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The political right has been hijacked.
Friday, 4 May 2012 at 20:25
Ezra Pound: the last word on usury
The political right has been hijacked. Even the extreme right as it is popularly understood is an expression of the neo-liberal consensus. Often couched in terms of ‘resistance’ to incursions by Muslim migrants, the right has ended up defending a world of western ‘values’ created by its real enemies.
What is the right defending? The so-called right would benefit from asking not what western values it is defending, but what is the west despoiling?
It is often said that Islam would have benefited from a reformation, or an enlightenment. Well did the west benefit?
We lost a world in which economic interests were subordinated to the real business of life, which was universally understood to be death, or rather salvation.
The assumption held today that a life can be led in the pursuit of worldly happiness and economic gain would have been utterly unthinkable to the medieval mind. At every turn there were warnings from the church, limits and restrictions against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs.
One of the most practical expressions of the subordination of the material to the divine was the prohibition of usury, the lending of money for interest.
There was a universal loathing of usury, which was considered to be on a par with adultery and fornication on the scale of sinfulness. Usury was contradictory to scripture, Aristotle and nature.
Why this loathing for usury? Because the needs and distress of others was seen as an opportunity by the money-lender. By lending money, the rich were seen as having a fixed and certain return from those to whom they lent, because other people bore risks on the money-lender’s behalf. There was a fear that if economic life cut free from the church, the rich would put their money into usury, because of its sure and certain return, rather than into the production of food and other necessities for the general well-being. For if the rich were to lend with a sure and certain return, and the poor were to borrow out of distress - the rich would surely get richer and the poor poorer. The situation would be unsustainable.
What did the reformation and enlightenment bring to the west? They promoted science and intellectual interchange and opposed superstition, intolerance and what were thought of as abuses by the church.
Great enlightenment thinkers emerged like Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Paine amongst many others. Their ideas led to the French and American revolutions, influencing Franklin and Jefferson along the way.
But they also ushered in the precept that in life that man’s material interests were no longer subordinate to the divine. Political decision making, even political theory became dictated by economic contingency and not morality.
At an individual level, life became compartmentalised. One could go to church one day and work in a bank the next.
As a result of secular freedoms, usury was let loose upon the world, riding a wave of Liberté, égalité, fraternité and the rights of man. It continues to swallow up the last enclaves of resistance to this day, always in the name of freedom and democracy, often at the point of a gun.
Hardly anybody understands how our central banking system really works today, except that it is based on debt. With little or nothing of intrinsic value to back it up, wealth is created out of thin air in tandem with usury. If every debt were paid off today, our entire money supply would cease to exist. And the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
So where does the political right stand in relation to this? Still defending western values? Still championing liberty and democracy against so-called unenlightened peoples?
Let us leave Ezra Pound to have the last word on usury, for little more need or could be said.
 Ezra Pound
With Usura
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luthes
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,
with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning.
Pietro Lombardo
came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura
nor was "La Calunnia" painted.
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.
Not by usura St Trophime
Not by usura Saint Hilaire,
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroiled
Emerald findeth no Memling
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.
(Canto XLV - by Ezra Loomis Pound)
John Dunn.
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New Challenges and Opportunities in Education Policy
Sunday, 29 April 2012 at 10:48
‘Diversity in educational provision’ was the mantra of the previous government. Well we certainly have diversity. After layer upon layer of initiative, we are now in a bizarre situation where diversity exists, but it is diversity without responsibility and, for the end users, it is diversity without choice!
To use an analogy, if retailing today were like education, we would still be living in the age of the corner shop. There would be lots of different providers, each with little local monopolies and offering not much choice.
To use another: if education today were like retailing, we would be living in the age of the superstore. There would be a small number of providers, but they would be competing locally, offering massive choice and consistent quality.
In short, education needs less diversity and more choice! Leave education to the market and this will happen.
A small tentative start was in fact made by the last government, which has been accelerated under the current administration. The academies, freed from the clutches of the rather small-minded local authorities, will inevitably begin to coalesce into groups and federations. The potential savings in management and administrative costs are immense. This process of concentration should be encouraged by state funding being offered on condition of efficient application.
