Category Archives: Book reviews

Book review – Displacement

The story of  a man resigned to being a victim because he does not realise he is a victim

Author Derek Turner

Obtainable from  Amazon

Review by Robert Henderson

In his last work Sea Changes Derek Turner offered a large canvas on which he painted both the predicament of the illegal  immigrant and a Britain afflicted with a paralysing political correctness with which traps both the British elite and the ignored and secretly despised  working-class into an ideological web far removed from reality.    With  Displacement, a novella rather than a novel,  we have a more intimate work which illustrates through Martin Hacket  a dismal deracinated England which has left the English with no sense of  national feeling or any sense of having a land they could call their own. It has even robbed them of any sense that their predicament is in some way wrong or even just plain odd .

Displacement is set in South London. Martin is young , blond and  a member of  the white working class, an endangered species in his London.  Like the rest of his class Martin has been robbed not only of his sense of historical and territorial  place  but  materially deprived. He  has a job as  courier on a bike and, because he knows no better,  he thinks himself lucky to have the menial job  because  such jobs normally go to graduates.

The world Martin inhabits is unreservedly  tawdry. Everything  that once gave the white working class a sense of belonging, worth and respect has been removed by the massive  postwar immigration. A  surreptitious colonisation of Britain has occurred. His family is one of the few white English faces left in the road in which he lives.  Their  few white English neighbours  are not of his class, merely  the advance guard of a possible gentrification.   Martin wishfully thinks of a life in the suburbs.  He used to dream of somehow finding the money to move there when he  had a girlfriend Kate,   but  allowed that dream to die after they broke up because he  knows  he could never  afford any sort of  property.

Martin  lives with his father and elder brother Mike.  His father is a vessel  adrift from its anchor. He worked on ships as a deckhand until the company  which employed him  went belly up. Since then he has been unemployed.  But it is not just his work which has gone. A natural Labour voter he no longer has a meaningful Labour Party to vote for or a union to which he can belong .   Mike is a drug addict and minor criminal.

Martin’s  release from the  dreariness of  a  London in which  the native English have been reduced to just one ethnic group is twofold. The first means of escape is  free running.  This frees him from the clutching mediocrity of his social and physical world, giving him not just a physical release but a sense that he is above the fray the society in which he  lives.  His second release is through  poetry which he both reads and writes.   Martin  is not academically inclined and never got much out of school, but he has  a desire to express himself  and free verse  can be like free running,  something which is not constricting,  something he can bend to his will rather than being bent by circumstances.

Against all the odds Martin becomes a sort of celebrity, or  at least he has his fifteen minutes of fame.  Whilst free running  Martin is seen by  people in the buildings he scales.  This causes alarm amongst some, because he  runs in a  white hoody which with his blondness  gives  him a ghost-like appearance.  Martin  is also seen on a building housing a senior politician, something  which attracts the notice of the police who fear he is a security risk. The media takes up the story without knowing who  is  the   person  responsible.  Martin’s ex-girlfriend  guesses that he is responsible .  She is excited by Martin’s sudden if so far anonymous celebrity, reconnects with him and  arranges for a public school educated journalist by the name of Seb to interview Martin about his free running.

Seb visits Martin and his family  in the spirit of  an anthropologist visiting  a tribe of hunter gatherers.   Except for Kate , whom he tries unsuccessfully to seduce , Seb  does not have any real interest in Martin and his family and friends; they are  merely props for an article which will validate his ideas about the white working-class, an out of date , redundant species, Morlocks robbed of their purpose,  with  Martin cast as the ugly duckling who is changed into a swan by his free running exploits, something celebrated in prose of excruciating pretension  such as ’From  his concrete eyrie he can discern the essential unity of humanity’.

The article is deeply offensive but  Seb diffuses the anger  of Martin and his friends and family  by introducing Martin to a publisher of poetry .  What Martin does not appreciate is that this is an act of heavy patronage, a re-enactment of that extended to working-class authors in the quarter century after the Second World War, which is a continuation of the offensive patronising  tone of Seb’s newspaper article.

