Among those who detest bureaucracy, there is a common criticism. Theodore Dalrymple indicts the British bureaucratic machine with these words:
“… Anthony Blair, with the cunning of the natural born swindler, seized his chance and created a loyal, corrupt, self-seeking nomenklatura class that remains extremely influential and easily able to outwit the blancmange-like David Cameron, who in any case so easily moulds himself to any shape going.”
The idea is simple enough. Bureaucracies represent the interests of the class from which they are drawn. Over time they ossify into a lobby for that class, at the expense of society at large. In Britain’s case, there’s a caste of people most attracted to Blairite ideology, who form the core of the public service. Their predominance explains why Britain is incapable of moving beyond a collection of stale centre-left notions, regardless of the stance of the government in power.
The analysis is a classic one. Aristotle (Politics, 4.1294a; 6.6.1320b18; 6.1.1316bb39-1317a10) and Polybius (Histories, 6.10.4-11; 6.12.4) both see the balancing of different social groups as vital for social justice. It’s not just that there are executive, judiciary and legislative branches of government. These must be staffed with the right combination of groups in order to properly represent the interests of society. If a single class monopolises an institution, the results are bad, regardless of other separations of powers.
But there’s a further perception which, I think, has escaped Dalrymple. Implicit in his criticism is the idea, conscious to him or not, that were British bureaucrats something other than a Blairite nomenklatura caste, that things would be better. That a bureaucracy can be balanced between social groups, just like a parliament, and all will be well.
The training of a bureaucrat necessarily excludes any political virtue. A bureaucrat is a cog in a political machine. His job is to maintain the state’s will despite any turmoil or emergency the country may face.
In this sense the bureaucrat isn’t dissimilar to a soldier. The conservative French philosopher Yves Simon analysed the nature of authority in 1962, sometimes using the army as a metaphor. Much of what he says can be translated over to bureaucracy. Any association of people has a common good and a common action which enables it. The common good of the army is defending the national interest against enemies, so its common action is armed campaign to defeat the enemy. To do this, it must have unanimity: every soldier must know what he’s supposed to do and how to do it.
Now, every soldier is a rational individual with his own opinions and ideas. In an ideal world, each soldier would immediately understand the why and wherefore of an order, and assent to it through reasoned argument. But the reality is that the circumstances of war are so confused, cloudy and ambiguous, that were the army to expect rational assent from every individual to every strategy, nothing would get done. There would always be a cause of doubt; always a valid motive for dissent from a plan. So, there must be a threshold where deliberation stops, and opinion becomes an order. At this point, the soldier substitutes the reasoning of a superior officer for his own. Not because he’s stupid or unable to reason, but because common action demands it.
In the military the stakes are very high: destruction, death, and annihilation. Therefore, the threshold where opinion becomes an order is low, in comparison to other organisations. In a government bureaucracy the stakes are high, if not quite so high: shortage of goods, mass hunger, economic paralysis. This is why, I contend, the bureaucrat isn’t that different from a soldier. The common action of bureaucracy is to keep the country running. Like with war, the task is loaded with ambiguity and unpredictability. So, the bureaucrat is required to frequently substitute the deliberations of superiors for his own.
But this means that an excess of bureaucracy in a country will have similar cultural effects to an excess of militarisation, but without any of the martial vigour. The training of a bureaucrat isn’t to think deeply; it’s to internalise the state’s ideology to keep the country running at all costs. A bureaucrat who thinks deeply is a liability because he’s someone who will constantly express doubts and interrupt the state’s ability to act or respond to problems. So, a society that’s dominated by bureaucrats at every level will be radically conformist, incapable of self-reflection, and unable to undertake serious reform.
The city of Sparta, because it was narrowly focused on warlike virtue, excluded all other virtues and went into decline (Aristotle, Politics, 2.1271b). Sparta made all citizens into soldiers, and so rendered them unable to act as independent rational agents in times of leisure. Once the battle was over, Spartans couldn’t think without orders to follow. Sparta stopped innovating and was outcompeted by her neighbours. Isn’t a bureaucratic state like Britain prey to a similar fate of death by ideological conformity? If the bureaucrat is the model citizen, and not the statesman, artist, philosopher, or craftsman, shall our society not also become a self-regulating idiocy?
