European Nationalism

Review of “Blood in the Square” by John Bean

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BITS-OP

Blood in the Square, by John Bean
Ostara Publications, 2014; Kindle version

Reviewed by Colin Liddell

Blood in the Square is a highly readable novel about the world of nationalist politics in Britain of the 1960s. I raced through its 119 pages in a couple of normal working days. This might suggest that it is a well-crafted work by a veteran novelist, with all the tricks of the trade at his command. But although the writer, John Bean, is certainly a ‘veteran,’ he is a veteran of nationalism, not fiction. This work represents his debut as a novelist at the sprightly age of 87!

The reason the novel reads so well is that Bean is a natural storyteller and knows his subject inside-out. He has used this deep knowledge of the issues and characters of British nationalism to construct a believable and entertaining narrative that also gives great political insight, especially into the practical problems faced by nationalists in building a movement and getting their message across to a largely unsympathetic audience. The 1950s and 60s was a difficult time for nationalists thanks to recent memories of World War II, relatively low levels of immigration (by today’s standards), and the electorate’s unrelenting focus on economic and social issues, instead of cultural and existential ones.

One of the advantages of great age is that Bean writes from a perspective that overarches this entire period, and with awareness of what came before and what comes after. As far as British nationalism goes, he has seen it all.

Born in 1927, he was called up for national service in 1945, spending time in both the RAF and Royal Navy in the immediate post-war period. In 1950, after a stint working in India, he joined Oswald Mosley’s post-war Union Movement, before going on to start his own party, the National Labour Party, in 1957.

With a socialist-influenced economic focus, this party was designed to appeal to the demographic that was to be hit hardest by mass immigration in the following decades, namely the British urban working class. For this reason, the National Labour Party has served as a kind of template for more recent manifestations of British nationalism, such as the BNP and the present day British Democratic Party, of which Bean is now a member. Read more

“To Be French”: Reviving the National Dream

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One characteristic of our dominant “postmodern” culture is the assault on all sense of shared narrative and identity, above all nationhood, which is subject to constant and aggressive “deconstruction.” But a recent video by the French think tank Polémia, founded by Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a former National Front (FN) Member of the European Parliament, shows how a positive national vision can be promoted amid the ambient relativism and traps of political correctness.

The above video is making the rounds in French nationalist circles and has already reached an impressive 140,000 views in less than two weeks (a translation is available from the excellent English-language French nationalist news site GalliaWatch; reproduced below). What I love about this video is its optimism, its articulation of joint national and European identity, its being both rooted in the past and looking forward to the future, its inclusion of apolitical themes like heritage in music, food and good living, but also in explicit mentioning of the necessary ethnic component of national identity.

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The Curse of Victimhood and Negative Identity

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Originally posted at Arutz Sheva: Israel National News, January 30, 2015. Posted here with permission of the author.

Days and months of atonement keep accumulating on the European wall calendar. The days of atonement however, other than commemorating the dead, often function as a tool in boosting political legitimacy of a nation – often at the expense of another nearby nation struggling for its identity.

While the media keep reassuring us that history is crawling to an end, what we are witnessing instead is a sudden surge of new historical victimhoods, particularly among the peoples of Eastern Europe. As a rule, each individual victimhood requires a forever expanding number of its own dead within the context of unavoidable lurking fascist demons.

Expressed in the postmodern lingo of today, the modern media-made image trivializes the real death and dying into an image of a hyperreal and surreal non-event. For instance, the historical consciousness of Serbs vs. Croats, Poles vs. Germans, not to mention the victimological memories of the mutually embattled Ukrainian and Russian nationalists today, are becoming more “historical” than their previously recorded respective histories.

It seems that European nationalists do not fight any longer for their living co-ethnics, but primarily for their dead. As a result, as Efraim Zuroff correctly stated, “in post-Communist eastern Europe, [they’re] trying to play down the crimes of the Nazi cooperators and claim that the crimes of the Communists were just as bad.” (AS,” Top Nazi Hunter: Eastern Europe Rewrote the Holocaust,” by Benny Toker, Ari Yashar, January 27, 2015).

Yet Zuroff’s s remarks, however sharp, miss the wider historical context. Any day of atonement or, for that matter, any day of repentance on behalf of a victimized group, is highly conflictual, if not warmongering by its nature. Read more

Have We Carefully Thought of the Consequences of Absolute Free Speech?

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One “thought experiment” in the recent — but not yet concluded — debate on freedom of speech surrounding the Charlie Hebdo massacre particularly impressed me:

Here is a thought experiment: Suppose that while the demonstrators stood solemnly at Place de la Republique the other night, …  a man stepped out in front …  carrying a placard with a cartoon depicting the editor of the magazine lying in a pool of blood, saying, “Well I’ll be a son of a gun!” or “You’ve really blown me away!” or some such witticism. How would the crowd have reacted? Would they have laughed? …  He would have been lucky to get away with his life.

Masses of people have turned the victims of a horrific assassination … into heroes of France and free speech. The point of the thought experiment is not to show that such people are hypocrites. Rather, it is to suggest that they don’t know their own minds. They see themselves as committed to the proposition that there are no limits to freedom of expression… But they too have their limits. They just don’t know it.

