Roots of Radicalism

THE ROOTS OF BRITISH NATIONALISM

By Andrew Brons

OUR DETRACTORS would like to portray us as a party devoid of native tradition ― an aberrant and even alien cancer destructive of the wonderful and harmonious multi-racial materialism, the Establishment has so kindly created for us. Indeed, Racial Nationalism is not usually presented as an ideology at all but at best a set of outmoded 'prejudices' and at worst a sort of collective personality disorder or 'criminal super-ego' as neo-Freudian pseudo-psychologists would say. In fact, the roots of British Racial Nationalism are to be found in the political, economic and social statements, claims and actions of our own people through the centuries and in the deepest instincts of both our own people and humanity in general. History and science testify to the pedigree, rationality and endurance of our ideas.

Sociobiology has demonstrated that one of the deepest instincts in all human beings (and indeed in all animal life) is the desire to replicate and perpetuate their own genes or those most similar to their own ― to ensure that they are survived by people of their own kind. It has demonstrated that racialism, far from being an aberration, is an instinct in all of us ― whether we accept it and glory in it or try to repress it by layer upon layer of self-imposed guilt feelings.

That type of instinctive racialism has been seen in Europe since the dawn of recorded history. It served to defend the European heartlands from mass alien invasion centuries ago. There was the defeat of the Huns by the Franks, Alemanni and Romans in A.D. 451, the defeat of the Moors at Tours/Poitiers by Charles Martel in the year 732, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the Fifteenth Century and the turning back of the Turks from the gates of Vienna in 1683 by the heroic Polish King, John Sobieski. Had those defences failed, Europe might now be European neither racially nor culturally.

ALIEN INVASION

Britain itself has not been subject to that scale of alien invasion until this century but the various peoples who number amongst our ancestors (and it is now recognised that all of the British people can count all of the traditional inhabitants of these islands amongst their forebears) have tried to repel succeeding invaders who were seen to be culturally alien, even though they were certainly not racially alien. (Contrary to the myths of the multiracialists, the various peoples who together make up the British people were predominantly Northern European). They would include Cardoc/Caratacus; Boudicca; the Romanised Celts in the Fifth Century who tried to resist the Anglo-Saxons and perhaps inspired the Arthurian legends; the success of Alfred and the West Saxons in confining Guthrum and the Danes to the Northern and Eastern parts of England; Harold Godwinson's denial of the claims of Duke William and the Normans; Edward I who expelled the Jews and perhaps Llywelyn Ap Gruffydd and Robert Bruce who tried to expel Edward I from Wales and Scotland respectively!; and of course Elizabeth's defeat of the Armada. Even the ruling clique of Tories as well as Whigs who invited Dutch William to replace James in 1688 rationalised their actions to the ordinary people as a rejection of 'alien' Catholicism (a debate into which we will not step!), even though it resulted in the impositon of an alien-inspired financial oligarchy that rules to this day. Indeed in every subsequent conflict, including the wars of this century, the ordinary people have been mobilised (some would say manipulated) on the strength of a genuine racial nationalist desire to protect the homeland from invasion by 'foreigners' and 'alien' influences. The genuineness of our people's nationalism is not to be doubted even if those wars have left the country less free and more invaded by people who are infinitely more alien!

Our financial and industrial policies ― to return the control of the money supply to the state from the hands of private financiers and to ensure that agricultural, industrial and commercial property are well-distributed amongst the people who work in them ― are not simply an appendix to our racial and national policies. They complement and support those policies. In fact the country could not be sovereign if they were not implemented.

DISTRIBUTION OF PROPERTY

It would be dishonest to suggest that there was ever a 'Golden Age' in which the distribution of property was complete or even on the verge of being complete but the present all-but-complete dispossession of the vast majority of our people from any property in the concerns in which they work has certainly never been greater. Nevertheless, the accumulation of property in the hands of the few has been resisted through the ages by people whose instincts for economic and political freedom were the same as our own.

Those in the Nineteenth Century, like William Cobbett, who criticised the accumulation of land that resulted from the seizure of Church lands in the Fifteenth Century were not concerned with the privileges of the Church but with the effect of those accumulations on the remaining land in the hands of small holders. Cobbett pointed out that the accumulations in the Sixteenth Century led inexorably to the aptly-named Statute of Frauds in the Seventeenth Century, which provided for the dispossession of 'tenants-at-will' who did not have records of their holding in the manorial court.

