Nation Revisited # 97

Nation Revisited

# 97, November 2012  nationrevisited@gmail.com 

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Keep on Trying

Those of us who are trying to defend European civilization do not always agree on the way forward. Some of us believe in a United States of Europe but others favour a European Confederation and some deluded souls still think Britain can go-it-alone. Some factions are committed to racial identity and others emphasize culture. There are socialists, conservatives, authoritarians and libertarians. But we agree that we should stop exporting jobs and importing cheap labour.

The established political parties have their left and right wings but they don’t constantly split. They stay together because they know that parties are essentially coalitions. No two people exactly agree with each other – unless they are political or religious zealots following a fixed agenda. Internal debate is healthy and policies have to change to suit circumstances. Policies set in stone are a sure sign of a dead or dying party.

A radical party is unlikely to come to power in the UK where the so-called “democratic” system is firmly entrenched. We are run by big business and important decisions are not made in Westminster but in the boardrooms of Wall Street or the City of London.  We are not going to stage a coup d’état or take power in an election but we can influence public opinion and governments can be swayed by lobby groups if they make enough noise.

Attitudes are changing. The popular press is still committed to NATO but it’s now respectable to be against war in the Middle East. Immigration is openly discussed and the established parties are calling for stricter controls. But the biggest change has been the criticism of global capitalism. This used to be the preserve of the lunatic fringe but now ordinary people want to regulate the banks and tax the rich.

The rise of the Internet and English-language TV stations like RT, Press TV and al-Jazera has broken the Establishment stranglehold on the news. People are more likely to read relatively unbiased agency reports on the Internet than to swallow the mendacious nonsense put out by the popular press. The rapid decline in newspaper circulation has already sunk The News of the World and the increasingly out of touch Daily Telegraph has lost nearly half of its readers since 2000 – from 1,039,749 to 578,774 (ABC). Only nine million people still read hard copy newspapers in the UK; so keep talking, keep writing and keep on trying.

It Must Never Happen Again

After years of opposition to European unity British nationalists are turning to the idea of confederation. The Swiss Confederation is a union of self-governing states with a federal parliament, a national army and a single currency; a prosperous and united country that speaks four languages and preserves the individuality of its cantons. But the Swiss model is too united for some of them.

The Europaische Aktion group is led in the UK by Richard Edmonds, the National Front candidate for the forthcoming Croydon North by-election. They call for a European League with a common foreign and defence policy but with: “the utmost freedom of cultural, educational, financial and economic policies” for member states.

The Alliance of European Nationalist Movements is a EU parliamentary group that includes Nick Griffin of the British National Party. They believe in: “The creation of a Europe of free, independent and equal nations in the framework of a confederation of sovereign states, refraining from taking decisions on matters properly taken by states themselves”.

Andrew Brons MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber has quit the BNP and now sits as an independent. His claims his defection is due to “constructive expulsion” and has nothing to do with policy. He states on the Nationalist Unity Forum: “I shall, of course, continue to promote the policies on which I was elected...”

The nationalists are clinging to the illusion of independence but their “sovereign states” equipped with national armies and national currencies would inevitably compete with each other and perpetuate ancient quarrels. There is no such thing as “nationalist unity”: far from uniting neighbouring states nationalism inevitably divides them. Nazi Germany invaded Austria and Poland and Fascist Italy invaded Albania and Greece despite the fact that they all had nationalist regimes.

Followers of Oswald Mosley and Jean Thiriart have a much grander vision of Europe. Modern writers such as; Alexander Dugin, Robert Edwards, Guillaume Faye, Constantine von Hoffmeister,  Norman Lowell, Luc Michel, Robert Steuckers and Pavel Tulaev each have their own conceptions of a European superstate stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

After fifty years of delay and hesitation the EU is finally coming together. The euro has survived a sustained attack by the rating agencies and its future is now guaranteed by the European Central Bank. The ancient ties of blood and culture that unite Europe did not stop us from fighting two fratricidal wars in the last hundred years. But now that spiritual union is protected by political and economic union we can be sure that it will never happen again. For all its faults the EU is a step in the right direction.

