From an aesthetic, or mannerism perspective, gentlemen had indeed almost entirely perished from the Isles. But the idea that no one should be seen confronting anyone, and a stiff upper lip must be kept at all times had passed onto generations after generations well and intact. But does a combination of that and an increasingly restrictive legal system means nothing can ever be done to rescue Great Britain from its managed decline?
Not really. But the struggle needs to start small, tiny first steps to ease everyone out of the mindset of being a ‘gentleman’.
Unfortunately, if you started pushing over idle motorcycles on your local taxi ranks and smashing windows on your local ‘souvenir shop’, you won’t last long until your own people (yes, your own people) will start reporting you to the KGB (Komitet-Gosudarstvennoy-Bezopasnosti Great Britain), and the government WILL be on your opposition’s side.
What you need to do what some may call a ‘petty nuisance’, completely within the boundaries of law. Or rather, practicing your rights to its maximum, and making the ENEMY’s life harder – cross a zebra crossing just as a Deliveroo rider or a matte-black tinted-window Range Rover arrives so they will have to stop, if they don’t, make them, it is YOUR right! There are much more ways to do this, the sky really is the limit.
Be an active petty nuisance to your enemy, this is your last resistance to those who are invading your life. It may sound humble, perhaps futile, but it keeps the spirit of resistance awake, reminds you that this is still an active struggle, it kills the gentlemanly mindset to give in, to compromise, it keeps a little bit of that fire alive. You will find yourself fighting back more and more as you become more and more comfortable with it. And eventually, perhaps hoping, you will find yourself winning, in this petit crusade, fought with petty nuisance.
This is an excerpt from “Nuclear”.
To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
-
Oligarchic Oafs
British cultural critics, in my opinion, suffer from an insularity which prevents them from connecting the events of their own country to any wider patterns of civilisation. This is truest for those who are the most correct with their criticisms. Take for example Theodore Dalrymple, whose 1998 article Uncouth Chic in the City Journal was prophetic in diagnosing a distinctly British pathology. I give a lengthy quote to showcase the depth of his description:
“The signs — both large and small — of the reversal in the flow of aspiration are everywhere. Recently, a member of the royal family, a granddaughter of the queen, had a metal stud inserted into her tongue and proudly displayed it to the press. (…) Middle-class girls now consider it chic to sport a tattoo — another underclass fashion, as a visit to any British prison will swiftly establish. (…) Advertising now glamorizes the underclass way of life and its attitude toward the world. Stella Tennant, one of Britain’s most famous models and herself of aristocratic birth, has adopted almost as a trademark the stance and facial expression of general dumb hostility to everything and everybody that is characteristic of so many of my underclass patients.”
Dalrymple lays the blame for this “uncouth chic” on moral relativism: “… since nothing is better and nothing is worse, the worse is better because it is more demotic.” This much may be true, but it sidesteps an important matter. There’s an area where the British remain elitists: money. Whatever relativism now reigns upon our morality, it has areas of preferred emphasis. With manners we are relativists, but with cash we are a nation of absolutists who think being rich is better than being poor. Indeed, the very need to transform the uncouth into a type of chic (a word meaning sophisticated and fashionable) betrays such a mindset. Nobody is demanding unfashionable uncouth trash.
To be an elitist about your wallet and a vulgarian about your manners. I wager this combination isn’t accidental but vital. The latter flows from the former.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who defines a lot of things near-finally, defines an oligarch as someone who is both wealthy and has a wealth-based idea of goodness. That is, an oligarch isn’t just rich; he thinks being rich is identical with being good. This is why he thinks only the rich should hold political office, for example. So, it’s not that money is the root of all evil and the rich the wickedest. The one who has his character in order only benefits the more money he has, because he understands money as a tool for acquiring other goods. The oligarch grasps for money like an idolum and hates anybody who doesn’t have it.
But why does the oligarch think this? Hasn’t he observed all the good poor people in the world? Is he blind to the honest pauper? Aristotle’s answer is simple: the oligarch thinks money equals goodness because he thinks living well is gorging every appetite with no limit. “For where enjoyment consists in excess, men look for that skill that produces the excess that is enjoyed”[ii]. In other words, if the good of life is endless pleasure, and endless pleasure needs endless money to buy it, the good of life requires endless money. Those without money are unable to get endless pleasure, so the oligarch looks down on their lives as inferior.
