In the throes of the culture wars, it’s easy to get acclimated to the situation after some time has passed. It feels like a lifetime ago that the battlefield that has become of the issue of transgenderism was little more than a few videos on YouTube imploring viewers to cringe at ‘Die Cis Scum’, and if anything demonstrates the futility of the adage ‘twitter is not real life’, it would be the recent admission from Jamie Wallis that he considers himself a woman.
There is almost certainly some kind of meaning to the fact that Jamie’s desire to be a woman emerged after he was raped, as though he psychologically associates a lack of autonomy to womanhood. But I am not a psychologist, and Jamie’s warped feelings about his identity are irrelevant in and of themselves. What this turn of events creates however, is a moment of decision for the Conservatives.
For a long time, the Conservatives have enjoyed playing both sides of the culture wars. At conference, they can laud Maggie Thatcher as the first female Prime Minister and reap the benefits of appearing to be progressive – knowing that opposition can be quickly labelled sexist, and something that even the Conservative party has outgrown. Simultaneously, they can point to the Labour party and remind us of what happens if we abandon them. A few cringeworthy remarks about supporting women into politics is certainly a preferable alternative to those same “women in politics” sporting a five-o’clock shadow and suspiciously broad shoulders.
Governments, political parties, and states, like individuals, can hold simultaneously contradictory beliefs. Those who do not act are fortunate enough to never have to confront these contradictions – for they never implement them. But it is through existential participation in life that these contradictions make themselves plain, and a moment of decision must occur. Constitutional monarchies justified themselves with recourse to the people – but what happens when the monarch and the people (or at least, the institutions representing the people) are at odds over a decision? Who decides? The logic of constitutional monarchy legitimises the king with recourse to the people, and so those institutions closer to the people in the mind of the populace ultimately set the laws. It’s these moments of decision that move history – a constitutional monarchy may retain the state form of monarchy but rest atop the principle of democracy, but the moment of decision reveals the incoherence of this state form and opens up a state of exception to alter it.
Equally, the Conservatives present themselves as being opposed to wokeism, but like the constitutional monarch – justify themselves on the principles of equality, and the moment of decision reveals the incoherence of their rule. Whilst the party had no skin in the game, and whilst it had no existential participation, it could ignore the incoherence because it never actually had to make any decision based on these two contradictory principles. But the moment of decision has arrived, and what is in store for us as members of the party?
Jamie Wallis has been supported by Boris and Oliver Dowden, the CEO of the party. It is clear the Conservatives have no intention of removing this person from the party or even coming close to asserting that transgenderism is in no way conservative. Jamie Wallis will most certainly be in attendance at Conference and all Conservative events in the future. The Conservative party will now have to decide:
- How will it refer to Jamie, should he ask to be referred to by female pronouns?
- What will they do if Jamie Wallis decides he wants to use the female bathrooms?
- If they wish to affirm Jamie’s wishes, how will they then define what a woman is, since it clearly no longer conforms to a simple definition?
Once again, the failure of Conservatives to engage in philosophy rears its ugly head. When you don’t attempt to delve into your beliefs, when you rest everything on ‘Common Sense’, you actually rest your political order upon the principles of those who do wish to assert and articulate their beliefs. Then, when you inevitably go to implement your beliefs: you’re struck with the inability to implement them in accordance with the principles you’ve justified your beliefs on. It’s simply not enough to have a political philosophy which resolves political (read: economic, technical, bureaucratic, etc.) problems. Your political philosophy must blend, gel, mesh, and harmonise with your ontological beliefs about the very essence of what it means to be anything at all. The idea that culture, economics, and philosophy are distinct and separate spheres is an optical illusion brought about by extended periods of peace. Any of these things, driven to a sufficient extreme become political, and our only tool to navigate these new political realities is philosophy. Those who don’t use it will find themselves lost, both politically and spiritually.
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Why We Shouldn’t Abandon Politics
Until a few weeks ago, I was thoroughly resigned to the fact that I would not be voting for the first time in my adult life.
This wasn’t a flippant or particularly natural decision for me. A fan of unfashionable causes from a young age, I had always bought into our democratic political system and believed that despite its faults, ours was preferable to the large majority of those around the world.
I’d argue with my sixth form college history teacher, a chain-smoking trade union crustacean, that the Cuban revolution was not a good thing actually. At university, I set up the local youth chapter of UKIP and was one of approximately three students who even signalled that they would vote for Brexit.