The real  tragedy is not the mean circumstances in which Martin  finds himself, but the fact that he accepts his lot without questioning : he does not ask  why he  cannot set up home in decent circumstances because housing is beyond expensive; why he cannot get the sort of job his father’s generation could get,  manual most probably but paying well enough for a man to raise a family; why his father has been reduced to idleness through no fault of his own. Most   importantly he does not question how it is that where he lives is almost entirely  dominated by people who are not like him when only  a few decades before the place he lived in had been solidly white working class.

Martin is a man resigned to being a victim because he does not realise he is a victim. He  sees the mediocrity of the world he lives in but accepts it as just how things are. He does not even have what Winston Smith in 1984 had,  vague  memories  of what  was before the  dismal world  in which he lived.  Winston however ineptly had an urge to challenge the status quo; Martin has  no urge to change things  only to find a way to escape the grind of his daily existence with poetry and free running, which both gives him a focus on something  untainted by the rest of his life and literally lifts him above it.  Yet even that consolations will be fleeting enough because free running is for the  young.  It will not be too many years before Martin is too old to find his freedom there.

Book Review – Sea Changes

Derek Turner

Washington Summit Publishers

ISBN  978-1-59368-002-2

By Robert Henderson

The time is somewhere around the present: the place is England. Thirty seven  bodies wash-up on the North-East coast of England. Some have gunshot wounds. All are would-be illegal immigrants.  There is one survivor from the group: Ibrahim, an Iraqi.   This is the cue for the politically correct  mob to go into action, with everything from the-borders- are-racist  campaigners to those who pounce on the evidence of gunshot wounds to suggest that some of the illegal immigrants were  murdered by the locals.

The novel  has two strands. One is of the survivor Ibrahim. He has had the misfortune to spend all his life in uncertain circumstances, living under the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, both before and after the first Gulf War, then through  the perpetual  chaos following the defeat of  Saddam. We follow him on his tortuous journey from Basra to England,  during which we gradually learn more  and more of his story,  a history which includes working as an enforcer for a notorious Basra gangster. He moves from Basra in Iraq to Syria, across Turkey, then by boat to Greece where he is interred in a centre of asylum seekers before escaping and travelling across Europe before paying to be smuggled across the North Sea to England.

Once in England he finds being an illegal immigrant is not all milk and honey.   This is partly his own fault because he fabricates a  story which falsely  paints him as a someone who resisted Saddam and suffered for it, a lie which is discovered and takes the gloss off him as a weapon for the politically correct to wield, but it is also the disillusionment of finding the promised land does not do what it says on the tin.   The result is Ibrahim’s withdrawal into the cultural cocoon created by other Iraqis in Britain.

Surrounding  Ibrahim’s  tale is the English response to the bodies on an English beach. In the politically correct world that is modern England  the would-be illegal immigrants are taken up as not the invaders they are, but people who at best have been murdered by the immigration policies of the government which have forced them to take this route to enter England and at worst   to believe that those who died of gun wounds  have been slaughtered  by the unreconstructed English who inhabit non-Metropolitan England.

The  peecee  fox is started running by a  farmer local to the area where the bodies wash up. A farmer  in late middle age by the name of  Dan Gowt living in the fictional village of Crisby.   He is interviewed on  television and expresses views which would have passed without remark when he was young,  but are now considered not merely insensitive but positively racist, remarks such as. “The fact is they shouldn’t have been trying to get intro England in the first place. It’s a crime that is. It’s just common sense … “

His words make Gowt  a media  hate figure. He tries to remove the label of racist  by talking to the media, writing a letter to a newspaper explaining his position, seeking a lawyer to sue on his behalf for the libels he has suffered.  All to no avail. His explanations to reporters are twisted out of recognition, his letter is not published and his attempt to find a lawyer to act for him results in a refusal on the grounds that acting for him would taint the firm.

Gowt  finds many of the people he knows shun him, his wife and daughter are treated as guilty by association and his windows are smashed by “antiracist” protestors, whom he goes outside to tackle with a shotgun but who  drive away before he can come upon them.  After the last event he calls the police who not only show little interest  in investigating the crime,  but tell him that he has brought this on himself and his family by his racist words. The police go as far as to say threateningly that he is lucky he has not to have been investigated for his racist words and hinting that he may still be.  They are also pleased to suggest that his licence for his shotgun may be revoked because he has intended to threaten  people with it.

