Almost Forgotten Genius: Rider Haggard by Ian Buckley
Originally published in Spearhead - spearhead.co.uk
Though a vastly popular writer at one time, Henry Rider Haggard is now more or less ignored. Even King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain and She have almost disappeared from the bookshops and libraries, to say nothing of the writer's forty odd other books, most of which have been out of print for decades.
This neglect of Haggard is no accident, but rather reflects a considered policy of the poisonous cult of political correctness. His stories always celebrate the virtues of honour, nobility, loyalty and courage, and so are at odds with the shabby modern world, whose only real God is money. Rider Haggard saw the beginnings of this distasteful trend and, as he says towards the end of Allan Quatermain (1887):
"Well it is not a good world - nobody can say that it is, save those who wilfully blind themselves to facts. How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and self-interest the guiding star? The wonder is not that it is so bad, but there should be any good left in it."
Or again, in Allan Quatermain, we find the following pithy and wise comment:
"For instance the law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money. A man may half-kick his wife to death or inflict horrible sufferings upon his children at a much cheaper rate of punishment than he can compound for the theft of a pair of old boots."
Surely in his own sub-creational world, the dashing Allan Quatermain has more reality about him than does the ludicrous figure of the Prime Deciever, Mr Tony Blair!
Henry Rider Haggard was born in 1856 at West Bradenham, Norfolk, the son of the local squire. The youngest of eight children, he was a slow developer and was originally viewed as the family dunce. Today, ambitious young people face continually diminishing horizons, but fortunately for Haggard there were many opportunities then available in Africa.
Like his close friend, Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard played an active part in building the British Empire. As private secretary to Commissioner Shepstone, he was one of the party that annexes the Transvaal in 1887. Again like Kipling, he was a keen defender of British imperial expansion, but also had some sympathy to spare for those displaced by the process. For, in the final analysis was it the British Empire that advanced into the Zulu homeland... or the Rothschild Empire, seeking gold and diamonds and - more important - the raw power that these precious commodities represented?
Another reason for Haggard's present-day unpopularity can be found in his Private Diaries published in 1980. These diaries reveal him to be an unabashed conspiracy theorist. Those who hold up their hands in horror at this should reflect that Rider Haggard only came to these particular views after long and careful reflexion, just as was the case with another famous author and administrator, John Buchan. Are such men, with wide experience of the world of public service, likely to have been completely wrong? My own view is that, in matters of great national and international importance, there should never be any forbidden areas of discussion. If any taboo subjects exist, then logically one should become more suspicious on encountering them, while always taking care not to descend into gibbering paranoia.
In any case, Rider Haggard's opinions on what happened in South Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century have now been mostly confirmed by a mainstream book, The Randlords, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.
Haggard's first major literary success, King Solomon's Mines, was written as the result of a bet that he made that he could produce an adventure story as good as Stevenson's Treasure Island. As with most of Haggard's later books, King Solomon's Mines is a blend of carefully observed realism and wild flights of imagination.
Haggard's interest in the esoteric and supernatural came to the fore in She, a story of the undying Ayesha, ruler of the lost kingdom of Kor. She, with its blend of mysticism and carefully sketched archeological background, was appreciated by no lesser figure than Carl Jung. Rider Haggard's She can be understood and appreciated on many different levels - as is the true mark of a great writer. The following quote illustrates this:
"The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature. Ah! If man would but see that hope is from within and not from without - that he himself must work out his own salvation."
The rest of Haggard's many books cover so many different genres - historical fiction, fantasy and adventure, for instance - that it is quite difficult to single out specific works. A good introduction to his historical fiction would be The Wanderer's Necklace, which tells the tale of the Norseman Olaf, who became captain of the Varangian guard at Constantinople:
"Instantly from three hundred throats, above the sound of running feet that drew ever nearer, came the answering shout of "Valhalla, Valhalla! Victory or Valhalla!" Then out of the gloom up dashed the Northmen."
