Artists of the Right

by Kerry Bolton

  In 1936, Campbell met British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley at the suggestion of Wyndham Lewis.[476] Although Campbell declined to join Mosley as British Fascism’s official poet, his poetry was to appear in Mosley’s journals.[477]

  Toledo, the Sacred City

  The Campbells next moved to Toledo, which had been Spain’s capital under Charles V during the Holy Roman Empire. The city was isolated and timeless, medieval, full of churches, monasteries, convents, and shrines. The old fortress, the Alcazar, destined to play a pivotal role in the defense of Christendom against Bolshevism, served as a military academy. The city was full of priests, nuns, monks, and soldiers, a combination of the religious, the military, and the traditional that prompted Campbell to call Toledo the “sacred city of the mind.”

  The Left-wing Popular Front’s assumption to power resulted in the release of communist and anarchist revolutionaries from jail amidst increasing political violence in Madrid and Barcelona and street fighting between Left-wing and Right-wing factions.[478] Churches were now being desecrated and destroyed throughout Spain.[479] The violence reached Toledo, despite its Rightist majority, where priests and monks were attacked and a church set ablaze.[480]

  The Campbells sheltered several Carmelite monks in their home.[481] Despite the danger, Campbell’s retort later was: “Better a broken head than a broken spirit every time!”[482] Campbell, well known for his anti-Bolshevik views and for his faith, was indeed severely beaten by government “Red” guards and paraded through the streets to police headquarters.[483] His gypsy friend, with whom he was riding at the time of his capture, “Mosquito” Bargas, was murdered at the time of the arrest.[484] In his tribute to his friend, “In Memoriam of ‘Mosquito,’” Campbell writes with typical stoicism and faith when beaten bloody and dragged through Toledo:

  I never felt such glory

  As handcuffs on my wrists.

  My body stunned and gory

  With toothmarks on my fists . . .

  While Spain was on the verge of civil war and any display of faith was fraught with danger, the Campbells were confirmed into the Church by Cardinal Goma, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, in a secret ceremony.

  In July 1938, the government’s Red guards killed parliamentary opposition leader Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the monarchists.[485] Four days later, the military under General Franco revolted against the government to restore order and liberty of worship. The Alcazar being a military academy, Toledo was easily taken by Nationalist troops, and peasants from the surrounding countryside fled to the city for refuge from their “proletarian liberators.” The government militia from Madrid prepared to attack Toledo, and the Alcazar was bombed and shelled. The Campbells hid the rare and valuable archives of the Carmelite monks at their home for the duration of the Civil War, the Carmelite library having been razed.

  Seventeen Carmelite monks were herded into the streets by the Red forces and shot. Among them was the Campbells’ Father Confessor who died with a smile and the shout of “Long live Christ! Long live Spain!”[486]

  In Campbell’s excursion into the city he came across the Carmelites lying in the street and found the bodies of the Marist monks. Smeared in their blood on a wall was: “Thus strike the Cheka,” a reference to the original Bolshevik secret police. In the city square religious artifacts from churches and private homes were tossed onto bonfires.

  In the besieged Alcazar were 800 Civil Guards and 500 civilians, including over 200 children.[487] Under the command of Colonel Moscardó they held out, even as the Colonel’s 24-year-old son Luis, captured by the Red forces, was compelled to telephone his father and say that he would be shot unless the Alcazar was surrendered. In an epic act of heroism and martyrdom that helped make the Alcazar a shrine to this day, the Colonel replied to his son: “Commend your soul to God, shout ‘Viva España,’ and die like a patriot.”[488]

  Campbell’s tribute to the Alcazar was published in Mosley’s British Union Quarterly:

  This Rock of Faith, the thunder-blasted—

  Eternity will hear it rise.

  With those who (Hell itself out-lasted)

  Will lift it with them to the skies!

  Till whispered through the depths of Hell

  The censored Miracle be known . . .

  The towers and trees were lifted hymns of praise,

  The city was a prayer, the land a nun:

  The noonday azure strumming all its rays

  Sang that a famous battle had been won,

  As singing his white Cross, the very Sun,

  The Solar Christ and the captain of my days

  Zoomed to the zenith; and his will was done.[489]

  The Campbells left Spain and returned to London. They felt isolated in England, where most of the literati supported the “Left” in the Spanish Civil War.[490] The family soon moved to a fishing village in Portugal, a nation that, under the corporatist regime of Salazar, retained the same spirit of faith and tradition as that for which Spain was fighting to restore.

