Category: Obituaries

Death of a patriot

“We must turn the country around to face its citizens. The scale of the repair will be so great that Poland will become a new republic.”

Any president of a populous European nation who can utter these words, at once loyal and revolutionary, is a rare and valuable bird likely to be much loved by his people.  Such, we now know, was Lech Aleksander Kaczy?ski who died in an air accident at a fog-bound Smolensk-North airport today, aged sixty.

With him died all ninety-five aboard the Polish Air Force Tupolev Tu-154, including Kaczy?ski’s wife Maria and many members of the Polish ruling elite.

The mainstream media coverage of this tragedy will keep rolling for days, no doubt.  Kaczy?ski’s career will be closely analysed, his successes and failures picked over, his patriotism and social conservatism described perhaps more charitably in some quarters than ever they were while he was alive.  But where here, besides the simple, respectful marking of yet another sadness in Poland’s national life, is the legitimate angle for a nationalist to explore?

It seems to me that Kaczy?ski represents something we should understand well, and that is how liberal democracy limits the action of any patriotic national figure outside of, and hostile to, the neo-Marxist/neoliberal dispensation.  Kaczy?ski enjoyed little freedom of action.  During his presidency he was unable to avoid putting his presidential signature to the Lisbon Treaty.  He saw his Law and Justice (PiS) party ejected from office by Donald Tusk’s neoliberal and europhile Civic Platform.  Earlier he was, as mayor of Warsaw, even dragged before the European Court of Human Rights for refusing homosexuals an opportunity to parade - no doubt, as grotesquely and offensively as possible - through the capital in the name of a non-existent equality.

He had come to the presidential office promising:

the purging of various pathologies from our life, most prominently including crime (...), particularly criminal corruption – that entire, great rush to obtain unjust enrichment, a rush that is poisoning society, [and preventing the state from ensuring] elementary social security, health security, basic conditions for the development of the family [and] the security of commerce and the basic conditions for economic development

How much of this he achieved I leave it to someone more informed about Polish politics to say.  But the definite sense I have is that he was continually frustrated by the democratic process, which is to say, by the ubiquity and resilience of liberal presumptions and by the power of the liberal dynamic - things that must have seemed so desirable to Poles in 1989.  All conservative political careers end in failure.  Lech Kaczy?ski’s ended in the shocking and sudden violence of a national tragedy too.

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 05:49 PM in Obituaries
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The Evil That Men Do

The last Kennedy brother is dead but their legacy lives on.

From the VDARE article “So Much for Promises - Quotes Re 1965 Immigration Act”:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA)

“Out of deference to the critics, I want to comment on … what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S.500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. Thirdly, the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious disease or serious mental illness. As I noted a moment ago, no immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge … the charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage.”(Senate Part 1, Book 1, pp. 1-3)

Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY)

“In fact, the distribution of limited quota immigration can have no significant effect on the ethnic balance of the United States. … Total quota immigration is now 156,782; under the proposed bill, it would rise to 164,482. Even if all these immigrants came from Italy, for example, the net effect would be to increase the number of Italo-Americans by one-tenth of 1 percent of our population this year, and less as our population increases. Americans of Italian extraction now constitute about 4 percent of our population; at this rate, considering our own natural increase, it would take until the year 2000 to increase that proportion to 6 percent. Of course, S.500 would make no such radical change. Immigration from any single country would be limited to 10 percent of the total-16,500-with the possible exception of the two countries now sending more than that number, Great Britain and Germany. But the extreme case should set to rest any fears that this bill will change the ethnic, political, or economic makeup of the United States. … [w]e bar immigration by those individuals who would compete for jobs for which the supply of labor is adequate for the demand … we bar immigration by individuals who have demonstrated that they do not hold such allegiance [to our fundamental precepts of political freedom and democratic government]. … If it is true that those from northern Europe, as individuals, can make greater contributions to this country than can others, then this legislation will bring them here. If the legislation does not bring them here, then the assumptions on which defenders of the present system rely are wholly false. … [S.500] will facilitate the entry of skilled specialists … the level of immigration now proposed is far less than that thought ‘assimilable’ by the most restrictionist Congress [1924] in our history. … As far as the quota system, it [S.500] increases it about 9,000 and as far as a practical matter, it increases it about 50,000. It is not a large number.”(Senate Part 1, Book 2, pp.216-218, 226, 242)

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 01:47 AM in Obituaries
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose words those are, has died from heart failure in Moscow, at the end of a long period of decline.

“You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.”

