“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.” said Cecil Rhodes, self made millionaire, Prime Minister of Cape Colony, founder of Rhodesia, patriot, imperialist, and creator of the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford.

It is that last achievement which now lies at the centre of a continuing controversy in Oxford, and more particularly at Oriel College which was a major beneficiary of Rhodes’ generosity and now houses a statue of the great man.

You have no doubt read of the campaign by a black student (present in this country on, of all things, a Rhodes scholarship!) to remove the statue on the predictable grounds that Rhodes was a “racist” and imperialist, a campaign which has attracted the support of many of his fellow students; worse still, and most shamefully, the campaign enjoys the support of the academic body of the very college which has for so long fattened on the wealth bequeathed to it by Rhodes. It seems likely that the statue’s only defence is the status of the college as a listed building so that any alteration to its fabric, such as the removal of a statue, will need planning permission from Oxford City Council – which just happens to be Labour controlled!

Although there has been considerable opposition to the campaign from the mainstream Right, that opposition largely accepts the campaigners criticism of Rhodes, merely excusing him on the grounds that he was a man of his time. The protesters allege that in his conquest of the Zambezi region (which he organized into Northern and Southern Rhodesia) Rhodes was guilty of “murder, rape and theft”. But what he actually did was to introduce western civilization into a region which had previously been a wilderness; the law and order which came with his forces, the schools, modern medicine, modern agriculture, improved varieties of plants and animals, employment on White owned enterprises, all led to an explosion in the number of Black inhabitants. The great majority of the Blacks now living in Zambia and Zimbabwe could never have existed if it were not for Rhodes!

It need not have been like that – the White colonists of Southern Africa could have treated the Black inhabitants as the White colonists of North America treated the Red, herding the sparse and scattered population onto reservations and resettling the rest of Southern Africa as a new White dominion along the lines of Australia; there were powerful voices who urged precisely such a course, and perhaps those voices were right. But, rightly or wrongly Rhodes wished to use the Blacks as labour on White owned farms, in mines and factories and as domestic servants; thus he preserved them and so in time demography ran its inevitable course.

As Racial Nationalists we can look at this furore from two quite different perspectives. It would have been difficult for our grandparents’ generation, brought up on the glories of the British Empire, to have much sympathy for the plight of Blacks and other non-Whites who were so ungrateful as to resist the blessings brought to them by Britain; we, now colonised in our turn, know that those who fought against us or rose against us were doing the the only honourable thing.

But the other perspective, which must surely prevail, is that in his love of Britain, of the White British race, in his belief that the world would be a better place the more British it became, and in his belief in a great confederation of Britain and the White settlement colonies, Rhodes was absolutely right. Those of all races, including sadly our own, who wish to see his statue and other memorials removed are guilty of gross disrespect for a major figure in the history of the White British people, and as we are the product of our history, of gross disrespect for the White British themselves.

The most disheartening aspect of the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement is the support which it receives from White students at Oxford, at best ignorant of the gigantic achievements of their ancestors, at worst taught to be ashamed of them. It falls to we Racial Nationalists to ensure that our children and all future generations of our people are brought up with a healthy understanding of these things because a nation which is ashamed of itself cannot survive.

By Frederick Dixon © 2015