Why I Am Not a Liberal - Imperium Press (Studies in Reaction)

Jonathan Bowden

• Publisher: Imperium Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780648859314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Conservatisme et libéralisme

Bowden's oratorical firepower is on full display in this 2009 interview. Members of the London New-Right put every question to him you ever wanted to ask, letting Bowden hold forth on such topics as race and politics, the EU, Islam, gender roles, paganism and Christianity, modern art, and his own vision of the future. This volume also includes three short reflections on Bowden the man by members of the London New-Right.Far from suggesting a misty-eyed return to a nostalgic past, the picture Bowden paints here is one of great intellectual daring, aesthetic dynamism, and the sort of bravado needed for any political movement to succeed. This is a foundational voice of the dissident right reminding it of lessons it has forgotten.The inaugural release in the Studies in Reaction series, Bowden's Why I Am Not a Liberal serves as a sweeping overview of illiberal thinking, and makes for an excellent entré into dissident right politics.

Acknowledgements and Dedication

The editor wishes to acknowledge, above all, the late Jonathan Bowden. This is a fitting first title for the Studies in Reaction series, being comprised of pithy reactionary works, as Bowden himself acted as a gateway to illiberal right intellectuals by his précis of them. This little volume is dedicated to him.

The editor also wishes to acknowledge Black Gnosis, whose members not only had the foresight to record many of Bowden’s talks and to interview him, but who also granted permission to republish all content that follows.

Finally, he wishes to acknowledge Counter Currents, who, in addition to doing important work in their own right, have granted permission to use their transcription of this interview.

A Note From the Interviewer

The following is a transcript of a three and a half hour interview I filmed with the British author, artist, and orator, Jonathan Bowden, back in 2009.

The location was a bar in a private members’ club for ex/serving military personnel, in Waterloo central London.

Sat surrounding Bowden, in a horseshoe shape, like attentive listening disciples around a besuited sage were fifteen members of the London New-Right; the pragmatic English take on France’s GRECE/Nouvelle-Droite, that was founded in 2005 by Troy Southgate. The interview itself had taken place shortly after Bowden had closed a successful NR meeting with a memorable and energetic talk about the historical and cultural significance of Punch & Judy; a favourite subject he’d covered previously in essays and a film entitled Grand Guignol.

Forever the performer, Bowden enjoyed the attention and answered the myriad of questions put to him instantaneously, like an actor delivering lines from a well rehearsed script, but in his case, they were questions he had been contemplating for most of his adult life. The topics ranged from a damning critique of The Conservative party, UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) the BNP (British National Party), Islam, Christianity, Paganism, the Middle-East, Israel, the EU, Feminism, and the social decline of the working-class ethnic-English in the post-industrial north.

In-between questioning we broke for coffee and I decided to keep the camera running. For myself, this was the most interesting part of the whole proceedings because it allowed Jonathan’s humour, complaisance, and knowledge of British popular culture and subcultures to come through. There were also some humourous anecdotes thrown in about an ex-tabloid newspaper columnist and characters that Bowden had crossed paths with over the years. Due to their potentially libellous nature I promised Jonathan I would edit them out if the interview ever saw the light of day.

Cut all that stuff out I said about G—y Bu—ll, would you?

As is now widely known Jonathan passed away in March of 2012 from coronary failure—not long after suffering a nervous breakdown—and a month shy of his 50th birthday. As was commented about his death elsewhere online, “when you push your mind to those sorts of limits something has to give”. Jonathan Bowden, a Nietzschean ‘til the end.

Work and Legacy

With the sad passing of Jonathan Bowden the New Right has lost one of its most gifted advocates and humanity has lost its most gifted orator. Like other commentators who have written about Jonathan in the few weeks since the announcement of his death, I regard Jonathan’s unique contribution to have been his erudite, entertaining and inspiring speeches. Whilst there is no substitute for hearing a great speaker in the flesh, it is happily true that a great deal of the power of Jonathan’s oratory is communicated through the many videos that were made of his talks, and which are currently available to view online. This enduring legacy is largely due to the foresight of a Black Gnosis member, who took the trouble to film many of Jonathan’s speeches at the regular London New Right gatherings.

