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.
There’s a little-known Chesterton work called The Return of Don Quixote. Don’t know it at all?
I don’t. I mean, I’m familiar with the original Don Quixote by Cervantes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Return of Don Quixote, and it’s about the victory of a joyous reactionary movement, written as an Edwardian novel, set in the future. It’s very interesting and it sort of catches the sort of joyousness right, which is an absolutely essential part of, like, any kind of restoration of this type.
And yet, you know, kind of Russian Hide And Seek, which is of course a much later work, is more…black-pilled, you might say, and perhaps a little more convincing. And I would say, sort of read them both. You’ll get kind of some of both of these ideas, but just breaking out of this incredible, I mean, it’s like, when you look in the rear-view mirror at Brexit. It’s like 0.1% of a British Meiji, right? And it’s a completely failed venture, and a completely failed thing, you know, I was reading Richard North’s blog EU Referendum, back in the earlier ‘00s, you know, I think he was associated to some extent with, like, early UKIP, and, um you know, the idea of having a referendum on Britain leaving the EU in 2005, let alone that referendum winning, it seemed like such, what we call here, a stretch goal.
It seemed so unimaginable and it happens. This incredible revolution happens and of course it happens and it doesn’t amount to shit. It just has no momentum. As soon as it wins it begins to lose. And, actually, the main effect of Brexit was to destroy the Brexit movement.
Pretty much.
You can’t help but feel that when you do something and people put that much effort and that much hope into something, and in retrospect you can look at it and just say “Well duh, obviously that was gonna…there was no way that could have worked in any way, shape, or form and done anything useful or relevant, or whatever,” and, the, you know…the definition of insanity is making the same mistake twice, and, right, and here, is just the form of government that has been how England rose to greatness and has been governed for pretty much all of the last two millennia, you know, before the invitation to William, right? You know, I guess, you know, William, it’s hard to know to what extent William of Orange was really interested in British domestic affairs. I don’t know how great it was.
Queen Anne was certainly pretty feeble and um, you did know that the um, the king has the right to veto legislation in parliament, right?
Yes.
And do you know who the last person, the last king, who actually used that power was?
It’s not going to be James I is it? Someone distant. Charles I?
Here’s a hint. It wasn’t a king at all.
Really? OK, so was it Queen Anne then? Was it in fact Queen Anne?
It was in fact Queen Anne. Uh, she did it once, and I forget over what. Probably some completely symbolic bullshit.
I see. They went “No, no, this is no good, we’ll get this Dutch fellow”.
Yeah, yeah, it was sort of their ‘lordships die in the dark’ moment. I think, like you know, the People’s Budget of 1911 or whatever. Yeah, Queen Anne was like the legitimate daughter of James II, right? And there was some hope that – and she was basically a Jacobite heir – it’s sort of like this woman Georgia Meloni who gets elected in Italy spouting all this rhetoric and then she’s like “We must fight for the Ukraine, the cause of Ukraine is the cause of all of us”, right?
You know, when I was in Portugal, I was in a small town in this summer and, you know, all of the…you would swear the whole population of Setúbal, Portugal, had come out and, like, popular enthusiasm for the cause of the Ukraine was everywhere, spontaneous graffiti, right, you know, and it’s like, these expressions of popular enthusiasm, like ‘workers of the world, unite’ in Czechoslovakia in 1976. You know, the greengrocer does not really care about workers of the world and I’m pretty sure that if you’re a bus driver in Setúbal, Portugal, your interest in the Dnieper isn’t really – excuse me, Dnipro – is fairly limited, and the uh, just, I mean, it’s increasingly comical, and so, the idea of just like, this whole structure collapsing in one boom is so much more realistic than the idea of Brexit. It’s so much more realistic. People think it’s unrealistic, no, it may be unrealistic, but it is vastly more realistic than Brexit.
I read your piece about a Meiji Restoration. I was sat in the middle of a bunch of naval officers and I was thinking “You know what? Rishi Sunak’s not very popular, neither is Keir Starmer, nobody likes parliament, what would actually happen right now if King Charles did in fact just go ‘guys’…”
Martial law.
Yeah exactly. What would actually happen? And you know, there’s been this sort of endless slew of headline after headline after headline of “Oh, this thing isn’t working, we’ll get the army in to drive trucks” and “Oh, this isn’t working, we’ll get the navy in to sort out this hospital”, and you just sort of look at this thing and think “Why is it that the last sort of functional bit of our government is essentially military?” And “Why is it that…” what would actually happen if…would anyone stop it? Would anyone in the military?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was in Dartmouth. I was at BRNC when the Queen died.
Oh wow.
It’s full of these young, early twenties cadets, who are going through…you know, I was there the day…so I think I was one of the last people to officially join the Queen’s navy and one of the first to join the King’s, and you know, everybody, the whole, the whole college just stopped. I went out onto the Parade Ground at about 5pm in the early evening and every church bell in Dartmouth was ringing across the valley. And yes, there’s a huge amount of symbolic nothingness to it –
But that symbolism can be converted back into reality.
Right!
And everyone would be stunned at how easy it was, and how obvious it was.
I don’t think anyone would say no.
Well, would Sir Arthur Scargill bring the unions into the street? Would like, you know, would the SpADs like set up barricades outside of Nelson’s Column? What?
