In the Land of Lies: Seeing, Saying, and Pseudotopia, Part 2

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 “Yo blud, wot you mean?”

All of this is a direct result of mass immigration, as the journalist Mary Wakefield has admitted in the cuckservative Spectator:

In the [London] Evening Standard, Wayne, an ex-gangster from Plumstead, gave an interview in which he explained that the resettled kids from war zones had upped the ante in gangland. ‘In the last ten years, since the Somalis and the Congolese came to London, they taught us a whole new level of violence. These people had seen family members mutilated, so when they said, “I’m gonna smash you up”, us guys would be shouting, “Yo blud [i.e., blood-brother], wot you mean?” and they would just pull out a blade and juk [stab] you in the chest. It upped the speed and level for us British-born guys. We had to arm up to protect ourselves. It created an upward spiral.’

Not Amber Rudd, not Sadiq Khan nor Theresa May would ever speak publicly about this, for fear of seeming racist. But isn’t that in itself racist? It implies that the problem is somehow to do with skin colour, when any poor kid forced into a civil war might well be brutalised by it. We absolutely have a duty to offer asylum to children fleeing horrific circumstances, but we also have a duty to acknowledge the increased dangers the police face as a result. If we don’t, these multiply. (An odd new feeling has crept up on me — sympathy for the police, The Spectator, 21st April 2018)

Why do we “absolutely have a duty to offer asylum to children fleeing horrific circumstances”? In fact, we don’t have any such duty at all. To suggest otherwise is mawkish virtue-signalling that would have been dismissed with contempt not only by that great conservative hero Winston Churchill, but by all mainstream politicians well into the twentieth century. Somalia and the Congo are a very long way from Britain and the “children fleeing horrific circumstances” passed many safe places en route to this country. Now that they are here, they are reproducing the savage and barbarous culture of their homelands.

Virtue-signalling and vibrancy

Is that a surprise? Not to anyone with eyes in their head and brains between their ears. But in the Land of Lies, the wilfully blind are King. And I’m sure that the virtue-signalling Mary Wakefield and her family rarely, if ever, encounter that Somali and Congolese culture at first hand. They will live at a safe distance from the enriched areas of London, allowing the “absolute duty” of welcoming enrichers to fall on other people.

But let’s give the Spectator some credit: it also publishes the Islamophobe Douglas Murray, who has criticized Muslim immigration and even gone so far as to mention the Jewish role therein. He has recently asked a very important question: “Why do politicians refuse to tell it how it is on immigration?” Sadly, his answer was wholly inadequate. The subheading to his article ran: “It is the one issue where our leaders deny the wishes of their citizens.”

That’s like saying that food is the “one issue” where a dog-owner denies the wishes of his dog. If the dog wants food and doesn’t get it, then the owner proves that he is unfit to own a dog. He is failing to meet the dog’s most basic and important need. Similarly, if politicians “deny the wishes of their citizens” on immigration, they prove not only that they are unfit for office but that they are acting with conscious treachery. Immigration is not just “one issue” among many: it is, as Enoch Powell pointed out half-a-century ago, of vital, existential importance, altering a nation and its future in the most direct and intimate way. Read more

In the Land of Lies: Seeing, Saying and Pseudotopia, Part 1

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It seems such an obvious truth: In regione caecorum rex est luscus — “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” But the English writer H.G. Wells turned the proverb on its head in his short-story “The Country of the Blind” (1904), one of the cleverest and most profound ever written. Wells’ story describes a sighted mountaineer who, while climbing in the Andes, discovers a hidden valley where the inhabitants have been blind for generations.

Seeing is Sinful

Does the sighted mountaineer become king of the valley? Far from it. Socially speaking, his faculty of sight isn’t merely a disadvantage but a dangerous curse. The blind tribesfolk are not impressed by his claims to possess an additional and superior sense:

He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently became condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe, from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. (“The Country of the Blind”)

It turns out that, in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is a heretic. It would be even worse in a land where, for religious reasons, people merely pretended to be blind. Or rather: it is indeed worse in a land of pretended blindness. Britain is like that. So is the rest of the ethnically enriched West. It is heretical to comment on certain highly visible aspects of the world. Instead, we have to pretend that they’re not there and either remain silent or state the opposite of the truth.

