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Hier Stehe Ich! (“Here I Stand (I Can Do No Other”) — Martin Luther http://cafe.nfshost.com/?p=9316

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Monday, January 1, 2024

Hier Stehe Ich! (“Here I Stand (I Can Do No Other”) — Martin Luther

 Every year since I started Throne, Altar, Liberty I have, on the kalends of January which is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on the Church Kalendar and New Year’s Day on the civil calendar, posted an essay summarizing where I stand on matters political, religious and cultural, the subjects on which I write.  It is a custom I adopted from one of my own favourite writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel.   I have often used Dr. Luther’s famous “Here I Stand” as the title in one language or another.   This year it is the German original.  Each year it is a challenge to write this anew because, while I hope my views have matured they have remained basically the same.   Each year I have to resist  the temptation to  just point to T. S Eliot’s “Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature” and say ditto.   I usually do make reference to Eliot’s famous self-description, which I read as a twentieth-century update of the definition of Tory that Dr. Johnson wrote for his dictionary, because it provides a handy frame on which to organize my thoughts.

Before getting into my views I will provide as usual some basic background information about myself.  I am a patriotic citizen of Commonwealth Realm that is the Dominion of Canada and a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III as I was all my life prior to his accession of his mother of Blessed Memory, our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II. I love my country’s traditional institutions, Loyalist history, and basically everything about Canada that the sniveling twit who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office either wishes we would forget or is endlessly apologizing for.  I have lived all my life in the province of Manitoba, where I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, where I studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College – at the time it was Providence College and Theological Seminary – in Otterbourne which is a small college town south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, where I have lived for the almost quarter of a century since.

Am I, like T. S. Eliot an “Anglo-Catholic in religion”?  If by Anglo-Catholic you mean holding the theology expressed in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the admirable collection published by John Henry Parker in the nineteenth century of the writings of the classical Anglican divines of the centuries previous including Lancelot Andrewes, the martyred King Charles I’s martyred Archbishop William  Laud and the other Caroline Divines, the scholarly apologist for Trinitarian orthodoxy Bishop George Bull and the Non-Juror George Hickes, I would say yes.     If you mean embracing the views of the Oxford Movement I would be more hesitant.   I think that the most important thing Keble, Newman, Pusey et al.  got right was that the truest and most important establishment of the Church was that by Christ through His Apostles rather than establishment by the state.   I have far less sympathy for the tendency that  manifested itself in some, not all, of them to look Romeward, to regret the Reformation for reasons other than that all schism that harms the visible unity of the Church is regrettable, and to regard the Anglican formularies with a “this will have to do for now” type attitude.   

The Vincentian Canon, “that which is believed everywhere, at all times, and by all”, and its tests of antiquity (does it go back to the Apostles), universality (is it held throughout the Church in all regions and ages rather than particular to one time and place), and consent (was it affirmed by the Church’s leadership in a way that was subsequently received as authoritative throughout the Church) is in my view the right way of determining what is truly Catholic, not whether it has been declared dogma by the Patriarch of Rome or one of the Councils that his adherents have held since the Great Schism between East and West.   I come from a family in which most of my relatives were either United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist) or Anglican, became a believer with an evangelical conversion when I was 15, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church while a teenager and confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult.  As my theology matured I came to realize and respect the Symbols handed down from the ancient Church – the Apostles’ and Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creeds and the Athanasian Symbol – as the basic definitions of Scriptural orthodoxy, to recognize that episcopalian Church government is not adiaphora but clearly established in the New Testament (the Apostles governed the whole Church, while it was localized in Jerusalem they exercised the authority Christ gave them to establish the order of deacons, after the Church was scattered they appointed presbyters or elders over the local Churches which seems to be something they borrowed from the synagogues, and as their ministries closed they passed on to others, Scriptural examples of which include SS Timothy and Titus  their government over the Church including the power to ordain the lower  orders), and that the ministers of the Church are priests (St. Paul explicitly states this of himself in the Greek of Romans 15:15) charged not with offering new sacrifices but with feeding the people of God with Christ’s One Sacrifice through the Sacramental medium of bread and wine. 

