London New Right meeting, October 2010
Several EFP members attended the latest meeting of the ‘New Right’ in London on 23rd October. This is a non-party discussion group which is run by former BNP advisory council member Jonathan Bowden and Troy Southgate, founder of the National Anarchist Movement. It operates on an entirely non-sectarian and non-factional basis.
The latest event attracted an audience of eighty nationalists including numerous current and former BNP members as well as members of the England First Party and National Front.
First speaker was Norman Lowell, founder of the Malta-based movement Imperium Europa whose topic was “Implementing the Imperium”. Mr Lowell spoke of the need to unite European nationalists in a pan-continental struggle to re-establish the values of our race. Rather optimistically he believes that the various existing nationalist parties that have already won representation in the European Parliament can be won over to a common programme under radical leadership – though it seems a long way from Nick Griffin’s chiselling of expense accounts to the grand vision of Atlantis reborn that lies at the heart of Mr Lowell’s project. The new European Imperium would also extend eventually to an alliance with racial brothers overseas, particularly in parts of the Americas (North and South), Southern Africa and Australasia. Further details are at Mr Lowell’s website Imperium Europa.
Next was Martin Webster, national activities organiser of the National Front from 1969 to 1983 (with brief intervening periods out of office due to factional and legal disputes). Mr Webster spoke of Britain’s central responsibility for the fate Palestine, and why “Justice for Palestinians is a vital British national interest”. At the crudest level of national self-interest Britain would be better off allied to the oil-producing Arab states than to the Zionist state, which has no oil and precious few strategic resources of its own, and survives solely by exploiting the goodwill (or the guilt) of others. On a more elevated level Mr Webster pointed out that Britain’s position in the world depended ultimately on keeping promises and facing up to responsibilities. Our debt to the Palestinian Arabs after the First World War was betrayed by the Balfour Declaration agreed with Lord Rothschild, which formed the basis for a second betrayal after the Second World War when after a three year bloody resistance to Zionist demands Britain capitulated to the new pirate state of Israel. Mr Webster acknowledged that the most decent and patriotic government in this respect was the 1945-51 Labour government led by Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, but that government’s honourable early stance was betrayed by Bevin’s successor Herbert Morrison (grandfather of Peter Mandelson) – a betrayal which has continued to this day.
The third speaker was Dr Tomislav Sunic, well known to readers of Heritage and Destiny which has reviewed two of his books: Homo Americanus and Against Democracy and Equality. Tom Sunic is one of the leading thinkers of the European New Right, and on this occasion he spoke on “Schopenhauer and the Perception of the Real or Surreal Postmodernity”. He insisted that Schopenhauer was not primarily (in fact hardly at all) a directly political writer. Though he had made pungent comments about Judaism this should be seen in the context of his overall thought and times – for example Schopenhauer wrote:
“While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations.”
For Schopenhauer the importance of religion and other traditional practices and systems of thought was as a form of “hyper-reality”. These were not to be judged by the liberal Establishment standards of Reason, but by how such hyper-reality helped to make life itself tolerable and comprehensible – since for a cultural pessimist such as Schopenhauer life could not be comprehended in positive, rationalist terms. An online version of Dr Sunic’s talk will be available shortly.
This formed an appropriate link to the final speech of the day, by leading British New Right figure Jonathan Bowden, whose topic was “Savitri Devi: Daughter of the Black Sun”. Born in France of combined European ancestry, Maximiani Portas travelled to India in the early 1930s and adopted a form of Hinduism and Hindu nationalism. By 1940 she was already a profound admirer of national socialism, and she then married the equally pro-German Brahmin Asit Krishna Mukherji.
Mr Bowden outlined the basis of Devi’s world view as the polar opposite of all political temporising – she implicitly believed that all truth was to be found by taking the most extreme philosophical or political positions. Her ultimate deification of Adolf Hitler – and her view that the catastrophe which befell the German people was a purification by blood and fire which would eventually contribute to the creation of a new, higher civilisation, in accordance with an eternal “law of violence” – would as Mr Bowden states probably see her ceritified mad by 21st century liberal standards.
Yet if a “New Right” is to succeed in overthrowing the current liberal, egalitarian hegemony, this “daughter of the Black Sun” has important insights for those building a new ideology for a reborn Europe.
