Sunday, September 11, 2011

Big names speak out

Something I've noticed lately is the trend for big name celebrities from the 1970s and 80s to come out against aspects of liberal modernity.

John Cleese is one. The famous comedian has complained that open borders have turned London into a city that is "no longer English' and that:

I mean, I love having different cultures around. But when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, "Well, what's going on?

In response, the former mayor of London, "Red Ken" Livingstone, defended the demographic transformation by arguing that,

To stay competitive, London must be what New York is to the U.S., a global centre of business, culture and innovation, none of which can be achieved without people of all nations working and living here.

Ken Livingstone is supposedly a socialist - but here he is defending open borders on the ground that it will benefit big business interests.

It's the kind of thing that rock musician Roger Daltrey can't stand about left-wing politicians:


Roger Daltrey

A lifelong Labour voter, he’s disgusted by the last Government. ‘I was appalled at what Labour did to the working class — mass immigration, where people were allowed to come here and undercut our working class,’ says Roger.

‘It’s fine to say everybody can come into your country, but everybody should work towards a standard of living expected by people who live here. Not come here, live 20 to a room, pay no tax, send money home and undercut every builder in London. They slaughtered the working class in this country. I hate them for it because it is always the little man who is hurt badly. It’s terrible. It frustrates me.

‘We have got to stop pandering to people because we won’t be able to afford to keep this going. At the very least, it should be a pre-requisite that people have to learn English.

Like John Cleese, Roger Daltrey isn't really making principled criticisms of liberal society here. Unfortunately, he cedes the principle at stake by saying that "it's fine to say that everyone can come into your country" - before then making some good specific criticisms of how that has played out in reality.

Pop star Gary Numan is so disenchanted with the growing thug culture in England that he's considering moving. The final straw was when his wife and children were surrounded and menaced by a local gang:

It was the latest in a string of incidents that have all served to make Numan deeply uneasy about the changes he perceives in British society. A combination of the recent riots and various instances of drunken, aggressive behaviour he has witnessed while touring has led him to contemplate a new life in Santa Monica, California.

'I've always considered myself to be fiercely patriotic,' Numan says. 'I love Britain – its history and the down-to-earth attitude people have. Until recently, I'd never have entertained the thought of leaving


What can we make of such comments? They show that it's not only traditionalists like ourselves who are disconcerted by the changes being made to Western societies. The alienation is being felt even amongst those who were prominent within the culture a generation ago.

The problem, though, is that none of the complaints go far enough. Gary Numan's solution is to relocate to another Western country with its own crime issues. Roger Daltrey is politically articulate, but as mentioned he cedes a lot of ground when arguing against the effects of open borders. And John Cleese has in recent years supported the Liberal Democrats in England and Barack Obama in the US, so he doesn't really seem to have connected the changes in society he dislikes to the political forces pushing those changes onto society.

If you are serious about opposing the alienating trends within modern society, then you have to make a serious effort to recognise the political beliefs which have brought them about - and then learn to effectively counter those beliefs.

31 comments:

  1. I laughed when I read Numan's solution is to move to Santa Monica. As a resident of Los Angeles for the past 28 years, I think he may be moving from bad to worse. Santa Monica may be slightly better than LA when it comes to violent crime, but it is no more than a stone's throw away and completely within the reach of LA's gangs.

    Daltry may not be ceding as much as you think. I agree with him that there is nothing wrong with allowing immigration. It's all in how and why. The problem isn't immigration as much as it is the culture of entitlement granted to both legal and illegal immigrants. This culture is supported as much by the right as it is the left.

    The right desires the poor immigrant for his cheap labor. They need him to drive down the cost of labor by increasing the supply. the left encourages immigration with all the freebies. Taxpayer supported education, medical care, welfare, etc. the freebies make up for the exploitation and together the left and the right contribute to the problem and have created a culture in which immigrants are both supported and exploited, but far better off than they would be in their own countries.

    Immigration would not be nearly the problem it is if we took away the incentives provided by the left and regulated those provided by the right.

    TDOM

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  2. "What can we make of such comments? They show that it's not only traditionalists like ourselves who are disconcerted by the changes being made to Western societies."

