L’Œuvre Française: racist-anti-racism

L’Œuvre Française is a French nationalist movement active from the late sixties ’til the present. These quotes are from a leaflet they produced in 1993. I like the argument used here, and the aggressive style -- Griffin received his loudest applause from the ‘Question Time’ audience for making a related point in a similar fashion about Straw and Greer’s assault on English ethnicity:

International Anti-Racism is the Negation of National Patriotism

In government, in the Church, in parliament, in political parties, in the media and art, in the judicial system, in the street, the insolence and maliciousness of those who claim to be ‘anti-racist’ seem no longer to have any limit.

Their aim is to ensure the victory of cosmopolitanism through the use of all intellectual and material forms of subversion.

Their plan involves the negation of the Christian essence of our national existence and the denial of the European source of our French identity.

Their tactic consists in systematically accusing French people of good stock, and who are prepared to defend themselves, of ‘fascism’ and ‘nazism’. It is what they call ‘the struggle against racism’, ‘anti-racism’.

Anti-racism is the negation of French France

Self-styled anti-racism is an internationalist ideology which abusively exploits phoney humanitarian sentiments to encourage the invasion of the nation’s inner world, to the detriment of the physical and moral health of France. It is the negation of natural rights - never called into question till now - of the French to live peacefully as masters in their own homes in accordance with the genius of their blood, the nature of their soil, the faith of their heaven.

The pretext invoked is the pseudo-philosophy of the ‘rights of man’, the ideology of the so-called liberation, the frenzy of what was supposed to be the ‘resistance’ … This has culminated in the anomaly of a new state doctrine: anti-racism, which leads to the hatred of every normal society, i.e. one which is hierarchical, traditional, and national.

The result which anti-racism banks on achieving is a France which is under occupation, disfigured, changed beyond recognition: a cosmopolitan ‘Hexagon’ which would no longer be historical France, the France of the French.

Anti-racism is the enemy of our freedoms, our jobs, the future of our children, the enemy of civil peace at home and a fruitful co-operation between states abroad.

L’Œuvre Française wants to safeguard national identity

A strictly nationalist movement, L’Œuvre Française, was founded and directed by Pierre Sidos. Its symbol is the Celtic cross, its slogan ‘France for the French’, and its action is based on a political creed which affirms the existence of a single France, historically constituted as a sovereign state, whose unity and continuity is assured by a principle of authority allied to personal responsibility. It is composed of a people of European extraction, generally of French language, of a Christian tradition, of a classical education, and of a millennial nationality, living in Western Europe within fixed boundaries. The power of integral nationalist thought on all acts of public life must form the basis of the preservation of its spiritual and intellectual identity, its physical and moral integrity, its political and cultural independence, for the common good of the French and the healthy balance of the international community.

This profession of nationalist faith rejects the division of France into ‘left’ and ‘right’ by asserting a national sentiment which transcends the various cleavages within society, and exists over and above elections and parties. It obviously rejects anti-social theories, anti-national machinations, anti-natural practices, all engendered by cosmopolitanism and its modern successor, anti-racism.

The precondition for safeguarding French national identity is first and foremost not to confuse but to differentiate, to make selections between people, to make choices between ideas, by opting for definite preferences and establishing hierarchies. In this respect, L’Œuvre Française … is superbly well placed to make a valuable contribution to the re-establishment of France in every sphere.

More of their Myths

In I’m a racist no more and Myths of Oppression I wondered just how much of the nonsense written by ‘anti-racist’ academics they themselves believe. Consider these quotes from an essay by Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, ‘The 1951-1955 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration’ -- is it plausible that they really do not see that their justifications for exonerating Black immigrants of the charges laid against them by certain natives are bogus?

On welfare ‘scrounging’:

The attempt to portray higher levels of black unemployment as evidence of welfare ‘scrounging’ was scotched by the National Assistance Board Working Party representative. She pointed out that though some of the recent Caribbean migrants were , like sixty thousand Irish workers, in receipt of national assistance this was because of their ineligibility for unemployment benefits.

(Got that? ‘Welfare scroungers’ are people who receive welfare benefit x, not welfare benefit y. Really?)

On crime:

The undesirability of black migrants on grounds of a ‘racial’ predisposition to criminality had been a longstanding concern of government departments and Parliament. In the House of Commons in November 1954, secretary of state for the colonies Alex Lennox-Boyd was asked by Sir Jocelyn Lucas ‘what machinery exists to ascertain the proportion of Jamaican immigrants who have police or criminal records’. Hansard is studded with questions of this nature. Likewise in the questionnaire sent to Ministry of Labour regional offices area officers were asked: ‘Can any distinction be drawn between the coloured workers who come here as fare-paying passengers and those who come as stowaways or deserters?’

The general tenor of responses was: Not enough evidence to make a judgement. Behind this question lies a clear assumption that the manner in which the stowaway came to Britain was a confirmation of a criminal proclivity. No attention was given to the way in which increasingly stringent administrative measures introduced by Labour and Conservative governments criminalized the stowaway.

(Brilliant. Quite apart from denying the validity both of concern about the criminal record of immigrants and the notion that Blacks are predisposed to high crime levels, they would have us believe that a demonstrated willingness to resort to crime is not a reliable indicator of ‘criminal proclivity’).

The essay ‘The 1951-1955 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration’ appears in Winston James and Clive Harris (eds), Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain (London: Verso, 1993). The title of that book - ‘Inside Babylon’ - again calls attention to the way we are asked to believe something transparently absurd, that Britain is both a place of hostility and oppression for Caribbean Blacks, yet also a place they voluntarily came and come to.

Pierre L. van den Berghe: Does race matter?

From Pierre L. van den Berghe, ‘Does race matter?’ : Nations and Nationalism, I: 3 (1995), 359-68

Abstract: This essay contends that behaviour can only be understood within an evolutionary framework that gives equal weight to genes and environment. Our cultural environment itself evolved, in part through natural selection of genes and in part through other mechanisms. Racism, however, involves association of genetically caused differences in physical appearance with characteristics to which they are wholly unrelated. Yet this association has a biological cause: fitness maximisation through nepotism. This association, therefore, has an effect upon the life chances and reproductive success of genetically different groups and, therefore, upon the process of human evolution.

Do social races have any biological underpinning?

At a trivial level, the answer to that question is an obvious 'yes'. A social race is defined as a group sharing physical (as distinguished from cultural) attri­butes. But must there be such a linkage? Do physical differences between groups always lead to social differences? More generally, do physical pheno­types always matter socially? And, if so, why?

My theory, first stated a decade-and-a-half-ago, is very simple. All social organisms are biologically programmed to be nepotistic, i.e. to behave favourably (or 'altruistically') to others in proportion to their real or perceived degree of common ancestry. Social organisms evolved to be nepotistic because altruistic investment in unrelated organisms is biologically wasted and therefore could not evolve, as Darwin clearly saw well over a century ago. The evidence, both human and non-human, for rampant nepotism is over­whelming. The bibliography on humans alone now runs into several hundred titles. Favouring kin among humans is sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, and biologically, it does not matter which. But, consciously or unconsciously, we must be able to discriminate according to degree of biological relationship to ourselves, if our beneficence to others is to increase our inclusive fitness.

For the most fundamental mammalian social tie, the mother-infant one, a simple mechanism is typically present: identification and imprinting shortly after birth by sight, sound, olfaction or a combination of these. Experimental switching of neonates has demonstrated these simple recognition mechan­isms in many mammalian species. But often, and certainly for humans, the situation is much more complex. More than most (perhaps all) other organ­isms, humans recognise and make fine gradations of kinship, and dispense their largesse or their nastiness accordingly.

Being intelligent and opportunistic animals, humans use all possible clues of relatedness, with a preference for the ones that are reliable, quick and cheap. Since it pays, in fitness maximisation terms, to be a fine-tuned dis­criminator of kinship in a wide range of situations involving hundreds or even thousands of relationships, any readily identifiable, unfalsifiable marker of probable common ancestry will be used. Specification of a few simple proper­ties of the marker itself, of the social circumstances of the individual, and of the ecological conditions of the social encounter can lead one to good behavioural predictions. For example, it can be predicted that, among social mammals with heavy biparental investment in offspring, parenthood will be 'tested' by males more than by females, because paternity is exposed to much more uncertainty than maternity. Mothers know their babies are theirs; fathers cannot be so sure, and therefore will look much more for physical resemblance, especially for signature-like rare characteristics such as a mole on the nose. Women concerned with paternal investment in their offspring, on the other hand, can be expected to stress the physical resemblance of their babies to their mates more than to themselves. 'Isn't he his father's spitting image?'

Let us now widen the focus from kinship in the narrow sense, to that form of extended kinship we call race or ethnicity. Both racial and ethnic groups are socially defined by real or putative common descent, and the distinction between the two types of groups is merely in the relative salience of biolo­gical or cultural markers of membership. My contention is that, in both cases, the social concern is with common biological descent, even when the markers are primarily cultural.

There are three main objections to my formulation of ethnocentrism and racism as extended forms of biologically rooted nepotism.

(1) The common descent of ethnic groups is often a myth, not a biological reality. Therefore, my argument is invalid. To which I reply: A myth, to be effective, has to be believed, and a myth of ethnicity will only be believed if members of an ethnic group are sufficiently alike in physical appearance and culture, and have lived together and intermarried for a sufficient period (at a minimum three or four generations) for the myth to have developed a substantial measure of biological truth. The Emperor ofjapan can effectively claim to be the father of the Japanese nation in a way that Queen Victoria could never validate her claim as mother ofIndia. Ethnicity or race cannot be invented or imagined out of nothing. It can be manipulated, used, exploited, stressed, fused or subdivided, but it must correlate With a pre-existing popula­tion bound by preferential endogamy and a common historical experience. Ethnicity is both primordial and instrumental.

(2) If ethnicity and race are both rooted in the biology of nepotism, why is it that most ethnic groups stress cultural markers of membership rather than heritable physical ones? The answer here is quite simple: because most ethnic groups seek to differentiate themselves from their immediate neighbours in situations where some short-distance migration and intermarriage take place. Therefore, most ethnic groups look so much like their neighbours that they must rely on cultural markers of distinction. The proof of the biological pudding is that, where physical, genetic markers do a reliable job of differ­entiating between groups, they are used. In fact, the conditions under which racial groups do emerge are quite predictable: they appear after long-distance migration of sizeable groups across visible genetic clines: slavery, colonialism, indenture, voluntary migration, military conquest are so many examples, especially across large geographical barriers such as oceans or deserts. And racial groups can only survive as long as interbreeding remains relatively infrequent. Three or four generations of 25 per cent or more exogamy typically erode both racial and ethnic boundaries, and lead to the formation of new ethnic groups. Both race and ethnicity are not immutable, but their mutability is a function of exogamy over several generations.

(3) If biological nepotism is extended to large groups, which, under modern conditions, often comprise millions of individuals, has not the con­cept been diluted to the point of meaninglessness, and reduced to a mere analogy?

Of course, the more distant the biological relationship between two individuals, the more diluted the benefits of nepotism become. Indeed, the biological model predicts that the preference is proportional to the degree of relationship. Relatedness is relative. Ego is at the core of a set of concentric circles defining declining degrees of relationship: nuclear family, extended family, lineage, clan, dialect group, sub ethnicity, nation. These levels of relatedness are imbedded into one another. Circumstances and interests will determine the level of solidarity which is activated at any given place and time, in a classical fission-and-fusion scheme such as British anthropologists have described for African segmentary lineage societies. But the principle of nepotism, however diluted, suffuses all levels, and there is no a priori reason why nepotistic discrimination should stop at any particular point, unless it can be displaced by a superior strategy of fitness maximisation. Brothers do murder each other, but not gratuitously and not as easily as strangers. When they do, there is usually a big payoff, such as a throne, an inheritance or a harem. To affirm the operation of nepotism, even in large groups, is not to deny the operation of other principles of cooperative behaviour (such as class solidarity), or fitness maximisation (such as deceit and treachery). The size of the group dilutes the effectiveness of solidary behaviour whatever the base of solidarity, but not more so for ethnic groups than for other social groups such as classes, corporations, clubs or army units, and perhaps even less. Ethnic and racial groups can be politically mobilised, even on a huge scale, with greater ease and rapidity, than other social groups, especially under external threat from an enemy who is himself defined in ethnic or racial terms.

