The Magazine

CasaPound is an Italian political movement that takes its name from the American poet and Fascist sympathizer, Ezra Pound. Although it is inevitably referred to as "extremist," "racist," and "neo-fascist," the movement, which was founded in 2003, is in fact more complex and interesting, especially from an alternative right perspective. It takes a holistic and grass roots approach to politics, focusing on culture, community, and a variety of activities for its members, as much as on traditional street politics. This is an interview I did by email with Gianluca Iannone, the movement's leader, in early 2011 for an article I was writing.

CasaPound is still not so well known in the English-speaking countries, even by those active in right wing politics. Could you introduce your movement to our readers and describe it? How big is CasaPound? How many members and how much support do you have?

First of all, linking CasaPound to the right wing is a bit restrictive. CasaPound Italia is a political movement organized as an association for social promotion. It starts from the right and goes through the entire political panorama. Right or left are two old visions of politics, we need to give birth to a new synthesis. CPI has more than 4000 members all over Italy but the supports and sympathy we gain days after days is far larger… Just think that the Blocco Studentesco, our student organization, obtained 11,000 votes in Rome and the Province for the students’ elections.

Please tell us a little about yourself personally and your background.

I was born in August 1973 and started political activism at 14 in the Fronte della Gioventù (Youth Front) in Acca Larenzia, one of Rome's downtown neighborhood. Since then I have never stopped to be part of this world. Journalist since 1999, I worked for TV and radio stations and also wrote for national newspapers on international conflicts, literature, cinema and music.

Lincoln Cathedral looms above its locus like a celestial city of its own, its three towers on top of its lofty limestone cliff drawing all eyes for miles in every direction to focus on its perfection and their abjection.

It is one of the great buildings of medieval Europe, a perfectly-judged coda to the Steep Hill up which city dwellers and visitors have struggled breathlessly for centuries to Iron Age and even older forts, the Romans’ colonia of Lindum where the Fosse Way crossed Ermine Street, and a piquant parade of counts and chevaliers, serfs and saints, merchants, moneylenders and mendicants living, working and dying in round-arched, herringbone-patterned houses so strongly built by Norman masons that a few are still in use, some of the oldest domestic buildings in the West.

Roman roads lead to and from the city, often ruler-straight, always ruthless—north through the still-standing Newport Arch to the Humber, Yorkshire and Scotland—westward to the Trent and Nottinghamshire—south to Sleaford, Grantham and London (part of the actual surface, complete with cart-tracks, preserved under the Guildhall at the foot of the Hill)—east through lumps of hills tumbling eventually into the verdancy of the Lincolnshire Marsh, through which the ghosts of tide-dependent trackways wend towards the shadows of salterns.

We had come along that eastern road that morning, swooping through wisps of mild mist, past prehistoric barrows and undulating pastures full of Lincoln Reds, always under the eyes of buzzards—seeing the Cathedral grow before us from distant spikes to dizzying stronghold, struck into silence as ever by the sight, doubly aware of it today because of the occasion.

Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower is an apt follow-up to his 2002 volume, The Death of the West. Although the new book focuses on the United States, it restates and updates the narrative of the older book. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the former refers briefly to the latter early on.

Buchanan’s main thesis is this:

When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization.

Suicide has stirred some controversy in the mainstream media for stating what for many is, or should be, known and obvious, but which for the majority is either not so or taboo: the negative consequences of immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism.

Yet, the book has obtained wide coverage and seems widely available—last month, while travelling in the United States, I saw it prominently displayed in the bookshops of major airports. This is a significant achievement that must not pass without notice, for there are others who have been advancing identical theses without the same level of exposure.

Suicide, however, is not without significant limitations, and these merit detailed discussion, for they stem from an outlook that will need to be overcome if we are ever to move forward with an effective solution to the suicide of America and the rest of the West.

The Pluses

With 428 pages of meat in it, Suicide is divided into 11 chapters, each of which is in turn divided into shorter sections with lapidary titles. The chapters are: The Passing of a Superpower, The Death of Christian America, The Crisis of Catholicism, The End of White America, Demographic Winter, Equality or Freedom, The Diversity Cult, The Triumph of Tribalism, The ‘White’ Party, The Long Retreat, and The Last Chance.

In none does Buchanan flinch from presenting the facts as they are. And where there are lacunae, Kevin MacDonald has already filled them with his Culture of Critique. The first chapter is in tone apocalyptic, yet the sheer rapidity of the United State’s decline as a superpower justifies that tone; Rome’s decline in wealth and capability may have taken longer, but America’s is comparable and, as Buchanan presents it, suggests familiar buildings and everyday objects one day becoming ruins and broken artefacts in a continent abandoned to a dark age. Buchanan proposes solutions in the final chapter, but, besides flawed (and I get to that further down), they are conditional, which lends the trajectory of decline traced throughout most of the volume an aura of inevitability. This is not an indulgence on pessimism, because all previous empires eventually collapsed, and all previous great civilisations in history came to an end.

In his detailed discussion of Christianity’s role in the United State, and of the crisis of Catholicism, Buchanan acknowledges the importance of the transcendent. Many of the ills that afflict the West in our age are linked to, if not the result of, a materialist conception of life, and of the consequent subjection to a secular economist criterion of all matters of importance to a nation and a people. The dispossession and loss of moral authority of the White race in their own traditional homelands was to a significant degree achieved through, or caused by, economic arguments. It was not the so-called ‘civil rights’ movement in the United States that turned Detroit into a ruin; what turned it into a ruin was the reliance on economic arguments—so characteristic of the materialist liberal outlook—that enabled the decision to purchase Black slaves in African markets and ship them to North America. Similarly, the loss of moral and spiritual vigour, which has so enfeebled the White race and sapped its will to live, can be traced to the rise of secularism, to the severing of the race’s link to the transcendent. ‘Where are the martyrs for materialism?’ he asks.

To this Buchanan adds a helpful discussion about equality and freedom. He explodes the liberal conception of them as concomitant concepts, and convincingly presents them as polar opposites in a dichotomy: greater equality means less freedom, greater freedom means less equality. Buchanan makes clear that the only possible way to see these two concepts as concomitant is by ignoring human biodiversity, for, where inborn differences in physiology impose upper limits to human plasticity, equality—the elimination disparities in outcome—cannot be achieved without handicapping the cause of those disparities. Thus, the freedom to choose among the best universities is limited for bright White students when entry requirements are relaxed among less able non-White students in the effort to achieve equal outcomes among all racial groups.

The chapters on the diversity cult and tribalism re-state arguments that have for years been advanced by Jared Taylor. Taylor has done it in much greater detail, but Buchanan will reach a much wider audience, so this is a gain. Buchanan also echoes the Sailer Strategy—‘the idea that inreach to its white base, not outreach to minorities, is the key to future GOP success’—in his discussion of his party’s prospects as Whites decline in the United States. And, like Taylor, he ridicules those who see this decline as a cause for celebration.

Also like Taylor, but in the economic area, Buchanan reveals some astonishing facts. Apparently, the United States military relies on equipment that cannot be made without parts manufactured by potential enemies and economic rivals. Did you know that?

Another helpful discussion is introduced in the final fourth of the book, where Buchanan, following Amy Chua, deals with the fatal design flaw that afflicts multiethnic nations that have embraced democracy and capitalism:

Free markets concentrate wealth in the hands of a market-capable ethnic minority. Democracy empowers the ethnic majority. When the latter begin to demand a larger share of the wealth, demagogues arise to meet those demands.

This is a reply to the economic argument for the state-sponsored policy of immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism in the West, repeated without proof and refuted by empirical studies everywhere, that supposedly boosts economic growth because diverse immigrants ‘bring in skills’ and foster greater creativity. In fact, said policy leads to Whites becoming dispossessed minorities, as they already did in a number of other former European colonies. Buchanan points out that people like Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, use ‘principles invented by white men—universal franchise and majority rule—to dispossess white men’. He also quotes 19^th century Rightist Louis Veuillot to describe how democrats are dispossessed by non- (or ‘instrumental’) democrats: ‘When I am the weaker I ask you for my freedom because that is my principle; but when I am the stronger I take away your freedom because that is my principle’. He asks: ‘What does the future hold for the West when people of European descent become a minority in nations they created, and people of color decide to vote themselves proportionate or larger shares of the national wealth?’

In terms of solutions, Buchanan offers common sense advice: the United States should live within its means and actively take steps to cut its deficits. For him this means pruning government and government expenditure, including social security benefits and military bases overseas; and instituting a policy of economic nationalism, levying tariffs on imports and cutting corporation tax to zero, so as to revive manufacturing in the United States, attract overseas investment, and reduce reliance on imports. I do not think even economists will agree on whether this would yield the desired results, but at least Buchanan is making concrete policy proposals that place the interests of his country first, and is willing to accept that ethnonationalism is an inescapable reality of the human condition. 

The Minuses

There are fundamental flaws in Buchanan’s exposition.

Firstly, he equates European civilisation with Christianity. This is surprising, particularly coming from an American writer, advancing an Americanist position, given that some of the basic principles and practices upon which America was founded, such as the constitutional republic, originated or had their roots in Europe well before the dawn of Christianity. What about ancient Greece? What about ancient Rome? Were those not European civilisations? A more accurate statement is that the United States is a Christian country. This is defensible, even if the United States never had an established religion and even if not all Americans were Christian. Perhaps what Buchanan means is that Faustian civilisation—the civilisation of Northern Europe, of which North America is an extension—is a Christian civilisation.

Buchanan is correct to identify the decline of Christianity in America as one of the roots of its decline. In doing so, however, he has Edward Gibbon as his inverse counterpart, for Gibbon identified the rise of Christianity in Rome, that is, the decline of the Roman religion, as one of the causes of Rome’s fall. Gibbon would have sympathised, perhaps, with the statement, ‘When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die.’ Yet, given that the fall of Rome did not mean the end of European man, and that if the rise of Christianity was linked to Rome’s fall, the rise of Christianity was also linked to the rise of Faustian civilisation. All this tells us, therefore, is that we may be witnessing the end of a cycle involving Christianity. However, even if it is Christianity’s fate to pass, as have other religions, or to become a ‘Third World religion’, as Buchanan puts it, European man will still be there, at least for a while, and, provided he survives as a race, he will give rise to a new civilisation, traceable to the Greek, the Roman, and the Faustian, but founded on somewhat different principles. This will bring no comfort to Christians, nevertheless, and Buchanan, as a Christian, is justified in his alarm.

Gibbon would concede that Buchanan makes a powerful argument for Christianity. A monotheistic religion with a personal god can be a potent unifying force, eliciting much stronger commitments from its followers. The Roman pagans were easygoing, and vis-à-vis other religions, the pagan outlook, as expressed by Nehru in a conversation with the former Chilean Ambassador in India, Miguel Serrano, is generally ‘live and let live’. One can easily accept that it is not difficult to decimate a people with that outlook, for, in as much as it resembles the multiculturalists’ easygoing attitude to all religions except Christianity, it is proving daily in our society an agent of dissolution. It may well be that in a world of intense ethnic competition, a high-tension—even totalitarian and intolerant—religion is the more adaptive group evolutionary strategy. Buchanan’s discussion on the growth and endurance of evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, and militant Islam indicates he is of this view, and that is a plus consistent with his recognition of the importance of the transcendent. Yet he inadvertedly exposes a conundrum: if Christianity is a universal faith, accommodating every race and nationality, as he says, and if, as he also says, non-evangelical forms of Christianity have declined because they are accommodating, then, would this not suggest that Christianity will not survive in practice as the White man’s religion unless it becomes a non-accommodating faith?