Right, right. I don’t see it.
I don’t see it. And so you can have your New Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. You just have to realise that the chains that are bonding you are made of paper.
But that’s the question. The new Prince of Wales hands out copies of the Big Issue –
[*Laughs*]
And I just don’t see the king going along with this, so what do we do? Do we have some kind of new Cromwellian parliamentary lie where oh no, no, the king is held captive by these malignants and bad ideas, what is it? What on Earth are we doing?
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, um, maybe we, you know, uh, I don’t know, if Prince William did enough acid, maybe?
-
Five Truths from Dostoevsky’s The Devils
Whenever I scroll through the news on Twitter or listen to talk radio, I like to play a game called “Dostoevsky called it.” As one can guess, it consists of identifying events or trends that correspond with those in Feodor Dostoevsky’s novels and letters. Because Dostoevsky devoted so much ink to warning about the motives and effects of atheist-utilitarian socialism from the radical left, the game often points to his most direct attack on those ideas: The Devils.
Published between 1871 and 1872 and written in response to the Nechaev affair, where an underground group of socialist-atheist radicals, planning to ultimately overthrow the Tsarist government through propaganda, terrorism, and assassination, murdered a former comrade who had left their secret society, The Devils (Бесы; also translated as Demons or The Possessed) is Feodor Dostoevsky’s most explicit expose of and polemic against the revolutionary nihilism growing in late nineteenth-century Russia. Although, due to his own participation in a socialist plot aimed at educating and ultimately liberating the serfs, he often gave the benefit of the doubt to the moral idealism of the younger generation of radicals—assuming their hearts, if not their methods, were in the right place—in The Devils he nonetheless skewers the radical ideology and his generation and the next’s culpability for it.
While his main focus is on the characters’ psychologies and their symbolic significance, Dostoevsky nonetheless lays out many of the ideas populating late-nineteenth-century Russia, displaying a thorough understanding of them, their holders’ true motives (which, like those of that other ideological murderer Raskalnikov, are rarely the same as those consciously stated by their loudest advocates), and what would be the results if they were not checked. In several places, Dostoevsky unfortunately calls it right, and The Devils at times reads as a preview of the following fifty years in Russia, as well as of the modes and methods of radicalism in later places and times.
It would be too great a task to cite, here, all the places and times where Dostoevsky’s visions were confirmed; at best, after laying out a few of the many truths in The Devils, I can only note basic parallels with later events and trends in Russia and elsewhere—and let my readers draw their own additional parallels. Nonetheless, here are five truths from Dostoevsky’s The Devils:
1: The superfluity of the preceding liberal generation to progressive radicals.
The Devils is structured around the relationship between the older and younger generations of the mid-1800s. The book opens with an introduction of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, father to the later introduced radical Peter Stepanovich. A Westernized liberal from the 1840s generation, Stepan Trofimovich represents the upper-class intelligentsia that first sought to enlighten the supposedly backwards Russia through atheistic socialism (a redundancy in Dostoevsky).
However, despite his previously elevated status as a liberal and lecturer, by the time of The Devils Stepan Trofimovich—and, with him, the 1840s liberals who expected to be honored for opening the door to progress—has become superfluous. This is highlighted when his son returns to the province and does not honor his father with figurative laurels (when such a symbol is later employed literally it is in satirical mock).
Though never the direct butt of Dostoevsky’s satire, Stepan Trofimovich cannot (or refuses) to understand that his son’s nihilism is not a distortion of his own generation’s hopes but is the logical, inevitable product of them. The older man’s refusal to admit his ideological progeny in his literal progeny’s beliefs, of course, enables Peter Stepanovich to mock him further, even while he continues to avail himself of the benefits of his father’s erstwhile status in society. This “liberal naivete enabling radical nihilism” schema can also be seen in the governor’s wife, Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke, who believes that she can heroically redirect the passions of the youth to more socially beneficial, less radical, pursuits but only ends up enabling them to take over her literary fete to ridicule traditional society and distract the local worthies while agents set parts of the local town ablaze. Stepan Trofimovich, Yulia Mikhailovna, and others show that, despite the liberal generation’s supposed love for Russia, they were unable to brake the pendulum they sent swinging towards leftism.
The same pattern of liberals being ignored or discarded by the progressives they birthed can be seen in later years in Russia and other nations. While it would historically be two generations between Belinsky and Lenin (who was born within months of Dostoevsky’s starting to write The Devils), after the 1917 Revolution, Soviet Russia went through several cycles of executing or imprisoning previous generations who, despite supporting the Revolution, were unfortunately too close to the previous era to be trusted by new, socialistically purer generations.
In a more recent UK, Dostoevsky’s schema can also be seen in the Boomer-led Labour of the ‘90s and ‘00s UK paving the way for the radical, arguably anti-British progressivism of the 2010s and ‘20s (which, granted, sports its share of hip Boomers). In America, it can be seen in the soft divide in congressional Democrats between 20th-century liberals like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and “the squad” comprised of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and others who have actively tried (and arguably succeeded) in pushing the nation’s discourse in a left progressive direction.
2: Ideologies as active, distorting forces rather than merely passive beliefs.
