Don’t Fall for the Obvious Traps

By Christopher Jolliffe

London saw two very separate protests in recent weeks. On the one hand, three hundred thousand pro-Palestine types marched across the city on Armistice Day. This sparked an uproar about the timing — timing that was very deliberate — a reminder that our history no longer belongs to us. On the other, a few hundred Right Wing types gathered to defend the Cenotaph, to reassert that history, even though the first march was not passing anywhere near it. In their minds, it was Rorke’s Drift; in the minds of their detractors, it was Kristallnacht. Neither account is true, yet over a hundred arrests were made, with little surprise as to which group got nicked. Union Jacks and the cross of St. George are less welcome in England these days than the flag of Palestine, and as one copper said in a moment of rare candour, “There’s more of them than there are of us.” Whoever else is imagining Rorke’s Drift, it’s not the Metropolitan Police.

However unsettled you might feel about the course of recent history, getting out and pounding the pavement is about as effective in this case as it is in acquiring white-collar jobs. Street demonstrations are demonstrations of power: the clue is in the name. If you don’t have any power, there’s no point. Populist revolts don’t work because elites run the show, as anybody who’s read any history knows. You’re putting a target on your back for no real reason, and what’s worse, providing fodder for a hostile media. They have a perfect opportunity to pivot away from covering that which causes them great unease — conflict between two groups who both want to monopolise the victim-status totem pole, which in our post-Nietzschean world, translates into power — and put the focus back on the real problem, which as you might expect, is a restless native population. Because they’re clever enough never to waste such an opportunity, they’ve not hesitated, and milquetoast ex-Home Secretary Braverman has gone the journey. It was a trap for her, but it was a bigger trap for the rest of us.

Since 1945, much political energy has been bent toward crippling any genuine sense of nationalism among home-grown Europeans, regardless of where their transnational journeys have taken them. This is why there are Holocaust memorials in every major city, but none to the Armenians, the victims of the Bolsheviks or the Holodomor, or those of Pol Pot or Mao. Only one of these tragedies had the correct antagonist, even if the RAF and USAAF bombed that antagonist night and day for years on end. Little subtleties like who exactly belonged to the Axis seem unimportant when it comes to preventing the feverishly imagined rerun of mid-twentieth-century German nationalism. 

Today’s Britain is ruled by the managerial-colonial types of yesteryear, except they treat the United Kingdom the way those overseas possessions were once treated. At least, this is so where the native inhabitants are concerned, and many alibis are provided to smooth over this process of cultural and political disprivileging, oftentimes by the Tories themselves. That party has an eighty-seat majority; if they liked, they could end overnight the turmoil that has gripped London’s streets in recent weeks. Alas, they can’t (or they won’t). Neither answer is particularly satisfying. The Britain of old couldn’t be deader if we exhumed it and executed it again, as was the fate of Oliver Cromwell.

If the far-right protestors are guilty of anything, it’s being not too bright and a little brutish. However, for their part, they received their share of elite support. Even Douglas Murray inveighed on the subject, and Tommy Robinson and Katy Hopkins were mysteriously unbanned from Twitter/X to encourage this Assembly of the Notables. A cynical person might wonder what exactly the anti-Jihadi types, at least those within the establishment, are really about. What are they defending, exactly? An unnatural liberal status quo that created all the problems that now threaten it? The same status quo that is incapable of recognising its mistakes, let alone learning from them? It is because of effete liberal principles and policies that Western cities now resemble the bazaars of foreign places, that our social cohesion has vanished, that long lines at psychiatric practices exist, or that The Simpsons, once satire, appears for many suburbanites an impossible dream. You might wish to fight and die for Pride Month, for abortion-on-demand, for no-fault divorce and all it brings, but I certainly don’t. To call it Cultural Marxism is half the story; the rest is homegrown in the bones of liberalism, whether we like it or not. That the two have made a love match is a longer story, but if you’ve oriented yourself properly, your words ought to be those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Let the lie enter the world. Let it even triumph. But not through me. Don’t get caught fighting for the wrong side; clear out your mental cobwebs before you start painting a banner with banal slogans written all over it.

This is no defence of indigestible Islam, a creed as incompatible with the West as any imaginable ideology. Nor does it defend the hybrid horrors that emerge when the strictures of an austere desert religion intersect with iPhones and the rotting liberal self-conception of their new neighbours. Remember the words of Houari Boumediene:

One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.

We’ve dug ourselves a deep hole, but digging sideways is hardly the answer. Far away from our shores, this ought to be a little unsettling because we must pay the old world its due, and we can expect certain patterns, powered by our overly globalised world, to make themselves manifest here. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, a child of Empire, even if it was long departed before my birth. In that, I consider Australians as Englishmen far from home. Much that is good about our country comes from that green and pleasant land, and if we forget this, our long heritage that goes back before William the Conqueror, we can only become prey to other feverish imaginings — those that envision places stripped of history and displaced from time and place. 

Defend your heritage, but defend it cleverly.