Since Elon Musk’s purchase of X, Anglophonic media has been under increased pressure to reform. His self-proclaimed empowerment of “Citizen Journalism” is becoming difficult for the mainstream to ignore. Through algorithmic changes that suppress the liberal voices that have dominated for so long, and boost accounts loosely but best described as “anti-woke”, the discourse of the “Global Townhall” is changing. Musk’s commitment to efficiency privileges interactions over anything else, meaning high impact, low complexity is the currency of the day.
For the mainstream, this is challenging: audiences are organisms, they are found, cultivated and pruned by publications; the less they are a known quantity the harder it is to write for them. Most of us possess multiple social medias meaning multiple algorithms, there are more “content” outlets than ever before, and a bottomless pit of data being bought and sold. What were once “audiences” are now millions of individuals, simultaneously a part of as many groups, being groomed into consumers from as many directions. In short, much of what is published in the mainstream is based on presuppositions, both major and minor, that no longer exist.
To remedy this discrepancy, the journalistic “plays” commonly used by the British commentariat must be abandoned. Providing interesting twists on pre-existing answers (I’m paraphrasing the FT’s Janan Ganesh) is not good enough when the questions being asked are not set. The risible construction of “identify a specific issue, universalise it, and then deem it intractable, unanswerable and requiring vague consideration” must go because as the post-war consensus collapses almost everything is up for debate. The practice of articulating a specific consequence of a certain dynamic, e.g. mass immigration, while not admitting the dynamic exists, and presenting the consequence as a driver of outcomes rather than what it is—that is, a consequence—must go as it prevents real discussion. The world is less constrained than it has been for a long time, the long twentieth century is over, globalisation is in retreat and liberalism is on the rocks. Journalists need not twist the same lines of argument to keep things interesting, they must find new facts.
To see what makes an impact we must look to X.
The story of Springfield, Ohio, which in early September 2024 was struck by an influx of Haitians – most likely with TPS (Temporary Protected Status) – said by inhabitants to be eating local animals, serves as an example. To this day if you google it, you will find a page of articles condescendingly informing you it didn’t happen, apart from the Telegraph. Except it did happen (albeit with clarifications), the story was broken on X (albeit amid a flurry of less reliable, engagement-farming posts), and it was an important factor in swinging the vote for Trump; it provided him with an opportunity to clarify and articulate his stance on immigration. It turned the ‘spirit’ of 2016 into policy.
The issue of the Mirpuri rape gangs re-entering the discourse at the beginning of the year is another. Few knew the full extent of the ongoing horror because (for the most part) journalists have historically omitted the specifics of the atrocity. However, during the weeks that Elon Musk had an excerpt of one of the court transcripts pinned to his X profile, people were very aware of the depravity that had occurred. Brits’ revulsion at ourselves combined with pressure from America forced us to come to terms what the rape gangs are: our Chernobyl—the rot at the heart of Britain—and total inditement of the post-war project. We were forced to see ourselves as others see us.
The micro-trends of the Westminster sphere are another. The fissuring of Reform, a party that consistently polls as highly as Labour, took place on X and was provoked by Rupert Lowe’s popularity and success on it. The Trump regime’s distancing themselves from Farage was first alluded to on X and can only really be understood through X as that’s where each does most of its talking. Most importantly, the new and controversial topics entering the media-sphere—the Motability scandal, the two-tier justice system, the demography of who receives state resources, and the emergence of MPs who campaign and win solely on their co-ethnics’ support—are all drawn from a pre-existing discourse on X.
The online and offline worlds are merging. This is a fact. What will life look like as events online further impinge offline, how will journalists react?
When confronted by Trump’s tariffs, a policy thought by many to be consigned to the past, journalists were forced to respond, but here in Britain new visions for our country are only just emerging. Labour have no reason for being in government, the Tory party doesn’t exist apart from Robert Jenrick, and Reform offers little more than anti-woke jibes—the norm has run out of road.
But on X there is a Dissident Right that has answers to the questions of the day and cares as much for the last millennia of British history as it does for the next. It looks to similar movements throughout Europe, all represented on X, who share the same concerns and similarly themed solutions. In fact, the true importance of X is its tabling of an Anglophonic consciousness, something that will come to dominate this century.
All this cannot come too soon as the cratering of the mainstream’s ability to tell us what is happening in the world will only deepen. The termination of USAID was the destruction of a global patronage network that funded news outlets, journalists, NGOs, charities and more. Without it the liberal worldview we are so familiar with will be pushed significantly less. Redundancies have occurred from Politico to aid workers in Africa, liberal mouthpieces are no more. What’s now clear is just how much of the mainstream “discourse” is a confection, created by a small number of highly motivated people. Naturally this will only increase the public’s distrust of the media, but it also clears the ground for new voices to enter the fray, promising a further de-privileging of what manages to hang on.
If journalists are to benefit from what their industry is experiencing, they must see it as a selection event. They must go out and find issues to investigate and investigate them. They must open their eyes to the currents of the world we live in and explore it, broadening their understanding of what is. Finally, they must stop repeating the platitudes of yesteryear. There is a huge opportunity for change, for journalists to ride out on their own and make a real impact on the world. Let’s hope they do.
