More Alibhai than Anthony

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 06 January 2006 01:53.

Today I happened across an internet site named Heritage and Identity. The Heritage in question was said to be British. But, in fact, it seemed pretty much concerned with Englishness alone. Out of curiosity I settled down to read an article on the site, somewhat baldly titled Last orders for the English Aborigine.

I should, of course, have realised from the Heritage Lottery Fund symbol on the banner that, despite the emphasis on heritage, the H&I site is a Marxist front. The Heritage Lottery Fund doesn’t provide grants to nativist interest groups like, for example, MR.

The article informed me in no uncertain terms that in “an age that is actually defined by global mobility, transnational identities, and a weakening of the nation-state” people such as myself are mere “monocultural elegists”. We are blissfully unaware that “our sense of history should be informed by critical perspective: it needs to be capable of understanding the ‘otherness’ of the past and aware of the dangers of cleaving to imagined ‘organic’ continuities.”

The writer, one Patrick Wright, finished by telling us that we must embrace heritage “as a various theme: one that expands horizons rather than narrowing them, and also confirms … that it is entirely possible to maintain a sense of cultural belonging in the 21st century without retreating into a dank tribal recess … and peering out aggressively at the increasing number of people who know that the future lies elsewhere.”

So, this Marxist insists that we now understand our distinct genetic, historical and cultural lineage as “other”, “dank” and “aggressive”. I imagine he had an unhappy childhood. Or he is not really fully English – perhaps an Anglo-Irish scouser like the patchily redeemed Terry Eagleton.

Ar the foot of the H&I article Patrick Wright’s credentials are logged, concluding with his Professorship at the Institute of Cultural Analysis, Nottingham Trent University. So yes … he’s a Culture Theoriser labouring in what appears to be a poor man’s Birmingham School (not that poor though – it organises an annual Identity conference attended by “more than 300 delegates from the fields of heritage, local government and social science”). But for all his Marxism and all the hatred of self and society that that implies, he is afforded a Professorship at an English university … he does TV work … he moves among the great and good of the left-political and arts worlds.

Meanwhile, those English majoritarian patriots whom he disparages in such unforgiving terms are near-bereft of voice and quite bereft of influence on the political and social process. It is a strange and deep dichotomy, and one that Anthony Browne, the anti-immigrationist author and journalist, might have addressed in his new book, The Retreat of Reason. I think, though, that he has badly missed the opportunity.

Let me say at the outset that I haven’t read his new book yet, which was launched two days ago. But Civitas kindly helped things along for Browne with a detailed press release. The thrust of his argument is surely contained therein. For example …

Anthony Browne describes political correctness as a ‘heresy of liberalism’ (p.2) under which ‘a reliance on reason has been replaced with a reliance on the emotional appeal of an argument’ (p.6). Adopting certain positions makes the politically correct feel virtuous, even more so when they are preventing the expression of an opinion that conflicts with their own: ‘political correctness is the dictatorship of virtue.’

... essentially the product of a powerful but decadent civilisation which feels secure enough to forego reasoning for emoting, and to subjugate truth to goodness’.

The poor chap is looking, alas, at the surface. Political correctness is not merely speech code or an expression of liberal vanity or even Western decadence – though, God knows, one can ascribe almost anything these days to the latter.

For my money, you have to look for the meaning and purpose of PeeCee in the same way you look for the meaning and purpose of our Marxist friend from H&I. Political correctness is a set – indeed the set - of trammel lines leading directly and only to the New Man of the post-Postmodern age. Call him Pee-Cee Man, if you like. The Soviet Union of the 1920’s had politicheskaya pravil’nost to mark out the orthodox ideology for New Soviet Man. We have what has come to be known as political correctness, though it isn’t a label originally applied by the left.

It is NOT a product of decadence. It is a product of totalitarianism, and its purpose is to deconstruct – or destroy – the self. That is a four-letter word for heritage and identity, by the way.

In the Soviet era, the destructive orthodoxy of Marxist-Leninism was underpinned by the threat of physical destruction. The pitiless state either murdered or psychologically crushed dissenters wherever they arose. Today’s dissenters exist under the threat of a moral, political and professional destruction, all achieved by the simple and no doubt kinder means of public denunciation as a racist, sexist or homophobe. It is still a moral murder, though. And it is not limited to the individual. Language, art and literature and all the principal institutions of Western Society can be subjected just as effectively to the onslaught. It is, indeed, extraordinarily effective. Look at the British police today, politicised and subverted into anti-racism to the point of the most dire gutlessness.

