No, I'm Not English - and Why Should I Care?

I am Swedish. I am born in Austria and perhaps made in Poland (or then Czechoslovakia, or Austria). Niestetny, mówię bardzo trochę po polsku. Studiowałem ten język tyłko jeden semestr i tyłko pól czas.

I don't feel insulted if a complete stranger takes me for an Englishman or a German. But in places where I have been already, I find it annoying after already answering the question more than once if they insist. Not that it would be a shame to be English or German. It would even be an honour to be Irish or Austrian (but if I were a Pole, I'd have to be ashamed of my nearly non-extant Polish, see above).

But I find it annoying when people who could have read the answer fairly easily on my blogs or heard it from others in the neighbourhood insist.

No, I am not English, and I am also not German. Sweden is a small country, and Swedes pick up cultural traits from elsewhere. While children's books from our own writers include Selma Lagerlöf, Astrid Lindgren, and from Finland, Tove Jansson, we also thrive on French and English books, though as per recently less German ones. There are children's books that are really meant for small children, and may not give very much to adults. There are also the category "9 - 12". In the XXth C. this category has often involved better story books than the novels written for adults. Apart from Astrid and Tove, I very much favour Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Though Lord of the Rings is considered the age group above 9 - 12, I first read it at 13.

Obviously, I have nothing against reading adult material in linguistics or pseudo-science Evolution, or real alternative science Creation Science. Or from earlier centuries. Or by people who wrote really well even for adults, even in the XXth C. like Tolkien and Chesterton.

I have also nothing against reading essays (not quite the same thing as when a French writer calls La France juive or Le hasard et la nécessité an "essai", I'd call those monographies, and I do enjoy both genres, since getting past puberty : Chesterton and Lewis also wrote great essays, like ...

On Mending and Ending Things
G. K. Chesterton
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/mending.html

or

Fern-Seed and Elephants
C.S. Lewis
http://orthodox-web.tripod.com/papers/fern_seed.html

... and they also both wrote great monographies, what the French would call essais, like ...

THE NEW JERUSALEM
by G. K. CHESTERTON
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/GKC_New_Jerusalem.html

or

STUDY GUIDE to
Miracles
By C.S. Lewis
http://www.cslewis.org/resources/studyguides/Study%20Guide%20-%20Miracles.pdf?x98961
(I cannot link to the text of the book Miracles, it is copyrighted and you'd need to buy a paper or e-book version, unless you can borrow, hence link to a Study Guide)

... and while I appreciate a sassy article by François Brigneaud, I think the nation of Bossuet is, during the XXth C., not quite the equal of certain Englishmen. Let's put it like this : Rivarol regularly gives biographies over XIXth C. precursors of their monarchist movement, and as regularly, I think : yeah, sure, good enough, but Maurras was not equal to it and if you want something that is, go to ... Chesterton, Belloc, Tolkien, Lewis.

These were certainly English (except Belloc who was English and French, double citizenship, did military service in France, I think, and certainly knew details about it, and C. S. Lewis who was Irish born and of Welsh and Scottish origins - Lewis family being Welsh and Hamilton family Scottish nobility, also present in Sweden's "Gotha").

But they were not the typical English élite which has contributed to misforming the modern world so much : they were in opposition to it. Blaming them for Cecil Rhodes is like blaming Drumont for Jules Ferry.

This is why I object to being taken as an Englishman : it often comes from people who are concerned to reduce the favourite authors to a marginal, purely English and temporal phenomenon. Here is what's in for a Frenchman in getting to read them : Belloc was a man whom one could consider close enough to Drumont, Déroulède, Drieux la Rochelle in shared values, and he was also a man who after 1945 said "Hitler has dishonoured Antisemitism". Belloc and Chesterton opposed the Boer War, in which camps were tried out against Afrikaander farmers, to prevent them from giving supplies to the Afrikaander armies.

They and also Tolkien and Lewis were totally opposed to saying "obviously the English were right and Krüger wrong, because Krüger lost". History doesn't work that way. Hegelian historicism is a cult of things as "progress" just because they happen to win. Up to Harmageddon, the good sides in more than one conflict will actually be losing the battles. Yes, on a battle field, God may be present as He was present when the Sun stood still. But He may also be present as He was present on Calvary. When the one man who was ever totally good - because He was and is God - before His blessed Mother and to His Eternal Father recited "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani".

Maurras was often knowledgeable about what had gone wrong (but sometimes no doubt indebted to Drumont, it seems Ferry was Jewish, I didn't know that). But when it comes to what is right, the English quattuor I just cited is beside Maurras like expresso beside cold jus de chausette.

Drumont founded no lasting party, but for a Monarchist, is that so bad? Maurras himself stated what he hated about parties. So, founding one doesn't make him superior to Drumont, as per a real return (if ever it could come) to l'Ancien Régime. Tolkien said once he was a man of limited sympathies, so are most men. But the bad thing with a party is, sometimes the members limit their sympathies to those endorsed by the party line or the founder.

The good thing with writers is, they widen the sympathies to what is - often enough, and in these four cases certainly - worth sympathising with.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Raphael Archangel
24.X.2020