CHAPTER TWO: Anthony Mario Ludovici: A 'Light-Weight Superman'
I prefer to be known by posterity as a writer of accurate and prophetic vision, rather than as a time-server and stooge of Philistinism who acquired ephemeral fame by toeing the conventional line marked out by his least enlightened contemporaries.
-- Anthony Ludovici, Confessions of an Antifeminist, 1969, p. 355
Who has ever seen an old man who did not praise former times and condemn the present, loading on to the world the weight of his own wretchedness and on to the manners of men his own melancholy!
-- Michel de Montaigne, 'On Judging Someone Else's Death', Essays, II: 13
In November-December 1908, at the age of 26, Anthony Mario Ludovici lectured at the University of London on the subject of Nietzsche's philosophy. From the man who later translated Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche's infamous biography of her brother, it comes as no surprise to find statements such as the following: 'The strong will and must discharge their strength, and in doing so, the havoc they may make of other beings in their environment is purely incidental.' [1] In 1967, displaying a remarkable lifelong attachment to ideas that had long since become unfashionable, Ludovici claimed in his last book that 'everywhere in Europe the mob, high and low, has been indoctrinated with the Liberal heresy that heredity plays no part in human breeding, and that therefore special endowments cannot be transmitted from one generation to another'. [2]
In this chapter I discuss the writings of Anthony Ludovici, a man who, despite his many publications (over fifty books and pamphlets, and numerous articles), has been almost totally forgotten. [3] The interest of Ludovici's extreme ideology lies not in 'the fact that he was the only person to espouse the views he did -- at least before 1939 -- but in the fact that he continued to maintain his position until his death in 1971, entirely failing to modify his opinions. Furthermore, the peculiar melange of ideas which went into making Ludovici's ideology cannot easily be labelled with any familiar term. I argue that we should not forget the 'extremes of Englishness' just because its ideas, here represented by Ludovici, did not ultimately inform policy. [4]
While it would be overstating the case to claim that Ludovici's writings were widely influential, he was well known as a public figure, whose ideas, particularly early on in his career, acquired some intellectual currency. But the Whiggish view of history which still dominates interpretations of British fascism -- that its failure was a result of the inherent strength of British parliamentary institutions -- means that he has long been ignored. Ludovici's idiosyncratic blend of Forster-Nietzscheanism, Lamarckianism, social Darwinism, antisemitism, anti-feminism, monarchism and aristocratic conservatism was, however, not as ridiculous to Edwardian minds as it is to ours today; it is easy to dismiss Ludovici as a crank, and therefore miss the fact that many of his ideas chimed in with those being espoused by people on the left as well as on the right certainly before 1914, and even until 1939. I argue that reminding ourselves of the existence of men such as Ludovici -- who was not as marginal as might at first appear -- can help in dispelling the complacency which still surrounds the historiography of British fascism.
Studying Ludovici can also provide a wider context for the stormy intellectual milieu that witnessed the birth of modernism. W. B. Yeats, for example, was a mystical nationalist and eugenicist, and in On the Boiler (1939) his ideas -- with the exception of antisemitism -- were very close to those of Ludovici. [5] And advocating eugenics, even if not of the extreme, 'negative' sort with its total dependence on hereditary factors, [6] was as common on the left in the Edwardian and post-First World War period -- Shaw, Ellis, the Webbs -- as on the right. There is a certain contingency about the play of ideas in intellectual and political life that was especially marked in the interwar period. This is not to say that one cannot divorce right from left, or liberal from conservative, but that extremes can be incorporated into the life of the nation where a willingness to do so exists. Perhaps if Ludovici had written good poetry instead of bad novels he may -- like Pound -- have later been celebrated.
Anthony Mario Ludovici was born in 1882, the son of a painter. [7] Brought up in London in the age of the height of Empire and the first stirrings of British decline (he was fourteen when E. E. Williams's scare mongering tract Made in Germany was published), in 1906 he worked as private secretary to the sculptor (and misogynist anti-Dreyfusard) Auguste Rodin, followed by a year in Germany spent reading Nietzsche, whom he then set about promoting. In 1914 he enlisted, was wounded, and made a captain. Early on captivated by Nietzsche's phrase 'transvaluation of all values', Ludovici believed he had found the key to society's problems; the rest of his life was spent trying to persuade others of the veracity of his interpretation of this phrase. He was among the translators of Oscar Levy's first English edition of Nietzsche's works, and his first books were exegeses of Nietzsche's ideas, particularly as they related to art. [8] As he put it, he believed that 'the best and subtlest way of illustrating and advocating the Nietzschean Weltanschauung was to employ an indirect approach and to show through history and current events how the application of Nietzschean values would prove salutary'. [9]
The most concentrated outpouring of Ludovici's works occurred, however, during the 1920s and 1930s, when he was a member of the English Mistery. Here he found the perfect forum for expounding his theories of degeneration, birth control and race-breeding. The group is usually characterised as part of the 'muck and mysticism' side of the British right, which indeed it was, with its stress on rural values, the link between blood and soil, and service to the monarch. But that does not fully encompass its activities, nor adequately express its ideological underpinnings. It is easy to dismiss as harmless lunatics a group that believed that England could 'once again' become a rural paradise; it is far less easy to dismiss it when one also finds out about its founder's involvement with Arnold Leese's Imperial Fascist League, one of the few genuinely Nazi organisations in Britain, [10] and when one sees that the rural nostalgia of the English Array (the breakaway successor to the English Mistery) was indissociable from its antisemitism.