Eric Brighteyes, written some 25 years before The Wanderer's Necklace, also explores the ancient Northern world, and is perhaps the best modern work written in the form of an Icelandic saga.
"When Eric left her, Gudruda drew yet nearer to the edge of the mighty falls, and seated herself on the very brink. Her breast was full of joy, and there she sat let the splendour of the night and the greatness of the rushing sounds sink into her heart. Yonder shore the setting sun, poised, as it were, on Westman's distant peaks, and here sped the waters, and by that path Eric had come back to her."
The twenty odd books ans short stories devoted to the exploits of Allan Quatermain are also worthy of attention. Though some might (wrongly) view these adventure stories as juvenile, they are at the very least a welcome antidote to the electronic cesspit of television.
After his return from Africa, Haggard became an expert on the land, agriculture and rural poverty. His non-fiction books such as The Land and the Poor and A Farmer's Year based on extensive research and travelling, deal with problems such as rural depopulation. Haggard was one of the few men of influence who expressed sympathy and concern for the rural poor, a fact which should not be forgotten. It was for this work that Rider Haggard was knighted in 1912. His autobiography, The Days of My Life, published in 1926, just after his death.
Complete editions of most of Rider Haggard's books can be found online - including some hard-to-find out-of-print works - at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ and http://www.blackmask.com/
Economic Reasons
Coal was not phased out in Britain because of concerns about pollution and global warming. Those issues were
discussed at the time but the real reason was that coal miners were the highest paid industrial workers in the country and gas was cheap and plentiful.
We were taught that the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833 out of Christian charity. But the white working class worked for such low wages that they were actually cheaper to employ than slaves that had to be shipped from Africa and fed. Mechanisation and poverty were the real liberators.
When Idi Amin expelled the Uganda Asians in 1972 prime minister Ted Heath was reluctant to accept them as refugees, until he realised that they included doctors, dentists opticians, and accountants. We were desperately short of professional people at the time and the Uganda Asians helped to fill job vacancies. His actions have been lauded by liberals and condemned by conservatives but they were simply expedient.
Margaret Thatcher was critical of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 but she was originally a pro-European. As a shopkeeper's daughter she knew the value of money. Our
affinity to Europe is based on blood and culture but it has always been dictated by economics. We are an offshore island separated from half a billion people by 30km of sea. Isolation does not make sense.
A National Revolution
Those of us who believe in European unity but are opposed to Third World immigration and unrestrained capitalism are effectively disenfranchised. The Labour Party is weak and divided. The Conservatives are dominated by right wing reactionaries like Boris Johnson and Liam Fox. The Liberal Democrats are sound on Europe but weak on almost everything else. The Greens want to save the planet but they are not interested in European civilisation. Ukip are petty nationalists and so are the little parties of the far-right.
We are still suffering from the global financial crisis of 2008. Unless we find a way to revive the economy our insurance companies and pension funds will not be able cope with near zero interest rates and the government will not be able to sell bonds. We are a low wage economy with a desperate housing shortage and a failing National Health Service. The British public have reacted to austerity by voting to quit the EU but that will only make things worse.
The world has largely benefited from global capitalism. Nearly everything is cheaper and people have been able to work and study wherever they want to. But the downside is that manufacturing industry has declined in Europe and North America to the point where people are not earning enough money to afford the cheap goods available.
This crisis of capitalism will eventually lead to the breakdown of the global system predicted by Oswald Mosley. When the lights go out, the supermarket shelves are empty, and our credit cards stop working, even the well-behaved British will be driven to revolution. Several times we have come close to economic collapse. In 1944 it was the Bretton Woods Agreement that saved us from bankruptcy, in 1976 it was an emergency loan from the IMF, and in 2008 we lent ourselves the money by Quantitative Easing; a practice made respectable by the Japanese. But our national luck will not last forever and when it runs out anything will be possible.
Harold Soref
Last month marked one hundred years since the birth of Harold Soref. He was born in Hampstead on December 18 1916 and died in London in 1993.
