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Ties Abroad: The context and causes of Jewish immigration from 1881

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[Alderman]: For British Jewry this represented a very considerable victory; it was little wonder that when Disraeli returned in triumph from Berlin, Moses Montefiore (despite his ninety-four years) was the first to greet him at Charing Cross railway station.17

[Horus]: “A very considerable victory” it was, over anyone more sympathetic to Christians than to Jews, as in the common folk of Christendom. The Congress of Berlin is spoken of by derivative historians today as a ‘triumph for Disraeli’, and it was, but for Disraeli as a Jew, not as the Prime Minister of Britain. Establishing the paradigm wherein British interests are treated as the automatic inverse of Russian (and Eastern Christian) ones was also a victory for Disraelites that continues to pay dividends today.

In a previous essay I discussed the causes of the Jewish immigration wave that began in 1881 and the role of the existing Jewish population and their supporters in Britain. Here I expand on the situation of Jews in Britain before 1881, their influence on British foreign and domestic policy, the reasons for the mass immigration from 1881 onwards and the initial reactions of the more settled population to the arrival of the new, drawing on the works of Jewish historians.

Jews in Britain before 1881

A mixture of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, amounting to 50-60,000 people, lived in Britain before the inundation from the east began, and they were remarkably free and prosperous compared to their co-religionists elsewhere.1 Todd Endelman tells us that

The great mass of Jews, who could hardly aspire to sit in Parliament or hold a naval commission, suffered little from legal inequality. There were no restrictions on the trades they might follow, the goods in which they might trade, the areas in which they might live. Nor were they subject to special taxes, tolls, levies, or extortions. The statute book simply ignored their presence….2

Some legal disabilities did apply to Jews in statute but had long been enforced inconsistently. As Geoffrey Alderman describes, “professing Jews were prohibited from voting in British parliamentary elections until 1835”, after which they were on par with native Britons, but though before that date “the returning officers who supervised constituency election arrangements had the right to demand the swearing of a Christian oath by all intending voters… this was not a right they were obliged to exercise,” and some chose not to:

In May 1830 Sir Robert Wilson told the House of Commons that Jews habitually voted in parliamentary elections in Southwark (south London) because no one bothered to insist that they take the Christian oath. In December 1832 Rabbi Asher Ansell of Liverpool was clearly able to vote in the general election without hindrance.3

After gaining the right to vote, British Jewry was still eluded by

...full political emancipation – meaning the right of professing Jews to stand as candidates for, and be elected to, the House of Commons. Jews were not the only religious group to be denied this right. Catholics had only won the right in 1829. Unitarians did not then enjoy the right, nor did atheists.4

Emancipation was achieved largely thanks to the propinquity of wealthy Jews to powerful Britons. The campaign for it, as Endelman says, was “the work of a handful of ambitious, well-connected City men, whose close government contacts allowed them to put the question of Jewish disabilities on the national agenda.”5 Common British folk, and presumably the enemies of Jewry, lacked such contacts or campaigned less effectively; the successful demonstrations against the Jew Bill of 1753 were not replicated.

Overrepresentation in politics followed immediately. As Alderman describes,

Lionel de Rothschild’s ceremonial entry into the House of Commons to take his seat (28 July 1858) was an occasion of great communal rejoicing, but it also brought into the open a worry… Jews were overrepresented in the social strata from which the political classes were drawn, and there were enough of them with sufficient private wealth to make their candidatures an attractive proposition regardless of their religious backgrounds. So the Jewish presence in the legislature grew with embarrassing speed. […] After the general election of 1865 no less than six Jews sat in the Commons; a further two were returned at by-elections during the lifetime of the 1865-8 Parliament.

Compared with the proportion which Jews comprised of the total population of the United Kingdom, they were already ‘overrepresented’ in the Commons, a state of affairs that has persisted ever since.6

The Liberal Party was identified as the vehicle for Jewish interests. By the late 1860s,

“[w]ithout exception all the Jewish MPs at this period were Liberals. The first Jewish Conservative MP, the obscure Nottinghamshire coal-owner Saul Isaac, did not make his appearance at Westminster till 1874. Until then the parliamentary Jewish lobby was a Liberal lobby, one which had, moreover, developed during the decade (1859-68) when the Liberal party had taken on a definite form and substance, under the leadership of, first, Lord John Russell and then Gladstone. The triumphs of Liberalism and Jewish emancipation thus seemed to go hand in hand, as products of the same political ethos. On Saturday, 28 April 1866 there was a remarkable demonstration of this fact, when Russell’s Parliamentary Reform bill passed its second reading in the Commons by a majority of five votes; all six Jewish MPs voted for it, the sabbath notwithstanding.”7

Endelman shows that a degree of formal exclusion from the City of London (the financial centre) did not stop Jews trading there.8 Certainly long before 1881, Jews like the Rothschild and Mocatta families were prominent in finance, spanning bond and commodity trading to every sort of brokerage. The Rothschilds in particular were uniquely important in enabling states to borrow and, as they worked as an international partnership, their role in financing wars made their approval a factor in deciding which states could afford to fight and when.

No Jewish family, and no other family, was as rich as the Rothschilds, but Jews in general were ascendant in wealth. As Endelman says,

At the start of the nineteenth century, most Jews in England were immigrants or the children of immigrants—impoverished, poorly educated, dependent on low-status street trades and other forms of petty commerce, popularly identified with crime, violence, and chicanery, widely viewed as disreputable and alien. Over the next three-quarters of a century, the social character of the Jewish community was transformed dramatically. Poverty ceased to be its defining characteristic. On the eve of mass migration from Eastern Europe, the majority of Jews in Britain were middle class. They were native English speakers, bourgeois in their domestic habits and public enthusiasms, full citizens of the British state, their public and personal identities increasingly shaped by the larger culture in which they lived—even if their gentile neighbors viewed them as less than fully English.9

Geoffrey Alderman’s description is similar. In 1883,

Over half London Jewry [the bulk of British Jewry] was now located within the middle‑classes; in 1850 the proportion had been about a third. Moreover, we know from Jacobs’ painstaking examination of commercial directories and other records that within these middle‑classes the greatest single occupational group was to be found within the financial sector—pre-eminently the Stock Exchange—followed by general merchants (over half the dealers in military stores were Jews) and certain manufacturing sectors (cigars, pipes, slippers and boots, furniture, furs, jewellery and watches, and diamonds). Jews still accounted for only 6% of London’s tailors and only 5% of London Jewry was engaged in the professions—barristers and solicitors, surgeons, dentists and architects.10

Jews were well-positioned to influence British policy in favour of their own tribe, and they did so. They were, however, also forced to adapt to the effects of the far larger numbers of Jews entering from 1881, and in some ways were altered by it. Subsequent essays will show that British history over the subsequent century and a half has been characterised by the part-confrontation, part-collaboration of the older, more settled, more wealthy Anglo-Jewry and the later incomers from eastern Europe.

Modern Jewish Politics and foreign policy

The burgeoning of the Jewish population even before 1881 resulted in ever-growing pressure on British politicians to divert British policy in favour of Jewish interests. There has never been a body that speaks for all Jews, but several institutions constitute communal leadership with at least the tacit acceptance of a large majority of Jews in Britain. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is the most ‘central’ of these, and as early as 1836, “the Board notified the chancellor of the exchequer that it was the only official channel of communication for the secular and political interests of the Jews.”11

Throughout the 19th century, the Board and the leading families that controlled it increasingly concerned themselves with the interests of Jewry worldwide. The historian C. S. Monaco has described their practices as ‘the rise of modern Jewish politics’ and has shown how they set the pattern for the present and the past century.12 From the 1840s, Jewish interventions in foreign affairs were usually led by Sir Moses Montefiore, the long-standing president of the Board of Deputies, who famously travelled to petition for Jewish interests in several countries.

Moses Montefiore

From 1871, the Board faced competition from the Anglo-Jewish Association. As Alderman describes, “[t]he Association might indeed have become a rival to the Board of Deputies”, and “[a]t first the Board of Deputies held aloof from it. But after its very effective intervention during the Balkan crisis of the late 1870s… the Board came to terms with it, and agreed in 1878 to the formation of a Conjoint Foreign Committee, consisting of seven representatives from the Board and seven from the Association.” The collaboration was productive. Jews thereafter had “an Anglo-Jewish ministry of foreign affairs” whose deliberations “were conducted in secret” and whose “conclusions were reported to neither of its constituent bodies.”13 In addition to the “close contacts” that won Jews the right to enter Parliament, the “overrepresentation” that immediately followed and the proclivities of some powerful Britons to put Jewish interests first, the secret “ministry” ensured that Jewish interests worldwide would be represented immediately and insistently in a way that had never applied to the British people or Christians.

It had become advantageous to be an ethnic minority in Britain. While Jews’ assertive internationality was rewarded, no such ministry for the native British would have been suffered to exist, let alone given any audience by the powerful. As Endelman approvingly describes,

In Victorian Britain, at least before the end of the century, the pressures that caused Jews elsewhere to abandon traditional notions of peoplehood, collective fate, and mutual responsibility were muted. British Jews were free to express their ties to Jews abroad without fear of endangering their own struggle for civil equality and social acceptance. In this sense, the diplomatic activities of Montefiore and the Board of Deputies … testify to the confidence of communal leaders about their own status. It is important to stress this, for the contrary has been argued. … Only toward the end of the century, with classical liberalism under attack and nationalism and antisemitism on the rise, did fears [of emancipation being reversed] gain ground and begin to shape communal policy—especially in regard to the newcomers from Eastern Europe. 14

Earlier in the century, Jews openly tried to steer policy their way. Later they gained reasons to hew closer in their overt conduct to the gentile elite, whose receptiveness to them was already in evidence. See my article “Resplendent Cosmopolitanism” on the Jewish associations of King Edward VII.

Resplendent CosmopolitanismKing Edward VII

Jewish foreign policy: Pursuing Jewish, not British, interests

The first professing Jewish member of Parliament, Lionel de Rothschild, probably the richest man in the world, and others of his family, used their influence in favour of the Ottoman Empire and against Europe, as did their friend and beneficiary Benjamin Disraeli. In 1876,

Disraeli’s Eastern policy had the warm approval of most British Jews. In the first place Jews had considerable investments in Turkey, and were loath to see them thrown away because of Gladstone’s conscience. Beyond that, British Jews, in common with their co-religionists in Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, and America, looked at the situation from the point of view of Balkan Jewry. Turkish rule had allowed these Jews ‘a degree of tolerance far beyond anything conceded by Orthodox Christianity’. A. L. Green, minister of the prestigious Central Synagogue in London’s West End and ‘a Liberal in politics all my life’, instructed the Liberal Daily News ‘The Christian populations of the Turkish provinces have held, and continue with an iron hand to hold, my coreligionists under every form of political and social degradation.’

As Alderman describes, “With very few exceptions… British Jews did not merely refuse to be associated with Gladstone’s Bulgarian Agitation; they actively opposed it.” Jewish allegiances in Britain were decided by the perceived interests of Jews at the other end of Europe. The Rothschilds became Tory supporters. “The Daily Telegraph (owned by the Jewish Levy-Lawson family) swung its influence behind Disraeli’s policy.” Then a “conference of European and American Jewish organizations” met to discuss “the reopening of the Eastern Question to improve the lot of Balkan Jewry” and soon afterward the Anglo-Jewish Association lobbied the government to amend British foreign policy. That the Ottoman forces had verifiably slaughtered thousands of Bulgarians while the Jewish organisations were merely vaguely presaging crimes against their co-religionists made no difference. “When war broke out between Russia and Turkey the following year, Sir Moses Montefiore made no secret about where his sympathies lay; he contributed £100 to the Turkish Relief Fund.”15

Alderman complains that “[i]t never occurred to Gladstone to consider the position of Balkan Jews, whom Turkish rule had allowed ‘a degree of tolerance far beyond anything conceded by Orthodox Christianity’.”16 Why that would occur to Gladstone is unexplained. Were Jewish interests already so sharply divergent from British ones, and on major issues? If so, was it Gladstone’s duty to side against his own people? And were Jewish politicians not loyal to Britain first? Evidently not. Then as now, Jewish politicians, activists, journalists and historians openly sided with their own tribe, wherever located, against the host nation, with scarcely any reproach, and no threat of expulsion. See: “Beaconsfield Revisited.”

Beaconsfield Revisited

The Rothschilds’ pre-eminence as financiers of states enabled them to be represented by the two main powers at the Congress of Berlin. As Alderman describes,

While the Anglo-Jewish Association (later in collaboration with the Board of Deputies) petitioned the British Government on the need to secure the civil and political rights of Jews in newly independent Balkan states, the aged Lionel de Rothschild mobilized the considerable resources of his extended European family, and those of his German-Jewish banking associate Gerson von Bleichröder (Bismarck’s banker and adviser) to influence proceedings at the Congress of Berlin called to resolve the crisis, and of which Bismarck was President. The result was that the western European delegates at Berlin refused to sign a final treaty until Jewish anxieties had been allayed. The Treaty of Berlin, when signed in July 1878, thus contained definite guarantees of civil and political rights for the Jews of Romania, Bulgaria, and the Danubian principalities.

For British Jewry this represented a very considerable victory; it was little wonder that when Disraeli returned in triumph from Berlin, Moses Montefiore (despite his ninety-four years) was the first to greet him at Charing Cross railway station.17

“A very considerable victory” it was, over anyone more sympathetic to Christians than to Jews, as in the common folk of Christendom. The Congress of Berlin is spoken of by derivative historians today as a ‘triumph for Disraeli’, and it was, but for Disraeli as a Jew, not as the Prime Minister of Britain. Establishing the paradigm wherein British interests are treated as the automatic inverse of Russian (and Eastern Christian) ones was also a victory for Disraelites that continues to pay dividends today.

The Liberal Party lost Jewish electoral support, funding and candidates:

[T]he secession of the Rothschilds had turned a great many City Jews into Conservatives, and seems to have acted as a green light to provincial Jewries also to demonstrate their support for Conservatism. This happened at Liverpool in 1876 and three years later at Sheffield, where the Conservative candidate won the support of Jews specifically because of issues of foreign policy.18

An impression of the Congress of Berlin

The loss was fruitless. Disraeli had his way at Berlin anyway, the Conservative Party was accommodating, and Gladstone and the Liberals resisted Jewish demands only to the extent of causing anger, not defeat. As Alderman describes,

the Bulgarian Agitation had had unpleasant anti-Jewish overtones, in which Disraeli’s own ethnic origins were exploited to the full, particularly by Liberal members of the intelligentsia such as Gladstone’s friend and future biographer, John Morley. Worse still, Gladstone himself had unleashed the full fury of his oratorical powers against Jews and Jewish influence. ‘I deeply deplore’, he told Leopold Gluckstein, author of a pamphlet on The Eastern Question and the Jews, ‘the manner in which, what I may call Judaic sympathies, beyond as well as within the circle of professed Judaism, are now acting on the question of the East.’19

Gladstone’s deploration only amounted to a campaigning stance while in opposition. His own conduct of foreign policy, after he became Prime Minister in 1880, is generally agreed to have been aimless and ill-informed. And though, as Alderman notes, Gladstone refused “to become moved by the plight of Russian Jewry, or to get up an ‘agitation’ on its behalf,” it was under his premiership that the westward flood of eastern European Jews began, which led to the Jewish population of Britain quintupling by the First World War. The effects of ‘Judaic sympathies’ were multiplied in intensity by Gladstone’s own passivity toward the composition of the demos.

William Gladstone

Reasons for mass migration

Still, it would be misleading to single out Gladstone for condemnation. Jewish immigration on a smaller scale preceded 1881. According to Endelman, “In addition to middle-class immigration from Germany, there was also a small but steady trickle of impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe—contrary to the popular myth that the pogroms of 1881 inaugurated immigration from Poland and Russia.”20 Alderman notes that “The famine in north-east Russia in 1869-70 had brought some migrants to Britain; young Jewish men, seeking to escape service in the Russian army during the war with Turkey in 1875-6, also made their way to England” before ‘the pogroms’.21 Before 1881, chain migration was underway: “as Professor Gartner has noted, a high proportion of Jewish immigrants to Britain before the 1870s appear to have been single men, without family responsibilities.’ But by 1875 this pattern had broken down.”22 Simply, as Lloyd Gartner says, “emigration did not begin on account of pogroms and would certainly have attained its massive dimensions even without the official anti-Semitism of the Russian Government.”23 Endelman’s explanation is worth quoting in full:

The most fundamental cause of emigration from Eastern Europe was the failure of the Jewish economy to grow as rapidly as the Jewish population. Between 1800 and 1900, the Jewish population of the Russian empire shot from one million to five million persons, exclusive of the one million who emigrated before the end of the century. (The Jews of Galicia, who enjoyed Habsburg tolerance but contributed to the migration current nonetheless, increased from 250,000 to 811,000.) During this same period, tsarist policy toward Jews oscillated between schemes to coerce their russification (through military service or education in state schools, for example) and measures to accomplish the reverse, that is, to isolate them from contact with sections of Russian society considered too weak to resist their alleged depredations—the peasantry, in particular. Measures with the latter goal in mind constricted Jewish economic activity and caused increasing immiseration over the course of the century. As the number of Jews exploded, the government repeatedly imposed limits on their ability to support themselves. With the exception of certain privileged persons, Jews were forbidden to live outside the Pale of Settlement, Russia’s westernmost provinces, and thus were denied access to those cities and regions where industrialization was creating new opportunities. At the same time, the government undertook steps to remove Jews from border regions and the countryside and concentrate them in the Pale’s overcrowded cities. There artisans and petty traders faced mounting competition from each other and, in the case of the former, from factory production as well. General conscription of Jewish males, imposed in 1873, as well as countless arbitrary acts of cruelty, made material immiseration seem even more unbearable.