The academy groups will grow to such an extent that we will have a small number of ‘brands’ delivering education across the UK and, potentially, beyond. The scale of these operations will be such that the range of choice available to students at all key stages will expand enormously. Each organisation will have the capability to train its own teachers and monitor and review ongoing quality. The notion of ‘qualified teacher status’ will be a thing of the past. The fact that one has been trained by brand X and works for that group will be qualification enough.
Above all, the student experience will be consistent. Parents will know what to expect if they send their child to brand X as opposed to brand Y. There will be many similarities, but there are likely to be different points of emphasis and values as there are now, returning to our earlier analogy, between a Waitrose and a Sainsbury’s. Parents will ‘shop’ from a limited number of educational providers, but the range of choice and consistency of quality will be life-changing. And when we turn parents into direct buyers (with funding support where needed following the child) the revolution will be complete.
Would superstore shoppers today swap the current situation for a return to the corner shop, with its limited range, inconsistent quality and often rather stale products? Well in educational terms, the latter is what we have now. It needs to change.
John Dunn.
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The Worst Form of Slavery
Wednesday, 25 April 2012 at 11:31
Julius Evola
What is taken for the political right today? There are two common misconceptions. Firstly, that the right stands for proponents of free enterprise and the free market – as opposed to leftists who advocate state intervention in economic and other aspects of life. Secondly, that extreme nationalists are on the right, advocating white supremacism as opposed to multiculturalism.
Criticisms of these two positions from the left might be that:
The market cannot be left to its own devices. Spending by the state is required to avoid the worst of recessions. Proponents of the free market are devoid of ethical principles. State intervention is required to protect essential services such as healthcare for everyone. Social security is required for the losers in the system. State intervention is needed to ensure fairness and equity, for example, in the education system.
- Extreme nationalism is equated with fascism. Proponents are intolerant of people with differences of nationality, race, creed and sexual orientation. (Criticism of religious intolerance is problematic to the left, given its tendency to wards atheism.) Intolerance and discrimination are considered by the left to be unethical. Both the free market and nationalism are believed to be historically spent ideals.
But where might another critique of the nationalist right wing perspective come from? The Elovian right. The traditionalist right. The perennialist right.
 Traditionalist books
A traditional society consists of individuals who each affirm their individual identities through adherence to superior principles and interests. Personality is not abolished, but is integrated through participation in a society in which ‘every individual, function, and caste acquire their right place and reason for being through acknowledgement of what is superior to them and their organic connection with it’. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.338)
The acknowledgement of a common spirituality and a common active propensity towards it is such that each and every action by an individual becomes a rite and the fulfilment of a role. Through this fulfilment, the individual gives a law and form to his own nature. He is sure and certain of his purpose – which is sacred.
The roots of tradition lie in the distant past, but emanate most typically in religions and systems of caste. Such is the depth of these roots of tradition that adherents refer to them as perennial, in the sense that they have always existed in one form or another and always will.
In the Middle Ages there was widespread adherence to the perennial tradition. As a result, whilst nationalities existed, nationalisms did not.
Whilst individuals conformed to this or that nature, language or exoteric religious emanation of the tradition, the social principles of caste were articulated across all nationalities. ‘Hence, the possibility for members of the same caste who came from different nations to understand each other better than the members of different castes within the same nation.’ (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.339)
With the loss of tradition, the need for a new type of unity was increasingly felt. Modern nationalism offers an artificial and centralising unity for individuals stripped of religious certainties, living out lives as commodities in a state of pure quantity, as one of the masses.
Nationalism acts upon these masses through myths and suggestions that are likely to galvanise them, flatter them with the perspectives and fancies of supremacy, exclusivism and power.
(Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.339)
Nationalism emerged as a collectivising force. The nation, the homeland became primary as an entity that required from the individual belonging to it an unconditional declaration, as if it were a moral and not merely a natural and political entity. It led to a mentality of ‘my country, right or wrong’.
Even when nationalism parades its traditions up and down, it is living out a myth of fictitious continuity based on a minimum common denominator that consists in the mere belonging to a given group. Celebration of the nation really means the upholding of antitradition. The leaders of world subversion see in nationalism a way of disposing of the tradition. Turning this contingency into a science, Marx felt able to affirm ‘all that is sacred melts into air’.
Now for the nightmare vision of the kali yuga.
