Right from the Start
Nollson, John
John Nollson RIGHT FROM THE START The symposium on neoconservatism which appeared in these pages one month ago is woefully incomplete and inadequate, a point driven home to me in a letter I have...
...He was disinherited...
...I myself almost did not become a neo-conservative...
...Clive Nollson, head of the British branch of the family, was reputed to have become a constitutional monarchist, one of the financiers of the Glorious Revolution of 1688...
...His pleas that it was in fact a conservative revolution fell on deaf ears...
...It is, after all, one thing to be opposed to homosexuality because one is a heterosexual, quite another to accept heterosexuality rather than celibacy because some Tsar once ordered your great-great- great- great - great - great - grandfather to do so...
...Pyotr and I are, in fact, scions of an old Russian family, the original name being Nollsonikov, the two last syllables having been dropped in the eighteenth century when one of our patriarchs decided to throw in with the Americans after the Battle of Yorktown...
...At least with Commentary, the print doesn' t rub off on your fingers...
...They were much interested in propounding notions of racial superiority and inferiority...
...He was the first Nollson ever to have anything to do with revolution of any sort...
...It continues to be a family ritual...
...Meanwhile, some of the European Nollsons, still under the influence of the founder, began to observe September 9, 1865, as Black Tuesday, that being the date that Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs...
...It is a mistake," he writes, "to convey the impression that the most dynamic political movement of the age springs from the disaffection of Stalinists, Trotsky ites, Luxemburgists, Kautskyites, Lieb-knechtists, Bukharinoids, Marcuseards, and bits of flotsam and jetsam from the Americans for Democratic Action...
...The first intellectual to appear in our family, Igor Nollsonikov, was financial advisor to Ivan the Terrible...
...There is not an ex-socialist or even an ex-liberal among them...
...We are right-wing to the core...
...One of our forebears, Pierre Nollfils, as the French Nollsonikovs were called, went so far as to endorse the financial reforms of late 17th-century France, and their implication that everything was not the property of the King...
...These days, all Nollsons, whether in Europe or North America, consider themselves neoconservatives...
...John Nollson RIGHT FROM THE START The symposium on neoconservatism which appeared in these pages one month ago is woefully incomplete and inadequate, a point driven home to me in a letter I have received from my brother, Pyotr...
...Authentic neoconservatism, practiced by the Noll-son family for several generations, originates on the Right, where rightism should properly originate...
...He correctly predicted that this radical innovation would cause the price of gold to soar to 23 livre the ounce avoirdupois...
...In truth, the movement away from genuine paleoconservatism to the milquetoast variety which has come to characterize the family was most pronounced in the United States...
...As he observes, the pieces all describe a movement from left to '.Ight...
...Pyotr considers himself a neoconservative, but refuses to have the phenomenon represented as yet another instance of left-wing splittism and sectarianism...
...The British Nollsons, in order to rebuild their fortune and to demonstrate that they were not so far from the tradition of our founder, began to speculate in slaves...
...I decided, finally, to junk the New York Review and to stick with Commentary exclusively...
...But the leftward drift could not be arrested...
...For three generations, his descendants made much of their republicanism, the liberalism of that era, even though they continued to reap enormous profits from their participation in the slave trade with their British cousins...
...Louis XIV was able to finance several wars through this inflationary policy...
...But he kept his tongue and prospered in the shipping industry...
...That he did not do this until hearing of the British defeat at Yorktown suggests that his deconversion was as much one of opportunism as of conviction...
...Igor's grandson not only believed in Oriental despotism but, unlike earlier Oriental despots themselves, such as Cyrus the Great, he was also a vicious anti-Semite...
...His grandson, John Bradford Nollson, a fixture of the Puritan aristocracy, was our first true middle-of-the-roader...
...Cadet branches of the family in Germany and France abandoned despotism for absolutism...
...We became neoconservatives after generations of being paleoconserva-tives...
...I used to read both Commentary and the New York Review of Books and, being wishy-washy, I could not make up my mind between them...
...An intellectual breakthrough of sorts was achieved in the next generation when Aleksandr Nollsonikov abandoned the family's traditional defense of Oriental despotism and began to argue merely for the divine right of kings...
...As I suggested earlier, the American Revolution was a kind of watershed in our development...
...How to explain our migration to the left...
...He was opposed to Jewish settlement in Mother Russia in the first place, differing from some of his more liberal colleagues who wanted Jews to settle there so that they could be persecuted...
...At first, the family did not accept this, for many believed that to imply that the ruler was not himself God, or at least a god, would lead immediately to social breakdown and lax morals...
...Samuel Nollson was the first among us to abandon monarchism for republicanism, a decisive break with our conservative tradition...
...He did not much believe in the burning of alleged witches, but he did believe that the movement toward tolerance in nearby Rhode Island had gone much too far...
...They were very reactionary and, in the mid-nineteenth century, were the principal financial backers of the Pro-Slavery Society, which sympathized with the American Confederacy...
...His surviving writings suggest disenchantment with this particular Tsar who, though a despot, scarcely believed in the traditional sort of Oriental despotism Igor had tried to revive...
...Though a personal friend of Cotton Mather, his private diary reveals that he thought Cotton, indeed the whole Mather family, to be "soft on heresy, squishy-soft on witchcraft...
...And they are very mistrustful of neoconservatives who have a leftist genealogy of any sort, understanding as they do that in order to be a good new conservative, one must have begun life as an old one...
...It is not clear how the Nollsons became mixed up with the more radical notions of the age...
...It began with Thaddeus Nollson who, after arriving in Boston, abandoned his tough Russian Orthodox faith in order to become what he himself called a "namby-pamby Puritan...
...This is a crucial distinction which the editors of this magazine refuse to make...
...This is true in matters of mores as well as of politics...
...These attitudes softened in the Victorian Era when Lord Randolph Nollson became the first of the clan to hire a non-white footman...
Vol. 12 • December 1979 • No. 12