In this context the pogroms of 1881 and the repressive legislation that followed were more catalyst than cause. Spreading fear and despair throughout Poland and Russia, they convinced the young that they had scant hope for a better future under tsarist rule. They accelerated a decades-old movement, causing migration to assume a momentum and life of its own. Personal exposure or immediate proximity to mob violence was not necessary to set people in motion. The first waves of immigrants to Britain came disproportionately from northern districts in the Pale, which were hardly touched by the pogroms of 1881. In Habsburg Galicia, which remained relatively free of pogroms throughout this period, a higher proportion of Jews migrated than in Russia. Here economic backwardness propelled migration—to Britain, the United States, and the Habsburg capital, Vienna.24

Susan Tananbaum places more emphasis on Jews’ plight and notes that “pogroms, such as the one in Kishinev in 1903 and elsewhere, and the failure of the 1905 Revolution, provided additional impetus to leave” but agrees that “population increases and poverty had the greatest impact” and says that “[f]or several million Jews, the opportunities of the industrializing West offered their best hope for the future.”25 As Alderman says,

most emigrants from eastern Europe were not, in the narrow sense, political refugees or, in the narrow sense, the victims of persecution. Most came from Lithuania and White Russia, where there was comparatively little anti-Jewish violence. Of course, the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II [in 1881], and which were renewed and intensified between 1882 and 1889, and again between 1902 and 1906, turned the trickle of Jewish refugees from Russia that had been observed before 1880 into a flood; restrictions imposed by the Russian authorities on Jewish residence, the forcing of Jews off the land while they were prohibited from living in cities, the expulsion of Jews from Moscow in 1891, all made it virtually impossible for most Russian Jews to participate in normal economic life.

In the west, pogroms and persecutions were regarded as the basic causes of Jewish emigration. In truth the picture was much more complex. The overriding reason for Jewish emigration from eastern Europe to England was economic. During the nineteenth century the Jewish population of the Russian Empire increased from one to over six millions. Given the ever more onerous restrictions on Jewish life, this burgeoning population sought better prospects elsewhere. But the towns to which they were drawn could not support them; the flow was driven further west, and, eventually, overseas. Nor did this flow originate only in Russia or Russian Poland. The Jews of Galicia (then part of the Habsburg Empire) were politically emancipated in 1867 and were relatively persecution-free thereafter; but Jews emigrated from Galicia in greater proportion than they did from Russia. From Romania, in 1899—1900, came a stream of fusgayers (walkers), a spontaneous march across Europe by young Jews searching to escape from persecution, famine, and hopelessness.26

Fusgayers from Romania

Gartner describes the escalation of the migration wave:

The turn of the century brought a decade of turmoil. In almost consecutive order, East European Jewry underwent the Rumanian ‘exodus’ of 1900, the Kishinev outrage of 1908, the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the Revolution of 1905, and its trail of pogroms lasting into 1906. Under these hammer blows, the semblance of orderly movement which had been preserved for some ten years vanished. Waves of Rumanian wanderers, fleeing conscripts, pogrom victims, and above all, Jews who simply despaired of improvement in Russia streamed into the British Isles in proportions which bewildered those who tried to organize the flow. An added magnet was the dissolution of the “Atlantic Shipping Ring’ and that price war upon the high seas, the Atlantic Rate War from 1902 to 1904. Previously, English shippers had agreed with Continental firms that they would not sell their cheaper trans-Atlantic tickets to transmigrants. The connivances used by immigrants to outwit the shippers were abandoned and the fare dropped precipitously. Furthermore, a recognizable number of Jews from South Africa sought refuge at the commencement of the Boer War. By 1907, the great waves had spent themselves, and the Aliens Act [of 1905] erected a barrier to uncontrolled torrents.27

See my article “Great Variance.”

Great Variance

Gartner characterises the easterly flood as “a spontaneous movement of people which flowed unencouraged by outsiders.”28 Yet Jews in America at the time, concerned with limiting immigration as well as helping those who had already immigrated settle, noted that “many of the refugees had been lured by extravagant promises of assistance and ‘glowing accounts of America given them by persons interested in inducing them to emigrate”.29 Many of those who settled in Britain had been in transit to America but found reasons to stop partway. Gartner himself describes how British officials in Odessa “always warned those who are proceeding to England to settle there that England is over crowded with unemployed workmen and that it is most undesirable that people should proceed there… but they invariably insist on going as their friends send them glowing accounts and also money to pay their passage.’”30

Lures

Immigration was also encouraged by and profitable for organised criminals and predators. According to Nelly Las, in large cities in Eastern Europe, “prostitution took place in certain sections known to be controlled by the Jewish underworld, to which the authorities turned a blind eye… In 1908, the American consul in Odessa reported that ‘All the business of prostitution in the city is in the hands of the Jews’.” Amid mass migration, “Jewish criminals… exported prostitution to distant lands.” Some prostitutes chose to move to wealthier countries in the expectation of earning more. Others were trafficked: “To entice their victims, Jewish sex traffickers used newspaper advertisements for jobs, the promise of an immigration certificate, and marriage proposals, all the while taking advantage of the parents’ naiveté and poverty.”31 As Tananbaum describes, “immigrants, particularly women, found travel precarious… Dishonest agents overcharged immigrants, promised them a marriage partner at the end of their journey, tricked them into the white slave trade or raped or harassed them en route.”32 Jewish women entering Britain could also be trapped into prostitution on arrival. “In the chaos of landing, the recruiter could too easily entice some friendless bewildered girls to accept hospitality at a place which would turn out to be a brothel”, according to Gartner.33

Jewish communal leaders were aware that Jews were over-represented in slavery both as victims and as perpetrators. Constance Rothschild co-founded the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women in 1885 to address the “mixture of Jewish traffickers and Jewish victims”.34 The latter were thought unlikely to seek help from Christian organisations. The JPGAW observed that “the girls have been lured from their parents and natural protectors, to be taken for immoral purposes to lands strange to them where a language they cannot understand is spoken.” According to Tananbaum, “[t]he founders soon learned that local prostitution was only a small part of a worldwide sex slave trade involving a number of Jews and extending from Eastern Europe to South America” and that “[w]hile small in total number, Jews made up a significant proportion of white slavers.”35 “The principal ‘contribution’ made by Jews was the supply of girls to the entrepôts of the system in Buenos Aires, Bombay, Constantinople, and elsewhere, fresh from the East European Pale and London also”, according to Gartner. As Las describes, “Jewish sex traffickers were prominent in major transit points from Europe to Latin America, such as Berlin, London, and Hamburg. In the latter, for example, of 402 sex traffickers caught by police in 1912, 271 were Jewish.”36

Numbers of immigrants

The immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe into Britain and America should be thought of less as a great flight of innocents from persecution and more as a great transposition of a large part of the Jewish population and its ways of life into the receiving countries. The larger the Jewish population in the West grew, the easier it was to avoid adapting or assimilating, even if the setting had changed for some from rural to urban, and some old trades were unviable in the West. The years from 1870 to 1914 “witnessed a phenomenal growth” of the Jewish population “both quantitatively and qualitatively” according to Immanuel Jakobovits. Gartner says that the population movement “was of vast proportions”.37 As Alderman describes,

“On the eve of the Russian pogroms the number of Jews living in London was, as we have seen, about 46,000, and in the country as a whole around 60,000. By 1914 these totals had been dwarfed by the arrival of about 150,000 immigrants; most found their way to London. Merely from a demographic viewpoint this amounted to a revolution. [B]etween 1881 and 1900 London Jewry expanded to approximately 135,000 [and] of these, it was estimated in 1899 that roughly 120,000 were living in the East End.”38

Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews lived in Britain by the time of the Great War. “Merely from a demographic viewpoint this amounted to a revolution”, says Alderman.39 The inflow also had other revolutionary effects. Assimilation was a threat that was successfully headed off, as Jakobovits describes:

[T]his influx was no doubt responsible for the intensity of the religious and Zionist commitment, the diversity, and indeed the sheer survival of the community as we know it today. Without this enormous transfusion of new blood, very few descendants of those resident in this country in 1870 would now maintain their Jewish identity, let alone sustain a vibrant Jewish community.40

Reaction of settled Jews

The position of the older Jewish population was transformed. Through the Jewish Board of Guardians or ad-hoc relief efforts many aimed to help those who had arrived survive and, as seen, avoid being drawn into criminality or slavery, but did not typically encourage more to come. Although, according to Robert Henriques, the influence of the Board of Deputies “had been largely responsible for the liberal immigration policy which had doubled or trebled the numbers of Anglo-Jewry after 1880”41 and, as Gartner says, the “leading families like Rothschild, Montefiore, and Mocatta … would have kept the gates of England always open to all”, they “would give no encouragement and as little aid as possible to immigrants”.42 A typical view was that the “Jewish community could best protect itself from the charge of fostering immigration by ignoring the immigrant.”43 Aid could be expected to beget the demand for more aid. The Jewish Chronicle observed as early as 1880 that “over ninety per cent of our applicants to our Board of Guardians have been subjects of the Czar, and the larger proportion of our poor are invariably immigrants from Russia or Poland.”44 With whatever reluctance, though, aid and other kinds of communal uplift were provided. A typical view at the time was that “[t]hey will drag down, submerge and disgrace our community if we leave them in their present state of neglect”.45 Alderman summarises:

Jews already settled in Britain objected to foreign-born Jews coming to Britain because these foreign Jews drew attention to themselves, and brought political controversy in their wake, so that the public mind became focused upon Jews as foreigners and a cause for concern at the very time at which the established Jewry was trying its hardest to blend itself, chameleon-like, into its non-Jewish environment… Jews became news.46

Blending in became impossible, the more so as newcomers brought new ideas and advanced them with vigour and disregard for any pre-existing consensus. The immigrants, unlike the Rothschilds and the cousinhood, were “Poor (for the most part), Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox, socialist and Zionist”.47 As James Appell describes, the immigrants into London also “resented an attitude towards them from their co-religionists which placed low value on the character of the immigrant.”48 There was unanimity on two points, though: “[t]he Yiddish press kept a prudent distance from contentious social and economic questions, except the defence of Jews against anti-Semitism and in favour of free immigration to England.”49 The newcomers outnumbered the older Jewish population manifold, and today “[t]he vast majority of British Jews are third- or fourth-generation descendants of working-class migrants from eastern Europe”, according to Alderman.50 As will be seen in future essays, Britain was altered by the incomers in unprecedented ways. As Alderman says,

The Jewish immigrants changed the shape of the British polity as surely as they changed the structure of British Jewry: the Jewish experience and the British experience merged and affected each other in a manner far more central than that offered by emancipation itself. 51

My people were refugees, goy

That ‘mass immigration’ into Britain began in 1997 or later is a myth convenient to those who condone the smaller numbers that came before. First as immigrants themselves, then as advocates, instigators and facilitators, Jews have been inseparably involved with mass migration into white countries. Their own movement through Europe, sometimes marching in columns, prefigured that of Muslims in the decades since the Second World War. Angela Merkel, who proudly opened Germany to the entry of more than a million Africans and Asians per year from 2015, has been lavishly acclaimed by Jewish activists and the state of Israel. Vaguely the advocates of immigration speak as though her importees were all refugees, a tactic that continues to work. Except in Israel, Jewish organisations, including the Board of Deputies, routinely cite the experiences of their ancestors to justify their pro-immigration stance. While British electors and leaders continue to respond cravenly, they will do nothing for their own nation. Repudiating the myths may help revive it.

1

Modern British Jewry, Geoffrey Alderman, 1992, p117

2

The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, Todd Endelman, 2002, p73-4

3

Controversy and Crisis, Geoffrey Alderman, 2008, p274

4

Geoffrey Alderman in Leeds and its Jewish Community, edited by Derek Fraser, 2019, ch1

5

Endelman, p106

6

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p63-4

7

The Jewish Community in British Politics, Geoffrey Alderman, 1983, p31. The sabbath was to become more withstanding when it came to the controversy over Sunday trading laws, to be covered in a later article.

8

Endelman, p36, 101, 277 (note 36)

9

Endelman, p79

10

Controversy, Alderman, p234

11

Endelman, p106. Endelman adds parenthetically that the Board “continued to make this claim throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although there was no legal basis for it.” For more on the question of the extent to which the Board speaks for Jews, see The Communal Gadfly, Geoffrey Alderman, 2009, p15-28.

12

See The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics, C.S. Monaco, 2013. Today, similar practices are continued by the likes of the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League, though Jews’ situation has been transformed since the 1880s.

13

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p96

14

Endelman, p123-4

15

Jewish Community, Alderman, p37-8 and Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p99. See also Alderman, MBJ, p98-9: “[M]ost British Jews supported Disraeli’s Eastern policy.”

16

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p98-9

17

ibid., p99-100

18

ibid., p99-100

19

ibid., p99-100]

20

Endelman, p81. See also p128: “Contrary to popular myth, East European immigration did not begin with the pogroms that swept through Bessarabia and Ukraine in 1881.”

21

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p112. ‘Pogroms’, referring varyingly to organised riots against Jews or to more spontaneous inter-communal violence, had occurred before 1881, but the term ‘the pogroms’ is sometimes used to refer to the violence of 1881-2 and the subsequent mass emigration.

22

ibid., p82

23

The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914, Lloyd Gartner, 1973, p41

24

Endelman, p128-9. See also Gartner, p41. As Gartner says of the population increase, “The economic structure of Jewish life failed to expand with the needs imposed by this unprecedented increase.” See Gartner, p21. “Economic backwardness” was a cause of broader trends in rural-to-urban migration at the same time. According to Gartner, “[b]etween the earlier years of the nineteenth century and 1930 occurred the heaviest voluntary migration of people known in history… 62,000,000 persons… crossed international frontiers in this age of relative ‘free trade’ in human movement… migration, even of such dimensions, was itself partly an aspect of such pervasive nineteenth century trends as industrial development, urban growth, and strivings for personal freedom. Under the heading of migration one may well include tens of millions more who crossed no political boundary, yet traversed an economic frontier by pulling up stakes from a farm or village community and settling in an industrial city within their own country.” Gartner, p270

25

Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880-1939, Susan Tananbaum, 2014, p22

26

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p111-2. Columns of African and Asian ‘fusgayers’ marched through Europe in 2015.

27

Gartner, p46-7

28

Gartner, p12

29

Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-2, John Doyle Klier, 2011, p373. In the 1940s, the Jewish-owned Gleaner used similar methods to entice Afro-Caribbeans to move to Britain.

30

Gartner, p29. He cites the example of a villager seeing the volume of money being sent from Britain to his neighbours and deciding to move too.

31

White Slavery, Nelly Las, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 2021. Jewish Women’s Archive

32

Tananbaum, p19

33

Gartner, p183. “In 1910, the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW) called a conference in London to discuss the issue. It was attended by representatives from all over the world and focused on Jewish women from Russia and Romania leaving Europe and becoming involved in prostitution in South America. The editors of Anglo-Jewry were concerned that white slaving was seen as a Jewish issue and that more than just Jews were involved in the trafficking of women. At a Yorkshire level, the Hull Jewish community were sufficiently concerned that they monitored all single Jewish girls who came through the port as lone travellers and checked that they safely reached their destination.” Grizzard in Leeds, edited by Fraser, ch7

34

Constance Rothschild, Lady Battersea, Linda Gordon Kuzmack and Ellery Gillian Weil, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 2021. Jewish Women’s Archive

35

Tananbaum, p132-3

36

Las, 2021

37

Preface by Immanuel Jakobovits to The Jewish Immigrant in England by Gartner, p1, and p45

38

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p117-8

39

Controversy, Alderman, p196-7

40

Jakobovits in Gartner, p1. Endelman concurs with Jakobovits: “[W]ithout this infusion of new blood, the small, increasingly secularized, native-born community, left to itself, would have dwindled into insignificance, as drift, defection, and indifference took their toll.” Endelman p127

41

Sir Robert Waley Cohen, 1877-1952: A Biography, Robert Henriques, 1966, p353

42

Gartner, p50-1

43

ibid., p55-6

44

ibid., p41]

45

James Appell in New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History, edited by Geoffrey Alderman, 2010, p31-2

46

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p120

47

Alderman in Leeds, edited by Fraser, ch1

48

Appell in New Directions, edited by Alderman, p31-2

49

Gartner, p260

50

Controversy, Alderman, p313

51

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p102

 

The Intellectual Legacy of Christoph Steding: Anti-individualism and the Primacy of the Political and Military

/in , /by

5442 words

The Reich and the Disease of European Culture —Part II: The Reich and Culture, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, translated, introduced and annotated by Dr. Alexander Jacob
Christoph Steding
Uthwita Press

This nicely presented volume resurrects from obscurity the first English translation of a German work that provides an added methodology in analyzing the pathogens afflicting Europeans worldwide. Published posthumously in 1938 from a manuscript written in 1937 by a young German philosopher, Christoph Steding, the insights are applicable today, because the author’s premise, that of a dichotomy between state building and “neutrality” has progressed across the world in a myriad of forms.

Steding is an advocate for the Third Reich. He sees this as a development from the hard realism that premised the Second Reich of Bismarck, to which he frequently alludes. He contrasts the Bismarckian with the Wilhelmian, seeing the latter as play-acting with grandiose and childish gestures, in the manner of the “cultural nation,” which is synonymous with the “neutral nation,” as culture and aesthetics become substitutes for power by nations that have become ahistorical.

We might say that such nations are all glitz and no substance, blustering verbosely and moralizing obsessively on the world stage because they are powerless in real — political and military — terms. Such nations are what Steding calls “neutral,” and what could be called neutered. 

Neutral States

Steding traveled extensively in Switzerland, The Netherlands and Scandinavia in 1932, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, having attained his doctorate the previous year. His subject was the role played by these neutral states on Bismarck’s Reich. He visited Basel, Zurich, Bern, Geneva, The Hague, and others; centers of the “neutral states” that were to direct their ire against the “cultureless” Third Reich on the world stage.

It was on returning to Gemany in 1935 that Steding began work on The Reich and the Disease of European Culture. He saw in the Prussian spirit the antithesis of what he had observed in Scandinavia, Switzerland and The Netherlands, which accounted for the vehemence from these states directed towards the Third Reich.

Culture in Context

Steding condemns “culture.” This might seem to be falling into the stereotypical cliché of the “Nazi barbarian;” “The Hun” of both world wars—brutish and primitive, and recalls the quip falsely attributed to Göring that whenever he hears the word “culture” he wants to reach for his revolver. Steding means something specific however and relates “culture” to what he calls the “neutral states,” which he sees as lacking the serious purpose of state building.

