A. K. Chesterton, cousin of G. K. Chesterton, founded the nationalist and anti-immigration National Front Party. And Tolkien seems to have been a passive supporter of the National Front Party. Hilaire Belloc praised Franco’s war on marxism in Spain.
Supposedly Tolkien became less racial later in life. Many nonracial Catholics think highly of Franco.
It’d be interesting to judge each by a kinist standard. I’ll look back at some of their writings and respond here - that’d be interesting to look into. I’ve got Belloc’s Crisis of Western Civilisation sitting in front of me, so I’ll start with that.
Judging by such a harsh standard as to make Buchanan into a liberal and a supporter of ideological nationalism though, I suspect these great men too will fail.
Tolkien was anti-“Nazi” but not anti-“racist” in the modern sense and did not support the pro-Soviet “Allied” War effort in WWII .
More on Tolkien
The League of Empire Loyalists (which later became National Front Party) was the main group to develop in this era. Founded by A. K. Chesterton in 1954, they were actually a pressure group, rather than a political party, and refused to contest elections. The majority of their members were part of the Conservative Party, and they were known for their politically-embarrassing stunts at party conferences. J.R.R. Tolkien was a known supporter, and the group promoted a Shire-esque view of an idealized UK. It has been argued that the majority of this group were more ‘Colonel Blimpish traditionalists, rather than fascists. 1
And more from wikipedia(Remember a PC source)
Tolkien’s views were guided by his strict Catholicism. He voiced support for Francisco Franco’s Falangist regime during the Spanish Civil War upon learning that Republican death squads were destroying churches and killing large numbers of priests and nuns. He also expressed admiration for the South African poet and fellow Catholic Roy Campbell after a 1944 meeting. Since Campbell had allegedly served with Franco’s armies in Spain, Tolkien regarded him as a defender of the Catholic faith, while C. S. Lewis composed poetry openly satirising Campbell’s “mixture of Catholicism and Fascism”.
The question of racist or racialist elements in Tolkien’s views and works has been the matter of some scholarly debate. Christine Chism distinguishes accusations as falling into three categories: intentional racism, unconscious Eurocentric bias, and an evolution from latent racism in Tolkien’s early work to a conscious rejection of racist tendencies in his late work.
Tolkien is known to have condemned Nazi “race-doctrine” and anti-Semitism as “wholly pernicious and unscientific”. He also said of racial segregation in South Africa…
However, he could get just as agitated over “lesser evils” that struck nearer home; he denounced anti-German fanaticism in the British war effort during World War II. In 1944, he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:
“It is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic ... There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.”
He was horrified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the Bomb’s creators as “these lunatic physicists” and “Babel-builders”.1
Getting your info from wikipedia is cheating, heh.
Babel builders, eh? He might be alright after all. I expected the opposition to the nuking, though I’ve heard the majority of American Catholics supported it? (Source: a recent Zmirak article at takimag...) I obviously believe Nagasaki/Hiroshima was a horrific mistake.
It’s tough to know going by second/third/etc hand sources… I’ll just have to read through while taking note of what’s said on such matters. Though it might be the truth is hidden in personal letters… Some of these great men are too great to be honest.
Patrick Buchanan is an example of the liberal-conservative. In a recent book he writes about the unnecessary war, the Second World War, but it was only unnecessary if you are a kinist, someone who believes that race and faith bind a nation together. If you believe, as Buchanan and his ilk do, that a nation is based on an idea, then World War II was necessary to defend the idea of the universality of democracy.
I disagree with this. Buchanan simply cannot say what he really wants to say. If he gets racial or ethnic to any great degree, his career is over. Call him a hypocrite if you like, but not someone who holds the proposition nation position. If he were a “propositionalist,” he would not be associating with white nationalist radio. Think about it. He’s trying to say what needs to be said in the mainstream media without being assigned the scarlet letter “R” for racist, any more than he has been.
I think we need to get past “conservative” and “liberal” labels when discussing certain things. I’m not sure how useful they really are. We use too much shorthand in our thinking because the effort to master the details is daunting.
The Catholic distributists like Chesterton and Belloc cannot be labeled liberals in any modern sense of that word. But distributism does entail a “nationalizing” of land in order that freeholders can have access to it. The U.S. had a form of nationalized land policy regarding the western territories. The difficult question is how do you put in place policies that favor the freeholder and that facilitate a transition from industrialism and large agribusiness concerns to an economy of freeholders? It is a difficult question, and the “distributists” and “Georgists” solved it in different ways. The Georgists proposed the abolishment of all taxes outside of an ad valorem land tax, to penalize large landholders who possess large tracts of undeveloped land and to force land onto the market, opening it up for agricultural concerns and freeholders. Some distributists favored a temporary nationalization of land for the purposes of a sale of lands to freeholders, the former landholders being compensated as a result of the sale. Distributism is seen as a “third way” economy, an alternative between capitalism “ownership by the few” and socialism “ownership by the state.” Indeed, Chesterton is recorded to have said that, “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” This is a relatively strident anti-monopolistic stance, in contrast to, say, the form of laissez faire capitalism favored by Ayn Rand, which, while not promoting monopolies, contains no features that act to curtail them.
Catholic “conservative” W.F. Buckley Jr. also maintained distributist sympathies and was an admirer of both Chesterton and Belloc, and was also a supporter of the Georgist idea of a Single Tax.
