I have been greatly looking forward to the release of Edward Dutton’s Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Times of Jonathan Bowden. While I may not be the most fanatical of Bowden appreciators, I have always enjoyed his speeches on art, culture and the thought of the Dissident Right, and wanted to know more about this mysterious figure.
For those unaware, Jonathan Bowden was an English orator famous for a series of speeches that he gave to various nationalist gatherings during the 2000s which later ended up on YouTube. These speeches are ostensibly on the topic of various right-wing cultural figures like Ezra Pound, HP Lovecraft and Thomas Carlyle. They often go on extraordinary tangents, attacking everything from the education system and post-modern art to the foundations of liberalism itself. Bowden’s delivery style is unlike anyone else, throwing his whole being into bringing these long-dead thinkers and their insights to life for his audience. He delivered these extraordinary addresses in the back rooms of local pubs to small gatherings of nationalists, but the internet has given him a posthumous fame that has gone far beyond the modest reputation that he held in life.
The greatest strength and weakness of the book is that it’s written by Edward Dutton. It’s the book’s greatest strength, because Dutton is a meticulous researcher and an excellent writer. Yet it is also the book’s greatest weakness because Dutton insists on parsing all of this research through the theories of Evolutionary Psychology and obsesses over Bowden’s mental health issues as though they were the key to understanding his entire life.
According to Dutton, Bowden had symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder and Autism. Everything about his personality, life and fame is attributed to these psychiatric problems. The author’s theory is that genius of Bowden’s type is a happy accident, where a combination of mental health issues meets with high intelligence to turn disability into superhuman development in one particular aspect of the personality.
Unfortunately for Dutton, none of the psychiatrists who treated Bowden while he was still alive came to the same conclusion. They found him to be a paranoid schizophrenic, and paranoid schizophrenics are not known for their ability to give compelling speeches on Mishima and TS Elliot. The link between mental illness and genius that is the centre of Dutton’s argument can therefore be thrown into reasonable doubt. The reader is left to decide who to believe. I personally found that Dutton’s analysis was crudely reductionist in trying to make Bowden the sum of his problems.
Thankfully Dutton largely confines his amateur psychoanalysis of Bowden to the first and last chapters. Between them is the real meat of the work – an excellently researched and compellingly written account of Bowden’s life from birth to death. What made this part so enjoyable to read is that it not only captures Bowden the man, but also the milieu in which he lived.
It’s easy to forget today, but the hard wall between the “Far Right” and the establishment in the Anglosphere has only really existed for the last twenty years. Bowden’s early career exemplifies this, for he began during the 1980s and early 1990s with the Conservative Party and its semi-official pressure group the Monday Club. It was entirely possible in 1991 for Bowden to stand for the executive committee of the Monday Club on a platform of “abolishing the Commission for Racial Equality, the re-criminalisation of male homosexuality and mandatory death sentences for IRA bombers”. Indeed, his application was only rejected because he lied repeatedly about his educational achievements (this would become something of a Bowden specialty). During this period Bowden came into contact with a surprising number of mainstream Conservative figures, including future cabinet member Michael Gove.
The second act of Bowden’s life took him into the crucible of nationalist politics in early 21st Century Britain. It was the most productive period of his life, as virtually all of Bowden’s recorded speeches on art and politics come from this time. It would also eventually destroy him, as the pressure of being involved in the vicious infighting and state persecution took its toll on someone who had always had a sensitive temperament.
Through a series of political migrations, Bowden eventually wound up in the British National Party (BNP) by 2003. Luckily for Bowden, this turned out to be at the very start of a period when the openly pro-White political party started to experience mainstream success. By the time of its collapse around 2010, the BNP had won 50 local council seats in the UK and two seats in the European Parliament. Those who think that the public in Anglosphere countries isn’t ready for open racial nationalism should take note – they already were 15 years ago.
On joining, Bowden was immediately promoted to the role of Cultural Officer, and travelled around Britain giving his famous speeches several times a week. He was also a prominent speaker at the London Forum and the New Right Forum; two think tank groups that brought together nationalists from across the political spectrum to discuss political theory and culture. Bowden always spoke without a script, or seemingly any prior preparation at all. Bowden also became internationally known at this time, travelling to the US to meet notable nationalist figures like Jared Taylor and Greg Johnson.