Today there is a trend towards universal brotherhood, reflected in ‘multiculturalism’, which is really ‘uniculturalism’. Far from abolishing the nationalist spirit and its pseudo-traditions and pride, its supreme form as the nation will be called mankind. The tradition, on the other hand, manifested most typically as religion, especially in the Muslim world, will be regarded as the enemy.
Traditionalist books
The individual will barely attain the status of a cog in the all-consuming global enterprise and lose all self-differentiation from the masses. In losing all sense of law and form of his nature, the individual will lose all sense of personality. The individual will be crushed.
Since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary "slavery" should be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times. (Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p.109)
Once the global enterprise has been established, there will be no escape; no Guenon-like refuge in a traditional culture beyond its borders.
John Dunn.
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Syria, Breivik and Western Values
Thursday, 19 April 2012 at 17:18
What are the rebels in Syria fighting for? What are the Arab Spring demonstrators demanding? They look to the West and NATO for support. They want to share in our individual freedoms, our democratic rights. In short they want the products of the Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment that the Islamic world never had. It is an urge that has already been expressed by hundreds and thousands over many decades now in the relentless tide of economic emigration that has swept over the West. Seen by many in the West as a threat to Western values, this emigration is, rather, an endorsement of those values. But that’s where it all gets complicated.
Traditionalist bookshop
To those who feel that Islam is a threat to the West I ask – what is threatened? From the traditionalist point of view, the West is an increasingly bland, irreligious, materialistic society of dull uniformity and conformity, in which the individual is evermore subject to the collective – not daring for a moment to be out-of-step with politically correct and sanctioned social mores. The rebellions for freedom in the Middle East in this context present the unholy spectacle of people trying to break into the prison.
Once over the walls what will they find? A world in which any residue of religious feeling has been dissociated from transcendent ideals, to be used instead to ‘sanctify’ temporal achievements – social service, work and even profit. Reality has become so synonymous with materiality that to think otherwise risks the accusation of insanity. Inner freedom has been sacrificed to a state of naturalistic necessity and a belief in the myth of progress. As slaves to the forces of ‘becoming’ our individual being is destroyed by a destructive progressivism. Democracy? All mainstream political opinion in the West represents shades of neo-liberalism. There is effectively no difference and no choice.
No – Islam is not a threat to the West and its hollow values for hollow men*. On the contrary, Islam, where it has not chosen to secularise as in Turkey or Indonesia, is a final enclave of tradition from which we in the West have much to learn. It is escapees to Islam like René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon and, more latterly Roger Garaudy who have shown the way in their search for the perennial tradition and a way out of the Kali Yuga.
That most traditional of traditionalist, scourge of the modern world and disciple of Guénon, Julius Evola, said of Islam that it is to be characterised as ‘a tradition at a higher level than both Judaism and the religious beliefs that conquered the West’ (Revolt Against the Modern World, p.245) that is to say, Christianity. (For more on Julius Evola and Islam see Claudio Mutti’s website.) I said it was complicated. More complicated than the media propaganda frenzy in support of sanctions and the bombing of Islam into Western liberal-democratic values would have you believe. Certainly more complicated than a Breivik worldview.
Evola and other traditionalists
* T S Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men, is apposite in this context.
John Dunn.
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What Must Be Said by Günter Grass
Thursday, 19 April 2012 at 16:52
Günter Grass
The Nobel laureate has written one of the momentous poems of European literature. It is certainly a landmark poem of the 21st century.
This lyrical poem draws attention to art actually in the process of doing what all great art should do.
This poem, in simple and direct language, uncovers a truth that lies hidden below the surface.
The nature of the subject-matter, however, allows Grass to turn irony back upon the truth revealed.
This is because of the monstrous hypocrisy that surrounds the presentations of Israel’s raison d’être in Western media, politics, conformist art and, most hideously of all, education. It will draw a smile of knowing from the thinking reader.
Lies are often paraded as unquestioned truth, whilst the art of a great poem is the truth.
John Dunn.
Buy books by Günter Grass 
What Must Be Said
Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long
What clearly is and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.
It is the alleged right to first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people--
Enslaved by a loud-mouth
And guided to organized jubilation--
Because in their territory,
It is suspected, a bomb is being built.
Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because no testing is available?
The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as incriminating lies
And force--the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of "anti-Semitism" is familiar.
