Book Reviews: Griffin and Lowell

Books by Roger Griffin and Norman Lowell.

First:

Roger Griffin, Fascism: A Quick Immersion, Tibidabo Publishing, Inc., 2020

This book is an unoriginal rehash, a dumbed down version, of his previous “scholarly” work defining fascism and a fascist minimum, as well as of his work on the groupuscule concept; this new book is likely intended as sort of a handbook about fascism for hygiene-challenged Antifa and lard-enhanced blue-haired SJW fatties.

Griffin’s definition of fascism – centered on palingenetic ultra-nationalism – remains sound. Anyone who believes that Franco was a fascist or that Trump is a fascist is an idiot.  In this sense, Griffin remains correct.

However, the fact remains that the Left is congenitally unable to understand fascism and fascists and they ignore or misinterpret the lessons of Griffin’s work. Not for them are analyses of “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” or understanding of the revolutionary and dynamic nature of fascism. No, for them, fascism is simply reactionary oppression; thus, Franco was a fascist, Trump is a fascist, Wall Street stockbrokers are fascists – any White person to the right of Karl Marx is a fascist. They understand nothing, learn nothing, and their approach to the Far Right is simply bashing heads and censoring dissident voices.  Griffin’s beloved Left is intellectually and morally bankrupt, depends upon brute force, and has no use for his work.

Roger Griffin in this latest book expresses his usual tiresome shtick – he always dedicates his books to “the victims of fascism” and/or piously pontificates how the “real readers” of his books are so-called anti-fascists who can use his work to “diagnose and treat” the “disease” of fascism. His attitude toward fascism and fascists is one of snide contempt. However, in reality, the true readers of his works on fascism are fascists themselves - the proponents of the “Universal Nazism” that he decries as a major player in post-WWII fascist metapolitics - the Far Right being the only area of the political spectrum today where actual intellectual ferment occurs. Thanks, Griffin. Although no thanks are required for the volume under review here, as it breaks no new ground and is a rather pallid effort, with zero utility.

In this remarkably unoriginal book, Griffin once again repeats one of this constant tropes – fascists (i.e., the real Far Right) are impotent, desperate, powerless, and because of the “structural” nature of modern sociopolitical reality, fascists have absolutely zero chance of achieving any of their goals.  So, besides the obvious question as to why Griffin has dedicated his entire career to fixate on this useless, impotent, and powerless creed (*), we are left with another question – why is the Left/System always screeching about “the rise of fascism, the threat of fascism, the resurgence of fascism” if the Far Right is such a powerless joke with no chance whatsoever of achieving power?  Griffin argues – and I agree with him here since the facts are incontrovertible – that the whole leftist spectrum (from Marxist Antifa to Marxist university professors to the mass media to the political class to the typical blue-haired fatty) mistakes right-wing populism, paleoconservatism, identitarianism, and rightist reactionary authoritarianism as “fascism.” So, yes, if everyone to the right of John McCain and Mitt Romney is “fascist” then there is a resurgence of “fascism,” but that is just the stupidity and the paranoid fantasy of the Left. Those individuals and entities are not fascist, and so Griffin can continue to assert that not only is the Far Right completely powerless today (a fair assessment, but one lacking in context) but will always be so, regardless of context (not a fair assessment).

What Griffin terms the real existential threat – worse than Nazism and Stalinism – are ecocatastrophes and other such threats to human existence, which he claims will become more likely if the (non-fascist, but still bigoted and hateful) anti-liberal Right comes to power. All humanity will perish in a cataclysm because of, say, Trump or Le Pen or Bolsonaro or Brexit or Salvini.  Any deviation from SJW multiculturalism, any deviation from a pathological altruism that embraces every "other," any deviation from crazed xenophilia – that is going to threaten humanity.  All those intolerant White bigots will not and cannot effectively address the looming ecocatastrophe.

Thus, Griffin in this book has jumped the shark – or, more precisely, jumped the pachyderm – to write what may be the most juvenile and cringeworthy sentence in the history of childish leftist polemics:

Meanwhile, as Trumpism and the Brexit debate illustrate, the looming ecocatastrophe is still the elephant in the room, a metaphor that before long may have a tragic ring to it when the only elephants are left in zoos.

Jumbo weeps.

Well, after all, as we know, Negro transsexual lesbians and obese blue-haired neo-Marxist SJW feminists, who cry about microaggressions and about the patriarchy, and who “deconstruct” science and technics as the White Man’s ju-ju, are going to save us all from ecocatastrophe. Yes, the descendants of people who never invented the wheel are going to lead us to the stars, as long as we don’t reject “democratic pluralism” and as long as we blindly and self-destructively accept “otherness.”