    I wasn't raised a traditionalist, more a right-liberal. It was living in London and experiencing directly the effects of those changes that caused me to reject liberalism. I wasn't exactly the 'liberal who's been mugged' - I chased off the would-be home invader - but the stress of having to constantly be on your guard on the street, keep the door locked, maintain situational awareness... There has to be a better way to live than this. And it's not being one of those liberal sheeple who walk around with their iphone playing, just begging to become a victim.

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  3. TDOM:
    "I agree with him that there is nothing wrong with allowing immigration"

    I agree. I'd be fine with dozens, even hundreds of foreign immigrants arriving in England every year.

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  4. "I laughed when I read Numan's solution is to move to Santa Monica. As a resident of Los Angeles for the past 28 years, I think he may be moving from bad to worse. Santa Monica may be slightly better than LA when it comes to violent crime, but it is no more than a stone's throw away and completely within the reach of LA's gangs."

    Numan's wife will have been menaced by lower-class white louts - chavs - not black gangbangers.

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  5. Simon in London said...

    I agree. I'd be fine with dozens, even hundreds of foreign immigrants arriving in England every year.



    Well said!

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  6. Cleese really is a big name isn't he and quite left wing. Its sad though because as bad as they see the situation in England they still see the big enemy as the "right" or traditionalism. Hence arguments such as "I'm fine with immigration ...", ie I'm not right wing, "but I'm nevertheless concerned about ...".

    They're going to have to sort themselves out aren't they.

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  7. There's only two choices, liberalism (right or left of the same paradigm doesn't make a choice) or fascism.

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  8. Experience always tends to test conformity to dominant ideology. The most pro-immigration people are those who never experience its effects. No one is more pro- immigration than people who live in 97% white communities. No one is more confident that anyone who opposes mass immigration is just a racist.

    The trouble is there's no large political party that will offer a principled opposition to immigration.

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  9. anon:
    "There's only two choices, liberalism (right or left of the same paradigm doesn't make a choice) or fascism."

    Fascism of course is also a Progressive ideology. Franco's regime in Spain seemed to mix Fascist-Progressive and Traditionalist elements quite successfully (eg Franco-ism lacks the Fascist emphasis on imperial conquest) and created a reasonably stable and pleasant society; we had an interesting seminar about it at my work awhile back.

    In the US, Giuliani & the Neocons after 9/11 worked on creating a sort of quasi-Fascist ethos for the USA, but I don't think it was particularly successful domestically, and I reject completely its abhorrent emphasis on foreign aggression as in the US invasion of Iraq.

    Overall I'd say that while Franco found a way to integrate Fascist elements successfully within a broad platform, Fascism usually makes a bad situation worse - it certainly did for the US post-9/11, and obviously didn't work out too well for Italy.

    I think What the Anglosphere needs is a primarily Traditionalist ethos suited to nations which are mostly Protestant in their ethoi, traditions and ancestral religion. Obviously Catholic thinkers and examples have a lot to offer, but the many brilliant Catholic-traditionalist writers must bear in mind that the depth of our current disaster is primarily a Protestant problem (& I speak as someone raised Protestant, culturally), and any solutions will have to be at least partly Protestant, too. The Catholic nations of the West do have their own problems too, but the iron grip of cultural Marxism over our souls is a distinctly Protestant-nation phenomenon.

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  10. "the iron grip of cultural Marxism over our souls"

    I could have written "the iron grip of Liberalism" there - Frankfurt School cultural Marxism was a poisonous seed deliberately planted in the fertile bed of Liberal Protestant mid-20th century society, initially that of the USA - ironically after having been weaponised by the CIA in the deconstruction/reconstruction of German culture post-WW2. If you visit Germany today, the Protestants are all full of c-M derived German guilt, the Catholics down in Bavaria and Austria are completely blase about WW2 and the Holocaust.

    So, cultural Marxism was designed to infect and destroy Protestant-Liberal cultures. Perhaps Protestant Liberalism bears the seeds of its own destruction, and without c-M some other agent would have come along soon enough - but for two centuries that was far from obvious. Our post-Enlightenment Liberal-Democratic societies seemed on top of the world, and are still militarily and culturally dominant.

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  11. Yes, Fascism was a progressive movement at the time, and yes, it really is the answer to what ails the West today. Traditionalism isn't a complete program, is it?

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  12. CamelCaseRob:
    "Yes, Fascism was a progressive movement at the time, and yes, it really is the answer to what ails the West today. Traditionalism isn't a complete program, is it?"

