Go to Part 1.

SAMMY LEE AND LES GIRLS

Sammy Lee (born Samuel Levi in Canada in 1912) was the other half of the subversive nightclub and sex business that gained prominence at Kings Cross during the early 1960s. Lee came to Australia in 1937 as part of a touring jazz band, and had prior experience with clubs in Canada. He began with The Roosevelt and Sammy Lee’s Theatre Restaurant, both on Oxford Street, where the illegal liquor sales and late bar hours saw him (as well as Saffron) dragged in front of the Liquor Royal Commission in 1954. Lee’s nightclub and restaurant portfolio grew to operate other popular venues during the era, such as the Latin Quarter (a favourite haunt of Sydney gangsters), Club Flamingo and the strip club Pigalle, but undoubtably his most enduring venue was the Carousel Club and its celebrated revue Les Girls, located in the heart of Kings Cross at 32 Darlinghurst Road.

The Carousel Club was originally opened in 1963, jointly by Lee Gordon, Reg Boom and Sammy Lee, Gordon’s last major venture before his death. The venue began exhibiting drag queens under the title Jewel Box Revue, a name Gordon likely took from a Miami-based drag revue that operated in Florida during the 1950s.[1] Gordon had exhibited the French transsexual performer “Coccinelle” at one of his Kings Cross venues in 1959, and sneaking men into the line-up had become an in-joke at strip clubs, but this was the first proper drag queen venue in Australia, specifically dedicated to openly cultivating this form of homosexual gender-bending “art.” Operating in a building owned as you would expect by Saffron, Lee took over sole management of the venue in 1964, remaining until his death in 1975. The drag queen revue changed its name to a performance name which ended up being more identifiable than the name of the club itself. This troupe included the performer “Carlotta” (Richard Byron), who became Australia’s most famous drag performer and transsexual media personality while at the venue, and led the revue for nearly 20 years. Lee brought Les Girls to Melbourne in 1971, premiering at the Ritz Hotel in St Kilda, allegedly the first (official) drag performance to take place in the city, which included a performance of Hava Nagila by drag queen “Cinnamon Brown.”[2]

LEE GORDON TAKES ON WHITE AUSTRALIA

Up until the 1950s, the music industry in Australia was a quaint affair and most historians use the word “parochial” as a description of the scene at the time. Live entertainment and music promotion were still dominated by variety-entertainment companies Tivoli and J.C Williamson, and foreign musicians rarely made it to Australia, as promoters had to contend with the “tyranny of distance” that marked the country for its first 160 years.[3] The sheer remoteness of Australia made bringing out foreign acts an expensive and time-consuming affair, in particular for the most popular performers, who balked at the 22-day boat trip. As such, the country managed to keep the worst excesses of the jazz age and the ensuing eroticism far from its shores. To listen to famous jazz musicians, Australians had to settle for imported gramophone records produced by the Jews at Tin Pan Alley. In the aftermath of a disastrous first Australian tour by a Black jazz troupe in 1928, Australia even established a de-facto color ban on Black jazz performers entering the country.

The tour, promoted as “Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea” by J. C. Williamson,[4] was marred by scandal after members of the band had their Melbourne apartment raided by police, who found five Australian women amongst a group of revellers. The band had successfully toured Sydney (residing in apartments in Kings Cross[5]) but came under intense scrutiny by the Commonwealth Investigation Branch[6] and local police. There was no law against women simply drinking while being in the presence of a man, colored or not, so the women were let off by a judge due to a lack of evidence that anything untoward occurred. O’Connell alleges that two of the women were in fact police informants, working as part of an entrapment plot designed to get the Sonny Clay troupe deported.[7] Nevertheless, the incident was turned into a major miscegenation scandal in the press and the government acted swiftly to deport the band, while introducing new criteria on entrance applications for negro performers. Alongside being “of general good character,” they also had to demonstrate an ability to “raise the local standard”—a control designed to exclude jazz music, which degraded the local character.[8] How exactly these criteria came to be abandoned by 1954 is unclear; in all likelihood, the evolution of jazz music diminished the overtly racial nature of genre, and the criteria had fallen by the wayside. But what is clear is that a Jew saw an opening and soon made it his own. Enter Lee Gordon.

Brought on by the jet age and the ever-increasing dominance of American music, Lee Gordon was the first to demonstrate that the tyranny of distance was broken, and he became the pioneer in bringing leading American performers to Australia. Born Leon Lazar Gevorshner in 1923, Gordon was a former sales merchant and bookings manager at the Tropicana nightclub in Cuba. He moved to Australia in 1953 to pursue concert promotion at the suggestion of friend and fellow concert promoter Arthur Schurgin, who remained Gordon’s business partner and American contact.[9] Once settled, Gordon set up an office at the periphery of Kings Cross (on Bayswater Road), close to the stadium where he would soon be exhibiting the Sydney leg of his tours.

