This morning ConservativeHome, the only really salient website for politically-minded British conservatives, ran an interesting piece by Rebecca Lowe.  She is described as “the former director of FREER, and a former assistant editor of ConservativeHome. She is co-founder of Radical.”  The latter tells us that she is part of the feminist rearguard action against the trespasses of trannyism on womanhood, her judgement being that the broad offices of state have fallen to it, and it is now a radical act to speak of woman in her nature and whole being. 

The article is titled What consequentialism and Peter Singer have taught me about the gender debate.  In it she is much exercised by the Jewish radical Singer, and spends a fair part of the article sniping at his approval of parents murdering their disabled babies.  But her principal concern is “the gender debate”.  It’s a good and properly conservative article but, of course, it does not situate Singer in the wider historical paradigm, the failure to recognise which ensures that conservatives continue operating on the enemy’s ground and on the enemy’s terms.

One ConHome commenter (whose similarity to other such, long-banned commenters of a nationalist persuasion, offering an identical nationalist critique, we need not dwell upon) offered the following, minor observation in an attempt to open a few tight-shut conservative eyes:

FickleFate
Good to see a properly thoughtful article at ConHome raising issues of an importance greater by orders of magnitude than the customary political fayre.

Consequentialists are active nihilists: deniers of all that is content-ful in the human being. What resides in and belongs to us, what we receive from the past, what connects us, what is particular and of the essence of us, what is emergent from our nature, what we discriminate for and, most of all for nihilists, moralise about ... this can have no place in the utopian end time, where all otherness is the same as self, all boundaries and borders are gone, and all human cause, all struggle, all desire, all need, all conflict is forgotten.

That self-estranged and denatured , artificial human estate, sans nation, sans kin and kind, is the final equality. It is not at all at odds with our Abrahamic religious and post-Enlightenment secular philosophical paradigms; which is why conservatives, who stand, in theory at least, against it, can never slough it off. They stand and fight on ground which inclines towards it, and are for the most part captured by gravity, defending only the last slip downwards from the next, but always relenting anyway, always sliding again in the end.

We need a clear philosophical exposition of why it is only truly conservative to level the ground. Scruton strove throughout his life to speak of such.  There are some less exalted nationalists and anti-modernists, routinely and mechanically traduced by the crazed left, who speak of much the same.  But will you listen, or are you too complacent, too self-absorbed, too materialistic, too disinterested in the struggle for the human tomorrow?

Official release poster (part)

A couple of nights ago, as our daughter was home for the weekend, we three settled on the sofa in front of the television in her rooms to watch the Netflix drama The Dig.  Its storyline may disappoint Anglo-Saxonists.  It is not really about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial.  Neither at the dig nor in the conservator’s lab do we get to gaze upon the glories emerging into the light of day after fourteen centuries.  No, this is a movie of the lives of those involved in the dig, most of them real people, and their place in that most pregnant moment in history.  Starring Ralph Fiennes as self-styled excavator Basil Brown, Carey Mulligan as the landowner Edith May Pretty, and Lily James as Peggy Piggott, it was released to general approval - and some disapproval - in January this year.

To be clear at the outset, the film as such is of secondary importance in the thesis of this short essay.  It is really only a vehicle for a commentary on our nationalism.  So let us dispense with it quickly ...

The plot is thin.  War with Hitler’s Germany is imminent.  An old Suffolk archaeology hand is called in by a dying landowner to excavate some barrows on her property at Sutton Hoo.  He uncovers a 6th century Anglo-Saxon boat, and the big names in British archaeology in the 1930s come bouncing in and take over.  These middle-class folk do some middle-class things, including snobbery, professional in-fighting, and extra-marital sex, some of which latter, we are led to believe, is homosexual (completely illegal at the time).  But they also unearth the greatest archaeological treasure in British history.  The excavation closes.  War is declared.  The End.

And that’s it, really.  If the action is boorishly, predictably infected with the modern, the Suffolk coastal landscape breathes history and regulates the action with a heavy sense of the timeless.  Its photography is rich and beautiful, and the lead acting performances match it.  Feinnes revels in the broad country accent and the native intelligence and simplicity of his character - a man who can say “My father taught me,” and for it to mean all the long line of fathers in our past.  The important lines, the ones which reveal meaning, all belong to him.  Feinnes delivers a performance that is at once austere and entirely human in scale.

READ MORE...

This is the second part of my re-work of the original Journey posts.  A third will follow.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

The entrance to that part of the secret state
concerned with countering domestic threat.

The text on Jon Dunstan’s mobile read, “1.00 pm same place”.  It was initialled “B”.  He understood that this was not a request.  But the short notice rankled.  Obviously, they knew very well that he could have client commitments but they didn’t care.  They knew he would obey the call.  He would attend what was, in fact, a final briefing, given that Driscoll’s personal secretary had booked one of the first-floor private rooms at Rules - hardly the most chic of eateries - for dinner that very evening.  Still, the game was commencing and that was what he had signed up for.