Distributism shares many features with Kinism, but Kinism entertains no notion of a nationalization of land and seeks to transform society through voluntary cultural and economic secession into agricultural communities through the vehicle of thrift and planning, rather than state intervention.
I don’t know whether distributism is Liberal, but it has man biblical features, IMO. And faithfulness to the Bible is the Kinist test of truth, not adherence to “conservative” or “liberal” talking points.
sorry, I meant “liberal” with regard to the valuing of kin ties within a nation.
I’m actually very sympathetic to distributism. John Medaille’s The Vocation of Business brings distributism into today’s society, that’s the first I’d read of cooperatives. Medaille is also the one who awakened me to the reality of the “Fair Tax”, that it would tax the working poor hardest, and of Japan’s requiring of Japanese executives to make no more than a multiple of the lowest paid employee.
Somewhere on ChesterBelloc Mandate there’s a quote that distributism wouldn’t be equality at all - there’d still be a hierarchy, and full equality is not desirable. However, the gross wealth divide of today, the separation of owners from management, the separation of pride and responsibility from one’s work, the pursuit of profit at the expense of all else, the fluidity of investment and ownership, usury, the influence of big business and of financial bankers as well as the military-industrial complex over government policy, the transience of today’s society, the pollution and extreme short term thinking of today’s economy, the importing of immigrants who come here to make a buck rather than to contribute to the nation, etc. are all severe and undesired problems. Honor ought to be more important than wealth, and at some point a man like Bill Gates is simply no longer pursuing material capital but abstract profit as a child pursues points in a video game, or an Olympian pursues a gold metal. It’s absurd and sick for a man to acquire as much as he and so many others have. And for what has Gates accumulated? He gives his money away to the popular causes of the day, seemingly to win approval, and his spending is little different from that of our government. He doesn’t pass it down to his family and relatives; use it to grow a large family, help defend his people, spread the good word, etc; nor does he seem to have any particular aim in mind. All of his hard work then seems to have been in pursuit of… money for money’s sake.
Someone recently said, post Banking crisis, American capitalism is simply socialism for the rich, and distributism would allow for a more free market. I suspect this to be very true. As Chesterton said in the piece you quoted from, I forget what it’s called, if a peasant farm were to grow too large the others would put a stop to it. Monopolies can infringe on the market and on the interests of the greater society. After a point, it’s no longer healthy, for the individual or for his society, for a person to pursue only wealth. After a point, other pursuits ought to be taken where a desire to pursue remains. And it’s certainly honorable to work. As Edison famously wrote: Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. We need more of such geniuses, geniuses who’ll fight for their people. That’s not to say of course that any government intervention is needed to encourage actions that help others, or that reduce pride and honor gained from activities that help others, often honor and vanity seem to be channeled into good actions in my experience, though of course vanity can be very dangerous as well. Government simply is needed to prevent members from acting against society, within a degree. When that peasant farmer seeks to dominate his neighbors and to make them his employees, that’s when they step up to limit his further acquisition. They don’t, however, take all that he has and declare all to be equal…
My only criticism of distributism, and there seems to be a great diversity within it, is that it insists Catholicism must be at center.
Ah, that’s not to say workaholics, those who escape from their duties in their work, are the ideal. I mean rather that those who are productive and who do their duty to the fullest of their ability are to be honored. Such is the ideal.
I’m unfamiliar with Georgists, though I’ll google after posting this, however taxing and limiting the growth of large businesses and land accumulation as well as perhaps the raising local tariffs seems a good path towards a more balanced society. Also, the limiting of executive pay would be good as mentioned before. I don’t agree with distributists who wish to nationalise and then redistribute wealth - that’s socialism in my mind, as is some of the odd banking ideas.
I used to have a plan for how to move America into a distributist society… It was for an article I never finished at CHT called “Molding the Powers that Be III”. It went something like this:
1. Raise trade barriers and thus force American businesses to be tied to America’s fate. Once American businesses are once again American, they’ll be more prone to acting in America’s best interests. Use populist forces to push this, e.g. “they took our jobs”, put America First, etc.
2. Reduce immigration and reassert that America is in fact a real nation. Resist globalism with American nationalism. Since business powers will now have a greater interest in the long-term well being of America, they will be less apt to resist immigration reform despite rising wage pressures.
3. Encourage state tariffs and barriers to allow for further decentralisation.
4. Reform the corporate system
5. Eliminate the federal reserve bank, reform the banking system, pass laws against usury.
6. Bring American troops home and drastically reduce foreign and military spending except where reasonable, thus shrinking the military-industrial complex. This should be easier after #4.
7. Decentralise the federal government, returning it to the states - there should be more decentralised forces after state-tariffs have been up for awhile. Also, there should be less demand for socialism and government involvement as wage pressures rise as a result of #1, #2, and #4.
Yea, it’s not very brilliant and some important details are left out (e.g. just how is the corporate system to be “reformed?"), but it’s a start… I’ll put up a new post now organising some of my favorite distributist articles on the web. Faust I’m sure could add to it too.
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The failed paleos seem to want to go at this in reverse… Trade has to be the first reform in my mind, and nationalism is a powerful intermediary to more decentralised kinism. There’s no decentralisation without trade barriers, and the lewrockwell boys are largely counterproductive.
1. Raise trade barriers and thus force American businesses to be tied to America’s fate. Once American businesses are once again American, they’ll be more prone to acting in America’s best interests.
Alain de Benoist has some suggestions towards this end.
