has been eating away at European Man’s existence for the last three hundred and fifty years and, if left unaddressed, will deliver him into a dispossessed, deracinated, dying individualism.  By any past or present measure in the life of Man, what is happening now to the most beautiful and creative of all his peoples is an event of incomprehensible scale.

Only those Europeans who cleave to that something called the radical right have noticed this, it seems.  We complain ceaselessly about it.  We point out that there is no place in the West where our people are not sick with freedom, or sickening fast.  So sick are they, we say, that the very ties of love that bind and bring meaning and beauty to their lives are being loosened with each passing day.  They are pursuing a vision of freedom that has as its method pure vandalism.

But none of it has the impact we desire.  Turning in on ourselves, then, we are haunted by two questions.  We return to them again and again.  How did it come to pass, and why?

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In the thread to the recent JW post on immigration and the GOP, I rashly asserted that, “My belief is that for the next couple of decades a genuine Conservatism is absolutely capable of providing a serviceable vehicle for a survivalist ethos, informed by European sociobiological needs and leavened by a light touch in the areas of personal and economic freedom.”

As luck would have it, I am too intellectually challenged to do serviceable.  But here’s an unserviceable one for all sufferers of insomnia.

The political change required to address the crisis in the West lies on the scale of the revolutionary. 

There is nothing new in this statement, extraordinary and disconcerting though it might at first seem to the conventional mind.  The long journey out of thinking that our persecutor is “the left” or “the state” - or, indeed, “Islam” or “immigration” - undoes all faith in electoral solutions and inevitably lead to this conclusion.  It is the putting away of causal simplicities and the beginning of political adulthood, of thinking in terms of scale.

At the same time, the purposive side of the equation - the “Great Question” of what we are to do - simplifies and tends in one of two broad directions, either:-

a) A collective spiritual renewal centred on a sacralisation of the folk,

or

b) a materialist approach serving the birthright of our sons and daughters.

It would be fair to say that the Revolutionary Conservatives or Traditionalists and the philosophers of the European New Right are grouped in the first category, and with them the Fascists and National Socialists of 20th Century Europe – notwithstanding the Nazis’ somewhat self-justifying ventures into racial science.

It would be entirely fair to say that present-day European political nationalism and American White Nationalism are grouped in the second category, albeit sometimes with longing sideways glances at the Speeresque glories of Nuremberg.

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Even self-professed National Socialists who reject liberalism in theory show the same expressive individualism of their peers in practice.  Their rallies are just as anarchic as those of their opposition.  Both sides in Knoxville were composed of dishevelled individualists venting their random emotions.  The classic Nazi rallies of the 1930s projected discipline, order, submission of the individual to the collective will.  Their contemporary imitators are usually nothing more than fetishists enamored with the Nazi aesthetic, as if it were another one their grotesque tattoos (indeed, this is often the case).  They may put on the clothes and flash around the symbols of the Third Reich, but the soul of National Socialism is not there.

This paragraph from a comment on the Interesting life thread by Scimitar of Occidental Dissent opens up a vein of discursive possibilities.  What is individualism, as it pertains to the life of European Man?  From whence does it spring?  Where, for us, does it lead?

There appears to be quite a bit of confusion surrounding the term.  Let’s dispel a deal of that straight away by saying what, in the sense of any understanding useful to us, it is not. 

Individualism is not a free-wheeling, self-expressive personality thing.  It is not a gun-toting independence of spirit.  It is not studied eccentricity or glamourousness, nor any attribute of self-hood.  Let us be clear that individualism, as the enduring political value of our age, is not to be apprehended at the level of the sad little, unawares “individual” at all.  It abides, somewhat counter-intuitively and as an abstraction, in the sum of the atomised parts ... to be precise, in the liberal social dynamic which atomises us and which preconditions the life we can lead.

For individualism is the inherent value in liberal philosophy and politics.  The social dynamic, that insatiable, promiscuous, ideological search for freedom, is our jealous adoptive parent.  It never quite succeeds in making us forget the old collective fetters of nation, faith and tradition, through each of which the European sociobiology unfolds.

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Life and blogging are sometimes unpredictable.  A week ago I put up a fairly extensive post on metapolitics and Man.  In it I drew together some strands of what, in my addled brain, passes for philosophical thought.  There was nothing there that hasn’t been aired before at MR, and none of it was very remarkable, no doubt.

Even so, whenever one goes out on a limb in this way it is always with an expectation that the most godawful humiliation lies just around the corner.  After all, we are intellectual gunslingers of a sort and MR is, if not Dodge City exactly, certainly somewhere the tumbleweed rolls.

So after posting the piece I waited, as one does, for the saloon doors to swing open and the fun to start.  I was disappointed.

Then two days ago I posted an innocuous little piece about the popular redefinition of language not by the left now, and still less by the incompetent right, but by our children.  This wasn’t a controversial or dangerous post.  It was intended as light reading.  My holster stayed hanging on the hook behind the door.  So why, pray, have so many people taken it upon themselves to start shooting?

In a word, Wintermute, I suppose.  But, really, all he did was to light up an unmissably large target for lots of MR folks who really, really don’t like neoliberalism.  Quite right too.  I am a bit embarrassed to point out that none of what WM had to say, and none of the gunfire that followed, was aimed anywhere near where I take my philosophical stand.

I don’t want to repeat here all the remarks I made in my post of last week.  I do want to say that even the best understanding of the C-word that the thinking American right can offer does not include my meaning - which, anyway, is less political than metapolitical, less about “conserving” than according with our nature.

Here, then, is my meaning:-

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There has been a lot of Establishment hand-ringing of late over the waning sense of Britishness among the natives of these islands.  Specifically, the hand-wringing is about the uncomfortable likelihood that by being true to themselves the natives will leave the Third World of Bradford, Leicester, Peckham and Hounslow high and dry, together with their newly minted British identities.  The future of the great coerced experiment of the Multicult in England, particularly, is riding on whether the pols can keep us from understanding our own distinctiveness.  They, however, can only approach the issue in one way, which is also the wrong way ... as a crisis of that fungible commodity, “identity”:-

White children living in mixed-race communities feel as marginalised and uncertain of their British identity as ethnic minorities, a controversial government report has found.

A review of citizenship lessons in schools by Sir Keith Ajegbo, a Home Office adviser, concludes that white children are suffering “labelling and discrimination” that is severely compromising their idea of being British.

His review will suggest that while most people assume issues about diversity or “cultural and community cohesion” centred on the black or Asian communities, just as much thought and resources need to be put into providing diversity education to white pupils.

To demonstrate that his sudden concern for English children is indeed motivated by something other than compassion, the half-caste Mr Ajegbo informs us:-

“It makes no sense in our report to focus on minority ethnic pupils without trying to address and understand the issues for white pupils.  It is these white pupils whose attitudes are overwhelmingly important in creating community cohesion.  Nor is there any advantage in creating confidence in minority ethnic pupils if it leaves white pupils feeling disenfranchised and resentful.”

But why would they not feel “disenfranched and resentful”?  Has it not occurred to Mr Ajegbo that, cast as sinners, they are actually the sinned against?  As immigration’s victims they have nothing to gain from “creating community cohesion”.  The only thing that is worse than a multiculturalism that doesn’t work is, as they say, one that does.

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Daedalus - he of The Phora, Friedrich’s Civic Platform, the soon to be Phora blog and possibly more besides - made some interesting historical comments about Conservatism in America on JJR’s “Stomp Israel” post.  In consideration of those comments I thought it might be interesting to (somewhat briefly) explore the metapolitics expressed by modern America and to contrast these with the essence of the most necessary alternative.

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