Gowt being labelled a racist affects his  wife Hatty and his daughter Clarrie. His wife is simply bewildered; his daughter patronisingly tolerant as  she condemns what her father has said   whilst blaming his ideas about immigrants on his age, what   Marxists would describe as “false consciousness”

The really terrible thing about all this is the fact that  Gowt  has not been racist in any meaningful way. All he has done is express a perfectly natural resistance to foreigners settling his country in large numbers and effectively colonising parts of it.

Turner parades a large  cast of characters before the reader. This can often lead to confusion and the under  development  of characters. To his credit the author keeps control  of them by repeatedly  providing snapshots of their  intervention in the affair.  We may not get to know them intimately ,  but we do not need to because it is  their symbolic roles in the tragedy that is modern England which is important.

There are the  politicians varying from fearful pc driven sheep to true believers in the One  Worldism creed,  the journalists who use their newspapers and broadcasters  to carry forward the pc received wisdom and last but not least  the multifarious interest groups and individuals who represent immigrant interests: the Black Muslim Mecca Morrow ,  Wayne Smith of the Christian Democrat Reachout , Atrocities against Civilians Scum,  the Rural Racism Task Force ,Ben Klein  founder of  National Anti-Fascist Foundation NAFF,  Dylan Ekinutu-Jones  of the Forum for Racial and Ethnic Equality (F.R.E.E) , Carole Hassan from the Muslim Alliance and the   Guatamalean Action Group.  Readers will be able to readily spot their counterparts in real life.

The political parties are also thinly disguised version of those that exist: the Christian Democrats, the Workers Party and  the Fair Play Alliance. All are shown not  merely as dishonest but either fanatical or cowardly.  There is also a party, the National Union,  which plays the indispensable  role  for the politically correct,  a Far Right bogeyman.    The Party has a single MP who is ostentatiously ostracised by all the other MPs who eventually vote to expel him from the Commons because of his non-pc views.

There are more substantial characters such as Albert Norman of the Sentinel . Norman  is a licensed jester , a man of 70 allowed to be non-pc in a pc world  largely because he is a relic of an earlier less tightly controlled era.  He also serves a useful purpose for the liberal left establishment because they can point to him and say there, all voices are being heard. Norman’s tragedy is that he is right but ultimately irrelevant because the people who listen to him and agree  are the powerless, the ordinary people of England.

Norman is the one character who sniffs out the truth about Ibrahim, as well as resolutely refusing to climb  on the English-locals-must-have-killed-immigrants  bandwagon . His  columns are wildly popular but the his  youngish editor Doug is getting twitchy about their  political incorrectness .  He asks  Norman to tone down his columns because he wishes to move the Sentinel to a new  part of the press marketplace.  Norman resists but eventually gives  in and  re-writes a piece about  Ibrahim.  Norman’s readers  feel cheated by his new blandness and Norman soon realises that his day is done and retires.

Opposed to Norman on the media front is John Leyden of The Examiner, a columnist who takes a religiously pc on everything whilst being , as so often with card carrying liberals, monstrously selfish  and bigoted in the way they live their lives.  Leyden thinks no further than the next self-promoting headline, regardless of the harm he inflicts on others.  Just think of the more obnoxious type of Guardian journalist and you will get the picture.

Overall Turner paints a picture of an England  which has been defeated, at least for the moment.  The pc  propaganda has not  been completely successful,  so that part of the population of England has remained in the eyes of the politically correct regrettably backward.  But even that part of which has not been fully conditioned understands the danger of being identified as a racist and either keeps mum, clumsily try to fit their true feelings within the envelope of political correctness,  or engage in grovelling apologies when the racist hounds start to run after they  are judged to have committed the pc sin of not being thoroughly brainwashed  into the multicultural way of thinking. The claustrophobia created by what political correctness has become, namely, a totalitarian ideology in both form and practice is nicely caught .

