Song of Sebastien Jallamion

Tiberge at Gallia Watch has posted an item which shows how crazy things are getting in France. A policeman named Sebastien Jallamion has been punished by a court for political commentary he made on an anonymous Facebook page. He has also been suspended from his job. During his police disciplinary hearing he was rebuked for having criticised the leader of ISIS following the beheading of a Frenchman. A member of the committee said to him "Are you not ashamed of stigmatizing an imam in this way?"

It led me to compose this little response written from the viewpoint of that committee member:

Song of Sebastien

Are you not ashamed Sebastien?
You have spoken against evil
You have defended your countrymen
You have acted with courage as a free man.

And here I sit in a committee room
risen within a servile state
where truth and character is as small
as the statutes I bring to condemn you.

Are you not ashamed Sebastien?
If you were not here but had stayed unseen
I would not be discomfited by thoughts
of the greater man I should have been.


PS I notice there is a petition in support of Sebastien Jallamion here.

Wordsworth's pedlar

What makes human life feel blessed? For William Wordsworth the experience of being deeply connected to nature brought about such a feeling. This experience was open to all, even to those of humble rank. The following lines are from the poem The Pedlar and the Ruined Cottage:

Claude Lorrain

From early childhood, even, as I have said,
From his sixth year, he had been sent abroad
In summer, to tend herds: such was his task
Henceforward till the later day of youth.
Oh! then what soul was his when on the tops
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked;
The ocean and the earth beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle; sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being: in them did he live,
And by them did he live: they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not. In enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power
That made him: it was blessedness and love.
A Herdsman on the lonely mountain tops,
Such intercourse was his, and in this sort
Was his existence oftentimes possessed.
Oh! then how beautiful, how bright appeared
The written Promise! He had early learned
To reverence the Volume which displays
The mystery, the life which cannot die:
But in the mountains did he feel his faith.
There did he see the writing. All things there
Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving: infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite, and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe - he saw.
What wonder if his being thus became
Sublime and comprehensive! Low desires,
Low thoughts had there no place, yet was his mind
Lowly; for he was meek in gratitude
Oft as he called to mind those ecstasies
And whence they flowed, and from them he acquired
Wisdom which works through patience; thence he learned
In many a calmer hour of sober thought
To look on nature with an humble heart
Self-questioned where it did not understand
And with a superstitious eye of love.

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke

C.J. Dennis

During World War I the Australian poet C.J. Dennis published a book of verse titled The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. It's about a Melbourne "larrikin" named Bill who meets a girl, Doreen, and who gives up his wayward life to become a husband and father.

It was a popular book of verse in its time. In the following stanzas, Bill reflects on what is worthwhile in life:

This ev'nin' I was sittin' wiv Doreen,
Peaceful an' 'appy wiv the day's work done,
Watchin', be'ind the orchard's bonzer green,
The flamin' wonder of the settin' sun.

Another day gone by; another night
Creepin' along to douse Day's golden light;
Another dawning when the night is gone,
To live an' love -- an' so life mooches on.

Times I 'ave thought, when things was goin' crook,
When 'Ope turned nark an' Love forgot to smile,
Of somethin' I once seen in some old book
Where an ole sorehead arsts, "Is life worf w'ile?"

But in that stillness, as the day grows dim,
An' I am sittin' there wiv 'er an' 'im--
My wife, my son! an' strength in me to strive,
I only know -- it's good to be alive!

It seems that back in 1916 it was still the case that a poet would express a spiritual response to nature and a sense of fulfilment in family. These themes are repeated in these lines of the poem:

But when the moon comes creepin' o'er the hill,
An' when the mopoke calls along the creek,
I takes me cup o' joy an' drinks me fill,
An' arsts meself wot better could I seek.

An' ev'ry song I 'ear the thrushes sing
That everlastin' message seems to bring;
An' ev'ry wind that whispers in the trees
Gives me the tip there ain't no joys like these:

Livin' an' loving wand'rin' on yeh way;
Reapin' the 'arvest of a kind deed done;
An' watching in the sundown of yer day,
Yerself again, grown nobler in yer son.

Bill's love of his wife features too in this stanza:

An' I am rich, becos me eyes 'ave seen
The lovelight in the eyes of my Doreen;
An' I am blest, becos me feet 'ave trod
A land 'oo's fields reflect the smile o' God.

Not owning up?

Are leftists willing to own their own politics? I ask this having had yet another frustrating exchange with a leftist, who seems unwilling to own up to the real content and the real consequences of leftist politics.