“I’ve never understood anything about your theory…” Peter Stepanovich tells the serene Aleksei Nilych Kirillov later in the book, “I also know you haven’t swallowed the idea—the idea’s swallowed you…” The idea he is referring to is Kirillov’s belief that by committing suicide not from despair or passion but by rational, egotistic intention, he can rid mankind of the fear of death (personified in the figure of God) and become the Christ of the new utilitarian atheism (really, Dostoevsky intends us to understand, not without pity for Kirillov, an antichrist thereof). The topic of suicide—rising in Russia at the time of the book’s writing and a result, Dostoevsky believed, of the weakening of social institutions and national morality by the subversive nihilism then spreading—is a motif through the book. Countering Chernyshevsky’s romanticized revolutionary Rakhmetov from What is to Be Done?, Kirillov is Dostoevsky’s depiction of the atheist rational egotism of the time taken to its fullest psychological extent. Like others he had and would later write (Raskalnikov, Ivan Karamazov), Kirillov is driven mad by an idea that “swallows” him in monomania and which he has admitted to being obsessed with—the idea of a world without God.
Though Dostoevsky considered it the central issue of his day (which still torments Western culture), my focus here is not on Kirillov’s idea, itself, but on his relation to it. Countering the Western Enlightenment conceit that ideas are mere tools to be rationally picked up and put down at will, Dostoevsky shows through Kirillov that ideas and ideology (ideas put in the place of religion) are active things that can overwhelm both conscious and unconscious mind. Indeed, the novel’s title and Epigraph—the story of Legion and the swine from Luke 8—already suggests this; for Dostoevsky, there is little difference between the demons that possessed the pigs and the ideas that drive characters like Kirillov to madness.
Of course, a realist-materialist reading of Kirillov’s end (I won’t spoil it, though it arguably undercuts his serenity throughout the book) and the later Ivan Karamazov’s encounter with a personified devil would contend that there was nothing literally demonic to the manifestations, but for Dostoevsky that matters little; for him, whose focus is always on how the individual lives and experiences life, being possessed by an ideology one cannot let go of and being in the grasp of literal demons is nearly synonymous—indeed, the former may be the modern manifestation of the latter, with the same results. In his work, such things almost always accompany a lowering of one’s humanity into the beastial.
The problem with ideology, Dostoevsky had discovered in Siberia, was in their limited conception of man. By cutting off all upper transcendent values as either religious superstition or upper class decadence, the new utilitarian atheism had removed an essential part of what it meant to be human. At best, humans were animals and could hope for no more than thus, and all higher aspirations were to be lowered to achieving present social goals of food, housing, and sex—which Dostoevsky saw, themselves, as impossible to effectively achieve without the Orthodox Church’s prescriptions for how to deal with suffering and a belief in afterlife. Of the lack of higher impressions that give life meaning, Dostoevsky saw two possible results: ever-increasingly perverse acts of the flesh, and ever-increasingly solipsistic devotion to a cause—both being grounded in and expressions not of liberation or selflessness, but of the deepest egotism (which was a frankly stated element of the times’ ideologies).
From this view, Dostoevsky would have seen today’s growing efforts to legitimate into the mainstream things like polyamory, abortion, and public displays of sexuality and increasingly aggressive advocacy by groups like Extinction Rebellion or NOW (he predicted both movements in his other writing) as both being attempts to supply the same religious impulse—which, due to their being cut off by their premises from the transcendent metaphysic required by the human creature and supplied by Christianity, &c, is a doomed attempt.
3: Seemingly virtuous revolution motivated by and covering for private vices.
By the time he wrote The Devils Dostoevsky had seen both inside and outside of the radical movement; he had also depicted in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment characters who discover, to their angst and horror, that their actions were not motivated by humanitarianism, but by envy, cravenness, and the subsequent desire for self-aggrandizement. The Devils features the same depth of psychology beneath the main characters’ stated ideas and goals, and the book often shows how said ideas cannot work when applied to real people and real life.
As the chronicle unfolds, characters often speak of the petty vices that undermine the purity of the revolutionaries’ stated virtues and goals. “Why is it,” the narrator recounts Stepan Trofimovich once asking him, “all these desperate socialists and communists are also so incredibly miserly, acquisitive, and proprietorial? In fact, the more socialist someone is…the stronger his proprietorial instinct.” So much for those who seek to abolish property; one can guess to whom they wish to redistribute it! The revolutionary-turned-conservative Ivan Shatov later continues the motif, digging deeper into the radicals’ motives: “They’d be the first to be terribly unhappy if somehow Russia were suddenly transformed, even according to their own ideas, and if it were suddenly to become immeasurably rich and happy. Then they’d have no one to hate, no one to despise, no one to mock! It’s all an enormous, animal hatred for Russia that’s eaten into their system.”
Leftists might accuse Dostoevsky of merely wishing to make the radicals look bad with such an evaluation; however, as addressed by Joseph Frank in his chapter on the topic in Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, the “bad for thee, fine for me” mentality of The Devils’s radicals (if their ideology doesn’t completely blind them to such inconsistency in the first place) was straight from the playbook of men like Nechaev: the Catechism of a Revolutionary. Far from trying to evade contradictory behavior, such a work, and other later analogues (Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”; Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals) advocate being inconsistent and slippery with one’s principles for the sake of the revolution. Indeed, contradicting the rules one was trying to impose on others was and is seen not as an inconsistency but as a special privilege—of which several examples can be found, from upper party opulence in the USSR to modern champagne socialists who attend a $35,000-per-seat Met Gala while advocating taxing the rich.
