Dear Just Stop Oil,
You’re a success.
You stuck to your principles through ridicule and hate. You’ve carried a burden. Others may still dismiss you, but that’s also an achievement. They didn’t even know to dismiss you before. You’ve now got a place in political discourse.
What are your next steps? Are the following broad steps reasonable guesses? It’s probably safe to say that you’re doing these things continuously, right?
Taking stock of where you’re at, analysing, refining your tactics, techniques, etc, consolidating your position, looking at how to increase the range and scope of your activities, deciding what to do next.
Are you open to ideas?
You’re off to a great start. You could be even greater. What if there were some small, simple changes which could inordinately boost your cause at no cost? What if you could get more publicity, stay in the news longer, and even win over political enemies while keeping your political allies?
The solution is simple. Your targeting is off.
Public roads, bridges, New Scotland Yard, art galleries. These are alienating a big portion of your potential audience. This portion is made up of a few main groups of people, with some Venn overlap, which you could easily win over. You’ll find the prospect of winning over some of these groups surprising but it’s easily possible.
The first is the general public. You’ve gained notoriety but at the expense of public support. Worse, you’re gaining public resentment. Whether you agree with them or not, these people place their own priorities, like getting to hospitals in emergencies, their jobs, daily lives, even just their own convenience, well ahead of Just Stop Oil becoming famous.
Find targets; simultaneously, do not cost these people anything. Even better, targets which these people might enjoy. Don’t worry, suggestions will come later.
Second, conservatives. Small c, big c, whichever, and as a broad group. There are just some people who value things like the normal goings on of the day to day, and indeed cultural heritage at art galleries.
Find targets which do not rankle these people. Even better, targets which strike at this group’s political enemies. Where do your and their enemies overlap? Don’t worry, suggestions will come in a minute.
Third, climate deniers. Let’s indulge you and use your characterisation for now. If you want to fully win this group over though, you should strongly reconsider using a term for them which they find derogatory, which makes them thing you’re abusing Holocaust victims for what they see as a manipulation. But yes, you can even win climate deniers over too. Again, they have political enemies. Where is your overlap? Suggestions will come now!
The last thing to adjust on targeting is where your own enemies are.
Where are the brains of the operation and who are their mouthpieces?
Oil company executives? No. Bankers? No. Tories? Really no.
If you’re thinking about who runs the world, the real question is about where do their ideas come from about what to do? The source of those ideas is really who runs the world. Where do these people all go to pick up their ideas? What is the last finishing step these people take before getting set loose in the world? Where might you go to learn about how to govern, about stately things like philosophy, politics, and economics? The tactic of getting noticed by annoying people will really work when you target those who actually have power.
Next, the mouthpieces. Who are the biggest purveyors of social, cultural, political, etc. ideas? Who is responsible for amplifying or diminishing points of view on a national level? More importantly, where do the most influential, the powerful (the governing?), get their information from once they’re out in the world? Is it from the Big Business Chronicle? The Burning Blaze Channel? Nah, maybe, disreGuard. The tactic of getting publicity will really work when you target those who themselves disseminate information at scale to those in power.
You’re probably thinking that these places are full of progressives, people much closer, more sympathetic to your side. Exactly! They already basically agree with you and they’re not going to give that up just because you soup, glue, and obstruct up their stuff. Even more reason to go totally nuts! More glue! How about cement? More soup! How about something obnoxiously fishy? More obstruction! Do you need a new parking space?
These are the exact same organisations which your above target audience can support. Even better for you, getting right up in these targets makes it much easier and more personal for them. They will talk about you loudly and a lot.
What do you reckon, Just Stop Oil? Do we have terms?
