El ejercicio del derecho a la libertad ideológica y religiosa

Being asked to speak about European civilization is like being asked to throw an enormous spool of string into the future, and to try and grasp it as it goes away from you.

What do you talk about? Do you talk about the art? Do you talk about the architecture? Do you talk about the science? Do you talk about the history of various nation-states on the European Continent? Do you talk about what white people have achieved when they’ve gone abroad into the other continents of the world?

Do you talk about politics in a more narrow way? Or do talk about metapolitics, in other words, the ideas, the philosophy, the culture and history as they impact upon a high level of consciousness and as these gradually feed down into lower-level, more intermediate, more street-political sorts of formulations?

What I’ve decided to do is to be optimistic, in relation to some of the pessimism that we’ve heard from various speakers this afternoon. And to look at what European culture and civilization has achieved.

Now, it’s such a broad canvas that I’m going to look at two works, that are tragic works. One is a tragedy by Aeschylus called Agamemnon, and another is a tragedy by Shakespeare called King Lear. And the reason I’ve picked these out, is because during the course of the 20th century there have been various travesties of these tragedies produced by the Left. I think in particular of Steven Berkoff’s version of Agamemnon, and I think in particular of the Marxist playwright Edward Bond’s version of King Lear, which was called Lear.

Those who know Lear will remember that it involves a blinding scene when Gloucester is blinded by Cornwall, in the middle of the play, in Act III, I believe. But in order to mechanize this in a more materialistic way, Edward Bond has a machine: a machine that removes eyeballs, as a complaint against capitalist violence and against violence per se.

Just to fill in a little bit of a paraphrase here, Bond is a Marxist playwright.

Marxist playwrights took over the British stage and British theater in the

1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, particularly influenced by Brecht’s idea of epic theater.

Bond produced a Left-wing version of Lear, in which Lear is a mad king who of course gives his territory away to scheming sons, in this case, scheming daughters in two of the cases in Shakespeare’s drama.

Lear suffers terribly for this at different levels, and is brought to a form of realization as to his own folly, the nature of kingship, and many moral causative factors about life, by virtue of the suffering that’s imposed upon him because of his primordial mistake. When you have a kingdom, you never divide it, because you are inviting civil war into your own self, if you’re a monarch, and into your own territory, regardless of anything.

Bond is quite unusual, because Bond is obsessed with the issue of violence.

And like a lot of playwrights and filmmakers who are opposed to violence, his entire work consists of violence. All the time. Mayhem, rapes, gouging out of eyes, autopsies on the stage. Mock autopsies, of course, with plenty of blood:

watery red liquid and bits of sponge moving about which indicate that they’re sort of fillets of steak drawn from the human body. Because in a sense Bond is a materialist, and things have to be kept at a material level even when he’s dealing with classic drama.

One of the great difficulties of the contemporary Left—certainly, if we go back over the last 30 to 40 years—has been to deal with Stalinism. Why did their project of universal human emancipation end up with Stalinism, in every sense? Why did it fail, catastrophically, even in its own terms? Why did a doctrine of radical human rights where all would love and all would congeal and all would come together in the fastness of our days, end up with the Gulag?

This is something that is very, very difficult to answer.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the Left-wing intellectual in France, ended up as a Maoist towards the end of his life, with Simone de Beauvoir. He attempted to answer it in an enormous philosophical work, called The Critique of Dialectical Reason, based on Kant’s volume of several centuries before. Sartre was trying to synthesize existentialism and Marxism as two of the great currents of intellectual thought in the 20th century.

But when he got to Stalinism, and when he got to the attempt to explain the internal dialectic and convolutions of the Soviet Union post-Lenin’s death, and after the defeat of Trotsky and his Left opposition faction in the Party in 1928, he hit a brick wall. He couldn’t go any further. The second volume of The Critique couldn’t be written, because in a sense it’s unanswerable even in the terms of his own theory.²⁵

Bond believes that violence is irrational and proceeds from bourgeois man and the context of capitalist competition. But the problem with this, as in the problem with all Marxism, is there is a complete voiding of the biological realities of life.

Man—men and women, in all groups—are 80% inherited, at least, 80%

generic, 80% genetic, 80% hereditarian. And the socialized element, the naturalizing, normative element, where we’re reared through parents, the psychology of the relationship that we have with them, where we’re culturalized through education and behaviorism in a society: that’s 20%. And even that is ecology, which is a species of biology. Everybody knows ecology is a subject area within biology.

It’s almost as if the 20% which is actually given by naturalization—that which is nurture rather than nature to use old-fashioned formulations from the 1960s—is actually part and parcel of nature itself. Because what sets us up and primes us to be naturalized as human beings if not nature itself?