The debate was supposed to be about Maxine Beneba Clarke's poem on the Haiti earthquake. If you remember, Clarke imagines in the poem that God and Jesus must be white men to have visited such disaster on brown people. She imagines the "pale trinity" feeling good about crushing the Haitians with an earthquake, and other brown peoples with tsunamis, lava and hurricanes.

To me the poem is clearly hostile to whites. It conjures up images of white powers maliciously visiting acts of evil upon others. But my leftist commenter, "anon contrarian" (AC), just couldn't see this at all:

AC: I think the poem in question is an entirely reasonable and 'human' response to a disaster

Me: No, it's a poem that clearly vilifies whites. Just like many other poems by Maxine Clarke, on many different themes.

AC: No, in reality I challenge you to find a word in there that 'vilifies' anybody, without relying on the tortured logic of somebody with a persecution complex.

Challenged to find a word? Surely, the whole poem vilifies whites by suggesting that they would enjoy inflicting terrible disasters on other people? In what way is this a "tortured logic"?

AC also argued that Maxine Clarke's poem wasn't significant as it would only be read by a few thousand people. I replied that it was significant because the underlying ideas were held widely on the left, "including the idea that whites are uniquely guilty of racist oppression of others".

This is a key concept in "whiteness studies" courses being taught on many campuses. The idea is that whites invented race as a social construct in order to gain an unearned privilege over others. Racism therefore becomes tied to the idea of white oppressors and non-white victims. Whites are assumed to be dominant and the goal for progressives is to deconstruct whiteness. Whites who object are assumed to be motivated by a desire to uphold "white supremacy".

This is standard fare on the left. But AC is in full denial mode:

Me: AC, you really think that there are no leftists who believe that white guys are bad and cause the suffering of others? Really?

AC: You're straw-manning the argument again. No leftist on earth pushes the line that only 'whites' are capable of evil, whilst everybody else is innocent.

I'm not sure that AC really understands what's going on here. Whites are held to be uniquely evil and everybody else innocent in the particular way I described above. It was whites who supposedly invented race and racism to gain privilege at the expense of the non-white other. It is therefore whiteness which needs to be deconstructed and disallowed in order to create justice and equality. It is therefore whites who are jumped on as defenders of "supremacy" if they happen to defend their own ethnicity.

What happens if you take this left-wing politics especially seriously? You become anti-white to a radical degree. Consider, for instance, the views of Professor Robert Jensen:

White people can be human sometimes, but only if we turn our backs on being white: We can be human, or we can be white.

Are you likely to hear such a thing said by a professor about non-white races? If Professor Jensen had said it, for instance, about Asians, would he still be a professor at the University of Texas?

Here's another choice comment from Professor Jensen:

White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt and ethically flawed, because white supremacy has taken a huge toll on white people's capacity to be fully human.

In the professor's mind whites exist in a condition of white supremacy. That's our identity and collective purpose. It makes us less than human.

Again, how often do you hear such things said about other groups?

I'm not suggesting that most leftists would take the underlying ideas as far as the radical formulations uttered by Professor Jensen. But they do mostly share the underlying ideas.

Which brings me to the final point. AC reacted in the following way when I described leftists as categorising whites as dominant and non-whites as victimised:

Me: whites are the ones to be categorised as privileged, dominant; non-whites as historically victimised

AC: In what way are whites 'victimised'? I mean, seriously. Is it like jews in the holocaust, kulaks under Stalin, Catholics in Belfast, Aboriginals in the early years of white settlement? ... It's like a kind of victim-envy here.

My complaint was that leftists always make whites out to be the oppressors. AC interprets this as me preferring the role of victim; he queries how whites could be victims.

It's another odd question to ask. Of course whites have been victims at times throughout history. There were Australian soldiers and nurses who were victims of Japanese atrocities during WWII. There were Russians who were victims during the Tatar yoke. There were south-eastern Europeans who were victims during the rule of the Ottomans. There were many thousands of whites who were the victims of the Barbary corsairs.

But, most of all, whites are the victims of leftist (and liberal) politics. Not in the sense of suffering violent persecution, but in having our group existence delegitimised. If whiteness is a false and oppressive category, harmful to others and productive of injustice and inequality, then it must be cut down so that it no longer casts an influence on society.

And so Jennifer Clarke, who teaches at the Australian National University, can write an article titled 'White' Privilege in which she describes Australia as a "regionally anomalous white enclave run largely by white people to our own advantage", in which anti-discrimination laws should be applied more effectively so that "a majority of Australians would no longer be of northern European ethnic heritage".

It's a program of "getting rid of" the group thought to be responsible for social ills, not via violent pogroms, but by demographic change.

Even at a personal level, it's a kind of low-level persecution to go through life being held responsible for the ills of the world and being portrayed negatively as a privileged oppressor. It's particularly problematic for young people who have little choice but to accept what is put before them at school and at university.

