The application of what are called human rights by what, these days, is adjudged to be the human rights industry is roundly and rightly deprecated by nationalists.  This isn’t news.  But it is not only us.  It’s fair to say that the white man in the street tends to much the same view.  By natural instinct alone he understands that none of the silvered words of the great panjandrums, those politico-corporate whores and criminals who wallow in their own faux-virtue at the UN and all the international conferences, and in the TV studios … none of their gracious, corrupt schtick is meant to benefit him.  He is not one of their designated victims.  He knows elitism when he sees it, and it isn’t deference he feels toward it.  Ask him about the Human Rights Act (or, if you like, dress it up as the European Convention on Human Rights) and he will tell you about some Pakistani hate preacher or African multiple rapist who says and does what he wants but, somehow, never gets deported.  Ask him about the human rights lawyers who work the courts and win these verdicts, and he’ll narrow his eyes and tell you he’d like to ship the lot of them off to Somalia for a little life-education.  It is the stubborn, abiding dissent of the sturdy yeoman, and it comes straight out of who he is, defiant and unabashed.

He’s probably far from alone, too.  I imagine that even in these neo-Marxised times there are plenty of perfectly liberal-minded lawyers operating in other, less rarified areas of the legal system who also have some mixed feelings on the subject.  They might say of their HR colleagues, “Good luck to them if there’s money in it”.  But classically liberal-minded lawyers and judges will care about the integrity and political neutrality of the law.  The judiciary, after all, is its custodian and interpreter.  Judges, if they have not grown political themselves, should tend to discomfort with any politicisation of the justice system.  The overt campaigning fervour for social justice which typifies HR progressives ... indeed, the whole idea of an intrusive hyper-egalitarian, internationalist political bandwagon really ought to offend against their professional principles.

That said, this essay is not one about signs of light in the darkness.  This essay is about the fundamentals of the life which our history has vouchsafed us, and which has brought us to the pass in which we now labour.  It is about a history of serial anti-identitarian developments, of which human rights and the universalism which underpins them are but a sign and a sadness.  My apologies for the length.  I hope it will prove interesting and informative.

Rights, but how human?

For our part, we nationalists are bound to ask how, in practise, that seminally Christian ideal of an overriding and overarching love of one’s fellow man, and compassion for his suffering, degenerated into an instrument of global political activism undertaken for the purpose of solidising and advancing a new technocratic elite whose priestly function is to stand over the world and make moral distinctions between “the rich north” and “the poor south”, or “privileged whites” and “oppressed non-whites”, or “narrow-minded, xenophobic racists” and “suffering refugees”, etcetera.  The answer, of course, is that love has absolutely nothing to do with it.  Indeed, these men and women who affect to love everyone love no one but themselves.  Their self-interested political activism is the inevitable precondition for regulating and maintaining a panoply of positive rights which are, without exception, contingent upon other values and sensibilities about what is just and fair.  Even the perfectly understandable claim in Article 3 of the 1948 UN Declaration, that “everyone has the right to life”, is not actually natural in kind (something I will come to later).  It, like the other twenty-eight articles, is grounded in Western presumptions and preoccupations, and interpretations which are quotidian, fluid and highly susceptible to political fashion.  Consider Article 22, which states:

Everyone, as a member of society, … is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

… or Article 24, which solemnly informs us that:

Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

These are standard, ethically quite marginal desiderata of the liberal right and left.  Yet here they are in a proclamation of the highest international standing, a significant function of which, according to its preamble, is to gift men with means of recourse against tyranny and oppression other than rebellion (ie, to forestall the necessity of putting life at risk).  It is almost as if the teenage idealists’ desire to campaign for anything, really, runs away with what started out as their parents’ project to secure against the pain and loss and destruction of conflict.  It is really rather odd.

The very first and most basic of those “Western presumptions and political prejudices” is that justice and fairness themselves have a generality and permanence which is (a) attributable to Nature and, therefore, (b) universally applicable.  The original idea – I believe, Aristotelian – is that because we all have a sense of these things, they must somehow constitute a definite, natural, homeostatic force in the life of Man.  The first problem is the patchy, careless way in which thinking from the normal sensitisation for the evolutionarily adaptive has been attenuated beyond the evolutionary and into broad and objectively neutral principles.  A clear case of this can be seen in the eagerness with which evidence for “a sense of justice” among animals, particularly monkeys, has been imputed where the intelligence for simple envy and self-interested competition plainly exists.  The evil genius of monkey nature, of course, would appeal much more to the parsimonious Brother Occam.  If he was still around today, and had the intellectual courage to read Darwin, he might also cut to the view that the animal propensity for excess which excites such envy is also innate, and a perfectly reasonable response to an unforgiving environment and an unpredictable future.