  Campbell returned to Spain as a correspondent for the British Catholic newspaper The Tablet and was given safe conduct to the Madrid front.[491] His desire to enlist in the Nationalist forces was frustrated, as the Nationalist authorities were insistent that he could do more good for the cause as a writer. Nonetheless, he was awarded the Cruz de San Fernando for saving life under fire, fourteen times.[492] With the conclusion of the Civil War, the Campbells resettled in Spain, and he was present at the Nationalist victory parade in Madrid.[493]

  The Civil War resulted in the murder of 12 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks, and around 300 nuns. George Orwell, who had gone to Spain along with others of the literati to fight with the Reds, was to remark that, “Churches were pillaged everywhere as a matter of course. In six months in Spain, I only saw two undamaged churches.”[494]

  Flowering Rifle

  Campbell’s epic poem Flowering Rifle[495] is a detailed explanation of his political credo inspired by the Civil War. It is a tribute to his Catholicism and to Spain’s faith and martyrdom, as well as a condemnation of the British intelligentsia. In his introductory note, Campbell explains that a hypocritical “humanitarianism” is the “ruling passion” of the British intelligentsia, which “sides automatically with the Dog against the Man, the Jew against the Christian, the black against the white, the servant against the master, the criminal against the judge.”

  As a form of “moral perversion” it was natural that such “humanitarians” sided with Bolshevik mass murderers. The poem begins with a description of the (fascist) salute, the “opening palm, of victory” the sign, of “palms triumphant foresting the day.” By contrast is the clenched fist of communism, “a Life-constricting tetanus of fingers,” the sign of an “outworn age” under which “all must starve under the lowest Caste.” The Bloomsbury intelligentsia represents the connection between capitalism and communism. Behind these stand “the Yiddisher’s convulsive gold”: one of many allusions to the prominent role played by Jews in Communism and in the International Brigades.

  Spain is heralded as a resurrected nation that might show the rest of Europe the path to regeneration and stand against Bolshevism “which no godless democracy could quell.” The martyrs of the Nationalist cause are described in mystical terms, each death “a splinter of the Cross,” each body building a cathedral to the sky. Nobility is achieved through suffering and sacrifice, as Christ, the “Captain” suffered. But when suffering and sacrifice are eliminated from life, mankind is “shunned by the angels as effete baboons.”

  José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the charismatic young leader of the Falangists, who had been shot without trial while in the custody of the Leftist government, was similarly eulogized:

  Whose phoenix blood in generous libation

  With fiery zest rejuvenates the nation . . .
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  The Marxist deaths, on the other hand, were vacuous, for their gods are economics, science, gold, and sex, and as exponents of abortion and birth control they are the essence of anti-life. But capitalism is just as much a debasement of man as communism:

  To cheapen thus for slavery and hire

  The racket of the Invert and the Jew

  Which is through art and science to subdue.

  Humiliate, and to pulp reduce

  The Human Spirit for industrial use

  Whether by Capital or by Communism

  It’s all the same despite their seeming schisms

  Those who are debased the most are, under democracy, elevated to positions of honor and state, elected by the voting masses who are mesmerized by the media and the literati, while the politicians hang about the League of Nations:

  That sheeny club of communists and masons

  He bombs the Arabs, when his Jews invade.

  Britannia’s trident had become a “graveyard spade” while condemning Germany and Italy. “Who from the dead have raised more vital forces . . .” Franco, Mussolini, and Portugal’s Salazar had “muzzled up the soul destroying lie” of communism, and as Spain had shown, victory would come through nationhood, not League of Nations sanctions, wealth, or arms. Meanwhile, Britain shunned its unbought men, such as Campbell, who brings “the tidings that Democracy is dead.”

  When the Campbells travelled to Italy in 1938, the exiled Spanish King Alfonso XIII, who was greatly impressed with Flowering Rifle, cordially greeted them.[496] Of course the British literati were outraged, and even some Catholics felt the poem lacked “charity,” but it did have its enthusiasts, such as Arthur Bryant, who were willing to speak out, while predictably Stephen Spender, one of the most prominent of the literary Bolsheviki, despite his secret admiration of Campbell’s style, was scathing.[497]

  War Service

  Campbell and his wife returned to Toledo in 1939. But there was now widespread famine. Mary opened a soup kitchen and refurbished the damaged chapel by selling all her jewelry. Both literally gave their clothes away to help the distressed inhabitants.[498]

  As the World War approached, Campbell considered that there would be two great contending forces: Fascism and Communism. With the exception of what he considered to be a pagan orientation in Germany, the Fascist states were eminently Christian and allowed Christians the right to live, whereas Bolshevism simply killed and degraded everything, being the enemy of every form of religion.[499]

  However, despite his antagonism to the English bourgeoisie and democratic Britain, Campbell always had an admiration for the heroic spirit of the British Empire and a feeling for those Britons facing an enemy. He sought to enlist, although under no illusions about the justice of the Allied cause. His animosity by this time was against all systems, fascism, democracy, and bolshevism, which he dubbed as Fascidemoshevism.[500] The Hitler-Stalin Pact prompted Campbell’s reassessment,[501] which is not to say that he ever considered rejecting his Rightist, Catholic beliefs.

  His ideal was not the cumbersome state of any of these systems but that of small, self-reliant, and cooperative family based communities, like those he had experienced in Provence, Spain, and Portugal.

  In the “Moon of Short Rations,” Campbell considered the Allied cause to be that of both socialism and the multi-national corporations, twin figures of a universal sameness. He saw that the post-war world would be ever more depersonalized and mechanical. Campbell could not sit still or take a soft option as a number of his pro-war Left-wing intellectual accusers were doing while Britons marched to war. He lampooned these hypocrites such as Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis who had jobs at the Ministry of Information, when they attacked his “fascism,” and he wrote “The Volunteer’s Reply to the Poet” stating:

  Oh yes! It will be the same, but a bloody sight worse . . .