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The Campaign for Scottish Independence is back to Square One
‘Within the next five years, in one form or another, break-up is likely to come about’. These are not the reflections of an unhappily married man, but a pronouncement on the fate of Great Britain, as prophesied by none other than Tom Nairn, widely considered the intellectual flagbearer for Scottish nationalism up until his death last year. Most notable for his book The Break-up of Britain, which foretells the dissolution of the United Kingdom as a consequence of imperial decline, Nairn, delivering one of his final interviews, felt confident enough to declare that the hour was finally at hand, despite being ‘usually cautious about predicting timelines’.
Nairn wasn’t alone in his prediction. According to a Survation poll, when asked ‘How likely or unlikely do you think it is that there will be another referendum on Scottish independence in the next five years?’, 65% of Scots were of the opinion that it was either ‘Very likely’ ‘or ‘Quite likely’. Only 25% answered ‘Quite unlikely’ or ‘Very unlikely’. The 65% may indeed be correct; but if any such referendum is to take place within the given timeframe, Scottish nationalists will have to pray for a miracle to happen within the next week or so, seeing as the survey in question was conducted all the way back in October 2019. Nairn’s five-year prediction was made in 2020, which affords it slightly more leeway. Yet the odds that the Scottish National Party, which only months ago suffered a crushing defeat at the ballot box, is able to persuade the British government to grant them a second vote by next year are slim to none. The truth is that the nationalist cause hasn’t looked more hopeless since the result of the original Scottish Independence referendum in 2014.
Even that episode, in which the UK faced its first truly existential threat since England and Scotland were united in 1707, ended on a modestly optimistic note for separatists. While the result of the vote was 55-45 in favour of Scotland remaining in the UK, the fact that Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party, had been able to secure a referendum from the British government in the first place – and that the ‘Yes’ side, as the pro-Independence side became known, had come so close to winning – was taken by many as a sure sign that the Union was on its last legs. Worse still for the ‘No’ side, the fact that Independence was more popular among younger voters seemed to suggest that the end of the UK was not only inevitable but imminent. Led by liberal activists whose passionate appeals invoked the rhetoric of earlier Independence movements in former British colonies, the nationalists’ quest for freedom from the English yoke became an end goal for progressives; it was merely a matter of time before the pendulum swung left, thereby slicing in half the nation-state that birthed the modern world.
Any doubts anyone may have harboured about the impending demise of the UK were surely dispelled by the political turbulence that followed the referendum – the general election a year later, the other referendum the year after that, if not the snap election that took place the year after that – which to onlookers home and abroad resembled the death throes of a spent entity. In particular, amidst the chaos that occurred in the wake of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the only thing anyone seemed to be able to predict with any certainty was that Scotland – which had voted 62-38 to remain in the EU – would jump ship at the soonest opportunity. (Around a third of Scottish voters even believed that there would be another referendum before the UK completed the Brexit proceedings.)
Indeed, for many unionists, the ostensible advantages of remaining within the European Union proved a deciding factor in their ‘No’ vote: a stronger economy, representation at the European Parliament, and facilitated travel to the continent. As part of the UK, Scotland was by extension part of the EU, and a newly independent Scotland would surely struggle to gain re-entry to a bloc which mandates a 3% deficit ratio for all member states, given that the nation’s deficit hovered around 10%. But the UK’s vote to leave the EU put a knot in that theoretical chain of consequences. Remaining in the UK became a guarantee that Scotland would be cut off from the EU, while Independence under the stewardship of the passionately pro-Europe Scottish National Party at least allowed for the possibility, however scant, of being ‘welcomed back into the EU with open arms as an independent country’, in the words of one MP.
Against this backdrop, even the most optimistic unionist would not have expected the status quo to hold. And yet, 10 years on from the 2014 referendum, Independence polls produce, on average, the same 55-45 split. So what happened?
As it turned out, while Britain’s decision to leave the EU predictably shored up support for the SNP, it also complicated the logistics of Independence. The smallest matryoshka in the set, Scotland would find itself not only isolated but vulnerable, separated by a hard border with its only contiguous neighbour. The country would have to decide between a customs union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland (which collectively constitute the greater part of Scotland’s trade) or with the much larger, but more distant, EU.
And while a number of sometime unionists found themselves suddenly on the ‘Yes’ side of the debate – including a contingent of high-profile figures, from the actors Ewan McGregor and John Hannah to the writers Andrew O’Hagan and John Burnside – a number of those who had voted ‘No’ in 2014 suddenly found themselves siding with the so-called ‘Little Englander’s. These Eurosceptic defectors were broadly comprised of what the commentator David Goodhart would go on to classify as ‘somewheres’: patriotic Scots, typically older and poorer, and defined by a profound attachment to the place they call home, as opposed to the cosmopolitan aloofness of ‘anywheres’. An understudied but significant section of society, Scottish ‘somewheres’ have been instrumental in preventing separatism gaining a majority in the almost weekly polls, considering how many elderly, unionist voters have passed away in the last ten years, and how many Gen-Z, overwhelmingly pro-Indpendence voters have aged into the electorate.