Under the name Big Show tours, these star-studded performances combined multiple artists as a package event, which at the time was more economical than running individual tours for each artist. The list of names Gordon brought to Australia is a who’s-who of the most prominent performers at the time, covering every popular genre, but Jazz and Rock & Roll were the main fare. Gordon didn’t just bring his shows for a whirlwind Sydney/Melbourne trip, he ran lengthy country-wide tours that brought performers to even the smaller cities like Newcastle and Hobart. With his Big Show tours, Gordon had also broken the de-facto ban on bringing Black jazz musicians to Australia that had held since the Sonny Clay incident. His first tour in July 1954, six months after the Saperstein brothers brought the all-Black basketball troupe the Harlem Globetrotters to Australia, featured Black singer Ella Fitzgerald in a racially integrated jazz line-up alongside Jewish artists Buddy Rich and Artie Shaw (Arshawsky), all paid on a percentage basis and not a fixed fee.[10]

Black performers imported by Gordon (as well as Martin and Brodziak) just kept on coming during the 1950s—names like Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr, Eartha Kitt, Nat King Cole, Winifred Atwell and Harry Belafonte—and it has not subsided ever since. The impact of these racially integrated tours on racial sensibilities, through mass exposure to the racial “other” that had so perturbed earlier generations,[11] cannot be underestimated. With every new successful Black musician brought into the country by Jews, the White Australia Policy was looking more and more out of date. Fitzgerald’s arrival in Australia was even accompanied by teary headlines that she had been racially discriminated against by Pan-Am Airlines. Perhaps, people were starting to think, we Australians were being too harsh in our racial policy and there is no real harm in letting some in; did Australia really need protection from people like Ella Fitzgerald?

Gordon shifted into the nightclub scene in the early 1960s and his spendthrift ways and financial woes eventually led him to collaborate with cash-rich Abe Saffron. In need of a successful tour, Gordon invited Saffron along on a trip to Las Vegas in 1959 to secure another Frank Sinatra tour,[12] where it is likely Saffron made (or strengthened) his connection to the Jewish mob. Among Gordon’s last endeavours was the notorious Sydney tour of Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce (Leonard Schneider) in 1962. Bruce spent much of his fortnight in Sydney lurking around Kings Cross and searching for heroin, but Gordon made the mistake of booking Bruce at a genteel venue, the Aaron’s Exchange Hotel in the city, instead of a seedier Kings Cross location, as would have more suited his “sick comedy” style. Bruce became agitated by hecklers and headlines the next day carried the outrage of the performance:

SICK JOKE MADE AUDIENCE ILL; SICK COMIC’S SEX JOKES, WOMEN DISGUSTED; DISGUSTED BY ‘SICK’ JOKES, 4 WOMEN WALK OUT.[13]

Bruce’s further performances were all cancelled, another disaster for Gordon who had yet again pegged much of his financial stability on a successful tour. Gordon fled to London in 1963 after being arrested for drug possession and he was found dead in a hotel room shortly thereafter. Observing the Lenny Bruce scandal from afar—and brimming with scorn at how he had been treated—were three university students, Messrs. Neville, Walsh and Sharp, the future founders of the far-left OZ magazine which I discussed previously.

BRODZIAK Vs. MILLER

There are any number of events that can be pointed to as the definitive arrival of the sexual revolution in Australia. Some would say the approval of the birth control pill Anovlar in 1961, others the founding of Saffron’s strip clubs. Another contender would surely be the arrival of the Beatles on a wet and windy Sydney morning in July 1964, a catalytic event of the sexual revolution that flared the passions of Australian youth like no other before it. This was the cultural event of the decade, with wall-to-wall media coverage, and people lined up around the country to catch even a glimpse of the Beatles in a passing car or on a hotel balcony in Kings Cross. Sensible society just didn’t know what to make of the young women screaming their heads off in ecstasy at Beatles concerts, something that had not been encountered before in the country on this scale.  Those who attempted to warn Australia about the Beatles, their sexual lyrics, and the impact their style had on the young and on notions of parental authority, were exposed by the massive crowds and media frenzy as out of touch moral busybodies who no longer had a monopoly over moral discourse.

The man responsible for the tour was music promoter Kenneth Leo Brodziak, who had fortuitously (and cheaply) booked an Australian tour of the Beatles with manager Brian Epstein through his London agent (Cyril Berlin), as part of a talent scouting trip in July 1963. This was well before their explosion in popularity in the UK and their subsequent appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in the US. Born in Sydney in 1913 to an established Jewish family, Brodziak, alongside Harry M. Miller, followed in the wake of Lee Gordon’s ground-breaking tours as the next generation of Jewish promoters importing the biggest foreign entertainment acts to Australia.

Brodziak in 1994, showcasing his original Beatles contract (Rennie Ellis—State Library of Victoria)

Brozdiak founded Aztec Productions in 1946 which became a successful theater company, often working with David Martin at the Tivoli. His early productions skirted the line of what was acceptable under obscenity law at the time, often all-male performances which indulged his homosexual tendencies, and his first self-written play, Desire Brings Welcome, was banned in 1937 by the NSW government.[14] Other Aztec theatrical productions such as Rusty Bugles and The Square Ring (first performed in 1948 and 1953 respectively) came under scrutiny for obscenity, and the company held the Australian performance rights to the works of controversial playwright Lillian Hellman. By the late 1950s, Aztec was bringing in musical acts from Britain and America as well, including many Black artists, taking over from Gordon’s headlining tours which had fallen out of success.

At the time, Brodziak’s main commercial rival was the young Harry Maurice Miller, the founder of Pan-Pacific Promotions.[15] Their rivalry during the mid-1960s intensified into a tit-for-tat music promotion battle, each attempting to outdo the other. In 1964, Miller toured a group of Liverpool artists as the “Liverpool Sound” to take the wind out Brodziak’s Beatles tour. Brodziak responded with an exclusive stadium partnership deal that locked out Miller from the biggest Australian concert venues, and Miller countered with a tour of the Rolling Stones, held at a refurbished pavilion in the Sydney Showgrounds.[16]  Miller was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1943 to a Jewish rag-trader who migrated from London in the 1920s.[17] Miller made Sydney, specifically Kings Cross, his base of operations from 1964 and used his prior New Zealand connections to also arrange for many New Zealand tours of his contracted acts.