It would be easy for antagonists to paint Steding as The Hun with a will-to-destroy, in the sense that the “Nazi” state and ideology are often portrayed, but which runs closer to Bolshevism. Rather, Steding places “culture” in historical context. He wants a “new political reality” that opens to a “new possibility of culture,” citing Bismarck as the precursor.[1] He sees Germany as having a mission to reorder Europe, the states having fallen into decay.

The National Socialist regime, far from establishing itself as hostile to the arts, pursued what it considered as rescuing the arts from the formlessness of what was called “cultural-Bolshevism.” Hitler envisaged the Third Reich as the center of European culture.[2] This was not a culture-state, however, but a political state that sought the flourishing of culture as an expression of a collective folk identity.

What Steding objects to is those which advocate the “culture state,” which politically becomes the “neutral state (we might say, the neutered state). These states have their own mission as neutering other states. The League of Nations was a primary example of the mechanism used by the neutral states to destroy those who sought resurgence.

Cultural History vs. Political History

The “culture state lives off the past,”[3] hence, Steding is opposed to the “culture historian” as distinct from the political historian. The latter does not demean culture, but to the contrary, places culture within context, returning it to origins, a constant theme in the volume.

The culture historian arises within an old nation that has exhausted its political possibilities and justifies its static existence with “neutralization.”[4] The new political history places the past in harmony with the future,[5] rather than maintaining it as a museum piece; an ethnographic curio studied within “world culture” or as a focus of nostalgia by those who have no future. Hence for Steding the focus should be on “national culture,” not “cultural history,” which is the pastime of a society that has become Fellaheen, to borrow a term from Spengler.

However, the neutral states, while recording their cultures, are detached from their origins, no longer seeing the past as a forerunner of the future. True historical writing, Steding said, examines the “stages of reality,” which are the “stages of politics.”[6] This is what Spengler undertook, his “cultural epochs” being within the context of “political epochs,” “spiritual epochs,” and “historical epochs.”

As a National Socialist, Steding adds “racial science,” used to explain Germany’s “mission” as the “ordering, nurturing center of Europe.”[7] The new Reich is inspired by “Nordic” traditions,” hence the affirmation of tradition, in contrast to the “neutralization” of history as merely a record of the past, written up as “cultural history,” and “neutral” insofar as it becomes part of a nebulous “world history,” where conflict between two New Guinean tribes is no less relevant than the Siege of Vienna.

In this racialization of Europe, the Dinaric stands in partnership with the Nordic[8] in forging new possibilities, while the Alpine has a merchant disposition and has replaced the Nordic in the rulership strata of the neutral states, The Netherlands, Scandinavia and Switzerland. The Dinaric is seen as a merchant, aligned with Jewish financial commerce.[9]

Contra Nietzsche

There are anomalies about Steding as a National Socialist philosopher, placing him in an original mode within the regime. In particular, he is scathing of Nietzsche.

While one might account for the surprising lack of totalitarian conformity in philosophical and other matters in the Third Reich by viewing National Socialism as philosophically dialectical, with a number of doctrines competing in the process of synthesis, there was no synthesis between Steding and Nietzsche. He saw Nietzsche as a representative of “culture” of the type that hindered the building of the State and the Reich. This was part of the conflict between the “neutral”, that is to say “culture” states, and the Reich.

Nietzsche was an advocate of the “culture state,” against the “political state.” He was a critic of the Reich and of Bismarck, disparaging of Germans, and more admiring of the Jews. He was part of Romanticism, as distinct from Classicism. Dionysian contra Apollonian. Steding regarded his “will-to-power” doctrine as “the hysterical theories of the impotent in impotent and unrealistic times.”[10]

The reader might recall Nietzsche’s contempt for the “State” and readily comprehend the meaning of Steding’s doctrine by contrasting it to Nietzsche’s. The latter elevates the “individual,” “Higher Man,” whose freebooting character is in opposition to the State. Nietzsche is apolitical and hence antithetical to the doctrine of Steding who is thoroughly political. Hence, Nietzsche writes that,

political and economic affairs are not worthy of being the enforced concern of society’s most gifted spirits: such a wasteful use of the spirit is at bottom worse than having none at all. They are and remain domains for lesser heads, and others than lesser heads ought not to be in the service of these workshops: better for the machinery to fall to pieces again![11]

Nietzsche is therefore a spokesman for the apolitical, and hence the “neutral” who take flight into aesthetics, in Steding’s estimation.

For Steding, by contrast, the State being realized by the Reich, formed an organic totality that encompassed all constituent parts in a system of order and law. Steding cites Aristotle that man is a “political animal.” For Nietzsche, politics was anathema because of its suppression of “noble” individuality.

For Nietzsche, “the state is a prudent institution for the protection of individuals against one another: if it is completed and perfected too far it will in the end enfeeble the individual and, indeed, dissolve him—that is to say, thwart the original purpose of the state in the most thorough way possible.”[12]

While Nietzsche is considered to epitomize the antithesis of Liberalism, his definition of the State seems to be that of the “social contract,” with his allusion to the purpose of the State being “the protection of individuals against one another.” Where he departs from Liberalism here is his rejection of the “general will” that Liberalism postulated to justify the elimination of those who break the “social contract,” and hence the institution for example of the guillotine in the interests of “public safety.” However, increasing draconianism is paradoxically where the “social contract” leads, no matter what extent of its Liberal rationalization. Bolshevism, whatever its label, is the natural development of Liberalism.

Steding sees State-building in a distinctly Prussian style, which results not in the suppression of the individual in the interests of a “social contract,” or in the name of the “general will,” as Rousseau called it, but in the citizen as a constituent part of an organic community. This is the corporative (as in corpus) state that National Socialism and the many variants of Fascism sought to enact.

Dionysian vs. Apollonian

What Steding wants to impart can be conveniently understood by his opposition to Nietzsche’s celebration of the “Dionysian” as the act of “play” that creates culture: Steding championed the Apollonian; Nietzsche the Dionysian. In The Brith of Tragedy Nietzsche describes the origins of European art in Greece as a dialectical play between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term “Art;” till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy.[13]

Here we see what Steding means when he condemns the “play” of “aesthetics” as the disease of European culture. For Steding there is no “pairing” of the Apollonian and Dionysian in a playful creative dance, but an irreconcilable opposition that is reflected in conflict of outlook in art, state, politics, and economics.

In the Apollonian and the Dionysian there is a polarity that can be seen as underlying Steding’s theory. This polarity remains in conflict and any synthesis is a “mush,” and not the high art as Nietzsche would have it. Such is Steding’s opposition to Nietzsche, that it often seems that Nietzsche is at the foundation of Steding’s thinking, by way of opposition.

Apollo is form, and order; Dionysius, formlessness and disorder. Steding concisely critiques Nietzsche when referring to his cultural ideal as “Dionysiac enthusiasm, a lack of moderation, and restraint,” Steding uses the Medieval epoch by way of contrast, as expressing the Apollonian.[14]

The opposition between the doctrines of Steding and Nietzsche reflected the unresolved dichotomies of the regime, raising questions as to really how totalitarian the Reich should be considered. In this instance, according to Dr. Jacob, Walter Frank (head of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany), who met Steding in 1935 and 1937, prepared Steding’s manuscript for publication and issued it in five editions, until 1944. The run of editions indicates its success and importance. On the other hand, the work was opposed by Alfred Rosenberg and critiqued by his ideological faction. Interestingly, both Steding’s work and a selection of Nietzschean aphorisms were issued to frontline soldiers.[15]

There were other figures peripheral to the “Right” or to National Socialism, who were rejected by Steding, including the Swedish novelist Strindberg, Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and C. G. Jung, whom Steding regarded as representing the “culture” of the “neutral Swiss,” and thus as objectionable to Steding as the Jewish psychology of Freud.[16] It is evident that Steding regarded Jung as a universalist, and his psychology as having a dissolutive effect.

While it might be disputed as to whether Jung was part of the dissolutive process of psychology, with his theory of racial archetypes, on the other hand, in justifying Steding’s criticism, one could cite Jung’s 1936 essay “Wotan.” In this essay Jung explains the Third Reich psychoanalytically as an atavistic resurgence of the leader of the Wild Hunt, which would make the Reich a Dionysiac frenzy rather than an Apollonian will-to-form. This Steding, who must have been familiar with the essay, would see as evidence of Jung’s alignment with the “neutral” offensive against the Reich.      

Analogies with Spengler

There are numerous parallels between Steding and Oswald Spengler. Although Spengler died in 1936, he had already become persona non grata at the beginning of the Reich. Perhaps that accounts for a passing rebuttal of Spengler by Steding?

Stylistically, both use many metaphors and analogies. In particular, both see in Prussia the foundation of the building of the authentic State. Spengler referred to the State-building ethos as “Prussian socialism,”[17] with a stern realism that seems to accord with that of Steding. For Spengler Prussianism is service; for Steding, it is duty.

Perhaps the most salient similarity is that Steding contended that when a state focuses on “culture” it has returned to a stage of primitivity after having exhausted its historical possibilities, becoming “ahistorical,” or “outside of history.” Spengler referred to this cyclical process as returning to a Fellaheen stage, after a civilization has become etiolated, again, having exhausted its historical possibilities.[18]

Steding refers to the ahistorical phase of a late culture “dissolving itself into pure culture.” He also referred to analogous “stages,” [19] while Spengler refers to analogous “epochs.”

Spengler is alluded to briefly as among those historians engaged in the “disintegration of politics,”[20] and as being a product of his time. Steding contends that Spengler considered the past and future without an order. This seems precisely what Spengler did not do. Steding regards Spengler as among the “melancholy” culture historians. Spengler was during his time and to the present assumed to be a “pessimist,” to the extent that he wrote an essay attempting to repudiate the assumption of inevitable decay,[21] because he saw historical cycles as inexorable, while Steding referred to the “wheel of history,” and the decay of nations. Spengler’s essay “Pessimism” concludes in a manner that seems close, perhaps identical, to that of Steding:

Politics, yes, but in the hands of statesmen and not idealists. Nothing else will be of consequence. And we must never lose sight of what lies behind and ahead of us citizens of this century. Germans will never again produce a Goethe, but indeed a Caesar.[22]

This seems close to Steding. Spengler was not only a philosopher but was engaged in a vigorous political campaign against Weimar.

Steding rejects Spengler for not retracting his distance from the “national revolution,” and for not having converted to National Socialism. Spengler died persona non grata during the Reich, despite the efforts of the regime to enlist his support. Hence Steding refers to Spengler’s “tragic greatness”[23] (sic), which hardly seems a repudiation Spengler, but rather a lament that he did not join the ranks of National Socialism, which he regarded as inadequate.

 

State vs. Money

To both Spengler and Steding politics stood in opposition to economics, Steding stating that economic man is not interested in political questions. He pointed to Basel as the typical merchant city that was apolitical.[24] In relation to the Reich these “neutral” financial centers acted as negations, one might say. The subordination of money to politics brought the Reich into conflict with the international money markets.

The primacy of the economic is contrary to community building; in this instance that of the organic state. Steding refers to this contrast with the money-centered politically neutral, and ahistorical cities and states, which were involved with the literary, economic and diplomatic assault on the Reich.

Again, there is a similarity with Spengler: both see politics and economics in opposition. Spengler wrote that in the finale of a civilization, forces arise to restore vigor as a political not a cultural State, where “Money is overthrown.” In what seems analogous to Steding’s outlook, Spengler closes his magnum opus referring to History as “life and life only,” in favor of the “stronger, fuller and more self-assured life.” The “dictature of money,” “and its political weapon democracy” are broken.[25]

For both politics dominates economics; in contrast to the “freedom” ascribed to culture, where the political—the state—is subordinated to other interests.[26]

Neutral Diplomacy

For Steding the neutral states attempt to maintain relevance by focusing on the arts, especially literary arts, presenting themselves as the centers of civilization. Such a state can only politically express itself and give the appearance of relevance on the world stage, by declaring itself “neutral” and therefore presenting itself as the arbiter of disputes between states that continue to make history. One might say that the attempt to neuter states is what gives the neutral centers their relevance.[27] Their role in history is as a negation.

The Hague, Basel, and Bern, become “neutral” world centers. Woodrow Wilson’s democratic internationalism summarized in “The Fourteen Points” aimed to establish the United States as a world power by an act of negation against states maintaining or entering an historic destiny. “The Fourteen Points” were formulated to neuter the potentiality of States.

Although Steding does not use the example of Wilson or the U.S. in his critique of “neutral states” as harboring the “disease of Europe,” it is an example of how Steding’s theory as a methodology remains relevant. The U.S. was formed as a detachment from European origins and founded on ideologies that had emanated from intellectualizing among the decadent bourgeois and debased aristocracy of European salons. The U.S. was the product of the end-phase of European civilization; not the start of a new national adventure. The American ideology was based on Locke and Rousseau. The U.S. carried the “European disease” back to Europe in exaggerated forms. As a “neutral” nation it sought to neuter the European states even from the nineteenth century with its diplomatic maneuvers against Spain in Latin America; it presented itself as the arbiter of the world.

Classicism vs. Romanticism

One of the most vociferous condemnations of the Third Reich was its alleged suppression of artistic creativity—in this instance the suppression of the freedom of individual artistic expression. Here we see the spirit of the atomized man, deracinated, rootless, and his neurosis commodified on an international market. This is artistic freedom.

The Reich saw the artist as an integral part of the organic community, and art as reflecting that bond. Hence, it is easy to consider Steding as demeaning art, while it is Liberalism, and the dissolutive neutering impact of economics applied to the arts that relegates culture to a detached “play.” The Reich’s architecture and sculpture for example were in the monumental style, hard, enduring, classical, associated with names such as Arno Breker, Albert Speer, and Jospeh Thorak.

Much literary criticism has been expended on ridiculing the Reich style as barbarian and tasteless by those who champion Abstract Expressionism, Dadaism, etc., which are the liquidation of form. Thus Steding sees the “squiggles” of economic transactions and of art as part of the same disease. It is the “mush” of drunken Dionysus, frenzied, deracinated and formless, capable of quick production and marketing, like an automobile or refrigerator.

Steding alludes to classicism in referring to Rome as being called by culture-historians a “barbaric state,” Germany being called the same, and in particular Prussia.[28] Steding sees Prussia as premising the Third Reich as it did the Second under Bismarck. He defines the Prussian ethos as analogous to that of the Roman. Contrary to the condemnation of such an ethos as “barbaric,” according to the democratic conception of freedom, Steding contends that it is only the restoration of a Classical-Prussian ethos that can prevent the world from sinking into the barbaric.

Psychology

Steding saw numerous manifestations of barbarian resurgence, such as Freudian and seemingly all other forms of psychology, the aim of which was to study the abnormality of the individual.[29]

Steding states that in the Reich psychology was not regarded seriously because the preoccupation of psychology was with the individual. The focus of the Reich was with the national, folkish health, as a collectivity.

Ironically, the Reich and National Socialism as an ideology, are condemned as collective psychosis. Post-1945 the Critical Theorists use this antifascism as the foundation from which to pathologize all attachments that they and their sponsors seek to destroy.[30] Steding explains that for the Reich the health of the individual is inseparable from that of the national community. The answer of the Reich to the questions of mental health amidst Late Civilization, to borrow a phrase from Spengler, is the “removal of all diseases that arise from the separation of the individual from the whole of his nation and state.”[31] Madness arises from individualism and the destruction of social life.[32] This might also be seen as part of his objection to Nietzsche.

While Marxism claims to address the alienation caused by capitalism, it did so by destroying the very attachments that are the foundation of social life—foundations that were fractured by capitalism and by industrialism. Rather than seeking their restoration and invigoration, the bond of pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, pre-urbanized, attachments to the land, church, town, family and guild were all — without exception—targeted by Marxism, including the neo-Marxian Critical Theorists of the present era. This is why both Steding and Spengler, and others on the “Right” could state that Marxism is a product of capitalism, and not an answer to it.

Jung as a Swiss is criticized for seeing life “from the perspective of the abnormal,” and as “only corporeal, like the body.” This dismissal of Jung on such a basis might seem questionable, as Jung had famously broken with “Jewish psychiatry” over such matters 25 years previously.

Marxism

Marxism was as much part of the destructive process as finance-capital, as the relationship was recognized by Steding, referring to a common worldview in that both capitalism and Marxism sought a leveling of life. In Steding’s metaphor of “play,” while finance-capital was the “phantom dance” that strangled the life-force out of the peasantry as the basis of the organic community, Marxism was the “dance of death.” It drained the lifeblood literally, and again the peasantry was particularly victimized.

In the neutral cities, socialism thrived beside the literary arts, the latter being the most vociferous in its opposition to the Reich. In the same ahistorical current stood Rousseau, who sought to neutralize the historical “wheel of fortune” (to use one of Steding’s phrases) by the social contract, and under which many currently exiting states exist today as merely groupings of individuals legally bound for the purposes of peaceful commerce. Hence, in the socialist atmosphere of Geneva during Steding’s time he refers to the city as “Voltaire-Rousseau like.”[33] Here Rousseau was born and remains honored. Voltaire lived in Switzerland for over 20 years, up to his death. Nietzsche started his career at Basel university for a decade from 1869. In 1914 Lenin settled in Switzerland, which hosted key international socialist conferences (Zimmerwald, Kiental). The socialist leaders were writers and lawyers, and one might say, in keeping with Steding’s metaphors, that both played a dance with words. Marx us prototypical—his only regular income was journalism for The New York Daily Tribune, the largest newspaper of the time.

 

Play of Cultureulturally, as “world citizens,” and what Steding calls “deracinated,” the neutrals are arbiters of world culture. Steding sees this both culturally and politically as a process of liquification. Everything merges into “play,” which might become increasingly grandiose to compensate for lack of potency. Here, Steding again somewhat controversially vis-à-vis the (German) Right, condemns Kaiser Wilhelm II for his public displays of royal grandeur and what Steding sees as an aspect of such a character: a preoccupation with artistic and archaeological interests. The Kaiser was oblivious to the grand politics swirling around him, later claiming this as proof of his innocence of war-guilt.

This “play” of the neutrals” grabs everything within its clutch, which it deracinates, liquifies, and makes formless.

