Note: The following is the full text in English of an interview conducted by Moritz Schwarz for the German weekly periodical, Junge Freiheit. A full-page interview, it was conducted in English and subsequently translated into German and edited down to fit. The interview appears on page 3. The occasion is the publication by Antaios of a collection of essays by me in German translation, titled Warum Konservative immer verlieren [Why Conservatives Always Lose].

In modern liberal historiography, the efforts of eugenicists towards immigration restriction in the United States, which eventually led to the Immigration Act of 1924, are perceived as having been illiberal, and therefore morally in contradiction with the liberal founding principles of the North American republic. But were they really? The Immigration Act of 1924 was chiefly authored by Albert Johnson, a Republican Congressman, who was friends with Madison Grant, and who was by then, and thanks to the . . .

In ‘Equality as an Evil’, published in April 2012 in Alternative Right (and recently re-posted on that same site), the argument is made that

it is difficult not to see White egalitarians as suffering from an undiagnosed psychopathology, particularly when their equality activism’s long-term effect is to cause massive damage to their race, perhaps even its eventual destruction. Being perfectly analogous, such behaviour can be conceptualised as a collective tendency towards self-mutilation and / or suicide. In the case of Whites, it is reasonable, then, to treat egalitarianism as a moral defect or mental disturbance. (In the case of coloured people, egalitarianism is paid lip service in the interest of extracting concessions; in the case of a subset of Jews since the nineteenth century, egalitarianism is a strategy aimed at making Western societies more amenable to Jews.) Mental disturbance and defective morality are often linked.

The above is a video recording of my talk for the 13 April 2013 edition of the London Forum, held in central London. I am introduced by the organiser, Jeremy Bedford-Turner. The video was recorded by a member of the audience. The topic of my talk is the late Jonathan Bowden, orator, artist, writer, thinker, and friend, who passed away on 29 March 2012. The day before the talk would have been his 51st birthday. As announced after the speech, I am currently researching a book-length biography of Jonathan Bowden.

Obscure today, but until seventy years ago a well-known and prolific author and translator, British artist and writer Anthony Ludovici is best remembered today as a proponent of aristocracy. The Specious Origins of Liberalism, published in 1967, was his last book, and while (broadly speaking) its title correctly describes its contents, this is more a case for aristocracy than a critical history of the intellectual origins of liberalism. The earlier chapters of the book offer a critique of liberal thought; the author pours scorn on what he considers the foolish liberal belief in the natural benevolence of man, which he attributes to a lack of psychological insight. He accuses liberal philosophers of having little knowledge of human nature and, especially John Locke and William Godwin (father of Mary Shelley), of having their heads in the clouds—though some, like John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Herbert Spencer are quoted betraying certain awareness of the impracticability of their ideals.

It is a cliché in our Left-leaning liberal society that we must all remain vigilant against any ideology that rejects equality as a morally desirable aim, because, should that ideology achieve political power, we would soon find ourselves back in the slippery slope that begins with a justification of racism and ends with the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both liberals and their Marxist critics present themselves as forces of liberation and emancipation, and their historiography portrays the time before their advent as one of privilege, oppression, and inhumanity. Yet, the history of the last one hundred years has shown that, contrary to the conceit of liberals and the Left, and contrary to the fine rhetoric that emanates from their camp, the moral logic of egalitarianism also justifies privilege, oppression, and inhumanity, exactly the same ills it claims to have opposed.

In a book he wrote some twenty years ago, Jonathan Bowden said that meaning originates in difference, or inequality. This interests me because, prior to discovering the text, I made a very similar argument in an essay, published about a year ago, where I attacked the idea—almost universally accepted in the West—that equality is a moral good. My argument was that the nature of value is both qualitative (subjective) and quantitative (objective). Qualitative value exists when something is special, when it is different from other examples of the same, because it has special or unique qualities. Quantitative value exists when something is superior, when it is different from other examples of the same, because it is measurably better or of a higher quality.

For close to half a century now those at the Right end of political conservatism throughout the West have been protesting government immigration policy. Much has changed during this period, only invariably for the worse: if twenty, thirty, forty years ago it was thought that the governments of the day were letting in too many ‘immigrants’, the governments of today are letting in far more; and if before it was difficult to speak honestly about why the number of ‘immigrants’ was a problem, now it is more difficult than ever. The campaign against ‘immigration’ has failed. What is more—and this should have become obvious long ago—it will never succeed. The problems with the campaign are not cosmetic . . .