Secondly, Suicide makes it clear that Buchanan cannot conceive of anything beyond the America of the 1950s. This is the most unfortunate aspect of this book. It is also the reason why Buchanan offers no real solutions, other than turning back the clock. Were his recommendations implemented in the United States, they would only retard the processes that are in place, achieving a temporary reprieve, a momentary stabilisation, before resuming their course, perhaps with renewed vigour and speed.

What Buchanan seems not to recognise is that, while the 1950s may have felt good for many, the conditions for the modern trends that he condemns were already in place then. They were simply masked by the transient prosperity, stability, and romanticism of the era. The 1950s led to the 1960s. And the upheavals of the 1960s had their roots in the academics of the 1930s, who in turn had their roots in Marxism, dating back to the 19^th century, which in turn had its roots in liberalism and the Enlightenment in the 18^th century. And this is not merely a question of there having always been a hostile faction within the American republic, seeking to undermine it with its insidious liberalism; the conservatives who opposed Marxism also had their intellectual roots in 18^th-century liberalism. Buchanan makes it seem as if the United States has been hijacked by liberals, but the fact is that it has always been in the hands of liberals, right from the beginning: the United States was founded and is predicated on the ideas of liberal intellectuals, and its Founding Fathers were liberals. If the United States seems to be spearheading the process of Western decline, bringing everyone down with it, it is because liberalism took stronger root there than anywhere else, due to a lack of opposition to liberal ideas.

From this perspective it can be argued that Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower is not the result of the United States’ being ‘far off the course set by [the] Founding Fathers’, but rather of the United States’ being exactly on that course, even if the Founding Fathers never anticipated that it would lead where it has led.

As a conservative in a republic founded by liberals, Buchanan is by definition a liberal, defending a previous stage in the development of liberalism. Hence his failure to see beyond liberalism’s event horizon.

Liberals have a linear conception of history. Thus Buchanan hopes that by prescribing better liberal policies (what he would call conservative policies), the American republic can be set back on course and resume its trajectory of endless progress and economic growth. Unfortunately, treating the problem as if it were a disease in need of a cure is futile when the problem is a congenital defect. In such cases the best hope is genetic resequencing, a form of death and rebirth. Most likely it will mean certain death and a possible rebirth, elsewhere, as something else, perhaps in North America, but at first, if at all, only in a part of it. Concretely this means the break-up of the union into regions and the emergence among them of a dominant republic among weaker ones, with strength or weakness being a function of the dominant racial group in each case.

Similarly futile is the attempt to revert a civilisation to an earlier stage of development. In the Spenglerian view this would be like trying to turn an old dog back into a puppy, or an old tree back into a bush. Technology may make it possible one day to reverse the physical effects of ageing, but it will not erase the memories and conclusions of a lifetime, and therefore not rejuvenate the spirit. This applies even in the non-organic realm: we may be able to restore an old mechanical typewriter so that it looks and works like new, but it will still be obsolete technology, and its reason for being will shift from usable tool to unusable antique.

Unfortunately for those living today, reality is more in accord with the organic conception of history, whereby things go in cycles and slow build-ups lead to rapid changes in state. Following Spengler, Francis Parker Yockey argued that attempts to cause a reversion into an earlier state of development will at best yield temporary results, introducing distortions that will be magnified as the next stage of development indefectibly follows.

One can sympathise with the argument that it would be worse if the current political leadership in the United States managed to stabilise the economy and perform plastic surgery on the face of America, as this would buy said leadership more time and permit existing trends to remain in place until the possibility of a White rebirth in North America, even without United States, became extinct. A Spencerian collapse sooner may open up avenues that may be closed later.

Buchanan wonders whether the United States will implode by 2025. This was my own scenario in Mister, where the United States disintegrates in a hyperinflationary chaos. But it is difficult to predict with accuracy and I would not want to speculate beyond a possible dismemberment along regional lines sometime this century. When it happens, whenever it may happen, those who remember the America we know today and who did not know better until it was too late will be amazed that people thought the United States would go on forever. They will also be amazed that people ever thought as they do now, despite the final outcome being so blatantly obvious. Buchanan’s diagnosis is mostly accurate, but his treatment, well intentioned as it is, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The Balance

Despite its defects, there is no escaping it: Suicide of a Superpower is a punishing indictment of the United States’ post-war political leadership, authored by a prominent conservative who speaks as part of America’s mainstream establishment. Any White American fed up with the way things have been going in recent decades and looking for new politics beyond Democrat or Republican will find here solid justifications for going beyond convention and eventually adding his muscle to the struggle for fundamental change.

Suicide will not awaken the complacent, induce the fearful to speak up, or cause ideological enemies to change their views. The complacent is comfortable in his ignorance and does not want his world disrupted by inconvenient truths; in most cases he has the means to avoid them by insulating himself economically. The fearful, who knows but remains silent, will not be emboldened by Buchanan’s confirming him in his views; he will wait, as he has always waited, and then side with change once it looks like it is going to win. The ideological enemy is beyond convincing; the only solution is to crush him thoroughly.

Should you buy Suicide of a Superpower? The answer is yes. Not only is it brave, but it contains many helpful insights and bewildering facts to fuel a healthy debate. The fact that the book is everywhere has also infuriated the radical Left, who have renewed their efforts to have Buchanan fired by MSNBC. The radical Left does not want this kind of discussion to take place in a mainstream media forum. In fact, radical Leftists would like Buchanan to be banned from the networks, shunned by his publishers, phlebotomised by the taxman, prosecuted by the ICC, and sent to the gulags, to spend his old age in poverty, obscurity, and hard labour—surrounded, of course, by politically correct diversity. To his credit, Buchanan has not buckled in to criticism. Therefore, every copy that is sold is a kick to the radical Left, and added impetus for the book to reach more persuadables.

With enough manpower and talent it will be possible to survive the cataclysm and make it through to the other side. The other side is something entirely new; traditional, but different—it is not the White America of the 1950s, nor Reagan on steroids, nor is it a linear extrapolation of what is good about the 2010s minus what is bad. For Whites to survive in America, Americanism must end. Those who survive will be the architects of what comes after Americanism; they will not call themselves Americans—the designation may not even make sense for them. Viewed from the other side, with the old certainties gone and new ones in place, it will be impossible to think as we do today, even if future generations carry forward much of our knowledge, traditions, and cultural legacy.

A propos:
Dominique Venner.
Le choc de l’Histoire. Religion, mémoire, identité.
Versailles: Via Romana, September 2011.

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –Nietzsche

Conservative thinking, Karl Mannheim notes, is essentially historical thinking—in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time.

Some anti-liberals are wont thus to situate their ‘conservative’ project within the frame of Europe’s historical destiny and the higher design informing it.

The most renowned of such historical thinkers (representing what Carolina Armenteros calls the ‘the French idea of history’) was the father of European anti-liberalism, Joseph de Maistre—though he is not our subject.  Rather, it is the foremost contemporary avatar of anti-liberal historical thought: Dominique Venner.

The 75-year-old, French-speaking European of Celt and German descent, father of five, Venner is a historical scholar, a writer of popular histories and of various works on firearms and hunting, as well as the editor of two successful, artfully illustrated historical journals.

But whatever his genre, Venner bears the knightly (or legionnaire) standard of Europe’s multi-millennial heritage—the heritage, he claims, that took form with the blind poet, who is the father of us all—the heritage whose Homeric spirit knows to honor the brave, bare-foot soldiers of the Confederacy and the social banditry of Jesse James—and, most insistently, the heritage that expects a future commensurate with Europe’s incomparable past.

Venner is not your average academic historians; indeed, he’s not an academic at all. His life has been lived out on the last of France’s imperial battlefields; in Parisian street politics, in the outlawed OAS, in prison, and in laying the conceptual foundations of the European New Right; and finally, since his early thirties, in the various libraries, archives, and communal memories he’s searched to produce the 50 books he’s written on the key historical upheavals of the last century or so.

Unsurprisingly, his historical sense is ‘over-determined’—not solely by an  intelligence steeped in the life of the mind, but also by disciplines acquired in those schools of initiands known only to the political soldier.

His latest book—Le Choc de l’Histoire—is not a work of history per se, but a series of meditations, in the form of a book-long interview (conducted by the historian Pauline Lecomte) on the historical situation presently facing Europeans. These meditations approach their subject in parallel but opposite ways: 1) one approach surveys the contours of Europe’s longue durée—those centuries of growth that made the great oak so venerable—and, in the spirit of the Annales School, reveals her ‘secret permanences’, and, 2) a very different but complementary approach that silhouettes the heroic individuals and individual events (Achilles and the Iliad foremost) exemplifying the Homeric spirit of European man—disclosing his possibilities, and offering him thus an alternative to his programmed extinction.

Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now—however slowly—beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious.

Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself—the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind.

The Sleep

The Second European Civil War of 1939-1945, however it is interpreted, resulted in a cataclysmic defeat not just for Hitler’s Germany, but for Europe, much of which, quite literally, was reduced to mounds of smoldering rumble. Then, at Yalta, adding insult to injury, the two extra-European super-powers partitioned the Continent, deprived her states of sovereignty, and proceeded to Americanize or Sovietize the ‘systems’ organizing and managing the new postwar European order.

As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization—believing, as they were encouraged, that they were simply one people, equal among the world’s many peoples.

Worse, for their unpardonable sins—for what Europeans did to Jews in the war, to Blacks in the slave trade, to non-White peoples in general over the course of the last 500 years—for all the terrible sins Europeans have committed, they are henceforth denied the ‘right’ to be a ‘people’. In the Messianic spirit of Communism and Americanism, the Orwellian occupiers and collaborators have since refused them a common origin (roots), a shared history, a tradition, a destiny. This reduces them to a faceless economic-administrative collectivity, which is expected, in the end, to negate the organic basis of its own existence.

The postwar assault on European identity entailed, however, more than a zombifying campaign of guilt-inducement—though this campaign was massive in scale. Europe after Jahre Null was re-organized according to extra-European models and then overwhelmed with imported forms of mass consumerism and entertainment. At the same time and with perhaps greater severity, she was subject to an unprecedented ‘brain-washing’ (in schools, media, the so-called arts, public institutions, and private corporations)—as all Europe’s family of nations, not just the defeated Germans, were collectively made to bear a crushing guilt—under the pretext of the Shoah or the legacy of colonialism/imperialism/slavery—for sins requiring the most extreme penance. Thus tainted, her memory and identity are now publicly stigmatized,

Venner’s Europe is not, of course, the Soviet/New Class-inspired EU, just as she is not the geographical entity labeled ‘Europe’. Rather than a market, a political/administrative structure, a geographic category—rather even than a race (though in a certain sense it is all about race in the end)—Europe for him is a multi-millennial community of closely-related national families made up of Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others, having the same ancient (Indo-European, Borean, Cro-Magnon) roots of blood and spirit: that is, having the same Thirty-thousand Years of European History and Identity.

This makes his Europe a community with a common civilizational heritage that stretches back to the depths of prehistoric time. Historically, the tradition and identity of this heritage has informed Europe’s representations and values in ways distinguishing/identifying her and her peoples from other civilizations and peoples.

Tradition, though, is not  for Venner the metaphysical abstraction of the perennialists or the historical repository of the Burkeans: it is not something outside history nor is it something forged once and for all in the night of time.

Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass.  It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out.

Tradition may originate in Prehistory, but Venner claims it is preeminently contemporary—just as every origin represents a novel outburst of being. It serves thus as a people’s inner compass. It directs them to what and whom they are. It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. Life lived in reference to tradition, Venner insists, is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies—the ideal of ‘who we are’.

In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century. But he is no knee-jerk anti-American (though the French, in my view, have good cause to be anti-US). He’s also written several books on the US War of Secession, in which much of America’s Cavalier heritage is admired. Knowing something of the opposed tendencies shaping American ‘national’ life, he’s well aware of the moral abyss separating, say, Jesse James from Jay Gould—and what makes one an exemplar of the European spirit and the other its opposite.

Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World, Venner claims America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents—which meant disowning the idea (old as Herodotus) that Europe is ‘the home of liberty and true government’.

Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired—as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity—to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Hence, the bustling, wealth-accumulating, tradition-opposing character of the American project, which offends every former conception of the Cosmos.

New England, to be sure, is not the whole of America, for the South, among another sections, has a quite different narrative, but it was the Yankee version of the ‘American epic’ that became dominant, and it is thus the Yankee version that everywhere wars on Americans of European descent.

Citing Huntington’s Who Are We?, Venner says US elites (‘cosmocrats’, he calls them) pursue a transnational/universalist vision (privileging global markets and human rights) that opposes every ‘nativist’ sense of nation or culture—a transnational/universalist vision the cosmocrats hope to impose on the whole world. For like Russian Bolsheviks and ‘the Bolsheviks of the Seventeenth century’, these money-worshipping liberal elites hate the Old World and seek a new man, Homo Oeconomicus—unencumbered by roots, nature, or culture—and motivated solely by a quantitative sense of purpose.

As a union whose ‘connections’ are essentially horizontal, contractual, self-serving, and self-centered, America’s cosmocratic system comes, as such, to oppose all resistant forms of historic or organic identity—for the sake of a totalitarian agenda intent on running roughshod over everything that might obstruct the scorch-earth economic logic of its Protestant Ethic and Capitalist Spirit. (In this sense, Europe’s resurgence implies America’s demise).

The Shock

What will awaken Europeans from their sleep? Venner says it will be the shock of history—the shock re-awakening the tradition that made them (and makes them) who they are. Such shocks have, in fact, long shaped their history. Think of the Greeks in their Persian Wars; of Charles Martel’s outnumbered knights against the Caliphate’s vanguard; or of the Christian forces under Starhemberg and Sobieski before the gates of Vienna. Whenever Europe approaches Höderlin’s ‘midnight of the world’, such shocks, it seems, serve historically to mobilize the redeeming memory and will to power inscribed in her tradition.

More than a half-century after the trauma of 1945—and the ensuing Americanization, financialization, and third-worldization of continental life—Europeans are once again experiencing another great life-changing, history-altering shock promising to shake them from dormition.

The present economic crisis and its attending catastrophes (in discrediting the collaborators managing the EU, as well as de-legitimatizing the continent’s various national political systems), combined with the unrelenting, disconcerting Islamization of European life (integral to US strategic interests) are—together—forcing Europeans to re-evaluate a system that destroys the national economy, eliminates borders, ravages the culture, makes community impossible, and programs their extinction as a people. The illusions of prosperity and progress, along with the system’s fun, sex, and money (justifying the prevailing de-Europeanization) are becoming increasingly difficult to entertain. Glimmers of a changing consciousness have, indeed, already been glimpsed on the horizon.

The various nationalist-populist parties stirring everywhere in Europe—parties which are preparing the counter-hegemony that one day will replace Europe’s present American-centric leadership—represent one conspicuous sign of this awakening. A mounting number of identitarian, Christian, secular, and political forces resisting Islam’s, America’s, and the EU’s totalitarian impositions at the local level are another sign.

Europeans, as a consequence, are increasingly posing the question: ‘Who are we?’, as they become more and more conscious—especially in the face of the dietary, vestimentary, familial, sexual, religious, and other differences separating them from Muslims—of what is distinct to their civilization and their people, and why such distinctions are worth defending. Historical revivals, Venner notes, are slow in the making, but once awakened there is usually no going back. This is the point, Venner believes, that Europe is approaching today.

The Unexpected

History is the realm of the unexpected. Venner does not subscribe to notions of historical determinism or necessity. In contrast to Marxists and economic determinists, anti-Semites and Spenglerians, he believes there are no monocausal explanations of history, and unlike liberals such as Fukuyama, he believes there’s no escape from (no ‘end’ to) history.

In history, the future is always unknown. Who would have thought in 1980 that Soviet Russia, which seemed to be overtaking the United States in the ‘70s, would collapse within a decade? Historical fatalities are the fatalities of men’s minds, not those of history.

History, moreover, is the confluence of the given, the circumstantial, and the willful. This makes it always open and hence potentially always a realm of the unexpected. And the unexpected (that instance when great possibilities are momentarily posed) is mastered, Venner councils, only in terms of who we are, which means in terms of the tradition and identity defining our project and informing our encounter with the world.

Hence, the significance now of husbanding our roots, our memory, our tradition, for from them will come our will to power and any possibility of transcendence. It’s not for nothing, Dominique Venner concludes, that we are the sons and daughters of Homer, Ulysses, and Penelope.

"The West is the best and we'll do the rest," sang Jim Morrison on that damning 1967 indictment of poor parenting and pharmacological excess, The End. Despite it's intended irony, the lyric nevertheless reflected the realities underlying US foreign policy at the time, which consisted of believing in the Western way, stepping up to the mark when challenged, taking responsibility for what happened on one’s watch, and trying to win in the cold light of day and with the world’s media watching. Heck, America still gets it in the neck for that famous photo of one gook shooting another gook in the head.

With the Soviet Union doing such a good job of being a shining beacon of progress in those days with its cheap shots against, post-colonialism, inequalities of wealth, and mean differences in height and body mass, America had to do its best to fight the good fight and to go down with the ship when holed below the waterline, as it did in the 1970s, a decade which can be likened to one enormous session of navel gazing: cue Apocalypse Now.

British children’s writers usually find favour in America—from A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame to J. K. Rowling and Nick Park—but one who has never quite captured American hearts is Richmal Crompton, author of the classic Just William stories.

Why this should be is unclear, because at their best the stories combine the period charm of The Wind in the Willows with the mischievousness of Roald Dahl and the wit of Wodehouse—while her hero has been likened (admittedly not entirely convincingly) to both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The 11-year-old likeable scapegrace William Brown is an imaginative institution in England and in many other countries; the Sunday Times said of the stories that they are “probably the funniest, toughest children’s books ever written”. Yet for some reason Hollywood has not come calling—although perhaps this is just as well (1).

As well as telling delightful tales, Crompton incidentally charts revolutionary changes in British life from the time the first story appeared in 1919 until the author’s death in 1969, as seen through William’s half-wise, half-innocent eyes. Although the stories should be read for their own sake rather than any philosophical content, they have therefore also attracted considerable interest from cultural historians, and occasionally even controversy.

Richmal Crompton Lamburn was born in Bury, Lancashire, in 1890, the daughter of a schoolmaster of Anglican and Liberal views. She had an older sister, Mary, and a younger brother, John, and some of William’s exploits would be based on her memories of John’s youth.

She won a scholarship to London’s Royal Holloway College, from which she graduated in 1914 with a BA in Classics. She taught Classics in Cheshire before relocating to Bromley High School on the southern edge of London in 1917. She beguiled her leisure time by writing, and the first William story appeared in Home Magazine in 1919, illustrated by Thomas Henry, who was to illustrate the stories until his death in 1962 (he died whilst working on a William picture). Henry’s perfectly-judged drawings have helped to define William as much as E. H. Shephard’s drawings fixed the public visualization of Winnie the Pooh.

The supposedly ephemeral stories swiftly overshadowed what Crompton always regarded as her serious work—40 novels and collections of short stories aimed solely at an adult audience, now virtually forgotten, while William eventually ran to 39 books (some posthumous) and still sells millions of copies worldwide, not to mention numerous TV and radio adaptations. (2) Yet although the stories are ostensibly written for children, they are perhaps best savoured by adults who can appreciate the author’s recondite references and “unsystematic satire” (3).

She was able to retire from teaching, which was fortunate because after 1923 she went down with polio, eventually losing the use of her right leg. Despite this, she led an active life, getting around in a specially adapted car and having all kinds of cultural and charitable interests (she was a noted campaigner for paralyzed children). She never married and died much mourned.

Her fictive force of nature is a middle-class 11-year-old living in a village between the fictional towns of Marleigh and Hadley, the location of which is a subject of agreeable but fruitless debate amongst keen Cromptonians. William’s village is clearly an amalgam of southern English Erewhons. In 1962, Crompton wrote “The village in which William lives is entirely imaginary…a small country village in Kent—or perhaps Surrey or Sussex, within easy reach of London” (4).

The earliest stories see William living with his parents and older brother and sister in a substantial Victorian or Edwardian villa, complete with library, morning-room, stables, cook, housemaid, and gardener. Later, the family is downsized by economic and social pressures and the domestic staff disappear, but the Browns always contrive to be comfortably off and stalwarts of community life.

Mr. Brown works in the City, and comes home every evening to sit aloofly reading newspapers and occasionally giving vent to unexpectedly vitriolic political reflections, such as “I tell you he’s bleeding the country to death. He ought to be hung for murder”. His outbursts contain a clever echo of his younger son’s purpler expostulations—and there are other occasional hints of a tacit understanding between the two that no-one else in the family can share. But most of the time, Mr. Brown is like a smoking volcano in the background of an ordered Italianate landscape—something to be tiptoed around, and which only comes to life at times of crisis—such as to pay some enraged neighbour for damage caused by his errant offspring.

By contrast, Mrs. Brown is not at all menacing; like most mothers she is the pivot of the household and the chief source of its respectability, stability, and comfort. Her chief roles are to darn socks and make excuses for William.

William’s sister Ethel is beautiful and always has a string of suitors—many of whom William irritates or frightens off, usually without meaning to or even while trying to ‘help’ them.

William’s older brother, the irascible and insecure Robert, is a mirror of the fashions and follies of every generation, from dancing the Charleston to toying with Bolshevism, and from experimental poetry to sports cars. He is always trying to find a girlfriend, and whenever he is making headway William usually ruins it—again often with the very best intentions. Like many 11-year-olds then and now, William regards girls as an utterly distinct (and generally inferior) species, and his lack of susceptibility can drive Robert to distraction. In “William the Intruder” (1922), Robert is telling his mother about his latest pash:

‘She’s different from everybody else in the world’, stammered Robert ecstatically. ‘You simply couldn’t describe her. No one could!’

His mother continued to darn his socks and made no comment. Only William showed interest.

‘How’s she different from anyone else?’ he demanded. ‘Is she blind or lame or sumthin’?’

There is also a plethora of aunts and uncles, most of whom find William wholly antithetical to their preferred pastimes of crochet-work, church-going, and snoozing off their lunches in the library.

Beyond the constraints of the family circle lies a huge world full of colour and adventure. William owns a devoted mongrel called Jumble and he also leads the Outlaws—a close-knit gang of boys, Henry, Ginger, and Douglas, similar in background and tastes but with slightly paler personalities. Beyond the Outlaws there are manipulative or adoring girls, and many other children more or less in thrall to William’s abounding personality. Inevitably, he also has enemies—ranging from epicene, immaculate, golden-curled, lisping sneaks with names like Cuthbert, to rougher would-be Williams with whom he has to physically contend for mastery of the village space.

Then there is the adult world, whose roster of characters alters as the stories dash through the decades—flappers, spiritualists, vegetarians, painters, academics, aristocrats, teachers, ex-majors, vicars, spinsters, nouveau riche businessmen, beatniks, burglars, protest marchers, pop-stars—most of whom seem to William to lead dull lives full of pointless rules. In “William Below Stairs” (1922), he muses that when he is grown-up,

“He’d have rooms full of squeaky balloons and trumpets in his house, anyway—and he’d keep caterpillars and white rats all over the place too—things they made such a fuss about in their old house—and he’d always go about in dirty boots, and he’d never brush his hair or wash.”