Then there was COVID. As with every other political matter, the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019 dramatically changed the nature of the Independence debate. Since pandemic response was a devolved matter, the four home nations took a competitive approach to dealing with the virus. While Prime Minister Boris Johnson was initially reluctant to impose lockdowns, Sturgeon lost no time in employing comparatively draconian measures, such as mask mandates and severe quarantine regulations. As a result, Scotland was able to boast a considerably lower death rate than England. Between January 2020 and June 2021, excess deaths in Scotland were only around 3% higher than average, compared with England, where they were 6 % higher. This measurable discrepancy had the effect of suggesting to many minds that not only was Scotland capable of handling its own affairs, but that government under the SNP was safer and more effective than direct rule from Westminster. For the first time, Independence polls consistently suggested that the ‘Yes’ side would win a hypothetical referendum..
But the momentum didn’t last. As the months passed, and particularly as Johnson was coerced into a stricter COVID policy, adopting many of the SNP’s own strategies, the gap in hospitalisation and death rates between each of the home nations narrowed to a pinpoint. Moreover, the UK had developed its own vaccine, and thanks to opting out of the EU’s vaccine rollout was able to conduct its vaccination campaign far more rapidly than any other European country.
From there it was all downhill for the SNP. In the summer of 2021, it transpired that the party had been misallocating donations and routinely lying about membership figures. Nicola Sturgeon, who had replaced Salmond as First Minister after the 2014 referendum, resigned in February 2023, citing gridlock around the Independence question. A month later Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and chief executive of the SNP, was arrested as part of a police investigation into the party’s finances, prompting the SNP’s auditors to resign as well.
Sturgeon was replaced as party leader by Humza Yousaf. But while the former First Minister had been able to command respect even from her adversaries, Yousaf, who lacked Sturgeon’s charisma and the prestige that comes with an established reputation, proved a far more divisive leader at a time when the party was crying out for unity. The fact that Yousaf only narrowly won the leadership contest, after his openly Presbyterian opponent had been slandered by members of her own coalition for espousing ‘extreme religious views’, did little to endear him to the Christian wing of his party. Perhaps most controversially, his decision to carry forward the Gender Reform Bill – which made it possible to change one’s legal gender on a whim by removing the requirement of a medical diagnosis – provoked derision from a public which still falls, for the most part, on the socially conservative side of the fence. Nor were progressives much impressed by his decision to end the SNP’s power-sharing agreement with the Scottish Greens.
Yousaf resigned after thirteen months in office and was replaced by John Swinney, one of the more moderate senior members of the party, but the damage to the SNP’s credibility had already been done. With less than two months to go until the UK-wide general election, Swinney had his work cut out for him when it came to convincing Scots to continue to put their trust in the scandal-ridden SNP. Independence polling returned to pre-COVID levels. However, for nationalists, such polls were less germane to the pursuit of a second referendum than the election polls, given that keeping a pro-Independence party at the helm in Holyrood was a necessary prerequisite to secession. As long as the SNP commanded a majority of seats, there was a democratic case to be made for holding another referendum. This had been Sturgeon’s argument during the 2021 Scottish parliament election campaign, which was, in her eyes, a ‘de facto referendum’. If the SNP were to end up with a majority of seats, she claimed, the party would have the permission of the Scottish people to begin Independence proceedings. (As it happened, they went on to win sixty-four seats – one short of a majority.)
The SNP had fewer seats in the House of Commons, but the nature of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system meant they still enjoyed considerable overrepresentation. Still, if possessing forty-eight seats at parliament was not enough to secure a referendum from the British government, then plummeting to a meagre nine seats in the 2024 general election killed the prospect stone dead. As the Labour party made sweeping gains in Scotland and the UK more widely, the SNP suffered the worst defeat in its 90-year history. In a speech following the election, a dour-faced Swinney acknowledged the need ‘to accept that we failed to convince people of the urgency of independence in this election campaign.’ The party ‘need[ed] to be healed and it need[ed] to heal its relationship with the people of Scotland’.
It is difficult to take note of something that isn’t there, which is perhaps why, as Ian MacWhirter noted in a piece for Unherd, ‘It doesn’t seem to have fully dawned on the UK political establishment that the break-up of Britain, which seemed a real possibility only a few years ago, has evaporated’. The topic of Independence now rarely features in the news, and some of the biggest names associated with Scottish nationalism – not only Nairn and Burnside, but also Alasdair Gray, Sean Connery and Winifred Ewing – have passed away in the decade since the referendum. Meanwhile, younger Scots are turning away from nationalism in general, an unforeseen phenomenon which MacWhirter puts down to the fallout from Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, a sequence of geopolitical shocks that has many Scots wondering whether the campaign to sacrifice the nation’s economy and security on the altar of identity might well be recklessly indulgent. ‘The Union is probably safer now than at any time since the Jacobites waved their claymores 300 years ago.’
If the SNP hope to bring the dream of Independence back to life, it will not be enough to rely on generational shift and the goodwill of the British government. An uphill struggle awaits the Independence movement. It will entail extensive repairs to the party’s image, providing clarity on issues such as currency, retention of the monarchy and the route to EU membership, and – perhaps hardest of all – presenting a clear case as to why Scotland would be better off as an independent nation. Until then, the Union looks set to enjoy a new lease of life.
