The new Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, in his first newspaper interview since taking up the position, called for British weapons manufacturers to set up shop in Ukraine and revealed discussions with Zelensky about the Royal Navy getting more involved in the Black Sea.
The biggest potential escalation was his suggestion that British military instructors be moved into Ukraine.
“I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well.”
As of yet, the UK and allies have avoided a formal military presence in the conflict due to the risk of direct conflict with Russia, so these were major policy changes being floated.
The same day, former Russian President and now deputy chairman of the country’s influential Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, posted on Telegram that such moves bring World War Three closer.
‘[This will] turn their instructors into a legal target for our armed forces… understanding perfectly well that they will be ruthlessly destroyed. And not as mercenaries, but namely as British NATO specialists.’
Just over two hours later, the Prime Minister had pushed back at the Defence Secretary’s comments telling reporters on the first day of his party conference there were no immediate plans for this:
“What the defence secretary was saying was that it might well be possible one day in the future for us to do some of that training in Ukraine. But that’s something for the long term, not the here and now. There are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict.”
Leaving aside Mr Shapps’ questionable ministerial record and lack of obvious suitability for his brief, this incident (which was conveniently brushed under the carpet of the Tory conference) raises some serious questions about decision making at the MoD.
Was this interview cleared with No. 10 and if so, are they now backtracking? Or did the Defence Secretary go off script and unsuccessfully try to use his own initiative?
Or was this government floating an idea and testing the waters? If so, they got their answer quick.
The sight of British soldiers returning in body bags in an election year might not be a big vote winner.
Government’s decision to ramp up support for Ukraine and double down on its all-or-nothing position comes as cracks in the alliance grow wider by the day.
As all this was unfolding, Slovakia was electing its next parliament, with an anti-Ukraine party winning the election. The country has already halted military aid to Kiev, joining the Hungarians.
Just two weeks ago, one of Ukraine’s strongest allies, compared it to ‘a drowning man’.
A dispute over grain exports got so bad that the Polish president said:
‘The drowning man is really clinging to anything available and it is somehow what the situation between Poland and Ukraine is like today… it is clinging to anything available. Can we hold grudges against them? Of course, we can. Do we have to act in a way to protect ourselves from being hurt by a drowning one, of course, we have to act in a way to protect ourselves from being harmed by the drowning one, because once the drowning man hurts us, it will not get help from us.’
This was quickly followed by the Polish prime minister announcing: “We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons.”
Next week will see Poland have its own elections, and like Slovakia, an anti-Ukraine party is doing very well in the polls, with hopes to be kingmaker.
The United States is not immune from political division over the conflict, with various presidential candidates from Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy to Robert F Kennedy Jr calling for its end.
Domestic political pressure and war fatigue aren’t the only factors creating friction between Western capitals. After 20 months of being told victory is round the corner, reality is starting to bite.
This week NATO’s most senior military official told the Warsaw Security forum the West is running out of ammunition for Ukraine. Admiral Rob Bauer said: “The bottom of the barrel is now visible.”
UK Defence Minister James Heappey also added that the West’s stockpiles were ‘looking a bit thin’.
This might explain the eagerness to have British weapons manufacturers ramp up production by setting up factories in Ukraine, but it does not explain the stubborn continuation of a failed strategy.
A policy should be judged by its results and as of writing, Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of its young men, millions more have fled, its economy is decimated, and its state is on life-support.
Russia, meanwhile, has weathered the sanction-induced storm which turned out to be a strong breeze rather than the predicted tornado. Its economy has not only held up but is on track to grow.
NATO’s eastern flank, be it Turkey, Hungary, now Slovakia and potentially Poland, is already publicly disagreeing and diverging from the Washington-London line, and this is likely to continue.
And the Washington line, as we have only seen too well over the last decade, is liable to change rapidly depending on the outcome of the next election.
So, can Britain afford to continue its Johnsonian zeal for trying to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian, or is it time to take back control of our foreign policy and start thinking seriously about Europe’s long-term security architecture?
I would hope that the government concerned with ‘long-term decisions for a brighter future’ would be reassessing its policy.
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What we must take from Marx
Britain is a nation that enjoys making light of its peculiarities and eccentricities. We enjoy having a laugh over a slightly self deprecating and scathing analysis of the fine-points of our society. We are keenly aware of the little things that set us apart – most famously the class system.
