Dear Owen Jones

Communists are to guardrails what Andrew Tate is to marital virtue

For decades hysterical leftists like yourself have thrown the accusations of ‘Nazi’ and ‘Fascist’ at their political opponents. Always unfounded — absurd from any serious historical comparative standpoint — these accusations were effective as political rhetoric. They constrained the Overton window and ensured that a swathe of serious policy avenues remained permanently off the table — adjacent possibilities that could never be broached in polite company. Creating an inviolable structure of taboo, this rhetoric drew its power from a deep seated folk-memory of the collapse of liberal democracy in the 1930s and the subsequent atrocities of World War II.

Hang on — I say ‘the atrocities’ but I should say ‘one set of atrocities’ — because, of course, you never reference the tens of millions who were murdered by the communists in the course of collectivization, nor the millions who died in he subsequent cycle of Stalinist purges. Even as you shout about ‘genocide’ (the magical word de jour) in Gaza, you seem mostly ignorant of the 100 million people who died in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China — and in genocidal totalitarian state projects in Vietnam, Laos, Korea. And you flatly deny the common thread: eschatological madness of pursuing a centrally-planned heaven on earth; an obsessive grasping of [final] ‘solutions’ coupled with a cognitive blindness to trade-offs and unintended consequences.

The only reason that these accusations worked for so long is that WWII and the Holocaust [rightly] loomed so large in the Western imagination — dominating the formative years of Boomers and Generation X. But somehow, you managed to manicure a monocular focus on Hitler whilst ignoring Stalin and hiding the more structural and intrinsic problems of totalitarian progressivism. You made invisible the very real extent to which both social liberalism and the most violent and iconoclastic impulses of communism drew from same well-spring: a Faustian will to out-do God and re-make Eden in humanity’s image.

It is an irony lost on you, that Nazism and Fascism were part of exactly the same modernist revolt. National Socialism and the Mussolini’s ‘Third Way’ were very truly creatures of the left. They were predicated on the same rationalistic assumption that the world is knowable and can be recreated in man’s image (or in the image of individual men in this case). Just like you [here] they also rejected the Natural Law and revolted against God.

I have touched on this many times in other essays:

Postliberalism: A very quick response to Lucien Chardon

Right Wing and Green: Star-crossed Lovers

On moving from left to right: The problem of living together in modernity

Post-liberalism and the Commonwealth of Households: A Manifesto

The essential point is that the real political dividing line is between modernism in all its liberal, socialist, fascist and even [pseudo] ‘conservative’ permutations on the one hand, and the embedded, organic, virtue-ethical worldview of the Aristotelian Christendom that we left behind.

Even more completely, smack-me-in-the-face-with-a-smoked-kipper, ironic is the fact that, having for decades used the charge of fascism and the spectre of the Holocaust to suppress any dissent against the modernist-liberal hegemony, leftist children like you are are now using the same words to gloss over the civilizational threat of Islam. You call your opponents Nazis whist running cover for Islamists who seek to kill all Jews, destroy remaining Christian communities in the Middle East and secure a demographic coup across Europe.

And the bizarre thing Owen, is that you are such an ingenue and so unsophisticated, historically illiterate and unread, that you don’t even realize you are doing it. Growing up after the Berlin Wall came down and locked into a shallow, online existence, would-be intellectuals of your generation lack depth. In the twentieth century, intellectual Marxism had a kind of gravitas and a bibliographical and theoretical work ethic to back it up. They were the product of a wider culture which privileged debate, intellectual rigour, and serious interrogation of competing ideas. As documented on a million and one Substacks and YouTube shorts, modern progressives are allergic to intellectual challenge of any kind. Your modus operandi is to deplatform; to shut down opposition by criminalizing ‘hate speech’; to deny reality by gaslighting common sense.

Owen — you’re got a damn cheek talking about ‘guard rails’. The only reason the rhetorical charge of ‘fascism’ was effective for so long, was that the general public WAS very well aware of what happens when the ‘right’ goes too far. Those guardrails have been in place since American troops arrived at gates of Belsen.

The trouble is that the public, coached by people like you, focused on just the dimension of racial tribalism — which is undoubtedly a threat to the logic of the modern, civc-national state. You deliberately obscure the more structural features of totalitarian modernist states — the railway time tables, the bureaucracy, the equity politics, top-down mobilization of the citizenry, the crushing of the family and the church, the commitment to re-engineering speech and so structures of thought. Why is that? Because these are are the specifically modernist/socialist features of the regime.

So yes — ‘Nazis bad’! We get it. But when the so called ‘right’ is going too far, it’s largely because it is doing quintessentially socialist things. Nazi eugenics? Inspired by Fabian eugenics theories and the abortion programme of people like Margaret Sanger. You only have to look at the wild extremes of woke social workers, state euthanasia, gay adoption and surrogacy, the constant advocacy of polyamory and sexual transgression (by the BBC and your own paper and by your good self) to see direct continuity with Alexandra Kollontai’s plans to socialize all babies in the 1920s Soviet Union, or on ‘the other side’ with Nazi indoctrination of youth and state-regulated of families, compulsory adoptions and state ‘breeding’ programmes.

And tell us Owen, when have you ever written about the excesses of the left? When did you ever refer a single time to the broaching of obvious guardrails by socialists, progressives and liberals. You can’t even bring yourself to question transactivists who regularly threaten to rape and kill JK Rowling and others. You don’t even opine when a national treasure like Dame Maureen Lipman has to employ a bodyguard; or when thousands of British Jews many of whom have been in the country for hundreds of years are leaving for Israel because of the actual reality of anti-semitic violence as opposed to the ‘words are violence’ bullshit that odious creeps like yourself usually squeak about. Muslim rape gangs attack thousands of working class girls for decades — and your response focuses on Islamophobia. The drip drip of stabbings and beheadings, vehicular attacks, bombings — and your response is to warn about right wing extremism.

You talk about guardrails and the supposed excesses of supporters of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain whilst embracing hundreds of thousands of Islamist soldiers who have declared war on the West; people who are actively seeking an orgy of iconoclastic demolition directed at European institutions, habits of mind, cultural treasures and cherished patterns of civic life; everyday (sometimes unwitting) militants who want to recreate Christendom in the image of their own false prophet [and people who would gladly throw you off a roof]

In short, Owen, as well as being an illiterate, attention-seeking toddler, you’re a hypocrite. Belfast is an indication of what is to come. The (small L) liberal culture which most Britons have cherished depends on a shared understanding and affective sense of community and destiny which progressives, communists and mind-numbingly stupid liberals have completely shredded. Your homoerotic fantasy of jackbooted Nazis coming for the gays, is never going to happen. We might ban gay marriage and stop teachers abusing children. But Owen — quite honestly — we really don’t care how you live your life. When an awful civil war does emerge — a cultural death by a 1000 cuts — it will give me no pleasure to see the fleeting look of recognition on your face as they come for you, because they will. But it won’t be the white supremacists. It will be the Islamists and probably some of the communists — probably some of your best friends.

Owen — when that day comes, knock on my door by all means. I will be happy to share hearth and home, and shelter you as best I can from actual violence — just as I would my family, my neighbours and members of my church, and indeed anyone. But on that day, I will ask one thing of you, and I will ask it now in anticipation: Can you shut the fuck up and don’t breath a word about guardrails?