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On Truth and Democracy
O Tempora, O Mores (L., “Oh the times, Oh the customs”), is an apothegm attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC), a Roman statesman, attorney, philosopher, and scholar. In his First Oration against Catiline (63 BC) that he delivered in the Roman Senate, Cicero deplored the sorry condition of the Roman Republic, and particularly the Roman citizen, Catiline, who had conspired to foment an insurrection, intended to overthrow the Roman government and Cicero himself, who was at that time serving as the Head-of-State.
The perspectives expressed by Cicero could be ascribed to the sorry state of the virulent political climate and the dysfunctional political parties in our society, which have become dystopian and farcical for the following reasons.
First, it and they have devolved into cults of personality (cult, L., cultus, “worship,” “homage,” “devoted attention to a person or thing”) populated by sycophants (Gk., sycophantes, L., sycophanta, “informer,” “slanderer,” “servile flatterer,” “show the fig” [a vulgar gesture]).
Second, fueled by the toxicity of an unbridled social media, the raison d’etre (Fr., “reason for being”) of many politicians has become self-aggrandizement and power, to the determinant of public service and the commonwealth.
Third, rather than deliberate the substance of issues, they rant, demonize their critics, and employ every fallacy of argumentation in their rhetoric, most frequently argumentum ad hominem (L., “argument against the person”).
Fourth, more willingly than seeking common ground and common cause, they resort to demagoguery, contentiousness, mendacity, litigiousness, and extremism.
Fifth, they are barren of any discretion, decorum, propriety, civility, and self-control.
And sixth, their hypocrisy is unbounded, as they deny any allegations against them and divest themselves of any responsibility or accountability, by assuming a posture of victimization, devoid of any semblance of shame, guilt, remorse, or contrition (“I have done nothing wrong;” “I am innocent;” “It’s politically motivated;” “It’s a witch hunt”).
Collectively, it and they could be described metaphorically as a “ship of fools.”
Das Narrenschiff
Sebastian Brandt (circa 1457-1521) was of Germanic heritage and earned a doctoral degree in canon and civil law from the University of Basel. He served as Imperial Counselor, Judge, and Chancellor under the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (1459 – 1519). His most famous monograph, written as a humanist and satirist, was entitled Das Narrenschiff (Gr., “ship of fools”) (1494). Allegorically, it railed against the hypocrisies, weaknesses, political intrigues, and vices that were manifest during his lifetime. The author wrote that the ship was laden with and steered by fools. It wandered the ocean aimlessly, but by happenstance sailed to Narragonia, where they encountered Grobian, the patron saint of vulgar and coarse people.
To paraphrase the motif of the allegory, the author described the shipmates and crew as deranged, demented, frivolous, and oblivious; who were floating with the prevailing winds; and who were unhinged, unanchored, and unmoored. The author argued that they were in desperate need of statesmanship and leadership, to restore the ordinance and rule of reason and the ordinance and rule of law, grounded in truth, virtue, excellence, sound judgment, ethicality, and morality. The allegory is remarkably descriptive and prescient of the contemporaneous political climate and the political parties in our society.
The Past is Prologue
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), an English playwright, poet, and actor extraordinaire, in his tragicomedy The Tempest (1610-1611) wrote:
“Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come,
In yours and my discharge.”
Dialogue between Antonio and Sebastian; Act 2, scene 1, lines 253-4
One interpretation of that dialogue is that what had previously happened set the stage for what will follow, and will be the stuff of which our greatness or our fallenness will be made and measured. A cynical interpretation of that dialogue is that we will remain mired in the improprieties, imperfections, misinformation, and disinformation of the past. That notwithstanding, despite the dysfunction, farce, and fantasy that pervades the current political climate and the political parties in our society, both can be mitigated by a courageous, resolute, and willful intent. Consider, in that regard, the Four-Way Test.
The Four-Way Test
The Four-Way Test of the Things We Think. Say, or Do, is an ethical and moral code for personal and professional conduct and relationships. It was composed in 1932 by Mr. Herbert J. Taylor (1893-1978), a business executive and civic leader. It was adopted by Rotary International in 1943, as a standard and a code of conduct by which all communication and interpersonal behavior should be measured and judged.
When we hear or read an assertion in whatever venue, includingsocial media, it must always be analyzed rationally, logically, and skeptically, to discern its validity. The Four-Way Test is applicable in that regard:
- Is it the Truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build good will and better relationships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Common sense, prudence, and temperance dictate that if the assertion violates any of those tenets, that it is invalid; that it must be rejected; and that it must not be repeated, disseminated, or propagated.
Certainly, it may be advisable to research any assertion via other sources to confirm or refute its validity. Certainly, each of us enjoys freedom of speech/opinion, freedom of conscience, and liberty of choice. Nevertheless, those freedoms and choices imply a responsibility and an obligation to ensure that the assertions and our responses to them are truthful and valid. The intent of such an analysis is to preserve the integrity, honesty, veracity, wellness, health, and safety, of ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and our commonwealth.
Audent cognoscere veritatem (L., dare to know the truth”).
It is incumbent upon each of us to apply due diligence upon public officials and proper vetting of their assertions. We must critically inquire of and critically analyze the credibility of those individuals and the validity of their assertions. Our allegiance to and support of them must be rational, justifiable, and meritorious (L., meritorious, “deserving of reward,” “worthy of praise or honor”), and not irrational, vacuous, and meretricious (L., meretricious, “pertaining to a harlot,”). Fellow citizens, ubi sumus itiones? (L., “where are we going?”). Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), attorney-at-law, statesman, and the Sixteenth President of the United States of America, at the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield, Illinois, in 1858, paraphrased a citation from Holy Scripture — a house [nation] divided against itself cannot stand. Liberty, freedom, and democracy require a united, virtuous, informed, and engaged citizenry. With resolution and diligence, such citizens could dramatically transform the political climate and the political parties in our society by acceptance and application of the Four-Way Test.
By way of summary, the following quotation is very apropos:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted upon its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Preface, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Britain’s Fifth Column
A fifth column is “a group within a country at war who are sympathetic to or working for its enemies.”
We have a problem that is acknowledged but gets little to no serious attention in the official political or media spheres; the growing Islamic base that has been imported into this country. Given the above definition, it might seem absurd to imply that these people are a fifth column, seeing as we don’t appear to be directly at war, but we are. I would not call this a cold war as there are many thousands of victims of its adherents living among us in Britain currently. To do so would be to diminish their experience, something our traitorous state has done more than enough of.
Islam is its own self-contained religion and civilisational structure. By allowing this population to grow, we are fostering an ideology that will only seek to grow and supplant our society because that is what their god demands. Islam has been allowed to run parallel to our society by our cowardly state permitting Sharia courts, turning a blind eye to polygamous marriages, and generally leaving these guests to their own devices as they overtake British cities. While deplorable and deeply distressing, this has so far been contained, not so much any more. The Islamic community is breaking out, it’s establishing a significant voting bloc and this heralds a dark omen for things to come. In a great twist of irony, it seems Labour will be the first to fall foul of this new political development.
Contrary to their minority position, the Islamic community in Britain has a relatively tight grasp on small businesses in corner shops, barbers, hot food takeaways, off-licences, and petrol stations. They’ve also got an increasingly large share in drug dealing, likely facilitated by these interconnect, all hours, businesses, where cash is king and electronic fraud is missed. HMRC doesn’t have the resources to deal with such matters effectively, often fearing accusations of bigotry and being threatened with violence whenever they try to conduct their investigations. This is where Mohammed Hijab’s (a real name I’m told) bizarre TV comments about blasphemy against Islam not being tolerated by “Muslim gangsters” likely come from. We’ve seen this before, from the murder of Kris Donald to the grooming gangs. The community sheltering the vile perpetrators, in my mind, damns them. The religious extremists and the cultural criminals go hand in hand.
The more odious elements of Islam in Britain claim they have conquered Britain – that is, being imported by our traitorous elite and living off welfare. Make no mistake, this is not Mohammed taking Mecca from the pagans, these people are arrogant welfare queens that the state protects and cajoles at every opportunity. Where is this arrogance coming from? Is it their status beyond criticism? The enshrining of Islamophobia as an ultimate crime against “Modern British Values” is certainly a problem. We have Muslim MPs almost brought to tears in Parliament for mean words while White children up and down the country are groomed and raped by adherents of their ideology and culture, fanatic or otherwise; crocodile tears from a vile community that not-so-secretly laughs about the modern woes of the native British.
Muslim gaslighting doesn’t end in Parliament. Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed put out a bizarre video a few years ago in which National Front types went door to door ethnically cleansing Muslims from England. I thought this to be a particularly bizarre thing to do when you consider the terrorism rate, per capita, of the Islamic vs British community. To me this was a tell in his thinking, it acknowledges that fundamentally they are at war with us. Riz also starred in the film Four Lions, which follows a hapless Jihadi’s attempt to carry out a terror attack in the UK. The film, while amusing, does paint these men (other than the grossly unsympathetic White convert) as sympathetic in their idiocy, with Ahmed’s character leading his less bright friends astray. Outside the context of the film, I find this portrayal to be unrealistic. The average second-gen or third-gen Muslim youth sincerely hates Britain, its history, and its people. They’ll prioritise and take the side of foreign conflicts over any domestic issue concerning the British nation. The most they’ll interact with British culture is through the superficiality of sport.
Moreover, there is a bizarre Africanisation of British Muslim culture, Ali G was a send-up of this, but Cohen seemed to back away from this obvious interpretation for whatever reason. Drug culture, speaking in a pseudo-Jamaican patois (to steal from Starkey) mixed with Muslim conventions, producing a particularly unpleasant and idiotic-sounding dialect. A glorification of crime, violence, and importantly terrorism pervades this culture. We’ve seen this play out across the pro-Palestine demonstrations happening over recent months. To quickly touch on drug culture, cannabis is a major drug among this group. People like Peter Hitchens get the relationship twisted. They assume that cannabis is the cause of terror, not that these people engage in drug culture because they are themselves a criminal and subversive element in society. Do drugs exacerbate their hatred? I wouldn’t doubt it, but the hatred is before the imbibing of wicked poisons.
This is all an incredibly dangerous mix that the state and security services seem to barely be able to keep a lid on. Despite their protestations that right-wing terrorism is the biggest threat, this is clearly nonsense. Islamic terror threats outstrip right-wing ones by miles, even with the vast population difference. This can also be seen in the police’s reluctance to police the entrenched Muslim community. What are they so afraid of? My guess is terroristic violence. To cow in the face of such a threat is basically to guarantee you will hand the country to Islamists.
What is to be done about this? Ideas have been floated about banning certain aspects of the religion to encourage them to self-deport but again, this relies on enforcement by the state which it is both unwilling and incapable of doing. I would propose a ban on the production, import, and sale of ritualistically slaughtered meat as that would be the easiest to enforce without confrontation. Businesses would be shuttered, products would be impounded at customs, and we would stand firmly on the side of animal rights. It’s reprehensible to me that Britain should take a step backward in this regard to placate alien desert religions. Naturally, this ban would affect the Jewish community, but that’s a sacrifice we will need to make for the future of Britain. The Jewish community is particularly robust and progressive when it comes to issues of wrestling with God, and I’m sure they’d find a way around our new law.
Less practical solutions have been offered; recently I’ve seen people saying that public prayer should be banned in response to mass Islamic worship in London. This is a nonsense approach that would only affect our beleaguered Christian community and would likely not be enforced fairly. Some have suggested banning cousin marriages. Whilst well-intentioned, the main thrust of my objection to such a policy is that we haven’t had to ban it for it to no longer be practised in this country (outside the Muslim community and presumable other outliers). Simply put, we’d be creating a nationwide law for an imported subset of the population. It’s not the thin end of the wedge of tyranny, but it does point to the ridiculous codification of a multiracial society.
Groups are so vastly different in outlook and disposition that you need to make the detrimental illegal for it to appear to function. Perhaps we should take it as a sign that people who willingly marry their cousins and as such have the largest disabled community in Britain shouldn’t be living among us. Britain does not exist to serve as a eugenic uplift scheme for foreign people who cleave to a religion that orders them to supplant us. On an entirely different and less targeted front, the deportation of economic net negatives would substantially reduce the Islamic population of Britain, but the problem of Islam would remain, albeit at perpetual minority levels.
Approaching last Christmas, we saw the usual warning of terror attacks rolled out for many festive markets and events that are happening across the country. If you attend any of these markets, you will likely notice the ethnic make-up of the security and the broken English with which they communicate. It’s not lost on me that many of these men are of African, non-Muslim, extraction however many are of Muslim origin and I find it entirely insane that threats from Islamic terrorism would be policed by fresh off-the-boat Muslims. We have a growing force of non-white imported security, increasingly used by businesses because they are cheap and a state which seeks to enforce anti-white laws, which is worrying. Their conduct is poor, and their obvious biases and unfamiliarity with Britain can’t be ignored.
In a recent clip, a piano player is aggressively harassed by foreign security. Is the proliferation of such people across the UK security sector related to the housing of fighting aged illegals now being overseen by two of the biggest private security companies Serco and G4S? It’s certainly a question worth asking. It is not without reason that it could be expected for such people to end up in the official police forces of Britain eventually. Standards in policing have been dropping for decades, if things are not reversed, I imagine we will start seeing these people transition into the force within the decade.
To me, this is all part of the plan, the expansion of the police state. Contrary to Telegraph hacks, the police state is already here. This great panopticon of Modern Britain, with its pervasive speech laws coupled with the new ‘diverse’ religiosity, forms a tyranny of leftists and racial mafias over the native population. As with everything in Modern Britain, the “elite” have made a vast miscalculation. Creating such a system will be subverted and controlled by the most vocal, violent, and united community. Without a doubt, that community is the Islamic one. While they are still a minority, they will increasingly wield disproportionate, anti-democratic, power over us all. It’s a horrific reverse colonialism where we, the native British, have been entangled in a web of increasingly complex and restrictive laws that all but guarantee our disempowerment. The Tories are utter traitors and completely politically spent for not seeing this and not doing anything about it for their fourteen years in power. Hopefully, they’ll be destroyed at the next election and a new, vigorous, and unapologetically nationalist force can rise to lift us out of this predicament decades of political incompetence and deliberate malice have brought us to.