The collection of norms we call “etiquette” or “manners” have emerged organically over a long period. Some are obviously arbitrary or meant to exclude people unjustly (the outmoded and snobbish dress code of “no brown in town” comes to mind). But a great many are there to limit personal behaviour, to channel action into a disciplined pattern.
Why chew with your mouth closed? Because it shows consideration for your fellow diners. Why take small bites? Because it controls you to eat at a healthy pace. Why not deliberately get drunk? To not impair your reason. Why avoid constant use of foul language? To show that your mind dwells on higher things than bodily functions. In all these there’s a standard of excellence, mental or physical, drilled into the person through control of their actions.
It’s a principle properly summarised in a line from Confucius: “Therefore the instructive and transforming power of ceremonies is subtle; they stop depravity before it has taken form, causing men daily to move towards what is good, and keep themselves farther apart from guilt, without being themselves conscious of it.”.
Is there then any reason for an oligarch to cultivate manners? I think none of weight. An oligarch might make a show of good manners, if he thinks this displays wealth. But once the cultural association of money with good manners is gone, he’ll stop this act. An oligarch who sees money as the means to swelling himself with pleasure actually has an incentive not to cultivate manners. Why would he cultivate something designed to limit his appetites? If the purpose of eating is to shovel as much food into your mouth as possible, and not to nourish yourself, then you can dispense with the cutlery, even possibly the plate.
But this leads to a further thought. Money for its own sake is necessarily vulgar because any constraint on it points to a standard other than pleasure. If we accept that the manners and etiquette we call aristocratic have developed over time as a way of disciplining wealth into excellence, then an oligarchy engorged on pleasure must reject them. Rather, manners that the underclass have adopted out of lack of correction or poverty now become the fascinations of the rich. A poor man wears ragged jeans because he can’t afford anything else. An oligarch wears designer torn jeans because money compels him to wear whatever he wants however he likes it. The expression of “general dumb hostility” which Dalrymple notes, may have been born from the Hobbesian nightmare of a slum; but for an oligarch, it’s the hostility of wealth to any external correction.
In an oligarchic society the top and bottom begin to resemble each other in customs even as they drift apart in income, and even as the top despises the bottom. We may explain the vulgarity of British elites in terms of class guilt, demoralisation, or political posturing. But the issue remains that love of gold doesn’t protect you from barbarism. It’s the passion that unites the highest emperor with the coarsest bandit.
-
Britain’s Brown Scare
A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of fascism. At least, that’s what we’re told.
In Technology, Communism, and The Brown Scare, Curtis Yarvin defines The Brown Scare as: “America’s ginormous, never-ending, profoundly insane witch-hunt for fascists under the bed.”
However, it is blatantly apparent that this witch-hunt is not inherently American in character. Indeed, such paranoia greatly afflicts the wider Western world, and certainly the United Kingdom.
This month, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London said: “Those that have legitimate objections [to ULEZ expansion] are joining hands with a far-right group.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade, some of those outside are part of the far-right, some are Covid-deniers, some are vaccine deniers, some are Tories.”
Currently, ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) covers all areas within the North and South Circular Roads, but is set to expand across all London boroughs from 29th August 2023.
Vehicles that are not ULEZ-compliant will receive a daily charge of £12.50. This means that cars, motorcycles, vans, and specialist vehicles up to and including 3.5 tonnes, and minibuses up to and including 5 tonnes, will be charged.
Exemptions will be given to lorries, vans, or specialist heavy vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, and buses, minibuses, and coaches over 5 tonnes, which will continue to pay the Low Emissions Charge (LEZ) charge.
Unsurprisingly, there have been a range of objections to ULEZ expansion.
Many commuters cannot afford the charge and fear it will be detrimental to small businesses. Others are angered that no such proposal was included in Khan’s manifesto, and that the results of the ensuing consultation on ULEZ expansion have been ignored.
Some object to the planned expansion of surveillance that is required to make the policy workable, whilst others argue ULEZ is unworkable altogether and will not help lower carbon emissions.
