Thursday, March 30, 2006

EUROPEAN SONAN

INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN DE BENOIST


Bryan Sylvian conducted the following exclusive interview with Alain de Benoist,a prominent intellectual in the European New Right and a founder of the Centrefor Research and Study on European Civilization (Groupement de Rechercheet d’Études sur la Civilisation Européene—GRECE). Mikayel Raffi assisted inthe translation.Few schools of thought come even close to the range and depth of the European NewRight, from its Indo-European origins to the current biotech revolution and everythought current in between. This holds especially true for the dynamic core personifiedin one of the philosophical prime movers of France’s New Right: Alain de Benoist.

The French New Right (hereafter NR) greeted the new century ready for action,and proved it by issuing a manifesto for the whole world to read. Alain de Benoist(b. 1943), along with Charles Champetier, crafted that statement, which took stock ofthe NR since its birth in 1968 and fashioned a weapon for future intellectual combatin response to its critical assessment of our present predicament. The NR manifesto,“The French New Right in the Year 2000,” along with a biography of Alain de Benoistand a selection of his writings, can be viewed online (“Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist”http://www.alaindebenoist.com/).

The interview is a snippet from a much larger one that fleshes out the 2000NR manifesto. It may also be the first exposure to the NR’s outlook for many in theEnglish-speaking world, for whom so little of the NR’s output has been translated. Thisinterview may serve as the first exposure of many in the English-speaking world to the NR’s thought.

To read on, please go to http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol5no3/53-bs-debenoist.pdf

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

BENOIST’S PLURIVERSUMAN ETHNONATIONALIST CRITIQUE

by Michael O’MEARA

It is testament to The Occidental Quarterly’s growing stature that it has eliciteda major interview from one of Europe’s foremost anti-liberal thinkers.For too long, America’s nationalist right, indeed the right in general, hasexisted in an intellectual netherworld of free-marketeers (Wal-Mart über Alles),CIA intellectuals (Burnham/Buckley), Kirkian reactionaries, Bible-thumpers,and conspiracy nuts, all of whom, as Alain de Benoist notes in the aboveinterview, defend a system that destroys the very things they seek to conserve.With TOQ, white nationalists, radical traditionalists, biological realists, andother anti-liberals take up a different project, as they endeavor to work out anintellectual synthesis of the latest science and the most primordial forms ofEuropean thought to address not just the failures of American conservatism,but the nation’s historical-ontological tasks.

Benoist’s oeuvre is a good place to begin the intellectual rearmamentof America’s nationalist right, for no postwar thinker has brought as muchauthority and acumen to his critique of the liberal system threatening the whiterace. The ideas with which he and the European New Right are associatedhave, however, still to find an audience in the Anglo-American world. Theanti-intellectual, self-centered character of anglophone culture Benoist evokesto explain this paucity of interest might be questioned, but it is undoubtedlythe case that his reputation among us rests on a small number of translatedarticles—a mere fraction of an opus comprising fifty books and several thousandarticles—that have appeared in Telos, in The Scorpion, or on the Internet overthe last decade or so. This, though, may at last be changing. In addition toTOQ’s current interest, Ultra Press of Atlanta has just published the firstEnglish translation of a Benoist book; my New Right, New Culture makes anexposition and critique of his ideas comparable (I like to think) to Continentalones; and the Castilian website Nueva Derecha (http://foster.20megsfree.com/),perhaps the most authoritative New Right archive, now contains more than300 English-language articles.

I suspect TOQ readers will be impressed by the range, richness, anddepth of Benoist’s thought. Impression, however, is likely to be mixed withreservation—for reasons this short article hopes to provide. Like many of thegreat European opponents of the liberal-democratic regimes of money theUnited States imposed on defeated Europe in 1945, Benoist’s anti-liberalism descends from a tradition forced underground by the liberal-communist victors.Accepting the “biological realism” and “revolutionary conservatism” of thisrepressed legacy, the early GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d’études pourla civilisation européenne), under Benoist’s leadership, aimed at exposingthe fraudulent foundations of the various postwar occupation governmentsinstalled by Washington. With an extraordinarily sharp pen and the supportof an equally extraordinary group of collaborators (Louis Rougier, GiorgioLocchi, Guillaume Faye, Robert Steuckers, Pierre Krebs, among others), theyoung Benoist helped make GRECE an intellectual force—some would say,the intellectual force—on Europe’s anti-liberal right. Yet at the same time (andanglophone nationalists are less likely to realize this), he was no less responsiblefor leading the New Right into a dead end, compromising its project and makingundue concessions to the liberalism he ostensibly opposes.

An article of this size is not the place to examine the origin and course ofBenoist’s intellectual trajectory. But much of what is problematic in it is evidentin the above interview, beginning with his comments on metapolitics. As theextant New Right literature of the 1970s documents, GRECE’s initial understandingof metapolitics was not the innocuous ”transversal” of the so-calledmanifesto, but an explicitly Gramscian one, aimed at preparing the culturalrevolution requisite to an antiliberal political revolution. As the young Benoistput it: without Marx, no Lenin. That is, without a revolutionary critique of theexisting model of cultural subversion, a victorious assault on the citadels ofliberal power would be unthinkable. Besides depoliticizing the New Right’sproject, his redefinition now reduces metapolitics to an academic exercise,whose principal concern is promoting the “differentialist” world view whichhas shaped his thought since the 1980s.

In the optic of this differentialism, the world is a pluriversum of diversepeoples, cultures, and civilizations whose differences need defending fromthe leveling, homogenizing forces of liberalism’s global market. As hisformer colleague Guillaume Faye describes it (see “Ethnonationalism vs.Communitarianism: The Faye-Benoist Debate” at Nueva Derecha), this differentialistvision was born of a failed imagination. Following the media blitz of1979, an ensuing period of inquisition sought to muzzle the various dissidentexpressions of New Right thought. To circumvent these censorious restraintsand re-connect with the dominant discourse, Benoist opted to abandon his“compromising” ties to the right’s interwar heritage (especially its biologicalrealism and antiegalitarianism), appropriating the language and principles ofself-determination, diversity, and antiracism—that is, the pluralist principlesof contemporary liberalism—to defend Europe from its biocultural enemies.Instead, then, of pursuing a metapolitical strategy whose assault on the regnantliberalism could neither be ignored nor dismissed, he sought to outmaneuverthe liberals on their own turf—by recovering, diverting, and reversing theirpluralistic discourse in the name of European “difference.” That this discourse, with its abstract defense of identity, now compromises his own thought oughtnot, then, to surprise.