Now, though, because in my country
Which from time to time has sought and confronted
The very crime
That is without compare
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence
Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But through fear of what may be conclusive,
I say what must be said.
Why though have I stayed silent until now?
Because I think my origin,
Which has never been affected by this obliterating flaw,
Forbids this fact to be expected as pronounced truth
Of the country of Israel, to which I am bound
And wish to stay bound.
Why do I say only now,
Aged and with my last ink,
That the nuclear power of Israel endangers
The already fragile world peace?
Because it must be said
What even tomorrow may be too late to say;
Also because we--as Germans burdened enough--
Could be the suppliers to a crime
That is foreseeable, wherefore our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.
And granted: I am silent no longer
Because I am tired of the hypocrisy
Of the West; in addition to which it is to be hoped
That this will free many from silence,
Prompt the perpetrator of the recognized danger
To renounce violence and
Likewise insist
That an unhindered and permanent control
Of the Israeli nuclear potential
And the Iranian nuclear sites
Be authorized through an international agency
Of the governments of both countries.
Only this way are all, the Israelis and Palestinians,
Even more, all people, that in this
Region occupied by mania
Live cheek by jowl among enemies,
In the end also to help us.
Günter Grass.
Buy books by Günter Grass
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Roger Garaudy, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon and Baron Julius Evola
Monday, 9 April 2012 at 11:59
René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon
Does Roger Garaudy represent a transitional phase or the end of an era? He treads in the notable footsteps of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon in seeking sanctuary from the modern world. Even more notably, Guénon influenced Baron Julius Evola most decidedly.
Roger Garaudy, representative of the modern world par excellence as a Marxist, crossed into traditionalist Islam via a reawakening of his childhood Catholicism. My personal feeling of affinity with Garaudy is immense, having myself, after a long and tortuous intellectual journey, only lately discovered what too many suppressed histories could have told me from the start. I have concluded from my own isolated analysis that Marxism has long been co-opted by the current ruling neo-liberal elite as its underpinning cultural raison d’être.
Islam cannot resist the economic and militaristic imposition of the ‘modern world’, i.e. neo-liberalism, debt-financed banking, Zionism and cultural Marxism. The Eurasianism coming out of Russia, led philosophically and theoretically by Aleksandr Dugin, holds out a hope of a last bastion against a complete and final neo-liberal strangle-hold on the world, but the chances of its survival, let alone success, appear remote.
Sanctuary will have to be found within the system, amongst the ruins as Evola put it, rather than without, for there will be no ‘without’.
Starting from where we are now, at the lowest point of the kali yuga, if traditionalist alternatives to neo-liberalism are to have a chance of survival and ultimately revival, it is likely that Evola-inspired, metabiological formulations of what it means to be a traditionalist going forward will have to be developed. Nostalgia will have no place in this development, only an awakening to suppressed histories and cycles of involution.
John Dunn.
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The desacralised materialist prison of the Enlightenment
Sunday, 1 April 2012 at 20:53
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Christianity - 'Platonism for the people'.
The Enlightenment was significant in that, amongst the many cultural changes, it was the tacitly accepted lifting of the religious prohibition on usury that had the most important impact. It was from this point that western economies were set on a path towards the ultimate conversion of all things into commodities.
Society was not so much desacralised, but rather converted to an absolute end that was, still is, economic success as an end in itself.
For individuals locked into the fully commodified society, there has been an inversion of the relationship between subject and object. Capitalism subordinates subject to object, that is man to commodity, money, machine etc.
Reversing this arrangement will require something that neither moral vision in the sense of that offered by religion, nor revolutionary Marxism have been able to offer. That something is the iconoclastic power of human will.
Marxism cannot allow man to escape his fate and become the creator of his own history. Religion, on the other hand, serves as an opiate when man encounters God as something external and apart, rather than as an internalised phenomenon. It is an opiate as ideology rather than an act or rather, as Nietzsche said of Christianity, ‘a Platonism for the people’.
Marxism, empiricism, materialism, Platonistic Christianity, all leave mankind in a stultifying and passive state – wide open to manipulation and abuse.
It is the will to act that is needed if man is to escape his predetermined role as slave to the economic ends of a profane world. This will is not to be found in the desacralised materialist prison of the Enlightenment aftermath and its curiously labelled humanism. The source of opposition must be external and, ultimately, spiritual.
John Dunn.
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