On the whole, none of these positions are conspiratorial. If anything, they’re all pretty straightforward expressions of democratic and economic concern.
Nevertheless, all these objections are irrelevant because, at least according to Khan, opposition to an arbitrary proposal that will destroy livelihoods, expand mass-surveillance, and do little to help the environment is, allegedly, tainted by vague “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) tendencies.
As many have surmised, this is nothing more than a political tactic. Khan hopes that by condemning objections as “FAR RIGHT” (!!!), the Anti-ULEZ campaign will divert time, energy, and resources away from protesting his insane and popular policy, and towards expunging their association with the unnamed, unsubstantiated, likely fictitious and/or irrelevant “far-right group”.
Whilst this is true, it misses a more straightforward point, albeit one that is harder to bring up: just because something is “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Why would it matter if ULEZ is opposed by the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!)? As a policy, ULEZ is either good or bad depending on its intent, feasibility, and results and should be deliberated and implemented accordingly.
Unfortunately, the Sensible People, despite their obsession with Forensics, care very little for detail. Totally PR-brained, the ‘connotations’ of one’s words carry infinitely more weight than what one actually says.
As such, they are not only inclined to pedantic language-policing, they assess politics by every metric other than policy.
Take the Wakefield controversy as another example. A group of four children, and their families, received death threats after word got out that one had smudged a copy of the Quran, the Islamic holy text, as well as a suspension from their school, despite the headmaster’s declaration that there was: “no malicious intent by those involved.”
Consequently, the boy’s mother was dragged into the local mosque – by the police, no less – in what can only be described as Modern Britain’s equivalent of a Struggle Session.
Teary, veiled, and evidently shaken, she profusely apologised for the behaviour of her son, who is autistic, stating: “[he] doesn’t always realise what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.”
As we all know by now, in Modern Britain, the role of the police isn’t to prevent the type of crime that led to its founding. Recent data, published in The Times, shows that serious crimes, including but not limited to: harassment, assault, stalking, and criminal damage are virtually legal, and that charge rates have plummeted to an all-time low since 2015.
Rather, the purpose of the British police is to calm the ungrounded fears of society’s most unhinged members, those who believe that Britain’s traditional identity, and the preservation of it, inherently predisposes people to THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!), and that there is an omnipresent conspiracy to turn Britain into the least ethnically homogenous ethnostate in history.
As such, the permanent policy of the contemporary British state is not protection, but social engineering; it is one of never-ending, domestic, ‘de-Nazification’.
In fact, this establishment-sanctioned whataboutism, perpetually pointing the finger at the FAR-RIGHT (!!!), is so pervasive that not even national travesties can escape its grasp.
Charlie Peters’ recent documentary, aired by GBNews in February, outlined the scandalous racially charged abduction, trafficking, and rape of thousands of young white girls by south Asian men; a practice which took place across the UK over multiple decades.
Despite the eye-watering amount of completely preventable suffering caused by the scandal, it was clear that such evil was continuously swept under-the-rug by British police; specifically, for the sake of “political correctness” and “community cohesion.”
Like the police, whose complicity in suppressing public knowledge of the scandal has not resulted in a single firing, left-leaning and liberal-leaning individuals, led by a pseudo-academic, are calling for the censorship of Peters’ documentary, believing it emboldens the far-right, stokes racial stereotypes, and promotes “hate” and “division”.
Needless to say, but worth saying nonetheless, when 1 in 73 Muslim males in Rotherham are involved with paedophilic rape gangs, there is no community cohesion to fuss over – it simply doesn’t exist.
This is perhaps the defining feature of Britain’s Brown Scare: it prevents people from understanding what is right in front of them, whether it’s the condition of one’s community or one’s own material interests.
The Manchester Arena bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack and the first suicide bombing in the UK since the 7/7 bombings, conducted by a foreign-trained Islamist that came to Britain as a refugee, has been retroactively rewired to make the bombing about the threat of FAR-RIGHT (!!!), as opposed to Islamist, radicalisation.
No doubt about it, if a civilisation-ending meteor were to crash into Earth, Britain’s pseudo-intelligentsia, the Waterstones Intellectuals that they are, would use their last moments to make pseudo-profound remarks about how such a travesty would ‘embolden’ THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!).