Steding had come to his conclusions through firsthand observations among those nations he sees as most representative of the “cultured,” that is to say, “neutral,” as ahistorical bystanders. Their acts of negation paradoxically did affect history, with the playacting that was typical of those states that could only assert themselves at the League of Nations, and no less now by the even more numerous states that perform at the United Nations. Hence, The Hague hosted the Court of Arbitration to impart laws that were devoid of historical meaning; Geneva: the League of Nations; Basel: the Bank of International Settlements. With such international bodies, there is the “game of debates.”[34]

Cultural History

The “cultural historian” is a primary target for Steding. Cultural historians have detached cultures from nations, and neutralized them into an amorphous mass. A “world culture” we might see as supplementing the “world citizen” and the “world state.” The Western aesthete belongs to no nation, state or folk.

Steding advocated for “political history,” explaining that “the object of political history is not man in general. Man in general is the object of ‘cultural history’… It is thereby relatively a matter of indifference if the man is a Chilean or a German, Germanic or a Negro; in this history everything is dealt with in equal manner.”[35] The “cultural historian” speaks of “humanity” instead of “nationalities.”[36]

Into this “mush” (sic) the Reich throws the “lighting of Apollo.”[37] It strikes at the “Dionysiac” which “generates formless mush,” Steding cites the post-political epochs of classical Greece and Rome as examples of where the Dionysiac ascended, resulting in “syncretic religions” and “ecstatic cults.” That is to say, the Dionysian symbolized the decay of the Classical civilizations.[38] 

Banking and Aesthetics

The “play” of “culture” as in politics puts its impress also on banking, by which money becomes a symbol designating play. This sham of international finance we might compare metaphorically to juggling. It is a juggling with figures. There is nothing tangible about it; nothing creative, and here again is the “neutrality” of “high culture;” the rendering of money as “the phantom dance of figures,” “mysterious numerical formulae” “etching” on “flat surfaces” and targeting “real life”—“the working peasants and laborers to the game of squiggles.”[39]

Steding notes a relationship between those involved with the game of art and the game of finance. He refers to Aby Moritz Warburg, art historian and cultural theorist, a scion of the international banking family. Steding writes that Aby Warburg sought by means of scholarship to achieve what his brothers achieved by banking. Art becomes a “transaction” like money.[40] Aby Warburg, the art scholar, and Max, Felix, and Paul, his banker brothers, were all agents of formlessness, internationalization, and deracination. It is of added interest that Aby Warburg entered into an intellectual collaboration with fellow cultural theorist James Loeb,[41] a scion of the Loeb banking family, Paul Warburg being a partner in Kuhn, Loeb& Co.

In seeking to establish a “state” to fulfil an historical destiny the Third Reich intrinsically conflicted with those numerous and only seemingly disparate, but actually intertwined, aspects that Steding calls collectively the “disease of European culture.” The Reich aimed to purge the social organism of these maladies in art, politics, and banking. Of the latter, we come to a factor that is generally overlooked but of central importance in understanding the conflicts of the era. The organic state was impossible to create without relegating the role of money from master to servant. This necessitated a creative role for finance, in opposition to the “the phantom dance” that destroys “real life.” Hence the Reich laws on banking and trade that liberated the workers and the peasants from the thrall of usury, and the German state from the dictates of international finance.[42] 

Post-1945 Kulturkampf

The United States accords with Steding’s theory in presenting itself on the world stage as an international artistic icon, an arbiter of taste, from which the new in the arts emanate, aligned with global marketing and diplomacy—e.g., Abstract Expressionism and Jazz used as propaganda by Washington during the Cold War epoch; “Hip Hop diplomacy” (sic) at the present time).

Steding’s theory on the use of the arts as a means of neutralization, has continuing relevance when we consider that in the aftermath of World War II the U.S. embarked on a “cultural cold war.” Much money was expended in recruiting mainly Leftwing literati into the U.S. orbit.[43] Their primary organ was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, chaired by the veteran Sidney Hook, the New York Intellectual and a central figure on the anti-Stalinist left who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. The founding conference significantly was in Berlin in 1950, drawing writers from across Europe under CIA auspices. Steding would have seen this use of aesthetics, in which Abstract Expressionism and Jazz played significant roles, as a continuation of the “disease of Europe” brought back to the Occident where it had been temporarily purged. Oligarchs played significant roles as arbiters of Europe’s cultural taste, the Rockefeller Museum of Modern Art being a primary factor.

Steding’s resurrection from the Memory Hole thanks to this translation by Dr. Jacob is therefore a service not only as a matter of historical interest (as a curio of the Reich) but provides a useful tool with which to examine the present, where world diplomacy is played out on an international stage, as it was during Steding’s time, and involves the same “mush” of fracture, and dissolution, now called “globalization.” As in post-1918, in post-1945 the Dionysiac was unleashed over the world, in a chaotic dance that even renders “genders” as literally neutered, and all other organic identities, as subjects of dissolution. The battleplanes remain between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

[1] Steding, 206.

[2] F. Spotts, Hitler & the Power of Aesthetics (Random House, 2002).

[3] Steding, 210.

[4] Steding, 220.

[5] Steding, 202.

[6] Steding, 238.

[7] Steding, 229.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Steding, 230.

[10] Steding, 211.

[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1880] 1997), 108.

[12] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113.

[13] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), (1).

[14] Steding, 58.

[15] F. Nietzsche, Sword of the Spirit [1940] (1st English edition, D. H. Wright, London: Black House Publishing 2018).

[16] Steding, 155.

[17] Spengler, “Prussian Socialism (1919)” in Bolton (ed.) Oswald Spengler: Prussian Socialism & Other Essays (London: Black House Publishing, 2018).

[18] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1928] 1971), Vol. II, 105.

[19] Steding, 152.

[20] Steding, 307.

[21] Spengler, “Pessimism” (1921) in Oswald Spengler: Prussian Socialism & Other Essays, 127-142.

[22] Ibid., 142.

[23] Steding, 311.

[24] Steding, 45.

[25] Spengler, The Decline of The West, Vol. II, 506, 507.

[26] Steding, 46.

[27] The etymology of neutral is neuter, Latin meaning “neither one nor the other.”

[28] Steding, 51.

[29] Steding, 52.

[30] K. R. Bolton, The Perversion of Normality (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2011), 153-184.

[31] Steding, 272.

[32] Steding, 272-272, citing Hegel, “Proposals for the Reform of the German Constitution” (1802).

[33] Steding, 155.

[34] Steding, 156.

[35] Steding, 246.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Steding, 247.

[38] Steding, 262.

[39] Steding, 156.

[40] Steding, 159.

[41] D. McEwan, Studies on Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing (Routledge, 2023).

[42] K. R. Bolton, “The Myth of the Big Business-Nazi Axis,” Journal of Inconvenient History, September 4, 2015, https://codoh.com/library/document/the-myth-of-the-big-business-nazi-axis/

[43] Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA & the World of Arts & Letters (New Press, 2001).

The Shaman of the Radical Right: Jonathan Bowden

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In 2009, at a secret and un-filmed Occidental Quarterly meeting in Atlanta, a portly, middle-aged Englishman with a slightly whining rural accent delivered what, according to multiple witnesses, was the best speech ever made. Certainly, they all agreed, it was the best nationalist speech ever made. It was all the more impressive if you consider that when this man ascended the stage he apparently had no idea what he was going to say. A so-called mediumistic speaker, he told friends that, prior to an oration, he would effectively enter a trance in which he would dissociate — almost split in two — and then hear the words from the ether before saying them. This man was Jonathan Bowden.

Since his untimely death in March 2012 aged just 49, a process which had already commenced towards the end of his life has accelerated and continues to accelerate. Bowden has become a cult figure on the internet, especially among the increasingly rebellious and anti-Woke zoomers who have known nothing other than Clown World throughout their young lives. Bowden, despite or possibly because of his multiple flaws as well as obvious talents, is a nationalist folk hero; a kind of “based shaman” who inspires young people, and increasingly (though they won’t mention it in public) some rather prominent and influential older people, to at worst “Ride the Tiger” of Kali Yuga and to, at best, find the courage to fight against it, personal consequences be damned. Such is the clamour to understand more about this incredible man that I have just published his official biography: Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden. I have been flabbergasted, to be frank, by the level of interest in it, especially among Generation Z.

It was a book that almost never got written. Various people asked me to write it in 2019 but it turned out that a friend of Bowden’s had been doing-so since 2012. In 2021, he was still blocking others from writing it, clearly unable to produce it but also unable to admit that he couldn’t do so. In September 2024, I was a meeting of what I would call a “purple-pilled” magazine in London; one of those magazines that is slightly too frightened to fully go where the empirical evidence leads. I got chatting to a female philosopher who suddenly produced a book of Bowden’s speeches from her handbag (purse in American) and gleamed at me with undisguised pride. If I had been a cartoon, a light bulb would’ve appeared above my head: “Bowden is a lot more popular and influential than I thought,” I said to myself. Bowden’s heir (to whom he bequeathed all his property) and I gave his “official biographer” a week to write back, he didn’t, so off I went; determined to do Bowden justice.

A key question remained, though: Why has Bowden become such a phenomenon? What was it about him? Can we pick apart the assorted intertwined factors that led to my semi-respectable philosopher carrying around a book of speeches by this open “Fascist” in her handbag?

There was something inherently fascinating about Bowden’s breadth of knowledge, delivered without notes; the way in which he could reveal unusual connections or elucidate the previously obscure; from Julius Evola to Judge Dredd. Bowden was, to some extent, the Weberian charismatic; the man gifted with certain skills that, for a people feeling a sense of crisis or meaninglessness, is able to make a cold world seem warm again. When there is no crisis, such a person is perceived as a crank, or is a charismatic only for a small group of troubled followers (as he was in his lifetime), but as a sense of crisis spreads so does his role as the charismatic. As German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) put it, “The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary . . .”  The Charismatic comes to lead, inspire and embody the community.

Bowden’s extraordinarily engaging talks were, in some ways, a kind of performance art. His lectures are not meant simply to be read, and the internet has allowed them to be preserved and widely disseminated in a way that could not have been true of people like Bowden from an earlier generation. Recorded, often in an amateur way, in rooms above pubs, an aura of the genuine, of the English struggle against tyranny, of the mysterious is added to them.

Bowden used his real name despite the obvious financial and social dangers of being a dissident against the Woke regime. This indicated bravery and self-sacrifice. Bowden espoused a kind of Nietzsche-inspired philosophy: We must reject weakness, resentment and being part of the grievance hierarchy. We are in an evolutionary and spiritual battle in which, ultimately, the powerful will triumph. We must embrace power openly and fight, eternally, against weakness, such that we can bring about the triumph of our people.

Another attractive dimension to Bowden is that he took chances, particularly in terms of his nightmarish faux-Kandinsky abstract art; his unreadable and opaque stream-of-consciousness novels, but also in his unscripted speeches. One of Bowden’s friends referred to his prose thus: “His novellas and short stories are almost unreadable, but all the same the prose is incredible, uniquely pyrotechnic . . . in its use of metaphor, vocabulary, and striking juxtapositions.”  This risk-taking in pursuit of what he feels and believes has the potential not to pay off, but he was fervent enough to take the risk and it paid off not in terms of his novellas but in terms of his speeches. This risk-taking can be inspiring and certainly signals a kind of genuineness.

Bowden was an artist as well as a thinker, so he understood, explicitly from his reading, how to successfully transmit his ideas; the brilliant teacher, he could make the world make sense for his audience. Bowden had a way with words; he would leave other speakers thinking, “I wish I’d said that!” He was acerbically witty. Some of the radical right’s favourite phrases—such as “Clear them out!” (with reference to the Labour Party) —originate from him.

Most importantly, Bowden, in a sense made the ultimate sacrifice by dying and dying prematurely. This would have imbued him with a prophet-like status; an aura of the other-worldly. In this regard, studies have found that when a charismatic leader dies, and especially if he dies suddenly, then he is suffused with greater charisma. He is perceived as being “one with the group” and representing the group to a greater extent. Death renders him, somehow, fused with the collective.

In addition, there is an extent to which Bowden seemed, in some respects, slightly childlike and helpless. Studies have found that people who sometimes make mistakes are regarded as more relatable, that childlike traits, including slight helplessness, make people more engaging, and that charismatic leaders often have a childlike enthusiasm and naivety.  In comparing her husband, the leader of the British Union of Fascists Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), to Hitler, Diana, Lady Mosley (1910–2003) observed that Hitler possessed this attractive quality of slight helplessness: “When people met Hitler they thought: here is this wonderful but unfortunate man who seems to have all of the cares of the world on this shoulders, so we must do all we can to help him.”

Bowden also had an “identifiable flaw:” He was short and overweight. It has been argued that, counter-intuitively, this is an aspect of charisma; of gaining a following. It allows ordinary people to identify better with you and so bond more strongly with you. Bowden also suffered from serious mental health problems and was, essentially, penniless. A childless bachelor, Bowden lived alone in a decrepit caravan in a caravan park in Reading, never really worked, had an old mobile phone and didn’t have the internet where he lived, so he used to research his essays at the local library.

For some this might add to his charisma: he sacrificed the worldly so that he could dedicate himself to his research, his art and to promulgating his ideas. Diogenes the Cynic (412–323 BC) lived in a barrel in Sinope in what is now northern Turkey; Bowden lived in a mobile home in dreary Reading. As Bowden put it in his 2009 interview “Why I Am Not a Liberal,” “I’m probably a Bohemian. There’s an artistic element in me. I don’t care for bourgeois respectability. It doesn’t bother me. That’s where the leaders of the extreme right often come from. They actually come from the arts as much as from the academy or from the intelligentsia, and the arts are a psychologically very radical part of the society, and therefore you don’t care as much for, you know, being regarded as a bit of a demon.”

But, certainly, these are identifiable flaws. They all contribute to his charisma. Posthumously, though the process had already commenced during his lifetime, Bowden has become an “influencer,” with YouTube channels and Twitter accounts dedicated to him. He has become a meme, with inspiring videos of his speeches produced all the time. Were he alive today, I imagine he’d have a huge channel, but he is a dead, and, naturally, this has made him even more influential; for so many younger people he is a kind of based prophet.

Tom Sunic’s speech to the Nationalistische Studentenvereniging at the University of Ghent, Belgium, Flanders Nov 2024

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Synaptically Seductive Sequence: Meditations on Math, Mysticism, Metaphysics, Masculinity, Melanin and Morality

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Almost everyone has a favorite number. So if you aspire higher than the herd, you need a favorite number-sequence too. In fact, you need lots of them. Here’s one of mine:

1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, …

See if you can work out the rule self-generating the sequence. If you can, congratulations. If you can’t, don’t worry. The Kolakoski sequence, as it’s known, is simultaneously supremely simple and synapse-seducingly subtle. On the one hand, it’s entirely deterministic; on the other, it’s uncannily unpredictable. It’s merely mathematical, it’s mundanely mechanical, but it seems to have a mind of its own. Technically speaking, the Kolakoski sequence is identical to its own run-length encoding. In other words, if you write down the lengths of the runs of 1 and 2, you reproduce the same sequence [see Note 1]. This means that the Kolakoski sequence consists of nothing but 1s and 2s in runs of one and two.

William Kolakoski and his synaptically seductive sequence (adapted self-portrait from Wikipedia)

As I said: supremely simple. And mathematicians have been studying this supremely simple sequence for decades. But they’ve never found a straightforward formula for an arbitrary entry in the sequence. That is, no-one can easily tell in advance whether the 100th or 1000th or 1,000,000th number in the sequence is 1 or 2. To know that, it can be quicker to work out everything that comes before. In short, the sequence isn’t periodic and isn’t predictable. And no-one can yet prove that 1s occur there as often as 2s. As I also said: synapse-seducingly subtle.

Strangely beautiful

The sequence certainly seduced the synapses of the man who gave it his name. It soothed his synapses too. This was because William Kolakoski (1944-97), the American artist and amateur mathematician who popularized the sequence in 1965, was schizophrenic and needed constant medication to prevent his mind being carried into what a friend of his called “regions of chaos and delusion.” Because he couldn’t control his own brain, Kolakoski felt compelled to reject free will and accept determinism. But he wanted to find some “benevolent order” in the deterministic universe and he believed that his sequence was one expression of it. As I noted above, the Kolakoski sequence is entirely deterministic, but uncannily unpredictable. It’s also strangely beautiful. Discussions of it on the web sometimes make the claim that it’s “the only sequence” that is its own run-length encoding. That isn’t just wrong, but infinitely wrong. There are an infinite number of such sequences:

1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, … (Kolakoski sequence using 1,3)

2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, … (Kolakoski sequence using 2,3)

1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, … (Kolakoski sequence using 1,2,3,4)

If someone’s synapses aren’t seduced by such sequences, then they’ll never enter nerd-nirvana. But if their synapses are seduced, I can make two confident predictions about them. First, they’re probably male. Second, they’re probably light-skinned. They’re White or Jewish or Asian, not Black in the fullest, melanin-tastickest sense. Math appeals most to pale stale males like William Kolakoski. And like Rufus Oldenburger (1908–69), the American mathematician who first published the sequence in 1945.2 But that year is very late in the history of mathematics. Why was such a simple and seductive sequence not discovered millennia ago? That’s an interesting question. It’s also interesting to speculate what would happen to intellectual history if we could use a time-machine to teach Pythagoras or Archimedes or Aryabhata about the sequence.

All of those mathematical giants would have found their synapses seduced by it, I think.3 But Pythagoras might have been seduced most of all. After all, he was a mystic and metaphysician as well as a mathematizer. The Kolakoski sequence is mystically and metaphysically mesmerizing as well as mathematically so. As I said above: it seems to have a mind of its own. Indeed, a life of its own. The Fibonacci sequence – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, … – famously illuminates biology.4 The Kolakoski sequence almost seems to belong to biology. What would Pythagoras have made of it? I think he would have been dazzled and delighted by it. And if the Kolakoski sequence had become part of early mathematics, it might have profoundly altered and enriched the course and content of the field. Perhaps calculus would have appeared centuries or millennia earlier, and not had to wait for the genius of those two pale stale males Isaac Newton (1642–1726) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716).