Most Jews of his generation supported the Labour Party but he was proud to be British and acted as a standard bearer at Oswald Mosley's great BUF rally at Olympia in 1934.
He was educated at St Pauls' School, Hammersmith and at Queen's College, Oxford. His father had been a pioneer in Rhodesia and the young Harold specialised in colonial studies. In 1937 he was sent to the All-British African Congress in Bulawayo to set up the African Defence Federation.
He served in the Royal Scots' Regiment and the Intelligence Corps during WW2 and worked as a freelance journalist until elected as Conservative MP for Ormskirk in 1970. He lost his seat in 1974 to Robert Kilroy-Silk of the Labour Party.
He was a founder member of the Anglo-Rhodesia Society, a prominent member of the Monday Club and a fearless defender of South Africa. He was frequently attacked by left wing thugs but he campaigned tirelessly against terrorism, pornography and declining standards. In 1965 he wrote The Puppeteers, with Ian Greig, which exposed the organisations and individuals behind the anti-South African campaign. In 1964 the Williamses, a coloured (mixed race) family from Capetown, were brought to England by Christian Action. The Guardian reported that they had suffered no persecution and that apartheid was not the reason for their leaving. But the usual suspects made themselves busy: "Mrs Judith Hart, the Labour MP for Lanark and Vice Chairman of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, raised the matter in the House of Commons and later led a deputation to see Selwyn Lloyd."
Albert Friedlander wrote in The Independent: "There was a total consistency in all that he did and, while he did listen to others, he rarely changed his point of view. He was clear, lucid, bitter, and out of step with the world."
The Israelis commemorate Righteous Gentiles that have served their cause. If we had a similar memorial to Righteous Jews that had served Britain Harold Soref would certainly
have an honoured place.
Though a vastly popular writer at one time, Henry Rider Haggard is now more or less ignored. Even King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain and She have almost disappeared from the bookshops and libraries, to say nothing of the writer's forty odd other books, most of which have been out of print for decades.
This neglect of Haggard is no accident, but rather reflects a considered policy of the poisonous cult of political correctness. His stories always celebrate the virtues of honour, nobility, loyalty and courage, and so are at odds with the shabby modern world, whose only real God is money. Rider Haggard saw the beginnings of this distasteful trend and, as he says towards the end of Allan Quatermain (1887):
"Well it is not a good world - nobody can say that it is, save those who wilfully blind themselves to facts. How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and self-interest the guiding star? The wonder is not that it is so bad, but there should be any good left in it."
Or again, in Allan Quatermain, we find the following pithy and wise comment:
"For instance the law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money. A man may half-kick his wife to death or inflict horrible sufferings upon his children at a much cheaper rate of punishment than he can compound for the theft of a pair of old boots."
Surely in his own sub-creational world, the dashing Allan Quatermain has more reality about him than does the ludicrous figure of the Prime Deciever, Mr Tony Blair!
Henry Rider Haggard was born in 1856 at West Bradenham, Norfolk, the son of the local squire. The youngest of eight children, he was a slow developer and was originally viewed as the family dunce. Today, ambitious young people face continually diminishing horizons, but fortunately for Haggard there were many opportunities then available in Africa.
Like his close friend, Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard played an active part in building the British Empire. As private secretary to Commissioner Shepstone, he was one of the party that annexes the Transvaal in 1887. Again like Kipling, he was a keen defender of British imperial expansion, but also had some sympathy to spare for those displaced by the process. For, in the final analysis was it the British Empire that advanced into the Zulu homeland... or the Rothschild Empire, seeking gold and diamonds and - more important - the raw power that these precious commodities represented?
Another reason for Haggard's present-day unpopularity can be found in his Private Diaries published in 1980. These diaries reveal him to be an unabashed conspiracy theorist. Those who hold up their hands in horror at this should reflect that Rider Haggard only came to these particular views after long and careful reflexion, just as was the case with another famous author and administrator, John Buchan. Are such men, with wide experience of the world of public service, likely to have been completely wrong? My own view is that, in matters of great national and international importance, there should never be any forbidden areas of discussion. If any taboo subjects exist, then logically one should become more suspicious on encountering them, while always taking care not to descend into gibbering paranoia.
