JONATHAN BOWDEN UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT

Bowden, patron saint of the Dissident Right

by Colin Liddell

Jonathan Bowden was one of the "intellectual energies" that flowed into the swirling maelstrom of the early Alt-Right -- very early in his case, because he kicked the bucket in 2012 at the tender age of 49, after doing a series of podcasts with Richard Spencer.

Now, it seems, Bowden is under the spotlight, with a biography on him by Edward Dutton ("Shaman of the Radical Right" on the Neo-Nazi Imperium Press), and there is even an article in the "highly respectable" Spectator, a well-known, right-leaning UK periodical.

Dutton, of course, is well known as a fake academic Nazi and part of the Kremlin-boosted social media cluster that includes the full gang of idiots (Arktos, Academic Agent, Scandza Forum, Millenniyules, etc).

It is interesting, however, that this biography is being boosted by the Spectator. This might possibly have something to do with the fact that it was recently purchased with Kremlin-adjacent dark money. Yes, Britain definitely does not have a proper Deep State, or it would be able to stop its organs of influence falling so easily into the hands of dubious dark money!

The Specky article is written by Damian Thompson, an "associate editor" of the magazine who has always been drawn to rather questionable subjects. Check out his books The End of Time: Faith and the Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1997) and the equally upbeat Waiting for Antichrist: Charisma and Apocalypse in a Pentecostal Church (2005), or rather don't!

In the article, written from the viewpoint of his own personal association, Thompson is happy to admit that he was Bowden's only friend during their days together at Presentation College in Reading.

So, what do we learn about Bowden from this article? Not much about his ideology, but, then, maybe that is not entirely Thompson's fault.

Bowden's connection with the anti-immigrant BNP is mentioned, and the fact that "fascists" like him. Thompson also mentions that Bowden was apparently well-read and familiar with a lot of thinkers and philosophers:

"When we briefly resumed our friendship in our late twenties, before he’d gone full fascist, I was dazzled by the facility with which he juggled the ideas of Marx, Enoch Powell, Plato and Samuel Beckett."

Thompson also mentions one of Bowden's lectures and its wide -- perhaps too wide -- array of intellectual references:

"Entitled 'Bill Hopkins and the Angry Young Men', the lecture is a survey of the influences on his mentor Hopkins (1928-2011), a far-right Welsh writer who was close to Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, and Colin Wilson, whose 1956 book The Outsider has never been out of print. Speaking from notes, Bowden flits across the chaotic intellectual landscape of 20th-century Britain, in which Williamson and Wilson rubbed shoulders with John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Doris Lessing. Lessing was a communist at the time, which didn’t trouble Bowden. He had a soft spot for ‘culturally independent leftists’, and he speaks admiringly of Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital, a far-left black comedy about the NHS whose cast included Leonard Rossiter and Arthur Lowe. His lecture also squeezes in the Sitwells, Theodor Adorno, John Buchan, Simone de Beauvoir and Jimmy Tarbuck."

The end of this description is telling:

"Alas, we’ll never know how it tied together because the tape recorder broke, a typical Bowden mishap."

My guess it that it didn't tie together at all. Bowden's thought seldom did.

My view of Bowden was that he was merely an intellectual dilletante, able to talk impressively and rhetorically on a range of topics, and to sound rather clever (especially to Americans like Richard Spencer with their lower cultural level), but who lacked the ability of a true intellectual to use logic and evidence, and to parse extraneous language into concise and consistent thought. As a supposed "political thinker" he was also completely deficient at creating any kind of political policy from this.

Thompson, while using fake rhetorical distance, does in fact try to dress up and present a consistent Bowden ideology, but it just sounds lame and vague:

"Although it’s tempting to pathologise people who hold extreme views, I don’t think Bowden’s political philosophy can be attributed to mental illness. At its heart lay a yearning for a society of stable, ethnically homogenous families. I may get into trouble for this, but I think his racism was essentially theoretical: deplorable but not motivated by cold hatred. In the countless hours I spent talking to him, he never said anything nasty about black people. Nor did he bang on about Jews; indeed, he told me he was proud of being part-Jewish. That was also pure invention."

In fact the picture that emerges from Thompson's article and presumably Dutton's biography and Bowden's life (a food-chain of three very weird individuals) is that Bowden was just someone with severe mental, emotional, and behavioural problems. Various details pop out.

His social awkwardness:

"[Jonathan's father] was hurt that Jonathan was only invited to my house once; I didn’t tell him he was banned after turning his nose up at my mother’s cooking."

Eating disorders:

"His imitations of his Mancunian grandparents scoffing boxes of chocolates were almost worthy of Alan Bennett – though a bit rich coming from Jonathan, who once devoured a club’s entire cheeseboard in 20 minutes. I was paying, of course: he was massively stingy."

Complete untrustworthiness: 

"Bowden emerges from Dutton’s biography as a compulsive liar. He wasn’t working on a PhD; he didn’t even have a degree."

This is kind of ironic as Dutton's own "professorship" is likewise a crock of lies. But back to Bowden's fibs:

"[Bowden] once told me he was divorced from a woman called Karen; Dutton can find no trace of her, or of the five children he claimed to have fathered by another woman."

He also claimed to be wealthy, but died pathetically impoverished in Britain, a welfare state, where it actually takes effort to be really poor:

"Bowden was ‘a childless bachelor’ who ‘lived alone in a decrepit mobile home in a caravan park in Reading, never really worked and didn’t have the internet where he lived, so he used to research his essays at the local library’. In fact, Jonathan told me he was proud of living austerely in a caravan, refusing to spend his vast income from rental properties and a printing business. That was fantasy, too. He died penniless and his mobile home had to be towed away because it was a health hazard. He had even managed to get himself banned from the library."

Remember this is actually meant to be a sympathetic essay by Thompson, who also comes up with a defence for the allegations of paedophilia that dogged Bowden and drove him out of that "repository of moral rectitude," the British National Party:

"...his rivals...had earlier forced him to resign from the BNP by spreading rumours that he was a paedophile. Bowden denounced the claim as 'lying filth' – which it was. Dutton reports that a man of the same name had been convicted of downloading child pornography in 1999..."

Whether Bowden was a paedo or not, one could well understand people assuming he was one from his many other aberrant characteristics. 

Then there was his drug addiction and outright mental illness:

"These allegations, coupled with the disorientating acclaim from the United States, probably accelerated Bowden’s descent into paranoid schizophrenia. In 2011 he was picked up by police in Reading, semi-naked, holding a samurai sword. He was sectioned, and it’s possible that anti-psychotic drugs triggered his fatal heart attack."

But were his failings his fault? Thompson unwittingly makes the case that rather than a man in charge of his own destiny and able to exercise agency, Bowden was, in fact, a pathetic slave of his "mutant genes":

"On the other hand, we can’t ignore Dutton’s discovery that Bowden’s mother Dorothy died at 48 from a heart attack after apparently suffering from mental illness."

But, hey, even the Dissident Right needs role models and heroes!

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

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