ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEFT

One of the blind spots for the Left is that it is unable to accept it could be a source of bigotry or racism.  The Left is founded on the idea that it not only has different pragmatic and economic solutions, but that to subscribe to certain economic theories makes one morally superior.  The converse is also assumed, that however hard-working or diligent for the country a conservative is, he is morally bad perhaps even evil.  When coming into contact with decent conservatives, to keep their world-view of their moral superiority holding together, the Leftist will create some explanation, such as that this decent person has been fooled into being a conservative and is really Left wing under the surface.

Yet a perusal of history clearly shows that ideas put forward as progressive in every era have been responsible for more deaths, suffering, hatred and poverty than conservatism ever has been.  From 

Robespierre’s Terror to the Stalinist Gulags, to the economic catastrophe that is Socialist Venezuela (so admired by the current leader of the British Labour Party) it is the Left that has been the political movement most responsible for human suffering.  Nonetheless, when self-righteousness is the key foundation of one’s political involvement, it is an unthinkable thought that one’s beliefs might be the cause of suffering for the people you claim to help.  Thus begins the search for a scapegoat.  It is impossible for the average Leftist to take moral responsibility without his whole Weltanschauung and idea of himself as morally superior to his contemporaries being fatally undermined.

In the Twentieth Century anti-semitism was more associated with the Right and Jewish involvement in politics tended to be participation in Left wing Marxism.  If Nazism can be regarded as right wing, which is debatable given its anti-conservative, revolutionary and avante garde tendencies, that was of course the most egregious example of right-wing anti-semitism.  On the other hand, as Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, the high level of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik movement was disproportionate in comparison to the number of Jewish Russians.  It is also worth mentioning that the involvement of White Russian emigres seeking revenge through the National Socialist movement in Germany is often overlooked.

Nonetheless, anti-semitism has a far more natural home with the Left.  Despite the terrible suffering of the Jewish people most have refused to give in to a victim status that would seem a natural default position given the extent of persecution.  They have not become passive clients of a Leftist narrative that feeds off resentment.  Of course many black people or other ethnic minorities refuse the resentment narrative fed to the them by White Leftists, but the Jewish refusal to give in to victimhood has been phenomenal and brave.  They have succeeded as a community in keeping their traditions alive (something intolerable to the anti-traditionalist Left) and individual Jews have often reached the very top of Western society, giving the lie to the Leftist narrative that our society is based on oppression, rather than the hierarchies of competence identified by Jordan Peterson.

Therefore there are twofold reasons to choose the Jews as scapegoats for the Left:  first they have refused to be compliant with the Marxist post-modern narrative of oppression by a white Anglo-Saxon protestant-establishment.  Secondly, by succeeding in a capitalist system they have become part of the oppressive conspiracy as set out in Left wing narrative.  The irony is of course that not only Karl Marx, but the founders of post-modernism or cultural Marxism were largely Jewish.  This Left wing involvement by some Jews says more about the experience of lacking roots in a society than it does about Western society itself.  This was of course a very important point for the Jewish Catholic writer and philosopher Simone Weil.

Western culture is fundamentally Christian and that means the Jewish religion and Scripture is a core part of our culture and values.  We are a Judaeo Christian culture and it is that culture that the cultural Marxists, post-moderns and Leftists seek to destroy. 

If Western culture is a conspiracy of the capitalist class against the proletariat, it is a very fine line between making that claim and stepping into a dark conspiracy theory about a certain race that is successful in capitalism being behind globalist neoliberal economics. 

Being anti-conservative, whether as an international or national socialist or a post-modern, is about attacking the fundamental values and the fabric of our Christian culture.  That is why Leftists can make common cause with those attacking traditional gender roles and hard-line Islamists who believe in traditional gender roles.  It is not that these different groups have a shared positive cause, they are simply enemies of the Western inheritance.  The Jews are different – their great sin is to succeed as an ethnic minority in this allegedly oppressive society.  The Left has not achieved a claim over their loyalty necessarily – they are not supplicants to the morally-virtuous Left-wing politicians.  Of course this is a gross generalisation, but we must understand that the Left thinks in gross generalisations.  All the way back to Marx, people are not individual persons, but members of a class.  They are reduced to being part of an oppressor or victim class with their personal attributes erased in the eyes of the ideologue.  That of course is very similar to racism.     

It is therefore a very thin line between accepting the Marxist narrative and slipping into anti-semitism.  In the United States the dominance of intersectional theories of oppression places Muslims as a group above Jews.  The problem of anti-semitism in political Islam is therefore being overlooked.  In the United Kingdom the main Left-of-centre parliamentary party has been taken over by Hard-Left anti-parliamentary economic Marxists.  If you believe capitalism is a conspiracy against the poor, it is a very small step to believing Jews are oppressing the people.  We are already seeing serious problems with anti-semitism in the British Labour Party.  The willingness of the American Democratic party to see and hear no evil with regard to political Islam means they too are starting to turn a blind eye to anti-semitism, despite the party’s strong connections with the Jewish community in the United States.

