British Politics

Israel über Alles: The Rochdale By-Election Exposes the Zionist Control of British Politics

There’s only one problem with opposing identity politics. All politics is identity politics. Anyone who says otherwise is either a fool or a fraud. For example, the American pseudo-conservative Ben Shapiro (born 1984) is a fraud. He’s a strongly identified Jew and Israel-Firster who tells his White followers to eschew identity politics. He wants them to ignore race and emphasize character. He promotes the lie that America is based on ideas, not on identity. As he famously said: “I don’t give a good damn about the so-called ‘browning of America.’ Color doesn’t matter. Ideology does.” But would Shapiro be indifferent to the “browning” of Israel? Of course not. When he says he opposes identity politics, he means he opposes the wrong kind of identity politics: anything that threatens Jewish interests.

Ben Shapiro fights for Israel by fooling goyim (cartoon by Jinjer Zilla)

There are many other frauds like Shapiro. And even more fools who believe what the frauds say. You can’t escape identity. In a mono-racial society, politics is a struggle between different classes or religions, with relatively small genetic differences playing an important but largely unrecognized role. In a multi-racial society, politics is a struggle between different races, with much larger genetic differences playing a decisive role. Sometimes racial politics will be disguised as class politics, as they were when the disproportionately Jewish Bolsheviks won power over the old Tsarist empire and proceeded to slaughter and tyrannize millions of White Christians.

“Same as the old boss”

In formerly mono-racial Britain, the Labour party was founded in 1900 to champion the interests of the working-class. The White working-class, of course, but that didn’t need saying in the early twentieth century. Now it does need saying, because Britain has become multi-racial and Labour has become a dedicated enemy of the White working-class. White Labour-supporters completely opposed the mass migration by non-Whites that subjected them to violent crime, huge financial losses, and ethnic cleansing. But the Labour elite ignored their wishes and betrayed its most loyal supporters. That’s because Labour had been taken over by Jews and turned into a vehicle for Jewish interests. Jews espouse identity politics for themselves and anti-identity politics for Whites. That’s why they welcomed immigration by non-Whites and by Muslims in particular, because they saw the newcomers as “natural allies” against the White Christian British. Tony Blair’s so-called New Labour might as well have been called “Jew Labour,” because Blair was a narcissistic gentile front-man for Lord Levy and other Jewish plutocrats.

Tony Blair performs the goy grovel overseen by Jewish supremacist and alleged child-rapist Greville Janner (image © PA Wire/Press Association Images)

When Levy was forced out by a scandal over hidden donations to Labour by Jews like Sir David Garrard (born 1939), he was replaced as Labour fundraiser by the Jewish plutocrat Jonathan Mendelsohn, who was described by the Telegraph as “steeped in the north London Jewish community” and “a close friend of Lord Levy, who was at the heart of Labour’s cash for peerages affair.” As Roger Daltrey of the Who has often sung, it was a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” However, Jewish control of the Labour party was threatened in 2015 by the unexpected election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Corbyn was very popular with ordinary Labour supporters and party membership increased sharply during his leadership. But he wasn’t popular with Labour’s Jew-controlled Zionist elite. Jews didn’t object to Corbyn championing the interests of non-Whites and Muslims, because that meant that he continued to betray the White working-class. But Jews certainly objected to Corbyn refusing to make Jewish interests his first and overwhelming priority. Indeed, he didn’t want to make Jewish interests a priority at all. This was completely unacceptable, so Jews made an example of Corbyn first by vilifying him for years in the mass media, then driving him out of the party after he was toppled as leader.

A dedicated shabbos goy

Unlike Corbyn, the present Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is thoroughly kosher. He has a Jewish wife and belonged to a radical Trotskyist sect at university. Like Tony Blair, he intends to be a dedicated shabbos goy. Blair’s thuggish and Machiavellian press-secretary Alastair Campbell once told the Jewish Chronicle that Blair “was conscious of the need to have very, very good relations” with “the Jewish community.” That “community” is small in numbers but gigantic in power, influence and wealth. Starmer knows about Jewish power as well as Blair did, which is why he intends to govern Britain as Blair did: in strict obedience to Jewish orders. This is what Peter Hitchens, the insightful brother of the neo-conservative gasbag Christopher Hitchens, has said of the impending Labour victory in the general election: “Sir Keir [Starmer], whose hard left political roots are in a revolutionary movement called Pabloism, comes from the same stable as the 1997 Blairites. He will try to manipulate the voters with populist slogans, but his real programme will be miles to the left, concentrating more and more power in a left-wing state.”

Starmer is heading for victory because he has returned Labour to the paths of righteousness after the blasphemies of Corbynism. The party continues to betray the White working class, of course, and it continues to champion non-Whites, Muslims, and the “transgender community.” But all that is secondary, because Starmer now runs Labour as all decent and respectable parties should be run: as a vehicle for Jewish interests. However, this isn’t proving as easy for Starmer as he would have hoped, because Muslims aren’t being the “natural allies” that Jews fondly imagined they would be. To the dismay of Jews around the world, the war in Gaza has prompted Muslims in the West to side with Muslim Palestinians rather than with the poor persecuted military superpower of Israel.

Typical Muslim duplicity

And so, even as Keir Starmer has allied Labour with the completely Zionist and Jew-controlled Conservatives, Muslim members of the Labour party have been campaigning not of behalf of Jews but on behalf of their fellow Muslims. Look at the by-election in the solidly Labour constituency of Rochdale, where Muslim rape-gangs have preyed on White working-class girls for decades just as Muslim rape-gangs have done in the solidly Labour constituency of Rotherham. Because Labour is now the enemy of the White working-class, it did nothing to stop the rape-gangs either in Rotherham or in Rochdale. On the contrary, it sided with Muslims and helped the sexual jihad to continue. It’s still siding with Muslims, which is why the official Labour candidate in the Rochdale by-election was a fat and sleazy-looking Muslim Pakistani called Azhar Ali. With typical Muslim — and Pakistani — duplicity, Ali pretended to be an ally of Jews as he rose in the party. But his real allegiance was revealed in words he uttered in a meeting of the Lancashire Labour party shortly after October 7, the day that will live in infamy when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel to murder and rape the wrong kind of people.

The fat and sleazy-looking Azhar Ali, former Labour candidate in the Rochdale by-election (image from The Daily Mail)

And who are the wrong kind of people? Jews, of course. Jews have never cared about Muslims and other non-Whites murdering and raping Whites. Indeed, many Jews see this as well-merited payback for historic persecution of Jews in the West. That isn’t openly stated in the Jewish media, but nor is any regret for what Muslims and Blacks are doing to Whites. Jews have overwhelmingly ignored the Muslim rape-gangs of Rochdale and Rotherham. But they certainly condemned the Rochdale candidate Azhar Ali when he espoused a “vile conspiracy theory” at that meeting of the Lancashire Labour party. Ali said that Israel was warned by Egypt and America about a Hamas attack, but “deliberately took the security off.” According to Ali, Israel wanted to ensure the “massacre that gives them the green light to do whatever they bloody want.”

“Deeply offensive, ignorant, and false”

Ron Unz has convincingly argued that the conspiracy theory espoused by Azhar Ali is very probably baseless. Yes, Israel is happy to sacrifice unlimited numbers of goyim to secure its own interests, as it did in the false-flag attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 and as it intended to do in false-flag bombings of Egyptian targets in 1954. But the Hamas invasion of 2023 seems to have succeeded because of Israeli incompetence and arrogance, not because of Israeli complicity. All the same, why shouldn’t Azhar Ali be allowed to express his views? In a genuinely pluralist Labour party, there would be debate about the war in Gaza, not defenestration of all who disagree with the Zionist line. But Keir Starmer’s Labour party isn’t pluralist. It exists to serve Jewish interests and oppose White interests. That’s why Azhar Ali was forced to make a grovelling apology in words that were clearly dictated to him by Labour’s Zionist elite:

I apologise unreservedly to the Jewish community for my comments which were deeply offensive, ignorant, and false. Hamas’s horrific terror attack was the responsibility of Hamas alone, and they are still holding hostages who must be released. October 7 was the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, and Jews in the UK and across the world are living in fear of rising anti-Semitism. I will urgently apologise to Jewish leaders for my inexcusable comments. The Labour Party has changed unrecognisably under Keir Starmer’s leadership — he has my full support in delivering the change Britain needs. (“Outrage after Labour candidate claims Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on October 7 in order to give it the ‘green light’ to invade Gaza,” The Daily Mail, 10th February 2024)

Ali wasn’t sincere in his apology, of course, but like countless other ostensibly leftist Muslims in the West, he entered politics deciding that, for the time being, it’s better to submit to Jewish authority in public. However, what British-based Muslims intend to do in the future can be seen in Germany, where the Turkish president Recep Erdogan has set up “a political party for ‘people with foreign roots’ in Germany that will ‘stand against anti-Muslim racism’.” Indeed, what Muslims intend to do in future can also be seen in Rochdale, where the former Labour MP and eternal exhibitionist George Galloway is standing in the by-election for the far-left Workers Party of Great Britain. Galloway is pursuing Muslim votes and his campaign foreshadows the arrival of one or more permanent Muslim parties. In the meantime, the Labour party, formed to champion the White working-class, is the scene of a struggle between Jews and Muslims for supremacy. Here is a Jew responding to Azhar Ali’s comments and openly admitting that Jews are interested only in themselves:

Mike Katz, the national chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, said his group would not campaign in Rochdale because Ali had “destroyed his past record of allyship with the Jewish community” with his “totally reprehensible” comments. But he stopped short of calling on Labour to drop the candidate, warning that the “alternative in Rochdale is George Galloway”, whose victory would “harm the Jewish community far more than electing Ali”. (“Labour’s Rochdale byelection campaign engulfed in antisemitism row,” The Guardian, 12th February 2024)

Katz isn’t bothering to hide his ethnocentrism and his belief that Labour exists first and foremost to serve Jewish interests. However, he’s unable to admit that Ali’s past “allyship” with Jews was never sincere. Ali simply recognized that Jews currently control Labour and that he had to pretend to care about them in order to get on. Now his mask is off and he’s been suspended from the Labour party while an “investigation” is carried out into more of his comments, this time about Jewish power in the media.

Hidden in plain sight

Again, in a genuinely pluralist Labour party there would be debate about such topics, not defenestration of anyone who raises them. But Labour isn’t pluralist. It’s run for Jews by shabbos goyim, so Azhar Ali has been defenestrated, not debated. The trouble for Labour is that Azhar Ali holds the same views as the vast majority of Labour’s Muslim supporters. There are far more Muslims than Jews in Britain, so why does the party leadership side with Jews and Israel rather than with Muslims and Palestine? What hidden factor is at work?

In fact, it’s not hidden at all. It’s simply unmentionable in the mainstream: Jewish wealth and Jewish power in the media. Jews finance British politics and naturally enough dictate the pro-Jewish, anti-White agenda for British politics. Jewish interests must come first and White interests must come nowhere. The Rochdale by-election is a perfect example of Zionist control. It’s also a perfect example of how all politics is identity politics.

Alkali-Throwing for Allah: How the Right’s Rhetoric and the Left’s Lies Work Together to Deny Racial Reality

Kimberley Frank and Samantha Sykes. Those names were missing from the outraged commentary on the latest outbreak of vibrancy to enliven the formerly pale and stale United Kingdom. An Afghan Muslim called Abdul Ezedi is accused of throwing a flesh-eating alkali over a woman and her two young daughters, then trying to run them down with a car. “Human depravity doesn’t go much lower than this,” said the Trotskyist libertarian Brendan O’Neill. “If Ezedi is indeed the perpetrator, then this looks like the most horrendous and preventable of attacks,” said Brendan’s comrade Tom Slater. “How on earth was [Ezedi] given asylum once he had committed a sex offence that resulted in him being placed on the Sex Offenders Register?” said the Jewish comedian Konstantin Kisin.

Importing Afghanistan

Amid all the outrage, there was absolutely no honesty. None of them admitted the obvious truth: that importing Third-World people inevitably means importing Third-World pathologies. O’Neill and company believe in striking poses, not in solving problems. That’s why none of them mentioned the names of Kimberley Frank and Samantha Sykes. Nor did any other commentator in the mainstream media. O’Neill and company have either never heard of those two White girls or forgot about them long ago. This isn’t surprising, but it is reprehensible, because everything that is now being said about the depraved Afghan criminal Abdul Ezedi applies double to the depraved Afghan criminal Ahmad Otak:

Sadistic Afghan asylum seeker made ex-girlfriend watch him stab her sister and friend to death because she wouldn’t take him back

A “sadistic” asylum seeker who forced his former girlfriend to witness him stabbing her sister and her friend to death after she refused to take him back has been jailed for life. Afghan national Ahmad Otak laughed and spat on 17-year-old Kimberley Frank’s body after stabbing her 15 times at her home in Yorkshire while her sister Elisa watched helplessly. He then tied his ex-partner up with electrical flex and lured her friend Samantha Sykes, 18, to Kimberley’s flat in Wakefield, where he stabbed the teenager repeatedly before slitting her throat. … Leeds Crown Court was told that Elisa had met Otak in a children’s home after he arrived in the UK from Afghanistan in 2007, claiming he was 16 years old. The pair had an on-off relationship and had planned to marry in 2011, but when Otak became more controlling Miss Frank called off the wedding, the court heard. Prosecutor Richard Mansell QC said: “He said that even if she didn’t marry him she could not leave him. He told her that he would go crazy and would kill people.” He later claimed he was joking but later threatened to kill Elisa, her friends and members of family — including his eventual victims Samantha Sykes and Miss Frank’s sister Kimberley.