Specifically, his differentialism sought to transform the “rights” that ThirdWorld peoples had acquired in the fifties and sixties (rights, incidentally,which were the gift of Soviet and American efforts to subvert the old Europeanempires) into universal principles that European peoples could use to defendtheir culture and ethnos without having to suffer the stigma of “racism” and“fascism.” As Faye points out, this “turn” began as a “ruse” to mobilize thesystem’s pluralistic principles against its race-mixing ambitions. (This wouldlead one French critic to characterize it as a “differentialist racism”—insofaras it made culture rather than race the principle of exclusion.) Ruse, though,morphed into commitment, as Benoist gradually succumbed to the pluralisminherent in this discourse, confusing what was intended as a clever politicalploy with something inherently worthy of defense. Worse, he became increasinglycomplicit with the pluralism already subverting the European ethnos,assuming positions hardly distinguishable from the prevailing antiwhite ideologiesof equality and human rights. This, in turn, led him to a communitarianliberalism supportive of multiculturalism (and, implicitly, multiracialism)and of those disputable postmodern notions of identity politics that view thesystem’s hyperconsumerist, ultra-individualistic, and permissive behaviorsas symptomatic not of Europe’s decay, but of its future.

The negative ramifications of Benoist’s differentialism have been especiallyprominent in his understanding of race, immigration, and Americanism. Whilewell read in the literature on human genetics and population studies, with manysensible things to say about them, particularly respecting their reductionistabuses, he nevertheless rejects the primacy of racial identity, contrasting hiscultural differentialism to what Trotsky called “zoological materialism.” He isparticularly convincing in arguing that racial factors have a low explanatoryvalue, that human specificity is more social-historical than biological, and thatthe reductionist uses of genetics (in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology,for example) are as indefensible as those which ignore organic criteria. In makingsuch an argument to criticize those who posit the primacy of their racial orbiocultural identity, he nevertheless ends up flogging a dead horse—for evenHitler rejected the sort of racial determinism Benoist poses as the antipodeto his own culturalism. More to the point, ethnonationalists, bioculturalists,and racial realists never see race as an end-all, because race to them is asmuch a matter of culture, history, and life as it is of biological classification.In the antideterminist formulation of the determinist Madison Grant: “Raceimplies hereditary and hereditary implies all the moral, social and intellectualcharacteristics and traits which are the springs of government and politics.”A people’s national character, in a word, is inseparable from the racial stocksundergirding it—even if one accepts that race and culture are causally linkedonly in the last instance. More seriously, Benoist rejects the identities and commitments that racial stocks engender, and thus the preontological signi-fications establishing the organic fundament of a people’s existence. Thosewho defend their race as such defend not a crude biological reductionism, asBenoist contends, but the primacy of their genetic endowment in organicallyshaping their place in the world and, hence, in influencing everything elsethey think worth valuing. (As Aristotle put it, what is prior—in this case,one’s racial ascription—is necessarily posterior).

A similar form of reasoning leads Benoist to claim that the chief problemtoday is not the Third World’s colonization of the white homelands, but thesystem promoting such ethnocidal policies. Again, he is at least partly correctto emphasize that the system’s liberal capitalist tenets are indifferent to whiteracial survival (though I think it revealing that he has not a word for the Jewish“culture of critique” or the left’s racial nihilism). It is quite another thing,however, to argue that the immigrants are not one of the pincer movements ofglobal capital and that their occupation of our lands is not as threatening to ourexistence as the market strategies and corrupt government policies cooked upin the glass and steel office buildings of “New York, London, and Tel Aviv.”By focusing exclusively on the anti-immigrationists’ failure to grasp thesocial-structural basis of the non-white invasion, Benoist reveals somethingabout his scheme of values—and this, apparently, has little to do with anypre-rational attachment, born of blood and kinship, to his people’s geneticinterests (an attachment, I should add, that is not to be confused with theintellectual narrowing that comes from what he calls “ethnocentrism”).

Because he refuses to look behind the ideologically blurred surface of antiimmigrationistactivism and treats it as merely another cultural disorder, heinadvertently disparages the life force this activity, however opaquely, reflects.He seems thus to disparage the instinctual defenses of European life becausecertain erroneous ideas have been associated with them, indicating that hefavors theory over practice, thought over life. At the same time, he refusesto accept that whatever its ultimate cause, immigration poses the principaldanger to future European generations: threatening, as it does, to replace theContinent’s native population with a nonwhite one. As for the same dangerto the whites of North America, he adopts an even more cavalier stance,siding with the country’s aboriginal inhabitants, lambasting its previous racialstandards, and accepting its Mexicanization with detached indifference. Thoughone might agree with his contention that anti-immigrationists are wrong tofocus exclusively on the problems immigrants cause, only by dismissing orminimizing the immigrants’ toxic effect on white communal life can it then beposited that racial differences are socially insignificant, that racial ascriptionsare less constitutive of individual identity than social-cultural ones, or, mostunacceptable of all, that the antiliberal’s role is to identify with Kant’s categoricalimperative rather than with the particularistic imperatives of his people’sexistence. Having rejected the primacy of Europe’s bioculture, it seems hardly coincidental, then, that his differentialism becomes just another form of liberalpluralism, concerned not with the interests of our culture and our people, butwith those of all the others.

I suspect Benoist would prefer an all-white Europe (i.e., a European Europe)to the multiracial/transnational one the Eurocrats envisage—he is, after all,an ardent champion of the European heritage. Nevertheless, the universalistpostulates animating his pluriversum compel him to accommodate the ThirdWorld invasion and deride all who actually resist it. Those, like Faye, whohave been persecuted by the system for criticizing the invaders and calling fora Reconquista, he accordingly dismisses as “crazies,” with the implication thatthey deserve the retribution they bring down on themselves. Again, this seemsless the sentiment of an identitarian whose foremost concern is his people’simminent extinction than the indifferent detachment of a “free-floating intellectual,”fixated on an economistic view of international labor markets, blindto the catastrophic racial effects of Third World immigration, and perhapsweary of offending the left intelligentsia. This, of course, is not to say that he iswrong in arguing that anti-immigrationists who refrain from opposing globalcapitalism would do better to keep their mouths shut. But to leave it at that(especially while championing “diversity”) neglects both the symbolic andpractical significations of human behavior. (This was breath-takingly evidentin an interview Benoist gave last year to the Italian New Right journal Diorama,where he ridiculed the French government’s effort to ban the Muslim head scarffrom its schools, claiming this quintessential symbol of the invaders’ culturehad not the slightest effect on the educational process—as if education werenot about culture and French culture not dangerously menaced by Islam.)Indeed, the universalist pretences of his pluralism seem aimed at repudiatingthe actual (however limited) efforts of whoever resists the system’s subversions.This leads me to wonder if his overly intellectualized engagements are not “thepetty and superfluous activity” that comes, as Heidegger argues, whenevertheoretical or scientific activity is divorced from praxis—that is, whenever itis not treated as “a way of Being-in-the-world” and thus not understood aspart of the existential process that puts life itself in critical perspective. Butmore than encouraging the dilettantish approach to immigration his positionimplies, Benoist seems not to realize that even when analytically wrong, antiimmigrationistsare right in rallying to their people’s defense—just as the grandintellectual, despite his slightly larger though hardly flawless understanding,represents merely another bloodless objectivism justifying abstention from theskirmishes now slowing the enemy’s advance.