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On The Foreign Aid Sector
Foreign aid is a somewhat controversial subject.Those in favour argue that as a developed nation, we are morally obligated to help those who need it. They argue that it will improve the lives of others and that it is a great use of soft power. Opponents argue that charity should begin at home, that we have our own problems to deal with and that it has done nothing.
Regardless of your view on the matter, you cannot deny one thing- that the foreign aid sector is in need of dire reform. It’s not the sector that its advocates promise us that it is. It’s a sector rife with sexual violence, corruption, the spreading of illness, mistreatment of children and misallocation of resources. A movement that should be helping others is doing the complete opposite.
Let’s Talk About Sex (Violence)
One problem with the aid sector is the sheer amount of sexual violence that occurs within it. A person only needs to browse articles about UNICEF and others to see the deluge of scandal.
Women are encouraged to sleep with aid workers in order to obtain jobs. Children and women are raped, used as prostitutes. There are illegitimate children and abortions. It is not just one or two workers or just a single organisation. Numerous men and organisations were named by a variety of women.
One Congolese women died after a botched, illegal abortion. The man who’d impregnated her ghosted her after she told him. Who’s going to tell her children?
Haiti was another victim of deviance.
It is a country that has suffered political instability, dictators, and natural disasters for years. Even before the tragic 2020 earthquake, aid rushed to Haiti, so did those who sought to violate the innocent. For years, peacekeepers raped and abused Haitian citizens. Children as young as seven were raped. One report found 265 children whose mothers were abandoned after falling pregnant. These women suffered as family and neighbors cast them out. Peacekeepers took advantage of the poverty by offering food and money to minors in exchange for sex.
Even if these things were done to a consenting adult, it is a gross abuse of power and sexual manipulation. Sri Lanka, the country where most of the offenders came from, eventually paid up. The UN also took its sweet time to apologise, eventually owning up in 2016.
Let us not forget the famous whistleblower Kathryn Bolkovac. The former American police officer discovered a huge sex trafficking ring in the war-torn Bosnia, with young children involved. Further digging from Bolkovac revealed that those involved were foreigners, with many aid workers included. These crimes were actively ignored or covered up by the powers that be. After attempting to blow the whistle, Bolkovac was demoted, then fired. She luckily eventually gained help and did reveal it to the world, but barely anything was done. Whilst Bolkovac would eventually win money for wrongful dismissal, the company would not do much else. Even years after Haiti, Congo and Bosnia, cases are frequently dug up today.
Money, Money, Money
In 1983, a devastating famine hit the African nation of Ethiopia. News cameras from around the world broadcast images of devastation and starvation to the homes of millions. Donations poured in from average citizens. ‘We Are the World’ and ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ topped the charts. Live Aid gave us classic performances from the biggest acts of the age.
Most of it didn’t go to the starving Ethiopians. A large portion went to arming militants and the dictatorial government of the day.
We all hear jokes about how palaces are built with aid money and sadly, it’s not incorrect. Aid to Afghanistan went to the Dubai holiday homes of the elite. Rebels, politicians and tribal chiefs are stealing money destined for the starving population in Yemen. A sixth of foreign aid ends up in the bank accounts of the wealthy and the powerful.
Who can forget the Oil-for-Food scandal in Iraq?
Just look at how much the heads of charity organisations are on. Since taking on the role of CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), David Miliband has seen his pay treble in eight years. A recent £20K pay rise has seen him with a new salary of £768K. That’s over $1M. This money, as one would expect, is helped by taxpayers’ money.
We can wax lyrical about the pay of CEOs in private charitable organisations, but it’s still pretty darn shady. When it’s coming from taxpayers, well, still not great. Over $1M could pay for malaria treatment or schooling for a child. Instead, it all goes to rich fat cats.
Ineffective Bureaucracy
Aid isn’t easy. You don’t just dole out cash to a hospital or a school. Aid creates bureaucracy. There are multiple layers, not least in the ground. You must pass through so many people- it may create jobs, but it also creates problems. Before it reaches those who need it, it’s gone.
In countries with mass amounts of corruption, money is siphoned off to numerous individuals. Politicians and those in charge often get kickbacks in order to get things moving. It changes hands far too often.
The world was horrified by Biafra in the 60s, Ethiopia in the 80s and Haiti in the 10s. Yet, years later, we still see adverts for starving children being forced to walk for miles for water. International aid has not found a way to break decades of issues. It is not necessarily their fault- wars and disasters are pretty hard to predict- but the point still stands.