Yours very sincerely,
Joe King
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The Worst Case Scenario
It may actually be possible for the right to be sleepwalked back into the arms of the regime. This might strike you as an impossibility, but I am increasingly unconfident in the rigidity of our opposition to the regime and the system it imposes on us. I still believe it to be highly unlikely that this occurs, but its absolute incredibility as a vision of the future has ceased. But how exactly are they working towards this aim, unknowingly or not, and what exactly am I referring to? I will try and articulate myself as clearly as possible, lest we continue to mope around in the gloomy shadows of doomed projects, forever dissatisfied with our lack of meaningful progress. As someone who continues to self-assuredly profess the inevitability of revolution in Britain, what I fear most are attempts to delay this eventuality – and more importantly attempts to prevent it. A nominally right-wing, authoritarian government could quietly emerge, restore popular comfort with the idea of Britain being a diverse, liberalised country and resolidify the British people’s pessimistic, defeated attitude towards politics, race, and the fundamental structure of the economy. More importantly, it could cause the right to accept the improvements as “enough”, maybe even claim them as the final victory (the battle that has been “won”), and see us de-escalate our efforts. We are entering stage three, the bargaining stage, and many wish to go, cap-in-hand, with offers to negotiate. This is the regime’s perestroika moment, and it absolutely must not succeed.
When you have a non-democratic and ideological regime, as we do in Britain – as most White countries also do, there are many things that it will do before compromising on its ideological tenets. To undo the core pillars that define the regime would be to invalidate the legitimacy of the regime itself, so – despite the societal breakdown and rapid deterioration in living standards – things continue on as they always have, irrespective of popular sentiment. Public services rot at the bone, the police stop functioning beyond their utility as apparatchik tools, etc. So long as the Pravda and Stasi remain competent and efficient the rest can wither and die and those in power won’t care. The Chinese Communist Party was able to transition their country into a quasi-nationalistic yet fundamentally capitalist country whilst preserving the iconography of Karl Marx and the hero worship of Chairman Mao. For many reasons, I doubt that our regimes in the west could have this kind of fluidity of form to persevere – but they may be able to work within the restrictions of their own resolute determination to maintain mass-immigration and the liberal, capitalist status quo.
Since 2016, the western establishment has become more totalitarian in its governance of the countries it occupies. The Leave vote in Britain’s EU referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the USA made our establishment paranoid and defensive (a defensiveness Rory Stewart alluded to in his own deluded way). Those in power will continue to try their best to maintain the status quo to the letter, down to every last miserable and humiliating detail. For that purpose, the Brezhnevian conservative Keir Starmer has been appointed as our Prime Minister to do absolutely nothing but maintain progress at its present pace, no faster no slower and without a single railroad switch change in site. But there will be those that work in the shady halls of power more fidgety than the rest who are especially concerned about the future of their project (the project being a global, totalitarian, technocratic panopticon where a small corporate elite rules over a coffee-coloured serf class – forever). They will be playing wargames where we win and they lose and considering how to defang the right before we are capable of animating the British away from their agenda and towards a fundamentally different trajectory (which ultimately is what Brexit actually represented but, thanks to Dominic Cummings and the December 2019 General Election, that rebellious movement in the zeitgeist was snuffed out and forgotten to history). What is hypothetically possible is a small concession to dissident right positions on race and inequality to refine the status quo, just as communist regimes historically used fascist methods and policies to keep their countries afloat in times of, usually self-inflicted, crisis. This would mean a form of multiracialism that is genuinely “fair”, or at least as fair as it sells itself, that is more palatable both to the general population as well as the right. A truly colour-blind and meritocratic system that punishes criminals adequately, rewards hard work and enacts planning reform to end many of the negative externalities mass immigration is causing – does this sound familiar? It is the outcome ‘ProgNats’ and the like are agitating for – a more effective and efficient Presidium-operated country that will have accomplished making it even harder for people to articulate a legitimate case for an authentic nationalist position.