I do not believe Islam will take over Britain is guaranteed, I do not believe that things are too far gone. Britain is broken and while Islam is germinating in this environment it’s entirely imported. For the most part, the White British converts we see are the most broken of outsiders, with fringe academics constituting a bizarre exception. Most people in Britain look at the Islamic community with rightful derision. They may not express it openly but in their hearts, they see it as a thuggish religion of petty criminals and child rapists. This is the version of Islam that the immigrants have brought to our shores, the blame is squarely on themselves and they alone shame their Ummah. Indeed, Arab Muslims in states like the UAE or Saudi often wonder why we have let such people settle in our lands, a favour they do not permit to their “brothers and sisters.”
In order to prevent this growing Islamic problem in Britain, we must acknowledge the interconnected nature of this religion, from how drug dealers and home office employees are all working together to advance their faith and racial groups within that overarching religion. We are constantly told to take people on an individual basis, but time and time again in Modern Britain this has shown to be dangerously faulty reasoning. It’s outdated and only conceivably worked when the country was homogenous and dwelt under a Christian understanding. Those days are gone. In an irreligious and deracinated Britain, we are at the mercy of monolithic minorities who use the law to cudgel each other and especially the native population.
I had said in a previous piece that I was unsure of the civilisational war proposed by the counter-jihad movement, and I still hold that belief. I do not believe in siding with foreign interests outside of Europe that seek to interfere in the Islamic world instead of focusing on problems at home. The priority is removing Islam from Britain and more broadly Europe, not fighting Israel’s wars or throwing our lot in with Zionists. The European and Islamic civilisations should be separate and distinct.
Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
This past week, Tucker Carlson travelled to Moscow, Russia to have a sit-down interview with President Vladimir Putin. Before the almost two hour interview was conducted, Tucker Carlson explained his motives for being in Russia – a now pariah state in the Western mind – as trying to get the “other side” of the story.
After all, it has been almost two years since the greater war in Ukraine began, with the invasion of Russian forces in February of 2021. Yet no media outlet in the West has either sought, or been bothered to get a deeper understanding of the Russian motivation, instead painting the conflict with broad strokes as a Marvel-esque “good guys against bad guys” situation.
Credit where credit is due, Carlson is doing the job that most journalists these days refuse to do – report, and let the audience make up their mind. But what became very apparent from the offset of the interview conducted on the evening of 7th of February was just how unexpectedly out of his element Tucker Carlson appeared to be.
After the now infamous 45-minute long history lesson of Russian-Ukrainian relations going back to the eighth century, Tucker Carlson found himself getting overwhelmed with the offload of (possibly far-too-detailed) background context of the war and its causes.
This, for many, seemed to be shocking revelations.
“We didn’t know a world leader could be so detailed with historical knowledge!”
“He didn’t even need notes, meanwhile our leaders can barely read off of a teleprompter! Shameful!”
But Putin’s narrative and historical tangent shouldn’t come as a surprise, as it is the same reasons he gave in a published essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians which justified his reasons for the invasion and interest in bringing Ukraine (or at the very least, parts of Eastern and Southern Ukraine) into the Russian Federation.
Hardly new, shocking, or insightful – it’s the same point he has been making, very publicly, for the last two years – of course always ignored, filtered, or taken out of context by the Western news media.
When pressed to talk about NATO expansion being a possible provocation of Russia’s actions, Putin, once again, stuck to the same story he has been telling the world for the better part of a decade.
Russia is willing to cooperate with the West, and is even willing to allow an independent Ukrainian state partner with the EU and become more friendly with Western Europe and America, as long as Russia’s strategic and security interests are respected and cooperated with.
This was why for decades prior to the Maidan, Russia had not escalated provocations – beyond a few strongly worded statements – with NATO despite NATO expansion beyond Germany into the Baltics and Balkans.
Our leadership – more specifically – the warhawks and ideologues who make up the body of the US State Department and inner-mechanisms of Washington D.C. body-politic who are heavily benefiting from, and invested in the superfluous military contacts and deals, have had no interest in playing ball – even after the Cold War and the fall of the Communism in the Eastern Bloc.
Putin suggested that it wasn’t that he had poor relations with elected leaders, but rather that any time he had approached NATO, American or European leaders with opportunities for cooperation, it was always received enthusiastically, but then quickly shut-down by the “expert” teams that inform Western elected officials.
Perhaps this is just posturing and expert narrative-building that Putin tells himself to sleep better at night, and wants to manipulate the narrative to better suit his own image as a victim of the Western machine.
But speaking as a Westerner, and as someone who has seen the actions of elected governments of both left and right-leaning factions, has anything our governments done in the last thirty years, especially in the realm of foreign policy, actually benefited the world or made it better?
The Iraq War? We manufactured a false narrative about weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein working with Al-Qaeda in order to invade. We left millions dead, radicalised millions more to become vehemently anti-West, and left the vacuum for ISIS to grow in the wake of our “victory”.
The deposing of Gaddafi in Libya? We left a nation in ruins, which has now become a hotbed for open-air slave-trading, terrorism – and we now have no buffer state between Africa and the Mediterranean Sea, feeding the immigration problems of the last two decades.
The War in Afghanistan? Not only did we have no real long-term objective being there, we helped fuel the opioid crisis by encouraging, and protecting the cultivation of poppy – which would wind its way into the US through the illegal drug trade, leading millions of Americans to be hooked on literal poison. Not only this, once we left, the government we installed collapsed like a warm Easter egg and the Taliban became a regional power by seizing the weapons the U.S. military had left behind.
The Syrian Civil War? We armed “rebel” groups to topple the Assad regime, leaving a country devastated, millions of people displaced, and causing the refugee crisis in the 2010s.
I could go on and on, these are just a few of the glaring examples – but how has any of our “democracy building” fared? Did we build democracy, or did we just ruin perfectly stable countries because Washington policymakers were so convinced of their own excellence and patting themselves on the back for “safeguarding democracy” that they couldn’t see the looming disasters that would result from their insane actions?
When our reasons for going to war and causing untold levels of devastation have been as vague as “protecting/promoting/building democracy” for every single one of these conflicts, I’m not surprised that when a world leader outlines very different, very detailed reasons as to why he wants to conduct military action – analysts and intellectuals are hardly able to pick up their jaws from the floor.
Despite the fact that this has always been the way the world has always worked, it just goes to show how removed Western governments and foreign policy decision makers have become from reality.
Within a century and a half, we went from the brilliance of Bismark to the nonsensical politicking of Nuland. A truly astounding fall from grace.
Coming back to Ukraine, we had peace-talks and negotiations ready to go in Istanbul, which most likely would have resulted in an end to the bloodshed, and perhaps a North Korea type DMZ along the Dnieper that may not have made either country happy but would’ve at least established a firm red-line that neither party could justifiably cross.
But that was stifled by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who I assume was working at the behest of Washington and seeking his own Churchill moment, who instead encouraged Zelensky and the Ukrainian government to “fight on!”.
Almost an entire generation of young Ukrainian men have been wiped out, millions have fled the country as refugees, and it has become a meat-grinding war of attrition – one that the Ukrainians cannot possibly win by their sheer lack of numbers, but instead they will be slowly grinded down into submission, regardless of how many arms and funds are sent by the West.
All of this, because we have been refusing to sit-down, have a little sense of humility in the changing world we live in, and compromise at any level.
We have been force-fed this phoney narrative that Vladimir Putin is this seething maniac, frothing at the mouth rabidly because he needs this war, and he needs to win it otherwise his entire rule is delegitimised, and his iron fist over Russia be brought down – that all we need to do is keep fighting and we will win! The good guys always win, right?
But Putin’s conduct and body-language in the Tucker Carlson interview spoke very differently to the narrative we have been fed.
This is not someone who is on edge about this conflict, nor feeling as if his administration and rule over Russia is under serious threat. His body-language was as if this whole conflict was simply just another day at the office – that he is willing to negotiate to end these hostilities, but if not all he has to do is wait.
And who can blame him for this certain calm confidence that he carries?
At the same time the Carlson interview was being broadcast on X, President Biden held a press conference in the White House to assure the press and general public that his brain hasn’t turned into mashed potatoes – in the same speech he said that President Assisi of Mexico would allow humanitarian aid into Palestine. Reassuring, of course.
While the United States, Great Britain, and the broader Western world are all on-track for domestic disaster – with severe economic inflation, political and social rifts that have turned people against each other and their governments, and self-imposed demographic suicide – why would Putin need to worry at all about what the West does?
All he has to do is wait – and he has the growing world of the East, namely India and China, that will continue to trade and maintain relations with Russia, and not seek to harass or get involved in Russian domestic affairs.
Ukraine is not the “last stand” of the West as it has been made out to be. I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in the Western world who is actually enthusiastic about the idea of dying in the mud and snow-ridden trenches of Donetsk and Luhansk to defend… foreign democracy? If that even is what we are defending, after all, rival parties have been banned in the Rada.
No. Frankly, the United States is on the path to isolation one way or another. It will likely be because the domestic situation would become so bad that it has no other choice but to focus its efforts inwardly to prevent complete national fracture.
If push really comes to shove, even the warhawks in Washington would rather pull out from escalating into larger hostilities with a nation that can match the United States in terms of nuclear firepower. Having already made their billions of dollars in weapons contracts, what is the benefit of further plunging the world into a war which will surely lead to mass devastation, leaving no possible markets to sell their goods.
And when the United States withdraws much of its interest from Europe, where will that leave the EU?
Without American energy, and without American guarantees of protection, Europe will have to find its own ways of maintaining itself – which will be made all the more difficult since the position of the EU in regard to Russia, and the Russian supply of energy has been to sanction it and stop it, with no real viable alternative.
This will only exacerbate the pre-existing issues in Europe – when quality of life is severely lessened, and basic needs like warm homes in cold winters and steady food supplies are no longer guaranteed, the masses will lash out, first at each other, and eventually at the politicians and governments who led to this disastrous eventuality.
This is what the war has become. An international game of chicken, with one side holding a significant home-turf advantage. Sanctions have not worked, but instead pushed Russia to internally change to become less dependent on trading in US dollars and looking for foreign alternatives.
Funding and arming the Ukrainians has meant that a war that could’ve been over in a matter of weeks and months has now grinded into a war that will last for years, until the front lines simply cannot be maintained by lack of numbers. The humanitarian disaster that could’ve been averted almost a decade ago has left one of the largest countries in Europe devastated, decimated, and tens of millions dead and displaced – not just soldiers, but civilians.
Russia has been pushed further to work with other foreign global competitors like China and India, rather than European neighbours – both nations having some of the largest population centres on Earth. Pax Americana is dead and buried, never to return in our lifetimes – it was killed violently by the very people who were put in charge to maintain it. A sort of twisted ironic suicide.
One of the most important points brought up in the Tucker Carlson interview was Putin’s outlook on the changing world. He has seen the winds of influence and importance change from the West to the East, and he has adapted accordingly.
When discussing the opportunity to bring the conflict to an end via negotiating a peace deal with Ukraine (i.e. the United States) he stated that there were avenues to do so with dignity, that will allow the United States to have the PR victory it so desperately craves to save face from ultimately wasted efforts.
The avenue is there, and if I was one of the embedded decision-makers in Washington I would take a mutually beneficial deal as soon as possible – as the alternative will not be escalation into a hot war, but enduring diminishment of both hard and soft power in the continent, as European states begin to understand that they cannot rely on the United States to have their best interests at heart, or make sound policy decisions on their behalf – which is the ultimate function of NATO.
As T.S. Eliot once wrote:
“This is the way the world ends – not with a bang, but a whimper”.
The world we once knew is coming to an end, this much is overwhelmingly clear.
It is not our current flock of leaders or decision-makers – but rather it is up to us, the next generation of individuals and standard-bearers whether we will adapt to the changing world and rekindle the fire into something that endures, or whether we will let our civilization fade into obscurity and extinguish, never to return.
While we may not have learned anything all that new or groundbreaking from the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin, I think it serves a greater purpose than a simple “gotcha” to Western journalism or the current political class.
It is an insight into how the “other side” thinks of us, of our future, and our decline. We ought to wise up, prepare for the long, difficult road ahead, and ensure that the only thing that actually “declines” is the stupidity of our leadership and the influence of the unelected gaggle of fools that believe they can put a halt to the motions of the changing world we find ourselves in.
For My Ex-Libertarians
The United Kingdom, and especially the Isle of Great Britain, has a very particular legal quirk that sets it apart from Western Civilisation, and possibly most of the uncivilised world as well. There is no legal right to self-defence. Everyone knows that to some extent, “guns are banned” in the UK, and we’re nothing like those silly Americans who can carry so-called assault weapons in Wall-Mart. Yet most Britons will be surprised to learn that non-lethal options such as pepper spray are only available to law enforcement personnel, and that possessing any product “made or adapted to cause a person injury” (aka the most effective way to reasonably defend yourself or those around you) in a public or private space is against the law. Instead the ladies and gentlemen of the UK may purchase a rape whistle, as politely suggested by the West Yorkshire Police on their “Ask The Police” webpage. The UK is so averse to the concept of self-defence that in 2012, American Self Defence instructor, Tim Larkin was barred from entering the country by Theresa May during her stint as Home Secretary.
This is a stark contrast to the continent, where countries like Austria, Germany, and Hungary have strong, codified legal definitions of self-defence with “stand your ground” laws, as well as the option to carry things such as bear spray, and with an easily obtainable permit you can even carry pistols capable of firing rubber bullets or CS gas pellets. In France, similar laws apply, pepper spray, gas pistols capable of firing CN or CS Gas are available to any law-abiding citizen above the age of 18. Whilst carrying them in public for self-defence is not a valid reason, French law stipulates you may use them lawfully to defend your house and person. Of course, there are still problems here. Stéphane Charbonnier, the director of the famous Charlie Hebdo magazine and sports shooting enthusiast applied for a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence, this permit was denied, and he was told he could rely upon his police protection. We all know what happened next.
Following the various terror attacks across France in 2015, the French government permitted all police officers to carry their service firearms whilst off duty. Compare this to the UK, where outside of Northern Ireland, only specialist police are allowed to even think about firearms and have very little support from the government or the courts when they do shoot, despite their enshrined right to kill in service of the state and his Majesty. Imagine if Westminster had decided to arm all British city police services after the Murder of Lee Rigby, or in 2017 after multiple violent terrorist attacks across Britain. Imagine a Britain that allowed off duty police or even current or ex-servicemen the ability to carry a firearm in public for the purposes of self-defence. I digress, the arming of the British Police is another debate for another time.