Where are the schools? The water pumps? The hospitals?
Sometimes it’s not safe for aid workers. It just might not be feasible. They also need to pull their fingers out. How can they help when they’re based in cities? How can they help when the assistance of officials is based on bribery?
Take Indonesia for example. The country has attempted to put themselves in the forefront of the international aid community with a pledge for millions. That’s all well and good, but it’s a conversation that’s been going on for years. Bureaucracy has prevented management and funds being properly allocated.
As the government argues with itself on the merits, or lack thereof, of international aid, they need to look at reform first. We cannot support a sector that rapes children, can’t allocate resources and takes money from the mouths of the needy.
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In Conversation with Curtis Yarvin II (American Gorbachev and The Duke of Croydon)
Curtis Yarvin, known by his pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’, is one of the most prominent social critics and reactionary writers of the contemporary era. Yarvin’s blogs, ‘Gray Mirror’ and ‘Imperial Melodies’, can be found on Substack.
Yarvin’s words are in light.
Well, to be honest, I’m an American, and I write for Americans, and, you know, my view is that revolution only comes from the top. The collapse of the Soviet bloc did not start in Poland, it did not start in Czechoslovakia, it did not start in East Germany, although those countries were in a way culturally ahead of the Soviet Union, but the collapse had to come from the top down. And, so, you know, realistically, I think was that means is that if you saw a dissolution of the American Empire – you’d need a president to do it in the United States, you have a similar situation because the executive branch is technically under the command of the president, but in fact the wires have been completely cut – almost completely cut – and so those wires would have to be restored with more conflict but, again, you have the fact that opinion in the security forces is still – except at the very top levels – is still basically patriotic. There still is this patriotic backbone, there’s still soldiers who know how to fight, there’s still, you know, there’s still something there, of course, as you know.
And, then, you know, how does that get from there to England? If you have an American Gorbachev Doctrine, what you’re basically seeing is Washington saying to basically every capital around the world “Hey, guess what? You used to have pretend independence but now you have real independence”.
What real independence – let’s say you’re talking to the government of France. You’re like…
“Hey France, guess what? You have real independence now, we’re selling the American embassy, we’re sending everyone home. They can stay if they want and in future we’re going to follow – actually the text in the original Monroe Doctrine address – in regard to your country, and what that says is that we will take no interest in any conflicts among it, we will buy your wine, we do not care what your form of government is, we will buy your wine nonetheless, whether you’re ruled by, you know, Louis XX or the French Communist Party, or French Hitler, or, you know, we don’t care. We will buy your wine. You’ll watch our movies. Everything will be fine and if there’s some kind of need for international relations – sometimes issues come up – you know, for example, birds, when they migrate, they typically go north, south, north, south, they go up and down. Sometimes there’s a storm, the birds get lost, right? And a bird that should be in the Americas will get blown and it will wind up in France, and someone will catch the bird and they’ll be like [*flawless French accent*] ‘oh, this bird, it does not belong here’, and they’ll put it through some kind of AI recognition programme and they’ll say [*flawless French accent again*] ‘oh, this is the American bird’, and then you have international relations because basically the bird, [*French accent*] ‘the bird, of course, where do we send the bird? How do we feed the bird in the package?’ You know um, these details need to be worked out, OK? And I would suggest that these details could be worked out either by email or maybe on a Zoom. You could Zoom, or you could do it in the metaverse. You could do it in the Metaverse. You could have a really big imposing embassy but in the metaverse. And, and, I think that’s really quite sufficient to deal with problems, like that, of the bird.”
Let’s say you say that to France, and you’re like…
“Hey France, you want your colonies back? You want Algeria back? It’s up to you. You want to take all the Algerians into France, up to you. You want to send all the Algerians back to Algeria? Up to you. You want to reconquer, you know, French West Africa? Up to you. You want to reconquer Mexico? Restore the dynasty of Maximilian. Up to you, because, you know, that’s not the United States, uh, and we have adopted the position that we’re going to respect classic international law and we’re abandoning the global Monroe Doctrine, we’re even abandoning the local Monroe Doctrine. Hey, Brazilian army, you want to rebuild your country? You want to get rid of the favelas? You want to, you know, go full dictator and send the Communists home? Not a problem. Hey, Brazilian Communists gangs, you want to seize the country and like, re-enact, you know, the Jacobins in Paris? Not our business.”