The fate of the police should be taken very seriously by all of us, because it will be the fate of white males in general under this perverted ideology. For our incorrect principles, attitudes and beliefs, for our cleavage to “organic continuities” we shall be collectivised as sinners. The courts already sentence those who have fallen foul of orthodoxy to punishments ranging from awareness and diversity training to a prison sentence of up to seven years. I quite expect the heat to be turned up here, with perhaps an open-ended sentence of awareness training for the stubborn and the proud until such time as they recant Maoist-confessional style. The self must be destroyed in public, for Marxism is collectivist and allows no private space.

Now … the PeeCee which Anthony Browne understands as a war of suppression by “politically correct truth” on “factually correct truth” is, at best, a mild and gentlemanly interpretation. But it was greeted as anything but that by the left. On Tuesday Anthony was castigated on morning radio by the Ugandan-Asian journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and in the evening by the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee on Channel 4 News. Stephen Pound, the frightful Labour MP for Ealing North who is always good for a soundbite, declared Anthony’s book to be “political incorrectness gone mad”.

Alibhai-Brown was the most vociferous of Anthony’s detractors. She, of course, is as keen on culture war as Patrick Wright. Indeed, in that article of his at H&I he mentioned her:-

“… sceptics, such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who shun the idea of Englishness altogether, preferring to identify with a ‘New Britain’ organised around a democratic conception of citizenship rather than a reactive fantasy of organic roots.”

Her principal line of attack on Tuesday morning was to claim that political correctness was an invention of the right from around 1990, enabling it to attack the social change it disliked. I suppose she might have convinced herself of this. But I doubt it. She knows what culture war is. Anthony seems not to, and simply provided her with a convenient means to distract our attention from it. He has not done us much of a service.

Tags: Cultural Marxism

Comments:

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 02:54 | #

John Major’s policy of upgrading polytechnic colleges to university status was dumbing -down writ large and one shouldnt expect too much intellectual rigour from the faculty members of such institutions. To take just one example - Wright confidently asserts that Chesterton would not have encountered binge-drinking on today’s scale. Probably not. The Victorians and Edwardians drank much more alcohol during their binges than today’s tipplers and this practice was as widespread in Boodles or Brooks’s as it was in Gin Lane. This Alibhai-Browne person is of a type well-known in the UK media for their barely disguised animus towards the majority population.

Posted by AD on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 03:33 | #

Speaking of dank and aggressive…..the only thing that ever got through Trotsky’s retarded head was an ice-pick to the back of it.

Posted by Johannes Climacus on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 05:12 | #

They always hated me, even long before I understood that I was their enemy. They understood. I have never felt more comfortable in my own skin than I do now as a WN. And finally, my gift for being mostly ignored has come in handy!

How can they hate me and ignore me at the same time? Well, it does happen.

Posted by ben tillman on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 06:44 | #

“… sceptics, such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who shun the idea of Englishness altogether, preferring to identify with a ‘New Britain’ organised around a democratic conception of citizenship rather than a reactive fantasy of organic roots.”

As always, we see the value of owning the apparatus of public opinion formation. The notion that a multi-ethnic population can be “democratic” is the profoundest of stupidities, but it can safely be proffered because it cannot be publicly rebutted.

Posted by Steve Edwards on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 11:34 | #

Guessedworker - you are spot on.

The cause of our present ailment is surely not “decadence”, itself merely a symptom of the virus. The true cause of our “decadence” is a seamless worldwide totalitarian conspiracy that dates back to the ideas of the Frankfurt School of social research, and perhaps even earlier.

A criminal marxist element has taken over the reigns of government, and they are deliberately bringing about the destruction of western civilisation through a variety of means, from which the rule of a totalitarian world state will begin to emerge.

For example, as far back as 1953, Ford Foundation President, H. Rowan Gaither, admitted in Congressional Testimony that he was acting “under directives issued by the White House” in order to “make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union.” Through this lens of an elite-driven “comfortable merger” we can begin to see and comprehend all of the social revolutions that took place since the 1960s, as well as the growing political collectivisation throughout.