There is reason to believe that the average person will go along with this soft transformation of society from an overtly egalitarian and explicitly anti-White one to a society that has quietly resigned itself to accepting some degree of hereditarianism (but a society that has only done so to preserve the globalist project). In fact, this transformation is already happening in real time, without any input from above causing it. I had the misfortune of being at a McDonald’s in Leeds just off a motorway and was shown a small microcosm that represented this trajectory. It was a grimy, dirty, noisy square with bright white lights and three interactive telescreens for ordering from. I decided to go forward into the open space between these telescreens and the counter to talk to one of the cramped Maccy’s girls and asked if I could order from her directly with physical cash (a request which she granted me). What I soon realised; stood in my Argosian slumber awaiting the proclamation of my order number, was that there were actually two queues. One had a huddle of immigrant slaves with their corporate rucksacks ready for retrieval (rucksacks which I feel are brightly coloured either to be demeaning or to mask the repulsiveness of the services they are having to render) and the other had a larger group of dishevelled, unkempt White Britons, awaiting their own personal orders. I stood in disbelief, wondering to myself “Are people okay with this? Are liberals okay with this?” and then went on with the rest of my day. Those immigrant wage slaves will work those jobs, and jobs like it, for the rest of their lives – their children will be born into slavery arranged by a Darwinian free-market. They have denied themselves the dignity of working in their own homeland as part of their own strata and been granted their monkey’s paw wish of better wages and better living for themselves – serving in heaven.
There may be the odd moment where someone finds the old liberal, egalitarian conditioning bubbling up again from their subconscious – a White woman might be stood at a bus stop and witness a panting, emaciated Somali riding a bike with one of the aforementioned rucksacks at 6AM and think twice about what is happening to our country (that is a real anecdote) – but ultimately “the bulk of people conform to the energies and pressures that they now feel themselves living under”, and our people will either accept the newly-imported caste of service sector slaves but not collaborate or they will actively, decadently indulge this newfound luxury. The point of bringing these things up is to say that if the right-wing can be made to feel comfortable with, and accepting of, a multi-ethnic society that is allowed to be freely arranged along racial lines, they will have done so with the same impulse as the lumpenaristocrat normies who subconsciously enjoy ordering slaves to their door. It might not even solely be contentment either, given that the right is increasingly unprincipled and no more moral in personal actions than the average person, they too may enjoy the illusion of prosperity that this new feudalism grants them just as much as anyone else. The only possible difference is that the act of a right-winger ordering a Caribbean Wecasa maid to their home may also come with it a post-service “ironic” gigachad tweet boasting of how cool and racist they just were.
As is increasingly pointed out, the liberal consensus is becoming one of ambivalence to the natural order. Likewise, there is no considerable pushback against any of this from those on the left who enjoy the costume of performative socialism. This is because of the very obvious fact that the left’s primary cause at the present is anti-Whiteness; it participates in an inter-ethnic conflict which is ongoing, rather than a class struggle that has been lost. Any criticism of these trends might be construed (rightly) as a critique of mass-immigration itself, might nudge open the heavy eyelids of the sleepy Saxon. We can’t have that, can we? Even if it means pretending the squalor that third-world immigrants create for themselves and the barbarism they make our own people suffer under is an acceptable arrangement for everyone. Because of this fevered fear of the “far-right”, we have a left-wing in Britain and elsewhere that is religiously dedicated to defending everything the liberal status quo does – doing so to quell their own anxiety about a legitimately anti-establishment force from the right which would unravel the regime’s fundamental underpinnings.
Brought to its inevitable conclusion, you end up with a strange consensus that everyone is generally happy with. The left-wing gets their “post-colonial” dissolution of whiteness, the liberals get their Pret a Manger serfs, and the right-wing gets their… [pending peace treaty]. We are hurtling into a rerun of 20th century liberalism where Whites and non-Whites of all political walks all enjoy the zany sheninigans of KSI and Kai Cenat but for very different reasons. This is different to what has been the norm currently, what I am describing is a society where hierarchy is more apparent, in which group differences are more apparent and part of an unconscious acknowledgement of what makes the status quo acceptable to everyone; a hierarchy sustained by a shared sense of relief among those who sit above lowest-of-the-low in the new economic caste system. Maybe liberals are the real slave owners, or maybe we are the real liberals for seeing anything wrong with this so-called progress. This Brave New, Bell Curve-ambivalent, World… a Libtartheid state.
