Being British
In a desperate rear-guard action, assorted liberal multiracists including British premier Gordon Brown have been trying to define what it means to be “British”. As the enormity of their betrayal against their own race and culture becomes increasing evident in our cities, towns, and countryside, the promoters of this divisive society are flailing around like drowning donkeys struggling to reach the elusive lifeboat called “unity”. For them, no such lifeboat exists.
They hope that the mutually-antagonistic communities of Britain will rally around such vague concepts as “liberty”, “democracy”, “tolerance” or the “rule of law”. Firstly, these liberal ideals are hardly unique to the British, especially since the British did a pretty good job in imposing these values across the rest of the planet. Revolutionary French and Americans of the Enlightenment have equal claim to having formulated these values, and nearly every country in the world today at least pays lip-service to the same. The October 2007 issue of Prospect magazine perfectly illustrates the depths of their dilemma (the historian Robert Colls being one of the few intellectual commentators to cut through the waffle).
Secondly, not all of Britain's exclusive communities can subscribe to this liberal framework, in particular devout Muslims. Any law devised by man, as opposed to Allah, is quite literally anathema to these fundamentalists.
Thirdly, and perhaps most devastatingly, such ideas as “liberty”, “democracy” and “tolerance” are not so much values to aim for, as processes. They can never be ends-in-themselves. Liberty is meaningless by itself; one must have a desired outcome in order to exercise liberty. A person can be free to pursue (or avoid) a certain objective. The objective has value, not the method of reaching that value. The same with liberal democracy; democracy is a process, it is not a finality because negotiation is endless and can be changed at any time. Witness the amendments to the American constitution. If these values of liberty and equality are achieved (and they have already been achieved on numerous occasions, from Ancient Athens to the English Commonwealth, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall) then we are still back at square one, with separate groups glaring at each other across an unbridgeable chasm.
“Tolerance” is yet another meaningless value. Few Britons would endorse tolerance for serial killers, rapists or pedophiles. Tolerance has its limits, like democracy it is endlessly negotiable, hence not a value at all, least of all a principle that a nation can rally around. For a Muslim, homosexuality can never be tolerated and it is a requirement of their faith that homosexuals be annihilated, whereas a secular Englishman may beg to differ. There can be no final compromise between these two entirely opposing positions. For the moment, the “tolerant” consensus in Britain is that homosexuals should not be crushed under stone walls, or pushed over cliffs. Who knows what the “tolerant” position will be in the year 2051, when the non-white (mainly fundamentalist Christian and Muslim) population is expected to reach almost 30 per cent?
Fourthly, for all their bleating about “equality”, we all know that the only kind of equality that matters in a capitalist society is economic equality. A person can pretty much do what they like, so long as they have the funds to do it in private. And if they are caught, then all they need is more dosh to hire a good lawyer. In Britain, as in all the other countries that have followed the “Anglo-Saxon” economic model, the gap between the rich and poor is increasing. The rich can afford to trample any commonly-held values underfoot. Look at such people as Michael Jackson, O.J. Simpson or Robert Maxwell...and they're just some of the ones we know about.
So what is the alternative to the bankrupt liberal conception of “Britishness”? For European Identitarians and the New Right, the answer is straightforward: Britishness is an inseparable mix of one's race and culture. It is a description of what one IS, not some abstract concept to which we should all aim.
Race
For decades liberal multiracists, Cultural Marxists and the rest have maintained the fiction that the Britain is a “nation of immigrants” and that we are a mongrel race. The truth is the opposite; we are one of the most racially-homogeneous nations on earth. Multiculturalists like to point out that Britain has been invaded on numerous occasions, by the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, Normans, who originated in Scandinavia, but they fail to mention that all these different peoples shared on thing in common; they were all of the same race, i.e. Aryan, or, if you prefer, Indo-European. Some of them, for instance the Anglo-Saxons and Danes, even came from the same location, just at different times separated by a few centuries. It is impossible to distinguish between Anglo-Saxon and Dane DNA. Between 1066 and 1947 Britain experienced just two significant (50,000+) waves of immigration: continental Huguenots, who were the same race and largely possessed the same culture as the British, and the Jews, expelled by Edward I and re-admitted by Cromwell.