In what follows I will trace in outline Ludovici's output from his early work on aristocracy and degeneration, through his involvement with the English Mistery, and on into the postwar period. Doing so reveals several things. First, unlike most studies in the history of ideas, there is little change over time to be observed in this case, Ludovici's exceptionalism leaving him relatively uninfluenced by the enormous shifts in the intellectual and political climate of the twentieth century. Second can be seen the importance of such extreme ideologies in their English context: English writers were just as capable of combining civilisation and barbarism as Mitteleuropa, at least on paper. Fascism in Britain was not merely a politics of imitation, it also derived from home-grown problems. Third, there was nothing inevitable about the extreme right's inability to gain power, and the ideological casserole represented by Ludovici contained enough variation to appeal to a fairly broad spectrum, had conditions been more 'favourable'. It was correct to claim, as did one of his contemporaries, that Ludovici 'threatens to become the professional champion of lost causes'. [11] Nevertheless, until after the Second World War, Ludovici was not shunned by the wider community; thus he needs to be situated firmly in the context of the complex interplay of ideas in the Edwardian and interwar periods, an interplay where Nietzscheanism, race and eugenics come together.
***
In 1915, when Ludovici published his first major work not devoted solely to Nietzsche, A Defence of Aristocracy: A Textbook for Tories, the urgency of his message would have been felt by a fairly large section of political opinion. Many took seriously theories of degeneration and other social pathologies, seeing as evidence for them the decline of imperial power, the rise of Labour, and rapid constitutional and social changes. Before the outbreak of the war, only the right's own lack of leadership prevented it from taking power, having precipitated Balfour's fall in November 1911. [12]
Ludovici's Nietzsche-inspired ideas of struggle and power developed in a heated ideological context, in which the Diehard peers, centred around Lords Milner and Willoughby de Broke, fought the Liberal government and their own party over the 1911 Parliament Bill and (especially) over Irish Home Rule, an issue that had the potential to lead Britain into civil war. On 4 July 1911, Lord Farnham, for example, threatened that the Home Rule Bill would 'end in plunging a part of the United Kingdom into a state of turmoil, strife, and bloodshed, if not indeed an actual state of civil war'. And Willoughby de Broke set up the British League for the Support of Ulster and the Union in March 1912 in an attempt to make the government recognise the seriousness of the Diehards' resolve. In the Morning Post of 8 November 1913, the League actually went so far as to call men to arms. [13]
It was a period of ideological retrenchment on the right, but a retrenchment which was stated in the most aggressive of terms, demanding tariff reforms, substantial increases in military spending, especially on the navy, conscription, 'national efficiency', and anti-alien legislation. Many of their demands were in fact met, with the government's finally agreeing, for example, to spend money on Dreadnoughts, or the Aliens Acts of 1905 and 1919. Most of these ideas were promoted through the various nationalist 'leagues' that sprang up in the Edwardian period, the Navy League (founded 1895) and the National Service League (1902) being perhaps the most influential. [14] While the Diehards never left the world of parliamentary politics, they were certainly gearing up to do so in 1914 over the issue of Ireland, and they made of illiberalism, extreme nationalism, militarism and racism a base from which home-grown fascist ideas could develop in Britain. [15] Most importantly, in the years before 1914 the ideas of the Diehards were by no means those of a lunatic fringe, but were a powerful current in Unionist politics; indeed, one scholar suggests that their views 'were those of the mainstream rather than of a minority in Unionist ranks' . [16] In this context Ludovici's writings do not look so unusual as they would do by the 1960s.
