John J. Reilly appreciation thread

[KingOrfeo]

John J. Reilly was a conservative Catholic (both very important elements in his thought) intellectual who published a lot of essays and book reviews -- mostly book reviews -- on his website. It went dark when he died in 2011, but I recently learned that it is archived on the Internet Wayback Machine. And believe me, you would never think you could learn so much from book reviews.

I'll start with his review of Tragedy and Hope (1966), by Carroll Quigley, because I've seem him cited as a conspiracy theorist on the GB in the past, and because some recall that Bill Clinton studied under Quigley at Georgetown. Quigley did posit the existence of an Anglophile establishment, but he did not ascribe omnipotence or malice to it:

What chiefly ensured Quigley's work a lasting place in the pantheon of paranoia, however, was his attempt to provide a social context for this activity. This paragraph appears at the end of a tirade against McCarthyism:

"This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its paper and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known." [Page 950]

"Anglophilia" sounds like a debilitating psychological ailment, with some reason. In its American manifestation, it suggests a preference for tweedy clothes, water sports that don't require surf, and nominal affiliation with the Anglican Communion. The syndrome has a copious literature, much of it concerned with prep schools, but here is all you need to know in this context. The ideology of Quigley's network can apparently be traced to 19th century Oxford, indeed specifically to All Souls College, back when John Ruskin was expounding a compound of Gothic Revival aesthetics, the glory of the British Empire, and the duty to uplift the downtrodden poor. These ideas seized the imagination of Cecil Rhodes during his years at Oxford. He hoped for a federation of the whole English-speaking world, and provided the money and impetus for institutions to link those countries. (Lord Alfred Milner provided the organizing talent.) The best known of these efforts are the Rhodes Scholarships for study at Oxford. (Bill Clinton is among the many well-know recipients.) They also included informal "Round Table Groups" in the Dominions and the US, which sponsored local Institutes of International Affairs. The US version is the Council on Foreign Relations.

While the people in these groups were very influential (that is why they were asked to join), Quigley makes clear that the Round Tables never had everything their own way, even in the administration of colonial Africa, where both Rhodes and Milner were especially interested. As with the finance capitalists, the Anglophile network was essentially a league of private persons trying to fill a gap in the international system. As public institutions were created to exercise the Round Tables' consultative and communications functions, the network itself became less important.

Quigley makes the increasing marginalization of the Anglophile network perfectly clear, and in fact he does not suggest that it was ever more than one factor among many at any point in the 20th century. Nonetheless, it is his failing as a historian to suggest that a causal nexus can be inferred whenever two actors in a historical event can be shown to have met. Consider this excerpt from a discussion of the history of Iran:

"By that time (summer, 1953) almost irresistible forces were building up against [Prime Minister] Mossadegh, since lack of Soviet interference give the West full freedom of action. The British, the AIOC, the world petroleum cartel, the American government, and the older Iranian elite led by the shah combined to crush Mossadegh. The chief effort came from the American supersecret intelligence agency (CIA) under the personal direction of its director, Allen W. Dulles, brother of the secretary of State. DulIes, as a former director of the Schroeder Bank in New York, was an old associate of Frank C Tiarks, a partner in the Schroeder Bank in London since 1902, and a director of the Bank of England in 1912-1945, as well as Lazard Brothers Bank, and the AIOC. It will be recalled that the Schroeder Bank in Cologne helped to arrange Hitler's accession to power as chancellor in January 1933." [Page 1059]

I don't quite know what this is supposed to mean; that pretty much the same people overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh as brought us Hitler? I am reminded of nothing so much as Monty Python's parody of an Icelandic saga, about the deeds of "Hrothgar, son of Sigismund, brother of Grundir, mother of Fingal, who knew Hermann, the cousin of Bob." Maybe this is Quigley's idea of "thick" description. Certainly "Tragedy and Hope" is thick with it; it goes on for pages and pages.

No, what Quigley was really about was this:

"Tragedy and Hope" is a fossil, perfectly preserved, of the sophisticated liberalism of the Kennedy era. Quigley takes a partisan position in the debates about nuclear strategy that began in the 1950s. (He sat on several government commissions on scientific questions, including the one that recommended creating NASA. The book explains the physics of nuclear weapons in some detail; Quigley does not just name names, he names the weight of fissionable material necessary for a bomb.) Thus, he praises Oppenheimer and condemns Teller, deplores the cost-cutting strategy of "massive retaliation" embraced by the Eisenhower Administration and supports tactical nuclear devices suitable for conventional war. "Tragedy and Hope" has prose poems to "Operations Research," the application of quantitative analysis to military affairs, which he ranks with Keynsian economics as one of the pillars of modern civilization.

Though it is not entirely fair to criticize even a book such as this for failing to foresee the immediate future, still I cannot help but remark how many of these ideas were tested in the 1960s and found wanting. The number-crunching military philosophy that Quigley endorsed was essentially that of Robert McNamara's Pentagon; as much as anything else, it is what lost the Vietnam War for the United States. Quigley covers Vietnam up through the assassination of President Diem in 1963, but gives no greater prominence to the conflict there than to other Cold War trouble spots. This book is good evidence, if any more were needed, that even the Americans who knew most had not the tiniest idea what they were doing.