Mr. Mansell said Elisa was too frightened to report what had happened to the police but Samantha Sykes, 18, was not and reported Otak to the UK Border Agency as an illegal immigrant and contacted police, but no action was taken because Elisa declined to make a statement. In September last year she finally decided to leave him for good but relented when he threatened to throw acid in her face and petrol bomb her mother’s house. [Et cetera ad nauseam.] (Sadistic Afghan asylum seeker made ex-girlfriend watch him stab her sister and friend to death because she wouldn’t take him back, The Daily Mail, 9th November 2012)

Brutally murdered, long forgotten: White nobodies Samantha Sykes and Kimberley Frank with their Afghan enricher Ahmad Otak

The parallels between Abdul Ezedi and Ahmad Otak are glaringly obvious. Both were bogus asylum-seekers, both were refused asylum, both were nevertheless allowed to remain in the UK, and both made their depravity plain to the authorities long before they committed their horrendous crimes. But no-one in the mainstream media has drawn those parallels and pointed out the truth: that allowing any migration at all from Afghanistan is both evil and insane. Note how Ahmad Otak “threatened to throw acid” in a woman’s face. Abdul Ezedi went beyond threats and threw alkali in a woman’s face. That’s Afghan culture for you. But not just Afghan culture, of course, because acid-throwing flourishes all over the Third World. So do rape, misogyny, corruption, exotic diseases, and the genetic horrors that result from marriage between close relatives. When Third-World people come to the First World, those Third-World pathologies start flourishing in the First World too. Who could have seen that one coming?

Posturing and evading the truth

Not Brendan O’Neill and company. They continue to pretend that it’s possible to import Third-World people without importing Third-World pathologies. The trans-British Bangladeshi Rakib Ehsan responded to Ezedi’s Afghan culture by thundering: “The UK’s asylum system is utterly dysfunctional. Time and again, we see criminals, traffickers and terrorists slipping through the net. But even by Britain’s woefully lax security standards, the case of Abdul Ezedi has plumbed new depths.” As usual, Ehsan was posturing and evading the truth. He refuses to admit that the problem with the “UK’s asylum system” is not that it is “dysfunctional,” but that it exists at all. Western nations should not be granting any kind of permanent residence, asylum or otherwise, to non-Whites from the Third World. Please tell me, Rakib: Was the British “asylum system” functioning well when it admitted the Libyan parents of the suicide-bomber Salman Abedi? After all, those parents never hit the headlines. It was their son, born and raised in Britain, who blew children to bits at a pop-concert. And was the American “asylum system” working well when it admitted the Afghan parents of the mass-murderer Omar Mateen? Again, the parents never hit the headlines. It was their son, born and raised in America, who machine-gunned gay revellers in a Florida night-club.

Disconnecting the dots

As I described in “Sunshine Hate,” the left reacted to Mateen’s massacre by lying long and hard. They didn’t merely refuse to connect the dots: they denied that there were any dots there in the first place. Commentators like Gary Younge, the chief Black intellectual at the Guardian, claimed that the massacre was “home-grown” and had nothing to do with immigration, Islam or Afghanistan.   The mainstream right aren’t always as dishonest as that. They’ll admit that the dots exist, but they refuse to connect them. The left denies the dots; the right disconnects them. That’s why there was no mention of Kimberley Frank and Samantha Sykes in the outraged commentary on Abdul Ezedi’s alleged crime.

It’s also why the right are drawing the wrong conclusion in their outraged commentary on the departure from politics of a British MP called Mike Freer. The Jewish comedian Konstantin Kisin said more than he realized when he responded to Freer’s departure like this: “I don’t think it’s possible to sum up the state of Britain better than the fact that Mike Freer, a gay MP, has decided to leave politics because of death threats from Islamist extremists.” Mr Freer is a staunch supporter of Israel, you see, and so he’s under threat from Islamists. Indeed, Mr Freer has said that his “husband” is so worried that he “always wants to make sure he picks me up from the tube after work, he doesn’t like me walking home alone.”

Pedo-punim vs Islamist extremism: the Jewish comedian Konstantin Kisin (photo by John Anderson)

Konstantin Kisin thinks that a gay MP being menaced by Islamists is a perfect summary of “the state of Britain.” He’s right. But not in the way he means. He wants to suggest that the married homosexuals being menaced by murderous Islamists is anomalous and disturbing. He’s wrong. Married homosexuals and murderous Islamists go together perfectly, because both groups arise from the decadence and depravity of modern Britain. A culture that allows men to marry each other is suicidal and rotten to the core. That’s also why it allows mass migration by Muslims and other non-Whites who bring with them all the pathologies of the Third World. Kisin and company can’t connect the dots of gay marriage and “Islamism” because they approve of the former and disapprove of the latter. Nor can they connect the dots of “Islamism” and Freer’s support for Israel. It’s precisely because British politics is controlled by Jews that so many non-Whites have colonized Britain against the clearly expressed opposition of the White majority.

Not-so-random stabbing spree

But non-White migration is only the first stage of the Jewish war on White Britain. The second stage is minority worship, the lying cult that insists that non-Whites enrich and strengthen the country when in fact they do the exact opposite. A few days before that Afghan called Abdul Ezedi began throwing flesh-eating alkali in London, a psychotic Black called Valdo Calocane was sent to mental hospital for stabbing three people to death in Nottingham last year. Two of the victims were White and one was half-White, half-Indian. The Guardian didn’t reveal that Calocane came to Britain from Guinea-Bissau in West Africa at the age of 16, but it did say that his vibrancy “has disturbing similarities to that of Zephaniah McLeod, who killed 23-year-old Jacob Billington and injured seven others in a violent and random stabbing spree in Birmingham in September 2020.”

McLeod was also psychotic and also well-known to the authorities before the murder, you see. But in fact his “stabbing spree” wasn’t so random after all, because McLeod is also Black and his victim was also White. The Guardian didn’t mention those highly relevant facts or the “disturbing similarities” with the psychotic Black Phillip Simelane, who murdered a White schoolgirl called Christina Edkins in 2013, and the psychotic Black Timchang Nandap, who murdered a White scientist called Jeroen Ensink in 2015, and the psychotic Black Darren Pencill, who murdered a White father called Lee Pomeroy in 2019. The newspaper is dedicated to the cult of minority worship, so it never admits either that Blacks commit murder, rape, and other violent crimes at much higher rates than Whites do or that, just as in America, Blacks are far more likely to harm Whites than Whites are to harm Blacks.

Another psychotic Black enriches Britain: the Nottingham murderer Valdo Calocane and his victims (image from the London Evening Standard)

And although the Guardian does admit that Blacks are much more likely to suffer from psychosis, it does so only in order to portray Blacks as victims and to blame their higher rates of psychosis on (can you guess?) White racism. However, it can’t blame White racism for the lowered intelligence and horrible genetic diseases caused by inbreeding among British-based Muslims, so it doesn’t discuss that delicate topic.

In other words, it denies the existence of the dot. The mainstream right rarely discusses Muslim inbreeding either. And when it does, it never connects the dot of Muslim inbreeding to the dot of Muslim terrorism to the dot of Muslim alkali-throwing to the dot of Muslim rape-gangs to the dot of Muslim political corruption to the dot of Muslim honor-killing. After all, if the mainstream right connected those dots, it would have to admit that migration by Muslims and other non-Whites has been utterly disastrous for Britain. And if it admitted that non-White migration has been a disaster, it would have to ask why said migration has continued for so long at such high volume in the face of such clearly expressed opposition by the White majority.

Third-World people = Third-World pathologies

That question can’t be asked by the mainstream right, because the answer exposes the Jews who control politics here and oversee the cult of minority worship just as they do in America, Germany, and France. All across the West, three things have happened. First, non-White migration has taken place against the clearly expressed opposition of the White majority. Second, non-Whites have reproduced the pathologies of their Third-World homelands. Third, the mainstream right have disconnected the dots and refused to admit that non-Whites don’t belong in the West and never will.

Third-World killers and rapists are good for you, goyim!” says the Jewish globalist Gideon Rachman

We’ve seen that disconnection often in the past. Now we’re seeing it in the commentary on the alkali-throwing Afghan Abdul Ezedi. We’ll soon see it again when another non-White commits another horrendous crime. The mainstream right are in thrall to the Jewish cult of minority worship. That’s why they can’t admit the obvious truth: Third-World people = Third-World pathologies. That obvious truth has an equally obvious corollary. If you want to end Third-World pathologies, you have to expel Third-World people.

Britain’s Worst Amendment: The Online Safety Bill

Our new online safety laws will make the internet a safer place for everyone in the UK, especially children, while making sure that everyone can enjoy freedom of expression online.
From the summary of an early reading of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, 2022.

Matilda told such dreadful lies
It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.
Hillaire Belloc, Matilda, 1907.

There are doubtless many technical differences between soft and hard totalitarianism, but one of them is surely the nature of power at its point of application. We might call the infringement of power as it impacts the individual “capillary”, after the tiny blood vessels that connect the body’s blood supply with its major organs and without which those organs could not function. Power is nothing without its application. Capillary power under soft totalitarianism does not take the form of night-sticks, tear-gas, and jail cells, but often presents as legislation. You will watch what you say in public if you know it may lead to your door being kicked in at 2am. But you will also be circumspect if the law of the land is engineered to outlaw certain opinions, and which, if infringed, could lose you your job, your bank account, and your credit rating. One such statutory instrument receives royal assent (and thus becomes UK law) this month, and King Charles III could be signing away his countrymen’s freedom of speech.

The Online Safety Bill: Emo

The Online Safety Bill (OSB), in its early parliamentary readings, was known as the “Online Harm Hill”, but re-branding was deemed necessary. (The word “harm” won’t go away, however, as we shall see). Governments have to sell legislation to the public in the same way as companies have to sell their product to potential customers, and there are rhetorical techniques that become familiar over time. Here, the stratagem is a classic advertising maxim: use children. With the OSB, the main point stressed to the British media — now a governmental policy delivery system — is the safety of children, who are thus used as a virtual human shield to make commentators reluctant to criticize the bill. This is the same country that endorses drag queen story hour in infant-school classes.

But the OSB cannot distract us with the little ones; it is aimed at adults. The first intimation of special interest comes 23 pages into a 255-page document, in Section 12, “Adults’ risk assessment duties”, which looks at the following:

5d. The level of risk of harm to adults presented by priority content that is harmful to adults which particularly affects individuals with a certain characteristic or members of a certain group. [Italics added].

This category will soon pull to the front of the pack of priorities, and the criteria for group membership will require close scrutiny as it is not inventoried. The issue of who might potentially be harmed is left vague:

“Section 18, 6b: “A member of a class or group of people with a certain characteristic targeted by the content.”  [Italics added].

Does this mean that if I go to a Morris Dancing Facebook page and tell them they look stupid in those bells and flowery hats, I have harmed them by the criterion above? We are entitled to expect definitions of these groups and characteristics. We do not get them. We’ll look instead at what might harm these characteristic groups, and at what form that harm might take.

It is always worthwhile, in the UK at least, to look at already existing laws which cover the same area and see if the new legislation has extended powers already in place. With the OSB, we can go back to two legislative instruments which both cover much of the same ground, and show that the OSB, in terms of its capability to repress free speech, has had what we might call “gain of function”.

The OSB includes many things that are already illegal, but these are distractions from the online activity the government is actually going after, and how they intend to close it down. Dan Milmo is Global Technology Editor at The Guardian, and in a piece on the OSB he notes that it has been revised from its draft version to make clearer exactly what it is that is being criminalised, or at least having its criminal status aligned with online communication. As he writes;

The DCMS (The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) has published an updated list of … content, which includes: revenge porn; promoting suicide; people smuggling; drug and weapons dealing; hate crime; fraud; encouraging suicide.

They seem particularly keen on suicide, mentioning it twice. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, incidentally, covers four areas which are pure private sector. The government should have nothing to do with them apart from ensuring financial probity.

It seems to me that these categories are covered by the Public Order Act of 1986, which states that an offence has been committed if a person “displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting”.

But it is the second category which introduces what we might call “usable ambiguity”. A new offence, the paper states

…will make it easier to prosecute online abusers by abandoning the requirement under the old offences for content to fit within proscribed yet ambiguous categories such as ‘grossly indecent’, ‘obscene’ or ‘indecent’. Instead it is based on the intended psychological harm, amounting to at least serious distress, to the person who receives the communication, rather than requiring proof that harm was caused [Italics added].

This last sentence dispenses with “proof” of “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” and shifts its ground instead to the even more ambiguous category of “psychological harm”, which does not require any proof other than the perception of the individual.

Again, I thought this was already covered, this time by the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, but in fact this is a perfect example of re-engineering legislation. The 1988 Act finds an offence has been committed if, firstly, a communication has been sent via media which include electronic transmission and containing the following:

i. A message which is indecent or grossly offensive.

  1. A threat, or

iii. Information which is false and known or believed to be false by the sender.

Although the 1988 Act goes on to consider the causing of “distress or anxiety to the recipient”, this reaction is measured against what the OSB is calling “proscribed yet ambiguous categories” fit only to be discarded. The checks and balances formerly provided by legal definition are thus being replaced by the unquantifiable measure of “psychological harm” which requires no proof. As always in these times of destabilization, emotio is allowed to outrank ratio.

The OSB specifically and explicitly does away with defined categories, and we are left in the now familiar situation of the perception of grievance, upset, or threat by the receiver of the communication rather than the weighing of these responses against existing objective categories whose presence can be proved or otherwise in a court of law. What is known as “standpoint epistemology” is now present in legislation passed by the mother of all Parliaments.

The British would be used to this had they paid more attention to 1999’s Macpherson Report on the death of Black London teenager Stephen Lawrence. This report stated that any incident is deemed racist if the “victim” felt it to be so, or any third party. Presumably this third party could be your protective mother or another gang member. It’s all about how people feel about things, not what they are and are agreed to be.

The whole idea of replacing objective evidence of harmful online content with subjective perception and its attendant degree of psychological harm makes meaning rudderless and subject to whim. What if I were to write a barbed email to my ex-girlfriend, rich in expletives and full of truths aggressively expressed, and she read it and snorted with laughter, pausing only to have a good laugh about the email with her new boyfriend before deleting it? As I intended to cause distress, have I committed a crime even though none occurred? Or suppose my email was mild and rather affectionate, although it did inform my ex that I had slept with her sister. Does she then put on her tragedienne mask and go out to look for a police station (if she can find one in the UK) to report a hate crime and online abuse, because she is so upset? If emotio is given precedence over ratio when crafting legal legislation, then the criminal law becomes mere mood music.