Thus I am basically a High Anglican of the pre-Oxford type, with a  Lutheran soteriology, and a fundamentalist-minus-the-separatism approach to basic orthodoxy who regards every article of the ancient Symbols taken literally as fundamental and the Bible as God’s written Word, by verbal, plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant, which we are to believe and obey rather than to subject to “criticism” based on the false notion that because God used human writers to write the book of which He is the Author that it is a human book rather than a divine book.   Criticism based on that false notion makes fools out of those who engage in it, whether it be the higher critics who think that the fact that Moses varied which name for God he used means that his books were slapped together by some editor after the Babylonian Captivity from previously separate sources despite the total lack of anything such as examples of these “sources” in a pre-“redaction” state of the type that would logically constitute actual evidence or the lower or textual critics who think that the most authentic text of the New Testament is not to be found in that that has been handed down in the Church as evidenced by the thousands of manuscripts she has used (these are of the Byzantine text type) but either in small handful of old manuscripts that were not in general use and were particular to one region (the Alexandrian text) or in something slapped together by text critics in the last century which can be found in no manuscript whatsoever (the eclectic text).  Someone who makes the false idea that the Bible is a human book rather than God’s book the basis of his study of it will end up drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about it that no competent scholar would similarly draw about actual human books and will end up sounding like a blithering idiot.  So expect me to thump the Authorized (1611) Bible as I tell you that salvation is a free gift that God has given to all us sinners in Jesus Christ, that the only means whereby we can receive it is faith,  that faith is formed in us by the Holy Ghost through the Gospel brought to us in the Word and Sacrament ministered to us by the Church whose Scripturally established governors under her Head, Jesus Christ, are the bishops in whose order the ordinary governing office of the Apostles has continued to this day.

That I am a “royalist in politics” should already be evident from the second paragraph if it is not sufficiently evident from the title of my website.   I will add here that I am also a monarchist.   For some that will be a redundancy, the two terms being for them interchangeable.   It is for the sake of others who distinguish between the two that I add that I am both.   I am a much stronger monarchist than those Canadian conservatives are who are basically liberal democrats but who defend our monarchy because it is our tradition and make its non-interference with their real political ideal the sole basis of their argument.   I have been instinctually a monarchist all my life.   While C. S. Lewis famously said that monarchy is an idea easily debunked but those who debunk it impoverish and bring misery upon themselves (I am paraphrasing from  memory, Lewis said it better than that) I have found as I have studied the matter over the years that monarchy is rationally defensible.   Plato and Aristotle argued that the rule of true kings is the best of simple constitutions and I think their arguments still stand, just as I think that in our age the divisiveness, partisanship, and other evils that attend upon democratically elected government make an ironclad case for hereditary monarchy that makes the unifying figure at the head of the state one who does not owe his office to partisan politics.  Thus I would say that we should be arguing that our monarchy is essential not that it is merely acceptable.   The Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, makes a strong case for monarchy’s essential role in our constitution similar to that frequently made by Eugene Forsey. 

I am grateful to Ron Dart for drawing my attention to these men and their books years ago.   I find little to admire in the Modern ideal of democracy and defend instead the institution of Parliament for while Parliament is, of course, a democratic institution it is also a traditional one, a concrete institution that predates the Modern Age and has long proven its worth, which to me outweighs all the flimsy arguments Moderns make for democracy.   Ultimately, I have found a sure and certain foundation for monarchism in orthodox Christianity.   God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the absolute Sovereign Ruler of His Creation, i.e., all other than Himself that exists.  In the governance of the universe, we find the ideal form – think Plato here – of government, of which temporal earthly governments are imperfect representations and to which, the greater their conformity, the more their perfection will be.   This is why the most orthodox forms of Christianity – traditional Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Roman Catholicism, and the better kind of Lutheranism – saw Christian monarchy as the highest form of earthly civilization, and the least orthodox forms that can still be seen as  Christian in some recognizable sense, Puritanism and Anabaptism, are the ones that contradicted the obvious implication of the title “King of Kings” by saying “no king but King Jesus”.   

It is in the sense of someone who holds the views expressed in the previous two paragraphs and not in the common partisan sense of the word that I call myself a Tory.   The words “conservative” and “right-wing” as they are used today, even by most who self-apply them, have had their meaning defined for them by the very liberalism and the Left they purport to oppose.   Liberalism is the spirit of the Modern Age.   It consists of the demand for ever increasing liberty (in the sense of individual autonomy) and equality, despite the fact obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that these two cannot be maximized at the same time.   The universal homogeneity that it demands would if actualized be the ultimate form of totalitarian tyranny in which freedom, the real human good and not liberalism’s false ideal of liberty/individual autonomy, would be eliminated entirely.   The Left also worships liberalism’s false gods and historically has differed from liberalism primarily in its notion of how to achieve their goal.   A century ago the Left was identified primarily with socialism, the idea that all of man’s problems can be traced to economic equality arising out of the private ownership of property and are solvable by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with public ownership.   From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity this is utterly repugnant because it misdiagnoses the human condition (the correct diagnosis is sin), prescribes the wrong medicine (the right medicine is the grace of God freely given to man in Jesus Christ), and is basically the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, disguising itself with the mask of the highest of the Christian virtues, charitable love.   