Brodziak and Miller soon put their differences aside and were collaborating on theater and music promotions. The pair, now in a partnership, were behind the Australian premieres of all the largest obscene and blasphemous theatrical productions and musicals (many written and first directed by Jews) that were coming to Australia at the time. Such is their reputation now as theatrical trailblazers of the cultural and sexual revolution, that even people who have never stepped foot in a theatre in their life would recognise some of the names: Hair, The Boys in the Band, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Godspell, and A Chorus Line.

Their joint production of The Boys in the Band in 1968 precipitated another major obscenity trial in Australia in the lead up to the Portnoy’s Complaint victory. During the Melbourne performance leg, three of the actors were successfully charged with obscenity, much to the outcry of the press. It was a sign of the times that the police could no longer ban a production even with blatant homosexual themes, and had to resort to targeting utterances of the word “f*ck” to record any sort of conviction.[18]

For the first Australian production of Hair in 1969, Miller and Brodziak set up the Minerva Theatre in Kings Cross for a two-year performance stint. The challenge was, how to get the scene of full nudity (which became the first in a theatrical production in the country) past the government censors in the form of Sir Eric Willis. Miller’s solution was to reduce the length of the scene and adjust the lighting of the stage to be as dim as possible[19], and he deliberately invited Willis to the afterparty of the preview, where he was bombarded with people praising him for allowing the performance. In the end, Miller got the result he wanted and Willis backed down:

I told them it was not my kind of show. That it denigrated all of the basic standards of life that we had been reared to believe were correct … the nude scene in my opinion was completely unnecessary … but it was so brief that, you know, I just thought it was harmless.[20]

Both Miller and Brodziak continued their careers into the 1990s, by then eclipsed by the next generation of Jewish promoters in Australia—Michael Gudinski and Michael Coppel. 

DEATH ON THE CROSS

The progression to violence, anarchy and death, unleashed by sexual passions, is the seemingly inevitable result of sexual liberation, one that has played out throughout history. The sexual license of the French Revolution, spurred on by pornographic pamphlets and the Marquis de Sade, gave way to the Terror, Jewish perversion in Weimar Germany stoked the inferno of communist and fascist violence in the 1930s, and the ’68 generation mutated into terrorist groups like the Weather Underground and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The sexual liberation that Saffron and other Jews had help unleash at Kings Cross was no different. By the latter half of the 1980s, the Cross had devolved into a drug-infested horror show, beset by violence and gang warfare, and the homosexuals that had made the Cross their spiritual home were dying by the dozens of AIDS—a far cry from the once glitzy and glamourous Cross. By 1989, the situation had degenerated to such an extent, that some members of the NSW government even privately invited Abe Saffron, about to be released from prison, to re-take his throne as “King of the Cross” from the Lebanese criminals that had taken over and help the police clean up the mess that it had become.[21] That it was Jews like Saffron who had caused this mess in the first place was apparently not understood.

In Parts I and II of this series, this writer explored the important Jewish role in the downfall of obscenity laws in Australia in 1972, through the vehicle of Portnoy’s Complaint. At the time, Justice Ewen Ross upheld the ban on the book in Victoria, but in his judgement, he couldn’t help but admit that there was a ”new frankness” in the community when it came to matters of sex that made his decision a more controversial one.[22] This essay has outlined strong contenders for the origins of this new frankness amongst Australians—ones that can be strongly attributed to Jews. Centred around Kings Cross, it was the venues of Saffron and Lee, the Jazz and Beat music imported by Gordon and Brodziak, and the performances staged by Miller, that had done more than their fair share in grooming wider Australian culture prior to 1972 for the downfall of obscenity and the arrival of sexual modernity.

The death of Kings Cross finally came in February 2014, when the state government, tired of the amount of money and energy they were forced to invest into the precinct to stop the constant alcohol abuse and deaths from drunken brawls, implemented new “lockout laws” under the Liquor Act. These regulations, which applied selectively to Sydney’s nightlife precincts, barred patrons from entering venues after 1:30 am and from purchasing alcohol after 3 am. Opponents were quick to blame the laws for the shuttered strip clubs and the for-lease signs cropping up all along Darlinghurst Road; however, gentrification had already begun to take hold prior to this. Despite evidence that the laws had successfully reduced alcohol-fuelled deaths, the people of Sydney spent the next six years listening to wailing from progressives about the return of temperance and the death of their icon.

True to form as useless conservatives who fail to conserve anything—let alone even try to uphold basic moral standards, the NSW Liberal government gave in to public pressure and rescinded the laws in 2021. Hopes are high that the Cross can return as Australia’s premier “space for transgression,” but it almost doesn’t matter, Australia doesn’t need places like Kings Cross anymore:

The cruel reality is that Kings Cross has served its purpose. For decades it was the vanguard of modernism, sexual mores, design and nightlife and an escape from a parochial and puritan Australia. But now all that has changed.[23]

In an era where internet pornography is in every household, where “pride week” is celebrated at places of employment, and where drag queens read to children at local libraries,[24] it no longer has any currency in shocking the country and there is little left for Jews to transgress. In a way, every suburb in Australia has now become Kings Cross.

[1] Founded by “Danny Brown” and “Doc Benner.” Their background is unclear, but their slightly ethnic appearance and all too generic stage-like names hint at a Jewish heritage.

[2] H. Jay 1971, ‘BOY THESE LES GIRLS!’. Australian Jewish News, Friday 13 July, p.8.