One of the controversies that has emerged with the publication of this book has been the topic of Bowden’s lies. By any reckoning, the man was a fantasist. Bowden fabricated stories about everything from his marital status to his educational records and means of income. Dutton is quick to attribute this to Bowden’s alleged autism and BPD, but a more obvious explanation is that he was simply embarrassed about his circumstances. Bowden never graduated university, never held paid employment and lived off welfare and payments from his banker father. As a result, he lived an impoverished life in a caravan park, and later in government housing. He spent his life alone, unable to support a wife or children. This is hardly a background calculated to inspire confidence in him and his beliefs, whether from the wealthy MPs of the Monday Club or the solidly working class members of the BNP. He may have lied, but there was a clear reason for it.
Anyone who knows anything about Jonathan Bowden already knows how the story is going to end, but its inevitability doesn’t make the chapters dealing with Bowden’s mental decline and death any easier to read. Bowden was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital after a psychotic episode in 2011, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and given the drug risperidone to stabilise his moods. This may have helped him in the short-term, but it turned him into a shadow of his former self and ended up killing him a year later when the medication damaged his already weak heart.
Readers who have had to care for relatives or spouses suffering severe mental illness will find the scenes saddeningly familiar:
“He was gentle and quiet, like a child,” Gelati recalled. “He asked, ‘Can I have dessert?’ and I said, ‘Of course you can, Jonathan.’ ‘Cake?’” he asked, plaintively. Galati then took him to Oxfam, a charity shop, where Bowden replaced his lost copy of the novel Under the Volcano, and then to a pub close to Reading Railway Station. His eyes were glassy, as though he was on too much medication, and he kept reaching for his left hand, potentially implying a heart problem. Bowden remarked, speaking very softly, that, “I really like English people. There’s an art to being English.” Galati asked after Bowden’s fictional wife and children and he glumly responded, “They’re away. They’ve gone elsewhere. I’m on my own here.”
The man who talked so much about the cyclical nature of time and genetics guiding one’s fate ended up dying at almost the exact same age that his schizophrenic mother did, and of an almost identical cause. A suitably mythic early end to life that would help to establish his posthumous legend.
It is unfortunate that while the biographical section of the book throws a great deal of light on the external facts of Bowden’s life, there is almost no coverage of his ideas and beliefs. Saying that Jonathan Bowden was a schizophrenic who lived in a caravan is a bit like saying that Hitler was a mid-20th century European statesman. It’s factually correct, but rather misses the point. The man lived wholly for his art and his ideas, and neither of these are discussed in any depth. Someone whose only exposure to Jonathan Bowden was via this book would wonder what all the fuss is about.
The closest we get to an intellectual summary is a fragment of an 800 word section helpfully titled What Was the Essence of Bowden’s Philosophy?
…Bowden’s was a pagan philosophy: the world is cyclical as are civilisations, with their inevitable seasons; that which is natural (adaptive in evolutionary terms) is good; inequality is, therefore, natural because the weak will be selected-out and the group will become ever-stronger; ever-closer to the gods, producing ever-more supermen who are, of course, superior to the herd. Harm is natural, and to a degree good, because it will make the stronger more resilient and it will cull the weak, who will only make the group less effective in the battle against other groups and make it less able to achieve greatness. We must strive to create this genius elite, this aristocracy; never giving up the fight against the weakness within us.
But many questions about Bowden’s thought remain, and could have made for interesting discussions. How did Bowden develop from being a “wannabe [Max] Stirner” in his earliest known works to holding the integrated nationalist-vitalist worldview of Credo: A Nietzschean Testament? Why are his books and films made in such an incomprehensibly idiosyncratic style (as an example see his 2005 amateur film Venus Flytrap) when his speeches are so accessible? Why did he decide to make the leap from the Conservative Party to the BNP? Dutton attributes most of these changes to Bowden developing an autistic fixation on Nietzschean British author Bill Hopkins. But it seems hard to believe that someone as well-read and intellectually confident as Bowden would one day decide to base their entire worldview around crudely imitating the tastes of a minor novelist.
Unfortunately, these shortcomings mean that the definitive book on Jonathan Bowden is yet to be written. Shaman of the Radical Right is, however, a milestone in the growing field of Bowden studies. I would encourage everyone with an interest in Jonathan Bowden and nationalism in general to read it. Perth’s Imperium Press has done excellent work in publishing and distributing this important text, and it is vital that Australian nationalists support such local efforts.
As nationalism pushes through to the mainstream at last, it is worth remembering where our movement came from. We must pay tribute to those like Jonathan Bowden who laboured for decades to make it happen, with no reward during their lifetimes.
Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Times of Jonathan Bowden can be purchased directly from the publisher, or via Amazon.
