Michael Woodbridge

Dear Robert,

Thank you for publishing my correspondence in the latest ESA, also for a fair if slightly inaccurate account of my religious stance on the front page.

I have no fundamental quarrel with atheism except to say I'm personally more inclined to agnosticism and pantheism. In other words my outlook isn't based so much on a hostility to God but rather a feeling that he is beyond our comprehension.

If he did exist it would be arrogant for us as individuals to claim knowledge of him and thereby use that knowledge to tell others how to lead their lives. This is where I differ from Islam and Christianity.

Whilst I have an affection for our Christian cultural inheritance and a respect for Islamic culture, I can't see that either religion is any more than a form of social control.

I believe that a religion is only as good as those who adhere to it and the higher the racial type the better the religion.

For example, the 'happy clappy', Negro has found his metier in a type of evangelism. The Middle Easterner on the other hand needs to keep order with the more authoritarian, 'off with their heads' approach of Islam. That's why you were quite right in saying that I don't think Islam, for all its finer points (in the Sufi religion for example), is quite suited to White/Aryan religiosity.

Our approach is to find enlightenment through Nature and thus through Science. Because Nature is a vast system of checks and balances I see it as a wholeness and to this extent might describe myself as a pantheist.

It's through our sense of humility when listening to great music or contemplating the stars on a clear night that we transcend our miserable little egos and understand our place in the greater reality of evolution.

Well to come down from the stars for a moment, I'm thinking of writing an article for 'Western Spring' over the next couple of weeks and wondered, if the occasion should arise, whether we might use your cartoon of the Cenotaph Armistice parade to make much the same political point?

Regards,

Michael Woodbridge, Corwen

North Wales

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[The Editor replies: Many thanks for this, Michael. Always a pleasure to receive your opinion in your inimitable style. Permit me to respond politely.

Let us begin on the subject of God and your opinion that God is “beyond our comprehension”. You use this to question any belief in the very existence of God but others use it to affirm the true nature of God. The latter is the view of both Muslims and Christians but more so with Muslims because they disdain any pictorial representations. I recall the line of a hymn sung at school morning assemblies: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise”. An all-powerful supernatural entity, greater than all of us, is beyond our grasp in terms of knowing Him in the way we understand our fellow humans. We should not even attempt to understand God’s existence but simply have faith. It is often a mistake on the part of some Christians that human attributes are accorded to Him. The Church, over the centuries, is largely responsible for this error and it continues to be the case. To the true mystic, He can never be pinned down and analysed in order to see how He works as if he were a car’s engine and then put back together again. You either feel He exists or you do not. That is why He is beyond your comprehension, Michael. You do not feel God.

You are without God, Michael, as your scepticism proves. You are therefore an atheist by the simplest definition ... without God. Agnosticism is a half-way house for those who do not wish to be known as atheists but the fact remains that you are either with God or you are without God. There is no sitting on a fence dithering. There are no alternatives to non-belief.

With all due respects, your affection for “our Christian cultural inheritance” is sadly misplaced because Christianity is a religion with all the supernatural experience associated with it. It is much more than an identity based on culture, as is the same with Islam. Organisations like Christian Identity bear little resemblance to the teachings of Christ but are far more concerned with claiming to be the true Israelites, regarding Muslims as cousins and the rest of the dark races being “mud people”. Violently anti-Jewish and white supremacist. It used to be called British Israelitism but was hi-jacked by the Americans and then sent back here as Christian Identity with a strong whiff of armed white militias.

Some people have told me they are “cultural Christians”, which is to say they don’t believe in the religious doctrines nor even God. They identify as Christians for the purpose of opposing Islam and other religions they don’t like. In other words, they are using nominal religion for purely political purposes. This is further disguised by being ’cultural’. Cultural Christians exist in the far right Islamophobic movements. Godless and  hate-filled.

You say you can not see religion being anything other than social control. This means you totally miss the point of religiosity and its meaning to the individual believer. I am a believer but I am probably one of the most rebellious when it comes to the state and all the machinery of social control. My definition of the state differs very little to that of Karl Marx, for example. It is the organisation of a ruling class for the purposes of the suppression of all other classes. Oh, yes, I believe in class because our society is still riddled with it and is therefore something from which you can not escape or wish away. I am of the working class and my deep knowledge of English social history affirms my class consciousness.

You are claiming that the worth or value of a religion is directly correlated to what you consider to be a ‘higher racial type’. In the last issue of this publication I published an article demonstrating that Islam offers a higher moral challenge to the West’s secular liberalism and its system of debt slavery. It is not biological but entirely moral. You don’t describe the perfect religion for your ‘higher racial type’, which I presume is a tall blond beast with blue eyes ... your Nordic superman. The logical conclusion would be an interpretation of pagan Odinism.

I do not believe your Nordic is a higher type. I do not believe the worth of a people is determined by their physical appearance.