    Well like I said, Franco appeared to achieve a pretty successful Fascist-Traditionalist synthesis, but there's no precedent for anything like that in any Anglo-Protestant nation, which is where the heart of the current rot is. I can't even imagine what that would look like (leaving aside left-wing-written imaginary dystopias as in V for Vendetta et al).

    "Everything for the State? Nothing against the State?" Really? You advocate that? If not, what do you suggest?

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  13. The prime idea behind fascism is the belief that life is hard whereas progressives seem to believe that there is an unlimited supply of money to fund any and all kinds of malbehavior (if we would just tax the rich and those evil corporations more, LOL).

    Fascists believe that each ethnicity should have its own government without minorities opposing what is good for that ethnicity. In some way, Progressives have the same idea, because when you ask them about multiculturalism and ethnic mixing, they respond that they want eventually for there to be one worldwide ethnicity. Diversity, for them, is just an intermediate step.

    Fascist believe strongly in private enterprise working to produce wealth without interference from the government, but they insist that corporations keep in mind the interests of the polity and the people in mind -- globalism is out.

    Because life is hard and there is a limited amount of money, they oppose dystopic actions and encourage eugenics as a way of improving people.

    They are traditionalists and want one religion, one language, and one culture in each polity.

    They believe in equity, not equality. People should be rewarded according to how productive they are but with some regard to how hard they work, also.

    They believe strongly in civil order and crime prevention.

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  14. Numan's wife will have been menaced by lower-class white louts - chavs - not black gangbangers.

    You do know that one feeds the other right?

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  15. Generally those lower-class whites and black gang-bangers live with each other and love one another.

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  16. CamelCaseRob,

    Fascism was one of the nails in the coffin of the West.

    It was one of the big three modernist ideologies (liberalism, communism, fascism) which plagued Western civ in the period 1850 - 1950.

    Two of these ideologies have been seen off, but liberalism has remained to keep us in decline.

    Look at fascism in Germany. Like all moderns, the nazis rejected the idea of a transcendent good which could be a basis of social order.

    Instead what mattered was the assertion of will - the difference being that nazism rejected the liberal effort to find a way to allow the equal assertion of all individual wills.

    Instead wills were to be harmonised through the will of the leader.

    James Kalb is one of the best critics of non-liberal modernities. What follows may not be easy to grasp but it's worth the effort to do so since it explains well what was destructive about both bolshevism and nazism:

    It is not easy to make arbitrary will a principle of public order. Antiliberal moderns dramatize the paradox and then resolve it by emphasizing the conflicts and then appealing to collective power as their solution: the will of the people, party, or state, embodied in that of the supreme leader, overcomes all others and establishes order. The motive for participation in the effort, and thus the basis for loyalty to the regime, becomes the joy of smashing the opposition, together with comradeship in the struggle to make the willed order prevail.

    ...The result was catastrophe. Antiliberal modernists took as their principle of social order worship of the power of the order itself. In the absence of substantive goods that principle could express itself only through self-assertion against opposition, the more extreme the better. In the end infinite victory in infinite war became the ruling ideal of social life.

    A society that places itself on such a basis is not going to last. It will crash and burn like the Nazis, or sink into posturing, hypocrisy, and corruption that eventually becomes terminal, like the Soviets after Stalin.


    We should not be aiming to go back to a modernist ideology that has already disgraced itself and brought destruction upon Europe and the West.

    We don't need to look to anything so foreign. We have instead the example of the traditionalism upon which our own societies were founded.

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  17. Um, I thought traditionalists rejected democracy and wanted to go back to monarchies.

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  18. Um, I thought traditionalists rejected democracy and wanted to go back to monarchies.

    That's not a defining quality of traditionalism. There are some traditionalists who are monarchists, others who aren't.

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  19. anon:
    "Generally those lower-class whites and black gang-bangers live with each other and love one another."

    Not in the kind of rural market town where the incident occurred. Feral white youth have been a major problem in the UK at least since the '70s; and it's not just an urban thing.

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  20. CamelCaseRob:
    "Fascists believe that each ethnicity should have its own government"

    That would have been news to Mussolini.

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  21. Simon, good point.

    In fact, it seems most typical of fascists that they were imperialists - empire builders - rather than respecters of ethnic nations.