Does the biology of social race explain the etiology of racism in contemporary societies?

Better put, does my theory of the biological genesis of social race predict and explain contemporary racism better than competing theories? The answer, I think, is yes, not because it supplants other theories, but because it comple­ments them at a higher level of theoretical generality. It provides a predictive scheme of when, where and why racism can be expected to wax and wane, on a world-wide basis, without having to invoke any special cultural, psycholo­gical or historical causes.

Racism, defined as discriminatory behaviour based on inherited physical appearance, can be expected to arise whenever variance in inherited physical appearance is greater between groups than within groups. This is a relatively rare event, except when two or more hitherto isolated populations migrate across large geographical obstacles. It is even rarer for intergroup variance to remain greater than intragroup variance for long, because contact generally brings about interbreeding. So, racism will appear after long-distance migra­tion, but will only persist as long as social barriers to exogamy prevent intermixture, and thus the recreation of a more typical situation where intragroup genetic diversity exceeds intergroup differences. Racism cannot be sustained long if racial membership cuts across the microkinship of the family. Precisely because social race is an extension of the principle of nepot­ism, it cannot long survive interbreeding. Even the rare exceptions, such as relations between white and brown Afrikaners in South Africa, confirm the rule: the 'races' only survived the interbreeding of slavery because of the reimposition of an endogamous caste system after slavery.

Having specified the objective conditions which lead to the rise and the decline of racism, does it follow that racism will inevitably accompany these conditions? Unfortunately, I think the answer is, again, affirmative. Why? Because we are not only selfish maximisers, but intelligently opportunistic ones. Sociality is synonymous with discrimination. Only a fool behaves indiscriminately towards all. We must constantly decide when to be nice or nasty, trusting or suspicious. In the last analysis, we have only two bases for doing so: reciprocity and nepotism. Reciprocity is tricky, unstable, open to cheating, and often dependent on costly information or past experience. It only works between individuals who know one another well and who expect to continue interacting in a mutually beneficial way without deceit or coer­cion. For nepotism to yield its genetic reward, the only requirement is correct assessment of relatedness. It works best if the cost of that assessment is minimised, that is, if the assessment is reliable, easy and fast.

These simple principles enable us to predict which markers of group membership will be used under what conditions. Where neighbouring groups look alike physically, cultural markers do a better job of assessing group membership than genetic traits. Not all cultural markers are equally good. The beret may be a symbol of Basque ethnicity, but it is not reliable. Indeed, it has been usurped by millions of Frenchmen, Spaniards and others. Military uniforms are used for ready recognition of friend and foe from a distance, but they too are open to cheating. That is why costume is frequently a symbol of ethnicity, but never a test of it. Facial scarification is much more reliable than dress because it cannot easily be undone. Cultural markers of ethnicity which permanently change physical appearance are common: cir­cumcision, tooth filing, tattoos and so on. Language is also a common marker. Even though it is strictly cultural, it is learned early in life and difficult to 'fake' in adulthood, because few people retain the ability to mimic the phonetics of a language learned after puberty. Until recent migrations, some­one who spoke your dialect without a foreign accent was most likely to be a native fellow ethnic. But the drawback of language as a marker is that, though reliable, it is fairly slow. You have to ask questions before you shoot, and sometimes you cannot afford the delay.

Let us turn to biological markers. They only work between groups that look quite different. Between Zulus and Boers in South Africa, they worked with complete efficacy: you could shoot at 500 metres and never make a mistake. Norwegians and Swedes, on the other hand, could never be racists towards one another, even if they wanted to. They have to listen to one another before they can tell who is who. The Nazis tried to be racists with Jews but their biological markers worked with perhaps 10 to 15 per cent reliability. In practice, they used mostly cultural markers: circumcision, syna­gogue attendance, the Star of David, denunciations, surnames, etc. Nazi racial theory ludicrously outstripped the reality of genetic differences. They actually had a very difficult time picking out Jews from their Gentile neigh­bours, especially in the assimilated Jewry of Western Europe.

Physical markers, in short, only 'work' under the limiting and rare condi­tion of genetic heterozygosity being greater between groups than within. If such a condition is present, however, does it follow that racism is inevitable? Not by a long shot, because most genotypic differences are phenotypically hidden by recessivity or are so cryptic as to be useless for purposes of quick and easy group membership ascription. Blood types, for instance, must be tested by antigens from a blood sample, and the test is slow and costly enough that soldiers in combat are culturally tagged (or, in the case of the SS in Nazi Germany, even tattooed) for their genotype.

In practice, then, only a few inherited phenotypes are culturally utilised to form social races, and they are chosen, not for their behavioural significance, but simply for their visibility. Skin pigmentation is the most widespread because it is the most visible from the greatest distance and subject to only a limited range of environmental variation. (The genetics of skin colour are still poorly understood and are probably under the control of four to six different loci.) Facial features (notably eye, lip and nose shape), hair texture and physical stature are also used where they are diacritic. For example, in Rwanda and Burundi where the Hutu- Tutsi- Twa distinction is marked by large group differences in height, stature is widely used as a criterion. It works better in Rwanda where a rigid caste system hindered interbreeding, than in the more fluid social structure of Burundi, but, in both cases, the physical distinction was used as a quick and dirty basis for sweeping genocidal action (against the Tutsi in Rwanda, against the Hutu in Burundi). A particularly gruesome atrocity against the Tutsi in Rwanda was to amputate them at the knee to cut them down to size.

This double condition of greater inter- than intragroup heterozygosity and high phenotypic visibility predicts when, where and why physical phenotypes get transmuted into social races. The reason why racism became the great pandemic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was simply the sudden acceleration of large-scale, long-distance migration across wide genetic clines. The social consequences were enormous and noxious because racial distinc­tions are peculiarly invidious and immutable, well beyond cultural distinc­tions. All group distinctions between in-group and out-group are designed to exclude potential competitors from competition for scarce resources, but racial distinctions are especially nasty because they are almost totally beyond individual control. You can learn a language, convert to a religion, get circumcised or scarified, adopt a dress style, but you cannot become tall or white.

In practice, social race is always a social stigma for the subordinate group, and all attempts to pretend otherwise have been singularly unsuccessful. Pragmatically, in terms of policy, it means that institutionalisation of racial categories, however innocuous or even benevolent it may appear, is fre­quently noxious in its consequences. I am thinking of such measures as racial questions on censuses, race-based affirmative action and similar measures, which have generally had the effect of reinforcing stigmatised racial distinc­tions.

Conclusion

Let us now close the circle on the relationship between genes and behaviour. I have repeatedly stressed that behaviour, human and non-human alike, can only be understood within an evolutionary framework that gives equal weight to genes and environment acting in concert. For humans, culture is, of course, a large part of the social environment of our species. A genetic effect on behaviour can be direct and result from natural selection, even when it leads to a reduction in fitness (e.g. overeating when food is available, leading to obesity in affluent societies, but providing valuable caloric storage in unstable hunting and gathering economies characterised by cycles of feast and famine; or the craving for drugs which mimic the pleasurable sensations of natural enzymes).

The case of racism, however, is different. The linkage between genes and behaviour is clear, but it did not evolve by natural selection. Racism is conceivably a case of culture 'highjacking' genes which were selected for different ends (e.g. skin pigmentation regulating exposure to sun radiation in different latitudes), and making them serve a totally different social agenda. Yet, that social agenda itself had an underlying biological programme: fitness maximisation through nepotism. Finally, but not less importantly, that social agenda itself had an enormous feedback effect on the life chances of different groups, on their reproductive success, and therefore, in the final analysis, on the course of human evolution itself. We are only in the infancy of understanding the co-evolution of genes and culture, but understand it we must if we are to make sense of our behaviour, especially behaviour, such as racism, which does not seem to make sense.

Black Police Associations

Excerpts from a journal article interspersed with commentary:

British Journal of Criminology: Volume 44, Number 6 Pp. 854-865

The Development of Black Police Associations: Changing Articulations of Race within the Police


by Simon Holdaway and Megan O'Neill

Black Police Associations have been established in 35 of the 43 constabularies in England and Wales. The pace of their development has been considerable, marking a significant change in the organization and articulation of race relations within the police workforce … They bring their membership of ethnic minority officers and support staff into a formally recognized structure, fulfilling a number of functions. A seat on constabulary committees is secured; individuals are given support; social events are held; and the profile of ethnic minority staff is raised.



The Home Office recognizes the importance of associations in a number of ways. Financial and other support is given to the National Black Police Association, whose offices are provided by the Home Office. Membership of Home Office and constabulary working groups and committees is offered to its officers. Local associations have become indicators of good practice within Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary inspection framework. Black Police Associations are therefore based securely within the contemporary police landscape, shaping one feature of a wider, sometimes turbulent, terrain of police race relations.

[Omitted here is a lengthy passage about the ‘feelings’ of non-White officers and the rise of the complaints culture. Long story short: non-White officers often felt isolated working mainly with Whites whose culture and attitudes were different from theirs (I can think of one answer to that problem that appears not to have been considered), and started to sue the force charging racial bias when passed over for promotion. The upshot is the Met decided in 1990 to hold a series of seminars to investigate the non-White officers’ complaints.]

cont… This has been etched into the history of associations as ‘The Bristol Seminars’, held at Bristol Polytechnic in July 1990. All ethnic minority officers serving in the Met, together with a sample of white officers, were required to attend discussions in small groups about many aspects of their work. A report of the seminar was written by ethnic-minority officers, detailing, in clear terms, a very different experience of employment for white and for ethnic-minority officers. In the preamble to the report of the seminar, it is said that:


Many officers from the white group, however, remained distrustful and uncooperative; most did not acknowledge that their black and Asian colleagues had any specific problems and were therefore unable to address themselves to these problems.

[Every non-White officer attends but merely a sample of the White officers... The report of the findings is written up by exclusively non-White officers. If the intention had been to prejudice the findings and place on record the greatest number, widest range and most provocative examples of non-White officers’ experiences that’s how you’d do it. And the converse: you’d also have set things up to minimise coherent opposition to minority race-based claims.


You can understand the White officers feeling a mite aggrieved at having to attend this kind of seminar. They were of the view (recorded in the section I cut) that where officers had legitimate grievances there existed a functioning complaints procedure. But in this period we were entering the era of ‘institutional racism’ where an aggrieved party does not need to show that his antagonist has done anything wrong, he merely has to show that he is aggrieved for ‘racism’ to be demonstrated. Holding these seminars and structuring them in such a way as they did seems to suggest that the Met had accepted the non-White officers were suffering some form of unjust treatment at the hands of their White colleagues. And yet the evidence is vague and the ‘punishment’ collective. What employee would not feel aggrieved? Even I would feel hard done by - and I am racist!


The requirement that Whites should uncritically accept the non-Whites’ claims and ‘acknowledge’ the problem exists before changing accordingly is a demand that would return again in the Macpherson Report ten years later: ‘there must be an unequivocal acceptance that the problem actually exists as a prerequisite to addressing it successfully.’ It’s really a way of outlawing dissent. The problem, racism, exists because non-White officers say it does, so an uncooperative White officer is tolerating racism. And it doesn’t matter that the systematic focus on non-White perceptions is objectively racist, because any White officer, as in society generally, who dares to say White people also have race-specific interests in these matters is ‘racist’ anyway.]

cont… The report of the seminar raised the status of ethnic-minority officers, setting out their perspectives and the changes that they believed necessary to create a compatible working environment. Crucially, it also brought a large number of officers together, fostering a developing consciousness of the highly racialized context of their work; that racial prejudice and discrimination were a common experience; and that, together, they could develop a strategy to lobby for change.