The geometry of life

Why Newton and Leibniz didn’t discover the Kolakoski sequence is a question that currently belongs to history and the philosophy of mathematics. Why they did discover calculus is a question that now belongs partly to biology, because their genius is explained by something else that Pythagoras would have been dazzled and delighted by, namely, DNA. Part of his delight would have come from a sense of vindication. Pythagoras believed that “Number rules the Universe.” DNA is, in effect, a number-sequence that rules all earthly life. In other words, biology is mathematics: Aei hē Zoē geōmetreî, “Life eternally geometrizes,” as Plato might have put it.5 That ancient Greek verb, geōmetreî, captured the modern sense of “do mathematics” because Greek mathematics centered on geometry.

But DNA geometrizes in a more literal sense. It’s a geometric embodiment of a number-sequence, because the physical structure of DNA — its geometry — explains how it works, how it encodes and directs the manufacture of proteins. DNA is a splittable spiral, a double helix whose structure and simplicity would have added to the dazzlement and delight of Pythagoras. Biology is mathematics and mechanics! In effect, a human body is a giant factory full of microscopic machines manufacturing and maintaining meat. And also manufacturing and maintaining mind. Whatever the precise nature and origin of consciousness, there can be no doubt that it is profoundly influenced by mindless matter and by those microscopic machines of DNA. In some sense, mind is both mechanical and mathematical. If we want to explain the very wide mental variation among humans, we have to understand the mechanics and mathematics of DNA.

“A hidden arithmetic of the soul”

That’s because DNA governs the differing psychology and cognition of different human races. Indeed, DNA explains why and how there are different human races. DNA has mutated in the course of human history and now differs in significant ways from race to race, just as DNA has mutated in deeper biological time and differs from male to female. This produces a delicious irony: the number-sequence of DNA explains why some human beings delight in number-sequences and some don’t. And why some human beings are much better at understanding and manipulating number-sequences, in both a narrow and a wide sense. The great philosopher Leibniz, co-creator of calculus, once wrote that Musica exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi – “music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, unaware that it calculates.” In other words, music is mathematics (and is another synapse-seducing sequence). It’s not a coincidence that perhaps the greatest mathematician of all time, Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), belonged to the same race as perhaps the greatest composer of all time, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Leibniz, a GOAT in both philosophy and mathematics, belonged to that race too.

Charles Murray’s hate-hexagon captures 97% of human accomplishment by stale pale males in Europe

It was the German branch of the White European race. Gauss, Beethoven and Leibniz were all pale stale males. So, in a wider sense, is perhaps the greatest living mathematician, the Chinese Terry Tao (born 1975). He’s perhaps the greatest on Earth, that is, but there may be far greater mathematicians elsewhere in the Universe, members of alien species with radically different biologies. In one sense, math floats free of biology: it’s presumably a universal language for advanced intelligent beings of any kind, which is why we’ve beamed prime numbers at the stars to prove our existence and intelligence, not the poetry of Maya Angelou. But in other senses math is closely bound to biology. The Fibonacci sequence is one famous example. It governs the structure of pine-cones and pineapples, yet those species are subjects of math, not sovereigns of it like Homo sapiens. You could say that pine-cones and pineapples are mathematics, that is, they embody mathematics. Human beings both are mathematics and do mathematics.6 And if you want to understand why, you have to understand the biology of human beings and the number-sequence of their DNA.

Misomathematical mysticism

More specifically, you have to understand the biology of those individuals and races who invented and excel at mathematics. As I pointed out above, the individuals have a strong tendency to be pale stale males, from Pythagoras in the 6th century before Christ to Terry Tao in the twenty-first century after. The maximal masculinity of math is explained by the evolution of males to hunt and hurl weapons;7 the minimal melanicity of math is explained by the evolution of higher intelligence at higher latitudes in colder climates. In other words, the mathematics of DNA explains why some human beings have a mind for mathematics and some don’t. DNA is mechanically mathematical (and vice versa). But mystics, of course, object to the mechanization and mathematization of mind. There’s a great irony in that misomathematical mysticism, because some of those who espouse it are followers of a man who would, like Pythagoras, have been dazzled and delighted by DNA. And like Pythagoras he would have felt vindicated by it. But whereas Pythagoras would have hailed the mathematicality of DNA, Karl Marx (1818–83) would have hailed the materiality of DNA.

Marxism in its classic form claims to be a strictly materialist ideology. But modern Marxists, like the wider, Marx-influenced left in general, are resolutely anti-material when it comes to race and the influence of mere DNA on the majesty of mind. They deny the existence of race and claim that only sociology, not biology, can explain why Black women, for example, haven’t scaled the heights of mathematics like the stale pale males Isaac Newton and Terry Tao. For example, their devotion to Marxism unites stale pale males like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, and Steven Rose, the most important and influential of the DNA-deniers. They are all adherents of a strictly materialist ideology. And yet they resort to mysticism when it comes to racial and sexual difference, denying that genetics can explain the vastly different behavior and achievements of Whites and Blacks or men and women.

Partisan, not impartial

However, something else unites these dominant DNA-deniers. They are also all Jewish. So are the DNA-deniers — with delicious irony — determined by DNA? I would say yes, to some degree at least. Jewish DNA certainly accounts for the intelligence and verbal facility of Gould, Lewontin et al. Scholars like Kevin MacDonald would further claim that Jewish DNA accounts for the ethnocentrism of the Gouldeans, who haven’t been impartial scientists pursuing truth but partisan ideologues pursuing Jewish advantage. It’s not good for Jews for Whites to recognize the simple truth, namely, that biology underlies behavior and that the failure of Blacks in Western societies has deep genetic and evolutionary roots. But it is good for Jews for Whites to embrace a gigantic lie, namely, that sociology is supreme and that all non-White failure can be blamed on White racism. The Gouldeans are mendacious, not Mendelian. So you could also say they are immoral. And I would say that DNA also profoundly influences morality: some races have evolved for deceit and manipulation, and even for straightforward criminality.

As I pointed out in my article “Verbal Venom,” predation and parasitism have spontaneously evolved again and again in the animal kingdom. There are parasitic mammals, birds, fish, insects and more: Think of vampire-bats, cuckoos, lampreys, mosquitoes and so on. All of those animal groups behave in what is, from one perspective, a profoundly immoral way. They steal the hard-earned resources of their fellow creatures, deceiving and manipulating and sometimes literally sucking their blood. But morality doesn’t really apply, of course. It’s biology, not badness, that’s at work when a mosquito sucks human blood or a cuckoo-chick flips its unrelated nest-mates to their death and then exploits the labor of the deceived parents. And I think it’s biology, not badness, if those same readily evolving strategies of predation and parasitism have appeared among human beings. Predation and parasitism are written into mosquito and cuckoo DNA and may also be written into the DNA of some human groups.

Genetic geometry shows that Jews are distinct from northern European Whites

But DNA is a number-sequence, not a code of ethics. Morality dissolves in mathematics. I don’t think we can blame Stephen Jay Gould for his anti-Mendelian mendacity. As Kevin MacDonald points out, Gould proclaimed this in his most famous book, The Mismeasure of Man (1996): “May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of the evidence for empirical truth.” That was self-righteous and Gould is self-damned, because The Mismeasure of Man is replete with mendacity. But if Gould denied scientific truth and MacDonald champions it, that divergence isn’t surprising. Both men belong to small human groups that have had a vastly disproportionate influence on the world. But Scots, who have mostly had a good influence, are White and Jews, who have often had a bad influence, are not. Analysis of DNA has proved that. The three-dimensional geometry of DNA can be translated into a two-dimensional geometry of gene-clusters.8 On a gene-cluster map, Jews stand as a people alone, separated by the Southern-European cluster from Scots in the Northern-European cluster. But there’s another irony in such mathematically based DNA analysis, because one of the central figures in the discovery of DNA’s geometry was much more closely related to Stephen Jay Gould than she was to two of the other central figures in the DNA story.

James Watson (born 1928) and Francis Crick (1916-2004) were White like Kevin MacDonald, but the X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin (1920–58) was Jewish like Stephen Jay Gould.9 Unlike Gould, she was a true scientist, but unlike Crick and Watson she never achieved the scientific immortality of a Nobel prize. She died too soon and perhaps being a woman during her lifetime would have denied her a Nobel anyway. Immortality can be much easier to achieve in mathematics. William Kolakoski died young like Franklin, but he achieved immortality by discovering and giving his name to that synaptically seductive sequence of 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2…

Or rather: by re-discovering it. Rufus Oldenburger was there first. Or first on Earth, at least. Perhaps the Kolakoski sequence was first discovered millennia ago and light-years away by an alien being with a radically different biology. As I pointed out above, in one sense math floats free of biology. But, as I also pointed out above, in other senses math is closely bound to biology. I myself wish I were much better at it. Then again, I can boast that I’m very good at it already, like almost every human since the number-sequence of DNA first granted us the faculty of speech. Whether it’s spoken or written, language too is a number-sequence. It isn’t turtles all the way down, it’s numbers and algorithms and math. Le monde, c’est mathématique.10

Notes

  1. “How to generate the sequence

    The Kolakoski Sequence … is a self-describing sequence. The sequence consists of only 1s and 2s, and begins with 1. Each term in the sequence describes the length of the next run of the same number (either 1s or 2s). That probably didn’t make sense (as it didn’t to me the first time I read it), so let me show you what I mean…
    The sequence begins with 1. So this means the first run of the same digit only contains 1 number. Since the first number is 1, this means there must only be one 1 in this run. And by definition, because this run must only contain one 1, the next number must be 2.
    Because the second number is 2, that means that there are 2 of the same number in the next run. So the sequence will next contain another 2. And this term will be the end of this run of the same number.
    Because the third term is 2, we know that the next run of the same number will have length 2. Because we know the third term was the end of the last run, the fourth term has to be 1.
    The fifth term will also be 1, as this run has to have length 2.”

    You can also create the Kolakoski sequence by dropping the initial 1 like this: 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, …

  2. Oldenburger’s precedence means that the Kolakoski sequence is an example of Stigler’s law of eponymy, which states that “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Stigler’s law is also, by design, an example of Stigler’s law.
  3. Of course, if a time-machine took the Kolakoski sequence back in time, there would be no need for a time-machine to take the Kolakoski sequence back in time. You can avoid this paradox by invoking the multiverse and supposing that a time-machine from one universe hops across to another universe that’s accessible and observable from the former.
  4. For example, as noted later in the article, the Fibonacci sequence helps explain the structure of pine-cones and pineapples.
  5. According to Plutarch, Plato believed that ἀεὶ ὁ Θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ, aei ho Theos geōmetreî, “God ever geometrizes.”
  6. That is, we humans are governed in our biology, physiology, etc by mathematical principles, but are also capable of creating and performing mathematics as an explicit symbology.
  7. Tracking prey involves following a sequence of spoor through space; throwing spears or firing arrows selects for spatial ability too.
  8. In fact, gene-space has far more dimensions than two, but the gene-cluster map above uses only two and I’m simplifying for rhetorical effect.
  9. And like the mathematical giant Emmy Noether (1882–1935). As I noted above, stale pale males have dominated math, but stale pale females have sometimes been important there too.
  10. “The world, it’s mathematical.” After the manically alliterative title of this article, that’s a mildly alliterative envoi in French (inspired by Louis XIV’s alleged remark L’etat, c’est moi, “I am the state”). Perhaps both the mania and the mildness can be explained by my genetics. Anglo-Saxon poetry was famously based on alliteration, not on rhyme. Gene-expression strengthens with age and the older I’ve got, the more I’ve felt compelled to alliterate. I hope this sequence about a synaptically seductive sequence has been synaptically seductive in its own written right.

Pornography and the Failure of the Constitution: How Our Legal System Has Facilitated the Proliferation of Pornography in Society and Culture, Impugning the Credibility of Democratic and Constitutional Norms

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Despite the stubborn optimism and indeed naïveté of mainstream conservatives and their dogged fetishism for the Constitution not merely as a governing legal document but as a moral and normative authority, our system of government and indeed the Constitution itself are irredeemable. Such utter lack of fitness of purpose requires a truly revolutionary spirit, one that seeks to burn the Constitution, end democracy, and dismantle our current form of government through to its very foundation. Those who balk at such a radical proposition must at least concede that the judiciary branch of this government has wreaked absolute havoc and destruction for many decades, and that there is no apparent prospect of undoing the damage within the framework of the current system. Indeed, those committed to democratic norms, despite all the evidence to the contrary, should consider how the Constitution has been unable to stop a rogue judiciary from appointing itself as the final arbiter as to what is a compelling (or legitimate) state interest or not.

Introduction: Pornography, Obscenity, and Modern First Amendment Jurisprudence

One unfortunate characteristic typical of much of mainstream conservatism is a dogged appeal to the Constitution, not just as a legal authority, but as a moral or normative one. It is of course a fallacy to presuppose that, because something is or is interpreted to be mandated or proscribed by the Constitution, that such a legal mandate or proscription is therefore correct and infallible on that basis alone as a moral, normative, or even practical matter.  The Constitution after all once explicitly recognized and endorsed the institution of slavery. It has similarly been interpreted by the Supreme Court to prohibit execution for child molestation and other heinous sexual offenses Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008), as it has also been interpreted to require provision of education and other services to children of illegal immigrants (whether born in the states or not) (Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 [1982]). The Supreme Court has also ruled that practically unlimited campaign contributions — in effect legalized bribery — is also subject to First Amendment protections.

Whereas most would argue that freedom of speech under the First Amendment—both as a proscription against government censorship and as an important societal norm and value—is infallible and utterly beyond reproach, this author is not convinced that freedom of speech should be quite so sacrosanct, particularly if a far-left movement could seize power and have the wherewithal to censor, oppress, and even eradicate speech they do not like. But even conceding what is agreed to by a seemingly overwhelming consensus, namely that free speech under the First Amendment is one of the highest societal norms and values (as well as a proscription against government censorship), the Constitution and more particularly the First Amendment, as currently interpreted, understood,[1] and applied, currently permits one of the worst vices of the modern age: that vice is of course pornography. Much to the indictment of mainstream conservatism as well as mainstream public consensus at large, many, including many mainstream conservatives and libertarians, are free speech absolutists.  Many are convinced that the First Amendment not only does protect pornography under the First Amendment, but that it ought to. Both propositions are dubious, no matter how strong the consensus urging the contrary may be.

In discussing and analyzing this both as a legal and as a normative matter, a brief synopsis of First Amendment jurisprudence as it relates to pornography and obscenity is in order.  Contrary to popular misconception, obscenity, even today, is not protected under the First Amendment, at least not in a strictly legal, technical sense, even if particulars make censoring obscene material impossible in practical application. The seminal Supreme Court decision on this matter is Miller v. California 413 U.S. 15 (1973).  The Miller decision sets forth a three-prong test concerning obscenity and First Amendment protection:

a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest. . . . (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

It is of particular note that the Miller opinion refused to adopt the “utterly without redeeming social value” test of Memoirs v. Massachusetts 383 U.S. 413 (1966).

At initial glance, it would seem to be fairly straightforward to ban or otherwise censor or regulate pornography using this three-prong test. Hardcore pornography obviously “appeals to the prurient interest,” depicts explicit “sexual conduct,” just as such material “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”  And yet even as obscenity technically remains outside the scope of First Amendment protection, as a practical matter it has become all but impossible for local, state or federal governments to exercise state power against this vice, due to machinations of prominent leaders in the legal profession as well as subversive elements in cultural, educational, and political centers of power that, for a variety of reasons, have waged a war to not just normalize pornography (among many other vices), but render it something wholly banal and commonplace.

How could this have come to pass? Readers are directed to two operative phrases in the Miller test, which have served as proverbial chinks in the armor in relation to any effort to use state power to ban, censor, or otherwise regulate pornography in any meaningful way. The first damning phrase is found in the first prong, applying “contemporary community standards.” (emphasis added). This phrase has in effect rendered the concept something utterly subjective, when obscenity is an objective matter.  “Contemporary community standards” ebb and flow with the ever-changing vicissitudes of an increasingly decadent and indeed profligate society. By not upholding a firm, objective standard, this test facilitates and accelerates a key sociological concept known as defining deviancy down.  Closely related to the Durkheim Constant, which stipulates that each and every society has a constant, fixed quotient of behavior it regards as deviant but nevertheless exists on the outlying fringes of conduct and behavior in that society, defining deviancy down explains how when a society tolerates deviant behavior, that society becomes acclimated to it and, unless society stigmatizes and sanctions such deviant behavior in a way that deters its proliferation, that behavior will eventually—or even quite quickly—become mainstream, and more deviant or even theretofore unthinkable behavior will then become the fringe, and the process continues for as long as society is unwilling or unable to sanction and deter deviant or undesirable behavior.[2] To whatever extent that pornography or any other vice is tolerated or countenanced at all, society becomes acclimated to it, and very quickly this vice becomes incorporated into the “contemporary community standards” of this society as it fails to respond to this vice with urgency.  This is of particular importance to unduly burdensome legal standards.  Pornography went from something that was stigmatized even in the mid to late 90s to something that is utterly mainstream and even banal in less than a decade. A legal standard that imposes many years of burdensome litigation renders any state action too slow and cumbersome to accomplish anything. For by the time such matters make their way up the court system, society has already become acclimated to hardcore pornography, as that vice, pornography, becomes quickly subsumed in “contemporary community standards.” As Geoffrey Stone articulates in “Sex and the First Amendment: the Long Winding Road of Obscenity Law, “The social changes unleashed in the 1960s and 1970s, shifting cultural values, and the advent of new technologies—including VHS, DVD, cable television, and the Internet—simply overwhelmed the capacity of the law to constrain sexual expression.”

This very phenomenon was demonstrated in a failed effort to prosecute Larry W. Peterman in Utah some 25 years ago. In that case, local authorities charged a video store proprietor, Peterman, for disseminating hardcore pornography via sales and rental of physical media. Peterman was unfortunately acquitted. One of the considerations that doomed the prosecution was this “contemporary community standards” qualifier.  Defendant’s attorneys submitted evidence concerning clients at hotels and the pay-per-view rental of pornographic films. This somehow convinced the jury that such materials were within “contemporary community standards,” even if most hotel guests come in from out of town and likely out of state. This extended excerpt from an article in The New York Times on this matter is noteworthy:

Why file criminal charges against a lone video retailer, Mr. Spencer argued, when some of the biggest corporations in America, including a hotel chain whose board of directors includes W. Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake City Olympics organizing committee, and a satellite broadcaster heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, were selling the same product?