As one can imagine, this made me very popular amongst the kombucha-brewing techno-listening charity shop fashionistas who I stubbornly brushed shoulders with by insisting on frequenting their hipster coffee shop, where once a ‘trans’ person told me I should “stop reading the fascist Spectator”.
My earliest political instinct, that our foreign policy did not serve our interests and was based on lies (an instinct that has only grown stronger) was also, I thought, sufficiently represented in our media and political system. I voted, I got excited about elections, watched the BBC and took politics seriously.
Everything changed in early 2020. Watching the entire ‘free world’ engage in highly coordinated state propaganda, erect detainment camps, lock people in their homes for months at a time, and by hook and by crook inject the vast majority of the population with a substance they weren’t allowed to scrutinise in polite society because ‘The Experts’ told them to, changed how I look at politics forever.
I was always aware of the military-industrial complex and its influence, and of that of the financial system. What I have since learnt is that these forces of evil are joined by many other interest groups: Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Food and the billionaire-foundation complex.
The mask-wearing millions even turned my anger towards them, the public as a whole, which was a very different feeling for a ‘power-to-the-people’, ‘silent-majority’ populist as I had up until then been. What morons, I thought.
How did I ever trust in the collective wisdom, the ‘common sense’ of the public, who had en masse accepted the (even then) clearly moronic behaviour of ‘stay-at-home’ rules and wearing chemical-laden Chinese face-nappies on while alone and outside?
When the Russians entered Ukraine in early 2022, this feeling was compounded. The Covid era had caught everyone off guard, but Ukraine was something I had seen coming for a decade.
In 2014, the year when the Russia-Ukraine war actually started, I had just started university studying, of all things, International Relations and Russian language. I had a large number of Russian and Ukrainian friends. I spent my summers volunteering at educational camps not far from the Ukrainian border. After graduating, I moved to Moscow and started working in TV.
This is my way of saying that I had followed the events since 2014 in detail, with interest, and understood the positions of both sides, the actors involved and like Nigel Farage, had a very strong feeling that this was a disaster in the making. Yet this was a position made paramount to treason. Putin was Hitler, and that was it.
Back living in London and working in UK media after riding out the worst of the pandemic in Istanbul, I had become fully cynical about politics.
How could our parochial, insular and frivolous party politics ever be a solution to the powerful global forces that had transformed the world within just a couple of years? How had I believed that the political fight I had been fighting actually had any chance of taking Britain away from corrupt globalist forces and ‘taking back control’ for the people? Brexit now appeared to be window dressing.
In fact, I had come to believe that I had been seriously deceived. Years of energy were given, and the country was seriously divided, and for what? To have more mass immigration and more economic decline under more Conservative government, with biomedical tyranny and continental war to boot?
In that time, I began to believe in the devil, which was then a stepping stone to believing in God. The world, it appeared, was the devil’s realm. The compounding increase in far-liberal and ultra-progressive ideologies, and the resulting destruction of the family and social degradation, made this clearer.
I concluded that the best way to fight in a world run by the devil, was not through politics, but through free will and faith, walking towards God through this darkness. I still hold that to be absolutely true.
Yet something has happened over literally a matter of weeks that has reignited my interest in politics, and it is more than the return of Nigel Farage, although that has been the catalyst.
The prospect of total Tory collapse was first enticing only out of pure spite.
I had been critical of Farage, one of my political heroes, for what I viewed as terrible positions taken by him and his party during the Covid era, and a perceived silence on our disastrous foreign policy, after years of being outspoken and having the right idea.
Though my disappointment in and disillusionment with politics did indeed make me cynical, nothing made me more cynical than working in British media.
After working with interesting, heterodox international and expat journalists abroad, I discovered that back home it’s staffed largely by mediocrities, as fickle and, frankly, basic as any KMPG graduate or marketing intern.
Outside of the narcissism of small differences, wholly adopted from newspaper op-eds and ‘journo Twitter’ in cyclical bouts of opinion bottom-feeding, they are often not the well-read intelligentsia that they present themselves to be.
Yet the depiction given by many in sceptic quarters, that narratives are tightly controlled by explicit political directives handed out from above, a view I have been sympathetic to in the recent past, does not seem to hold water.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact that there are a small handful of news wires which provide thousands of newspapers and news channels with the same stories, they decide to put out in the way they want, is far from ideal and does have the ability to influence the news cycle.