What all this tells us is that the Left cannot reform or be self-reflective or critical unless it accepts being Left wing is not an infallible sign of moral righteousness.  Most politics is just about the mechanics of achieving economic growth for as many people as possible and ensuring civil society survives.  There are different theories as to how this might be done – from wealth creation and trickle-down economics to redistributive taxation.  The moral choice is not whether one is Left or Right, but whether one participates at all.  As long as there is this blindness about its own moral fallibility, the Left will fail to confront its own festering demons of anti-semitism and bigotry.

Novichok and Holy Russia

Russia’s recovery from Bolshevism and Return to Christian Values is a Beacon of Hope – yet where were these values in Salisbury?

It seemed like the Barsetshire Chronicles had met John Le Carre when a Russian former spy and double agent and his daughter were poisoned by a chemical substance.  The cathedral city of Salisbury has been the site of the first chemical attack on these islands.  Since then one British subject has died from novichok poisoning and another has finally been released from hospital.

The evidence appears to point to Russian actors.  Russia denies this.  The alternative, put forward by conspiracy theorists, that British intelligence was responsible seems far-fetched to British ears.  To regard such an accusation as credible would require most of us to reconstruct completely our understanding of how the British state functions.  This is far easier for a Russian who is familiar with a state that commits crimes. History is clear, the Soviet state committed moral crimes against its people.  One only needs to peruse Solzhenitsyn to find this out.  The idea that the British Government would have fabricated or staged the poisoning may seem incredible to us, but not to a Russian citizen.

Neither is it very persuasive to draw an equivalence with the British State’s assassination of Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Syria.  These are cases of war zones and the former state is one where the government is an ally of the British and the latter state is no friend of the Islamists.  By contrast, in Salisbury an attack was made on British soil with a chemical weapon, with callous disregard of the danger to lives and the local economy.  In parenthesis  it is simplistic to imagine that the vast state of Russia and its intelligence services are as centralised as those of the British state, nonetheless, on balance, as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt, the Russian state appears to be guilty.  Western allies rallied to the cause of Britain – showing Brexit Britain continues to have international stature.

Herein lies the main point – Russia may have seen many dramatic changes since the fall of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless its starting point is very low if we recall Stalin, the KGB and the GUlag.  It is a low that is now far more familiar to those in the West, as the Soviets enforced by the jack boot what left-wing university professors in the West are re-educating middle-class students to support – abolition of capitalism and suppression of the Church, mass abortion and shifting women en masse into the work place.  Once we grasp this then we can understand how a nation that is seeing a resurgent Church can also be connected to a crime that was committed with a cavalier attitude to the sanctity of innocent life.

After the regicide of the Tsar Russia began a moral decline into atheistic tyranny.  Truth was sacrificed to a materialistic ideology and the sanctity of the person was as nothing.  The state became all intrusive and claimed citizens’ loyalty over and above human loyalties to family, Church and God. 

Of course the resurgence of Orthodoxy and the veneration of the Romanovs is proof that for all this state oppression the human values of the Russians did not disappear, but simply went underground.  Yet as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, the effect of the totalitarian system of Communism was to replace Truth with the Lie.  In effect – the attempt to abolish the Logos.  It was in that sense a Satanic project.  Russia hit a nadir in its civilization, whatever the nostalgia now for the certainties of the Soviet period, following the abuse of the common weal by capitalistic oligarchs. 

Countries' stories are not straight lines, but always revert to national archetypes.  If we think of the history of nations and cultures as cyclical rather than progressive we not only get a more accurate understanding of what is happening, but can rationalise the apparent contradictions of that vast country Winston Churchill once described as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.  Russia has hit the bottom point of a cycle and now is rising up again, but that does not mean the powers that be in the Russian establishment are untainted by the brutal system of the Bolshevik state of which many of the current establishment were part. Furthermore, any revolution is disruptive and undoubtedly criminal elements have benefited from the collapse of the Soviet Union, just as there has been the opportunity to resuscitate former traditions of value.

Quite apart from the apparent direct attack on our soil, why is this so important to us?  Because, continuing the theme of the cycle in the history of nations, it seems that Western civilization has reached a tipping point and is in precipitous decline.  The doctrines of the postmodernists and cultural Marxists have spread like a destructive contagion out of the university campuses and into mainstream life.  These destructive forces are too subtle to manifest themselves in the same bloody way that they did in Russia, but these forces are now more insidious.  Therefore Russia’s rediscovery of Christian tradition is the great hope of the West and to see it tarnished by the apparent disregard for the sanctity of the human person can seem to undermine this hope.