Likewise, there is much to criticize in Le Pen’s National Front, but Benoist’sone-sided critique of it has the effect of disparaging the antisystem politics withwhich he allegedly identifies. For within the optic of his critique, little weight isgiven to the fact that the semitotalitarian character of the Holocaust-worshippingNew Class regimes dominating Europe dictates that dissident political formations take positions and propound principles that compromise with the system (justas Benoist himself does whenever he is allowed into the “public sphere,” atFrance-Culture, for instance, to pose a bit of “negativity” to the reigning ideas).To essentialize these compromises, while slighting the antisystem positions theNational Front takes on immigration (as well as on populist resistance to EUsocial engineering and the globalists’ cosmo-capitalism), inevitably stigmatizeswhatever antisystem politics it is possible to practice under present circumstances.His skewed view of the National Front (this “collection of malcontents”)likewise affects his critique of its anti-immigrationism. He claims, for instance,that everything that can be done to halt immigration has been done and that theonly workable solution is to eliminate the system sustaining the internationallabor markets responsible for mixing disparate populations. In effect, the fatalisticprescription of this “Olympian” view posits an ideal of fundamental change(which is perfectly cogent) but simultaneously dismisses all struggles—suchas those waged by the National Front—which might actually prefigure such aradical transformation. To insist, moreover, that the present regime has tried tolimit immigration or to accept at face value the meager measures already takenseems perverse, for in fact nothing of real consequence has been done, and tosay otherwise simply accommodates the ongoing subversion.

But more than minimizing the problems of immigration, Benoistsurreptitiously legitimates the Third World’s invasion. For like those“anti-individualist” (and largely Jewish) liberals in the United States whocall themselves “communitarians,” he advocates a “salad bowl” model ofEurope, with both Europeans and non-European interlopers entitled to formcommunities based on their distinct cultural identities—somewhat in the waythe Ottomans’ despotic millet system allowed subjugated Greek, Armenian,and Serbian Christians to maintain their ethnoreligious institutions, as theywere dispossessed of most else. Similarly, he dismisses the role of race andcivilization as historical forces, downplaying not only the biocultural clashesthat have slashed and scarred the world’s history since Antiquity, but thefact that many of the most important conflicts in today’s world remainbiocultural in nature (as they are fought out between Serbs and “Turks,”Armenians and Azeris, Indians and Pakistanis, Russians and Chechens,Arabs and Jews, etc.).

Finally, a word on his anti-Americanism. Perhaps because I lack the sameappreciation the TOQ editors have for American civilization, I accept much ofBenoist’s critique of it and his argument that, as the preeminent exemplar ofliberal modernity, it is inherently destructive of its own heritage. At moments,I have even argued that in rallying to a government and a president whoseopen borders/free trade/unilateralist policies represent a reckless assault onthe heritage bequeathed by their forefathers, white Americans have never solived up to Mencken’s characterization of them as a bunch of “goose-steppingserfs.” But condemnation of a civilization whose Calvinist economic mania demotes biocultural identities and denies its defining traditions hardly implies,as Benoist assumes, that Americans are qualitatively different from continentalEuropeans—that their 400 years in the New World outweighs their previous30,000 years—or that the blood of Achilles, Cuchulainn, and Roland no longerflows through their veins. While it is undoubtedly true that much of contemporaryAmerican culture lacks anything worth preserving and that its elites,having no “discernible sense of history and culture,” wage a scorched-earthcampaign on the vestiges of its European heritage, America is neither simplyan unfortunate experiment in European liberalism nor the global vanguard ofantiwhite subversion (though it is both). For however cretinized and misled,its white populace represents—if only potentially—a still not insignificantexpression of European life and hence one of the forces which might give riseto another flourishing cycle of European civilization.

Like their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, South Africa,and New Zealand, America’s white inhabitants are the blood descendants ofMother Europe. Though the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia served as theoriginal European homeland, today “Europe” exists wherever white men exist.As one of our more indomitable comrades (Kyle McDermott) puts it: “I am awhite man. Put me on the moon and you know what I’d be?—A white man onthe moon.” In this spirit, Heidegger points out that “Americanism is somethingEuropean”— and something that is more than Benoist’s cultureless, economicenterprise, more also than “the nation of nations,” “the first universal nation,”or “the proposition nation” of the multiculturalists and the antiwhite elites.Thus, however different its course, America remains an organic extension ofEurope. This ought to be evident to the most superficial student of U.S. history:For early in the country’s growth there emerged a distinct national tradition,with several hundred years of history to its youthful credit; there were establishedspecifically American institutions more Celtic and Anglo-Protestant thanPuritan in form; but, above all, there arose a national consciousness rooted inthe North European, specifically Anglo-Celtic, racial stocks of its founders.Though the country’s settlers lacked Europe’s ancient genealogy, cultural legacy,territorial sense, and distinct ethnic consciousness (all of which disposed theirtwentieth-century descendants to the most extreme cultural inversions), theynevertheless spoke a European language, practiced a European religion, hada history shaped by the nation-creating influences of Europe’s High Culture,and, most important of all, took their North European racial identity as thedefining part of their collective identity. In Jared Taylor’s phrase, America untilquite recently was “a self-consciously European, majority-white nation.” Thatis, it was a nativist variant of the European nations which had spawned it.

That modern America, especially its leviathan state and deculturatedelites, practices a genocidal anti-Europeanism goes without saying. Thecountry’s political and cultural betrayals are not, however, the decisive issue.(For haven’t Europeans, subject these last sixty years to the same American media and “culture,” also betrayed themselves? And weren’t Russians, nowrecognized as the foremost bulwark of white existence, once, when ruled byJewish Bolsheviks, the force for global subversion?) From an ethnonationalistperspective, what counts is not America’s anti-white state, but the blood ofits white populace, the language, heritage, and achievements of its creators,and the self-consciously European aspirations of its biocultural defenders.Though America’s empire and liberal “way of life” may threaten the Europeanbiosphere today, European-Americans are still one (if not the most important) ofEurope’s organic offshoots—with an unmistakable interest not in Washington’santi-white polices, but in the actualization of Europe’s destiny. Thus, when theAmericophobic Benoist disingenuously claims he is not an Americophobe, butrefuses to recognize the primacy of the American people’s European originsand proposes a European alliance with the Third World, including its jihadists,to counter it, it is almost as if he denies what makes Europe European.

