"Heard you want your country back...fuck that!"

Discrimination is necessary to recreate the shadow architecture of (Christian) liberal democracy ?

“Heard you want your country back - fuck that” — the now notorious Bob Vylan at Glastonbury

Bob is clearly not a nice man. But credit where credit is due. He has boomed out the small print on a global stage — and after all this was always the plan. This is the Muslim Brotherhood back in 1990.

But YouTube is drowning in ‘shorts,’ with cropped haired Islamic immigrants promising that the country is now theirs — ripe for the picking — and threatening the locals to ‘get with the programme or else’. Islamic immigrants want to take over the country, and they are quite open about it. And the liberal establishment seems intent on handing it over. There were after all 400 BBC employees at the festival fawning over the line-up of mostly ultra-woke minor musical celebrities with an intransigent globalist, open borders agenda. Four hundred! What on earth were they doing?

Ok, so to channel the most successful revolutionary in history: What is to be done? Lenin had a distinct advantage. He was marching with the grain of history. Not in any moral sense. Merely that the process of modernization — big factories, an expanding impoverished industrial working class in the cities — and the unbearable societal stress created by total war, opened the door for him. And he was, undeniably, a masterful tactician.

For those who want to get in the way of Bob Vylan and the Muslim Brotherhood, it is a little more difficult. Lenin was in the business of making scrambled egg. Our problem — for I am one of them — is more akin to making eggs from omelettes. The laws of entropy are against us.

Society has already changed too much — in all the obvious ways.

Feminism, the infantilization of culture, hyper-social/spatial mobility and individualization all conspire against fertility. Secularization and disenchantment and a now rampant metaphysical materialism have drained away any reservoir of shared values and depleted the lode stone of virtue — the moral compass — that we inherited from Christendom. Reflecting on abortion till term and legal volitional killing,

Mary Harrington

recently observed that we have just jettisoned the central planks of the Christian worldview relating to the sanctity of life. She’s not wrong in describing this as a ‘metaphysical assault’. 1500 years of Imago Dei reversed in favour of a new kind of pagan instrumentalism and will to power. The meaning crisis has left society demoralized, unhappy but also profoundly ill-equipped to respond cohesively and cooperatively to a crisis. There can be no Dunkirk spirit in 21st century Britain.

Crashing birthrates and an aging society mean that we have become increasingly dependent on immigration. The fertility gap means that immigrant populations are increasing rapidly as a proportion of the population. The law of exponential growth means that even small growth rates can lead to massive transformations in just a few years. To get the doubling time of a quantity, you divide 70 by the rate of growth. So with 2% growth, a population would double in 35 years. For those non-mathematically minded people (like me), to really understand what this means watch this astonishingly fresh video of Albert Bartlett explaining it sometime in the 1970s.

[BTW EVERYONE should watch this. It applies to just about every sphere of life. Small growth rates can lead to incredible massive outcomes in much less time than you’d think. He’s also very funny]

With this in mind, the stats should not be surprising. Between 2001 and 2021 the Muslim population grew by 150%, from 1.6 million to 4 million, and they are the fastest growing minority group. In England, the 0-18 Muslim population is 11.2% of that age group. In Birmingham, 43.5% of 0-18 year olds are from a Muslim background, in Greater Manchester it's 35%. And in the Arab world they are very optimistic about the trend. “The Muslim population of the UK has risen 44 percent in a decade, according to the latest census figures published by the Office for National Statistics. Of the country’s total population, 6.5 percent — 3.9 million people — are adherents of Islam” trumpets Arab News. 4.4% annual growth gives a doubling time of just (70/4.4) 15 years

OPTIONS

There are only three options as far as I can see.

(1) Liberal multiculturalism with blinkers (DO NOTHING)

This is the default position. The status quo. It is dominant in all UK institutions — schools, hospitals, media, parliament, blue chip companies. Corporations don’t care because they benefit from cheap labour and can always move if things get rough. The public sector is absolutely full of liberal ideologues. Some of these people are self-conscious globalists and anti-Western iconoclasts (including all the old style Marxists). They can perhaps see the direction of travel and embrace it in some weirdly self-destructive form of accelerationism.

