Nation Revisited # 108,
October 2013
website: http://nationrevisited.blogspot.co.uk
The
Spectre of Communism
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the Communist
Manifesto in 1848. The first lines of it read: “A spectre is haunting Europe –
the spectre of communism.” Collins English Dictionary defines the word
“spectre” as - a ghost; phantom; apparition; a mental image of something
unpleasant or menacing.
From October 1917 until December 1991 communist all over
the world promoted the Soviet Union including the teachers and professors of
the Frankfurt School; an informal group of academics who tried to bring about a
“quiet revolution” by spreading propaganda amongst their students.
Anti-communists accuse them of undermining national identity but the Communist
Manifesto puts the blame on capitalism:
“The
bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the
heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred
of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production: it compels them to introduce what it
calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In
one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
Marx and Engels were right about the spectre of
communism; a mental image of something unpleasant or menacing is still haunting
us. Their manifesto predicted war between the classes and indicated Europe as
the best place to start. But the terrible revolutionary conditions of the 19th
century have passed into history and we have no need to be frightened of
ghosts.
Despite the efforts of the Frankfurt School most young
Britons emerge from the educational system as law-abiding, respectful and
diligent citizens. Britain’s contribution to the arts is outstanding and we are
world leaders in the fields of scientific research, pharmaceuticals, nuclear
and precision engineering. Every generation has bemoaned modern morals and
manners but given the right leadership our youngsters are capable of great
things. The real and present danger to Britain and Europe is unrestrained
global capitalism. A ruthless system that is committed to world domination,
bereft of morality, dependant on cheap labour and addicted to perpetual warfare.
It is not the ghosts of long dead academics that we should worry about but the
living politicians, bosses and generals of the American military-industrial
complex.
Representation
of the People
Dave Cameron’s humiliating defeat in the Syrian debate
was a rare victory for democracy in a country where membership of the political
parties is collapsing and election turnouts average less than half.
Our most popular TV programmes are East Enders,
Coronation Street and Emmerdale. They depict dramatized accounts of everyday
life in London, Manchester and rural Yorkshire. BBC 2 is the most popular radio
station with over 15 million listeners, this is a music station aimed at
adults. Second is BBC Radio1 with 11 million listeners, this is also a music
station but aimed at a younger audience. And third is BBC Radio 4 with 10
million listeners, this covers news, current affairs, the arts etc.
The most popular British newspaper is the Sun with 2.5
million readers, followed by the Daily Mail with nearly 2 million readers and
the Daily Mirror with 1 million readers. They are a shameful waste of ink and
paper. The Sun pioneered the use of semi-naked
women on page three. The Daily Mail
is obsessed with the Royal Family and the Daily
Mirror caters to an industrial working class that has almost ceased to
exist.
The great British public watches East Enders, listens to
Radio 2 and reads the Sun. We also eat takeaways, shop at the local
supermarket, and only go to church for weddings, christenings and funerals. Our
unchallenging lifestyle is universally popular but it does not equip us to make
informed political decisions.
Some American states used to have literacy tests for
voters. They were outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They may have been
discriminatory but they restricted the franchise to those capable of
understanding what they were voting for. In Louisiana potential voters were
given a complicated test that defeated most of them.
In the UK the voting age has been dropped to 16 for the
coming Scottish referendum and there is talk of extending voting rights to
prisoners, lunatics and expatriates. Everybody is encouraged to vote for
candidates who they have probably never heard of and know nothing about. And
the party with the most votes gets to raise taxes, pass laws, make war and do
what it likes until the next general election.
This system was devised in the age of the stagecoach to
represent a privileged minority of male landowners. In those days
communications were slow and MPs from outlying areas took weeks to get to
Westminster. But in the age of universal suffrage and instant communications
there are quicker ways to express our opinions. There is no reason why we shouldn’t
have referendums by e-mail or text message. If the powers that be really
believe in democracy they would embrace the idea; instead of waffling on about
“the sovereignty of Parliament”. But if we adopted modern methods we wouldn’t
need 650 MPs and 760 members of the House of Lords.
Captain
Henry Kerby MP
In AK Chesterton’s book Facing the Abyss he described his dealings with Captain Henry Kerby
MP. AK was something of an authority on conspiracies but he probably never knew
that Kerby was an MI5 agent.