Of course, the very opposite is the case. Griffin’s tolerant liberal democracy leads to a complete rejection of science; we’ve reached the point where university professors are disciplined for saying that men cannot become pregnant.  These are the people who are going to save us from an ecocatastrophe?  Is Black Lives Matter going to solve global warming?  Are critical theory advocates going to stop an asteroid strike? Is a ghetto gangbanger going to divert a comet? The only people who have demonstrated the scientific and technical capability to prevent an ecocatastrophe are those who Griffin’s work is intended to dispossess and, eventually, displace and replace. Griffin’s own ideology will help to bring about the ecological, physical, and cultural destruction he allegedly fears. It is multiculturalism, and the wages of diversity, that result in the hemorrhage of material resources, the loss of collective social goods, and the decline of community engagement (hello Putnam!  does Griffin “bowl alone?”) that will truly contribute to ecocatastrophe and human extinction.

I would like to end with two examples of why I hold Griffin in contempt. As part of his constant refrain of how modern fascists are a pathetic and powerless group with zero chance of achieving their goals, losers who cannot compete with the structural advantages of the victorious liberal democracy that the masses love and support, he demonstrates that he is either extremely stupid, so ideologically committed that he his blinded by a complete lack of self-awareness, or a mendacious and hypocritical gaslighting liar.

Griffin mocks Greece’s Golden Dawn as a “spent force” whose activists are on trial for being members of a “criminal organization.” That Griffin sees this as a victory for liberal democracy is simply astonishing.  WHY is Golden Dawn a “spent force?”  Was it defeated by liberal democracy in the marketplace of ideas?  No.  Golden Dawn was a potent force, increasing in popularity, and was attacked through political persecution by a liberal democratic state using “fascist” tactics of criminalizing political dissent. Thus, Golden Dawn is now a “criminal organization” – after all, it opposes liberal democracy and any dissent from liberal “tolerance” is unacceptable and must be criminalized – and its members are put “on trial” in a manner no different from the show trials of Stalinism. This, according to Griffin, is proof of the pathetic weakness of the Far Right - that it becomes so popular to the people, and so threatening to the liberal democratic state, that tolerant liberal democrats are forced to criminalize political dissent, jail political opponents, ban political parties, and censor political speech.  Griffin sees no problem with that.  He simply uses the criminalization of Golden Dawn as evidence of their ineptness without questioning whether criminalizing political dissent is compatible with the liberal democracy he so strongly espouses.

Then he mocks Britain First for having a large online presence but being unable to attract more than a handful of people to show up for a live rally, where they were out-numbered by antifascist protestors. Griffin neglects to note that the “anti-fascist protestors” are violent thugs who are protected by the State; in essence, Griffin's liberal democratic system uses criminal Antifa as stormtroopers to break up legal Far Right public events with brutal violence. The Antifa terrorists work hand-in-glove with the police and with the state security apparatus; if rightists defend themselves, it is they who are arrested and prosecuted.  No wonder that the Far Right doesn’t manifest many activists in street rallies these days.  In the context of the brutal repression by the liberal democratic state – and I haven’t even mentioned “hate speech” prosecutions and convictions in Britain that are used to suppress dissent (as they are throughout Europe) - any Far Right presence is impressive and should be applauded.

At no point whatsoever has Griffin’s liberal democracy engaged with the Far Right on a level playing field. At every point, liberal democracy uses authoritarian – and sometimes totalitarian – techniques of political violence, political repression and subversion, criminalization of speech and of dissent, to prop up their system.  Liberal democracy – and the Left in general – is intellectually, politically, and morally bankrupt. The fact that a so-called champion of liberal democracy such as Griffin blithely accepts political suppression of his opponents as “business as usual” demonstrates that the real “leakage” of “fascist ideas” into the mainstream has been the adoption of intolerant “fascist” techniques of political repression by the liberal democratic system.  Indeed, Griffin himself has been “tainted by fascism” since he accepts and applauds “fascist” techniques that are used to stifle ideas that displease him.

Further, even though the American “movement” is pitifully inept, “led” by affirmative action incompetents, it is still true that it has NOT been defeated in a free marketplace of ideas, but instead has been met with a combination of political persecution, street violence, selective prosecution, deplatforming, social pricing including termination of employment, and other assorted methods of authoritarian coercion that has nothing to do with classical liberalism or democratic procedures. The American Far Right has been suppressed by political thuggery and by criminal conspiracies to deprive activists of their basic constitutional civil rights.  This is essentially a tacit admission by Griffin’s vaunted liberal democracy that it had lost the battlefield of ideas. All that it has left is trying to win the battlefield of force and coercion.

This is true historically as well. Hitler was defeated by war; Mussolini was overthrown because of the war; Codreanu was murdered by the State. Fascism has never been defeated by liberal democracy in a free marketplace of ideas; it has only been defeated by brute force, by the “tolerant liberal state” using the tools of ruthless coercion, political persecution, and total war. Again, liberal democracy always adopts the tactics of “fascism” in order to defeat fascism; it is unable to do so on its own terms.