He found “B”, a middle-aged woman of unremarkable appearance and cool demeanour whom he knew only by the pseudonym Beatrix, sitting primly in the sun on one of the benches by the tennis courts in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  There were no niceties exchanged.  “Do you want to sit or walk?” he asked her.  She rose and the two of them began to stroll slowly around the perimeter of the Fields.

“We were disappointed to learn,” she stated, “that you will only be meeting with Driscoll.  How did that happen?”

Dunstan didn’t know.  “I sent you Driscoll’s text.  The Prof couldn’t make it, that’s all.”

“I doubt if that’s all,” she responded, “If Upton is distancing himself or not taking you seriously we want to know why.  We want to keep on top of things.”

Dunstan nodded dutifully although, in truth, he was not at all the dutiful sort.  “I’ll ask,” he said, “but I really need to stick to law as much as possible.  I’m not sure what else I can safely say to Driscoll if, as you say, he’s just the money-man.  It might be wiser to postpone altogether.”

“Postponing now would only make you look suspect,” she retorted, “We started with him, remember.  So it follows that you must want to see him.  About what, precisely, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think.  You’re on the same side.  You haven’t got to explain everything.  It’s more subtle than that.  Watch his face.  Sense his working assumptions about you.  Where they are positive let him run with them.  Where they’re not, throw in a redirection or put him off by cross-examining him.  Never allow him to cross-examine you.  Always be aware of the underlying power-dynamics.  It’s trade-craft.  Surely it must be second nature to any half-decent advocate?”  Something close to a smile yet not a smile, a schemer’s relish, played on her lips.  But it was gone without trace in an instant.

“Yeah yeah, OK,” said Dunstan, sighing wearily.  She had this way of beating him down which felt intentional.  Was that because she was “aware of the underlying power-dynamics”?  He was a junior of thirty-one, for Christ’s sake, and he knew perfectly well how to handle himself.  He was not charmed to be told otherwise, even by MI5.  He didn’t hide it well, either.

“Am I boring you, Mr Dunstan?” Beatrix inquired with quiet malice.  “This is a formal operation, in case you have forgotten.  It has a clear objective, a plan of action, a codename, and a budget.  What it does not have is room for cavalier attitudes from you.”

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, knuckling down again,“of course I will do as you ask.”

“You will have to,” his handler stated flatly, “You’re in now and there’s no getting out.”

READ MORE...

From time to time I endeavour to pull the old-style nationalist writers at PA away from their Nietzschean assumptions.  This is a typical effort, on a thread honouring the anniversary of Jonathan Bowden’s death, and specifically in response to the author’s defence of “the will”:

Nietzsche held nationalism in contempt, seeing not love, relation, sacrifice and creativity but submission to human smallness and weakness. He understood Man in another way entirely, as a being of cultural not ethnic definition and in moral not existential crisis. His presentation of the will, while it seduced the fascist mind and has perverted nationalism for a century, is fantasy. Human beings cannot declare themselves heroic possessors of iron intent without drowning in lies. No people, including our people, can become a figurative hero, was ever a figurative hero, and will ever be a figurative hero.

What the fascists could screw out of deluded youth was murderousness and arrogance towards the weak, which duly collapsed because lies will be found out. The fascist heroes were found out by humble Englishmen like my own father, who bombed the blazes out of them.

We betray our nature, we betray ourselves when we allow ourselves to be seduced by the fascist misreading of Nietzsche. How, anyway, can a creature seduced by such a deceit truly love his people. He can love only himself. Our people will never come to the side of such a man.

Enough. We do not have the time to continue in intellectual error. We must break with the failure of the past and think anew.

GW

The Coronation Oath Act of 1688, as it appears on statute

Having seen the front page illustration to the British Constitution Group website, making a big song and dance about how “The People Retain Authority over their Government”, our close friend John Standing thought he might ask a question of these lawyerly folk.  Here it is:

Dear Sirs,

May I, as a lay person in matters of British Constitutional law, ask why you hold the view that “the people” are sovereign, yet quite evidently from the illustration which graces your website you don’t mean the indigenous people of this land but anyone from anywhere who has been able to acquire citizenship.  I suspect that you have confused “the people” with British nationality or perhaps even the electoral roll.  Allow me to explain.

First, you are right that the primary constitutional documentation shows the people to be sovereign, and the same documentation and likewise The Bill of Rights 1689 and, by implication, the 40+ Representation of the People Acts from 1832 onward show that people to be the final source of authority (which is only ever lent to elected representatives, never given).  But the person of the sovereign is not a fluid as the demos is. It has an identity specified in the Coronation Oath Act of 1688; and that identity is “the people of this Kingdome of England” and by extension Wales and, with the Acts of Union, Scotland.  Note that the specification here is “people” not of course “subjects” or “citizens”, and “the people of”, not “a people in”.  Words used in founding constitutional documents are definitive, not descriptive; and this document defines the people of England in the year of 1688 as separate and distinct from any other, including the peoples of the Dominions, and thus they can only remain, sovereignhood being transmitted by succession by descent.

