NationalConservative
02-16-2010, 06:07 PM
IN THIS COLUMN last month I pointed to the inadequacy of Liberal Democracy, as it has developed in Britain, to preserve society from the tendencies towards disintegration. I analysed the manifestations of sickness in the Liberal West that had given rise to the counter-revolutionary movement generally known as Fascism. I stated that because the West had rejected Fascism as an answer to the problems that Liberalism had created it did not mean that an alternative answer had been found. I pictured Liberalism and Fascism as respectively thesis and anti*thesis in the quest to find that ideal balance between Order and Freedom, and proposed that we now had to find the synthesis.
It must never be forgotten, however, that both the Liberal-Democratic and Fascist styles of government and society are mere forms; procedures and structures adopted as means of achieving certain human goals. They are not ends in themselves, and as long as we persist in seeing them as ends, rather than just as means, we will experience continual confusion in our search for the synthesis mentioned.
Even the aims of Order and Freedom, referred to earlier, are themselves only means. What value in Order if it is the order of a senescent society, quietly and peacefully dozing its way towards eclipse, towards an exit from history? Conservatives who call for a restoration of 'Law and Order' usually give the impression that so long as that state of things is achieved nothing else matters. In fact the orderly progress towards national death is less preferable than a state of violent revolution and upheaval if the consequence of such revolution and upheaval might be the restoration of national life forces. No, the virtue of Order depends entirely on the purposes to which society is ordered.
So also with Freedom. What value in Freedom if it is the freedom of the criminal to prosper in crime, the freedom of the mobster to promote mob rule, the freedom of the subversive to subvert, the freedom of every anti-social and anti-national element to run amok, the freedom that ends in political, economic, social and moral chaos? As I said in last month's article, there is only one freedom worth defending and that is the freedom to do what is right.
THE LIBERAL VIEW
Indeed this is not how the liberal sees it. To him Freedom is the ultimate end of everything — his particular conception of Freedom, that is. It is a freedom which has very little to do with the right of the ordinary individual to live his private life as he wishes — for that freedom has in fact been steadily eroded as the liberalisation of modern society has advanced. The freedom which liberals principally have in mind is the freedom of the sediment of society from legal restraint and the freedom of sectional power-groups to tear society apart.
The obsession of the liberal with 'Freedom' in this context can be seen from the liberal reading of history. The last two World Wars, for instance were fought, not first and foremost for the defence of land and people, of Empire, of national interests; they were fought for 'Freedom' - a piece of meaningless verbiage that seems to suffer no diminution from the ironic laugh that it must now provoke East of the Elbe. History as a whole is seen as a continual progression upward towards greater 'Freedom' meaning of course a progression towards ever more liberal institutions. The good guys of history are those who aided this pro*gression, the bad guys those who hindered it. Thus liberals today ask of an age, not what great music, literature or architecture it produced, not what achievements of national expansion, of heroism, of discovery. of invention it generated, not whether for the nation it was an age of victory or defeat, glory or humiliation, but whether in such an age liberal ideals of Parliamentarianism, Democracy and 'Liberty' were in the ascendant.
To oppose this thoroughly shallow and silly view of history and the idea of priorities that it betokens does not mean dismissing Freedom as being of no value or importance; it means simply establishing a perspective in which Freedom is seen as one of the possible means towards a better society depending on who has it and the uses to which it is put.
SOCIETY'S GOALS
We can only properly evaluate Freedom, and we can only properly evaluate Order, if we first settle the question of what are society's basic goals? What is society's purpose in the first place? What is the object of all politics and human organisation?
To liberals no better summary of this purpose and object can be found than that contained in the following passage from the writings of Jeremy Bentham, often regarded as the Father of English liberalism:—
"The aim of government should be the greatest happiness of all the members of the state. But what is good for one may be opposed to the happiness of many others. Unfortunately, it is impossible to enlarge indefinitely the sphere of happiness of every individual without coming into conflict with the happiness of others. Therefore the only aim should be the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number; in a word, the common good is the right aim of government, and the proper task of a lawmaker is to discover regulations designed to bring about the greatest good to the greatest number of human beings . . . The determination of every point in every law, from first to last, without exception, must be directed towards the greatest good of the greatest number and must rest upon that principle."