You know, and, and, and –
Fire up the helicopters! Sharpen the guillotines!
Yeah, right, right, and what you’d see in a country like Mexico, you’d see an almost instantaneous reassertion of order as the army realised it could just get rid of the drug gangs and govern the country. Bang. Nothing to stop them, no reason to stop. Bang, they do it, the place is cleaned up and Mexico City is as safe as Tokyo. I exaggerate slightly. I exaggerate slightly at four in the morning at the worst districts you might still want to be a little bit careful. You might see a little bit of trash somewhere occasionally. Someone might have thrown an orange. You know, should you eat off the street, I would probably not advise eating off the street. But, you know, yeah, you could restore the Porfiriato, you know, in Mexico. You could basically roll back all of these revolutions.
You know, England seeing that, basically realising that all around the world, every country in the world, was getting fixed up by kings…
You know, in Africa, Paul Kagame got like special dispensation to be a king. The like, international community felt so guilty about having, you know, abetted the genocide that they’re like “OK, you know, normally we’re against strongmen. We don’t have strongmen, your country needs to be run by weak men. No strongmen. No, you can’t have one strongman, you’ve got to have a lot of weak men. Your country is going to be a filthy, corrupt, vile, disgusting mess. Um, that’s just how it is, it’s called ‘freedom’. Freedom is very important and don’t worry, we’ll send lots of aid money and lots of aidocrats. Of course there are far more aidocrats than there ever were imperialists. We’ll send all these people, you know, to help you out, but you’re country has to be a mess. Rwanda…OK, fine, you can govern yourselves, you can have a big man. You can have a king in all but name. You can have Paul Kagame, and you can have streets…OK, I wouldn’t eat off the streets in Kigali either, but I would walk through any part of Kigali at four in the morning. [*Chuckles*] And you’re just like this one exception to the global extended super Monroe Doctrine”.
And, like, the worst Goddamn country in Africa, at a certain point, cleans itself up, and becomes the Japan of Africa. And, it’s just like so…so obvious when you think about it.
At that point a royal restoration in the UK would be like peer pressure. Like Charles, Charles and Prince William, OK, they’re fashion followers. Guess what? Fashion changes, they’re going to follow a new fashion. They’re gonna be like “Wow! Louis XX has sure made Paris nice again. Wow! I can actually take the RER, you know, from the airport without putting my life at risk. Uh, wow, could we try something like that? You know, in the UK? And boy, sure we could, uh, wow, you know, all I know how to do is hand out the Big Issue and look imposing in the tabloids. I’d better hire a capable CEO to run…how about Demis Hassabis, OK?”
And call him the Duke of wherever the fuck he wants.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, “We’ll make Demis Hassabis the, you know, the Duke of Croydon or whatever and…” [*laughing*]
[*Laughing*] Croydon.
“And he’ll be the Strafford, you know, um, um, to my Charles I”.
Um, you know, Demis Hassabis will be like “OK, we’re going to take Strafford’s policy of ‘Thorough’ – what would a policy of ‘Thorough’ mean today? Dissolve parliament, of course, and govern by a decree, or executive order, or royal prerogative, or whatever you call it then, and um, you know, I am, you know, a weak womanish man, and so Demis Hassabis will be my, you know, Lord Cecil, and he’ll make a new England”.
I’m just randomly choosing a British CEO. I guess Hassabis is not an English name, but it’s fine, he’s a foreigner, you know, is he some kind of Cypriot or something?
It doesn’t matter at this point, does it?
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Absolutely. After Rishi Sunak it does not matter, right?
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Why We Won’t Publish the Word ‘Woke.’
As of today, the Mallard is no longer publishing articles that include the word ‘woke’, in either print or online.
Too many submissions, not just to the Mallard, but other publications – have become reliant on this word to explain away current trends that people find unappealing, yet cannot articulate why beyond anything other than this word. It is the responsibility of all outlets to contribute to the public discourse, and when a word, concept, idea, or individual, fails to contribute to the discourse – they have to be removed.
When pundits of the right use ‘woke’, they are using a word spawned by the online Left to denote their being ‘awake’ to the ‘injustices’ of the world, which are usually spawned from an ideological conviction rather than an actual understanding of the complex issues of the world. It suggests these people – the ‘woke’ left – are awake to the things that we are not, as if they have some deep insight that surpasses the average person. It is simply the latest expression of ‘real consciousness’ derived from Marxism.