Unblemished by the tumults of the continent, we never saw fit to put whole socio-economic stratas to death, and such, on this isle has evolved a range of economic classes; that at times can seem whole cultures within themselves. The topic of a good Harry Enfield sketch, the plethora of verbal inflections in dialect, or what one tends to do on a Sunday, to general mannerism and pattern of speech – there is much that can set one into working, middle, or upper class. We view class not through a reasoned analysis, nor through a simple review of how much money is in one’s wallet – in fact, these tend to be quite secondary thoughts when judging someone’s place in the hierarchy.
Class is understood through a range of social signifiers, all of which have their root in one’s upbringing, which have their root in the upbringing of one’s father, and his father, and his father, and so on.
No matter how much money you win for your coffers, no matter how noble and high your method of work is, no matter how much you may put on a rendition of received pronunciation – you cannot really change your class. You may own a country estate, go shooting pheasants with the lads on Sunday, you may call your son Tarquin, but if your Dad came from a pit village, and passed down the speech, mannerism, and sentiments of said pit village to you – you’ll never leave the place. You may be able to win your son a jaunt up the social ladder, Joseph Chamberlain’s little known son called Neville transcended his father’s position in the middle class by growing up far away from his Dad at Eton, managing something of a different upbringing thereby.
The ultimate result of this strange institution is an utterly cartoonish understanding of class. It is entirely possible in this view of things, that a well-born feckless son from a manor in the home counties could spend his days shepherding pit-ponies around mineshafts in South Wales, and still outrank Gwyn Jones who was born in the pit village just adjacent, and made enough money to buy that very country estate mentioned.
Do not suppose that I write against such cartoons, they are quite wonderful, and I wish not for some Jacobin iconoclasm to mandate state-approved classes based upon occupation. These things make brilliant Harry Enfield sketches, however, when we seek to understand British society, and thereby create a successful right-wing movement, we have no time for the twee cartoons of such a sketch. We can not begin to engage in a successful right-wing, or nationalist political program without a firm understanding of how social classes interact in this country, every political movement must find itself between a class antagonism, lest it fail. Hence, we must begin to integrate Marx’s view of class into our thinking. Marx, despite standing in near complete contradiction to us, is the only thinker from which we can concretely define and analyse the real and tangible class divisions within the British people, beyond the thesis of a sketch.
Marxist class analysis centres around how one relates to the means of production. Totally ignoring someone’s salary or mannerisms – Marx defines class purely through the manner in which one works. We all know of the two main classes of industrial capitalism he expounds upon – the proletarian, and the bourgeois. The bourgeois class owns means of production (in Marx’s time this could be a cotton mill or a steelworks) he holds this capital, and purchases wage labour in order to produce goods with it. The Proletarian class are the folk from whom wage labour is purchased, not owning any means of production themselves, the working class sell their labour-power in order to make a living.
Furthermore, Marx introduces the petit-bourgeois class. Marxists (who cannot for the life of them agree on anything) disagree on what exactly this class is, and whom makes up its ranks. Simply, it could be said, the petit-bourgeois class may own alternative forms of capital (such as a small shop) but are unlikely to purchase labour power in the working of this capital, and wherein he does, he likely works side by side with the proletarians he pays.
Now, Marx does not ramble on like this all day, and he eventually gets to the point: antagonism. The ultimate purpose of delving into these social relations is getting to grips with the separate desires and interests each class works toward. To put it simply, the proletarian seeks to labour as little as possible for the greatest wage. The bourgeois, inversely, wishes for the proletarian to labour as much for the smallest possible wage.
In this, we find Marx’s most valuable lesson. In taking up his understanding of class, we need not blanketly throw his particular analysis of the Victorian urban sprawl onto our day, we need not even use the word bourgeois and such – in fact, the economic relations of our day can be said to have deviated so much from Marx’s day that such terms are useless. We must centre in on the antagonism between the classes, while also putting key caveats on our understanding of it.