The NR Questionnaire

The following readers have replied to our five questions; John Bean # 76, Robert Edwards # 77, me (Bill Baillie) # 78, and Michael Woodbridge # 96 and now Eddy Morrison. His political biography From British Nationalist to National Socialist can be read online at www.aryanunity.com 

Who are you?

Eddy Morrison, aged 63, long-term veteran White Nationalist and founder member of the National Front.

What do you believe in?

Pure unadulterated White Nationalism. I base my beliefs on Arnold Leese’s quote “Race is the only truth.”

If you could direct government policy what would you do?

I would dismantle democracy and replace it with an Authoritarian system integrating the Corporate State theories of Oswald Mosley.

What are you proud of and what do you regret?

I am proud of my organization of the 1989 Dewsbury open air rally which gained worldwide publicity for the BNP and put it on the map. I am proud never to have deviated from my core beliefs.

I regret not staying with any one organization long enough and trying different experiments some of which were a partial success and some a failure.

How would you like to be remembered?

As a White Nationalist who made whatever contribution he could to the Cause – in speaking, writing, poetry and activism and NEVER compromising his beliefs for short-term gain.

Ben Greene

Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists supporters were not the only victims of the infamous wartime Defence Regulation 18B. Others included Captain Maule Ramsay MP, Admiral Sir Barry Domville, Arnold Leese of the Imperial Fascist League, John Beckett, Ben Greene and Jack Philby of the British People’s Party, and various others. A total of 1500 men and women were held in prison or internment camps. None of them were ever charged or tried but some managed to take their cases to a tribunal known as the “Advisory Committee.”

Ben Greene (1901-1978) was the Labour Party candidate for Gravesend; a giant of a man who was a pacifist and a committed socialist. He joined the BPP to fight against the coming war and the money power behind it. Ben was a member of the multi-talented Greene family that included the writer Graham Greene, the mountaineer Raymond Greene and BBC boss Hugh Greene. He served the League of Nations as Deputy Chief Returning Officer for the Saarland Plebiscite in 1935. And he worked tirelessly for the Save the Children Fund resettling refugees from the First World War. But his distinguished career didn’t save him from detention under Regulation 18B. He was arrested in 1940 and deprived of his liberty until 1942.

He was imprisoned on the false evidence of Harald Kurtz, an MI5 agent working for the notorious spymaster Maxwell Knight who had been infiltrating fascist movements since 1923. He was released when his lawyer Oswald Hickson revealed Kurtz’s confession to the Appeal Court. He shared his lawyer with Oswald Mosley and the two detainees also shared the enmity of Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. Oswald Hickson addressed the court on his client’s behalf:

“Ben Greene is a man who is vouched for by respectable people everywhere as a thoroughly straight and honourable man. He may be a bit of a crank, but Oliver Cromwell was considered a crank when he started his political career. He may be perhaps rather difficult: at any rate he has had difficulties with members of the Labour Party who are now members of the government, and therefore you have the peculiar position that a Minister of the Crown, Mr Herbert Morrison, who is the Home Secretary now, has had political disagreements with a man who is now detained and whom he insists on detaining.”

In an ironic twist of history Ben Greene and his compatriots were locked up as suspected traitors while his cousins Elizabeth and Graham were both working for Jack Philby’s son Kim in MI6. Kim Philby was a senior British Intelligence officer but he was also a colonel in the KGB. He was part of the notorious Cambridge Five spy ring, with Donald Stuart Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow in 1951 and Kim Philby defected in 1963. The Queen’s art historian Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a traitor by Andrew Boyle’s book Climate of Treason in 1979. He was stripped of his honours but never brought before the courts.

Ben’s daughter Leslie Greene was an active member of the League of Empire Loyalist. She wrote for their magazine Candour, and she stood as an independent candidate for the safe Labour seat of North Lewisham in 1957; she got 1,487 votes - nearly 4%. And as Mrs von Goetz she was a founder member of the National Front in 1967. I remember her as a cheerful and intelligent woman who had inherited her father’s courage and determination.