Thus Ludovici's claim that democracy bred weakness by ceding power to the masses was as familiar a refrain as was his assertion that true leadership could only be undertaken by an aristocracy set apart from the rest of the people. This was an argument that had been put forward by other thinkers attempting to revive Tory thinking. Willoughby de Broke, for example, wrote in 1913 of his conception of 'National Toryism', one which 'aims at the establishment of an aristocracy, not of birth, or of brains, but of instinct and of character ... The national revival will follow on the great appeal to the national instinct.' [17]
Other, more philosophically minded thinkers were engaged in similar projects. T.E. Hulme, for example, whom we will encounter again below, wrote his A Tory Philosophy in 1912, in which he argued from 'the conviction that the nature of man is absolutely fixed and unalterable, and that any scheme of social regeneration which presupposes that he can alter is doomed to bring about nothing but disaster'. [18] Most importantly, a 'revival of aristocracy' had been proposed in 1906 by Oscar Levy, as we have seen in Chapter 1. His 1906 book adumbrated many of the concerns with which Ludovici was to preoccupy himself for the rest of his writing career: degeneration, miscegenation, 'sickly modernity', 'sensible marriages', and 'an aristocracy ... to counterbalance that equalized and contemptible rudis indigestaque moles'. [19] Importantly, both Levy and Ludovici explicitly did not mean the existing British aristocracy, for they had betrayed the interests of the people, unlike their medieval forebears who had understood the meaning of noblesse oblige. [20]
After 1918, this haughtiness, deliberately cultivated to be reminiscent of Nietzsche's 'aristocratic radicalism', [21] contrived to keep Ludovici apart from the BUF, despite their shared racism. His political isolation was, however, by no means matched by social exclusion. Among other things he debated with Sylvia Pankhurst in the Oxford Union debating chamber (29 January 1936), and argued in print with Dora Russell, who correctly called Ludovici 'one of the most inveterate anti-feminists'. [22] Ludovici was also discussed by guild socialists, at least those of a more organicist persuasion, who agreed with his aspirations -- a revival of authority -- but took exception to the means -- the revival of aristocracy. Arthur Penty, for example, discussing Ludovici, fully sympathised with the desire to initiate 'measures for the public good'; he questioned, however, the plausibility of Ludovici's suggestions, proposing instead of the 'authority of persons' the authority 'of ideas or things'. [23]
Even before the First World War Ludovici had established a reputation for himself through his bi-weekly art column in the New Age, a column which gave rise to lively debate. When, for example, Ludovici attacked the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose work was on display in the Twenty-One Gallery in London, T. E. Hulme responded by ridiculing Ludovici, calling him a charlatan, and 'a little bantam' with 'a little Cockney intellect'. Obviously having offended his taste for modernism, Ludovici was to feel the full weight of Hulme's withering vituperation. Most revealing here, however, is that in the pages of the New Age there were other people who had read Nietzsche; Hulme turned Ludovici's ideology against him, claiming that only 'the unworthy sentiment of pity for the weak, which, in spite of Nietzsche, still moves us, prevents us dealing drastically, with this rather light weight superman'. [24] In response, Ludovici claimed that he was only trying to fight against 'anarchy in art', a claim which sufficiently annoyed Wyndham Lewis for him to become involved; in typical Lewisian style, he condemned Ludovici as 'obviously a fool' who wrote only 'dismal shoddy rubbish'. [25] In this small vignette Ludovici, far from being unknown, emerges as a. minor player in the debates that surrounded the emergence of modernism, today's better-known players (Hulme and Lewis) becoming so aggravated mainly because they could not admit just how close in fact they were to Ludovici's way of thinking on most matters.
***
In the interwar period Ludovici turned away from art to concentrate on more explicitly political topics: anti-liberalism, anti-feminism, birth control and, increasingly, race. Behind all of these topics, on which he wrote widely, lay a theory of degeneration. For Ludovici, degeneration was axiomatic: 'at the present moment we are simply an undulation in a rapid avalanche making speedily towards complete and utter degeneration'. [26] His reasons for believing so are interesting. They range from the prolix -- a rather sensational (and left-sounding, in the vein of Morris) claim about the 'disease of language' -- 'The causes of our present condition are to be sought, first and chiefly, in the decline of a common and uniform culture, secondly in the cheap literature that has come into being since the Education Act of 1870, and thirdly in modern journalism' -- to the 'scientific': 'Spencer has shown conclusively that by far the greater number of existing organisms are the degenerate descendants of higher species . . . Development is, therefore, really the exception rather than the rule.' [27] Appealing to Spencer in the 1920s revealed Ludovici's Lamarckian bent, which, when combined with social Darwinism in the 1930s, led him to voice some of the most extreme political opinions to be found in Britain in this period.
