Blood and soil in Buckingham

Restore Britain’s racism.

It’s taken me some time to write up the speech that Harrison Pitt, Rupert Lowe’s ideologue in Restore, gave to the Heterodox Sociology conference at the University of Buckingham in July. The delay is unprofessional, but I was too shocked to engage with it for a long time.

Pitt is described in the blurb to his policy paper as a “writer and academic”, without any academic affiliation listed. He is the author of Restore’s policy on mass deportations. He wants to abolish the asylum system and to “detain and deport every single person who has broken illegally into our national home”. Mass deportation is not a figure of speech here. He wants to deport nearly 2m people, who he hopes to get rid of in three years: 150,000 a year are to be forcibly deported, and three times as many would find life had been made so miserable that they would leave of their own fee will. All this is to be paid for by “taxes on remittance payments and fixed penalty notices”.

His speech at the conference was a plug for the book he has written to provide a philosophical justification for these policies. So here’s a quick readout from the recording I made at the time.

First, it is full-on Great Replacement theory

We are halfway through a rogue experiment … undertaken by Western elites … The hypothesis through which we’re living … Since diversity is a strength, our nations will be made stronger by mass immigration and the greater diversity that this produces

This is standard neofash historiography, including a wholly conspiratorial recounting of the origins of the Great Replacement.

Influenced by earlier generations of thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno, much of the political left by the 1990s had come to view the white working classes of their own nations as a rather disappointing interest group … Short of giving up altogether on transformative change, the natural next move was to hunt for more pliable interest groups, from persecuted criminals to marginalized minorities, and if necessary, to import them. This was the intellectual seedbed of replacement migration fueled identity politics.
Such a movement could only achieve sufficient appeal through open borders. All the better for bringing in new foreign voters, grievance mongers, and other foot soldiers receptive to the updated message. And so they came in their droves.

It must be strange to live in a world where Marxist academics have so much more influence over what happens than the capitalists operating in their own self-interest.

Then we get to the blood and soil reasoning.

The various tribes into which we fall are for the most part not chosen by us or assigned at birth, but a function of our ancestral histories. This is true even, in many ways, of religious identity. For while in credal matters we may be technically free to convert away from the religion of our ancestors, the fact that we are often disinclined to do so is itself suggestive …

We are untrue to the nature of belonging if we treat it, even in the way that Hazony does, as a simple matter of learning to hold certain things sacred and not others. The reality is that certain peoples are naturally predisposed, quite apart from what they are taught, to hold certain things sacred and not others … Such attachments are not environmentally learned, as Hazony implies, but precognitive, in such a way that enables them, if need be, to be environmentally drawn out.

I’d say that this was the only original part of his speech, or the part so very anachronistic that it will strike its contemporary hearers as a novelty. Pitt’s way of talking about essential nationhood transmitted through blood and soil was common across Europe until around 1945. The Irish nationalist, the irredentist Hungarian, the Protestant bigot, and, of course, many Germans, all used similar language¹. The difference is that in those days the threatening alien invaders were all pale-skinned.

In our time it has been repurposed so that the imagined ethnos corresponds to skin colour, and given a scientific gloss. Pitt does not pretend to science, although he suggests that religious allegiances (guess which one?) are also genetically transmitted. In all this he entirely misses the role of social pressure in determining which groups you belong to. The consequences of this kind of thinking are nicely expressed in a letter that Unity Mitford, who worshipped Hitler, wrote to her sister Diana in July 1938.

You know Heinz, her fiancé, was a member of the SS in Vienna – I believe since 1932. He was a tremendously enthusiastic Nazi & really risked everything for the cause during the Schuschnigg Regime. Well it seems that just after the Machtübernahme his father, also a member of the Partei, who had brought him up to be very ‘national-denkend’ [nationalistically minded], told him that both his (Heinz’s) mother’s parents were Jewish. Of course poor Heinz was completely erledigt [shattered] when he heard it, & wanted to shoot himself at once, which it seems to me would have been the best way out.

Pitt’s insistence on “precognitive”, inherited national identities, presumably carried on the genes, leads him to deny the possibility of any real integration between different populations.^[1] In any case, it cuts him off from David Goodhart, and even from Rudyard Kipling, for the whole of Puck of Pook’s Hill is a myth about the successive integration of waves of invaders and strangers into a shared English identity.

Pitt argues against the proposition that belonging can be reduced to box ticking; in particular that nationality can be established by agreement with certain abstract propositions. He attributes this position to Jürgen Habermas², who I have not read, but who does not have the reputation of being a bloody fool which is how he appears in Pitt’s telling.