“What
goes on in the minds of Right-Wing MPs intelligent enough to be aware of what
their leaders are doing? In the middle 50s Captain Henry Kerby, Conservative MP
for Arundel, asked me to visit him at the House of Commons. His object was to
tell me that he and very many of his colleagues greatly admired the work I was
doing in defence of British interests at home and overseas. I expressed my
gratification adding that it would be even more encouraging were the Members to
defend these causes from the floor of the House of Commons. “Never fear, it
will come, it will come” he assured me. The years went by but nothing came.
Then it occurred to me to ask why, if the others were afraid to speak out.
Kerby did not defy the Devil.
Here
as far as I can remember is his answer: “Look at the chaps on our side of the
House, if they do not posses private means have this, that, or the other City
directorship, or are political advisers to this or that big corporation they
would struggle financially. Some of the biggest corporations have quite a bevy
of political advisers, and not from all Benches! For my own part I have no City
directorship or emoluments from any outside source. If I were to stand up in
the House and hammer home the truths you publish, Central Office would not lose
a day before going to work in my constituency. Someone else would be put
forward as the official candidate at the next election and I would be ditched.”
Kerby’s
ironical understanding of his colleagues in Parliament shows something of the
reality of life in the Palace of Westminster, as it does the unreality of many
popular conceptions of what takes place there. While it cannot be said that the
politician is a greatly esteemed figure in modern Britain few people realize
how great the difference between Parliamentary values and the values held in
private life.”
Captain Henry Kerby MP (1914-1971) introduced an Early
Day Motion in 1964 calling for the power to issue money to be restored to the
Crown. This confirmed him as an enemy of international finance and a hero to
the far right. He was also a fierce supporter of the duodecimal system who
called decimalization: “this metric madness, this alien academic
nonsense, introduced by the back door by a bunch of cranks and the big business
tycoons.”
We now know that Kerby was a wartime SAS officer who
fought with Tito’s Partisans. He spoke prefect Russian and acted as a
parliamentary interpreter during the visit of Nicolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev
in 1956. He retired from MI5 1966 but he continued to spy on his fellow
parliamentarians. He tipped off Harold Macmillan about the Profumo affair,
spread the rumour that Ted Heath was homosexual, and alleged that Harold Wilson
was a Soviet agent. But despite his anti-socialist pretentions he ended his
days as Harold Wilson’s personal spy inside the Tory Party.
This article is based on; Richard Davenport-Hines, An English Affair. Peter Wright, Spycatcher, and Freddie Feest, On Red Alert).
Gas
and Hypocrisy
In recent years the British and French air forces under
NATO command have bombed targets in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya killing an
unknown number of civilians. The Americans have killed 2,809 Afghans and
Pakistanis with pilotless drones (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), and
their client state Israel used napalm, depleted uranium shells, white
phosphorus bombs and anti-personnel mines to kill thousands of Palestinian and
Lebanese civilians. With this appalling record of aggression we have no right
to usurp the function of the UN Security Council by intervening in Syria.
The British media doesn’t like the Syrian regime but they
probably wouldn’t like the al-Nusra Front if they took a good look at them.
They are mostly foreign mercenaries armed and funded by Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf States.
The Emirate of Qatar operates the world’s third largest
gas field. They are trying to build a pipeline to export gas from the Persian
Gulf to Turkey. They have spent $3 billion trying to install a puppet regime in
Syria because Bashar al-Assad is allied to rival gas producers Russia and Iran
and will not allow it to cross his territory. Estimates of the potential
European gas market run into trillions of dollars.
But the Syrian war is not just about gas; either poisoned
or natural. It is part of the ongoing struggle between Saudi Arabia supported
by the US, and Iran supported by Russia. Israel is happy to see Syria destroyed
but there is no compelling European interest; Britain and France are just
obeying orders. The centre-right government of Dave Cameron and the centre-left
government of Francois Hollande are united in their unquestioning support for “American
exceptionalism”.
Two years ago rioting mobs burned down Croydon town
centre and terrorized the UK but the Syrians refrained from commenting on our misfortune.
We have got a persistent housing crisis. Our borders are completely out of
control and nobody knows how many illegal immigrants are in the country. Our
public services are being starved of investment and youth unemployment is
unacceptably high. We have got more than enough problems without sticking our
noses into the Middle East. Following the decisive vote in Parliament we should
stop pretending to be a world power and sack William Hague; a strutting,
boastful, ridiculous Foreign Secretary who thinks he is Lord Palmeston sending
a gunboat to put down a native uprising.