All this said, it’s clear that this delusional preoccupation with an impending fascist threat isn’t a recently-concocted political tactic. Rather, it is at the centre of the West’s post-war secular theocracy. As such, we can expect The Brown Scare to afflict wider culture, more so than mainstream politics, and indeed it does.
Whether it’s Coronation Street’s goofy storyline about a white working-class kid joining the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) after he’s replaced by a refugee at his old school, or the upcoming 60th anniversary special of Doctor Who, which is set to feature an antagonistic “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) party, aestheticized as a mishmash of every “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) development as of recent: GBNews, Patriotic Alternative, MAGA, Brexit Party, Vote Leave, The Conservative Party, you name it.
Drag Queen Story Time, which involves an adult-entertainer talking to infants about sexual exploration, gender identity, and… other things – Y’know, good family-friendly stuff – was hosted at Tate Britain, inciting sizeable protests and counter-protests. How did the media portray this debacle? As a far-right attack on human rights, but ultimately a triumph for liberal society.
Erstwhile, Prevent, the government’s own anti-terror programme, has flagged various films and TV series as FAR-RIGHT (!!!) material, including but certainly not limited to: Zulu, The Dam Busters, Yes Minister, Civilisation, The Thick of It, and (perhaps most ridiculously of all) Great British Railway Journeys.
In addition, the list features authors ranging from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to Thomas Carlyle and Edmund Burke. Tolkien, Lewis, Conrad, Huxley, even Orwell, make a debut on an official red-flag list used and taken seriously by the British state.
Even the works of our national poet, Shakespeare, were listed as potentially dangerous material. Considering this, it’s no wonder they are being adapted to conform to our post-war neurosis, with a recent showing of The Merchant of Venice being about fighting Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
At this point, one cannot pretend that the scare is just a fringe, confined conspiracy – it’s a widespread, mainstream conspiracy theory that masses of people, “low-status” or “high-status”, have bought into wholesale.
Things have gotten so bad that the BBC, not exactly in good books of “THE FAR RIGHT” (!!!), or the right in general for that matter, had to release a press statement telling people stating that, despite rumours of a “sixth episode” being pulled to avoid “right-wing backlash”, no such episode of Sir David Attenborough’s new series, Wild Isles, exists or has ever existed.
Given this daily bombardment of delusion, there is a tendency to push back; to demonstrate a more measured approach to the topic of fascism, usually echoing, or making direct reference to, Orwell’s words in What is Fascism?:
“The word is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
This tendency is completely understandable. When Reform UK and left-wing individuals with mildly gender-critical views are listed alongside fringe and powerless Neo-Nazi weirdos as threats to society, one gets the impression that those seeking to affirm the veracity of UK-wide fascist collusion are, to say the least, scraping the barrel.
However, this misses the overarching point: according to those afflicted by Britain’s Brown Scare, nothing is in possession of any inherent quality.
From raiding wallets to raping, bombing, and harassing children, from blacklisting timeless literature to human trafficking, things most people would consider egregious, only become worthy of condemnation depending on their imagined relative proximity to Adolf Hitler, or their hypothesised potential to ‘embolden’ the “FAR RIGHT” (!!!).
Most recently, of course, Gary Lineker has been suspended from the BBC after he compared the government’s recent attempts to crack down on illegal channel crossings to 1930s Germany.
Whether one thinks Lineker deserves to be suspended or not is beside the point: Britain’s Brown Scare is believed by those in positions of considerable influence, not just nutty FBPE parochialists.
With a general election set to take place next year, and a Labour victory all but officialised, we can expect Britain’s Brown Scare to get worse, especially when Modern Britain’s founder, Tony Blair, is effectively shadow-leading the party.
Besides, how are Labour meant to remain in power if they don’t satiate the delusions of those that support them to save the NHS and immigrants from Tory Brexit Fascist UKIP Stalinism?
However, none of this means Labour is popular. The British people would like nothing more than a new party, with one-quarter of Brits saying they would support a party led by Farage, which is prepared to lower immigration, bring economic stability and growth, and tackle crimes that people actually care about.