If one is to ignore this doctrine of antagonism, then one is to ignore nearly all of British political history. Is not the rift that has dominated our nation since even before the Civil War that of Whig and Tory? One cannot separate these two groups from their diametric class antagonism. The Tory of the country, who profits from agriculture, who finds himself well off in the ancient landed hierarchies. The Whig who profits from the city, who thrives in more modern and capitalistic relations of the mill and steelwork. There are few debates of British political history that can be fully understood without getting to grips with this specific sociological battle. We cannot look to Peel’s full thrust support for the abolition of the corn laws, and championing of free trade thereby, without understanding that the Whig sought out this reform in order to ensure the flow of cheap grain into urban centres, and the mouths of their proletarians, at the expense of the Tory landowner and his tenant. Without this economic antagonism, there is no movement to abolish the corn laws.
Now, this is not to say that all hitherto history is that of class struggle, we should not assume that Peel was consciously plotting to pull the rug under the Tory landowner – no one thinks this way, in fact, class antagonism while informing these political disputes can sometimes enter the sub-conscious. We can understand this doctrine without becoming totally affixed to it.
Principally, we must maintain that class is not the prime fraternity of man. There is no international working class or the like, and such is a fanciful idea. Ultimately, one’s nation and ethnicity trump their class identity. Leftists like to imagine that they have more in common with a working class Chinaman than a billionaire of their ethnic kin, but while Richard Branson may have vastly different economic interests; you can share a conversation in your mutually native language, you celebrate the same festivities every year, you probably share the same cultural references and tidbits. Man is much more than his economic interests, and his identity goes much beyond what he’d like to be paid at work – such a totalising view of class ignores the depth that makes up men’s lives.
Nonetheless, we can simultaneously hold that ethnos is the prime fraternity of man, while recognising the inherent divisions within such a thing. Without a comprehension of these differences, we will remain ignorant as to how to effectively mobilise our people in a political movement. Blindly assuming that if we put forward a political program that broadly seeks to better the condition of the native Briton, that such will rally all sections of our people will lead us to ruin.
While it is true that in ‘diverse’ societies, democracy simply becomes an ethnic headcount (see South Africa) such diversity is concentrated in certain areas of our country. Areas such as Bradford fit this model much more, wherein the diametric antagonism between the native and immigrant groups naturally trumps the bounds of class, however in other areas of the nation this is not such. (Ironically, it is class antagonism that brought this into being. Former industrial areas are highly saturated with immigrant groups due to the importation of cheap labour into mills and cotton works, for example.) Thereby, we must understand the class antagonisms we can ride, and the classes with whom we have appeal.
To illustrate this, let us think to the average voter in the 1983 general election, the man who voted for Thatcher, and the man who voted for Foot. The man who voted for Thatcher, 38 years on, has likely benefited from the deindustrialisation of the country, much more attuned to a neoliberal regime of international finance and services. He is likely insulated from the demographic issues of the nation, perhaps he will scoff at some anti-social behaviour on the tube, but he is not bound by public transport. Let us think now to the man who voted for Foot, he has seen the industries his family worked in for generations crumble before his eyes, and the economic impetus of his town dry up. Equally, he has seen an unprecedented swamping of its demographic character in mere decades. He has lost his home, and his work at the behest of short sighted, shock doctrinaire neoliberalism.
Who is more likely, do you think, to support a nationalist cause? We all know that the working class tend to be more right-wing in our day, but if we do not understand the antagonism (being in this case, deindustrialisation) that this tendency has its roots in, then we shall fail to harness this support. Once we comprehend this, we will understand that nationalism has no future among the jungles of the free market, it must entail economic nationalism, and an active role of the state in economic affairs in order to steer the economy toward the national interest.
Without being at the parapet of class antagonism, that fuels all successful political movements, we march aimlessly into bogs and marshes. We must understand that nationalism has to be a movement in the interests of the disenfranchised native working class, that acts in the interests of that class. Without this, we are but ideologues barking into the wind.
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The Whitewash – A Review of ‘War on the West’ by Douglas Murray
To begin, it’s worth saying I owe something of a debt to Douglas Murray. He brought me to many of the positions I hold today, and while my overall impression of ‘War on the West’ was disinterest, it is only upon looking back at my own political journey I’m beginning to understand why I felt that way.
