by K. R. Bolton
The means of achieving this unity and strength was through “Corporatism,” a form of government that was attracting widespread support from around the world during the 1930s as a means of overcoming the crisis of capitalism while avoiding the destructiveness of communism. Corporatism had become the system of government under which Fascist Italy functioned, where the democratic party structure of parliament was replaced by chambers of corporations representing the crafts and professions. Corporatism also agreed with Catholic social doctrine, and certain “fascist” parties in some countries took specifically Catholic forms, such as Rexism in Belgium, Hungarism in Hungary, the Irish Blueshirts, Adrien Arcand’s movement in Canada, etc. Corporatism was seen at the time by many as the wave of the future, and corporatist regimes formed in Brazil, Portugal, Austria, and Italy before the war. Stephensen also refers to the Corporate State as, “the Body Politic” and the “Social Organism,” “A political idea as old as humanity, a biological fact as old as organic life.”291
The organic social order had existed until the French and American Revolutions. Stephensen explains how these upheavals undermined the traditional social order with “democratic sectionalism,” and “an alleged equality inspired by the thoughts of J.-J. Rousseau,” the Swiss philosopher. The result, under the facade of democracy and equality, was not to empower “the people,” but to empower industrial and financial interests which are able to use democracy to undermine any authority and power. However, Corporatism enables the social organism to function as “an integral whole” subjecting sectional interests, whether class or party, to the interests of the community, like the cells of a biological organism that all function for the common good of the whole.
While Stephensen believed this Corporatist or organic state was necessary to bring harmony between the social and economic classes, and expected both capital and labor to restrain their sectional demands for the benefit of the whole, his ideas on financial and economic policy do not seem to have been well developed. Despite his opposition to “international Jew finance,” as he put it, and his recognition that the Axis countries had thrown off the power of the plutocrats, his statements on policy do not reflect a recognition that the Axis economies were based on state regulation of credit and currency creation and a system of trade based on barter. Instead, Stephensen opts for more orthodox banking practices and condemns theories of credit expansion and specifically Social Credit, to which many like-minded men of letters such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot adhered as a means of overthrowing the rule of money. Hence the points on economics in the 50-point program include:
44. For industrial development; against speculation.
45. For competition; against monopoly.
46. For private ownership; against government encroachment.
47. For conservative banking practice; against inflation.
48. For less taxation; against greater taxation.
49. For reduction of debt; against increase of debt.
50. For world trade; against restricted trade.292
He does, however, expect capitalists to invest their capital in productive rather than speculative enterprises once the state has ensured an economic climate generating reasonable returns for such investment. His opposition to debt, increased taxation, and speculation, nonetheless failed to tackle the root cause of these factors in the economy. This was the debt-finance system, and many nationalists of the time recognized the necessity of replacing it with an alternative system such as C. H. Douglas’ Social Credit, or state credit, endorsed by Ezra Pound, Rex Fairburn, etc. His primary platform on banking referred to: “conservative banking practice; against inflation.” The inadequacy of this financial policy is all the more remarkable considering that in Australia at the time, as in New Zealand, Social Credit had a popular following. State credit had also been a major demand in the Australian Labour movement, as it had in New Zealand, where the iconic “state housing project” had provided work for 75% of the unemployed by the use of 1% state credit.293
STEPHENSEN’S “REASONED CASE AGAINST SEMITISM”
Stephensen, like other Rightist men of letters such as Ezra Pound, retained friendships with Jews as individuals but expressed animosity towards a perceived Jewish political agenda and regarded Jews as an unassimilable minority. His partner in Mandrake Press was Jewish, Edward Goldston, as was his collaborator on the Crowley biography, Israel Regardie, who was to retain a life-long affectionate memory of “Inky.”294
Stephensen presented his “Reasoned Case Against Semitism” in 1940 in The Australian Quarterly. He states that anti-Semitism arises as an anti-toxin to the toxin of an aggressive “pro-Semitism.” His concern with the Jewish question seems to have been particularly prompted by a suggestion that a territory in northwest Australia be set aside for Jewish refugees from Europe. Stephensen opposed any “cessation” of Australian land.
He saw in the Jews a highly-organized, separatist minority which pursued its own interests. The Jews remain a separate minority by choice, indeed by their insistence as a “God-Chosen People.” Stephensen states that “they cannot have it both ways”—being treated as no different to anyone else, while insisting on remaining aloof from the nation in which they reside. Their propaganda includes agitation for internationalism and the concept of the “Universal Oneness of Mankind” among Gentiles, yet they have maintained themselves through 5000 years by a most exclusivistic racialism. Stephensen states that nobody likes being “humbugged” with such a double standard.
Stephensen compares the manner by which a small number of Jews are able to wield immense influence through a superior close-knit communal organization to the manner by which communist cells were able to insinuate themselves into institutions and get their measures adopted by an unsuspecting and mostly lethargic majority. The “too-zealous propagandists of the Jewish Cause” in Australia had done the Jews a disservice by drawing attention to the them as a distinct community, for anti-Semitism is a reaction to aggressive pro-Semitism and neither exists unless a nation is in a pathological state.