John
Tyndall on Europe and the Commonwealth
John Tyndall had a long and turbulent political career but
in death he has become the spiritual leader of the far right. He believed in
restoring our ties with the white dominions and his followers are still
pursuing that policy. His thoughts were set out in a National Front booklet
from the seventies entitled “Britain: World Power of Pauper State”.
“Australia,
New Zealand and Canada do not have to be won back into the Commonwealth; they
are in it now. They have to be persuaded to join with Britain in making the
Commonwealth more than just a phrase, in making it work as a co-ordinated body
able to count in the balance of modern world power. South Africa and Rhodesia
have to be persuaded to rejoin and thence to do the same for their co-members. If
we were living in any period before 1918 it would be realistic to propose that
these countries enter immediately into a full political federation which would
grant to some supreme ruling body executive powers over foreign policy, trade
and tariffs, defence and other major fields of decision. This was always a
desirable course for the Empire and Commonwealth, and for a long time it might
have been straightaway feasible had there been in the leading Commonwealth
nation, Britain, a government with the determination to pursue it. Much water
has flowed under the bridge since that time and the best prospect that the
immediate future can offer is that the countries concerned may be persuaded to
return to a relationship based on strong voluntary co-operation such as existed
between 1918 and 1945.”
Britain tried to unite the Empire at Ottawa in 1932. But
British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s plan for Empire Free Trade was vetoed
by the United States. We were in no position to defy America. British exports
had slumped by 50% since 1929; we had a trade deficit of £100 million (£1.6
billion in today’s money) and 3 million unemployed. Eighty years later a
reconstructed Commonwealth is just as unlikely because Canada is fully
integrated into the North American Free Trade Area, South Africa and Zimbabwe
are black-run states, and Australia and New Zealand have found new markets. The
following quotation is from John Tyndall’s book The Eleventh Hour:
“In
this book I have emphasized the national and British interest, and called for
the building in Britain of a movement of nationalism. This is necessary because
Britain is our country and it must come first in our priorities – along with
those other countries sharing with us a British heritage. But none of this
should obscure the fact that, at a certain level our struggle is global – just
as we are confronted by a global enemy. I have acknowledged our spiritual and
intellectual debt to nationalist thinkers of the era preceding 1914, and it is
a considerable one. But in our thinking today and in the future nationalism
must take on something of a different dimension to the one dominant at that
stage of history. Over and above the rivalries of nations, there is the
transcending interest of Western Civilization, Western Culture and – as the
creator of these things – the White European Race. Here we must see “The West”,
not in the form currently fashionable: as a coalition of organized in mutual
defence of the dubious blessings of ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘capitalism’, but
as a cultural and above all racial entity. In this regard, the peoples of
Eastern Europe currently under communist rule are in truth part of the same
entity.”
John Tyndall was a nationalist who campaigned against the
European Union but he recognized our cultural and racial origins and he even
accepted our kinship with the peoples east of the Oder-Neisse Line. The British
people are worried about the economy, crime and immigration. Those implacably
opposed to Europe will vote Ukip and carry on dreaming of Empire, but those of
us who acknowledge “the transcending interest of Western Civilization” know
that the Commonwealth will not be revived and that we must fully engage with
Europe.
The free movement of labour policy was drawn up in the
days of full employment but the founding fathers of the EU never envisaged mass
migration from the former Soviet bloc. All the major states of Europe are
experiencing the same problems so there will be no problem in changing the
rules. And Angela Merkel’s stunning victory in the German general election
means that Europe is on track towards political and economic union.
Contrary to the propaganda of the popular press the EU is
governed by its member states. Margaret Thatcher negotiated her rebate, the Poles
kept aspects of their legal system, and the Danes linked the krona to the euro.
National requirements are being met within the framework of the EU. It’s up to
us to make it fit for purpose.
Union
Movement Policies
The world has changed dramatically since the demise of
Union Movement nearly forty years ago. Communism has collapsed in Russia and
turned into rampant capitalism in China. The European empires in Africa and
Asia have gone. Britain is recovering from the worst recession since the
thirties but we are still stumbling from one crisis to another. Our borders are
almost unguarded against an invasion of economic refugees, our defence relies
on NATO, our energy policies are in chaos and we are at the mercy of world
trade. People are increasingly disillusioned with party politics but none of
the existing parties offer a way out. We will not be developing Africa as
envisioned by Oswald Mosley, and the UK demographic has changed. But the core
policies of Union Movement have stood the test of time. They are outlined in
the following leaflet from the early sixties.
