Sunday, October 25, 2020

Anglo-Saxon AWAKE Check

 

The Anglo Saxon world is undergoing an intense historical passage at this present time, challenged by the Han from without, and re-animated by rising nationalism from within.  It is a global distribution of a specific group, each inflected by their local environment and history, but bound together inside a globe-spanning linguistic, economic, and informational framework, not unlike Bowden’s observation England was a series of adjacent political and cultural entities ‘knit-together’ over centuries. 

Many have joked about political integration of the Anglosphere countries, but they miss that has *already* happened or is about to happen. Canada is culturally and economically a satellite of the United States, and for this reason, we can speak of an Anglo North America from Anchorage to Austin.  Australia and New Zealand are tightly integrated economically and militarily.  Britain has left continental Europe and is already negotiating trade deals with its former colonies.  As the hot peace with the Han heats up (and the potential for Antarctica to become a contested locale materializes), the DC metropole (which includes Ottawa) will inevitably use its extensive political influence to reconsolidate ANZUS, irrespective of the Anti-American left in Australia or New Zealand. The only question that remains is the political orientation of Britain. Will it follow economic ties into becoming a regional sheriff of Washington, or stagger on in less than splendid isolation, separated from Europe and the Anglo-New World? Nationalism will prove to be the decisive factor here. A nationalist Britain’s foreign policy will tend to comport itself in terms of an Anglo-Saxon bloc for reasons I will now address. 

As nationalism rises in the United States particularly, the original ruling caste of WASPs will begin to reconstitute themselves. Yes, Anglo-American founding stock counted narrowly according to origination in the British Isles are not the demographic force they once were, but they are buttressed by (continental) Germanic settlers easily assimilated under an Anglo-Saxon rubric. A strong founding core capable of supporting a ruling caste remains intact. The historical record from early modern times suggests an enduring strategic-cultural feature of virile Anglo-elite thinking rejects Hobbit-hole medievalism (most recently arising out of the trauma of WWI industrial scale slaughter) for an expansive vision of world presence linking a network of functionally co-equal nodes through control of global sealanes. Although global on a geographic scale, it is the antithesis of globalist ideology. We are speaking of a particular seized of such a will to power it became what is mistaken for the Universal. 

A chauvinist articulating an unreflectective American interest might argue for the remnants of libertarian defeatism on the nationalist right: isolationism in foreign policy.  Although Judeo-Saudi wars are obviously to be avoided (especially after American energy independence under Trump), Anglo-North America, to retain its economic position ,will rely upon what from a national-populist Washington will look like a forward-deployed nationalism, staking out a sphere of influence distributed across the globe. Geopolitical fissures will do away with neoliberal insitututionalism, even if the empty forms of the UN, NATO, and EU remain. Germany and France control Western continental Europe, and in conjunction with Russia, itself an entire wing of European civilization, will decide the fate of Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It is unclear whether a nationalist Germany (allied to Eurasia for resources) or a globalist Germany (economically tied to China) will have much interest meeting the Chinese challenge. As ever, St. George will have to slay the dragon by himself. But outside of a geographically proximate South America, which can be corralled through a growing populist Protestantism, Anglo North America will have to replace the logic of a political elite servicing a metastasizing corporate interlock for the traditional substrate of empire: common race, language, and culture -  a networked super-ethny. 

Australia is already the regional sheriff of the US, to which New Zealand is attached as a different sovereign expression of the same regional Anglo footprint. Moreover, when we think of empire according to modern historiography-  a constellation of far-flung nodes interacting on a horizontal plane upon which the metropole overlays directives - the ANZAC entities, though not the heartland of the United States, are the heartland of the Anglo-Saxon world presence, upon which the United States, Britain, and the rest of the young lions, small and great, depend.  Our ancestors ventured forth upon the world stage, and if we do not stick together, we will surely hang together. If Five Eyes is compromised in Wellington, it is compromised everywhere. 

How did it start? Alfred the Great unified the heptarchy in a fractal operation of the same abstract machine I'm applying to 'how it's going', controlling for contemporary factors. Britain, the ur-origin, cannot but hold a special place in the hearts of any New World Anglo-descended nationalist. And in the same way New England’s revolutionary elites drew confidence from Britain as a superpower during the rise of the United States, a confident nationalist United States, reconciled with and affirming its origins, will irresistibly attract the Anglos of the Old World who have rejected the siren song of cosmopolitanism. Britain will act as the Anglo-Saxon stronghold in the Old World, a rock of Gibraltar writ large; the staging ground for both jostling and cooperating with the broader swathe of Western civilization. Non-American Anglos cannot fight Washington or New York by banding together with losers (a filthy French idea). They must help their trans-Pacific/Atlantic brethren take the commanding heights of their national infrastructure for themselves.

The schematic sketched above is a generalized strategic container for the rich tapestry of the Anglo-Saxon multiplicity, from Port Stanley to Wellington; from Land's End to Plymouth Rock. One is never simply a generic Anglo. One is always an Anglo from a specific place, a lived inflection on a theme possessed of its own history; both constituting, and constituted by, the wider Anglo-ecology. There is the ‘southern man’ from the rural South Island of New Zealand, the families of the Old South in the States, and the people still living in the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms like their ancestors in modern Britain. What is in order is local identity, national loyalty, and Anglo-Saxon consciousness with reference to the West as a whole. The latter is something of an elite preserve, but it can only be attained when the first two items are firmly entrenched and set to rights. Those who would be world-historic actors must first, and above all else, be actors for the good in their local surrounding, cultivating a thick meshwork of received ties. The ultimate guarantee against the Yellow Menace will not be carrier strike groups, but the Stem family. 

Let us end with a word from BOWDEN: “English and British people exist all over the world. We exist all over the world. All over Europe, all over North America, all over Australasia, in quite a few of the countries of Latin America, in most of the ex-colonies. English is the language of the world. It’s the lingua franca of modernity or post-modernity. We have given the world a great lot, and this is just to refract our own identity through the national consciousness of one particular people who are actually a part of it. So, I think that the worst thing that can be uttered at this time is despair, because there are more than enough of us to provide the vanguard which is necessary. The trick is to link the vanguard to the popular will and to find a way to link the vanguard to the popular will…

There are more of us than ever before, but it’s always a question of quality as against quantity in this life, because what I am going to propose is that instead of looking at demographic and quantity-based analyses, quantitative ways of looking at things, let’s look at qualitative ways of looking at things. Let’s look at quality. Let’s look at elitism.”