A lady of my acquaintance sent me Pearce’s book with the request that I read it. I was surprised to receive in a sense in that she hadn’t expressed much interest in my political and philosophic views before and it was a little out of character. As I began to read it I began to understand why she had thought it would interest me.

Many of these kind of books – and I have read a great many – often feature some kind of religious conversion, which is both vague and rationalized with a large degree of hindsight. Pearce – a former National Front organiser in its heyday and a friend of the founder of ‘Skrewdriver’ Ian Stuart Donaldson – superficially offers a more reasoned approach to his ‘conversion’ away from nationalism.

The book focuses on his political career in the National Front and suffers from the predictable dollop of hindsight – as well as some refreshingly truthful observations at times especially about so-called ‘conspiracy theories’  – but is written in a rather mediocre style. It lacks any kind of real flair and is largely made up of introspective self-commentary written from a rather intellectually debilitating ideological framework.

I personally rather doubt Pearce is quite as intellectually critical as he likes to think – although he does like to play the introspective penitent – preferring instead to see him in the light of a David Myatt type character. Myatt for those who don’t know was a British radical right figure who worked his way through a multiple of religious and intellectual systems (including Catholicism, Paganism, Satanism and Islam) in the space of about thirty years or so.

Myatt, like Pearce, saw each of his ideological-cuм-religious drifts as the ‘evolution’ of his thinking to the ‘final philosophy’ in true Hegelian style. Where-as Myatt had a penchant for extreme changes; Pearce’s intellectual bad habits were a bit less steep.

Pearce cannot see much farther than his proverbial intellectual nose as he recounts how he came to be attracted to different ideas as he encountered them. He moved from tub-thumping British patriotism to neo-nαzιsm to Strasserite patriotic socialism to Catholic Distributism to a kind of Catholic Libertarianism which is where he currently resides intellectually.

When I was reading Pearce’s little book I couldn’t help laughing at Pearce’s own intellectual hubris in perpetually thinking that his philosophy was ‘evolving’, because he read other opinions. When he read nationalist thinkers he was a nationalist, when he read dissident patriotic socialist thinkers he was a Strasserite and when he got hooked on Chesterton and Belloc he became a Catholic Distributist.

Hence when Pearce claims that he found that Nick Griffin – the former leader of the British National Party and one-time friend of Pearce’s – thinking had ‘ossified’. (1) He is actually projecting his own intellectual situation onto Griffin. Griffin’s thought has evolved – and I have read enough of it to know – where-as Pearce’s pen merely – in the words of Sherlock Holmes – reflects the light of other minds rather than creating any of its own.

We can see in how he swallows and then repeats stereotypical ideological canards when he talks about how a racist cannot be friends with people of other races. (2)

In addition how he tries to imply that Arthur Jensen – of whose Jєωιѕнness he was and is apparently unaware – and Hans Eysenck’s work is only that of psychologists not scientists. (3) Directly implying their work wasn’t, and isn’t, scientific when both were validated in the ‘Bell Curve Wars’ of the 1990s as Pearce could have discovered by simply reading a book on the subject.

See the problem with Pearce’s self-described intellectual inclinations?

That’s right: he shows no signs of critical inquiry or interest beyond what harmonises with his own current ideological bent.

After his turn to Strasserite patriot socialism after reading Otto Strasser’s three books translated into English and Douglas Reed’s two hagiographies of the man, (4) which – having read them all – I cannot help loudly guffawing at. Pearce begins finding new absurd things to say. For example how he had always found the ‘anti-Semitic ravings of Julius Streicher and his British acolyte Arnold Leese completely unsettling’. (5)

This is of course nonsense given that I doubt Pearce has ever read anything Streicher wrote – as he still doesn’t read, write or speak German to my knowledge – and nor was Leese ‘Streicher’s British acolyte’.  Leese met Streicher’s son when the latter came to Britain in the late 1930s. Leese also approved of Streicher’s basic content, which Leese couldn’t himself read but had to hear about it by report as he didn’t read German either.

Similarly absurd comments can be found in Pearce’s condemnation of the ‘shrill bigotry of the Hitlerites’, (6) the ‘unworthy cause’ of nationalism, (7) claims that he was ‘blinded by’ and ‘descended into the abyss of bigotry’ (8) in addition to the trite classic of comparing Hitler to Satan. (9)

‘Race with the Devil’ is written in the voice of a man who is, to use his own words, ‘blinded by bigotry’ but like many other broken-down scribblers: he believes his gilded canary cage is really the most beneficent boon. It frees him from the obligation of having to actually think. Allowing him to please his patrons by parroting the same old tired tripe about Jєωs being an eternally irrationally persecuted religious minority, racial differences being the figment of the fervid dreams of evil racists and that Hitler was indeed the great Satan.

When we notice these basic factual errors combined with Pearce’s uncritical and laughable belief in the long discredited claims of Hermann Rauschning. (10) You cannot help but see Pearce as the intellectual version of the Emperor with No Clothes.

In other words: Pearce is a vacillating intellectual pygmy who reflects intellectual fashions and does not use his own intellect beyond trying to validate his ideological presumptions.

Times are a-changing Joe… fast.


References

(1) Joseph Pearce, 2013, ‘Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love’, 1st Edition, Saint Benedict Press: Charlotte, p. 74
(2) Ibid, pp. 50-51
(3) Ibid, p. 81
(4) Ibid, p. 154
(5) Ibid, p. 84
(6) Ibid, p. 154
(7) Ibid, p. 56
(8) Ibid, pp. 3; 7
(9) Ibid, pp. 17-18
(10) Ibid, p. 156
Posted 2nd August by Karl Radl