”I despise this stuff — some of it is really raunchy,” said Mr. Spencer, a public defender who described himself as a devout Mormon. ”But the fact is that an awful lot of people here in Utah County are paying to look at porn. What that says to me is that we’re normal.”

This is no principle by which public policy, implemented through the exercise of state power, can hope to deal with this or any other vice. If lots of people partake in child pornography, violent or gore pornography, bestiality, should it therefore be outside the scope of state action because such unspeakably evil vices comport with “contemporary community standards?” Some readers may mistake this rhetorical question as to somehow suggest this author is unaware of New York v Ferber 458 U.S. 747 (1982), in which the Supreme Court deigned to grant that prevention of child pornography and the myriad harms it causes is a legitimate state interest; other damaging effects inflicted on society and the public welfare by hardcore pornography apparently are not. To the contrary, this rhetorical question exposes a certain cognitive schism, a moral and intellectual inconsistency where obscenity is subject to a subjective set of “contemporary community standards,” but the most pernicious evil of child pornography is still subject to an absolute, objective standard. That people are developing a taste for such things on a certain economy of scale implores a dire need for state intervention in all instances, from hardcore pornography to the sorts of even more pernicious, extreme content mentioned above.

More disconcerting still, language in the Supreme Court decision in Reno vs ACLU 521 U.S. 844 (1997) indicates the “contemporary community standards” component of the Miller test may forbid any national censorship or curtailment of internet pornography, as the opinion states that “the ‘community standards’ criterion as applied to the Internet means that any communication available to a nationwide audience will be judged by the standards of the community most likely to be offended by the message.” Footnote 39 further admonishes that the “determinations of ‘what appeals to the ‘prurient interest’ or is ‘patently offensive’ … are essentially questions of fact, and our Nation is simply too big and too diverse for this Court to reasonably expect that such standards could be articulated for all 50 States in a single formulation, even assuming the prerequisite consensus exists.’” This supercharges a race to the bottom, to the most depraved and profligate community standards in the nation.

As to what that race to the bottom might ultimately arrive to, this author suggests perusing three photo essays featured on the zombietime.com website (found here, here, and here) concerning street fairs in San Francisco, in which all sorts of obscene conduct was taking place out in the open street, in broad daylight, including homosexual men engaging in oral sex, men impaling themselves anally with dildoes while masturbating, and other lewd sexual acts. These photo essays even depict a “piss pool,” an inflatable lawn pool for children, where a man with a shirt with “piss pig” written on it offers fellatio to untold numbers of men while others urinate on him.  This sort of conduct apparently comports with the local “contemporary community standards” of San Francisco. Any anti-pornography laws less profligate than those standards (one struggles to find any standards at all) would, according to Reno, violate the Constitutional rights of people in San Francisco and elsewhere defined by such abject depravity.

Our legal system similarly has defeated attempts to ban, censor, or regulate pornography under other nebulous legal doctrines such as “vagueness” and “overbreadth,” which only serve to frustrate and obstruct the exercise of state power on matters that are a vital state interest, as was done in the aforementioned Reno decision. See e.g., the series of Supreme Court decisions regarding the doomed Child Online Protection Act (Copa) Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002), a deplorable Supreme Court decision which ruled that the government could not ban simulated child pornography,[4] and the 2002 and 2004 Supreme court decisions in Ashcroft vs ACLU 535 (U.S. 564 and 542 U.S. 656), which enjoined enforcement of the act, remanding it to the lower court, which ultimately led to the act never taking effect. The practical effect of these and other decisions is that under our current legal system and jurisprudence, it is inconceivable that any attempt to use state power to ban, censor, or regulate pornography will be successful in the foreseeable future. Gregory Stone, constitutional law expert and law professor at the University of Chicago has stated as much in this summary of the limited extent that state power can do anything about this menace:

First, there remains a strong presumption in favor of protecting unconsenting adults and children when they are out in public. Second, the government can constitutionally prohibit the sale or exhibition to children of material that is obscene for minors, but only if it can do so without significantly interfering with the rights of adults. Third, the government can constitutionally prohibit the production, distribution, and possession of child pornography (that is, sexual images and videos made with real children). Beyond that, though, there are effectively no limits on what consenting adults can see.

Stone further explicates how 20 years ago. during the first term of the Geroge W. Bush presidency, Attorney General Ashcroft promised to crack down on obscene materials, but it was already too late and there were less than ten prosecutions sought. Those prosecutions only “went after the most extreme fare, such as videos in which men urinate in a woman’s mouth, women have sex with horses, and women and men engage in violent sado-masochistic behavior.”

 

Conceptualizing Pornography Not as Speech, But as a Product and Service

Were it possible. this realization suggests that the Constitution and even this form of government ought to be jettisoned altogether.  But since that is not likely to happen anytime soon, a close examination of what pornography is intrinsically is in order, as such an examination demonstrates that it should not be that difficult to devise a legal standard and framework within our Constitution and current system of government that could, theoretically at least, allow the government to ban, censor, or regulate such material.

Arguably the most renowned legal article published by legal scholars exploring the viability of banning pornography is Cass Sunstein’s “Pornography and the First Amendment,” originally published almost 40 years ago.  That this was published so long ago and societal norms and mores have declined so precipitously is an irrefutable indictment by itself of the Constitution, our legal system, and this form of government. While the treatise does not advocate for the censorship of pornography per se, the author at least argues that the proposition of banning, censoring, or regulating pornography should at least be permissible as a legal matter when interpreting the First Amendment and its proscriptions against government censorship.

For the purposes of the analysis set forth in this essay, some additional primer on First Amendment jurisprudence is in order for those readers less familiar with such matters. The First Amendment is of course not absolute. Many often trot out the old chestnut that “you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater,” but that was taken from a horrible Supreme Court decision Schenck vs United States 249 U.S. 47 (1919) that allowed the United States to prosecute and convict American citizens for rightly denouncing the United States entry into World War  I, a decision which was overturned in the seminal Brandenburg v Ohio 395 U.S. 444 (1969) decision over 50 years later (better late than never, one supposes).  There are nevertheless various types of speech that are not protected at all or receive little protection from the First Amendment. These typically include things like threats, bribes, as well as defamation.  In addition to such forms of speech that are entitled to no First Amendment protection whatsoever, other types of speech receive lesser protection than others. First Amendment jurisprudence offers the highest order of protection for speech that concerns political, cultural, religious and other matters relating to society, morals, culture, the law, and so on, known as “high value speech” in legal parlance. Commercial speech is theoretically entitled to a lower level of protection, but unfortunately, as a practical matter, even commercial speech (e.g., advertising) is afforded what this author argues are unreasonably robust protections.

At the start of the treatise, Sunstein offers a clumsy definition of pornography that is bound up in feminist perceptions at the time concerning explicit or tacit violence against women as somehow intrinsic to pornography. While pornography is degrading to both men and women, most of it does not seem to touch upon this issue of violence against women at all, and in this way this preoccupation with violence against women, indeed defining pornography as necessarily having this feature seems counterproductive to formulating any legal or intellectual framework whereby state power under our current system and constitution (or any other system for that matter) would have free rein to ban, censor, or regulate such material.  After fumbling with such a dubious definition, Sunstein redeems himself to some limited extent by stating the obvious distinction that any worthwhile legal system would easily recognize: pornography is, at its essence, a “sexual aid.”[5] While describing pornography as a sexual aid, Sunstein does not go so far as to argue that pornography is not speech at all, but he ought to have.  Sunstein later describes pornography as a type of speech or expressive activity that is not at all “cognitive” in nature, whereas the higher forms of speech that do receive the highest, absolute protections under the First Amendment are “cognitive” in nature. Forms of speech that are “cognitive” in nature include written books, essays and treatises, video essays on YouTube and other streaming sites, documentaries, as well as novels, short stories, cinema, and other works of fiction that tell a narrative and are characterized by things like plot, character development and the like.  The distinction between cognitive expression and non-cognitive, emotive expressive activity was well enunciated in Chaplinsky vs New Hampshire 15 U.S. 568 (1942), which had affirmed the “fighting words” exception to First Amendment protections, but has regrettably been narrowed significantly. The operative language in Chaplinsky juxtaposes whether expression (or expressive activity) involves the exposition of ideas, balanced against interests of the public welfare.[6] Chaplinksy denied First Amendment protection to “fighting words” when “such utterances are not an essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”

Pornography typically—if not categorically—lacks any of these features, and when the status of First Amendment protection was not nearly so settled as it is today, pornographic films of the 70s and 80s typically consisted of the most rudimentary plot that was only there to provide plausible deniability on this issue. Any shoddy suggestion of plot was transparent in how pretextual it was.  No one ever watched pornography for the plot, but watched it to get it off, either by masturbation or for sexual stimulation before engaging in sexual relations with another person or even more than one person. Any semblance of plot or other features that Sunstein, other legal scholars, and our legal jurisprudence regard as “cognitive” in nature are merely incidental; pornography in its essence is a sexual aid, in other words a product like an illicit drug, or in the instance of personalized cam shows and the like, a service and a product.[7]

Conceptualizing pornography not as speech but as a sexual aid—a product or service acting as a sexual aid— is the key, defining distinction, and it ought to be the key factor that permits outright censorship and banning under the First Amendment, both as a legal proscription and as a greater societal value.  Unfortunately, as obvious as this distinguishing factor is, it is one lost on prevailing jurisprudence and legal scholarship. Indeed, in Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition, Justice Kenndy fretted how Romeo and Juliet and other great literary works concern teen sexuality and even child abuse. His opinion even makes direct allusions to the films Traffic and American Beauty, specifically how the daughter of the lawyer for the D.E.A. becomes addicted to drugs and trades sex for drugs with a Black drug dealer.  He also expounds at great length how American Beauty depicts a sexual act between one of the teenage girls and her boyfriend, as well as how her blonde friend was ready to “yield herself” sexually to a middle age man, and even alludes to a teen boy performing fellatio, although that allusion or depiction rather is a mistaken perception with fatal results at the film’s climax.  While arguably indecent (probably not, as there is no full frontal nudity or any depiction of genitals, graphic or otherwise) none of these examples are sexually explicit. And they certainly do not come close to obscenity or acting as a sexual aid (at least not for the vast majority of persons). That our legal system is incapable or unwilling to discern such basic distinctions is utterly and permanently discrediting.

One way to conceptualize this fundamental distinction is by analogizing hypothetical laws against prostitution with pornography—a matter Sunstein for some reason neglects to examine altogether. If laws prohibiting one person from paying another for sexual favors are permissible, why is it then somehow constitutionally or morally suspect to promulgate laws prohibiting a client from paying one or more parties to commit sex acts either with that client, or simply by himself (masturbation) or with other parties because those sexual acts are contracted for while being filmed? Most if not all anti-prostitution laws would prohibit a man from hiring two women to have lesbian sex for his gratification as a spectator or voyeur, or paying a woman to have sex with another man, or hiring a prostitute and a gigolo to achieve some exhibitionist thrill, provided he does not film such sexual encounters. How this analysis should somehow change under precisely the same scenario but in front of a camera seems incredibly dubious. Analogizing pornography to prostitution is so obvious it was covered in a Family Guy joke—and yet it remains nebulous and confounding to leading lawyers and legal scholars alike.

Conceptualizing pornography as a sexual aid and as something evaluated under objective rather than subjective standards under a slightly modified Miller test that deletes the “contemporary community standards” component and illustrates the commercial nature that very often but not quite always defines pornography at its essence. Of course there are some who might produce such material for free. Just as some might produce methamphetamine, marijuana plants, and other illicit drugs and distribute this product for free. Such gratis offerings are still in effect a sexual aid, and in this way closely analogous to illicit narcotics that one might, as an exception and outlier, produce and disseminate for no monetary gain because such persons are committed, for their own peculiar reasons, to recreational drug use as some sort of perverse crusade.[8]   A product or service offered gratis is still, at its fundamental core, a product or service.[9]

Other arguments include objections that people find all sorts of things sexually stimulating, even something a person could use to help “tend to one’s self.” This sort of objection is typified, for example, in distasteful, vulgar, and thoroughly stale jokes about masturbating to the women’s underwear and intimate wear sections in Sears catalogs and the like back in the day before the Internet and before pornography became so utterly ubiquitous. There is no doubt some have masturbated while looking at models in panties and a brassiere in otherwise benign offerings in advertising and the like.  Perhaps the problem is the phrase “prurient interest,” rather than sexual aid, as one can watch Rachel Reynolds strut around in open-toed strappy heels and a low cut, tight-fitting dress with a prurient interest, or Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, or Gillian Anderson as Agent Scully, Catherine Bach as Daisy Duke, the list goes on and on.[10]  The same rationale applies to even more risqué fare, such as burlesque dancing and even, perhaps, nude images that could be categorized as erotica but not as obscene, hardcore pornography.[11] With arguably the last instanced excepted, such a “prurient interest” does not make these images pornographic, or a sexual aid by their intrinsic nature, for indeed such instances are neither obscene nor are most of these examples even indecent. But just as rudimentary plots to pornographic films of past eras were incidental and were not of the essence of what pornography is intrinsically, R-rated or other salacious or alluring images that may arouse such a prurient interest and a lewd thought—or several—and serve as a sexual aid in marginal instances—are incidental and not intrinsic to the essence of such things, i.e., what they are fundamentally and principally. To reiterate: the incidental manner in which such images arouse a “prurient” interest is demonstrated by the fact that they are not obscene, the hallmark of pornography as a sexual aid and ersatz for prostitution.

In addition to falsely conceptualizing pornography as speech, rather than as an ersatz sexual aid or a product or service that offers sexual excitement and titillation, our legal system has toiled and fretted unnecessarily with supposed evidentiary problems in determining or ascertaining how pornography is harmful and the precise nature of harm it causes both society and the individual. Such obfuscation and obstructionism are exhibited for examples in the series of Ashcroft decisions discussed earlier. Sunstein spins his wheels on this matter as well, although he does note that difficult evidentiary problems should not be used to paralyze state action for the public welfare and greater good.  He specifically notes how very difficult it can be to prove carcinogens cause cancer according to higher standards of proof, such as clear and convincing or beyond a reasonable doubt evidentiary standards, but it would be madness to suggest that the nebulous nature of such matters should prevent the government from taking such action.

 

The Harm Pornography Inflicts on Society and the Individual

Published in 1986, Sunstein’s treatise is nearing its fortieth anniversary. It is noteworthy that it was written as pornography was just beginning to become more ubiquitous through the advent of VCR technology, which allowed persons to rent or purchase pornographic video tapes and watch in the privacy of their own homes, rather than go to some seedy “adult” theater. To whatever extent VCR and other home movie technologies caused greater ubiquity of pornography without social stigma and other external factors that deterred its use and proliferation, that problem has exploded by many orders of magnitude with the rise of broadband internet and the failure to respond in any meaningful way to pornography on the internet. Almost half a century has gone by, and our legal system—”our democracy”—has utterly failed to respond to this problem in any meaningful way.

Streaming pornography on the internet is of course quite different than a VHS tape or DVD disc back in the day, for a variety of reasons, and has begotten a plethora of social problems that harm both society and the individual.  Streaming pornography has a particularly pernicious effect on brain chemistry and structure, acting in a manner similar to how opium and other drugs overload our natural endorphin reward system in ways our brain chemistry and biology could never possibly handle or deal with.  One result is increasing desensitization, propelling those who use pornography to seek out more and more extreme material.  The result—for both men and women—is that often an actual, living person as a sex partner is not able to titillate or arouse in the way ever more extreme internet porn can and does. This destroys interpersonal relationships while also hampering new relationships from ever forming in the first place, and further exacerbates the demographic winter that is one of the existential threats facing European peoples.  Evidence is piling up that internet pornography gives rise to erectile dysfunction, not just in middle age men but young males, even those 18 years of age or younger. Any man who experienced or is experiencing adolescence and young adulthood in health rather than such sickness will attest what a shocking proposition this notion is. Pornography is the irresistible force that can and does topple a seemingly unmovable object, namely the male libido in adolescence and youth. Or would it be the immovable object that stops an irresistible force dead in its tracks? Beyond that, the explosion of persons using pornography has been associated with autogynephilia. In other words, tolerating internet pornography the way this dystopic society has is an antecedent to the transgender menace. Finally, the ubiquity of pornography is such that large numbers of minors, including not just adolescents but prepubescent children, regularly consume it.  The assurances provided in Reno vs ACLU and other opinions from the effectiveness of internet filtering software to the burden lying principally with parents have been utterly and completely discredited.

Anything that creates such terrible maladies are an enemy to public health, public welfare, and the greater good, and accordingly should be obliterated from society to the furthest extent possible; this means not just pornography, but the Constitution, our utterly worthless and dysfunctional legal system, and democracy[12] itself insofar as such hallowed institutions have proven incapable of stopping the proliferation of these and other civilization-destroying vices. There can be no more legitimate use of state power than protecting the public health and the public welfare, the most important considerations that all too often pure, unbridled laissez-faire capitalism not only fail to protect but can actively work against.  After all, in a pure capitalist system favored by misguided and deluded libertarians and many mainstream conservatives alike, little would sell quite as well as peddling cocaine or heroin—or sports gambling, pornography, prostitution. The list of destructive vices is seemingly endless.

Questioning Freedom of Speech and Democracy Itself

First Amendment jurisprudence has proven itself uniquely destructive and pernicious in other contexts as well. Note for example United States vs Stevens 559 U.S. 460 (2010), which held that the government could not impose criminal sanctions on the production and sale of videos featuring dog-fighting on the overbreadth and vagueness doctrines, even though engaging in the activity depicted in these vides violates laws in all 50 states as well as federal law. The federal statute in question, 18 U.S.C. § 48. was revised in a way to supposedly pass constitutional muster by deleting prohibitions of depictions of wounding and killing and focusing instead on cruelty and torture, as the revised statute merely prohibits so-called “animal crush sexual fetish videos” and states that such material must be obscene. Indeed, a special report by the New York State Animal Law Committee determined that “This [revised] statute limited its proscription to so-called crush videos, the fetish animal torture videos designed to appeal to prurient interest.” The revised statute was deemed constitutional in a Fifth Circuit appeals court decision Texas vs Richards No. 13-20265 (5th Cir. 2014), in which defendants were prosecuted and later convicted for producing and selling videos in which kittens, chickens, and other animals were tortured and killed in sexually orientated crush videos.