He in turn exasperates most grown-ups, which is scarcely surprising, because through sheer joie de vivre he exacts a heavy toll on their possessions—trampling their flowerbeds, ruining their lawns, scrumping their apples, falling through their roofs, shooting arrows through their windows, eating their food, tormenting their cats (twice actually killing them), covering everything with dirt, ruining their sleep, and leading their children astray. Some have even worse experiences, such as Aunt Emily, a generously-proportioned woman who disturbs the whole household with her deafening snoring, who wakes from an afternoon nap to find her bedroom full of wide-eyed local children who have paid William to watch her sleep, below an ill-lettered label reading:

“Fat wild woman

Torking Natif

Landwidge.” (5)

He may be noisy, unkempt, destructive, dictatorial, aggressive, opinionated and indignant—but he is also good-hearted, chivalrous, imaginative, brave and generous and has a strong sense of natural justice. In 1962, Crompton said William had:

“…the spirit of the inventor and pioneer…the stuff of which heroes are made…at the state of the savage—loyal to his tribe, ruthless to his foes, governed by mysterious taboos, an enemy of civilization and all its meaningless conventions…that threaten his liberty.” (6)

William is always prone to nostalgie de la boue. He is fascinated by ne’er do wells, real or imagined; he longs to leap his bourgeois traces and embrace what he sees as freer modes of living—down and preferably dirty amongst the working classes, the poor, criminals, subversives and exotic foreigners. William’s fascination with what she calls “horrid, common, rough boys” is a source of exasperation and incomprehension to the supremely class-conscious Mrs. Brown. Asked by her who he wants to invite to his Christmas party, he scandalizes her by replying “I’d like the milkman” then “I’d like to have Fisty Green. He can whistle with his fingers in his mouth”. She almost wails in reply, “But he’s a butcher’s boy! You can’t have him!” He listens enraptured to the Cockney accents of London children visiting the village on a day trip—

“He decided to adopt it permanently. He considered it infinitely more interesting than that used by his own circle.”(7)

William also envies “savidges”. Watching an amateur-dramatic production of Christopher Columbus with the Indians, he looks yearningly at the blacked-up white boys playing the Indians—

“…how different—how rapturously different. Browned from head to foot—a lovely walnut brown. It made their eyes look queer and their teeth look queer. It set them in a world apart…he saw himself, browned from head to foot, brandishing some weapon and dancing on bare brown feet in a savage land.” (8)

Like most boys then and now, he has fantasies of super strength and global domination—fighting his way out of ambuscades against impossible odds, consigning cities or countries to destruction with an imperious wave, being “Dictator of England” (9) or “World Potentate” (10)—accepting the imaginary homage of imaginary masses as he imagines multitudinous “stachoos” of himself.

Crompton is sometimes likened to the equally unsentimental “Saki” (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870-1916) whose short stories have been described as evoking “Pan beyond the drawing-room windows”. There is a similar quality in William. He may be fey, but he is safely fey. The solidity and stability of William’s background is the ideal backdrop to his adventures, which lampoon authority but never undermine it. He may be “Dauntless Dick of the Bloody Hand” out in the fields and woods, but every evening he is once again Master William Brown, subject to the iron dictates of what he calls contemptuously “Civilizashun”—obeying his parents, saying please and thank you, washing his face, wearing his Eton suit, and being forced to go to school and Sunday school. William has a disdain for education, as he tells his reform-minded Uncle George:

“When I was a boy, William, I loved my studies. I’m sure you love your studies, don’t you? Which do you love most?”

“Me?” said William, “I love shootin’ and playin’ Red Indians.” (11)

He is aggrieved by the way his parents react to his school reports—

“I keep tryin’ to explain to them about that. What’s the good of us usin’ up all our brains at school so’s we’ll have none left when we’re grown up an’ have to earn our livings? I’d rather keep mine fresh by not usin’ it till I’m grown up an’ need it.” (12)

The other Outlaws are almost as unintellectual, with the partial exception of Henry who can always be relied upon to give informed opinions on even the most complicated subjects—

‘They were always killin’ people for one thing’ said Henry.

‘Who were?’

‘People.’

‘Why?’

‘They had to. How’d you think there’d ‘ve been any hist’ry if they hadn’t?’ (13)

Crompton was, remembered her friend Joan Braunholz, “a true-blue Tory…a temperamental Conservative” (14). She belonged to her local Conservative Association in Bromley—which was unimaginative enough to utilize the bestselling author solely to stuff envelopes with campaign ‘literature’. One cultural commentator has called Crompton “a species of conservative modernist” (15), while another has defined her outlook as “defending the private against the public and the individual against the demands of society and the state” (16).

Her conservatism is implicit but always apparent—in her High Anglicanism, pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature, ridicule of idealists, and belief in the necessity and durability of the class system. It was for this last reason that her books were removed from some libraries between the 1960s and 1980s by librarians trying, rather like Robert Brown, to be real and relevant. Today, the sensitivities more often surround race, with casual phrases like “rather more swarthy than the average boy” and “not an English cast of countenance” (17) causing consternation amongst the easily frightened.

Through William, Crompton constantly exposes the pomposity and hypocrisy of the complacenti. There are the advocates of “Higher Thought”, a coterie of sharp-chinned spinsters who hurriedly abandon their meeting when William’s cache of centipedes and spiders gets loose. Then there is the League of Perfect Love, ‘animal rights’ ignoramuses who have an instant change of heart when rats invade their living room (this 1935 story is rarely reprinted now, because it shows a rat-killing competition). There are the adopt-a-poor-family agitators who baulk at admitting the self-same poor into their own circles, or contributing financially towards these schemes (18). There is the teacher

“…with a startling taste in socks and ties, whose ‘modern’ methods of teaching had left the minds of his pupils completely but not unpleasantly befogged.”

Later, the same individual

“…transferred his gifts and his person to a small but exclusive repertory company that specialized in performing ‘experimental’ drama to a limited audience of leftwing intellectuals” (19)

“William and the Protest Marchers” (1965) contains the egalitarian students of “Newlick University”, marching to demonstrate against “those moth-eaten old relics of antiquity” Oxford and Cambridge—only to give up their march and forego their principles as soon as they get hot and they find a place to get a drink without having to mix with what their leader calls “riff-raff”. In the same story, an animal rights lecturer gets pushed into a lily-pond by a pig whose saintliness he has just been extolling.

William always reflected what was going on in the wider world (his creator often reminded herself in her diaries to “be topical!”) and the 1930s accordingly saw William setting up his own paramilitary formation after seeing a Mosleyite demonstration (20). Like (presumably) many adult Mosleyites, the Outlaws are intoxicated by “the salutes, the shouting” and fashion themselves green armbands, whereupon William harangues the townspeople:

“You’ve gotter have a dictator…you’ve all gotter to be Green shirts same as us…We’re goin’ to fight everyone that isn’t…We’re goin’ to fight everyone in the world…We’re going to conquer the world…We’re goin’ to be dictators over the world.”

This address and the subsequent clashes with a blue shirted gang over which will have the largest “col’ny” with the most doughnuts is a brilliantly funny commentary on contemporary Europe, already self-immolating at the hands of much less excusable orators.

The 1934 story “William and the Nasties” is frequently singled out for criticism and indeed it does leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, to the extent that it is no longer included in collections. Yet it is congruent with the fantasy psychology and immature knowledge of boys of that age. The Outlaws are talking about the new “Nasty” regime in Germany:

"They rule all the country" said Henry "an’ make everyone do jus’ what they like an’ send them to prison if they don’t."

"I’d be one of them if I was in that country’ said William.

"Jews are rich" explained Henry, "so they chase ‘em out and take all the stuff they leave behind. It’s a jolly good idea."

"Ole Mr. Isaacs is a Jew" said Ginger. They stared at each other with sudden interest.

(Mr. Isaacs is the unfriendly owner of the sweetshop whom they suspect of giving them short-measures of bulls-eyes and “cokernut lumps”.)

“’There came to him [William] glorious visions of chasing Jew after Jew out of sweetshop after sweetshop and appropriating the precious spoils."Henry explains the Nasties’ modus operandi—“They’ve got people called storm troops an’ when those Jews don’t run away they knock ‘em about till they do.”

They plan to break into Mr. Isaacs’ shop, but as they are so doing, their basic decency rapidly reasserts itself:

“A strange distaste for the adventure was creeping over the Outlaws.”

They never attack Mr. Isaacs, obviously, and in fact inadvertently do him a favour which brings about friendly relations between them and him. A recent study (21) acknowledges that Crompton was “probably trying to make pro-Jewish points”, but concludes that the story was unusually clumsily constructed. The story is genuinely disturbing, as if something hideous had briefly broken the surface of the still pond of English life, to sink again almost immediately but leaving behind a shivery memory. Needless to say, when war does come, William “does his bit” to ‘help’—and in “William Takes Charge”, which appeared in May 1940, our hero’s ineptitude is an obvious swipe at Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous diplomacy.

William is essentially apolitical. Long before being a Fascist, he had also been the sole member of the junior branch of Reformed Bolsheviks. He had to form his own organization because Robert will not let him join the Bolshevik club to which the Outlaws’ older brothers belong. Once again, William’s oratory ridicules fringe folly—

"All gotter be equal" he pronounced fiercely. "All gotter have lots of money. All ‘uman beings. That’s sense, isn’t it?... Well, then, someone ought to do somethin’!"

And William does do somethin’; he and the other Outlaws expropriate the belongings of their older brothers, who in consequence have a change of heart. As Robert admits ruefully to his father,

“It’s all right when you can get your share of other people’s things, but when other people can get their share of your things, then it’s different.” (22)

In “William—The Bad” (1930), there is a mock election between the Outlaws. Standing as the communist candidate, Ginger sets out his stall,

“Ladies an’ Gentlemen, Communism means havin’ a war against all the people that aren’t Communists an’ conquerin’ an’ killin’ them.”

In “William, Prime Minister” (1929), Henry explains more lucidly than many real-life commentators the true nature of politics:

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.”

In a thousand such effortless-seeming asides, the wide-awake William and his chums unmask the pretensions not just of communism, but of all adult existence.

Yet howsoever revelatory about society, William is first and foremost the boy all boys wish they had been and who all girls adore—and we like to read about his escapades because they conjure up the intoxicating essence of childhood. Through Crompton’s timeless thaumaturgy, with a laugh and a pang we suddenly remember the texture of youth—the energy, the curiosity, the visions, the passing loves and hatreds, the resentments and rapprochements, the fears and guilt, the first times and sudden insights, the wonder and the acceptance, the long imaginative journeys inside one’s head or across fields of sun-striped grasses on afternoons when reality seemed contingent and time appeared to have no end. Like William, we have all lived “crowded hours”—and thanks to his immemorial ebullience, even now we can recover our pasts for a time.

Notes

1. According to the Summer 2011 edition of the Just William Society Magazine there have been three British films—Just William (1939), Just William’s Luck (1947) and William at the Circus (1948). Recordings are extremely rare

2. In her other novels, Crompton “sought to attack the cosy conventionalism of Victorian thought. Her novels are thronged with adultery, illegitimacy, divorce, suicide, child abuse, and homosexuality” (Classes, Cultures, and Politics, Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin, edited by Clare V. J. Griffiths, James J. Nott and William Whyte, 2011, Oxford: OUP). Ironically enough, Crompton’s brother John, the original inspiration for William, earned a reputation for ‘serious’ writing with his natural history works, especially 1948’s The Hunting Wasp, which was deservedly praised by John Betjeman, Harold Nicolson and others

3. Classes, Cultures, and Politics, op. cit.

4. “Meet William”, Collectors’ Digest Annual, 1962, cited by Mary Cadogan, in Richmal Crompton—The Woman Behind Just William, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1986

5. “The Show”, 1922

6. “Meet William”, op. cit.

