A Short Note About A Mistake

On having your words hijacked

I don’t especially want to write this post, but I want to tell my readers about something that has cropped up this week, in case they hear about it somewhere else and wonder why.

Several months back I received an email from a German magazine asking me to write something for them. I’d never heard of Die Kehre, but they presented themselves as a ‘conservative’ magazine, and told me they were running a debate about Christianity and its relationship to nature. Was Christian teaching responsible for the destruction of the natural world? They asked me for an interview.

I told them I didn't have time, to which they responded by asking me to reproduce one of my essays, about saints and nature, from here at the Abbey. I said that would be fine: it seemed like a good way to get the story out. I didn’t take any payment. They told me they would let me know when the piece was translated. They never did so. I never heard from them again, and I forgot all about it.

Well, this week, I heard from a reader who is also a leading authority on political extremism. He informed me that Die Kehre is closely associated with the far right in Germany. The phrase ‘far right’ is used too often these days to smear people with even mildly conservative views, but when I looked into what he told me, I found that the magazine is run by people with links to Europe’s ‘Identitarian’ movement, the AfD in Germany, and the Nouvelle Droite in France. At least some of these have their roots in actual neo-fascism. All of this is a very long way from being merely ‘conservative.’

None of this was made clear when the magazine approached me. I imagine this was the point: outfits like this like to leaven what they are really up to by bringing in more ‘acceptable’ outside voices. Die Kehre refused to answer my subsequent questions about their political ideology, their connections with these groups, and their funding sources, instead pointing me towards their lawyers. As a result, I wrote to the magazine withdrawing my consent for publication. Unfortunately, it seems it is too late now to stop the piece coming out.

I’m telling this story because I don’t want anyone coming across this independently, and imagining that I am part of this political current. I’m not. It is a form of politics I have nothing to do with, which I have publicly written against for decades, and which I won’t allow my writing to be hijacked in support of.

I have written all my life about the human connection to place and nature, about what culture means, about spiritual life, and about what happens when these things - human necessities all - begin to fracture. It is fracturing now, and the rise of this kind of hard right, ethnocentric, authoritarian politics is one inevitable result. It claims to offer a political response to the issues I write about, but the offer is tainted, and it leads nowhere good.

Identitarians and authoritarians are everywhere in the 2020s, on both sides of the political spectrum: reacting to each other, fuelling one another, driving the increasingly oppressive and angry atmosphere of the age. These are times when it is harder and harder to write about the things that matter without being hijacked by one extreme or mobbed by the other. Nuance, some days, seems like a dirty word. Still, I know what I stand for, and against, and I am going to keep attempting to elucidate them for as long as I am able. Right now, though, I feel hoodwinked, and I want to make that publicly clear.

Thanks for reading. Normal service will resume next week.