4,453 words
David Abbott
Dark Albion: A Requiem for the English
Ramsgate: Sparrow Book Publishers, 2013
Boy, was I excited to get this for review! According to Amazon, this book is ‘’to be enjoyed by fans of dark fantasy” and a “stunningly original collection of short stories, featuring tales of terror and horror’” in fact, “acclaimed Occult author Philip Cooper describes this book as ‘great stuff, and a chilling candlelight read!'” Yes, it’s “a wonderfully twisted collection of horror short stories, featuring weird and disturbing tales, which make up the world of Dark Albion.”
Well, of course, I’m just being silly. Searching Amazon for some information about David Abbot’s book, and lazily typing “dark albion david” I found two recent books by that title, by authors named David.[1] That the other David writes fantasy — dark, disturbing fantasy, it would seem; horror, if you will — may prove, I think, more than a coincidence.
So anyhoo, this past Sunday I finished off an early morning plate of huevos rancheros, delivered from the nearby Mexican place, took a seat by a sunny window with a cheese tamale, and began to dive into Dark Albion.
I mention this, of course, because any question raised about mass immigration in the USA is met, at some point, with the sneering dismissive: “What, don’t you like Mexican food?” As if immigration was about establishing ethnic restaurants of greater or less authenticity. As if the later required mass immigration (how many millions of French immigrants did it take to establish French cuisine in Manhattan?). As if some gringos couldn’t just go down to Mexico, pick up the recipes, bring them back to Soho and do a better job anyway (like these guys).
And above all, as if a culture, even Mexican culture, were just a matter of cuisine.
David Abbott knows this, and provides the evidence here, because whether or not we can see him as a writer of horrific visions, he’s certainly something much rarer: a journalist, but one of the old school (now retired and reflecting on the state of his homeland). The significance of this was noted in a review by Francis Carr Begbie — Abbott is
White working class, a relic from an age when journalism was a suitable career for bright working class lads from unpromising backgrounds (that has been closed off now).
As a trained reporter, he is used to noticing things. Now with most young journalists today, what you do not notice is more important than what you do, especially if you want a flourishing career.[2]
He not actually ashamed to get into insalubrious neighbourhoods, talk to White working class people and report their opinions. In this he is similar to that caustic observer of modern England, Theodore Dalrymple. Young journalists on the Telegraph, Times and Daily Mail tend to be the products of England’s finest schools and find reporting a tiresome chore that gets in the way of the bloviating and commentary.[3]
Now, some other reviewers seem to find the comparison to Dalrymple to be a bit of a red flag.[4] For myself, I would more naturally find the proper comparison to be Orwell, during his Road to Wigan Pier period. Like Dark Albion, Orwell’s book “documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II”[5]–or, in Abbott’s case, South London (i.e., or so I take it, a Cockney). And, like Orwell, Abbott
does not wish merely to enumerate evils and injustices, but to break through what he regards as middle class oblivion . . . by immersion . . . directly into the experience of misery.[6]
We’ve been at pains to emphasize, in some earlier essays, the connection between fantasy, or at least horror, and close, even obsessive, attention to the details of ordinary life, which also characterizes this old school kind of journalism.[7] Thus, the sine qua non of Lovecraft’s mature writing is the co-opting of various means of verisimilitude, such as newspaper clippings, scientific reports, etc., using the careful accumulation of detail to provide a believable background against which Elder Gods can be revealed; while some of James’ most horrific writing is found not so much in the famous ghost stories but in his almost surrealistic reactions to modern New York found in his later travel writings.[8]
Like all great fantasy, the writing in Dark Albion (Abbott’s that is) is rooted in the details of reality.[9] Being rooted in reality, rather than airy-fairy theorizing, such writers tend to be “conservative,” not the reverse;[10] as in the smug assumption of the cultural gatekeepers such as S. T. Joshi (on Lovecraft, passim), China Mieville,[11] or, or . . . this guy:
For all its heavy-handed biblical tone, this quotation [from the Necronomicon] represents the cyclic rise and fall of humanity in a manner that, at first glance, appears one of Lovecraft‘s fairest, most unbiased appraisals. Upon closer inspection, the racial tension observable in so much of his work and readily apparent throughout the rest of The Dunwich Horror comes through with the insistence on knowing the outsider/other “in the features of those They have begotten on mankind.” This single line, perhaps, more than any other in the narrative, demonstrates HPL‘s insistence of the inferiority of the kind of half breed Houellebecq mentions or mongrel flesh as Lovecraft himself would say. Also, the line,
“They walk serene and primal, unseen to us . . .”