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With Friends Like These…
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
Lord Palmerston’s famous adage is typically divorced from its context, especially when used in discussions regarding Britain’s foreign policy, or lack thereof. Delivered as part of a speech in the House of Commons in 1848, the then Foreign Secretary was responding to an argument put forward by one of his most consistent and outspoken opponents, Thomas Anstey, Irish Confederate MP for Youghal.
Over a decade after Poland’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, Anstey maintained intervention in support of the rebels, seeking to establish an independent Polish state, was both a feasible operation and a moral imperative which the government of the day – especially Palmerston, who was still foreign secretary during this period – absconded in favour of non-interference, despite previous suggestions to the contrary. According to Anstey, this amounted to, among other things, a betrayal of Poland and, by extension, their sympathetic ideals.
Accounting for the particular circumstances in which Palmerston was operating, primarily seeking a basic balance of power across the continent, maintaining a preference for less-absolutist models of government without a frothing desire to see them imposed at the drop of a hat, the essence of his shrewd foreign policy stems from the realisation there is no equivalence between interpersonal and international relations, due to the second-order consequences which come with maintaining such agreements:
“…When we are asked why the British Government have not enforced treaty rights in every case, my answer is, that the only method of enforcing them would have been by methods of hostility; and that I do not think those questions were questions of sufficient magnitude in their bearing on the interests of England, to justify any Government in calling on the people of this country to encounter the burdens and hazards of war for the purpose of maintaining those opinions.”
“It does not follow, when a Minister announces in Parliament an intention to perform a public act, that it is to be considered like a promise made to an individual, or by one private man to another, and that it is to be made a reproach to him if the intention be not carried out.”
Indeed, the maintenance of certain opinions under specific circumstances simply isn’t worth it. The opinions we value, whether written in parchment or spoken over the airwaves, and what we are prepared to do to maintain them, form the essence of our political loyalty. Unfortunately for many in Britain’s political class, even its nominally right-wing constituents, their political loyalty seems to lie with Israel. Berating any criticism or lack of enthusiasm as an act of betrayal, the British people are expected to view their interests as secondary to the interests of the Israeli government, all else being unthinkable.
However, much to their aggravation, Britain’s cooling support for Israel has only accelerated these past few days after a convoy of three vehicles, each displaying the World Central Kitchen (WCK) logo, was attacked whilst returning from a humanitarian mission to Gaza through a deconflicted zone; a route agreed with the knowledge and consent of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The affected British nationals were working as private military contractors tasked with protecting the convoy and providing medical support. By all estimations, not exactly frothing Hamas-adjacent anti-semites motivated by Islamism or Palestinian nationalism. Worse still, the convoy contacted the IDF after the first vehicle was hit, but to no self-preserving avail.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Israelis has taken liberty with the lives of British nationals, although it’s perhaps the first instance in which the disregard of the Israeli government and its supporters has been made so blatant. The IDF’s chief of staff released a less-than-sincere-sounding apology, claiming the attack was an accident, which chef José Andrés, WCK’s director and co-founder, evidently didn’t find convincing, noting the attack took place over considerable distance, never mind in an area tightly controlled by the IDF.
Benjamin Netanyahu responded in a similar vein, stating occasional civilian casualties were part-and-parcel of war and the overarching mission to keep Israel safe. Whilst not technically untrue, it’s also part-and-parcel – even if not an iron law of reality – for states to alter their relations in accordance with their interests, often in unexpected ways; those who are allies one day are rivals the next. As such, I’m sure Netanyahu would be very understanding if Britain ceased all arms exports to Israel, especially if we had a few security concerns, so to speak.
The Israeli government’s sense of entitlement when it comes to Western support is hard to ignore. David Mencer, Israeli government spokesman and former director of Labour Friends of Israel, affectively stated Britain was obliged to continue supporting Israel as doing otherwise would constitute a betrayal of liberal democratic values. In Mencer’s own words: “You’ve got to take our side.”
Indeed, Britain had great sympathy for the Israelis following the attack on October 7th and a military response from Israel was thought to be expected and justified. It is essentially different to claim Britain has a moral and political responsibility to secure the existence of the Israeli state from its enemies, whatever that entails. In any case, this whole debacle suggests two things about Israel, both of which should inform the UK’s future relationship. Either Israel is too incompetent to be considered a reliable ally or too malicious to be considered an ally at all.
However, despite growing suspicion, mainstream criticism of the Israeli government and its agencies has yet to attach itself to the national interest or any loosely-related concept. Sir Alan Duncan’s comments on “pro-Israel extremism” at the highest echelons of government, citing the conduct of various ministers and politicians, resulted in accusations of anti-semitism and a near-immediate disciplinary inquiry from the Conservative Party. At first glance, this looks like one of several increasingly confident pockets of dissent at the heart of the establishment. In reality, it’s the more puritanical believers in the liberal rules-based international order pointing out the internal contradictions of the status quo.