As if anticipating that his interpretation of 'happiness' might be questioned, Bentham described it as being a state of "Subsistence, Abundance, Security and Equality".
In this evaluation of Bentham's we can find an echo of the words of John Locke, writing nearly a century earlier, who said:—
"Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent, which is done by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it."
In the latter passage Locke gives a strong clue to what is the essential point: men join together "for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living" - in other words, were this comfortable, safe and peaceable living to be obtainable without such a coming together it would not occur. Implicit in this way of thinking is the supposition that there is in Man absolutely no firm community spirit or loyalty stemming from his innermost being; any community that he joins is merely a protection society for the furtherance of his own private interests and desires; men come together to obtain by co*operation that which they could not obtain living in isolation from one another. Citizenship is in effect relegated to the status of a mere insurance policy in which in return for certain contributions one gets certain benefits.
That some men in this world regard their place in society as being no more than that is undoubtedly true. However, such men are the exception to history and not the cause of it. There is scarcely a single major historical development of which this impulse can be said to be the motive. All of history's most decisive men, and the movements of multitudes that they have inspired and directed, have assuredly been driven on by far deeper forces within the human spirit. This is a fact so patently obvious that even the most doctrinaire liberal would not deny it. Yet the logic that it predicates in our understanding of society is something that liberals just will not accept.
As for Bentham's ideal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, this reduces human society to no higher level of consciousness than a herd of cows in a field, who are surely happy while being allowed to graze in peace. Should the quest for political wisdom not recognise in great races and nations some more lofty ambitions than those of cows?
ANARCHY THE LIBERAL IDEAL
These gems of liberal thought betray the real truth: that the ideal human state is one of anarchy, in other words with every*body enjoying total freedom to do what he likes. Liberals do not say that this is not desirable, only that it is not possible — given the proximity to one another in which humans have to live. One man's freedom is therefore limited by the need for it not to come into "conflict with the happiness of others" - and not, it seems, by any higher considerations than that.
So far as Bentham's criteria of happiness are concerned, we get an even better picture of liberalism's real values. "Subsistence", "Abundance", "Security “all essentially materialistic concepts. About "Equality", it may be assumed that Bentham meant equality before the law, for liberalism had not in his time advanced so far along the communist road as to claim that all men can possibly be equal in merit, possessions or rank.
We need not waste time arguing the usefulness of these aims to evaluate them in the scale of human priorities. Of course everyone prefers Happiness to Unhappiness, Subsistence to Starvation, Abundance to Shortage, Security to Insecurity, and certainly most of us believe that men should be equal before the law.
But in my submission any society in which these aims are paramount is a society advanced very little above the animal level and indeed in some respects even inferior to animals, as I shall later explain. To return to our original question, what is the object of all politics and human organisation?
OUR PURPOSE
To us in the National Front the answer has always been clear. The strongest drive which we as humans possess is the drive towards the perpetuation and the destiny of our kind, towards the furtherance of its interests and the expansion of its power.
And when we say this we mean it historically and not just contemporarily.
By "our kind" we mean of course our people that people bound to us ethnically and by tradition, custom, history, language and sentiment: our nation.
Thinking and feeling in this way, we cannot cut ourselves off either from our past or our future. Our past has made us what we are and given us what we have. Had our ancestors married negroes, we would today be part negro, with all that that implies. Had our ancestors not conquered and colonised great areas of the world, our generation today would lack living space and natural resources. Had our ancestors not achieved mighty works, we today would not only not be able to enjoy the practical benefits of those works but would not be able to draw upon their creation as a source of honour and pride.