Having used Marxism both at home and abroad to basically gut the entire social fabric of the West, it seems our leaders are now trying to bring about a “comfortable merger” between Islam and what remains of western civilisation, creating a new world order through which they will tyrannise with impunity.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 13:06 | #

Steve, the goals of Marxism and of ordinary liberalism are not so dissimilar. Both want, as the end result, the “free” man, who is not impeded in his will or his “self” by unchosen obligations or forms of identity, whether these relate to attachments to country, or to family life, or to gender, or to traditional moral restraints.

It is no surprise at all that the West has moved toward an increasingly radical understanding of this new “liberated” Westerm man. What organised force is there to oppose taking things ever further? The official insitutions of society were captured by liberalism long before they were assaulted by any members of the Frankfurt school.

Yes, it is true we are being led along a path to international government. There may well be some high level agreement about this. But again, if the political class is unanimous that the only permissible form of national identity is a purely civic one, then what basis is there for a principled stand to retain a traditional national sovereignty? If my being an Australian is simply a matter of agreeing to certain liberal political practices, then why should I worry if Australian sovereignty is ceded to some larger regional entity, and then to an international one?

Posted by Andrew on Sat, 07 Jan 2006 02:01 | #

Don’t you just love how they find new enemies and give them a political name, when really Ideological and non-definitive meaning are a creation of their own thought patterns. I think it is cute when some state the Ideological patterns of the Right wing Ideology- they are only creation their own path of explanations. Stalin hated Trotsky, despised Hitler etc, the level of depravity is within their own battle of Corrupt Ideals or lack there of and a need to create an enemy out side the existence of the real enemy or threat.
Criminal elements are the actual meaning as Steve Suggests, and the motives of that dialog are exoneration and protection upon committal of criminal acts. You see the same type of behavior in Islam at is start. It is the Philosophy of corrupt antithesis intent: that is an undeniable link To Marxism’s depravity and devoid of real concepts of the Here and Now. A pure form of Envy and intent to deprive you of anything you may have, “Looters”. Modern day thieves . Not by guns but by psychology of Guilt.

Posted by Luniversal on Sun, 08 Jan 2006 19:09 | #

Guessedworker, it isn’t just marxoids who are anxious to rob us of all our backward attributes. The ‘libertarians’ of Samizdata have just banned me again for daring to comment as follows when their Master of Modernity, Perry de Havilland, was lamenting the introduction of identity cards as an affront to British notions of freedom:

“If you are going to range yourself on the side of conservative traditionalism
rather than ‘modernity’ (of which fascism was the first serious manifestation in
the mouths of Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Chirico etc) then you will have to accept
some possibly distasteful propositions:

(1) The nation state, not the globalised world

(2) Race (= extended family) solidarity, not ‘universal humanity’ or the
divide-and-conquer deceit of ‘individualism’

(3) Limited government, not libertarian anarchy or the monolithic state

(4) Religion, not secularised ethics

(5) Consolidation, not accumulation or aggrandisement

“The fourth proposition is the key one. If you do not despise this world and
believe that at best it is a preparation for a better one, you are a bogus
conservative, and you have no sure defence against the inanities of ‘progress’
and ‘democracy’ or the blandishments of ‘modernity’. You will never be more than
a brake on the runaway coach.

“A monoracial, stable polity has no need of identity cards, since its members
know who they are and who their friends are. They also know their limits, their
own business and how to mind it.

“A state on the lines of the degenerate USA—a smorgasbord of indigestible
incompatibilities—will always wind up enslaving its own folks and persecuting
others. Perhaps we can afford one America, but a world composed of such
multicultural entities would be a planet divided by aggression.

“Ethno-cultural stratification—the process of rationalising frontiers which has
been going on since World War One ended with interruptions—is a hopeful trend
in the other direction. Empires have crumbled. But mob-handed travel and
international labour markets remain a danger, and not just because terrorists
travel incognito thereby. It is best that the masses in different nations and
races should communicate ‘virtually’ rather than commingle physically. Now that
the vanguard countries of the Third World, China and India, are setting examples
of autarchic growth, others may imitate them and tolerance of brain drains to
the greedy, lazy West may diminish. We may also see the voluntary return to
their ancestral countries of non-whites who do not fit into the western world.
‘Good fences make good neighbours’—and rob tyrants such as [Lord] Gould of the flimsy
rationale for their dragooning of Her Majesty’s subjects.”