The likes of Lord Dave and Sir Alan aren’t posturing against Israel out of ‘realpolitik’; they aren’t aligning against the Israeli government for nationalist reasons, but for internationalist ones. In their mind, Britain should distance itself from Israel for the sake of conforming to international law to a greater extent than it already does; it has very little to do with a state being so entwined with a foreign government that it can barely condemn attacks on its own citizens, undermining the most basic interest of any modern state: the protection of its people.
At bottom-level, their understanding is an extension of their bizarre idea of domestic affairs. Parliament amending and breaking the law are one in the same; as an entity, law is stagnant and cannot be ‘constitutionally’ changed, at least not to any political degree. Likewise, the breaking of treaties, for whatever reason, is a violation of international law and therefore necessarily bad. Alas, just as men must tear muscle to build more to gain bodily strength, states must tear laws and treaties to create new ones to gain political strength, at home and abroad.
This line of thought is straightforward and popular enough. In fact, it may explain some of the strongest support for Israel among certain sections of the public; older, Conservative and Reform-voting types with the Union Jack and the Star of David in their Twitter bio.
Accounting for the obvious fact many use support for Israel as proxy for domestic concerns pertaining to the rapid growth of Britain’s Muslim population, doubling as an implicit anti-racist credential by aligning with a historically-persecuted minority group, I suspect a considerable amount of Israelophilia among Britain’s old can be attributed to Mossad’s response to the 1972 Munich Massacre; a 20-year global hunt for Black September soberly titled Operation Wrath of God. Their first impression of Israel, as portrayed by a sensationalist mass-media machine at the height of an international event, is that of a rabidly nationalist state which spares no expense when it comes to pursuing its goal and eradicating its enemies.
The fact Israel didn’t catch the main culprit of the massacre is of secondary importance, what matters is the will and perception of the Israelis was evidently more attractive than whatever the British state was doing. At this time, Britain was enduring some of the worst years of its post-war history, encumbered with economic stagnation, social unrest, and an impotent political class with no perceivable willpower or solution. Sound familiar? As many will recall, similar flickers of admiration were visible following the early response of Israel to the October 7th attack, reigniting a love for a certain determination which our own foreign policy lacks.
Of course, this only accounts for the inclinations of a broadly defined, misguided but well-intentioned demographic of everymen. The political fetishism of Israel among Britain’s centre-right commentariat and policymakers (literal fetishism in some cases) defies any comparable justification. Outside of building the largest possible electoral coalition against Islamism, it seems to be a bizarre fixation.
In short, condemning the actions of Israel committed against our country may feel like a condemnation of the type of politics many of us desire, but it isn’t. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true: it is one of many steps required towards the realisation of a sovereign, self-interested foreign policy.
Palmerston was right, there is no fundamental equivalence between interpersonal and international relations, but there is one similarity worth remembering: trust is the basis of all relations. We trust based on our perceptions of others, our experiences with them and others like them; we make informed guesses, leaps in the dark, as to whether or not we should make ourselves open and vulnerable for the purposes of co-operation and friendship. If our knowledge of another changes, it impacts our ability to trust them. Sometimes this strengthens trust, sometimes it weakens it, and if trust is weakened to such an extent, whether chipped away by routine transgressions or destroyed outright by a single, deeply callous act, one is forced to reconsider their relations.
This is true of both people and states, and following the most severe form of disregard from our so-called ally, after all we felt and done for them, without expectation of reimbursement or lavish praise, it is time we reconsider our relationship with Israel; not towards Palestine, but to our own, independent national interest. They haven’t allowed our co-operation and friendship to disrupt the pursuit of their perpetual interests, it’s about time we do the same.
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The Importance of National Storytelling
I’m warming myself by the fire where pork shish-kebabs crackle, as I gulp down sweet homemade wine with cured belly fat and black village-bread. We are at a friend’s dacha about 150 miles southeast of Moscow. As we drink the talk gets more political. Eventually a bearded armchair expert starts explaining a theory involving different ethnic groups having innate biological proclivities. He explained Englishmen were ‘sailors’, they live on an island, and they sailed around the world and settled new lands. Jews were ‘traders’ and therefore became widespread but remained on the outside. Russians were the ‘forest men’, who conquered the Eurasian steppes, uniting Slav with Turk in a forest-steppe continuum – or something like that. I didn’t realise until much later that this was a bastardised layman’s understanding of a genuine, developed school of thought now popular in Russia and beyond.
The once-obscure theories of Lev Gumilyov, the Gulag-surviving Soviet social scientist and son of influential poets, are now deeply embedded in the Russian mainstream. Gumilyov conflated nationality and ethnicity into ‘ethnos’ – a universal element of history that makes its foundation. He believed that each ethnos acquired ‘behaviour stereotypes’ in its early stages of development or ‘ethnogenesis’ (presumably what my drunk acquaintance was referring to), connected to geography but also to another concept – passionarity. Passionarity can loosely be defined as an intrinsic motivation towards purposeful activity. Putin has described it as ‘the will of a nation’; its ‘inner energy’. This became the ontological framework for Eurasianism which, part-philosophy part-ideology, is newest part of the story that Russia tells itself. In practice, Eurasianists believe that the post-Soviet states of the ‘near abroad’ are Russia’s natural allies, and not the Slavs or others to their West. They believe Russia and the states that surround it make up a unique, ‘Eurasian’ civilisation united by a ‘Tatar-Mongolic’ heritage, making up the heartland, destined to be in constant battle with the outer rimland.