And to us honour and pride are very real values because they are very real human emotions — emotions without which mankind descends very quickly to a con*temptible existence.
This sense of honour and pride drives us to pass on to the generations of the future the heritage which we have had handed down to us from generations of the past -if possible increased but at least not diminished.
As nationalists we see ourselves as part of a process of destiny and our individual lives valuable or worthless according to what part we play in that destiny; in this destiny lies the extension of our egos which lifts us to a level of thought and action higher than that which merely serves our own selves. This does not mean that we deprecate individualism but that we value the individual personality as an agent in the destiny of nation and race. This is in complete contrast to liberalism, which regards the individual as an end in himself and community as merely a means.
From our position we are bound to take a different view of Freedom and its limitations. The liberal will limit the freedom of one individual at the point where it may intrude upon the freedom and happiness of another individual. To us that limit is dictated by the national interest, present and future.
THE ANIMAL WORLD
Even the animal world, notwithstanding its comparatively primitive level, is in this respect more virtuous than humans of the liberal persuasion, since it does have a very rudimentary urge to survive and continue itself — if we exclude such unusual forms of animal life as lemmings. Certainly in nearly all types of animal there is a built-in instinct of self-preservation which extends to the preservation of the species, of the race. Humans addicted to liberalism are nearly alone among life forms on this planet in being quite unconcerned with the destiny of their kind, only with the destiny of their beliefs.
There is one particular field which best exemplifies the difference between our own national and race ethic, with its destiny orientation, and the wholly selfish ethic of liberalism: this is the field of procreation.
Today the liberal world is frantically trying to organise 'birth-control'. Why birth control? Very simply because in the spiritual wasteland that is the modern West families must be kept down to a size that will not endanger our enjoyment of such economic priorities as motor cars, colour TV sets and washing machines. It is no use telling liberals that birth-control leads to racial death; for such things as race destiny have no interest for him. His concern is only for the contemporary world, its pleasures, its amuse*ments, its material wants. Sex is one of these and nothing more. The future of the race can therefore be forgotten as we get on with the job of enjoying the present to the fullest degree.
How differently do we see things! To us a divine purpose is at work in ordering the human functioning so that one of life's most beautiful experiences is at the same time a means to the creation of new life; the pleasure of the former achieves its most complete totality with the coming of the latter. With joy we greet the birth that is the sign of the continuance of family and race; to the liberal that birth is an inconvenience to the business of enhancing the 'affluent society'.
It is in these basic human values and goals that we see the real gulf between liberalism and our own nationalist philosophy, not necessarily so much in the political procedures that are adopted in the pursuit of those values and goals. We really stand for an entirely different type of country and an entirely different type of world to those of the liberals, and it is this, more than any questions of method, that divides us from them.
SYNTHESIS
Once this is recognised, it is much easier for us to reconcile and synthesise the sometimes conflicting concepts of Order and Freedom, Authority and Democracy.
In a really mature approach to politics neither Authority nor Democracy are sacred principles in themselves. There are situations in the affairs of men in which salvation can only come from the inspiration of the out*standing leader and through the gift of his command, or alternatively through the command of a wise and strong-willed elite. There are other situations in which the best decisions can be made by means of popular consensus. The art of true leadership, and of government, is that of correctly appraising these situations and acting accordingly -knowing, in other words, when to adopt autocratic and when to adopt democratic methods.
This is not the liberal approach. To the liberal, Autocracy is at all times self-evidently wrong — even if it achieves results that bring great benefits to nation and people; Demo*cracy is at all times self-evidently right -even though its results may be disastrous to nation and people. In appraising the history, tradition, custom and psychology of the British peoples, we in the National Front believe that the only method of government that will work with any permanence in this country and kindred Anglo-Celtic countries around the world is that which will exist by popular representation and consent and which will give to people the right to debate freely the great issues of the day -- in essence Democracy.
