Jonathan Bowden Is a Fascist for Our Postliterate Age
Jonathan Bowden, who died 13 years ago today, is a cult figure on the international right. He self-published books and films, philosophized about white replacement in pubs, and fantasized about being a millionaire father while living alone in a trailer.
Jonathan Bowden gives a speech on March 12, 2010.
Jonathan Bowden, the British far-right writer and activist, was like a figure from a Roberto Bolaño novel. The author of several dozen works of self-published avant-garde fiction that even his fiercest defenders describe as almost entirely unreadable, and the producer and writer of several strange and extremely low-budget horror and fantasy films, Bowden spent decades flitting between various parts of the British far right before his death at the age of forty-nine in 2012.
His first brush with infamy came in the early 1990s when he was expelled from the Monday Club, a group on the racist fringes of the Conservative Party, after which he formed his own, even more extreme group, the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus. That group caused something of a stir, even getting a write-up in Esquire by Francis Wheen, as well as denunciations in the press by both the liberal left and the Tory right.
Something of a loner since his school days, he was nevertheless intellectually searching and precocious. After leaving school, he supposedly attended Cambridge University before starting a PhD on Wyndham Lewis at Birkbeck. This work was part of his longer project, one that sought to connect the modern British far right — always more concerned with street movements than intellectual exploration — with an extended European tradition, stretching from Friedrich Nietzsche and the Futurists via Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Martin Heidegger, Bill Hopkins and the “angry young men,” through to the European New Right of Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye.
He did this not so much through his writing — which was too strange to ever draw much of a readership beyond a small circle of admirers — but with his oratory. His talks were usually delivered extempore, at meetings in the back room of various pubs and bars, for groups like the neo-Nazi British National Party, which he joined in the early 2000s. His skills as a speaker are celebrated still, and his speeches are today obsessively combed over and shared on social media by young radicals looking for intellectual ballast for their very online ethnonationalism.
The Cult of Bowden
Bowden was born in 1962 in the Middle English town of Tunbridge Wells to a bank manager father and a mother who died when he was a teenager; little else was known about him than what he told people. His personal life remained a mystery, even to his close friends. He was, he claimed, a millionaire, either due to an inheritance or through the print shop and rental properties he owned in and around Reading. Alongside this, he managed to hold down a marriage to his wife, Karen, with whom he had either four or five children, although he also kept his family and his love life far from his writing and activism.
Except, of course, all this was a lie, as revealed by the new biography of him by the disgraced anthropologist Edward Dutton, published by the Australian white nationalist publisher Imperium Press. Bowden was in fact a childless bachelor who lived alone in a trailer on the outskirts of Reading that was so dirty that the council had to destroy it after his death. Far from the roving intellectual of self-built myth, he was terminally unemployed and did most of his research at the local library, as he lacked internet access at his trailer. (In a revealing note, Dutton says that Bowden was at one point banned from the library; he doesn’t say why, but it would be easy to guess.) He did attend Cambridge, but only for a few months, and he never completed a degree, let alone began graduate work.
In the year before Bowden died, he spent several months in a psychiatric ward, institutionalized after being found half naked, brandishing a samurai sword and a machete. His death was partly caused by the antipsychotic medication he was given for paranoid schizophrenia. Rather than the celebrated intellectual he long wished to be, and which his later fans have taken him to be, he was a racist, delusional crank with a tendency toward compulsive lying.
Wikipedia Fascism
There has been something of a cult of Bowden emerging in recent years, the first signs of which had already begun before his death. In 2011, he traveled through the United States on a speaking tour, along with the likes of Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist website American Renaissance. A year later, in one of his final public conversations, Bowden gave an extended interview to Richard Spencer, the poster boy of the alt-right.
Today the internet is filled with Bowden content: there are dozens of his speeches on YouTube, along with a website dedicated to his talks and writing, several X accounts that churn out quotes and clips, and a legion of followers and high-profile fans.
And now there is a biography, which, despite puncturing some of the myths that have accumulated around Bowden, will no doubt only feed the allure. The book itself is almost as strange as the man. It’s written in a barely edited, almost stream-of-consciousness style. It’s a tough read, filled with bizarre digressions. After mentioning that Bowden once told a friend he had studied engineering at Manchester University, for instance, we get a nearly full-page sub-Wikipedia precis of the university’s history. Dutton also has a strange habit of putting parenthetical birth and death dates in the text after the name of every person he mentions, clogging the page, and the book is larded with obsessive references to evolutionary psychology, which leads to strange sentences like:
For these youthful Bowdenites, rather than be like the hypocritical liberal virtue-signallers — whom many studies prove, on average and in comparison to conservatives, are objectively unpleasant, selfish, arrogant and entitled, treacherous, criminal, mentally unstable, congenitally physically unhealthy, physically weak, short, ugly, have objectively unattractive bodies, mutated, hateful, authoritarian, and dishonest people, and who, being frightened and mentally unstable, covertly attain status by pretending to care about equality but in fact are motivated by a desire for power and by resentment of that which represents the power they feel they lack . . .
(This is an “objectively” funny thing to write in a celebratory biography of a short, fat, nearsighted, mentally unstable loner and fabulist.)
Or:
We would expect an up-and-coming movement [in this case, the new online right] to include a growing number of young, childless females. They are more socially anxious and socially aware than males, so can be expected to better intuit the way the political wind is blowing. They sexually select for high status males [as with most far-right figures and most fans of evolutionary psychology, Dutton is obsessed with female sexual selection], or males for whom they believe will achieve high status, so a growing female presence is akin to investors investing early . . .
So much for the biography. What of Bowden?
Well, to be honest, even I don’t have the fortitude to wade through hours of rambling lectures. I have read a great deal of his writing, however. What Bowden gives in what I have read and seen, more than his celebrated learning and oratory, is a kind of shallow and memeable erudition. Reading him is like spending an hour with someone who has ADHD as they click through Wikipedia pages, interspersed with some fascist invective about the “moral syphilis” of liberalism or the “Jewish desire for power.” It’s the false erudition of the overconfident undergraduate, which must be a powerful stimulant in the otherwise barren pastures of the far right. Plus, there’s an edginess to it — he’s talking openly about figures like Evola and Savitri Devi alongside Oswald Mosley. Ultimately, he’s a grim symptom of a postliterate society.