The government’s wily use of language throughout the passage of the OSB is, as always, worth forensic inspection. Nadine Dorries, boss of the CDMS during the early stages of the bill and described rather appropriately as “Digital Secretary”, wrote the following:

This government said it would legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while enshrining free speech.

Fitting, really. A shrine is where people gather to remember the dead.

As well as the strategic vagueness of “psychological harm” or, as the press release also phrases it, “ruining people’s lives” (the life of a sensitive plant on social media doesn’t take much to ruin it), there is a very explicit type of online Thoughtcrime which interests the new lawmakers. Here, as well as seeing what worries the government as a narrative-spoiler, we see every ideologue’s old and trusted friend: moral equivalence.

The new communications offences will strengthen protections from harmful online behaviours such as coercive and controlling behaviour by domestic abusers; threats to rape, kill and inflict physical violence; and deliberately sharing dangerous disinformation about hoax Covid treatments.

Just look at the company kept by those anti-vaxxers! Rapists, killers and wife-beaters.

Many on the Right are frustrated that a nominally Conservative UK government should come down so hard on free speech, something that should be a core principle for them. But why should they care about the loss of such a liberty when it is the only luxury they can’t themselves enjoy? Three categories mentioned in the early-stage OSB as beneficiaries of the protection the Bill seeks to afford are MPs, celebrities and footballers. These people have no freedom of speech, far less than we little people do, and the Klieg lights of the media are trained on them at all times for potential gaffes or hasty Facebook posts. Of course, they don’t care if the peons go to jail for voicing an opinion. MPs have to spend every day clinging to the guard rail of the gravy train, scared to death that they might tweet the wrong thing and lose their grip.

Then there is the question of messaging, and the bill aims to end double-ended encryption because, as you have doubtless guessed, this creates “a safe haven for paedophiles”. Won’t someone think of the children? We will be advised to do that while government turns its attention to its real quarry, adults.

Quite apart from anything else, encryption is a feature which attracts users, and if your business niche loses its USP (unique selling point, the grail of marketing), then you are just another provider duking it out with the others, who now have everything you have. But more importantly, encryption is essential for many people in these Stasi-esque times. I use an encrypted service because I have it on good authority that young and zealous social justice warriors frequently work for at least one major email provider, and are not above cancelling accounts for Wrongthink found while they rifle through your private correspondence, or at least correspondence you thought was private.

Media Coverage

British press coverage has been interesting through the course of the OSB’s passage through parliament. Britain’s Daily Mail is one of the leading newspapers in the world now, largely because they adapted to online publishing quicker than their competitors. They are also deemed “Right-wing” by the Left, and always have been. The Mail made some noise about the dangers of the OSB during its early readings in 2022, but the downside pieces tailed off in Spring of this year, to be replaced by features by and about women worried about their children’s potential misadventures online. The last piece the Mail ran on the subject had the headline: “Becoming a mother has convinced me we MUST protect children from the ‘Wild West’ of social media”. The piece was written by Michelle Donelan. Ms. Donelan is not a journalist by trade, but rather Britain’s Technology Secretary, and thus in charge of the OSB. As I said earlier, government has to package and sell legislation like any other consumer good, and the British MSM double as their PR department.

Enforcement

Finally, the government has the problem of enforcement, and for that it has weaponized the Office of Communications (OfCom). This body, among its many other duties, oversees political partiality in broadcasting, which generally amounts to going after the likes of GB News — as I wrote about here at Occidental Observer — while giving the BBC a pass on everything. But now they are free to roam social media looking for suspicious ideas too freely expressed.

Here is confirmation, if such were needed, that big tech are now essentially governmental sub-contractors, very powerful NGOs to which the political class has outsourced enforcement — malicious examples of what the British used to call PPEs, or public/private enterprises. Big tech is now the Man from MiniTru. And the OSB is also a flick of the riding-crop on the rump of big tech to make sure it does what it is told:

Previously the firms would have been forced to take such content down after it had been reported to them by users but now they must be proactive and prevent people being exposed in the first place.

That’s quite a statement. A government is telling private companies not to listen to its audience, but to listen to the government. This is how soft totalitarianism hardens.

It might be assumed that the battle for free speech is being fought on level terrain on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It is not. While America still has the First Amendment woven into the very origins of its founding constitution, the United Kingdom has no such thing, and is about to add to its own body of regulatory law in less libertarian ways. The Magna Carta is often invoked as the British equivalent of the First Amendment, but this is wishful thinking once you see the denuded state of that founding document. Of the original 63 clauses present when King John signed Magna Carta in 1215, 59 have been repealed. The only important one left states that the government can’t throw you in jail without a trial. What the current government is doing to get round that is to widen the criteria of what can land you in court with the Crown as your opponent.

Conclusion

The OSB is a legislative instrument essentially intended, despite its pretensions, to police social media. Policing speech (or writing, if expressed online) is interesting in the UK. The fact that the actual British police are more likely to be found snooping online or participating in a gay pride march than doing any actual policing is duly noted, but this legislation will empower the state literally to act as commissars of what is said online, and by extension what is thought. It’s okay to like the British Blair — not Tony Blair but Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, which was a pen-name), but he must be lying in an unquiet grave.

The OSB is being presented as the benevolent state guarding its children from the predations of malevolent parties, but its own malevolence will be reserved for adults who speak out of turn. And this type of online infraction no longer leads merely to account suspension or deletion, but in some cases to jail.

We are used to Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World being held up as a mirror to our current predicament. But there is a third novel in Britain’s dystopian trilogy. In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a politician visits a jail to look for a subject for the Lodovico treatment which is designed to cure the offender of the impulse to violence. The reason the minister wants prisoners released safely back into society, and something of the sort is already happening in the UK, speaks to us: “Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political prisoners”.

Thoughts on Britain’s “Rwanda Plan”


 

“It seems fair to conclude that Jewish organizations have uniformly advocated high levels of immigration of all racial and ethnic groups into Western societies and have also advocated a multicultural model for these societies.”
Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique

 On April 14, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson outlined a remarkable immigration agreement with the nation of Rwanda. Under the agreement, “everyone who enters the UK illegally will be considered for resettlement to Rwanda,” where their asylum cases, should they wish to make one, will be processed. Even if a migrant is granted asylum, he or she will be encouraged to remain in the east African nation for at least five years. If their application is refused, Rwanda will offer them permanent residence, prompting Johnson to speak of “tens of thousands” of migrants who will be permanently removed from Britain in the years ahead. In return for taking Britain’s unwanted migrants, the UK government has offered Rwanda an initial payment of £120 million in cash and investment. It’s the kind of policy that would have prompted Enoch Powell, who always championed a policy of incentivized repatriation, to nod in agreement.

Despite its surface level appeal, however, those furthest to the right have expressed suspicion of the measure as yet another conservative sop, intended to mask spiralling legal migration and the fact the UK’s new points-based immigration system seems designed to keep numbers high. I agree with this suspicion. I also believe, however, that the Rwanda scheme is important in terms of setting a precedent that can eventually be built upon. We should be absolutely clear here that, at the level of first principles, what is proposed by Johnson is a step forward in population removal and the rejection of the idea that non-White migrants have a fundamental right to live among Europeans. To employ the well-worn Lenin adage, our ideas must probe with bayonets: When they find mush, we should push. I believe it is worthwhile pushing the Rwanda scheme. Concurrently, when the bayonet meets with strong resistance, we should pause and examine the nature of the obstacle. 

Jewish Objections

One of the most outspoken opponents of the Rwanda plan in recent weeks is Larry Bottinick, an American Jew and the UN Refugee Agency’s current envoy to the UK. Bottinick’s lack of ties to the British people hasn’t prevented him from prolific and outspoken interference since the announcement of the plan. His main point of attack seems to be accusations that the plan will become “eye-wateringly expensive” and that it could “violate international law.” He told the Associated Press “There’s nothing in international law that says you have to ask [for asylum] in the first country you encounter. UNHCR understands the frustration of the U.K. government on that, and is not in favor of Channel crossing, of course. We think there’s more effective ways and more humane ways to address this.” By “effective and humane” he means doing nothing at a time when “more than 4,500 migrants have crossed the English Channel from France to Britain in small boats … four times more than the total this time last year.” Bottinick’s real fear seems to be that these migrants will never be allowed to settle in the UK, telling one skeptical interviewer that his understanding of the Rwanda plan is that “Once they’re in Rwanda they won’t be brought back to the UK. … You’re trying to deter them from coming.”

Bottinick has claimed that the Rwanda plan, the primary aim of which is to prevent migrant crossings of the English Channel in small boats organized by smugglers, won’t do anything to prevent people smuggling. I suppose it might be a coincidence or the simultaneous deployment of the Royal Navy to patrol the Channel for migrant boats, but in the nine-day period immediately after the plan became public knowledge, there were no migrant crossings in the English Channel. It’s clear that such attempts to enter Britain will seem radically less attractive to migrants if they result not in walking the streets of Notting Hill, but rather those of Kigali or Muhanga. This relates to the truth that the ultimate goal of the vast majority of even genuine asylum seekers to the West (to the extent that they do in fact originate in a country experiencing violent conflict or where they personally experience persecution) is not to find peace and security, but to take advantage of the chaos in their country in order to fulfil their pre-existent material ambition of living among Europeans and deriving any benefit that might entail. The basic principle of international refugee law contains, and approves, this ambition implicitly. It is the unspoken enshrinement of what we might call the international right to live among White people. This is why we see the widespread phenomenon of so-called asylum seekers passing through a dozen or more perfectly safe and welcoming countries in order to reach their chosen Northwest European destination, selected from the global map in the same way you’d pick your prize at a fairground. It’s also why we see the outlandish examples of Africans crossing an ocean, trekking across Latin America, and presenting themselves in the United States where they claim asylum.

Larry Bottinick

Rwanda has three times the intentional homicide rate of the UK, low by African standards, but not quite the asylum seeker’s desired prize. If the Rwanda plan was put into full effect, migrant crossings of the English Channel would become almost non-existent — a fact that seems to deeply alarm Mr. Bottinick. Bottinick’s ideas on the outcome of the Rwanda plan aren’t just wrong, of course, they’re also deeply hypocritical. In previous employment, according to one legal document, Bottinick worked as a “Senior Resettlement Officer,” in Tel Aviv, during which time he participated in a working group designed to “work to facilitate the departure to third countries to be determined of some 16,000 Eritreans and Sudanese under various programmes, including sponsorship, resettlement, family reunion and labour migration schemes.” Under Bottinick’s watch at least 4,500 Africans were removed from Israel to third-party nations, apparently without the process becoming “eye-wateringly expensive” or resulting in an increase of illegal immigration or asylum applications.

Another significant objection to the Rwanda plan has been raised by Enver Solomon, Chief Executive of the UK’s Refugee Council. Solomon’s name has the air of a Dickensian villain, which is about the only English connection he really has since he’s the son of a Jewish father and a Muslim mother. Shortly after the plan was announced Solomon wrote:

We are appalled by the Government’s cruel and nasty decision to send those seeking sanctuary in our country to Rwanda. … Sending people seeking asylum to be processed abroad will do absolutely nothing to address the reasons why people take perilous journeys to find safety in the UK. It will do little to deter them from coming to this country, but only lead to more human suffering and chaos – at a huge expense of an estimated £1.4 billion a year. Far from enabling people to rebuild their lives, we know from where this has been done by other countries, it only results in high levels of self-harm and mental health issues and can also lead to people ending up back in the hands of people smugglers. We urge this Government to immediately rethink its plans, which are in such stark contrast to what every Conservative Prime Minister since Churchill has sought to do by providing a fair hearing on British soil for those who claim asylum. Instead, the Government should focus on operating an orderly, humane and fair asylum system, and developing safe routes such as humanitarian visas, rather than harming lives and destroying our reputation as a country which values human rights.

Enver Solomon

I must applaud Mr. Solomon for his literary talent in crafting mendacious, manipulative propaganda. Every trick in the book is present here. Consider, for example, the emotive language “cruel and nasty.” Look also at the many diversions, like it “will do absolutely nothing to address the reasons why people take perilous journeys to find safety in the UK.” Is it the responsibility of the UK to address internal stability in every nation on earth? Isn’t the presumption that some people are incapable of governing themselves “imperialist thinking”? Apparently not when you can use to it pry open borders. He then proclaims that sending migrants to Rwanda will lead to “high levels of self-harm and mental health issues.” Why? The missed chance to see Buckingham Palace or the Beatles Museum? Aren’t these people fleeing war zones and death threats? The UK government has stressed that Rwanda is a “fundamentally safe and secure” location, perfectly suitable for the relocation of people in genuine distress. If you are thrown into distress because you missed out on Piccadilly Circus and instead find yourself in another situation in which you will be safe and cared for, then perhaps you weren’t in that much peril and need in the first place. Finally, and predictably, there is the coup de grâce — an appeal to abstract values so near and dear to the the British (and completely missing among Jews re Israel): “our reputation as a country which values human rights.” And yet Solomon himself has previously described Britain not as a country which values human rights but which is typified by “empty rhetoric” and “nationalist posturing.” Mr. Solomon is indulging in a cynical and petty moral blackmail.

Following in the footsteps of Enver Solomon’s screed, the Guardian published an open letter by a collective of “rabbis and members of the British Jewish community,” spanning Orthodox, Reform, Masorti, and Liberal sects of Judaism. The offended postmodern Israelites complained that

we are utterly appalled by the government’s inhumane plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for offshore processing. Such a policy flies in the face of Jewish values, and would be a cruel, moral failure to those in urgent need of protections. It is particularly disturbing that such plans have been announced shortly before our community celebrates Passover, a festival where Jews recall our journey to safety from Egypt. As we prepare to read the story of Exodus, it is deeply unsettling that the government is seeking to deprive the opportunity of freedom to those fleeing modern-day tyrants. Such proposals also bring to mind unpleasant memories of the overseas internment of Jewish refugees in the second world war. This policy was a grave error: we urge the government to learn from this historic mistake, uphold international refugee law and ensure all those seeking safety in the UK are treated with dignity and respect. If the government is serious about preventing small boat crossings, it should act to introduce safe and accessible routes to sanctuary in the UK. Seeking to replicate Australia’s disastrous offshoring system in Rwanda, a country frequently condemned for its appalling human rights record, would be a terrible abdication of responsibility. We urge the government to instead stand up, fulfil its moral duty, and protect, not punish, those fleeing conflict and persecution.

