The execrable cult of Jonathan Bowden
Jonathan Bowden, the British far-right writer and activist, was like a figure from a Bolaño novel. The author of several dozen works of self-published avant-garde fiction, which even his fiercest defenders claim are 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 49 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 of both the liberal-left and the Tory right.
Something of a loner since his schooldays, he was nevertheless intellectually searching and precocious. After leaving school, he 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 move concerned with street movements than intellectual exploration – with an extended European tradition, stretching from Nietzsche and the Futurists via Jünger and Spengler, Evola and 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 – too strange to ever draw much of a readership beyond a small circle of admirers – but with his oratory. His skills as a speaker – his talks usually delivered extempore, at meetings in the backroom of various pubs and bars, for groups like the neo-Nazi British National Party, which he joined in the early 2000s – are celebrated still, and are today obsessively combed over and shared on social media by young radicals looking for intellectual ballast for their very online ethno-nationalism.
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, other than what he told people. For most, 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 printshop and rental properties in and around Reading that he owned. Alongside this, he managed to hold down a marriage to his wife, Karen, with whom he had either 4 or 5 children, although he also kept his family and his love life far from his writing and activism.
Except, of course, all of this was a lie, as revealed by the new biography of him by the disgraced anthropologist, Edward Dutton, and published by the Australian white nationalist publisher Imperium Press. Bowden was in fact a childless bachelor who lived alone in a caravan on the outskirts of Reading which 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 caravan. (In a revealing note, Dutton says that he 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 never completed a degree let alone begin graduate work.
In the year before he died, he spent several months on a psychiatric ward, sectioned after being found semi-naked, brandishing a samurai sword and a machete. His death was partly caused by the anti-psychotic 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 as, he was a racist, delusional crank with a tendency towards compulsive lying.
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 travelled through the US on a speaking tour, along with the likes of Jared Taylor, editor of white nationalist website American Renaissance. A year later, in one of his final public conversations, he 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 of every person he mentions in the text after their name, 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…
(An “objectively” funny thing to write in a celebratory biography of a short, fat, near-sighted, 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 evo-psych people, 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 … [and on it goes].
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 just for a short Substack piece. I have read quite a bit – several lectures, an extended interview published as Why I Am Not A Liberal, etc – though. 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 with 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 over-confident 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.
A grim symptom of a post-literate society
