An interesting life

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, 02 June 2007 00:05.

There is a moment, difficult to spot to be sure, when imperilment slips by some tenth or hundredth of a degree into something else ... something darker and doom-laden ... something from which escape is no longer possible. The elite effort if not to murder the children of Europe directly, then certainly to void the ties upon which their survival depends, has not yet reached that pivotal moment. Not in my opinion anyway. If it had, our little community would likely not be labouring over the creation of this rallying point. We would, I hope, have found other ways to fight, ways more fitting to the hour.

With this in mind - this consciousness of the special meaning of time - it is appropriate to remember that the fight has been fought at every stage. Liberalism, decadence, democracy, equality, capitalism, internationalism, Jewish self-advocacy in all its manifold guises ... these things have been critiqued by intellectuals throughout the 20th Century, and protested by activists since the flood began with the Windrush in June 1948.

Those who have fought before us were as strong in their persuasion as any Linderite, and no less pleased to shock. But such are the antecedents of our protest. There’s no point denying it.

Many of those brave, difficult people have paid a high price. Some have lost life itself, some their liberty, many their livelihoods. Some have lost their way or became disillusioned by the company they kept. Some have fought on faithfully, for, in truth, they can make no other accomodation with the world.

Today, on a thread at Laban’s ostensibly devoted to the trial of the man accused of the murder of Charlene Downes, one of these honourable men provided a potted history of his activism. I thought it was interesting and educational, so I am reproducing it here.

His thread-name is Veritas.

I noticed that things in this country were unbearably bad by about 1980. After the death of Albert Mariner I joined the National Front. Other members of my family had been involved with it for some years previously.

A local branch used to come for meetings at my parents’ house. John Tyndall came over but I didn’t get on with him at all. In general they seemed a decent bunch, but our interests didn’t coincide. I contributed a few ephemeral articles and reviews to a Nationalist periodical however. I was worried a bit about the peculiar rumours of cultic behaviour, and having met several Nationalists who were into magic, neo-paganism (that most transparently shallow and nonsensical of all modern inventions) and into the sort of weird Hitler-worship that “Searchlight” used to decry.

However, the members I met in London seemed a livelier, more clued-up bunch, and a leaflet given me after Albert Mariner’s death prompted me to join the NF. I managed to make an accomodation in my mind between Christianity and neo-paganism, based on the respect both systems accorded the family unit.

I soon became an officer in my local branch, organised events and addressed meetings, went on demos and marches and became extremely active. I counted quite a few well-known members as friends, from an intellectual like Andrew Brons to another like Joe Pearce, now achieving fame as a biographer and expounder, and Ian Stuart the “Skrewdriver” musician.

This imperilled my working life, and my Union wanted to expel me. I made no secret of my membership at work, and survived several attempts on my position there, too. My family and social life was also pressurised, and the whole thing cost me a great deal of money.

However, I was becoming increasingly aware of all sorts of sinister cross-currents and factional problems. There were neo-Hitlerians, Mosleyites and Strasserites, anti-Semites and Holocaust revisionists, Jews like Albert Elder, Catholic distributists (“traditionalist” followers of Archbishop Lefebvre but they hadn’t any Latin), followers of Dawkins and neo-pagans, Gaddafi-lovers, pro-Arabists, people who proposed approaches to the anarchists or to the hard Left, Theosophists, political soldiers, people who wanted to take a pop at the Tyndall lot, people who liked skinheads, people who feared them. Some notables took to coming to meetings with bodyguards, fearing a good beating would be administered by the locals, and there was the problem of the Fiore faction, bitterly opposed by Webster, who caused problems of his own by his outrageously homosexual behaviour. The whole thing was bursting with ideological contradictions and, of course, it was incredible easy for the police and Searchlight to infiltrate us. I spoke at the AGM at which Webster was expelled (I voted against him). He left prophesying disaster, and was right.

After various legal wranglings I left too. It was getting too confusing, and to be quite frank, dangerous.

I don’t regret belonging in the least as I met some jolly interesting people and had many good debates, but I don’t think I could join any of the present Nationalist groups, but would be perfectly happy to collaborate with some of them. I would beware of some of them though: as I’ve said, the cross-over between “Rightist” thought and a type of anarchism isn’t at all new and in its present incarnation could contain the seeds of menace.

In about 1988 I left, and took up in a very humble capacity, the attitude exemplified by the elderly Oxford don who was approached by one of the white-feather brigade in 1914.

“Why aren’t you out at the front, protecting our culture?” she hissed.

“Madam”, said he, “I AM that culture!”..

I have since done as much as I can with limited means to promote and make propaganda on behalf of European and British culture, whether folkish (traditional singing and balladry etc) or courtly (Renaissance music and poetry), and given the occasional lecture. For some years I’ve been in poor health and have had some life-threatening hospitalisations: there hasn’t really been a group to get active with ( I distrust the BNP although I’d vote for them), nor am I physically up to it. I don’t think that even if I could afford to leave the country for a nice barn-conversion in rural italy I would do so as I love my country.