I admit I was treading on Mr de H’s corns, disparaging his atheism and his god-that-never-fails, the USA. I was testing my theory that libertarianism is a late heresy of collectivism, a 180-degree reaction from it. And I got this quick comeback:

“Luniversal, that is pure crypto-fascist drivel.

1. The nation-state is the engine of collectivism and tyranny.

2. Race means nothing meaningful except to a few moonbats such as yourself. One
only needs to look at the breathtaking rate of miscegenation in Britain. People
have voted with their genitalia and you lost the election.

3. Limited government is exactly what I want because of the need to deprive
loathsome people like you opportunities for getting their hands on the
collective means of coercion.

4. Of course religion appeals to you: it is sanctified idiocy… rather like
elevating skin colour to something of importance come to think about it.

5. Feel free to stagnate back in the ‘good old day’ (wherever they were). I am
off to the networked globalised transhuman future and you ain’t invited. Ciao.”

Which makes me wonder: if he’s not going to allow Britons to oppose encroachments on their liberty on the basis of their being disconsonant with national tradition or faith, and if he pours such scorn on what Chesterton called ‘the democracy of the dead’ as he contemplates his Transhomo Tabula Rasa marching bravely into the radiant ‘meta-context’ of the Future, what buttons can Perry press to get a head of steam behind his protests? Promising even more immigration, freedom to take drugs and fire handguns in Perrytopia than in America?

When I tried to explain that my musings were not off-topic since a nation at ease with itself, monoracial and sharing inherited assumptions and mutual trust while leaving other nations alone, had no need of ID cards… I was told I was a “racist jackass” and was excommunicated by an underling.

If I may encroach further on your bandwidth, the follow-up comment which got me the chop was this:

“Guy Herbert [another of my critics, wrote]: “... which is why we’re appalled by “ethno-cultural stratification”
(How very modern and inclusive! it used to be called apartheid or rassenhygiene)
of the sort Luniversal advocates.”

“I didn’t necessarily advocate it, I pointed out that it had been happening since
Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles. The large multiracial
empires of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Britain have been
replaced by a multiplicity of polities, more fitted to the ancestries and
cultures of a majority of their inhabitants. The Soviet empire and Yugoslavia
subsequently divided similarly. There are more sovereignties today than since
the Renaissance.

“I do not know why Perry de Havilland thinks nation states are an ‘engine of
collectivism and tyranny’, since their rise has tended at least to coincide with
the decline of totalitarianism; but history is not his strong suit. One looks
forward to further subdivision of outdated entities (perhaps even in the British
Isles!) since the smaller the country. the less power or inclination it has to
harm others.”

I realise libertarians are a tiny, impotent clique of grumblers in the UK, but they are quite a force among the political clerisy in the States: Ayn Rand, who described partiality for one’s own race as ‘barnyard socialism’, is their goddess. This contretemps seems to illustrate how liberal egalitarian reflexivity has spread among those who think they are agin it.

After all, communism also promises a paradise for ‘the individual’, one day, some time. Perry merely offers to short-circuit the distasteful phase of collectivism that must be endured before the state ‘withers away’. So the true faultline seems not to lie between self-styled Left and Right but between dangerous, gormless, eternally adolescent optimists and peaceable old pessimists. I don’t see the British majority as gormless optimists, so I wonder how they can best be alerted to the fate the transhumanoid Pod People are preparing for them.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 08 Jan 2006 20:22 | #

“People have voted with their genitalia and you lost the election.” (—the Perry de Havilland genocide enforcer, as quoted by Luniversal)

Wrong. The election was never held. Politics-by-genitalia was rammed down everyone’s throats with Libertarians like de Havilland helping to do the ramming. This piece of ordure, de Havilland, only shows what totalitarian genocidalists the Libertarians are. In the final analysis Libertarians have nothing whatsoever to do with opposition to extreme radical leftism: they and the extreme radical left are allies. Is this walking talking breathing piece of excrement, Perry de Havilland, a Yank or a Brit? Notice this piece of dog shit doesn’t relocate to Rhodesia or Johannesburg. He just wants to require everyone else in the world to relocate there, whether literally or figuratively.