[Raised their status and set out their perspectives… how nice - for them. / If you set out to racialize a context there’s a better than average chance you’ll subsequently be conscious of that context being racialized. / I’ll bet the racial prejudice implicit in the seminars and the discrimination explicit in their structure and focus were an unacknowledged part of the ‘common experience’ - even though you must ‘acknowledge’ the racism, even objectively demonstrable racism, before you can remedy it...]

cont… It is important to remember that the seminar was organized by the Met’s senior ranks, who required ethnic-minority officers to attend. The reasons for it are not clear, save that the number of industrial tribunals gaining pace may have prompted some senior officers to act. Whatever the formal intention, the heightening of a racialized consciousness amongst ethnic-minority staff and their expectation of change was an unintended consequence of the seminar. As far as the development of associations was concerned, the seminar created a strong network of ethnic-minority officers, who continued to meet socially.

[It is more likely that the ‘heightening of a racialized consciousness’ amongst ethnic minority officers was an intended consequence of the seminar. This is perfectly consistent with the general tenor of ‘multiculturalist’ discourse at the time and is a practically inevitable consequence of a process designed to ascertain a picture of these officers’ racial consciousness! It’s a point often emphasised with regard to issues of local councils deciding not to fund Christmas celebrations that the impetus for these excesses comes more often from raceless managerial elites than from ornery minorities. It’s also quite possible that it was seen as beneficial to make White officers as White officers feel uncomfortable and pressured. An early variant on Ian Blair’s hanging ‘em out to dry approach.]

cont… Regular social events were held at central London venues for officers who had attended Bristol and their partners. Attendance at what became known as the ‘Bristol Reunions’ grew quickly, with upwards of 300 people purchasing tickets. The officers who organised the events have said that they became a major task, eventually needing a committee to coordinate arrangements.

Their organizers described the events as ‘safe’, meaning they had three key characteristics. First, officers attending could be sure that they would not be the subject of racial jokes and banter, or other expressions of racism. Secondly, the required dress code was formal - a style that members of Afro-Caribbean communities within the police liked. Thirdly, there would be no rowdy behaviour, no drunkenness, no spilling of drink over each other and no atmosphere of bravado, common to many police rank-and-file gatherings. (Authors’ note: This was the perception of officers. We are not sure about its accuracy. It may have been an exaggeration - a stereotype against which ethnic-minority reunions could be compared.)

[I love that. You can feel the authors’ discomfort at having to recount a litany of racist stereotypes and double standards - this coming from their designated victims of racism.]

The social events are of particular interest when considering the move from an individualistic to a collective understanding of ethnicity within the police. Officers who attended the reunions chose to do so because they perceived themselves to be united by their categorization and ascription to membership of an ethnic group. White partners of black officers were given a proxy ethnic status and welcomed. What Handelman has called an ‘ethnic network’ was forming in the Metropolitan Police. Officers chose to meet with their ethnic peers. They identified each other and their attendance at reunions in relation to an ethnic ascription, to being black. Reunions offered opportunities to make an investment in and to exchange resources that could be gathered and fostered as members of an ethnic network. An awareness and group consciousness of being a member of an ethnic group was one such resource - an affinity with other black officers. Stronger alliances between officers became a possibility. It was feasible to cultivate and strengthen one’s sense of ethnic identity, to sustain relationships based on the criterion of ethic ascription.

[Yes, I too am wondering how they write approvingly of all this when their knickers would be in a real old twist if it was a network of White officers they are describing.]

The reunions were shot through with meanings of ethnicity of relevance to employment within the police. Cultural symbols recognized by members of the one ethnic group were displayed and affirmed. Organisers of the events talked about their formality, the smart dress code required, the rules of decorum, of manners, of speech, and so on. Some of these were described as distinct characteristics of events that ‘black people attend’. They were recognized and strengthened by these gatherings.

Most of these features, however, can only be understood when juxtaposed to other, more negative meanings. The formality of events attended by black officers was in contrast to the perceived informality and, at times, perceived delinquency of those attended by white officers. The formal dress code was characteristic of ‘black events’ and in marked contrast to the casual code of white events. The language used was free from negative, racist expletives and connotations, common to the rank and file. The socials were ‘safe’, controlled by and for ethnic-minority people, free from the disruption threatened by ethnic-majority colleagues.

Bristol reunions created a space within which black police officers were not assumed to be like white officers. To attend a Bristol reunion was to be a black police officer and a black person within a ‘safe’ environment - the opposite of the ‘unsafe’ environment of other police gatherings. In a sense, to attend the Bristol reunions was to not attend socials organized by white officers; it was to declare that one was not white and, by default, to categorize the ethnicity of white police officers. One was, in many ways, the opposite of the other, orchestrated to counterbalance the damaging, as Wilson emphasized in his evidence to Macpherson, pervasive occupational culture … Ethnicity was and is not expressed in and of itself, but to gather capital for ethnic-minority officers and, perhaps, their partners.

[A common complaint in the section I cut was that White officers tended to see the ethnic-minority officer not merely as another officer, but as an ethnic-minority officer. Here we have that complaint turned on its head. Apparently they wanted to have their distinctive non-Whiteness recognised all along - just not by Whitey - even though they intended it be recognised at his capital expense.]

cont… […] The reunions were more symbolic than instrumental. Constabularies do not change because ethnicity is affirmed and ethnic opposites are defined at social events. Much more is required if ethnic resources are to be used in relationships of power; a range of alternative policies need to be developed to touch pressure points of racial prejudice and discrimination within constabularies; and the voices of black officers need to be heard as authentic, persuasive and demanding of change. Deeper incursions into police territory were required if changes of policy and practice were to be realized. Something more robust and visible than an ethnic network was required.

[If ‘more is required if ethnic resources are to be used in relationships of power’ how did White racism come to define the police force without any visible policies, pressures, voices or incursions, robust or otherwise? The Whites didn’t even have a Whites-only association where they defined their members by contrast with tolerant, smart and sober Blacks! How’d they do it?]

cont… […] A momentum to develop the Bristol reunion network increased and an association was formed. Membership of the new association was inclusive, offered to black and Asian officers and support staff. The association took a vigorous stance when supporting colleagues alleging discrimination in employment.

[Placing those last two sentences together … what does it say about the authors’ smug self-confidence in the justness of their racist-anti-racism?]

cont… […] The association could not be seen as divided in any way or by any tactic that senior command might deploy. A unified, black police association was to challenge a unified, white constabulary.

In 1997, the Metropolitan Police Black Police Association announced its public launch at New Scotland Yard. The Commissioner was invited as the keynote speaker but his permission to hold the very public event that attracted the attention of the national media was not requested. The association took the initiative away from the Met, pressing its senior command to make a decision about whether or not they offered support. In effect, the Commissioner was presented with a fait accompli. His failure to offer no or qualified support could be seized upon as an endorsement of the status quo, including its racially discriminatory features. The Commissioner responded in his keynote speech at the launch, acknowledging that his choice was to either offer the association his full support or to sit on the fence, which was not an option. The Metropolitan Police Black Police Association was launched - the first ethnic-minority police association in the United Kingdom.

[This reads like a Hollywood movie: the Black freedom fighters snatch victory from the unified White constabulary ... sorry ... conspiracy in the final scene, outwitting the head Nazi with their superior smarts (racists are always dumb and Blacks are always clever in the movies). A Morgan Freeman voiceover would tell us over triumphal music that the freedom fighters went on to achieve recognition from the rest of the country’s elite, other top cops, the government, the media and academics. And not just their organisation but their righteous ethos, too. And that is what happened... Pretty much... Except for the absence of any White person anywhere near the levers of power who objected to the creation of the Black Police Associations and their agenda... In fact, every White person anywhere near the levers of power raced to embrace the associations and their agenda. But aside from that ...]

I’m a racist no more...

From the Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, Eds. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember and Ian Skoggard (Springer, New York and HRAF, Yale, 2005):

[South Asian Diaspora, p.293]

The South Asian population is clustered in pockets and sharply segmented along religious and ethnic lines in London, southeast England, and the West Midlands in a region known as the ‘Asian corridor.’ Thus, Wembley has a greater concentration of Gujarati Hindus, while Southall is largely Sikh. Bradford and Birmingham are known for the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim concentrations. Entire Sikh and Gujarati villages are imported into England replete with local politics. South Asians in Britain resist cultural homogenization and even maintain caste affiliations through their marriage traditions. Religion is the central organizing force for many British South Asians, with mosques, gurdwaras (Sikh places of worship), and temples functioning not only as centers of social life, but also of political protest. This adherence to religious and cultural identity and homeland politics has been a double-edged sword, keeping South Asians ghettoized on one hand, but also helping them cope with the stresses of living in a racist, European-dominated society. Racism is a daily reality in Britain, reinforced and institutionalized by entrenched patterns of residential accommodation and employment practices.

****

We nationalists often gripe about being called ‘racists’ - here’s the answer. Ditch the ‘racism’ and follow the example of the gentle Asian colonists: self-segregation on ethnic lines; active resistance to cultural homogenisation; adherence to religious and cultural identity; and top it all off with a bit of homeland politics. Easy!

They are bright people who write and edit encyclopaedias for prestigious academic publishers, normally anyway, so how did the writer of this entry and his editor fail to see the inconsistency? How do so many intelligent people fail to see so many inconsistencies?

Still, nice to have an authoritative source for the claim that whole villages from South Asia have been ‘imported’ into Britain. I’ve seen that called ‘paranoid fantasy’ before.

The Herd Management Act (1965)

(Officially The Race Relations Act [1965])

In Russell Lewis, Anti-Racism: A Mania Exposed (Quartet Books, London, 1988. p.34.):

The incitement to racial hatred part of the bill was not controversial. As a matter of fact it was due less to racist propaganda against coloured people than to anti-Semitic speeches at public meetings in the early 1960s. This change in the law was strongly urged by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The reason it was not controversial is because organised Jewry was advocating for it. If Black or Bangladeshi organisations had been demanding laws limiting free speech no-one would have listened. With Jews, no-one dared defy them.

Frank Soskice was Home Secretary at the time.

Oh, boy, is the Devil in the Detail...

Methodists banned from joining BNP

Revd Sylvester Deigh, who proposed the Notice of Motion, said; “We must be clear that racism is a denial of the gospel. An openness to all people, regardless of nationality, is at the heart of Methodist identity.”

The principle of open-ness cannot be at the heart of identity, because open-ness unavoidably replaces the characteristics which supplied identity in the first place with random characteristics from outside, and because it’s a principle goes on doing this eternally. Methodists would be suicidal to impose this nihilistic anti-morality on themselves, the attempt to impose it on ethnic groups - which ultimately this amounts to - is genocidal.

There is a picture of the Revd. Deigh at Sarah’s.

The lessons of Lumley

Joanna Lumley’s ‘gift’ to the nation will be one that keeps on giving, and not just in terms of family unification migration and remittances. The multicult wastes nothing as it picks over the history books and the passing scene for examples - good and bad - to imprint onto young minds. I suspect many educators are already drawing up lesson plans for September that will include some reference to Lumley and the Gurkhas’ ‘victory.’ It is automatic, educators are selected in part, by systems designed by the likes of Chris Mullard, for their willingness and ability to promote the multicult, and once employed they operate in a system which rewards this ability and punishes its absence.

In ‘The Camp of the Saints’ Jean Raspail described how educators responded to a fictional equivalent to the Gurkha story, albeit on a larger scale:

At the very same moment thirty-two thousand seven hundred forty-two schoolteachers hit on the subject for the next day’s theme: “Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in.” Irresistible, really! And the dear little angel — all simple, childish soul and tender heart — will spread four pages’ worth of infantile pathos, enough to melt a concierge to tears, and his paper will be the best, the teacher will read it in class, and all his little friends will kick themselves for having been much too stingy with their whines and whimpers. That’s how we mold our men nowadays. Because even the tough, hardhearted little brat, the one with all he needs to succeed in this life, is forced to take part, since children abhor standing out from the crowd. So he’ll have to play along too, and work himself into a hypocritical sweat over the same philanthropic rubbish. And he’ll probably write just as brilliant a theme, clever child that he is, and he may even wind up believing what he writes, because youngsters like this are never really bad, just different, that’s all, just untapped potential. Then he’ll go home, like his classmate, both of them proud of their fine compositions. And father, who knows what life is all about, will read the A-plus masterpiece, terrified (if he has the slightest imagination) at the notion of that foreign family of eight coming to live in his three rooms and kitchen, but he’ll sit back and keep his big mouth shut. Mustn’t frustrate the little angels, mustn’t shock them, mustn’t sully their innocent thoughts and risk turning them later into hopeless prigs. No, he’ll wallow, ensnared, in his gutless affection, and chuck his little angel on a cheek flushed with pleasure, telling himself that he’s really a dear, and besides, “out of the mouths of babes,” isn’t that what they say? … The mother will snivel in her handkerchief, eye moist with maternal affection rewarded...