This all seems rather reasonable and modern, two European democracies with modern, democratic attitudes towards personal self-defence, but that’s not all. Countries like Italy and Spain allow high risk individuals and business owners such as jewellers or cash transit guards to carry firearms on their person, or to be kept in a secure location at their place of work. There are similar laws like this across the less developed nations of Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. But what’s extremely interesting, is that right in the heartland of Europe, there are two countries that stand alone when it comes to modern European firearms and self-defence law, Austria, and Czechia (formally known as the Czech Republic). Both of these countries permit civilians to own firearms for the express purpose of self-defence, and even allow civilians to carry them (Czechia) or very conditionally (Austria). The majority of all firearms held in Czechia are held for protection, and more than half of all Czech firearm owning citizens have a permit to carry a firearm for self-defence. Austria has some more specific use cases, but the general legal position is that if you own any sort of firearm, or any other kind of legal weapon for that matter, it can be used to lawfully defend yourself or your property. Austrian business owners or employees of said businesses (with express legal permission from the owner of the premises) can carry their firearms within their private premises but carrying prohibited weapons in public is illegal without a lawful reason. I don’t need to attack your brain with graphs, stats, and differential equations to prove to you that modern European nations with clear self-defence laws that empower victims with the ability to neutralise threats quickly and effectively to their person, their personal liberty, and their property are better places to live in than any major British city.
If you cannot effectively defend yourself or your property, how can you be expected to defend your country? In 2013, after Lee Rigby was brutally executed on a busy street in broad daylight, there was a lot of discussion about how people in the background are just carrying on with their own lives, walking past the two-blood-soaked Islamic militants as if public beheadings were just a normal part of life in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. A similar discussion has opened up regarding the recent rape case on the tube, about how other passengers just sat there and let it happen. The general public is aghast and shocked at such cruel indifference. But all official documentation from government and law enforcement officials in the UK recommend non-intervention, that your best choice of action is to merely alert the authorities and wait. And even then, there’s a possibility that even a police officer acting in the course of their duty to protect the general public, can be charged with murder. The current UK legal system requires all violent action towards others to be “proportional force” to be considered lawful self-defence, but how do you calculate what is proportional to a man raping an unconscious woman right in front of you? Surely in this instance you apply the most efficient and effective method you have at hand, regardless of how much damage is done to the assailant?
With the official legal advice of the government and all Law Enforcement in the UK advocating a form of learned helplessness, it’s no wonder that when confronted with difficult and violent situations, many can only watch in horror as they wait for the equally ineffective authorities to arrive and diffuse the situation. Now what happens if you are a young woman, and after calling for assistance you are greeted by Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens? After that incident, the complete indifference to the “Near-Eastern Ceasefire of the week” public disturbances, and the overall lack of an effective police presence across any British Urban centres, what’s the point in calling the police? They won’t arrive on time, and it’s more than likely they’ll have you sleeping in a cell when they finally get there.
My own personal experience of the ineffectiveness and apathy from the British Police Services, was last year, when my mother’s car was stolen from her drive in the early hours of the morning. Already prepared for the Brazilification of the UK, the car was equipped with a tracking device. Being model citizens who know better than to engage in vigilantism, we scoped out the location on google maps and informed our police service that the car had been stolen, but we could also provide the police with the approximate location, aiding with the investigation and bringing about swift justice to car thieves! After all this isn’t South Africa, where you have to bring your own pen to the police station to report a crime. Amidst the excitement, our local police service informed us that since the car was now located in Outer London, the case would have to go through a lengthy transfer process to the Metropolitan Police Service before anything could happen. This process could take hours or days depending on how busy things were, and things are always busy for the Met. This immediately put a damper on the celebrations. Who knew how long it would be before the tracker was found, and the car relocated to a secure location beyond the reach of google street-view…
The deskbound officer heard our dismay and informed us that car theft in the UK currently follows a rather specific modus operandi. Cars are stolen to order by professionals, who then take the cars to out of the way locations, blocking the car from view with vans or other large vehicles, then they leave the cars alone until multiple stolen cars can be transported in bulk to the coast and then shipped off into the unknown. Then the officer told us that we could, as private citizens, retrieve our own property, as long as we believed that it was safe to do so. Yes, you read that correctly, the policeman who took our call, told us to go get our car back by ourselves, and to bring proof of ownership and identification because we would most likely be stopped by the police on our way home as we would be in the possession of an “un-stolen vehicle”. When I heard this I actually belly laughed, it was like being back in South Africa again. Nevertheless, we decided to sally forth.
As South Africans, our natural instinct was to reach for the 9mm for some insurance. Sorry, this is a civilised western nation, you can’t have that anymore. And even if we could, British laws would criminalise us for bringing anything with us for self-defence, and we would potentially receive greater punishment than any of the car thieves if we had anything on us which could be used to harm another person. To cut a long story short, despite assurances from police that someone would be dispatched to make sure we weren’t bleeding out on a dodgy council estate, we retrieved the vehicle with zero assistance from the police. It was located on an estate covered in bits and pieces of various luxury SUVs and Saloons, with masked youths cutting up cars on driveways in broad daylight. If anyone came at us with a knife or blunt instrument, my only effective means of self-defence would’ve been to hit them with my car, certainly a gross violation of “proportional force”.
This is what made me realise that the British Police and the legal system have completely failed the ordinary person. We were explicitly told by the police that if we ever wanted to see the car again, our best course of action would’ve been to retrieve it ourselves, providing that “it was safe to do so.” How is retrieving a stolen vehicle from a council estate safe in any capacity? Is “safe vigilantism” the future of law and order in Britain? The British police outsourcing law and order to the general public is not a recent phenomenon, and there have been many other cases where the police have been dependent upon law-bending civilians to enforce the peace.
Now if we were Sikhs, rather than dreaded White South Africans, we would be well within our rights to carry a blade during this endeavour because the legal system makes an exception for a weapon that has to be carried at all times “for religious purposes”. That religious purpose is explicitly self-defence mind you. Despite the fact that carrying any kind of blade explicitly for self-defence is a gross violation of UK law. Quite famously during the 2011 riots, Sikhs took to the streets with swords, bats, and all manner of weapons to defend their communities, and instead of the police disarming the sword-wielding paramilitary forces and dispersing, the Sikhs were praised by the Prime Minister! If I took even a rounders bat with me to rescue my mother’s stolen car I would’ve gone to jail.
The interesting thing about this Sikh tangent, is that the Seax, the famous historical general-purpose knife of the Anglo-Saxons, was considered to be a status symbol of a freeman, and that anyone without one was possibly a serf or a slave. Could an Anglo-Saxon freeman lawfully carry a culturally and religiously significant object like the Seax in modern Britain?
The 2011 August Riots revealed a long-held apathy within the police and the law enforcement caste of the United Kingdom. Across the country, militias appeared outside of Turkish barber shops and kebab bars. This mass mobilisation was welcomed across the political landscape, with no minister brave enough to question why these businesses and community centres had a surplus of edged weapons and baseball bats conveniently ready for an occasion like this. The EDL came out in force in Enfield and North London, and were reprimanded by the police and political establishment merely for being present. None of them were armed with more than an England football shirt, yet received none of the praise the middle eastern baseball enthusiasts got from the then Prime Minister, David Cameron.
I was going to conclude the article there, but since writing began, three more events have come to attention. On the 30th of December, 2023, roughly 50 men from the London Eritrean community gathered in Camberwell, armed with bats and wooden planks, injuring four officers and disturbing the public good. Apparently only eight individuals were arrested during this act, when you can clearly see countless men violating every British weapon law, as well as assaulting police officers and vehicles with weapons whilst the police seem only capable of timidly backing away. 50 or more Eritreans with cudgels fighting a pitched battle with the police, barely any news coverage, less than a quarter of the perpetrators arrested… Why? What’s the point in even showing up? Let the Eritreans bash up their own embassy if you’re not going to arrest them, it’s probably better they harass their own government rather than vent their frustrations on ordinary Londoners.
The second event was the reveal that Lawrence Morgan, the Jamaican Gangster whose deportation flight was prevented by a jumped-up Cambridge grad who now resides in Norway, was scheduled to be physically removed after a string of violent firearm related incidents. In 2016 Lawrence Morgan was imprisoned for only five years and ten months after being charged with the unlawful possession of a firearm, ammunition, and controlled substances. Another two-year sentence in 2017 for drugs charges, and then in 2020 he is caught on CCTV footage participating in a lethal Birmingham gang shootout whilst riding a small bicycle. No murder or attempted murder charges, despite the battle causing the violent execution of his associate, and Morgan himself caught on CCTV firing a pistol with intent. Jailed again in 2021 for only five years. The authorities attempted to deport Lawrence Morgan in 2023, if they fail to do so again (Border authorities have reportedly hired a hanger to stage deportations since they have become completely incapable of doing their job) Lawrence Morgan will most likely be back on the streets of England in a few years’ time. Ideally Lawrence Morgan would’ve been deported after his first firearms offence, but the only reason the authorities have attempted to deport him now was because in October last year, UK prison governors announced that British prisons were rapidly approaching full capacity. How many failed deportations do they let you have before they grant you citizenship?
And thirdly, a horrific chemical attack was carried out by an Afghan Asylum seeker, one let into the country despite a history of violent and sexual offences. The police now seem incapable of finding him and have publicly lamented that it’s “sooo difficult” to find someone who doesn’t use their bank card or a mobile phone. The forces of the state have no issue when it comes to keeping track of every football fan who has ever gotten a little rowdy at an away match, but a violent sexual predator can disappear into thin air as long as they stay away from their smartphone. As an ordinary citizen, no rape whistle or panic button can defeat a lunatic armed with even a small quantity of a corrosive substance. What can you possibly do when threatened with life changing injuries and or death? The legal precedent of proportional force would suggest that ordinary civilians should disfigure or maim an acid attacker, instead of putting the threat down with a human and instantaneous response.
Idris Elba and other lionised television gangsters such as the Labour party have begun a call for the complete ban of items such as machetes and “zombie knives” aka any large single bladed knife or sword, like the various kebab knives and industrial cutting tools that many people use for work, daily life, and the odd riot prevention. Nevermind the fact you’re more likely to be stabbed to death by a supermarket steak knife or B&Q screwdriver than meet your end facing an authentic katana or antique sabre wielding urban youth. There has been nothing from these public figures about controlling the usage of drain cleaner or any other household substances that can permanently disfigure or kill someone, but tools and items used by ordinary citizens, historians, law abiding collectors, and specialist craftsmen must be taken away because their mere existence corrupts the urban children and encourages them to embrace gang culture. As usual, our politicians would rather punish law abiding citizens instead of actually attempting to tackle why the urban populations of Britain prefer smoking weed and carving each other up instead of going to youth clubs and boxing gyms.
I expect Lawrence Morgan and other violent Jamaican gangsters will be back on our streets on “good behaviour”, in no time, and other local roadmen will be offered shorter and shorter sentences. Violent schizophrenic, with a history of incidents, Valdo Calocane, who stabbed three people to Death in Nottingham is not being charged with murder, but manslaughter. Following this trend, after a few years of medication and observation in a secure hospital he will undoubtedly be released back into the general public, to make room for more aggressive mentally unwell individuals.
We can no longer rely upon nautical building accessories like Narwhal Tusks, and have a sensible European approach to the legal right to defend one’s self, one’s property, those around you, and that which you hold dear. If you look at prior days of infamy, such as the Siege of Sidney Street or the Tottenham Outrage, when doing battle with violent aliens, the forces of law and order were joined by armed civilians giving chase themselves, or equipped and supported by civilians. Conveniently enough, the fact that the police during the Siege of Sidney Street were armed with firearms provided by a local gunsmith is left out by almost all official sources such as the BBC and London Police museum exhibitions.
With the appropriate equipment, perhaps it would be possible to galvanise the British public and restore even a semblance of law and order to Urban Britain. If at least one person had ready access to an incapacitating weapon like pepper spray or even a concealable firearm on London Bridge that day, five people would not have been stabbed. Across all of England’s terror attacks and similarly violent incidents, there are multiple references to bystanders resorting to desperate and weird items to defend themselves with like skateboards, tusks, or ornamental spears from historical displays. Granted pepper spray won’t do very much against a Christmas terror-lorry barrelling towards you but merely knowing in a violent situation you would be capable of doing more than cowering in fear and waiting for the royally appointed death squads might encourage the British population to have more of a spine.
The Effigies of Crediton
William Peryam (1534–1604) of Little Fulford lies in the north side of the chancel. Adjacent to the west side of ‘Will’ is ‘Liz’, Elizabeth Tuckfield (1593–1630). Then John de Sully and his wife Isobel can be found at the end of the south choir aisle. John (1282–1388) was Lord of the Manor of nearby Iddesleigh, noted since for its public house, The Duke of York, recently frequented by Our King, where the author Michael Morpurgo of Warhorse fame says he talked to an old soldier with first-hand knowledge of the use of horses during the Great War.
The Church of the Holy Cross at Crediton in the county of Devon is often empty of live people, which helps. Once known by the Pythonesque name The Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross and the Mother of Him who Hung Thereon, the church today is an ancient and sacred space alive with dust and history and I heartily recommend a visit. The grand nave and chancel of the current building date from the fifteenth century. The existing structure is built on the site of what was the cathedral of the Bishop of Crediton until the mid-eleventh century when the see was transferred to nearby Exeter. Conveniently, it sits twixt Brampford Speke on whose riverbanks I flyfish the Exe, and Crediton Tandoori where I gorge on lamb saag most Saturday evenings (when fishless) during season.
I find my four friends to be patient listeners. They have now replaced the old monks – a housemaster, a headmaster and a teacher monk – who used to listen and advise on how best to conquer life’s rapids. All are now dead and gone, my monks, buried in Monks’ Wood cemetery at Ampleforth, a Benedictine school and monastery, in North Yorkshire.
The peace one can find in this fine church in Crediton, especially on the pew nearest to ‘John and Izzie’, elevates one’s thoughts. Problems solve themselves while dust dances in the light. Speaking to effigies is a practice I recommend to all my friends – they don’t talk back; they never sue and not once have they lost their tempers.
The effigies have helped me map out a business plan and decipher a pressing recruitment challenge. We came up with some inspired moves for the backs in my son’s rugby team and I felt reassured in their presence of numbers at the recent death of a beloved labrador. I have role-played a court case with my effigy pals, pondered a complex moral quandary and worked through innumerable challenges to the point of viable outcomes.