For Ludovici, then, such things as the Education Act were really only symptoms of degeneration, not its cause. This was to be sought first and foremost in careless breeding, especially miscegenation, a theme that obsessed Ludovici for the rest of his life. As he asked in 1921, 'What breed of sheep, what breed of horses, what breed of common barnfowl, could have been abandoned to the promiscuous mating alone (not to mention other errors) to which modern man has long been abandoned, without suffering degeneration?' [28] By 'other errors', Ludovici meant primarily political changes that had opened the way for mass participation, and the emancipation of women. These were caused by and led to further degeneration. As he wrote in 1927, 'The influence of the democratic contempt of blood and family, which is based upon the belief in equality, and leads to miscegenation on a universal scale, must also be reckoned among the remoter and deeper causes of modern degeneration.' [29]
In response Ludovici proposed inbreeding, and for a while even incest. [30] And here his understanding of race came into play. Interestingly, Ludovici did not condemn Jews and non-whites as racially degenerate, but adumbrated the ideas of the New Right when he argued that each of the races could only preserve its own cultures through inbreeding. This theory of race was backed up by biologists and anthropologists who were Ludovici's contemporaries. Levy's friend George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, for example, in the same year that Ludovici's Man was published, in a book which had significant influence over the growing school of British anthropology (and which cited Ludovici), defined race as 'identity or measurable distinction and a constant degree of relative homogeneity . . . A race survives only in so far as it remains ethnically segregated.' [31]
Unsurprisingly then, Ludovici's comparison of men to animals such as sheep and horses was a common theme of right-wing thought. Indeed, it was a theme that displayed impressive longevity. In 1901, for example, the journalist Arnold White had written in characteristically vigorous style that 'The best specimens of a race, whether among men, pigeons, orchids, or horses, are only to be found where the laws of breeding and of culture are carefully obeyed.' Much later on, in the unashamedly pro-Nazi and astonishingly ill-timed book Unfinished Victory (1940), of which he rapidly became very embarrassed, Arthur Bryant wrote that Hitler 'knew the fatal consequences of neglecting the breed through having witnessed them at first hand'. And this way of thinking provides a link between the thought of the interwar right and the postwar extreme right wing in Britain. Ludovici's erstwhile colleague A. K. Chesterton,. writing in 1965 as first chairman of the directorate of the National Front, warned of the dangers of ignoring racial differences in terms that were typical of Ludovici's way of thinking:
'Racial discrimination' which throughout Nature is a clean and wholesome thing is depicted as something abominable, and cowards in their millions shy away from it, afraid of what they fear will be the immediate social consequences and thereby ensuring that the ultimate social consequences will be laden with all the human pathos and misery of miscegenation. [32]
The political implications of the belief in the dangers of cross-breeding were clear to Ludovici: all forms of progressive thought were the cries of the weak hoping to assert themselves in the face of the degeneration of the strong. Hence his rhetorical question, 'Is it possible then that the very cry of 'freedom' belongs essentially to weakness? to feebleness of character?' [33] In other words, his racism combined both an 'external' character -- keeping the English race apart from others -- and an 'internal' one -- protecting the best stocks within the race and eliminating the weaker. His attack on democracy was not simply a defence of traditional hierarchies, but an attempt to revivify conservative thought by demonstrating the biological and cultural necessity of those hierarchies. Where 'biologism' in the nineteenth century had largely been a liberal ideology, by the twentieth' it had become largely conservative. The internal aspect of Ludovici's racism believed that 'Democratic institutions tend inevitably to destroy the belief in national purity and good stock. Miscegenation might even be regarded as the peculiar vice of democracy'; the external aspect 'disbelieves, therefore, in having Jews, or men of foreign extraction, or odd people -- that is to say, eccentrics, cranks, and fanatics, as politicians in an English Parliament'. [34] Again, this was not a stance that Ludovici held in isolation. In 1909, for example, the director of the National Social Purity Crusade, James Marchant, blamed most of the vice and degradation that existed in Britain on foreigners, 'Germans and Jews predominating', and proposed 'to deport all foreigners engaged in the white slave traffic directly or indirectly'. [35] This was written at an earlier period, in the midst of anti-alien scaremongering. But then, when Ludovici wrote his Defence of Conservatism some twenty years later the atmosphere was hardly less uncomfortable for 'aliens', that is to say, primarily for the Jews. [36]