While that result is the necessary and correct one, the Stevens decision seems to allow the production, dissemination, and sale of dog-fighting videos and the like, even though the underlying actions depicted in such media are illegal in all 50 states. Aside from the ridiculous objections concerning vagueness set forth in the Stevens decision, it must be emphasized that a legal distinction permitting videos that expose and condemn such barbaric acts while prohibiting videos that offer such depictions for sick gratification would not pass constitutional muster as “content-based, viewpoint-based discrimination.” This only serves as a further indictment of the First Amendment. Videos and other materials depicting dog-fighting or people (usually of a certain racial background) who train pit bulls or other large dogs to attack and kill cats are not simply unpopular or repugnant; they invoke matters of principle on which there cannot and must not be any tolerance or compromise. Those who would produce, disseminate, or sell such materials for any purpose other than exposure and condemnation ought not be tolerated because they are morally repugnant and anathema to basic decency.

At the broadest, most abstract level, Supreme Court jurisprudence from the 1970s onward has eviscerated any societal constraints against profanity and disorder, ruling for example a person has a constitutional right to wear a jacket that reads “fuck the draft,” Cohen vs California 403 U.S. 15 (1971) not just in public but in court, even as courts to this day can (and do) expel persons for not being properly dressed. Those who regard the Constitution and our legal system with such undeserved deference should be made to consider how much more vulgar, profane, and coarse society has become since 1960. With deviancy defined ever further down, we now live in a pornographic and profligate society, and the response by luminaries in the legal profession and legal scholarship is, to quote Cohen vs California, “avert your eyes.”

But just as our legal system has crippled the government from doing anything about pornography or videos depicting animal cruelty and gratuitous killing of animals and other pernicious activity, a cursory glance at the body of laws and other instances of state action demonstrates this same legal system allows state power to censor or sanction all sorts of speech which does facilitate the “exposition of ideas” or is cognitive in nature. That consideration of course demonstrates what absurd folly it is to humor the idea that any government could ever pretend that it could ever categorically avoid censoring or having a “chilling effect” on speech or expressive activity it deems undesirable or harmful.  Amanda Shanor argues that the determinative factor whether speech or expressive activity “falls within the First Amendment’s reach and what is excluded from it does not rest on the distinction between speech and conduct,” but rather on “social norms. . ..”  Sunstein articulates how, in the context of employment settings, the federal government suppresses and sanctions a wide range of speech expressing opposition, hostility, or general aversion to organized labor unions. The degree to which organizing labor unions is harmful or beneficial to a society (or to an employer or employees) is at the very heart of “high value” “cognitive” speech that touches on matters of politics, religion, and other high-minded concerns regarding society and public policy. And yet both the government and luminaries in the legal profession have few qualms about state power curbing, chilling, or censoring that sort of speech.

In addition to viewpoint-based restrictions on matters of organized labor, the government imposes all sorts of sanctions on speech in employment and business settings in relation to the onerous civil rights regimes imposed by Title VII and other so-called civil rights laws that restrict or deter freedom of speech on a number of important issues related to sex, race, sexual orientation, and now possibly even the menace of transgenderism. Anyone who doubts this is challenged to discuss gay marriage or the question of women in combat or as on-the-beat law enforcement not even as an employee, but as a sole business owner. Or consider the result of a proprietor of an eating establishment, hotel, or other public accommodation who displays some sort of sign or manifesto denouncing miscegenation.

Since Sunstein’s treatise was written in 1986, American society has also seen the rise of so-called hate crime legislation, an onerous regime that punishes people for harboring views the state disfavors. While it is true hate crime legislation does not ban or censor disfavored types of speech per se, vastly disparate outcomes in remarkably similar fact patterns involving prosecution doubtlessly create a chilling effect.[13] Many liberal cities make no effort at all to enforce laws against vandalism and graffiti, and yet if one were to carve or paint a swastika on a park bench or place a sticker featuring the confederate banner or a World War II Reichskriegsflagge on a park bench or some fixture in public transit, a special hate crimes task force would be assembled to find who did such a dastardly thing.

These and other considerations indicate that perhaps the aversion to the proposition of state censorship, embraced most especially by mainstream conservatives, could not be more misguided. As set forth in “American Degeneracy Laid Bare,” censorship works if done correctly.  Many will clamor about the Streisand Effect, but that only applies to censorship done poorly, such as when the Sex Pistols or Frankie Goes to Hollywood were “censored”—of course were not censored, as the BBC practically advertised for these artists by announcing they will not air “God Save the Queen” or “Relax (Don’t DO it”). Compare and contrast with how the German government deals with materials it (wrongly) regards as “material harmful to minors,” namely music, writings or art that advocate for far-right ideas or historical interpretations sympathetic to the German cause in World War II.  As explicated at length in “American Degeneracy Laid Bare”:

The German government does not put a label on compact discs, records, and the like brandishing a recording as neo-Nazi or far-right. They ban the sale of such materials outright, making it illegal to sell (but not possess) such media. Neither the German government nor state-owned media announce to millions that a particular disfavored artist, album, or song will not be played on the airwaves, thereby publicizing such materials to the public. They quietly prevent the broadcast, and disseminate lists of materials deemed to be “harmful to minors” to law enforcement and other agencies, as those agencies then use (or did use) those lists to audit what was sold in record stores back when those existed. As far as this author is aware, those lists are not available to the public.

Censorship efforts in Germany and elsewhere in Europe go well beyond such measures, a matter which has become newsworthy given grumblings about banning the Alternativ für Deutschland, EU bureaucrats fretting about Twitter during its Elon Musk era, and most particularly how Germany has cracked down on content on the internet that the bureaucrats and officials in the puppet state deem hate speech.  The latter was of course featured in an infamous 60 Minutes segment on February 16, 2025, and has become quite a controversy particularly in the states.

Many Americans liken censorship to ineffectual, half-hearted measures, such as “Tipper Gore’s initiative to put explicit advisory labels on recordings” in the 90s.  That of course was an absolute farce, as the “explicit materials label” did nothing to restrict access to minors to anyone, and essentially advertised that such recordings were edgy by using profanity that might upset or offend parents, teachers and elders. Whereas one could hardly think of a better advertisement to entice young people than a conspicuous black and white label that reads “parental advisory, explicit lyrics,” actual censorship efforts by entities like the American vassal-state, the Bundesrepublik, both restrict access to materials targeted by this body in an effective, concerted way, while also stigmatizing such materials in incredibly powerful ways given the context of modern German society, defined, in many ways, by a pernicious war-guilt complex. The modern German government and other similar entities in Europe are of course utterly wrong about what they censor, “but the tactics it uses have been remarkably effective in curbing and curtailing cultural trends it wrongly finds to be anathema.”   While “the motivations of the Bundesrepublik. . . are repugnant,” efforts to censor far-right materials have been remarkably successful in stunting the growth of such movements. Censorship as a tactic or means to achieve greater ends is remarkably effective if implemented wisely with a “gloves off” approach, provided such efforts are supported by some segment of the population and fortified by a minimally competent propaganda campaign.[14] As this author urges in “American Degeneracy Laid Bare,” “If the right ever achieves political and cultural power necessary to implement such measures, similar policies and more must absolutely be implemented to further our righteous ends.” 

Grim Prospects of Turning the Tide: A Nigh Impossible Task Lies Ahead

While implementing no-nonsense censorship policies such as those in various European states is not realistic in America in the foreseeable future, conceptualizing pornography as both objectively obscene, rather than subjective “contemporary community standards” and as a sexual aid or a sort of ersatz prostitution should not be so terribly difficult for what are regarded as the finest minds in the legal profession to enunciate. After all, this obvious distinction was alluded to, at least to some limited extent, in the Family Guy joke linked above This of course strongly suggests that the matter is not so much that these leaders in the legal profession and legal scholarship are unable to enunciate why pornography should not and must not be entitled to legal protection. Rather, it is that they do not want to,[15] just as these same leaders have instigated all different sorts of civilizational ruin in various forms. That consideration further suggests the necessity of something far more drastic than conventional conservatism, but rather some expression of right-wing authoritarianism that at least envisions utterly purging these nefarious elements from our cultural and political institutions of power, including much of the legal profession as it currently exists and has existed for decades.  A system of government and indeed a society at large that cannot protect its citizenry from a vice so destructive it renders otherwise healthy 17- and 18-year-old men impotent, a vice that destroys relationships and contributes to unsustainably low birth rates does not possess any fitness for any purpose for which the state or the social contract as envisioned by Enlightenment thinkers are created.

Those who are of a more optimistic outlook or are of a more mainstream persuasion concerning the Constitution and the First Amendment are apt to note that Supreme Court recently granted certiorari regarding challenges to a Texas state law requiring age verification to ensure users are of age, and heard the case, Free Speech Coalition vs Paxton, this past month (January 2025). Given the spotty history of Barrett and most particularly Roberts (who wrote the opinion in the deplorable Stevens decision), it is most unclear whether the Court will uphold even some of the very modest regulations and limitations mandated by the Texas state law and other state laws. It is utterly inconceivable that the Court will overturn past precedent in cases like Reno or the series of Ashcroft decisions, let alone reinvigorate the dead letter of Miller vs California.

Despite the stubborn optimism and indeed naïveté of mainstream conservatives and their dogged fetishism for the Constitution not merely as a governing legal document but as a moral and normative authority, our system of government and indeed the Constitution itself are irredeemable. Such utter lack of fitness of purpose requires a truly revolutionary spirit, one that seeks to burn the Constitution, end democracy, and dismantle our current form of government through to its very foundation. Those who balk at such a radical proposition must at least concede that the judiciary branch of this government has wreaked absolute havoc and destruction for many decades, and that there is no apparent prospect of undoing the damage within the framework of the current system. Indeed, those committed to democratic norms, despite all the evidence to the contrary, should consider how the Constitution has been unable to stop a rogue judiciary from appointing itself as the final arbiter as to what is a compelling (or legitimate) state interest or not.[16]

Alas, that sort of effective remedy to so many of our problems does not seem foreseeable in the near or distant future. The emotional appeal to the Constitution and the First Amendment in particular has been thoroughly engrained in the conscience of an overwhelming number of people. This is particularly true of conservatives and many opposed to the left. That tendency, whereby mainstream conservatives carry on about “constitutional principles,” “human rights,” etc. is particularly disadvantageous insofar as many elements on the left have been openly espousing censorship policies, from Tim Walz saying so-called “hate speech” and “disinformation” should not enjoy First Amendment protection to myriad other examples.[17] True to their form, conservatives will adhere to Queensbury rules to their graves, even as the other side fights no-holds barred.

In addition to the problem of dogged fetishism for the Constitution, other problems abound insofar as pornography has become so utterly mainstream, as many in society discuss it, their masturbatory habits, and other sexual proclivities as matters fit for polite society, in the public. Pornography is such a uniquely pernicious vice precisely because it strikes at the heart of the mammalian essence of human sexuality and, accordingly, is pleasurable and exciting. The visual sight of an attractive young or even middle-aged woman nude, performing certain sex acts is hard-wired into our very biology to be appealing, arousing, and sexually gratifying. But just because something is pleasurable, enjoyable in the short term does not mean it is not harmful in the short or long term. In many ways, pornography can be likened to the vice of alcoholism for native Americans, a vice which is uniquely pernicious to that group for reasons stemming in large part from racial differences and evolutionary biology. Such a vice that overwhelms our reward system calls into the question the very notion of freedom. Is it really freedom for an alcoholic to have 20 dollars in his pocket, affording him an opportunity to buy a bottle of whiskey[18] or vodka when such liberty simply feeds his vice? Or consider a heroin addict with similar money and opportunity to partake in his preferred poison. Is it really a personal freedom for him to he able to purchase a few hits of heroin when the interest of his own well-being and the greater good for those around him and society at large implores that he must not have such liberty?

It will be exceedingly difficult to muster any effective resistance to hardcore pornography—not just as it relates to turning the tide in decades of disastrous legal decisions, but reversing and upending the process whereby pornography has not only ceased to be stigmatized and shamed, but as something that has become commonplace and banal, and something for which much of society openly professes an affinity. Working within the parameters of our current legal system and form of government, the sort of legal and intellectual framework envisaged in this treatise needed to have been implemented decades ago, in the 70s or the 80s, possibly the 90s at the very latest. Putting the proverbial genie in the bottle will be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.  However difficult confronting this and other existential threats to European civilization and posterity may be, the fight, the revolution, starts with the articulation of those ideas that rebut and repudiate conventional, prevailing wisdom about civilizational ruin. In relation to the vice of pornography specifically, any Kulturkampf must begin with the ability to articulate why pornography is not speech, but rather a vice, an illicit product or service for more akin to prostitution and illicit drugs than free expression. This is particularly so given that freedom of speech is not just a governing legal proscription against government censorship in the United States, but something the vast majority regard as an important societal norm that would doubtlessly endure even if our current system could be jettisoned or overthrown.  In addition, such an effort must articulate how pornography is a pernicious vice that harms both the individual and greater society alike.  That basic intellectual framework is the nexus from which any effective resistance to this problem will necessarily emanate.

While it is doubtful this legal system and system of government will respond in a way that addresses these concerns, the propagation of ideas such as those espoused in this treatise will engender not just outrage at the continued tolerance of pornography. Insofar as this and other catastrophic failures impugn democratic and constitutional norms, the propagation of the ideas set forth in this treatise and similar works will, with good fortune, foster greater dissidence on a scale sufficient to make far more radical change possible, once a critical mass of people realize our current system is beyond salvage and utterly irredeemable. 

Other articles and essays by Richard Parker are available at his Substack page, theravenscall.substack.com. Please consider subscribing on a free or paid basis, and to like and share as warranted. Readers can also find him on twitter, under the handle @astheravencalls. 

[1] One important matter related to the topic of this treatise but which cannot be explored in depth concerns original intent, that is what the framers intended by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It will only be stated in passing this author is highly skeptical that the framers ever envisioned let alone intended the First Amendment to protect hardcore pornography. It is of course important to note that only the printed word existed at that time, or indeed when John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty, from which the expression “marketplace of ideas originates.” “First Amendment Fetishism” by John Kang 2024 UKR 679 (2024) offers some analysis of the legal history the author uses to make this argument, but much of it seems tangential. A far more persuasive argument is that the framers failed to address things like obscenity and hardcore obscenity because such things were utterly unforeseeable and thus something they could not have fathomed. Given how obscene and even profane content was regularly censored before 1960 seems indicative of how questions of original intent ought to be answered with any intellectual honesty.

[2] See generally the introduction to Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Defining deviancy down has been discussed at length by this author, most notably in “This Horrid Rainbow: Defining Deviancy Down and Away,” which explores how mainstream conservatism was unable to effectively combat the advent of so-called gay marriage in large part because mainstream conservatives either had no conception of this vital concept, or did not want to impart this important concept to the public.  The concept is also discussed at some length in “What Consenting Adults Do Is Our Concern” and “The Psychic Toll: How Anti-Social Behaviors and Bizarre Manias Affect The Individual and Society in the Instant of the Moment.”

[3] As to what that race to the bottom might ultimately arrive to, this author suggests perusing three photo essays featured on the zombietime.com website (found here, here, and here) concerning street fairs in San Francisco, in which all sorts of obscene conduct was taking place out in the open street, in broad daylight, including homosexual men engaging in oral sex, men impaling themselves anally with dildoes while masturbating, and other lewd sexual acts. These photo essays even depict a “piss pool,” an inflatable lawn pool for children, where a man with a shirt with “piss pig” written on it offers fellatio to untold numbers of men while others urinate on him.  This sort of conduct apparently comports with the local “contemporary community standards” of San Francisco. Any anti-pornography laws less profligate than those standards (one struggles to find any standards at all) would, according to Reno, violate the Constitutional rights of people in San Francisco and elsewhere defined by such abject depravity.

[4] In a strict sense this was due to vagueness and overbreadth, but the particular import of this decision was to prevent the United States federal and state governments from even attempting to promulgate revised statutory language that seeks to ban such material.

[5] As modern legal jurisprudence favors multi-prong tests or sets of criteria, a list of indicia that are the hallmark of pornography-as-a-sexual aid are set forth by this author as follows; this set of criteria is written ad hoc, on an off-the shelf basis. The particulars of such language could be refined and elaborated on by any legislature.  The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that it is abundantly clear how pornography, at its essence, is a sexual aid and that our legal system should not be spinning its wheels on such matters for half a century.  Any visual, written, or audio medium that bears these attributes with the principal, essential, and intrinsic purpose of providing sexual stimulation and gratification for the purposes of masturbation, sexual congress, or orgasmic climax are a sexual aid and therefore not subject to First Amendment protection:

  • Lurid, unobstructed videographic, photographic, or illustrative depictions or exposure of human genitalia or the anus;
  • Depiction or simulation of sexual acts including but not limited to masturbation, vaginal, anal, or oral penetration or stimulation by a penis, vagina, sex toys, fingers, or other implements or body parts. Any act of vaginal, oral or anal sex, or masturbation, or other act tied to a sexual fetish;
  • The commission of any sexual act or performance in exchange for monetary consideration is particularly indicative that the phenomenon in question is not speech but a sexual aid, a product designed to provide sexual stimulation and climax. Such an act or performance does not need to be done for monetary consideration in each and every instance. That is typically or commonly done in exchange for monetary consideration is indicative of its nature as a sexual aid and not expressive activity subject to First Amendment protection.

 

[6] It is of note that Steven vs United States declares that free speech jurisprudence can no longer apply such a balancing test.  Such marginal areas of expression are grandfathered in, it would seem.