Today, the Left is identified primarily with an expression  arising out of American racial grievance politics, “wokeness”.   “Wokeness” is like socialism in that it claims (generally falsely) to be the mouthpiece for the oppressed, but differs from socialism in that it it does not divide people into oppressor/oppressed by economic status (Marx’s “haves” and “have nots”) but by a legion of personal identities based on such things as race, sex, gender, etc.   Some, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried, have argued on the basis of specific content that today’s Left is something totally different from the Left of a century ago, from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity there is a discernable continuity in the Left.   Whether it speaks in terms of economics or in the terms of race and sex, the Left is an entirely destructive movement, driven by hatred of civilization as it historically has existed for not living up to the false and self-contradictory ideals of liberalism, that, whenever it has succeeded in tearing something down, has never been able to build anything good let alone better on the ashes of the good if not perfect that it destroyed.   The orthodox Christian must condemn this utterly because it clearly displays the spirit of Satan who operates out of the same hatred directed towards God.   Therefore I describe my orthodox Christian monarchist views as Tory and reactionary (in John Lukacs’ sense of the term, basically someone willing to think outside the Modern box, not by embracing the nihilism of post-Modernism but rather the good in the pre-Modern), preferring these terms over conservative which for the most part denotes a false opposition to liberalism and Left defined entirely by liberalism and the Left.

As for being a “classicist in literature” I think that if we take this to  mean someone who seeks to learn from Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said” this is a goal that someone with the views expressed above can recognize as most worthy to pursue with regards not just to literature and reading, but to the other elements of culture such as music and the visual arts as well.   It is also a difficult one to consistently follow as many are the enticements, more so today than ever before, to distract one from the classical heights of the Great Books and the Great Tradition into the murky swamps of corporate, mass-manufactured, pop culture.   I have striven to follow this goal on and off again – it makes an excellent resolution for those who do that sort of thing today – with varying degrees of success at resisting the distractions.   Perversely, I have found stubborn contrariness has often been a great motivator in this regards. 

 I read Mark Twain’s remark that a “classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” years ago and thought to myself “Sez you, Sam Clemens” and set out to read nothing but classics, persisting in this for several months.   Similarly, Thomas Fleming, the former editor of Chronicles Magazine several times enriched my reading habits with remarks about about books nobody was familiar with today prompting a “Sez you, Tom Fleming” response.   Today, as the Left in its “woke” form as described in the previous paragraph has laid siege to the Great Books and the Great Tradition it is more important than ever to reacquaint ourselves with “the best that has been thought and said”.   This is a far better and ultimately more effective way of resisting wokeness than generating and posting any number of anti-woke internet memes could ever be.   So I resolve today once again to seek to elevate my reading, listening and viewing habits in 2024 and  encourage you to do the same.

Happy New Year!

God Save the King! — Gerry T. Neal

Remembering Sam Francis — He’s Been Gone a Decade

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Remembering Sam Francis — He’s Been Gone a Decade
by Gerry T. Neal

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2015

Remembering a Philosopher-King


It has long been recognized that there are two ways in which civilization can break down into barbaric conditions. The rule of law can collapse altogether leaving ordinary citizens powerless against the criminal elements that now call the shorts. This is called anarchy. Or the state can become intrusive and controlling, curtailing its people’s freedoms, dictating their everyday decisions, and ruling by sheer force in an atmosphere of fear. This is called tyranny. It has also long been recognized that there is a cyclical pattern to the rise and fall of civilizations in which after civilization breaks down into one of these conditions for a period, the other emerges in response, and eventually a new civilization is born out of the rubble.

What if, however, civilization were to break down in both ways simultaneously and the same state was to fail in providing the basic protection of the law on the one hand, while tyrannically harassing and abusing its people on the other? Twenty years ago one of the greatest American political thinkers of the last half of the twentieth century saw this happening in the United States and all around the Western world and coined a term to describe it – anarchotyranny, the synthesis of anarchy and tyranny. On February 15th, ten years ago, he passed away due to complications following heart surgery at the age of 57. His name was Sam Francis.

