My answer

Additional Notes

Note A – (Tribal societies)

Fabel van de Illegaal do seem to consider tribal societies as thoroughly evil. Helena Norberg Hodge, for instance, in her book Ancient Futures sings the praises of Ladakh society, which she has studied carefully over the last 28 years. “The story of Ladakh serves as a source of inspiration for our own future”, she tells us. “It shows that another way is possible and points to some of the first steps to kinder, gentler, patterns of living”. This fits in very well with my son’s experience of Ladakh, where he worked on a farm in a distant Ladakh village for three months last year. He could not have been more impressed by the happiness, kindness, and hospitality of these people, the remarkable solidarity they display within their community, the incredibly ingenious way in which the cultural pattern they have developed through the ages enables them to live and indeed thrive in a particularly hostile environment.

Helena also notes that the Ladakhis are bonded to their place with intimate daily contact, through a knowledge about their immediate environment, with its changing seasons, needs, and limitations.” However, “bonded to their place” in the eyes of Westerlink means that the Ladakhis are chauvinists and racists. Still worse because Helena intimates that they live close to nature, and indeed see themselves as part of it, means for Westerlink that she adheres to the Nazi “blood and soil” thesis.

For him Ladakhi society, about which he obviously understands nothing whatsoever, is “characterised by its outspoken feudal, patriarchal, and religious power relations”. For Westerlink and other members of Fabel van de Illegaal this is another way of saying that Ladakh society is thoroughly evil, and undoubtedly he would view all other traditional societies in exactly the same light, i.e. in terms of the aberrant values entertained by the alienated youth of the atomised mass society in which he lives. What he may not realise is that such values serve above all to justify the suicidal course on which our society is set and which will probably make this planet largely uninhabitable within the next century.

Note B – (Innuendo)

Krebbers accuses me of quoting Konrad Lorenz in my book The Way: an Ecological World-View. Lorenz was apparently sympathetic to the Nazi movement. That could be, but I have to admit that I do not carry out a Gestapo-type investigation into the political acceptability of the people I quote in my writings. In any case, it would have probably taken me more time to carry out such an investigation than to write my book, as in it I refer to at least 480 different authors.

What is more, part of this book is about animal behaviour or ethology, as it is also called. Lorenz’s work in this field is outstanding. It is criticized by Krebbers today because Lorenz rightly saw at least some degree of aggressivity as a normal feature of the behaviour pattern of the males of many species. On the other hand, he devoted a lot of space to showing how, in normal conditions, this aggressivity is highly ritualised, leading to few casualties – which was also true of warfare among primal societies, (see my article “The Ecology of War” published in my book The Great U-Turn). Lorenz is one of the most important figures in his field, and I challenge Krebbers, or any of my critics, to find a serious book on ethology that does not quote him. I have before me a small paperback that I extracted from a bookshelf. It is called Ethology: an Introduction by Robert A. Hinde, and it quotes Lorenz no fewer than 17 times.

I am also attacked for having included in my book The Way a quote from the writings of Alexis Carrel. “Science has destroyed the soul of the world” he once said – a valuable quote that I feel has its place in my book, which provides, among other things, a critique of modern science which has played so big a role in assuring and also in rationalizing and hence legitimising the destruction of the natural world. As it happens, I never read any of Alexis Carrel’s writings until last month, when I bought a copy of his book Man the Unknown.

However, Pierre Taguief, the recognized authority on the French Right – whose book I recently read, sees the present critical view of Carrel as largely unjustified and refers to “the new obscurantist interests that seeks to nazify Carrel” on the grounds that like Hitler he believed in eugenics. According to Taguief, Carrel defends euthanasia largely, if not uniquely when applied to major criminals if they continue to practice the same crime after being released from prison. Apparently Carrel suggests that such criminals should be gassed. One may or may not approve of this, as Taguief himself admits, but the death sentence by gassing is still applied in a number of states in the USA and though few environmentalists would approve of this practice, few accuse the state legislators and judiciaries involved of being Nazis.

I have only answered a few of the endless accusations levelled against me by Krebbers, Westerink and other members of Fabel van de Illegaal. It is truly astonishing the energy and time they have devoted to scouring my writings for the slightest word, phrase or sentence that could, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, serve to justify their contention that I am a racist, fascist, and neo Nazi.

Note C – Totalitarianism and Mass Society

The American sociologist Robert Nisbet noted that “far from being as is sometimes absurdly argued, the linear product of 19th century conservatism, totalitarianism is in fact the very opposite to it.” The power base is the masses. Before totalitarian government is possible, the masses must first have been brought into being. It was Aristotle’s thesis in his “Politics” that the great tyrants of antiquity such as Dionysius of Syracuse and Pisistratus of Athens could only have emerged in a vast anonymous mass society.

Kornhauser noted in his celebrated book “The Politics of Mass Society” that in such a society “the lack of autonomous relations generates widespread social alienation” which “heightens the responsiveness to the appeal of mass movements” because it provides the opportunity to express resentment against the mainstream society from which they feel alienated, also because these movements promise people “a totally different world”, in particular a substitute for the community of which they have been deprived. In short, as Kornhauser writes, “People who are atomised, regularly become mobilised” and since “totalitarianism is a state of total mobilisation, mass society is highly vulnerable to totalitarian movements and regimes.”

Throughout the course of history, totalitarian government, once in power, have sought – sometimes desperately – to destroy the family and the community and other intermediary social groupings. The reason is well stated by Jean Bethke Elshian: “totalitarianism strives to govern all of life; to allow for only one public identity; to destroy private life; and most of all, to require that individuals never allow their commitments to specific others (family, friends, comrades) to weaken their commitment to the state.” [Jean Bethke Elshian "The Family and Civil Life", in David Blankenhorn et al, Rebuilding the Nest, Family Service America, Milwaukee, 1990.]