However, in tile 19208 and early 1930s Ludovici's main ideological target -- because the one that revealed most clearly the extent of English degeneration -- was feminism. His basic claim was that feminism was 'simply an automatic reaction to man's degeneracy'. [37] Yet women demonstrated their inferior nature by the fact that instead of seeking to reverse the degeneration they actually sought to emulate men. Rather than preach the reawakening of healthy values, they sought sexual equality; rather than working towards a recognition of aristocratic qualities, they sought the franchise. Hence feminism revealed its own bankruptcy: 'Modern democracy with its political machinery is so thoroughly discredited, and is moreover such a menace to our national greatness, that, if there had been any social acumen or shrewdness in woman, she would have proved it by utterly scouting this political faux pas of degenerate manhood.' [38]
Yet again, this was hardly an original argument, [39] but Ludovici backed up his political assessment of feminism with sexological arguments. In pursuing the same ends as men which were leading to degeneration -- women damaged their biological requirements. Women, claimed Ludovici, were not intelligent enough to perceive this damage on their own, and had to be carefully trained: 'No reform can come of teaching women anything.' [40] Basically, what feminism led to was an atrophy of the female sexual organs, since feminists taught women that they could enjoy the same sexual cycle as men. Rather, Ludovici claimed, 'although Woman means everything to Man's sexuality, and is the embodiment of all that his reproductive instinct can desire, even when it is at its keenest, Man means very little to Woman. [41] What he meant was that a woman's sexual pleasure is not exhausted in the sexual act -- as it is for men -- but is only completed in pregnancy and suckling: 'Thus, unless a woman has been specially trained, she can never appreciate that it is possible for her to be consciously averse from having a child, while her reproductive apparatus may be yearning to function and actually in a parlous condition because of its deprivation.' [42]
Permitting women a freer sexual life, Ludovici believed, was a step on the path to doom. When Dora Russell wrote in Hypatia that for women, sex, 'even without children and without marriage, is to them a thing of dignity, beauty and delight', Ludovici responded with incredulity. 'The implication; he wrote, 'is that sexual satisfaction with contraception is a perfectly possible and rational practice for women, and Mrs. Russell pleads for sterile "Free Love" for the unmarried as if it were a sufficient substitute for marriage and maternity.' [43] And apart from the damage being done to women's bodies by their own recklessness, birth control could only favour the weak: birth control, 'by reducing sound stocks proportionately with unsound stocks, cannot operate in favour of the sound, and must in fact ultimately reduce the sound (already much too few), to a dangerously small group'. [44]
Apart from the rather vague notion of a 'Masculine Renaissance', [45] Ludovici proposed to deal with this distressing problem by 'approaching the matter merely from the qualitative or race-improvement standpoint'. [46] This meant dispensing with squeamish moral norms, norms which were, anyway, those of the weak: So apart from encouraging women to marry at an early age, when their sexual organs had not entered into 'relative senility', [47] his solution was selective culling: the only means of escaping the hastening degeneration was 'controlled and legalised infanticide'. Only this would 'allow standards governing infant-selection to be periodically revised, and will thus lead to an improvement of the race'. [48] In the 1930s, he defended his ideas by appealing to the example of Hitler's Germany, where 'measures calculated to impose sanitary mating on the people' [49] had been introduced with widespread support.
Once Ludovici had opted for the solution of selective culling and legalised infanticide, in which 'Only that life should have sanctity which offers some guarantee of future worthiness', [50] he espoused it in ever more strident tones. And in the English Mistery he found a forum where he could discuss his ideas with other like-minded men.
