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Remembering generational conflict “There were two contrasting worlds in the 1960s, the tiny elitist world of Brian Jones, with its sex, drugs and decadence, and the real world, Frank’s world, which was still very grey. Frank [Thorogood] was very bitter, and jealous of the kids who were reaping the benefits of what he had helped to create. He was one of the forgotten generation who had won the war and survived terrible things, in his case losing an eye. And they’d done it though discipline and self-control. Then along came the 1960s with this ‘Let it all hang out’ attitude. It was like a red rag to a bull.” Film-maker Stephen Woolley, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph on his directorial debut with “Stoned”.
However Jones’ death occurred, it was a sad and sordid end. Vice or viciousness, it really doesn’t matter. But, as Woolley’s words show, “Stoned” has a sub-text which is much more interesting. I was coming up to my eighteenth birthday in July 1969 and fell in to that category of younger siblings for which the sixties were largely a ready-made “experience”. Unlike Jones, we did not taste the heady delights of over-running the brave old world. We were not the advance troops of the early 1960’s wielding their light arms of social justice, attacks on the Establishment and anti-censorship campaigns or, for non-politicals like Jones, sex, drugs and blues (not yet rock ‘n roll). Our elder brothers and sisters did all that. We were to be the revolutionary army of occupation. By our time the big battles were over and things were getting seriously wild … that is, seriously anti-authoritarian, disordered and promiscuous. Being nobody’s revolutionary guard, questions about the purpose and excess of it all began to surface early in my dull consciousness. Woodstock still lay a month ahead when Brian Jones’ life ended, but Chicago and Paris had already announced to the world – and to me - that peace, man, was essentially a left-wing concept. Chicago and Paris and, when it “happened”, Woodstock, also told me that crowd behaviour, however perverse, is always inwardly conventional. The precise fad and the age of the crowd never mitigates the slavishness of its actions. I didn’t feel comfortable with the sixties’ crowd or with slavishness. Indeed, much of what we now term “the sixties” made me far more angry than the things sixties people supposedly despised. The one exception to this, let me say, was the miraculous emergence of a forest of bared female legs - you can’t ask an eighteen year old male to be unimpressed with that. But the weird, drug-attended psychedelia, the inchoate anger with “the system”, the contempt for our parents’ gentle, suburban limitations, the organised violence and rank, left-wing ugliness of the anti-war movement – all these I recoiled from with a will. Probably, I could see youthful ignorance and arrogance in others more clearly than in myself. It was certainly nothing very special. I remember one arrogant, youthful sage - perhaps Mick Jagger himself, perhaps some petty, troublesome student “leader” - gleefully warning the world that the day will come when the young are the Establishment, and then things will be different. “No, pal,” I thought, “you will change with age. All this crap you do will fall away and the world will go on just the same.” But in most of the ways that matter he was right and I was wrong. In fact, I turn out to have been the naive one all along. The sixties were, for Western gentile youth, a generational conflict. Indeed, it was the one conflict our fathers’ generation had not a chance of winning. Our liberal political and social milieu permits of greater, leftward expansion into individualism and nothing else. The end result - as with Brian Jones, the IQ 135 son of a respectable, middle-class Cheltenham family – can only be excess and self-destruction. So one can’t be surprised that the loves and obligations of nationhood, for example, have been so successfully trampled by my generation. They say of English aristocratic families that the estate can survive one wastrel, but not two in succession. The estate in this case was Man himself and the wastrel world war. A free people engaged upon a vague but horrifically dangerous Cold War could not reasonably tolerate each new generation going to waste. There had to be some way of breaking the cycle - and unfettered youthful brio, politically used by the left, seemed for a while to be it. The irony is, of course, that peace and victory in the Cold War was not won by that means, but by the discipline and self-control that Frank Thorogood would have understood. Today, Remembrance Sunday, reminds us what real conflict meant to past generations of young Westerners. To the extent that we remember our fathers as devoted and courageous young men fighting in the service of their countries, and not in the terms that the vile little revolutionaries of that vile decade derided them, we have set aside the illusions of our youth. But the sociological and political harm that we did was not at all illusory, and can’t be set aside. Our children and grandchildren have paid a grotesque price for our wilfulness and self-indulgence, and I know of no expeditious way to put that right. Comments:2