The author, among other works, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The First Circle (1968), Cancer Ward (1968) and The Gulag Archipelago(1973–1978), historian, Nobelist, and a profund Russian nationalist and Russian Orthodox Christian, Solzhenitsyn belonged nowhere but in the socks and shoes of his own spirit.  Life forced moral judgements upon him wherever he looked ... as a soldier in Germany in 1945 witnessing the murder and rapine of the Red Army, as a witness to the grotesque violence inherent in Stalinism, as a prisoner in the gulag and a persecuted intellectual outside it, and as an exile in the liberal West appalled by the spiritual absence, self-indulgence and materialism there.

Until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the West had actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it . . . All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs.

Solzhenitsyn’s final act of courage in the written word, Two Hundred Years Together (2003), remains unpublished in the West.  It examines in a critical way the nature of the Jewish engagement in Russian life from the partial annexation of Poland in 1795 to 1916.  Whilst it finds that the Revolution was not a Jewish conspiracy, it does dwell on the culpability of Jews where Jewish culpability existed.  For this, of course, Solzhenitsyn has received his due measure of reflexive semitic hatred inside Russia, and his book has been very effectively frozen out in the West.

“It is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka only by the fact that two-thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect.”

But the Jewish tantrums will be of no import to our memory of the man.  Solzhenitsyn will be revered in Russia and admired in the West for his moral stature, and for proving that the human spirit was greater than the corruption and violence of the Soviet system ... and, perhaps, greater too than the equally deady - actually, more deadly - dangers of modernity which beset Westerners, in all their comfort and security, today.

“It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey.”

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, August 4, 2008 at 04:04 AM in Obituaries
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Alisdair Clarke

On his New Right Forum this evening Troy Southgate announced the death from pneumonia of Alisdair Clarke, 46, blogger, traditionalist, paganist, emerging NR intellectual and, just occasionally, a commenter on MR threads.

His final post at Ayran Futurism, dated January 10th, contained these words:-

Our race, culture and vision of limitless expansion in space and time has no future under the current global materialist status quo.  Indeed, with inertia and the continuance of business-as-usual, the survival of the whole human race and other species is moot.  If one day our descendants are reaching into inter-galactic space – then it is US that they will remember, and thank for our perseverance and loyalty to a higher order.  It is US who are living at the critical junction in history, with unparalleled consequences for the Aryan race and the planet more generally.  It is within our lifetimes that the fate of the planet for possibly millions of years will be decided.

We must view our destiny clearly.  Whether we face a future amongst the stars, or final annihilation and extinction, the end of the experiment of advancing intellect and spirituality across the cosmos, is a decision for our current generation.

As a practising homosexual, Alisdair was proof, if proof were needed, that homosexuals have ethnic genetic interests.  Disavowing the posturing contrarianism of gay politics,  Alisdair demonstrated that homosexuals are not bound to be careless of the rights and the traditions of the majority.  He could write of the European New Right’s wish for “strong family life, fecundity, and marriage or relations within one’s own ethnic group”.  The “or” in that sentence might have resonated rather loudly with him, of course.  Certainly, he sought a martial place at the table for homosexuality in the “Aryan Future”, for which he was spectacularly defenestrated by the long-emerged and leading intellectual of the ENR, Jonathan Bowden, writing in Troy’s New Imperium magazine:-

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 07:13 PM in Obituaries
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Sir Edmund Hillary, 20 July 1919 - 11 January 2008

A quiet, dignified man who, long ago, made the world gasp with wonder, passed away today.  Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, KG, ONZ, KBE, conqueror of Everest, died at the age of 88, surrounded by his family in Auckland City Hospital, New Zealand.

Hillary was bound to be defined by that moment of greatness on 29th May 1953, and in truth the rest of his life scaled much less remarkable peaks.  So let us remember him now for his spirit as a mountaineer-adventurer.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, January 10, 2008 at 07:33 PM in Obituaries
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The death of a multi-racialist

Should there be European populations in Africa, living alongside Africans?

To Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia who died yesterday, and the man who unilaterally declared independence from Britain on 11th November 1965, the question did not even arise.  The 300,000 white Rhodesians whose cause he championed were almost all of British descent, and almost all enjoyed a pretty good life in their southern fastness of the continent of the negro.  That had to be made to continue.  The shining commercial success, the gentle settler culture, the ties of family, the imaginings of belonging ...  it was inconceivable that these things could be allowed to be lost, simply be given up.

But where are they now?

Smith, of course, was a remarkable man in many ways, and his obituaries will dwell upon that.  Those in the conservative and nationalist spheres will laud him as a man of his people and, in the light of the Mugabe experience, someone not without wisdom and foresight.  How his words, from the Declaration of Unilateral Independence, resound now:-

... African nationalists believe that, provided they stirred up sufficient trouble, they will be able to blackmail the British Government into bringing about a miracle on their behalf by handing the country over to irresponsible rule.