To Stephensen, exclusion of Jewish immigrants is simply a continuation of the White Australia policy that had been a mainstay for the development of Australian nationhood, based on the aim of what he calls “Fused-European Homogeneity.” European migrants had discarded their Old-World ties and amalgamated to form what was becoming an Australian nationality. Australia had “antedated Hitler’s ‘racial theories’ by fifty years.”
It is of interest that the White Australia policy was not of imperial or capitalistic origin but was instead one of the primary aims of the Australian Labour movement, which met principal opposition from both the British Colonial Office and from Australian business interests which sought a pool of coolie labor.295 The demand for immigration restriction was an ideal—a nation-building mythos—that shaped Australian identity, albeit one that was predictably subverted in recent decades by the bourgeois Left (antithetical to “Old Labour”) in tandem with Big Business.296 Among the most memorable advocates of the policy were the working-class literati, such as the poet Henry Lawson, and also William Lane, founder of the Australian Labor Federation. In pre-emption of Stephensen, Lane stated: “We are for this Australia, for the nationality which is creeping on the verge of being . . . Here we face the hordes of the east as our kinsmen faced them in the dim distant past . . .”297
Should Jews forego their Jewishness and fully integrate and intermarry there would be no Jewish problem. That they do not do so is their choice, but Stephensen was convinced that they would never forsake their Jewishness, and so the Jewish problem would remain. “Here then we are faced with a defiance by Jews of the fundamental principle of Fused-European Homogeneity which it is the basic aim of Australian national policy to establish and maintain. They claim the right not only to settle here but to maintain themselves in perpetuity, as a self-segregated minority, of different and distinct racial stock from the rest of the Australian community.”298 It is, as he points out, a matter of
perspective. As a non-Jew in any conflict of interest between Jew and Gentile he would instinctively side with his own. Stephensen’s loyalty was to Australia, and a large migration of Jewish refugees from Europe would undermine the Australia that he wished to see developing as a nation, culture, and people on its own account.
INTERNMENT
Such sentiments were regarded as treasonous by the authorities whose government had tied Australia to British imperial and American, i.e., plutocratic, interests. Additionally, several individuals and groups had gained the attention of military intelligence as possible collaborators in the event of a Japanese invasion.299 Some of these were loosely connected to the Australia First Movement.
“Enemy aliens,” including those who were anti-fascist, were being interned.300 Sixteen supporters of the Australia First movement, whom the press described as a “spy ring,”301 including Stephensen and his brother Eric, were detained under Regulation 26 at Liverpool internment camp in March 1942. Police occupied the Publicist office. The poet and author Ian Mudie, an executive member of the movement, was questioned but not interned, although he was to remark that he was either as “guilty” or “innocent” as those who were. Muirden comments: “Strangely, the Publicist was not banned, and the movement was not officially proscribed.”302 However, this was unnecessary, and perhaps could be regarded as being hypocritical, since Stephensen, and the other two proprietors of The Publicist were interned with key members.
The Bulletin remained strongly opposed to the internments, and made much of one of the internees being “an Old Digger.” The latter, Martin Watts, a holder of the Military Medal from the First World War, was conditionally released after a few months along with several others. However, Watts’s job was gone, and he died several weeks later of bronchial pneumonia, exacerbated by his internment.303 The internees were questioned before a secret tribunal, and no record was kept of proceedings, although one internee did manage to record the questions. Despite Australia First never having been banned, the questions directed at the internees make it plain that they were being persecuted because of their association with the movement. 304
Transferred to Loveday Camp, then to Tatura Camp, Stephensen spent three-and-a-half years interned.305
After the war, several ex-internees continued to campaign for exoneration, and two issued a reprint of the 1942 issues of the Publicist to provide a “durable historical record” that would show their loyalty and patriotism.
POST-WAR
Ian Mudie had been keen to see Australia First revived. However, Stephensen was optimistic regarding the development of Australia’s national consciousness and believed the aims of the movement were being realized. The imperial connection was dissipating, and there was a growing interest in Australian culture.
For the first decade after the war Stephensen was mainly involved in assisting Australian writers, principally Frank Clune.306 By 1959 Stephensen had sufficiently re-established his literary reputation to be asked to undertake a Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture tour of South Australia with Mudie. The lectures were published as Nationalism in Australian Literature.307 Other such lectures followed in Queensland in 1961.308 By this time, his continuing theme of an Australian national culture was meeting with wider support.