Perhaps because he’s a philosopher and by profession he’s obliged to analyse the logical consistency and theoretical validity of statements, Brian Klug here encapsulates the problem with the default mainstream “Je Suis Charlie” position.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech. Read more

True France, True Europe: A Survey of Mercury, Venus and Marr

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If you had to pick one man and one woman to represent the spirit of France, a good choice would be Voltaire (1694-1778) and the film-star Brigitte Bardot (born 1934). They stand for brains and beauty, wit and style, irony and compassion.

First consider Voltaire, that icon of free speech and the unfettered mind. He was like the god Mercury, sharp-witted messenger of the gods, wing-footed and roaming the universe. Liberals and neo-conservatives have invoked his name again and again since the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.

Raging Fanaticism

But if Voltaire were alive and writing today, those same liberals and neo-cons would be clamouring for his head. This is because he did something forbidden in the modern West: he noticed racial patterns.

All of the other peoples have committed crimes, the Jews are the only ones who have boasted about committing them. They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if this nation some day became deadly to the human race. (Letters of Memmius to Cicero, 1771)

It is commonly said that the abhorrence in which the Jews held other nations proceeded from their horror of idolatry; but it is much more likely that the manner in which they at the first exterminated some of the tribes of Canaan, and the hatred which the neighboring nations conceived for them, were the cause of this invincible aversion. As they knew no nations but their neighbors, they thought that in abhorring them they detested the whole earth, and thus accustomed themselves to be the enemies of all men. (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764)

Can you imagine how the freedom-loving neo-conservatives would react to passages like that? But the neo-cons would be wise to consider what he said about “raging fanaticism.” The murdered liberals at Charlie Hebdo could have learnt something from Voltaire too. Their cartoons were crudely obscene. Voltaire could be obscene with style:

Were the Jewish Ladies Intimate with Goats?

You assert that your mothers had no commerce with he-goats, nor your fathers with she-goats. But pray, gentlemen, why are you the only people upon earth whose laws have forbidden such commerce? Would any legislator ever have thought of promulgating this extraordinary law if the offence had not been common? (Philosophical Dictionary, entry for “Jews,” Vol. 6)

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Nick Griffin on the Paris Massacre

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By Nick Griffin as posted on the British Unity Facebook page, with permission.
See also the statement of the Alliance for Peace and Freedom, edited and expanded by Nick Griffin.

Kalashnikovs, mass murder and fears of a YouTube beheading in the heart of Paris. France is already in shock as the news of the CharlieHebdo Massacre sinks in. But the shock waves will also be felt all over Europe, and in Britain, as people grasp the enormity of what has just happened.

This wasn’t a criminal gang attack. It was a well-planned and ruthlessly executed assault by a highly trained military commando. It is likely that at least the ring-leader has military experience – either gained in the French army or fighting in one of the proxy wars against Arab nationalists that began when the USA, Britain, Israel and France promoted the so-called Arab Spring and then trained, armed and provided air cover for the ‘rebels’.

This is the first real example of ‘blow-back’ from that criminal lunacy, but it will definitely not be the last.

“When I used the term ‘vicious, wicked faith’ back in 2004, the BBC and British state tried to put me in prison for it,” says Nick Griffin.

“But in the wake of the revelations about the gigantic scale of the sexual grooming scandal, of the mass murders and sexual enslavement of non-Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, and in the light of this multiple execution for the ‘crime’ of publishing a cartoon, will any of the liberals who condemned me then STILL deny that it is the perfect description of the brutally aggressive strain of Sunni Islam that has infected so many young Muslims?

“More recently, after my visit to Syria in June 2013, I published a video interview with a captured Islamist in which he said that the aim was to bring their Jihad to Europe. “The Christians – they are the real target” he told me quite openly. Read more

Denmark: Tone of debate makes immigrants want to leave

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During the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Mitt Romney was roundly criticized for suggesting the common sense policy that illegal immigrants would deport themselves if there all the goodies were taken away — work, driver’s licenses and any public benefits, etc. Now it turns out, it may be even easier than that if Denmark is any indication. Just create a negative environment. From “Tone of debate makes immigrants want to leave“:

Immigration, and particularly Muslim immigration, is a perennial issue in the public debate in Denmark [but not in Sweden, see below]. From calls to make it harder for people from Muslim countries to enter Denmark to pleas from business leaders to change the way the nation discusses its newcomers, immigration is constantly under discussion.
But for some immigrants, it has become too much. An opinion poll of Danish-Turks residing in Denmark revealed that three quarters of them have considered leaving Denmark altogether to escape the negative debate about immigration.
In the poll, conducted by the magazine Opinionen, three out of four respondents said that they are either ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ considering leaving Denmark for Turkey. And for nearly half of those who are thinking of leaving, the debate on immigration and Islam was cited as a primary reason. …
Inger  Støjberg of the Venstre party, who had suggested “that Denmark should make it harder for people from Muslim countries to enter the country, said the negative tone that surrounds immigration is immigrants’ own fault.”

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