But this is solely because we think that a form of Democracy is what suits the national temperament, not because we think Democracy is morally right. It may not have been right for Germans and Italians before and during the last war; it may not be right for Chileans and Iranians today. Different peoples at different times have different political needs. Our argument against Dictatorship is not an ideological argument; it is merely a difference of opinion as to the best way to get things done.
As to Freedom, in the type of society to which we aim I do not envisage the average individual having any less freedom than he has now — indeed he may have more. It will be the moral basis of Freedom that will change.
We do not see it as the object of society to make the individual as free as possible — within the sole limits postulated by Bentham and his liberal disciples; we believe it right to strive for a fine balance in the extension of freedom whereby the individual is enhanced as a member of his people, whereby he becomes the best possible servant of his people.
This should be enough freedom to encourage his personal enterprise and initiative and to give scope for the exercise of his individual gifts but not so much freedom that he becomes cut off from his duties towards his people.
THE REAL CONFLICT
It is symptomatic of the stupidity of the contemporary liberal West that it regards the crucial world conflict of today and tomorrow as being between its type of society, in which the individual is theoretically supposed to be 'free', and the Communist type, in which the individual is tightly regimented and controlled. In reality these societies, while differing in their methods, serve the same basic goal; they are humanist-orientated, and their aim is a cosmopolitan world society in which one man is considered as good as another and in which Nationality and Race are of no account; they seek a placid and bovine Mankind, preoccupied first and foremost with the pursuits of food, drink, pleasure and safety. In the shaping of this world Marxists differ from Benthamite liberals only in so much as the former place more emphasis on the role of collective action.
The real conflict of today and tomorrow is entirely different: the real conflict is between this uniform, cosmo*politan world society, with its lotus-eating ideals, and the resurgent spirit of Nationality and Race, with its promethian ideals of Genius, Beauty, Nobility, Destiny and Heroism.
As the standard-bearers of this spirit in Britain and among British Folk, we fight with equal passion against the worlds of both East and West, of Communism and Usury-Capitalism, of the harsh Marxist slave-state and of soft liberal decadence.
We fight - and we shall win, because the future, as always, belongs to those who are prepared to brave the storms, to set their eyes on the lofty peaks, to struggle and sacrifice for goals greater than themselves, to march with the thunder and the drums of history.
It must never be forgotten, however, that both the Liberal-Democratic and Fascist styles of government and society are mere forms; procedures and structures adopted as means of achieving certain human goals. They are not ends in themselves, and as long as we persist in seeing them as ends, rather than just as means, we will experience continual confusion in our search for the synthesis mentioned.
Even the aims of Order and Freedom, referred to earlier, are themselves only means. What value in Order if it is the order of a senescent society, quietly and peacefully dozing its way towards eclipse, towards an exit from history? Conservatives who call for a restoration of 'Law and Order' usually give the impression that so long as that state of things is achieved nothing else matters. In fact the orderly progress towards national death is less preferable than a state of violent revolution and upheaval if the consequence of such revolution and upheaval might be the restoration of national life forces. No, the virtue of Order depends entirely on the purposes to which society is ordered.
So also with Freedom. What value in Freedom if it is the freedom of the criminal to prosper in crime, the freedom of the mobster to promote mob rule, the freedom of the subversive to subvert, the freedom of every anti-social and anti-national element to run amok, the freedom that ends in political, economic, social and moral chaos? As I said in last month's article, there is only one freedom worth defending and that is the freedom to do what is right.
THE LIBERAL VIEW
Indeed this is not how the liberal sees it. To him Freedom is the ultimate end of everything — his particular conception of Freedom, that is. It is a freedom which has very little to do with the right of the ordinary individual to live his private life as he wishes — for that freedom has in fact been steadily eroded as the liberalisation of modern society has advanced. The freedom which liberals principally have in mind is the freedom of the sediment of society from legal restraint and the freedom of sectional power-groups to tear society apart.