 
 
'Remembering Sam Francis -- He's Been Gone a Decade by Gerry T. Neal SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2015 Remembering a Philosopher-King It has long been recognized that there are two ways in which civilization can break down into barbaric conditions. The rule of law can collapse altogether leaving ordinary citizens powerless against the criminal elements that now call the shorts. This is called anarchy. Or the state can become intrusive and controlling, curtailing its people’s freedoms, dictating their everyday decisions, and ruling by sheer force in an atmosphere of fear. This is called tyranny. It has also long been recognized that there is a cyclical pattern to the rise and fall of civilizations in which after civilization breaks down into one of these conditions for a period, the other emerges in response, and eventually a new civilization is born out of the rubble. What if, however, civilization were to break down in both ways simultaneously and the same state was to fail in providing the basic protection of the law on the one hand, while tyrannically harassing and abusing its people on the other? Twenty years ago one of the greatest American political thinkers of the last half of the twentieth century saw this happening in the United States and all around the Western world and coined a term to describe it – anarchotyranny, the synthesis of anarchy and tyranny. On February 15th, ten years ago, he passed away due to complications following heart surgery at the age of 57. His name was Sam Francis. Sam Francis was far more than just the man who thought up a clever name for this phenomenon – he was also its chief chronicler, analyst, and critic. In his twice-weekly column, syndicated by Creators but carried by far fewer newspapers than it ought to have been for reasons we will shortly get into, he provided a bold, uncompromising, commentary, expressed in a dry, sardonic wit that was perfectly complemented by the way he seemed to look out at you with amused disdain through his heavy glasses in the publicity photo attached to his column, on the news and issues of the day and the narrative beneath the news and issues – the ongoing war being waged by those presently in power in the West and particularly in the United States on the traditions, cultures, symbols, and ways of life of Western peoples. Nor did he shy away from addressing the taboo aspect of this subject, the racial element. Dr. Samuel Todd Francis was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 29, 1947, and it was in Chattanooga that he was raised and where as a young prodigy his literary talents and brilliant mind first gained attention. It was also in the Scenic City, under the Appalachian mountains, that we was finally laid to rest in 2005. He studied English literature at John Hopkins University in Baltimore before taking his Ph.D in history from the University of North Carolina. It was at Chapel Hill that he became acquainted with two of his fellow students, the classicist Thomas Fleming and the historian Clyde Wilson. These men would become his lifelong colleagues. They worked together on the Southern Partisan, a conservative quarterly that was started up in the late 1970s in the spirit of the Vanderbilt Agrarians. Each contributed to The New Right Papers, a 1982 anthology put together by Robert W. Whitaker. Their most significant collaboration however was in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, founded by Leopold Tyrmand in 1976 and published by the Rockford Institute of Rockford, Illinois. Thomas Fleming became the editor of Chroniclesfollowing Tyrmand’s death in 1985. Clyde Wilson is an associate editor, and until his passing Sam Francis was the magazine’s Washington or political editor. Under the direction of these men Chronicles became the flagship publication of paleoconservatism which, in opposition to the neoconservatives who were calling for a Pax Americana, a new world order in which the United States would use its military might to export liberal, capitalist, democracy to the farthest parts of the globe, called American conservatism back to its roots in the Burkean traditionalism of Russell Kirk and the small-r republicanism of the American Old Right that had opposed the New Deal, American entanglement in foreign conflicts, and the development of the “welfare-warfare state”. This was very much bucking the trend in the larger American conservative movement. As the neoconservative viewpoint came to increasingly dominate the movement, conservative writers who having opposed mass, demographics-altering, immigration, both legal and illegal, criticized Israel and objected to America’s being drawn into wars in the Middle East on her behalf, called for a rollback of the American federal government to its constitutional limits, refused to concede the victories of liberalism in the culture wars, and otherwise offended the neoconservatives, found themselves exiled from the pages of National Review and other mainstream conservative publications.Chronicles became a place of sanctuary for these writers. By the middle of the 1990s it was a sanctuary Dr. Francis was himself in need of. Up to that point