What must therefore be understood is this :  The shadow of brutal Bolshevik atheism is cast long over modern Russia, on the one hand.  On the other hand, the forces of tradition, religious faith and the Church were never extinguished and are now resurgent, with the support of the same state still tainted by a Bolshevik past.

Two parallel ideas are underpinning post -Soviet Russia, that of Holy Russia and that of Greater Russia.  In the figure of Vladimir Putin both ideas are honoured, although perhaps the latter to the greater degree.  Putin recognises the importance of religious faith and apparently was secretly baptised and raised as a believer.  Yet to believe he is manipulating religious belief and imposing it upon people to disguise his alleged tyranny is a complete misunderstanding of a very simplistic Western mind-set.

The Russian Church is a grass-roots phenomenon, its flame was kept burning by the people.  The Government has recognised this as a fact, just as Stalin had to recognise it during the German invasion.  A cultural Marxist narrative of religion being a means of control simply will not do as an intelligent analysis of what the situation is in Russia.

Furthermore, Putin is not having to contrive at remaining in power – he is very popular because he stood up to the oligarchs and because he, like the Russian people at large, felt the humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union.  He is a patriot, for all his faults.

The western media may describe Putin as a kleptocratic reincarnation of Hitler, but this is almost a back-to-front misunderstanding.  Putin’s mind-set is defensive not aggressive, I believe.  He wishes to maintain Russia’s status and a sphere of national interest on the world stage.  That need not affect Western interests.  His speech at Munich in 2007 goes a long way to explain his world view.  The expansion of NATO, the stationing of US missiles on his border and Western intervention in the Ukraine, prior to his annexation of the Crimea have all created a feeling of encirclement. Russia had not expected this and initially believed that the end of the Cold War would mean a partnership of equality between the United States and the Russian Federation, with mutual respect for their different traditions.

We are rightly proud of our own turning point after another event in Munich, when we were to go on to stand alone against Hitler.  Yet this moment of true pride in our national valour sometimes misleads us into thinking every international situation is one of a moral test to resist the temptation of appeasement.  Anthony Eden arguably made this mistake over the Suez Canal.

Russia is changing or going full circle, rediscovering values and traditions we are on the point of losing.  Russia needs to know it is still an equal player on the world stage and that its own traditions, which are not liberal-democratic, can be regarded with respect.  Let us remember the U.S. started intervening in Russia’s choice of leader before Russia ever did so in US elections. 

For this reason President Trump, in the teeth of opposition from the Washington establishment and the military-industrial complex, is approaching Russia in the right way.  Friendship and mutual respect will bring the best out of relations with Russia.  Were Russia no longer painted as a pariah state we might also learn something from how traditional values can resurrect after Marxism.  This is a very necessary lesson we could learn as our own traditions and values, from Christianity to the meaning of gender are being corroded by unchallenged cultural-Marxists.

So what about Novichok?  Well again it seems that President Trump has it right in an approach that is both realist and principled.  While the UK is rightly going through the process of a criminal investigation, the President took a clear stand against Russia with the recall of diplomats, but he is now adopting the constructive policy of engagement.  For unlike National Socialist Germany, engaging with Christian Russia will undoubtedly lead to benefits for both civilizations. Engagement should not always be regarded as appeasement.   

WHY MONARCHIES FALL

Today is the anniversary of the brutal regicide of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and the bloody murder of his wife Empress Alexandra (Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter), their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (collectively referred to as OTMA by themselves in family correspondence) and the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexey.  Their murders were brutal, clumsy and bloody.

Another anniversary occurred a couple of days before - the celebration of the storming of the Bastille in France in 1789 - which led to the state murders of King Louis XVI and his Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette.  Burke famously lamented the treatment of the Queen with the following words in his famous Reflections: 

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy.

Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

Marx despised this passage, which is reason enough for us to take it to heart.  For Marx was the inspiration behind the brutal crime against the Romanovs.  They were killed in the name of his ideology in a basement of their prison in Ekaterinburg and their bodies dumped and an attempt made to dissolve them with acid.  Thus modern regicide hit a new low of depravity.

Solzhenitsyn, the Russian intellectual, saw a direct link between the horrors of the French Revolution and its reign of Terror and the Bolshevik Revolution that tore down his own country's social fabric and hierarchy.

In our own island the British Monarchy remains and continues to hold the respect and love of its subjects.  It survived where others did not and it is often assumed that is because of the pragmatism of British institutions.  The British Monarchy unlike the Russian Autocrat adapted to a constitutional role in a parliamentary-representative democracy.