As you are really a National Socialist, behind your cover as a racial socialist, and an admirer of Third Reich racial theories, it is entirely appropriate to remind you of a speech that Hitler made at the 1933 Nuremberg Parteitag. He said, “ We do not conclude from a man’s physical type his ability but rather from his achievements his race”. The thing to consider here is, he never described the physical type of an ‘Aryan’ and he never talked of Nordics. He disapproved of Hans Günther for a start.  The term Aryan was used by them to draw a distinction between the Gentile Germans and the Jews. That’s all. Other than that, it really, truly, alludes to the Indo-Europeans and their languages.

All the rest of the plethora of literature on the subject of ‘Aryan’ biological supremacism is exaggerated charlatanism. Germans with a Jew in their ancestry or had one parent who was Jewish were described as Mischling. They were tainted, as such, according to the Nuremberg Laws. But what does it mean in terms of worth? They were no lower or inferior to those deluded people who think of themselves as racially pure. When you start regarding people the way you regard thoroughbred horses then mankind is de-humanised and man sacrificed on the altar of biological madness.

When a Jew sheds his Jewishness, as with Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon, he ceases to be a Jew because it is entirely a mindset. The apostate Jew then rejoins humanity, at last. He no longer believes it is the destiny of Gentiles here on Earth to serve the morally superior Jew, as Judaism preaches. They then become the severest critics of the tradition in which they were born.  The racial thing does not apply then.

When you say “The Middle Easterner on the other hand needs to keep order with the more authoritarian, 'off with their heads' approach of Islam”, you display an ignorance of the essence of the Holy Qur’an. You’ve never read it, obviously, but prefer to make a sweeping generalisation based on urban myths, populist ideas and the ignorance of the bigot. There is nothing in the Qur’an regarding cutting off heads but there is a lot of mercy exercised in regard to the harsher punishments. They are to be used reluctantly and sparingly, if not at all, and not in the manner of blood-thirsty Saudi princes and their Wahhabist perversion of Islam. Don’t ever think they represent true Islam.

According to the Anthropology Department of the British Museum, most Arabs (I take it that is who you refer to as ‘Middle Easterner’) are Caucasians of the Mediterranean Proper sub-race, similar to the Portuguese, Greeks and Italians. The term Semitic is a purely linguistic category. There is no Semitic race.

Thousands of years ago there was much migration and mixtures were formed then. For example, the Persians and Afghans have facial dimensions similar to the Nordics. The Kurds of Iraq, Iran and Turkey, who include a blond minority, may be a mixture of Irano-Afghan  and ancestral Nordics. None of them are ‘inferior’ races.

Your stereotypical ‘happy-clappy Negro’ is a deceptive piece of imagery, of course. Much of Africa is Muslim and Sharia law is often preferred as a matter of choice. In the United States the blacks are often Baptist evangelical or Methodist evangelical. My parents were Welsh Methodists. A lot of White Americans in the Deep South and elsewhere are Protestant evangelicals. We are all free to worship in our method of choice.

You seem to live in a bye-gone age when the Dark Continent was being discovered, expeditions to the source of the Nile, India of “It Ain’t ‘Arf Hot, Mum”, pith helmets, swagger sticks and Bombay bloomers, Rudyard Kipling, the Empire upon which the sun never sets ... and, of course, lesser breeds with the white man supreme. The upper classes, that is. The lower classes were there as cannon fodder. Not all white men retired for tiffin with the memsahibs on the veranda. They were regarded as ‘inferior’, as much as the natives. Class snobbery is not amenable to ideas of racial solidarity.

As with most Americans today, we could not see beyond our own culture and Empire. As with Americans today, we have no idea regarding the history and achievements of many other peoples around the world who you would regard as inferior to the Nordic Europeans. You should read Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and you will realise a wider perspective. It will do you good.

Nature is not a religion, Michael. For a start, there is obviously nothing of the supernatural about it. Pantheism involves God. It means God is everything and everything is God. But, then, you say God is beyond your comprehension. Science, on the other hand, is a branch of knowledge based mainly on observation, experiment and dealing with material phenomena. None of this has any bearing on religiosity.

Nature is a physical power, whereas religion is on a higher spiritual plane, above and beyond the merely physical. This physical power is responsible for the phenomena of the material world. Religion reaches out far further to God.

I agree when you describe seeing the stars on a clear night and transcending your self. I look out to the vast sea and listen to the waves crashing on the shore. There is a kind of heavenly music in that. The thing you get from these experiences is the unavoidable truth that there is something greater than all of us. If you open yourself to all possibilities, you might feel God’s presence as a result.

I know you feel the end of the Third Reich was the greatest of all tragedies but it fell as a result of mistakes. The biggest mistake was a racial doctrine based on the innate inferiority of other peoples, principally the Jews and the Slavic peoples to the East. The Russians were to be permanent slave labour in the service of ‘colonising Aryan’ Germans. Do you realise how bad that sounds now?