Others — and I think this is much of the rank and file Labour Party — are simply framing the problem wrongly. They see the world through a post-war left /right lens. They grew up fighting against Maggie Thatcher, the ‘milk snatcher’ and attending ‘rock against racism’ concerts. They genuinely believe in the mythos of liberal multiculturalism. Ironically their worldview is actually profoundly Occidental and even inadvertently racist because they assume — like pretty well all post-war sociologists and certainly all the Marxists — that with modernization, all cultures will converge. Everyone will basically become ‘like us’. And happily they will converge on some version of Anglophone social liberalism — shorn of Queen and religion. This weird variant of Victorian progress theory is the conceit of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. It is hard to imagine how anyone at a music festival can ‘Imagine’ in this way, just 18 months after Hamas slaughtered hundreds of beautiful young Israeli peaceniks at a similar music festival — whilst listening to bands who literally celebrate the slaughter. But then the human capacity for imagination also allows for self-deception and mass delusion. Convergence theory has been dead in the water in sociology for decades. Anyone who has studied capitalist modernity unfolding in places such as China or Nigeria or Brazil must surely now that variety is the name of the game. There are and will be different ways of doing modernity. None are perfect and some are better than others. The British ‘way’ is uniquely fantastic and has seeded many of the more benign cultures in the world. It is also fragile and on the point of self-destruction.

Either way, whether driven by cynical iconoclasm or rose-tinted, Polly Anna-ish self-delusion, the result will be the same. Britain will become fractured, ghettoized, fragmented along ethnic lines and in a permanent state of sub-civil war — often breaking out in to violence. A kind of European Lebanon.

Demography is destiny — welcome it or not, white Britains are being replaced. This is just true. The real questions is whether it is whiteness that matters or religion and culture. Contrary to ideologues on both the far left and the ethno-right, there is a real difference. The culture and the religion of immigrants matters. It makes a massive material difference to the outcome. Mass Christian immigration could arguably move the country back closer to its historical roots and tradition. Even now, the Church of England is holding on in some places only on the back of black and asian bell-pullers and vicars. Anglicans should be truly thankful for this. My own Catholic Church sees priests and nuns drawn from all over the world. I would feel closer to the fantasy of Yeoman Olde England if the Churches were once again full — especially if the English Hymnal would see fit to re-include ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’.

This speaks to the reality that all countries and societies change all of the time. What is revolutionary and iconoclastic in one generation becomes the backbone of the country within a century. One only has to think about the scale of the change wrought by the Reformation. This was a terrible catastrophe. But it did define national identity and culture for the next 400 years. And 400 years prior to that, the Norman conquest — a terrible wound for sure, with consequences visible even today. But it was a wound that grew over. It didn’t destroy the underlying continuity of Christendom. William was crowned at Westminster Abbey.

So it is not really change per se — but the balance between change and continuity. In the case of a Christian revival prompted in part by immigrant Christians, the superficial ‘discontinuity’ of race and colour would be more than outweighed by the reinforced continuity of 1500 years of Christendom. In this sense modern materialism, narcissistic individualism and secularism present a far more dangerous cultural discontinuity than race per se.

But modernity has also rendered us uniquely vulnerable to the kind of immigration that we are actually experiencing — which is from intransigent, uncompromising, imperialist Islam. Mass Islamic immigration is something different. Yes there is a demographic revolution under way, that can accurately be described as a hostile take over with white Britons likely to be a minority by 2063 according to Matt Goodwin.
But much more worrying is that 25% of the population will be Muslim. Against the backdrop of a fragmented, deracinated, non-cohesive and self-hating mainstream culture in which iconoclasm is the first instinct of the ruling class, the presence of an organized cultural block that literally despises the bedrock of Western culture — not least the treatment of women — will give it the weight and a presence to Islamify the country rapidly. This is already happening in many Western cities, where women are now deeply fearful of walking alone in Islamic areas without a chaperone. It’s rude to point this out. But it is true.