[3] The phrase was popularised by historian Geoffrey Blainey in his book The Tyranny of Distance (1966), which argued that remoteness had shaped the development of Australia as a country.

[4] Organiser Harry Muller of J.C. Williamsons even had to lie on their visa applications to get the band into the country – D. O’Connell 2021, Harlem Nights: The Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age, Melbourne University Press, Australia, p.65.

[5] Ibid., p.84.

[6] The Australian equivalent of the American FBI at the time.

[7] O’Connell, Op. Cit., p.184.

[8] Ibid., p.243.

[9] F. Van Straten 2007, ‘Lee Gordon – Hall of Fame’, Live Performance Australia, retrieved from: https://liveperformance.com.au/hof-profile/lee-gordon-1923-1963/.

[10] The Sun-Herald 1954, ‘Sydney Filmgoers to See STARS In The Flesh’, Sunday 11 July, p.44.

[11] The desire to avoid the emergence of a “colored problem” like that in America was a crucial impetus to the creation of the White Australia Policy.

[12] Saffron, Op. Cit., p.104.

[13] D. Kringas 2012, ‘Lenny Bruce’s Visit to Sydney 1961’, Dictionary of Sydney, retrieved from https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/lenny_bruces_visit_to_sydney_1962

[14] Sydney Morning Herald 1937, Ban on Play, Thursday 11 February, p.10.

[15] Co-founded by Dennis Wong of Chequers nightclub.

[16] D. Kimball, ‘Kenn Brodziak’, Milesago: Australasian Music and Popular Culture 1964-1975, retrieved from http://www.milesago.com/industry/brodziak.htm

[17] The name ‘Miller’ is likely an anglicized version of an eastern European Jewish name. Miller himself doesn’t give it away in his autobiography, or perhaps he simply doesn’t know either: H. M. Miller & P. Holder 2018, Harry M Miller- Confessions of a not-so-secret agent, 2^nd edition, Hachette, Australia.

[18] P. Mullins 2019, The Trials of Portnoy, Scribe Publications, Australia, p.124.

[19] Miller & Holder, Op. Cit., p.82.

[20] D. Kimball, ‘Hair’, Milesago: Australasian Music and Popular Culture 1964-1975, retrieved from http://www.milesago.com/Stage/hair.htm

[21] Saffron, Op. Cit., p.242.

[22] Mullins, Op. Cit., p.147.

[23] Nowra, Op. Cit., p.454.

[24] Drag Queen Story Hour is now a thing in Australia as well.

In his 1863 Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  In another speech–Lyceum 1838– he emphasized that, given its size and geographical location far from foreign powers, the United States (very much similar to China’s privileged status today) could not be conquered from abroad but only from within.  To preserve national unity and harmony, the sensible choice was to work together towards a common beneficial goal or to die by suicide from rebellious forces within its boundaries.

To paraphrase the biblical verse: “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword”(Matthew 26:52), we could say in a different manner:  the country that willingly betrays its foundational principles in favor of false tenets will in time see the very nature of its society collapse.  In the same context, Polonius, counselor to the king, tells Hamlet in Shakespeare’s drama:  “To thine own self be true.”

That is an accepted axiom of political longevity.  Human communities are subject to varying means of governance as well as the laws of physics (entropy).  We are given birth (Declaration of Independence, 1776; Constitution in 1787), we reach an age of maturity and greatness, and then, in temporal segments since the War in Vietnam, we descend into senescence and eventual extinction as a dominant power.  This is the pattern that major countries throughout history have followed.

According to historians and modern-day pundits (Cal Thomas, Martin Armstrong, John Glover and others), all empires or major political powers are condemned to a pre-ordained death cycle within 250 years of their onset.  There are in the ancient world, notable exceptions: Persia, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Carthage, et al. that survived longer.

America, in 2026 will be 250 years old (dating from the Declaration of Independence, 1776).  There are many objections by historians to this time line of self-destruction—although Lincoln rightly predicted that our downfall would come from within the country and not from hostile foreign powers.

The Greek, Roman, Persian, and Egyptian empires have long since passed away into historical oblivion.  Modern-day France (born in 1789 with the French Revolution) is a pale relic of the Napoleonic domination of Europe in the early nineteenth century. The prestige and economic prosperity it once enjoyed from its now defunct world-wide empire can no longer justify its aspirations to be a global power.

We are now, some 246 years after our birth as a nation, in a period of senescence.  To the extent that we never sought international dominance, we are poorly situated to maintain our role as the world’s most powerful country in foreign and economic affairs.

Democracy is also a tired and fragile system of government; autocracy and oligarchy are becoming more and more attractive to the modern politician.

Centralized government lets you bypass the will of the people; it permits leaders to resolve complicated issues without having to seek the approval of the common weal.  Dogmatism of this sort promotes single-party rule with its unfortunate consequences, as history has demonstrated time and again.

So the physicists say, our universe is condemned to extinction in the far, far distant future; if this is true and the earth’s immediate existence is compromised by global warming and other man-made abuses, we need to find alternative ways to escape the threat of planetary decline as predicted by scientists.

Our sacrificial attempts to purify the planet are mocked by foreign powers that pollute at will (China and India in particular with almost 2.7 billion inhabitants collectively) in an effort to pursue economic prosperity and political hegemony for their vast populations.

In Africa, animal species are disappearing as poor nations grant poachers free access to their sanctuaries to hunt elephants for their tusks and rhinos for their horns.  Brazil does little to prosecute or deter farmers from destroying trees to create arable land in the Amazon.