In Hitler’s Last Will and Testament in 1945, he goes on about how the German people failed him and they now deserved to perish. He believed in the survival of the fittest in the harshest terms. It is this ideological point of view that led him to treat entire races with total indifference regarding their fate in wartime. With the Russians, he considered them  inferior barbarians to be liquidated and replaced with German peasant colonisers in his declared policy of Lebensraum in the East.

His attack during Operation Barbarossa was entirely ill-conceived and as winter approached the Wehrmacht was eventually out-manoeuvred by the Russians, encircled and doomed. It was simply unprepared for a winter campaign.

The biggest error was to treat the Russians with utter cruelty. This cruelty came from this doctrine of the Herrenvolk and the superiority of the German over all others. Hitler told the German people that they were going to rule the world and that they must be merciless in that goal.

Russian prisoners of war were not treated according to the Geneva conventions and millions died in captivity. They were used as slave labour until they dropped. Eye witnesses saw columns of these sad wretches on the way back to labour camps, half-starved and exhausted.

The Siege of Leningrad lasted for 872 says and was the longest and most destructive in the history of mankind.  The suffering of the people was unbelievable and not enough attention is given to this episode in what Russians call The Great Patriotic War. In all, the Russians lost more in that war than any other nation and that includes European Jewry. Hitler wanted his Hitler Youth to be as hard as Krupp steel but the Russian was harder and tougher.

When the tide of the war turned in Russia’s favour, their only thought was revenge. They were no longer the inferior Slav or the primitive-minded Bolshevik beast of Nazi propaganda. They went through East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania like battle-hardened veterans seeking vengeance on the Germans whose government previously wanted them all annihilated in a racial war.

Hitler’s misbegotten racial ideas caused the savage deaths of millions of Germans in the East. It was Hell on Earth. The Russians believed they got what they deserved but that is the nature of war.

So, Michael, when you talk of ‘higher racial types’ and sneer at the religion of other people, you must consider the inevitable consequences and the lessons of history. It is too late for the German people of East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania, settled there for many hundreds of years. All that is gone and can never return.

The Russians today are a fine people and their leader Vladimir Putin a remarkable statesman. The lesson of history says we should be allied to Russia and never go to war. Hitler had his chance then but threw it all away. In The European (The Journal of Opposition) of July 1958, the academic A. James Gregor wrote an article titled National Socialism and Race. The European was printed by Oswald Mosley’s publishing arm. The theory of race is the element that made National Socialism what it was and James Gregor tackled the subject of how their race theory developed and changed.

There were three periods. The first consisted of Hitler’s own writings and his use of the term ‘Aryan’ as his preferred race. He is vague about it and seems to include all Europeans with non-Europeans being inferior.

The second period involved the Nordicist cranks, including Hans Günther with all the nonsense about cephalic indices, “pure” Nordics, inferior races and physical type. At that time, Karl Weinländer took the ‘Nordic Race’ thing too far. He wrote, “Nordic blood  when transfused into the sick will promote rapid improvement while a transfusion of blood from the lower races (particularly Jewish blood) will dispatch the patient”. It was published with the endorsement of the NS Teachers’ Bund. The madness permeated throughout German society as this nonsense became increasingly popular.

The last phase was a rejection of Hans Günther and his cronies. Nordicism was consigned to the dustbin of the Third Reich and the ‘Aryan’ was restored as the favoured word. Aryan was not as specific as Nordic and was without a recognisable type. This suited the National Socialist state in its dealings with other people who were potential allies.

In 1939, in the last phase, Dr Walter Gross of the Rassenpolitische Amt defined official policy.

“A serious situation arose through the fact that other people and states, because of German race laws, felt themselves attacked and defamed.

For example, the whole world of the Far East remained for a long time under the impression that the Germans had designated them as non-Aryan and as non-Aryans inferior rabble, that the Germans had designated them unworthy, second class humanity and that the Germans imagined themselves as the sole bearers of culture.

What could we say to those who saw in German racism a fundamental  defamation of men of other races?

We could do nothing other than, with patience and conviction, repeat that German racism does not evaluate or deprecate other racial groups. It only recognises, scientifically, that differences exist. We have often been disturbed by the indiscretion or even stupidity in our own land when,  just after we had carefully made clear to some people that we respected and honoured their racial qualities some wild fool manufactured his own ideas about race and declared these same people were racially inferior ...”

Towards the end of the war, the HQ of the Reichsführer SS published the views of Dr Ludwig Eckstein:

“While supporting our own race and, if necessary, fighting against other races to protect its right to exist, we should not overlook the fact that almost all races display something in themselves that is sound and biologically resolved and therefore beautiful, natural and valuable, Each race carries first of all the measure of worth in itself. When once we understand this then we do not foster feelings of inferiority in others ...”

By then it was too late. Mad Nordicists like Hans Günther had done the damage in the second phase of National Socialist race theory. The work of the third and final stage was largely lost and scattered. The talk then was of races in formation rather than “fixed and immutable”.

 Copyright European Socialist Action No 58