Oy vey indeed. Our Hebrew friends are deeply distressed that the Rwanda plan reminds them of ancient stories that involve talking shrubs, sticks magically being transformed into snakes, and self-parting oceans. It’s almost criminal that Britain’s civil servants hadn’t considered this possibility when drafting the plan. In all seriousness, however, we see here precisely the same rhetorical tactics employed by Bottinick and Solomon. Again we see the emotive language, “cruel” and “inhumane.” It’s disparaged as a “moral failure,” and a “terrible abdication of responsibility” and “moral duty.” It’s an affront to “Jewish values” — values that are somehow missing in Israel which has deported thousands of African refugees to Canada against their will.

It’s cynical and petty moral blackmail another illustration of the power of moral imperatives in making Westerners act against their self interest. Cynical because, try as I might, I can’t find these same people issuing similar statements in the aftermath of Israel’s eviction of its Africans under Bottinick. You might argue that that’s because these are “English Jews” concerned with what’s happening in England, but that doesn’t add up either. The main author of the Guardian piece is Edie Friedman, who’s from Chicago, in yet another example of an American Jew bleating shamelessly about values she feels native Britons should adhere to.

In fact, much as with the American situation, almost everywhere one looks in the context of British refugee and migrant organizations, Jews are found in leading roles. The executive director of British Red Cross is Zoe Abrams, who has said she is “profoundly concerned” about the Rwanda plan and, echoing Bottinick, Solomon, and the Guardian complainers, added that “the financial and human cost will be considerable.” She wants the UK to accept “at least 10,000” migrants, and claims “We’re an island, but we can afford to be more generous, and as Global Britain — we should be.” Boris Johnson recently complained that refugee policy in the UK in recent years has been bogged down due to opposition from an “army of politically motivated lawyers,” but unmentioned is the fact that most British “refugee lawyers” filter through the University of London’s Refugee Law Initiative, founded and directed by the Jew David Cantor, and led academically by “Senior Lecturer in Refugee Law” Sarah Singer.

Christian Complicity

Aside from Jews, outspoken nonsense has also gushed forth from the Church of England, in the form of its abysmal Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. I’ve previously written of Welby:

At the heart of this disease is the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England, Justin Welby, a man who looks like ten minutes of manual labor would actually kill him. He is the definition of all that is wrong in modern Man. Setting aside his uninspiring physical presence, Welby is a literal bastard, his mother Jane Portal having cuckolded her husband, the alcoholic Jew Gavin Welby (born Bernard Weiler) with her boss, Sir Anthony Montague Browne. The result of these chaotic origins is that Archbishop Welby/Weiler/Browne has fled entirely from any sense of meaningful identity, asserting in 2016: “I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes.” If Welby limited himself to personal genetic oblivion there might not be a problem. A problem does, however, emerge, when Welby uses his position and influence to attack those who do pursue their interests. In 2016, when Nigel Farage told the press that sex attacks by migrants were “the nuclear bomb” of the EU referendum, Welby/Weiler/Browne told MPs in the home affairs select committee that he “utterly condemned” Farage for an “inexcusable pandering to people’s worries and prejudices, that is giving legitimization to racism.” If that wasn’t bad enough, Welby/Weiler/Browne, who has confessed to struggling with his mental health, appears to have an almost Freudian desire to replace the Jewish father he thought he had with the current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Welby/Weiler/Browne has taken to accompanying Mirvis on numerous excursions, echoing the Rabbi’s sentiments on almost every subject.

For once, however, Welby seems to have taken the lead. While Mirvis has yet to say a word on the Rwanda plan, Welby has decided to speak for his deity, announcing that the plan is “the opposite of the nature of God.” I personally think Welby’s motivations for opposing the plan might be a little more earthly than heavenly. A recent London School of Economics study found that while native Britons are spending less and less time in Welby’s churches, “Migrants into the UK are more than three times more likely than natives to attend a religious service weekly, or to pray daily.” Welby probably thinks he’s boosting his pious flock, but it’s not quite so simple. It was reported by The Week last November that the Church of England was merely helping asylum seekers “game the system” by converting to Christianity. A Home Office source was quoted as describing the way in which asylum seekers would “show they are committed Christians” and can then “argue that their new faith would put them at risk in their home country.” The Telegraph reported that “thousands” of asylum seekers had been “welcomed into the Anglican faith in recent years, with clergy even given written guidance on how to navigate the Home Office system.”

Several newspapers pointed to a tribunal decision on an anonymous asylum case in 2017 that suggested an “improbably large” number of Iranians attending the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral cast doubt on whether they were all “genuine converts.” In other cases, asylum was granted after conversions were deemed authentic — normally after evidence of the very regular church attendance of the kind described above (three times more than native Brits). Modern British Christianity exists only as a left-wing immigration assistance body. It’s most notable conversion in recent years is that of Emad Al Swealmeen. He was denied asylum in 2014, then had a sudden road to Damascus moment which resulted in his baptism a year later. In 2017 he was “confirmed” to the applause of hundreds of idiots in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. Four years later this confirmed Christian prematurely detonated a bomb in the name of Allah, intended for a military remembrance event in the heart of Liverpool. I wonder if Archbishop Welby considers whether assisting such people, and making a mockery and a fraud of his religion, is “the opposite of the nature of God.”

Conclusion 

Surrounded by hostile forces, there is a temptation within our camp to adopt contrarian stances towards almost everything emanating from mainstream politics. There is a lot of context around the Rwanda plan which is far from ideal and is in fact contemptible. The Rwanda plan has been introduced by Home Secretary Priti Patel, who recently sought after the interests of her own ethnic group by signing the Migration and Mobility Partnership (MMP), a deal that has been instrumental in the dramatic rise of Indian immigration to Britain. The immigration profile of the UK since Brexit has been transformed, with a huge drop in east European migration, and a large increase in non-EU migration, especially from India and China. Much of this migration is in the form of student visas for Chinese and Indian students, which might lead commentators to assume that this is a “temporary” migration problem that doesn’t result in long-term settlement. A comprehensive study of the relevant figures in 2015, however, found that trends consistently show “a majority of students were not going home. For the past three years the estimated inflows of students has been significantly higher than the number of self-reported former students estimated to be leaving.”

Britain has a massive legal immigration problem, and the Conservative party seems to be cynically playing to its audience. The party is traditionally the choice of rural England, while Labour is the choice of the industrial heartlands and the major cities. By curbing east European migration through Brexit, the Conservatives removed visible migration from rural areas where these migrants were occupying jobs in agriculture and food production. Legal migration is less visible to rural England, since it tends to flow in large part to the universities and workplaces of the major cities, which are regarded as fully multicultural anyway. As such, simply through geography and demography, Boris Johnson and Priti Patel can increase migration while giving the opposite impression to their key voters. The Rwanda plan is in many respects another part of the ploy, since it gives off an air of being hardline and appeals to the instinct of Conservative voters to want to tackle illegal immigration.

Those of us looking on at this charade from a radical Right perspective have a difficult choice to make. Do we support such charades knowingly and opportunistically, in the hope that it is something that could be built upon culturally and politically? Or condemn it honestly as a legislative hoax, and make no inroads at all in terms of the political landscape? I suggest probing with bayonets, but without getting your hopes up.

Jewish Loot and Neglected Fruit: How the Mainstream Right Serves Jews and Betrays Whites

“Low-hanging fruit!” cry deluded right-wingers all over the West. “Why doesn’t my favored party on the mainstream right pluck that fruit and defeat the left?” Well, they’ve been crying that for decades and will still be crying it when the left pack them off to a slave-labor camp or an organic gas-chamber. Some of those right-wingers are too stupid to see the truth; some are too frightened to admit it. Their favored party on the mainstream right doesn’t pluck the low-hanging fruit because it doesn’t want to defeat the left. And it doesn’t want to defeat the left because it is the left. That is, it’s financed and controlled by Jews who support the left and its anti-White, anti-Christian, anti-Western agenda.

The lies and delusions of perverts

Take the question of transgenderism. In 2021 Boris Johnson, British prime minister and leader of the so-called Conservative party, was presented with some low-hanging fruit — ripe, delicious, and trembling on its stalk. Johnson was asked to affirm that “only women have a cervix” after his supposed opponent, the Labour leader Keir Starmer, had said that this simple statement of biological fact was “transphobic.” According to Starmer, “it is not right” and “should not be said.”

The Goy Grovel: Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson betraying Whites and serving Jews

If Johnson had wanted to stand up for “conservative values,” defeat the left, and rally millions of ordinary Whites to his party, he would have said that, yes, of course only women have a cervix and that the Labour party are pandering to the lies and delusions of perverted and mentally ill men. But Johnson didn’t say that. He’s a cuckservative and he cucked. If he’d spoken the truth about transgenderism, he would have pleased ordinary Whites. But he would have angered Jews. As Kenneth Vinther pointed out in his review of Scott Howard’s The Transgender-Industrial Complex (2020) at Counter Currents, transgenderism is a thoroughly kosher campaign: “at the top of the [transgender] pyramid rests a series of charming Jewish billionaires like George Soros, Paul Singer, Dan Loeb, Seth Klarman, Jennifer Pritzker, David Gelbaum, Andrew Shechtel, Sheldon Adelson, Loren Schecter, Martine Rothblatt, David T. Rubin, and Mark Hyman, to name a few.”

Take the fight to Labour!

Now take the question of racism. A typically deluded right-winger called Patrick O’Flynn has recently complained in the cuckservative Spectator about “renewed lurches into race-baiting by Labour.” He condemns Labour for demanding “a posthumous royal pardon of those who took part in an anti-slavery uprising in Guyana in 1823” and for blaming “health inequalities” and the poverty of Black-headed households on racism.

O’Flynn rightly says that all this inflated anti-racist rhetoric “will be hated” by the working-class White voters who have switched allegiance from Labour to the Conservatives. Labour’s claims “ought to be meat and drink to a competent Conservative party.” After all, he says, a “cabinet in which the Home Secretary, Chancellor, Health Secretary, Education Secretary, Business Secretary and several others are from non-white backgrounds should be taking the fight to Labour about its unfair characterisation of modern Britain.”

“Anti-racist” means “anti-white”

O’Flynn points out the obvious: “Now would be the perfect time for some of these ministers to step forward and make the case that Britain is one of the least racist countries in the world and a place that should be aspiring to a post-racial politics rather than buying into Labour’s relentless grievance-mongering.” But alas, none of those non-White ministers has stepped forward to defend Britain, so O’Flynn concludes his article on a puzzled and despondent note. Despite the low-hanging fruit waiting to plucked by the multi-hued hands of that admirably vibrant cabinet, Labour’s racial rhetoric has “gone pretty much unanswered.” O’Flynn can’t bring himself to admit the truth, you see. The Tories don’t want to defeat the left’s rhetoric on racism, let alone attack the anti-White ideology central to the concept of racism.

That’s because the Tories accept the anti-White ideology themselves and proudly proclaim themselves to be an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic party. As the Jewish Conservative Tom Tugendhat has said: “Anti-Semitism sits alongside racism, anti-Islam, homophobia, and sexism as a cretinous and divisive belief that has no place in our public life and particularly not in government.” O’Flynn doesn’t mention at the Spectator that the Pakistani Muslim Sajid Javid, one of those non-White ministers in the Tory government, did indeed recently “step forward” in response to leftist hysteria about racism. In fact, he stepped forward not once but twice. And what did Sajid Javid do after he stepped forward? He heartily agreed with the left, first about the need to stamp out racism by White sportsmen and second about the need to punish a White comedian called Jimmy Carr for a good joke about Gypsies: “When people talk about the Holocaust they talk about the tragedy of six million lives being lost to the Nazi war machine, but they never mention the thousands of Gypsies killed by the Nazis, because no one wants to talk about the positives.”

Diligently kissing Jewish backsides

In between those two anti-White interventions, Sajid Javid found time in his busy schedule to extend “early Chanukah greetings” to Britain’s tiny but very powerful Jewish community. Javid knows which side his bagel is buttered. He wants to be prime minister and that’s why he has been diligently kissing Jewish backsides ever since he entered politics.  Being anti-White is part of being pro-Jewish. The same is true of Priti Patel, the high-testosterone Indian Hindu fem-pol who was fired as a minister by Theresa May for having secret meetings with Israeli officials under the supervision of the little-known but very powerful Jew Stuart Polak, a former chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). Theresa May didn’t object to Patel being a shabbos-shiksa, agent of Israel and cringing step’n’fetchit for Britain’s Jews. After all, May was all those things herself. No, she objected to Patel being a clumsy shabbos-shiksa and bringing Jewish control of British politics to public attention. But Patel didn’t spend long out of high office. When the part-Jewish Boris Johnson became prime minister, he appointed Patel Home Secretary and she’s now overseeing a harshening of Britain’s already draconian laws against “hate speech.”

She’s also been revealed as an obnoxious bully of her White staff. That’s poetic justice, because White officials at the Home Office are heavily leftist and have been imposing ethnic enrichment on ordinary Whites for many years. Now they’ve experienced for themselves a little — very little — of the misery inflicted by non-Whites. All the same, if rules on ministerial conduct had been followed, Patel would have been fired for the second time. But obnoxious behavior towards Whites doesn’t count. Patel performs the goy-grovel before Jews and that does count. She’s still in her post, still obeying Jewish orders, and still declining to “step forward” and defend Britain from the left’s anti-racist (and anti-White) hysteria. Rishi Sunak, the Indian Hindu Chancellor in the Tory cabinet, has also declined to step forward and bat for Britain. He’s much more intelligent than Patel, which isn’t difficult to be, and he’s a former employee of Goldman Sachs, which is exactly what you would expect him to be (Richard Sharp, his Jewish overseer at Goldman Sachs, became “the BBC’s third Jewish chairman” in 2021).

