"The Clampdown" -- The Clash
Following the sanguine slaughters of the Great War, subsequent cultural and political upheavals, and massive economic displacements, a victimized humanity began questioning the Enlightenment idealism that forms the bedrock of modern civilization. Understandably, they felt betrayed, brutalized, and angry.
Less understandably, too many people rejected our still callow steps toward what Karl Popper would brilliantly term The Open Society. Instead, many of society’s disaffected answered the siren call urging them to march lockstep to the extreme fringes of the political spectrum. And so, the opening decades of the Twentieth Century witnessed the birth of a new form of government, the Totalitarian State, beget by the perfect storm of history’s first industrialized war, an even deadlier pandemic that crisscrossed the entire globe, a nearly complete collapse of the world economy, and unparalleled innovations in communications and transportation. Totalitarianism rose from the ashes like some sort of nightmarish phoenix.
Karl Popper's landmark defense of liberal freedoms
and devastating critique of teleological historicism.
The first tentative steps towards a totalitarian are said by some historians to have occurred in 1916 when the sedate Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his manic Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff became the defacto rulers of Imperial Germany. The German Empire was staggering, buffeted by inefficient economics, domestic revolution, and intermittent French and British strategic military innovation. Hindenburg and Ludendorff thought to save the crumbling Empire by directing all its energies toward Total War. They failed, and the Empire ceased to exist.
But in Russia, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik followers accomplished what the commanders of the German Army could not. In November 1917, Lenin staged a coup against the liberal Provisional Government which had replaced Tsar Nicholas II only eight months previously. After a brutal civil war in which Lenin’s Communists defeated the uncoordinated and constantly feuding factions arrayed against them -- conservatives, monarchists, liberals, socialists, anarchists, and even foreign expeditionary forces. Lenin was the victor, the people of Russia the victims.
Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd, 1920
Lenin was a creature of the Left, but the political Right would beget the next generation of Totalitarian states. In 1922, Benito Mussolini and his fascist Blackshirts marched on Rome. The march was essentially a buff, but King Victor Emmanuel III acceded to their demands and appointed Mussolini Prime Minister. From that post, he began Italy’s transformation into a fascist state.
In the wreckage of post-war, recession-wracked Germany, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had not finished working their mischief. Hoping to advance their own conservative agenda, each promoted the goals of Mussolini’s most infamous disciple, Adolf Hitler. All Totalitarian movements, be they like Lenin on the fringe Left or, in the manner of Mussolini and Hitler on the extreme Right, share certain common characteristics -- disdain of democracy, some official ideology, politicized violence and terror, for example. But Hitler’s unique brand of Totalitarianism added a new element to the mix: Race theory became a guiding factor in governing philosophy.
Adolf Hitler at the 1935 National Socialist Party Congress in Nuremberg.
This infamous rally marked the initiation of de jure anti-semitism
in the Third Reich.
Hitler’s fantasy of an Aryan empire died with him beneath the rubble-filled streets of Berlin in May of 1945, but his malignant racism continues to inspire those who inhabit the extreme fringe of rightwing politics. Racism has frequently found welcome on the Authoritarian Right, but since Hitler, it has become a defining feature, inspiring rightwing extremists across the globe.
Consider, for example, the United Kingdom’s National Front, frequently abbreviated to “the NF,” founded on this day in 1967 by A. K. Chesterton. Like Hitler and Mussolini, Chesterton was a veteran of the Great War, broken by the insanity and violence no human should be forced to witness. The Great Depression further radicalized him. His biographer David Baker observed:
[Chesterton] tilted at windmills and sharpened his skills as a controversialist while the Great Depression deepened and the bankruptcy of liberal and capitalist democracy became apparent. The corporate state, he came to believe, would rule in the interests of the whole nation, whereas democracy was the plaything of special interests and privilege.
[Chesterton] tilted at windmills and sharpened his skills as a controversialist while the Great Depression deepened and the bankruptcy of liberal and capitalist democracy became apparent. The corporate state, he came to believe, would rule in the interests of the whole nation, whereas democracy was the plaything of special interests and privilege.