In any case, Rider Haggard's opinions on what happened in South Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century have now been mostly confirmed by a mainstream book, The Randlords, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft.
Haggard's first major literary success, King Solomon's Mines, was written as the result of a bet that he made that he could produce an adventure story as good as Stevenson's Treasure Island. As with most of Haggard's later books, King Solomon's Mines is a blend of carefully observed realism and wild flights of imagination.
Haggard's interest in the esoteric and supernatural came to the fore in She, a story of the undying Ayesha, ruler of the lost kingdom of Kor. She, with its blend of mysticism and carefully sketched archeological background, was appreciated by no lesser figure than Carl Jung. Rider Haggard's She can be understood and appreciated on many different levels - as is the true mark of a great writer. The following quote illustrates this:
"The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature. Ah! If man would but see that hope is from within and not from without - that he himself must work out his own salvation."
The rest of Haggard's many books cover so many different genres - historical fiction, fantasy and adventure, for instance - that it is quite difficult to single out specific works. A good introduction to his historical fiction would be The Wanderer's Necklace, which tells the tale of the Norseman Olaf, who became captain of the Varangian guard at Constantinople:
"Instantly from three hundred throats, above the sound of running feet that drew ever nearer, came the answering shout of "Valhalla, Valhalla! Victory or Valhalla!" Then out of the gloom up dashed the Northmen."
Eric Brighteyes, written some 25 years before The Wanderer's Necklace, also explores the ancient Northern world, and is perhaps the best modern work written in the form of an Icelandic saga.
"When Eric left her, Gudruda drew yet nearer to the edge of the mighty falls, and seated herself on the very brink. Her breast was full of joy, and there she sat let the splendour of the night and the greatness of the rushing sounds sink into her heart. Yonder shore the setting sun, poised, as it were, on Westman's distant peaks, and here sped the waters, and by that path Eric had come back to her."
The twenty odd books ans short stories devoted to the exploits of Allan Quatermain are also worthy of attention. Though some might (wrongly) view these adventure stories as juvenile, they are at the very least a welcome antidote to the electronic cesspit of television.
After his return from Africa, Haggard became an expert on the land, agriculture and rural poverty. His non-fiction books such as The Land and the Poor and A Farmer's Year based on extensive research and travelling, deal with problems such as rural depopulation. Haggard was one of the few men of influence who expressed sympathy and concern for the rural poor, a fact which should not be forgotten. It was for this work that Rider Haggard was knighted in 1912. His autobiography, The Days of My Life, published in 1926, just after his death.
Complete editions of most of Rider Haggard's books can be found online - including some hard-to-find out-of-print works - at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ and http://www.blackmask.com/
Economic Reasons
Coal was not phased out in Britain because of concerns about pollution and global warming. Those issues were
discussed at the time but the real reason was that coal miners were the highest paid industrial workers in the country and gas was cheap and plentiful.
We were taught that the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833 out of Christian charity. But the white working class worked for such low wages that they were actually cheaper to employ than slaves that had to be shipped from Africa and fed. Mechanisation and poverty were the real liberators.
When Idi Amin expelled the Uganda Asians in 1972 prime minister Ted Heath was reluctant to accept them as refugees, until he realised that they included doctors, dentists opticians, and accountants. We were desperately short of professional people at the time and the Uganda Asians helped to fill job vacancies. His actions have been lauded by liberals and condemned by conservatives but they were simply expedient.
Margaret Thatcher was critical of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 but she was originally a pro-European. As a shopkeeper's daughter she knew the value of money. Our
affinity to Europe is based on blood and culture but it has always been dictated by economics. We are an offshore island separated from half a billion people by 30km of sea. Isolation does not make sense.