William Cobbett

Cobbett was probably the most unambiguous precursor of Racial Nationalism. He was a patriot who supported his country in the war with France despite the fact that he was a political exile from it. He was a racialist who opposed the activities of the Jews and castigated those like Wilberforce who were more concerned with the interests of Black slaves abroad than White wage slaves at home. He was an economic radical who opposed the bankers' swindle and the wage slavery of the factory system. He was a ruralist who resisted the industrial encroachments or rural life and he was a 'distributist' before the word had even been coined. He was a democrat who fought to secure the political rights of ordinary people. A former soldier, he was a fierce advocate of soldiers rights ― particularly against the brutal floggings they had to endure. He was a 'Tory Radical' ― a contradiction in our day but in his it meant simply that he loved his country and his people ― a Racial Nationalist born two hundred years before the National Front was formed!

Later in the Century, the 'Back to the Land' movement was to be led by Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter and others. They advocated, and physically established, rural colonies of smallholders; others like Cecil Sharpe rediscovered folk song and dance.

Contemporary with the 'Back to the Land' movement were the mainstream socialists who were to found the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. However, most of them were neither Marxists like Benn and Livingstone nor Capitalist reformers like Wilson and Callaghan. Socialists like Blatchford attacked Capitalism, not because industry and land were not in the hands of the state but because they were not in the hands of the great mass of the people ― they were then as now dispossessed. One of the few early British socialists who was quite explicitly a Marxist was H.M. Hyndman but he was a most unorthodox member of that school. He made some very uncharitable remarks about the Jews and, unlike many other socialists, supported his country in the First World War.

The Labour Representation Committee was not the only movement to be formed at the turn of the century. In 1901 the British Brothers' League entered the political arena to resist Jewish immigration from Russia. However, instead of seeking an alliance with those who were seeking to combat the iniquities of Capitalism, it allowed itself to be too closely identified with Conservative MP's who paid lip service, but no more than lip service, to the control of alien imm­gration. By doing so they lost the initially massive support of racially-minded workers, including the Dockers' Union.

Later in the Twentieth Century, the mantle of Cobbett was to be worn by Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. They, amongst others, coined the rather ugly term 'Distributism' to refer to their belief in the wide distribution of industrial, commercial and agricultural property among the people who work in those areas. They (particularly Belloc and Cecil Chesterton in the Eye Witness) also attacked the Judaeo-Financial clique that dominated not only this country but also the United States and later Bolshevik Russia. Gilbert Chesterton's special contribution was to argue extremely persuasively against those who would suggest that Nationalism was synonymous with Imperialism and that nationality was synonymous with imperial citizenship ― something completely beyond the comprehension of modern jurists and politicians who seem to think that nationality (and not just citizenship) is created by accident of birth place and the reckless grant of a passport.

Gilbert (G.K.) Chesterton's cousin A.K. Chesterton, co-founder of the National Front in 1967, was a supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley until 1937 when he broke with him on account of Mosley's too close association with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. Mosley was certainly a racialist despite his post-war protestations to the contrary and he was forthright in his condemnation of the fraudulent financial system and the power and influence of International Jewry (though not, he claimed, individual Jews). However, he did not venture any solution to the problem of Capitalism at home by any identification with Distributism, His adoption of Italian bus conductors' uniforms served only to give his movement a 'foreign' aspect that was, after the war, to be given further credence by his 'Europe a Nation' policy.

What then of National Socialism and Fascism themselves? To what extent are our roots to be found there? It is true that their nationalism sprang, in part, from the same instincts and traditions from which all European nationalism has sprung but they had essential differences that denied them the support of nationalists of other persuasions and from other countries. It is true that some strands of National Socialism, especially the ideas of Darre, Feder and the Strassers, not forgetting the 'Twenty-Five Principles', were similar to those of the Distributists and the Social Credit Movement. However, their anti-democratic stance, their agencies of repression and their territorial expansionism denied them the support of the Distributists (although Belloc did express support and admiration for Mussolini). It would be more correct to say that both of those idea-systems as well as modern Racial Nationalism are distinct heirs of an ancient European nationalist tradition and natural human instinct. However, the National Front has a lineage of its own in the political traditions if our own country - a lineage that we have been too slow to acknowledge and claim as our own. That omission' has allowed British Nationalism to be misdirected and misrepresented by friends and foes, alike. We are determined to make it good in the future.