Griffin is a laughable turd indeed, the very incarnation of Nietzsche’s Last Man, the very embodiment of the sissified White Cuck.

What a buffoon.

*I suppose Griffin would argue that even though the Far Right is pathetic and powerless, certain of its illiberal and bigoted ideas can seep into the mainstream, through the filter of right-wing populism, and so must be studied and opposed for that reason; further, he asserts that pitiful and desperate fascists will conduct lone wolf terrorism and so are a limited threat in that sense. Even with all of that, the amount of his life energy put into the study and opposition to fascism is orders of magnitude out of proportion to the reality if he really believes the aforementioned are the only real long term threats to the liberal order from the Far Right.

Second:

Norman Lowell, Jesus the Usurper: Murderer of Christ, Norman Lowell, 2020.

This is the third in Lowell’s series of books, after Credo and Imperium Europa; this one stresses “spiritual” issues.

Now, at first glance I may be ill-suited to handle the task of reviewing such a work, since I am relatively uninterested in spiritual issues, focusing instead on the political and science/technics sides of racial and cultural issues. Needless to say, I am hostile to religion, organized or otherwise. However, these characteristics may in fact make me particularly well suited to tackle this task, for it may well be useful to have someone approach a spiritual work from an “outsider” position, purely objective without a “dog in the fight” so to speak.  In this sense I can examine Lowell’s arguments without being biased due to a pre-existing strong religious belief on the subject.  As a “third party observer” to spiritual and religious disputes, I can render a verdict based purely on the arguments made.  Of course, the book also needs to be critically examined by those who have more expertise (and “skin the in the game”) on this subject; nevertheless, my own viewpoint may be a useful supplement.

The foreword to this rather slender volume was written by an acquaintance of Lowell’s, a Kevin Ellul-Bonici, described as a “former police investigator and prosecutor specializing in fraud and economic crime," as well as someone involved in “Eurosceptic” politics. This individual claims to disagree with aspects of Lowell’s book and this is clear from the tenor of the foreword, particularly in its pro-Christian ending.  This individual, interestingly, claims that the Jews are not actually the prime movers in the conspiracy against the truth, which he instead avers are…the Jesuits.  Now, I do not wish to be close-minded, and I certainly am no expert on these affairs. I do not doubt the pernicious influence of the Jesuits throughout history, but I am – let us say – skeptical that they are the high point, the very top, of the global conspiracy. Indeed, I doubt that any single group is, but instead several powerful groups with interlocking interests – Jews, Jesuits, global capitalism, the Left, the rising tide of color, among others, are responsible.  Things get worse in the foreword with a dive into anti-materialism in the sense that the ultimate cause of our troubles is assigned to “extra-dimensional beings and the Luciferian agenda.” The author, unlike Lowell, takes a pro-Paul view in the midst of Christian apologia, and states that “The Man of Reason can never grasp how Christ redeemed us by paying the price on our behalf as descendants of the fallen Adam. Reason would rather have us believe the lies of this world then in His second coming.”

With all due respect, this is, in my opinion – as a “Man of Reason” – ridiculous nonsense, and completely against the message of Lowell’s book. On the one hand, one can admire Lowell’s open-mindedness and confidence in his own arguments as to invite a contradictory foreword; however, as a “Man of Reason” my overall reaction to the foreword was a loud sigh followed by a face-palm.  That is exactly the anti-reality, anti-the-real-world attitude, rejected by Lowell (and Nietzsche), which has contributed to our current demise. Oh, what damage two thousand years of Christian lies have wrought!  Crush the infamy!

Lowell himself in this book takes the view of Nietzsche that the traditional, "official" Jesus of Christianity was an invention by the Jew Paul to undermine the Roman Imperium, spreading a doctrine of weakness and surrender, making people disregard the heroic work required in the real world in favor of some (mythical) otherworldly paradise suited for the weak and the botched.  Lowell instead sees Christ as being Caesar, who was valued by Nietzsche as a form of superior human being.

This type of “Christianity,” focused on the higher values of Life, coupled to an Aryan Cosmotheism, is what Lowell sees as the spiritual way forward for European Man. A Nietzschean religion, allied with Cosmotheism, that elevates Caesar as an ubermensch to model ourselves after, is fine by me (although I would prefer no religion at all). But, surely, such a religion – Caesar as Christ – is far from any traditional understanding of Christianity and cannot be termed as such, nor would it be accepted by the public (or even by most elite activists) as such.  It is something completely different, and requires its own terminology.

All in all, Lowell’s contribution is interesting and thought-provoking. One thing though is that I’m not very fond of references to “Atlantis” and such.  A minor point. 

Overall, a good and useful book.