“There is only one race — the human race!”

Britain is not a Utopia but a Pseudotopia — a Land of Lies. The biggest and foulest lies swirl in the vast sewer of what the left would call “racial discourse.” Here are a few of those lies:

  • There is only one race — the human race.
  • All races are equal in intellectual, moral and civilizational potential.
  • Mass immigration from the Third World enriches the stale pale nations of the First World.
  • Any White resistance to ethnic enrichment must be crushed before it leads to a Second Holocaust.
  • When non-Whites fail, it can only be because of White racism.

Stephen Lawrence, Black martyr

These lies are reinforced constantly by every medium of official propaganda and public education, but sometimes the storm of mendacity rises to a hurricane. Britain has experienced one of those hurricanes in 2018. First, this year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the martyrdom of our new patron saint, St Stephen Lawrence, the Black teenager who was murdered by a White gang in London in 1993. Second, the government is accused of mistreating members of the so-called Windrush Generation, that is, the saintly non-White immigrants who began arriving in Britain after the Second World War. Read more

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Enoch Powell, and the Rocket that Never Came Down [multi-parter]

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Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: A Critique [Part Three]

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“Sartre’s analysis is mere gossip parading as well-reasoned, irrefutable phenomenological argument.”
Pierre Birnbaum, 1999.

Sartre on ‘the anti-Semite’

As noted previously, the ambivalent response to Sartre’s thoughts on ‘the Jew’ is in stark contrast to the much-more positively received section of the text dealing with ‘the anti-Semite.’ Indeed, Michael Walzer states that this portrait of the anti-Semite is “rightly taken to be the strongest part of the book.”[1] Jack Kugelmass has described it as a “key text for Jewish cultural studies.”[2] Herbert Spiegelberg, meanwhile, argues that Sartre’s interpretation of the anti-Semite is “persuasive and brilliant.”[3] Such appraisals, it will be demonstrated, can be based only on the value of Sartre’s conclusions as an ideological weapon: that the anti-Semite is a highly pathological individual, and that Jews and their behavior have absolutely no bearing on the opinions of Jews formed in the minds of the surrounding population. This conclusion is nowhere summarized more succinctly than in Sartre’s formulation: “Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist the anti-Semite would invent him.”[4] It is argued here that Sartre’s dubious critique of ‘the anti-Semite’ has enjoyed significant praise solely because the author provided Jews with the strength of his own personal reputation as a public intellectual, as well as a relatively novel and valuable theory of anti-Semitism which denied it any social or political legitimacy and heavily stigmatized individuals associated with it. It is further argued that, in terms of methodology and historical awareness, Sartre’s ‘portrait of the anti-Semite’ is perhaps the weakest and most ignorant text ever produced on the subject of anti-Semitism.

Sartre’s anti-Semite is an overwhelmingly negative presence in society, and the philosopher’s interpretation of anti-Semitism is overwhelmingly beneficial to the reputation of Jews. Sartre argues that it is wrong to examine external causes when attempting to understand why host populations develop antagonistic attitudes to Jews. He writes that anti-Semitism cannot be explained as “an impersonal phenomenon which can be expressed by figures and averages, one which is conditioned by economic, historical, and political constants.”[5] He adds that it is merely the idea of the Jew that causes anti-Semitism and that history can tell us nothing about the phenomenon: “No external factor  can induce anti-Semitism in the anti-Semite.”[6] Joseph Sungolowsky summarizes it thus: “Sartre contends that anti-Semitism is a self-sufficient psychological process taking the form of a passion that is not motivated by any external cause, but rather the idea that has been formed of the Jew.”[7] Read more

Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: A Critique [Part Two]

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“Sartre almost always swallowed huge quantities of amphetamines when writing non-fiction.”
    John Gerassi, 1989.[1]

Sartre on ‘the Jew’

Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew is divided into four sections, concerned as it is with four actors, or character profiles: the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic Jew, and the authentic Jew. Existing criticism of the book has almost exclusively concerned Sartre’s treatment of Jews (in Sartre’s jargon, both ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic’), while the most highly praised aspect of the book has been his incredibly negative characterization of the anti-Semite. Since Sartre’s comments on ‘the democrat’ are generally regarded as the most meagre and the least consequential, this critique is concerned only with Sartre’s comments on both the Jew and the anti-Semite. We will start with a summary of problems in his theory of Jewishness.