4: Social chaos and purges as necessary and inevitable in achieving and maintaining utopia.
Perhaps the single most prophetic scene in The Devils occurs in the already mentioned chapter “‘Our Group’ Meets,” which depicts the various local radicals meeting under cover of a birthday party. A cacophony of competing voices and priorities, the scene’s humorous mix of inept, self-serving idealists is made grotesque by the visions they advocate. Most elaborate of the speakers is Shigalyov, whose utopian scheme for the revolution was insightful enough that Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn both referred to the Russian government’s post-October Revolution policies and methods as “Shigalevism.”
While Shigalyov’s whole speech (and Peter Stepanovich’s commentary) is worth reading as a prophecy of what would happen less than fifty years after the book, here are some notable excerpts:
“Beginning with the idea of unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism…One-tenth will receive personal freedom and unlimited power over the other nine-tenths. The latter must forfeit their individuality and become as it were a herd [through re-education of entire generations]; through boundless obedience, they will attain, by a series of rebirths, a state of primeval innocence, although they’ll still have to work…What I’m proposing is not disgusting; it’s paradise, paradise on earth—there can be none other on earth.”
A direct goal of the purges in Soviet Russia, and of the alienation of children from their parents, was to create a new, purely socialist generation unburdened by the prejudices of previous or outside systems.
“[We’ve] been urged to close ranks and even form groups for the sole purposed of bringing about total destruction, on the pretext that however much you try to cure the world, you won’t be able to do so entirely, but if you take radical steps and cut off one hundred million heads, thus easing the burden, it’ll be much easier to leap over the ditch. It’s a splendid idea…”
While hundred million murders may seem like hyperbole in the scene’s darkly comic context, in the end it was an accurate prediction of what communism would accomplish if put into systemic practice; however, we should also not miss the stated method of destabilizing society via conspiratorial groups aimed not at aid but at acceleration—a method used in early 20th-century Russia and employed by modern radical groups like Antifa.
“It would take at least fifty years, well, thirty, to complete such a slaughter—inasmuch as people aren’t sheep, you know, and they won’t submit willingly.”
Besides the time element, the identifying of the individual human’s desire for life and autonomy as a lamentable but surmountable impediment to revolution—rather than a damning judgment of the radicals’ inability to make any humanitarian claims—is chilling.
“[Shigalyov] has a system for spying. Every member of the society spies on every other one and is obliged to inform. Everyone belongs to all the others and the others belong to each one. They’re all slaves and equal in their slavery.”
A corrollary to the section above on freedom-through-slavery, this part accurately identifies the system of paranoid watchfulness in the first half of the USSR, as well as the system currently in place in the DPRK, among other places.
“The one thing the world needs is obedience. The desire for education is an aristocratic idea. As soon as a man experiences love or has a family, he wants private property. We’ll destroy that want: we’ll unleash drunkenness, slander, denunciantion; we’ll unleash unheard-of corruption… [Crime] is no longer insanity, but some kind of common sense, almost an obligation, at least a noble protest.”
Anti-traditional-family advocacy and the flipping of the criminal-innocent dichotomy as a means of destabilizing the status quo all took place in the early years of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, they are all too familiar today in the West, whether we’re talking about the current argument in the US that children’s education belongs to the community (i.e. teachers, public unions, and the government) to the exclusion of parents, or the argument heard at several points in the 2020 that crimes and rioting committed during protests were an excusable, even “noble,” form of making one’s voice heard (while nicking a TV in the process!).
More recently and ongoing here in California (often uncannily parallel to the UK in certain policy impulses), our current District Attorney George Gascon, in an attempt to redefine the criminal-victim mentality in the state, has implemented policies that benefit criminals over victims by relaxing the definitions and sentences of certain crimes and refusing to try teenagers who commit felonies as adults (among other things); as many expected would happen, crime has risen in the state, with the Los Angeles PD recently advising residents to avoid wearing jewelry in public—which, to this resident, sounds oddly close to blaming the victim for wearing a short skirt by another name, and is certainly a symptom and example of anarcho-tyranny.
To nineteenth-century readers not as versed as Dostoevsky in the literature and ideas behind the Nechaev affair (which was publicly seen as merely a murder among friends, without the ideological significance Dostoevsky gave it), this section of The Devils would have seemed a comic exaggeration. However, to post-20th-century readers it stands, like a clarion pointing forward to the events later confirmed by Solzhenitsyn, as a dire warning not to forget the truth in the satire and not to dismiss the foolishly hyperbolic as impotent. Even in isolated forms, the ideas promoted by Shigalyev are real, and when applied they have been, as Dostoevsky predicted, disastrous.
5: Socialism not as humanitarian reason, but as religious poetry; revolution as primarily aesthetic, not economic.
An amalgam of, among other members of the 1840s generation, the father of Russian socialism Alexander Herzen, Stepan Trofimovich is, by the time of the 1860s setting of The Devils, an inveterate poet. This reflects Dostoevsky’s evaluation of his old theorist friend, whom he nonetheless cites as the enabler of men like the nihilist terrorist Nechaev, despite Herzen’s claims that the terrorist had bastardized his ideas (see truth number 1, above).