Yet on the day-to-day, factory-floor level, the reality is that the media, and politics, is largely made up of people who are subject to the very same waves of information warfare, perception manipulation and social acceptability that the general public and all of us are to an extent.
If it is indeed the case, as I now believe, that the enemy is not only far weaker than it has led us to believe, but has never been weaker than it is now, we do not only have the possibility the shift the Overton window through politics, which the media have no way of hiding from, but that we have a duty to be happy warriors and believe that it is possible to effect change.
For those still rightly enraged about the collective amnesia over Covid era mandates and who therefore see Reform as invalidated by not choosing to campaign on that, the reality is that its leadership now hold the correct view of the lockdowns and the jabs, even with the benefit of hindsight.
This won’t satisfy everyone, and I am completely sympathetic to that, but as Bismarck famously said, politics is the art of the possible, and what is possible at the moment is to mobilise around our current problems. Immigration is the obvious issue that will galvanise serious support against the uniparty – and our demographics are our ultimate destiny.
The rise of Reform to neck-and-neck polling position with the Tories is indeed an impressive feat. In fact, the campaign of the Conservatives in this election, which suspiciously feels like it is being directly run by the Labour Party for their own benefit, has got many wondering if this is not an orchestrated handing over of the baton.
In late March, Barack Obama, the man rumoured to be de facto running the Biden administration and campaign, dropped in to see Prime Minister Sunak, for reasons undisclosed.
In the following weeks there was talk by Andrew Bridgen MP that Sunak had been ‘told by the generals’ that we would officially declare we were at war against Russia in the summer ahead of a major escalation. The PM, it is alleged, responded that he did not want to be a wartime leader and a couple of weeks later had abruptly called an election.
All of this, alongside Rishi’s announcement in the rain, which bloggers have called a ‘humiliation ritual’, has led some theorists to believe the Tories are basically throwing the election. Reform, so the theory goes, is ‘controlled opposition’ designed to contain the Tory exodus.
There might be elements of truth to what I have just outlined but my personal experiences with Reform’s leaders do not lead me to that final conclusion. Farage and his team are genuinely running an anti-establishment revolt.
Not only is he running on the same issues which have only gotten worse since Brexit, our broken economy and the rapid demographic transformation of the country, but there is plenty of red-meat for sceptics; railing against the Tories for ‘taking away our freedoms’, hitting out against the World Health Organisation and the World Economic Forum, fighting against debanking, a cashless society and Net Zero lunacy. It’s not a bad platform.
The Andrew Breitbart doctrine is that ‘politics is downstream from culture’. It might then seem obvious that culture is therefore downstream from media, but as I have outlined, that is in fact not the case.
Our media is downstream from both politics and culture. Farage is very successfully using will to power to shift the Overton window and provoke the media into discussions they would ordinarily not have.
Whether you trust him to stick to these positions when push comes to shove almost doesn’t matter as much as his proven ability to act as a battering ram against our established political elite. In any case, he has been consistent on everything and on the Covid saga he has now come to the right place, which is more than can be said for others.
It has been Farage’s positioning on Ukraine, however, that has clinched it for me.
Despite the potential to alienate much of Tory Boomer-England who display their Ukraine flags with the same zeal that Corbynista students do with their trans-Palestinian-EU ones, Farage has stuck to his long-held position that this horrendous conflict was a long time coming.
The establishment, smelling blood, sought to use this to neutralise him, but he hit back harder and spent days making speeches outlining the failed wars of the uniparty, the lies they were based on and their horrific consequences. Labour in Iraq, the Tories in Libya and Syria and yes, Ukraine. “Foreign policy matters!” he’s been telling energetic crowds.
The power of taboos is a force more potent and yet more vulnerable than we imagine. A few hundred thousand of us silently crossing boxes in polling booths do have the power to change the parameters of acceptable discussion by the fallout it can cause for years to come. We should not scoff at that.
At a time like this, when all signs are that the most dangerous and corrupt elements of the collective West are itching for a global conflict, the man who proudly bellows to large crowds that “We only go to war as a very, very last extreme; I will campaign for peace wherever it is possible”, has my vote.
As it says in Psalm 146, Trust in God, Creator and Redeemer:
“Do not place your trust in princes, in mortal men who have no power to save.”
– Psalm 146:3I won’t, but I will not abandon politics as a way of shifting the dial to expand public consciousness and as a way to take us off potential paths of ruin. Not yet.