Chesterton would find himself increasingly drawn toward the anti-Communist and Nationalistic stances of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), eventually joining the party the very year Hitler achieved supreme political power in Germany. As editor of the official BUF newspaper, Chesterton found expression for his harsh anti-semitic opinions and an audience eager to hear them.
A. K. Chesterton lost faith in Oswald Mosley
and the British Union of Fascists,
but, tellingly, not in Fascism itself.
Coming to realizing the hopelessness of Mosley’s organization, Chesterton abandoned the BUF in 1938, but he soon found a home more to his liking, The Right Club. Founded by Archibald Ramsay, yet another disaffected veteran mentally shattered by the brutality of the Great War, The Right Club unrealistically hoped to unite the various far-right groups roaming the British political landscape beneath its umbrella. It’s platform was one of extreme nationalism, right-wing Christian orthodoxy, accommodation and even alliance with Hitler’s Germany, and, significantly, virulent anti-semitism. Like Hitler and his fanatically nescient following, The Right Club membership thought a sinister cabal of Jewish villains to be the seed from which all civilization’s problems sprouted. Ramsay articulated The Right Club’s goal:
The main object of the Right Club was to oppose and expose the activities of Organized Jewry, in the light of the evidence which came into my possession in 1938. Our first objective was to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence, and the character of our membership and meetings were strictly in keeping with this objective.
A. K. Chesterton
The onset of the Second World War ended Chesterton’s association with The Right Club, but not his infatuation with the extreme right. But now his mission had expanded. World War I precipitated the immolation of four great European empires, those of Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turks. Now, the economic tolls of World War II, combined with increased demands from colonial populations for self-determination presaged the dissolution of the British Empire. And so Chesterton added defense of English imperialism to his long list of shameful dogmas.
Candour
August/September 2016 Issue
Claiming to be the United Kingdom's longest running Nationalist magazine,
Candour was founded by A. K. Chesterton in 1953.
He served as chief editor until his death in 1973.
On 7 September 1967, Chesterton announced the formation of the National Front Party, attracting into a coalition a small handful of far-right groups ranging from fascist to extreme nationalist, from Hitlerite to Strasserite, all struggling to shape the party’s official ideology. The National Front has never managed to elect one of its own to any political position higher than a local office, but it endures. Even today, it draws the disaffected bitter, united only by their conviction of British exceptionalism, isolationist fervor, hatred of immigrants, racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, and homophobia. Still, the movement has fallen far from its peak in the 1970s. Other extremist groups burdened with less impolitic baggage are found more acceptable uneducated and radicalized Brits. But while the National Front might be in poor health, it is by no means dead. The unexpected success of the Brexit Referendum has buoyed the spirits of its remaining true believers, and members glance approvingly across the Atlantic and find assurance of a white future in the election of Donald Trump.
In the 1980s, socially conscious artists, aware of the potential lure the inhuman ideology cast to England’s alienated youth, sought to counter its spell. Seminal punk band The Clash joined with other rockers in concerts targeting the same audience, offering them a more wholesome and less hateful option. The Clash always poised with the vanguard of political revolution in music. Band members Joe Strummer and Mick Jones reference the National Front’s attachment to bigotry and authoritarianism when writing their 1980 single “The Clampdown.”
"The Clampdown" -- The Clash
The kingdom is ransacked
The jewels all taken back
And the chopper descends
They're hidden in the back
With a message on a half-baked tape
With the spool going round
Saying I'm back here in this place
And I could cry
And there's smoke you could click on...
What are we gonna do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?
'Cause they're working for the clampdown
They put up a poster saying we earn more than you!
When we're working for the clampdown
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers
The judge said five to ten-but I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D'you know that you can use it?
The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal
You grow up and you calm down
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
Make your first kill now
In these days of evil Presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong! (working for the clampdown)
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong! (working for the clampdown)
Yeah I'm working in Harrisburg
Working hard in Petersburg
(working for the clampdown, working for the clampdown)
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
Beggin' to be melted down
And I'll give away no secrets
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