‘War on the West’ follows ‘The Madness of Crowds’ and the ‘Strange Death of Europe’ as Murray’s third book discussing the state of political affairs in the Western world. Murray’s thesis is best laid out by Murray himself:
“People began to talk of “equality”, but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism”, but they appeared deeply racist. They spoke of “justice” but they seemed to mean revenge.”
Herein lies the problem with ‘War on the West’, and why I moved away from Murray in my own life: there is no examination of what equality is to mean, what anti-racism is to look like, or what kind of justice is to be enacted, if any. The primary objection Murray has to the armies waging a war on the West is that their vision is not a classically liberal one. Explicitly antagonising white people with terms like ‘white fragility’, ‘white tears’, or ‘white privilege’ is bad because it racialises things Murray believes to have been deracialised by the Civil Rights Movement and other changes that occurred between the 1950’s to early 2000s. In his previous work, Murray uses an analogy of a train of equality pulling into the station, only to careen off down the tracks at a greater speed than ever before without allowing its passengers to get off. Throughout Murray’s work is an unexamined liberalism, that at best, is only ever criticised for being too pure. Liberalism, by its nature, criticises social orders for creating barriers for individuals. The many freedoms the West has provided have always come at the expense of the social orders liberalism eroded. Freedom for women came with the erosion of a patriarchal social order, and took with it the benefits such a system provided – such as the ability to raise a family on one income, a high degree of social trust, and a defined relationship between the sexes. It was inevitable that liberalism would eventually critique itself, and many of the authors Murray cites, from Kendi to DiAngelo, often build on those drawing on Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno. The former was given money by the Rockefeller Foundation, and even worked for what would become the CIA. In many ways, it was Western liberalism with its free flow of capital and revolving door between the academy and influential roles of state that enabled these theories to promulgate.
In his interview with the Telegraph promoting the book, Murray states:
“As long as people are armed with the right facts and the right arguments, I just don’t see how the cultural revolutionaries can win. I don’t know about you, but I’m not spending the rest of my life cringing and being told I’m guilty of things I never did. Not doing it, not guilty.”
This really begs the question of how exactly we got to this position to begin with. What’s most striking about ‘War on the West’ is that it does read almost like a recap of a war. Battlefields are specified, different players and their decisions are named, and Lord knows there are a huge number of casualties in the culture wars Murray describes. But, were the people who permitted things to reach this stage simply incapable of posing arguments against it? In one chapter, Murray notes that claims that America is founded upon stolen land are self-refuting because the many tribes of America stole the land from one another. Are we to believe Americans are so ignorant of their own history that this argument has never been made? Murray himself notes in the conclusion that outlets such as MSNBC and the New York Times will deny that Critical Race Theory is taught in schools, but acknowledge that it exists when forced. There are no arguments that can be used against such a thing.
Left out of ‘War on the West’ is any truly systemic analysis of the problem. The aforementioned New York Times moved to a paywall model in 2011, and from that point forward, the focus on things like ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, and ‘transphobia’ increased many times over. Around this time, legacy media was dying slowly. So newspapers moved from selling papers to many people to selling stories to a niche audience. The niche audience of the New York Times is the kind of cosmopolitan liberal who is very interested in niche identitarian trends, and in pitching themselves as radical while at the heart of the very system they claim to dislike. Despite this being a veritable War on the West, according to Murray, the emergency powers of war are never called upon. There are no calls to take decisive action to halt or prevent these systemic changes that led to this point. And in the conclusion, he defends the same economic system of capitalism that gave the New York Times its power, and forced it to change its business model to appeal to a niche audience of people hostile to Western people.
This attachment to a liberal historiography, in which individuals are given The Arguments and Make The Case, with spontaneous and emergent bottom-up change coming about as a consequence blinds Murray to the economic and legal realities that influence and shape this War on the West. Multiple universities are stated as battlegrounds for this war, but there is not a single mention of the fact universities are public authorities under the Equality Act (2010). That they have an ‘equalities duty’ to publish routine equalities reports, and must legally keep permanent members of staff dedicated to pushing this anti-Western message.