A talented and prolific writer of immense learning who played a leadingrole in mobilizing the intellectual opposition to the liberal-democratic regimesof money imposed on postwar Europe, Benoist was originally one of us. Evenin absorbing many of the liberal postulates he formally criticizes and henceending up in one of the New Right’s culs-de-sac, his work still elicits ourinterest. Yet while recognizing and continuing to profit from his incomparableliterary achievement, it is crucial to the life-and-death struggle we nationalistswage to realize that whatever is vital or pertinent in the New Right’s legacyhas been vitiated by his pluriversum.

Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole desHautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and modern European historyat the University of California. He is the author of New Culture,New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (2004).

Taken from "The Occidental Quarterly" - www.theoccidentalquarterly.com

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

This is the speech given by Prof. Fraser at the Inverell Forum on Friday the 17th of March. With the kind permission of the Professor we publish his speech, in full, as a "World Exclusive".

Reversing the Racial Revolution: A Classical Republican Case for Regime Change

by Andrew Fraser


Introduction

My career as a thought criminal began once I developed an academic interest in applying the theory and practice of classical republicanism in contemporary circumstances.

My academic colleagues seemed to recognize before it occurred to me that the classical republican tradition was not of universal relevance to all mankind. Indeed, I have come to understand that it was the unique product of European man.

The contemporary eclipse of the republican tradition is linked to decline of racial consciousness among white Europeans as consequence of managerial revolution.

Reversal of that revolution will require a revival of Anglo-American republican tradition. In effect, we need “regime change.”

But “regime change” does not mean the violent seizure of state power aimed at imposing a counter-revolution from the top down. Instead we require a republican reformation designed to rebuild civil society from the bottom up.

In my talk today, I will discuss the nature of the classical republican tradition. Secondly, I will explain how and why the contemporary managerial regime has undermined republican tradition. Thirdly, I will examine the impending crisis of the managerial regime. Then I will outline briefly and in principle the republican reformation of the family and the household; the legal profession and the judiciary; and the modern business corporation. Finally, I point to the role of churches, colleges and universities in the transmission of the fruits of that republican reformation to future generations.


Classical Republicanism

For Aristotle, the polis (what Romans call “republic”) was an “association of persons formed with a view to some good purpose.”

Not surprisingly, my post-modernist colleagues spotted something suspiciously “sexist,” “fascist” and “racist” about that idea.

Why? Only free citizens possessed “power of reasoned speech.” Aristotle excluded women, children, and foreigners (not to mention “barbarians”) from citizenship because they lacked the “power of reasoned speech” essential to public discourse about the nature of the good life in a particular community. Even Aristotle himself was denied Athenian citizenship because he was a metic or foreigner.

The Greeks understood that the survival of a stable republic presupposes a community of language, memory and blood.

Classical republicanism was marked by 3 central themes:

1. Citizen rises out of private realm into public sphere in pursuit of common good;
2. Search for public good demands civic virtue; the one, the few and the many each possess their own distinctive virtues and vices.
3. Fear of corruption in a pure democracy, aristocracy or monarchy led many classical republican thinkers to advocate the principles of mixed and balanced government.


Managerial Regime

In this paper, I argue that a revival of the constitutional principles of the classical republican tradition offers a solution to the problems created by managerialist regime.

That regime has destroyed the three foundation principles of classical republicanism:
1. It has become a system of no-man rule, eroding the public/private distinction; promoting centralization and a concomitant civic passivity in both the corporate sector and the state; it also breaks down mixed and balanced government;
2. the system has no goal beyond its own endless growth and enhanced vitality;
3. civic virtue has been displaced by pragmatism and a breakdown of public and private morality;
4. managerial elites-far from cultivating the virtues of the classical few deny the very existence of ruling class, claiming that they “only work here;”
5. we therefore bear all the burdens of arrogant, self-interested and exploitative ruling class without any of the benefits of “noblesse oblige;”
6. managerial multiracialism replaces community of language, memory and blood. An all-pervasive momentum towards separatism replaces momentum towards connection.
7. In Oz, this required the dismantling of the Australian Settlement

The convergence of economic, ecological, social and demographic catastrophes paradoxically offers some hope that, at the very least, the European peoples may be forced to make a virtue out of necessity, challenging the open borders of the last four decades as a matter of sheer economic survival. It may be possible to achieve a moratorium on non-white immigration, perhaps even the restoration of our historic freedoms of thought, expression and association along with the rights of private property.


The Possibility of and Need for Regime Change

But no one should believe that moratorium on non-white immigration or a rollback of anti-discrimination law can be set in concrete under present regime.

After all, such victories were achieved earlier in the twentieth-century in Australia, Canada and the United States. The White Australia Policy and the American immigration restriction act of 1924 were adopted by the same centralized governments that opened the floodgates to mass non-white immigration in the 1960s.

One can be sure that the curious coalition of Christians, cultural Marxists and corporate capitalists at the centre of the open borders lobby will regroup asap to take back any ground lost to immigration restrictionists in the aftermath of an economic collapse and political crisis Should good times return, they will be back with a vengeance.

Therefore the operating constitution of the managerial regime must be transformed whenever and as soon as the opportunity arises. This requires the reinvention of a ruling class prepared to accept responsibility for its actions (and failure to act).

Returning to the original principles of the classical republican tradition as they were once embodied in Anglo-American civil societies would revitalize our people, creating nations vastly different from the “proposition nations” so beloved of contemporary neo-conservatives.

Anglo-American civil societies must, once again, foster a sense of ethnic kinship rulers and the ruled. Shared membership in community of blood and memory must transcend class differences.

National identity must be akin to membership in a family. But, by the same token, the family must take on some of the attributes of body politic.



The Household as Civil Body Politic

Family not the individual is the basic unit of society, a principle until the rise of mass democracy and universal suffrage.

Family—at their best—provided individuals with a firm sense of their ancestral roots and the genetic interests associated with an inherited identity.

Family is like a race in microcosm. Race like large, partly-inbred extended family

Those extended family ties are breaking down as whites are forced to integrate with a massive influx of non-white immigrants.

Ironically, it is the putatively democratic institution of universal suffrage that has smoothed the way for the replacement of white peoples by a population of atomised, deracinated individuals.

Combined with universal suffrage, a multi-racial society trivialises politics into a perennial quarrel over who gets what, when, where, and how, calling into question the very existence of a shared public interest.

Universal suffrage fragments the family, destroying its moral strength and political unity.

A classical republican form of household suffrage would help whites to recover a sense of their ethnic genetic interests by reconstituting the family as an autonomous, self-governing, civil body politic.

The right to vote or to win office in local, state and federal elections should be granted not to individuals but to the heads of each independent household.