The obsession of the liberal with 'Freedom' in this context can be seen from the liberal reading of history. The last two World Wars, for instance were fought, not first and foremost for the defence of land and people, of Empire, of national interests; they were fought for 'Freedom' - a piece of meaningless verbiage that seems to suffer no diminution from the ironic laugh that it must now provoke East of the Elbe. History as a whole is seen as a continual progression upward towards greater 'Freedom' meaning of course a progression towards ever more liberal institutions. The good guys of history are those who aided this pro*gression, the bad guys those who hindered it. Thus liberals today ask of an age, not what great music, literature or architecture it produced, not what achievements of national expansion, of heroism, of discovery. of invention it generated, not whether for the nation it was an age of victory or defeat, glory or humiliation, but whether in such an age liberal ideals of Parliamentarianism, Democracy and 'Liberty' were in the ascendant.
To oppose this thoroughly shallow and silly view of history and the idea of priorities that it betokens does not mean dismissing Freedom as being of no value or importance; it means simply establishing a perspective in which Freedom is seen as one of the possible means towards a better society depending on who has it and the uses to which it is put.
SOCIETY'S GOALS
We can only properly evaluate Freedom, and we can only properly evaluate Order, if we first settle the question of what are society's basic goals? What is society's purpose in the first place? What is the object of all politics and human organisation?
To liberals no better summary of this purpose and object can be found than that contained in the following passage from the writings of Jeremy Bentham, often regarded as the Father of English liberalism:—
"The aim of government should be the greatest happiness of all the members of the state. But what is good for one may be opposed to the happiness of many others. Unfortunately, it is impossible to enlarge indefinitely the sphere of happiness of every individual without coming into conflict with the happiness of others. Therefore the only aim should be the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number; in a word, the common good is the right aim of government, and the proper task of a lawmaker is to discover regulations designed to bring about the greatest good to the greatest number of human beings . . . The determination of every point in every law, from first to last, without exception, must be directed towards the greatest good of the greatest number and must rest upon that principle."
As if anticipating that his interpretation of 'happiness' might be questioned, Bentham described it as being a state of "Subsistence, Abundance, Security and Equality".
In this evaluation of Bentham's we can find an echo of the words of John Locke, writing nearly a century earlier, who said:—
"Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent, which is done by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it."
In the latter passage Locke gives a strong clue to what is the essential point: men join together "for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living" - in other words, were this comfortable, safe and peaceable living to be obtainable without such a coming together it would not occur. Implicit in this way of thinking is the supposition that there is in Man absolutely no firm community spirit or loyalty stemming from his innermost being; any community that he joins is merely a protection society for the furtherance of his own private interests and desires; men come together to obtain by co*operation that which they could not obtain living in isolation from one another. Citizenship is in effect relegated to the status of a mere insurance policy in which in return for certain contributions one gets certain benefits.
That some men in this world regard their place in society as being no more than that is undoubtedly true. However, such men are the exception to history and not the cause of it. There is scarcely a single major historical development of which this impulse can be said to be the motive. All of history's most decisive men, and the movements of multitudes that they have inspired and directed, have assuredly been driven on by far deeper forces within the human spirit. This is a fact so patently obvious that even the most doctrinaire liberal would not deny it. Yet the logic that it predicates in our understanding of society is something that liberals just will not accept.
As for Bentham's ideal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, this reduces human society to no higher level of consciousness than a herd of cows in a field, who are surely happy while being allowed to graze in peace. Should the quest for political wisdom not recognise in great races and nations some more lofty ambitions than those of cows?
ANARCHY THE LIBERAL IDEAL
These gems of liberal thought betray the real truth: that the ideal human state is one of anarchy, in other words with every*body enjoying total freedom to do what he likes. Liberals do not say that this is not desirable, only that it is not possible — given the proximity to one another in which humans have to live. One man's freedom is therefore limited by the need for it not to come into "conflict with the happiness of others" - and not, it seems, by any higher considerations than that.