This won’t however play out in one direction. Britain is unlikely to become a cohesive Islamic state. Rather over the next century, the country will become ghettoized and fragmented and in a state of near permanent sub-civil war, with outbreaks of violence, constant inter-community ‘negotiations’ and every more militarized patterns of policing. The unit of political analysis in such re-tribalized societies is not the rational individual voter but the ethnic block. Voting along tribal lines will become the norm. And of course this is already happening with the emergence of Islamic parties and candidates in the UK, and an independent Islamic caucus within the Labour Party.

Professor David Betz is doing the rounds showing just how near to this we are moving

2. Ethno-nationalist revanchism would degenerate into pagan collectivism /fascism

Faced with all this, the temptation on the right is to meet the racial identity politics of the left with their own version — a nativist ethno-nationalism. This playbook would involve a ethno-nationalist party taking power through the ballot box and launching a dirigiste revolution against multiculturalism with a cessation of all immigration and mass race-based deportations of non-citizens, as well as incentivized repatriation of dual-citizens.

Because large swathes of the white population would also resist such a government, this would certainly become a kind of civil war with the suspension of civil liberties and democracy and an ethno-nationalist authoritarian state. If successful, there is a good chance that such a movement would descend into the kind of atrocious pit of 20th century fascism and socialism — with genocidal and inhuman consequences. The reason is that in order to propel itself into power, it would have to fuel the kind of racial-supremacist ideology that is pagan, cruel and fundamentally untrue. We have spent 20 centuries unfolding the most precious idea that human beings are individuals created in the image of God and each personally sacred to him, and therefore to all of us. There is nothing — not even the prospect of a unified national society — that would make such a reversal worthwhile. The end doesn’t justify the means — but more than this, the means would irrevocably damage and destroy the end.

The ethno-nationalist society could never replenish the well of virtue, nor recover the sacral understanding of the individual. Having treated individuals as generic racial bricks, the collectivist sentiment would remain — and mobilized by an all-powerful modern state, the results are unlikely to be any better than previous incarnations.

3. Christian civic nationalism

There is an alternative: a form of push-back which sustains and would, in the end, preserve the sacral recognition of the individual that was first made possible by Christendom, and subsequently became a central tenet of classical liberalism.

This would involve a coercive and unblinking re-assertion of the unity of the British state rooted in the indigenous peoples of the Isles and their identities and histories, an outright rejection of multiculturalism. So far, so similar to the ethno-nationalist option. But it would also recognize that there is nothing so constant as change. Rooted in perhaps, but not framed not by a tribal conception of race, this path would foreground 1500 years of Christianity and a monoculture predicated not upon race but on colour-blind civic nationalism. After all ‘Your Country Needs You’ appealed to the dependents of Picts, Celts, Brythonic tribes, Romans (including the odd North African) Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Normans. But the secret of our success was that waves of immigration were slow — even when in the context of outright invasion and conquest. There was always sufficient continuity for a myth of ‘imagined community’ and consanguinity to be forged — if not for the next generation, then 3 or 4 generations down the line.

For sure the British monoculture involved the suppression of minority languages in Celtic periphery of England as well as the United Kingdom. This was the condition for modern state formation across all of Europe (as the Basques or the Catalans). But it also stood on the firm foundation of 1500 years of Christian culture as well as pre-Christian Saxon institutions relating to political culture and the commons.

A strategy predicated on this perspective would fall far short of the tribal identity politics favoured by ethno-nationalists. But it would mean a complete end to Muslim immigration from anywhere. This is because Islam has shown repeatedly a disinclination to live alongside a host culture in peace. The overt aim of Islamic organizations is aggressive proselytization and a take over of democratic institutions. We are already a long way down this road in the UK with most large cities and councils under the sway of Muslim Labour parties and now with upstart Islamic parties. New York seems now to be heading in the same direction. Recognizing that Islam represents a threat to Western civilization is, at this stage, simply common sense. The strategy would also necessitate banning Muslim political parties as well as extreme public displays of Islamic culture including street prayer, the burqa/Niqab (as in Denmark) and Islamic schools. The priority for public policy would be for integration and assimilation. Islam itself should not be banned. But it should be prevented from occupying the public square and contending as the dominant public /national religion. Islamic related offences against public order would be fast-tracked and lead to immediate deportation.