The only law Murray appears to mention in this vein is the Civil Right Act, which he defends as an example of the kind of good equality that he desires. Yet it was the Civil Rights Act which created the Civil Rights Commission, which in 1973 wrote to the Civil Service Commission and had them drop the standards for algebra in order to allow them to hire more non-white civil servants. Similar acts can be found in the UK. The Race Relations Act of 1973 (which performed the same anti-discrimination function as the Civil Rights Act he praises) created the Commission for Racial Equality. Today, the Race Relations Act has been assimilated into the aforementioned Equalities Act, and the Commission for Racial Equality has become the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which forces compliance with the Equalities Duty. There is a clear through-line from the civil rights legislation both in the USA and the UK, to the situation we are in now. The back of ‘War on the West’ reads as follows:
“The anti-Western revisionists have been out in force in recent years. It is high time we revise them in turn …”
Fundamentally however, there isn’t much of a revision of dominant left-wing narratives within ‘War on the West’ at all. Instead, it seeks to remind leftists that their own heroes, from Marx, to Foucault are also not spotless figures. This can only go one of two ways: either they ignore this, and nothing changes, or they recognise this, and move away from those figures, and as a consequence have doubled down on their principles of removing any and all unsavoury figures from public life. Regardless, none of this is at all revisionary, nor does it fundamentally challenge the values and beliefs of the cultural revolutionaries. A truly revisionist view of things would challenge the dominant understanding of things like the Civil Rights Movement, which was not (as Murray describes) people ‘making the case’ for rights, that the American public was so blown away by that they accepted and endorsed. Academic studies like that done on Rosedale show the side of desegregation that was forced upon people, and came at the cost of schools, neighbourhoods, communities and lives. Rosedale was a segregated community, but desegregation and the tensions that came with it made it difficult for authorities to maintain peace. The result was that many of the former residents who didn’t move out of their homes, found themselves the victims of racial violence by those who moved into the area, and had no regard for the police, who stopped policing the area out of fear of creating tensions. When Brown v. The Board of Education ended the desegregation of schools in America, and people protested, the national guard was sent in to disperse the crowd at gunpoint.
All of these changes were not the natural unfolding of human progress. They came today as they did in the civil rights movement, through force. Eisenhower and the national guard did not make the case for desegregation in light of Brown, they imposed it down the barrel of a gun. Whether that was right or wrong is irrelevant, that fact alone disproves the notion Murray insists upon in his recent public life – that the train of equality was chugging along gently, and only recently got out of hand. Equality is not a train chugging along set tracks, it is an amorphous blob that seeks to desacralise everything and dissolve all boundaries between all things. It does not progress in one direction alone, like a train, but expands in all directions and infects all things, including our supposedly right wing public figures.
In light of this, I still see some utility in Douglas Murray. Challenging double standards and hypocrisy is a cheap tactic which ultimately will not defeat those Murray opposes. Yet it is often the first chink in the armour for many people. I know I first came to move away from liberal beliefs because I found them to be contradictory, it was only in time I rooted out my own inherently liberal views, and ultimately moved to the political views and positions I hold now. In this respect, Murray is useful – he can confirm people’s suspicions about the modern left, and give them comfort that there is a public figure who opposes these things. It’s incumbent upon people with more bravery and introspection to take that one step further, and marry it with a systemic analysis of the situation, and propose and action a plan to undo these things and institute something new in its place.
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The Original “Original Right-Wing Gramscians”
Last year, The Mallard’s Chairman, Jake Scott, wrote two essays titled “The Original Right-Wing Gramscians”, detailing the history, ideology, and influence of free-market think-tanks in post-war Britain.
However, unlike the post-war free marketeers, whose “right-wing Gramscian” descriptor has been added retroactively, the French ‘New Right’ (Nouvelle Droite) openly characterised themselves, as did others, as “Gramscians of the Right” – both during their intellectual ascendancy in the 1970s, and during revived interest in their movement around the turn of the millennium.
Whilst technically established in 1968 with the foundation of the ‘Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne’ (GRECE; Research and Study Group for European Civilization), the most recent attempt at a unified doctrine for the French (and, by extension, European) New Right is found in an essay titled “The French New Right in The Year 2000” (FNR2K).
A relatively short work, the FNR2K reads less as a political manifesto and more as an intellectual one. Granted, the content is political, but it doesn’t confine itself to the trappings of electoral politics. After all, the French New Right (FNR) grew out of electoral alienation, instigated by consecutive right-wing electoral defeats throughout the 1960s.