Habermas – Pitt says – argues for shared allegiance to the ideals expressed in a constitution as the thing that binds a nation together. To a German of Habermas’s generation, the pieties of liberal democracy have a force and emotional content quite unavailable to us, even in the age of Trump. But Habermas must also have understood that what’s needed – to carry on with the language of pieties – is a lively faith, one that is expressed in daily action, and which binds private and public moralities together. He needed only look over the wall at Stalin’s constitution to see that propositions on their own are meaningless.³ “Democracy is not a constitution. It’s millions of people saying ‘Christ, you can’t do that!’” as the hero of Shooting Script says when invited to join a Latin American revolution.

Pitt ignores the emotional dimensions of everyday belonging, and of shifting belongings, as if they were alien to his temperament. He sees the whole problem as one of intellectual conviction:

“Certain outliers are able to reason themselves into a more passionate sense of belonging to a foreign country than their own. I do think this is a possibility. With enough intellectual exertion, say, an Englishman might learn to think of themselves as more Armenian than English.”

But this is not how hundreds of millions of immigrants became Americans. In matters of belonging, as in others, reason is and has to be the slave of the passions. Then again, one tribe which resolutely refuses the possibility of integration into mainstream British values is his own, the young fogeys.

The worry about modern mass migration which seems to me justified is that it can appear no more than tourism infinitely prolonged, a condition in which the immigrants has no desire to integrate, and no passion to belong in the new country. But foreigners in Pitt’s world do not have feelings or emotions like normal people. At most they may have “passions” by contrast with our “traditions”.

His views on inherited national values are rather like Tibetan theology: reincarnate lamas at the head of the Tibetan state could be chosen at a very young age from any family of any social position. They were detected by teams of wise men looking for exceptional children, whom they would test by showing them some small, intimate objects that had belonged to the previous lama. If the child showed interest, that proved he was the reincarnation they were looking for.

Just so, Pitt argues

“from the modest hunch that ties of lineage are at least as vital in ordering our attachment to particular national homelands as, say, they are in ordering our attachment to particular family heirlooms. It’s a logical instance that if an heirloom is discovered in the attic of my house, let’s say it’s been in the family for 15 generations or whatever else it might be, I’m going to feel more drawn to that than a person who’s come to stay for the weekend.”

Although he thinks that such an attachment is “pre-cognitive” and inherited this is ridiculous. To believe that an heirloom has been in your family for fifteen generations is about the most post-cognitive thing that can be imagined. You know it only because you have been told, and because you have an idea of what ancestry, and belonging, and heirlooms, mean. What’s more, your emotion is entirely dependent on trusting that you’ve been told the truth. This can’t be taken for granted, as Unity Mitford’s friend Heinz could tell you.

It is in this sense that Pitt is profoundly racist. Western values, whatever they might be, are less important to him than Western people.

“The loss of certain values, norms, and mores, as lived by peoples, disturbs us⁴ less than the loss of such peoples themselves. Civic nationalism brooks no defence against mortal demographic threats.”

These “mortal” threats are not the threat of genocide, of violent replacement, at least in his argument as it’s presented here. In the wider propaganda of Restore and even of Reform, with all the talk of “Young men of fighting age”, there is a suggestion that we’ll all be slaughtered in our beds by the Somali hordes now disembarking from their rubber dinghies. But that is not what Pitt means here by “ethnocide”. When he talks about the “ethnocidal thrust of replacement migration” he can only be talking about changes in the gene pool of the inhabitants of these islands.

There was a certain irony in hearing this guff peddled at a conference which is otherwise united in its contempt for the windy bullshit of cultural anthropology. I completely share that contempt and I sympathise with many of the “heterodox” concerns. Some of the people at these conferences have clearly been persecuted for standing firm against fashionable opinion. I don’t go to these meetings wanting to be shocked, but to learn and to talk to interesting people and I’m usually successful but sometimes I am also shocked by the way in which revulsion at the absurdities of the Progress drives people into the absurdities of the Reaction.

There is also a pull factor. Weaponised absurdity is now where the money flows. Pitt was chosen to give a response to Peter Thiel’s lecture on the Antichrist in Cambridge. I only wish I’d heard it. Restore, rather than Reform, is now Elon Musk’s chosen instrument in British politics.

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1. Robert Graves, too: Graves had himself suffered from it at Charterhouse when World War 1 broke out and the other boys learned that his full name was “Robert von Ranke Graves”. Unlike the Saxe-Coburg Gothas, he was lumbered with his birth name. This did not stop him writing some remarkably racist things about the German character in later life.

2. FWIW the strongest argument against Habermas I’ve heard came from a German philosopher at another conference: the problem is that liberal democracy cannot nourish the virtues that it needs to flourish. Those can only come from other, opposed, traditions. This is related to Michael Lind’s critique of liberalism as an inherently unstable state.

3. You can even Google “Don’t be evil” for a contemporary proof.

4. Who “we”, white man?