We need to view interstellar space as the new frontier—a pathway to the stars or planets such as Mars where human communities can be created as an escape venue from the inevitable dying of our planet.  It might be interesting to speculate about what Planet Earth will become one hundred or more years from now as millions of settlers leave our sphere to resettle on Mars—the new Wild West.

Will wars among the surviving countries on Earth be so devastating that life itself will be compromised?  Will nations, in a desperate effort to preserve their viability, make peace or at least sign a truce, putting aside highly destructive weaponry for the sake of survival?

Unfortunately, we are genetic victims of our origins more than a million years ago.  Waging war to preserve existence and national (or tribal) safety is engrained in our psychological nature.  The military-industrial complex promotes international conflicts to keep its industries profitable.  No era in human history has been without disastrous warfare and conflict.  The future will not be an era of Pax Americana.

The military hierarchy rewards those who have served valiantly in combat.  Without war, the officer corps becomes restless, knowing full well that only on the battle field could their promotions in rank be assured.

Intelligence agencies and law enforcement are being weaponized against dissenters.  Democracy or a representative form of government is now an inconvenience more than a necessity.

Talk shows, movies, and media programs are rife with discussions about how slow and inept true democratic procedures are.  In the eyes of current administrations, getting quick answers to thorny questions is more important than obtaining accurate results without rushing to conclusions.

The sanctuary cities and states (California) that welcome illegal immigrants act in willful contravention of federal laws.  No one in Congress will impose legal sanctions on these “blue” states or cities.

What if America, overwhelmed by millions of unvetted immigrants, abandons its traditions and becomes a compilation of warring tribes and ethnic groups?  As Lincoln predicted, suicide from inside will surely be a reality within a few decades.

America will continue to be a privileged geographical location, a massive presence in the Western world, but how can it once again become a player in the Eastern hemisphere? China is now the dominant force throughout this region. Any attempt to limit its military expansion within its sphere of influence would be met with strong resistance.

We are in a tenuous situation financially.  The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency.  However, according to current trends, China will eventually replace us as the major economic force in the world; as a result, they will demand that a basket of currencies, not the dollar, become the currency of world exchange.  This assault on the American dollar, once it is replaced or no longer enjoys its privileged status, will have a disastrous effect on our economy.  It will shift the equilibrium of political power throughout the world.

More than thirty trillion dollars in debt, the American economy cannot sustain its current rate of spending and the massive acquisition of debt.  In due time, its bonds will be marketed at a discount.  Social programs will not be able to be adequately funded; military expenditures will be reduced, economic incentives will be curtailed, etc.  The long-anticipated recession will occur and Americans of all stripes will struggle to adjust their lifestyles.

An increasing percentage of the national debt will be interest payments to foreign investors, in particular to countries that have regularly acquired our debt: Canada, Great Britain, China, and Japan.

None of the current spending programs will be implemented effectively with a corresponding lack of adequate funding.  The Treasury cannot keep on printing money (“funny money”) in an inflationary period.  But it does.

Sooner or later, the national debt will bring about a collapse of our economic safety net: the belief in the so-called unshakeable strength and durability of the American economy.

The uninhibited allocation of recent funds (the “Inflation Reduction Act”) and student loan forgiveness strain the imagination.  Much of the money set aside for infrastructure initiatives goes to programs that have nothing to do with roads or bridges.

For example, to encourage the purchase of more electric vehicles, the government has proposed offering a generous subsidy to consumers (~$7,500).  It has been reported that car manufacturers will then raise the price of their vehicles in keeping with the amount of the buyer’s subsidy, thus indirectly rewarding manufacturers to produce more electric cars at very high prices, especially compared to comparable gas-powered vehicles.

As stated above, the growth of the Asian population in America, especially Chinese, will provide a fifth column of sorts to undermine  American scientific achievements and eventually its world dominance in computer and technological innovation.

The Chinese are aggressively purchasing vast tracts of land for agricultural products and investing in American corporations that serve an economic or political purpose.  G-5 and Tic-Toc are prime examples of this incursion.  They have also invested in South American countries (Venezuela and others) in an effort to spread their influence throughout the world.  The Chinese have heavily invested in Canada, Africa, and Mexico as well.

While we are obsessed with feminism, critical race theory, and woke-dominated issues, the Chinese are methodically implementing their long-term plan of global domination.  We are not equipped to fight a land war in Asia, and our Navy is inferior to its Chinese counterpart.

We do not have a coherent plan of action if China invades Taiwan or attempts to take over some of the neighboring islands. The power vacuum created by weakness is always exploited in a political and military context.

All in all, there is nothing new in these comments.  President Biden is compromised by his family’s connection with Chinese business interests (via his son Hunter and his brother).  He is not respected in Asia.  If Japan perceives it cannot be protected by American military power, it will seek other means of defense in acquiring atomic weapons and rapidly expanding its military capabilities.  They will be tempted to enter into alliances with other major players in the Far Eastern zone to protect their interests.

If America does not show resolve to intervene on their behalf against Chinese aggression, Japan may demand that American troops be withdrawn from their territory.  South Korea may follow a similar path of autonomy if the United States doesn’t express the will to protect its peninsula from military threats from the Chinese and North Koreans.

A destabilized Far East will not bode well for American influence in the area.  It is foreseeable that major global corporations will side with the Chinese to preserve their massive economic presence on the Chinese mainland.  American stockholders, for the most part, will remain silent and not challenge corporations who portray the Chinese as reasonable and sensible business partners.