Other than swallowing huge amounts speed, a habit that would ultimately lead to several debilitating strokes, Sartre conducted no preparations before writing Anti-Semite and Jew, telling Benny Levy in 1980: “I wrote without documentation, without reading one book about Jews.”[2] Sartre also failed to conduct any research into the history of anti-Semitism, or to read widely the arguments put forth by anti-Semites. He would later state that his opinions on anti-Semitism had been shaped for the most part by his reaction to reading a handful of contemporary French anti-Semitic pamphlets.[3] It is notable that while Sartre’s lack of research on the history and nature of anti-Semitism hasn’t prevented his commentary on anti-Semitism being portrayed as a “a classic,” his lack of research on Jews and their history has been pointed out as highly problematic. Indeed, from the moment of its publication Jews have been torn between a desire to adopt Sartre’s ‘weapon’ against the anti-Semite, and their unease at Sartre’s treatment of their own sense of identity.

Jewish criticisms of Sartre have for the most part revolved around his Marxist/existentialist interpretation of Jewish identity, and to a large extent these criticism are valid. It was argued in the first section of this essay that Sartre was beholden to an image of Jews and Jewishness as useful allies in his subconscious quest for social and cultural revenge. For Sartre this would necessarily involve denying Jews and their history any specificity which may exclude him. Predictably then, he advanced a theory that ‘the Jew’ was not a member of a rigid ethnic group defined by blood, history, and culture, but was instead a mere abstract compilation of Jewish ‘traits’ — the Jew as ‘intellectual,’ ‘urban,’ ‘social critic,’ ‘marginal,’ and ‘disruptive’—traits which he would himself come to embody, so one might label his book an exercise in narcissism. In his haste to portray Jews as a picture of innocence in relation to the origins of anti-Semitism, Sartre essentially suggested that the Jews themselves didn’t even exist, or if they did, it was in a largely ‘inauthentic’ form. In Anti-Semite and Jew Sartre writes that Jews are neither a national or religious community, but merely “an abstract historical community.”[4] Jews are not united with each other, or made Jews, by their history or religion, but “because they have in common the situation of a Jew, that is, they live in a community which takes them for Jews.”[5] Jews are thus, like Sartre himself, ‘created’ from exclusion and marginalization. Read more

Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew”: A Critique [Part One]

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“That book is a declaration of war against anti-Semites, nothing more.”
 Jean-Paul Sartre, 1980.

A little over a decade ago I decided to research the Jewish Question in earnest. The precise chain of events leading to this decision was complex, but the main engine driving it was sheer intellectual curiosity. Here was a subject at once profound and deeply entwined with European history, and yet also obscure and apparently also half-sunk in a quagmire of shame. As a young developing scholar in the Arts, I felt the Jewish clash with Europeans had it all — economic aspects, religious factors, the opinions of philosophical giants, the dictates of kings and the risings of peasants. Here was history in raw, perpetually political form. As a result, I found myself haunting college and public libraries, slowly absorbing the topic’s mainstream texts, along with the not so mainstream, until one day I came across a small, unassuming volume just barely visible between two much larger books.

The name of the author brought about a spark of recognition, but it was the title that made me reach for it. There was something about Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) that suggested a personal approach to the subject that I felt had been hitherto lacking in the works I’d consulted. I took Sartre’s slim monograph to a nearby table where I devoted an afternoon to some but not all of its contents. I couldn’t finish it. Materially sparse and logically recondite, the book disappointed all initial hopes. I returned it to the shelves, and for the next ten years never felt the need to consult Sartre’s contribution to the discussion of anti-Semitism.