I first became aware of the power of Jonathan’s oratory when someone on an internet forum asked Troy Southgate if the transcript of a particular speech could be made available. Troy replied that Jonathan never prepared or consulted notes when he spoke. This intrigued me. In the modern world of endless noise and distraction how many people have the mental capacity to deliver an hour long speech without notes or preparation? When I found the speech in question online and listened to it, my intrigue grew to an immense respect. ‘Heidegger and Death’s Ontology’ taught me a great deal about Heidegger, a philosopher I had found too daunting to ever try reading, and it inspired me to begin exploring his work. It also taught me a great deal about Jonathan: about his encyclopaedic knowledge; about the laser precision of his eloquence; and about his ability to enrapture an audience with a forbiddingly abstruse topic.

The facility with which he could engage his listeners was remarkable to behold. All the more so considering the fact that he never talked down to an audience. Indeed, he expected his audience to do a great deal of work in following his various trains of thought, his labyrinthine sub clauses, and his perfectly formulated parentheses. The complicated structural form of his talks was never a barrier to understanding them; it just seemed to be a necessary means to incorporate the vast array of ideas and illustrations that were required for him to express what he had to say. And what he chose to emphasize again and again was that we are engaged in a cultural struggle at all levels of social activity.

One example of this will suffice. During one particular speech Jonathan claimed that Pol Pot, the future leader of the Khmer Rouge, heard lectures given at the Sorbonne by Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. When these existentialist intellectuals discussed notions such as the necessity of destroying the family as a bourgeois construct, Pol Pot interpreted them rather literally and carried out their ideas with Maoist zeal. Thus, Jonathan described a political spectrum of Marxism stretching from the feminism of The Second Sex to the killing fields of Cambodia. And this, of course, is the dirty secret of liberalism. When it requires a face of tolerance and humanity to succeed then it will wear that face; when it requires bullets, the mask is changed accordingly. The hypocrisy is mostly hidden due to the hegemonic influence of the Left across all political and cultural institutions.

Jonathan often described the New Right as an alternative university, one free from this hegemony of Marxism. His desire was to see everyone on the New Right raise their game and begin to address these cultural issues directly from our perspective. To a great extent this is a lesson that has to be learned from the praxis of the New Left. We are at a stage where political censorship and demographic change have made it impossible (or at least unlikely, if one is being optimistic) for us to regain control of our political institutions by the usual channels. The role of the New Right, as Jonathan delineated it, is to explore the realm of ideas at a higher level; to face the intellectual reality of New Left hegemony and challenge it head on; and to provide a cultural space wherein young people, whose ideas may not yet have been totally corrupted, can find an alternative current to the materialistic doctrines of contemporary Western societies. This is a project that can and should be pursued at all levels of cultural activity. Whether in the creation of fine art; the reviewing of popular films; or the exegesis of complex philosophical ideas, we should be attuned to our position as European men and women resisting the current of materialism and liberalism.

Jonathan pursued this cultural project vigorously, producing a great many paintings and books, and also a couple of films. It is true that some of these works are difficult to locate within a conventional ‘right wing’ discourse, but I do not think that this is a failure of those works. Instead, they represent a desire to create a new aesthetic space in which works which are expressive of the ethos of Western man could be produced, without the necessity of either craven apologetics to the liberal elite or self-imposed submission to a didacticism of the right. His paintings in particular, which look like a sort of cross between Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon gone wrong, can seem deeply rooted in post-modernity, but in reality they express a sense of projection into a more autonomous artistic future. The distortion of the figures and the claustrophobia of the composition are relieved by the vivacity of the colour palate and an associated sense of strength and belief. I believe that many of these pictures represent the caging and etherization of the European spirit at the present time and the ultimate indefatigability of that spirit, and I suspect that they will come to be more admired as time goes on.

Whenever Jonathan spoke in public he wore a wooden runic pendant to express his pagan beliefs. The symbol on the pendant was the odal, or eðel, rune. This is representative of ‘home’ or ‘homeland’. A home is a space that is won by one’s ancestors and that must be vigorously defended by the descendants or it will be destroyed. Within the home it is possible to be oneself, to ex...