There is a degree of exaggeration for the sake of narrative sharpness  in the depiction of the limp calamity of the people of England in thrall to  a vicious and recklessly ideological elite, but sadly  the book is an all too plausible representation of what England is now. This is a country in which people are imprisoned for expressing their anger at mass immigration, where a single non-PC remark can result in the loss of a job, where the mainstream media go into witchfinder-general mode at the slightest opportunity offered by someone who does not religiously observe the pc  rubric of equality.

Those who have read Jean  Raspail’s Camp of the Saints will notice some generally similarities of structure as well as  intent in Sea Changes. There is no harm in that. Indeed I found Sea Changes a rather better vehicle for warning about the dangers of mass immigration, because it is far less hysterical and blessedly bereft of the intellectual and cultural pretensions of Raspail’s book.

Sea Changes might almost be treated as a documentary of what has gone sadly wrong with English society. Yes, that is what it is, a record of what English society has become now,, or at least of that aspect which touches on mass  immigration and its consequences .  Whatever the future brings it will stand as a primer on a particular and decidedly peculiar period of English life. Worth reading on its own virtue as a novel and doubly worth reading for its important  message.

The significance of borders –why Representative Government and the Rule of Law Require Nation States

Author: Thierry Baudet

Publisher: Brill

ISBN 978 90 04 22813 9

Robert Henderson

This a frustrating book.  Its subject is of the greatest interest, namely, how human beings may best organise themselves  to provide security and freedom.   It contains  a great deal of good sense because   the author understands that humans cannot exist amicably unless they have a sense of shared identity and a territory which they control.   (Anyone who doubts the importance of having such a territory should reflect on the dismal history of the Jews.) Baudet  vividly describes  the undermining of the  nation state  by the rise of  supranational bodies: the loss of democratic control, the impossibility of taking very diverse national entities such as those forming  the EU and making them into a coherent single society;  the self-created social divisions caused by mass immigration  and the rendering of the idea of citizenship based on nationality effectively null by either granting it to virtually anyone regardless of their origins or by denying the need for any concept of nationality in the modern globalised world.  He also deals lucidly with the movement from the mediaeval  feudal relationships of fealty to a lord to the nation state;   correctly recognises representative government as uniquely European;  examines the  concept of sovereignty intelligently and is especially good on how supranationalism expands surreptitiously, for example,  the International Criminal Court is widely thought to only apply to the states which have signed the treaty creating it. Not so. The nationals of countries which have not signed who commit crimes on the territories of states which have signed can be brought for trial before the ICT.

That is all very encouraging stuff for those who believe in the value  of the sovereign nation state. The problem is Baudet  wants to have his nationalism whilst keeping a substantial slice of the politically correct cake. Here he is laying out his definitional wares:  “I call the open nationalism that I defend multicultural nationalism – as opposed to multiculturalism on the one hand, and an intolerant, closed nationalism on the other. The international cooperation on the basis of accountable nation states that I propose, I call sovereign cosmopolitanism – as opposed to supranationalism on the one hand, and a close. Isolated nationalism on the other. Both the multicultural nationalism and sovereign cosmopolitianism place the the nation state at the heart of political order, whole recognising the demands of the modern, internationalised world. “(p xvi).

Baudet’s  “multicultural nationalism” is  the idea that culturally different  groups ( he eschews racial difference as important) can exist within a  territory and still constitute a nation which he  defines  as “a political loyalty stemming from an experienced collective identity…rather than a legal, credal or ethnic nature ” (p62) . How does Baudet think this can be arrived at? He believes  it is possible to produce the  “pluralist society, held to together nevertheless  by a monocultural core”. (p158).    Therein lies the problem with the book: Baudet is trying surreptitiously to square multiculturalism with the nation state.