The process I employ with the four is less Ghostbusters and more mentor mind mapping. (Mind mapping is when you write, draw, or think up pictures of a goal that you would like to achieve and then you brainstorm everything you need to do to achieve that goal. One can add mentors for assistance and wisdom). Some people are clever enough to mind map without the need for effigies – I am fool enough to require their help. I use the layout of Crediton church and my imagining of the characteristics of the effigies to build mind-maps in my head. Not wishing to big up their egos, I suppose the effigies merely provide effective sounding boards and some geographical parameters while existing in a quiet and holy place where one can think, open to the universe.
I hand a problem to each of my stone counsellors. Financial decisions tend go to Will, who was once Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Family issues and questions of morality go to the ladies. John tends to get lumbered with questions of strategy for no reason other than he looks like a cunning, card-playing chap. Then I work my way around the church in my mind’s eye, imagining an exchange of thoughts, often inspired by the coloured light that shines through the church windows, giving off Newtonian stimuli. You’d be amazed at how effective the whole process is. If we get stuck, then there is always that gigantic crucifix atop the main altar.
When I am disburdened, I light a candle, pray for their souls and for loved ones alive and dead, then put a few quid in the roof fund box. This is the most practical thanks I can give my counsellors for their guiding light as they would all erode without shelter from Devon rains – alas, some already suffer from worn noses.
Speaking to the dead was a capital offence punishable by stoning under Old Testament law. God in the Bible considers talking to the dead a detestable practice and He calls His people to be blameless. In mitigation, I do not believe I am really talking to the dead in Crediton church, but I confess that talking to my effigies is sometimes easier than talking to the living. I am reminded by them of Marcus Aurelius’ encouragement to, “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.”
When we are honest with ourselves, we are all mere effigies. As long as light is transmitted, who cares what state of living one’s assistants take?
As one of my Benedictines taught me, death is but a thin veil and we are never far from the dead. He was with two boys at Medjugorje who had recently lost a sister in a tragic accident. They pleaded with him to ask her to give them a sign that she was well. As he prayed out loud before them, a rose seller walked close by, and they were all overcome with the sweet smell of roses.
It is thus at Crediton church. I enter burdened with problems and leave smelling roses.
Kino
Between Tradition and Modernity: A Review of “British Conservatism: 2024 to 2044”, by Richard Cruston
This lively volume follows the development of right-wing thought in Britain between the beginning of the premiership of Labour’s Keir Starmer and the end of the presidency of Mark Hall of the United Party.
Richard Cruston, Professor of Political Theory at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a learned scholar who has written biographies of Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton and Jacob Rees Mogg. His deep knowledge of ideas and personalities were clearly essential in developing this book.
His story begins with the astonishing electoral failure of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2024 — ending almost fourteen years of more or less unrivalled Conservative success. In exile, the Conservatives found themselves fragmented, both politically, with the Johnson loyalists in a fiery campaign to make the unenthusiastic former Mayor of London and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Leader of the Conservative Party, and ideologically, with “post-liberals”, “national conservatives” and “classical liberals” vying for influence.
If conservative ideas mattered at all, it was in their influence on the Labour government. Professor Cruston is an authority on the development of post-liberalism — a communitarian trend which earned support in the wake of the 2028 London riots — which spread from the capital across provincial England — as its emphasis on order and localism chimed with the state’s management of societal division. Cruston suggests that there might have been the faint whiff of opportunism in the combination of communitarian rhetoric and neo-authoritarian security measures — with more of an emphasis on “community hubs” and “peace enforcement” than on family and faith — but it was politically successful.
The 2030 blackouts were considered the beginning of the end for the Labour government. Prime Minister Meera Devi won the 2032 elections on a platform that some commentators called “neo-Thatcherite” — promising economic liberalisation, energy reform and closer links with what became known as “the younger powers”. Professor Cruston disapproves of what he describes “the fetishisation of the market” — though he doesn’t say where the power was meant to come from.
Devi’s government placed significant emphasis on character and individual responsibility. “Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important,” she was fond of saying, quoting Britain’s first female prime minister, “Is the high road to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.” Regrettably, her time in power was dogged by scandal, with ministers being accused of cocaine addiction, using prostitutes, doing cocaine with prostitutes and being addicted to doing cocaine off prostitutes.
Ashley Jones’ Labour premiership offered conservatives a chance to regroup. Had they forgotten the ends of politics as well as the means? Were they too focused on economics and not culture? Cruston is informative on the subject of the traditionalist “Lofftism” which flourished in the late 2030s, only being interrupted by the “Summer of Crises” which finally led to the United Party taking power in March 2039.
Conservative thought flourished in the early years of the 2040s, with generous funding being invested in private schools, universities, think tanks and private clubs. Here — if you were fortunate enough to be invited — you could hear about great right-wing minds from Hayek to Oakeshott, and from Kruger to Hannan. It was a time of intellectual combat but also intellectual collegiality. Millian liberals could debate Burkean conservative and yet remain friends. You could say anything, some intellectuals joked, as long as you didn’t influence policy.
With the unexpected departure of President Hall on the “New Horizons” flight the future of British conservatism looks mysterious. Professor Cruston counsels that we return to Burke — a voice that spoke in a time of similarly great upheaval. Perhaps we should heed his words.
In Conversation with Curtis Yarvin (The Return of Don Quixote and Anglo-Meiji Restoration)
Curtis Yarvin, known by his pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’, is one of the most prominent social critics and reactionary writers of the contemporary era. Yarvin’s blogs, ‘Gray Mirror’ and ‘Imperial Melodies’, can be found on Substack.
Yarvin’s words are in light.
There’s a little-known Chesterton work called The Return of Don Quixote. Don’t know it at all?
I don’t. I mean, I’m familiar with the original Don Quixote by Cervantes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Return of Don Quixote, and it’s about the victory of a joyous reactionary movement, written as an Edwardian novel, set in the future. It’s very interesting and it sort of catches the sort of joyousness right, which is an absolutely essential part of, like, any kind of restoration of this type.
And yet, you know, kind of Russian Hide And Seek, which is of course a much later work, is more…black-pilled, you might say, and perhaps a little more convincing. And I would say, sort of read them both. You’ll get kind of some of both of these ideas, but just breaking out of this incredible, I mean, it’s like, when you look in the rear-view mirror at Brexit. It’s like 0.1% of a British Meiji, right? And it’s a completely failed venture, and a completely failed thing, you know, I was reading Richard North’s blog EU Referendum, back in the earlier ‘00s, you know, I think he was associated to some extent with, like, early UKIP, and, um you know, the idea of having a referendum on Britain leaving the EU in 2005, let alone that referendum winning, it seemed like such, what we call here, a stretch goal.
It seemed so unimaginable and it happens. This incredible revolution happens and of course it happens and it doesn’t amount to shit. It just has no momentum. As soon as it wins it begins to lose. And, actually, the main effect of Brexit was to destroy the Brexit movement.
Pretty much.
You can’t help but feel that when you do something and people put that much effort and that much hope into something, and in retrospect you can look at it and just say “Well duh, obviously that was gonna…there was no way that could have worked in any way, shape, or form and done anything useful or relevant, or whatever,” and, the, you know…the definition of insanity is making the same mistake twice, and, right, and here, is just the form of government that has been how England rose to greatness and has been governed for pretty much all of the last two millennia, you know, before the invitation to William, right? You know, I guess, you know, William, it’s hard to know to what extent William of Orange was really interested in British domestic affairs. I don’t know how great it was.
Queen Anne was certainly pretty feeble and um, you did know that the um, the king has the right to veto legislation in parliament, right?
Yes.
And do you know who the last person, the last king, who actually used that power was?
It’s not going to be James I is it? Someone distant. Charles I?
Here’s a hint. It wasn’t a king at all.
Really? OK, so was it Queen Anne then? Was it in fact Queen Anne?
It was in fact Queen Anne. Uh, she did it once, and I forget over what. Probably some completely symbolic bullshit.
I see. They went “No, no, this is no good, we’ll get this Dutch fellow”.
Yeah, yeah, it was sort of their ‘lordships die in the dark’ moment. I think, like you know, the People’s Budget of 1911 or whatever. Yeah, Queen Anne was like the legitimate daughter of James II, right? And there was some hope that – and she was basically a Jacobite heir – it’s sort of like this woman Georgia Meloni who gets elected in Italy spouting all this rhetoric and then she’s like “We must fight for the Ukraine, the cause of Ukraine is the cause of all of us”, right?
You know, when I was in Portugal, I was in a small town in this summer and, you know, all of the…you would swear the whole population of Setúbal, Portugal, had come out and, like, popular enthusiasm for the cause of the Ukraine was everywhere, spontaneous graffiti, right, you know, and it’s like, these expressions of popular enthusiasm, like ‘workers of the world, unite’ in Czechoslovakia in 1976. You know, the greengrocer does not really care about workers of the world and I’m pretty sure that if you’re a bus driver in Setúbal, Portugal, your interest in the Dnieper isn’t really – excuse me, Dnipro – is fairly limited, and the uh, just, I mean, it’s increasingly comical, and so, the idea of just like, this whole structure collapsing in one boom is so much more realistic than the idea of Brexit. It’s so much more realistic. People think it’s unrealistic, no, it may be unrealistic, but it is vastly more realistic than Brexit.
I read your piece about a Meiji Restoration. I was sat in the middle of a bunch of naval officers and I was thinking “You know what? Rishi Sunak’s not very popular, neither is Keir Starmer, nobody likes parliament, what would actually happen right now if King Charles did in fact just go ‘guys’…”
Martial law.
Yeah exactly. What would actually happen? And you know, there’s been this sort of endless slew of headline after headline after headline of “Oh, this thing isn’t working, we’ll get the army in to drive trucks” and “Oh, this isn’t working, we’ll get the navy in to sort out this hospital”, and you just sort of look at this thing and think “Why is it that the last sort of functional bit of our government is essentially military?” And “Why is it that…” what would actually happen if…would anyone stop it? Would anyone in the military?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was in Dartmouth. I was at BRNC when the Queen died.
Oh wow.
It’s full of these young, early twenties cadets, who are going through…you know, I was there the day…so I think I was one of the last people to officially join the Queen’s navy and one of the first to join the King’s, and you know, everybody, the whole, the whole college just stopped. I went out onto the Parade Ground at about 5pm in the early evening and every church bell in Dartmouth was ringing across the valley. And yes, there’s a huge amount of symbolic nothingness to it –
But that symbolism can be converted back into reality.
Right!
And everyone would be stunned at how easy it was, and how obvious it was.
I don’t think anyone would say no.
Well, would Sir Arthur Scargill bring the unions into the street? Would like, you know, would the SpADs like set up barricades outside of Nelson’s Column? What?
Right, right. I don’t see it.
I don’t see it. And so you can have your New Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. You just have to realise that the chains that are bonding you are made of paper.
But that’s the question. The new Prince of Wales hands out copies of the Big Issue –
[*Laughs*]
And I just don’t see the king going along with this, so what do we do? Do we have some kind of new Cromwellian parliamentary lie where oh no, no, the king is held captive by these malignants and bad ideas, what is it? What on Earth are we doing?
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, um, maybe we, you know, uh, I don’t know, if Prince William did enough acid, maybe?
Birth of the Cosmoproletariat (Magazine Excerpt)
When you hear talk of globalisation, the winners and losers have become fairly set categories: the “winners” are the hyper-mobile, global class that are capable of picking up and putting down almost anywhere, whether that is London or LA, Tokyo or Berlin, Moscow or – well, maybe not Moscow, at least not at the moment.
These winners are the beneficiaries of the most dynamic economy that has ever existed in history before, in such a way that – even if we cannot put a hard date on it – I think it is pretty clear that the modern global economy defines the contemporary era of mankind more than anything else. We are living in the “global age” and there will inevitably be those for whom that age is good.
And then there are those for whom that age is bad. These are the majority of people whose lives are usually spent in one place, from school to work and, if they’re lucky, a few years of retirement. They might be more mobile than their ancestors, for whom life was inevitably spent in the same village, whilst they travel around their county or district but, broadly speaking, never stray too far.
These are the losers, we are told. They have suffered the effects of globalisation – declining industry, evaporating investment, creaking and groaning infrastructure – but are powerless to do anything about it, as they get caught in a cycle in which power follows money and money flows away.
So why not go where the money is? Why not travel abroad, where the work is? Part of the reason is that the last thing the “losers” have left is each other. The day before the In/Out Brexit Referendum, news vox-pops of people on the street saying they would vote to Leave, when asked why, gestured and said “look around. What do I have left to lose?” The backdrop of shuttered shops and boarded windows was the answer, and it wasn’t a very compelling one.
But the answer off-screen was one that the Remain camp had tried to buy into – they had their families, their households, their communities. When David Cameron claimed Brexit would “put a bomb” under the British economy, and George Osborne’s treasury pumped out statistics on the damage it would do to the average household, they were trying to speak to the rational brain that fears material loss. It made sense – it was the same brain they had been speaking to for six years with messages of necessary spending cuts, tax breaks, and increasing job opportunities.
Except this did not work because that audience was not there. The average person did not have the material loss to be threatened, and at a time when fatherlessness was rising, families were breaking down, and over three million households were single-parent; even that small amount to lose was felt to be lost already.
The one thing that the losers had left was their community – and by and large, these were communities that had been decimated by the austerity years. So, they stayed, because their families might be thin and disappearing but their community remained fairly strong.
When Karl Marx decided that the slow transfer of people from the countryside to the cities meant that the “proletariat” would emerge, he was attempting a scientific analysis of what was already happening. As people moved from field to factory, leaving behind their old places in the world and attempting to take up new ones, they forged bonds of solidarity to replace the ones they lost. Human beings are deeply sociable, both from an inherent reality, and an existential need; we can only come into this world as a result of others, but we need to be seen and recognised while we’re here.
So, Britain especially saw the rise of industrial communities – and not just the political conscious-raising efforts of Trade Unions, for politics is tiresome and boring, really. There were also football clubs, local churches, free schools, civic action groups, and so on – in Bristol, there were 400 alone. I’m sure Marx’s miserable mind was able to only imagine the political, but in truth the personal is so much more interesting and enriching than the political. Don’t be fooled that they are the same thing.
This is an excerpt from “Nuclear”.