Stephensen’s literary output continued at an impressive rate, and included The Viking of Van Diemen’s Land,309 The Cape Horn Breed,310 Sail Ho!,311 Sydney Sails,312 The Pirates of the Brig Cyprus,313 and The History and Description of Sydney Harbour.314 His seminal Foundations of Culture in Australia was republished in 1986.315
Stephensen collapsed and died on May 28, 1965 after giving a lively address on Lady Chatterley’s Lover.316 He never moderated his beliefs.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
November 20, 2011
CHAPTER 5
REX FAIRBURN
A. R. D. “Rex” Fairburn, 1904–1957, is not usually identified with the “Right.” As a central figure in the development of a New Zealand national literature, much of the contemporary self-appointed literary establishment would no doubt wish to identify Fairburn with Marxism or liberalism, as they would other leading literary friends of Fairburn’s such as the communist R. A. K. Mason. However, the primary influences on Fairburn were distinctly non-Left, and include D. H. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and of course Social Credit’s Major C. H. Douglas.
While Fairburn described himself at times as an “anarchist,”317 it was of a most unorthodox type, being neither Left-wing nor Libertarian. Fairburn outspokenly rejected all the baggage dear to the Left, including feminism and internationalism. His “anarchism” was a type of Right-wing individualism that called for a return to decentralized communities comprised of self-reliant craftsmen and farmers. His creed was distinctly nationalistic and based on the spiritual and the biological components of history and culture, both concepts being antithetical to any form of Leftism.
We feel more than justified, then, in identifying Fairburn as an “Artist of the Right.”
THE REJECTION OF RATIONALISM
Fairburn was born in modest but middle-class circumstances. He was proud of being a fourth-generation New Zealander related to the missionary Colenso. Although critical of the church hierarchy and briefly involved with the Rationalist Association, Fairburn was for most of his life a spiritual person, believing that the individual becomes most profoundly who he is by striving towards God. He believed in a basic Christian ethic minus any moralism. Fairburn soon realized that rationalism by itself answers nothing and that it rejects the dream world that is the source of creativity. He was in agreement here with other poets of the Right such as Yeats, and throughout his life often stated his rejection of materialism.
While he agreed with his friend Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, who called poets a “spiritual aristocracy,” Fairburn at first thought socialism was the way to “free artists of economic, worldly shackles,” and even made sporadic favorable references to Communism.318 However, he looked in particular to the non-doctrinaire socialism not of a political theorist but of another artistic luminary, Oscar Wilde, whose essay on the subject319 he enthusiastically recommended to Potocki. Wilde advocating the elimination of the “burden” of private property to free the creative spirit from economic drudgery.320
Potocki would have no belief in socialism of any type other than “national socialism,” and Fairburn would find the answer to the economic question he was looking for in Social Credit. Nonetheless, these early socialist interests were part of Fairburn’s quest for a more humane system.
Throughout his life, Fairburn rejected any form of materialism and rationalism, and it seems likely that in his youth he had not realized that these are features of communism and of most forms of socialism, given his rather romantic ideal of “socialism” and even of Communism. Fairburn came to see the counting-house mentality as intrinsic to rationalism and it repelled his sense of the spiritual.
He wrote of this counting-house mentality,
having rejected Jonah and Genesis,
contrived to erect
a towering edifice of belief
on the assumption that God
is an abridgement of the calculus
and lived happily
ever after.
What is adequate suffices.321
ENGLAND
Potocki had left New Zealand in disgust at the cultural climate and persuaded Fairburn to join him in London, since New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born for: “to make and to mould a New Zealand civilization,” as Potocki stated it.
Fairburn arrived in London in 1930. Like Potocki, he was not impressed with bohemian society and the Bloomsbury intellectuals who were riddled with homosexuality, for which both Potocki and Fairburn had an abiding dislike.322 Fairburn was reading and identifying with Roy Campbell’s biting satire and ridicule of Bloomsbury,323 and there was much of the “wild colonial boy” in both men’s personalities.
However, away from the
bohemianism, intellectualism, and pretentiousness of the city, Fairburn came to appreciate the ancestral attachment with England that was still relevant to New Zealanders through a continuing, persistent “earth-memory.”324
In London, he felt the decay and decadence of the city. Like Knut Hamsun and Henry Williamson, Fairburn conceived of a future “tilling the soil.” He now stated: “I’m going to be a peasant, if necessary, to keep in touch with life,” and he and his future wife lived for a year in a thatch-roofed cottage in Wiltshire.
Having eschewed rationalism and godlessness early on, conceiving a land and culture in metaphysical terms gave Fairburn a deeper spirituality than he could find in modern religion, and the land became fundamental to his world-view. His reading of Spengler made him acutely aware of the land and the farmer-peasant as the foundations of a healthy culture. He was also aware of the symptoms of cultural decay and of the predominance of money-values in the “winter” cycle of a civilization, when the land becomes denuded of people and debt-ridden, with foreclosures and urban drift.
The barn is bare of hoof and horn,
the yard is empty of its herds;
the thatch is grey with age and torn,
and spattered with the dung of birds.
The well is full of newts, the chain
long broken, and the spindle cracked,
and deep in nettles stands the wain