***
The English Mistery was founded in 1930 by the disaffected mason William Sanderson. The Mistery conceived itself as a school for leadership based on the revival of the 'lost secrets' of race-memory, government, power, organisation, property and economics. In other words, its ideas were really radicalised extensions of some of those advocated by the Tory revivalists of the Edwardian radical right. The stress on 'instinct' recalls Willoughby de Broke's discussion of 'national instinct', just as the Mistery's stress on 'service' recalls Willoughby de Broke's claim that 'the privileges of British citizenship are derived from the performance of duty' and White's assertion that the aim of a revised British educational system should be 'the creation of citizens who shall be fit to reproduce their kind by a race fit to do their duty to themselves, their children, their country, and their king'. [51] According to Sanderson, the word 'mistery' meant simply 'service', and the group would educate Englishmen that what they are 'bound to serve' is 'nothing imaginary, or ideal, or mystical, but the only truly real thing in the world'. [52] This was the English race, defined unusually as separate from that of the other British races. Sanderson shared Ludovici's peculiar mix of social Darwinist racism and Lamarckianism. Arguing that 'The first cause of degeneracy is the loss of aptitude for sexual selection, and capacity to recognise sexual values', he went on to use this social Darwinist prognosis as evidence for the interruption of tradition, by which he meant the Lamarckian idea of the instincts preserved in the collective memory. [53]
Yet for all the similarities in their understanding of contemporary England, Sanderson was more inclined to ritual than was Ludovici. Sanderson's stamp is found in the numerous pamphlets the Mistery produced, containing details of constitution, procedure and aims, and little about actual political goals. The stated purpose of the Mistery was 'to regenerate the English Nation and to recreate a body politic with properly functioning members', and to create 'a sound ethical basis for national politics' based upon 'principles derived from the instincts and traditions of English breeds'. These pamphlets were more an outlet for Sanderson's conspiratorial angst than for serious ideological discussion, especially since 'Debate is prohibited within the kin.' [54]
However, this 'muck and mysticism' side of the Mistery should not blind us to its extreme -- and potentially extremely dangerous -- ideology. Sanderson was not just an occultist; he had early on joined the antisemitic Order of the Red Rose (founded in 1917), and was a member of the violently Nazi Imperial Fascist League. And the Mistery's position was founded not just on rural nostalgia, but on fears of racial contamination. Its 'Instructions to Companions', for example, contained the following warning: 'Realise, then, that it is the life of your race that is at stake, and that its survival will depend on a handful of men fighting a desperate battle with their backs to the wall.' [55] And elsewhere it openly asserted that 'the best cocker spaniel will never make a good greyhound, and a Jew may be a good Jew but will never be an Englishman'; the Mistery 'supports the elimination from public life in parliament or elsewhere of all those Jewish and other alien influences which, however worthy in themselves, cannot fail to work against English instincts and traditions'. [56] Again, such sentiments were but extensions of well-established right-wing views. James Marchant's Purity Crusade was set up with the aim of expelling vice from the cities and encouraging healthy lifestyles, but its fundamental premises were exclusivist, if not racist. Attacking the 'so-called laws' of heredity, Marchant's claims were exactly those later to be echoed by Sanderson: 'Man enters into a great inheritance of customs and traditions, laws and religion, art and literature, which, even if we grant a great deal to heredity, exercise an immeasurable and decisive influence over him.' [57]
No wonder, then, that Ludovici felt at home in the English Mistery. The lack of activity, however, bothered him, and it is clear that those who knew of the Mistery's existence, notably members of the Conservative party (several of its MPs were members, such as Michael Beaumont and Reginald Dorman-Smith), had begun to mock it. In a Mistery publication, Ludovici took up this problem, stating that the group had become 'no more than a farce, or at most an insignificant branch of the Conservative Party'. And in a passage pregnant with hints about the state of the group's internal politics, he went on: 'If we cannot achieve this unity we might just as well join the Boy Scouts or the Salvation Army as continue to belong to or believe in the English Mistery.' [58] Even so, at the end of his life, Ludovici still felt that his association with the group had been worthwhile:
as . . . a certain air of mystery hung over both our aims and our proceedings, our group contrived during the period of its existence in full strength (Le., from 1930 to about 1937) to attract a good deal of notice and to provoke considerable curiosity and interest. Nor was this confined to England; for our fame spread abroad, particularly to Germany and Italy, and with consequences which as far as I was concerned, proved of the utmost educative value. [59]
These included meeting leading officials of the Third Reich.
Unsurprisingly, the group split in 1936, Sanderson continuing, with a few others, to use the name, the rest going on to found the English Array under the leadership of Viscount Lymington. Lymington was primarily a rural revivalist, but he believed that his aspirations could be fulfilled only through careful racial selection. What he called 'kinship in husbandry' also had to apply to human beings, and in a classic horticultural metaphor so beloved of degeneration theorists, he wrote that 'if the best are to survive it must be by careful tending and protection from weeds and parasites'. On the basis of his observations of the differences between urban 'scum' and healthy rural types, he concluded that 'It is blood and soil which rule at last.' [60] The influence of Ludovici on Lymington is clear to see, since by 1938 Ludovici had for some time been advocating the policy of 'sacrificing the lesser to the greater'. Already in 1925 Ludovici had written that 'This absurd and degenerate value must be transvalued into the following: It is noble and virtuous to sacrifice the less for the greater, the rubbish for the precious.' [61] And in 1928 he once again -- this time in the context of birth control -- asserted that 'the only justifiable way to set about solving the question of over-population is to proceed drastically with the elimination of the undesirable'. [62]
But it was in 1933, under the aegis of the Mistery, surrounded by people such as Sanderson and Lymington, that Ludovici wrote a piece unequivocally advocating wholesale slaughter. In this piece, Violence, Sacrifice and -war, the usually haughtily restrained Ludovici yielded to an outburst of excess energy comparable to speeches made by German Nazis before 1933. Although it would be difficult to call Ludovici a fascist -- thanks to his distaste for populism -- it is clear that the ideologies that fused to produce Nazism were not unique to Germany.