Culture
Given Britain's history of invasion by her immediate continental neighbours, it is impossible to isolate British culture from wider European developments, but we can perhaps discern certain traits in this wider European culture that became especially emphasised on our own island.
Soon after the retreat of glaciers covering Britain at the end of the last Ice Age, the first colonizers arrived from the continental European Atlantic seaboard and became incorporated into western European Megalithic culture, culminating in the late-Neolithic achievements of Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill. This pre-historic culture was unified across central and western Europe in that it shared the same astronomical worldview-religion and units of measurement. It was superseded by the bronze age pan-European Celtic cultures of Hallstatt and La Tène, the first cultures in Britain that we can definitively categorize as Aryan, then the Romans (the Aryan solar empire par excellence) and finally by other folk from north-western Europe. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892-1974) makes some interesting observations about how landscape influenced the cultural outlook of these latter colonizers:
“the gray-green North Sea has long-drawn-out, mile long, high waves, whereas the bluer Kattegat thunders with waves of shorter length. Here everything seems to become closer and narrower, everywhere we see the shores or sense their existence, and even beyond the Öresund and the 'open' Baltic Sea we never again fully get that feeling of limitless expanse, infinite distance, we never again get that compelling feeling of power which the North Sea gives...The land of the North Sea is characterized by distance and movement; over broad stretches it is integrated into the depths of space.”
“The Nordic soul experiences its world as a structure made up of countless thoroughfares – those already at hand and those still to be created – on land, on water, in the air, and into the stratosphere. It races like a fever through all segments of the Nordic community, a fever of speed which, infectiously, reaches out far beyond the world of the north...”
Historically, Britain has allowed women a more active role in culture and politics than our continental cousins; I would argue that this is a legacy from Celtic civilization where women held an honoured status in the political hierarchy, as evidenced by continental chariot-burials, or the Oera Linda Book. It is one instance of insular cultural conservatism that has served the British well; one need only think of Boudica, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth I, Victoria and even Margaret Thatcher.
Inventiveness
British culture is also distinguished by its innovation and exploration: a trait it naturally shares with the wider Aryan culture but which became especially concentrated on this island. I suspect that this “Nordic style of reaching out, in its ultimate and boldest intensification” (Clauss) is a characteristic we inherited from our sea-faring ancestors. It is the same impulse that led from the expansion of the original rune-row to Tim Berners-Lee. Famously, Britain was the first nation to industrialize, and the first to produce science-fiction with Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells.
The British are also famous for being practical and pragmatic, unlike, say, the Germans who are prone to adventurously over-extend themselves at any given time (“In the last analysis it will recognize only the limits of the possible as its own limits. It may even happen that at this point it will fall ill and will try to ignore all limitations – a characteristically Nordic illness” - Clauss). This practicality is at its best and most successful when it is made to serve the dynamic process of synthesizing. It is at its worst, and most destructive, when it attempts to control and dominate the indigestible products of other, non-European cultures. The resulting incoherent mess benefits neither the target alien civilization, nor the British.
Despite the deathly, flattening corruption of the liberal consensus, the British sense of intellectual precocity has carried on into the late Twentieth Century, often directly from the street with the proliferation of until then unimaginable youth cults, music and fashion.
The British are nonetheless skilled at containing their imaginative energy. This is practicality at its best, as mentioned earlier. Beverley Grammar School in Yorkshire was founded around the year 700. A century or more later, Alfred the Great was encouraging all his subjects to read and write, to study and learn. As a result, we produced some of the greatest literature in the world. It was the British aptitude for contained exuberance that disciplined rowdy games between villages into the world-conquering sports we know today.
Britain's Malign Influence
There is one aspect of cultural development of which the British have no reason to be proud, although ironically it is the one development of which the liberals, Blair and Brown, Cultural Marxists and other multiracists are most proud: the deeply-flawed notion of liberalism and “Human Rights”. Although this sickly transplant from the Middle East did not originate on our land, we can be rightly blamed for nurturing it and allowing it to spread across the globe like some monstrous triffid.
When Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534, he was selfishly motivated by lust, greed and stupidity. His lack of foresight led directly to the most extreme forms of Christian Protestantism, with its spurious notions of a “priesthood of all believers” infiltrating English and Scottish minds. That Britain had been Christian for a millennium was a serious enough problem, although in mitigation late medieval Roman Catholicism had been profoundly Europeanized and paganized. After the Protestant Reformation, Christianity was stripped of this European cultural influence and returned to its pristine, alien, Judaic kernel. The Bible became the sole truth and law, and most of the Bible was comprised of the books of the Old Testament; all of it was written by Jews. It was this dismal process that was accelerated with the advent of Puritanism and culminated with Oliver Cromwell's brutal, and profoundly anti-British dictatorship. It was pared-down Protestantism that provided a deformed, if significant, root for the Enlightenment and its political expression in liberal individualism. Hence the excesses of the American and French revolutions, the first global plutocracy in the form of the British Empire, and the dire spiritual and environmental crisis we find ourselves in today, so ably outlined by Alain de Benoist and Tomislav Sunic amongst others.
Our Identity and Destiny
So, in answer to Brown's abstract, universalist and ultimately unrealizable definition of what it means to be British, we True Brits can propose a definition which is solid, testable and leave no room for ambiguity. To be British is to be a part of the north-west European racial stock and to inherit a culture which is firmly based on the Aryan weltanschauung, both practical yet also supremely progressive and inventive.
All Aryan culture is innovative, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis method of development is explicitly written into our earliest myths. Energy and inanimate matter, fire and ice, reacts to create the giants, who in turn create the gods; a tri-partite sequence of conflict and resolution on a higher plane of existence, or a greater degree of complexity. The British have exemplified this quintessential process, albeit until now unconsciously. To remain British means to advance this process, not to stand still. We can only do so by ridding ourselves of the static dualistic alien worldview which was first introduced into Britain during the late Classical era, and was re-introduced with magnified intensity and virulence at the beginning of the Modern era with the Reformation. Then, once again, England will be merrie and Scotland will be bonnie; it will be an intensification of the culture we developed during the High Middle Ages, on a higher level.
In the words of Clauss, “After the surface of the globe had been traversed so far and wide that there were now only a few small unknown spots left on the map – when there was no longer any new land left to discover – the Nordic craving for the faraway found other outlets. If there was no new region to be found, the Nordic took the whole global space more firmly into his grasp. The enveloping of the earth took the place of discovery. Here the craving for speed, which we mentioned earlier, finds its real meaning; it is the urge to grasp the entire world with one grip. All the same, the spiritual homeland, in accordance with the style of Nordic man, will always be – and can only be – the north.”
They hope that the mutually-antagonistic communities of Britain will rally around such vague concepts as “liberty”, “democracy”, “tolerance” or the “rule of law”. Firstly, these liberal ideals are hardly unique to the British, especially since the British did a pretty good job in imposing these values across the rest of the planet. Revolutionary French and Americans of the Enlightenment have equal claim to having formulated these values, and nearly every country in the world today at least pays lip-service to the same. The October 2007 issue of Prospect magazine perfectly illustrates the depths of their dilemma (the historian Robert Colls being one of the few intellectual commentators to cut through the waffle).
Secondly, not all of Britain's exclusive communities can subscribe to this liberal framework, in particular devout Muslims. Any law devised by man, as opposed to Allah, is quite literally anathema to these fundamentalists.
Thirdly, and perhaps most devastatingly, such ideas as “liberty”, “democracy” and “tolerance” are not so much values to aim for, as processes. They can never be ends-in-themselves. Liberty is meaningless by itself; one must have a desired outcome in order to exercise liberty. A person can be free to pursue (or avoid) a certain objective. The objective has value, not the method of reaching that value. The same with liberal democracy; democracy is a process, it is not a finality because negotiation is endless and can be changed at any time. Witness the amendments to the American constitution. If these values of liberty and equality are achieved (and they have already been achieved on numerous occasions, from Ancient Athens to the English Commonwealth, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall) then we are still back at square one, with separate groups glaring at each other across an unbridgeable chasm.
“Tolerance” is yet another meaningless value. Few Britons would endorse tolerance for serial killers, rapists or pedophiles. Tolerance has its limits, like democracy it is endlessly negotiable, hence not a value at all, least of all a principle that a nation can rally around. For a Muslim, homosexuality can never be tolerated and it is a requirement of their faith that homosexuals be annihilated, whereas a secular Englishman may beg to differ. There can be no final compromise between these two entirely opposing positions. For the moment, the “tolerant” consensus in Britain is that homosexuals should not be crushed under stone walls, or pushed over cliffs. Who knows what the “tolerant” position will be in the year 2051, when the non-white (mainly fundamentalist Christian and Muslim) population is expected to reach almost 30 per cent?