Now, multiply that by a million mindless themes, applauded by a million milksop fathers, and you get some idea of the climate of total decay...

At the very same instant, some seven thousand two hundred and twelve lycée professors decided to begin their next day’s classes with a discussion of racism. It didn’t make the slightest difference what they taught: math, English, chemistry, geography, even Latin. After all, whatever his field, isn’t the professor’s role to develop his students’ minds and force them to think? And so, they would have them speak their piece. The subject was there, ideal, made to order, too good to pass up: the fleet and its mission to cleanse and redeem the capitalist West! A fine topic, politically charged, with something for everyone, a limitless script in that ongoing cinema of the masses, spontaneous and unrehearsed, whose feeble and trite ideas, hashed over again and again, swallowed up any sense of reality, any notion of personal obligation.

They need us to be bad...

Anti-nationalists need to believe we’re bad to justify their hatred of us.

In response to ‘Jew with a View’ - a redundancy there? - and her urging that the ‘mainstream,’ i.e. anti-British, parties should ‘act now on immigration’ to ensure the BNP (‘vile wannabe Hitlers’) don’t get into power and act on their ‘desperate’ desire to ‘cleanse Britain’ of ‘Jews and Asians and Muslims and Black people,’ I wrote:

The main reason people vote for the BNP is the belief that the native Britons have the right to control our own country. The ‘mainstream’ parties you would have us vote for all agree on the rights of non-European peoples to enjoy this advantage, and you will be aware that they are most vocal about this right when discussing your people and its state, the much promoted ‘right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state’. And the BNP agrees with ’em.

The difference between the BNP and the others is over the right of Euros to control our homelands, this means the BNP is exceptional because it is not anti-White, not because of its views about non-Whites.

Oh, and far from being anti-Semitic as you imply, the BNP agrees that Jews are entitled to their own country and so may reasonably pursue immigration policies which discriminate against all other peoples including the English, Welsh and Scots, but insists that the English, Welsh and Scots in our countries should not discriminate against Jews for the same purposes. This is a minor double standard telling in favour of Jews, thus making the BNP just a tad anti-British in relation to one particular people.


The comment stood for a short while at her blog before ‘Tabatha’ found my plea that she allow us something close to equality - not even equality! - too much ‘hate’ to handle and deleted it.

The ‘Goddess’ Lumley

The Joanna Lumley / Gurkha story offers a demonstration of how easily the public can be manipulated against its settled views and its best interests by mindless feel-good arguments. Nobody who’s thought about it for a second really believes that the Gurkhas ‘risked their lives for Britain,’ they were mercenary soldiers fighting for payment.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all along an exercise in testing the media’s power to direct public opinion concerning a rapidly emerging political issue. Even the BNP felt it necessary to recognise the Gurkhas’ absurd claim, not a good sign for the future. Conclusion: there is no such thing as ‘Too much love, drooling like syrup from too many famous mouths!’ (The Camp of the Saints)

BT and AA

June 2009

Working with recruitment agencies to make requirements clear has been the key to creating a racially diverse workforce at BT, according to the telecoms firm.

This week BT came top of the Race for Opportunity index, which uses survey data to benchmark the most race-friendly employers in the country. The research looked at the policies and practices used by organisations in attraction and recruitment, talent progression, measurement of diversity, and engaging with customers, suppliers and the wider community.

Becky Mason, people and policy manager, BT Group, highlighted work with suppliers as a key factor in the firm’s success. ‘The work we have been doing with recruitment agencies - our suppliers of people - is crucial. We demonstrate our policies to them and ask them to tell us what their policy is. It’s quite clear, stating the standards that we expect, that we expect to be sent a diverse mix of candidates and for agencies to set in place statistical monitoring of their processes statistics to ensure that is the case.’

BT reviews its preferred suppliers every 2-3 years and HR works with procurement colleagues to ensure that diversity is a factor in these decisions, added Mason.

BT currently has 10.8 per cent BME staff, which is in excess of the proportion in the population overall of around 8 per cent. Mason also pointed out that, with three people from a BME background on BT’s board, there was no doubt that minorities were able to progress in the organisation.

‘If initiatives such as BT’s encouraging of its suppliers to sign-up to minimum standards on race diversity were to become common practice, I am confident that the UK could make real progress on tackling the gross under-representation of ethnic minorities,’ said Sandra Kerr, national campaign director for Race for Opportunity.

July 2009

BT is asking its staff to take a 75% pay cut in return for long-term holidays to help the company ride-out the recession. British Telecom is offering workers the chance to take a year off if they accept a fraction of their salary as an upfront payment. It is part of a raft of measures being introduced by BT to cut costs until the economy improves without having to resort to further redundancies.

The former state telecom company, which employs more the 100,000 people, posted £1.3billion losses for the first quarter of this year. BT cut 15,000 jobs this year, mostly in the UK, and claims these ‘extremely progressive’ measures are necessary to save further losses. A spokesman said: “BT is known for it’s progressive human resources policies with flexible working.”

****

The familiar ritual, emphasised in the first link, of measuring progress by the extent to which White people have been dislodged from power and representation by other races really ought to be met with fury from White people.

Of course it would be simplistic to claim a direct cause and effect relationship between BT’s anti-White discrimination and its poor results, but only as simplistic as an assumption that anti-White discrimination would lead to good results. The difference is, anyone so stupid as to make the first claim would not be allowed to run employment policy for a major PLC. BT’s staff are entitled to ask what other idiotic ideas the management have wasted time and money on, and to insist the company discontinue this one.

Buchanan on the navy whose ‘number one priority is diversity’

Pat Buchanan comments on the claim that the US Naval Academy sets lower admission standards for non-White candidates than for White ones. It is not surprising, of course - as Buchanan points out that kind of anti-White discrimination is widespread - but he draws attention to the critical difference between gormless supermarket managers and senior military officers who ‘struggle to master basic concepts’:

these students will be operating the most sophisticated and complex weapons systems ever built -- aircraft carriers, Aegis cruisers, nuclear submarines.

This sums up the problem of developed liberalism: even in the midst of war the principle of ‘equality’ must over-ride everything even to the peril of national security (and of global security if we are to believe the rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’). Ultimately it must prove suicidal.

Raul and Bernie II

There are two obvious reasons the establishment would prefer to keep the holocaust story simple and so attack someone like Ecclestone for offering a more nuanced take than the typical~ ‘Hitler was an evil anti-Semite who wanted to murder all of Europe’s Jews and settled on death camps with poison-gas chambers as the method to achieve this.’ The simple narrative lends itself to use for two programs central to the worldview of our elites, anti-nationalism for most of us, coupled with fierce nationalism for Jews.

But there’s a third explanation for the pitiless attack on Ecclestone and it may also explain why people that are surely aware of Hilberg’s research, work that seems to justify Ecclestone’s comments, are among his most vociferous critics.

Here, again, are Hilberg’s words:

1) “There was no pre-established guiding plan. As for the question of the decision, it is in part unsolvable: no order signed by Hitler has ever been found, doubtless because no such document ever existed. I am persuaded that the bureaucracies moved through a sort of latent structure: each decision brings on another, then another, and so forth, even if it isn’t possible to foresee exactly the next step.” (In Le Monde des Livres, October 26th, 2006)

2) “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.” (February 22nd, 1983 at an event arranged by the Holocaust Survivors Foundation, quoted in Newsday a day later)

‘Colin Laney’ in a comments thread at MajorityRights.com remarks on the implication of these statements if true:

[quote] It should be acknowledged that even Yad Vashem does not hold that there were death camps inside of Germany. This is very significant: every camp that might meet the conditions of the hypothetical death camps just happen to be those which were captured by the Red Army …

Since [the revisionist] case has taken the day with regards to all of the camps captured by the West, there is strong reason to believe that the case you make that begins with the officers in these camps intuiting and carrying out the wishes of their superiors is not sustainable. Part of your case is plausible, that officers in the field understand their broader mandate and pursued it under their individual initiative, but how on earth could the Nazis have known in advance to only kill Jews in only those camps that would later be captured by the Soviets, rather than the Americans or the British?

Perhaps the Nazis really did have the Spear of Destiny and could use it to tell the future? But even accepting this - as we now must - do we go on to suppose that the Ahnererbe was sharing occult information with officers in charge of the camps, even morale crushing information about their eventual loss of the war? [end quote]

Raul and Bernie

Three quotes that question Hitler’s role in the holocaust and challenge the popular idea that the holocaust was a centrally planned deliberate genocide.

Quote 1: “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was, in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done… In the end he got lost, so he wasn’t a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it . . . so either way he wasn’t a dictator.”

Quote 2: “There was no pre-established guiding plan. As for the question of the decision, it is in part unsolvable: no order signed by Hitler has ever been found, doubtless because no such document ever existed. I am persuaded that the bureaucracies moved through a sort of latent structure: each decision brings on another, then another, and so forth, even if it isn’t possible to foresee exactly the next step.”

Quote 3: “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”

Quote one is from F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone and predictably he drew a lot of flak for those comments. World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder has called on Ecclestone to resign saying he is no longer fit to serve in his role; Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard says Ecclestone is “either an idiot or morally repulsive”; Denis MacShane MP, Chairman of an all-party inquiry into anti-Semitism, says “if Mr. Ecclestone seriously thinks Hitler had to be persuaded to kill six million Jews … then he knows neither history and shows a complete lack of judgment”; Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, says “the comments themselves are totally idiotic and reveal a staggering ignorance of the events of World War II and the Holocaust”; and Yad Vashem spokeswoman Iris Rosenberg emailed this response to a journalist: “It is an unfortunate and lamentable statement, unworthy of comment.”

You might expect that the person behind quotes two and three, they being much more coherent and emphatic than Ecclestone’s comments, would draw even more opprobrium. But no. Instead, Raul Hilberg, for it is he who said these things about the holocaust, is described in ‘Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume I, The Meaning of Genocide,’ as ‘the outstanding expert on the apparatus of Holocaust.’ In ‘The Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust’ his ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’ is described as a ‘massive and meticulous treatise’ and ‘perhaps the most important single work ever written on the Holocaust.’ According to the same source his ‘explanation of the Nazi machinery of murder … in the destruction of the Jews is a masterpiece of historical research.’

Odd, ain’t it?

Racial cringe

‘Edward Gibbon’ at the Original Dissent forum discovered this terrifying example of racial cringe in Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel, p.100:

British Prime Ministers, soon after they come into office, customarily visit Washington and Moscow to get acquainted with American and Russian leaders. When Prime Minister James Callahan made his state visit to Moscow he had two amicable meetings with Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. At the end of the second day he remarked that he was happy to discover that there were no urgent problems threatening to bring the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union into conflict. Brezhnev then replied with some emphatic words in Russian. Callahan’s interpreter hesitated , and instead of translating Brezhnev’s remark asked him to repeat it. Brezhnev repeated it and the interpreter translated: “Mr. Prime Minister, there is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive.” Callahan was so taken aback that he did not venture either to agree or disagree with this sentiment. He made his exit without further comment. What he had heard was a distant echo of the Mongol hoofbeat still reverberating in Russian memory.