The Roots of National Socialism

Rohan Butler traces the origins of National Socialism from the Romantic Movement to the rise of Adolf Hitler. An historical progression that still worries those frightened of German hegemony. The Germans are reluctant leaders of Europe but they are the largest country with the most dynamic economy. This situation was forecast 200 years ago by the economist Adam Heinrch Muller 1779-1829. He believed in monarchy and tradition but he was a visionary who could see beyond the unification of the German Empire to the union of Europe:

“The great federation of European peoples, which will come some day as sure as we live, will also bear German hues, for everything great, fundamental, and eternal in all European institutions is certainly German… The seed of German life has indeed, in these recent folk-tumults, only been extended even further and further over the ground of our continent; it will proceed in its triumphant growth, and from quite unpretentious beginnings will gradually advance to mighty effects; let its growth be left to eternal nature.”

The Nazis owed their mysticism to Richard Wagner, their philosophy to Friedrich Nietzsche, their economics to Adam Muller and their racism to Houston Steward Chamberlain. But the real father of National Socialism was Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), the son of a Jewish merchant of Breslau; now known as Wroclaw. He studied philology and philosophy at the universities of Breslau and Berlin. He started his political career as a socialist with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but he fell out with the communists and founded the distinctly nationalistic Allgemeiner Deutsche Arbeiterverein; a socialist movement committed to the German Empire. He was imprisoned several times for revolutionary activities but he eventually became an unofficial advisor to Otto von Bismarck. Years later the Iron Chancellor was asked in the Reichstag to explain his relationship with Ferdinand Lassalle by the Social Democrat leader August Bebel. He replied:

“I saw him, and since my first conversation I have never regretted doing so… I saw him perhaps three or four times altogether. There was never the possibility of our talks taking the form of political negotiations. What could Lassalle have offered me? He had nothing behind him… But he attracted me as an individual. He was one of the most intelligent and likeable men I had ever come across. He was very ambitious and by no means a republican. He was very much a nationalist and a monarchist. His ideal was the German Empire, and there was our point of contact. As I have said he was ambitious, on a large scale, and there is perhaps room for doubt as to whether, in his eyes, the German Empire ultimately entailed the Hohenzollern or the Lassalle dynasty… Our talks lasted for hours and I was always sorry when they came to an end.”  

Ferdinand Lassalle accepted David Ricardo’s “Iron Rule of Wages” that states that employers will only pay the minimum wage necessary to attract workers. He therefore advocated state intervention to control wages and prices. He was never anti-Semitic (unlike Karl Marx) but his support for the German Empire and his passionate belief in social advancement were entirely compatible with National Socialism. He died fighting a duel with Count von Racowitza over the hand of Helene von Donniges.

Half a century after his untimely death German politics was dominated by the conservative rabble-rouser Adolf Stocker. Not to be outdone the socialist Eugen Duhring shamelessly used anti-Semitism to court the newly enfranchised workers:

“The decisive thing is not knowledge for its own sake but will, which attains its more definite goal by means of knowledge. The necessity of making an impression upon great masses limits the utility of concepts to that which can be generally understood and partly also to that which lies near at hand or can be conceived of with certainty. Theories must here be stripped of all superfluous luxury, and it essential ever time to find the natural point of contact through which they accord with the impetus of life as a whole.”

Eugen Duhring’s “point of contact” with his National Socialist followers was a belief in racial supremacy that ultimately led to their downfall.

The rabid nationalism promoted by General Friedrich von Bernhard and Friedrich Neumann led to WW1 and the collapse of the German Empire. The Spartacist revolt that followed the German surrender was put down by the free-corps and its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were beaten to death. The Weimar Republic restored order but it was crippled by inflation and unemployment. Into this chaos stepped Adolf Hitler, a charismatic leader and a brilliant orator who understood the mood of the people. Unfortunately he thought that nationalism was the cure rather than the cause of his nation’s troubles.

The Germans have excelled in all human activities. They were undoubtedly guilty of war crimes but so was everybody else. The destruction of Dresden and Hamburg, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the killing of the Polish officers in the Katyn Forest were deeds as wicked as the Holocaust. Throughout history the Germans have survived by their courage and optimism. They are a Christian nation that believes in Salvation but most of their great thinkers have been obsessed with death. The last of them was Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of “The Decline of the West.” In 1933 he wrote:

“A genuine international is only possible through the victory of the idea of one race over all the others, and not through the dissolution of all opinions into a colourless mass. Let us be skeptics at last and throw out the old ideologies. There are no reconciliations in real history. There is only one end to the eternal struggle, death: death of individuals, death of peoples, and death of culture. We Germans have rich unspent possibilities within us and huge tasks before us. To the international which is in irrevocable preparation we have the idea of the world-organization of the world state to give; the English that of the worldwide trust and worldwide gain; the French nothing. The real international is imperialism, domination of the Faustian civilization and consequently, of the whole earth by means of a single formative principle, not through settlement and concessions, but through victory and annihilation.”