So far as Bentham's criteria of happiness are concerned, we get an even better picture of liberalism's real values. "Subsistence", "Abundance", "Security “all essentially materialistic concepts. About "Equality", it may be assumed that Bentham meant equality before the law, for liberalism had not in his time advanced so far along the communist road as to claim that all men can possibly be equal in merit, possessions or rank.
We need not waste time arguing the usefulness of these aims to evaluate them in the scale of human priorities. Of course everyone prefers Happiness to Unhappiness, Subsistence to Starvation, Abundance to Shortage, Security to Insecurity, and certainly most of us believe that men should be equal before the law.
But in my submission any society in which these aims are paramount is a society advanced very little above the animal level and indeed in some respects even inferior to animals, as I shall later explain. To return to our original question, what is the object of all politics and human organisation?
OUR PURPOSE
To us in the National Front the answer has always been clear. The strongest drive which we as humans possess is the drive towards the perpetuation and the destiny of our kind, towards the furtherance of its interests and the expansion of its power.
And when we say this we mean it historically and not just contemporarily.
By "our kind" we mean of course our people that people bound to us ethnically and by tradition, custom, history, language and sentiment: our nation.
Thinking and feeling in this way, we cannot cut ourselves off either from our past or our future. Our past has made us what we are and given us what we have. Had our ancestors married negroes, we would today be part negro, with all that that implies. Had our ancestors not conquered and colonised great areas of the world, our generation today would lack living space and natural resources. Had our ancestors not achieved mighty works, we today would not only not be able to enjoy the practical benefits of those works but would not be able to draw upon their creation as a source of honour and pride.
And to us honour and pride are very real values because they are very real human emotions — emotions without which mankind descends very quickly to a con*temptible existence.
This sense of honour and pride drives us to pass on to the generations of the future the heritage which we have had handed down to us from generations of the past -if possible increased but at least not diminished.
As nationalists we see ourselves as part of a process of destiny and our individual lives valuable or worthless according to what part we play in that destiny; in this destiny lies the extension of our egos which lifts us to a level of thought and action higher than that which merely serves our own selves. This does not mean that we deprecate individualism but that we value the individual personality as an agent in the destiny of nation and race. This is in complete contrast to liberalism, which regards the individual as an end in himself and community as merely a means.
From our position we are bound to take a different view of Freedom and its limitations. The liberal will limit the freedom of one individual at the point where it may intrude upon the freedom and happiness of another individual. To us that limit is dictated by the national interest, present and future.
THE ANIMAL WORLD
Even the animal world, notwithstanding its comparatively primitive level, is in this respect more virtuous than humans of the liberal persuasion, since it does have a very rudimentary urge to survive and continue itself — if we exclude such unusual forms of animal life as lemmings. Certainly in nearly all types of animal there is a built-in instinct of self-preservation which extends to the preservation of the species, of the race. Humans addicted to liberalism are nearly alone among life forms on this planet in being quite unconcerned with the destiny of their kind, only with the destiny of their beliefs.
There is one particular field which best exemplifies the difference between our own national and race ethic, with its destiny orientation, and the wholly selfish ethic of liberalism: this is the field of procreation.
Today the liberal world is frantically trying to organise 'birth-control'. Why birth control? Very simply because in the spiritual wasteland that is the modern West families must be kept down to a size that will not endanger our enjoyment of such economic priorities as motor cars, colour TV sets and washing machines. It is no use telling liberals that birth-control leads to racial death; for such things as race destiny have no interest for him. His concern is only for the contemporary world, its pleasures, its amuse*ments, its material wants. Sex is one of these and nothing more. The future of the race can therefore be forgotten as we get on with the job of enjoying the present to the fullest degree.