Can it be that the love of such a patriot as Kipling was conditional:-

“If England was what England seems,
‘Ow quick we’d drop ‘er! BUT SHE AIN’T!”

And even if I did leave, I don’t think I would take such a hostile attitude to those who could only stay at home.

From my standpoint, the transformation of Tyndall’s BNP into Nick Griffin’s election-fighting (if not yet electable) party does signal that we will soon approach that “pivotal moment” with which I began this post. Minds are being concentrated, as they must. The uproarous, energetic, almost Hogarthian political world of the NF of the 1970s and 80s has slipped behind us, an anarchic, swastika-laden self-indulgence that we can no longer afford. But it was also a canary in the coalmine. The people did not listen to its cries. They are still not really listening.

Tags: Far Right

Comments:

Posted by Scimitar on Sat, 02 Jun 2007 03:26 | #

The uproarous, energetic, almost Hogarthian political world of the NF of the 1970s and 80s has slipped behind us, an anarchic, swastika-laden self-indulgence that we can no longer afford.

Sounds like the contemporary American WN scene. I still have my doubts about the democratic approach, though.

Posted by anon on Sat, 02 Jun 2007 04:36 | #

Well as someone who was far too young to be involved in that scene, from my perspective those guys didn’t achieve jackshit.

Its like the IRA.. The Brits only temporarily closed the Northern Ireland assembley intending to establish a new one, but when the IRA started its bombing campaign they couldn’t reopen it for fear of being seen as weak in the face of the enemy.

The National Front seems to me to have played the same role in Britain, they’ve been the bogeyman used by the liberal elite to demonise any kind of patriotism.

Its easy to understand why those people weren’t successful by listening to idiots like Hal Turner talking about lynching people, I can see why he is angry but that kind of talk is more likely to drive support away than swell your ranks.

Posted by Scimitar on Sat, 02 Jun 2007 12:20 | #

It is depressing to think that issues like “should the swastika be used at protests” are highly controversial within the American WN community. Personally, I don’t have anything against the Third Reich; it has been bashed enough for a dozen lifetimes. Nazi symbolism though will never resonate with the American public and invariably becomes a cartoonish distraction when put on public display. The Knoxville rally is a good example of this. The one guy who happened to be wearing a swastika t-shirt there was shown over and over again on the CNN coverage of the event. He was seen on television more than anyone else who attended. Linder’s dramatic confrontation with the police was sandboxed because of the clothes he was wearing.

This cuts back to the larger issue of how deeply liberalism has penetrated the American psyche. 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.

Any individual who would put his own self-expression above the needs of his group is not a true National Socialist. He is a costume fantastist; qualitatively, a different animal altogether. It is typical of American debates about this issue though to focus almost entirely on the individual and his need for self-fulfillment as opposed to the purpose of holding rallies and the practical advantages that accrue to the group from avoiding unnecessary historical associations. The roots of this mentality can be traced back not to the Third Reich, to the counterculture of the 1960s and before that to the cosmopolitanism of the predominantly Jewish New York Intellectuals associated with Parisan Review during the 1930s.**

* - “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.”

Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 2nd ed. (London: University of California Press, 1996), 333-334

** - “Central to our argument is the notion that the pre-World War I New York avant-garde valued expressive individualism and cosmopolitanism above all else. After the war, and coming of age in the late 1930s, a new generation of New York thinkers emerged to carry their torch. This group sported a larger Jewish contingent (owing to New York’s changing demographics), but its intellectual lineage came from the Young Intellectuals and carried forth their mantras (Aarons 1961; Wald 1987; 15, 27-45). In David Hollinger’s estimation, these new intellectuals were formed from an equal fusion of Jewish and Anglo-Saxon radicalism and should be considered a united community, if not a surrogate ethnie. Nor was their an asymmetry of influence; the two groups of exiles influenced each other in a dialectical fashion (Hollinger 1985: 58, 63). Cardinal among their beliefs was the dictum that all attempts at collective representation, whether ethnonationalist or state-socialist, were to be shunned.

The nerve center of the new cosmopolitan enterprise was a congerie of literary journalists based in New York around the Nation, Partisan Review, and the New Republic. Joined by their artistic fellow-travelers just prior to World War II, this group helped form a hegemonic postwar intellectual culture. Emerging in the 1930s, these thinkers exercised increasing influence in American intellectual life and were simply referred to as the “New York Intellectuals.” As both David Hollinger and Terry Cooney remark, the group’s overriding goal was modernist cosmopolitanism, and their ideological somersaults from the 1930s to the 1950s are understandable if one sees their various positions as a means to achieving this end (Cooney 1981: 598).”

Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 59-160

Posted by gongstar on Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:46 | #

Couldn’t get anywhere finishing this, but the first para was interesting. Out of the mouths of babes and yobs?