  Since you have a hand in the game . . .

  You coin us the catchwords and phrases

  For which to be slaughtered . . .

  However, because of his age and a bad hip Campbell had to be content with the Home Guard until 1942, when he was recruited into the Army Intelligence Corps due to his skills in languages. Britain in wartime had in Campbell’s view awakened from its “drabness” to become again a “warrior nation.” Campbell was popular with the troops as a “grandfatherly” figure, and was stationed in East Africa. Suffering from malaria and a deteriorating hip condition that necessitated the use of a cane, he was discharged with an “excellent military record.”

  The Post-War World

  The England of the post-war years returned to its drab routine and, worse still for Campbell, the prospects of an all-embracing welfare state. Campbell soon went back into fighting mode against the Left-wing poets, writing Talking Bronco.[502] Even Vita Sackville-West, part of the Bloomsbury clique, acclaimed this volume, calling Campbell “one of our most considerable living poets.” Desmond MacCarthy, writing in the Sunday Times, regarded Campbell as “the most democratic poet,” not politically, but in his feeling for the common man and for the common soldier. Others were of course outraged. Cecil Day-Lewis, another of the literary Bolsheviki, believed Campbell should be sacked as a “fascist” from the job he now had as producer of the BBC talk programs, since he was not fit to “direct any civilized form of cultural expression.”[503]

  Campbell was horrified by the Allied victory that had placed half of Europe under the USSR. For Campbell, the Cold War was a contention between two equally internationalist forces.[504]

  His daughter Anna wrote in 1999 that Campbell admired all types of ethnic civilization as opposed to the mass conformity of Marxism and the globalization of the likes of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. His concern was in the nightmare of “everything becoming the same.” He would have been “horrified by what the world has become now,” she wrote.[505]

  Despite Campbell’s sensitivity to being called a “fascist,” he was unapologetically a man of the “Right,” of tradition and nationalism, and continued to forthrightly expound this position after the war in his poetry and essays. Writing in a Jesuit journal, he refers to the “Gadarene stampede” of progress for the want of two sensible standbys (a brake and a steering wheel). In “Tradition and Reaction,” he writes: “A body without reactions is a corpse. So is a Society without Tradition.”[506]

  In 1949 Campbell left his job with the BBC to take over the editorship of The Catacomb, founded by his close friend, the poet Rob Lyle, as a defense of Catholic and Classical traditions against socialism and secularism. The Catacomb stopped publication in 1951.

  In 1952, the family moved to Portugal, which had remained a bastion of Catholic civilization under Salazar. Before leaving England, Campbell got together with a number of South African literary friends, including Alan Paton and Laurens van der Post, and signed an open letter to the South African government protesting voting restrictions on the colored population.[507] However, Campbell’s misgivings about the South African situation were not prompted by the liberal desire for a democratic, monocultural state. He feared that antagonism between the races would result in Bolshevism and the destruction of his rustic ideal. With the advent of black rule, free market capitalism was ushered in on the wings of Marxism and revolution, which would hardly have surprised Campbell. Today the ANC today calls globalization and trade liberalization the “correct path to Marxism-Leninism.”[508]

  In 1954, he gave his views on his native land while accepting an honorary doctorate from Natal University. In an off-the-cuff speech, much to the embarrassment of the liberal audience, he defended South Africa against England’s condemnation of apartheid, ridiculing Churchill and Roosevelt, who had sold “two hundred million natives of Europe” to the far worse slavery of Bolshevism.[509]

  While in the US on a speaking tour, he praised “the two greatest Yanks,” Senator McCarthy and Gene
ral Mac-Arthur.[510]

  On April 23, 1957, Campbell and his wife had a motor accident while returning from Spain to Portugal. Campbell’s neck was broken, and he died at the scene. Mary survived him by 22 years.

  Edith Sitwell, who converted to Catholicism through the example of the Campbells, remarked that he was, “The true Knight of Our Lady. . . . He died as he had lived, like a flash of lightning.”[511]

  Campbell, despite his rejection of affiliation with the pre-war British Union, remained a hero of the Right and was eulogized in Mosley’s journal, The European, by Richard Aldington[512] and by Henry Williamson, who concluded by describing Campbell as “the only unencumbered man of genius I have known . . .”[513]

  About the Author

  KERRY BOLTON holds Doctorates in Theology and a Ph.D. h.c. He is a contributing writer for Foreign Policy Journal and a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research in Greece. His books include Revolution from Above (London: Arktos Media, 2011). His articles have been published by both scholarly and popular media, including the International Journal of Social Economics; Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies; Geopolitika; World Affairs; India Quarterly; The Occidental Quarterly; North American New Right; Radio Free Asia; Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies, Trinity College; International Journal of Russian Studies, and many others. His writings have been translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Czech, Latvian, Farsi, and Vietnamese.