This need not require the sacrifice of the republican principle of political equality; each individual could still carry equal political weight so long as heads of household received a number of votes equal to the number of souls subject to their jurisdiction.

In other words, single persons forming a household on their own would receive one vote. Childless couples on the other hand would have two votes on condition that the couple nominated a head of household to vote on its behalf.

Couples with children would receive three or more votes depending on the number of children in the household. Every additional child living at home, of any age, would entitle the head to an additional vote.

Any household unwilling to nominate a head empowered to cast a ballot as a surrogate for all its members would forfeit its right to vote. How the decision to select a head is made in any given household would be a matter for itself.

The person selected to serve as head for purposes of voting or holding office at the local level need not necessarily be the same person serving as head at the state or federal level.

The point of this arrangement would be to enable individuals to consider their social, political and genetic interests as members of a particular and united family.

The head would rise out of the private realm of the household into the public realm where he would represent not just his individual interests but the interests of the family as a whole.

Heads of household must not just represent the interests of their families; they must also be seen to be representing those interests, faithfully and well. Members of the head’s family have an interest in knowing just how the household vote is cast. So too do his neighbours since heads of household are obliged to consider the public interest.

In other words, the theory and practice of household suffrage may well be opposed to the secret ballot. Those who vote on behalf of others must display both their good faith and the courage of their convictions.

Most of the deep-dyed reactionaries here might hope that heads of household would be men, if only to rekindle a sense of manly responsibility among our people. But there is no reason to prevent any household from selecting a woman to hold that office.

Western societies have always been distinguished by the relatively high status they have accorded to women. Accordingly, each household should be free to govern its own affairs according to its own lights.

Restoring civic responsibility to the family and the household would be a significant step towards the reconstitution of autonomous, self-governing European civil societies.

Any such step would require significant legal and constitutional changes. The reality is that such changes would require support from within the legal profession and the judiciary—institutions which themselves have been corrupted by the managerial regime.


Reconstituting the Legal Professions

In the early American republic, lawyers were not just a learned profession but the closest thing to an aristocracy to be found in this country. Indeed, Tocqueville thought the aristocratic character of the legal profession was much more distinctly marked in both England and the United States than in other countries.

In those days, both the English and the Americans had retained the law of precedents; that is to say they continued “to found their legal opinions and the decisions of their courts upon the opinions and decisions of their predecessors.

The legal profession was the very model of a transgenerational community binding the interests of those of us in the here and now together with the interests of the dead and the unborn. Laws, according to Tocqueville, were “esteemed not so much because they [were] good as because they [were] old.”

In England in particular, lawyers and judges worked to preserve the traditional fabric of their society, bending every effort to ensure that changes would “square with the intentions and complete the labours of former generations.”

Because lawyers belonged “to the people by birth and interest” but “to the aristocracy by habit and taste,” they served “as the connecting link between the two great classes of society.”

Among the members of that natural aristocracy, the governing professional ideal was the image of the public-spirited lawyer-statesman.

It went without saying, therefore, that the lawyer was distinguished from ordinary men by the spirit of citizenship. Through an extended apprenticeship in judgement, the best lawyers acquired their defining character trait, prudential wisdom.

Their “special talent for discovering where the public good lies and for fashioning those arrangements needed to secure it,” gave lawyers a powerful awareness of the shared destiny linking the profession to their people as a whole.

That was then; this is now. Today, the law is no longer a “learned profession,” despite the long years spent in law schools. Instead, law is a business. Like any other business, law firms are now driven by the economic imperatives of billable hours and the bottom line.

Following the rise of the corporate law firm, legal practice has become commercialised, de-professionalised and bureaucratised. In place of the practical wisdom of the lawyer-statesman, we now have the “expertise” of the “transactional specialist.”

If we are to return to the original principles of the ancient British constitution, the legal profession must be reconstituted as a natural aristocracy of lawyer-statesmen. This could be done by restoring to lawyers the opportunity to act as independent, public-spirited citizens.

One way of achieving that end would be to allow all those lawyers admitted to practice in any given court to serve as an electoral college convened to elect the judges of that court. It might be prudent to restrict that franchise to independent members of the practicing profession, that is to say, to the partners of established firms or solo practitioners.

In jurisdictions where the profession is divided between barristers and solicitors, membership in the Electoral College might be limited to barristers. The object in either case would be to exclude employee solicitors who might be said to lack an independent will of their own.

These reforms would provide a constitutional counterweight to the pernicious influence of state and corporate power within the legal profession. To ensure that the legal profession and the judiciary retain a sense of shared destiny with their fellow citizens, provision should also be made for popular recall elections.

After a period of, say, ten years, the name of every judge elected by the profession should appear on the ballot at the next general election so as to give heads of household the opportunity to vote for their recall should they feel such a step is warranted by judicial errors, either of commission or omission.

But these reforms will not themselves suffice to roll back the managerial revolution in the corporate sector which contributed so greatly not just to the corruption of the legal profession but to the alien invasion of Western societies.

The modern business corporation itself must be reconstituted in accordance with its original design as a civil body politic.


Reconstituting the Modern Business Corporation

Few people are aware that the modern business corporation began its career as a “little republic.” As such, it was a distinctively Western and, more particularly, Anglo-American institution. Like the law of contract before it, the development of the business corporation presupposed a society based on non-kinship based forms of reciprocity, making it possible for strangers to band together in a joint enterprise.

In the early American republic, where the chartered business corporation began to appear in large numbers, the nature of the joint enterprises they conducted was not unequivocally economic in character.

Indeed, the great wave of incorporations that swept over New England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a response to a political crisis, the rise of mass democracy.

The Old Standing Order of New England sought to reconstitute its hegemony on the terrain of civil society. The corporation became the favoured vehicle for that political objective.

That is why banks, insurance companies, and turnpikes were not the only recipients of corporate charters. Schools, colleges, hospitals and even churches were also chartered as “civil bodies politic and corporate.”

Corporations were created to achieve public as well as private purposes. For that reason, shareholders in a business corporation were conceived not just as owners but also as citizens of their own little republic.

If the corporate charter did not specify the voting rights attached to share ownership, it was not unknown for judges to hold that, prima facie, the rule ought to be “one voice, one vote.”

Such civic considerations also led many to take a dim view of proxy voting; the practice was condemned as an abdication of political responsibility.

The adoption of proxy voting, along with the “one share, one vote” rule were symptoms of the managerial revolution in corporate governance.

Ownership was separated from control. Managers were now in the driver’s seat in an impersonal system of organized irresponsibility.

As a system, corporate capitalism has become a form of no-man rule. No one person or group can be held responsible for the operation of the system as a whole.

It follows that denunciation of the managerial regime serves no useful purpose unless it helps to create a new ruling class.

Corporations must be reconstituted as civil bodies politic. Civic responsibilities must be re-attached to the proprietary rights of share ownership.