The logic of looting

At least, Sunak’s earlier work for Goldman Sachs is exactly what we haters at the Occidental Observer would expect. Sunak has been placed at the top of British politics to serve Jewish interests, not the interests of Whites. But his work for the great “vampire squid” went unremarked in another of Patrick O’Flynn’s deluded articles at the Spectator. O’Flynn was complaining that Sunak hasn’t plucked yet more low-hanging fruit. The policies Sunak is pursuing don’t help the former Labour-supporting Whites who switched to the Conservatives. Their hard work isn’t being rewarded and Sunak is deliberately pushing them down the social scale. As O’Flynn says:

Think about how this must feel to workers on roughly median earnings. Two decades ago they earned two-and-a-half times as much as minimum wage workers. Now they earn less than twice as much. By 2024, Sunak has decreed that minimum wage workers in entry level roles will be earning two-thirds of the amount that median earners do. This will represent a massive compression of wages within a single generation.

For those working people who put in a lot of effort in their schooldays compared to their more idle classmates, or who perhaps underwent apprenticeships on very low earnings at the start of their careers, this is highly unlikely to feel like progress. … Sunak has no parallel policy of ensuring that median earnings catch up as a proportion of the top 10 or 1 per cent of earners. In other words, his approach defies logic. Those in the modest middle of the pay scale have every reason to feel victimised. (Does Rishi Sunak really understand red wall voters?, [“red-wall voters” = traditionally Labour-supporting Whites who switched to the Tories], The Spectator, 13th November 2021)

O’Flynn is wrong. Sunak’s approach doesn’t defy logic. It’s perfectly logical for an alumnus of Goldman Sachs to continue serving plutocratic Jews, not ordinary Whites. Sunak is there to help mega-rich Jews get richer, not to defend Britain against their looting. Of course, you can’t expect O’Flynn to mention Jews in a cuckservative magazine like the Spectator. But he could at least have mentioned Sunak’s connections to Goldman Sachs and drawn the obvious conclusion. I suspect he was scared to bring an obviously Jewish bank into the argument. After all, look at what happened to the great conservative philosopher Roger Scruton when the left whipped up a hysteria about a speech he had once made in Hungary. He had criticized George Soros and said, with perfect truth, that “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros empire.” Scruton was denounced as an “anti-Semite” by Luciana Berger, the very Jewish Member of Parliament for a very non-Jewish constituency in Liverpool.

Blind to the truth

As I described in “A Philosopher Falls,” Scruton’s response was typically cuckservative. He should have denounced Berger for her dishonesty and turned the blowtorch of his mighty intellect on the flimsy and regularly misused concept of “anti-Semitism.” He didn’t. Instead, he indignantly denied that he was an anti-Semite, thereby accepting the validity of the charge and merely rejecting its application in his particular case.

That is not how a great philosopher should behave. But then I don’t think Scruton was a great philosopher or an effective defender of Western civilization. To defend something, you have to recognize who its enemies are. Then you expose and oppose them. Jews are the central enemies of Western civilization, but far too many self-proclaimed defenders of the West are still blind to the enemy within the gates. Thanks to their blindness, they are betrayed by the Jew-controlled right again and again. When they stop being blind, they’ll stop being betrayed, because they’ll stop supporting the Jew-controlled right.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “England”; trans. Alexander Jacob

Go to Alexander Jacob’s Introduction


Even when you do business, do not value your commercial advantage higher than the mercy of God, rather consider divine mercy as your greatest gain.
Cromwell, 1658

The Englishman no longer confesses today: I believe in God, the almighty Father, creator of heaven and earth, but: I believe in Father Dollar, who accomplishes everything.
Ruskin, 1880

Old experience teaches us: One who spends six weeks in a foreign land sits down confidently and writes a lively book in which the national character, the customs, the characteristics and the errors of the people are clearly described and in an amazingly simple manner; as the English say: he that runs may read. More thoughtfully does he write who has employed keenly conscientious observations for six months; his book runs the danger of boring through its many reservations and questions the reader who wished to experience something definite and now gropes, staggering. But one who has lived there six years and had the opportunity to become closely acquainted with a number of differently disposed individuals of the concerned nation so that he could accurately perceive in their disposition the consequences of events in effect and counter-effect and become acquainted not only with the character but also with the characteristic orientation of the character will give up any intention of writing a book about that nation because he cannot hope to do justice to the obviously complex situation.

It is something different when a man who himself belongs to the concerned nation, and therefore possesses an inexhaustible knowledge of the same, and ponderingly lets the past entrusted to him pass before him; deep insights then impose themselves on him at certain points, such as those where character and history intersect. Then he suddenly recognises that this character should, if the course of history had not imposed a definite orientation on it, have developed quite differently and that the same historical event would have led in the case of a differently disposed character to other results. Of course, one must proceed very cautiously whenever one speaks of the ‘character’ of a people; for this so-called character is necessarily made up of innumerable different individual characters, so one runs the danger of obtaining an image of the sort prepared by Lombroso,[1] who had fifty faces of murderers superimposed on one another in order to convey in this way the physiognomy of the ideal murderer, from which there arose a type fully without character, whose only definite characteristic is to seem like no murderer that ever lived.

In the case of a nation, however, the ubiquitously ramified blood relationship does much for a standardisation, and the so-called mass psychology, that is, the influence under which the individual lies within a community, also does much. Thus, for example, there is manifest with striking persuasiveness these days a uniformity in the German national character: 1914 is indeed, for Germany, one of those moments where history and character intersect; suddenly we obtain an insight into a depth that otherwise the deceptive superficialities hide from one’s eyes. Similarly is revealed precisely at this same moment—not, we hope to God, with the same unanimity, but still clearly and decisively—an intersection of English character and English history; and here too we stand shaken, but shaken with fear and a feeling of guilt. For it is useless when publicists declare that the English are no longer Germans—that they evidence through their conduct; but they are Germans, purer Germans than many Germans and the development of the last two hundred years has caused among other things the ever stronger emergence of the Anglo-Saxon—thus of the really German—at the expense of the Norman-Frankish (leaving aside the fact that the latter loses itself increasingly in the former through mixing). One may not throw in the influence of the Jews, which is of course especially great in the ruling government of England; Germany, however, has ten times more Jews, and where are they now? Wiped away, as it were, by the powerful upheaval, no longer to be found as ‘Jews’ because they do their duty as Germans against the enemy or at home, whereas the English Jews, who are indeed the physical brothers and cousins of the German Jews, take part in everything shameful, change their German names to English ones and in the press belonging almost exclusively to them march at the head of the defamation-campaign against the Germans. If a nation rises up, the Jew follows, he does not lead. The causes of the development are to be sought deeper, in the events of the long centuries that have led England to the place where it stands today. This was one of the possible developments of the Germanic character; it became a fact through an intersection of history and character.

One who ponders on political history will always be surprised what a far-reaching and, at the same time, incalculably ramified effect simple events and hardly perceptible turns of fate exercise. It is sufficient to focus on a single event at the beginning of England’s history and a single change that took place half a century later caused by external circumstances to understand many things that otherwise would be an unresolvable riddle. From these two facts indeed arises—as an effect—a third; from the characteristically determined effect, however, there arises necessarily an equally characteristically determined counter-effect; and so there is formed finally—as in all organic life—from the simplest elements thinkable an infinitely manifold characteristic whole in which all parts are at the same time conditioning and conditioned.

The campaign of conquest of the Normans that subjugated the Anglo-Saxon population in the 11th century is the ‘event’ that I have in mind; the ‘change’ is that through which the farming, water-shy population of England slowly, from the 16th century onwards, was transformed into a sea-faring, trading one. That differentiating character-traits inexplicable to every foreigner arose in the first place from the combination of the political system that had already reached a fine maturity under Alfred with the spirit of the Norman strongmen cannot be doubted; but as little can it be doubted that, from the moment that the change to sea-faring took place, there arose also a change of the entire system formed in the course of five centuries that had to lead finally to the catastrophe whose beginning we experience today.

In England one understands by ‘nobility’ not that which is understood thereby in other countries; it does not have to do with titles through which entire members of a family are externally elevated for all time but with the membership in a social caste that is inwardly separated from the rest of the people. Men constantly fall out of this caste, others constantly enter it through assimilation. Every Englishman who belongs to the ‘nobility’ and ‘gentry’ is recognisable in the very first minute, very often already by his facial features but always by his facial expression, gestures, voice, and especially—indeed with absolute certainty—by his language. Nobody asks about his title, which anyway only one of the living members bears, it is only a matter of the caste. Precisely the highbred people often spurn the title; to the respected families belong those who through the centuries have refused every bestowal of nobility.

One may not point to the analogy of the ancien régime in France, it leads one astray. Of course, the Frankish and Burgundian and Gothic nobility was clearly distinguishable from the rest of the people until the Revolution; today one finds those great physiognomies only very scattered in France; in England, however, the conditions are from the beginning different and have as a result of this obtained another significance. The Burgundians and Franks and Goths invaded Gaul as entire peoples, the greater parts fused completely with the earlier inhabitants, only princes and nobles held themselves separate and were numerous enough to carry out this inbreeding for a long time. On the other hand, the noble families that followed the first kings from Normandy and Anjou to England were relatively few in number; so this nobility, which accepted and assimilated into itself only a few Saxon and Danish families, remained fully separated from the remaining unmixed Anglo-Saxon people; from this arose the fact of the upper caste that distinguishes England alone which possesses to the present day its own language—more accurately its own expressions, though the expressions include numerous words and phrases that the English who do not belong to the caste correctly master as little as the expressions inaccessible to them. From this circumstance there arose a division that even today separates the population into two irreconcilable components, an upper and a lower, a noble and a common. William the Conqueror strove, but without success, to learn Anglo-Saxon; among the first kings after him—narrates the great political theorist Hobbes—those who complained about the tyranny of the new aristocracy received the reply: Thou art but an Englishman![2] And yet this mere Englishman won insofar as he refused to learn French. But similarly—and here is the critical point—the upper caste refused to learn Anglo-Saxon. From this dual character there arose a new language, we call it today English; it arose out of two conflicting languages of which each wanted the supremacy for itself; but even after the final fixation the battle continued in the two forms of expression that still prevail today: the upper class and the common.

One who focuses on this point—the language—will be able to soon obtain a deeper insight into many situations than lengthy books can give him. So, for example, high schools that are open to the entire nation—as in Germany, France, Italy and everywhere—are impossible in England. I cannot indeed send my son to a school in which he will absorb from his comrades and even from his teachers the expressions ‘igh’ for ‘high’ and ‘hi’land’ for ‘island’ and, in addition, the nasalisation that has developed so disastrously in the city folk of England at home and now in America and Australia. The grammar school and the secondary school are therefore impossible, there are institutions where the children of the upper class are educated and there are institutions where the children of those who are not upper class are educated; the boys do not know one another, never speak to one another, and mutually despise one another. Consequently also a university in the German sense is impossible. The old universities are exclusively upper class and produce those exquisite English scholars who, removed from everything common in the enclosures of their mediaeval ‘colleges’, at the same time worldly wise as happens naturally from the membership in the ruling classes of a ruling nation, often possessing unlimited leisure for researches and travels, represent perhaps in their person and their books the most perfect culture that one can attain today; indeed, one must admit that they are a greenhouse product. The new universities however are mainly only specialist schools; in them work individual significant researchers—that is, chemists, physicists, mechanists, etc.—who have almost all of them studied in Germany; they cannot influence the solely practically oriented character of the institutions, a character that in no way serves pure science. One of the supporting columns of present-day Germany thus is completely lacking in England: the schools and universities that are all-unifying, and penetrate the entire life of the nation through a thousand canals and raise it to a cultural unity.

No less is lacking in England the possibility of a popular army, of that powerful moral creation that one can call the backbone of present-day Germany. For, the German army would not possess this enormous moral force if the absolute unity of all the forces of the nation were not active in it and mirrored itself in it: from the majesty of the Kaiser to the youngest peasant recruits all form a single family, everybody is a comrade to the other, they are all united in obedience, duty and love for the fatherland. Before the army could arise and the unity of Germany could be formed into a great power, the moral and spiritual unity had to be there to wish for and create such an army. This is lacking in England. In England, the two halves of the people—the lesser and the greater—know nothing about each other, absolutely nothing. I can have a servant for twenty years and know no more about him than about the soul of my walking stick; the pride of the Englishman who does not belong to the higher caste is his unapproachability; he does not want to be asked, he does not wish to speak, he does not say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good night’; if he meets his master on the street, he crosses over to the other side in order not to have to greet him. What kind of comradeship can there then be between officer and soldier? Whence should the unity come? It is, and remains, the relationship of a nobleman who gives orders to men from another world and compels obedience through his inherited superiority.