A National Revolution
Those of us who believe in European unity but are opposed to Third World immigration and unrestrained capitalism are effectively disenfranchised. The Labour Party is weak and divided. The Conservatives are dominated by right wing reactionaries like Boris Johnson and Liam Fox. The Liberal Democrats are sound on Europe but weak on almost everything else. The Greens want to save the planet but they are not interested in European civilisation. Ukip are petty nationalists and so are the little parties of the far-right.
We are still suffering from the global financial crisis of 2008. Unless we find a way to revive the economy our insurance companies and pension funds will not be able cope with near zero interest rates and the government will not be able to sell bonds. We are a low wage economy with a desperate housing shortage and a failing National Health Service. The British public have reacted to austerity by voting to quit the EU but that will only make things worse.
The world has largely benefited from global capitalism. Nearly everything is cheaper and people have been able to work and study wherever they want to. But the downside is that manufacturing industry has declined in Europe and North America to the point where people are not earning enough money to afford the cheap goods available.
This crisis of capitalism will eventually lead to the breakdown of the global system predicted by Oswald Mosley. When the lights go out, the supermarket shelves are empty, and our credit cards stop working, even the well-behaved British will be driven to revolution. Several times we have come close to economic collapse. In 1944 it was the Bretton Woods Agreement that saved us from bankruptcy, in 1976 it was an emergency loan from the IMF, and in 2008 we lent ourselves the money by Quantitative Easing; a practice made respectable by the Japanese. But our national luck will not last forever and when it runs out anything will be possible.
Harold Soref
Last month marked one hundred years since the birth of Harold Soref. He was born in Hampstead on December 18 1916 and died in London in 1993.
Most Jews of his generation supported the Labour Party but he was proud to be British and acted as a standard bearer at Oswald Mosley's great BUF rally at Olympia in 1934.
He was educated at St Pauls' School, Hammersmith and at Queen's College, Oxford. His father had been a pioneer in Rhodesia and the young Harold specialised in colonial studies. In 1937 he was sent to the All-British African Congress in Bulawayo to set up the African Defence Federation.
He served in the Royal Scots' Regiment and the Intelligence Corps during WW2 and worked as a freelance journalist until elected as Conservative MP for Ormskirk in 1970. He lost his seat in 1974 to Robert Kilroy-Silk of the Labour Party.
He was a founder member of the Anglo-Rhodesia Society, a prominent member of the Monday Club and a fearless defender of South Africa. He was frequently attacked by left wing thugs but he campaigned tirelessly against terrorism, pornography and declining standards. In 1965 he wrote The Puppeteers, with Ian Greig, which exposed the organisations and individuals behind the anti-South African campaign. In 1964 the Williamses, a coloured (mixed race) family from Capetown, were brought to England by Christian Action. The Guardian reported that they had suffered no persecution and that apartheid was not the reason for their leaving. But the usual suspects made themselves busy: "Mrs Judith Hart, the Labour MP for Lanark and Vice Chairman of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, raised the matter in the House of Commons and later led a deputation to see Selwyn Lloyd."
Albert Friedlander wrote in The Independent: "There was a total consistency in all that he did and, while he did listen to others, he rarely changed his point of view. He was clear, lucid, bitter, and out of step with the world."
The Israelis commemorate Righteous Gentiles that have served their cause. If we had a similar memorial to Righteous Jews that had served Britain Harold Soref would certainly
have an honoured place.
Racism and Nationalism
Racism originally meant a dislike of other races but it has come to include different nationalities. Hostility towards the Irish, Poles, and Romanians is regarded as racism and some people are so anti-American that they can only be described as racists.
All of the great religions
proscribe racism and inciting racial hatred is illegal in most of the world. But despite a century of racial equality in Brazil the whites are
still at the top of society, the blacks are in the middle and the
Amerindians are at the bottom. Similar arrangements apply throughout Latin
America.