We can do better, but this means making a clean break with the underlying assumptions of leftism.

Goldsmith's Traveller

I was intrigued to read at Vanishing American's site an excerpt from a poem by Oliver Goldsmith.

The poem is The Traveller, written in 1764. It begins with a traveller observing that nations tend to hold to a single good, rather than keeping a range of goods in balance. The emphasis on one good alone inevitably produces negative outcomes:

Hence every state, to one loved blessing prone,
Conforms and models life to that alone.
Each to the favorite happiness attends,
And spurns the plan that aims at other ends;
'Till carried to excess in each domain,
This favorite good begets peculiar pain.

Goldsmith then describes the particular good sought by the Italians, the Swiss, the French and the Dutch, and the "peculiar pain" brought about by each.

The main interest of the poem, though, is Goldsmith's treatment of his own homeland. He believes that the British have adopted freedom as the key good, which has had some positive effects on national character:

With daring aims irregularly great,
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by;
Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band,
By forms unfashion'd, fresh from Nature's hand;
Fierce in their native hardiness of soul,
True to imagin'd right, above control,--
While e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man.

However, even in Goldsmith's day, a danger was looming:

But foster'd e'en by Freedom, ills annoy:
That independence Britons prize too high,
Keeps man from man, and breaks the social tie;
The self-dependent lordlings stand alone,
All claims that bind and sweeten life unknown;
Here, by the bonds of nature feebly held,
Minds combat minds, repelling and repell'd;

Goldsmith sounds like a traditionalist here, observing that it is wrong to take "freedom" as the sole organising principle of society, and that when individual autonomy is all ("The self-dependent lordlings stand alone") natural social ties are likely to suffer.

If natural social ties fall away, then you get a society based on money and the rule of law:

Nor this the worst. As Nature's ties decay,
As duty, love, and honor fail to sway,
Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,
Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe.

Goldsmith worries that older virtues such as patriotism, military prowess, and a love of learning and culture will give way to a levelled, materialistic society:

Till time may come, when, stripped of all her charms,
The land of scholars, and the nurse of arms,
Where noble stems transmit the patriot flame,
Where kings have toil'd, and poets wrote for fame,
One sink of level avarice shall lie,
And scholars, soldiers, kings, unhonor'd die.

Over time, radical individualism hasn't even kept its positive side. Who would describe modern Britons (or any other Westerners) as "fierce in their native hardiness of soul"?

It seems that a society has to get the balance right: individualism can't be so excessive that natural social ties are undone - or else any benefits of this individualism are lost.

More Les

My apologies if this post is a little self-indulgent. The thing is, I really enjoy the political poetry of Les Murray. Here's another one, the major part of "A Stage in Gentrification" from Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996).

Most Culture has been an East German plastic bag
pulled over our heads, stifling and wet,
we see a hotly distorted world
through crackling folds and try not to gag.

Sex, media careers, the Australian republic
and recruited depression are in that bag
with scorn of God, with self-abasement studies
and funding's addictive smelling-rag.

Eighty million were murdered by police
in the selfsame terms and spirit which nag
and bully and set the atmosphere
inside the East German plastic bag.

It wants to become our country's flag ...

Maybe you had to experience the leftist ascendancy of the mid-90s in Australia to "get" this poem. It brought me immediately back to the atmosphere of the campus arts faculties of the time; the term "self-abasement studies" is especially acute.

A conservative laureate?

If Australia has a poet laureate it is Les Murray. I bought his newly released Collected Poems today and was interested to find how openly conservative some of his work is.

For instance, there is a poem titled "A Brief History" from the volume he published in 1996, Subhuman Redneck Poems. In it Murray actually defends the maligned majority population of Australia against the attacks launched against it by the political class.

For instance, the fourth stanza sums up the state of the nation in which Aboriginal culture, with its dreamings, is treated favourably as "our one culture", whilst the white majority is blamed for whatever goes wrong, with another group, the "Ethnics", being excused from the blame.

Our one culture paints Dreamings, each a beautiful claim.
Far more numerous are the unspeakable Whites,
the only cause of all earthly plights,
immigrant natives without immigrant rights.
Unmixed with these are Ethnics, absolved of all blame.

(Think about the fourth line. It catches the strange, no-win position the Anglo majority is placed in by the political class.)

In the next stanza, Murray writes of the failure of the political class to take its own tradition seriously, even to the point of declaring Australia to be an Asian nation.

All of people's Australia, its churches and lore
are gang-raped by satire self-righteous as war
and, from trawling fresh victims to set on the poor,
our mandarins now, in one more evasion
of love and themselves, declare us Asian.

