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…
Auteur: John Merrick