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 13 Nov 2005 20:36 | # The sixties were, for Western gentile youth, a generational conflict. Indeed, it was the one conflict our fathers’ generation had not a chance of winning. But it was not a generational conflict. It was a conflict over which ethnicity had the power to indoctrinate the next generation. 4
Posted by Matra on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 01:23 | # Frank Thorogood! I haven’t heard that name since the mid-80s when I was a 60s obsessed teenager reading books about the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. My parents, like virtually all working class Ulster Protestants who came of age in the 60s, rejected everything about that decade - except the music. By the time I was about 18 and reading about politics instead of pop culture I understood my parents’s hostility to that disastrous decade and their annoyance at my interest in 60s politics. By the mid-80s those who protested in the 60s were prominent in the cultural establishment making the movies and sitcoms we watched, teaching us at school and hammering home the anti-traditionalist anti-Western message they were/are obsessed with. In that respect the 60s never really ended. Just watch a pre-1966 movie and compare it to almost anything made since. Indeed I’m surprised there aren’t moves to phase out showing those old movies as they provide those of us who weren’t born until around 1970 with a peek at life before the decline of our civilisation. I think it is also important to point out that Jews played a considerable role in creating the 60s counterculture. For them it wasn’t all that radical as they were raised by anti-Christian, anti-patriotic communists. To many white Gentiles opposing war, supporting “civil rights” and embracing all the 60s had to offer meant conflict with family and friends. The wreckage from such conflicts is still visible. 5
Posted by john fitzgerald on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:34 | # Facts do point to the ethnic attrition coming first, exacerbating any generational conflict. 6
Posted by seelow heights on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 07:16 | # Re the ethnic factor in the sixties cultural revolution a key book is Rothman and Lichter’s Roots of Radicalism:Jews, Christians and the Left. If the authors were not themselves prominent members of the Jewish community, this work would be labeled anti-Semitic. One reason for such a label is that it deliberately draws a distinction — not always unbarbed — between leftist students of the 60s of Jewish backgrounds and those who were not Jewish. Even more, Drs. Rothman and Lichter claim to have discovered significant differences between these groups, based upon what they perceive as a divide between Jewish (albeit nonreligious) attitudes and the attitudes of non-Jewish students. In the course of drawing this distinction, the scientists prepare an overview of Jewish radicalism from the time of Freud to today, with emphasis upon the deracinated Jews of fin-de-siecle Vienna, the Weimar Republic, and the attitudes of Jewish radicals who emigrated to the United States from Czarist Russia. 7
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 14:14 | # I do not take issue with the fact of Jewish activism nor with its ethnic motivation. I do not dispute that the emergence of class-war and, latterly, culture war were philosophised by Jews and, in large part, the leading foot-soldier activists were also Jews. I do, however, urge you all to place this in its true political context. If you fail to do this, if you simply cleave to the assertion that an unseen Jewish hand is ruling everything you are embarking on the journey into paranoia and, most importantly, missing the point that liberalism is <u>the key</u> to understanding. I have tried to point out here that it is liberalism - the pursuit of freedom and individualism - and the liberal zeitgeist in which all politics obtain, be they left or right, Conservative or revolutionary Marxist, that presents an open door to, among many other things, Jewish racio-political activity. Change the political zeitgeist and all other solutions follow. But ... we few free-thinkers cannot change the zeitgeist merely by opposing it, bicep against bicep. Ordinary voters want liberalism. They think they like it. They conflate it with material wealth and scientific progress, and believe that OMOV democracy gurantees their freedom. They do not yet know they are not free, that liberalism has advanced beyond coarse constitionalities and into dabbling in the psychology of a supposedly permanently guilty white man. They will understand this in time and, naturally, they will reject it. But if the change that flows from that is not sufficiently fundamental and, in a genuine, historical sense, Conservative, the political gains will be insufficient. For that, liberalism must be scorched away and a zeitgeist productive of stability and reflective of our evolved nature and natural rights must replace it. 8
Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 15:08 | # Whoops, I have a fundamental disagreement here. Freedom and individualism are important CONSERVATIVE values. The 1960s and the 20th Centruy as well were primarily collectivist/socialist, and it is that collectivism that was heavily fostered by Jewish leftist intellectuals. Nobody has ever really tried a society with freedom, individualism and no Leviathan government—such a society would almost certainly be fissiparous, with completely free migration being countered by groups of well armed Geoff Becks trying to stop said migration (there being no Leviathan hindering Geoff Beck.) The ideal society has freedom and individualism, but it also has strong ethics (whether or not via religion), a stable social order (which doesn’t allow multiculturalism, essentially unstable), a class system and a robust, well oberved and stoutly enforced legal framework. THAT’s Conservatism. International meddling, heavy immigration, big government, trashy culture and debased ethical and mral values aren’t part of it. But nor’s Jew-bashing or dreams of Aryan superiority. 9
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 15:18 | # “But nor’s Jew-bashing” (—Martin) Martin, Seelow’s post (a couple above this) was not Jew-bashing, if that’s what you’re referring to. (Probably you’re not, but are making a general observation ... Was just making sure ... Excuse the intrusion.) 10
Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:45 | # No, just to confirm, I wasn’t referring to Seelow, who was quoting from a respectable work written by Jewish authors. I was trying to distinguish Conservatism both from GWB-politics and from where some at MR would appear to wish it to go. Feel free to agree or disagree. 11
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:18 | # Martin, I don’t think you and I have a very fundamental disagreement on the issues of freedom and individualism. We do, after all, agree that only from a stable foundation can anything durable and worthwhile be built. We agree, I think, that liberalism, a system predicated on change rather than stability, needs must countervail its supposed gains to the individual with oppressive control. It is a fraud. Where we seem to differ is in my conviction that social stability is racially, not culturally, based. I often cite Emile Durkheim’s work on suicide in respect of stability, because he was the first to demonstrate that social instability produces psychological instability (and vice-versa, as we are now learning via the fruits of liberalism). For me, the primary source of social stability is shared interest based on ethnic kinship. You have identified class, I think, as a more influential source. But class sundered by competing ethnic interests resolves into atomisation or the emergence of a dominant ethnic interest. Neither will lend stability to society. You are not, however, alone in proposing a non-ethnic foundation for stability. As much as I approve of Durkheim in many ways, as a Jew, a secularist and a socialist he was compelled to oppose the movement in France for a return to a Catholic, nationalist polity, following the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War. He produced a theory whereby modern society was, being complex and urban instead of simple and rural, no longer based on shared heritage and ethnicity. It was united by the cooperative practises of city life and economics. An essentially good man, Durkheim was nevertheless driven by his own ethnic interests to deny the same by this means to the French. This denial is the principal product of Jewish political thought. It’s no good pretending otherwise. The same pattern emerges continually. At least let us acknowledge the fact and not hide from it. If we do so the question then arises: To what kind of general polity would our people, freed from alien influence, naturally gravitate? One might call the answer a Political State of Nature. Ours is, I feel, a Conservative, patriotic and loyal nature. At a secondary level one could assert tolerance (as a means of binding the people closer). But the fundamental glue is a common ethnicity, regardless of class. To suppose that ethnicity has no role here - or only a minor one - is to declare a detachment from one’s own ethnic roots and interests. What, exactly, is there to conserve if one disgards those? 12
Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:36 | # There isn’t much worth conserving in the British or U.S. political scene of 2005, true, but Conservatism was defined as conserving the political system of 1830, and it is that we must get back to. Conservatism postulates a world of strong law-abiding mono-cultural (and hence largely but not necessarily completely mono-ethnic —otherwise what do you do with the Basques, the Welsh and the Jews?) societies, not interfering with each other, and each pursuing their own civilisational goals by peaceful means. A society that tries to export multiculturalism is a threat to such a world, as is a society that tries to grow government excessively (which is why the British 1920s so hated and feared Boslhevism, far more than they had feared the Czars.) Japan is probably the closest today to a conservative society, though its government is too big. A Conservative Japan would be very different from a Cosnervative Britain, yet it would share the same underlying goverbnmental system. The relative importance of nature (race) versus nurture (culture) is a scientific one; I find it very hard to believe it’s more than 70/30 either way. It’s also a very interesting question, if indeed it becomes firmly established that Western and East Asian races have a “smart” gene that has only appeared within the last 8000 years, and that other races don’t have, what one should do about it. There appear to be three alternatives (i) ignore it, and hope that Darwinian selection makes the smart races survive and the others die out (by no means certain, in today’s world, and if it did happen, possibly involving appalling conflict) (ii) interbreed like bunnies (solves the problem, but may wipe out other genetic characteristics one wishes to preserve) or (iii) genetically engineer the “smart” gene into at least some of the non-“smart” ethic groups, after which “smartness” will presumably spread worldwide. I favor (iii) but it’s not an easy call. If denial becomes impossible, the left will favor (ii), presumably. 13
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:28 | # I favour allowing our people to pursue their own ethnic interests, which you have not included in the list. In respect of “the Basques, the Welsh and the Jews”, there is no fundamental right enjoyed by these or any people to live in another’s land. Let each pursue their interests within thier own homelands (might let the Welsh in to Ross-on-Wye if they stop burning Englishmen’s properties on Anglesey). 14
Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 19:49 | # Yes, we may differ in that “pursuing their own ethnic interests” can imply a Manichean struggle with other ethnic groups. I see no reason to regard life as a zero sum game in this respect, and believe the ideal to be separate ethnic groups pursuing their own destiny separately, in a world of more or less free trade but not free migration. Ross on Wye the Welsh can have by all means. However, at HAY on Wye I erect the barricades, since I regard the world’s largest second hand bookshop collection as approximately equivalent to the Potosi silver mine in its importance as a resource 15
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 22:29 | # Hay? You’ve been too long among the colonials, Martin. Don’t you know Hay has fallen to the enemy? I don’t get this Manichean thing. Ethnic interests are what they are, however Manichean or not that makes them. You can’t pick and choose with reality. At this juncture you might be inclined to flinch from the reality of EGI. It does, after all, have a rather hard-right ring to it - not perhaps the sort of thing one can discuss at a Hay dinner party. But in forgetting that we have interests of our own we have allowed others to profit, have we not? Not asserting our own interests has allowed the possibility of losing our homelands to come into being. If this scale of things qualifies as Manichean in your estimation, then OK - Manichean it is. There’s no point in drawing a personal line in the sand if the dispossession continues. Private tastes and high principles are worthless unless they conform to our interests. Here’s a question for you, Martin. Is it possible for a “Liverpudlian” Conservative polity to sustain in a heterogenous society? Assume genetic distance is maximised. 16
Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:37 | # I’ve no idea, but we didn’t have Liverpudlian Conservatism in the 1950s either. The decline of Britain has been going on for 170 years not 30; Thatcher was just a brief upward blip. Heroic and painful efforts to reverse the immigration of the last 30 years, but not to change anything else, would improve matters much, though certainly continuing high immigration would make them worse. We need a much more broad brush approach, in which ethnic identity is just one factor and the Japanese and other well run countries are naturally our allies. Incidentally, here’s Cynthia Grenier’s review of “Great Conservatives” in CRISIS magazine. 17
Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:38 | # ... would NOT improve matters much… Sorry—illiterate. 18
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:41 | # He leaves his readers wondering, what are the chances of a conservative revival in this new century, “in circumstances very different from the agrarian society in which Conservatism flourished”? The chances are good only if we take the golden road of replacing OMOV with something to strengthen the Conservative currents in society. The consequent, long-term remoralising pressure on the polity would change all that is bad about liberalism - which is much. But what “Conservatives” care for or understand that? Not Cameron. Not Davies. 19