It is no coincidence that those political thinkers who have promoted the all-powerful state as an ideal have been enemies of the family and community and the other basic institutions of a real society, and were thereby the proponents of the atomised mass society. Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose writings inspired the French Revolution, which gave rise to the totalitarian regime of the Jacobins under Robespierre – which in turn gave rise to the ultra-militaristic regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, said that society must be stifled and that the state must be set up to do so:

“Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state, for it is only by the forces of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured.”

Marx also believed in the atomised society. He regarded with hostility “the traditional affiliations of family, community, association and religion”. It is worth noting that this has not been a feature of all socialist thinking. Indeed, it earned Marx the hostility, indeed the hatred, of earlier non-state socialists like Bakunin and of the anarchists such as Proudhon and Kropotkin.

Hegel, who very much influenced the Nazis, saw things in very much the same way as Rousseau and Marx. For him the opinion of mere citizens was not even worth taking into account. Only the state could decide what was good for them. He went so far as to deify the state. “Its existence”, he stated “marks the arrival of God in the world”.

Note D – The definition of racism

The term racism is now used by politically correct fundamentalists like Krebbers, Hildyard, and Lohmann, in a totally new way. It suffices to suggest that Hottentots are physically different from Eskimos to be accused of “differential racism”. Even that is not enough, to suggest that groups differ from each other culturally is now regarded by Hildyard and others as a new form of racism, which they seem to regard as just as evil as racism in the traditional sense of the term.

One problem with this definition is that it makes nonsense of the very principle of cultural diversity, which only exists because different social groups see themselves as different from their neighbours. It is because of this cultural diversity that social groups have been capable of adapting to so many different and often hostile environmental conditions. Think of the ingenuity with which Eskimos have learnt to live in the Arctic wastes and the Bedouin in their desert wildernesses.

It also makes nonsense of the important democratic principle of self-determination – the right of people who share a common identity to govern themselves. It makes nonsense too of the very notion of empire. The British Empire was an empire precisely because the British governed vast numbers of very different people, who were racially and culturally very different.

If they were all the same, then of course the British Empire would not have been an empire at all. It would have been indistinguishable from countries such as Denmark and Sweden, except that it was bigger and that an army was required to put down regular revolts by its citizens who, for some inexplicable reason, did not want to be run by the government at Westminster. Are Krebbers, Hildyard and Lohman partisans of empire? It looks that way. It goes without saying, of course, that to define racism in this manner serves above all to trivialize real racism.

Note E – (Left & Right)

In any case the division between the left and the right is indeed outdated. Today there is no effective difference in the policies adopted by right-wing and left-wing governments. In any case, for responsible people, the true enemy is totalitarianism, i.e. government by an all-powerful state that rejects any form of social control. The totalitarian state, moreover, is just as often left-wing as right-wing.

Stalin’s regime in the USSR, for instance, was one of the worst examples of a left-wing totalitarian state. It did not differ substantially from the fascist state in that it was militaristic in the extreme. It was also corporatist in that much of the power resided with the leaders of heavy industries. It was incredibly brutal as in order to replace the peasantry with an industrial proletariat better suited for the sort of industrial state he wanted to create, he disposed of some 30 million peasants by the simple expedient of exterminating them – one of the greatest crimes in history. Stalin was also highly racist in that he classified certain ethnic groups as enemies of the communist regime. These included the Volga Bulgars, the Crimean Tatars, and the Chechens. These and similar nations were expelled from their traditional lands to distant and inhospitable areas where large numbers of their people died.

Other regimes in communist Eastern Europe were scarcely better – nor was the Marxist regime of Mengistu in Ethiopia. In other words, it is not right-wing totalitarian regimes any more than left-wing ones that we must oppose – and oppose strenuously – but totalitarian regimes in general. This basically means recreating societies that are capable of running themselves. That is what real democracy is all about.

It is worth noting that one of the best-known authorities on the French Right, René Remond, regards fascism and conservatism as mutually incompatible. Fascism, for Remond, rather than being a movement of the Right was a movement of the Left, descended from the Jacobinism of the French Revolution of 1798. To Remond it was the revolutionary, violent and authoritarian aspects of fascism that mattered.

Another authority on the French Right was Eugene Weber. For him, Larocque, the leader of the Croix de Feu, that was often referred to as a fascist movement, was too conservative to be a fascist. He was “a respectable, law-abiding man”, and “a soldier respectful of the Republican institutions and the law”.

Another critic, Ernst Nolte, considered that Mussolini’s early followers were quite left wing in their goals. Yet another student of the French Right, Sternhell, an Israeli, also accentuated the left-wing sources of the French extreme Right. Admittedly this was not the view of other authorities on this subject, such as William Irvine, Sam Goodfellow, and Robert Soucy.

Note F – (The family)

It may be that in the traditional world the family tended to be patriarchal in the sense that the father was the head of the family and also the priest of the cult of the family ancestors. This did not mean that he was a sort of tin-pot dictator, though in some societies he may indeed have been. One must remember that perhaps half of all the tribal societies studied by anthropologists were matrilineal, which means that inheritance is via the mother. In such societies, of course, the mother has a lot of influence.

Many traditional societies are also matrilocal, which means that when a young man gets married he lives in his wife’s community rather than his own, and thereby among his wife’s family and relatives. In such conditions her influence is particularly strong, and if her husband misbehaves there is hell to pay.

·Ω·