Beginning with a rather romantic tale of the evolution of civilisation, Ludovici goes on to argue that it is nevertheless impossible to remove violence from society, since violence is an inevitable result of the 'healthy expansion' which drives civilisation forwards in the first place. Here is Ludovici's basic development myth:
All through man's history it is this healthy expansion that has with monotonous repetition introduced fresh violence into human communities, and since violence means the sacrifice of something or somebody, one of the perpetual problems of human societies has been how to shift the ultimate effect of the violence upon a group or community other than the one in which the violence actually originated; and if this was not possible, how to sacrifice portions of the community itself so as to neutralise the world. [63]
All societies, then, whether primitive or modern, need sacrifice so as to create order. On a cursory glance, this notion of the necessity of sacrifice sounds somewhat akin to Rene Girard's theory of mimetic violence and the need for scapegoating. [64] But, unlike Girard, Ludovici does not see the possibility of transferring the role of scapegoat either on to a non-human element such as an animal, or of a single figure (Christ) revealing the workings of this scapegoat mechanism so that the violence can be deflected. Rather, Ludovici seems to take pleasure in acknowledging the intractability of the problem, and the violence that it apparently demands: 'Surely, therefore, the time has come to recognise the inevitability of violence and sacrifice, and consciously to select the section or elements in the world or the nation that should be sacrificed' (pp. 11-12). Ludovici, armed with his schoolboy's Nietzsche, rather sounds as though he would relish the opportunity to take the necessary decisions.
So, from a starting point -- an untested and wild hypothesis -- which he chooses not to validate, Ludovici is led in a few simple moves to a call for mass-murder. The fact that he cites the practice of sacrifice in numerous societies, ranging from the ancient Peruvian practice of burning widows to infanticide in China (p. 7), is sufficient for Ludovici to make the claim that this type of sacrifice-as-population-control is always and everywhere necessary.
Ludovici sees his call as part of the project of the transvaluation of all values required to regenerate the English race. What he wants to create in England is 'a great and brave nation' which 'will not hesitate to abandon all such suicidal solutions as homosexuality, heterosexual vice, birth control, infanticide, emasculation, etc., and will distribute the burden of sacrifice over inferior races abroad, and inferior human products in all classes at home' (p. 15). He ends by reiterating this clarion call: 'I suggest that in future a great nation should courageously face the fact of violence and sacrifice, and make the latter as far as possible selective whether at home or abroad' (p. 15).
This pamphlet tells us more about the English Mistery, and about Ludovici in particular, than any of their other publications. The Mistery were open to radical suggestions for redefining 'Englishness', suggestions that reached their extreme form in Violence) Sacrifice and War. In the context of the development of European right-wing thought, this is a particularly interesting piece. Since the mid-nineteenth century, zoologists and anthropologists had justified the mass-murder of 'native' people by theories of progress and degeneration. Hitler was to apply the same logic when the principles of colonial rule were applied to the European continent. For the argument that fascism partly represents a type of 'colonialism come home', Ludovici's pamphlet is important evidence, for here we find an explicit recommendation that genocide (dressed up, as it always was, as scientific necessity) could be applied to the populations of the metropole. [65] Perhaps one of the reasons for the successes of German and Italian fascism as opposed to British or French is connected to the failed colonial policies of the former countries.
Who, though, does Ludovici have in mind when calling for the removal of unsound biological stocks from the population? Part of the argument is clearly a justification for Empire: the slaughter of primitive peoples as a way of venting the Englishman's excess energy, long a mainstay of British imperial thinking. In the debate over conscription at the turn of the century, for example, one author casually remarked that 'the presence of the white man will tend to entail less extreme suffering upon his subjects', a happy outcome to be attained 'partly by better organisation, partly by increased publicity and the action of European organisation upon the colonists, partly by the mere extirpation of the most ill-used races'. [66] But where 'sacrifice' at home is concerned, I would argue here that, although it is unspoken in this particular piece, the Jews are the most obvious target.
Seeing the Jews as the obvious target does not just mean seeing what happened in Germany during the war and imputing the same thought processes to British fascists. I have already shown that antisemitism was integral to the English Mistery's conceptions of what was threatening the English race. And there were several references to Jews in Ludovici's earlier writings in which the foreignness of and threat from the Jews is stressed in terms of admiration for their supposed racial purity: the Jews' 'momentary superiority' is 'the effect of their close inbreeding in the past, and that is why we cannot do the Jews a greater disservice than to increase our friendliness to them to the extent of breaking down the racial barrier that now separates them from our degenerate miscegenated stocks'. [67] But it was only after his involvement with the English Mistery, and especially the English Array, that Ludovici devoted a whole book to the Jews, Jews) and the Jews in England (1938).