Yet such an understanding suggests a shallow and positivist perspective of history.  The British Monarchy has not simply survived because it adapted to the Whigs' Glorious Revolution.  Just like the Russian and French Monarchies it is closely associated with the Church and Tradition.  And if Monarchy is to be what it should be, it must retain a connection with transcendental Tradition.

Nonetheless it is true that while that transcendental aspect of Monarchy inspires loyalty and sacrifice, it also makes it a target of those who would flatten out our society with the aim of breaking any connection with the Transcendent.  Yet our own Monarchy is closely linked to the idea of transcendent Tradition and the power of this idea was demonstrated by the impact of the traditional Coronation service upon Queen Elizabeth II.  The anointing with oil within a tabernacle was a sacramental experience for Her Majesty, which has continued to sustain her through the many trials of her reign.

This claim to a divine connection led to attacks upon our own Monarchy.  It faced revolution and suffered regicide as a result of the Civil War.  Charles I approached his death with the stoicism of his Christian faith so that he is still regarded (albeit quietly) as a Martyr of the Anglican Church.  The same progressive and regicidal forces, somewhat moderated later in the Century, ensured after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that the Monarchy's powers were curtailed by Parliament, and its survival would be conditional on popular assent, as demonstrated by the lines in our national anthem:

"May she defends our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice
God save the Queen"

Yet the Monarchy itself has a place in our hearts and moves us because of its sacred and traditional elements.  This power of Tradition has also shaped Prince Charles' values and idea of vocation.  His Royal Highness has associated himself with perennial and Traditionalist ideas of religion, which has clearly drawn him to orthodox religion of many forms, from his own Greek Orthodox heritage on Mount Athos to traditionalist Islam (which should be distinguished sharply from the revolutionary Islam of the Salafists - unfortunately often misleadingly described as "conservative").

So the British Monarchy does not really fit the Whiggish mould and retains its connection to the transcendent Tradition, albeit less obviously than the Romanovs.  And it was that connection with the transcendent Tradition that meant the Bolsheviks needed to eliminate the Romanovs.  For the revolutionaries believed the Transcendental to be fake and that all could be explained by economics and materialism.  They wanted to break the connection with the Transcendent.

For Tsar Nicholas and his family however, their Orthodox faith was of central importance.  It was for this reason the kindly father and reluctant monarch Nicholas, resisted calls for a full parliamentary-democracy and remained the autocrat.  It was Empress Alexandra's Orthodox faith (combined with her Victorian and Protestant upbringing) that led her to bring up their children un-spoilt and un-corrupted by the decadence of the Russian Court, leading to resentment from the aristocracy.

Often the involvement of Rasputin in the Romanov family is used by secularist historians to point to the superstition of their religious faith and paint it as one of the causes of their tragic overthrow.  Yet this is to take the Bolshevik propaganda at face value and to fail to understand certain important elements of Russian Orthodoxy.

Empress Alexandra was a sincere convert (after initial reluctance) from Lutheranism to the highly Traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church.  A central sacred figure of Orthodoxy is the fool for Christ or yurodivy.  Alexandra became convinced Rasputin was such a figure and furthermore she depended on him because of the love she had for her family.  Only Rasputin had the power to heal her precious son of his haemophilia when the medical doctors could do nothing.  Is the Empress to be found at fault for this?  Rasputin (unlike the Romanovs -declared martyrs by ROCOR and Passion Bearers by the Russian Church) has never been acknowledged by the Orthodox Church, but it is our modern post-Enlightenment mindset that prevents us understanding his importance to the Royal Family.

Just as with the French Monarchy, the Russian Monarchy had to be eliminated in the opinion of those forces that emerged from the Enlightenment.  Monarchy maintained the connection between man and the Transcendent, right back to the early beginnings of our human story.  A Monarchy that has lost this connection, as it can do by becoming secularised or modernised, is no longer a threat to the materialist and anti-sacred agenda of the revolutionaries.  It is no longer a target.  It is therefore of great credit to the the Stuarts, the Bourbons and the Romanovs that they were considered such a threat as to be necessary to murder.  They courageously went to their deaths believing in the divine aspect of the kingly vocation.  To lose this sense is to lose the point of Monarchy.

While our own Royal Family has accommodated itself to modernism in the mixed economy of the British constitution, made up of representative democracy and monarchy as it is, our Queen has maintained the sacred nature of her vocation and this sense of the Transcendent has shaped her reign.  Albeit with his own personal perspective, Prince Charles too is clearly a believer in the Transcendent Tradition.  Yes such an aspect to Monarchy will always provoke the hostility of those who wish to break the connection with the Transcendent in the name of progress, but to lose that Tradition would make the Monarchy purposeless, causing it to degenerate into mere celebrity.