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A Romantic Case for Anime
We’ve all felt it—the mixed excitement and dread at hearing a beloved book is set to be made into a movie. They might do it right, capturing not only key plot events but also (and more importantly) how it feels to be swept up in the work as a whole; 2020’s Emma with Anya Taylor-Joy comes to my mind, most of all for the way it captures how someone who understands and loves Austen’s ubiquitous irony might feel when reading her work. However, they also might do it poorly; despite both 1974 and 2013 attempts’ being worth watching, I’ve yet to see a rendition of The Great Gatsby that captures the book’s plot and narrative tone in the right proportion (in my opinion, the 1974 version emphasizes the former but misses some of the latter, while parts of the 2013 version exagerrate the latter just to the border of parody). My readers have, no doubt, already imagined examples of works they’ve always wished could be faithfully put onto the screen and others they’d rather not be risked to the vicissitudes of translating from one medium to another.
The last decade has thankfully seen a growth in long-form, box-office quality productions that makes it more possible than ever to imagine longer works being produced without curtailing their lengthy plotlines—example, the BBC’s 2016 rendition of War and Peace. However, this leaves another, perhaps more important, hurdle to hazard: while live-action media can now faithfully follow the plots of the originals, there still remains the difficulty of conveying the tone and feel of the works, especially when different media necessarily have different capacities and limitations of representation. Though I’ve enjoyed productions that have been made, I don’t know that I would expect live-action renditions to reproduce the aesthetic impression of, say, Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Crime and Punishment, and I worry that attempts to do so might mar more than measure up. The problem lies in the difficulty of translating characters’ inner experience—which is usually conveyed by a stylizing narrator—via the essentially externalistic medium of the camera eye.
While a live action movie or series might remain faithful to the selective events in a plot, the lack of an interpretive narrator removes a key element of what defines epic poems and novels. Paradoxically, the narrowing of perspective through a stylizing narrator allows story to move from the limits of natural events into the limitlessness of human perception and interpretation. Voiceover narrators can provide thematic stylization in film, as well as essential plot coherence, but it is still primarily the camera that replaces the literary narrator as the means of conveyance. Furthermore, if too ubiquitous, voiceovers can separate the audience from the action, which is the focus of film. Film’s power inheres in its ability to place the audience in the midst of a plot, removing as many frames between the watcher and the story’s events as possible. However, this is also why books are so difficult to translate: motion pictures focus on events when the aesthetic experience of literature inheres in how characters and narrator experience said events.
The literary movement that focused most on the character’s experience (and, vicariously, ours) as the purpose of art was Romanticism. Romantic literature and poetry were less concerned about the subject matter than about their effect on the character’s emotions—in the sense that, from the generally Platonic metaphysics of the Romantics, the incidental reaches its fullest meaning by provoking an aesthetic experience far beyond it. From Hawthorne’s rose bush growing outside Salem’s prison, to Shelley’s secondhand rumination on the ruined feet of Ozymandias, to Keats’s apostrophe to the Grecian urn, the Romantics showed how part of the reality of an object involves its significance to the observer, and it was the role of the Romantic narrator and speaker to draw out that effect for the reader.
It is this essential influence of the narrator and characters’ inner lives on the great works’ aesthetic experience that makes me skeptical of even the best acting, camera work, and post-production effects to sufficiently replace them. It may be possible, and, again, I have very much enjoyed some renditions. Furthermore, not wanting to be the audience member who misses the Shakespeare performance for the open copy of the play on their lap, I tend to watch movie adaptations as distinct works rather than in strict relation to the originals. However, this, itself, may be a concession to my hesitance to trust film to live up to the aesthetic experience of certain books. I would, however, trust anime to do so.
While a history of Japanese manga and anime is beyond the scope of this piece (or my expertise), since choosing to explore the artform as a post-grad-school reward (or recovery—one can only stare at the sun that is Paradise Lost for so long) I’ve watched plenty of anime over the past ten years, and I have become convinced that it might serve as, at least, a middle ground when seeking to capture plot, narrative tone, and inner character experience in a motion medium. Anime is capable of handling virtually every story genre, and while it contains many of the same ridiculous hi-jinks and satire of Western cartoons and CG animation, it can also capture tragic pathos and sublime catharsis in ways that would be out of place in the vast majority of Western animation. This makes sense: originating in early 20th-century Japan, manga and anime were not subject to the same skepticism about artistic representations of transcendent value that characterized Western art after the move from 19th-century Romanticism and Realism to 20th-century modernism and post-modernism.
Of course, there have been exceptions; 20th-century Disney animation, or Marvel and DC Comics, were iconic because they attempted to be iconic—they unironically tried to depict in images those values and stories that are transcendent. However, even these were created predominantly with the child (or the childlike adult) in mind. Furthermore, while anime certainly has deserved elements of ambivalence, if not cynicism, and while there are many incredibly satirical and humorous series, anime as an artform is not implicitly dismissive of narrative trustworthiness and characters’ experience of the transcendent in the same way that much of Western motion art is. Rather, anime conventionally allows for the sublime heights and deepest horrors that previously characterized Romanticism, all of which it presents through the stylization of animation. This stylization is able to act as an interpretive medium just like a novel’s narrator, contextualizing events through the experience of those involved in a way often eschewed by, if not unavailable to, film.
For an example, I submit Kaguya-sama: Love is War (Japanese Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai – Tensai-tachi no Ren’ai Zunōsen, “Kaguya Wants to Make Them Confess: The Geniuses’ War of Hearts and Minds”). Though a romantic comedy in the Slice-of-Life genre, it exemplifies anime’s ability to convey the heights and depths of inner experience of the characters—here Kaguya and Miyuki, a pair of high school teenagers who, as student council president and vice president, compete to be top of their class while being secretly in love with each other and too proud to admit it. As the English title conveys, a running metaphor through the show is the bellicose subtext of their attempts to maneuver each other into confessing their love first and, thus, losing the war; think Beatrice and Benedick with the extremizing effect of teenage hormones and motifs of heavy artillery.
Plot-wise, Love is War follows a standard rom-com formula, with tropes recognizable to Western audiences: the pride and prejudices of the characters, the much ado about things that end up being really nothing, the presence of a mutual friend who acts as an oblivious catalist and go-between in the relationship, etc. However, the show reinvigorates these tropes by portraying via hyperbolic narrator the deuteragonists’ experience of the episodes’ conflicts, bringing audience members into the all-consuming tension of how a teenager might see something as minor as whether to share an item from their lunch. The combination of chess and military metaphors conveys the inner conflicts of the initially cold but gradually warming characters (the “tsundere” character type common in such animes), and the consistency of such motifs creates a unified aesthetic that, due in large part to the disconnect between the over-the-top tone and, in reality, low-stakes subject matter, is hysterical. Another unique aspect about Love is War is that, due to its focus on the characters’ experience of the plot (all the better for being trivially mundane), it’s a technically Romantic romantic comedy.
Love is War is, of course, a low-stakes example of what modern anime can do, though it did score three awards, including Best Comedy, at the 2020 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. A more serious example, Death Note, similarly conveys much of its gravitas through voiceover—this time the first-person narration of protagonist Light Yagami, a high schooler who with the help of a book from the realm of the dead is able to kill anyone whose name and face he knows, and L, a mysterious and reclusive detective charged by Interpol to find him. Throughout the series—which employs similar, if non-parodic, attempts by characters to outwit each other as Love is War—Light and L articulate their planned maneuvers and the implications thereof through inner voiceover. Not only does the narration lay out elements of their battle of wits that the audience might have missed, but it conveys the growing tension the two experience—especially Light, who, as he amasses fame as both a menace and cult hero experiences a growing egotism and subsequent paranoia around the possibility of being found out.
Just as Love is War is, in many ways, a parallel of Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth and Darcy, themselves, both being tsundere characters), Death Note’s focus on a young man who wishes to achieve greatness by killing those deserving of death and who subsequently develops a maddening neurosis is virtually the same as Crime and Punishment—however enormously their plots and endings differ (Crime and Punishment lacks an explicit demonic presence like Death Note’s Shinigami Ryuk, the Death Note’s otherworldly owner; Dostoevsky would not employ the spectre of a conversant devil until The Brothers Karamazov—yet another point of consanguinity between anime like Death Note and his writing). Regardless of their differing plots, the anime’s inclusion of the characters’ inner thoughts and imaginations convey an increasingly tense tone similar to how Dostoevsky steadily shows Raskalnikov’s moral unmooring, and the explanations and attempted self-justifications by both Light and L convey more than I think even the best cinema would be capable of showing.
I am not advocating that every narrative motif or figuration be included in page-to-screen renditions, nor that we cease trying to actively reinvigorate great works of art through judicious adaptations into new media. Yet, if the inner lives of teenagers—which are often exaggerated, if at times unnecessarily, to Romantic proportions—can be portrayed by anime to such comic and tragic effect, with the figuration and tone of the characters’ perceptions seamlessly paralleling the literal events without obscuring them, then I’d be interested to see what an anime Jane Eyre, The Alchemist, or Sula might look like. Based on the above examples, as well as anime heavyweights like Fullmetal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, and, if one is not faint of heart, Berserk, all of which present events in some measure through the background and perspective of the main characters, I could imagine the works of Milton, Hugo, Austen, Dostoevsky, and others in anime form, with the aesthetic experience of the original narration intact.
The Conservative Cope
According to recent polling by YouGov, a measly 1% of 18- to 24-year-olds plan to vote Conservative at the next general election. Having won roughly 20% of this demographic in the 2019, the Conservative Party has lost 95% of its support amongst Britain’s youngest voters in less than four years.
In reaction to this collapse in support, journalists and commentators have taken to rehashing the same talking-points regarding Tory ineptitude and how to resolve it – build more houses, be more liberal, have younger parliamentarians, and so on.
I don’t intend to add this ever-growing pile of such opinion pieces. Instead, I want to put Tory ineptitude into perspective, in hopes of undermining the entrenched and parochial coping of Britain’s right leaning politicians and commentariat.
Even though Churchill didn’t coin the phrase, right-leaning talking-heads maintain that “if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain”, even if not articulated as such; the progressive and liberal tendencies of the young are annoying, but natural and inevitable.
Of course, this is simply not true. Thatcher won the most support from 18- to 24-year-olds in 1979 and 1983, something which left-wing and right-wing critics are more than happy to point out, yet such doubters of the Iron Law of Liberal Youth have managed to reinvent the law, albeit without the caveat of an inevitable turn to the right in later life.
Socialists and capitalists don’t agree on many things, but they are united by the belief that Britain’s youth is a bastion of progressive leftism, marching in lock-step with other first-time voters around the world. In the former, this inspires great confidence; in the latter, this inspires a sense of foreboding.
Other commentators have blamed Brexit, which is also wrong. Despite the widely-cited age-gap between the average Remainer and Leaver, the UK’s relationship with the EU is pretty far down the average young person’s list of political priorities, hence why almost every avid post-Brexit remainer is a terminally online geriatric. Ironically, The Data from the British Election Study predicted a gradual increase in support for the Conservatives amongst Britain’s younger voters between 2015 and 2019.
Any person that has met the new cohort of young conservatives will attest their nationalistic and socially conservative modus operandi. Having its failures on crime and immigration reduction broadcast across the nation, its unsurprising that such people would lose faith in the Conservative Party’s ability to govern as a conservative party.
Indeed, given the Conservative Party’s eagerness to hold onto the Cameronite ‘glory days’ of tinkering managerialism, interspersed with tokenistic right-wing talking-points (i.e., the things which actually matter to the conservative base) its little wonder that the Tories have failed to win the young.
The Conservative Party Conference has a less than palatable reputation, but when the bulk of events revolve around uninformed conversations about tech, financial quackery, achieving Net Zero and lukewarm criticisms of The Trans Business, it is unsurprising so many Tory activists choose to preoccupy themselves with cocaine and sodomy.
Contrast this with the European continent, where right-wing populist parties are doing remarkably well with a demographic the Tories have all but officially dismissed. In the second round of France’s 2022 presidential election, incumbent president Emmanuel Macron, a centrist liberal europhile, was re-elected for a second term, with more than 58% of the vote. Although Macron obtained the majority of 18 to 24 years old who voted, it was over 60s which provided the backbone of his re-election, acquiring roughly 70% of their votes.
Moreover, whilst she was most popular with older voters (50- to 59-year-olds), the right-wing Marine Le Pen secured a sizeable portion of voters across all age brackets, especially those aged between 25- and 59- years old, filling the chasm left-behind by Macron’s near monopolisation of France’s oldest citizens.
These patterns were generally replicated in the first round of voting, although the far-left Melenchon garnered the most support from France’s youngest voters. At first glance, most right-leaning commentators would flippantly dismiss the wholesale liberal indoctrination of the youth, overlooking the astonishing fact that roughly 25% of France’s youngest voters support right-wing nationalism, whether that be Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour.
Due to growing suspicion of the two main parties in Germany, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU, otherwise known as Union) and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), third parties have gained support from the disaffected young, such the centre-left Greens, the centre-right Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Whilst it’s not doing as well as the Greens with first-time voters on the national stage, the AfD is making strides at the federal level and is doing noticeably well with Germans in their 30s, which isn’t insignificant in a country with a median age of 45. Compare this to Britain’s Conservatives, who start to faulter with anyone below the age of 40!
Moreover, the AfD is effectively usurping the CDU as the main right-leaning political force in many parts of Germany. For example, the AfD was the most popular party with voters under 30 in the CDU stronghold of Saxony-Anhalt during the last state election, a forebodingly bittersweet centrist victory.
Similarly, Meloni’s centre-right coalition, dominated by the nationalist Brothers of Italy party, didn’t lead amongst the nation’s youngest voters (18 to 34 years old), but they came extremely close, gaining 30% of their votes compared to the centre-left coalition’s 33% – and won every other age bracket in the last general election. Again, not bad for a country with a median age just shy of 50.
Moreover, these trends transcend Western Europe, showing considerable signs of life in the East. Jobbik, the right-leaning opposition to Viktor Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party, is highly popular party with university students, and despite losing the recent election, Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party obtained roughly a third of first-time votes in the election four years prior.
Roughly a quarter of first-time voters in Slovakia opted for the People’s Party-Our Slovakia, a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots, and roughly 35% of Bulgarian voters between 18- and 30-years-old voted for the right at the last parliamentary election, centre-right and far-right included.
Evidently, the success of right-wing nationalism amongst young voters across Europe, isn’t confined to republics. In addition to its republics, European constitutional monarchies, such as Sweden, Norway, and Spain, have materialised into right-wing electoral success.
The Moderate Party, Sweden’s main centre-right political force, won the largest share of voters aged by 18- and 21-years-of-age, with the insurgent right-wing Sweden Democrats placing second amongst the same demographic, coming only a few points behind their centre-right recipients of confidence-and-supply in government.