More generally, a twenty year moratorium on all immigration would be combined with the deportation of illegal immigrants, and a requirement for citizenship to be linked to language acquisition and active endorsement of Western values (with refusal/dissent leading to immediate deportation). Alternatively, much more limited immigration but with a meritocratic points system AND positive discrimination in favour of Christians could both fill any critical skilled labour shortages and add momentum to the Christian revival.

Would it work? Twenty years of such a regime MIGHT just MIGHT just avoid options 1 or 2 which are infinitely worse. It would at least preserve the principle of equality —more or less—for all citizens regardless of race, whilst insisting on the outright superiority and a priori precedence of Western/British culture over those cultures imported by migrants. I say more or less, because citizens would have equality in everything except the advancement of a public religion and culture. You have to want to actually be a citizen, and citizenship is conditional on a pre-cognitive, pre-conditional acceptance of belonging. You can be invited and accepted in to belong - but not to rebuild the house in your own image. Come because you want the culture not the material benefits. The principle is simple. When in Rome, live as Romans.

Doubtless a liberal reading these lines would regard that final proposition as totally contradictory. How can individual equality be reconciled with targeted discrimination against one religion? The answer is ‘it’s a matter of degree’. Even, or rather especially, in their heyday, liberal democracies worked because the range of issues about which there was total individual freedom of action, was framed by a much larger pre-cognitive, pre-judged, pre-political agreement about societal virtues — taken for granted modes of behaviour and habits of mind, failures with which to comply would signal a kind of madness.

The problem we have now is that these ‘shadow structures’ are now up for contention. The rate of change has been so high that we now have to take conscious charge of the underlying parameters. We are forced to be responsible for their maintenance, repair, gradual upgrading and steering. Unfortunately, this means embracing certain types of discrimination. In the past, these discriminations were simply part of the institutional architecture or didn’t arise. Social democracy for instance, always depended on strong borders and an exclusive kind of solidarity between citizens. In the heyday of the welfare state, nobody questioned borders or tried to make the claim that entitlements should be available to anyone from anywhere, who happened to turn up. And if they had, they would be been considered quite bonkers. And yet this is now the default position for much of the left.

In short, to recover some kind of equilibrium, we do have to re-create the shadow architecture that makes any kind of consensus possible — and this means a period of overt discrimination. If it works it will be followed by a much longer permanent situation of implicit and mostly unconscious discrimination. In a house these structures are called foundations. Nobody living in a house, digs up the foundations willy nilly. And most of the time, we don’t think about foundations. They simply constitute our world in the background. In traditional Chinese society, Confucianism provided such a foundation. In the West it was furnished by Christianity. Right now, our society is bereft. But only with that discrimination — the rebuilding of taken for granted foundations — will it be possible to sustain the sacral society of individuals. Needless to say, none of this can work without a revival of the Church. Christian culture can’t be sustained without mass participation in the liturgy. Without such a revival, we probably deserve Islam.

It should be pointed out in passing — although it is obvious — that exactly the same logic applies to debates about gender, sexuality and marriage. We have lost the precognitive unspoken consensus. The liberal replacement epitomized by secular gay marriage has fallen apart within just a decade. Fertility is collapsing and the welfare state will follow. By exactly the same token, to survive Western society will need a period of overt discrimination to re-draw boundaries, establish heteronormative marriage and taboos against promiscuity to such an extent that they are renaturalized and taken for granted. We should not re-criminalize homosexual lifestyles. But we should ban gay marriage, stop ideological indoctrination in schools, support marriage and fertility and ban the public processional advocacy associated with annual PRIDE marches.

It turns out that liberal modernity doesn’t have foundations and can’t provide them. Gender activists have provided only chaos and unhappiness. Muslim activists are deadly serious about replacing Christendom with their own foundation. We should take them at their word. The choice couldn’t be more simple.