7. “Not Much”, 1923

8. “The Native Protégé”, 1923

9. “William the Persian”, 1935

10. “A Present from William”, 1935

11. “William’s Hobby”, 1922

12. “William the Conspirator”, 1935

13. “William the Conspirator”, ibid.

14. Cited by Cadogan, op. cit.

15. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, London and New York: Routledge, 1991

16. Classes, Cultures, and Politics, op. cit.

17. “The Native Protégé”, ibid.

18. “William—The Showman”, 1937

19. “William and the Holiday Task”, 1965

20. “What’s in a Name?”, 1938

21. Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War, Edinburgh University Press, 2007

22. “The Weak Spot”, 1924

Here in the bars, bazaars, and dens of iniquity that make up the ex-pat Far East, you run into your fair share of cads, chancers, and rum fellows – the sort of chaps whose eccentricities and slight quirks go unnoticed amid the teeming masses of Asia. The broad-minded and perpetually distracted Oriental, it seems, has a nasty habit of lumping all White men in together and glossing over the subtle codes and hierarchies by which we define ourselves.

It was no surprise, therefore, when on a recent trip to Singapore, I ran into an old European acquaintance, whom, I had been reliably informed, had died and been buried a long time ago back in his native Europe, a place where he had never really fitted in, leading, on occasion, to unfortunate excesses of behaviour that saw him blackballed from most of polite society.

As he pressed me for news from home over cocktails at the Raffles, I could see that he had done extremely well for himself out here, and seemed far, far younger than he had any right to be.

The bartender and waiters were clearly in awe of him; while, from across the room, came the deferential glances of the city's movers and shakers, and the realization that I myself could not be a complete nobody to be in such exalted company.

"It's really all down to my old chum, Lee Kuan Yew," he told me warmed by his fifth daiquiri. "Without Harry's help, god knows what I'd be doing."

After a series of pogroms tore through Russia in 1886, the young philosopher Vladimir Soloviev would exercise his prophetic impulse. Neither a slave to social fashions nor a stranger to controversy, Soloviev was a friend to the Jews out of sincerity rather than any calculation. Two years prior, he had published an article asserting the intertwined destinies of Christendom and Jewry as part of his greater vision of a “free theocracy.”¹And so in the pogroms’ aftermath, Soloviev wrote in a letter to his acquaintance, the Talmudic scholar Feivel Getz:

What are we to do with this disaster? Let pious Jews pray intensely to God, that He set Russia’s fate in the hands of religious and also sensible and brave men, who would want and could dare to do good for both peoples².

Such a man would be granted to Russia, if only for a time. As the Romanovs’ empire was swept into a ruinous war with Japan and the 1905 Revolution, Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin would stand against the maelstrom. Stolypin was ruthlessly suppressing rebellion as governor of Saratov oblast when he was called by Nicholas II to national duty. Within months, the new prime minister would proceed to re-establish order in Russia and undertake challenging political, economic and agricultural reforms. Just as Soloviev had hoped but would never see, Stolypin also attempted to improve the acrimonious Russian-Jewish relationship at the level of nationalities policy. This premature effort, however, was unlikely to satisfy any interested party, much less radicals of any persuasion.

Stolypin would resign in March of 1911 from the fractious and chaotic Duma after the failure of his land-reform bill. His peace in this world would be short-lived, though; he was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House on September 14 in the presence of the emperor. Upon being shot, Stolypin stood and declared his willingness to die for the Tsar, whom he then blessed before collapsing. In a eulogy for the fallen, the conservative monarchist Lev Tikhomirov would praise his nobility and strength of heart, all of which he devoted to the service of his fatherland:

The blood of his ancestors spoke in him, and his soul was deeply Russian and Christian. He believed in God as the Lord may grant belief to the servants before His altar…In such a way did he believe in Russia, and in this we can only admire him. And from this faith he drew vast power³.

Fragments of angels, segments of saints, pieces of people, broken birds, refracted sunbeams, tumbled landscapes, jumbled inscriptions, unidentifiable blocks of time-worn colour—I looked for a long time at the medieval glass so carefully but meaninglessly re-set in Holy Trinity church beside the Cathedral at Coventry.

These disjecta membra of former didactic decorations spoke of the violent iconoclasm of the Puritan revolution, when God’s self-appointed gatekeepers had smashed irreplaceable works of art in an orgy of ignorant glee. But because this was Coventry, it also hinted at much more recent ordeals—the Luftwaffe’s rawly-remembered raids of 1940-2, which killed 1,250 Coventrians, laid waste what had been a well-preserved medieval city, and gave rise to the dark slang “coventration” to signify indiscriminate eradication.

Seen in conjunction with the 15^th century “Doom” painting that stretches superbly across Holy Trinity’s chancel arch, with the just entering the Celestial City on Christ’s right and the damned going down to perdition on His left, while a bare-breasted Virgin intercedes in pity, the crazed glass seemed emblematic of deep dislocation—as if all of Coventry were a study in interrupted histories and partial reconstructions.

Dissatisfied with its own suffering, Coventry is twinned with Dresden, Warsaw and Volgograd (Stalingrad) and commemorates Hiroshima Day every August, while in the centre of the city is Lidice Place, to commemorate the mass murders that followed the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Even the radical rebuilds of the Fifties and Sixties that were supposed to refocus the city on the future look troubled to modern eyes—blank, brutalist cliffs as impersonal, impractical and impermanent as they are unpopular.

And beyond the tortured compactness of the city a ghostly hinterland unrolls to all sides. The ninth largest city in England is also the furthest from the sea, landlocked “far in the country of Arden”—the legendary super-forest of central England in which a squirrel could proverbially leap from tree to tree for the whole of Warwickshire’s length.

In England, woods once symbolized freedom, and their fastnesses are peopled by anti-establishment avatars—wodewoses, Wild Hunts, Queen Titania, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, Robin Hood and his Merry Men holding out for the return of the King. Medieval masons carved “Green Men” into thousands of ostensibly Christian churches—demonic faces forming capitals and roof-bosses, their eyes darting danger while their mouths vomit swags of oak, as if the forest was trying to break into the brash new buildings of this abstracter idol from the East.

Of all these archetypal forests, Arden was one of the greatest. Elm has the country-name of “Warwickshire weed” and into recent times the shire bore the soubriquet—part topographical description, part tourist attractant—of “Leafy Warwick”. Arboreal imagery even features in local heraldry, with the overreaching Earls of Warwick adopting the image of a bear supporting a tree as their armorial crest. This sparsely populated territory was attractive to opportunists as well as outlaws, and in 1540 John Leland found

“the ground in Arden is muche enclosyd, plentifull of gres . . . and woode, but no great plenty of corn”.

But despite economic depredations, Arden long remained a bosky wilderness evoked piquantly by Warwickshire writers Michael Drayton in his 1622 patriotic epic Poly-Olbion and his more famous contemporary William Shakespeare:

“Under the greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note

Unto the sweet bird’s throat.

Come hither.”

Shakespeare set As You Like It in the Ardennes (the Celtic word-root “high place” is the same), but he clearly had in mind the southern fringes of Arden around his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon 20 miles south of Coventry. His mother’s maiden name was Arden, and she belonged to one of only three English families which can trace themselves back directly in the male line to the Anglo-Saxons (1)—so the name is freighted with more than remembrance of a vanished landscape. In the 17^th century, Arden was still at least partly forested; the antiquary William Dugdale recorded ruefully, presumably from personal experience of frustrated forwanderings, “the ways are not easy to hit”. The countryside surrounding Coventry—the name tellingly derived from “Cofa’s tree”—is therefore central not just to English geography but also the English imagination; it rustles not just with phantasmagorical foliage but also unnumbered dead. (2)

Warwickshire has existed as an entity since the tenth century, but it is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 1016, as under attack by Canute’s Danish marauders. The county claims to contain the centre of England at Meriden, between Birmingham and Coventry (3), and the Mercian dialect that was spoken in Warwickshire is the one from which standard English is mostly derived. It spawned the Anglo-Norman romance (circa 1300) of Guy of Warwick, who fought in the Holy Land, and killed the Dun Cow of Dunsmore (near Coventry) and a dragon in Northumberland so he could marry the Earl’s daughter—only to die in poverty outside the castle gates, but acknowledged by her before he died.

In 1312, Piers Gaveston, homosexual lover of Edward II, was murdered just outside Warwick, and in the following century the then Earl Richard Neville—“Warwick the Kingmaker”—played a history-changing role during the Wars of the Roses. For all these reasons and others, Henry James dubbed Warwickshire “unmitigated England”, but this city that has hummed for so long at the county’s core has been—to put it mildly—very much mitigated.

A nunnery was founded on the site by St. Osburga in the 8^th century, whose memory is perpetuated in the name of a local Catholic school. “St. Augustine’s arm” was presented to an unspecified local church in 1022, which hints at ecclesiastical importance. Then in 1043 Leofric, Earl of Mercia and one of England’s three most powerful nobles, and his wife Countess Godiva (Godgifu) founded a Benedictine priory whose walls were “enriched and beautified with so much gold and silver that the walls seemed too narrow to contain it.” (4) The Domesday Book (1086) only mentions agricultural holdings at Coventry, although there must have been a town because it became a bishopric in 1102.

Leofric’s black eagle helps hold up the city’s coat of arms, but his wife’s naked ride on a white horse to protest her husband’s oppressive taxation of the poor has become one of the great traditionary tales of the Middle Ages. Whether it really happened is immaterial, because Godiva embodies ancient attributes and imagery and, like Boudicca before her, became a potent symbol of self-sacrifice and the liberties of the English. Roger of Wendover, whose Flores Historiarum is the earliest account (around 1230), believed the ride had occurred and in any case obviously enjoyed visualizing it:

“The Countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil, and then, mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the marketplace without being seen, except her fair legs, and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked.”

In his treatment of the legend, Tennyson evoked the shuttered but watchful town with its frowning gables and worked in the moralistic accretion of the tempted tailor “Peeping Tom”:

“And one low churl, compact of thankless earth, 
The fatal byword of all years to come, 
Boring a little auger-hole in fear, 
Peep’d—but his eyes, before they had their will, 
Were shrivel’d into darkness in his head, 
And dropt before him.”

In Hertford Street there is an early 19^th century head and shoulders effigy supposedly of Tom, a writhing and agonized image, its mouth open as if shouting in pain, set incongruously on a modern wall facing a newsagents with the appropriate name of Peeping Tom News.

While successive earls made war on successive kings, economic life carried on. There were a dozen mills by the 12^th century powered by the River Sherbourne that passes west to east through the basin of the city on its way to the Avon—now mostly gurgling sadly underground, although I found one exposed segment near Spon End that bursts with greenery, damselflies and yellow wagtails, crossed by a graceful 1850s iron bridge.

Wealthy trade guilds funded the building of Holy Trinity, St Michael’s (which became the Cathedral), St John the Baptist’s, Christchurch and St. Mary’s Guildhall. They sponsored the Coventry Mysteries, a cycle of miracle plays acted at Coventry for two centuries until suppressed by devout killjoys in 1591. The Pageant of the Shearsmen and Tailors, which recalled Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents”, is the source of the Coventry Carol, one of the earliest extant pieces of English music, a lovely evocation of a mother’s love for her endangered infant:

“Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.”

The 13^th century saw disputes between the “Prior’s Half” and the “Earl’s Half” of Coventry for control of the wool trade. (The expression “true blue” comes from the non-fading qualities of Coventry thread. In Michael Drayton’s 1593 Shepherd’s Garland, the pastoral hero wears “breech of Cointree blue” to symbolize his steadfastness.) In 1345, Coventry was freed from religious control to become the county’s first free city. The new Corporation promptly erected city walls in the local red sandstone—a small stretch of which still stand beside the Swanswell Gate, their eroded evocativeness marred by a recent foot-bridge that leaps arrogantly over, a wonder in structural steel sadly disfigured by blue glass panels.