shows the profundity of difference between humankind and those beings which seek to make the earth their own, representative of the waves of immigrants entering the United States. Joshi notes Lovecraft‘s inability to accept that this influx of foreigners could maintain the cultural standards [HPL] valued (HPL: AL177-78). Similarly, in The Dunwich Horror, the unseen or Invisible alien walks unchallenged and ignored until it is nearly too late to eradicate its evil menace and perverted influence, an insidious presence which, as Lovecraft confides, leaves legitimate natives of a place feeling like strangers on their own hereditary sod. (SL II)[12]
Now, Dr. Vance, as he seems to like being called online[13] — though he has a perfectly smashing name in that “G. Warlock” business — seems to find it odd, unacceptable, that someone might question, indeed doubt to any extent, the ability of the wretched refuse of the world — to say nothing of trans-dimensional beings of uncertain mentality — to “maintain the cultural standards [HPL] valued.”
Faced with the sort of evidence Abbott and others have marshalled — to support the entirely commonsensical proposition that importing a Third World population would produce a Third World country, displacing the indigenous peoples and their culture (or, in the case of the Old Ones, producing an Earth “wiped clean of human kind”), the good-thinking liberal type has two moves open to him: to close his eyes and deny the evidence, or, since this is ultimately hard to maintain, dismiss the importance of “the cultural standards that [HPL] valued”: viz, multiculturalism (“All cultures are equally valid”).
Now, Abbott has read enough Spengler, or has enough of the Spengler spirit in him, to know that cultures are not only different but also rise and fall, and that there is no shame in a culture entering its “golden years” of decline. But this one isn’t declining, it’s been pushed — or persuaded by its culture-distorters to jump. So this journalist sees his task, or mission, as an act of proud though perhaps futile resistance — exposing who the traitors were, and above all providing a record of the daily facts of our dispossession.
We can express our anger at the treachery, naivety and stupidity of our leaders. We can document the origins of their betrayal, and, surmounting our fate by scorn, reveal the nature of those who are displacing us. We can note the impact of mass immigration on our daily lives.
Unlike most journalists on the upward career path today, he does not “acquiesce in deception, obscuring both the extent and the consequences of mass immigration.” He rebukes — with historical evidence once known to every British schoolboy — the politically correct smarties who would sneer that there is no “indigenous” (in ironic air quotes) English “people” (ditto). In fact, “the first sure fact in English history” is that
The immigrants whose settlements formed these original English kingdoms all belonged to a single group of closely related Germanic peoples. . . . There was no difference of race or culture. They were of the same stock. And they knew it.
And more than language, “it rested on a fundamental similarity of political structure and social convention.”
A culture is neither education nor law-making; it is a heritage and atmosphere. What makes a culture specific is the way in which over many centuries the elements have combined, developed and affect one another and eventually formed a system. The strengths of a people lie in continuity. To break with it is perilous.
“The strengths of a people lie in continuity”– not, as our neocons would have it, in diversity united under some proposition. Today, of course, we’ve reached the point of sneering at citizenship altogether, but even if everyone follows the rules and swears allegiance to some vague words, so what?
If a settler comes from a lawless part of the world, he fetches his lack of respect for the law; if being devious is a way of life where he comes from, he brings his deviousness; if getting all upset at the least little thing is in his culture, he imports histrionic behavior. Harshly bureaucratic people have fetched their delight in causing problems when in a position to do so; religious fanaticism and interference have been introduced into our formerly peaceful and rational secular country. The rudeness endemic in backward countries has been imported wholesale. The settler’s off-spring inherit their parents’ traits, at the same time as tiresomely moaning that they did not ask to be born in a country where they do not feel they belong, implying that this is somehow the fault of the indigenous people and not a consequence of their parents’ decision to emigrate. The young males, fuelled by testosterone and their sense of grievance, engage in anti-social activities and crime. The indigenous people are expected to put up with all this.
Take the West Indians who made up the initial, post-war surge. Welcomed at first,
As the West Indians multiplied, their presence affected more and more English people, and so more noticed how loud and flamboyant they were in an un-English way. They spoke louder, their adolescents’ horseplay was louder, they played their music louder and they dressed louder. Their cars hurled along too fast . . . They kept finding occasion to shout to a friend on the other side of the street. Worst of all were the noisy all night parties.
And of course, precisely all this was lauded by the intelligentsia — who live as far away from it as possible, of course — as the “vibrant” contribution of diversity, any complaints merely ignorant racism. Just have a jerk chicken pastie and chill, man. As Abbott and his readers know, the ignorance — in the sense of studiously ignoring facts on the ground — is all on the other side.