Further broken down by sex, the Sweden Democrats were distinctly popular with young Swedish men, and tied with the Social Democrats as the most popular party with Swedish men overall. Every age-bracket below 65-year-old was a close race between the Social Democrats and the Moderates or the Sweden Democrats, whilst those aged 65 and over overwhelmingly voted for the Social Democrats.
Similar to the Netherlands, whilst the Labour Party and Socialist Left Party were popular among young voters at the last Norwegian general election, support for centre-right Conservative Party and right-wing Progress Party didn’t trail far behind, with support for centre-left and centre-right parties noticeably increasing with age.
Whilst their recent showing wasn’t the major upset pollsters had anticipated, Spain’s right-wing Vox remains a significant political force, as a national party and amongst the Spanish youth, being the third most popular party with voters aged 18- to 24-year-olds.
Erstwhile, the centre-right Peoples Party (PP) is the most popular party with voters between 18- and 34-year-old with the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) drawing most of its support from voters aged 55 and older, especially voters over 75.
Still, it is easy to see how sceptics might blame our culture differences with the European continent on the right’s alleged inability to win over the young. After all, its clear youth politics is taken more seriously on the European continent. The JFvD, the youth wing of the right-wing Forum for Democracy (FvD) in the Netherlands, is the largest political youth movement in the Benelux. The JFvD regularly organises activities which extend beyond campaign drudgery, from philosophy seminars to beach parties. Contrast this to the UK, where youth participation begins and ends with bag-carrying and leafleting; the drudgery of campaigning is only interspersed by instances of sexual harassment and other degenerate behaviour.
However, this suspicion is just as easily put to rest when we compare Britain to the rest of the Anglosphere, especially New Zealand, Canada, and the United States of America.
In the run-up to New Zealand’s general election, polling from The Guardian indicated greater support for the centre-right National Party (40%) amongst voters aged 18- to 34-years than the centre-left Labour Party (20%), a total reversal of the previous election, defying purported trends of a global leftward shift amongst younger generations.
More to the point, support was not going further left, with the centre-left Labour-Green coalition accounting for 34% of millennial votes, compared to the centre-right coalition’s rather astounding 50%; again, a complete reversal of previous trends and more proof than any that so-called ‘youthquakes’ aren’t as decisive as commentators and activists would have us believe.
Despite Labour’s success with young voters in 2017 and 2019, when the voter turnout of younger generations is as abysmal as Britain’s, it’s not exactly a given that parties and individuals of a non-socialistic persuasion should abdicate Britain’s future to a dopey loon like Corbyn. The creed of Britain’s youth isn’t socialism, but indifference.
If anything, right-leaning parties are more than capable of producing ‘youthquakes’ of their own. In a time when the British Conservatives are polling at 1% with their native young, the Canada’s Conservative Party are the most popular party with, polling at around 40% with 18- to 29-year olds, and despite his depiction as a scourge upon America’s youth, Trump comfortably won white first-time voters in both 2016 and 2020. Perhaps age isn’t the main dividing line in the Culture War after all!
In conclusion, the success of the Conservative Party with younger voters does not hinge upon our electoral system, our constitutional order, our place in Europe or the Anglosphere. Simply put, the Tories’ inability to win over the young is not an inability at all, but the result of coping; a stubborn and ideological unwillingness motivated by geriatric hubris, disproven time and time again by the success of other right-wing parties across the Western world.
The Obsession with News
In 1980, Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld co-founded the Cable News Network (CNN). Despite derision over the idea of a 24 hour rolling news channel, CNN became a massive hit and would become the forefather to the news system today. In the 43 years since CNN first aired, news channels have changed from having bulletins every few hours to being on air 24/7. Our parents would have to wait for the top of the hour for news, unless breaking news broke into programming, whilst we can just turn it on with a press of a button.
Whilst many may marvel at the idea of 24 hour news, it is part of why news today has its problems. As a result of constant media absorption, competition from social media and the internet, as well as a fast-paced world, society itself has become obsessed with the news. Every tiny little story becomes splashed across screens, both large and small, in a desperate attempt to capture the moment before it vanishes.
Everything is Breaking News
If, like me, you have the BBC news app alert on your phone, then this will be a similar tale. The alert goes off. You check it. Whilst it’s officially classed as ‘Breaking News,’ it’s not really that important. Some things are of course important. Look at the death of Her Majesty The Queen last year. That was a news story that knocked everything else off the air. Considering that she had been our monarch since 1952, it’s fair to say that this was incredibly important breaking news.
Generally, the app applies the term ‘Breaking News’ rather liberally. Holly Willoughby leaving This Morning after fourteen years is not worth your phone going off. Beyoncé removing ‘offensive lyrics’ from an old song isn’t worth it either.
That also applies to news channels. Sky News and BBC will have that ticket going across the bottom of the screen quite happily for just about any reason. Rare is the day where the bottom of Sky News is not a flash of yellow and black. Even a slow news day will have breaking news just to keep things a bit fresh.
It’s understandable really. In this day and age, news travels fast. It comes and goes in the blink of the eyes. News companies want to have their hold on the story before the next one comes. When Twitter/X or Facebook gets the news first, well, that’s one less story that they’ve managed to break to viewers. The big media organisations may have the means to research the stories and get the scoops, but they don’t ever get it out first. One is more likely to find out a story through social media than they are the 24 hour news or their app.
Considering the point of the 24 hour news cycle is to be fresh, that’s not really a good thing.
Every Little Story, Made Bigger
On the 18th April 1930, BBC news would announce that “there is no news.”
Can you imagine that today? Another issue with the 24 hour cycle and news today is the fact that there’s a desperation to find something to report on. When channels and apps are never off, they can’t have a rest. Something must be going on. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it must be something.
Perhaps it’s a take on a news story through the issue of race, gender or sexuality. Perhaps it’s a random study from Australia. Whatever it is, it’s got a place in the news because it’s something.
Take for example the Daily Climate Show on Sky News. What was originally a daily, thirty minute slot on prime time was axed to a weekend event. It’s not hard to see why this was. In its desperation to make more news out of something, Sky took a risk by devoting half an hour everyday to the exact same topic. Considering how climate change and its presentation is a divisive subject, it was hardly a risk worth taking. Changing it to every weekend was still a poorly thought out move.
Repetition
You might turn the news on when you get up at seven in the morning. You might turn the news on at ten before you go to bed. What might link those two viewings is that they are exactly the same.
When the media can’t slot a new story in, they’ll just repeat it. If it’s an unfolding story, then of course you’ll see it or read about it again later because there are news things to be said. The problem occurs when it’s the same story over and over again.
Nobody wants to hear the same story they did fifteen hours ago without new information. It’s tiresome.
The Fear Factor
Then there’s the fear in which the media thrives.
From the moment that Boris Johnson told us that we now had to stay in our homes because of COVID, the media was all over the pandemic- perhaps even before then. With nothing else happening because everyone was locked down, all the media could do was run constant stories about the ever climbing death toll. At first, well, it was what we expected. Then it started to get a bit repetitive.
These stories tend to get a much frostier reception if reported today. Commentators scold the media for trying to scare us or create fear.
They could, however, get away with it during those early months. With nothing else to do, we had more time for the news. Their stories were constantly about the deaths and after effects of COVID. We were already unable to leave our homes and live our daily lives, with constant mask wearing when we went out, so did we need to be intimidated even more?
It’s not just COVID. Look at the climate protestors, especially the young ones, when interviewed. Some of them cry in fear for their future, weeping about the thought of a planet that could be gone when they have reached adulthood. Considering the constant doomsday coverage of climate change in the news, it’s easy to see where this fear comes from. Kids’ news shows like Sky’s awful FYI focus on the topic regularly. It’s constantly on mainstream news.
Children are more in tune with the world today. With all the darkness in the news and on social media, some will blame it for the declining mental health we are seeing in young people. Indeed, where is the hope? Well, people don’t watch the news to hear about new innovations or cute animals being born in zoos. Fear is more gripping than hope, and a bigger seller too, but it’s not good for morale.
It’s vitally important that we know what’s going on in the world, but too much news is bad for the soul. In a world where it’s all too accessible and the media makes money on constant news, we can’t rely on it for real information. We’re either fed fear or repetitiveness. The obsession with news is, ironically, making us less knowledgeable. Resist the urge to keep up behind what is needed. It’s better for you.
Out of the Cauldron: America’s Intervention in Somalia, Thirty Years Later
Since the end of World War Two, the United States has received a heightened amount of criticism for how it has conducted itself abroad. Its interventionism and choices in which to act has thrown many a challenge to its own legitimacy and eligibility as a superpower. In the following short article, I will argue that at its core some of America’s interventionism is more a sign of a flawed but idealist attempt at helping the world.
From this, we can think of many circumstances in which America and its strategic choices to intervene have resulted in large scale failure. From Southeast Asia, to that of Latin America, we can be shown countless examples of either propping up corrupt dictatorial figures or even right-wing paramilitary death squads. This criticism has found itself not just from the proverbial left-wing but even from non-intervention right and libertarian circles. These failures have sadly detracted from the times America was arguably right to say it had a moral obligation to do something. Its critics have largely been correct with figures like Odd Arne Westad, Stephan Walt and Vincent Bevins, being the most notable at generating specific criticism towards American foreign policy failings, rather than the traditional critics like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn; commentators who prefer to use certain political arguments, while ignoring other uncomfortable and less than ideologically convenient truths about America.
As such, thirty years ago, we can be shown an example of America standing up for doing what is right and just, and being punished for it anyway. This was found by America directly after Desert Storm and the first Gulf War, turning its attention to that of Somalia and the Horn of Africa in 1993. Although remaining complex and disputed, what is known is that the nation of Somalia had largely fallen into a state of Civil War by the end of the 1980s. This conflict still continues to this day and still continues to displace many within the region at large. By the early 1990s, the nation remained a lawless place, in which differing power factions and warlords were fighting over what was left. It is this, for which many were exposed prior to American involvement.
American involvement came as a means to support and back up the United Nations which were being targeted within the country. From this involvement, America turned its attention to that of targeting those figures and warlords which had declared war on the United Nations personnel, such as Mohamed Farrah Aidid. As such, the mission to find him was that of Operation Gothic Serpent.
Out of Gothic Serpent, we enter what became the most famous and defining image of this conflict, the ‘Battle of Mogadishu’. The Battle of Mogadishu, fought in early October 1993, became famous through writer Mark Bowden’s book, ‘Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War’, for which Ridley Scott’s 2001 war movie was named. This battle became emblematic of America’s foreign policy failures, as it fought the toughest house to house fighting since the Tet Offensive within 1968’s Vietnam (something it would not match until the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004). The outcome for the battle was the death of some twenty one Americans and nearly 300 Somalians. Dead American bodies were dragged naked through the streets and shown on CNN, the helicopters that had been shot down (four in total) became symbols of America’s failure and success for the Somalis. The sight of American Marines running back to base after being chased out the city by armed militia showed they were far from welcome.
How did America end up here? In the years prior, Somalia had descended into being a failed state, the outcome of which had been a complete disaster for all within its borders. Compounding this, a large famine had begun to grip the nations. The results of which meant that some 200,000-300,000 individuals had succumbed to starvation, in 1992. Alongside high rates of food aid looting and storage, the famine was used as a tool to wage war and genocide against others within the nation. There was no fixing this, there was little anyone could do to stop this nation from ripping itself apart at the seams. Out of this mess and the targeting of the United Nations personnel, America decided to support those on the ground. Within several years, it had all but left completely.
What we can learn from such events? Three decades after, has Somalia improved in any way? Well of course not. Has Afghanistan improved in any way since 2001? Of course not. As such, this attempt at fixing the problem was to only inflame the situation and result in the deaths of more individuals. More than just the US State Department, the entire world must realise its problems cannot be solved by sacrificing the lives of white boys from Arkansas and Ohio.
One might begin to wonder if the Somalian Civil War and its aftermath had never occurred, whether America might have also seen itself as being politically able and morally obliged to intervene in other African nations that also went through genocide in the subsequent years, such as Rwanda and Burundi. In this sense, its attempts are more than flawed but tragic. Imagine if Vietnam had never occurred, if America would have then had the stomach to stop the Cambodian Genocide from occurring.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, some might say. I would personally lean towards the viewpoint that America’s intervention into Somalia during this time is more indicative of a wider tragic sense of action that has haunted America since the end of World War Two. In many ways, America is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. It is forced to choose between fickle condemnation and disgrace its reputation as a superpower or military action, the latter of which produces images of dead soldiers being dragged naked through the streets, leading many to ask the question: what was it all for?
Diversity: A Pyrrhic Victory
The Russo-Ukraine war has underscored the arduous, industrialised drudgery which characterises modern warfare; the mechanised obliteration made possible by modern technology has minimised opportunities for combatants to attain individual recognition and perform feats of life-affirming glory.
In continuation of this grim rediscovery, a revitalised war between Israel and Palestine has revealed the metaphysics to which modern warfare owes its preference for annihilation over capitulation: the depoliticization of combatants, a dehumanising process in which Palestinians become “human animals” and Israelis become “filthy pigs”.
Those who say “Israel’s security is our security” are wrong, but they’re less wrong than those who believe Britain is unaffected by the recent attacks in the south of the country. Over the course of decades, Britain’s policy of mass immigration has produced a series of immigrant enclaves in towns and cities up and down the country, many of which dislike each other far more than the native white British population for a variety of historic reasons; a fact which has been made apparent to everyone after several members poured into London, to celebrate and to mourn the outbreak of war.
However, as one can clearly see in the videos, with Turkish and Palestinian flags fluttering side-by-side, it’s not merely Britain’s Jewish and Palestinian diasporas being at each other’s throats, it’s a matter of every ethnic diaspora and commune piling into coalition with one another, further diminishing social trust and charging historic grievances.
Across all of England, from Oldham to Stoke, from Birmingham to Burnley, from Peckham to Kensington, from Rotherham to Dover, Britain’s post-war policy of mass immigration has gradually turned the Land of Hope and Glory into a giant drop-zone for an inter-ethnic Battle Royale.
Far from a cohesive unit, it is near impossible to walk through the middle of London without encountering a protest dedicated to the interests of another nation. When the government sought to curb illegal migration, Britain’s Albanian diaspora descended upon London in boisterous assembly, decrying the government’s rhetoric as racist and a xenophobic sleight against the disproportionately Albanian ‘asylum-seekers’ crossing the English Channel.