This prioritisation of intellectualism over electoralism is made clear off-the-bat when Alain De Benoist, often dubbed the FNR’s leading figure, dispels the idea that the FNR constitutes a “political strategy”. Instead, the FNR is defined as a “school of thought” attempting to “formulate a metapolitical perspective”.
Metapolitics, Benoist continues, is “not politics by other means”. Rather, it is the idea that “ideas play a fundamental role in collective consciousness”. All human actions, trivial or revolutionary, take place within a framework of “convictions, beliefs, and representations which provide meaning and direction”. These “convictions, beliefs, and representations” are the focus of the FNR’s work. In simpler terms, metapolitics is that which is outside, but shapes, the development of politics.
FNR2K is divided into three sections: Predicaments, Foundations, and Positions. ‘Predicaments’ is divided into three sub-divisions: What is Modernity?, The Crisis of Modernity, and Liberalism: The Main Enemy, all of which provide context to the FNR’s intellectual work.
‘Foundations’ establishes the FNR’s theoretical first principles in relation to a variety of topics: man, society, politics, economics, ethics, technology, the world, and cosmos. Throughout, these first principles are juxtaposed with the theoretical first principles found in liberal modernity.
Finally, ‘Positions’ summarises that which the FNR is for and against, as well as an additional 13th stand-alone commitment to promoting “independence of thought and a return to discussion of ideas”.
The FNR interprets Modernity as a convergence of five processes: Individualization (the destruction of traditional communal life), Massification (the adoption of standardised lifestyles), Desacralization (the replacement of religious understanding with scientific understanding), Rationalization (the hegemony of “instrumental reason” via capital and technology), and Universalization (the globalisation of assumed-to-be superior models of social organisation).
The Crisis of Modernity refers to the failure of these processes to produce their initial promises of Freedom and Equality. Freedom has been reduced to a procedural formality; it means to operate “within the marketplace, technoscience or communications without ever being able to influence their course”. Erstwhile, Equality has failed two-fold. It has both “betrayed” the people it allegedly sought to benefit (e.g. the murderous nature of communist regimes) and has been “trivialized” (e.g. growing economic inequality under capitalism). Specifically, this has happened despite Equality being the foundational principle of both communism (equal access to means of production) and capitalism (equal opportunity to prosper within a market economy).
As such, the end result of Modernity is “the most empty civilization mankind has ever known”. Contrary to a free and equal paradise, “the language of advertising serves as the paradigm for public discourse, the primacy of money has made commodities an omnipresent feature of society. Man has turned from a social animal to a hedonistic object; he occupies an unreal world of drugs, virtual reality, media-hyped sports” – he operates as a “solitary individual” amid an “anonymous and hostile crowd”.
Considered to be “the dominant ideology of modernity”, it follows that Liberalism is the FNR’s primary intellectual target. Attacked for reducing life to individualistic economic competition, erstwhile imposing a hypocritical notion of value-neutrality, the FNR considers Liberalism responsible for creating a barren existence: survival for the sake of survival, an existence devoid of higher purpose or aspiration.
However, Liberalism is not the only target. Whilst charitably described as a “legitimate reaction”, the FNR dismisses Marxism as a counter-productive and misdirected response to the problems arising from Liberalism, being rooted in common modern presuppositions.
As an example, Benoist points to the modern welfare state. Emerging as a reaction to the autonomous market, the welfare state does not restore historic communal ties undone by Liberalism. Rather, it assisted in re-engineering society to adhere to the matrix of mere production and consumption. Whilst Liberalism is nothing more than a “global system of production and reproduction”, Marxism has created conformity around “an opaque redistributive structure”, one which has “generalised irresponsibility” and has transformed members of society into “nothing more than recipients of the public system”.
In summary, Modernity has reduced humanity to the lowest-common denominator; to the barebones of production and consumption, supplementing its constituents with a hypermodern array of metastasized rights and a dehumanising system of welfare. Compounded, the end result is a frightful and depersonalised lumpen.
In response to this hellish existence, the FNR begins to lay the ‘Foundations’ of its counter-ideology. At bottom-level, this means recognising a distinction between Pluriversuum and Continuum; a distinction between what is diverse and particular (‘plural’) and what is constant and universal (‘continuous’).