This might sound like (and likely is) wishful ahistorical nonsense, but there are worse examples. Hungary is an observer state of the Turkic Council, and every year hosts the ‘Great Kurultay’ event, where participants from across the Turkic states and Turkic regions of Russia gather to ride horses and dress like Genghis Khan. The debates over Hungarian pre-history are as confusing and they are endless but basically, they also involve a lot of Eastern-European Turkophilia and dubious historiography. The Turks themselves are split between being a reincarnation of an ancient nomadic people in the body of a Kemalist republic or the rebirth of Islamic power rising from the Ottoman ashes. We might find all this story telling strange, but what stories do we tell ourselves today? What is the level of our ‘inner energy’?
One of the stories we tell ourselves is that ‘the West’ exists as a civilisational bloc due to a shared European and Christian culture, but how true is this now? Our leaders almost never define us in this way. We are instead liberal, democratic nations united by ‘shared values’. The power of ‘the West’ is invoked only when we are being convinced of virtues of the latest war. In this values-based understanding, Taiwan is just as much a part of the West as Israel and Japan are. When that loose definition can’t be convincingly stretched enough (thinking for example of our good friends Saudi Arabia), then we simply become ‘the international community’. All of this is collapsing in front of us, as forgotten civilisations re-emerge with powerful narratives. The West’s old stories do not even convince any more, let alone inspire.
If we look under the hood of this artificial construct of the modern West, we see that it’s held together by little other than the political, economic, and military ties of the globalist regime. I shouldn’t have to say that this does not diminish the magnitude of the West’s contribution to art and science, but a culture must be lived to exist. When it ceases to be, it becomes mere history. We must look at the reality of what today’s West is and not just where it came from. We can divide the modern West into roughly three parts (if we exclude for now the strange parallel Western world that is South America) and they are the Anglo-Saxon countries, the ex-communist states, and the rest of continental Europe. Let’s look at them one by one.
The nations that spent decades under communism are undergoing what can only be described as a cultural renaissance. Hungary and Poland are notable examples, but the pattern is at play across the former Warsaw Pact countries. Being frozen off from the rest of the West for all those decades has unexpectedly left these societies uninfected by the viruses of cultural guilt, atheism, mass immigration, degenerate pop culture and third wave feminism, just to name a few. In fact, the repression of national cultures, religion and traditional family life has led people to embrace and guard those aspects of their identity and lifestyle with a militant zeal. I am aware that most of these countries suffer chronic demographic issues of some kind, but unfortunately most of the world are now victims to a similar fate, so let’s park that for now.
These countries suffered occupation and oppression from many empires across the past centuries, all engaging in national struggles, only to engage in new ones as the red yoke fell. They are therefore not short of stories to tell themselves. The revival of Christianity in these lands only adds to the spiritual rebirth that is evidently sweeping this part of the world. Gone are its Orwellian regimes and rigid state ideologies, very obviously authoritarian, offensively so to our Western sensibilities. Yet the Brave New World-style totalitarian society that we now live in is less obvious, most of us refusing to see it despite it being all around us. It may well be the case that the future will see a new Iron Curtain, where EUSSR citizens try to escape to the sunlit uplands of Eastern Europe. This is what the direction of travel indicates.
Next up is the rest of continental Europe. For all its faults and afflictions, countries like France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and even Sweden, are in better positions to get out of the mess they find themselves in than, say, the UK (which finds itself in a near-identical mess). It turns out that the European system of proportional representation and regionalism is a far better bulwark against globalist top-down policies than the much revered Westminster system of government, as the success of Meloni, Wilders and other patriotic populists shows. Here, the inferior status of the English-language along with inherent protectionist tendencies have acted as shields from the extremes of financialised progressivism. Not having the world’s lingua franca as your native tongue adds a filter between national cultures and the globalist monoculture.
Despite most European capitals being marked with giant conquering rainbow flags, thousands of non-metropolitan regions maintain the standards and traditions of their forebears. Culture is preserved on the local level, with much disdain and distrust directed towards the centre. An understanding that traditional way of life relies on a healthy nation, rather than on liberal democratic values, is pervasive and comes naturally. Folk music, national dress, culinary customs, community events, religious occasions and even superstitious traditions are more prevalent and taken more seriously on the continent. These countries are locked in a tug-of-war between the chauvinist East and the emasculated West. Preserving these rich cultures by reclaiming the nation-state seems like a motivating purposeful activity and compelling story.
So, what do you do when you are a country made up of four nations? What if your language is not a delicate national treasure but the universalist tongue of billions? What if your country was set up by people from one part of the world, but is now populated by people from a different part? These are just some of the identity crisis challenges that face the Anglo-Saxon world today. What stories can these countries tell themselves about their place in history and their destiny as a people, outside of materialist comparisons? GDP rankings aren’t the stuff that give you goosebumps. Christian heritage holds these societies together, but actual belief in Christianity is largely missing. Other non-religious ‘values’, like ‘tolerance’ and ‘belief in the rule of law’ are as perverted as they are meaningless. Even Ireland with its unique story was until recently one of the most cohesive, vibrant, and successful of the English-speaking countries, but has now followed its cousin-countries down a road of ruinous self-flagellation.