    For instance, Oswald Moseley promoted the idea that the whole of Europe and parts of Africa should become one nation. See here for an interesting, brief article on this.

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  22. ""That would have been news to Mussolini.""

    Indeed he intergrated quite a few Libyans into local fascist party supporting leagues.

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  23. A political philosophy based on homogenous ethnic (not necessarily racial)groupings will have a problem with stronger nations wanting to expand their size at the expense of surrounding states. But in this day and age of nuclear deterrence this is less of a problem. Weak nations can be protected from stronger nations by various means.

    I'm not that familiar with Mussolini's regime but I know he did go along with some purging of Jews.

    Ethnic minorities don't have to be eliminated as the Nazis set about doing. The Jews could have been integrated by forbidding the worship of their religion, forbidding the speaking of any language but German, and perhaps encouraging out-marriage to ethnic Germans. The Gypsies could have been forced into a non-traveling life style and strict law-enforcement would have shut down their theiving ways. Eugenics via sterilization for low IQ people would have improved the population of Germany gradually. Fascism demands something along these lines.

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  24. Not in the kind of rural market town where the incident occurred. Feral white youth have been a major problem in the UK at least since the '70s; and it's not just an urban thing.

    Did I say it was an urban thing? No. I was saying how those lower-class chavs have assimilated to black and other minority norms. They may be white in blood but they're culturally black.

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  25. Yes the majority of chavs stay within racial lines but others cross over and we have miscigenation. I've seen wiggers chase black chicks.

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  26. CamelCaseRob,

    If you're going to pursue the fascism line you're going to have to do it elsewhere. This is a site for traditionalist conservatives. As I commented previously, fascism was a modernist ideology in the sense that it rejected a transcendent good as a source of social authority. That's one reason why fascists could be so ruthless in the pursuit of their aims and also why there was a worship of will and power amongst fascists.

    I want this site to be a place where someone new to politics might learn a traditionalist alternative to liberal modernism. Musing about fascism doesn't help this at all, so please do it elsewhere.

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  27. As I commented previously, fascism was a modernist ideology in the sense that it rejected a transcendent good as a source of social authority.

    Interesting. I would put 'atheist conservatism' in the same bin.

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  28. Mark, on the issue of the immigration crisis facing the Anglo-Saxon countries, have you by any chance come across ex-Macquarie University professor Andrew Fraser's new book, The WASP Question?

    From the publisher:

    "Andrew Fraser’s The WASP Question deals with the question of Anglo-Saxon life in the United States, Australia and everywhere across the world where they have settled. Having for the most part lost a sense of their own ethnic identity in a time of increasing globalism and international multiculturalism which values nearly every culture except their own, the ‘WASPs’ – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – are alternatively mocked, attacked and ignored in their own lands. Professor Fraser addresses the many questions involved in the matter with impeccable erudition and proposes possible solutions for the future. Constitutional and legal history, evolutionary biology and Christian theology all come into play as Fraser tackles one of the most burning questions of our time. As an analysis of the problems, and possible way forward, faced by a European ethnic group, the book will be of interest to anyone concerned about the fate of not just the Anglo-Saxons, but any specific cultural and racial identity in the postmodern, multicultural age."

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  29. @CamelCaseRob - your description of Fascism bears very little resemblance to Fascism as actually practiced.
    When you say "Fascism" I'm pretty sure you're actually thinking of "National Socialism"; whether the Nazi version or the milder forms adopted in eg deValera's post-independence Ireland. The two ideologies eventually formed links, but they started out from quite different premises. NS is Romantic and Ethnocentric, Fascism is Modernist and Imperialist.

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  30. anon:
    "Did I say it was an urban thing? No. I was saying how those lower-class chavs have assimilated to black and other minority norms. They may be white in blood but they're culturally black."

    You're wrong to extend the modern London 'wigger' situation to areas of the UK without a black population. Belfast and other industrially-collapsed townds of the 1970s and '80s already had feral white youth with zero black influence. I saw it in Coventry (very small black population) in the '90s, too.

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  31. anon:
    "Mark, on the issue of the immigration crisis facing the Anglo-Saxon countries, have you by any chance come across ex-Macquarie University professor Andrew Fraser's new book, The WASP Question?"

    Thanks anon - I've just ordered it.

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