How differently do we see things! To us a divine purpose is at work in ordering the human functioning so that one of life's most beautiful experiences is at the same time a means to the creation of new life; the pleasure of the former achieves its most complete totality with the coming of the latter. With joy we greet the birth that is the sign of the continuance of family and race; to the liberal that birth is an inconvenience to the business of enhancing the 'affluent society'.
It is in these basic human values and goals that we see the real gulf between liberalism and our own nationalist philosophy, not necessarily so much in the political procedures that are adopted in the pursuit of those values and goals. We really stand for an entirely different type of country and an entirely different type of world to those of the liberals, and it is this, more than any questions of method, that divides us from them.
SYNTHESIS
Once this is recognised, it is much easier for us to reconcile and synthesise the sometimes conflicting concepts of Order and Freedom, Authority and Democracy.
In a really mature approach to politics neither Authority nor Democracy are sacred principles in themselves. There are situations in the affairs of men in which salvation can only come from the inspiration of the out*standing leader and through the gift of his command, or alternatively through the command of a wise and strong-willed elite. There are other situations in which the best decisions can be made by means of popular consensus. The art of true leadership, and of government, is that of correctly appraising these situations and acting accordingly -knowing, in other words, when to adopt autocratic and when to adopt democratic methods.
This is not the liberal approach. To the liberal, Autocracy is at all times self-evidently wrong — even if it achieves results that bring great benefits to nation and people; Demo*cracy is at all times self-evidently right -even though its results may be disastrous to nation and people. In appraising the history, tradition, custom and psychology of the British peoples, we in the National Front believe that the only method of government that will work with any permanence in this country and kindred Anglo-Celtic countries around the world is that which will exist by popular representation and consent and which will give to people the right to debate freely the great issues of the day -- in essence Democracy.
But this is solely because we think that a form of Democracy is what suits the national temperament, not because we think Democracy is morally right. It may not have been right for Germans and Italians before and during the last war; it may not be right for Chileans and Iranians today. Different peoples at different times have different political needs. Our argument against Dictatorship is not an ideological argument; it is merely a difference of opinion as to the best way to get things done.
As to Freedom, in the type of society to which we aim I do not envisage the average individual having any less freedom than he has now — indeed he may have more. It will be the moral basis of Freedom that will change.
We do not see it as the object of society to make the individual as free as possible — within the sole limits postulated by Bentham and his liberal disciples; we believe it right to strive for a fine balance in the extension of freedom whereby the individual is enhanced as a member of his people, whereby he becomes the best possible servant of his people.
This should be enough freedom to encourage his personal enterprise and initiative and to give scope for the exercise of his individual gifts but not so much freedom that he becomes cut off from his duties towards his people.
THE REAL CONFLICT
It is symptomatic of the stupidity of the contemporary liberal West that it regards the crucial world conflict of today and tomorrow as being between its type of society, in which the individual is theoretically supposed to be 'free', and the Communist type, in which the individual is tightly regimented and controlled. In reality these societies, while differing in their methods, serve the same basic goal; they are humanist-orientated, and their aim is a cosmopolitan world society in which one man is considered as good as another and in which Nationality and Race are of no account; they seek a placid and bovine Mankind, preoccupied first and foremost with the pursuits of food, drink, pleasure and safety. In the shaping of this world Marxists differ from Benthamite liberals only in so much as the former place more emphasis on the role of collective action.
The real conflict of today and tomorrow is entirely different: the real conflict is between this uniform, cosmo*politan world society, with its lotus-eating ideals, and the resurgent spirit of Nationality and Race, with its promethian ideals of Genius, Beauty, Nobility, Destiny and Heroism.
As the standard-bearers of this spirit in Britain and among British Folk, we fight with equal passion against the worlds of both East and West, of Communism and Usury-Capitalism, of the harsh Marxist slave-state and of soft liberal decadence.
We fight - and we shall win, because the future, as always, belongs to those who are prepared to brave the storms, to set their eyes on the lofty peaks, to struggle and sacrifice for goals greater than themselves, to march with the thunder and the drums of history.