Fourthly, for all their bleating about “equality”, we all know that the only kind of equality that matters in a capitalist society is economic equality. A person can pretty much do what they like, so long as they have the funds to do it in private. And if they are caught, then all they need is more dosh to hire a good lawyer. In Britain, as in all the other countries that have followed the “Anglo-Saxon” economic model, the gap between the rich and poor is increasing. The rich can afford to trample any commonly-held values underfoot. Look at such people as Michael Jackson, O.J. Simpson or Robert Maxwell...and they're just some of the ones we know about.
So what is the alternative to the bankrupt liberal conception of “Britishness”? For European Identitarians and the New Right, the answer is straightforward: Britishness is an inseparable mix of one's race and culture. It is a description of what one IS, not some abstract concept to which we should all aim.
Race
For decades liberal multiracists, Cultural Marxists and the rest have maintained the fiction that the Britain is a “nation of immigrants” and that we are a mongrel race. The truth is the opposite; we are one of the most racially-homogeneous nations on earth. Multiculturalists like to point out that Britain has been invaded on numerous occasions, by the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, Normans, who originated in Scandinavia, but they fail to mention that all these different peoples shared on thing in common; they were all of the same race, i.e. Aryan, or, if you prefer, Indo-European. Some of them, for instance the Anglo-Saxons and Danes, even came from the same location, just at different times separated by a few centuries. It is impossible to distinguish between Anglo-Saxon and Dane DNA. Between 1066 and 1947 Britain experienced just two significant (50,000+) waves of immigration: continental Huguenots, who were the same race and largely possessed the same culture as the British, and the Jews, expelled by Edward I and re-admitted by Cromwell.
Culture
Given Britain's history of invasion by her immediate continental neighbours, it is impossible to isolate British culture from wider European developments, but we can perhaps discern certain traits in this wider European culture that became especially emphasised on our own island.
Soon after the retreat of glaciers covering Britain at the end of the last Ice Age, the first colonizers arrived from the continental European Atlantic seaboard and became incorporated into western European Megalithic culture, culminating in the late-Neolithic achievements of Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill. This pre-historic culture was unified across central and western Europe in that it shared the same astronomical worldview-religion and units of measurement. It was superseded by the bronze age pan-European Celtic cultures of Hallstatt and La Tène, the first cultures in Britain that we can definitively categorize as Aryan, then the Romans (the Aryan solar empire par excellence) and finally by other folk from north-western Europe. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892-1974) makes some interesting observations about how landscape influenced the cultural outlook of these latter colonizers:
“the gray-green North Sea has long-drawn-out, mile long, high waves, whereas the bluer Kattegat thunders with waves of shorter length. Here everything seems to become closer and narrower, everywhere we see the shores or sense their existence, and even beyond the Öresund and the 'open' Baltic Sea we never again fully get that feeling of limitless expanse, infinite distance, we never again get that compelling feeling of power which the North Sea gives...The land of the North Sea is characterized by distance and movement; over broad stretches it is integrated into the depths of space.”
“The Nordic soul experiences its world as a structure made up of countless thoroughfares – those already at hand and those still to be created – on land, on water, in the air, and into the stratosphere. It races like a fever through all segments of the Nordic community, a fever of speed which, infectiously, reaches out far beyond the world of the north...”
Historically, Britain has allowed women a more active role in culture and politics than our continental cousins; I would argue that this is a legacy from Celtic civilization where women held an honoured status in the political hierarchy, as evidenced by continental chariot-burials, or the Oera Linda Book. It is one instance of insular cultural conservatism that has served the British well; one need only think of Boudica, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth I, Victoria and even Margaret Thatcher.
Inventiveness
British culture is also distinguished by its innovation and exploration: a trait it naturally shares with the wider Aryan culture but which became especially concentrated on this island. I suspect that this “Nordic style of reaching out, in its ultimate and boldest intensification” (Clauss) is a characteristic we inherited from our sea-faring ancestors. It is the same impulse that led from the expansion of the original rune-row to Tim Berners-Lee. Famously, Britain was the first nation to industrialize, and the first to produce science-fiction with Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells.