The United States likes to tell itself that its constitutional system is so perfect that it has been able to melt the peoples of the world into a nation based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s the official narrative. Like many official narratives, not only are they instantly challenged by people’s reality, but they are fundamentally untrue. The country was founded by settlers from a very small triangle of the world roughly covering England and Holland. Its system has worked only insofar as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture has dominated. As we are realising to our horror today, our social order is not based on what laws we have, but on how ordinary people behave. Yes, it is illegal to commit rape and murder, but that fact is not the only thing stopping me from doing those things. Somehow, I also don’t want to.
America seriously struggled with integrating first German then Irish and Italian immigrants, due to what were then considered as huge differences in culture. In time, the shared aspects of European culture proved to be enough of a basis to integrate these masses of people into a new nation. Yet it was the efforts of a handful of Ashkenazi Jews in the early 20th century that would cement the homogenous American identity and bring it to life. Through the studio system, the barons of Hollywood’s golden era created folklore for a virgin country, projecting an Anglo good life and WASP values across the land and world. The American dream was not about getting rich but raising strong God-fearing families behind a white picket fence.
This America has long been lost and its 21st century replacement is on a trajectory to become part of Latin America. Like Brazil now, it’s set to become a country where the south is populated largely by White European evangelical Christians while its coastal cities are made up of wealthy gated communities and skyscrapers, separating the liberal elites from the mixed favelas and shanty towns. Adopting Spanish as a national language also adds to this analogy. Part of this region’s problem is that, with Europeans, Africans and natives mixed throughout the arbitrary post-colonial borders, it lacks convincing stories to tell itself. This is probably behind the Latin American habit of entering abusive relationships with radical ideologies.
This leaves us with the rest of the English-speaking countries, the British Isles, and their offspring. The British identity formed with the union of kingdoms and came into its own with the growth of empire. The Scots, Irish, English, and Welsh spread out from their small corner of the globe and settled its far-flung frontiers, producing developed and orderly societies. Far from diminishing the British identity, the loss of empire should have been an opportunity, a released burden, from having to govern large masses of alien people. The British world, with its shared state structures, language, and history, should have been a proudly embraced inheritance, ensuring the culture of these small islands lives on across the world. Instead, America took our place as the mother country, and along with the other realms we have all become part of the American world. Yet the American dream is now clearly a nightmare.
Interest in increasing ties between these extremely similar countries was revived during the Brexit campaign, with the idea of CANZUK, a proposed political alliance between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK being one of the more promising projects. Its proponents argue that it makes sense for countries with similar economic, political, and legal systems to increase cooperation. Yet these systems have brought the same ills to all these countries. All these countries have had decades of mass immigration and state multiculturalism. All these countries engaged in inexcusable tyranny and criminal negligence during the covid years. All these countries are fully signed on to serving the military-industrial complex and the agenda behind the climate scam. All these countries are losing their identities far quicker than anywhere in Europe or even than America. Is there a common cause of this? It seems more likely than not that a once shared-cultural space left us victim to the same cultural decline, and the extreme liberalism of today’s CANZUK nations (even in comparison to ‘progressive’ European countries) suggests there’s something running through all that ties us together and has sent us all down the same wrong paths. It therefore seems unlikely that further integrating these countries in their present states would make anything better. There’s been such a demographic shift, an erosion of national sentiment and a detachment from the traditional culture of the British Isles, that the populations of these countries would reject this.
Another trait shared by these countries is the seeming inability to think outside of modern ideologies; leftism, capitalism, socialism, liberalism, secularism, nationalism, etc. These all take different objects of study, be it class, the individual, the nation, and increasingly in our post-modern world, race, sexual identities, and other perceived oppressed characteristics. What lies outside all these largely Western constructs is traditionalism. Traditionalism isn’t an ideology but rather a school of thought. It’s of course entangled with right wing politics, but it is a separate prospect. Time to the traditionalist is not linear but cyclical. We’re not going somewhere in the future but instead always coming back to a past. It’s seeing the immaterial in the material. The inherent virtue of tradition and moral good of beauty. It is possible to embrace this mindset without believing in God, but it’s easier when you do. Either way, it requires a breaking out of our utilitarian conditioning. Shun the bugman world!
There is a clear difference between the health and overall robustness of modern British and Turkish cultures, to give an example. This can be demonstrated in how cultures collide. In Turkey, the native culture reigns supreme, forcing all forms of art and entertainment to conform to local tastes or bend itself in some way. Netflix and Disney plus can’t just dish out subtitled versions of their usual fare, they must create locally produced, Turkish-oriented content or they won’t survive. Likewise, foreign music is a rarity on the airwaves, with outside genres being morphed and orientalised out of recognition before taking final form. International fast-food chains perform well but will never outcompete the legion of local takeaways with their motorcycle delivery armies. Even then, country-specific modifications are common. The point is, this is a robust culture that absorbs and bounces away outside elements. Modernity is only accepted once it has been infused with tradition, or domesticised.