Contrary to Modern depictions of man, either as an “infinitely malleable” atomised individual or the sum of a single specialised factor (i.e., economy; homo economicus) – man is neither wholly determinable or determined.
For example, one can’t change his ethnicity or family, but can, in a moral sense, choose to “go beyond himself or debase himself”. In this instance, the Pluriversuum of man is exemplified by the natural diversity of communities which exist in the world, whilst the Continuum of man is exemplified by his ability to engage in decisions, irrespective of his particular community and its customs. Neither is more key to man’s nature than the other; they are distinct but equally important aspects of what he truly is.
Against the backdrop of the first section, the FNR sees Modernity as reducing Earthly existence to Continuum (technical decision-making within a globalised system of production and consumption) at the expense of Pluriversum; liberal modernity means global homogenization (or, as it has become known in some circles: globohomo).
Given this, it follows that the origins of man, a social animal, as well as the affairs of his society, are also beholden to this logic. Society cannot be reduced to a homogenised collective or aggregated individuals, but a “body of communities” – families, neighbourhoods, localities, national ethnicities and supranational groups; they are distinct and defined by their respective, precise, and unique relation to each other.
Politics is an art, offering a vibrant plurality of forms, renditions, improvements and cultivations, unlike the Modern understanding which situates politics as a system of management; decisions are made to be purely technical and “neutral”, denying any fundamental alternatives to the machine, reducing politics to a matter of stability, rather than the deliberation and actualisation of ideas.
Economics (oikos-nomos; family law) must be recontextualised, from the narrow realm of immediate and quantifiable transaction to a broader understanding which incorporates distinctly qualitative values, such as beauty, ecology, family, and ethics.
Ethical values, whilst universally contingent on the distinction between good and bad, and other such related categories, must be allowed to organically develop into specific customs appropriate for particular societies. The universal reduction of morality to “practical materialism” must be resisted. This principle of striving towards excellence, provided specific meaning by context, is also true of different modes of life within a community; a good plumber is better than a bad philosopher.
Technology, whilst celebrated for its “Promethean” capabilities, must be harmoniously balanced with environmental custodianship. Concern for the natural world should stem not from government regulation or technophobia, but from a shared moral conscience; one which earnestly wishes for future generations to inherit a world “no less beautiful, no less rich, and no less diverse than the world we know today”.
Having established their given context and theoretical response to said context, the FNR2K concludes with its ‘Positions’ – what it is against and for:
Against Uprooting, For Strong Community Identities; Against Racism, For Difference; Against Immigration, For Cooperation; Against Sexism, For Gender; Against The New Class, For Bottom-Up Autonomy; Against Jacobinism, For a Federal Europe; Against Depoliticization, For Democracy; Against Productivism, For New Forms of Labour; Against Ruthless Economic Policies, For Economy at the Service of the People; Against Gigantism, For Local Communities; Against Megalopolis, For Cities on a Human Scale; Against Unbridled Technology, For Integral Ecology; For Independence of Thought and a Return to Discussion of Ideas.
Many of these points will be intuitively, if not immediately, understood, such as the first, third, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth. After all, these are matters regularly discussed and supported by more traditional conservatives: social cohesion, national identity, strong borders, developing social and economic capital, aesthetical refinement of all kinds, and environmental custodianship.
Although there has been strong pushback against ‘gender ideology’ and corresponding issues (i.e. transgenderism), one shouldn’t be misinterpret De Benoist’s use of ‘gender’ – he’s saying very much the same thing: men and women are ontologically different and one cannot, and should not, become the other.
Even unfamiliar terms like “The New Class” immediately become familiar once De Benoist pins down a summary:
“…the manpower for the media, large national and multinational firms, and international organisations. This New Class produces and reproduces… the same type of person: cold-blooded specialists, rationality detached from day to day realities… engenders abstract individualism, utilitarian beliefs, a superficial humanitarianism, indifference to history, an obvious lack of culture, isolation from the real world, the sacrifice of the real to the virtual, an inclination to corruption, nepotism and to buying votes… The New Class depersonalises the leadership of Western societies and… lessens their sense of responsibility.”