Let us go into the dreams of the compromisemaxxers, those who wish to retain our present texture of life, our liberal, capitalist economic structure and even Britain’s current affliction. Ponder a future in which there is, with the gracious consent of some Bill Ackman-like figure, an end to the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion that the 2010 Equality Act, 1970 Equal Pay Act and 1965 Race Relations Act have brought – but also the continued assurance that Britain would continue on with its current course of Brazilification. This timeline, though delusional and unlikely – is more likely than mass-immigration slowing or being halted without a meaningful revolution. This alternative world where a government comes to power and makes our national demographic transformation as acceptable as possible is a recipe for turning revolutionary fervour into consigned resignation that the future is impenetrable and our fate sealed – save only for the hope that a White Bumiputera system could be implemented someday. “Okay, a homogenous, White British Britain might be over, but maybe we can have a Rhodesian style government” is essentially a sentiment being passed around now in once-nationalist circles, as the new generation works to dilute opposition to the demographic problem. “Okay, well maybe the American Empire will allow us to be like the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan or Israel even! We’ll still bow down and maintain occupation policy on the economy and migration, but the immigrants will be guest workers without rights” – as appealing as a British Gastarbeiter might conceptually be to our friends in middle-class management jobs who work adjacent to power in the centre of London, this silver bullet is in fact a poison pill. This immigration policy might have failed West Germany and lead to Germany having a large and expanding Turkish minority, but I am sure we could make it work here with our own immigrant population. I can see it now, Prime Minister ProgNat declares all immigrants as now being non-citizens, but residents in perpetuity – no push to return Britain to the state it was in when our grandparents were born, but instead the beginning of a giddy rock throwing competition with hornets’ nests as targets. This would transition us to the most tolerable post-majority arrangement but would further breed resentment in the immigrant population – assuring our doom as a people further down the line. Do we want done to us here in Britain our very own Zanzibar revolution? Having delayed the radicalisation of the masses by several decades, it would degenerate inevitably back to the present status quo but with much worse demographics to contend with. We would be scattered specs of diasporic blood across the global windscreen of progress, without any hope of homogeneity ever returning, the final nail in the coffin which holds within it our distinction from every other nation in the world, especially what defines us – our root-nation homeland in Europe. This is not the kind of country I want to live in, or the kind of country I want my descendants to live in. Whole areas lived in exclusively by immigrants – guest workers or not. Bus systems, roads, infrastructure all constructed and maintained to facilitate a large immigrant population – guest workers or not. The status is not the issue, their rights and position as citizen-equals is not the issue, the issue is these enclaves being here at all. Again, compromises are dreamt up in the hope of mitigating the problem, of dampening its consequences and the issues that come with it. But if the problem continues to exist it will endure, and if it endures it will win. Reform will not lead us to victory.
It is as if all revolutionary thought and visions of a brighter future are incomprehensible now to most, to such an extent that even within the realm of a hypothetical fantasy of taking over our country, we still affirm even within our own minds the promontory confines of what can and cannot be done – as rigidly set by the establishment. For the last four years or so we have seen the emergence of a Menshevik/Bolshevik split on the right, a split between those who wish to reform the current system and those that wish to see it all swept away – driven by (I would argue) a widening class divide. This class divide is a new one, caused by the excesses of 21st century capitalism, the continued fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 Lockdown policies – all of which led to the consolidation of plutocratic power over Britain. To further pursue liberalisation of the economy (as if everything that came before now “Wasn’t Real Growth”) would only sharpen the worsening quality of life and living standards of the White British working class. The necessity is greater now than at any other point in our nation’s history for a radical, class-collaborationist economic system that puts the interests of the nation as a whole first – perhaps a form of Corporatism or a modern rendition of Syndicalism. The details are less important than the essence, which is that nationalism is no longer compatible with capitalism (if it ever had been). We need an economic system that doesn’t just benefit the middle class in the South of England (a section of our population that continues to successfully avoid radicalisation due to being economically shielded from most of the repercussions of capitalism).