It may be added in passing that the Englishman of the people has always been unwarlike. The Plantagenets had many wars in France and distinguished themselves in the Holy Land; but, apart from the nobility, they did not obtain any soldiers in England; Green[3]—the well-known historical scholar—writes: ‘the population of England did not worry at all about wars and crusades; they valued their kings for only one thing, that they create lasting peace on the island.’ And that remained so to the present day when the English army consists predominantly of Celtic Irish and Celtic Scots; the actual English do not let themselves enlist. In the English battles of the past, Englishmen from the aristocracy perhaps commanded, but the armies consisted of foreign soldiers, mostly of Germans. The battles in India were conducted from the beginning mostly by Indian, not English soldiers; the legally determined norm was a fifth of Englishmen, and these ‘Englishmen’ were, as mentioned, mostly Irishmen. The delightful descriptions of the recruiting of soldiers in England that we owe to Shakespeare are known to every German from Henry IV, Part Two; in the letters of the English envoy in Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, will be found a delightful historical confirmation from the same period. At the beginning of 1617, England wished to assist the Republic against Spain. The Doge accepted the services of a Scottish count who brought with him soldiers from Scotland and Ireland but for the offered English forces he offered thanks: ‘He does not have a high opinion of them and knows how much their love of war is dependent on the three B’s—beef, beer and bed!’ Then one may consult von Noorden’s The War of the Spanish Succession;[4] one will see that, in 1708, England had to decide ‘to remedy the lack of English recruits that was becoming more perceptible from year to year through legislative means.’ It is always the same story, 1200, 1600, 1700 and 1900; I could offer dozens of examples. The insular position alone does not suffice as an explanation; the island kingdom of Japan has formed a formidable national army before our eyes. I am convinced that the real reason is to be sought in that ‘circumstance’ of racial mixture followed by the social division, and then later increased by the ‘change’, of which I shall soon speak. It may be mentioned, in addition, that the theory that England does not need any large army and should not by any means form any was supported already early by practice; no statesman was—and is still today—esteemed more highly by his countrymen than Lord Bolingbroke;[5] far beyond his own life, he remained the prophet of the particular developmental course of modern England; in the middle of the victories of Queen Anne, he explains in his ‘Remarks on the History of England’ that England should possess a great navy but not a standing army, for the latter would cause the island to ‘approach, as it were, too near the continent’, whereas it is England’s interest to have the continental powers war mutually against one another without involving ‘themselves intricately, much less continuously, in the political schemes of the continent’; an army would ‘carry great domestic inconveniencies, and even dangers too, along with [it].’

Let us mention briefly a third thing: the entire legislation of England—the state, its constitution, its politics—is the work of one social stratum alone, without the participation of the others. Hobbes, the honest, admits it: ‘Parliament has never represented the entire nation.’ The point of departure, however, was the Reformation; for, everywhere religion formed the innermost axis of all politics; and what do we find here? Those Englishmen who separated themselves seriously from Rome had to soon flee the country and seek freedom of conscience in the wildernesses of North America; on the other hand, the disengagement of the state Church as a purely political measure followed, determined by Henry VIII, who ruled in a very absolutist manner almost without any questions from the Parliament; the population of England had gone to bed as ‘Roman Catholics’ and woke up next morning as ‘Anglicans’.

One of the things that has always provoked me is the talk of the political freedom of England; it was from the beginning of its history till now a matter only of the freedom of a caste. Athens had the leisure to be ‘free’ because 400,000 slaves served 20,000 free citizens; England had the luxury of affording a so-called free parliament because this parliament was fully in the hands of rich people to whom ruling was their pleasure and life. An author known too little in Germany, Thomas de Quincey—one of the most richly gifted in intellectual acumen, knowledge, memory, and literary skill that England ever produced—shows that the increase of the influence and authority of the Lower House since around 1600 is not to be attributed to a revival of popular power but to the increase of the lesser aristocracy, thus from the families deriving from the younger sons; the latter slowly pushed aside the higher feudal aristocracy and the bishops. It was very clever of the Parliament to obtain rights even for the people: that strengthened it with regard to the king, and allowed it to behead anyone who did not wish to be interfered with by the ruling caste; no less bloodily was it able to suppress every desire of the people for power. Even today, when the suffrage is extended in such a way that significant sections of the common people have a say, the old violence of the ruling class is still maintained. Many readers will know Dickens’ description of a parliamentary election from Pickwick. I myself can confirm this from more recent times. On the day of the elections, an extra train brought in to the small provincial town where I was living 400 ‘roughs’, that is, rowdy men, terrible strongmen with insolent or criminal physiognomies, from the nearby factory city, each provided with a powerful club. That was the guard employed by the Conservative Party; in itself the elections in another city had nothing to do with these men but they were present to intimidate and—if that were not sufficient—to break their skulls. Thankfully the Liberal committee too had not been lazy and, shortly after, there emerged another 300 more terrible comrades from another place. The whole day there was yelling, cudgelling; the voters were dragged out of their carriages by their feet, the speakers smeared with rotten eggs, etc. A typical image of the freedom of political opinion and suffrage! In the evening, I experienced this on my own person. For I was at that time a pupil in a college and, of the 80 inmates of the teacher’s house, the only one who bore the Liberal colours and thereby showed himself a Gladstone[6] man; even the requests of my teacher were not able to make me lay aside the colours of my choice and to tack on Disraeli’s[7] in my buttonhole; and so the whole gang fell upon me, threw me to the ground and pommelled me until the teacher and the servants hurried to help me. On that day—it was 46 years ago—I learned more about the English constitution and the English concept of freedom than later from the books of Hallam[8] and Gneist.[9] In England’s politics, two brutalities stand opposite and complement each other: the raw violence of the class used to ruling and the elementary brutality of the entire uncultivated masses who, as described above, are nowhere associated with anything higher.

All these phenomena are derived from that event which, in 1066, destroyed the fine Anglo-Saxon state with sheer violence and created the kingdom of ‘England’. I am of the opinion that both England’s rise and its downfall are rooted here.

But now the remarkable ‘change’, because without it the general demoralisation of all strata that we lament today would presumably never have come about.

Already long ago, John Robert Seeley, in his classic book The Expansion of England,[10] refuted the legend that the English were, from the beginning, daring sea-farers in the manner of the Vikings and the early Normans; the opposite is true. It cost much effort and time to give the English a taste for the water. Seeley remarks at the same time that the English in reality are not conquerors; they have founded colonies where the countries stood empty or were inhabited only by naked savages; others they snatched through contracts from the Dutch, French, Spanish or—for example, Malta—through breach of contract. India was subjugated by Indian troops; England has never undertaken campaigns of conquest through force of arms, like the Spanish and the French. The Englishman does not, like Alexander or Caesar, conduct wars for the sake of glory. ‘To England’, says Seeley, ‘war is throughout an industry, a way to wealth, the most thriving business, the most prosperous investment, of the time.’ One may praise it or not, I mention it only because this trait complements the others: that the English are not soldiers and also not bold and reckless sea-farers but were attracted to the water solely by trade; both the army and navy are not for the defence and strengthening of the homeland but for the promotion of the assets held in all parts of the world—certainly industrious and brave but not the expression of a national need or a moral idea.

Naturally its insular position brought with it, from the beginning, the fact that England had to obtain many things from beyond the water; not only conquerors came from there but also all sorts of wares. But for long centuries this trade lay in foreign hands. Among the successors of William the Conqueror it was the French of Normandy and Picardy who monopolised English trade; then the German Hansa intervened, then the so-called Flemish Hansa; Venice and Genoa took care of the entire trade from and to the Mediterranean according to special arrangements without the intercession of English ships. Even the fishing on the English coast was conducted mostly by Dutchmen so that, when Henry VIII sought to promote the tentative efforts of the first company of ‘merchant adventurers’ and to create for their protection a small navy, he did not know from where he should get the sailors; there were no sailors among the English. And to remedy this defect a law was passed in 1549 under his successor Edward VI that ordered the eating of fish on Friday and Sunday evening, as well as on all days of penitence, on pain of fines! Elizabeth did not fail to sharpen this regulation and otherwise too to promote fishing as much as possible. At a time therefore when Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese had already produced generations of brilliant, heroic ocean-farers, obligatory regulations had to compel the English to herrings and flounders so that they would become familiar with the watery element! (cf. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce).[11] Of course, now it proceeded quickly in an upward direction and that Doge who thanked English soldiers was glad to accept the help of some English warships that were indeed only armed merchant ships but were still counted as part of the royal navy. For the very first time in history seven English warships sailed into the Mediterranean Sea in July 1518 as a modest component of a powerful Dutch and Venetian navy (Corbett, England in the Mediterranean).[12] Now England had recognised the new world situation and the opportunity for enrichment that it offered precisely to it. All problematic things had indeed been carried out already by others: the eastern and western routes discovered, the New World opened up, India made accessible, relations established with China; now it was a matter only of grasping at Mephistopheles’ morality:

One asks about what and not about how?
I do not have to know anything about sailing,
War, trade and piracy,
Are threefold and not to be separated.[13]

In these words the now developing policy of England is accurately described: war, trade and piracy.

As soon as England set its mind on overseas trade, there is also hatred: and indeed first of all against the German Hansa; one who wishes to learn more needs only to consult Schanz’s Englische Handelspolitik.[14] Immediately there is also the robbery system: without declaring war England falls like a vulture upon the unsuspecting Spanish Jamaica and founds in this way its West Indian empire. For a long time England’s ‘colonial activity’ was limited to intercepting Spanish galleons that were sailing home laden with gold and precious wares. Everywhere England, conducting merchant voyages, developed more than the other nations and then became after their destruction ever greater. Piracy leads the way; trade prospers upon it; one makes war where nothing else works, but always bearing in mind the ‘island policy’ of Lord Bolingbroke. First England allied itself with Holland to destroy Spain’s colonial empire, then with France to cut the vital nerves of Holland; then it spied how brilliantly the great Frenchman Dupleix had apprehended the Indian problem, imitated him gradually and incited the Indians against the French, who were conducting their trade peacefully there, then the Indians against the Indians until it had finally subjugated one of the richest empires in the world ‘without conquest’. At the turn of the 19th century, the gentle and at the same time consistently keenly perceptive Kant judged England to be ‘the most violent, warlike state’. How godforsakenly amoral the people soon became under the influence of this new spirit a single example may bring to light. How the battles that Marlborough[15] won with his German soldiers are celebrated in English schools! Now what was their real goal and its success? To ensure to England the monopoly of the slave trade! Lecky, the author of the great History of England in the Eighteenth Century,[16] says that, after the Peace of Utrecht (1713), the slave trade constituted the ‘central point of the entire English politics’. The English conducted it so long as it remained profitable; Liverpool became important not through its industry but through the hunting and selling of unfortunate millions of blacks. The patriotic historical writer Green writes literally: ‘The frightful cruelties and nefariousness of this trade, the ruin of Africa and the destruction of human dignity did not arouse compassion in any Englishman.’ Then, however, Green passes to the description of efforts of individual philanthropists; but these were not able to effect anything for decades; Parliament remained deaf, the businessmen were indignant … until the day when a new situation made this trade seem undesirable and now, under disgustingly hypocritical protestations of humanity and England’s mission to lead all other nations in an enlightened manner, etc., slave-trade was legally abolished. On this we are so fortunate to possess the clear immortal judgement of Goethe: ‘Everybody knows the declamations of England against the slave-trade and, while they wish to make us believe what humane principles underlay this procedure, it is now discovered that the real motivation was a real objective without which the English, as is well-known, never act and which one should have known. On the west coast of Africa they used the negroes even in their large estates and it was against their interests to remove them from there. In America itself they had established large negro colonies that were very productive and that provided yearly a large yield of negroes. With these they supplied the North American needs and, since they conducted in this way an extremely profitable trade, the import from outside was very much in the way of their mercantile interests and they therefore preached not without a reason against the inhuman trade.’

It is impossible within the scope of an essay, and perhaps even unnecessary, to describe how in this way of an increasingly more exclusive devotion to trade, industry, generally to the acquisition of money, England’s agriculture declined. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, English weavers still lived in the country in comfortable houses with vegetable gardens and fields; today only a very rich businessman can afford the luxury of living in the country in England because its cultivation does not pay the costs. In 1769, with a total population of 81/2 million, 2,800,000 were occupied in the cultivation of the land and the raising of cattle; in 1897, with a population of around 40 million, altogether 798,000 men and women worked on the land (Gibbins, The Industrial History of England, 5th edition).[17]

To this is related a deep transformation of the entire character of the population in both its strata; through this change the life and soul of the Englishman was slowly fully transformed. The old England had for centuries enjoyed the immeasurable fortune of not having to fear any external enemies and it had had its few wars fought, as already mentioned, by foreign soldiers. In this way agricultural work and life flourished and—as the old poets show us and the new scholars demonstrate to us statistically—not only the lords but also the small tenants and farm labourers were incomparably better off than now. In all of Europe England enjoyed the fame of congeniality and ‘cheerfulness’. A traveller of the 15th century is struck by the fact that the English, ‘less plagued than other peoples with hard labour, conduct a refined life and one more devoted to intellectual interests’; another celebrates their incomparable ‘courtesy’. All of that has changed. In the essay ‘German Freedom’ (p.19),[18] I mentioned some things about the ‘intellectual interests’ in present-day England; but as regards ‘merry old England’, whose highest flowering—known to, and loved by, every one of us from Shakespeare and Walter Scott—falls in the times of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, it has gradually disappeared, at first slowly and later frantically fast, exactly in step with navigation and industry—though inversely. In the novels of the 18th century it glows in a heavy, uncanny twilight; Dickens’ genius reveals it still in the middle of the 19th century in the hearts of individual naïve eccentric souls where it flickers here and there in between caricature and melancholic insight into their own unreal shadow existence nearing death; today, the last trace is trampled upon: one finds in England no stateliness, no broad good-natured humour, no cheerfulness; everything is hatred, noise, pomp, pretentiousness, vulgarity, arrogance, sullenness and envy. One remembers the fine old-English Christmas festival with the decorations of fruit-bearing holly and mistletoe under which innocent kisses were stolen; at least on that day, even thirty years ago, in all of England only a few men could be tempted out of their house; today the halls of all the big hotels of London are, already weeks before, rented out; families sit at 1000 tables, eat and drink and are noisy until, at midnight, the unified scream of trivial popular songs in the style of ‘he’s a jolly good fellow’ arises, after which celebration of fraternity, the tables are quickly removed and now all these young men and girls, who did not know each other previously, give themselves in disgusting promiscuity to the enjoyment of negro dances, while the more serious play cards in the adjoining rooms; in this way is the birth of our Saviour Jesus Christ celebrated today in England! And I choose this example from the many deliberately because in this tasteless way of enjoying oneself the opposite of ‘merry England’ is announced. For, the word ‘merry’—the American philologist Whitney[19] instructs us—has no Germanic relationship; the Anglo-Saxons took it from the defeated Celts, among whom it signified ‘child’s play’, for an indication of the delight in country beauty, that is, in meadows and woods; even Shakespeare calls the humming of bees ‘merry’; from that the word was expanded to the indication of joy in music, that is, in song; and only a third developmental phase used it for cheerful innocent joy in general. In this so characteristically significant word are clearly reflected the early English folk. And I do not think that any Englishman with judgement will contradict me if I say: we were ‘merry’, we are that no longer. With the total decline of country life and with the equally perfect victory of the sole God of trade and industry, Mammon, the genuine, harmless, naïve, heart-warming cheerfulness has disappeared from England. And that recalls to mind an old English saying: ‘’Tis good to be merry and wise’; the one who is merry is also wise; the one who is not merry is certainly unwise.

