I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

Scruton faith

Over the holiday season I enjoyed Roger Scuton's book "Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life".

Less a memoir than a series of essays on particular chunks of his life or matters of importance, Scruton grasps faith perfectly here:

"Faith is not simply an addition to our repetoire of ordinary opinions. It is a transforming state of mind, a stance towards the world, rooted in our social nature and altering all our perceptions, emotions and beliefs."

Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 220

The end of the world is nigh? Environmentalists, Fascism and Eco-Collapse

If the earth is going to die screaming, as UB40 prophesised, what political forms will emerge before it dies?

For many in the environmental movement, fascism is not just a future threat, but is encapsulated in today's campaigns to save fossil fuels. Worse, those fuels themselves have always been brown - that is fascist, and never green.

I think much of that world view is nonsense, and have set out a three page argument in the current Notes From the Borderland magazine, making that very point. There is also room along the way for comment on political figures as diverse as Paul Mason, Boris Johnson, Roger Hallam, Tommy Robinson, and the National Union of Mineworkers campaign against apartheid.

You can order a copy of NFB here, and can find a pdf of my article below.

Download Eco-Fascism Stott NFB 12 2024

The Joy of Old Books - What's Tucked Inside The Greatest Treason: The Bizarre Story of Hollis, Liddell and Mountbatten?

My current reading is this 1990 title, by the late espionage writer Richard Deacon.

I am only 60 pages in, but it does seem this is an apologia for MI5 and a rebuttal of the view that the Service's Director General from 1956-65, Roger Hollis, was a Soviet spy. How else to take a book which claims one of Hollis' greatest rivals and chief inquisitor, Peter Wright "served in MI5 for a relatively short period" (p.6) Wright actually served for 21 years, being recruited as the organisation's principal scientist, going on to specialise in counter-intelligence.

One joy of buying and reading second hand books from thirty plus years ago, is that they so often come with news cuttings and other bits and pieces tucked away inside them. In this case it is not a news clipping or an obituary, but a series of comments written on the previous owners bookmark.

No one using a kindle will ever know the pleasures of such random discoveries. May they be preserved for ever!

The concert for Bangladesh 1971

Part of my summer reading was a short book by Abu Sayed and Priyajit Debsarkar on the 1971 concert for Banglagesh, one of a series of momentous events in the period which saw east Pakistan break away from West Pakistan, in a bloody conflict marked by outrageous crimes on the part of the Pakistani military and its supporters, to become the independent nation of Bangladesh.

"The concert for Bangladesh: United friends of Bangladesh" is a 112 page work which first appeared in Bangla last year, followed by an English translation in 2023. It is beautifully produced with a colour cover, and excellent quality black and white photographs throughout. This is history poorly known to British readers, and is all the more valuable for that. Some of the baddies however, are all too familiar - the Chinese government and Henry Kissinger for example, had few concerns about Pakistani atrocities, as they sought a balance of power in the region which weakened India.

This work will also be of interest to Beatles completists motivated to buy anything and everything with George Harrison (and indeed Ravi Shankar) on the front cover. As for the Madison Square garden concert, the concept of cultural diplomacy is now one that is very familiar - less so in 1971. As Sayed and Debsarkar record, by 1985 some $12 million had been raised for Bangladesh - the impact on later interventions, such as Live Aid and Ethiopia, is clear.

Gripes? The text needed a tighter spell and grammar check, and as yet, the book does not appear to be available on some of the main online book sales sites?

The phoney war? Radical environmentalists, animal rights activists and direct action

Earlier this year Routledge, who seem to dominate academic output when it comes to the political fringe, published the Routledge Handbook of Non-Violent Extremism.

Edited by Elisa Orofino and William Allchorn, it is a pretty hefty piece of work, with 32 separate articles.

One of them is from me, 'The phoney war,' which charts radical environmental and animal rights activism across five decades. I argue direct action leads to a conversation between protestors and the authorities, and in the case of the animal rights movement, militant activism faded as many of the protestors core demands (such as the abolition of hunting) were won. The present era is significantly different, in that activists propagate arguments of imminent environmental collapse, a position that is to at least some degree accepted, and even echoed, by ruling elites.

What happens though, to this movement, as we get potentially closer to the environmental point of no return (2030?) that they insist is approaching? When does the conversation stop?

Two short comments on the handbook itself. It is a substantial piece of work, covering differing types of extremism, from religious actors to the far-right, far-left and environmentalists. Unfortunately the nature of academic publishing means that for all the sterling work put into the project, few will seriously study it. The cheapest price - £178.18 - guarantees that. Although you can read it via a Kindle for £38. Academic publishing appears content to phase out actual books, and to sell at a high price to universities and similar institutions, leaving out the man and woman in the street. In the long-term that strategy is unsustainable - it is taxation which of course funds the universities. The relevance of academic research, especially in the social sciences, needs to be debated far more than it is. Secondly, I salute the enormous amount of work the editors have put in to tie this project together. It is much appreciated by this author.

The Personal Is Perhaps Not Political

A couple of years after everyone else, I have just finished reading 'The Madness of crowds: Gender, Race and Identity' by Douglas Murray.

It is very good, indeed the only one of his books which has missed the mark is probably the one no one talks about now - the 2006 text 'Neoconservatism: Why we need it'. The truth of course is that we didn't!

In the conclusion to the Madness of Crowds, Murray writes beautifully of the effort people put into politics, and how identity politics in particular becomes all-consuming. It is worth quoting in full:

But of all the ways in which people can find meaning in their lives, politics - let alone politics on such a scale - is one of the unhappiest. Politics may be an important aspect of our lives, but as a source of personal meaning it is disastrous. Not just because the ambitions it strives after nearly always go unachieved, but because finding purpose in politics laces politics with a passion - including rage - that perverts the whole enterprise.

For anyone who has ever been involved in, or observed a political split within an organisation, these words hit home:

If two people are in disagreement about something important, they may disagree as amicably as they like if it is just a matter of getting to the truth or the most amenable option. But if one party finds their whole purpose in life to reside in some aspect of that disagreement, then the chances of amicability fade fast and the likelihood of reaching any truth recedes.

The quotes are on p.255-56 of the 2020 paperback edition.

The Silence of the Metropolitan Lambs: A Review of Islamophilia by Douglas Murray

The Summer 2021 issue of the Salisbury Review is now out. You can buy the magazine, or download a copy, here.

Within its pages I have a review of Douglas Murray's short book 'Islamophilia: A Very Metropolitan Malady.' What are the consequences of an outbreak of Islamophilia? Read the review and find out.

Download Murray Islamophilia review Salisbury Review Summer 2001 p 53

Download Murray Islamophilia review Salisbury Review Summer 2021 p 54

A Quote To Leave 2020 On.....

Just before Christmas I finished reading Paul Embery's 'Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class'.

It is very good, although I fear that the people who need to read it, and to learn from it, will not. Embery risks that cruellest of fates, being a Prophet in his own land, destined only to be heard from those outside his own tribe.

These are some of the lines on which he finishes the book:

We have learned that any drive to create an 'open' 'diverse' and 'progressive' nation will alienate a large part of the populace if it is forced upon them too rapidly, violates their sense of order and belonging, and comes at the expense of social solidarity and stability.
The British working class has found its voice. Politics in our country is realigning at speed as the old tribalisms crumble. The Left, if it is to halt the slide towards irrelevance, had better start listening.

I suspect this overstates the extent to which life may be breathed into a corpse. But that politics is realigning, is self-evident. And it is genuinely exciting.