So there’s an easy answer to Sartre and to Bond, and to other people of this sort who pretend that there is a deeply complex and invidious set of reasons as to why the Left-wing projects ended up in the way that they did.

It’s now a canard, it’s now a sort of species of rhetoric, that Stalin’s Soviet Union was one of the worst regimes that’s ever existed in human history. I recently re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, which is a satire upon the Hampstead Left of his day, and which is a satire against the Soviet Union of its time.

I remember Peter Hain was once asked, what are the glories of Western Civilization? Hain of course, an ex-South African liberal Leftist who was head of the anti-apartheid movement when he came to this country, said that there are no triumphs to Western civilization. He said that there’s nothing to be proud of at all. All we’ve created is Hitler and Stalin. Don’t forget he’s on the Center-Left. So to include Stalin is in a way a mélange “own goal” in relation to what could be perceived to be his own side.

The fact that Bond and Sartre—and Hain, who’s a much lesser intellect than either of those—compute the same failure is due to the fact that they irreducibly deny the biological basis to civilization.

Race is culture and culture is race, essentially, put very tendentiously and very crudely and far too crudely than many intellectuals would like, or feel comfortable with. But there is a degree to which everything that exists has to come out of something which existed before it. It has to have a primal root. It

has to have a foundation. It has to be “racinated,” to use Simone Weil’s term. It has to come from some egg, or some implantation of self, which gives birth to it.

This is one of the reasons for the pessimism of some of our speakers earlier today, because they don’t see any European high culture being created at the present time. And although there’s an enormous mélange and superfluity of culture being created at the present time, particularly by the state-subsidized and semi-capitalist arts.

One also has to say, where is the greatness of a universal cultural Western exhibitionism being created today? Because if you look around you don’t see it. What you do see is deconstruction on the opera stage. Whereby you will have Cosi Fan Tutte, and you’ll have a urinal in the middle of the stage. A urinal, into which men empty their bladders.

Now why is that on the stage? It’s because the people who have put that piece of work on are rebelling against the nature of the piece. They’re at war with the text. This is what they would tell you. They’re attacking the text, even as they’re putting it on. It’s a sort of masochism in a way, because it means even if they’re going forwards they’re pummeling themselves in the face, rhetorically, and watching it in a mirror. And they’ve got a film camera like that one over there, filming them pummeling themselves in the mirror.

Because what they’re frightened of is too much authentication. What they’re frightened of is too much cultural affirmation. Because if things are culturally affirmed in a prior or an identitarian sort of a way they’re conceived to be “too white,” or “too European,” or too “ur-,” or “too fascistic,” or “too dangerously tribal.”

And that’s the reason these things are done. Everything is done for a reason.

This society, in all of its very complex processes and cultural formations, exists for interconnected sets of reasons. Nothing is purely accidental or contingent. Things may come together by virtue of accident and things feeding off each other in a way that one thing will spawn a concept related to itself.

But things are rooted in structures of being and belonging which have either been torn up and thrown to the side, or actually subsist and come out of something that’s related prior to their existence.

Why did a Left-wing playwright like Berkoff rewrite Agamemnon in the 1960s and 1970s, which is a play by Aeschylus from ancient Greece? Why did Bond rewrite King Lear? They did this because they wanted to take some of the primal energy that exists in these amazing cultural forms and use it for their

own purposes. They also wanted to have versions of their own of Aeschylus and Shakespeare that they could put on without any filter and without the older texts, which could be perceived as reactionary or unprogressive, or created before the era of progress, created in both cases before the liberal Enlightenment of 200 years ago or more. They wanted a situation where you could refer to a text which is of this present hour and of its present prejudices.

Now Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is the beginning of a series of tragedies called the Oresteia and survives from a Greek competition. Everything in Greece was competitive. Sport was competitive, but art was competitive.

When people wrote a tragedy, it would compete with other tragedies, and there would be a vote. And Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus, who were the three tragedians that come down to us, won quite a lot of those votes.

This play is about revenge, and it’s about the primal, and it’s about sources of identity. It’s about the aftermath of the Trojan Wars, when Agamemnon comes back from Troy, which they have successfully destroyed after a long siege. He brings with him Cassandra, who may or may not be with child by him. She is the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy, whom he seduced and has kept as a concubine or mistress. He comes back to Argos, the city-state from which he left prior to the Trojan adventure, with the desire to flaunt the fact that Troy has been destroyed, but maybe not to the degree that his wife who’s plotting his murder, Clytemnestra, wishes.

Clytemnestra is one of the greatest characters created in Western art. She is the prototype for Lady Macbeth; she is the prototype for all of the powerful women in Western drama, Western cinema, and Western art, who in a sense often adopted a quasi-male role. This is hinted at very much in the early part of the play where she’s described as a “man-minded woman,” a woman with the mind of a man, a woman who’s a woman on the outside and a man on the inside.