In his acknowledgment pages Paul O’Keefe states that it took him a decade—not including the years of research already donated to him by another writer—to complete his biography of Wyndham Lewis, a project he began in 1990 while he was president of the Wyndham Lewis Society. And this is apparent, for this volume, holding 700 pages of tightly packed print, offers an indefatigably detailed and masochistically researched account of the British modernist artist and author’s life. Biographies differ in emphasis, depending on the author’s biases, and the tone here is set early in the first chapter, which consists of a detailed description of Lewis’ bisected brain—now preserved in the Pathology Museum of the Imperial College School of Medicine—and the progressive destruction (through compression of the adjacent structures) caused by the growth of its pituitary tumor, medically known as a chromophone adenoma. O’Keefe’s narration is temperate and balanced in the extreme . . .

On 2 January, the Daily Mail reported:In a scathing assessment, the respected centre-Right think tank Civitas accuses the Prime Minister of using billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to ‘rebrand his party and cement the coalition with the Liberal Democrats’. The study warns that the wasteful Department for International Development is almost beyond reform and suggests it should be effectively shut down. . . . [It] calls for Mr Cameron’s ‘exorbitant and self-indulgent’ target to spend 0.7 per cent of Britain’s income on aid to be scrapped, saying there is no evidence it will help the world’s poor.

It may seem ironic for those who are said to have “far Right views,” but perhaps one of the biggest obstacles in the struggle for the West is the far Right’s obsession with the scientific understanding of human races. It is not so much that scientific knowledge about race is irrelevant to our political purpose (which is the struggle for the West), but, rather, that this science is thought to possess a political utility it does not and will never have. As I have stated before, unless he is already temperamentally predisposed towards elitism, the man in the street in the 21st century will never be induced to alter his views on race by dint of scientific data alone, because that data will be interpreted always in relation to extra-factual social considerations that, in the West, hinge on the dominance of egalitarian liberal morality.

There are those who wonder what the point is in discussing abstract theory while we are losing control over our society, in concrete and measurable ways, on multiple fronts, on a daily basis. For them abstract theory is just words, futile and devoid of meaning because their effect cannot be quantified, because their abundance is disproportionate to their physical effects, and because what ultimately counts for them is what transpires in empirical reality. This is an extreme empiricist view, which is driven by a pragmatic turn of mind. However, it is not an uncommon view, given that only a small minority are capable of thinking in very abstract terms. And yet any movement that seeks fundamental political change is mostly about words, which means it is mostly about ideas. While it is true that what counts, ultimately, is what happens out there in the empirical world, what happens out there represents the culmination of a process that began once upon the time with a lone man thinking.

Having spent a few days with the author in his native Alabama, I decided it was high time to tackle his best-known work: Lee. Lee was, apparently, originally to be titled, The Book of Lee, and it was the first of Perdue’s books to be published (in 1991), though not the first to be written. Not long after publication, a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer wrinkled his nose at Perdue, and pronounced him ‘a reactionary snob’. It seems Perdue always looked forward to being a cantankerous misanthrope in his seventies, because in this novel his alter ego, Leland Pefley, Lee, is a cantankerous misanthrope in his seventies. Now 73, with menacingly cantilevered black eyebrows, Perdue must be loving every minute of the . . .

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Sergei Eisenstein's second installment of his intended film trilogy about Ivan the Terrible began production in 1945. When finished, a year later, Stalin's censors harshly criticised the film on account of its ambivalent depiction of state terrorism. This led to a decision not to release the film, which, in turn, caused production of Part III to cease. Part II tells the story of Ivan's crushing of the boyars, and is remarkable, among other things, for its sudden switch to colour film during the last ten minutes. This was intended to symbolise the transition from good to bad, and is part of the general array of symbols used by Eisenstein to convey meaning or the nature of the main characters, who are likened to various animals. . .

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While spending a few days in Alabama with misanthropic novelist Tito Perdue, the latter insisted I watch Sergei Eisenstein's 1944 film, Ivan the Terrible. This was the most user-friendly of an unrelentingly stern and serious collection of black and white films he had in store, all made for deathly serious men of 40 and above, all in DVD with covers depicting 40-and-above male faces unvaryingly creased with grief, rage, and despair. Made in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule, Ivan is nevertheless an extraordinary production, as one would expect, albeit incomplete, since only Parts I and II out of an intended trilogy were ever made. (Stalin objected to Part II and funding was withdrawn, causing Part III never to leave the production stage.) Part I is the best of the surviving . . .

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