his career as a thinker within the American conservative movement had been quite successful. It had three basic stages. In 1977 he joined the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D. C. think tank that had been founded four years earlier by New Right activist Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner with money put up by beer baron Joseph Coors. Dr. Francis was hired as a policy analyst in the fields of intelligence and security, particularly with regards to the threat of terrorism as a strategy employed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In 1981, following the publication of his The Soviet Strategy of Terror, he left the Heritage Foundation to take a position as legislative assistant to Senator John P. East, R-North Carolina. It was as an expert on national security matters that he was hired to this position but, interestingly, in the course of his work for East he was called upon to write a document that both required this expertise yet also had to do with the cultural and racial concerns on which his later, and lasting, fame rests. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill that made the third Monday in January into an American national holiday in honour of Martin Luther King Jr. The bill had been hotly debated, and leading the opposition to the holiday was the other Republican Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms. Senator East worked closely with his colleague and mentor in the campaign against this ridiculous holiday and on October 3, 1983, Helms read out in Congress a paper written by Dr. Francis that documented King’s collaboration with Soviet agents and Communist fronts. Dr. Francis worked for Senator East until the latter’s death in 1986 at which point he joined the staff of the Washington Times. He served the newspaper as an editorial writer, opinion columnist, and editor and it was here that his career started to really take off. His column was nationally syndicated, and his articles won him the Distinguished Writing Award in 1989 and 1990. He was runner up for another award both those years as well. Then, in 1995 all of that came to an end. It started with his column for June 27, 1995, entitled “All Those Things to Apologize For”. Written one week after the Southern Baptist Convention issued a grovelling apology for the stance they had taken 150 years previously in the controversy over slavery that divided them from the Northern Baptists, this column pointed out that the Baptists were making a big deal about repenting for something never condemned as a sin by the Bible. “Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery,” he wrote, “despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian before modern times ever thought it was”. All of this is true. Unfortunately, it is the kind of truth that people in this era cannot bear to hear. Dr. Francis was not arguing for slavery. He was arguing against what he called a “bastardized version of Christian ethics”, that had appeared in the 18th Century and had so permeated the churches that they “now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins such as pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee-pool.” He observed, correctly, that to read the abolitionist message into the New Testament and dismiss the passages that tell bond-servants to obey their masters as irrelevant is to undermine the authority of passages that “enjoin other social responsibilities.” These truths were especially embarrassing to the kind of Christians who, on the one hand pride themselves on the Christian roots of abolitionism, while on the other hand trying to defend what remains of traditional authority and order against the modernizing influences of those who see the abolitionist movement as the first stage in their perpetual revolution against the “slavery” of marriage, family, and traditional morality. This embarrassment proved too much for Wesley Pruden, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. He rebuked and demoted Dr. Francis, cut his salary, and began censoring his columns. In September of that same year, he fired Dr. Francis outright. This time it was not over something he had written in a column but something he had said in a speech the year previously. In May of 1994, American Renaissance, a monthly periodical devoted to matters of race, intelligence, and immigration hosted its first conference and Dr. Francis was invited to speak. He gave a message entitled “Why Race Matters”, the text of which was later published as an article in the September 1994 issue of American Renaissance. In this speech, he talked about how the culture of Western countries, especially the United States and in particular the South had come under attack, with traditional symbols being attacked, demonized, and replaced, how anti-racism was an effective strategy in a campaign being waged against the white race, how whites themselves were digging “their own racial and civilization grave” through liberalism and leftism, and that a merely cultural strategy in defence of Western civilization would not be sufficient – there needs to be conscious racial element to Western identity as well. He