Why you’re even posting over there, Luniversal, is a mystery. You can’t talk to someone who has no ears. You can’t reason with someone who has no brains. I don’t talk to insects—what’s the point? A Russian proverb I learned from Richard Poe is,

“When a dog barks, a man doesn’t answer; still less does a man answer when a dog turd barks.”

Might as well try to reason with Jason Soon, the self-described “latte libertarian.”

Libertarians are nothing, zero. They count for nothing, stand for nothing, accomplish nothing, favor nothing, hope for nothing. They’re a big piece of pure nothingness. I’d avoid them like I’d avoid all other manifestions of worldly meaninglessness. Who has the time to deal with that crap anyway?

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 09 Jan 2006 01:07 | #

All the best people are banned by Samizdata. I am impressed if you’ve managed it twice.

David Carr and Brian Micklethwaite are decent chaps who, during my year on the Samizdata threads, always avoided discussion of the racial issue - but never attacked me for discussing it. Perry de Havilland is half-American. But that’s no excuse. Guy Herbert is a clever Jewish lawyer (which, of course, is).

Anyhow, I hope you find a spiritual or, at least, political home here.

Posted by ben tillman on Mon, 09 Jan 2006 03:35 | #

I do not know why Perry de Havilland thinks nation states are an ‘engine of collectivism and tyranny’, since their rise has tended at least to coincide with the decline of totalitarianism; but history is not his strong suit.

Actually, Fred, this is the one thing Havilland managed to get right. The rise of the nation-state was the rise of collectivism, meaning the production of collective action through coercion. The rise of the nation-state naturally coincided with the dissolution of the unity of Europe under the Church and a common moral code. The rise of the nation-sate was the end, not the beginning, of self-government.

You are, however, right that in all other respects Havilland is utterly irrational.

Posted by ben tillman on Mon, 09 Jan 2006 05:01 | #

It is no surprise at all that the West has moved toward an increasingly radical understanding of this new “liberated” Western man. What organised force is there to oppose taking things ever further?

None, of course. Race and religion are the natural sources of such organization, and it is no coincidence that attacks on racial and religious organization are the keys to the production and maintenance of the countervailing state of atomization. An often overlooked aspect of Marxism-Bolshevism, now superseded by Cultural Marxism, is the hyperindividualistic nature of class warfare. Class warfare is premised on each individual’s rational pursuit of his interests as homo economicus.

Your comment is pregnant with a further question: What organized force is there to function as the glue of the ruling elite? Can it be any other than that race for which race is a religion?

Posted by Luniversal on Mon, 09 Jan 2006 19:52 | #

Fred Scrooby wrote: “Is this walking talking breathing piece of excrement, Perry de Havilland, a Yank or a Brit?”

As a proto-transhumanist, beta version, he claims to be both. One of the comments that got me banned—apart from calling Alycia Rosenbaum the Wicked Witch of the West—was to have reminded Perry that he threatened to move to New Hampshire if Labour won the last election, but (rather like Alec Baldwin) had not made good on his promise. Typical statesman, breaking his pledges;-)

I can easily get back on Samizdata with a bit of spoofing. Despite saying that he makes his living advising others on how to run blogs, P de H is not too savvy about the technicalities.

The Nietzsche of the Nattersphere has rages when he realises that the world is not going his way. Typically he lashes out against those who criticise him from a partly sympathetic position, much preferring (like all fanatics) the cyber-companionship of the diametrically opposed, since his brain does not encompass subtleties such as why isolationism and internal freedom might go together.

I do find Samizdata (even the name is an insult to Russian dissidents, given its censorship policies) and Perry in particular a hoot, and in general I prefer crossing swords to scratching backs. Winding up someone with absolutely no sense of humour, let alone no knowledge of the past or how this wicked old world works, is too easy… but it’s amusing. It might be thought to be in poor taste, like goading the inhabitants of Bedlam on Sunday afternoons (and I once called libertarianism the Asperger’s Syndrome of politics) but it’s exhilarating. And not without rewards: before Perry banished me, one other race realist had chimed in with moderate and cogent support. Poor Perry, so many primitive survivals upsetting his ubermenschtum.

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