What might often seem like ankle biting on the Twitter timeline is at its core a division over the basic fundamentals of how our nation should be organised. I am trying to make the case that a middle class-dominated right is currently leading us down into dead ends, pitfalls and off ramps to deradicalisation. There is now within the right a reframing of the issues that places Whites (in the pan-European, London-centric demographic sense) as an exclusively middle-class demographic (comparatively), pitted against a disproportionately black and brown underclass beneath them – a top-down class war with total disregard for the White working class caught in the market forces crossfire. From this line of reasoning, Thatcherite arguments have intruded themselves into our circles – with a broad racialism as their justification. Many on the right now seem to be willing to throw poorer, less-intelligent Whites into a third-world underclass wilderness to compete and struggle against the new slave caste (imported here to undercut them as workers and replace them as people). An example of what I describe occurred not too long ago, when a redpill on the racially-disproportionate occupancy rates of social housing in London was contorted into a dilution of the anti-immigration agenda and support for “selling off of social housing”. Not to state the obvious, but selling off social housing would only accomplish a geographic integration of the immigrant population, in line with explicitly stated regime aims, softening the urban BAMElaw which acts as an eternal reminder of the glaring incongruence between the Britain that was and the Britain that now is. This factitious right-wing continues to be fuelled by centre-right establishment journalists such as Sam Ashworth-Hayes and propped up with power-adjacent backhand deals granting them access to – maybe not the halls of power – but the cloister outside of them.
Our future depends upon reconnecting with the severed ends of our endangered White British working class. The remnants of them that are still out there have been deprived of everything but their blood – their nation is all they have left. Their country, their communities, their jobs, their trade unions, their dignity – all stripped from them as if they were no longer needed. So they wander the post-industrial wastelands, as they have for over thirty years, Ahasverus’ of Albion – longing for the homeland they knew when they grew up, constantly being told that it is not only dead but that it was evil and that it never really existed anyway. What is the liberal right’s answer to these people? What of the generation of White British people born into this post-industrial wasteland? Many have now become Gridlockian, Macra-like shadows of their former glory – anti-social, loutish; addicted to drugs, alcohol, and readily-available techSoma. It follows that the liberal right identifies more with their class than their nation. This is one sign among many that capitalism is ultimately a left-wing force, as is liberalism – perpetuating a materialist worldview that breaks down national bonds and turns individuals with homelands into consumers with shopping malls. This goes back to my earlier point about the desire to make the displacement process “fair” rather than to abolish it entirely; the result is a people that identify more with their class in a revitalised capitalist hierarchy. The new right-wing rejection of any and all criticisms of capitalism as a system comes from an animosity towards the White British working class for still being able to perceive things through a communitarian lens, which is itself a holdover from the trade union movement – which had kept the White British working class economically collectivist in their outlook (with that same tribalism now increasingly taking a populist orientation). Poorer, less-intelligent Whites could only have deportations, an end to immigration in principle and the abolition of capitalism as its survival/victory condition – this solution can never become conscious if the issues are allowed to be oriented around a middle-class class-consciousness purely driven by personal, material self-interest. An atomised, materialist right without a communal and spiritual element, regardless of form or flavour, continues to be stillborn because it lacks the ability to evoke a higher calling or bond that calls the people upwards. A higher calling that would offer higher values beyond their personal, material self-interest is something the White British working class is more open to now due to having had their class-consciousness broken by liberal capitalism. By giving up national economic decision making to shareholder capitalists and market forces, we have cut off our legs to spite our body, the national body, and the liberal right retroactively justifies the real economic contractions and trauma of deindustrialisation as a necessary (even positive) act of policy.