Britain
should join with Europe, the former white dominions and southern Africa in
creating a great “third force” in the world, independent of both America and
Russia. This “third force” should have a central government for its defence,
the economy, finance and scientific development, with power to raise wages and
control prices as production increased for a guaranteed market, insulated
against unfair competition from the rest of the world.
The
pressures on our housing and other social problems should be eased by stopping
further immigration and by returning post-war immigrants to good jobs and
conditions in their homelands to which prosperity had been returned by using
the surplus wealth and production of united Europe. Britain should make a start
now.
The
housing problem should be relieved by taking it out of the hands of local
authorities and entrusting it to the government, with power to treat it as an
“operation of war”. That is, the government should organize the mass production
of houses for the people, as they organized the mass-production of armaments
during the war. The rents of the houses thus cheaply produced should be further
reduced by the provision by government of low-interest loans for housing, paid
for by high-interest loans for luxury construction or enterprise.
While
there should be a central European government there should also be independent
national and regional governments for each European country and the main
regions. This would enable England, Wales, Scotland and other European
countries to have their own parliaments for internal affairs and for the
preservation of their national and regional cultures.
There
should be freedom of speech for everyone, guaranteed by the government, which
should maintain law and order in the State and take effective action against
mob violence, which today denies freedom of expression to any view of which its
agitators disapprove.
There
should be freedom of the press, for both newspapers and the public. Any man who
felt himself misrepresented in the press should be guaranteed (by law) equal
space to reply in the newspaper concerned. This would free the public from the
expense of seeing justice through costly libel actions and free the newspapers
from the legal blackmail of a threatened libel action by some unscrupulous
racketeer.
Government
elected by the whole people alone should govern, and that both trade unions and
employers must obey the law. But government should give clear economic
leadership to get better wages and to stop price rises as science increases the
means of production. Then we will have co-operation instead of conflict in
industry.
The
“brain drain” should be halted and a new spirit of national service aroused in
our British people by relating all reward directly to skill, effort, initiative
and responsibility. There should be “great reward for great service”, crowned
by higher pensions drawn from the wealth of the new economic system.
Neville
Bealing
I recently received an enquiry about Neville Bealing from
Jose Bellido Anon, a postdoctoral scholar at Birkbeck College, London
University who is working on the history of post-war Britain in the twentieth
century. I was able to tell him that Neville Bealing was a political activist
with the National Labour Party; a forerunner of the National Front led by John
Bean and Andrew Fountaine. He spoke at their inaugural meeting in 1957,
together with John Tyndall, and he wrote an article in the first issue of Combat calling for white solidarity and workers’
partnership.
I did not know Neville Bealing (I was only 12 in 1957)
but his contemporaries remember him as an imposing figure who spoke several
languages including ancient Greek and Persian. He was a follower of Francis
Parker Yockey and part of a convivial group that frequented the Black Horse in
Kentish Town; this included Bert Clare, Peter Greenslade, Frank Leonard and the
enigmatic John Gaster.
In 2009 a non-political fellow linguist called Michael
Rank posted the following article on his website:
“I am not impressed with GCHQ. I dare say Britain’s main intelligence gathering centre doesn’t feel
the need to impress the likes of me (or probably you), but it could have been
more helpful nevertheless.
I
emailed GCHQ a few weeks ago about a colleague, Neville Bealing, who died
recently aged 83. I was going to say a few words at his funeral in a week’s
time, so I asked them politely and somewhat hesitantly if they could confirm
that Neville worked for GCHQ (or its predecessor) about 50 years ago.
He
had mentioned to a colleague that he had worked for GCHQ, and it must have been
as long ago as the late 1940s or the early 50s as he worked for the company I
work for as a translator for an amazing 50 years. He retired (reluctantly) only
a year or two before his death.
I
didn’t expect GCHQ to tell me much; just confirmation that he had worked there
would have been enough.
But
they didn’t even reply. Not so much as an acknowledgement, not even a computer
generated one. This doesn’t surprise me hugely but it does make me angry. I
don’t like to be ignored when I ask a polite, reasonable question…
Oh,
as a tribute to Neville I would like to mention his other main claim to fame.
He sat on Thomas Hardy’s knee as a baby. His father was a photographer in
Shaftesbury, Dorset, so he must surely have taken a photograph of this great
event, but Neville told me he had never seen a copy”.