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From Atheism
Looking at the demographics of the Mallard, I assume most are familiar if not directly, then indirectly, with New Atheism. It was particularly popular between the 2000s and the 2010s, likely because the last vestiges of cultural Christianity were being stamped out, but the embers of cultural leftism were yet to catch. Early YouTube was dominated by atheists, who took to the new media platform to deliver the message of atheism to a new generation of young adults – myself included.
In fairness, I can’t blame YouTube for my lack of faith. My Church of England school hardly did anything to justify the faith to me, and without parental guidance, it was inevitable that I’d be filled with misgivings and misunderstandings of what faith was. Later in life, I’d take up a degree in Physics and later rest my atheism on the claim that the existence of God doesn’t adhere to the tenets of science. This is true, and something I believe even now. In science, if something cannot be validated or invalidated, then you dismiss it. This tenet is so engrained in scientists that when Pauli proposed the existence of a massless, chargeless particle, he bet a crate of champagne that no-one would find it due to the ludicrousness of being able to test the existence of a particle with no mass and no charge.
Of course, they did find it – and Pauli made good on his promise, gifting a crate of champagne to the scientists who discovered the neutrino. If you want to dismiss the existence of literal physical objects, this tenet will do just fine. The problem with it, is that it applies equally to anything not located in space and time. Morality, for example, is not a physical thing and its existence cannot be tested. We can do an experiment showing that murder rates generally correlate with unhappiness, but who says unhappiness is synonymous with badness? And so, on the same basis I dismissed the existence of God, I dismissed the existence of morality. At the time I did not know it, but this problem had been expressed in Hume’s Guillotine. A should statement can never rest on an is statement. It is raining, so I should wear a coat presupposes I shouldn’t want to get wet, which only pushes the problem back one step. Of course, if you insert an intelligent creator into the picture, you can say the way the world is, is a reflection of that creators plan for us, which we should follow – and so you can begin to talk about some kind of natural order to the world beyond science.
In time, I would find the failure of scientism to present a morality to be troublesome. After all, even if I were correct, and that morality didn’t exist – it was wholly arbitrary to hold that belief, after all, believing the truth over lies could not be the right thing to do by the very nature of my claims. The answers I saw from atheists regarding this, particularly Richard Dawkins, were not so impressive. Dawkins has argued that morality is an evolutionary instinct, which only begs the question as to why to follow that instinct over any other instinct. All instincts do is attempt to keep us alive, after all. Instincts also tell us to be distrustful of people ethnically dissimilar from one another, and Dawkins refutes that behaviour in the strongest terms, often accusing Brexiteers of behaving in that way. If we are to follow the evolutionary moral instinct because it is the ‘right thing to do’, and what is right is determined by that same instinct – all Dawkins is saying is that the evolutionary moral instinct says to follow itself, but of course an instinct says to follow it: that’s what instincts do. At this point, it became quite clear that attempts to either dismiss morality on the basis of science, or to construct one out of scientific principles inevitably tended towards circular logic.
Materialism, the belief that everything is one substance, that of matter, is very elegant on its surface: Everything is matter, the interactions of that matter are described by science, and anything we perceive to be outside of that is just a social construct, a spook, or a delusion. One major flaw in materialism is the existence of qualia, of the sensation of experiencing things. For example, the sensation of happiness is not the same as the chemicals that produce that sensation. It may be described as such, and you may even be able to predict with perfect certainty that someone will feel a sensation and how intense you expect the sensation to be. However there is a thisness to the sensation that cannot just be reduced to the biochemical processes that go into it. As a consequence, materialism has to simply deny that these sensations are real, and insist that things like joy, sadness, and conscious experience itself are just tricks of the mind (composed of atoms and microelectrodes and nothing more). This ultimately refutes materialism itself, however. If our conscious experiences are not meaningful or true, then the scientific laws we derive from those experiences are not meaningful either.
If you want to insist the universe is one substance, it makes much more sense to argue the universe is not all matter, but all consciousness – as consciousness is all anyone has ever been given, even those who came up with and tested scientific laws did so through verification of sensations they experienced in their consciousness, which cannot be reduced to the physical processes that went into bringing consciousness about. Even if we could have a perfect understanding of the human brain, and could replicate what I imagine on a screen – all we would have succeeded in doing is making a map of consciousness, not replicating consciousness itself. This would be the same as arguing that because we can make a map of New York City, that the map is identical to New York City. The map may describe New York, it may even predict things around New York – but the map is not New York. Equivalently, science may describe and predict consciousness or reality, but science is not consciousness or reality.