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:43 | # Incidentally, since you did not answer my question I will. Conservatism cannot exist if two or more competing EGI’s are present, since the stability it must found will forever be knocked away. 20
Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:19 | # Provided you allow for useful and small minorities, like the 18th century Jews who created the London merchant banks, I agree with that. There’s a “tipping point” beyond which a majority culture accomodative to minorities becomes a multicultural mess. That tipping point allows for a somewhat larger percentage of the minority race/culture if it has assimilated a long time; I think for example that African Americans are assimilable into a Conservative US, at about a 10-12% minority (Geoff Beck would disagree with me on that, I recognize.) For one thing, the great majority of African Americans have some settler ancestry and hence presumably the “smart” gene—I will defend the contribution to US culture of Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers Brown (my choice for the next Supreme Court Justice) against anyone. The 25% overall minority US subculture of African Americans and Hispanics (really mostly Amerind) is pretty clearly too big, even if its numbers were stabilsied over a lengthy period. For one thing, it’s showing strong signs of forimg a ghettoised alliance of trashy culture and leftist politics that is dragging many Caucasians (though not many Asians) down with it. In the US therefore, some repatriation, at a bare minimum of essentially all the low-skill illegal immigrants, but probably more, is essential. In the UK, we’re not yet at that stage - I guess the total immigrant/non-British population is still no more than 10%. The main need is to stop the inflow, and then beat up/break up/privatise the school system so that British values are reinforced and multiculturalism is stamped out. If that was done, it is my guess that a Conservative society could be recreated with only minimal expulsion of troublemakers. Powell made two mistakes in 1968 and after. First, he sensationalised the problem, which may have brought it home to the masses but allowed the politicians to close ranks against him (otherwise Heath would have had to include him in a 1970 Cabinet.) Second, he left the Conservative Party and faffed around in Ulster, missing out on the chance to be Maggie’s elder statesman, and push that government much further in the directions it should have gone but didn’t. Like most very clever people, he was right but politically inept. 21
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:03 | # “Provided you allow for useful and small minorities, like the 18th century Jews who created the London merchant banks, I agree with that. There’s a ‘tipping point’ beyond which a majority culture accomodative to minorities becomes a multicultural mess.” (—Martin) This is right. In adding carbon to iron during steel manufacture there’s a tipping point beyond which the end result changes from steel to a heap of brittle scrap: iron with a trace of carbon in it gives steel, while carbon with a trace of iron in it gives a heap of flakes. “I will defend the contribution to US culture of Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers Brown (my choice for the next Supreme Court Justice) against anyone.” Martin will find no one here to take up that challenge: we all would do the same as he. All we’re asking is that the country not be changed deliberately and against the will of its unconsulted people into majority non-white: that we be allowed to be iron with a trace of carbon added rather than forced to be carbon with a trace of iron added. All we’re asking is to be allowed to remain what we’ve been. We don’t think that’s asking too much. 22
Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:43 | # It has been sometimes noted that American Jews who spouted generic anti-war rhetoric during the Vietnam conflict quickly abandoned that position when Israel became involved in hostilities and, having done their utmost to avoid the US draft, quickly volunteered to defend Israel by enrolling in the IDF. Post a comment:
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Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:09 | #
It’s a little known fact that Brian Jones drowned in what had previously been A.A. Milne’s swimming pool, in his country house next to the “Hundred Acre Wood.”
Truly the Sixties was a DREADFUL decade. I, just a year older than GW, said so at the time, loudly and doubtless pompously, to a bunch of my parents’ 50ish friends (mostly Tory voting) assembled for New Year’s Eve, 1969. They were duly shocked and blithered on about liberation. However, I still think I was right.