In the Streets of Londonistan, John Upton

Perhaps it is the rain. The gaggle of BNP protesters standing behind the crowd-control barrier on Tottenham High Road are very subdued. They are almost to a man - they are all men - overweight, shaven-headed and in their late thirties (think Private Eye’s Yobs). They stand rather meekly, as if trying hard to prove their reasonableness. One of them, the oldest, holds a soaking piece of paper in his left hand on which is written a speech, and in his right a megaphone to berate his audience of passers-by and journalists on the other side of the road. ‘This is a sovereign nation. These people are committing treason. Why are they not being arrested?’ The megaphone squeals with feedback. A man is talking about them on his mobile phone; he laughs openly. The small group of policemen posted outside the industrial estate where al-Muhajiroun are holding a press conference, laugh too. The rain begins to fall even harder; on the kebab shops, on the hairdressers, on the BNP. ‘Fucking Pakis,’ one of the Yobs says. It is 11 September 2003.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n02/upto01_.html

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Jun 2007 23:22 | #

But that is the whole point about the “far right”. History has vindicated them, and it doesn’t make any difference how ugly they were, how many tatoos they had or how blunt their language was. They’ve been proven right, while liberals of all stripes have absolutely no basis for supposing that multiculturalism, assimilationism or Professor Ted’s highly profitable interculturalism will lead to the la-la land of hippy-dippy, many-hued British people skipping hand-in-happy-hand over the rose-coloured horizon.

It’s years since I heard a principled argument for the MultiCult. Everything now is about repairing what never worked in the first place, whilst the reality is that we are living under some very frightening state powers.

Could a government of skinheads possibly be worse?

Posted by gongstar on Sun, 03 Jun 2007 18:18 | #

They’ve been proven right,

That they’ve been proven right while liberals have been proven wrong is further reason to despise and silence them. If we start judging political parties by how well they can predict the future, heaven knows where we’ll end up.

while liberals of all stripes have absolutely no basis for supposing that multiculturalism, assimilationism or Professor Ted’s highly profitable interculturalism will lead to the la-la land of hippy-dippy, many-hued British people skipping hand-in-happy-hand over the rose-coloured horizon.

Cantle has what his tribe have always relied on: chutzpah. One scam fails and without a pause for breath he’s plugging another.

“Roll up, roll up, getcher luvly multiculti ‘ere! Guaranteed a lifetime’s service! Luvly multiculti! (What’s that, madam? Exploded when ya plugged it in an’ wrecked the livin’-room? Oh dear, oh dear, ya mustn’t ‘ave followed the instructions right—the guarantee’s void. Nah piss off or I’ll ‘ave the ‘ate crimes unit on ya.) Roll up, roll up, getcher luvly interculti ‘ere! Guaranteed a lifetime’s service! Luvly interculti!”

Posted by 123 on Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:14 | #

Gongstar is one of several among the commentariat who ought to blog here. Could he be persuaded?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:27 | #

MR is an open house. Gongstar is welcome to contact me if he would like to do more here.

Posted by 123 on Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:44 | #

Thank you GW. I think Gongstar has the viewpoint and the talent to be worthy.

Are you up for it Gongstar?

P.S. GW, what happened to PF? TY.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:07 | #

PF felt he had contributed what he could, and feared overstaying his welcome. He wanted to take his leave as quietly as possible, and I assented to that.

Not everyone who offers help with hauling the plough is equipped to labour in the field all day. We take from our friends what they can offer, and are grateful whatever that might be. They are all potentially frolicsome as far as we are concerned. I, for one, just never know how things will turn out. I have, though, seen some amazing personal developments flowing directly from involvement here. MR life is never dull.

Posted by 123 on Mon, 04 Jun 2007 01:09 | #

MR life is never dull.

It has the goods. Real diversity, real freedom, real vibrancy. Thank goodness.

PF made a valuable contribution to the good fight. Good posts and comments - good guy. Good luck to him.

Posted by Joe on Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:41 | #

The NF in Britain during the seventies had far more support than the WN “movement” does in America today.

Posted by gongstar on Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:49 | #

Are you up for it Gongstar?

It’s flattering to be asked, but I couldn’t do it.

Posted by gongstar on Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:13 | #

Trust her: she knows what she’s doing:

King, whose father is African-American and her mother British Jewish, has been appointed chair of the Institute of Community Cohesion, which formally launches tomorrow. It was set up two years ago at Coventry University, under the auspices of Professor Ted Cantle, and has been building up an evidence base of practical and academic research examining how multiculturalism might be developed: how people and communities can become more at ease with cultural and difference; how they can build a better understanding of what they have in common with others; how localities might successfully develop a sense of belonging and head off extremism. The important thing about the institute, says King, is that it is not a thinktank, but is about finding practical solutions.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,2095895,00.html

Of course it is: what has the left ever been interested in but practical solutions? And here another public-spirited jew offers one:

But it will be a bit odd if new arrivals have to clear a series of hurdles - language and history exams, voluntary service requirements - that those born here do not. Why should they be more British than the British? Happily, there’s a simple solution: make everyone pass the same test.

I mean it. At the age of 18, every person on these islands should only become a citizen once they have met a set of requirements, including a spell of community work. The boy who migrated from Albania and knows his roundheads from his cavaliers might pass while the lad born in Birmingham might fail. At the end, all the new citizens could stand together in a shared citizenship ceremony - a ritual no longer confined to migrants as it is now. It would be the clearest possible signal that we are one people, equal under the law.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,,2096335,00.html