The Bablake Free School for Boys was founded in the reign of Queen Isabella and, according to a believable tradition, endowed by an ironmonger who had ordered steel from Spain, but was sent by mistake a vastly more valuable cargo of cochineal and silver.

Isabella’s grandson (Richard the Lionheart’s son) Edward, nicknamed the “Black Prince” because of his black cuirass, stayed frequently in Cheylesmore Manor House, part of which survives as the city’s register office, a touching relic unhappily blocked in by ugly offices and a car park, where old confetti swirls sadly around in eddies of exhaust from New Union Street nearby. The rooms that once housed princes of the blood royal are heaped with teetering boxes of stationery and broken computers. Yet so proud was the city once of the connection with the hero of Crecy that its motto is still Camera Principis (“chamber of the prince”) and Edward’s heraldic “cat-a-mountain” surmounts the city arms.

In the 15^th century, Coventry acquired county status and even held parliaments—the Parliamentum Indoctorum in 1404, the “lack-learning parliament” which lawyers were forbidden to attend, and the Parliamentum Diabolicum of 1459, when the man who would become Edward IV two years afterwards was attainted.

Coventry’s loyalty to the Lancastrian cause persuaded Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou to set up court in the city during the Wars of the Roses—her strategic “secret harbour”, where her husband could manage the wars while she managed his mental breakdowns. Their sojourn here is marked by a stupendous piece of tapestry made in Tournai between 1495 and 1500 that still hangs on the wall for which it was designed in St. Mary’s Guildhall. Columns stitched in the tapestry align with real stone transoms behind, separating saints, symbols, monarchs and courtiers into six compartments patterned with interleaving diamonds, knots and leaves.

The Guildhall is one of England’s most miraculous medieval survivals, considering that is just a few feet away from the blasted Cathedral. When you go through its arched gateway, see the tapestry for the first time, stand in the Ante Room with its disturbingly sloping floor or look out of a leaded window into its courtyard you could be in Bavaria or Saxony. The Great Hall with its tapestry and oaken angels has seen three King Henrys and even played a joke on James II, who was splashed with custard when his table collapsed during a banquet. In an oriel window bay there is a 19^th century plaster statue of Godiva being disapproved of by 16^th century stone saints but surveyed with friendlier interest by a medieval glass man re-set in a strategic position, whose hand appears to be reaching out to take liberties.

The city dwindled and by 1520 the population had more than halved. Dissolution of the monasteries removed the principal employers, and John Leland recorded plangently, “The glory of the city decayeth”. Coventry had also long been a locus of Lollardism and this led to public burnings of those residents found guilty of the atrocious crime of having the scriptures in a language they could understand. Coventrians still take gloomy pride in this latitudinarian legacy.

Ironically, Warwickshire later developed a reputation for Catholic recusancy. Robert Catesby was an Arden as well as an ardent man, and in 1583 Edward Arden—distantly related to Shakespeare’s mother—was executed for plotting against Elizabeth I. Mary Queen of Scots killed time in Coventry in 1569 in comfortable confinement while Elizabeth wondered what to do with her inconveniently Catholic cousin.

Almshouses for the elderly poor were founded during the 16^th century, and two still function in the buildings in which they were founded—Bond’s Hospital and Ford’s Hospital. Other small patches of the Middle Ages have also survived, especially in Spon Street where there are facing rows of handsome shops and houses supported by frames of local oak, but as everywhere in Coventry these sit uneasily with the postwar period’s often hideous heritage. These sturdy buildings, once so workaday with their large families and weavers’ lofts, now give room to prissier businesses—boutiques, wedding planners, financial consultants—while just behind them smile the broken teeth of Sixties office blocks.

In the Civil War Coventry sided with Parliament, and even the city’s women helped to fill in quarries to avoid them being used as cover by Cavaliers:

“[T]hey assembled in companies, and marched in military array, with mattocks and spades, headed by an Amazon who carried an Herculean club on her shoulders” (5)

With civic sinews bolstered by such sisters, in 1642 the city refused admittance to Charles I. The Coventrians treated Royalist prisoners of war so rudely that “being sent to Coventry” passed into the language as shorthand for being neglected (6). The prisoners were kept in St John the Baptist church, whose banked-up graveyard leans conveniently on the walls of Bond’s Hospital. Bulbs burn in busy rooms that abut tombs topping centuries of Coventrians. Coventry paid for its democratic zeal after the Restoration, when Charles II cast down the city walls so they could never again be held against a King.

Coventry re-built its reputation for skilful workmanship and by the 18^th century it had become a centre for silk weaving and clockmaking. Textiles again became economically important, and the population more than quadrupled over the 19^th century. There was a burgeoning middle-class, whose lives and modern mores were captured by Mary Ann Evans—better known as George Eliot. (Coventry is thought to have been the model for Middlemarch.)

Engineering came because of good coal and connections (just 95 miles to London, and convenient for Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Liverpool, Wales and Ireland). The city was reamalgamated into its historic county (in 1974, it was taken out again and crammed against the locals’ will into the insipid “West Midlands”.) Coventry became a proto-Silicon Valley, the ideal place for local boy James Starley to make his patented Rover Safety Bicycle to replace the more dangerous penny-farthing. His nephew then designed motorbikes and automobiles under the brand name Rover. He rapidly had rivals, ranging from the Great Horseless Carriage Co. to more serious contenders like Humber, Riley, Standard, Triumph, Daimler and Jaguar.

Coventry became Car City, clever with its hands, in love with wheels, dependent upon and devoted to rapid transit, with the 20^th century even throwing up reports of spectral coaches and trucks to reflect modern superstitions, replacing the monks and nuns of the pre-engine past. Even in the pleasantest suburbs, or in attractive Green Belt meadows, one can always hear vehicles passing and re-passing endlessly on the ring-roads, roundabouts, bypasses and motorways. Because of the cars, there came aircraft and armaments factories—and because of them the Luftwaffe, dropping death and disaster on the high-tech city as the Royal Air Force would soon do in its turn on equally lovely cities in Germany.

An archetypal clever Coventrian was jet pioneer Frank Whittle, born in the suburb of Earlsdon in 1907 and captivated by seeing a plane on Hearsall Common in 1916. His bronze shades its eyes with an over-long arm below the Whittle Arch—a huge aluminium X in front of the Transport Museum, a suitable place to reflect on British car manufacturing then and now. Almost all the marques have gone, probably never to return. Jaguar’s design HQ is still here, but manufacturing has moved elsewhere. The last fully Coventry-made cars were the London black cabs made by LTI, but in March 2010 they outsourced manufacturing to China. The last major machine tool manufacturer was also foreign-owned and went out with a bang—Matrix Churchill, secretly belonging to the Iraqi government, which was attempting to supply a “supergun” to Saddam Hussein notwithstanding UK sanctions.

There was a final flurry of hopeful innovation during the short-lived “New Elizabethan” period, which lasted for about a decade until the early 1960s—a period in which romanticists likened the young Queen to her iconic predecessor and predicted a similar effloresence of Englishness, informed by technology taught in bright new schools just as the earlier Elizabethans had been informed by Reformed theology preached in clear-glassed churches.

Modern Coventry is a monument to their misplaced idealism. There is a list of the Redevelopment Committee on a building at Broadgate House, the first major building of the redevelopment, opened in 1953. It is slightly surreal to read Anglo-Saxon titles like Alderman and unvarnished surnames like Grindlay, Swain and Binks affixed to a dank office that has not resisted time half so well as Cheylesmore—and to imagine what utopian will o’ the wisp took hold of all these bowler-hatted Binkses. They were led by Donald Gibson, CBE, visionary author of the “Gibson Plan”, who combined the roles of Chief Architect and Planning Officer in what could be construed as a conflict of interest. Probably he saw himself as a chummy “Chris” Wren for the Britain of the beatniks.

The Council had been planning massive redevelopment even in the 1930s, and the Mayor said on the morning after the first raid:

“We have always wanted a site for a new civic centre, and now we have it.”

Gibson’s chief innovation was to introduce large pedestrian precincts with cars diverted onto an inner ringroad, which may make central Coventry more walkable but also encircles the centre in an unwelcoming envelope of steel railings, stained concrete and charging cars, with flyover supports co-opted for cringe-worthy artworks and messages of solidarity from Tito’s Belgrade.

Gibson wanted to remove most of the surviving old buildings, leaving little except Coventry’s landmark “Three Spires”—but some of these were saved because of protests, doubtless to Gibson’s disgust at such sentimentality.

The compromise city is full of surprises and strange juxtapositions, with sudden views of huge Perpendicular spires along half-timbered and sandstone streets—these giving way without warning onto motorized mayhem or raddled rectangles of flaking concrete and tinted glass. The apparent attitude of the Redevelopers reminded me of the name of a house I had noticed out in the suburbs—“Itlldo”.

An early Sixties film shown in the city museum shows BBC journalist Raymond Baxter interviewing one of these planners, perhaps Gibson himself—a stocky man in brown three-piece suit with a heavy moustache, like an Ealing Studios character actor. The film is a relic in itself, with its well-dressed and well-spoken participants looking at photos of new and nasty edifices while they shake their heads at the stuffiness of those “homesick for the overcrowded medieval city they knew” and nod approvingly at those who “thinking of their children, and the future, will say ‘It’s smashing!’” The results were indeed “smashing”, although not always in the way intended.

Some of Gibson’s schemes are now being put into reverse as the city undergoes another renovation, and some of this will be an improvement—because the council consulted the public, an approach the opposite of that which prevailed in the 1950s and 60s, when it was assumed that the man from Whitehall really did know best. The best idea is the re-opening of stretches of the Sherbourne right in the middle of the city. It is pleasant to think of the wrecking ball as possible liberator.

One building that will not be altered is Coventry’s most famous landmark—the Grade 1 listed St. Michael’s Cathedral, re-imagined by Sir Basil Spence to win a 1951 competition, filled with the products of some of the period’s finest craftsmen and consecrated in 1962 to the strains of Benjamin Britten’s specially-commissioned War Requiem.

Spence’s bold conception was to leave the 14^th century shell standing as its own grave-marker, and build beside it at right angles a whole new cathedral, connected to its predecessor by a concrete canopy. This structural syncretism is not wholly successful, but the ensemble is both evocative of the period and extremely atmospheric. Occasionally, the local newspaper even carries stories of impressionable visitors who say they have heard the droning of aircraft over the old building—memories of the first great raid of 14 November 1940, which the Germans called with gallows humour “Operation Moonlight Sonata”—yet more motorized ghosts to make the city twitch and grumble in its sleep.

Post-modern pilgrims enter through the western porch into the roofless skeleton of the old St Michael’s, with the miraculously surviving tower rising up and up—at 300 feet “a sight to make one’s eyeballs turn about”, as John Russell put it in his 1942 Shakespeare’s Country, repining for this place “where the air is singed with the sudden denial of adoration”. All around are imprints of calcined chapels, and the glassless ghosts of windows—just enough to give some idea of what was lost. Office workers eat lunches on benches and sparrows hop around in hope as school field trippers roam through the remains on their way to the Brave New future as visualized by Sir Basil.

If we follow them, we come into what feels like a 1980s conference centre, then past a desk where a cashier relieves each visitor of £7, and an indeterminate space of stacked chairs and vestment lockers. It is an inauspicious introduction, but then you climb stairs, passing the poignant crucifix of charred roof timbers that was placed defiantly on the high altar the morning after Moonlight Sonata, and pass into a 270 foot by 80 foot rectangle, crepuscular even by cathedral standards. The darkness is caused by the ‘saw-tooth’ shape of the walls and the abstract stained glass which transmutes even the strongest sun into subdued pulses and mood-zones. But at different times of day it is brighter, because almost the entire south wall, the one that looks out onto the ruins, is a huge window, the Screen of Saints and Angels, with engraved figures by John Hutton. With their ever changing background of sun and cloud beyond the old walls, these are ethereal but unconventional representations of heavenly beings, which the artist has made no attempt to render beautiful. With their empty eyes, gnarled hands and knuckles, and the sky shifting through them, they are striking and slightly troubling—ideal angels for an age of angst.