The lines "in one more evasion/of love and themselves" get to the heart of what's wrong with a political class which is willing to declare null their own nation's historic identity.

Finally, Murray sympathises with Australians turning away from high culture, given that it has already turned against them in the name of empty ideology.

Australians are like most who won't read this poem
or any, since literature turned on them
and bodiless jargons without reverie
scorn their loves as illusion and biology,
compared with bloody History, the opposite of home.

I like especially the part of the stanza I've highlighted. Murray perhaps is identifying the tendency for a liberal politics, as a "bodiless jargon," to consider illegitimate the real, embodied forms of identity and connectedness felt by most people.

What does the last line mean? I think it's a reference to the political class also running down the things valued by most Australians because they are "ordinary" - they aren't associated with the glamour of the great conflicts of history, with "bloody History", which Australians might shy away from as "the opposite of home".

Murray has been a prolific writer, so it will take me a while to read through the entire volume of his work. When I've done so, I'll write another item and try to provide more of an overview of his poetry.

Poetry wars

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 it was greeted with enthusiasm by the young intellectuals of Europe.

The English poet William Wordsworth was no exception. He wrote verses in support of the Revolution, including these significant lines,

Once Man entirely free, alone and wild,
Was bless’d as free, for he was Nature’s child.
He, all superior but his God disdained,
Walk’d none restraining, and by none restrained,
Confessed no law but what his reason taught,
Did all he wish’d, and wish’d but what he ought.

In these lines Wordsworth is claiming that man is naturally free in the liberal sense of having no impediments to his individual will and reason. The individual man is superior to everyone else but God; he needs no restraints and recognises no laws except those accepted by his own reason; he follows his own will in all things (but always chooses to do the right thing).

A few decades later another famous young English poet, Shelley, was still holding firm to the same political ideal. In his work Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley advanced his ideal of a “new man” who would “make the earth one brotherhood”. This new man would be,

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself

Shelley is following the same ideal as the young Wordsworth, but has taken things a step further. Unlike the nature’s child described by Wordsworth, Shelley’s new man does not recognise a higher authority in God, nor is it assumed that he will always choose what is right.

Shelley has also drawn out the logic of this liberal concept of freedom by rejecting nationalism. What matters for Shelley is that we are all equally sovereign individuals – the kings over ourselves. We are not to be circumscribed, contained, or ranked according to collective identities, whether they be based on class, tribe or nation.

In the long run, Shelley got his way. The liberal concept of freedom came to dominate Western politics; it became such an orthodoxy that traditional nationalism came to be seen negatively as a limitation or restriction on the individual, and as a “discriminatory” offence against equality.

There was resistance along the way, though, to this unfolding of the liberal view. The French Revolution did not meet the expectations of its supporters. It did not return man to a natural, untrammelled freedom, but unleashed the Reign of Terror, followed by the dictatorship of Bonaparte.

Wordsworth reconsidered his position. He shed his liberalism and adopted a more conservative outlook. This change in his views is very clear in his homage to Edmund Burke, the political philosopher who had stood against the stream and had warned, prophetically, of the likely consequences of the Revolution:

I see him – old, but vigorous in age, -
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But some -
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems based on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born
(The Prelude 519 – 529)

There is no quibbling about liberalism in these lines. Wordsworth, following Burke, no longer believes that our own individual will and reason, acting alone, are sufficient to order society. Time hallowed institutes and laws are to be respected, even though they cannot by definition be self-authored. Customary social ties do not circumscribe individual freedom but are remarkable for their vital power.

Most strikingly, we are born to our allegiances. Wordsworth, in asserting this, has made a root and branch rejection of liberalism, and has, politically, set himself free. He is no longer limited, in what he identifies with, to purely “voluntary” associations chosen as a deliberate act of will or reason.

Instead, the whole gamut of allegiance is open to him. He may follow his deeper loyalties to an inherited ethnic nationalism; he may identify completely with an inborn masculinity; he may accept traditional and stable forms of family life; and he may assent to external, objective codes of morality.

Wordsworth, having once shared Shelley’s enthusiasms, knew how to break most cleanly with the ideal of the sceptreless, tribeless new man. But Wordsworth’s defence of nationalism was not the most famous of its time.

In 1804 Sir Walter Scott wrote a stinging attack on those who felt no allegiance to their own homelands. He relied less on theory and more on force of expression:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
(Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto Sixth)

There is only a hint of theory in this poem. The “wretch” is described as being “concentrated all in self” and this perhaps is aimed at the radical individualism of the “new man” who was, despite the best efforts of poets like Wordsworth and Scott, to so greatly affect the fortunes of twentieth century Europe.