And the rest. Presumably this meeting took place in 1976 or 1977. Brezhnev will surely have had contemporary British and American racial strife in mind at least as much as historic Mongol invasions of Russia. In avoiding such an obvious explanation for Brezhnev’s comments Dyson shows that he’s just as uncomfortable with racial issues as the pathetic fool Callaghan.

Mindsets

Philadelphia fitness expert, David Sylvester, joins 39 other professional and amateur bikers for Tour d’Afrique, a 100-day cycling event beginning in Cairo, Egypt, and ending in Cape Town, South Africa. Sylvester rides to raise money for a scholarship honoring his dear friend and fellow African American Kevin Bowser, who died in the 9/11 tragedy. Near the end of the trip he arrives in Lilongwe, Malawi, where he discovers a hip-hop clothing store called “Niggers.” Thinking at first “this is a very bad joke,” Sylvester investigates further. After talking with the two attending salesmen, Sylvester concludes, “This is no joke. . . . The bottom line is this: I rode over 12,000 miles on two continents through 15 states and 13 countries and broke two bikes in the process, to get to a store in Africa called Niggers.”

He feels guilty for his role in the vulgar ritual grammar that has grown to infect the continent he calls the motherland. “I am willing to step [up] and admit my part in the havoc that we have wrought on our mindset,” he writes in an email now posted on his website, “but I think that we all are to blame.”

Quote from article ‘The Not-So-Harmless Social Function of a Word that Wounds,’ Debra Walker King in The Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations

Concern with his race’s ‘mindset,’ racial identification with the homeland, sensitivity to verbal slights against the race; Mr Sylvester is a better man than most Whites. But he has no idea how good Blacks have it. European man’s mindset either denies his race exists or says it does not matter; his mindset determines that his race should welcome being displaced by other races in his homeland; and how wonderful it would be if our fortunes and self-confidence had turned around to such extent that we could ironically embrace other races’ slurs against us.

Still, I did laugh.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s planned pro-war propaganda

In a 1943 memo to Leon Lewis, the Los Angeles lawyer of the Institute of Social Research, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described their ideas for a film which they hoped to interest Hollywood in making:

Since it is the general idea underlying this plan to counteract the apathy of a large part of the population, it might be advisable to take this very apathy as the point of departure. While it must be made plain that no average American wants to have anything to do with Nazism or Fascism, their aversion to “atrocity propaganda” should be made equally clear. Some of the deeper psychological mechanisms underlying their attitudes should be brought to the fore, e.g., the reasoning: “these things are so horrible that one cannot believe them, and therefore they are untrue” (self protection), or: “people who have been treated this way must have brought it on themselves.”

These snatches of conversation finally reach some very prominent Americans who believe in probing things to the quick. They should be public figures whose reputation is unimpeachable like outstanding Congressmen, representatives of commerce and industry. They should not be played by actors but the personalities themselves should appear in the motion picture. They decide that people should learn the full, unbiased truth about what Nazism means to its victims and what it would mean to Americans in the case of a Hitler victory… The skeptics shown at the beginning are present making embarrassing remarks, when they interrupt the narrators they should be answered quietly and firmly. The climax is reached when one of the hecklers asks: “Where are your eyewitnesses?” The answer is: “there are none.” Then a cemetery with a fresh Massengrab (mass-grave) flashes on the screen. We see how the skeptics of the beginning eventually are brought to the conviction: “Those devils must pay.” They are shown, their numbers increasing, finally merging with a symbolic picture of the whole American nation, marching united against the Axis.

Memorandum on a motion picture project, April 27, 1943, Max Horkheimer-Archiv, II, 10, 397

Enriched by waves of racist invaders?

So, just as some nationalists have said, the right word for gypsy ingress into Northern Ireland is ‘invasion’:

In addition to the continual presence of these [native itinerant] groups of presumably autochthonous origin, medieval Europe would seem to be scoured now and then by foreign groups: “Egyptian” acrobats visit Greece, Macedonia, and Spain, while an “Ethiopian” group given to magic artistry visits Italy, Spain, France, and England during the thirteenth century. However, undoubtedly at the start of the fifteenth century Western exotic nomads began to invade western Europe. Their presence in the Balkans had already been noted during the previous two centuries. Although Europeans used many names to describe these foreigners, two are by far the most common: “Egyptians” in the Atlantic regions, which was to become “Gitanos” in Spanish, “Gitans” in French, “Gypsies” in English, etc.; and “Cigani” (a term whose etymon is dubious - perhaps from the Greek word “Atsinganoi”) used in central-eastern Europe with several variants: “Zigeuner” in German, “Zingari” in Italian, “Cingani” in modern Latin, etc. The two terms overlap in many regions.

From the Encyclopaedia of World Cultures prepared under the auspices of Yale’s Human Relations Area Files (Volume 4, p.196).

In a surprisingly bold blog at the Telegraph, James Delingpole suggested that the ethnic-specific behaviour of the Gypsies may have provoked the Belfast uprising. This is quite possible, Gypsies self-define in part by their ways of earning a living and by how they relate to other communities; a Gypsy who does not conform to group norms risks being ostracised. And, however impolitic it may be to say so, Gypsy group norms are generally hostile to their host communities’ interests - and remarkably stable through time and across location. This is well-known as regards their ways of making money and showing disrespect for the property rights of others, but not so well-known are their defining cultural attitudes toward “Gorgios,” i.e., foreigners.

A Rominche is considered as such by reference to parentage - that is, at least one parent must be Rominche. “Didikois” is the usual term applied to “half-breeds,” while non-Rominche are called “Gorgios.” … There are prohibitions against marriage to a Gorgio … Violations of these prohibitions do occur, however. In the case of marriage to a Gorgio, the status of the “outsider” spouse will always be ambiguous - acceptance is never complete… Rominche culture is in many ways influenced by their opposition to Gorgios. Pollution beliefs are a strong example of this: food is “dirty” or “polluted” if even the shadow of a Gorgio falls upon it. (Ibid., pp. 216-7)

Are the ‘anti-racists’ fighting the wrong foe, I wonder?

Young, gifted and White? No... but one out of three ain't too bad.

By chance I caught a snatch of the Radio 2 documentary last night about the anti-Thatcher protest music of the eighties. I really only heard presenter Jeremy Vine say that next week’s episode will feature music by artists who supported Thatcher(ism); balance you see. Giving equal air time to pro- and anti-Thatcher pop musicians despite the antis outnumbering the pros by, what? 100 to 1? will seem to many listeners to be proof of the BBC’s integrity and cause for celebration. In fact the stretch reveals something else: the beeb’s determination to present a seemingly comprehensive survey of political ideas while never venturing outside the establishment-safe right- and left-liberal options, all the while encouraging us to pick a side with which to stand, to get involved in the charade.

Half of the beeb’s job is to appear to the public as having no party loyalties and no political prejudices of its own; the other half is to systematically promote the establishment parties and the supposed conflict between them while excluding independent parties and genuinely alternative ideas. When they give equal air time to both sides of a scene so massively one-sided and unbalanced it only shows how mechanically the beeb’s commitment to herding us into left and right factions pre-ordains the content of its programming. In truth individual BBC producers are no more independent of the two-party system than they permit us to be, they just sit higher up the food chain. Like camp capos or Uncle Toms.

****

To English nationalists and others with an interest in racial issues the idea of BBC balance or producer/presenter independence is just comical, of course. I exchanged a few emails with Radio 2 DJ Alex Lester last year, his attitude demonstrates that point. The influence of the guys at Resisting Defamation can be seen:

(Lester's replies in bold)

Sent: 26 November 2008 04:37 To: Alex Lester Subject: Young, gifted and black...

Please don’t keep playing this song. I can accept the age-ism, this is after all pop music, designed to create cultural discordance between generations... but the racism? I can’t do that! You wouldn’t play a song that claimed "to be white is where it’s at" -- and you’d lose your job if you did. I get a little tired of these racist double standards.

---

> Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...
> Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:41:07 +0000
> From: alex.lester@bbc.co.uk

It was a huge hit and a lot of people like it. What you are advocating is censorship. It is a song “of its time”.

---

Sent: 26 November 2008 04:49 To: Alex Lester Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...

I am advocating a consistent non-racism, the only non-racism that isn’t racist.

Censorship would be to prevent the playing of certain records altogether, I can’t do that and wouldn’t, I simply appeal to you to stop going along with racist double standards on your show.

---

Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:03:16 +0000
From: alex.lester@bbc.co.uk

So depriving people who actually like the song of the chance to hear it! There is a formal complaints procedure at the foot of this email if you want to go that route.


---

Sent: 26 November 2008 05:14 To: Alex Lester Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...

People who like the song would not be ‘deprived’ of it should the BBC become consistent on non-racism and cease playing it - ever heard of record stores? - but non-Black listeners would not needlessly be slurred.

The BBC is the censor, the gatekeeper; more than any other organisation it is responsible for generating the racist double standards you submit to, and complaining to the racist about racism seems pointless. I appeal to your conscience, Mr Lester: you would not play records saying the positive measure of a person is how white he is - we both know this - so why forget your moral standards and play “Young, gifted and black”?

---

> Subject: RE: Young, gifted and black...
> Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:20:07 +0000
> From: alex.lester@bbc.co.uk

To me it is just a song and of its time. It is in our central core of music. I will cease playing it if instructed by the BBC.

Chesterton on ‘The Patriotic Idea’

The essay reproduced below was written by G.K. Chesterton for inclusion in the book England: A Nation: Being the Papers of the Patriot’s Club, edited by Lucian Oldershaw and published by R. Brimley Johnson: London and Edinburgh, 1904.

G.K. Chesterton: The Patriotic Idea

I

The scepticism of the last two centuries has attacked patriotism as it has attacked all the other theoretic passions of mankind, and in the case of patriotism the attack has been interesting and respectable because it has come from a set of modern writers who are not mere sceptics, but who really have an organic belief in philosophy and politics. Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest of living Europeans, has succeeded in founding a school which, whatever its faults (and they are neither few nor small), has all the characteristics of a great religion. Like a great religion, it is positive, it is public, above all, it is paradoxical. The Tolstoyan enjoys asserting the hardest parts of his belief with that dark and magnificent joy which has been unknown in the world for nearly four hundred years. He enjoys saying, “No man should strike a blow even to defend his country,” in the same way that Tertullian enjoyed saying,“Credo quia impossible.”

This important and growing sect, together with many modern intellectuals of various schools, directly impugn the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of the love of humanity. To them the particular is always the enemy of the general. To them every nation is the rival of mankind. To them, in not a few instances, every man is the rival of mankind. And they bear a dim and not wholly agreeable resemblance to a certain kind of people who go about saying that nobody should go to church, since God is omnipresent, and not to be found in churches.

Suppose that two men, lost upon some gray waste in rain and darkness, were to come upon the light of a porch and take shelter in some strange house, where the household entertained them pleasantly. It might be that some feast or entertainment was going forward; that private theatricals were in preparation, or progressive whist in progress. One of these travellers might lend a hand instinctively and heartily, might play his cards at whist in a fighting spirit, might black his face in theatricals and make the children laugh. And this he would do because he felt kindly towards the whole company. But the other man would say: “I love this company so much that I dislike its being divided into factions by progressive whist; I love so much the human face divine that I do not wish to see it obscured with soot or grease-paint; I will not take a partner for the lancers, for that would involve selecting one woman for special privilege, and I love you all alike.” The first man would undoubtedly amuse the whole company more. And would he not love the whole company more?

Every one of us has, indeed, been lost in a gray waste of eternity, and strayed to the portal of this earth, over which the lamp is the sun. We find inside the company of humanity engaged in certain ancient festivals and forms, certain competitions and distinctions. And, as in the other case, two kinds of love can be offered to that society. The prig will profess to join in their unity; the good comrade will join in their divisions.

If the stray guests see something utterly immoral in the distinctions, something utterly wicked in the ritual, doubtless they must protest; but they should never protest because the distinctions are distinctions, and therefore in one sense exclusive, or because the ritual is ritual, and therefore in one sense irrational. If the stranger in the house has a moral objection, for instance, to playing for money, he ought to decline, though he ought not to enjoy declining. But he must not ask, “Why am I arbitrarily made a partner with So-and-so?” He must not say, “What rational difference is there between spades and diamonds?” If he really loves his kind, he will, as far as he can, and in the great mass of things, play the parts given him. He will preserve this gay and impetuous conservatism; he will throw himself into the competitive sports of nationality; he will walk with relish in the ancient theatricals of religion.