If he could survey the current ruptures in the American political scene, Abraham Lincoln would be appalled by the tribalism and identity politics that have severely divided our nation.  The coastal elites and the bureaucrats in the “Washington Swamp” are more and more convinced that the barriers of our Constitutional Republic can be breached with little or no opposition. We are entering by all measures a post-Constitutional phase of our governance.

Unless there is a political renaissance in the Republican Party, the Democrats will continue to exert an inordinate influence in the restructuring of America’s destiny.  The more conservative enclaves in the South and mid-West will be displaced or repressed by regulations and laws that go against their interests.

How long will the “forgotten” millions who supported Trump stay silent?

Revolutions seldom come from frustrated and enraged workers or lower middle-class malcontents, but from those in positions of power who see their influence blocked or bypassed by political entities that work to enhance their own quest for power.

America’s decline, both globally and domestically, will be the subject of major concerns in the decades to come.  Are we now on the cusp of a national and international fall from power as dictated by historical norms or can this trend be offset by a new policy of returning to the democratic principles of the past that were so successful in holding our nation together?

In the long run, what would Abraham Lincoln have said?

Could he have restored unity without a Civil War or military suppression of dissenting voices?

Statue of Alfred the Great, Winchester, England

Go to Part One.

Preterism, or, Covenant Eschatology

Preterism (from the Latin, præter or “past”) is a biblical hermeneutic or interpretive method consistent with process theism.  A preterist biblical theology denies that the Bible sets out the story of humanity from the creation of planet earth when God breathed life into the first human until the end of the world at the Second Coming (the Parousia) of Jesus Christ.  Rather, the biblical narrative has to do with the rise and fall of Old Covenant Israel.  On a preterist reading, the bible story will not support a futurist eschatology which still awaits the return of Christ at the end of the world.  Preterists hold that the clear text of Scripture shows that all of the biblical prophesies of a new heaven and a new earth, not just those in Revelation, were fulfilled in AD 70.

In that year, Christ returned to oversee the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the physical center of the old heaven and old earth occupied by God’s first people.  In the Book of Revelation, we see the Old Covenant world of Israel sinking into lakes of fire, while the New Covenant world enters into history.  The Jerusalem Temple makes its exit in a spectacular cataclysm; a new creation becomes incarnate in the church, the ecclesiastical Body of Christ.  There the bible story ends.

The preterist hermeneutic is also known as “covenant eschatology”.  That is to say, the biblical narrative is consummated by the fulfillment of the covenant promises to carnal Israel.  This was the end of the old age; it was then, that “the first heaven and first earth” long-symbolized by the Jerusalem Temple, “passed away.”  It was with the end of the Old Covenant that the promised resurrection of the saints was fulfilled.  This consummation was a process of spiritual renewal, begun by the resurrection of Jesus the Christ as “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20).  As the “Holy City, the new Jerusalem” came down from God, “a new heaven and a new earth” came into being (Rev. 21:1-2) thus inaugurating the church age.

This preterist vision of the resurrection at “the end of the age” is quite different from O’Donovan’s mainstream futurist eschatology.  On his reading, “it is given to nobody but the risen Christ to raise the dead, the church’s authority does not rest in exercising that power by delegation, but in pointing to its future exercise in an act of testimony.” O’Donovan, like another well-known Anglican theologian, N.T. Wright, looks forward to the parousia of a “global Jesus” at some point in our own future.  Wright portrays Paul as the one who prophesies the still-future transfiguration of the entire cosmos, the moment when all those who belong to the Messiah “are themselves raised bodily from the dead.” Wright very explicitly ties the victory over death promised by Paul and Jesus to a physical resurrection of the dead.  If death is to be defeated, he declares, then “anything other than some kind of bodily resurrection, therefore, is simply unthinkable.”  In stark contrast, preterists contend that “the covenantal eschatology of national Israel offers a much more persuasive hermeneutical framework within which to interpret Paul’s understanding of the resurrection body.”

Samuel G. Dawson, for example, points out that Paul publicly declared that he “was saying none other things but those which the prophets and Moses did say would come” (Acts 26:22).  Dawson contends that “Paul’s concept of the resurrection wasn’t that fleshly (or even transfigured) bodies would come out of holes in ground at all, because that’s not what Moses and the prophets taught.”  Instead, Moses taught “the resurrection of Old Covenant Israel from the death of its fellowship from God”.

Dawson breaks even more dramatically from Wright when he observes that Paul never speaks of resurrected “bodies.”  Instead, Paul refers only to “the resurrection of one body, the Old Covenant faithful who were being transformed into the body of Christ.”  The hermeneutic problem here, Dawson concludes, “comes down to whether the resurrection Paul spoke of was one body in his present time or billions of bodies more than two thousand years in the future.”

If Dawson is right, then the early church effectively replaced Israel as the people of God.  The God of history ordained that old national Israel fulfill its telos through one final, fiery sacrifice on the Temple Mount.  A new age dawned in which the historical process of interaction between God and national Israel, as recounted in the biblical narrative, expanded to incorporate both the Greek and Latin civilizations of the Mediterranean basin.  In effect, Old Covenant Israel was superseded by the development of European Christendom.

O’Donovan explicitly rejects any such supersessionist interpretation.  National Israel, he asserts, can never be replaced.  The Old Covenant remains in force for the Jews.  Because Jesus the Christ represents God the “Kingdom’s representative must suffer the resistance of Israel on God’s behalf; but representing Israel’s cause, too, he must suffer God’s resistance on Israel’s behalf”.  In the end, however, O’Donovan returns to the utterly ahistorical claim that the representation of Israel “opens out to the representation of the human race”.  In this new creation, however, O’Donovan insists that “the continuing Israel…is not to be dismissed as an irrelevant survival from the past”.  The Gentiles have been grafted onto Israel’s root; we only await the moment when carnal Israel comes to see “the possession of the law fulfilled in Christ”.