said: The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. This is so obviously true that one wonders that it needs to be stated. Nevertheless, it was the last straw for Wesley Pruden. The way in which Pruden learned of the remark did not help matters. Dinesh D’Souza, who had attended the conference, wrote a book, The End of Racism, which was published in 1995. D’Souza’s book discussed many of the same issues American Renaissance specializes in, and often took positions similar to theirs. D’Souza was, however, a firm believer in propositional nationalism and the ideal of the United States as a “universal nation”, who objected very much to the idea of defending Western civilization in explicitly racial terms. The chapter in which he talked about the conference contained many distortions – even after D’Souza was force to rewrite the chapter when Jared Taylor andLawrence Auster, along with Dr. Francis, wrote to the publisher to complain of the many ways in which D’Souza had twisted their words. In September of 1995, at the time the book finally saw print and reviews were beginning to appear, an article by D’Souza about the American Renaissance conference appeared in the Washington Post. D’Souza selectively quoted from Dr. Francis’ speech and presented the quotes in a very unfavourable light. And so, Dr. Francis lost his job at theWashington Times. He remained on the editorial staff of Chronicles, of course, to which he contributed each month, either his “Principalities and Powers” column or a book review or feature article. The Creators Syndicate continued to distribute his column. In the latter he offered his commentary on the news of the day and, while immigration was the issue that he most frequently addressed, he covered a broad gamut of topics, including free trade and globalization, gun control, and the erosion of civil liberties. He supported the presidential candidacies of his friend Patrick Buchanan and kept a watchful eye on the doings of those who actually made it to the White House. Scathing as his criticism of the Clinton administration was, he was no less severe in his assessment of George W. Bush. He contrasted the way in which the Bush administration had expanded its policing powers, undermining the civil liberties of Americans in the process, by means of antiterrorist legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act, with the way in which it refused to use its existing, lawful, powers to control immigration, this contrast being a classic example of anarchotyranny. In 2002 he wrote several columns against the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iraq and when that invasion took place saw his arguments more than justified. His arguments against the war were far more sane, sensible, and interesting than either the neocon arguments for the war or the blithering banalities uttered against it by the left-wing peaceniks. His final column was about George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech and it concluded by saying that Bush had “confirmed once and for all that the neo-conservatism to which he has delivered his administration and the country is fundamentally indistinguishable from the liberalism many conservatives imagine he has renounced and defeated.” In his Chronicles column, where he had more space to work with, he discussed the same topics at a deeper level. From James Burnham, about whose ideas he had written a book, he had learned much about the nature of power and the elites who inevitably hold it, including the present elite of technocratic managers who preside over the dismantling of the traditions, culture, and civilization of Western societies and rationalize their actions with the universalistic ideology of liberalism. From liberal sociologist Donald Warren he had gleaned insights into how the alliance of the uppermost and lowermost classes in the welfare state was putting the squeeze on the middle class, radicalizing what is ordinarily the most stable of classes, and thus generating a support base that a populist movement could use against the elites. From these insights, Dr. Francis framed his argument for such a populist “revolt from the middle”, bending the cold, hard, theory of Machiavellian power politics to serve ends that was anything but cold and hard – the cause of white, middle class Americans, who were seeing everything they held dear, their culture and religion, traditions and way of life, on every level from the regional to the national, including the constitution of their republic and their habits and institutions of freedom, being mercilessly swept away by elites they seemed powerless to stop. First in the New Right that brought Ronald Reagan into power, and later in the movement that failed to deliver the presidency to Pat Buchanan, he had found movements that could potentially achieve his ends. The dilemma for which he was seeking a solution to the very end of his life, as can be seen in his last “Principalities and Powers” article entitled “Towards a Hard Right”, was how such a movement could gain success without being sidetracked from its goals by corporate globalists dangling the carrot of the free market before its eyes.'