The Hindu caste system is known as Varna by the Indians. The word caste is from the Portuguese "casta" which means "race." Discrimination has been illegal since independence but it still dominates Indian society, with the fair-skinned Brahmins at the top and the dark-skinned Dalits at the bottom.
Race is intertwined with class and income. A rich black man in the USA is better off than a poor white man but he might still be the victim of discrimination. It is also mixed up with culture. The Pieds-Noirs in French Algeria were poor whites of Mediterranean stock but they were Europeans and the Algerians were Arabs. There was little racial difference between them but the cultural division was decisive. Over a million Pieds-Noirs fled to France after Algerian independence in 1962.
There was even less to distinguish Slavs from Germans but the Nazis thought that there was. Adolf Hitler was so convinced of the inferiority of the Russians that he refused to take the Red Army seriously until it stormed the gates of Berlin. His racial theories led him to believe that they would not be able to fight a modern war, and in pursuit of this nonsense he destroyed most of Europe.
Nationalism is not necessarily racial. America is a multi-racial country united by "American Exceptionalism," and civic nationalism is promoted by Ukip who are putting up non-white candidates and restricting their hate campaign to European immigrants.
We have the technology to feed all the people in the world but we also have the power to destroy them. Pakistan, India, China, North Korea, and Israel have atomic weapons and Japan, South Korea, and Iran have nuclear programs. The United States has enough nuclear warheads to destroy the planet; the NATO countries, including Turkey, have access to nuclear weapons, and Britain and France have their own nuclear arsenals. With so much firepower at our disposal we should avoid sabre-rattling.
Overproduction and mass migration are the hallmarks of global capitalism. An equitable distribution of land and resources would require a new world order based on geopolitical self-sufficiency.
Ideas and Suggestions
You will note that I do not recommend any of the so-called 'evidence' on this subject prepared by the anti-Jewish sector of the Far-Right. Although many of the followers past and present were/are Jewish, so were many of the intellectual followers of Marxism. Today, many, but not all, of such followers have been replaced by the 'uni-trained' sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. In essence this is why some of us are concerned with the existing influence of the Frankfurt School of social theory thought
.
My fundamental reply to your theme is that the EU as an institution has long since ceased to serve the European interest because it has made economic interests paramount, whilst ignoring the cultural and especially the biological concerns of the European people. It has thus aligned itself with our most vicious enemy, the cosmopolitan "liberal elite."
To restore Mosley's original vision of 'Europe a Nation' I believe you'll have to champion the racial factor of our people, united as blood relatives.
John Bean writes: In your latest Nation Revisited you state that a conspiracy theory surrounds the Frankfurt School "that appeals to a deluded minority. But the majority of people put it in the same category as flying saucers of the Loch Ness Monster." I believe that such a comment belittles your knowledge (which normally I respect) and the reliability of your NR blog. Just look at some of the numerous pages on the Frankfurt School's history to the present day which appears on: A. Wikipedia, Frankfurt School of Social Theory and Philosophy. B. Marxist Internal Archive.
You will note that I do not recommend any of the so-called 'evidence' on this subject prepared by the anti-Jewish sector of the Far-Right. Although many of the followers past and present were/are Jewish, so were many of the intellectual followers of Marxism. Today, many, but not all, of such followers have been replaced by the 'uni-trained' sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. In essence this is why some of us are concerned with the existing influence of the Frankfurt School of social theory thought
.
Michael Woodbridge writes: Thanks again for a jolly, thought provoking read. Without writing a blog myself I couldn't do justice to every point you made.
My fundamental reply to your theme is that the EU as an institution has long since ceased to serve the European interest because it has made economic interests paramount, whilst ignoring the cultural and especially the biological concerns of the European people. It has thus aligned itself with our most vicious enemy, the cosmopolitan "liberal elite."
To restore Mosley's original vision of 'Europe a Nation' I believe you'll have to champion the racial factor of our people, united as blood relatives.
European Outlook
Our sister blog is posted on http://europeanoutlook.blogspot.co.uk