The problem with the Kennedy Enlightenment is not that elements of its conventional wisdom were wrong; that is true of all eras. The great flaw was its totalitarian streak. Quigley expresses this attitude perfectly:

"The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and more international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in terms of procedure, priority and method..." [Page 1248-1249]

Quigley was aware that there was a substantial number of persons in the nascent conservative movement who did not think that all issues had been settled yet, but he regards their opinions as not just erroneous but illegitimate. Quigley has fits of class analysis, so he tells us that the traditional middle class, considered as a cultural pattern rather than an economic group, was evaporating because of growing prosperity and feminization. (His description of contemporary students as promiscuous, unkempt and unpunctual suggests he had some inkling of just how annoying the Baby Boom generation was going to be.) The Right, however, was dominated by a parody, also destined to be ephemeral in Quigley's estimation, of the disappearing middle class. The Right was "petty bourgeois" (he actually uses the term), grasping, intolerant and careerist. They were ignorant, even the ones who tried to get into top colleges on the basis of good grades, since those grades were achieved by unimaginative drudgery rather than by any real engagement with the life of the mind. The Right even came from unfashionable places, principally the Southwest, where they made fortunes in dreadful extractive industries, like oil and mining. The Right, particularly as manifest in the Republican Party, is merely ignorant. It must be combated, but need not be listened to.

Let us think less harshly of Bill Clinton hereafter, if these were the opinions he heard from the Wise and the Good of his youth.

 

[rocket_surgery]

He's a good compliment to Will Ferrell and can hold his own dramatically. Was surprisingly good in Kong Skull Island and Gangs of New York. Plus people don't give Walk Hard enough credit. It was funny and whats her name is really cute.

 

[KingOrfeo]

And, just for fun, Chtuluism and the Cold War!

LERNER: "Dr. Turnip, can you tell us about the significance of the recently declassified sections of the Venona Codex?"

TURNIP: "The Codex proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that people like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were in fact in league with unspeakable evil throughout the 1930s and `40s. We not only have names and dates, we even have Henry Wallace's fingerprints on the Silver Key."

LERNER: "And Mr. Ward, what do you have to say to that?"

WARD: "Highly mephitic, I say. This is pure American triumphalism. Maybe 100 million people have been consumed since the Old Ones returned in 1917, but that is no reason to condemn as a traitor everyone who ever attended an invocation of the Crawling Chaos. We are talking about the fundamental legitimacy of progressive politics here."

LERNER: "Dr. Turnip?"

TURNIP: "Throughout the 20th century, the term `progressive' has been the silken mask of the High Priest Not to be Described. It's people like the readers of `The Burrower' who became pacifists when the Ribbentrop-Nyarlathotep Pact was signed, but suddenly changed their minds when Hitler invaded Leng."

WARD: "This is McCarthyism of the most eldritch kind. In the 1930s, no one but the Starry Wisdom Party was doing anything in this country about racial equality and the condition of working people. That's what the Cthuluist tradition is really about."

TURNIP: "If you read the Party platform from those years, you will see that what `equality' meant to Cthuluists was that all non-initiates were equally tasty. As for the condition of workers, you know perfectly well that the old CIO demanded that the membership surrender their souls on election day."

LERNER: "Gentlemen, please. To change the subject slightly, it is often said today that the only place that Cthuluism still finds adherents is on college campuses. Mr. Ward, would you agree with that?"

WARD: "That is a squamous calumny on multiculturalism. There are indeed a few campuses today where gender equity and anthropophagy are actively promoted by the administration, but the reality is that most institutions of higher education in this country are highly reactionary. To this day, in fact, a few colleges refuse to hire faculty who cannot tolerate direct sunlight. But doubtless this situation pleases Dr. Turnip and his neoconservative friends at Miskatonic University."

TURNIP: "The real fact of the matter is that our universities have been taken over by Black Diaper Babies."

WARD: "You know, it's people like you who see a zoog under every bed."

TURNIP: "There usually are zoogs under my bed; it's people like you who send them."

LERNER: "Dr. Turnip, isn't what you say a little extreme? Aren't you free at Miskatonic University to write and teach whatever you want about the influence of the Starry Wisdom Party?"

TURNIP: "Let me begin by saying that Dean Golder at Miskatonic has done a very good job of keeping the more obviously non-human applicants out of the tenure track, at least in the liberal arts. And it is also true that, nationally, the number of undergraduates who are inexplicably dismembered on Lammas Night has fallen to its lowest level since the late `60s. Nevertheless, the situation only grows worse and worse. Spontaneous deliquescence is now a protected condition under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Literature survey courses used to start with `Moby Dick.' Now they start with `The Pnakotic Manuscripts.' There's postmodernism for you. Most of these ideas are simply imported from France, where Cthulu always had a large following."

LERNER: "That brings us to an important point. Is it really fair to identify French postmodernism completely with Cthuluism?"

TURNIP: "Well, Michel Foucault did die by being torn in pieces by a nightgaunt over the Boulevard Saint Germain."

WARD: "Excuse me, but I think it is simply bigotry to invoke the tragic circumstances of Foucault's death as a way to discredit his ideas. It expresses contempt for the thousands of people who suffer similar afflictions everywhere in the world today."

 

[phrodeau]

He's a good compliment to Will Ferrell and can hold his own dramatically. Was surprisingly good in Kong Skull Island and Gangs of New York. Plus people don't give Walk Hard enough credit. It was funny and whats her name is really cute.

You're thinking of this guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKHzTtr_lNk

 

[KingOrfeo]

Before discovering Reilly I never heard of "esoteric fascism." Apparently such a thing exists, and while it is no potent force politically and never likely to be, it is a topic of some interest.

Review of Revolt Against the Modern World, by Julius Evola.

Men Among the Ruins, also by Evola.

The Dark Imperium.

Black Sun.