The foundation on which acquisition is built, then, is the struggle for existential security, which is the permanent condition of all living things.  After all, security is never more than relative and temporary.  The foundation on which the envy of acquisition is built is the perceived exclusion from security, ie, a relative failure in the same struggle.  The conditioning factor in both cases is self-interest in the competition for resources, including sexual partners.  Logically speaking, this leaves, let us say, a mile-wide gulf to the liberal demand for our endless and non-reciprocal fellow-feeling and charity to the Other.

Happily, if you do not consider that dichotomy fatal to liberal altruism, there is a second crisis of self-contradiction for it, and that is the non-universal nature of the liberal model of universalism.  This is the meat of this essay, and I’m afraid it does require a brief walk through history.  So please bear with me.

That Question again

In its broadest terms - and it is nothing if not a term for breadth - universalism means the death of the self.  Its origin, which is worth looking at in detail, is the (non-possible) Christian practise of love for all Mankind in pursuit of a (non-real) heavenly after-life by (non-available) salvation from a (non-existent) existential moral condition called sin.  At best it is a horribly clumsy and disfiguring social representation of the essential movement within the psyche from absence to presence via conscious detachment.  At worst it is a blind alley created so all Mankind may strive towards the fulfilment of the Judaic millenarian paradigm.  The history of early Christianity suggests that it is very much the latter.  Matthew 5, in particular, leaves no doubt that the early Christian practise, as it contested with that of the other Judaic faith movements of the time, was entirely consistent with Mosaic Law and the Judaic paradigm as such:

17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled

Little detail survives of how the Christ cult was presented to the Jews of Jerusalem in the apostolic ministries of James and Peter.  Paul speaks of “the gospel of the circumcision”, as he speaks of “the gospel of the uncircumcision”.  There are passages in Acts and in Galatians (most notably the Incident at Antioch) which transmit to us something of the Jewish conservatism and sensitivity on the (to them) empty practise of teaching Torah to gentiles free of the obligation to observe the Mosaic Law it contains, including the demand for circumcision and dietary restriction.  It was a test of the ethnic bounds, and of the cultural-religious strictures by which the gentile crossing of those bounds might be acceptable.  Seen as a Jewish unwillingness to compromise on the high personal price paid for their ethno-religious inclusiveness, one’s sympathies as a racially European nationalist today might well attach to the Jews of proto-Christianity.  Why should they lightly dispose of their very identity, as they understood and expressed it?  Confronted with a kind of spiritual immigration, they rightly stood their ground.  What, dear reader, would you have done in their place?

On both sides, then, this was a crisis of the very foundations of the faith and, ultimately, of nationalism and anti-nationalism, identity and non-identity.  Unsurprisingly, two could not be written as one.  An Apostolic Council was convened in Jerusalem around 50 AD, and the profoundly influential decision taken to accede to both sides’ demands.  Only three non-critical Noahide obligations, to do with sexual morality and diet, were laid upon uncircumcised believers.

The matter came to a head, finally, at Antioch, when Paul upbraided the traditionalist faction in the person of Peter, attacking him for refusing to break bread with the uncircumcised.  As Paul describes it in his letters to the Galatians:

7 But contrariwise, when they saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was committed unto me, as the gospel of the circumcision was unto Peter;
8 (For he that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me toward the Gentiles:)
9 And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.
10 Only they would that we should remember the poor; the same which I also was forward to do.
11 But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.
12 For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision.
13 And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation.
14 But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?
15 We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles,
16 Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.
17 But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God forbid.
18 For if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor.
19 For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God.
20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
21 I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.