Once a people is identified as the sovereign, therefore, then sovereign it must remain unless it consents to the contrary; for its ethnic person is constitutionally inviolate.  There is no power in the land (not the monarch, not the executive, not parliament, not the judiciary) and no novel legal instrument (not, for example, the Nationality Act of 1948) which can constitutionally force change upon or replace the sovereign, or meddle with the rule of succession by descent.  For such would be a usurpation.  To be doubly clear, neither government nor parliament can constitutionally possess the power of usurpation.  If either does take that power to itself it does so unconstitutionally, and the sovereign has the constitutional recourse to all necessary action to defend itself.

If you have a contrary argument as to why immigrant populations which the sovereign people has never consented to accept but which, on the contrary have been coerced upon the sovereign people with extreme governmental prejudice against any and all dissent, can themselves be sovereign then I would be most interested in hearing it.

Yours sincerely,

John Standing

Several years ago I ripped off the first couple of chapters of a book that I had no intention of writing in full.  The idea was to explore in dramatic form the question of how Western governments might be taken to the International Criminal Court on a charge of committing a genocide agaist their native European people.  The two essays that it took to accomplish the task were pretty well received by the then MR commentariat.  But, in fact, they would both have benefitted from a longer period of gestation and a more considered approach to the actual writing.

Now I’m re-writing them in a more developed and more narrowly-focussed form for the purpose of offering the finished product to PA for their site.  The whole exercise should run close to 8,000 words, the first half of which is posted below.  The second half will follow in two or three days.
        —————————————————————————————————————————————————————

“The Court will hear your opening statement if you please, Mr Truscott-Brown,” announced the presiding chief justice in fluent but by no means native English. For that was to be the only language spoken in the room during the next three undoubtedly arduous days. No translators would be whispering into microphones, no one in Court would be hurriedly adjusting his or her earpiece to catch some mangled phrase. This was an entirely English, or British, affair except that it was taking place at The Hague before one judge from Montreal, another from Heidelberg, and a third from Uppsala, all of whom had forgone the privilege of hearing the proceedings in their native tongue.

“Thank you, your Honour,” came the reply in ringing received pronunciation. George Truscott-Brown QC OBE, FSA, RHS, lead advocate for the plaintiff, eternal renegade and inveterate fighter of lost causes, peered over his reading glasses at the unknown quantity which was the bench.  He steadied himself inwardly and, with a final, ever so slightly uncertain caress of the bundle of papers on the table in front of him, rose to begin his work for the day.

“Learned judges, may I at the outset, on behalf of the appellants, myself and my team, state for the record of proceedings our sincere gratitude to each of you and to the ICC as a whole for agreeing to hear this application.  We fully appreciate that that decision alone broke new ground.  So your Honours will be acutely aware that this is a conceptually novel and therefore, in some quarters, controversial action which presents a number of tests for the 1948 Convention. If the plaintiff is successful at this review, a subsequent plenary hearing may set precedent in several areas of high significance for the jurisdiction and practise of the ICC and, specifically, for its future interpretation of Article 2.  By that we mean, in particular, its interpretation of prevention in the context of the modern Western society where armed conflict is absent.

“Mindful, therefore, of all this, and of the profound responsibility which would weigh upon the eventual trial judges, it is our intention, at the kind invitation of the Office of the Prosecutor, to present your Honours with the greatest possible wealth of evidence and legal argument within the time available to us. It is our firm belief that all of the former will be ruled admissible and the latter applicable, and that your Honours will be led to the only possible conclusion that the Court must grant the Prosecutor leave to investigate the complicity of those individuals named in the Court papers in the creation of conditions of life calculated to bring about, over time, the physical destruction of whole or part of the peoples native to Great Britain.  It is our firm belief that we will clear that high legislative bar.”

And so it began.

READ MORE...

Dr McCullough’s frank and important testimony of 10th March:

I was pondering leaving this post entirely blank, both as an expression of my personal interest in the life and times of the royal princess, or “Me Again” as she has become known, and as a summation of the meaning and significance of her latest adventure.  But then I thought no, that would be out of character and disrespectful to readers.

So I have decided to write down everything that needs to be said about this apparently really important, media-hogging person and the poor, besotted sap she controls.  Sorry, I meant married.  Oh, and then there’s the terrible and, y’know, racist treatment they have received at the hands of, oh, everyone really.  Got to hear about that, obviously.

So here goes ...

The end.  Or how I wish it was the end.  But I fear we have many more years of opportunities to be lectured on our “racism” by this interloper.