Britain, by every real metric, has ceased to have a meaningful, sovereign national government. We are now an economic zone with the apparition of a state attached – a state which on paper has the absolute authority to do anything in the country through parliament, but which in practice has no such authority. Government bankruptcy is irrelevant to a system that will always want an ever-expanding pool of labour to increase the number of consumers, keep the value of labour down and chill workers’ rights. We once had a mercantilist economic system, with the Navigation Acts and Corn Laws – great guarantors of our national wealth, until the Manchester vision of our country took hold and facilitated the creation of an international business elite that would eventually become greater in power and influence than the nation states themselves. This is the essence of capitalism – a materialist, internationalist system that values only money, productivity and growth – could this really be preferable to communism? It sounds identical to communism, actually. Mass immigration being, in part, not only a symptom of the finance capital growth model but a policy which this system depends upon (especially as it breaks down and self-cannibalises) is proof enough that we must strive for a fundamental alternative. The liberal right can write this off in little quips as much as they like but their solutions are evidently not workable for meeting the current moment. We are capable of organising a new system beyond the EconGrad consensus. We can step over the noxious vision of a nominally right-wing Britain that would be using a vaguely racialised comparative advantage theory of labour to justify the necessity of third-world slaves, second-world professionals and first-world transnational elites.
We are up against self-professed liberals who are incapable of answering their own version of the breakfast question – “What if liberal capitalism and nationalism were mutually exclusive?” – even though it is plainly obvious by now that they are. But maybe the globalists will grant them a scrap from the table down to their comfortable tier on the ivory tower, above the sea of sludge they are generally free from interacting with – like the limousine driving through the favela. Is this not what Milei and Wilders represent? These are surely establishment plots to sell artificial right-wing figures that are still controlled by the interests of capital so that liberalism can be maintained but with an authoritarian update that cleans up the bugs and issues. This only works if the right allows itself to become part of the regime apparatus of control, by the co-opting of dissident online right-wing culture and its domestication into a harmless playpen on the fringes – a playpen where naive, grumbling, headline-quote-tweeting toy soldiers cooperate unwittingly with the status quo. It seems to me the right-wing has found itself desiring only to be pandered to again, wishing for superficial wins to brag about online: like videogames having sexy female characters again or the adverts being trad. The shattered, retreating sentiment of “Maybe we never really wanted a meaningful change to the social, cultural and economic status quo, maybe the texture of our lives in modernity is fine, maybe multiracialism is okay – for they have stopped humiliating my people and our beliefs daily and have begun nominally cooperating with us” completing the total political convergence of left and right on a reformed regime that a depoliticised population can receive some newfound benefits from. That is what I mean when I warn of the perestroika of our time. We must hope and pray this stalls, failing at the hands of conservative figures such as Keir Starmer or prevented by reactionary figures such as J.K. Rowling.
It is time to acknowledge a paradox of 21st century politics, one which only figures like Matthew Goodwin and Glenn Greenwald have alluded to – we are the heirs to the socialist cause despite not believing in equality or a materialist worldview. There has been a “collapse of the far left in the last 20 to 30 years”. Communism as a conscious, ideological force no longer exists. It fell as if it were a cursed ring, melting into the Soviet Union’s now-extinct volcano. The mantle which we take up now is the conservative tribalism which the trade union movement represented in Britain – which once organised workers and communities to struggle against the shifting sands of progress imposed by capital. Just as such tribalism must return to our people through a deeper pulse that reaches beyond the defeat at Hastings to our Anglo-Saxon primordials, the right must also return to the radical anti-capitalism aspired to in previous right-wing movements before its compromises whilst in power. We must now move away from the eternally sliced pie where oligarchs expect their tithe and piece of the nation to run amok with. To meet this moment, it is crucial for us not to lose the thread of working towards an authoritarian, centralised state power – a state that would be mounted firm across the whole of the British Isles, shielding the British people and their liberty from the volleyed shots of moneyed interests. The plunder will end.