Facing them is the 75 foot high tapestry of “Christ in Glory” by Graham Sutherland that fills the opposite wall, a tiny and undifferentiated man standing straight but insignificant between Jesus’ colossal feet. Some of the fittings are bland or ugly, almost like shop fittings, but they are redeemed by reminders of suffering, like the iron “Crown of Thorns” made by the Royal Engineers that frames a giant silver-winged angel in the Chapel of Gethsemane. There are altar cloths embroidered with the names of World War 2 battles and thick books of remembrance, and the centerpiece on the High Altar has as its centerpiece a cross made of 15^th century nails from the bombed building. Coventry is the centre of a global network called Communities of the Cross of Nails, all 160 of which display a cross made of old nails from Coventry—and whenever the Royal Navy has an HMS Coventry it carries an identical cross. The last ship of this name was sunk during the Falklands War, and Navy divers went down especially to salvage the cross—which has since been seconded to HMS Diamond, a ship with links to the city.

For a building concerned with conciliation, outside on the east wall there is a surprisingly martial touch in Jacob Epstein’s large 1958 bronze of St Michael standing skinny but strong, with a giant spear in his clenched fist and trampling down the naked and cloven-footed Lucifer.

Like their city, Coventrians themselves have also been in a state of flux in their recent history. In a slightly preposterous but revealing 1968 book called British Tastes, advertising agent D. Elliston Allen takes time out from discussing the beer-drinking habits of the north-east and the body-shapes of women in the Home Counties to remark,

“In going out today into the streets of any central Midland town or city, the first reaction of any normally perceptive person can hardly fail to be one of momentary surprise, even shock. Almost everyone, it seems, looks remarkably similar.”

If that was true then—he was relying largely on a 19^th century book called Races of Britain, unlikely source material for an advertising executive even then—it is much less true now. Thanks first to industrial demand and more recently two universities (plus a higher birthrate) out of a total population of around 310,000 the city has an estimated ethnic minority population of over 25%—although some of these are members of easily assimilable white minorities. Coventry has a relatively low black population (just over 3%) and fewer Muslims than has become usual in English cities. Rather surprisingly, the largest non-Christian religion is Sikhism and I saw a Sikh road-mending crew, elderly men with long wagging beards and yellow turbans to complement their fluorescent safety tabards—although such anecdotal evidence is even less scientific than D. Elliston Allen’s saloon-bar sociology. It is not only bombs or wrecking balls that have changed the city; in a way, Coventry is all of England condensed and speeded up.

An atypical Coventrian was Philip Larkin, born here in 1922, whose father somehow rose to become City Treasurer, despite combining manic depression with literary sensitivity and an admiration for Hitler. The Larkins’ commodious family house in Manor Road (that name itself evoking vanished buildings and vanquished orders) was demolished in the 1960s to make way for some road ‘improvement’, and such casual vandalism could have coloured the poet’s controversial politics.

In “I Remember, I Remember”, he passes through Coventry in 1955 for the first time in years, on a train “coming up England by a different line”. At the station:

“I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign 
That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’ 
So long, but found I wasn’t even clear 
Which side was which . . .”

As the Binkses continued their ruthless work, in their way as zealous as the Luftwaffe or the Puritans, Larkin would probably have found it even harder to know “which side was which”. But then, as now, all such ‘judgemental’, ‘conservative’, ‘classist’, ‘reactionary’ concerns are generally dismissed as impossible, High Tory, quasi-fascistic fantasies of crowd control and ‘turning back the clock’.

Larkin’s poem ends on notes of self-deprecation and acceptance, with him settling back in his seat as the train pulls out of Coventry, smiling as he brushes off the subject with the mock-flippant line—

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”.

The “nothing” Larkin pretended to discount was an intense early life lived in places now largely vanished, and that is also Coventry’s special “nothing”—a history that is simultaneously unique to the place and representative of the whole of England. Despite all the travails of her history, despite the Puritans, planes, planners, and other progressives, Coventry has narrowly succeeded in holding onto some segments of herself—precious particular pieces, a sense of being somewhere rather than just an abandoned “anywhere”.

NOTES

1. According to James Lees-Milne in the 18^th edition of Burke’s Peerage, vol 1

2. Some historians have disputed the notion of huge expanses of unbroken ancient forest, pointing out that human habitation in Warwickshire go back at least 5,000 years and therefore there must have been extensive clearance early on. See, for example Terry Slater, The History of Warwickshire (1981). There is a commendable project to reunite central England’s relict tracts of forest with a scheme called the National Forest

3. Unhappily for Warwickshire loyalists, satellite mapping has identified the real centre of England as being near Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire

4. William of Malmesbury, writing circa 1130

5. Samuel Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of England, 1840

6. It has been surmised that the phrase, like so many others, has Shakepearean origins—cf. Falstaff on his scruffy foot-soldiers: “I’ll not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat” (Henry IV, Part 1) 

Introduction

The goodwill towards the Southern states that one might expect from monetary reformers has been clouded by the claim that the War of Secession was instigated by international bankers for the control of the USA, and specifically that it was the South that was for this purpose backed by the Rothschilds and other European banking dynasties in Europe. While monetary reformers often allude to Abraham Lincoln having issued state credit in the form of the “Greenbacks,” and therefore Lincoln has become something of an icon among those who advocate alternatives to the usurious world financial system, seldom realized is that the Confederacy issued its own “Graybacks,” and did not have any type of fellowship with international finance. The condemnation of the South often includes an anti-Semitic element, because the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah P Benjamin, was Jewish, and from there flights of fancy roam free, including the claim that Benjamin was a “Rothschild agent” and even a that he was a “Rothschild relative.” This paper examines the claim as to whether the Rothschilds and other banking dynasties supported the South, and in particular examines the manner by which the Confederacy was really funded.

The “Grayback” served the Confederacy as the “Greenback” served the Union, and perhaps moreso, as the Confederacy was shut out of financial markets. It was a pragmatic move and one that better served the Confederate States of America (CSA) by force of circumstances than by going cap-in-hand to the international money-lenders, as most states then did and still do. Hence, the “Grayback” is an example of state credit used on a wide scale that allowed the functioning of an economy without recourse to usurious debt, and stands with other examples such as the use of Reserve Bank state credit by the 1935 New Zealand Labour Government.[i] Given the present widespread economic tumult caused by the compound interest intrinsic to the debt-finance system that controls much of the world, a concentration of alternative systems of banking and finance are of vital importance, but are presently problems seldom understood by the “Right.” This was not always the case, as exemplified by the writings of Ezra Pound[ii] and the “Social Justice” movement of Father Coughlin,[iii] et al.

Origins of a Myth

One of the first, if not the first, to circulate the allegation that the Confederacy was controlled by the Rothschilds as a means of weakening the Union and of taking control of the banking system was the Czarist émigré Count Cherep-Spiridovitch, who cites an alleged interview with German Chancellor Bismarck in 1876:

The division of the United States into two federations of equal force was decided long before the civil war by the High Financial Power of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained in one block and as one nation, would attain economical and financial independence, which would upset the financial domination over the world. The voice of the Rothschilds predominated. They foresaw tremendous booty if they could substitute two feeble democracies indebted to the Jewish financiers for the vigorous republic confident and self-providing. Therefore they started their emissaries in order to exploit the question of slavery and thus to dig an abyss between the two parts of the republic....[iv]

The alleged quote from Bismarck goes on to praise Lincoln for being conscious of the plans of the “Jewish financiers” and for bypassing them with his own credit, for which he was assassinated.

The Czarist Count’s interest in this matter might be accounted for by:

1. His tendency, common among Czarist émigrés in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, where Jewish involvement was regarded as predominant because of the conspicuousness Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Uritsky, Sverdlov, et al, to seek out explanations for all upheavals by tracing their origins to the Jews. The Count’s book, The Secret World Government, ascribes much of history to the “hidden hand” (sic) of Jewry. The Count sees the same “hidden hand” that killed Czar Nicholas and his family after the Bolshevik seizure, as being that which also assassinated Lincoln.[v]

2. The historically good relations that had existed between the United States and Czarist Russia. Cherep-Spiridovitch alludes to Russia being “friendly to the Union cause and in 1863, when the success of the cause looked doubtful, a fleet of Russian war ships came into the harbor in New York.”[vi] Cherep-Spiridovitch states that Czar Alexander II’s orders were for the Russian fleet to be ready to “take orders from Lincoln.”[vii]

These accounts have been repeated ever since, especially among Right-wing conspiracy theorists, but are incorrect. The circumstances of the Russian Atlantic Fleet’s entry into New York harbor are related by Marshall B Davidson, who captures the imagery of welcome and jubilation among New Yorkers at the arrival of the Russians. Davidson states that at the time there were many rumors as to why the Russians had arrived, chief among them being that they were there to assist the Union against the South.

. . . In any case, New York seems generally to have assumed that this was a “friendship visit,” and must indicate Russian support for the Northern cause—a legend that lost nothing in its retelling, over the years, and that was not finally put to rest until 1915.[viii]

The reference by Davidson that the matter was “finally put to rest” in 1915 is optimistic as the legend has remained firm among certain quarters, Cherep-Spiridovitch’s 1926 book being one such example. Marshall states that at the time the Russian ships sailed into New York and San Francisco, a potential for conflict had emerged between Russia and England, Austria and France over Russia’s suppression of the Polish revolt. In 1915 Dr Frank A Golder, having had access to official Russian records, wrote in the American Historical Review that the Russian visits were not ones of “friendship,” but had been highly secret manoeuvres to get the best of the Russian ships into safe ports, the concern being that they would be trapped in the event of conflict with the European powers.[ix] New York and San Francisco were the only convenient ports for the best ships of Russia’s Atlantic and Pacific squadrons. From here the Russian ships could harass British commercial routes. The manoeuvre seems to have succeeded, states Davidson, as there was no ultimatum against Russia. “That they came as interested supporters of the Northern cause was a notion concocted and nurtured by the Unionists who were only too happy to imagine it to be true,” writes Davidson.[x]

However, ninety-five years on from the article by Dr Golder, and the image of an alliance between Lincoln and Czar Alexander against “international financiers” and/or the Jewish “hidden hand” is still being nurtured. While those with what one might call a cynical attitude towards Jews see the presence of Judah P Benjamin as Confederate Secretary of State as sufficient reason to consider the South as nothing but a Rothschild contrivance, monetary reformers see Lincoln in heroic terms for his having issued the Greenbacks as state credit to bypass plutocratic interests. What is overlooked is that the Confederacy issued its own Greenback equivalent, known as Graybacks. Hence the scenario is that, for example, according to Rochelle Ascher, a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, Lincoln fought the “British-backed New York banking system” bringing banking under control and issuing $450 million state-created Greenbacks to fund the war.[xi]

The very fact that the Confederacy was not supported by international finance caused the necessity of the Confederacy to generate its own credit. While an examination of the efficacy of government currency issue is not the subject of this essay, what should be noted is that price-inflation was caused in significant part by large-scale counterfeiting of Graybacks from the North, and was also affected greatly by public confidence or loss of confidence, depending on the development of the war. State currency amounted to 60% of the CSA revenue during the war.[xii] Marc Wiedenmier states that the money issued by the CSA was interest-free:

. . . [N]on-interest-bearing money remained the predominant medium of exchange in the Southern Confederacy despite the existence of large quantities of interest-bearing money…. state and Confederate governments forced banks to accept both types of money through de facto legal restrictions.[xiii]

The diehard manner by which myths about the Confederacy persist is accounted for by the presence of Judah P. Benjamin, more than by any other factor. Such a “Court Jew” (sic) can only be explained. So it goes, by the existence of a high-powered conspiracy that placed him in that position. We have previously seen how this attitude was taken up by the Czarist émigré Count Cherep-Spiridovitch, in 1926. The White Russian émigrés were to become very influential in shaping anti-Semitic ideologies outside Russia. Two obvious examples are Alfred Rosenberg who was to have a major input into the ideology of the National Socialist party in Germany; and Boris Brasol, a Czarist jurist who had been a member of a Russian trade delegation in the USA when the Russian revolutions destroyed his world, and who maintained influential contacts and was instrumental in popularising the Protocols of Zion in the USA. At any rate, the anti-Southern attitude was taken up by leading American conservatives whom one might normally expect to support the aristocratic and agrarian virtues and states’ rights of the South against Northern industrialism and plutocracy, and might have done so if it was not for the pervasive bugbear of Judah P. Benjamin.