The Roots of National Socialism 1783-1933 by Rohan Butler was published by Faber & Faber in 1941 and is available from Amazon.

JRR Tolkien

John Bean writes: In spite of a Sunday Telegraph sub on the Letters page ringing me up on Thursday to check my quote from Tolkien’s comments in Candour, and assuring me that the letter was to be published on Sunday – it wasn’t. Surprise, surprise. Perhaps the lining up of Mosley, Chesterton and Tolkien with condemnation of the international banking cartel was just too much for them.

Sir – Christopher Howes’s masterful unearthing of English mythology in Tolkien’s The Hobbit again suggests that those wishing to see political messages in Tolkien’s works must look beyond conventional left and right. In the fifties he was a subscriber and occasional contributor to the magazine Candour which was edited by AK Chesterton (a prewar Mosley supporter) and was the official organ of the League of Empire Loyalists. From his contributions Tolkien thought that the Dark Lord of Sauron of LOTR was an allegory of the international banking cartel.

In July 1956 he wrote this in Candour.

“There should only be one source of money, one fountainhead from which flows the nation’s blood to vitalise commerce and industry, ensure economic equity and justice and safeguard the welfare of the people….In other words, it has always been and still is our contention that the prerogative of creating and issuing money of the nation should be restored to the state.”

John Bean,

Newmarket, Suffolk

Editors note. The Bank of England was nationalised in 1946 but AK Chesterton and his followers were bitterly opposed to the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 that tied the pound to the dollar in return for an American loan of $4.33 billion ($56 billion in 2012). Most historians concede that bankrupt Britain had no choice in the matter.

Unfair to the Fuhrer

A reader has protested at my unfavourable comparison of Adolf Hitler with Napoleon Bonaparte in NR # 96 – Europe: Solidarity or Division. He has drawn my attention to the following quotation posted on the Michael Walsh website.

Hitler by General Leon Degrelle

Hitler was the greatest statesman Europe has ever known. History will prove that when whipped up emotions have died down. He was more matter of fact, generally more unfolded than Napoleon. Napoleon was more of a vanquishing, empire-founding Frenchman than a true European. Hitler, in his being a man of his time, dreamed of an enduring, just, honest Europe, united by the initiative of the victor. A Europe however in which each ethnic group could develop according to their merits and accomplishments. The proof of this is that he offered Petain his hand. Just as Bismarck knew how to outgrow Prussia and become a German, so Hitler soon changed from being a German to being a European. At an early stage he disconnected himself from imperialistic ambition. Without any difficulty he began to think of himself as a European and initiated the creation of a Europe in which Germany – like Prussia in Bismarck’s time, was to be the foundation stone. Some comrades of the Fuhrer might still have been short-sighted Pan-Germanists. But Hitler had the genius, the right scale, the absence of bias and the necessary vision to accomplish the terrific task. He had an authority, not to be found for a second time in the history of the continent. His success would have established wealth and civilisation of Europe for centuries, probably forever. Hitler’s plans for Europe would have meant a blessing for us all.

Leon Degrelle’s glowing tribute is shocking to modern ears but it would be foolish to ignore the words of the legendary general. He was the first non-German to win the coveted Oak Leaves to his Knights Cross; awarded personally by Adolf Hitler in 1944. Hitler said that Leon Degrelle was: “the son I never had”. He was an outstanding leader of the pre-war Rexist movement; a fearless soldier on the Russian Front, and a stalwart friend of Europe after the war. When asked if he regretted anything he famously replied: “Only that we lost.”

We must acknowledge the debt we owe to the great men of history; Saint Constantine, Charlemagne, Phillip II of Spain, Peter the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler were all pioneers of European unity. The terrible wars that they are remembered for eventually welded Europe together. They may have failed to achieve their objectives in their lifetimes but the forthcoming Imperium will be their vindication. It will reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. It will be above nationalism and beyond petty statism: it will be European.