Dr Roger Pearson – a pioneering scholar and publisher across a wide range of anthropological studies, and a brave champion of racial reality in a world which increasingly denies scientific truth – has died aged 95. Born in England but spending most of his adult life in the USA, Dr Pearson was a good friend of many racial realists such as Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, Paul Fromm, Tom Sunic, and H&D editor Mark Cotterill, whose obituary tribute is online here. One of his last public activities was his speech at a tribute last June organised by Counter-Currents and the Free Expression Foundation: click here for details.
During my research into the British security service MI5’s investigations of postwar nationalist politics, I have already discovered occasional references to what must be a large hidden archive concerning Roger Pearson and his associates. Following his death, further revelations are likely.
One of the earliest archival references is a Metropolitan Police Special Branch report from December 1957, contained in an MI5 file on Colin Jordan, a Cambridge history graduate who was just beginning to make a name for himself on the British ‘far right’ and was soon to become one of the world’s best-known postwar national-socialists.
In September 1957 Jordan resigned from the League of Empire Loyalists (at that time the largest group to the right of the Conservative Party) after a dispute with its leader A.K. Chesterton, who regarded Jordan as too militant.
Special Branch and MI5 noted that Jordan had become UK representative of the bimonthly journal Northern World, which was edited and published by Roger Pearson (an economics graduate and former Army officer, who was then working as an accountant in Calcutta, India).
Two of Northern World‘s assistant editors were known by MI5 to have contributed to The European, a journal edited by Sir Oswald Mosley’s wife Diana and associated with Mosley’s Union Movement. One was Alastair Harper (a close ally of Roger Pearson in what was to become the Northern League). I later met Harper at nationalist conferences: late in life he was a parliamentary candidate for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
Early in 1958 MI5 monitored the creation of the Northern League: they had already opened a personal file on Roger Pearson, catalogued as PF 773735 but not yet available to researchers at the National Archives.
At the end of that year (for unknown reasons) their sister service MI6 requested a briefing on the League, which was supplied by Jack Cradock (a career MI5 officer best remembered as its senior representative in Northern Ireland during the 1970s).
Cradock accepted that MI5 could speak to their friends in the German intelligence services about the Northern League, though he requested that some details should be obscured so as to protect MI5’s sources.
He noted that Northern World had begun publication in May 1956 and the League had evolved out of this journal 18 months later. Northern World, according to MI5: “describes itself as a ‘journal of North European Friendship’ and although it tries to be rather more intellectual, is similar in content to The European, the magazine of the Union Movement in this country. The views it propagates follow familiar Fascist lines, emphasising the idea of ‘North European’ unity and showing the usual anti-semitic bias.”
The report added that the principal figure in the League and editor of its journal, Roger Pearson, though working in Calcutta, “is in contact with the Union Movement, although not a member, and has expressed support for its aims. He can therefore be regarded as having Fascist sympathies.”
The League also published a newsletter, The Northlander, edited by Alastair Harper. Its organising secretary was Thomas Leonard (who like Harper, lived in Scotland), and Colin Jordan was also a leading activist.
In June 1958 The Northlander merged with another nationalist newsletter, World Review, published by Peter Huxley-Blythe, who had been part of a faction of young dissidents who broke away from Mosley at the end of the 1940s and associated themselves with Francis Parker Yockey in the short-lived European Liberation Front.
Huxley-Blythe had become a prominent anti-communist networker during the mid-1950s, and in retrospect his contacts with militants in Germany and elsewhere (via an organisation called NATINFORM) can be seen as having contributed substantially to Roger Pearson’s developing international connections in what became the World Anti-Communist League.
(Some of the many complications of this networking, including factional rivalries and attempted infiltration by Kremlin agents, will be discussed in later articles at this blog.)
MI5 sought to reassure their MI6 colleagues that (at present) the Northern League did not present a security threat – though as it turned out they significantly underestimated the militancy and dedication of Roger Pearson, Alastair Harper and Colin Jordan – who in different ways were to spend many decades resisting the decline of the West.
“The picture that emerges therefore is one of a number of young men of Fascist sympathies trying to establish yet another small extreme right-wing nationalist organisation which can be expected to follow the usual Fascist lines. It is early to predict, but present signs are that like so many of its predecessors it will eventually wither away, probably because its leading figures have either quarrelled among themselves or lost interest. But for the time being they are probably full of enthusiasm and are trying to make contact with people of like sympathies in other European countries; thus it is at present their ambition ultimately to produce editions of The Northlander in German, French and Scandinavian and they can be expected to seek contacts in these countries. But for the present at least it seems unlikely that they will achieve any significance.”
By 1960 Special Branch and MI5 were intercepting mail addressed to the Princedale Road bookshop that had become the headquarters for Jordan’s successive organisations, the White Defence League, British National Party, and National Socialist Movement.
For reasons not yet explained in published files, they were especially interested in any international mail addressed to Roger Pearson (implying that the shop was being used for Northern League business as well as for party business).
In May 1960 the Foreign Office received a report on the ‘far right’ from Robert Carvalho, head of the Anglo-Jewish Association, which represents Sephardi Jews in the UK. This was clearly the product of Europe-wide Jewish intelligence operations against ‘neo-nazis’: it highlighted Pearson and the Northern League, among others. The report was shared with MI5 but its full contents are not yet public.
It seems certain that these and similar Jewish intelligence operations contributed to reports later leaked to mainstream journalists that were used to demonise Roger Pearson and his associates, especially after 1975 when Dr Pearson’s Council on American Affairs became the main US affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
Eventually a bankrupt former Tory MP, Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, collaborated with Jewish and leftist groups seeking to discredit Dr Pearson and force him out of WACL. Other victims of the purge included the young Canadian activist Paul Fromm and the head of the League’s British affiliate, Lady Jane Birdwood.
Undeterred, Dr Pearson continued his anthropological publishing work from an office in Washington, where his staff during the 1990s and 2000s included Heritage & Destiny editor Mark Cotterill and assistant editor Martin Kerr.
Roger Pearson was a living link between national-socialist academics such as Hans Günther and Franz Altheim, both of whom were active in the early days of the Northern League, and today’s racial realists and champions of European destiny.
Günther was professor of racial theory at the Universities of Jena (1930-35) and Berlin (from 1935) and was one of the first leading racial theorists to join the National Socialist Party, a year before Adolf Hitler came to power. He was interned for three years after the war for political reasons, though never convicted of any crime. Hans Günther never recanted any aspect of his views on race, and never accepted ‘Holocaust’ propaganda.
Altheim was a philologist and historian at the University of Frankfurt who became a leading figure in the Ahnenerbe, the academic division of the SS. His doctoral dissertation was on Aristotle’s Politics. Postwar he became a Professor of Ancient History at the University of Halle and later at the Free University of Berlin.
Today’s politically-correct propagandists have sought to purge racial science from universities. Dr Roger Pearson played an important role in ensuring that scientific truth about race, heredity and intelligence – whether drawn from the work of national-socialists such as Günther and Altheim, or part-Jewish scholars such as Hans Eysenck (the target of brutal physical attacks by the far-left) – will remain as an indispensable guide for future generations.