One of the most prominent of the American conservatives was Gerald L. K. Smith, a force in his day first as aide to Louisiana’s Huey Long, then as an eloquent “America Firster” along with Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, et al.[xiv] During the course of his long career attacking Communism, Zionism and Judaism, including what he states was his campaign in the South that was instrumental in the creation of the “Dixie Party,”[xv]Smith published an article on the War of Secession in which he states that,

. . . if we look behind the scenes we will find that the “slave question” was but the surface issue. Below the surface ran a current of intrigue that ended with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln because he was determined that the United State be free from the bondage of the international bankers.[xvi]

Smith cites a passage from a book by John Reeves, who was said to have had access to the Rothschild archives, in which Reeves states that the division of the USA was decided by the Rothschilds at the wedding of Leonara, daughter of Lionel, to her cousin, Alphonse, son of James of Paris, at the family gathering in the City of London, in 1857. British Prime Minister Disraeli is reported to have said that it was here that a plan was devised to divide the USA into two, split between James and Lionel.[xvii]

Be that as it may, Smith jumped to the conclusion that, “Judah P Benjamin was chosen by the Rothschilds to do their work in the United States and he was the first adviser to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Southern Confederacy…”[xviii] The claim is repeated that Czar Alexander knew of the Rothschild plans for the USA and that this was the reason for his dispatching ships to New York and San Francisco harbors. The article concludes with the often-used alleged material from Bismarck. Other articles attempting to relate the Confederacy to Rothschild domination follow the same pattern to the present time.

Judah P. Benjamin: Davis’ “Court Jew”?

As indicated by the several references above, the CSA’s alleged subservience to Rothschild interests centres around Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate Secretary of State, who is called by friend and foe alike the “brains of the Confederacy.”[xix]

Benjamin has been described not only as a “Rothschild agent,” but also as a “Rothschild relative.” Benjamin’s association with Rothschild agencies is said to have started early in his career. The LaRouche-sponsored “Modern History Project,” which sees the conspiratorial apparatus as of Anglo-imperialist[xx] rather than Jewish pedigree, for example, states:

Judah P. Benjamin (1811-84) of the law firm of Slidell, Benjamin and Conrad in Louisiana was a Rothschild agent who became Secretary of State for the Confederacy in 1862. His law partner John Slidell (August Belmont’s[xxi] wife’s uncle) was the Confederate envoy to France. Slidell’s daughter was married to Baron Frederick d’Erlanger in Frankfurt who was related to the Rothschilds and acted on their behalf. Slidell was the representative of the South who borrowed money from the d’Erlangers to finance the Confederacy.[xxii]

The conspiracy theorist Commander William Guy Carr wrote without evidence or references that, “Judah P. Benjamin, a Rothschild relative, was appointed as their professional strategist in America.”[xxiii] There does not appear to be any evidence of, or reason for believing, that Benjamin was a “relative of the Rothschilds.”

The attitude of Rothschild’s actual agent in the USA, August Belmont, who was also National Chairman of the Democratic Party, was, however, avidly and fanatically pro-Union. The attitude of the Rothschilds towards either side was cautious, but Belmont warned that if it were not Rothschild funding that was provided to the North, which Belmont was convinced would win any conflict, the Rothschilds’ rivals would take their place. The bankers who did emerge best from the war were J. and W. Seligman and Company who, “had been the main financial stay of Lincoln’s administration during the war and they reaped the benefits afterward.”[xxiv]

Diplomatic Failures with Europe

While it is generally held by friend and foe alike that the Rothschilds reigned above all in Europe, logic would suggest that Britain, France, and other states heavily influenced by Rothschild lending, would be inclined towards formal support for the Confederacy, if the CSA was a client state of the bankers. This was not the case, despite much being made of supposedly pro-South sentiments among some quarters in England and France.

Despite Benjamin’s efforts, diplomatic recognition by Britain was not forthcoming. Moreover, in 1863 Benjamin closed the CSA mission to England, and evicted the remaining British consular agents from the South.[xxv] This latter expulsion was at the direct instigation of Benjamin when he called a Cabinet meeting while Davis was en route to Tennessee, an action that nonetheless brought prompt agreement from Davis.[xxvi] Efforts to secure French recognition were also unsuccessful. Indeed, in a breach of supposed British neutrality, by 1863 around 75,000 Irishmen had volunteered to fight with the North, as did Germans and other foreign recruits.[xxvii]

Loans Not Forthcoming

As mentioned above, Seligman provided the North with its financial wherewithal, despite the claim that the Union stood against international finance, while the South was in thrall to usury.

The primary claim in regard to the “Rothschild” (sic) funding of the Confederacy is that an important loan was secured from the Erlanger bank in Paris. This financial arrangement was not however favorable to the Confederacy; it was nothing other than a typical money-lending deal that did the South no favors.

Much is made of CSA emissary and Benjamin’s former law partner John Sliddell’s daughter being engaged to Baron Erlanger; and of Slidell’s niece being married to August Belmont, the Rothschild representative to the Northern States.[xxviii] Despite the family connections, the Erlangers showed the Confederacy no support outside of a single usurious business deal. Benjamin personally negotiated the $2.5 million loan with Baron Emile Erlanger when the latter visited Richmond, Virginia. Benjamin hoped that involvement with the banking house of Erlanger and Cie, and with the Erlanger family, who were close friends and advisors to Emperor Louis Napoleon, would secure diplomatic relations with France,[xxix] having failed to make any headway with Britain. The original plan had been for a loan of $25 million to be repaid with bonds and the sale of cotton, with the Erlangers reaping a huge profit from a 23% commission and an additional 8% for handling the bonds.[xxx] Ironically, it was Benjamin who regarded the terms with outrage, as “usury.” Intensive face-to-face negotiations by Benjamin with Erlanger reduced the rate from 8% to 7%. Speculators and investors in Europe bought up the bonds and the Erlangers made a quick profit.[xxxi]

The seminal study on funding and diplomacy during the American Civil War is Jay Sexton’s[xxxii] Debtor Diplomacy.[xxxiii] Sexton does not try to obfuscate the role of international finance in politics. He states that the desire of the American states to gain European capital influenced foreign policy, and that the primary influence was that of Britain, and this influence was particularly evident during the Civil War. “Furthermore, the financial needs of the United States (and the Confederacy) imparted significant political power to an elite group of London-based financiers who became intimately involved in American foreign relations during this period,”[xxxiv] which Sexton describes as: “The unprecedented power of an elite group of international financiers.”[xxxv]

The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the great British-based banking houses reach the pinnacle of their power and influence in American affairs. Led by Baring Brothers, the Rothschilds, and George Peabody and Company (the predecessor to the house of J P Morgan), banks in the City of London were the architects of nearly every facet of the Atlantic economy. In addition to negotiating loans and marketing American securities abroad, banks such as the Barings and Rothschilds underwrote transatlantic trade, provided insurance, exchanged currencies, and compiled influential market reports. During the westward flow of capital across the Atlantic, however, remained the central function of the leasing transatlantic banks. Ninety percent of the United States’ foreign indebtness in 1861 was of British origin.[xxxvi]

The financial and commercial power of these banks “extended to them significant political and diplomatic influence on both sides of the Atlantic,” adds Sexton, and he alludes to the poem “Don Juan” by Lord Bryon, where it is stated that the Barings and the Rothschilds are the “true lords of Europe.” [xxxvii]

In the USA these bankers also exercised considerable influence through the connections of their emissaries; in particular August Belmont, and Thomas Ward and Daniel Webster acting for Barings, in Massachusetts, whom Sexton describes as “highly influential politicians and lobbyists.”[xxxviii] “These transnational banks established a network of high finance and high politics that connected Britain and the United State and merged international finance with international relations.”[xxxix]

Hence, Sexton confirms what so-called “conspiracy theorists” are often scoffed at for by academe and media; that there was—and is—an international elite of bankers who weld political power through their use of money and trade. This is also how another eminent historian, Dr Carroll Quigley of Harvard, described these same international bankers when he wrote that they are, “devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence on political life.”[xl] Quigley described their aim as being:

[T]o form a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers.[xli]

Amidst the power of the financial elite over much of Europe and the North, the most that can be said for CSA relations with the supposedly pro-Confederate England is that Confederate emissaries secured Enfield rifles from the London Armoury, which also provided arms for the North.[xlii]

The only bank that was sympathetic to the Confederacy was Fraser, Trenholm, and Company, Liverpool, under the directorship of Charles Prioleau, which became the Confederacy’s “unofficial bank.” This hardly amounts to collusion between international finance and the Confederacy, let alone with the Rothschilds. As Sexton observes, “the bank was far from a financial powerhouse by most estimations,” but by 1860 had become a leading cotton importer.[xliii] Charles Prioleau was a South Carolinian, “who had long attempted to free the South from, as he viewed it, the economic hegemony of the North.”[xliv] Hence the motivation of the firm, headed by a Southerner, was not only one of Confederate sympathies but that the primary individual concerned, Prioleau, wanted to assist the South in opposing the plutocratic interests centred in the North. The company was responsible for arranging for the ships that ran the Northern blockade, and its own ships even flew the Confederate Flag. In 1861 CSA President Jefferson Davis authorized the use of the bank as the Confederacy’s depository.[xlv] However, the agency of this relatively modest bank could not compensate for the lack of credit from international finance, and already by 1862 the CSA’s account with Fraser, Trenholm, and Co. was in severe overdraft.

Considering the disruption of the cotton trade to England as the result of war what is remarkable is the lack of support that Britain showed the Confederacy, despite turning a blind eye to the supply of ships from Britain. What the international financiers of The City of London sought by 1862 was a quick diplomatic solution to the war. However, Sexton emphasizes that:

It is important to note that the Rothschilds, whose holdings of Southern states securities were minimal and were only tangentially involved in the cotton trade, did not financially nor politically support the Confederacy. Rothschild records clearly reveal the firm’s disdain for slavery. Nor, despite the myth, did the bank loan money to the Confederacy during the war.[xlvi]

Sexton states in a footnote in regard to the “myth” of Rothschild funding of the Confederacy that there is only one instance when the bank brokered (as distinct from purchased) a sale of Confederate bonds, for only $6,000, on behalf of Joseph Deynood in 1864. “This sole instance pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Union bonds that the bank brokered in the same period.”[xlvii]

It was amidst this dire financial situation, denied the financial bloodline of international finance, that the Confederacy resorted to the issue of its equivalent to Lincoln’s Greenbacks, the Graybacks, for which Davis is seldom acknowledged by those who present Lincoln as a champion of banking reform against usury.