A little further on in the Declaration, Smith held out the possibility that the African would, one day, be ready for self-rule:-

Those who seek to damage us do not have any great concern for the principles to which they endlessly pay lip service; for if they really believed in these principles, which they ceaselessly proclaim, then they could not possibly deny, the many disasters which have been brought about by the premature withdrawal of European influence from countries in Africa and Asia who where nowhere near ready for it.

He said it, no doubt, out of political pragmatism.  But he could not have believed it.  Indeed, elsewhere he is quoted as saying:-

“I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing.  It spread civilization to Africa.  Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.”

Really ... rightly, Smith was, first and last, a believer in the white tribe of Rhodesia.  He trusted to their independence of mind, their industry and determination, and their self-reliance.  In an age when self-doubt and self-hatred scarred the European mind, Smith trusted wholly to these settler qualities.

Now, it’s easy for us today to support what Smith and his tribe attempted to do.  It was magnificent to stand against the moralising, liberalistic nonsense spouted by the global great and good.  And there’s no sane reason to invite an African “nationalist” to tea.

But that’s not enough.  Even if the impossible had happened, and Rhodesia had survived the odds (of 22 Africans to every white Rhodesian), it’s just not enough.

The question arises whether the shallow cultural roots and economic goods that white Rhodesians thought they were protecting were, in fact, worthwhile.  But life is more than these things, no matter that history is littered with similar collective errors of judgement.

There are secondary interests and there is a primary interest.  Smith and his Rhodesians were fighting for secondary interests, and a truly wise leader might have ventured to look ahead and divine their destruction anyway.  After all, others did: white South Africa considered the game lost across the Limpopo, and used its army at the end to keep the border crossings open for escaping whites.

Looking at Smith and UDI from our blighted vantage point today, it is odd to think that a black or Indian or Pakistani Smith might arise one day in an England rent by ethnic conflict and, in due course, certain to see a reclamation of sovereignty by its native people.  How will we view someone who refuses to repatriate, and steadfastly holds that seventy or eighty years of family history here ... weddings, births and funerals ... homes made ... taxes paid ... qualifies him and his kind to stay?  As a tragic figure, perhaps, at war with the spirit of the times.  But mostly, we will think him mistaken.  We would think the more of him if he could divine the lowly value of his interests here, and choose the higher interests of a true homeland and a secure future far away.

Ian Smith was not such a visionary.  He was a good man living, like his and every minority immigrant tribe, in the wrong place.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 08:31 PM in Obituaries
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David Ervine, 1953-2007

His contemporaries in Northern Ireland politics have praised him.  The obit writers are now posting their copy.  David Ervine, leader of the PUP, “passed away quietly with peace and dignity” according to a statement issued by his family today (Monday).  Unionism in Northern Ireland will feel his loss.

Ervine was one of the many UVF prisoners whom, during the 1970s, Gusty Spence turned from violence to politics.  He started appearing on our television screens as, essentially, the political voice of the UVF in the latter half of the 1980s, if my memory serves me correctly.  Even then, and notwithstanding the difficulties of speaking for an appallingly violent organisation only nominally engaged in terrorist counter-activity against the Provisional IRA and quite prepared to murder Catholics at large, Ervine struck me as a highly articulate and sympathetic character.  That he developed as he did in the period running up to and after the Good Friday Agreement into a passionate spokeman for peace was really rather remarkable.  He was a man of genuine vision, and his vision was that of a progressive Unionism as the only practical guarantor of Ulster Protestants’ interests.

He did not carry his own organisation with him on his political and spiritual journey.  The UVF remains armed and, in part or whole, criminally active.  He endeavoured to merge his PUP party with the Ulster Unionists and failed.  The times had not travelled so far or so fast as David Ervine.  Now the man is gone, and his too brief life stands as an example for those that might yet follow.

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, January 8, 2007 at 07:55 PM in Obituaries
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Rest in Peace, Pinochet

The news of Pinochet’s death should have taken nobody by surprise. He was an ailing old man of ninety-one, living in prison or under secure house arrest, and with the country he helped to preserve from the Red Menace now led and represented on the world stage by glib, effete busybodies. It’s a miracle he held out as long as he did.

Yet this was hardly the first miracle contained within his remarkable life. When, in 1970, Chile elected as its President that Castro wannabe, that Guerra fan-boy Salvadore Allende, many feared the emergence of a second Cuba, albeit one possessed of considerable natural resources and a powerful industrial base. Enough trees were felled to give any modern environmentalist a heart attack, to print all those reams of articles in the Nation and Newsweak giving dire warnings of failed American interventions. Revolutions only go one way, we were told. Once a nation tastes the fruits of the Socialist utopia, even if these fruits turn out to be both bitter and rotten, it will never turn back.