Of course, we all know that the word is used sarcastically – but to use it at all is to make the eternal mistake of the Right, and to fight the Left on their own terms. We have been making this mistake for seventy years, and to reverse this trend, we need to stop appealing to their language, their values, their goals.
But even when the word is used derisively, it adds virtually nothing. Issues around pronouns and bathrooms pale in comparison to the economic, cultural, and demographic changes brought about by the respective trends of globalism, liberalism, and immigration. There is nothing substantively different in the current cultural trends than in the previous cultural trends. What is happening today should not be described with a new word, because what is happening today is not new. That is the reality of where we are now – ‘woke’ is not sufficiently different from what came before it to really merit a separate topic of discussion. It is just an extension of the logic of the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights era, and the great liberalisation of the last sixty years.
One of our assistant editors, William Yarwood, last year recorded a short podcast begging us to stop calling groups like Antifa ‘fascists’ or the Left ‘the real racists’, and recognise that they are just communists. Stop calling the Left ‘woke’ as shorthand for a broad range of things you just ‘don’t like’.
It is useless to say ‘look, I agree with what they stand for, I just don’t like how they’re going about it’. Then your disagreement is technical, it is not fundamental, so really you’re just the ones putting the brakes on their movement. They will come for you eventually, so you might as well recognise that now.
Calling something ‘woke’ is a lazy caricature that lets (what passes for) the right wing commentariat get away with murder; the liberals of yesteryear are allowed to displace conservative voices in media, politics, and culture. They pretend, in their sarcastic overtones, that leftists are weak and hypersensitive, when in reality they want to put children on hormone blockers, let men into womens’ changing rooms, open our borders to people who hate us, and teach the next generation that they have nothing to gain from the civilisation that birthed them.
These individuals are not weak. These people are not hypersensitive. Instead, they pass laws to put people in prison if they so much as joke about them. The notion these people are weak is a reflection of decades of failure of conservatives to actually do anything about them. If these individuals were weak, they would not find it so easy to break down the barriers that protect the most vulnerable in society: women and children.
These are not just simple activists, by the way. They are in our institutions, running our universities, pioneering our civil service, ‘decolonising’ our curricula, all the while entrenching their culture by building parallel careers that have no real world purpose or function. The massive, tumorous growth of the ‘human resources’ machine has seen to it that busy body unemployable humanities graduates have a reason to exist once more, only now it is self-perpetuating cancer that simultaneously cannot abide the existence of leftist heresy whilst relying on it like a parasite.
And as we see continuously, the online right is just as bad. If there are necessary discussions about poverty, living crises, genuine injustices that actually harm peoples’ lives, the right shrieks ‘woke!’ in such a hypersensitive way that the actual discussion disappears behind parody and caricature. TalkRadio’s infamous Mike Graham recently told an Extinction Rebellion member that we can ‘grow concrete’ in an effort to ‘own the lib’ – to which the XR member, who is stupid for different reasons, was left speechless. By consequence, Mike Graham made XR look reasonable – an own-goal, if ever there was one.
When war broke out in Ukraine, it was necessary for the right to attempt to make sense of it. This was done well in some circles – with people drawing attention to the Realist school Regardless of your thoughts on the Realist school, it was undoubtedly an intellectual contribution to the discourse. If you looked at the mainstream discourse however, you would know nothing of this contribution. Instead, it became another flashpoint to discuss this word, those they associate with it, and how these people were ‘weak’, ‘hypersensitive’ and made it so we were incapable of fighting a war against Putin.
It couldn’t possibly be that nuclear war is a possibility, or even – as the neoconservative lobby implicitly recognises but refuses to admit – that we have nothing to gain from getting involved in the war. No, it must be the woke. We end up in some perverse eternal Spy vs Spy scenario, where ‘woke warriors’ seek out racism/sexism/whateverism in any place they can find it, while the ‘common sense rightists’ only try to define what they consider ‘woke’ to make it work, rather than criticise it on its own grounds.
So we are not publishing the word any longer. Here is a list of publications that are likely interested: The Sun; TalkRadio; The Critic; Compact; Breitbart; GB News. I am sure they will find your work fascinating. We won’t.