All this said, some points are likely less understood from the get-go. Despite being listed second, the commitment to ‘difference’ is perhaps the central defining tenet of the FNR. Dubbed “the right to difference” De Benoist suggests, as a matter of principle, that diversity is good – diversity of people, cultures, systems, products, religions, and ideas.
Placing primary emphasis on ethnocultural diversity, the “right to difference” is meant to counteract what De Benoist sees and refers to as “the ideology of sameness” – an all-encompassing term for global homogenization and all its various forms: mass immigration, economic and cultural globalisation, philosophical universalism, egalitarianism, and so on.
However, whilst the “right to difference” forms the basis for the FNR’s support for group-based, individual, and ideological differences, it also provides a basis for conserving differences in a whole host of other domains.
Democracy is, first and foremost, understood as a rejection of universal equality; it recognises “a people” – defined by a common, but distinct, sense of membership – as the basis for legitimate deliberation and decision-making, both in the name of the common good and as an expression of individual agency. This is situated in contrast to depoliticization, which does not recognise the existence of a people, and by extension the sovereignty of the people, allowing bureaucrats, technocrats, and lobbyists to forego pluralism and disqualify certain political programs at will.
Similarly, instead of a “Europe of Nations” or a “European Nation”, the FNR2K poses organic regional secession from existing European nation-states, and the ‘bottom-up’ federalized along Eurocultural lines (including Russia), affording distinct identities and devolved powers to all principalities, with the exception of “those matters which escape the competence of the lower level” and apply to “all the federal communities” of Europe, such as major military, diplomatic, legal, environmental, and infrastructural matters.
The FNR believes: “the nation-state is now too big to manage little problems and too small to address big ones” – civilizational superorganisms, organised in a polycentric patchwork, albeit with integrated research, industry, communications, and currency, are necessary for securing autonomy, tranquillity, and difference.
Labour must be reinterpreted beyond a ‘productivist’ understanding – it must incorporate work that is conducted and valued for qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, reasons; this ranges from labours of love and duty to ensuring the fruits of labour strive for timelessness, rather than obsolescence.
Additionally, modernity has created a society “where payment by salary is the principal means of integration into social life”. As such, the mission of reimagining labour is two-fold: “to work less in order to work better and in order to have some time for oneself to live and enjoy life”.
Tell me: doesn’t it feel as though you’ve heard all of this before? That you have felt, read, or even articulated such sentiments yourself? To be clear: I am not remarking on the originality or unoriginality of the FNR2K. After all, what good would such a point prove? ‘Originality’ – the moralist insistence to reinvent, the insistence of newness as a virtue – is a cornerstone of modernity.
Rather, I am remarking on how a document published over 20 years ago still bears an uncanny resemblance to matters the British right has, seemingly, only begun to publicly engage with, even if only peripherally, over the past few years: disaffection with liberalism, deracination in a society struggling to be cosmopolitan, the ‘bloatedness’ of institutions, the sense of ennui amid barely managed decline, the ‘re-emersion’ of tribal and class antagonism, the vicious discourse surrounding hereditarian innateness and social malleability, the homogenisation of everything from brand logos to community identities, from the sound of music to values and customs, from architecture to our options at election time.
Despite this, Francophobia has become something of an informal cornerstone of the British right’s identity; THB Britain Should Invade France, etc. Such parochialism, whether sincere principle or hollow performance, does not aid our political or intellectual development.
If the British right is prepared to concede, as it has done so before, that despite historic animosity and cultural differences, Britain and France share common civilisational challenges (multi-faceted demographic change, the future of freedom, sclerotic and hostile institutions, etc.) then it should also be prepared to engage with and learn from French – and more broadly, European – interpretations of affairs.
It’s no debate. The French right talks about positive visions for the future, the British right talks about the Plank of the Week. Whilst the British right mobilised to find footage of Keir Starmer not wearing a seatbelt, the French right almost made Eric Zemmour president of the republic. In Britain, we’ve only just got around to discussing illegal immigration. By contrast, France is way ahead of us.
It’s clear that many of our problems are here at home, not with the “Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys”. Given how intellectually barren the political landscape is generally, particularly on the right, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to look beyond the English Channel, and see what our continental adjacents can offer as inspiration.