Sam Francis was far more than just the man who thought up a clever name for this phenomenon – he was also its chief chronicler, analyst, and critic. In his twice-weekly column, syndicated by Creators but carried by far fewer newspapers than it ought to have been for reasons we will shortly get into, he provided a bold, uncompromising, commentary, expressed in a dry, sardonic wit that was perfectly complemented by the way he seemed to look out at you with amused disdain through his heavy glasses in the publicity photo attached to his column, on the news and issues of the day and the narrative beneath the news and issues – the ongoing war being waged by those presently in power in the West and particularly in the United States on the traditions, cultures, symbols, and ways of life of Western peoples. Nor did he shy away from addressing the taboo aspect of this subject, the racial element.

Dr. Samuel Todd Francis was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 29, 1947, and it was in Chattanooga that he was raised and where as a young prodigy his literary talents and brilliant mind first gained attention. It was also in the Scenic City, under the Appalachian mountains, that we was finally laid to rest in 2005. He studied English literature at John Hopkins University in Baltimore before taking his Ph.D in history from the University of North Carolina.

It was at Chapel Hill that he became acquainted with two of his fellow students, the classicist Thomas Fleming and the historian Clyde Wilson. These men would become his lifelong colleagues. They worked together on the Southern Partisan, a conservative quarterly that was started up in the late 1970s in the spirit of the Vanderbilt Agrarians. Each contributed to The New Right Papers, a 1982 anthology put together by Robert W. Whitaker. Their most significant collaboration however was in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, founded by Leopold Tyrmand in 1976 and published by the Rockford Institute of Rockford, Illinois. Thomas Fleming became the editor of Chroniclesfollowing Tyrmand’s death in 1985. Clyde Wilson is an associate editor, and until his passing Sam Francis was the magazine’s Washington or political editor. Under the direction of these men Chronicles became the flagship publication of paleoconservatism which, in opposition to the neoconservatives who were calling for a Pax Americana, a new world order in which the United States would use its military might to export liberal, capitalist, democracy to the farthest parts of the globe, called American conservatism back to its roots in the Burkean traditionalism of Russell Kirk and the small-r republicanism of the American Old Right that had opposed the New Deal, American entanglement in foreign conflicts, and the development of the “welfare-warfare state”. This was very much bucking the trend in the larger American conservative movement. As the neoconservative viewpoint came to increasingly dominate the movement, conservative writers who having opposed mass, demographics-altering, immigration, both legal and illegal, criticized Israel and objected to America’s being drawn into wars in the Middle East on her behalf, called for a rollback of the American federal government to its constitutional limits, refused to concede the victories of liberalism in the culture wars, and otherwise offended the neoconservatives, found themselves exiled from the pages of National Review and other mainstream conservative publications.Chronicles became a place of sanctuary for these writers. By the middle of the 1990s it was a sanctuary Dr. Francis was himself in need of.

Up to that point his career as a thinker within the American conservative movement had been quite successful. It had three basic stages. In 1977 he joined the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D. C. think tank that had been founded four years earlier by New Right activist Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner with money put up by beer baron Joseph Coors. Dr. Francis was hired as a policy analyst in the fields of intelligence and security, particularly with regards to the threat of terrorism as a strategy employed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

In 1981, following the publication of his The Soviet Strategy of Terror, he left the Heritage Foundation to take a position as legislative assistant to Senator John P. East, R-North Carolina. It was as an expert on national security matters that he was hired to this position but, interestingly, in the course of his work for East he was called upon to write a document that both required this expertise yet also had to do with the cultural and racial concerns on which his later, and lasting, fame rests. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill that made the third Monday in January into an American national holiday in honour of Martin Luther King Jr. The bill had been hotly debated, and leading the opposition to the holiday was the other Republican Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms. Senator East worked closely with his colleague and mentor in the campaign against this ridiculous holiday and on October 3, 1983, Helms read out in Congress a paper written by Dr. Francis that documented King’s collaboration with Soviet agents and Communist fronts.

Dr. Francis worked for Senator East until the latter’s death in 1986 at which point he joined the staff of the Washington Times. He served the newspaper as an editorial writer, opinion columnist, and editor and it was here that his career started to really take off. His column was nationally syndicated, and his articles won him the Distinguished Writing Award in 1989 and 1990. He was runner up for another award both those years as well. Then, in 1995 all of that came to an end.

It started with his column for June 27, 1995, entitled “All Those Things to Apologize For”. Written one week after the Southern Baptist Convention issued a grovelling apology for the stance they had taken 150 years previously in the controversy over slavery that divided them from the Northern Baptists, this column pointed out that the Baptists were making a big deal about repenting for something never condemned as a sin by the Bible. “Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery,” he wrote, “despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian before modern times ever thought it was”. All of this is true. Unfortunately, it is the kind of truth that people in this era cannot bear to hear.

Dr. Francis was not arguing for slavery. He was arguing against what he called a “bastardized version of Christian ethics”, that had appeared in the 18th Century and had so permeated the churches that they “now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins such as pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee-pool.” He observed, correctly, that to read the abolitionist message into the New Testament and dismiss the passages that tell bond-servants to obey their masters as irrelevant is to undermine the authority of passages that “enjoin other social responsibilities.” These truths were especially embarrassing to the kind of Christians who, on the one hand pride themselves on the Christian roots of abolitionism, while on the other hand trying to defend what remains of traditional authority and order against the modernizing influences of those who see the abolitionist movement as the first stage in their perpetual revolution against the “slavery” of marriage, family, and traditional morality.

This embarrassment proved too much for Wesley Pruden, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. He rebuked and demoted Dr. Francis, cut his salary, and began censoring his columns. In September of that same year, he fired Dr. Francis outright. This time it was not over something he had written in a column but something he had said in a speech the year previously.