Because the modern intellectuals who disapprove of patriotism do not do this, a strange coldness and unreality hangs about their love for men. If you ask them whether they love humanity, they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them, touching any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

The truth is, of course, that real universality is to be reached rather by convincing ourselves that we are in the best possible relation with our immediate surroundings. The man who loves his own children is much more universal, is much more fully in the general order, than the man who dandles the infant hippopotamus or puts the young crocodile in a perambulator. For in loving his own children he is doing something which is (if I may use the phrase) far more essentially hippopotamic than dandling hippopotami; he is doing as they do. It is the same with patriotism. A man who loves humanity and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity. The man who loves his country may not happen to pay extravagant verbal compliments to humanity, but he is paying to it the greatest of compliments - imitation.

The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song.

There is, moreover, another broad distinction, which inclines us to side with those who support the abstract idea of patriotism against those who oppose it. There are two methods by which intelligent men may approach the problem of that temperance which is the object of morality in all matters—in wine, in war, in sex, in patriotism; that temperance which desires, if possible, to have wine without drunkenness, war without massacre, love without profligacy, and patriotism without Sir Alfred Harmsworth. One method, advocated by many earnest people from the beginning of history, is what may roughly be called the teetotal method; that is, that it is better, because of their obvious danger, to do without these great and historic passions altogether. The upholders of the other method (of whom I am one) maintain, on the contrary, that the only ultimate and victorious method of getting rid of the danger is thoroughly to understand and experience the passions. We maintain that with every one of the great emotions of life there goes a certain terror, which, when taken with imaginative reality, is the strongest possible opponent of excess; we maintain, that is to say, that the way to be afraid of war is to know something about war; that the way to be afraid of love is to know something about it; that the way to avoid excess in wine is to feel it as a perilous benefit, and that patriotism goes along with these. The other party maintains that the best guarantee of temperance is to wear a blue ribbon; we maintain that the best guarantee is to be born in a wine-growing country. They maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to take a celibate vow; we maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to fall in love. They maintain that the best guarantee of avoiding a reckless pugnacity is to forswear fighting; we maintain that the best guarantee is to have once experienced it. They maintain that we should care for our country too little to resent trifling impertinences; we maintain that we should care too much about our country to do so. It is like the Mohammedan and Christian sentiment of temperance. Mohammedanism makes wine a poison; Christianity makes it a sacrament.

Many humane moderns have a horror of nationality as the mother of wars. So in a sense it is, just as love and religion are. Men will always fight about the things they care for, and in many cases quite rightly. But there is another thing which should not be altogether forgotten, and that is this: that in so far as men increase in intelligence they must see that a quite primary and mystical affection is a foolish thing to put into violent competition with another thing of the same kind. Men may fight about a rational preference, because there victory may prove something. But an irrational preference is far too fine a thing to fight about, because there victory proves nothing.

When men first become conscious of splendid and disturbing emotions, it is their natural instinct, their first and most natural and most reasonable instinct, to kill people. Thus, for instance, the sentiment of romantic love went through the same historical evolution as the sentiment of patriotism. When a medieval knight or troubadour realized that there was an intensity in a pure and monogamous sentiment which was quite beyond anything in merely animal appetites, he immediately took a long spear and rushed round the neighbourhood offering to kill anybody who denied that he had fallen in love with precisely the right person. I do not think that it can be reasonably maintained that romantic love has decayed in the centuries succeeding this; what has happened has been that people have perceived not that love is too insignificant to fight about, but that it is too important to fight about. Men have perceived, that is to say, that in these matters of the affections all combat is ineffective, since no combatant would ever accept its issue. Each of us thinks his own country is the best in the world, just as each of us might think his own mother the best in the world. But when we think this we do not proceed, or in the least desire to proceed, to the bellicose test. We do not set our mothers to fight each other in an ampitheatre, and for the excellent reason that if one mother overcame the other mother, it would not make the least difference to anybody. That is the only serious objection to the institution of the duel. That the duel kills men seems to me a comparatively trifling matter; football and fox-hunting and the London hospitals very frequently do that. The only rational objection to the duel is that it invokes a most painful and sanguinary proceeding in order to settle a question, and does not settle it. It is our belief, therefore, that the right way to avoid the incidental excesses of patriotism is the same as that in the cases of sex or war—it is to know something about it. Just as, according to our view, there will always be in some degree the power of sex and the use of wine, so there will always be the possibility of such a thing as patriotic war. But just as a man who has been in love will find it difficult to write a whole frantic epic about a flirtation, so all that kind of rhetoric about the Union Jack and the Anglo-Saxon blood, which has made amusing the journalism of this country for the last six years, will be merely impossible to the man who has for one moment called up before himself what would be the real sensation of hearing that a foreign army was encamped on Box Hill. The light and loose talk about national victories impresses those who think with me merely as a mark of the lack of serious passion. The average reasonable citizen, of whatever political colour, would admit that such talk shows too much patriotism. We should say that it shows too little.

To the cosmopolitan, therefore, who professes to love humanity and hate local preference, we shall reply: “How can you love humanity and hate anything so human?” If he replies that in his eyes local preference is a positive sin, is only human in the sense that wife-beating is human, we shall reply that in that case he has a code of morality so different from ours that the very use of the word “sin” is almost useless between us. If he says that the thing is not positive sin, but is foolish and narrow, we shall reply that this is a matter of impression, and that to us it is his atmosphere which is narrow to the point of suffocation. And we shall pray for him, hoping that some day he will break out of the little stifling cell of the cosmopolitan world, and find himself in the open fields and infinite sky of England. Lastly, if he says, as he certainly will, that it is unreasonable to draw the limit at one place rather than another, and that he does not know what is a nation and what is not, we shall say: “By this sign you are conquered; your weakness lies precisely in the fact that you do not know a nation when you see it. There are many kinds of love affairs, there are many kinds of song, but all ordinary people know a love affair or a song when they see it. They know that a concubinage is not necessarily a love affair, that a work in rhyme is not necessarily a song. If you do not understand vague words, go and sit among the pedants, and let the work of the world be done by people who do.” It is better occasionally to call some mountains hills, and some hills mountains, than to be in that mental state in which one thinks, because there is no fixed height for a mountain, that there are no mountains in the world.

II

Tolstoyanism, then, with all its earnestness, with all its honourable lucidity, we find, from our point of view, to be a frigid and arbitrary fancy, incomparable in its moral value to that intensity which has bound living men to an actual and ancient soil. It suffers in the comparison from the profound sense that we have that the former opinion is superficial, and the latter vital; that is to say, we have no doubt at all that an ordinary man, born in England, might profess himself a Tolstoyan and an opponent of patriotism with every mark of reason and sincerity; we also have no doubt at all that if he saw the Russian flag run up in Trafalgar Square he would go white to the lips. But this humanitarian theory of the wrongness of the national sentiment, though important, is by no means the most powerful opponent of that sentiment today. Another force is in the field, which is by its nature quite equally antagonistic to patriotism, and which is, unlike the other, equipped with power, with wealth, and with a fair chance of triumph in practical politics. This second enemy of patriotism is, I need hardly say, the idea commonly called Imperialism. Imperialism seeks to destroy patriotism, not by sketching a remote and unattainable fusion between different peoples, but by pointing out how and where at a particular moment such fusion may be made. Imperialism is an opportunist cosmopolitanism. It says in its rational moods (for it has perfectly rational moods, and of these only is it fair to speak): “We do not say we would annex Spain for fun or pick a quarrel with Norway for the sake of doing so. But wherever circumstances lead us more or less naturally to the opportunity of effacing a distinction, of pulling down a flag, of destroying a nationality, we will do so. Wherever we can turn some separate kingdom or republic, with special memories and symbols, into a part of the British or Russian or German Empire, and make it accept our memories and symbols, we will do so. We believe that civilization is on our side, and we enforce it against Fins or Boers, against Poles or Irishmen. We are Imperialists; we are not the reckless enemies of patriotism, but we are its enemies.” That is the voice of sane and educated Imperialism. I am aware that in the late confusion of political parties the cause of Imperialism was to some extent strengthened by appeals to the immortal sentiment of patriotism. But this is merely one of those electioneering bewilderments common in all practical politics, and especially in English politics. The patriotic feeling is used in favour of Imperialism just as the hatred of tyrants might have been used against the French Revolution, or the letter of the constitution against Pym and Hampden—that is, used quite honestly and with some reasonable significance, but without any reference to the real divisions between great ideas. It is perfectly evident when we consider the matter fundamentally that it is impossible to have an Imperial patriotism; that is to say, it is impossible to have towards a sprawling and indeterminate collection of peoples of every variety of goodness and badness precisely that sentiment which is evoked in man, rightly or wrongly, by the contemplation of the peculiar customs of his ancestors and the peculiar land of his birth. Of course, it is quite reasonable to use as a metaphor such a phrase as having a patriotism for the Empire, just as it is permissible to use as a metaphor such a phrase as having a patriotism of humanity, or such a phrase as having fallen in love with Rouen Cathedral. But the perfectly legitimate sentiment which leads a man to support, on political grounds, a huge cosmopolitan confederation has about as much resemblance to the passion which has made men sing of and die for a strip of land as an admiration for the architecture of Normandy has to the hunger in the heart of Romeo. I am not saying at this point in the discussion that this old and special attachment to some individual soil or blood is a correct sentiment. Perhaps the political theory which unites Jews like Disraeli or Germans like Lord Milner to a large modern civilization is a more rational sentiment than the old sentiment of patriotism. Perhaps patriotism is a brutal fancy of primitive man which it is possible for the world to outgrow. All this I shall discuss later. What I am concerned to point out at the moment is the more or less self-evident fact that this Imperial idea or plan for the consolidation and identification of an increasing number of different commonwealths cannot seriously be called patriotism according to any sense that the word has ever actually had among men. If patriotism does not mean a defined and declared preference for certain traditions or surroundings, it means nothing whatever. A thing like an empire, like the Roman Empire, which contained Greeks and Goths and ancient Britons; a thing like the British Empire, which contains Dutchmen and Negroes and Chinamen in Hong Kong, may be a perfectly legitimate object of a certain kind of intellectual esteem, but it is ludicrous to call it patriotism, or invoke the ancient deities of the hearth and the river and the hill. There may be good reason for supporting Mr. Beit in South Africa, but to ask us in the name of patriotism to remember that he is of our people is about as accurate as asking us in the name of family feeling to remember that he is our great-aunt.

Across the path of Imperialism as interpreted in a patriotic sense there lies the most insurmountable of human obstacles, an impossibility which is more than a political and more than a financial impossibility - a psychological impossibility. An empire has all the characteristics that render national attachments impossible. It is huge, it is mostly remote, it is everywhere diverse and contradictory. Above all, it is utterly undefined and unlimited. Not to see how this frustrates genuine enthusiasm is not to know the alphabet of the human heart. There is one thing that is vitally essential to everything which is to be intensely enjoyed or intensely admired—limitation. Whenever we look through an archway, and are stricken into delight with the magnetic clarity and completeness of the landscape beyond, we are realizing the necessity of boundaries. Whenever we put a picture in a frame, we are acting upon that primeval truth which is the value of small nationalities. Wherever we write or read with pleasure the story of a man living adventurously and happily upon an island, we have hold of the truth which broke the Roman Empire, and will always break Imperialism. All Imperial poetry, even the very best (as in the earlier work of Rudyard Kipling) must be psychologically false, for when a man really loves a thing he dwells not on its largeness, but its smallness. The very psychology of patriotism is in the patriotism of Shakespeare, above all in that hackneyed and admirable passage in “Richard II” which is the very ecstasy of the little Englander. It is indescribably significant that Shakespeare, in glorifying his country, compares it to two things - a fortress and jewel -

This precious stone, set in a silver sea,
Which serves it for the purpose of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house.