One angle I was pleased to see Mr. Abbott lay emphasis on, since it seldom seems to figure in most diatribes, is the harm to society cause by the sheer bulk of the immigrant. Partly, the numbers, of course, but even a single immigrant, with or without large size, can really prove disruptive.
One of the Nigerians speaking into one of these mobile phones is a gross woman dressed in gaudy African finery partly covered by an overcoat, who has an enormous arse. Although many passengers are having to stand she is unashamedly taking up two seats. The seats of London buses are not made for Nigerian arses. She has placed her shopping bag on the sliver of aisle not covered by her arse. In the bag she has a loaf of bread from which, with fingers adorned with rings, she scoops up crumbs and jams them into her mouth.
Crumbs are everywhere and she is also spitting them into her mobile. It is so unbelievably grotesque that the other passengers remain silent, unable to stop and interfere in this outrage against public decency.
Such is the vibrancy brought to staid, “white bread” London by jolly immigrants.
Here in America, we — or at least, those of us who can see — are all too aware of the parallel phenomenon of the Ubiquitous Negro: over and above being forced down our throats in the media (or what is still laughably referred to as our “culture”) their Cyclopean presence fills the big cites (so that “urban” is not marketing code for “Negro”); on the subways, for example, if anyone is blocking the stairs by standing or sitting thereon, or crowding out the platforms with their drumming circles, it’s a Negro.[14]
No longer is the fat mammy secreted upstairs, adjusting Scarlett’s corset strings; no longer is the hulking brute laying railroad tracks in the desert. They are everywhere, their slow shuffle less a relic of slave chains or African rhythms than the stately progress of royalty. [15]
Abbott is one of the few willing to note the enraging effects of all this on we of the indigenous race. Another is Greg Johnson:
I prefer my own race to the headhunters of Papua, the Aborigines of Australia, the Pygmies of the Congo, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari. But I do not hate them.
Why not?
Because I do not have to live with them. Because I am separate from them. Because, so far as I know, they do not negatively affect my life.
If, however, the Catholic Church, the federal government, or the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society established a colony of Papuans, Aborigines, Pygmies, Bushmen, or Martians on my block, and I had to live in close proximity with them—and, worse yet, subsidize them with my tax dollars—then I probably would start hating them.[16]
Of course, this loss of air and space is never “accounted for” in the Left’s pseudo-accounting notion of “reparations.”[17] Instead, the function of political correctness is prevent any doubt of the status quo goal of multiculturalism by lowering a cone of silence over any notice of, to say nothing of an outright complaint about, such obvious, predictable, and discomforting results of diversity, lest one be accused of “racism.”
It’s the details — the little things, as Vince says to Jules in Pulp Fiction — that add up to a culture, or, in this case, its slow destruction. Here is where Abbott the journalist makes his contribution, fearless of the PC regime, rendering daily life as a cultural nightmare.
That’s the “impact on our daily lives” part of his mission. Frankly, the chapters where the treachery part is documented are likely to provoke an eye-glazing response from most Yanks — like Wodehouse whenever he leaves off Jeeves and Bertie and delves into the minutiae of cricket — unless that Yank is interested in comparative malfeasance.[18]
Of course, it can’t be denied that for sheer, unabashed, almost gleeful political corruption, it’s hard to beat the Brits for amusement value; Abbott serves up the likes Muslim Conservative Baroness Warsi–whose mission seemed to be to discourage her fellow Pakis from electoral participation, so as to reserve all the loot for herself–Labour’s Jack (“The English as a race are not worth preserving”) Straw, and the proudly Socialist mayor of London, Ken (“I will make London a beacon of Islam”) Livingstone, all evincing a remarkable combination of race treason and personal enrichment that would be hard to beat even on New York‘s Upper West Side. While each seems to ratchet things up to a new level (“I’m alright, Jack,” “Kill Whitie,” and “Allah Akbar” might be their respective slogans), managing to tower over them all, however, is Denis McShane, who managed to pivot a journalistic career as an out-and-out liar into a political position overseeing — journalists.
Yanks, however, might find food for thought in Abbott’s discussion of Nigerian passport factories for pseudo-refugees, along with widespread voter fraud:
In Britain, voting registration forms are sent of every address in the country, and the head of the household fills in the people who live there. There is no check on the accuracy of this information. Everything is done on trust. The system worked well in tight-knit, homogeneous communities fifty years ago, when there was a high level of honesty. It is now abused on a massive scale by settlers. . . . Once, seventy postal votes were found to be registered in one two-bedroom terraced house.