It goes without saying that such a party, unlike the current Conservative Party, should be willing to protect right-minded citizens from the detached and paranoid fury which afflicts much of the populus, and threatens what remains of our livelihoods and liberties.
Many things can happen in politics, but one thing is certain: as long as the Brown Scare continues to spread, speaking the truth will remain a revolutionary act, and those with an outlook barely distinct from David Icke will be considered Sensible Centrists by everyone in a position of power.
-
The Chinese Revolution – Good Thing, Bad Thing?
This is an extract from the transcript of The Chinese Revolution – Good Thing, Bad Thing? (1949 – Present). Do. The. Reading. and subscribe to Flappr’s YouTube channel!
“Tradition is like a chain that both constrains us and guides us. Of course, we may, especially in our younger years, strain and struggle against this chain. We may perceive faults or flaws, and believe ourselves or our generation to be uniquely perspicacious enough to radically improve upon what our ancestors have made – perhaps even to break the chain entirely and start afresh.
Yet every link in our chain of tradition was once a radical idea too. Everything that today’s conservatives vigorously defend was once argued passionately by reformers of past ages. What is tradition anyway if not a compilation of the best and most proven radical ideas of the past? The unexpectedly beneficial precipitate or residue retrieved after thousands upon thousands of mostly useless and wasteful progressive experimentation.
To be a conservative, therefore, to stick to tradition, is to be almost always right about everything almost all the time – but not quite all the time, and that is the tricky part. How can we improve society, how can we devise better governments, better customs, better habits, better beliefs without breaking the good we have inherited? How can we identify and replace the weaker links in our chain of tradition without totally severing our connection to the past?
I believe we must begin from a place of gratitude. We must hold in our minds a recognition that life can be, and has been, far worse. We must realize there are hard limits to the world, as revealed by science, and unchangeable aspects of human nature, as revealed by history, religion, philosophy, and literature. And these two facts in combination create permanent unsolvable problems for mankind, which we can only evade or mitigate through those traditions we once found so constraining.
To paraphrase the great G.K. Chesterton: “Before you tear down a fence, understand why it was put up in the first place.” I cannot fault a single person for wishing to make a better world for themselves and their children, but I can admonish some persons for being so ungrateful and ignorant, they mistake tradition itself as the cause of every evil under the sun. Small wonder then that their hairbrained alternatives routinely overlook those aspects of society without which it cannot function or perpetuate itself into the future.
And there are other things tied up in tradition besides moral guidance or the management of collective affairs. Tradition also involves how we delve into the mysteries of the universe; how we elevate the basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing into artforms unto themselves; how we represent truth and beauty and locate ourselves within the vast swirling cosmos beyond our all too brief and narrow experience.
It is miraculous that we have come as far as we have. And at any given time, we can throw that all away, through profound ingratitude and foolish innovations. A healthy respect for tradition opens the door to true wisdom. A lack of respect leads only to novelty worship and malign sophistry.
Now, not every tradition is equal, and not everything in a given tradition is worth preserving, but like the Chinese who show such great deference to the wisdom of their ancestors, I wish more in the West would admire or even learn about their own.
Like the Chinese, we are the legatees of a glorious tradition – a tradition that encompasses the poetry of Homer, the curiosity of Eratosthenes, the integrity of Cato, the courage of Saint Boniface, the vision of Michelangelo, the mirth of Mozart, the insights of Descartes, Hume, and Kant, the wit of Voltaire, the ingenuity of Watt, the moral urgency of Lincoln and Douglas.
These and many more are responsible for the unique tradition into which we have been born. And it is this tradition, and no other, which has produced those foundational ideas we all too often take for granted, or assume are the defaults around the world. I am speaking here of the freedom of expression, of inquiry, of conscience. I am speaking of the rule of law, and equality under the law. I am speaking of inalienable rights, of trial by jury, of respect for women, of constitutional order and democratic procedure. I am speaking of evidence based reasoning and religious tolerance.
Now those are all things I wouldn’t give up for all the tea in China. You can have Karl Marx. We’ll give you him. But these are ours. They are the precious gems of our magnificent Western tradition, and if we do nothing else worthwhile in our lives, we can at least safeguard these things from contamination, or annihilation, by those who would thoughtlessly squander their inheritance.”
