According to the Whig history of England that still prevails to this day, Catholics are a peripheral minority of the population with a strange foreign liturgy suitable only for ‘Eyeties’ and ‘Bog-trotters’. It is to some embarrassment, then, for many of my fellow countrymen, that if one looks too closely at English culture—which is unquestionably a very great achievement—one sees that this unique culture is wholly dependent on the millennium of Catholic life that animated these isles prior to Henry VIII’s libidinous fit. Its common law, sacral monarchy, chambers of government, spectacular architecture, glorious landscapes, even its beer are all gifted to England by its Catholic ancestors. And Catholics have continued to foment, foster, and transfigure English culture in the centuries since the great spasm of murder and plunder that goes by the euphemism of ‘Reformation’.
A very important gift that England received from a loyal son of the Church in the last century was a complete national mythology to replace the one it had lost during the cultural cleansing policies of William the Conqueror. I speak, of course, of the Legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien. And anyone concerned not only with the common mind of this land but with its future should look upon it with Tolkienian eyes.
Many of the characters in Tolkien’s works are, I think, if I were to stray foolishly into Jungian jargon, ‘archetypal’. There is an eternal Aragorn, who recurs time and again in avatars down the centuries. Like a Bodhisattva, Aragorn is incarnated in Pious Aeneas, in Cato the Younger, in King Arthur, in Alfred the Great, in King Charles I, and so on, and so on. The same can be said of the other heroes of the Legendarium, but it can also be said of the villains: we can all think of Gollums and Wormtongues who recur down the ages and indeed torment the world today. There is also an eternal Saruman, with whom the world must contend over and over.
There are two ‘Sarumans’ who unhappily have become conflated in my mind. I can’t help it: every time I see an image of Prime Minister Kier Starmer or hear his voice, I think of Adolf Eichmann, for they both strike me as embodiments of the same ‘type’: the ‘Saruman type’. That might seem over the top, but as I say, I just can’t help it. I’m aware of the modern informal fallacy of the reductio ad Hitlerum. Obviously we should avoid the adolescent habit of calling anyone we don’t like a ‘Nazi’. But nonetheless there’s something about Starmer’s vacant eyes, that expressionless face, nasally voice, misplaced self-confidence, and near-total indifference to anything human that recurrently recalls to the present the spectre of Eichmann, which is in turn the spirit of Saruman.
A group of friends and I, all having been taught by Roger Scruton, meet a few times a year to discuss some important text together. A couple of years ago, the chosen text was Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which ignited among us a heated discussion about the correct enforcement of law, the nature of jurisdiction, and the legitimacy of retroactive punishment of evil yet legal activities. Leading up to this explosive discussion, besides reading Arendt’s book, I had spent many hours watching footage of Eichmann’s trial. This period coincided with Starmer’s rise as Labour’s new hope, and on account of their strikingly similar personality types, he and Eichmann have become conflated in my mind.
Starmer is like a weird, backroom clerk. He comes across as the sort of man who could torture people for hours and think nothing of it. And given his response to the rape and torture of thousands of England’s most vulnerable girls at the hands of Muslim gangs, it seems confirmed that we are dealing with a man wholly without feeling. Indeed, his lack of care for the victims of such crimes was fully conveyed in his description of growing calls for a comprehensive enquiry into the extent and gravity of this national disgrace as “a far-Right bandwagon”.
So much of Labour’s current policy appears to have as its motivation nothing other than an ideological hatred of the United Kingdom, its history and its way of life. Labour’s plans to restrict and regulate home education, for which England has some of the most liberal laws in the world; its axing of the few remaining Latin lessons in state schools; its slashing of funding for the upkeep of ancient churches throughout these isles; its plans to ban trail hunting in the countryside … the list goes on and on. There seems no interpretive key to any of these policies besides a pathological hatred of this ancient kingdom and its cultural heritage.
But then, which is it? Is Kier Starmer the unfeeling, mechanical, political engineer which I claim he is, or is he a wholly committed, ardent ideologue, as his odious policies indicate? The contradiction here is in fact only apparent, and not real, for these two personality types frequently inhere in the same person. In fact, it is this apparent contradiction within a single personality that comprises any incarnation of ‘Saruman of Many Colours’. Again, whilst his actions considerably differ from those of Starmer, the case of Eichmann is instructive for understanding the personality of the man who now governs the United Kingdom.
Decades after Eichmann was hanged for his crimes in 1962, recordings were released of interviews with Eichmann in Argentina dated 1957. These recordings seemed to reveal that his defence at his trial in Jerusalem was insincere. For during that trial, he had argued that he was merely dispassionately carrying out orders from his superiors for the transportation and killing of countless people, which, under the regime at the time, was entirely legal. He claimed that he never questioned the morality of his occupation, only whether he was competently fulfilling his tasks. This defence was famously characterised by Hannah Arendt, who was present at the entire hearing, as the “banality of evil”. The recordings from ’57, however, reveal that he was passionately invested in the Nazi project, a fervent Jew-hater, and regretted that the Third Reich had not had the time to complete its genocidal project.
The contradiction between the two Eichmanns is only apparent, not real. Again, the political engineer and the ardent ideologue are not irreconcilable or even conflicting personality types. Rather, they almost always inhere together in the same sort of person: in any Saruman. Tolkien places into the mouth of the great ent Treebeard the following description of Saruman:
He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment. And now it is clear that he is a black traitor. He has taken up with foul folk.
Saruman, for all his mechanical mind, is certainly no less an ardent ideologue who wants to become “a Power”. Starmer too has taken up with foul folk, siding with those who seek to corrupt the United Kingdom, bleeding it of what’s left of its financial health and its established culture, dismissing the seriousness of the rape and torture of children by Muslim men, and hunting down those who post impassioned tweets about it. He is a man both mechanical and unfeeling and yet ardently ideological, who, behind those vacant eyes and nasally voice, harbours a profound and diabolical resentment of the kind Scruton described so astutely:
Resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person.
That excerpt seems to have been written for our Prime Minister, and yet it was penned when Starmer was still a snivelling little activist lawyer. It merits some study, for it is imperative that Brits understand the kind of man who now governs them, that they may choose someone very different when they are next given the chance. Rather than toiling as slaves and orcs under a Saruman, I pray that one day the English rediscover their nobility and remember who they are, and find themselves with a Gandalf in Church and an Aragorn in state.