Then again, why shouldn’t they turn out to show support for their Albanian brothers and sisters? Aren’t public protest and freedom of speech cornerstones of our liberal democracy? Surely, the same can be said about the pro-Palestine demonstrations? Weren’t their ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ demonstrations indicative of their successful integration into Modern British society, underpinned by the civic values of diversity and inclusion, liberty and tolerance? Let’s face it: diversity hasn’t failed. Diversity has triumphed and everyone hates it.
Before projecting the Israeli flag onto 10 Downing Street and the House of Commons, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is of Indian descent, condemned the attack in the strongest possible terms:
“As the barbarity of today’s atrocities becomes clearer, we stand unequivocally with Israel. This attack by Hamas is cowardly and depraved. We have expressed our full solidarity to Benjamin Netanyahu and will work with international partners in the next 24 hours to co-ordinate support.”
Many have humorously remarked on the staunch, some might say excessive, support for Israel amongst Indians and those of Indian descent, but such solidarity is entirely rational. Given their historic enmity with Pakistan, it’s unsurprising that Indians would support the group with a grievance against a comparable ethnoreligious enemy. In blunt terms, the Indian support for Israel isn’t derived from a fondness for Jews, but from a general dislike of Muslims.
The tendency of our politicians to talk about hatred and division in the same breath overlooks the fact ‘hatred’ is just as capable of uniting people as it is of dividing them. Of course, Sunak is not your typical member of Britain’s Indian diaspora but given the riots in Leicester during the autumn of last year, it’s safe to say that if such grievance can be imported in-tact from the Indian subcontinent to the English midlands, it definitely extends from the English midlands to the nations of the Levant.
Meanwhile, north of Hadrian’s Wall, Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, who is of Pakistani descent, issued a more lukewarm response to the widely publicised atrocities:
“My wife Nadia and I spent this morning on the phone to her family in Gaza. Many others in Scotland will be deeply worried about their families in Israel and Palestine. My thoughts and prayers are very much with those worried about loved ones caught up in this awful situation.”
Whilst many found the latter’s statement wavering and distasteful, it’s important to see things from the perspective of Yousaf. After all, he has family in Gaza and the chances this doesn’t affect his view on such matters is highly unlikely.
For readers who don’t recall, Yousaf made national news attacking then-SNP leadership contender Kate Forbes for her Christian view on gay marriage, suggesting her stance made her unfit to be First Minister. A matter of days later, it was revealed Yousaf had dodged a crucial Holyrood vote to liberalise marriage laws due to pressure from his fellow members of the local Muslim population.
Evidently, he is trying to balance his ethnoreligious and familial interests and emotions with his official responsibilities, as leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. Indeed, this is impossible for most and far from easy for him – especially given his scornful opinions of the people he governs – yet it’s clear, given his unique position, he is forced to show more consideration than most people; people who lack the responsibilities of public office.
On her way to the Israeli embassy to pay her respects, Bella Wallersteiner, a liberal-conservative commentator of Jewish descent, encountered a large celebration of the attack on Israel. In response to the public display of support for Hamas and Palestine, she posted:
“I’ve left as didn’t feel safe. I tried speaking to a few protestors and making the point that it was totally inappropriate to hold a demonstration of this kind after a heinous terrorist attack. As you can imagine, I didn’t get very far. I’d advise people avoid the area.”
As someone who has routinely championed immigration and cosmopolitanism, Wallersteiner only now felt threatened by the implications of diversity and mass immigration because it negatively implicated her ethnic group. It goes without saying that homogenous societies are hard enough to maintain, even when its inhabitants adhere to pro-social values. As such, you can’t advocate the creation of a multi-ethnic, multicultural society until it affects you; such an ethnocentric outlook is unlikely to produce good results, for oneself or for other people.
Of course, Wallersteiner is not the only one guilty of ethno-narcissism. Diane Abbott’s letter to The Observer, which ignited accusations of anti-semitism, anti-ziganism, and anti-Irishness, which led to her suspension from the Labour Party, drew a qualitative distinction between racism and prejudice. According to Abbott, whilst Jews, Roma, and the Irish have been victims of prejudice, experience of racism is particular to black people. In summary: “You’re an Other, and therefore you’re a victim, but at least you’re a White Other, unlike me – a BLACK woman.”
Essentially, anti-semitism is bad, but anti-blackness is worse. The aforementioned minority groups aren’t immune to discrimination, but they are immune to exceptionally egregious forms of discrimination due to their ‘whiteness’ or relative proximity thereto; a notion which critics called a “hierarchy of racism“.
One might say this dispute has served as proxy for vying wings of the Labour Party, which is partially true. However, it’s evident that ethnic grievance plays a far more important role. Corbynites did take to Twitter/X (where else?) to complain about Abbott’s suspension, but their gripe had next-to-nothing to do with Blairite manoeuvring.
Instead, they targeted the implicit anti-blackness of Abbott’s critics and the publicity they received, suggesting they were the ones perpetuating a “hierarchy of racism”, privileging concerns about anti-Semitism over anti-Blackness, seemingly ignoring Abbott’s comments regarding the Roma and the Irish, thereby undermining their outrage and revealing their own ethnically motivated hypocrisy.
Every faction involved lays claim to real ‘anti-racism’. Compared to other social ills, they agree racism is evil, yet each group believes some evils are eviller than others. They agree on a general qualitative assessment but disagree on a distinct qualitative assessment; they agree on whites as the common enemy, but not who benefits the most from the racist superstructure of Western society, other than whites themselves.
Even when considered non-white, Jews are perceived as ‘white(r)’ than their comrades. As such, non-Jews band together to push concerns about anti-semitism to the periphery of ‘anti-racism’. Just as minority activists align themselves against whites due to their general non-whiteness, increasingly collectivised ‘Black and Brown’ members align themselves against Jews due to their distinct non-whiteness to push their interests up the priorities list of the ‘anti-racist’ movement.
Indeed, the anti-white intersectional logic of the anti-racist coalition which ejected the white working class from the political left, laying the groundwork for the Conservative electoral landslide in 2019, a victory which is being undone because the Tories severely underdelivered on their promise to lower immigration, is problematising a faction which helped this process along.
Arguably parallel to peripheralization of ‘cisgender’ women within anti-sexism in pursuit of ‘trans rights’, both Jews and ‘cisgender’ women are prone to flock to right-leaning media, who herald them as martyrs cancelled by the Social Justice Mob and so on. Just as ‘TRAs’ and ‘TERFs’ appeal to the external enemy of the sexist heterosexual man, accusing each other of jeopardising the safety of women – as if the nature of womanhood wasn’t the source of conflict to begin with – vying ethnic factions of the anti-racist coalition accuse each other of playing into the hands of white supremacy by advancing their respective interests.
The UK government does this all the time. Due to the hegemonic obsession with diversity amongst the political and media class, a propensity which has given rise to legal commitments to support and promote Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, as per the Equality Act (2010), the state-backed intersectional diversity which it encourages necessarily inflames tensions between minority groups and the white British majority.
In an attempt to hold warring minority groups together, hoping to offset the explosive potential of re-opening historic grievances, and to integrate a growing migrant and migrant-descended population, one which emerged from a policy which the British people have consistently opposed whenever given the chance, every facet of media has become infected with anti-white sentiment. From Access UK’s state-funded hotep workshops to fabricating history about the British Isles, from inserting slavery and racism into every facet of media to covering up racially-motivated grooming gangs to protect ‘social cohesion’.
However, whilst minority groups view the anti-racist coalition as a means of affirming their uniquely serious grievance – discrimination against their particular group – it becomes apparent that their opposition to whites merely aligns ethnic grievances; it does not assess their validity or resolve them. As such, the potentiality for conflict remains, overflowing into violence and aggression every time there is an international crisis or domestic dispute.
The direct consequence of this is the antithetical to what every self-appointed champion of small government and liberal values theoretically wants, which is more power being given to the state to interfere in people’s day-to-day life through censorship and distort public opinion through social engineering.
Sadiq Khan’s recent announcement to increase ‘anti-hate’ patrols is just one such example. In any other circumstance, conservatives and libertarians would dismiss such measures as pedantic, overbearing, and ideologically driven, yet nobody seems concerned that the attack in southern Israel is being used to empower an apparatus which spends every other day arresting people for ‘hate speech’.
The protection of people and property is the initial function of the police, so I severely doubt that specific ‘anti-hate’ measures will be limited to arresting people who smash up shopfronts and graffiti public property, especially since the police cannot be relied upon to fulfil its most basic functions, as revealed by their indifference to serious crimes and the public’s rapidly declining trust.
Moreover, what are new arrivals to this country supposed to integrate to? Democracy? What is democracy without a demos? Civil liberties? Which are routinely trampled by the managerial state? Capitalism? Do you seriously expect society to be held together by consumerism? People will eventually ask for something more than material security and economic growth, both of which we are failing to procure anyway; what holds society together then?
Integration is a necessarily particular process, it assumes a particular group and set of customs to which people can be integrated over time. You can’t ‘integrate’ people to a global matrix of sustenance. You can’t ‘integrate’ people to a group which you allow to be displaced through migration. You can’t ‘integrate’ people to a value system which is designed to accommodate everyone, lest you plan on hollowing out every religion on the Earth, forcing people to treat their symbols as quirky cultural tokens and their prophets as secularised self-help gurus.
How perversely ironic is it that the liberal-left obsession with diversity has emerged from the inability to comprehend that people genuinely are different to one another? If anything, it is the native population which has been told to ‘integrate’, to tolerate and adhere, to ways and customs of the new arrivals, not the other way around.
The Labour Party, almost definitely the next party of government, issued a document titled: “Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future”. According to the report, the commission “originally used in the first democracies in Ancient Greece – that are critical for the success of any nation, with Britain being no exception” – demos (shared identity), telos (shared ambitions), and ethos (shared values).
Curiously, the report left out another very important concept to the Ancient Greeks: ethnos (shared character; ethnicity). According to the ancients, a society which lacks a sufficient degree of homogeneity inevitably leads to a lack of social trust, a lack of social trust will inevitably lead to factions, and factions will inevitably lead to the outbreak of disorder and even civil war. As such, in an attempt to ensure its survival, the state must micromanage society down to the last snivelling minutia to tie everything together; a far-flung difference from the unarmed, gentle-natured, and almost passive policemen of George Orwell’s England Your England.
As Singapore shows, a diverse society is only manageable if you have a stable demographic supermajority and reliable public institutions, especially when it comes to dealing with the bare necessities of public order, such as preventing violence and theft. The UK has neither of these. As per the most recent census, the white British majority is declining and crime is basically decriminalised.
As such, if things continue at their current rate and on their current course, we’re going to need more than ‘anti-hate’ patrols, Tebbit’s Cricket Test, and Hotep Histories to integrate an increasingly diverse populous; dear reader, we’re going to need the Katechon. Indeed, diversity is not the fancy of freedom lovers, but of tyrants, as Aristotle elucidates in Politics:
“It is a habit of tyrants never to like anyone who has a spirit of dignity and independence. The tyrant claims a monopoly of such qualities for himself; he feels that anybody who asserts a rival dignity, or acts with independence, is threatening his own superiority and the despotic power of his tyranny; he hates him accordingly as a subverter of his own authority. It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition.” (1313B29)
I started this article with a reference to the wars in Ukraine and Israel, yet these two are not the only major conflicts which 2023 has endured. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, initiated after the latter launched a large-scale military invasion against the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, violating the 2020 ceasefire agreement between the nations and leading to the expulsion of over 100,000 Armenians.
Whilst Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, most of its territory was governed by ethnic Armenians. Without this natural fraternity, this sense of demos, the Republic of Artsakh could simply not exist, nor would the Azerbaijani government need to re-constitute the state through Asiatic authoritarianism. Even for us moderns, it is clear that diversity is not the basis of peaceful and stable self-government. The more we stray from this fact, we will deny ourselves to attain that which we have always wanted: the ability to discriminate and enjoy people as individuals and exceptions, rather than monoliths to which we are forced to remain diffident, for the sake of ourselves and others.
Therefore, to conclude, I shall leave you with this passage from Aristotle’s Politics, in which the great philosopher outlines the natural conclusion of a society which does not take its responsibility towards the diversity of its constituents with any prudence or honesty:
“Heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction – at any rate until they have had time to assimilate. A city cannot be constituted from any chance collection of people, or in any chance period of time. Most of the cities which have admitted settlers, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by faction. For example, the Achaeans joined with settlers from Troezen in founding Sybaris, but expelled them when their own numbers increased; and this involved their city in a curse. At Thurii the Sybarites quarreled with the other settlers who had joined them in its colonization; they demanded special privileges, on the ground that they were the owners of the territory, and were driven out of the colony. At Byzantium the later settlers were detected in a conspiracy against the original colonists, and were expelled by force; and a similar expulsion befell the exiles from Chios who were admitted to Antissa by the original colonists. At Zancle, on the other hand, the original colonists were themselves expelled by the Samians whom they admitted. At Apollonia, on the Black Sea, factional conflict was caused by the introduction of new settlers; at Syracuse the conferring of civic rights on aliens and mercenaries, at the end of the period of the tyrants, led to sedition and civil war; and at Amphipolis the original citizens, after admitting Chalcidian colonists, were nearly all expelled by the colonists they had admitted.” (1303A13)
Rousseau and the Legacy of Romanticism
One idea that I’ve fondly taken from Augusto del Noce is that ideologies have an internal logic to them, which unfolds as they interact with real-world events. Philosophies aren’t static, but constantly changing as they play out against one another historically. This view, while similar to the Marxist notion of praxis, finds ultimate inspiration from Joseph de Maistre. It’s de Maistre who writes that the French Revolution sweeps men up against their will and devours its own children.
Once put into practice, revolutions take on a life of their own, and like a wild tiger on a leash, drag their authors to new and unheard-of places. This isn’t to deny human free will; something I strongly affirm. It’s rather to recognise that rational humans, faced with circumstances, strive to act consistently with what they believe. This mechanism of consistency is what causes ideologies to evolve over time.
This insight is a powerful tool for understanding the long-term consequences of philosophies. The social sciences may quantify popular actions and opinions, but because human wishes are often nebulous, and people are fond of lying to themselves, there’s always room to dispute the results. The romantic primitivism of Jean Jacques Rousseau is one such ideology. Since being unleashed into the world from the bloody womb of the Reign of Terror, it has branched in many different directions and morphed into shapes Rousseau himself wouldn’t have recognised.