The concept of a monocultural core is akin to  what multiculturalists are trying belatedly to introduce into their politics with their claim that a society in which each ethnic  group follows its own ancestral ways can nonetheless  be bound together with a shared belief in institutions  and concepts such as the rule of law and representative government.  This is a non-starter  because a sense of group identity is not built on self-consciously created  civic values and institutions –witness the dismal failure of post-colonial states in the 20th century –  but on a shared system of  cultural beliefs and behaviours  which are imbibed unwittingly through growing up in a society.  Because of the multiplicity of ethnic groups from  different cultures in  modern  Western societies,  there is no  overarching single identity within any of them  potent enough to produce Baudet’s   unifying “monocultural core”. Moreover, the continued mass immigration to those societies makes the movement from a “monocultural core” ever greater.  In practice his “Multicultural nationalism” offers  exactly the same intractable problems as official multiculturalism.

Baudet’s idea of a “monocultural core”  would be an unrealistic proposition if cultural differences were all that had to be accommodated in this “pluralist society”, but he  greatly magnifies his conceptual difficulties by refusing to honestly  address the question of racial difference.  However incendiary the subject  is these  differences cannot be ignored.   If human beings did not think racial difference important there would  there be no animosity based  purely on physical racial difference, for example, an hostility to blacks from wherever  they come.  It is their race not their ethnicity which causes the hostile reaction.

The idea that assimilation can occur if it is actively pursued by governments is disproved by history. France, at the official level,  has always insisted upon immigrants becoming fully assimilated: British governments since the late 1970s have embraced multiculturalism as the correct treatment of  immigrants. The result has been the same in both countries; immigrant groups which are racially or radically culturally different from the population which they enter do not assimilate naturally.  The larger the immigrant group the easier it is for this lack of assimilation to be permanent, both because a large population can colonise areas and provide a means by which its members can live their own separate cultural lives and because a large group presents a government with the potential for serious violent civil unrest if attempts are made to  force it to assimilate.

The USA is the best testing ground for Baudet’s idea that there could be a common unifying  core of culture within a country of immense cultural diversity.   Over the past two centuries it has accepted a vast kaleidoscope of peoples and cultures, but  its origins were much more uniform. At  independence the country had, as a consequence of the English founding and  moulding of the colonies which formed the USA , a dominant language (English) , her legal system was based on English common law, her political structures were adapted from  the English,  the dominant general culture was that of England and the free population of the territory was racially similar.  Even those who  did not have English ancestry almost invariably prided themselves on being English, for example,  John Jay, one of the founding Fathers of the USA who was  of Huguenot and Dutch descent, passionately wrote:  “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.” (John Jay in Federalist No. 2).There was the presence of a mainly enslaved black population and the native Amerindians, but the newly formed United States at least at the level of the white population had a degree of uniformity which made the idea of a core monoculture plausible.

From the mid-sixties after US immigration law was slackened migrants arrived in ever increasing numbers and with much more racial and ethnic variety. The result has been a balkanisation of American society with a legion of minority groups all shouting for their own advantage with the  original “monocultural core” diluted to the point of disappearance.

There are other weaknesses in Baudet’s  thinking.  He is  much too keen to draw clear lines between forms of social and political organisation. For example,  he considers  the nation state to be an imagined community  (a nation being  too large for everyone to know everyone else)  with a  territory  it controls  as opposed to tribal or universal loyalty (the idea that there is simply mankind not different peoples who share moral values and status). The problem with that, as he admits, are the many tribes which are too large to allow each individual to know each other (footnote 23 p63).  He tries to fudge the issue by developing a difference between ethnic loyalty and national loyalty, when of course there is no conflict between the two. Nations can be based solely on ethnicity.

Another example of conceptual rigidity is Baudet’s  distinction between  internationalism and supranationalism.  He defines  the former as the traditional form of international cooperation whereby nation states make agreements between themselves but retain the ultimate right to decide what policy will be implemented (thus preserving their sovereignty) while the latter, for example the EU, is an agreement between states which removes,  in many areas of policy , the right  of the individual contracting states to choose  whether  a policy  will be accepted or rejected.   Although that is a  distinction which will appeal to academics,  in practice it rarely obtains because treaties made between theoretically sovereign states often results  in  the weaker ones having no meaningful choice of action.

Despite the conceptual weaknesses ,  the strengths of the book are  considerable if  it is used as a primer on the subject of national sovereignty.  Read it but  remember from where Baudet is ultimately coming.