The idea that it’s “crazy talk” to question an African politician’s birth certificate or a potential voter’s registration rests, of course, precisely on those shared norms of honesty, trust, and “what’s just not done” — or just doesn’t need to be done — found in traditional Anglo-American society, now cynically exploited by those who are actually working to replace it with a Third World population.
As an American, all this is modified by more than a little Schadenfreude. Ever since the Jazz Age, the Brits and French have been sneering about America’s race problems, expressing horror over having a segregated army stationed in England,[19] or welcoming Negroes of the “talented 10th” from Josephine Baker to Richard Wright to Miles Davis with front-page headlines in Paris newspapers and comfortable exile among adoring fans.
A good example of this kind of thing was Kingsley Amis, who was — or carefully crafted the image of being — the Ultimate Old Fogey. But “race was an issue where Amis drew the line.”[20] He famously insulted his hosts at Vanderbilt University for their casual “racism” and then had his wife write it up for public consumption. Still in a snit, he worked it into his next book, I Like it Here, in which a Little Englander (in American terms, an “isolationist”) finds justification in his abhorrence of Europe from the people he meets all being “fascists” and “racists.” Thus, he’s anti-Europe and anti-American because “they make the Right look bad.”
What a wanker.
Amis gets his posthumous comeuppance, though. His American redneck academic reveals his evilness by proclaiming: “In fifty years’ time, less than that, they’ll have dragged all of you-all down to their level.” As Abbott documents for England, maybe those of us who have had to live among the Third World hordes . . . had a point. As Fred Reed succinctly put it:
City after city joins the ranks of the bankrupt, semiliterate, corrupt black Bantustans which by honest naming would be called Lower Third World. Their culture is utterly alien to that of Eurowhites. Across the open border to the south pour huge waves from the Latino slums, less alien to Eurowhites, less hostile, but nonetheless threatening to form yet another country within a country. The Third World proportion of America closes rapidly on a full third. Despite desperate attempts to impose multicultural harmony, experience shows that widely disparate peoples who do not like each other do not enjoy happy endings. My country ’tis of three, sweet land of dystrophy. . . . [21]
On the other hand, ones Schadenfreude is rebuked in turn when Abbott, in discussing why liberals — safely ensconced in their academic and suburban redoubts — feel so good about their culture-destroying xenophilia, takes as his illustration of no-fault liberalism one Huck Finn, who runs off with N*gger Jim despite — or rather, because — he knows he’s already been freed: “I just wanted the adventure.”[22]
Considering that Abbott is on the right side, and that getting this published is little short of a miracle, it may seem a bit churlish to criticize the presentation. However, the publisher hasn’t done the author any favor by giving his work such a drab, pedestrian format; the banal typeface and tightly packed pages make reading something of a chore, and it was undoubtedly more of a pleasure to read in its original web appearance.
Additionally, in weekly installments on the web before a shifting audience, the repetitions would have been less noticeable, perhaps even useful, and each piece would have stood on its own; crammed into a book, they begin to grate. Abbott’s bits of wisdom about the effects of mass immigration and refutations of liberal sophistries get lost in all the narrative detail; an editor should have systematized them and given them more prominence, which would also slim down the volume, allowing for a more spacious layout.
At the end of the day, as the Brits would say, if you already feel that you’re being squeezed out of you own country, you probably don’t need this book, but if you’re still on the fence, or if you need to get someone else outraged, this may just do the job. Then you can put it on the shelf next to such works of horror journalism as James’ American Notes or Lovecraft’s letters from New York.[23]
Notes
1. The other being David Brian, Dark Albion, 3rd edition (Night-Flyer, 2014).
2. A reference, I suppose, to Steve Sailer’s valuable notion of “not noticing” as the Leitmotif of how good-thinkers deal with reality.
3. Occidental Observer, February 12, 2014, here. For recent examples from home, consider the jackasses infesting Ferguson, Mo.: “Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly . . . revealed his abject cluelessness this week when he hysterically tweeted a photo of what he thought were “rubber bullets.” They turned out to be high-capacity . . . ear plugs. Not to be outdone, J. V. Chris Hayes of MSNBC . . . breathlessly trumpeted seeing a “dead body,” which turned out to be neither dead nor a body.” – “The Ferguson Feeding Frenzy” by Michelle Malkin, August 20, 2014.