Continued...

Posted by Alex Zeka on Tuesday, December 12, 2006 at 12:59 PM in Obituaries
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Maurice Cowling: 1926 - 2005

(Obit from the Times is here).

I am saddened to learn British Historian Maurice Cowling has passed away. I had long wished to have him sign my copies of his three volume masterpiece Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England. I paid a hefty price of $75 for the third volume, but the richness of his scholarship far exceeds the monetary cost.

I’ve shared a few quotes from Mr. Cowling’s work on MR:

“…secularization, so far from involving liberation from religion has involved merely the liberation from Christianity and the establishment in its place of a modern religion whose advocates so much assume its truth that they do not understand it is a religion to which they are committed.”

My praise for this man’s intellect and hard-headed realism is boundless, though I’ve read he was quite a difficult person to be near, apparently he did not long endure ignorant men. In some ways I imagined him to be like the MR commentator Effra, who used to post here.

If someone can locate a photo of Mr. Cowling please post it, for I’ve always wondered about his features. Interestingly, for more than a year I’ve had a google news alert scanning the internet daily for the name “Maurice Cowling,” and this is the first time it was activated. I cannot think of anyone that has recovered more knowledge of Britain’s past than this man, now he is gone and we are left poorer.

Mr. Cowling has at least one article online, arguing Churchill’s war with Hitler was a flawed undertaking. Well, read it for yourself: The Case Against Going to War. I don’t expect Mr. Cowling was invited to many Hollywood type parties by writing such things, but I’m certain Mr. Cowling didn’t give a hoot about Hollywood.

Posted by leslie on Friday, August 26, 2005 at 07:50 AM in Obituaries
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Sir Edward Heath, 1916 - 2005

Today’s papers will be peppered with writings on the life and times of Edward Heath, British Prime Minister from 1970-74, who sailed Morning Cloud over the horizon yesterday, aged 89.  I am no obituarist, nor a historian.  So I won’t attempt to compete with those who are but, instead, mark the man’s passing with one or two of my memories from those four tumultuous years.

At the time I wasn’t long out of school.  I drove a delivery van, worked as a filing clerk and in a hospital laundry before getting a job as a trainee machine engineer and then moving into the company’s London offices as a lowly gofer.  That brought me to Bush House in the Aldwych.

One of my less tender memories of that time is of the student marches, a “megaphone obligatory” danced in moronic, slouching style by Socialist Workers –  who, of course, were not workers at all - on their way, yet again, to turf the Chancellor of the LSE out of his office.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, July 18, 2005 at 06:42 AM in Obituaries
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Sam Francis

I am sorry to hear that Sam Francis has just passed away after heart surgery.  I did not agree with everything he wrote but he was a great campaigner for conservative causes.

The following is a brief biographical sketch on Samuel Francis.

Samuel Francis was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on April 29, 1947. He was educated at The Johns Hopkins University (B.A., 1969) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he received a Ph.D. in modern history in 1979. From 1977 to 1981, he was a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., specializing in foreign affairs, terrorism, and intelligence and internal security issues. From 1981 to 1986, he was legislative assistant for national security affairs to Senator John P. East (Republican - North Carolina) and worked closely with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, of which Senator East was a member.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 06:03 PM in Obituaries
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Regret on hearing of the death of Arafat

It was a long time ago.  If I had to rely purely on memory I couldn’t even be sure of the year now.  But, you know, I was young and didn’t worry for the world as I do today.  I didn’t understand the need to hold fast to the remembrance of such dispiriting realities.  I didn’t understand why it would matter if, so many years later, they should slip out of the public mind, and mine.

So it was rather easy to forget.  Perhaps, too, forgetting went with the grain of the wood.  Seventies Britain was a different place with quite different expectations.  Life seemed more providential, and perhaps was.  We raced between the lights.  We were freer and more risk-taking or, perhaps, just more subject to the cheapening, egalitarian law of accident.  Now we are all wrapped up in cotton wool.  Death seems an intolerable affront.  But I don’t know that it was then in quite the same way. 

I should also say that we were also immeasurably more naïve then than now.  For one thing, the foul-minded, shit-hearted non-soldiers of the Provisional IRA had not begun leaving their murderous gifts in mainland pubs.  We saw terrorism on the nightly news.  But it was mostly on the island of Ireland, as the shit-hearts liked to put it.  Or it was even further away and involved Middle Easterners and Israelis.  This type of terrorism came to us through the most basic moral filter.  It was a filter through which only one side of the story ever got told.  We didn’t question it then.  We hadn’t learned to question everything.  But anyway it was a true filter.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 06:28 AM in Obituaries
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