By Eli Yockenthwaite for Patriotic Alternative
I last visited London in the late 90’s. It was work-related and involved attending monthly meetings in the capital for going on a year. The final meeting was tasked with winding up remaining business and it finished ahead of schedule with a good couple of hours to spare.
My first thought was to rush back to King’s Cross and catch the earliest train home – such was my fondness for our capital city. But instead I decided on a detour. I made my way to King’s Cross via Welling in south east London. It was a decision which, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, kind of changed my life.
Television images of thousands of left wing demonstrators attempting to bully the British National Party’s bookshop in Welling, and failing, had imprinted themselves on my mind. And with time to spare in London I felt I had to visit the beleaguered BNP bookshop. I figured it must be better than Buckingham Palace.
Fortress
The bookshop was a five minute walk from Welling railway station. I couldn’t have missed it if I’d tried. It was a fortress. Its entire frontage was encased in heavy plywood with a speak-hole cut into the reinforced door. I knocked on the armour-plating. Silence. Either no one was home or a knock on the door was an unusual event. I thought about peeking through the speak-hole but caution made me think twice. I knocked instead.
“Hello. Who is it?”
I levelled my eyes to the speak-hole. It was an amazing sight. Like an absent-minded professor’s study. Books and pamphlets everywhere. Shafts of dusty light dividing the room. I picked out three bodies amongst the stacks of reading material.
A face entered my vision. “Yes? What can we do for you?”
“I want to buy some books.”
“Who are you?”
I told the face who I was and where I was from and explained how I’d come to be knocking on the bookshop door.
The three had a brief confab and then I heard the sound of locks turning, bolts sliding, and latches lifting.
And then I was inside the notorious BNP bookshop.
A tall, well-spoken and affable man offered his hand and introduced himself, Richard Edmonds. He proved to be as likeable as he was intelligent and tough minded – a kind of BNP bookshop in human form. I told him about my shift from establishment potato-head to sceptic, brought about by the contradictions of life in Britain. And I asked him to recommend books that would help guide me through this shift in world-view.
Richard Edmonds in later life
He disappeared behind a bookcase. I heard the click of a kettle switch and its contents stir, and then I heard the sound of rummaging. A few minutes later he reappeared, two mugs of tea* in one hand and three books tucked under the other arm.
The books were: The specious origins of liberalism; the genesis of a delusion, (surely one of the great book titles) by Anthony Ludovici; The French Revolution, by Nesta Webster; and Imperium, the philosophy of history and politics, by Francis Parker Yockey.
All are still available and all are essential reads. Together they put past present and future in perfect context: Much respect to Richard Edmonds.
We chatted for an hour or so and then I made my way back to King’s Cross and my train ‘ooop North’. Once I’d settled down I treated myself to a quarter bottle of Scotch from the buffet car and spent the next couple of hours engrossed in Yockey’s Imperium. To orientate Ludovici’s writings I need only refer to another of his titles, The importance of racial integrity. Say no more! Nester Webster’s French revolution strips the egalitarian façade from the ‘Terror’ and exposes its evil. Both are important books but it was Imperium that grabbed my attention.
Yockey introduced me to the astonishing idea of a culture as a biological form and that as such it goes through the same processes that every other biological form goes through.
Written in 1948 Imperium was inspired by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, of which it is both an introduction and a continuation. Upon consuming Imperium it was only natural that I turn to Spengler and The Decline, a forensic investigation of the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Classical, the Arabian and the Western cultures**.
Life-changer
Birth, death, age, and lifetime are fundamental to all organisms. The question is, are they also fundamental to a culture? In his search for the answer Spengler studied every aspect of each of the ‘high cultures,’ their mathematics, their architecture, art, customs, religion and philosophy and he found, astonishingly, that cultures exhibit the ‘biographic archetypes’ that organisms do!
It’s not an easy read, every sentence is packed with meaning, but it’s a rewarding read. It truly is a life-changer.
Spengler begins by asking if there’s a logic to history. He ends by proving that there is. The implications of this are mind-blowing. For starters, it means that history can be predicted! It sounds crazy I know, but if history has a logic to it then of course it can be predicted.
Oswald Spengler: 1880-1936
I wonder what the establishment makes of this. Not the dopes in Parliament, I mean the real string-pullers. If Spengler’s analysis is correct, and I believe it is, is it not likely that those hiding in the shadows are aware of its conclusions and implications. And would they not employ that knowledge to their advantage?
Spengler’s investigation reveals threads that are common to all cultures. For instance, he found that during what he termed the ‘civilisation stage’, that is towards the end of a culture’s lifespan, cultures experience a collapse in money-power and a loss of confidence in the efficacy of politics. The West is in its ‘civilisation stage’ and it too is experiencing these problems; and what is Klaus Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’ if it’s not an effort by the establishment to nip these problems in the bud?
The issue is not so much the decline of the West as it is our refusal as ethno-nationalists to accept that decline. This is what Spengler had in in mind in his statement “optimism is cowardice”. He wasn’t talking about the optimism of laying the foundation-stone of a Gothic cathedral that will take 500 years to build, he was talking about optimism as an avoidance tactic.
And that’s a liberal thing. As an old uncle of mine used to say, “Liberals would outlaw death if they could.” And isn’t it liberals that engage in the futile search for immortality?
We need to see culture as it is, as a vehicle on which we hitch a ride. We make it our own, fashion it to our needs, and it comes to articulate who we are, but deep down we know it will eventually stop, never to start again. Culture is transitory but our line stretches unbroken to the beginning of time. Immortality is found only in our descendants and it is only they that really matter.
*Alas not Grandma Towler’s
**Spengler also refers to what he calls the Mexican culture and to the Indian but he can’t make much use of them in his analysis because information is limited.