O’Donovan maintains that “until the last reconciliation the two communities must coexist”.  Gentile Christians “cannot ignore the community into which they have by faith been grafted”.  In effect, therefore, when carnal Israel speaks, Christians must listen.  One might expect, therefore, that even if O’Donovan’s political theology does not require the criminalization of acts which “deny” or “downplay” the Holocaust, he would never condone such blasphemy.

Indeed, O’Donovan explicitly joins with Christian Zionists to accord carnal Israel a theopolitical status unknown to other nations comprising the eschatological society of the human race.  Whether other families, tribes, and nations have an eternal destiny may be open to debate; but there is no doubt in his mind that “Israel has one—is that not enough?”  A positive response to that rhetorical question, turns on the truth or falsity of the futurist eschatology upon which O’Donovan’s political theology rests.  My own view is that Old Covenant Israel is not the only nation through which God has worked in this world.  The English, too, once saw themselves as a “holy nation”.  With the grace of God, other British-descended peoples can and should strive to emulate that godly objective.

Kinism

Process theism, when combined with the historical theology inherent in preterism, leads inexorably to Kinism, or, as some would have it, “the Christian doctrine of nations”.  The Old Covenant bound the holy nation of Israel to God; the New Covenant offered the grace of God to every nation (ethnos) of the known world (oikumene).  The leaves of the tree of life in the New Jerusalem were to serve for “the healing of nations.”  Old Israel was no more.  On Judgement Day, Christ sentenced the stiff-necked synagogue of Satan to spiritual death.  Only a righteous remnant was left to carry the holy seed of Israel unto the nations.  For almost two thousand years, every Christian nation adjured Jews within the realm to recognize their Redeemer, thus ending their age-old rebellion against God.  In sharp contrast to the Jews, Anglo-Saxons eagerly entered into the new covenant world.

Attuned to racial and ethnic differences, kinists understand the powerful biocultural affinity between the early Christian church and the pagan tribes of Anglo-Saxon England as well as the prominent place occupied by covenants in tribal social structures.  Conversely, once their churches downplayed the importance of blood covenants to the spiritual life of both family and nation, the ancestral attachment of Anglo-Saxon Protestants to the Body of Christ was bound to fade away.  The creedal religion of the modern Anglican church denies that either faith or political allegiance is passed on through the blood of the large, partly-inbred extended family that constitutes the Anglo-Saxon ethny.  No modernist “proposition nation” grounded in the universalist ideology of secular humanism, least of all the one abjuring its ethno-religious roots in the sacred blood and faith of the Old English people, can ever again be a holy nation in the eyes of God.

For kinists, the Christian nation rests upon a covenant, under God, between the dead, the living, and the unborn.  The living members of the nation, according to R.J. Rushdoony, “see themselves as the trustees of the family blood, rights, property, name, and position for their lifetime.  They have an inheritance from the past to be developed and preserved for the future.”

Royalism

Royalty plays a central role in the bible story.  Jesus the Christ traced his descent to King David.  As the very model of an English David, Alfred the Great established a Christian kingdom in England.  The hereditary monarch of the British dominions once served as trustee-in-chief for his realm.  The ecclesiastical significance of the monarchy was given formal recognition when Henry VIII, his heirs, and successors were declared to be Supreme Governors of the Church of England.  The Royal Supremacy played a significant role in the rise of the broad-church movement in Victorian England.  It has since become little more than a mere manifestation of the shapeshifting Crown manipulated for its own ends by the (imperial cum globalist) government of the United Kingdom.

Anglican royalists should create an Angelcynn Network of ethno-religious activists to liberate the captive Crown in right of the Royal Supremacy.  The Crown has become little more than a rubber stamp for corrupt politicians with no discernible interest in the spiritual welfare of Anglo-Saxons “at home” or in the diaspora.  Once the Royal Supremacy over the Church of England has been insulated from political control, it should be extended to every reformed Angelcynn Church, not just in the United Kingdom, but throughout the British dominions as well.  In time, it may become possible for the Crown to charter Angelcynn churches even among the Anglo-American remnant population in the failed American republic.

In the eighteenth century, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke hoped that a Patriot King would re-awaken the English nation from its spiritual slumbers.  The appearance of such a patriot prince would have been a miracle indeed.  In our own time, it is doubly hard to imagine a British prince daring to stand against a government determined to maintain its control over the royal prerogative in ecclesiastical affairs.  But, as Bolingbroke wrote, those who pray for such a deliverance must not neglect such means as are in their power “to keep the cause of reason, of virtue, and of liberty alive.”  The blessing of a patriot prince might indeed “be withheld from us” but to “deserve at least that it be granted to us, let us prepare to receive it, to improve it, and to co-operate with it.”

Bolingbroke knew that were a patriot prince to campaign in defence of the monarchy, he would be subject to a raging torrent of criticism and abuse.  Yet when a good prince is seen “to suffer with the people, and in some measure for them…many advantages would accrue to him.”  For one thing, the cause of the British peoples generally “and his own cause would be made the same by their common enemies.”

