A review of Andrew Fraser’s book in the 2012 Salisbury Review:
‘The few proudly Anglo-Saxon patriots scattered around the world are now political pariahs’, declares Andrew Fraser in The WASP Question. ‘In an age of diversity, they are the invisible race. But their fate is not foreclosed; neither the gene pool nor the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race is doomed to extinction.’ This former Australian university teacher, after analysing the present predicament of people of English ancestry in an era of commercial materialism and compulsory multiracialism, assesses their chances of survival and revival.
The ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ acronym, which began as an epithet for US wealthy founder dynasties, now stretches to anyone of British descent. Quite correctly Fraser regards all ‘Wasps’ within the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and North America – as a large ethnic group. They generally possess all four characteristics of ethnicity – phenotypic subspecies (Caucasian), ancestral territory (England), mother tongue (English), and religious tradition (Christian).
The Germanic tribes who founded our Saxon kingdoms absorbed many blood-related Britons, Danes and Normans; Scots, Welsh and Huguenots subsequently strengthened the heartland patrimony. And the transatlantic settlers had undeniably varied ethno-religious backgrounds. Compare Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Utah, whose English descended Mormons today combine a bizarre theology with civic achievements.
The faith of the Venerable Bede’s ‘Gens Anglorum’ has transmuted from Thomas Arundel’s medieval ‘Marian Dowry’, through Arthur Bryant’s imperial ‘Protestant Island’ to Cole Morton’s currently abysmal ‘Everywhere and Nowhere, Baby’ with ‘black’ archbishops confronting lesbian ‘priests’, while churches become mosques or museums, and secularists try to clear the faithful from the public space.
The crucial problem is that Wasps, however precisely classified, either no longer possess a positive self-identity as a specific group, or see themselves collectively only in a guilt-relationship towards other communities, who blatantly assert their own ethnicities. In ‘societies’ obliged to ‘celebrate’ intrusive and incompatible ‘cultures’ and fund their grievance obsessed organisations, the erstwhile majority is losing both legitimate self-esteem and effective power within each homeland. ‘The roosters have become featherdusters.’
Particularly serious is Wasp demographic decline, aggravated by non-stop mass-immigration. Whether politicians attempt to preserve the heritage by incompetently ‘assimilating’ newcomers, or to betray it by ‘equality’ and dissolve it through ‘diversity’, it is indeed fallacious to think any distinctive civilization can indefinitely outlive its biological basis.
Fraser brings his formidable expertise in constitutional law to describe government structures from 9th century Wessex down to 21st century Washington, reinforcing his analysis with an erudition that embraces Hannah Arendt, Robert Bellah, Harold Cruse and John Milbank. He shows how a system once shaped by Anglo-Saxon folkways has been perverted into one that nullifies them, and contends that rescuing the founderrace and restoring control over its own future is morally justified. He envisages a future alternative: a worldwide self-sustaining network of English-speaking kinsfolk with their own guilds and churches, fondly recalling countryside villages and prairie homesteads.
Fraser believes the world economy is heading for a prolonged crisis and violent extremism. He is hardly alone; for instance, the economist Nouriel Rubini predicts a ‘perfect storm’ in 2013 from Eurozone chaos, American recession and Middle East war. Such retribution for managerial multiracialism, welfare parasitism, anomic consumerism, and the global nomadism of a mixed multitude, would consequently provide an opening for effective rebellion against the failed propositions and disintegrating structures of the ruling racketeers. However, any deliberate switch amid the wreckage, from hollowed-out constitutionalism towards an Anglo-Saxon ‘racial’ resurrection, requires, especially in our cyberwarfare era, realistic early preparation. There is little sign of that.
Reconsidering Viscount Bolingbroke (Henry IV), Fraser anticipates the emergence of a ‘patriot king’, freed from the conventional advice of ‘godless ministers’. And who can rule out completely someone of royal lineage and personal wisdom eventually seeing his sacred duty in sweeping away corruption, during a severe emergency, and restoring ‘Crown, Church, and Country’?
Nevertheless, serious questions arise: First, will Fraser’s Anglo-Saxon remnant, however united and therefore strengthened, stay as a self-sustaining archipelago, or develop its people-hood into a territorial state-hood, thereby regaining hegemony over urban centres largely occupied by foreigners; and if so, how? Secondly, he draws on the notion of evolutionary competition, which threatens conflict with rival communities on an increasingly overpopulated, resource-depleted planet. Fraser’s plans would require partnership with fellow-Europeans, from Catholic Irish to Orthodox Greeks, at least for common self-defence in any forthcoming major clash of civilizations. He opposes a comprehensive ‘white nationalism’ as vacuous and egalitarian, but surely it is prudent to preserve not merely ourselves from catastrophe but other western Caucasians and their creative elites? Thirdly, Fraser regards religion as decisively important. Without prescribing its detailed liturgy, ministry or doctrine, he proposes an exclusive Anglican ‘Volkskirche’. Unfortunately it resembles a ring-fenced sect, his fusion of ethnicity with worship complicating rather than resolving the spiritual exigencies of our time.
Despite the negative impact of modern scholarship on the credibility of scripture, the author pushes his religious remedies even further with ‘biblical’ arguments against racial intermarriage and an idiosyncratic exegesis of the ‘second coming’ in terms of the ancient destruction of Jerusalem. Nearly two millennia of ecclesiastical experience after Saint Paul ‘turned to the Gentiles’, Fraser too readily invokes the Holy Spirit for his private interpretation and Divine Wrath for his novel mission. However his lucid prose style sparkles with striking imagery and neat alliterations. His book is also beautifully printed. Eccentric even in the heretically pagan Arktos list, it makes a refreshing change from the usual C-of-E bookstall pap. Whether or not by ‘imagining the whole of life – at work and at play, at home, school, and church, in law and even politics – as a form of prayer, the Old Faith will help to hasten that happy moment’ when AngloSaxons themselves are ‘reborn as a people of destiny’, remains debatable. So why not debate it?