There is a comfort in appealing to scientific laws, they are predictable (that’s what makes them scientific,) but this predictability relies on the laws themselves being continuous. If gravitational attraction changed overnight, then the equations that described them would also have to change. The assumption that these laws are constant and reliable, and therefore the basis of yet more science is something that cannot itself be tested. If you want to insist that you only believe in the existence of things that can be falsified, then you cannot believe the laws of physics are continuous and constant – as this cannot be falsified. Again, Hume recognised this – and labelled it ‘naïve empiricism’. The naïvety comes in when we insist the laws of Physics are constant because they’ve always been constant in our experience. By the same token we can’t say the Universe existed before we were born because we have never experienced it, which creates a solipsism harder to justify than any spooky non-materialistic belief. Even if we appeal to the material truths which demonstrate existence beyond our lifetime, for example, carbon-13 dating – we can never justify whether or not the laws of physics will spontaneously change the day after our deaths, we simply assume that they won’t. This is not to say such the belief that the laws of Physics are constant is unreasonable, only that it is unreasonable within a world-view conforming to empiricism, and not something proven empirically.
So what kind of world-view does answer these questions? Well, I gave one answer earlier: one in which consciousness is primary, also known as Idealism. Another would be faith, which recognises the objective value of things not located in space and time. For example, morality. Morality is of course, not the only thing located in space and time that we treat as objective, I’ve just talked about it a lot in this article so I felt compelled to mention it first. Another would be numbers. You can have seven marbles, seven pounds, and the number seven on a piece of paper – but destroy the marbles, spend the money, and erase the number on the paper and yet the number seven still exists. We can’t simply escape the reality of numbers by arguing they are an invention of the mind, physical laws, such as attraction due to gravity require them. The gravitational constant, G, is a number you are required to multiply by (and cannot simply be dropped) to describe gravitational attraction. We can shunt the value of the number about by changing our units, but the number itself remains – and would make human life impossible if it were off by just 1 in 1060. Which is the same as getting statistically impossible odds ten trillion times. Not only are numbers not reducible to material reality, but they are also required to be highly specific for life to develop whatsoever.
A materialist might want to escape this by claiming that there are trillions of universes where these constants vary, and therefore our existence is statistically inevitable. But at this point you are no longer doing science. A multiverse is necessarily not empirically verifiable, and the existence of a multiverse is just as unfounded (on materialist terms) as a belief in God. Furthermore, this only shunts the problem back one step – why is it that multiverses are created in this one specific way, with the values of the constants varying? Why can’t there by multiverses where not just the constants in the equations, but the equations themselves vary? Who is to say there has to be these forces and their respective equations at all? Is there a multiverse of multiverses and a multiverse of multiverses of multiverses? Isn’t this all just circular and ridiculous at this point?
It was in light of all of these things: the absence of transcendence, the inability to consistently derive physics and metaphysics, and the failure to construct a morality, that drew me away from atheism and into my current beliefs. There are things beyond this world that we not only need to appeal to pragmatically, but need in order to make sense of the world as it exists. They are transcendent. They are not just a reflection of a higher world, but necessary components of this world as well. From morality, to numbers, to the very sensation of being anything at all, every part of life is beyond the mere matter we interact with every day. In that kind of understanding, the world ceases to be sterile, and instead takes on the character of an enchanted garden – where life, death, and the interplay of tragedy and comedy make up just a part of an order much larger than our mere existence.
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The Tragedy of the Praying Indians
A generation after the first Thanksgiving, colonial Massachusetts experienced the single deadliest per capita war in North American recorded history. Though the famed declaration of friendship between White settlers and Native tribes was within living memory for many of the fighters in this war, it did not in any way soften the animosity nor stay the violent hands of either side. This was King Philip’s War, a turning point for American history, the war that set the precedent for Anglo/Native relations for centuries to come, and yet one that is woefully unknown and underdiscussed even West of the Atlantic. It left all parties involved scarred, traumatised, and for one group even less understood than this forgotten war, a betrayal never to be overcome.