I think I may maintain with certainty that the catastrophe of the complete decline of English cheerfulness, English wisdom, English honesty (for even this was proverbial in older times) is to be attributed to the circumstance that the change to war, trade and piracy affected the nation in its characteristic twofold constitution. All culture—religion, education, army, art, legislation, customs—considered well, presupposes unity if it should penetrate an entire nation in such a way that every simple man receives something from it; what is meant by that we know precisely in Germany and so I do not need to describe it; in England, they do not know anything about this. As soon as the brave Anglo-Saxon peasant was transformed into a pirate the blond beast appeared, as the German philologist glimpsed in his crazy dream; and as soon as the refined noble of the 15th century had lost ‘intellectual interests’ and had become covetous of gold, there arose the heartless slave trader who was different from the Spanish men of violence only in his hypocrisy. There is nothing more brutal in the world than a crude Englishman; he indeed possesses no other support than his crudeness. Mostly he is not a bad man; he has openness and energy and optimism; but he is ignorant as a kaffir, does not undergo any schooling in obedience and respect, knows no other ideal than ‘to fight his way through’. This crudeness has slowly imbued almost the entire nation from the bottom to the top—as is always the case. Even fifty years ago it was an offence against class dignity if a member of the nobility took part in industry, trade and finance; today, the head of the oldest and greatest house of Scotland, brother-in-law of the king, a banker! Sons of counts and dukes disappeared from society; one enquires about what remains of them: ‘Oh, he’s making his heap!’, that is, his million; where and how is not asked and not said; suddenly he re-emerges as a rich man and then everything is alright.

Meanwhile, however, another sort of coarsening had entered in the upper caste that is still more alarming in the political context: in externally consistent good manners and genteel respectability the moral compass has ‘lost its north’; the temptation to enormous power on the basis of immeasurable wealth was too strong; in the nobility and in the circles related to it one soon was not able to distinguish between right and wrong. The same man who would never have deviated from scrupulous decency committed every crime in the supposed defence of the fatherland. The prophets among us—a Burke, a Carlyle, a Ruskin—have already for a hundred years and more pointed out the frightful decline in love of truth—which was once held so uniquely sacred! Even for this I would like to give in conclusion an example—since detailed discussion is excluded; the reader will learn to see what path or, rather, wrong path England has taken.

The name Warren Hastings will be known to most. Even as an immature boy he entered into the service of the East India Company; he continued until he became the Governor-General. Without question, England owes its rule in India in the first place to this man, who understood with Machiavellian cleverness to play against one another the different provinces and tribes and religions of India and, besides, to incite them all against the competition of the French. Along with an eminent power of understanding and an iron will, Warren Hastings was distinguished above all by the fact that he had no misgivings in political matters. He had to do with tyrants like Tipu Sultan,[20] with criminals who had risen from the lowest castes to princes and now ruled like wild animals over the submissive Indians, with old witch-princesses who held their own sons in prison, to carouse longer in the blood of their people, in short with the worst pack of Asiatic monsters that poor India had become a victim of; certainly gentle means were not in place there, and if the trading company or the English government standing behind it had intervened with powerful armed force, they would have accomplished a noble work nobly. But nothing of the sort happened. The government did not think of intervening in a helpful way with money or soldiers, and the company did not want increased expenses but, on the contrary, increased revenues. And so Hastings allied himself once with one Indian prince, at another time with another; he did not inquire into right and justice, rather he protected the greatest rascals among the throne-robbers as long as he served thereby the interests of his trading company and therewith also—as he thought—those of England. Above all, money was necessary; how otherwise should he equip and maintain an army? India had to pay for India’s subjugation. And so Hastings sought among the rival princes those that promised him the most financial payments; these he supported with all those means that a European had at hand. In this way he almost doubled the revenues of the East India Company. But how was that possible? How could the princes concerned make such large payments and provide so many soldiers? Through such frightful cruelties that the world has not heard of anything similar until the dear Belgians recently occupied the Congo basin, cruelties that have brought eternal shame on the idea of humanity, for no animal could think of them and no devil would have exercised them on innocent people. Then, in 1786, the great Burke—already immortal through this single act—entered and enraptured the Parliament through his eloquence to bring accusations against the man who shamed the good reputation of England. When the matter was brought to the Upper House as the highest judicial authority, Burke spoke six days consecutively, substantiated the complaint in every detail and concluded with the words: ‘I accuse Warren Hastings in the name of the eternal laws of justice, I accuse him in the name of human nature, which he has covered with dishonour.’ The trial dragged on for ten years, that is, was dragged on with all judicial means and ruses. One can imagine how difficult the distance of India at that time made all the interrogations of witnesses and procedures and how much this benefited Hastings and the trading company. Over and over again it was repeated: ‘Yes, he increased the revenues from 3,000,000 pounds sterling to 5,000,000; what more do you want? Even today one finds these figures quoted in English books almost everywhere; therewith Hastings was considered as being justified. Besides, he had invented the notorious opium trade; should such a genius be punished? Pitt, who as Prime Minister knew the papers, said: ‘There is only one rescue: he must plead state emergency.’ In short, Hastings was acquitted. Burke, in the last of his great court speeches, his heroic attempts—many times did he faint with exhaustion—to help bring the good case to a victory, spoke the eternally memorable words: ‘My lords, if you close your eyes to these atrocities then you make of us Englishmen a nation of concealers, a nation of dissemblers, a nation of liars, a nation of forgers; the character of England, that character which more than our arms and more than our commerce has made us a great nation, the character of England will be gone and lost[21] … We know, I say, and feel the force of money; and we now call upon your lordships for justice in this cause of money. We call upon you for the preservation of our manners, —of our virtues. We call upon you for our national character. We call upon you for our liberties.’

The day on which Warren Hastings was acquitted—23 April, 1795—is one of those days of which I spoke at the beginning of this essay, where history and character intersect and we suddenly cast a glimpse into our innermost. The new England—that already had been coming into being from out of the old conception—now appeared there full-fledged. Hastings had not enriched himself personally; he had not as a private individual betrayed other private individuals; he had perhaps not killed a fly in his life; but in the interest of his fatherland he did not shy away from any lie, any perjury, betrayed the one who trusted him, did not protect the innocent, and raised criminals to the throne; he tolerated that other men commit cruelties of the most frightful sort while he simply shrugged his shoulders and did not want to know anything about them, dismissed English officials who, shocked, reported of this. As we see, with the new England the modern English statesman also appears. Precisely such a man is Sir Edward Grey:[22] for years he has constantly held the chairmanship of conferences for the maintenance of peace—so that the intended war would not yet materialise, for years he has sought ‘rapprochement’ with Germany—so that the upright German statesmen and diplomats may not notice the intention of the self-willed war of destruction; the German Kaiser almost averted the danger of war in the last moment—Grey, the anointed apostle of peace was able to shuffle the cards in such a way that it would be inevitable; otherwise England abominated regicide—now, when the unheard of happens, and active state officials and officers prepare it and an heir to the throne has the neighbouring heir to the throne shot, now not a single word of shock, but Grey discovers England’s mission ‘to protect the small states’; the English government allows Antwerp, in ‘neutral’ Belgium, to be transformed into the strongest fortification in the world, it sent English ammunition already in 1913 to Maubeuge;[23] Grey already has in his pocket the military agreement with France and Belgium for the invasion of Germany from the north, all the details of the landing, the advance, etc. are in black and white—and yet he is able to arrange things in such a way that it is Germany which, through an extreme emergency—we know that it would otherwise have been destroyed—‘broke the neutrality’; for the first time in the history of the world the entire English navy was mobilised at the beginning of July—but only for a harmless review before the king; quickly even a friendly warship visit to Kiel is arranged—for the other attempts to spy out this port had failed. … That is the present-day political England as Burke had predicted it: ‘Let us not worry about this England; in a hundred years it will be numbered among the dead nations.’ Even I do not believe in the enormous power of England, of which we hear so much; true power can be rooted only in moral power; the individual Englishman is brave and virtuous, the state of ‘England’ is rotten to the bones; one needs only to take hold of it firmly.

Germany is now constituted so entirely differently that it did not understand England—the present-day political England—for years and repeatedly allowed itself to be deceived by it; I almost fear that this will happen no less in the future; that could be disastrous. Therefore I, an Englishman, must have the courage to testify to the truth. Only a strong, victorious, wise Germany can save us all.

Bayreuth, 9 October 1914.

Alexander Jacob obtained his Master’s in English Literature from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from the Pennsylvania State University His post-doctoral research was conducted at the University of Toronto while he was a Visiting Fellow at the departments of Political Science, Philosophy, and English Literature of the University of Toronto.

His scholarly publications include De Naturae Natura: A Study of Idealistic Conceptions of Nature and the Unconscious, Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 1992, (2nd ed. Arktos Media, 2011), Indo-European Mythology and Religion: Essays, Melbourne, Manticore Press, 2019, Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the Early Twentieth Century, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 2001, and Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity and the State: Essays, Manticore Press, 2021.

He has also published several English editions of European thinkers such as H.S. Chamberlain, Edgar Julius Jung, Alfred Rosenberg, Charles Maurras and Jean-François Thiriart.


[1] Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) was an Italian criminologist and phrenologist.

[2] Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (1666).

[3] John Richard Green (1837-1883) was an English historian noted for his four-volume A History of the English People (1878-1880).

[4] Carl von Noorden, Der spanische Erbfolgekrieg, Düsseldorf, 1870.

[5] Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) was a Tory politician and political philosopher.

[6] William Gladstone (1809-1898) was a Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom four times between 1868 and 1894.

[7] Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) was a Conservative politician who served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

[8] Henry Hallam (1777-1859) was an English historian who wrote a history of mediaeval Europe and a constitutional history of England.

[9] Heinrich Rudolf von Gneist (1816-1895) was a German jurist and politician who wrote a work on Das englische Parlament (1886).

[10] John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883) is a study of the development of the British Empire.

[11] William Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1882.

[12] Julian Corbett, England in the Mediterranean: A Study of the Rise and Influence of British Power within the Straits 1603-1713, 2 vols., 1904.

[13] Goethe, Faust, Act V, Offene Gegend.

[14] Georg Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende des Mittelalters, 1881.

[15] John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) was an English statesman and general. He is famous for his military victories in the Low Countries between 1704 and 1709.

[16] William Edward Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols., 1878-1890.

[17] Henry de Beltgens Gibbins’ The Industrial History of England was first published in 1890.

[18] Another of the essays contained in the Kriegsaufsätze.

[19] William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) was an Ame

rican philologist who specialised in Sanskrit.

[20] Tipu Sultan (1751-1799) was a ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore who was allied with the French against the British East India Company.

[21] The original of this section is: ‘But if, by conniving at these frauds, you once teach the people of England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded conduct: if you teach them qualities directly the contrary to those by which they have hitherto been distinguished: if you make them a nation of concealers, a nation of dissemblers, a nation of liars, a nation of forgers; my lords, if you, in one word, turn them into a people of banyans, the character of England, that character which more than our arms and more than our commerce has made us a great nation, the character of England will be gone and lost.’

[22] Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862-1933) was a Liberal politician who directed British foreign policy during the First World War.

[23] Maubeuge is a city in France where Britain, according to the Germans, had stored ammunition even before the war in anticipation of an invasion of Belgium, though this was denied by Britain.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “England”—Translated and with an Introduction by Alexander Jacob

Introduction

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) is best known for his cultural history Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century; Munich, 1899) as well as for his studies of Kant, Goethe, Wagner, and Heinrich von Stein. But his several tracts written during World War I[1] are interesting in their own right as documents of German nationalist literature that prefigure the doctrines of German supremacy propounded by the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar Republic as well as by the National Socialists. Of the works dating from the war, Kriegsaufsätze (War Essays; Munich, 1914)—from which the present essay is taken—was indeed the first.[2]

Chamberlain’s essay on England is a study of the psychological bases of England’s imperial edifice as well as of its war aims in World War I. He notes that, whereas the world has been accustomed to considering Germany as a militaristic aggressor, it is in fact the imperial ambitions of England that are the principal impetus of the war. This exercise in psychological study of national character Chamberlain undertakes by highlighting, first, the social divisions in England that have informed the aristocracy and the rest of the population and, secondly, the gradual transformation of an originally insular people into an ocean-faring people intent on international trade and colonial exploitation.

The ruling class in England has, since the Norman invasion, been the French aristocracy, which, being a minority that accepted only a few Saxon and Danish families into its rather exclusive circle, did not mingle fully with the local Anglo-Saxon population. There was little interaction between them and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon population, and the social superiority of the Normans was established in a clear and unmistakable manner expressed not only in their different physiognomies but also in their linguistic expression. The aloofness of the French rulers, however, later seeped down to the classes below the aristocracy as well so that the well-known English ‘reserve’ was eventually observable throughout the population.

The government of the nation was always in the hands of the aristocracy alone and the Lower House never represented the people even when, around 1600, it gained more powers, for these powers were to benefit only the lesser aristocracy, constituted of the younger sons of nobles, and not the population as a whole. The attitude of both the traditional rulers, represented by the Conservative Party, and the relative newcomers, represented by the Liberals, was, further, one of open hostility. This is especially observable during elections when both parties customarily employed armed ruffians to intimidate the supporters of their opponents. Thus, as Chamberlain, declares:

In England’s politics two brutalities stand opposite and complement each other: the raw violence of the class used to ruling and the elementary brutality of the entire uncultivated masses who, as described above, are nowhere associated with anything higher.