The brilliantly mixed critique of and homage to Dostoevsky’s own generation that is Stepan Trofimovich presents one of the book’s main motifs about the nihilist generation: that they are not pursuing a philosophically rational system of humanitarian goals, but a romantically poetic pseudo-religion. “They’re all bewitched,” cries Stepan Trofimovich about his son, “not by realism, but by the emotional and idealistic aspects of socialism, so to speak, by its religious overtones, its poetry.” Later, at the aforementioned pivotal meeting scene, Peter Stepanovich shows he is completely conscious of this fact—and willing to use it to his advantage. “What’s happening here is the replacement of the old religion by a new one; that’s why so many soldiers are needed—it’s a large undertaking.” In the next scene, Peter Stepanovich reveals to Stavrogin his desire to use the enchanting nobleman as a figurehead for revolution among the peasantry, intending to call him Ivan the Tsarevich to play off of the Russian folk legend of a messianic Tsar in hiding who will rise to take the throne from the “false” reigning Tsar and right all the world’s wrongs with his combined religious and political power.
Peter Stepanovich, himself, is too frank a nihilist to believe in such narratives; focused as he is on first destroying everything rather than wasting time pontificating about what to do afterwards, he even treats Shigalyov’s utopian visions with contempt. However, the rest of the radicals in the book are not so clear-sighted about the nature of their beliefs. Multiple times in the book, susceptibility to radical socialism is said to inhere not in reason but in sentimentality; showing Dostoevsky’s moderation even on a topic of which he was so passionately against, this critique often focuses on younger men and women’s genuine desire to good—which ironically makes them, like the naive and forthright Ensign Erkel, susceptible to committing the worst crimes with a straight, morally self-confident face.
It is this susceptibility to the art of revolution that causes Peter Stepanovich to be so sanguine about others’ romanticism, despite its falling short of his own nihilism. His intention to use others’ art for his own advantage can be seen most clearly in his hijacking of Yulia Mikhailovna’s literary fete to use it, through his cronies, as a screed against the social order and to mock artistic tradition. His doing so is just a follow-through of an earlier statement to Stavrogin that “Those with higher abilities…have always done more harm than good; they’ll either be banished or executed. Cicero’s tongue will be cut out, Copernicus’s eyes will be gouged out, Shakespeare will be stoned…it’s a fine idea to level mountains—there’s nothing ridiculous in that…we’ll suffocate every genius in its infancy.”
Against his son’s leveling of mountains, Stepan Trofimovich, to his infinite credit and speaking with his author’s mouth, declares, with the lone voice of tradition amidst the climactic fete, that “Shakespeare and Raphael are more important than the emancipation of the serfs…than nationalism…than socialism…than the younger generation…than chemistry, almost more important than humanity, because they are the fruit, the genuine fruit of humanity, and perhaps the most important fruit there is!” In this contrast between the Verkhovenskys, it is not different views on economics but on art—on Shakespeare, among others—that that lie at the heart of revolution, with the revolutionaries opposing the English Poet more viscerally than any other figure. This reflects Dostoevsky’s understanding that the monumental cultural shift of the 1800s was not primarily scientific but aesthetic (a topic too large to address here). Suffice it to say, the central conflict of The Devils is not between capitalists and socialists (the book rarely touches on economic issues, apart from their being used as propaganda—that is, aesthetically), nor between Orthodox and atheists (though Dostoevsky certainly saw that as the fundamental alternative at play), but between the 1840s late Romantics and the new Naturalist-Realists.
The prophetic nature of this aesthetic aspect of The Devils has many later confirmations, such as the 20th century’s growth of state propaganda, especially in socialistic states like Nazi Germany or the USSR, though also in the West (Western postmodernism would eventually make all art as interpretable as propaganda). Furthermore, the Stalinist cult of personality seems a direct carry over of Peter Stepanovich’s intended desire to form just such a pseudo-religious cult out of Nikolai Vsevolodovich.
Having written a novel on the threat posed to Shakespeare by the newest generation of the radical left (before reading of Verkhovensky’s desire to stone Shakespeare—imagine my surprise to find that Dostoevsky had called even the events in my own novel!), I hold this particular topic close to my heart. Indeed, I believe we are still in the Romantic-Realist crossroads, and in dire need of backtracking to take the other path that would prefer, to paraphrase Stepan Trofimovich, the beautiful and ennobling Shakespeare and Raphael over the socially useful pair of boots and petroleum. Like Stepan Trofimovich, I believe comforts and technical advancements like the latter could not have come about were it not for the culture of the former—and that they would lose their value were their relative importance confused to the detriment of that which is higher.
Conclusion
There are, of course, many other truths in The Devils that have borne out (the infighting of radical advocacy groups competing for prominence, radicalism as a result of upper-class boredom and idleness, revolution’s being affected not by a majority but a loud minority willing to transgress, self-important administrators and bureaucrats as enablers and legitimators of radicals…). While the increasingly chaotic narrative (meant to mimic the setting’s growing unrest) is not Dostoevsky’s most approachable work, The Devils is certainly one of his best, and it fulfills his intended purpose of showing, like Tolstoy had done a few years before in War and Peace, a full picture of Russian society.