It is 1675, and the titular King Philip, Christian name of the Sachem (chief) of the Wampanoag, Metacomet, has lead a raid on the New England colony town of Swansea in retaliation for the English executing three of his countrymen for the murder of one John Sassamon. Despite his European name, Sassamon was a Harvard-educated Praying Indian, the name given by the Puritan colonists to the groups of Native Americans that had adopted the faith and customs of their new neighbours. He was a respected member of Metacomet’s court and a cultural mediator who had recently informed the Plymouth governor of the Sachem’s intention to gather tribes for war. His murder was seen as revenge for this betrayal by the English, but this perceived overreach of the colonial authorities, in killing his kinfolk without consultation, was the pretext Metacomet was waiting for to being this war he had been so wanting.
The raid on Swansea was a horrible affair. The Wampanoag laid siege to the town before overcoming the militiamen defenders and laid a terrible waist upon the hapless civilians. Many women and children were butchered neath the tomahawk that day, and the other colonies were quick to respond to the massacre. The Praying Indian warriors were keen to come to the assistance of their European allies to meet this aggression, and expected naturally to be accepted as a welcome aid by their dear friends. They were in this, and in much else, utterly and tragically mistaken. Though the Praying folk saw the English as firm allies, this was a decidedly one-sided relationship. That these natives had taken as their own European clothes and custom, and English tongue and English Bibles, mattered little, for to the Europeans the Praying Indian inescapably remained, above all, an Indian. An outsider worthy always of suspicion over trust.
The early stages of King Philip’s war were not good for the English. Despite the common contemporary view of the various North American colonial conflicts as being between technologically advanced musket-wielding Europeans versus bow and hatchet-armed Natives, there were a lot of shared weaponry and tactics between them. This makes sense when considering that by the late 17th Century Natives and colonials had known of and been trading with one other for decades, and many groups had enthusiastically adopted firearms to fight their tribal rivals in wars over fur-trapping land. These years using European technology served the Wampanoag well in the first engagements of the war, and using them they beat the English militias in a number of battles up and down Massachusetts Bay. An opportunity of spiritual warfare was also presented; when a near total eclipse of the moon one night allowed the tribal warband to slip out of the colonial noose tightening on their swampland capital and make for the wilds. Such a freak lunar event at such a crucial time was seen as a divine blessing by the Wampanoag, and an ominous sign of heretical magic by the English, who were thoroughly demoralised by the affair.
Native successes in the war made the situation for the Praying Indians deteriorate rapidly. The English feared uprisings amongst the settled natives, and in a grim turn, dissolved the praying towns that had until then served as a shield for the colonies, and moved thousands of Indian civilians into internment camps, with over 1,000 being crammed into just one at Deer Island. Conditions in the camp were dreadful, and the families kept there doubled as hostages to ensure the loyalty of the Indian scouts fighting with the English. Many hundreds would die over the cruel winter of 1675-6. Puritan minister John Elliot would fight hard against this policy, but by this time it was dangerous to say anything to the defence of Native Americans, no matter the tribe or custom, and he was powerless to stop it.
As for the success of the Wampanoag and their allies, it would not be the English that finally overcame them, but their own kin. Upon hearing that the Mohawk tribe to the West were moving in force towards Massachusetts Bay, Metacomet and his men eagerly turned to await these new allies in their fight against the White man. He was, however, gravely mistaken. In a single action the Mohawk warriors fell upon the Wampanoag, upon the Narragansett, upon all the troublesome Algonquin Confederation and massacred them almost to a man. Metacomet’s power was in a single night broken, and broken by his own kind. He fled to the wilderness, shattered and alone, and would be later slain by the musket shot of one of those who had been, despite everything, loyal to the end; a Praying Indian called John Alderman. The war continued for a further two years in scattered skirmishes, but hope for victory died with Metacomet, King Philip himself, in the Massachusetts swamplands.
King Philip’s War devastated all involved. It resulted in the deaths of 2,000 Natives and 2,800 colonists, the near total annihilation of the Wampanoag and their allies, and of the English settlements nearly half were attacked with hundreds of civilian deaths. The Praying Indians suffered perhaps more than any; hundreds of their already small population had died, and the discrimination and suspicion they had suffered from the English before the war had metamorphosed into open hostility and hatred. They had considered the Europeans their brothers, in culture and Christ. They had adopted their ways and their God, severing themselves from their Algonquin brothers of Old in favour of the civilised and energetic New.
It did not save them.
The newcomers did not see brothers, they saw Indians. They did not see Christians, they saw Indians. They did not see allies, they saw Indians.
When it came down to it, ingratiating themselves to their new neighbours did not save the Praying Indians. For their efforts and their loyalty, they received only tragedy and betrayal, they died like the rest.
Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here.
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