Chamberlain’s description of English parliamentarianism indeed contradicts Oswald Spengler’s idealisation of the ‘old style’ of English politics dominated by aristocrats and gentlemen (see below).

More significant is the transformation of the entire nation into a sea-faring one even though the Anglo-Saxons originally had little interest in marine activities and had to be forced to develop a taste for the sea through legislation under the Tudors. However, once they had discovered the advantages of overseas trade by observing the successes of the Spanish, Dutch, and French colonial enterprises, England too began to develop its own merchant navy. What is important to note is that, in its international adventures, the English evidenced a singular proclivity to underhanded means of conquest involving piracy and cheating. When the English went to war, it was always to protect their trade interests. As Chamberlain points out, the English

have founded colonies where the countries stood empty or were inhabited only by naked savages; others they snatched through contracts from the Dutch, French, Spanish or—for example, Malta—through breach of contract. India was subjugated by Indian troops; England has never undertaken campaigns of conquest through force of arms, like the Spanish and the French. The Englishman does not, like Alexander or Caesar, conduct wars for the sake of glory. ‘To England’, says Seeley, ‘war is throughout an industry, a way to wealth, the most thriving business, the most prosperous investment, of the time.

The battles that Marlborough distinguished himself in during the eighteenth century were conducted to maintain a base slave-trade and Bolingbroke’s avowed foreign policy with regard to the continent in the same period was to contrive crises that would lead the European powers to war mutually against one another.

The immorality that marked England’s commercial undertakings was accompanied by a rapid decline in the traditional agricultural life of the nation. This resulted in a degeneration of the moral character of the English population as a whole:

With the total decline of country life and with the equally perfect victory of the sole God of trade and industry, Mammon, the genuine, harmless, naïve, heart-warming cheerfulness has disappeared from England.

Thus, nowadays

one finds in England no stateliness, no broad good-natured humour, no cheerfulness; everything is hatred, noise, pomp, pretentiousness, vulgarity, arrogance, sullenness and envy.

Meanwhile, the increased wealth of the nation allowed the English colonialist to be converted into a Nietzschean bully:

As soon as the brave Anglo-Saxon peasant was transformed into a pirate the blond beast appeared, as the German philologist glimpsed in his crazy dream; and as soon as the refined noble of the 15th century had lost ‘intellectual interests’ and had become covetous of gold, there arose the heartless slave trader who was different from the Spanish men of violence only in his hypocrisy. There is nothing more brutal in the world than a crude Englishman; he indeed possesses no other support than his crudeness. Mostly he is not a bad man; he has openness and energy and optimism; but he is ignorant as a kaffir, does not undergo any schooling in obedience and respect, knows no other ideal than ‘to fight his way through’.

Simultaneously, the coarsening of manners that took place abroad was reflected at home in the dissipation of the traditional aristocracy in base commercial activities:

This crudeness has slowly imbued almost the entire nation from the bottom to the top—as is always the case. Even fifty years ago it was an offence against class dignity if a member of the nobility took part in industry, trade and finance; today, the head of the oldest and greatest house of Scotland, brother-in-law of the king, a banker!

And the refined manners of the aristocracy came to serve only as a disguise for people whose ‘moral compass has lost its north.’ A further level of immorality was attained when the British government allowed the British East India Company to acquire colonial territory through devious, if not criminal, means that were justified only by the increased revenues of the Company and the steadily increasing rank of Britain among the European nations:

the temptation to enormous power on the basis of immeasurable wealth was too strong; in the nobility and in the circles related to it one soon was not able to distinguish between right and wrong. The same man who would never have deviated from scrupulous decency committed every crime in the supposed defence of the fatherland.

Chamberlain gives as examples of this indecent conduct of the British imperialists the case of Warren Hastings, who felt no qualms at all in committing all manner of political atrocities by allying himself with unscrupulous Indian potentates until, in 1788, he was formally arraigned in a famous impeachment trial that included the Member of Parliament Edmund Burke as the lead prosecutor. However, the trial was forced to drag on for ten years and ended with a final acquittal of Hastings. Hastings’ misconduct, indeed, was not unique to the eighteenth century and foreshadowed the deception exercised by Sir Edward Grey during World War I, when Britain sought to depict Germany as the aggressors whereas there was evidence, according to Chamberlain, that Britain had indeed been contemplating an attack on Belgium even before the Germans undertook one.

*   *   *

The relation between the ruthless nature of the politics and foreign policy of Britain and its evolving national character that Chamberlain highlights in this essay was reiterated by the German conservative thinkers Werner Sombart (1863–1941) and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936). Sombart, the German economist and social philosopher, is noted today for his several pioneering works on the capitalistic ethos. However, in his war-time tract Händler und Helden (Munich, 1915), he focused on the vital difference between the English character and the German that Chamberlain had pointed to in the first year of the war.

Writing to inspire young German soldiers in their combat against the English forces, Sombart considers the world war started in Central Europe between Austria-Hungary, in July 1914, to be essentially one between England and Germany.[3] For it is, in his view, an ideological, or even ‘religious’, war between the English worldview and the German. The sociological and cultural significance of the war, according to Sombart, is the radical difference existing between the English “trader spirit,” which aims at achieving mere “happiness” through the negative virtues of “temperance, contentedness, industry, sincerity, fairness, austerity … humility, patience, etc.,” all of which will facilitate a “peaceful cohabitation of traders,” and the “heroic spirit” of the Germans which aims at fulfilling the mission of the higher self-realisation of humanity through the positive, ‘giving’ virtues of “the will to sacrifice, loyalty, guilelessness, reverence, bravery, piety, obedience, goodness”—as well as the ‘military virtues’, for “all heroism first fully develops in war and through war.”[4]

War for the English has always been a chiefly commercial enterprise, whereas for the German it is a defence of his soul from the deadening influence of this same commercial spirit. In order to reveal the essential mercantile nature of the English nation, as well as of the war that it had recently embarked on in Europe, Sombart first points to the fact that the English have, through the ages, had no higher philosophy than a utilitarian and eudaimonistic one.[5] This is demonstrable by a perusal of the works of the major English thinkers from the Elizabethan empiricist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) to the more recent evolutionary biologist and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).

Bacon’s utilitarian views are indeed geared to the acquisition of comfort as a source of human happiness. And it is this desire for comfort that, according to Sombart, informed the British trading enterprises around the world from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards which, in turn, consolidated the mercantile mentality of the British nation as a whole. The British empire built on these considerations is thus only a mechanical aggregation of commercial interests and not informed by any ideal civilizing impulses. The wars conducted by the British are also essentially trade wars that seek to punish violations of the ‘contracts’ established by them with other nations for their international commercial purposes. Sombart thus maintains that one of the principal causes of the First World War was Britain’s need to eliminate the threat posed by German industry to its colonial empire.

Like Chamberlain and Sombart, the Neoconservative Oswald Spengler too, in his essay, “Preussentum und Sozialismus(“Prussianism and Socialism,” 1919), considered the so-called Marxist socialism as one based on alien, English and Jewish understandings of society and generically different from the genuine socialism of the Prussian state. The socialism of the English is demonstrated by Spengler to be a Viking-like individualism which has encouraged the colonial rapacity of the British Empire and the mercantile ruthlessness of its leaders. The Norman conquest of England had put an end to the Anglo-Saxon way of life and introduced the “piracy principle” whereby “the barons exploited the land apportioned to them, and were in turn exploited by the duke.”[6] The modern English and American trade companies are indeed enchained to the same motives of profiteering:

Their aim is not to work steadily to raise the entire nation’s standard of living, it is rather to produce private fortunes by the use of private capital, to overcome private competition, and to exploit the public through the use of advertising, price wars, control of the ratio of supply and demand.[7]

The Marxist doctrine, being a product of the Jewish mind, which is characterised by ‘resentment,’ is based on envy of those who have wealth and privileges without work, and so it advocates revolt against those who possess these advantages. It is thus essentially a negative variant of the English ethos. It is not surprising, therefore, that the worker in the Marxist doctrine is encouraged to amass his own profits through private business, so that, as Spengler puts it, “Marxism is” indeed “the capitalism of the working class.” The Marxian solution to boundless private property is also a negative one: “expropriation of the expropriators, robbery of the robbers.”[8] This is based on the “English” view of capital, wherein

the billionaire demands absolute freedom to arrange world affairs by his private decisions, with no other ethical standard in mind than success. He beats down his opponents with credit and speculation as his weapons.

The Marxist system is thus the “final chapter of a philosophy with roots in the English Revolution, whose biblical moods have remained dominant in English thought.”[9] In fact, as he goes on to say, “a biblical interpretation of questionable business dealings can ease the conscience and greatly increase ambition and initiative.”[10] While the industrialists engage in commerce with “money” as a commodity, the workers do the same with “work.”

In the Prussian state, on the other hand, work is not a commodity, but a “duty towards the common interest, and there is no gradation—this is Prussian style democratisation—of ethical values among the various kinds of work.” The Prussian sees property not as private booty, but as part of a common weal, “not as a means of expression of personal power but as goods placed in trust, for the administration of which he, as a property owner, is responsible to the state.”

The significance of the notion of the national state is completely ignored by Marx in his focus on “society.” Parliamentarianism is not only inappropriate in a monarchical state such as the Prussian but it is a tired and outmoded system which has lost the glory lent it by the “gentlemen” and aristocrats who once ruled German and British politics. Now

the institutions, the sense of tact and cautious observance of the amenities, are dying out with the old-style people of good breeding. . . . The relationship between party leaders and party, between party and masses, will be tougher, more transparent, and more brazen. That is the beginning of Caesarism.[11]

On the other hand, the Prussian form of socialism is based entirely on the notion of the primacy of the state, which is indeed the ideal of the Teutonic knight, diametrically opposed to the roving plunder of the Viking:

The Teutonic knights that settled and colonised the eastern borderlands of Germany in the Middle Ages had a genuine feeling for the authority of the state in economic matters, and later Prussians have inherited that feeling. The individual is informed of his economic obligations by Destiny, by God, by the state, or by his own talent . . . Rights and privileges of producing and consuming goods are equally distributed. The aim is not ever greater wealth of the individual or for every individual, but rather the flourishing of the totality.[12]

While English society is devoted to “success” and wealth, the Prussian is devoted to work for a common national goal:

The Prussian style of living . . . has produced a profound rank-consciousness, a feeling of unity based on an ethos of work, not of leisure. It unites the members of each professional group—military, civil service, and labour—by infusing them with a pride of vocation, and dedicates them to activity that benefits all others, the totality, the state.[13]

We see therefore that Chamberlain’s war essay on England had a major influence on the emphasis on the immoral nature of English commerce that is evident in the Neoconservative thinkers of the Weimar Republic.[14] More comprehensively than Sombart or Spengler, however, Chamberlain offers us insights also into the historical transformations of the British national character that underlay the several ill effects of this empire.

Part 2: Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “England.”

Alexander Jacob obtained his Master’s in English Literature from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from the Pennsylvania State University His post-doctoral research was conducted at the University of Toronto while he was a Visiting Fellow at the departments of Political Science, Philosophy, and English Literature of the University of Toronto.

His scholarly publications include De Naturae Natura: A Study of Idealistic Conceptions of Nature and the Unconscious, Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 1992, (2nd ed. Arktos Media, 2011), Indo-European Mythology and Religion: Essays, Melbourne, Manticore Press, 2019, Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the Early Twentieth Century, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 2001, and Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity and the State: Essays, Manticore Press, 2021.

He has also published several English editions of European thinkers such as H.S. Chamberlain, Edgar Julius Jung, Alfred Rosenberg, Charles Maurras and Jean-François Thiriart.


[1] These include Politische Ideale (1915) [tr. A. Jacob, Political Ideals, University Press of America, 2005], Die Zuversicht (1915), Deutsches Wesen (1916) and Ideal und Macht (1916).

[2] This collection was translated by Charles H. Clarke as The Ravings of a Renegade (London, 1915). The other essays in it are ‘German Love of Peace’, ‘German Freedom’, ‘The German language’, ‘Germany as the leading power of the world’, and ‘Germany’.

[3][3] Germany joined forces with Austria-Hungary against Russia in August 1914, and Britain declared war against Germany when the latter invaded Belgium in the same month in order to gain access to France.

[4] Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnungen, Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1915 [translated A. Jacob, Traders and Heroes, London: Arktos, 2021].

[5] Sombart particularly recalls Nietzsche’s similar low evaluation of the English mind and its typical representatives: They are not a philosophical race, these English. Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit in general, Hobbes, Hume and Locke a degradation and devaluation of the concept of a ‘philosopher’ for over more than a century.[5]

[6] Oswald Spengler, ‘Prussianism and Socialism’, in Selected Essays, tr. D.O. White, Chicago, 1967, p.62.

[7] Ibid., p. 63. This is the essential evil of the modern geopolitical phenomenon of Atlanticism.

[8] Ibid., p. 118.

[9] Ibid., p. 97. What Spengler does not explicitly observe here is that the biblical mode of thought which directed Puritan capitlistic industry is in fact a basically Jewish, voluntaristic one deriving from the conception of the universe as created by a Pantokrator who rules the creation with his Will as a personal Lord (see E. Zilsel, ‘The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law’, in Philosophical Review, no. 51 [1942], p. 247ff). For a discussion of the Jewish origins of this concept as well, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. T. Parsons (London : George Allen & Unwin, 1930).

[10] ‘Prussianism and Socialism’, loc.cit., p. 97.

[11] Ibid., p. 89. This depiction of European parliamentarianism is derived from Chamberlain’s other essay on ‘Germany as the leading power of the world’ in Kriegsaufsätze.

[12] Ibid., p. 62.

[13] Ibid., p. 47.

[14] Unfortunately, the moral corruption infusing the British Empire up to the First World War has continued beyond this war into the present day through the shadowy commercial empire that the Bank of England has maintained on the basis of revenues secretly channelled into the banks in the City of London from the tax havens in the former colonies of Britain in the Caribbean and elsewhere (see Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who stole the World, London, 2011.)