4. Such as this fiery chap, writing from The Gates of Vienna: “This is a real book by a real English pensioner. It is not one of those tossed-off dismissals of England’s lower classes by ‘experts’ such as Theodore Dalrymple. He has drawn my ire on several counts since his own retirement . . . This second career piggybacks on the same population for whom he was once the doctor. You will find no James Herriott writing with fondness of his ‘patients’ and their doting owners. This is a physician who retired to France and wrote most unfeelingly about those patients from whom he made his living. Where is the pity, the compassion a doctor is expected to display? Sure, he could confess to being burned out, but somehow it’s all their fault. And if he is the psychiatrist for these people, where are the success stories? Who did he manage to help? Why is the underclass given no mercy by any of the literati? The mills of the karma dude grind slowly; someone ought to point that out to Dalrymple. So support a real pensioner, one who is not living in the south of France. Buy Dark Albion and see if it doesn’t echo your own experience.”
5. Wikipedia, The Road to Wigan Pier, here.
6. Margery Sabin, “The Truths of Experience,” p. 45, in The Cambridge Companion to Orwell, ed. by John Rodden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
7. See the essays on Lovecraft in relation to Henry James and Baron Evola collected in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (San Francisco: Counter Currents, 2014).
8. See especially “The Princess and the Maggot” in The Eldritch Evola … & Others.
9. “One valuable thing that Abbott contributes is local veracity. Opinion writers for the big media outlets and the leading interviewers will not know about the 108 or 161 buses, let alone know how to use their experience of them emblematically to describe the bigger problems and changes facing our whole society today.” — Keith Thomas, commenting on Dark Albion: Xanadu-on-Thames, Wednesday, 09 July 2014.
10. As do detectives; see my “Mike Hammer, Occult Dick: Kiss Me Deadly as Lovecraftian Tale,” reprinted in The Eldritch Evola … & Others.
11. See her (his?) despicable “introduction” to the “definitive edition” of At the Mountains of Madness (New York: Modern Library, 2005), which is the only text I have ever literally torn out of a book.
12. The Dread and Portent of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon: Horror Fiction as Socio-historical Commentary, by Dr. G. Warlock Vance, 2010, p. 80. A PhD. Dissertation directed by Dr. Keith Cushman at the University of North Carolina, available online here: http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Vance_uncg_0154D_10076.pdf as well as from Amazon Digital Services, 2014.
13. He obviously hasn’t heard Barbara Hale screaming “Dr. Vaaaaaaaaance” in The Giant Spider Invasion.
14. Or, of course, a “White” person emulating them; as Abbott notes, such gross behavior, hitherto unthinkable among Brits, is more and more indulged in my lower class Whites. Often smugly noted by Negroes and their proud owners among the elite, it always reminds me of the retort given to the head of the Cynics by the head of the Platonic Academy, when the former boasted about how many Platonists had converted to Cynicism: Yes, a man may become a eunuch, but a eunuch can never become a man.
15. A phenomenon I find increasingly is their use of wheelchairs, always the latest and most expensive sort. For a race that glories in its supposed physical prowess, they seem remarkably fragile.
16. Here and reprinted as the title essay of Confessions of a Reluctant Hater (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2010).
17. Nor this: “Anytime something happens, you hear about the expense of police overtime. After 9/11, police overtime was a big topic. What is it costing in police overtime to contain the demonstrators and rioters to that small area that they’ve already destroyed?” — a commenter at Paul Kersey’s invaluable Stuff Black People Don’t Like, which performs a recording function similar to Abbott’s.
18. The Occidental Observer does a pretty thorough job of periodically documenting comparative Anglo-American perfidy on race and immigration.
19. James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor, a forgotten work we’ve frequently promoted as the best American war novel, is built around a similar theme: an Army Air Corp base in a segregated Florida town. Cozzens’ sense that good men are on all sides, that the right result is to be carefully crafted through compromise, and that the pushy Northern liberal officer is a jerk, makes him an objective “racist” today.
20. Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 589ff., online here.
21. “Weimar America: Groobers, Shickle and Otherwise,” August 6, 2014, here.
22. Indeed, unselfconscious fakery is one of the leading characteristics of American literature: Samuel Clemens of Connecticut lecturing his “fellow Southerners” as “Mark Twain”; Thoreau roughing it in his rustic cabin across the way from Emerson’s mansion, etc. Poe, the Lovecraft of the 19th century, was by contrast a very conscious manipulator of his naïve audience, perpetrating a series of literary hoaxes and even contributing an essay on “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences”: “We may [define] man, as an animal that diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of the picked chicken.”
23. Or the five stories collected by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz as From the Pest Zone (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003).