All shareholders who hold a substantial threshold stake in an enterprise should be entitled to participate in deliberative decision-making on the basis of one-voice, one-vote. In that way, share ownership could once again serve as a school of self-government and political responsibility.

From within the ranks of substantial shareholders, a new civic aristocracy could be selected or, as Hannah Arendt put it, “would select itself.” Whatever authority members of a shareholder senate acquired would rest “on nothing but the confidence of their equals.”


Conclusion

But even if a republican reformation were to succeed in reconstituting a responsible ruling class among heads of household, lawyers and corporate shareholders, its constitutional legacy would have to be transmitted to and preserved by succeeding generations.
Neither post-modern public universities nor the Christian churches seem ready, willing or able to perform that task.

In the universities, Gramsci’s resolute “optimism of the will” has become positively dysfunctional. The contemporary academic is the perfect exemplar of the weak-willed, other-directed character-type.

To climb the greasy pole in an academic bureaucracy, the well-adjusted personality must be sensitive to every shift in the prevailing ideological wind.

Pragmatic white elites, generally, go with the flow. They no longer believe that they can or should act to preserve their own peoples, much less to recover the will to power that made our ancestors the rulers of the world.

Meanwhile, Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intelligence” has been displaced by the power of positive thinking.

Fear of corruption is foreign to those embracing the cult of universal human rights. For them, the innate perfectibility of man is an incontestable axiom of political life.

The managerial regime has become a secular theocracy worshipping at the shrine of the divine economy. This is a false god and a corrupt religion.

Remember, the word religion derives from the Latin re-ligare, to bind again. The managerial state and the corporate economy are destroying the bonds that tie our people to each other, to their ancestors and to their descendants.

We need to recover the old-time civil religion that once fused the history and destiny of our people with the realm of the sacred. We need scholars and priests capable of laying the theological foundation for a revitalised folk religion.

That renewed faith must be handed down from generation to generation not just in the churches but in schools, colleges and universities throughout the Western world.

Like a stern and virtuous Roman paterfamilias, we respect the memory of our ancestors by rekindling the spirit of liberty in the hearts of our children—even though our head tells us that, sooner or later, every republic must perish.

The Greeks and the Romans believed that there was something divine and eternal about the polis and the republic. We need to maintain their rage against the dying of that ancient light.

Thank you for your attention.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

PUT OUT MORE FLAGS: THE MAKING OF ANOTHER AMERICA

by John Pilger

The other day, one of my favourite cinemas closed down. The boards went up on the art-deco Valhalla in Sydney, one of the world's best at putting out powerful, political documentaries. The lack of fuss might have seemed surprising in a city whose iconic Opera House is said to embody modern Australia's pride in the arts. On the contrary, the closure reflected a more general shutting down.

The Valhalla was certainly an anomaly in an Australia so entrapped by the cult of "marketing" that an executive of the Sydney Morning Herald can declare "the answer" is "not smart and clever people" but "people who can execute your strategy". On 9 February, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris proclaimed Australia the least regulated and most privately owned economy in the western world. This is a country owned and run by businessmen.

The most vivid example is the press. Rupert Murdoch controls almost 70 per cent of principal newspaper circulation. With the exception of the multi-ethnic Special Broadcasting Service and the radio network of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the rest of the media reflect Murdochism and a market ideology imported wholesale from the United States. The remarkable culture wars of the neo-conservative prime minister, John Howard, exemplify this.

Howard believes that "business and sport" are society's prime movers. The country's once-respected scientific research laboratories, the CSIRO, have been instructed to take on business sponsors. Almost alone among nations, Australia last year abstained rather than vote for a modest United Nations proposal that members should defend "diversity" in their own cultures - against rapacious great power. When Australia's leading playwright, David Williamson, likened Howard's privatised "aspirational" Australia to a cruise ship sailing to the "sobering destiny" of an environmental disaster, his speech was "called for" by the prime minister's office and a vicious campaign was orchestrated in the Murdoch press.

With no political opposition to speak of, Howard's conquests have been in cultural life, with historiography thrown in. Siding with an unchanging clique of far-right commentators, he has effectively stifled debate about Australia's bloody colonial past while deriding the "black armband theory of history": that is, the truth of a genocidal racism that continues to devastate the Aboriginal people. His patriotic, or "put out more flags", campaign is pure George W Bush. Schools have been ordered to erect flagpoles, and on "Australia Day", 26 January, which "celebrates" the "settlement" of another people's country, flags are distributed and often displayed with gormless aggression.

This was never part of Australian life; Americans wrapped themselves in their flag, but not we Australians. We saw it as a respectful reminder of those who had gone to fight and die in Australia's mostly catastrophic imperial wars, who "did their best". The Howard regime has changed all this. The little leader wears a plastic flag in his lapel, just like Bush, and puts his hand on his heart, just like Bush, and reinforces a race-based society, just like Bush. While the neglect of New Orleans is Bush's symbol, the contempt shown the first Australians is Howard's.

On "Australia Day", I made my way through the flags to Redfern, an Aboriginal area in the inner city, and celebrated what black Australians call Survival Day. Their first "Day of Mourning and Protest" was held in 1938 on the 150th anniversary of the white invasion. Over a thousand Aboriginal men and women attended that first civil rights gathering, after having been refused use of Sydney Town Hall. A long and painful campaign for freedom and justice had begun, and endures, like an invisible presence.

In Redfern Park on Survival Day, the flags were black, red and gold: colours of indigenous skin, the earth and the sun. The only report I could find of Redfern the next day was of a minor fight, which was no doubt fed to the papers by the police. Should the word "Aboriginal" enter the public arena it must be associated, where possible, with "no-hopers".

In Howard's Australia, the ultimate "no-hoper" is a sick, terrified, deeply troubled and abused young man called David Hicks. Hicks was a drifter, which was once an Australian type known as a "swagman" and a "larrikin" and lauded by our bush poets and balladeers. In the 1990s, Hicks became a Muslim and drifted through Kosovo, then on to Afghanistan, where he was kidnapped by the Americans and sent to their concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Not a shred of evidence exists that Hicks fought for al-Qaeda, or is a terrorist. He is a drifter. Yet he is to face one of Bush's "military commissions", for which torture is used to extract confessions, and there is no right to cross-examine witnesses, no presumption of innocence and no standard of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt". Even three of the hand-picked US military prosecutors have withdrawn, arguing that the commission is rigged to secure convictions. Many of Australia's leading jurists agree.

The Howard government has said, in so many words, that David Hicks can rot. He is a no-hoper, un-American, unaspirational. Put out more flags.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Why discrimination and intolerance are necessary

by Jim B.

In studying multiracialism and the way it has molded our society to a liberal viewpoint we must examine closely some terms used to make a people more submissive.