Unfortunately, modern British culture does not absorb and shape incoming elements but rather accepts and is taken over by them. Such is the dogmatic nature of the near-official state ideology of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, that the concept of a supreme, native culture is a thoughtcrime. If you told a Turk that Britain’s national dish was something called ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’ he would look at you with a mix of bemusement and disdain. Multiculturalism does not have to mean accepting foreign cultures as they are and putting them on a pedestal, but in the absence of a muscular home-culture this becomes a fait accompli. Britain, a country that just a few decades ago was a net cultural exporter, has undeniably lost its mojo. The reasons for this are likely to do with our modern economic system and the various cultural and sexual revolutions visited upon it in this period. Adding many millions of immigrants from the most incompatible parts of the world to the population in a short timeframe has undoubtedly contributed to the decline in shared identity, but it is not the root cause. Few offer a compelling way forward. Traditionalism offers a way to relook and renew.
There is something universalist in this perspective that deserves appreciation. Traditionalism has a ‘to each their own’ attitude that is especially attractive those of us who are sympathetic to non-interventionism and realism in international relations. At present, we ‘the West’, have not given up our position of the constant moral lecturer of the world. This position becomes ever more absurd as the reality of our corruption and social decay is further exposed. We lament the imprisonment of Alexei Navalny and other political dissidents in Russia yet have nothing to say about the imprisonment of Julian Assange or the death of David Kelly. We condemn the primitive corruption of local officials in the third world yet have nothing to say about the institutionalised corruption of our military and pharmaceutical industries and their revolving door self-regulating agencies. We scare ourselves with stories of China’s ‘social credit system’ while living in a comparable digital dystopia ourselves. We invade countries on false pretences, only to bait-and-switch into a Darwinian superiority battle of civilisations.
Our reaction to spending trillions of dollars, two decades and thousands of lives to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, is to Twitter shame Afghanistan for being culturally backward. It is therefore no surprise that Israel has done its own bait-and-switch, abandoning its anti-Hamas line in favour of posting pictures of gay IDF soldiers kissing, therefore demonstrating its cultural superiority compared to the backward homophobic Arabs. All this hypocritical and psychopathic nonsense is thrown out when you view the world through the traditionalist lens. It accepts the world as it should be; differing realms with their own ways of life. The world will not end if we simply let the Arabs be Arab and let China be China. The important thing is that we let Britain be Britain. We should own the right to be ourselves and drop the self-imposed burden of trying to change others. Live and let live – at the moment we do neither.
As far as cultural inheritances go, these islands are luckier than most. The rich tapestry of clans, tongues and kingdoms are genuinely ‘diverse’, and when you drive out of the big cities their beauty is on full display. This is a great lot to work with. As modern urban life becomes increasingly unbearable, it will be to the countryside and villages where people will escape and try to reconnect with the eternal. In the last few years especially, people of individual, independent, conservative, and alternative persuasions have (ironically) used the power of the internet to become part of a revival of traditional ways of eating and living. These people are entitled to (and do) make their own meanings and tell their own stories, but a nation is like an organism and relies on all its constituent parts to function properly. For this, we need grand narratives not of a brighter material future, but of a deep, spiritual, and eternal connection to the land and the people we share it with. It doesn’t particularly matter what stories we tell, but we need to think of some new ones because the old ones don’t work anymore. It will not make me popular to observe that the Second World War, for whatever reason, is no longer the unifying national myth that it once was (at least for Britain). Even countries like Russia, which treats the Second World War as a sort of national religion, needs other tales and stories to tell itself in addition to that. We need big narratives about who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Celebrating St George’s Day and Margaret Thatcher isn’t going to cut it. We are faced with a fundamentally different country at a critical time in its history.
Britain is a nation with extraordinary prospects that are being wasted because there is no vision. It has, to use Gumilyov’s terminology, low passionarity. Many British people to do not feel that group-specific inner biocosmic force inside of them, and that is a failure of culture over anything. My few childhood years spent in an Irish primary school imbued me with more of an appreciation and affection for that island and its culture than I ever got from a lifetime of secondary and higher education in the UK. The stories of my parents and grandparents, who as immigrants are more inclined to engage in cultural propaganda, instilled in me a visceral feeling of belonging and connection with my ancestors, and their cultures and histories. Yet I only truly connected with the traditionalist mindset after a long process of consciously deprogramming myself from the globohomo monoculture. I now experience a complete synthesis of my various identities, without succumbing to shallow partisanship. I see the beauty in and take strength from them all. The stories and traditions sustain me every day. These bedrocks of any culture need serious replenishing in our country. Our future depends on it. It won’t be an easy task and there are no overnight fixes. The many decades and multiple generations it took for the long march through the institutions to bring us to our current state can only be counteracted through an equally long period of renewal. As the cultural Marxists attacked the family and hijacked education, watching the consequences ripple through to the rest of society, so too must we rebuild the family and reclaim education over a long period of time. If this is viewed as a political project with goal posts, we will be doomed to fail. Instead, this should be viewed as an unending, cyclic process of passing on and telling stories to inspire meaning and bravery. So, reject modernity, embrace tradition!