To define romanticism, I turn to Irving Babbitt and his 1919 work Rousseau and Romanticism. Romanticism sets itself in opposition to classicism. Classicism seeks standards for ethics and culture in universal types which it deems natural. It’s not the case that classicism seeks rules necessarily (lest we confuse it with Kantianism). Aristotle is the foremost classicist, yet he denies that norms are truly codifiable into rules. A universal type is rather an ideal based upon the nature of something. A classicist (like Aristotle) might say that being polite at the dinner table is something we should do, and this politeness consists of showing due moderation in eating, drinking, talking etc. But this isn’t a rule so much as a way of displaying the excellence proper to a human being.
Classicism isn’t opposed to emotion either. Rather, it subdues emotions to rational norms. Human nature has a standard of excellence which demands the proper use of emotion. In other words, emotions are good or bad depending on how we wield them according to a standard for the human species. The one able to do this is a universal type, what Aristotle calls the phronimos, or wise man. The later Stoics didn’t condemn emotions entirely, as the popular misconception of them. They rather encouraged natural emotions and discouraged the unnatural. Again, nature is a standard for ideal behaviour, external to individual fancy.
Romanticism, on the other hand, seeks standards in what’s unique and unrepeatable. Instead of conforming to generic ideals, goodness comes from spontaneous individual acts and thoughts. The cause for this is Rousseau’s doctrine of original sanctity. Classicism makes a distinction between ‘things-as-they-are’ and ‘things-as-they-ought’. Humans, animals, and plants don’t come into the world fulfilling an ideal; they arrive imperfect and must strive after their ideal. If we deny this, as Rousseau does, then to be good just is to be what one is. The generic ideal has no purpose and drops out. Authenticity to oneself as one is becomes the aim of life, and this can only find expression in unrepeatable spontaneous acts.
Indeed, once authenticity becomes central, it’s but a short step to rebelling against all standards which society imposes on the self. Since whatever standards society imposes must be ideal repeatable types, and no ideal repeatable types are authentic, no socially imposed standards can be authentic. And since goodness lies in authenticity, being truly good means casting off the standards society has imposed.
As Alasdair Macintyre wryly says in After Virtue, Enlightenment philosophes have the least self-awareness of all thinkers. They create new and revolutionary systems, but the content of their morality is entirely inherited from the civilisation they’ve inherited and which they despise. Thus, Rousseau’s ethics are stuffed full of quaint and puritanical Calvinist ideas from his Genevan upbringing. “Effeminacy” is one of his constant worries, and he applies the term, in boyish fashion, to anything he doesn’t like. Thus, in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he can condemn civilised man:
“By becoming sociable and enslaved, he becomes weak, fearful, and grovelling, and his soft and effeminate way of life ends by enervating both his strength and his courage.”
Take these relics away, however, and Rousseau’s romanticism has only its sentimental primitivism to act as a limiting moral principle. Goodness is whatever lies in the untainted human heart, freed from social corruption. What becomes of it then? I wager it must enter an eternal spiral of liberation. Romanticism is built on the idea that we’ll be truly happy only when we free ourselves from all external rules and uncover a pre-social authenticity. Since this is a lie, no amount of liberation will ever create happiness. So, to remain consistent with itself, romanticism must seek ever more shackles of oppression to shatter. It’s either that or admit error.
The progressive radicalisation built into romanticism is visible everywhere. The sexual revolution, for example, has no brakes, because it’s built on a romanticised and primitivist vision of sex that would be falsified the moment brakes are applied. The radicals of the mid-twentieth century believed that socialised sexuality was corrupt, and once the orgasm was freed from all external restraints, pure happiness would result (Wilhelm Reich, for example, thought-free love was the precondition to utopian social democracy). Free love hasn’t made us happier, however. So, the answer is to find ever more previously unknown sexual taboos, whose chains we must shatter if we’re at last to be free.
In everyday morality, romantic assumptions have remade the life quest we each undertake for goodness, into a quest for authenticity. Finding one’s true self is now a drain on the wallet of the entire Western bourgeoisie. People of ages past underwent transformative moral journeys that turned them from sinners to saints, but theirs wasn’t a trek for authenticity. They did something far more mundane: they changed their minds. There’s an implicit vanity in the true-self doctrine. Changing your mind means admitting error. Finding your true self means you were right all along, but just didn’t notice it, because society was keeping you blind.
The cultural production of this quest is, I believe, simply inferior to the production of a mind that looks outwards from itself onto something else. Someone obsessed with finding his authentic self doesn’t have time to stand in awe of things greater than himself. What is falling in love, if not to be overcome by the sense of the intrinsic irreplaceable value of another person, without reference to oneself? We have all effectively become Rousseau writing his Confessions. A man who delighted in nature and other people only as frissons to express his authentic self, and could begin his book with the words:
“Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly after nature and in all her truth, that exists and probably ever will exist.”
In education, romantic ideas have done away with the rote learning that characterised pedagogy from Ancient Greece, through the middle ages and down to the Victorian Age. Twentieth-century educators like John Dewey, following in Rousseau’s footsteps, sought to remake schooling around the true self doctrine. Instead of moulding a pupil to conform to an ideal (a gentleman or citizen), modern education exists to help him discover his uncorrupted pre-social self. Self-expression without rules has become the educational norm, with the result that we have people who are experts in analysing their own minds and emotions, but incapable of self-denial or rigour. The excellence of mind and body requires constant training. We accept this more readily about the body because physical fitness is visible. But the mind, which is invisible, needs just as much training to be fit for purpose.
In the end, I see romanticism as an enormous civilisational gamble. The difference between classicism and romanticism is about what we think reality is truly like. The classicist sees a human race born lacking and sees culture as how a scaffold is to a building. Culture exists as an aid to human completion. The romantic, meanwhile, claims that human nature isn’t completable, but already complete, and merely corrupted. He wagers that if we accept this idea, we can remake the world for the better. Like any gambler, he doesn’t think about the stakes if the wager is lost. Here the stakes are social catastrophe if the assumption is untrue. If the truth is classical, then romanticism is akin to raising a lion on a strict vegetarian diet.
The Migratory Ratchet
To say Britain has just entered a recession is slightly disingenuous, notwithstanding the jargon and semantics of economists and journalists. Whilst GDP has dipped for a second consecutive quarter, GDP per capita has been contracting for seven quarters straight. Having dropped throughout every quarter of 2023, and most quarters of 2022, Britain is enduring the longest uninterrupted decline in GDP per capita since records began in 1955.
Compounded by the fact that Britain’s GDP would’ve declined further without the unprecedented amount of immigration experienced throughout 2022 and 2023, it’s abundantly apparent that the UK economy is a ponzi scheme; an artifice sustained through short-term economic benefits to the long-term detriment of the nation, offset by additional short-term benefits and so on. Even when Britain’s economy grows, having experienced anaemic growth throughout most quarters of the same period, it renders no discernible or substantive benefit to the average Englishman.
The benefits of this arrangement are exclusively experienced by politicians and corporations. The former is given a straightforward and politically convenient means of construing the impression of prosperity, of making Line Go Up, while the latter has access to an ever-replenishing pool of cheap and flexible labour; one which suppresses wage growth, burdens national infrastructure, and induces demographic problems across British society. Truly, the Potemkin School of Economics.
However, courtesy of the unprecedented and largely non-EU-driven spike in immigration following Covid, a lot of anti-immigration positioning has been reconstructed around this new normal. This isn’t entirely bad. After all, people deserve to know why immigration is increasing, despite longstanding public demand for it to significantly decrease, especially while its contemporaneous.
However, the problem I foresee, one which I see flickers of in right-leaning political commentary of all kinds, is the acquiescence to previous levels of mass immigration. You know? The days when net migration was running at a sensible 200,000, when a greater proportion of arrivals were high-earners from the EU in possession of illustrious Skillsets; the days when immigration coincided with increases in GDP and GDP per capita, putting White British people on-track to becoming a minority by 2066, rather than 2040.
As everyone should know by now, the immigration debate is fundamentally a concern about displacement, one which is forced to disguise itself through Legitimate Concerns, such as Parliamentary Sovereignty, Small Boats, Control, and so on. As such, given immigration salience is making a post-Brexit return, there will be attempts to force those concerned about demographic displacement to re-disguise their concerns in a way the system is prepared to officially tolerate.
I refer to this as The Migratory Ratchet, the process by which previous waves of migration are accepted to justify opposition to present waves of migration, and previous instances of ethnic displacement are accepted to justify opposition to present instances of ethnic displacement. The Migratory Ratchet operates on the basis that the quantity and quality of present migration is different to previous migration, and that recognising these differences must be the basis for immigration control.
This is not to say there aren’t quantitative and qualitative differences between forms of immigration. Nor is to say that it is always wrong to make such distinctions. Rather, it refers to the use of these distinctions as a political manoeuvre to re-politicise mass immigration under a system which seeks to depoliticise it as much as possible, and how this coincides with the system’s desire to perpetuate mass immigration in the long-term by making short-term concessions to immigration restrictionists.
The most prominent distinctions separate migrants between those on big boats (legal) and those on small boats (illegal), those with skills and those without, those coming in their tens of thousands and those coming in their hundreds of thousands, those who give and those who take, those who bring dependants and those who are dependants themselves, those who are white and those who aren’t, those who are (supposedly) Christian and those who aren’t.
By using these distinctions as proxy for nationalist politics, under prevailing ideological pressures which oppose nationalist politics altogether, one crafts a wedge which can be assimilated into the operations of the ratchet, allowing the system to adapt to present dissatisfaction. These so-called Legitimate Concerns, transform fundamental political questions of mass replacement into managerial caveats, summarised by the aforementioned distinctions, which merely refine the process as to make it less irritable to the common Englishman.
I’m doubtful Starmer’s inevitable premiership will change much, although I can envision a scenario in which he makes concessions to the Legitimate Concerns of immigration restrictionists; maintaining recently introduced regulations on bringing dependants, reducing illegal channel crossings (presumably by providing Safe and Legal routes), even placing more stringent barriers on foreign students, whilst increasing work permits at a similar or greater rate to the outgoing Conservative government and instating economic policies which reduce the intake of the cheapest of cheap foreign labour.
In summary, The Migratory Ratchet will keep turning. The least defensible externalities will be suppressed in a superficial show of strength, briefly demobilising the right, who will then express their outrage that net migration is pushing a million, instead of being controlled to a select few hundred thousand.
This wouldn’t be the first time this has happened. It is widely and incorrectly presumed that mass immigration began with Tony Blair, de facto chief advisor to the incoming Prime Minister, whose Institute for Global Change is pressuring the incoming Labour government to increase immigration for the sake of “Growth, Growth, Growth”.
Mass immigration as we understand it began with Blair, but mass immigration itself precedes New Labour. Britain has incurred large movements of people, even instances of replacement migration, before and after 1945 – that is, official Year Zero for Modern Britain – which now look small compared to recent intakes. Keep in mind: Britain basically had net zero migration from the end of WWII up until the early 1980s. Even with net negative migration, Britain experienced large influxes of people, the likes of which altered the country for generations.
On paper, 19th century Irish immigration is dwarfed by 21st century immigration, but it remains fact that the consequences of such immigration were vast and remain with us, such as turning Liverpool and Glasgow into hotbeds of anti-English sentiment, having largely displaced their native populations, and altering the face of trade union politics; from a tendency dominated by Englishmen trying to shield against the import of cheap Irish labour to one dominated by Irish surnames, infused and aligned with ethnic “anti-imperialist” politics.
On paper, the influx of Russian Jews at the cusp of the 20th century is dwarfed by the post-Covid spike in immigration, but this still led to ghettoization and the displacement of the native population in various urban areas; a trend that has continued well-into the 21st century as other foreign diasporas have set-up shop, bringing their grievances with them – infamously, something the centre-right can only identify as bad when it affects more settled diasporic communities in Britain – while Englishmen are pushed further and further into the surrounding shires.
The UK’s Somali-born population, one of the most financially and legally burdensome subdivisions of Britain’s foreign-born occupants, making them something of a lowest common-denominator in discussions about immigration, mostly arrived in the 1980s following the outbreak of civil war. This was merely one of several movements into the UK which occurred throughout the same period. Indeed, many rightists seem to forget (deliberately or not) that the first sustained increase in migration after WWII took place throughout the premierships of Thatcher and Major.
Boston, the most Eurosceptic place in the UK, is also the most Polish, having endured a major influx of Polish migrants throughout the early noughties; a transformation which was encouraged by the UK government following the accession of ex-Soviet countries to the EU. Needless to say, honouring the spirit of Brexit and rehabilitating mass movement from Poland as an acceptable mode of migration are mutually exclusive political convictions.
Nobody with any sense, or sincere nationalist principles for that matter, would look to such times and instances as the contextual basis for a “sensible” immigration policy. Alas, the centre-right believes one must implicitly concede to these instances of replacement to make incremental progress in resisting larger and renewed waves of migration and the various knock-on effects.
On the surface, it appears to be a pragmatic application of our principles, but nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, it is an implicit but unequivocal surrender of the nationalist framework for a moderated globalist framework; a substitution enacted under the bizarre assumption that as things get worse, our stated aspirations need to become less radical. Like our current leaders, whose short-termism is well-documented, it constitutes sacrificing long-term struggle for short-term gains to be offset by developments in the near future. Sound familiar?
It is one thing to find newer, more effective ways to express old aspirations, but this cannot be mistaken for substituting our aspirations altogether. Indeed, if the migratory ratchet was to make another full rotation, it follows that we should find ourselves in a new alliance with non-Anglo whites and “Model Minorities” (high-earners, high-achievers, more Westernised, etc.) marching in lockstep against “Third Worlders” – that is, exclusively the MENA/PT countries and sub-Saharan Africa.
As some have already noticed, talk of England as an Anglo-Saxon country has practically ceased on the British right, a large chunk of whom have started to nail their colours in defence of England’s “Anglo-Celtic” identity in view of “recent” attempts to make it Diverse and Inclusive – that is, not merely less English, but less European and less Christian. Erstwhile, colourblind meritocracy continues to be touted as a palatable wedge of political resistance, embracing entrepreneurial Indians and studious Chinamen to siphon off violent Albanians and lazy Somalians.
Such coalitions will not emerge out of shared political interests between societies, but within British society itself; an arrangement which befit the diversitarian politics of Modern Britain, but unbefitting the pursuit an undiluted nationalist agenda. There can be no two-stage solution. We cannot smoothly refine The Migratory Ratchet into obsolescence. Rather, it must be permanently reversed and absolutely destroyed; it must be rejected from first principles or not at all. This starts and ends with the reconstitution of the British people as a living, breathing, and historic reality.
Photo Credit.