Two such cliché’s we hear a lot are ‘discrimination’ and ‘intolerance’.

Used as a weapon of derision by liberals, the meaning of the expression ‘discrimination’ is self-evident; it implies that everyone is equal in all things we do. Culturally, religiously, ethnically, morally, financially, athletically etc. As such, nobody is allowed to be pass judgment on others, and nobody is allowed to be "offended" or to be different. Unfortunately this liberal dream sequence has no root in reality because life, even theirs, is full of discrimination, for and against on a daily basis.

For example when we go for a job we will most likely have to discriminate on the basis of which position we would like, at the interview it is likely you will be scrutinised along with several other candidates - the boss MUST discriminate (unless he has positions for everyone who applies) if he is to get the right person for the job.

When we go shopping we have to discriminate against certain shops (and consequently their owners) in favor of others, it can be because of a whole range of reasons big or small; maybe you like the prices, the atmosphere, maybe the fellow behind the counter has good or bad hygiene, perhaps you just like the colors of the store or the maybe the product is particularly good.

In personal relationships, people discriminate all the time based on the people they associate with (see the Inherent Human Values on page one). Ultimately a person discriminates and chooses one person over others to marry and start a family with. At the said wedding, reception or even just a backyard barbeque, discrimination occurs yet again. The guest list has to be kept in order, with quantity and quality control the order of the day; this means some people miss out, again based on a whole range of reasons.

Homosexuality and other assorted perversity are celebrated by liberals, but it is ironic to think that it is another example of discrimination on the basis of sex and sexuality, as with our examples in the previous paragraph.

In other instances discrimination is necessary for keeping people alive. If you know for example that there is a rough part of town nearby then you must discriminate against the people that hang around there and do your best to avoid it at all costs - unless you are a masochist and like having your head kicked in! Conversely you might like going to the opera or the art gallery - in deciding to do so you discriminate on the basis of social status.

Let us suppose for a moment that you are a Muslim. This means you will need to discriminate on the basis of religion and avoid going to a church, synagogue or temple to worship. You might even find that you are living exclusively amongst people from your own country or region - turning a part of that town into "Little Enclave" in an example of discrimination on the basis of race.

We have seen how discrimination is important in the day to day, what about on the national scale and pertaining to the host culture? Surely it is wrong to discriminate against people who just want to settle into your country and to deny them the rights and privileges of living here? Well no, in fact, it is more important to discriminate, our very survival depends on who we let in, how compatible they are, how productive they are, what place we have for them and in what quantities - just like our backyard barbeque guest list.

As you can see, discrimination merely indicates choice. Though judging by the left-wing societies we have had the pleasure of witnessing thus far, it doesn’t seem as though ‘choice’ is a strong point in the ‘collective’ mentality.

The second part of this commentary deals with the notion of ‘tolerance’.

The very idea of ‘tolerance’ is used by the left to bludgeon our society over the head with our own values and principles, namely our own sense of fair play and reasonableness.

However the term itself is misguided because it means ‘to put up with, to suffer, or endure’. A good example of ‘tolerating’ something is if your neighbor began extensions on his house.

People will tolerate this because it will finish shortly and all will be peaceful and quiet once more. Perhaps you are putting extensions up on your own house - the discomfort of not having full access to the living room or the driveway is ‘tolerable’ but again all will be well shortly.

However, people won’t ‘tolerate’, and nor should they, a continuing construction site next door which goes on for month upon month, at all hours. People won’t ‘tolerate’ loud music night upon night or a continually barking dog without finally wanting to do something about it. In other words, tolerance is not inexhaustible.

This is however what is expected of European society when it comes to multiracialism and third world immigration. An unending philosophy to dissolve our society and our instructions are to ‘grin and bear it’.

Around the world however we are beginning to see nations come to the realisation that unending ‘tolerance’ for a concept like multiracialism spells disaster for their way of life. We’ve seen Dutch "tolerance" stretched to the limits. Even in places like Thailand, the tolerance of the normally placid people has been broken by continual pushing and poking from hostile forces, forced belonging and contrived appreciation irrespective of actions.

Increasingly, we are finding more and more that the Cultural Marxism, or political correctness as it has become known, is no longer strong enough to hold popular sentiment against the never-ending-construction-site-next-door called multiracialism.

Another example of ‘tolerance’ and one not that far removed from those pushing the idea, is the fact that people in dictatorships ‘tolerate’ figures like ‘The Dear Leader’ or El Generale Presidente, irrespective of action. But in supposedly democratic societies like ours, both discrimination and intolerance, on whatever topic, are necessary, desirable, healthy and valid expressions of popular opinion.

How then has this ideological boot been allowed to tread so firmly into our collective necks, thus keeping us meek, mild and compliant? Primarily because people have been trained, from an early age, to accept the false premise that discrimination and intolerance are automatically bad. Thus when it comes time to have an opinion on something, the first instinct is to ensure we aren’t being "intolerant" or "discriminatory" of anyone. This includes checking your speech for ‘politically incorrect’ language instead of using plain speak, which is to the point and ensures we all know where we stand.

Of course, the only winner that comes out of implementing politically correct speech are the Cultural Marxists who can have fun playing word-games with the limp-wristed response you just gave on a subject which you are really very passionate about. Free from the burden of "tolerance" and "non-discrimination" themselves, your weakened argument is quickly destroyed by slander, innuendo, assumptions and lies.

The time has come when each one of us has to say what he means, and mean what he says, irrespective of whom it 'could' offend. Let the counter-revolution begin!

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

"This Land Is Ours" ...?
Multi-Culturalism or Cultural Diversity?
a critical re-appraisal of attitudes

When Lord Tebbit used a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference this summer to attack the concept of multi-culturalism, he also expressed the fear that we are becoming "a pagan society worshipping Mother Earth". We must pay tribute to him here for being the first establishment politician to acknowledge the best ecological magazine on the Internet... at the same time, we note the irony of this little-reported part of his speech -- for paganism, more than any spiritual tradition, is linked intimately to cultural identity as well as climate, ecology and landscape. Japan's Shinto religion, for example, is linked at both folk and State level to the concept of racial and cultural uniqueness. The name "Hindu" is linked to the name "India", and African Traditional Religion is the spiritual wing of black consciousness -- as such it is growing fast. In our own European societies, the revival of interest in pagan beliefs and folklore is part of a wider movement to reclaim folk identities. The growing fascination for Celtic goddesses, Norse shaman-kings and Baltic wood spirits is one that unites a pride in ethnic heritage with a reverence for nature -- a green, non-racist form of regional loyalty.