Until now. Prompted by a public radio discussion on Sartre (mainly focussing on his childhood and private life), around three months ago I decided to return to the Frenchman’s ideas on anti-Semitism — not because of any value inherent in the ideas themselves, but because of what a thorough critical treatment of them might tell us about Sartre and about philo-Semitic apologetics in general. During that time, I examined the text in full, making notes as I progressed. These notes eventually formed the following essay, which is, as far as I am aware, the first time that an ‘anti-Semite’ has replied to Sartre’s work.

The Significance of Anti-Semite and Jew

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French philosopher, writer, political activist, and literary critic. In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for his literary work but refused it on the grounds it was a cultural symbol with which he did not wish to be associated. He is perhaps best known as one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, an area of philosophy which contends that Man is a self-creating being who is not initially endowed with a character and goals but must choose them by acts of pure decision — existential ‘leaps.’ Sartre was born into a bourgeois Parisian family of comfortable means but would go on to be generally regarded as one of the most important Marxist philosophers of the 20th century. His father died when he was 15 months old, something which I believe profoundly affected the philosopher, consciously or not, throughout his life.

Sartre may be usefully characterized as someone in several respects at war with his roots, a fact demonstrated in stories (almost certainly apocryphal) from his autobiography and related to friends. Among them, for example, is an account of Sartre throwing his family tree into a waste basket.[1] Much of his future intellectual work could be seen as a rebellion against his own deeply bourgeois roots and perhaps even a form of self-loathing or an attempt to escape the Self. Never growing more than five feet tall, and painfully aware from a young age of his physical unattractiveness, Sartre invested a great deal of time on philosophical speculations on ugliness. Importantly, he viewed his ugliness as a form of social marginalization. It is particularly interesting that in these discussions he linked ugliness to other forms of perceived social marginalization, and even more interesting that he sometimes used the formulation “Aryan/Jew, handsome/ugly.”[2] Read more

Operation Excalibur: Back to Church, Bucko! Part 2

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For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Go to Part One

Toward an Alt Right Biblical Theology

As teen-agers many secular humanists on the Alt Right probably rejected one or other of the millenarian visions of Christian theology (pre-, post- or amillennialist) available to the average suburban church-goer.  For these folks, the Bible situates us within as-yet-unfinished story.  We are awaiting the end times; we just cannot agree on when or how the Day of the Lord will come.  But what if there is another, better way of reading the grand narrative set out in the Bible?  Perhaps God knows how to tell a story.  Perhaps the biblical narrative is set in historical time with a beginning, a middle, and an end that has already come and gone.

On that assumption, it seems to me that there is a good fit between the embryonic cosmology of the Alt Right and the eschatological views of a dissident school of predominantly white Anglo-Protestants known as “preterists” (from Latin, praeter or “past”).  The covenantal eschatology (from the Greek eschaton, or “end times”) espoused by preterists holds that biblical prophecies promising that the Lord would come again in judgement (the Parousia) were fulfilled with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.  On a preterist reading of Scripture, the Day of the Lord occurred in real historical time.  The forty-year interval between the Passion of Christ and the Parousia marks the Exodus of the righteous remnant from Old Covenant Israel.  In that period, the apostles preached the gospel to the ends of the earth, thereby fulfilling the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

In the Last Days of the Old Covenant age, the New Jerusalem came down to earth, forever supplanting the Temple made with hands.  A new heaven and new earth took its place.  Within a reborn cosmic temple, the saints of Old Covenant Israel as well as those who had “fallen asleep” in Christ in the first century were resurrected from the dead.  No, the physical bodies of Abraham and the prophets did not rise magically from the grave.  Rather, the long-promised, long-awaited spiritual communion of the Old Testament saints with the Body of Christ (now incarnate in the early Church) was consummated.  The providential telos, the divine point and purpose of Old Covenant Israel had been fulfilled.  What relevance, then, has preterist eschatology to the desperate need in our time for an Anglo-Protestant political theology? Read more