However, while Tolstoy’s work looked backward to a Russia that, from Dostoevsky’s view, had been played out, The Devils was written to look forward, and, more often for ill than good, it has been right in its predictions. Not for nothing did Albert Camus, who would later adapt The Devils for the stage, say on hearing about the Stalinist purges in Soviet Russia that “The real 19th-century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.”
-
The Nationalist Case for Caution
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been experiencing a rare phenomenon; politicians seem to have grown a spine. There’s tough talk of deportations and standing up to Islamic extremism. It’s far too good to be true. Many MPs and our Prime Minister have been living vicariously through Israel, springing to the defence of the Israelis and British Jews with extreme fervour. Cross-party leader support from Sunak and Starmer has been unwavering.
However, whilst the latter is facing rebellion from his immigrant and militant leftist contingent as Israeli aggression continues unabated, Sunak engaged in the humiliation ritual of meeting Israeli leaders at the King David Hotel. I’m unsure if a meeting between a sitting British PM and the Israeli leadership has been held there since Jewish terrorists bombed it, killing many Britons, but it’s certainly something I would not like to see again from a future PM.
The conflict in this area of the world does not particularly interest me. There are so many domestic problems facing Britain that I am somewhat dismayed that the sclerotic and otherwise necrotic government can rapidly reanimate when something so detached from us reaches their desks. As this latest crisis has rolled along several unfortunate reality checks have hit Britain. In an ideal world, we could completely wash our hands of it, but we are not in that position. Imported ethnic conflicts are coming to fruition and we need to navigate them as best we can.
Many Israelis were killed and over 100 hostages were taken, Israel retaliated with its usual tactic of bombing Gaza with extreme prejudice. The actions of Hamas provoked disgust from the wider British public, seeing people murdered in their homes does not sit particularly well, or so you would have thought. After the Israel response, pro-Palestinian demonstrations erupted across the UK. Among the usual suspects of white leftists was a sizeable ethnic minority contingent. London drew the most attention, at home and internationally, and most of the attendees were of minority ethnic backgrounds.
Between the messages of “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea” less familiar ones started to emerge; the idea that what Hamas had achieved was anti-colonialism in action. This is where alarm bells should begin to ring, especially if you have been listening to leftist talking points in recent years or paying attention to protest actions. If decolonisation was not in fact simply tearing down statues or renaming streets but murdering your “oppressors” then perhaps this large and young contingent of resentful ethnic minorities could turn out to be a life-threatening problem. As the country moves toward the White British becoming a minority, as in London, this is a ticking time-bomb. When you see at the most recent protest, in which White people are attacked for defending the Cenotaph and being called “White Trash” by immigrants, the nature of this protest as anti-White decolonisation action becomes more clear.
MPs and media personalities began the tough talk immediately. “Deportations for anti-semitic students” and possible prison time for Hamas supporters. Nothing so far has come to fruition in that regard and deportations are unlikely to happen because the Tories have failed to dismantle the legal apparatus that allows the successful appealing of deportation efforts. Deportation efforts that are consistently hampered by an industry of state-leeching legal practices and lawyers. A more devious development appeared during the most recent protest with the publishing of an article exploring the “English roots of anti-Semitism.” A feeble attempt to paint these events as originating as a native White issue or an extension of historical anti-Semitism, not something artificially imported.
It was at this point I began to think “Where was this talk when minority rape gangs were exposed or terrorist attacks were carried out here?” It was non-existent. We were actually encouraged to “Not look back in anger” with special government networks rolling out I “heart” (city/town affected by terrorism) almost immediately and a deafening silence with regard to the former. Anybody that has spoken out about these issues has been frequently demonised or silenced, they have not enjoyed even a fraction of Government support that Israel and British Jews have received over the last few weeks.
In response to the hostage crisis in Israel, British Jews have been running a poster campaign and projecting the images on the back of trucks in London. These efforts have been disrupted in the form of posters being torn down or the vehicles being stopped by the police themselves for the sake of “public order.” The people doing a substantial amount of the poster tearing have been minorities and in a particularly amusing clip a Jewish man states to an unconcerned Black woman that he “supported Black Lives Matter.” For him he had been a good ally how could these people betray them? Don’t they know they’re only meant to undermine White British society? The great irony that many British Jews are pro-immigration and support leftist causes that have led to this is not lost on us. Indeed, many leftist Jews were marching for Palestine in a somewhat annihilationist expression of self-determination.
The police have been no less cowardly than usual in their reactions. Violent rhetoric against Jews and Israel, actual calls to Jihad, being hand waved away by the police. As one would expect British people with Union flags or the St. George’s Cross have been arrested, escorted away or spoken to with typical condescension. Since the Oldham and Bradford riots the British police have been deathly afraid of policing minority issues for fear of them rioting or triggering acts of terrorism. This fear needs to be presented to the public as the police are utterly incapable of presenting this issue themselves. We saw a little bit of spine from the armed officers a few weeks ago but they have since stood down, happy to operate in a system that oppresses Whites and one that will throw them under the bus for political expedience. I’m not sure what is going on with the police in the UK; large swathes captured by leftists is the easiest answer, but many officers must be “lying back” and “thinking of the pension.” In the most recent protests we have seen police officers injured, although it’s hard to muster sympathy. Police support on the Right is definitely on the wane.