After this event Paul, a Helenised Jew who experienced not the visitation of the risen Christ in the flesh, as had the original disciples – now Apostles - but a mere vision, and who argued for the universality of belief over the particularity of belonging, was freed to shape his ministry to those who did not, and now need never, belong.  In doing so he was, of course, bound to present the dictates of a faith-nationalism somehow, because Christianity remained inherently Judaic.  That left no other interpretation but that the Christianisation of Jew and non-Jew alike must lead to the fulfilment of the Jewish ethnic destiny (albeit without dwelling too much on the Jewish eschatological version of this event).  In essence, the Christianised gentile’s detachment from his natural identity and attachment to the health and prospects of his own eternal soul was the work of making the world ready for the Jewish eschatological finale.

Everywhere that Christianisation took place over the ensuing centuries this act of self-estrangement was dug into the foundations of the personal and collective life.  It could not but be otherwise.  Theologians, of course, were oblivious of this, and up to as late as 1800 focussed their consideration of universalism on questions - so fascinating and fundamental to them - of the divine salvation or damnation of souls.  In other words, with extirpation of the old faith so went the place of the blood and the soil and the heavens in ordinary religious observance.  I have advanced the theory at MR before that so ruthlessly was the old faith extirpated and usurped, so thoroughly was the new one stamped on the land and in the religious feeling of the people, it delivered a shock even unto natural selection itself: by repressive means advantaging among all the ranks of the people the survival and transmission of the faith capacity and, possibly, of altruism too.  If that is so, we were changed … arguably knocked off our natural sociobiological equilibrium ... by this event.  After it we were less able to self-select.  Of course, we will never know for sure.

Certainly, by the early 14th century concern for the civic detriments of Christianity, brought specifically through its constricted and impoverished epistemology, was manifesting itself in early Italian (really, Catholic) humanism.

I know it’s only clever historical fiction but the late Umberto Eco’s postmodernist first novel, The Name of the Rose, set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, caught the nature of the times.  In one short passage in particular, given to the villainous blind monk Jorge of Burgos to speak, Eco captures the deeply ideological and regressive Catholic conservatism from which the Renaissance sought a popular deliverance.  This is it:

“My brothers, before the known world echoed with long debates about poverty and ownership, from the days of our founder, we, even when we had everything, have never had anything, our one true wealth being the observation of the Rule, prayer, and work. But of our work, the work of our order and in particular the work of this monastery, a part - indeed, the substance - is study, and the preservation of knowledge. Preservation of, I say, not search for, because the property of knowledge, as a divine thing, is that it is complete and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself. Preservation, I say, and not search, because it is a property of knowledge, as a human thing, that it has been defined and completed over the course of the centuries, from the preaching of the prophets to the interpretation of the fathers of the church. There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.”

Contrast that with the assertion of the pre-Socractic philosopher Protagoras, made famous by Plato and taken wholly to heart by the Renaissance schools, that “Man is the measure of all things.”  This was the freeing intellectual counterpoint to the rigid Catholic dogma which Renaissance humanism sought.  Among the hundreds of writers and thinkers of antiquity, neoplatonist and otherwise, who were rediscovered and studied at this time was the second century AD Latin grammarian and antiquarian Aulus Gellius.  He wrote in his Noctes Atticae:

That humanitas does not mean what the common people think, but those who have spoken pure Latin have given the word a more restricted meaning.

Those who have spoken Latin and have used the language correctly do not give to the word humanitas the meaning which it is commonly thought to have, namely, what the Greeks call φιλανθρωπία (philanthropy), signifying a kind of friendly spirit and good feeling towards all men without distinction; but they gave to humanitas the force of the Greek παιδεία (paideia); that is, what we call eruditionem institutionemque in bonas artes, or “education and training in the liberal arts”. Those who earnestly desire and seek after these are most highly humanized. For the pursuit of that kind of knowledge, and the training given by it, have been granted to man alone of all the animals, and for that reason it is termed humanitas, or “humanity.”

As a civilising medium, then, the studia humanitatis was in expectation of the revival of the civic, cultural, and intellectual life which obtained before Christianisation, and which was markedly absent after it.  The purpose was not anti-religious, of course.  Nor was it elitist.  It was generous and ennobling and for the common good, but that commonality was universalist in conception and focussed on the civic urban model.  Further, Italian humanism was a reaction (notwithstanding Christian elites and intellectuals, including popes, who counted themselves as humanists, for the movement began within the Catholic hierarchy).  Even as it reacted to the regressive, controlling aspects of the Christian dispensation, it carried within it all the other seeds of that dispensation, and left without it the seeds of that which Christianisation had so completely repressed a thousand years earlier.  If the Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural bridge from antiquity to the Enlightenment, those who crossed it did so not as kinsmen and sons of the land but as participants in a civic project.