She has taken a lover while Agamemnon has been away—because he’s taken a few, close to Troy’s walls—and the lover is Aegisthus. And Aegisthus is a man who has a bias and a prejudice against the house of Atreus, which is Agamemnon’s particular house. And this is because of an act of cannibalism which occurred earlier in the history and trajectory of the house of Atreus, whereby Thyestes served up the sons and daughters of Atreus for his own consumption. And it’s because of this blood on the hands and blood in the mouth, and because of this autophagy, this cannibalism which has occurred, that a curse, a curse has been placed upon this house by Atreus, and every so

often this curse has to ventilate itself.

One of the ways in which the curse ventilated itself is Agamemnon putting to death Iphigenia, one of his daughters he had with Clytemnestra. He did this because the Greek fleet, by myth, was stalled at Aulis and couldn’t reach the coast where Troy was. Therefore a sacrifice had to be given the gods. And he was told that he had to sacrifice one of his daughters, Iphigenia, in order to do so. Clytemnestra has never forgiven him for this, and is waiting to revenge herself when he returns to Argos.

When he returns to Argos, she makes him walk upon the purple, or upon the red, in certain of the theatrical versions of this play. It’s illicit for a Greek to ape the gods, because the gods are jealous of undue greatness in a human being, which is called hubris, false pride, the pride that portends before a fall.

Clytemnestra wants Agamemnon to walk upon the purple, partly because it would justify her later murderous rages and actions against him.

Agamemnon holds out against this, but in the end he walks upon the purple.

It’s a great moment, when there’s a series of doors at the back of the stage, and Agamemnon walks upon the purple as Clytemnestra is at the front of the stage with the chorus, until he finally goes into the palace from which he will not emerge, other than as a corpse.

Whether she murders him in the stagecraft with an axe or a sword, is to me textually unclear: there’s evidence for both. Aegisthus gives her a sword, but she also slaughters in the way that you slaughter an animal for sacrifice in accordance with Greek traditions, and this is with an axe. Many of the classical paintings of this play from the 19th century, particularly in English and British art, show Clytemnestra with an axe, either leaning on the axe, or holding the axe over a net. The net is there because these are the curtains, the netting that she actually traps Agamemnon in, prior to giving the blows that kill him in the bath. This is a scenario which has been worked out by Aegisthus, but Aegisthus is regarded as a weakling, because he gets Clytemnestra to do the murder.

One of the greatest scenes in Western drama is when the chorus of Argive elders are talking to the herald, and later then talk to Cassandra as the murder takes place. There’s a great cry and a shout, a sort of “Aaahhh!” from offstage.

And the chorus hears it and wonders what it is, and they’re terrified—the chorus are old men from the city of Argos. And they wonder whether Cassandra’s warnings about the possibility of Agamemnon’s death are true.

Now Cassandra is in Agamemnon’s car, in his chariot, as he pulls up. And

she has been afflicted by Apollo with the gift of second sight, so she can see the future. But because she spurned his advances, as a god he has cursed her with the fact that people will only recognize that she has second sight after the event. So she becomes a prophet of illicit loss, if you like. She can only ask the question that others will not accept until they have the evidence before them.

So she appears to be a false prophet until she’s proved to be right. In other words, her capacity for prophecy never has any positive outcome or goal at the time that she gives it. She’s always going to be frustrated in that regard. And the interesting thing is, is that the chorus of Argive elders is partly won over to her complaints, but also rejects her. And this is why in the journalistic tradition that surrounds us today with multiple media platforms, people who warn against a coming danger are often referred to as Cassandras, for adopting the role of Cassandra.

Suddenly, of course, she turns and goes back into the palace, knowing that she will be added to the death total with Agamemnon, because she is killed as his lover with Agamemnon by Clytemnestra at Aegisthus’ behalf.

Then this great moment occurs, which is a moment of catharsis in Aristotle’s terms. Aristotle believed that the point of tragedy was to put on the stage the negative, or more ferocious, or more diabolical side of man, the non-dualist side of man, in order to overcome it.

Because life is born in pain, dies in pain, and consists of quite a lot of pain during the intermediary stages between birth and death. And in order to overcome and face that, particularly in a stoical way, you needed to take up these negative emotions into yourself and have them purged, have them sublimated, to use a modern word. And the way that you purge them is by watching tragedy.

This is why people have always liked to be entertained by watching unpleasant things. It’s a characteristic of our species. And all genres like horror, and all the rest of it, rely upon the fact that people like to see conflict.

They like to see contumaciousness; they like to see that which in other circumstances could be perceived as threatening.

And this is what occurs when the doors are flung open at the back of the

And this is what occurs when the doors are flung open at the back of the