The online nationalist space has been interesting. Many Third-Positionists have naturally aligned themselves with Palestine and other aggrieved minorities in order to “strike out” at “Jewish power structures” and to rebuke Israel itself as a “colonial holdout.” Fundamentally, the minorities they are in a temporary alliance with see no difference between Jews/Israelis and Whites. Their incredibly short-sighted tactic is stoking anti-White rhetoric that is all too often used to put White British interests down.
The counter-jihad types have once again insisted that this is proof that we are indeed in a civilisational war with Islam, but I tentatively disagree. We have a demographic problem that extends beyond the Islamic population here. This should not be a theological debate, it’s a question of race; the preservation of the White British. I would be lying if I said that the large protests taking on Islamic characteristics didn’t alarm me. It’s as if we were seeing a vision of the future. The prospect of large Islamic voting blocs is something that could have us leaning more on the counter-jihad ideology in the future. Thankfully our electoral system suppresses this somewhat, although that itself is a double-edged sword suppressing us.
Others have seen the Government’s bold talk of deportations as a good opportunity for us to begin broaching the demographic question. I am not convinced that pushing this under the guise of dealing with “anti-Semitism” will serve us in any real capacity long term. Like all rushed legislation, it actually has the ability to hurt us in the long run; you set the precedent that anti-Semitism is somehow antithetical to life in Britain then many similar pieces of legislation could follow. We are already staring down the possibility of a Labour government that wants to make “misogyny” a “hate crime”, we don’t need more restrictions to speech before then if they can be avoided.
One silver lining from this mess, if not a vehicle to directly push deportations, is that it shows the obvious failure of the enforced multiracial project we call Multiculturalism. The success of this project has been so heavily disputed in recent weeks after being somewhat cynically trotted out by Suella Braverman. One other potential benefit is that it once again allows us to hammer home the point about the blocks to deportations from the ECHR as well as the legal practices opposing them being funded by the taxpayer.
The left has revealed its agenda by living vicariously through the actions of Hamas and the government has revealed their priorities in jumping to the defence of Israel and British Jews. Nationalists are effectively homeless; we have to advocate for ourselves. Leading from our principles towards our goals and not simply hoping to achieve something by serving others who have so often opposed us. Immigration, repatriation, withdrawal from the ECHR, smashing the Equality Act and Human Rights Acts, are all things that take precedence. Can we take a step toward doing any of these things with this crisis? Undoubtedly, but we must be cautious.
-
On Science and Conservatism: Is the Relationship Dead?
Why have conservatives have turned against science? This question is a fundamental mischaracterisation of the relationship between science and right-wing thinkers. As a young scientist and a conservative, I find myself straddling this so-called divide and in the unique position to offer analysis on the state of the relationship between the right-wing and science. It is true that today, with issues such as climate change and vaccine efficacy, right-wing criticisms of the scientific elite have overwhelmingly dominated the discourse on scientific distrust. But if one is to truly interrogate the disconnect between modern day conservatism and the scientific mainstream, you must also consider the converse; why has science turned against right-wing thought? Or perhaps more notably, how have left-wing idealogues used science against conservatives?
The left-wing bias of modern academia is well documented, with one recent study published by Nature revealing that only six percent of researchers self-identify as conservative and less than ten percent of academic political donations support conservative candidates. With this troubling trend of progressive overrepresentation in scientific circles, the left has used their advantage to co-opt and manipulate science for its own political ends. This threatens to undermine the very principles of intellectual freedom and academic integrity upon which scientific inquiry depends.
With the left having such a hold over modern science, the tendency on the right has, somewhat justifiably, been outright rejection of scientific thought and practice. This seems a self-defeating proposition. Sustainable prosperity will only be practically achievable if we look to make technological progress within our own borders. To do this we must address some major flaws which have become inherent to scientific thinking, causing both alienation of conservative thinkers and degeneration of the scientific practice.
Suppression of Dissent
Central to the ethos of scientific inquiry is the freedom to question the prevailing orthodoxy and challenge established thought. Yet, in recent years, the left has sought to suppress dissenting voices and enforce ideological conformity within the scientific community. This manifests itself in two ways, firstly through the development of a culture within academic institutions which is antithetical to conservative viewpoints and, perhaps more importantly, through political discrimination in grants and publication, prohibiting conservative viewpoints from being spread in scientific literature.
An often-understated consequence of the leftward shift in academia is the comprising impact on peer-review. Peer-review is the process which underpins science. Academics review the work of other researchers to assess the scientific validity and rigour of their experimentation and argument before the work can be published. Whilst a noble concept, it is easily victim to confirmation bias. If only six percent of academics identify as conservative, how likely is it that the handful of reviewers of a grant proposal or paper will be ideologically conservative or even supportive of controversial proposals? This fear is not merely the musings of a scorned conservative scientist but a reality backed up by research. Half of academics would mark down a right-wing grant application. Four in ten American academics admit they wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter. A third of British academics would not hire a Brexiter. Not only does this inhibit the volume of conservative scientific literature, but it restricts a conservative’s earning capacity from grants and promotion, and therefore their academic influence. What this leads to is the self-censorship of conservative thinkers looking to progress their careers, thus creating a spiral of worsening conservative intolerance on campuses and in academia.