Our people can do better than this. We do not have to settle for anything. We do not have to make the most of a bad situation. We certainly should not delight in occupation delicacies. By present trends, our people might earnestly snatch at any offer for improvement without undoing the principles that are baked into our being which caused the problems in the first place. That for me is The Worst Case Scenario – where not only the apolitical masses, but the left, the liberals and even the right reach a pitiful mindbreak akin to the conclusion of Winston’s journey in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. The quiet deflowering of our stagnant present into something far more dangerous – a system that can survive long into the future – is something we must reject with all of our energy no matter how spent we may feel currently. A genuine alternative is possible, it always has been, that is what they fear the most – our recognition of this fact – and why there is any talk at all of the possibility of, or desire for, reform within the establishment. The revolution can and will happen irrespective of potential economic and social turbulence. We can triple the wages and double the pensions of policemen and soldiers; we can do what is demanded of our country even if it will likely hurt our country in the medium-term. A fox gnaws at its leg when it is caught in a trap. The civil strife which is coming is inevitable, but luckily the establishment won’t succeed in its hypothetical reforms – our society might transmogrify into one which is more ambivalent to ethnicity as every group recedes into their own private spaces away from each other – but our western governments are far too dug in to ever consider a change to the present course, even if it could mean the perpetuation of their power (even in spite of suspicious actors on the right trying to make this a reality). Given the foreign policy ongoing in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe, it seems to me that those presently in power would rather see total nuclear oblivion to human civilisation than see their ideological and political grip on the world slackened in any way.
Let us go forth with wind in our sails, with our own form of ambivalence – ambivalence to the radical solutions which we take to be self-evidently necessary. Imagine the spectacular and triumphant scene of a fresh-faced vanguard declaring victory at the signing of a British Lausanne Convention; imagine the sensation of crossing the threshold into a restored nation and rebalanced world, one free of the impending burden of serfdom in a foreign land. We must stamp out the cockroach-like pessimism of skirted-edge 20+ year projects. Embrace the greater you that exists beyond your consciousness and reach within for the fated Anglo-Shintoism that will lead us home to sweeter pastures. The Samurai turned to Ceorl, the Wakizashi turned to Seax – meet your greater form with outstretched arms and welcome yourself back into the fold as a true Englishman, ready to step over this purgatorial dichotomy and the squabbles of then and now and forge something entirely new and yet also distinctly old and true to ourselves. Reject this world in its current form and not only break free of each and every one of its tentacles but severe them like the second labour of Hercules so that our progeny may be freer, safer and more prosperous than we ever will be. Survival depends on the sheer will of men willing to dedicate themselves to the cause, men who we know not the names of now but who will emerge in the eleventh hour and forge the new England, the new Britannia, summoned up as reincarnated spirits of forgotten heroes. All was once over in the 9th century too when all was to be lost and yet was then formed anew. No man is willing to suffer or die for planning reform and means-tested pensions; much less the privatisation of social housing or the lowering of corporate taxes for Tesco and Amazon. Reject the pending peace treaty; reject those that wish to negotiate with power to help it kick our can further down the road. This is our struggle, not our children’s or children’s children’s. Our time is now, and everything is on us. Believe in yourselves and believe in Britain.
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Roe v Wade Reaction
The news that the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade has divided opinion. Here is our first debate piece on the issue: we have two different views from two different young women about the issue.
Pro-Choice:
Olivia Lever is the director of Blue Beyond. You can follow her at @liv_lever on Twitter:
‘I feel very annoyed and frustrated. A woman should have the right to choose in the 2022, and the state should never have interference over a woman’s body – it is very similar to the vaccine debate, the state should have no say in what you do with your body. In a practical sense, sex education and social infrastructure in the States is very poor.
On a post note, there is no mention of social infrastructure being made better to help those that have to have babies not be struck down by the financial burden or making sure that these children don’t have less of a life than they should. The whole thing is so poorly thought out, plus the US is supposed to be secular. It’s the constitutional principle. We could lose same-sex marriage and gay marriage. It’s stupid to lose contraception seeing as it prevents abortion.’
Pro-Life:
@BeatriceSEM takes the opposite view:
‘Absolutely delighted and feeling pretty emotional. The number of babies who will now be given a chance at life is massive! I hope very much other countries follow suit!’