[7] The Supreme Court and lower courts have of course struggled with any distinction between actual speech and the provision of goods or services that involve “expressive activity.”  That topic is beyond the scope of this essay except in passing. It is of course true that the provision of some products and services have an expressive component to them. Consider for example the “bake the cake” cases in which LGBTQ have singled out political opponents with what ought to be considered vexatious litigation. “Pornography and Cognition: A Reply to Cass Sunstein” by Paul Chevigny is just one example of the viewpoint asserting that the sort of sexual activity at question here is expressive activity. Consider however that almost any action has an expressive component. Obliterating the distinction in this way should nullify any prostitution laws, on the idea that someone who exchanges sexual services for money is expressing a decadent or profligate worldview. To the extent pornographic material, or extremely graphic “erotic dancing” and the like can be limited to a finite number of variants of a few basic sex acts (masturbation, oral, anal, vaginal sex, lurid depiction of the genitals or anus), the idea that such things really have an expressive quality to them worthy of First Amendment protection is highly dubious. There is doubtless greater variation to products and services provided at a hair salon or barber shop, and yet the expressive activity involved there is not sufficient to overcome onerous civil rights laws that force proprietors to provide services to protected classes of people.

[8] A great deal of First Amendment jurisprudence gets bogged down with blurred lines between commercial and non-commercial speech, insofar as writers of books, essays, screenplays and any number of forms of speech that fit comfortably under that “highest order” of speech that receives nigh absolute protection from the First Amendment.  There is of course the cognitive distinction Sunstein and others make to distinguish higher forms of speech with things like pornography. There are only so many sexual acts that can be performed, and none of them express a cogent argument or idea the way an essay, novel, so and so forth do.

[9] An interesting distinction could be discerned as follows, resting on the existence of a long-term relationship or marriage. Lewd or even obscene videos or images in private correspondence between a husband and wife or even boyfriend and girlfriend do not implicate considerations involved with defining deviancy down and public morality, at least not as much, provided such materials are not disseminated to the public.

[10] This author laments at how he is able to cite these and other exemplars of American Unkultur with such ease.  As exemplified in “Enveloped by Kultur-Terror,” such an odious cultural milieu is something my generation was born into. Despite assertions to the contrary, we cannot just turn the television off. No one can. And anyone who asserts the contrary is challenged to find someone who does not know who the “Fonz” is.

[11] While there is arguably, some ambiguity concerning nude images, the proposed three-prong test set defined above should be clear enough. When such images are intrinsically a sex-aid, a sex act comparable to prostitution, such media crosses the threshold into obscenity.

[12] Invariably there will be some reader who happens upon this tract who is apt to utter the refrain that “Actually, this is not a democracy, but a republic.” The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary. of Historical Principles defines democracy as both direct and indirect democracy, as the definition reads in pertinent part: “Government by the people and is exercised by them either directly or by means of elected representatives. . ..” (Volume I, A-M page 629, Fourth Edition, 1993). A democratic republic is still a democracy as that term is properly understood and defined.

[13] The manner in which so-called hate crime laws punish persons for expressing viewpoints the current system disfavors or even reviles should be obvious, as evidenced by a hypothetical and a real-life example. As a hypothetical, consider two scenarios where a White man sits at a bar. Words are exchanged with a Black or other racial minority. The racial minority lunges or otherwise commits an assault battery in a manner that makes the man have a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury, entitling him to claim self-defense as a defense. The White man defends himself, resulting in either assault and battery or even homicide. In one instance, the White defendant has never indulged in so-called hate speech. Nor does he utter any forbidden words. In the other, he has read, or even simply has copies of books and materials on matters of race or the Jewish question (as does this author), or simply listens to Death in June (as does this author) or likes skinhead oi music, or even perhaps uttered a racial epithet while defending himself. It is totally foreseeable that whereas the first instance results in an acquittal or even not even having charges filed at all, the second instance could result not just in a conviction, but conviction with enhanced “hate crime charges.” The real-life example is the McMichaels-Ahmad Arbery matter, in which the Black went for the shot gun. Georgia citizen arrest statute has since been repealed, but it did seem the McMichaels had the  authority to conduct a citizen’s arrest. The McMichaels were convicted, and later even convicted on federal hate crimes and civil rights charges, with the government scouring their smartphones and other devices for disapproved speech. The much greater motivation prosecutors have in charging those like the McMichaels or the second hypothetical ought to invoke constitutional claims under the equal protection clause for selective prosecution and other theories, but good luck with that.

[14] Some readers may dispute this assessment, citing the surging popularity of the AfD. Such objections overlook how parties and movements like the AfD would likely be far more popular than they are if these censorship policies had not been implemented. Far-right movements in Germany had started to flourish immediately after Reunification in 1990, but quickly petered out largely due to these measures. Beyond that, it is doubtful the AfD and other parties will ever have a mandate sufficient to govern. This of course remains to be determined, but even if the AfD or any other power does somehow come to power, the rise to such power will nonetheless have been greatly hampered by these efforts.

[15] This salient passage by Stone professes the supposed positive “consequences” of how First Amemdment jurisprudence has led to a free-for all in which practically anything goes is particularly telling:

The greater availability of sexual expression, for example, enhances the ability of individuals to understand and to satisfy their own sexual needs and desires; gives them a much richer exposure to unconventional forms of artistic excellence; entertains, amuses, enlightens, and excites; and enables individuals to learn more about sex and its many varied possibilities. All of this, in varying degrees, captures at least some of the potential individual and social benefits of a much broader freedom of sexual expression.

His suggested remedy for how to contain or deal with pornography is not to ban it, but to educate people. Even after conceding that “in practical effect, though, it is difficult, if not impossible, to shield children in today’s world from exposure to sexually-explicit expression,” he claims that the proper response is parenting. He actually dares to suggest that “parents can create a reasonably safe environment for their children,” suggesting that the burden on parents to protect children and minors from an obscene, pornographic milieu is no different from the trust we place in parents more generally. “In everything from crossing streets to playing near the water to choosing friends to walking alone at night to eating right to smoking and drinking and drugs, we rely upon parents to protect their children from harm.”

[16] Those familiar with Constitutional Law know the Supreme Court and our entire judiciary compelled by it have had the audacity, the impudence—die Frechheit—for many decades, to dictate to duly elected governmental bodies what is and what is not a compelling state interest or what is “rationally related to a legitimate state interest” according to rationally based standards of review regarding matters litigated under theories and doctrines of Constitutional law.

[17] The amount of academic and other material beating the drum for so-called hate speech to be excluded as constitutionally protected speech is so vast as to dispense with any need for citation.  As this author warns in “Good Intentions or the Maddest Folly?,” a Kamala Harris presidency would  have been disastrous as the Supreme Court is just two justices away from “discovering,” by judicial fiat, a phantom exemption from First Amendment protection for so-called hate speech. Justices Thomas and Alito are 78 and 74, respectively. Law is downstream from culture.

[18] This particular example must not be construed to mean this author harbors puritanical views regarding alcohol.  Drinking age laws in this country are absurd, as the age 21 restriction might as well attempt to legislate against the sky being blue or grey, insofar as college and high school kids will (and ought) to drink. Someone however who has succumbed to alcoholism is different. The key difference however is that alcohol has many positive attributes, and indeed is part of our greater Western culture as seen in various styles of cuisine, cultural festivals such Oktoberfest or Frühlingsfest and so on. Pornography, heroin and other vices have no such redeeming value.

Unfaithful Servants: Britain’s Activist Civil Service

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The British are always claiming to have the best institutions in the world. The NHS, the British Army, the Mother of all Parliaments, whatever it is, whenever it was, Britain leads or led the world, or so the story runs. It is interesting to note Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, doubtless high on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, using the phrase “world leaders” whenever he mentions British aspiration in any field. He recently included this desire to lead globally in an otherwise disastrous speech about deploying British troops as part of a peace-keeping force in Ukraine. His suggestion is the quickest route to war anyone can think of, but he wants Britain to be world leaders at it.

Strange times.

He is tapping into the same mythos of British exceptionalism as Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1970s, when computers were first coming to the fore, crowing about the country he led being at the heart of the global forge producing the “white heat of technology.” How did that work out? Britain has often been audacious in its self-belief. At one time, however, Britain really did win Best in Show for one of its rather mundane governmental departments: the Civil Service.

As with all worthwhile British institutions, the Civil Service is scarcely a new and technocratic innovation. Today, when famous alumni of some institution are sought, they are often sports personalities or people on the television. Famed British civil servants include Chaucer, Milton, Pepys, Wordsworth, Burns and Trollope. That type of famous. Trollope wrote the novel The Three Clerks, semi-autobiographical and with themes concerning promotion on merit, drawn from his time as a civil servant. I imagine the internal memos produced by these literary giants were of a higher quality than is likely today. It should be pointed out, as Claire Tomalin does in her biography of Pepys, that no official Civil Service was in existence at that time, and so the great diarist (and thus his predecessors) could not have been civil servants. Not in name, certainly, but the duties performed were de facto those of today’s Civil Service.

Indeed, the roots of the British Civil Service can be traced back to “wicked” King John, who reigned from 1199 to 1216, and is popularly remembered as the monarch who went after proto-Marxist pin-up boy, Robin Hood. John was the first British ruler to compile comprehensive archives of constitutional proceedings and, possibly, the inventor of the filing system. I am sure he had an MI6-type file on Robin and his Merrie Men.

The British Civil Service came into its own with the occupation of India, a chapter in colonialism which (like the whole book) is now viewed as a source of shame by the Leftist chattering classes. In fact, British rule dragged that country — or continent — out of the dung in which it was mired and set it on its way to its present status as a country with a space program (one which the British now fund from the seemingly inexhaustible money-mill which is its foreign-aid budget). Figures differ, but it is estimated that around 20,000 British Civil Servants ran India from 1858 to 1947, around 0.5% of the population. Now, that is government efficiency, and possibly Elon Musk’s DOGE could learn something from studying this miracle of efficient bureaucracy.

On a related subject, the evolution of the Civil Service in the UK is testament to the possibility of a fruitful union of the private and public sectors. The first use of the phrase “civil servant” was among the employees of the East India Company. As this hugely successful concern became more and more entwined with government, so these “civil servants” took on a civic role they were well prepared for. Added to this, they were already familiar with India.

So it was that the Civil Service grew into the provisional wing of government, the mediator between the two Houses of the Commons and the Lords, and the British yeomanry. It is the properly executive branch of government. Acts of Parliament are merely paper records without their execution — as Musk himself recently pointed out in the case of his adoptive country — and Civil Servants are the delivery system for the legislative body of Parliament. Socrates might be seen, from a certain curious angle, as a civil servant, and might have had a question ready about the office. Just as the carpenter and the horse-trainer have special skills which allow them to succeed at their trade, does the civil servant require a similar skill? If so, what is it?

The Northcote-Trevelyan Report (NTR) of 1853 laid down a template which supposedly still dictates the structure and performance of the CS, a prototype of today’s “mission statement”. The following are stressed:

  • Permanence and competitiveness.
  • The union of the intellectual and the mechanical.
  • Separation of function and responsibility.

The NTR is of interest for two reasons. Firstly, it is effectively the founding document of the British Civil Service. Secondly, its intellectual patron, who provides an introductory letter to the report by way of a preface, was the Reverend Benjamin Jowett, one of the great educators of the 19th century. Should you ever purchase the collected works of Plato in English, ensure that it is in a translation by the Reverend Jowett, with his exegetical essays on each dialogue included, if possible. You will not find better. To have his imprimatur on the constitution and ethos of the Civil Service guarantees that its principles, at least, were sound.

But the report is highly critical of the type of personality attracted to the Civil Service. Musk and Trump have the same attitude today:

“Admission into the Civil Service is indeed eagerly sought after, but it is for the unambitious, and the indolent or incapable, that it is chiefly desired. Those whose abilities do not warrant an expectation that they will succeed in the open professions, where they must encounter the competition of their contemporaries, and those whom indolence of temperament or physical infirmities unfit for active exertions, are placed in the Civil Service, where they may obtain an honourable livelihood with little labour, and with no risk.”

A need for meritocratic hiring is stressed, rather than advancement through familial connection. And, even in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, with the industrious and naturally bureaucratic Victorians in charge, we read eerie foreshadowings of today’s Civil Service:

“[W]e often hear complaints of official delays, official evasions of difficulty, and official indisposition to improvement.”

There were supplementary reports and directives in the decades following the NTR, but these were refinements, and the notion of political impartiality grew organically, rather than being a diktat. The Pole Star of the British Civil Service is always assumed to be impartiality, but the NTR does not really mention it, although it does describe a modern malaise, that of the placeman, less interested in his performance of his job than its security and opportunities for personal advancement, nepotistically enhanced wherever possible. We will leave Victorian England, note the Civil Services becoming an organic and essential part of government, and also that political impartiality is almost a natural adjunct to the whole notion of civically oriented service to the people rather than for the government. We will come back, as though we were in the time machine H. G. Wells wrote of in 1895, to the present day.

Now, there is a new breed of civil servant, and one which should not exist within the supposedly strict requirement for political impartiality; the activist civil servant. But this is almost a secondary concern. The first systemic fault in the modern British Civil Service has been brought into sharp relief by Musk’s DOGE operation and its wider range of effects in Europe and the UK, and that is its sheer inefficiency. A combination of overstaffing and underperformance is beginning to become embarrassingly apparent, and change could be imminent. But, as Lucy Burton, Employment Editor of The Daily Telegraph notes, “We have heard all this before”:

In a nutshell, taxpayers are paying more for less. Although the number of civil servants has soared, public service productivity remains 8.5pc below pre-lockdown levels amid a collapse in output.

Then there is the vexed question of what these under-worked Civil Servants are actually doing on the taxpayers’ dime. The Daily Telegraph has been a disappointment in recent years as a conservative newspaper, but while it might not speak truth to power in more than a whisper, it does have the decency at least to mention the subject once in a while. From a report on the problem of the “woke” Civil Service:

Mr Glen said that the public expected ‘the core mission of the Civil Service’ to be delivering the Government’s agenda and public services rather than working on internal projects related to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). He said that taxpayers were ‘very sceptical of activism in identity politics which can slip into these networks’.

The anomaly is that the article sees the excessive time spent on “woke” projects as a problem of efficiency, not one of impartiality. The former can be evaluated with a time-and-motion study, the latter not so easily. It might be simple inefficiency if an employee were spending more than their recognized break-time filling in crosswords or learning a foreign language, but what if they are spending an inappropriate amount of time preparing transgender-awareness literature for government departments?

There is increasing coverage, even in the British MSM, of “woke” Civil Servants. This quote from another Telegraph article last year sets the mood music:

Civil servants in HMRC were told to ‘yield power’ to the marginalised and that they ‘unknowingly benefit’ from racism.

A handout given to senior officials, published on April 6 2021 but still in use as of last year, asks civil servants to ‘take a moment to reflect’ on ‘how actively anti-racist are you?’

The job of civil servant is a curious occupation in that it requires a certain mundanity. There is a need for competence, concentration, organization, and a host of other transferable workplace skills, certainly, but the acceptance of a monotony of efficiency is, or ought to be, a Civil Service maxim. Civil servants do not need to think outside the box; their position requires them to think inside it. But what if that box has been subtly altered, tampered with, to contain a certain political perspective that the Civil Servant should not, according to his professional ethic, condone?

The Institute for Government has as its working remit that it is “Working to make government more effective”. Not efficient, effective. Its statement on Diversity in the Civil Service repays inspection in this regard. The three key maxims behind diversity policy in the Civil Service seem designed to compromise the efficiency of its performance. They begin with a spurious claim:

Failing to reach different demographic groups can lead to missing out on attracting and appointing the best people for the job.

Well, it can, but then a lot of things can be the case, given the premises. And it would depend on the likelihood of “the best people for the job” being found in any of those different demographics. A good indicator of the suitable civil servant would be IQ, so the demographic the CS needs to “reach” would be White European rather than, say, Somali. But to be diverse, you cannot have White on your color-wheel.

The second maxim is headed Diversity of Ideas:

Attracting people from different backgrounds is likely to improve the quality of work by bringing forward new ideas, perspectives and ways of working.

Firstly, no Civil Service which has ever functioned efficiently — as the British CS did in India — has ever needed “new ideas, perspectives and ways of working”. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, runs the old engineer’s adage. But there is a new one now, a social engineer’s adage: If it isn’t broken, fix it until it is. And that is the real reason for the Tower-of-Babel approach to hiring for an ideologically diverse workforce.

Finally, an entirely groundless statement:

A civil service that reflects the society it serves is more likely to be trusted by the wider public.

This does not mean that there have to be a couple of French people in the Civil Service to reflect the proportion in the population, rounded up. It always means more Muslims and Blacks. And, if cutbacks in hiring make it more of a zero-sum game, this will mean fewer Whites.

Other government documents do at least address the concept of political impartiality, which seems to have gone missing. The following must, one can only assume, be read as an update, an abrogation, to the NTR. The title of the document is Guidance on Diversity and Inclusion for Civil Servants.:

We must at all times be mindful of the core values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality (including political impartiality) in the Civil Service code”.

Including political impartiality. It is not a core principle.  Again, note the order of priorities.

3. The Civil Service code sets out that all civil servants must serve the government, whatever its political persuasion, to the best of their ability in a way which maintains political impartiality, regardless of their own political beliefs. Civil servants must not allow their personal political views to determine any advice they give or their actions.

Unlikely as it may seem, I would defend the impartiality of the current British Civil Service, in practice as well as in theory.

A curious situation has evolved. The UK now has a Civil Service which is treating both parties, and thus the last two governments, in the same way, but this apparent impartiality is due precisely to impartiality. And this is due to the nature of the British uniparty. I wrote about this here at The Occidental Observer in a review of Peter Oborne’s seminal 2007 book, The Triumph of the Political Class. If the two main parties share the same core ideologies, then Civil Servants are impartial by the standards of either, logically as well as politically. The trouble would arise on the accession of the current British political tertium quid: Reform UK.

Nigel Farage is being talked about as the next Prime Minister of the UK, but this is of course fanciful while still over four years from a General Election. There will be a likely recession and a possible depression between now and 2029, and plenty of time for Starmer’s crew to further scupper a sinking economy. But Farage will want to watch the Civil Service in the meantime. If he were to take over, then you would see the end of the current and paradoxical Civil Service impartiality. Farage would have to “dismantle” the CS and start from scratch, in the same way Trump has taken a wrecking-ball to the American Department of Education and much else. Sometimes, you have to destroy the village to save it.