One striking example of this phenomenon is the case of postdoctoral researcher, Dr Noah Carl. Dr Carl graduated from the prestigious University of Oxford with a thesis titled ‘Cognitive ability and sociopolitical beliefs and attitudes’ and was subsequently awarded the Toby Jackman Newtown Research Fellowship at St Edmund’s College in Cambridge. For early-career researchers, such a postdoctoral fellowship is invaluable in gaining a foothold in the cut-throat academic industry. Yet Dr Carl was never able to assume his position as he was dismissed by St Edmund’s College for his alleged association with far-right figures. This so-called association involved attending a conference also attended by race researchers and publishing in a journal with a controversial editor. He advocated for free inquiry into how stifling debates around race can do harm and his research examined common stereotypes. Even a cursory assessment of this reasoning shows how Dr Carl was only guilty of challenging the left-wing orthodoxy. The University had no issue with his research when they appointed him, but guilt by association was sufficient to effectively end a young researcher’s career after left-wing student backlash.
Another case is that of esteemed Professor of Public Law at Macquarie University in Sydney, Andrew Fraser, who published a letter in 2005 in his local newspaper calling for restriction of African immigration, due to its effect on increasing crime rates. Macquarie University initially defended Fraser’s right to free speech, but after pressure from the local Sudanese community, Fraser was suspended, with the University citing how Fraser had affected the university’s ability to operate and offering a public apology to those who were offended. Again, absent from the response was any criticism of Fraser’s scientific rigour. Fraser has long been a proponent of the role of immigration in increasing Australian crime rates, the evidence for which remains strong to this day.
Regardless of your own views on these issues, its inarguable that both scholars faced vilification and professional repercussions for conducting research and providing comment which deviated from the left’s ideological agenda. The cancellation of scholars like Carl and Fraser serves as a chilling reminder of the dangers of ideological conformity in scientific discourse. By stifling dissent and enforcing orthodoxy, the left undermines the very foundation of scientific inquiry, to question and hypothesise, thus relegating it to a tool of political expediency rather than a genuine quest of understanding.
The Rise of Scientism
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the left’s control over science is the rise of scientism,a quasi-religious belief in the infallibility of scientific authority. In the eyes of leftist ideologues, science has become not merely a tool for understanding the natural world, but an all-encompassing worldview that supplants religion and morality. There is no phrase I personally detest more than, ‘Trust the science.’ This phrase has become a mantra of progressive politicians, but it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific practice. In trying to project science as objective truth, they are committing a major offence of scientific thought, presenting a theory as fact. The scientific method is built around making hypotheses and proving them wrong based on observation and evidence. Anyone that tells you science can prove truth is lying to you. It is fundamentally impossible to prove truth by using the scientific method, as more evidence can always be uncovered to refute any such assertion. In the leftist zeal to elevate science to the status of an objective truth, they conflate empirical evidence with ideological principles, compromising the integrity of the scientific process.
Science was never intended to replace religion or morality but rather to complement and enhance our understanding of the world. Renowned scientist Isaac Newton, for instance, integrated his Christian faith into his exploration of natural laws, aiming to inspire others to appreciate the beauty of divine creation.
“When I wrote my treatise about our system, I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.”
– Isaac NewtonModern scientists are increasingly unravelling new frontiers, from artificial intelligence to genetic modification, prompting profound ethical questions. But unfortunately, as science has progressed, secularism and scientism have gained traction in intellectual circles, causing the influence of religion on scientific discourse to wane. This trend has left a moral vacuum within the scientific community at a time when it is most needed. As we look to address the ethical questions of new scientific frontiers, the increasingly fervent belief in the infallibility of science among the elite is a dangerous precedent to set in our quest for knowledge.
How do we fix it?
It was easy during the Covid-19 lockdowns to argue against science, as it was used to justify draconian government laws. But now this period has passed, such a trajectory is self-defeating. Countless right-wing figures have continued to prosecute against science, yet they largely remain excluded from serious political discourse. Clearly though, a total embrace of the scientific establishment ignores a long-standing hostility and prosecution of right-wing thought.
As we look to wrest control over our own countries back from the leftist elite, conservatives and nationalists ignore science at their own peril. Across the Anglosphere we see conservative parties stagnating. Young people are disengaging from politics. Idealogues are pursuing their agendas. If a truly right-wing presence is going to be felt in politics it must champion cultural revival, national progress, and self-reliance. By leveraging national resources and driving scientific and technological innovation, we can build a future focused economy to our own benefit. Importantly, science can be reclaimed from leftist control by promoting independent domestic research to replace our current bureaucratic institutions, prioritising the protection of conservative thought in academia and rebuilding confidence among the right-wing populace.
So, is the relationship between conservatives and science dead? From suppressing dissenting voices to the promotion of quasi-religious faith in scientific infallibility, the left’s agenda threatens to degenerate scientific practice and undermine its capacity to investigate the world around us. But this should not catalyse right wing rejection of science. Science may have turned its back on right-wing intellectuals, but in a constantly evolving world it would be counterproductive for conservatives to concede science to the Left. It’s only with the input of conservative thinkers that truly free scientific endeavour can help lead us away from regression and embrace a vision for right-wing progress.