In May of 1994, American Renaissance, a monthly periodical devoted to matters of race, intelligence, and immigration hosted its first conference and Dr. Francis was invited to speak. He gave a message entitled “Why Race Matters”, the text of which was later published as an article in the September 1994 issue of American Renaissance. In this speech, he talked about how the culture of Western countries, especially the United States and in particular the South had come under attack, with traditional symbols being attacked, demonized, and replaced, how anti-racism was an effective strategy in a campaign being waged against the white race, how whites themselves were digging “their own racial and civilization grave” through liberalism and leftism, and that a merely cultural strategy in defence of Western civilization would not be sufficient – there needs to be conscious racial element to Western identity as well. He said:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

This is so obviously true that one wonders that it needs to be stated. Nevertheless, it was the last straw for Wesley Pruden. The way in which Pruden learned of the remark did not help matters. Dinesh D’Souza, who had attended the conference, wrote a book, The End of Racism, which was published in 1995. D’Souza’s book discussed many of the same issues American Renaissance specializes in, and often took positions similar to theirs. D’Souza was, however, a firm believer in propositional nationalism and the ideal of the United States as a “universal nation”, who objected very much to the idea of defending Western civilization in explicitly racial terms. The chapter in which he talked about the conference contained many distortions – even after D’Souza was force to rewrite the chapter when Jared Taylor andLawrence Auster, along with Dr. Francis, wrote to the publisher to complain of the many ways in which D’Souza had twisted their words. In September of 1995, at the time the book finally saw print and reviews were beginning to appear, an article by D’Souza about the American Renaissance conference appeared in the Washington Post. D’Souza selectively quoted from Dr. Francis’ speech and presented the quotes in a very unfavourable light. And so, Dr. Francis lost his job at theWashington Times.

He remained on the editorial staff of Chronicles, of course, to which he contributed each month, either his “Principalities and Powers” column or a book review or feature article. The Creators Syndicate continued to distribute his column. In the latter he offered his commentary on the news of the day and, while immigration was the issue that he most frequently addressed, he covered a broad gamut of topics, including free trade and globalization, gun control, and the erosion of civil liberties. He supported the presidential candidacies of his friend Patrick Buchanan and kept a watchful eye on the doings of those who actually made it to the White House. Scathing as his criticism of the Clinton administration was, he was no less severe in his assessment of George W. Bush. He contrasted the way in which the Bush administration had expanded its policing powers, undermining the civil liberties of Americans in the process, by means of antiterrorist legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act, with the way in which it refused to use its existing, lawful, powers to control immigration, this contrast being a classic example of anarchotyranny. In 2002 he wrote several columns against the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iraq and when that invasion took place saw his arguments more than justified. His arguments against the war were far more sane, sensible, and interesting than either the neocon arguments for the war or the blithering banalities uttered against it by the left-wing peaceniks. His final column was about George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech and it concluded by saying that Bush had “confirmed once and for all that the neo-conservatism to which he has delivered his administration and the country is fundamentally indistinguishable from the liberalism many conservatives imagine he has renounced and defeated.”

In his Chronicles column, where he had more space to work with, he discussed the same topics at a deeper level. From James Burnham, about whose ideas he had written a book, he had learned much about the nature of power and the elites who inevitably hold it, including the present elite of technocratic managers who preside over the dismantling of the traditions, culture, and civilization of Western societies and rationalize their actions with the universalistic ideology of liberalism. From liberal sociologist Donald Warren he had gleaned insights into how the alliance of the uppermost and lowermost classes in the welfare state was putting the squeeze on the middle class, radicalizing what is ordinarily the most stable of classes, and thus generating a support base that a populist movement could use against the elites. From these insights, Dr. Francis framed his argument for such a populist “revolt from the middle”, bending the cold, hard, theory of Machiavellian power politics to serve ends that was anything but cold and hard – the cause of white, middle class Americans, who were seeing everything they held dear, their culture and religion, traditions and way of life, on every level from the regional to the national, including the constitution of their republic and their habits and institutions of freedom, being mercilessly swept away by elites they seemed powerless to stop. First in the New Right that brought Ronald Reagan into power, and later in the movement that failed to deliver the presidency to Pat Buchanan, he had found movements that could potentially achieve his ends. The dilemma for which he was seeking a solution to the very end of his life, as can be seen in his last “Principalities and Powers” article entitled “Towards a Hard Right”, was how such a movement could gain success without being sidetracked from its goals by corporate globalists dangling the carrot of the free market before its eyes.