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In Defence of Political Conflict
It’s often said that contemporary philosophy is stuck in an intellectual rut. While our forefathers pushed the boundaries of human knowledge, modern philosophers concern themselves with impenetrable esoterica, or gesture vaguely in the direction of social justice.
Yet venture to Whitehall, and you’ll find that once popular ideas have been refuted thoroughly by new schools of thought.
Take the Hegelian dialectic, once a staple of philosophical education. According to Hegel, the presentation of a new idea, a thesis, will generate a competing idea or counterargument, an antithesis. The thesis and the antithesis, opposed as they are, will inevitably come into conflict with one another.
However, this conflict is a productive one. With the merits of both the thesis and the antithesis considered, the reasoned philosopher will be able to produce an improved version of the thesis, a synthesis.
In very basic terms, this is the Hegelian dialectic, a means of philosophical reason which, if applied correctly, should result in a refinement and improvement of ideas over time. Compelling, at its face.
However, this idea is now an outmoded one. Civil servants and their allies in the media and the judiciary have, in their infinite wisdom, developed a better way.
Instead of bothering with the cumbersome work of developing a thesis or responding to it with an antithesis, why don’t we just skip to the synthesis? After all, we already know What Works through observation of Tony Blair’s sensible, moderate time in No 10 – why don’t we just do that? That way, we can avoid all of that nasty sparring and clock off early for drinks.
This is the grim reality of modern British politics. The cadre of institutional elites who came to dominate our political system at the turn of the millennium have decided that their brand of milquetoast liberalism is the be-all and end-all of political thought. The great gods of this new pantheon – Moderation, Compromise, International Standing, Rule of Law – should be consulted repeatedly until nascent ideas are sufficiently tempered.
The Hegelian dialectic has been replaced by the Sedwillian dialectic; synthesis begets synthesis begets synthesis.
In turn, politicians have become more restricted in their thinking, preferring to choose from a bureaucratically approved list of half-measures. Conservatives, with their aesthetic attachment to moderate, measured Edwardian sensibilities, are particularly susceptible to this school of thought. We no longer have the time or space for big ideas or sweeping reforms. Those who state their views with conviction are tarred as swivel-eyed extremists, regardless of the popularity of their views. Despite overwhelming public dissatisfaction with our porous borders, politicians who openly criticise legal immigration will quickly find calls to moderate. If you’re unhappy with the 1.5 million visas granted by the Home Office last year, perhaps you’d be happy with a mere million?
The result has been decades of grim decline. As our social fabric unravels and our economy stagnates, we are still told that compromise, moderation, and sound, sensible management are the solutions. This is no accident. Britain’s precipitous decline and its fraying social fabric has raised the stakes of open political conflict. Nakedly pitting ideas against each other risks exposing our society’s underlying decisions and shattering the myth of peaceful pluralism on which the Blairite consensus rests. After all, if we never have any conflict, it’s impossible for the Wrong Sorts to come out on top.
The handwringing and pearl-clutching about Brexit was, in part, a product of this conflict aversion. The political establishment was ill-equipped to deal with the bellicose and antagonistic Leave campaign, and the stubbornness of the Brexit Spartans. Eurosceptics recognised that their position was an absolute one – Britain must leave the European Union, and anything short of a full divorce would fall short of their vision.
It was not compromise that broke the Brexit gridlock, but conflict. The suspension of 21 rebel Conservative MPs was followed by December’s general election victory. From the beginning of Boris Johnson’s premiership to the end, he gave no quarter to the idea of finding a middle ground.
Those who are interested in ending our national decline must embrace a love of generative adversity. Competing views, often radical views, must be allowed to clash. We should revel in those clashes and celebrate the products as progress. Conservatives in particular must learn to use the tools of the state to advance their interests, knowing that their opponents would do the same if they took power.
There are risks, of course – open conflict often produces collateral damage – but it would be far riskier to continue on our current path of seemingly inexorable deterioration. We must not let the mediocre be the enemy of the good for any longer.
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