What is the nature of that cause?  In short, a patriot prince will call forth a spirit of resistance to both managerial statism and the abstract universalism of globalist plutocracy.  He will do everything in his power to civilize those wild and immoral forces.  But the appearance of a Patriot King is not inevitable.  Indeed, only a people whose lost liberties are restored to memory will recognize his coming as an opportunity to reshape their allegedly preordained future.

The Idea of a Patriot King as Messianic Mythos

A postmodern neo-Angelcynn political theology could resurrect the hope of a nation re-born through the appearance of a genuinely godly Patriot King.  A diasporic network of Angelcynn evangelists should work to ignite the mythos of a patriotic British monarch acting as Supreme Governor of their ancestral church throughout the Anglosphere.

Of course, as a matter of legal formality, the Queen already plays this role in England. Constitutional reality is quite otherwise; her role as head of the church has been usurped in practice by the Prime Minister.  The Crown has been reduced to a rubber stamp.  Pending the constitutional reformation of the ecclesiastical body politic, the Anglecynn Network must develop a political theology which conceives the existentially political friend-enemy distinction as constitutive of the relationships between Angelcynn peoples and other peoples or states (including “our own” states which now employ their power over us, in part, by admitting alien peoples, in huge numbers, to citizenship on equal terms with British-descended host populations).

In other words, an authentic, autochthonous, neo-Angelcynn political theology would understand the church as an ethno-religious institution safeguarding the ethnic interests, spiritual welfare and godly character of the British-descended peoples.  The theological justification for such a church polity is essentially biblical.  That is to say, that the Bible tells the story of a historical process of interaction between the divine, God, or Yahweh, (whichever name you prefer) and a particular people or nation; namely, the Israelites. That nation developed into a medium through which God manifested his real presence in the world.

Significantly, the Angelcynn people in the time of Alfred the Great modelled themselves on ancient Israel.  During the Golden Age of the early church—the Age of Incarnation—the Angelcynn church was seen as the spiritual avatar of the emergent English nation, working in partnership with the king.  That ethno-religious symbiosis of nation, church, and kingship was disrupted radically during the eleventh-century by the Norman Conquest and, shortly thereafter, by the Papal Revolution which created a church-state claiming jurisdiction over the whole of Christendom.

The old symbiosis was not, however, restored by the substitution of a state church for the Papal church-state during the Reformation.  By that time, the Age of Disincarnation driven by the scholastic rationalism and legalistic absolutism of the papal church-state had all but eliminated the explicitly ethno-religious character of the English church.  Anglican Protestantism became just another creedal religion, inevitably spawning countless doctrinal schisms down to the present day.

A genuinely neo-Angelcynn political theology would aim to restore the spirit, if not the letter, of the original symbiosis between British-descended peoples, the church, and a British monarchy.  Such a church might become capable of regenerating a Volksgeist serving as the seed-bed for the advent of an actual Patriot King of the sort envisioned by Viscount Bolingbroke in the eighteenth-century.

Conclusion

Under present circumstances, every once-proudly Anglo-Saxon country throughout the Anglosphere, is now subject to states which have reduced the WASP founding stock to a de facto stateless people.  Both the globalist state and cosmopolitan Anglican churches embrace the multiculturalist program, according no special status or formal recognition to the British-descended peoples.  The informal alliance between British states and Anglican churches has, in effect, transformed WASPs into an invisible race.  That process was well underway by the early twentieth-century.

In retrospect, had an ethno-religious Angelcynn political theology existed as an autonomous force (i.e., one not bound hand and foot to the imperial state) during the first half of the twentieth century, church leaders might have recognized that the British and Dominion governments were acting in opposition to the best interests of the British peoples by twice declaring war on Germany.

Prior to 1914 or 1939, Germany did not conceive itself as an enemy of the British people.   Both the Kaiser and Hitler declared themselves ready, willing, and able to recognize, defend, and co-operate with the governments and peoples of the British Empire.   Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, many leading figures in both Britain and the United States (e.g., Cecil Rhodes, W.T. Stead, H.G. Wells, and Andrew Carnegie) not only promoted greater unity between the Anglo-Saxon nations but also believed that they should ally with their racial cousins in Germany.  Accordingly, Rhodes included students from Germany as well as those from America and the Commonwealth in his famous scholarship program.  Unfortunately, other, more powerful interests within the British state were determined (e.g., Winston Churchill, in both wars) to treat Germany as an enemy that must be destroyed (ideally by re-creating the fragmented statelets that existed prior to 1870).

Clearly, the idea of a Greater Britain withered away during and as a result of the world wars of the twentieth century.  For a time, during the century-and-a-half following the American revolution, the Anglo-Saxon world developed a unique geopolitical personality.  The Anglo-Saxon peoples anchored their collective identity in constitutional exoskeletons, creating a commonwealth of states sharing a common “British” civic identity.  In all of those nations, civic identity has been progressively drained of ethno-religious meaning.

In the nineteenth century, the Church of England and its colonial, dissenting, and American offshoots endorsed a secularized “political theology of cosmopolitan nationalism”.  Anglo-Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Christian Zionists jointly hailed the ecumenical lordship of global Jesus while awaiting his return in power and glory at the end of history.  What they didn’t expect was the First World War.

With the foundation of the Kaiserreich, however, the German Question reared its ugly head; it was not at all clear how the mercantile, thalassocratic ideal of cosmopolitan nationalism could be reconciled with telluric power of a militarized German Empire.  Unfortunately, the Anglican political theology of cosmopolitan nationalism did not preclude the defeat and destruction of that Empire.  Indeed, it eventually spawned the global hegemony of a godless, increasingly demonic, transnational corporate plutocracy.