He did so, however, only under a pseudonym -- Cobbett, a not inappropriate name given that Ludovici, like Douglas Reed, [68] had appealed to the pastoralism conjured up by Cobbett's Rural Rides on more than one occasion, in an early appeal to the languorous and bucolic England still evoked today by magazines such as This England. [69] That he felt it necessary to hide behind a pseudonym on this occasion is evidence of his embarrassment at entering the shadowy world of conspiracy theory more usually associated with the vehemently antisemitic Nesta Webster, and the popular distaste for open displays of antisemitism by 1938, two years after the Battle of Cable Street, a distaste that only grew after the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany later in the year.
The precariousness of the antisemitic position after 1938 is no doubt why Ludovici begins with the disclaimer that his book is an attempt at a neutral study, something it is hard to achieve given 'the high feeling created over this question, through recent anti-Semitic measures adopted in Germany'. But since his book is aimed neither at 'modem Germans or Jews' but at 'the earnest English student', he does not worry that 'in thus attempting to recover the calm of pre-Hitler historians, it will hardly be possible to please the extremists through our lack of violence, and the Liberals through our statement of many unpalatable and seemingly offensive truths' .[70]
This apparent neutrality was a widely used strategy before the war with regard to writing about Jews, [71] and continues in the writings of the New Right. In Ludovici's circle, though, it was soon discarded, and the pages of Lymington's journal, the New Pioneer, founded in 1938, became ever-more vociferously antisemitic the nearer to war Britain came. Ludovici himself, however, never ceased to base his antisemitism on a seemingly incontrovertible bedrock of anthropological and biological evidence. Rather than just condemn the Jews for the usual range of misdeeds (greed, usury, communism, rootlessness, cosmopolitanism), Ludovici tried to show, a la Lamarck, how these conditions of Jewish existence were conditioned by centuries of inherited characteristics:
four and a half milleniums of contact with civilisation, and at least three milleniums of contact with trade and urban life -- adequately explain all that is known about the Jew's character and his peculiar relationship to his Gentile environment, more especially when the latter is either predominantly agricultural and rural or has relatively recently achieved civilisation. (p. 83)
Thus, Ludovici set out to show how the history of the Jews from ancient times moulded them into 'a closely inbred race' (p. 5). By the time that the Jews came to Europe in 'the early centuries of our era' there was an 'irreducible kernel which was recognised as the basic peculiarity of the Jew' (p. 17). Accordingly, he condemned those, such as Huxley and Haddon, [72] who refused the notion of 'race' altogether, as avoiding basic facts of sociology and nationality:
It will not remove. the knowledge which all Europeans have, and which cannot be wholly fallacious seeing that . . . it is based on history, that the Jew traditionally favours certain callings, certain occupations, and reveals certain definite psychological characteristics which, whether conditioned by long habituation or not, are nevertheless distinct and may be (probably are) the psychological correlatives of his type. (p. 26)
And what was this type? Despite centuries of both urban and rural dwelling in Europe, 'it may be that it is precisely these few stubborn and primitive desert traits in the Jews, which have repeatedly moulded their history' (pp. 65-66). The Jews are, basically, nomads who can have no attachment to the soil, and can therefore never become part of a nation. This nomadism -- their' Asiatic Bedouin origin' (p. 79) -- explains both the Jews' lack of respect for property and their avarice: 'The nomad is essentially a particularist who is by nature, as it were, born into the philosophy of the Manchester School, whether this came after or before him' (p. 67). Ludovici's claims here were by no means original, but were a stock: in trade of British antisemitism. In 1899 Arnold White claimed that 'Intellectual superiority, Oriental subtlety, and the training of sorrow accredit the Jew with a complex and mysterious power denied to any other living race.' After the First World War, Lord Sydenham of Combe, in an article first published in the highly respectable Nineteenth Century and After, described the Jews as 'an exceedingly able, ambitious and power-loving Oriental race' whose ideals 'may conflict with Gentile polity'. And the extreme antisemite Harold Spencer devoted a chapter of his Democracy or Shylocracy? to 'A Desert People', describing the Jews as 'an Oriental people, one of those races baked by the sun in the dry, burning climate of the great deserts of North Africa, Arabia and Asia Minor', going on to claim that 'The desert crept right into their hearts, and so at all times they were filled with the spirit of the sandy wastes. Throughout the centuries Israel has remained a desert and nomadic people. [73]