Another irony of Lord Tebbit's speech is that of a politician who has dedicated his career to economic globalisation suddenly proclaiming himself a little Englander. Free trade and cultural protectionism do not sit well together, as Enoch Powell found to his cost when he tried to combine Friedmanite economics with populist racial prejudice. It is a truism today that opponents of multi-culturalism come from the political right. There is, nonetheless, a left-wing critique of movements of population and enforced assimilation. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, founder of modern anarchism, concluded in 1856 that :

"Land belongs to the race of people born on it, since none other is able to develop it according to its needs."

A century and a half later, he is predictably pilloried for these words by the "politically correct" thought-police -- many of whom themselves claim to be libertarians. Even Peter Marshall, in an otherwise sensitive appraisal of Proudhon's work, accuses him of proto-fascist "Blood and Soil" ideology. [1] Yet Proudhon was not suggesting that one people had the natural right to colonise, suppress or exterminate others... Instead, he was merely underlining the connection between land, culture and the preservation of freedom.

In a semi-agrarian society like nineteenth century France, such connections could be grasped quite easily by radicals and reactionaries alike. Today, surrounded by the urbanised, globalised, consumerist junk culture, we rely increasingly on indigenous land rights movements to remind us of enduring values. These movements give hope to those who seek political change, because they combine the best of anarchist, conservative and green agendas : decentralisation; cultural autonomy; reverence for nature; respect for tradition and ancient wisdom. A joint declaration of the Sioux, Navajo and Iroquois peoples, issued in 1978, defines land as the basis of their peoples' identity :

"Our roots are deep in the land where we live. We have a great love for our country, for our birthplace is here. The soil is rich from the bones of thousands of our generations.Each of us was created in these lands and it is our duty to take care of them, because from these lands will spring the future of our peoples. We will walk about with great respect for the Earth, for it is a very Sacred Place."

These Native Americans, and Proudhon's peasant forebears, derived their organic, stateless forms of social organisation from identification with ancestral land -- land as the guarantor of life, as the focus of religion, and as the source of ethnic distinctiveness. Today's more enlightened, less "politically correct" ecologists realise that the best conservers of local environments are not so-called professional experts, but indigenous peoples who are still outside the global economy.

Libertarians have, in the past, been quite good at supporting land rights. Both Proudhon and Kropotkin recognised its value to rural populations as a recourse against capital and state. The anarchist communes of the Spanish Civil War were radical experiments in co-ownership and self-management -- but unlike state socialism, they drew from regional traditions of direct democracy and mutual aid. Indeed it has been observed by George Woodcock that the ethos of the Asturian anarchist communities was socially conservative. Since the 1960s, and under the totalitarian influence of the New Left, the anarchism of Europe and North America has lost much of that "conserving" element which was once its great strength. Rather than raise critical questions about change, most of today's anarchists give unflinching allegiance to the raceless, genderless, history-less utopia of left-wing statism, sustained by social workers (the new missionaries), trendy educationalists, local government busybodies and the self-appointed Inquisitors of "political correctness".

During my time at Survival International, I recall an occasion when a volunteer in the office loftily proclaimed that the people of the East End "don't take enough advantage of the multi-cultural society around them". When I suggested that we should think of London's native working-class population as an indigenous people too, the response of my left-wing colleagues combined bafflement and anger. Brainwashed with left-liberalism, they were incapable of recognising the irony of their position. Whilst campaigning against gold mining settlers in Amazonia for destroying Indian land and undermining tribal culture, they refused to defend embattled cultures closer to home...

"Multi-culturalism" is a new word, much bandied about these days by opinion-formers in the political and business elites. It is not really about cultural diversity, still less land rights, and least of all individual freedom. Rather, it is a form of social engineering that seeks to level-down and standardise all cultures, trampling on regional and ethnic loyalties which are not determined by market or state. Multi-culturalism is more insidious in some ways than old-fashioned Stalinism or capitalism in the raw, because it uses the language of inclusion and equality. Nonetheless, the partisans of multi-culturalism are quick to impose universalist, "politically correct" principles on minority populations, be they Muslims (male and female) who resist the feminist blueprint [2], or English country folk (of all classes) who defend country sports. If anything, our society is becoming ever more uniform, less tolerant of non-conformity, with fewer local cultures, folk beliefs and tastes.

In former times, mass movements of population were part of a process of military conquest, prime examples of which include the Saxon displacement of the Celt and the Norman invasion. They could also be linked to a slave labour economy, as they were in ancient Greece and Rome, or in the American colonies. Global capitalism, however, transfers populations as a cheap, convenient way to erode local cultures, with their traditions of resistance to state and corporate control. In Amazonia, the Brazilian authorities oppose the idea of indigenous land rights - and the right of Indians to live by their traditional rules - with the "modern" idea of equal opportunities : If all Brazilians are equal, why should settlers be prevented from occupying ancient tribal land and polluting rivers in the name of progress? The Indonesian invaders of West Papua have planted half a million immigrants there, on land stolen from local tribes. Future plans include the forcible interbreeding of Papuans with these incoming Javanese and Sumatrans, to destroy the former and strengthen the latter. Against this background of land-grabbing and sinister eugenics, mining multinationals gouge vast holes out of sacred mountains.

The British left pays lip-service to the rights of far-away indigenous minorities, but usually through little more than stale, anti-imperialist rhetoric... They forget, if they ever knew, that the Buddhist Chakma minority in Bangladesh enjoyed more rights in colonial times than today, and that for the Tuareg of North-West Africa, "independence" has meant subjection to racist governments that dismiss them as "White Nomads". The left's indifference to such complexities erupts into hostility when it confronts working-class, urban communities who oppose or are even vaguely sceptical about multi-culturalism. Its position is essentially a debased form of internationalism, by which any opposition to non-European settlement is taken to be racist and placed beyond the pale. This attitude is backed up increasingly by official edicts, including "positive discrimination", and a burgeoning bureaucracy of community relations which seeks to control what can or cannot be discussed. It is hard to think of a better way to alienate young, white, working-class youth, males in particular, who live in aesthetic and emotional poverty as well as economic deprivation.

Like tribal peoples, Britain's indigenous working-class have suffered disproportionately from other peoples' idea of progress. Their hostility to multi-culturalism should be understood in a new way, as a particularist rather than a racist response to confusing cultural changes in which they lack a voice. A generation of bien-pensant reformers have been remarkably successful in destroying working-class culture, with its traditions of self-help and voluntary co-operation, its emphasis on family and community. High-rise housing, insensitive bureaucratised welfare and mass immigration into working-class areas have all, in their own ways, contributed to this process. Recognising this is a step towards an interesting political realignment in which greens, traditionalists and libertarians can all play a part.

[1]Demanding the Impossible : A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall; Fontana, London 1993, page 257.

[2]It is worth noting here that, contrary to "politically correct" propaganda, many Muslim societies accord high status to women. For example, among Tuareg tribespeople women are the educated elite, and it is the men who wear veils.