A fort is a thing which appeals both to the boyish and the practical instinct as characterized by a certain quality which can only be called coziness. A jewel is a thing the intense value of which is enhanced by its being both rare and minute. A fortress not upon its defence, a jewel multiplied over the earth like the pebbles of the shore, changes the note of feeling finally and beyond recovery. Imperialism is the opening of Shakespeare’s fort and the cheapening of his jewel. Shakespeare was right in this particular kind of love-poetry, as in all other kinds. While the anaemic moderns are trying to evoke passion by raving about size and space and eternity, the gigantic Elizabethan remembers in the matter of patriotism also the great psychological verity that all love-poetry tends to diminutives.

It is instructive to compare this graphic Little England patriotism of Shakespeare with the best work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. That best work is very beautiful literature, but it is always at its truest and most beautiful when the writer is speaking of cosmopolitanism, of the sensations of the traveller in many lands. The point of John of Gaunt’s utterance is that England satisfies; the point of the “Sestina of the Tramp Royal” is that nothing satisfies, hardly even the whole globe:

Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done,
Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good.
So write, before I die, “’E liked it all!

That is real poetry, and sentiment too, but it is the very reverse of patriotism. It is the light and not inhumane melancholy of the man who has paid his vows to many gods and many women. Shakespeare’s patriotism has the joy and pain of a passionate lover; Mr. Kipling’s has the gaiety and sadness of a philanderer among the nations.

Spiritually, then, we hold that a healthy man does not demand cosmopolitanism, and does not demand empire. He demands something which is more or less roughly represented by Nationalism. That is to say, he demands a particular relation to some homogeneous community of manageable and imaginable size, large enough to inspire his reverence by its hold on history, small enough to inspire his affection by its hold on himself. If we were gods planning a perfect planet, if we were poets inventing a Utopia, we should divide the world into communities of this unity and moderate size. It is, therefore, not true to say of us that a cosmopolitan humanity is a far-off ideal; it is not an ideal at all for us, but a nightmare.

And now, having this purely idealistic faith in loyalties of this scope and groups of this kind, we have to turn from pure ethics and poetry to the discussion of the earth as it is at this moment. Hitherto I have attempted to suggest that the national idea is more noble and pleasing in the abstract than either the cosmopolitan or the Imperial idea, if, indeed, Imperialism can be imagined as anything but cosmopolitan. But now let us turn to the practical people - convertimur in gentes.

Now, having this belief, that communities of a size much smaller than empires are the healthy homes for men, that they are better than either a cosmopolitan anarchy or Imperialism, we look out at practical history, and discover a rather remarkable fact. We discover that the civilization which has in practical politics led the world has not only, as a fact, branched or broken into communities of this type, but has made the outline and character of them a sacred thing. Europe, which is the most practical civilization, is also the only Nationalist civilization. Imperialism is Asiatic. We see it at its very best and most intellectual in a thing like the Chinese civilization. In Europe only is there this sense of the sanctity of nation. In other places men fight for the independence of their own tribe. In our Nationalist Europe only is there any notion of respecting the independence of another tribe. And this is, of course, the only test of the existence of a religion. It is no proof that a man holds life sacred that he wishes to save his own life; it is some proof of it if he refrains from murdering his enemy. And this was the whole of our objection to the annexation of the Transvaal, that it was a crime committed against the European virtue of patriotism. For a man has clearly no more right to say that his British patriotism obliges him to destroy the Boer nation than he has to say that his sense of the sanctity of marriage makes him run away with his neighbour’s wife.

There is undoubtedly a general notion abroad at the present time that small nationalities are dying out. There is a general notion that empires are living or destined to a continual life, that nationalities are dead or destined to die. Such an idea as this can only have arisen from ordinary ignorance of the history of Europe. It is true that empire often looks strong and nationality often looks weak, but that is merely because all the things that are eternal always look weak. That simple discovery has been the seed of all religions.

The practical truth is that the empires have been the light and transient things, brief as the butterfly; the nations have been the hard and solid and triumphant things, which nothing could break. The largest empire is really only a fashion. But the smallest nation is something greater than a fashion - it is a custom. Imperialism is not either a glorious discovery of the English, as some Englishmen think, or a wicked invention of the English, as other Englishmen think. It is a tiresome old European fad or fashion, coming round to us after having been tried and found wanting by nearly all the kindred nations. It neither starts anything nor ends anything; it merely recurs, like the crinoline. But while Imperialism goes out and in, like the crinoline, nationality remains, like the habit of wearing clothes.

Spain was once a colonial empire, far more brilliant and original than ours. Its empire has vanished, but there are still men who will die for Spain; there are still men who will strike you in the face if you say that they are not Spaniards. France had an empire covering all Europe after the great ecstasy of the Revolution. It vanished utterly, and all its ideas are at a low ebb in Europe. But there are still men who will die for France. And when from our mortal nation also this immortal fallacy is passed, when all the colonies of England have gone the wild way of the colonies of Spain, when some strange and sudden Waterloo has made the little dream of Beaconsfield as mad as the great dream of Napoleon, something will remain, I am very certain, which matters more than all these levities. There will still be men who will die for England.

If any ordinary Englishman wishes to feel the difference between the unreality of Imperialism and the reality of Nationalism - I do not mind whether he is an Imperialist or anything else—let him try one simple test. Let him say first of all to himself such a sentence as this: “It was largely due to the influence of England that Australia was ceded to Germany.” Such a sentence will no doubt fill him with a not illegitimate fury. He may rank it with Majuba, and call it a scandalous example of his country’s weakness. But then let him say to himself this sentence: “It was largely due to the influence of Australia that England was ceded to Germany.” He will not think that means the weakness of his country. He will think it means that he has no longer any country to be weak. He will not think that means Majuba, but Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods.

It is just because our modern Imperialists do not see the enormous abyss between the claim of the nation and the claim of the mere empire that their philosophy is so superficial and so insincere. It is no exaggeration at all to say that there is as much difference between asking an Englishman to give up his empire and asking him to give up his England as there is between asking him to alter the shape of his hat and asking him to alter the shape of his head. The two things lie geographically very near together, and for persons with pedantic minds the frontier between hat and head may, for all I know, be the subject of elaborate negotiation.

The people who live in our large towns, and read our large newspapers - probably the most credulous people who have ever existed upon earth—have got an idea into their heads that such things as the annexation of the Transvaal are parts of a normal historic process. They believe that big European empires have always been eating up small European nations, just as whales have always been eating up herrings. This, again, is because they know no history. When we come to look at the facts, the really extraordinary thing is that the absorption of white nations should not have happened oftener. In this wild and wicked world the keenest Nationalist would expect it often to happen, and often to succeed.

As a fact, it has seldom happened: it has never succeeded. Fragments of nations have been bitten off, as in Alsace and Lorraine, and even those have not been easy to chew. Wild tribes, in a chaotic period, with no national sentiment at all in the European sense - tribes such as existed in Europe once, and exist in Asia still - have overrun and eaten up each other; but a nation is a thing quite different to these. Some Christian nations have been swallowed; not one has ever been digested. The chunks of Poland still lie heavy on the stomachs of the Central Empires; Ireland has been a perpetual dyspeptic pain. For living nations were not meant by Nature to be our food.

In the whole circle of Christian history and the Christian world there is one instance, and one instance only, of a patriotic European people living contentedly with their Government transferred to another capital. That instance is Scotland; and if ever there were on earth an exception that proved the rule it is here, for Scotchmen have held their heads up after absorption for precisely the same reason that Switzers hold their heads up after liberation - the fact that they were never conquered. If anyone wishes to make the case of the Transvaal a parallel to the case of Scotland, the step required is simple enough. Let Edward VII leave his crown to President Steyn, and we will answer for the loyalty of the Dutch in South Africa.

We contend, then, that this Nationalism is, at any rate, an unbroken fact of our Europe. It is no more probable that the British Empire will outlast the patriotism of the Dutch in Africa than it was probable that the Spanish Empire would outlast the patriotism of the Dutch in Europe. Nations are tenacious, empires are slovenly. And now we come to that other matter which is important, the question of whether empires, strong or weak, and nations, strong or weak, do good or harm. In supporting the Spanish Empire or the British Empire, are we supporting something likely to do good to mankind? For, of course, we should be quite willing in that case to side with their weakness, and their forlorn hope of resistance against the enduring tyranny of nationality.

There is one faith which many good men have in Imperialism which must not be despised, but which must respectfully be shattered. Many good men believe that a great conglomeration of peoples, like the British Empire, may be a unification of varied merits. They believe that by it may be extracted the best from the Sepoy, the Australian, the Irishman, the Dutchman, the negro, and the Cockney. All these, they say, may thus grow in one orchard, and civilization can gather the best fruit from each.

Now, this kind of empire has many beauties; it is varied, fascinating, and instructive. But it has one defect: it does not exist. It is emphatically not true that when we conquer peoples we get the good out of them. So far from that, the reverse is rather true: when we conquer peoples we lose them for ever. Take an instance. Nothing has more profoundly interested us of late years, whether we are philosophers or children, than the study of the great mythologies. Nearly every baby is now brought up among the gods of Greece and the gods of Scandinavia. Many schoolboys could pass an examination as to who was the uncle of Mercury or the second cousin of Loki. We have ransacked every cranny of Olympus and Asgard, and all this time there existed in Europe another great mythology, as vast and varied, as powerful and as perfect.

The chief mark of such a great mythology is that the mere phrases of it are enough to establish its greatness. The mere phrase “The Son of man” is enough to prove Christianity to be a great religion if no other trace remained of the personality of Christ. The mere phrase “The Twilight of the Gods” is enough to prove that the Norsemen were poets and philosophers also. And as clearly and certainly a whole universe of primal imagination is revealed by such a mere phrase as “The Country of the Young.” And the mythology of which “The Country of the Young” is an example, of which other examples are such unfathomable conceptions as the Secret Rose, or the Black Boar, who in his brutal simplicity typifies the primitive darkness of things; - where, in what corner of Europe, in what crevice of the Caucasian mountains, has this sumptuous mythology been discovered? It has been discovered in Ireland. It has been discovered in that country of all countries which was nearest to us and most despised, which we conceived as the withered limb of our Empire. Why did we know so much about German mythology and nothing about Irish mythology? Any person with even the simplest knowledge of the world as it is must realize that the reason lies in the fact that our material conquest of Ireland put us in an utterly artificial position towards everything Irish. The Irish would not sing to us any more than the Jews, as described in their stern and splendid psalm, would sing to the Babylonians. I find it difficult to believe that there can be anyone so ignorant of practical existence as not to know that any attempt on the part of the Irish for centuries after their conquest to say to us what they had to say about their history and legends would have been met with nothing except jokes about Brian Baroo. We all know in reality that England would never have consented to learn from Ireland. It has learnt from France because it failed to conquer her. If Edward III or Henry V had succeeded in adding France to the Empire, we may be absolutely certain that we should have learnt as little from the song of Roland as we have from the legend of Maive, and that we should have profited as little from the genius of Mirabeau as we did from the genius of Parnell.

Or take another instance on a somewhat different plane. For centuries all European nations, and England as much as any of them, have been running round and round the metaphysical problem of being, of pessimism and optimism, of variety and unity. And all the time there existed in India an immense and lucid philosophy which, true or false, was, in the case of many English philosophers, the very thing that they were seeking; in the case of many of them, the very thing that they were saying. The eighteenth century was full of sad speculations and wild speculations; but they could not entertain quite so wild a speculation as that their sad philosophy had been reduced to its clearest elements by naked brown men in the wilds of Asia. It is strange to think that when poor Robert Clive stood with the pistol in his hand, and asked himself the value of life and death, he might have learnt from some ragged fakir, whom he treated as dirt, a pessimism infinitely deeper and infinitely more rational than his own. Englishmen could not find it out, could not even realize that it was there. The discovery of the greatest of all philosophical schemes for the absorption of personality was left for Schopenhauer, a German. His hands were not tied with the utter helplessness of empire.