The British are also famous for being practical and pragmatic, unlike, say, the Germans who are prone to adventurously over-extend themselves at any given time (“In the last analysis it will recognize only the limits of the possible as its own limits. It may even happen that at this point it will fall ill and will try to ignore all limitations – a characteristically Nordic illness” - Clauss). This practicality is at its best and most successful when it is made to serve the dynamic process of synthesizing. It is at its worst, and most destructive, when it attempts to control and dominate the indigestible products of other, non-European cultures. The resulting incoherent mess benefits neither the target alien civilization, nor the British.
Despite the deathly, flattening corruption of the liberal consensus, the British sense of intellectual precocity has carried on into the late Twentieth Century, often directly from the street with the proliferation of until then unimaginable youth cults, music and fashion.
The British are nonetheless skilled at containing their imaginative energy. This is practicality at its best, as mentioned earlier. Beverley Grammar School in Yorkshire was founded around the year 700. A century or more later, Alfred the Great was encouraging all his subjects to read and write, to study and learn. As a result, we produced some of the greatest literature in the world. It was the British aptitude for contained exuberance that disciplined rowdy games between villages into the world-conquering sports we know today.
Britain's Malign Influence
There is one aspect of cultural development of which the British have no reason to be proud, although ironically it is the one development of which the liberals, Blair and Brown, Cultural Marxists and other multiracists are most proud: the deeply-flawed notion of liberalism and “Human Rights”. Although this sickly transplant from the Middle East did not originate on our land, we can be rightly blamed for nurturing it and allowing it to spread across the globe like some monstrous triffid.
When Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534, he was selfishly motivated by lust, greed and stupidity. His lack of foresight led directly to the most extreme forms of Christian Protestantism, with its spurious notions of a “priesthood of all believers” infiltrating English and Scottish minds. That Britain had been Christian for a millennium was a serious enough problem, although in mitigation late medieval Roman Catholicism had been profoundly Europeanized and paganized. After the Protestant Reformation, Christianity was stripped of this European cultural influence and returned to its pristine, alien, Judaic kernel. The Bible became the sole truth and law, and most of the Bible was comprised of the books of the Old Testament; all of it was written by Jews. It was this dismal process that was accelerated with the advent of Puritanism and culminated with Oliver Cromwell's brutal, and profoundly anti-British dictatorship. It was pared-down Protestantism that provided a deformed, if significant, root for the Enlightenment and its political expression in liberal individualism. Hence the excesses of the American and French revolutions, the first global plutocracy in the form of the British Empire, and the dire spiritual and environmental crisis we find ourselves in today, so ably outlined by Alain de Benoist and Tomislav Sunic amongst others.
Our Identity and Destiny
So, in answer to Brown's abstract, universalist and ultimately unrealizable definition of what it means to be British, we True Brits can propose a definition which is solid, testable and leave no room for ambiguity. To be British is to be a part of the north-west European racial stock and to inherit a culture which is firmly based on the Aryan weltanschauung, both practical yet also supremely progressive and inventive.
All Aryan culture is innovative, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis method of development is explicitly written into our earliest myths. Energy and inanimate matter, fire and ice, reacts to create the giants, who in turn create the gods; a tri-partite sequence of conflict and resolution on a higher plane of existence, or a greater degree of complexity. The British have exemplified this quintessential process, albeit until now unconsciously. To remain British means to advance this process, not to stand still. We can only do so by ridding ourselves of the static dualistic alien worldview which was first introduced into Britain during the late Classical era, and was re-introduced with magnified intensity and virulence at the beginning of the Modern era with the Reformation. Then, once again, England will be merrie and Scotland will be bonnie; it will be an intensification of the culture we developed during the High Middle Ages, on a higher level.
In the words of Clauss, “After the surface of the globe had been traversed so far and wide that there were now only a few small unknown spots left on the map – when there was no longer any new land left to discover – the Nordic craving for the faraway found other outlets. If there was no new region to be found, the Nordic took the whole global space more firmly into his grasp. The enveloping of the earth took the place of discovery. Here the craving for speed, which we mentioned earlier, finds its real meaning; it is the urge to grasp the entire world with one grip. All the same, the spiritual homeland, in accordance with the style of Nordic man, will always be – and can only be – the north.”
posted by Alisdair Clarke at 4:47 AM
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