So we arrive at the social and political upheavals and uncertainties of modernity, and the great age of the unfettering of the will.  The principal early Enlightenment thinkers were all Christian.  None denied the existence of the Christian God.  They merely denied to the clergy any rational basis for the exercise of power over the secular life.  In any case, in the Protestant lands there was no issue with the authority of the pope above that of the monarch, and in England, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, there was no issue with the authority of the monarch above that of parliament.  The intellectual paradigm pointed squarely to continuing flight from the organic into abstraction.

At the very outset, Thomas Hobbes duly obliged in his Leviathan, published 1651, by introducing into the Western philosophical canon the principles of individual right and the equality of all men.  The future bi-axial form of liberal politics was clarified accordingly, guaranteeing that the long, long line of vestigially Judaic thinking about the gentile suffered no interruption.  European Man was consigned to what would become the denatured condition of an atomised, radically autonomous individual given substance by positive and negative social and civic freedoms.  With John Locke, just a few years after Hobbes’ opus, came the dawning of the self-authored New Man, for what else could freedom mean in a philosophical universe sans Nature and deity.  The fact that self-authorship was and is impossible … that Man cannot, either in his life or in his self, be constructed of choices … and that the whole thing resolves as a post-religious teleology, a species of secular salvation, seems simply to have never troubled anyone.

For his moral understanding in such estrangement from his own natural values, European Man was directed to commit himself in perpetuity and willful blindness to an equalitarian union with the human All.  Very plainly, that which is common to all is particular to no man, exposing right there the Christian denial of what is in Nature in favour of what is in Judaic thinking.  Just as Nature was replaced in the Christian faith by a state of original personal sin, so in the liberal ontology it is replaced by a specious state of enslavement to bounds – those between the European self and the non-European Other, those between Man and Woman, those between that which gives peoples life and that which takes it away.  It is the messianic ideal ... equality as an hermaphroditic condition of panmixia and uniform identity.  Here is Paul, again in Galatians, explaining how and why:

26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
27 For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
29 And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

The liberal’s dilemma

This European journey of two thousand years has produced in our time and that of our children all that is necessary for the dissolution of our precious kind.  Save for what comes from those yeoman instincts, with which I began this essay, and save for our stubborn and necessitous tendency to adopt even imperfect forms such as fealty to the monarch and worship of the Christian God, everything … the grand intellectual and cultural movements, the paradigmatic historical conflicts and shifts … has pushed us by degrees deeper and deeper into our long identitarian malaise, such that, confronted today by a whole array of second-order social, economic, and political pathologies, all of them rooted in some way in our troubled past, our very genius … our last resort ... may prove incapable of fashioning an escape.  The shadow of death is certainly upon us.  It’s in the thin, worthless art and architecture of our time, and in our attempts to make serious new music.  It’s in the anti-racism of our politics.  It’s in the economism and utilitarianism of our work life.  It’s in the progressivism of our churches, and our media.  It’s in the decline of marriage and of the family, and in our birthrates, of course.  It’s in the corruption and careerism of our political class.  It’s everywhere.

And yet it is still quite evident that all the really powerful arguments are ours.  They are the arguments for life. Even on the question of rights we have the edge.  There is one right given in Nature to all living things, and it is the right to struggle for life (not the direct right to life) - always allowing that the natural imperative can be admitted to have some degree of choice or decision in it.  The principle of universality can and does apply here, also.  Either every person and every people, without exception, has this right to struggle for existence, or none has it. 

Clearly, the possession of this right accords with natural justice and leads to diverse humanity as we have known it throughout its history. The denial of this right means that there can obtain no concern for continuity of existence and, therefore, no recourse to defend that existence.  Ironically, this would lead to a social darwinian, racial supremacist hell where power dictates everything, where any group of people can take what it wants when it wants it, and the principle of self-defence itself does not apply.

The first proposition is ethnic nationalist in kind. The second proposition is liberal in its present neo-Marxist, anti-racist form. To be truly liberal, a liberal cannot be neo-Marxistic or anti-racist ... cannot selectively call this natural right “racism” ... but must believe in the universality of the right to struggle for life not just individually but collectively and at the ethnic level.