Experience, then, is wholly against the idea that by conquering a people we can reach or use the good in them. The idea that an empire absorbs the Irish qualities when it conquers the Irish, or possesses the Indian wisdom when it conquers India, is one of the thousand delusions which are characteristic of world politics. It is like the notion of the cannibals that it is possible to become brave by eating a brave man, or experts at horsemanship by eating an elegant horseman. We can no more get the secret of Chinese stoicism by annexing China than a savage could become a good actor by dining on Sir Charles Wyndham. And the reason is very evident. The relations of a subject to a ruling race are in themselves false relations, and neither can know anything valuable of the other. They are very like the relations a man bears to his footman or his housemaid. If anybody told us that a duchess must know more of the soul of the butler than of her personal friends, because she saw the butler every day, and there was only a floor between them, we should not entertain a high opinion of that person’s knowledge of the world. But it has never occurred to us that this is the reason why we have reaped profit from the French temperament, and no profit from the Irish temperament. The truth is, of course, that the friendship of nations is like the friendship of individuals. No such thing is possible unless both parties are free. National independence is as much needed if peoples are to be genuine friends as it is if they are to be genuine enemies. Often as we have heard of liberty, equality, and fraternity, we do not remember enough that the two things essential to fraternity are liberty and equality.

The English people, who are upon the whole the most generous people in the world, have this defect in their generosity - that they cannot be persuaded that there are any people in the world who do not want their commodities. In fact, the English have a peculiar and even mystical kind of generosity - a generosity which is willing to give all its goods to the poor, but cannot be persuaded to let the poor keep the goods they have already. And consequently, when we begin to speak of self-government and independence and such matters, the typical Englishman always imagines that we mean a Parliament elected on the English system, with green benches and a Speaker wearing a wig; and as he imagines that this is the only possible kind of self-government, he says, with perfect truth, that no nation in the world has done as much for self-government as the English. It does not, however, seem to occur to him that every Government that ever existed in the world was a representative Government, and that every despot was elected silently by universal suffrage. Where a nation has a taste for politics, as in England, its politicians represent it; but where it has a taste rather for war, let us say, its warriors represent it; and where it has a taste for religious meditation, its saints and hermits represent it. Even in England, for instance, where we have some love of politics, and may admit, therefore, that Mr. Chamberlain represents us, we have a much greater love of cricket, and C.B. Fry represents us much better than Mr. Chamberlain.

In the light of this principle our relation to such a problem as that of the politics of India becomes clear. The reason why it is undesirable to extend the franchise to the Hindoos in India is not that it would raise a rebellion or create a ridiculous spectacle, but simply that representative Government in India would not be representative. And the reason that it would not be representative is simply this: that the political faculty not being an Indian faculty, the politicians who would dominate the country would be the most un-Indian Indians who could be found. No suffrage, however wide, no political machinery, however faultless, could make the spouting, ranting, Europeanized, Bengali adventurer represent India. Nothing could alter the fact that he would despise the ancient peasant-life of India, and the ancient peasant-life, with a great deal more justification, would despise him. The political faculty would, of course, be cultivated and brought, perhaps, to a high perfection by certain Hindoos, but it would remain to the eyes of India a unique and elegant and somewhat unnecessary accomplishment. The Bengali politicians would, under whatever democratic forms, inaugurate in India a rule of experts - that is to say, of stupid and fanatical oppressors. India would be about as much really democratized by such a scheme as England would be if we had a General Election every three years to choose the man whom the great soul of the people really believed to be the best player on the trombone.

So that this essentially generous English idea that we must provide all the parts of the earth we can influence with our political institutions is dropped significantly, and dropped, if one may say so, with a crash at the first sight of the greatest British problem, the problem of India. Face to face with India, we are obliged to admit that what is one nation’s meat is another nation’s poison. And the moment we have admitted that, we have broken at a blow the whole conception of that extension of Anglo-Saxon civilization which is the essential of current Imperialism. If our political institutions would not necessarily improve or represent the Hindoo, then the whole thing is a matter of local temperament, and it is quite as possible that our political institutions never have improved or expressed the Irishman, and never will improve or express the Boer. It may be a good thing, of course, in particular cases to give our civilization to these people, but it can no longer be maintained that it is obviously a good thing to give it as it is a good thing to give a loaf to a starving man. The essential principle of Nationalism, that the institutions which are the growth of the soil have an advantage as such, is admitted.

III

Civilization is a good thing, but it is not a thing like the love of God, by its nature infinite. A man may have too much civilization, as he may have too much beer, and the supreme evil of civilization may be expressed in one single phrase. It consists in permitting the human achievements to outrun the human imagination. A man possesses what he can think of, and not an atom more. If a man with twelve thousand millions a month received thirteen thousand million instead, not a farthing would really have been given to him, for he could not even imagine the difference. Similarly, if a citizen of an empire already containing numberless alien and incomprehensible people has added to his heritage another alien and incomprehensible people, no difference has really been made. A man is a citizen of that commonwealth the nature of which he can conceive, and of no other. If that commonwealth is only a street out of the Blackfriars Road, that street is his country, and for that he ought to wear ribbons or shed his blood.

The danger of small commonwealths is narrowness, but their advantage is reality. Now, at any specific stage in the world’s history we ought to ask ourselves whether humanity is in a greater danger from the narrow arrogance of small people, or from the phantasmal delusions of empires. That is the question which confronts the serious European of today, and the answer is not very difficult. It is idle to tell him that Nationalism is sometimes an evil in the confusion of a beptarchy, when the fact stares him in the face that the modern evils arise from remoteness, from unreality, from the circulation of wealth far from its producers, from the waging of wars far from the seat of action, from the wild use of statistics, from the crude use of names, from the investor and the theorist, and the absentee landlord.

We have reached in the modern world a condition of such appalling unreality that everything is done on paper. Men know the destiny of countries when they have never met a native, and professed love and hatred for men whom, if they saw them in the street, they could not tell from Poles or Portuguese. For this immense theoretic method of modern times they have invented an admirable phrase—a phrase that expresses with a searching accuracy and irony of which they are quite unconscious the nature of their political occupation. They have called it “painting the map red.” Like children, they are wholly concerned with the colours in an atlas. So long as they can paint the map red they are quite contented that the countries depicted there should retain until doomsday their own alien and inexhaustible colours of forest and field.

There is a decadence possible for our modern civilization, and it is just at this point that my difference from the Imperialists comes in. They think Imperialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism) is the cure. I think that Imperialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism) is the disease. I ignore for the moment the question of whether, in the abstract, combinations and centralizations and steamboats and Marconi wires are good things or bad. But to attempt to cure the evil of Birmingham and save the soul of Chicago by more combinations and centralizations and more steamboats and more Marconi wires seem to me stark lunacy; it is like a doctor ordering brandy to a man in delirium tremens. It is precisely from these things that we are suffering, from a loose journalism, from a vague geography, from an excitable smattering of everything, from an officious interest in everybody, from a loss of strong national types, of strong religious restraints, of the sense of memory and the fear of God. We are not suffering from any very painful or dangerous resemblance to the arrogant and cruel zealots who ruled in Sparta or died in the fall of Jerusalem. We are suffering from a resemblance to the mob in decaying Rome.

Is there anyone today who can reasonably doubt that what led us into error in our recent South African politics was precisely our Imperialism, and not our Nationalism? was precisely not our ancient interest in England, but our quite modern and quite frivolous interest in everywhere else? Millions of instances might be quoted to show how utterly at sea we were and are still about the soul of South Africa. It is as well, perhaps, to concentrate them into two examples.

President Kruger and Mr. Cecil Rhodes had both great talents, great ambitions, and exciting lives; they both had many sincere sympathizers in England, and each one of them at the supreme crisis of his life did things which mystified and appalled their English supporters. No English Rhodesian could ever defend the Raid; no English Pro-Boer has ever explained the Ultimatum. The reason is that neither Rhodes nor Kruger were English politicians. We cannot understand them; probably they understood each other.

It is true that it is sometimes alleged that such things as telegraphy and journalism have really abolished distance. This is not only an error, but a horribly dangerous one. Telegraphy and journalism can indeed convey some things easily, but these are precisely the things that do not matter—the mere names, dates, and incidents. At the worst, journalism supplies us with falsehoods; at the best, only with facts. And facts, taken apart from their atmosphere, local sentiment, and place in life, are quite as false as falsehoods. We know that a man is shot by a Boer policeman; but what is the use of knowing that? What we need to know is whether the thing was typical, whether it was exceptional, whether it was planned, whether it was excused, whether it was excusable. We want to know whether it was a thing like a German duel or a thing like a Whitechapel murder. And all this we could only know by living in the community. Our newspapers could not tell it to us, even if our newspapers were honest.

Or take the instance of newspapers themselves. How can that subtle thing, the prestige of a newspaper, be felt, except at close quarters? We know that the editor of the Canadian Tomahawk has impeached Lord Dundonald, but what ordinary Englishman will be dishonest enough to pretend that he knows whether this means the Times or the Daily Express? We shall never know how much of a fool Mr. Chamberlain may have made of himself over the French caricatures of Queen Victoria, because we do not live in France, and feel the flavour and position of Le Rire. But how great a fool he may, perhaps, have made of himself we can easily imagine by supposing that the Kaiser made a speech tomorrow calling on God and his brave Brandenburg because there had been a paragraph about him in Modern Society.

We must at all costs get back to smaller political entities, because we must at all costs get back to reality. We must get nearer and nearer again to love and hate and mother-wit, to personal judgments and the truth in the faces of men. As it is, the game of world-politics is an enormous game of cross purposes. In the fantastic sunset of a decadence the shadows of men are far larger than themselves.

President Roosevelt is accepted in England as something much greater than he is in America. Mr. Seddon is taken much more seriously by Mr. Chamberlain than he is by New Zealand. The really bad work of Cecil Rhodes was not his influence on colonial politicians, whom he understood, but his influence on English gentlemen, whom he could not understand.

It is characteristic of this vast bewilderment which we call world-politics that it so constantly leaves out of account the most important matters even in its own line. For instance, it perpetually tells us that the English race has a talent for colonization, and adjures it to find fresh continents and fresh islands in the seas of sunset or dawn. Yet there is one island which the English could colonize most easily, and which they are not permitted to colonize—England. In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are imprisoned between hedges and driven along rights-of-way. England does not belong to them at all; belongs to them far less than the Transvaal before the war belonged to the Uitlanders. And it is in the main that very class whose immense and absurd estates make impossible the colonization of England which urges the English people to colonize something else, preferably something on the other side of the world. These owners very naturally desire what they call a spirited foreign and colonial policy. They desire that every lonely old theocratical State from the Transvaal to Thibet should be invaded by the English; for all these enterprises put off the dreadful day when the English shall invade England.

But do not let us admit for a moment that in thus turning English loyalty to England we are serving merely England or ourselves. We are taking the turn which our great Christian civilization must take if it is to live. It is an old civilization, and it is for a season tired—tired of civilization, tired of cheap culture, tired of scepticism, tired of talk, tired of hearsay, tired, in a word, of Imperial politics. And it must return, as it did in the adoption of Christianity, to intensity and humility, to a devotion to particular things. About our European Imperialism let us remember primarily one thing, that it has all happened before. The end of the world happened a thousand years ago. At the end of the Roman era everything that was Roman seemed to have gone stale for ever. The world was with infinite agony made young again, because there were some tribes the Empire had never conquered, and some Scriptures that it had never read. The Empire and the continent were just saved by the failures of Imperialism. Strange religions came out of the virgin East, strange races came out of the virgin North, and became useful because they had been neglected. Such was the issue of the happy failure of Imperialism; the human mind dares scarcely imagine its success. Who can face the notion of a power which has destroyed everything but itself suddenly growing sick of itself? What pessimist could have pictured the great Empire, at the very instant when it had discovered Roman roads and Roman trophies to be vanity, stretching out its arms to the East and to the West, and finding nothing but its own intolerable omnipresence—finding nothing but Roman trophies and Roman roads?