We are conquering ourselves

Good Sunday morning to you,

Last week’s thought piece on the inexorable rise of the Far Right has become my most read Substack ever. Check it out, if you haven’t already.

Today we continue on a similar theme.

Enjoy!

I’m currently working on a new book about gold, and, as gold often leads to war - or is it the other way round? - I’ve found myself reading rather a lot about conquerors and conquest. There are certain things all conquerors do, from invade to plunder to strip the conquered of their wealth, power, history and identity. What is so bizarre about today in Britain and Western Europe is that we are doing all these things to ourselves, voluntarily. 

Let me explain.

As the armies of Alexander the Great marched east, overpowering all who stood in their way to form probably the first great empire the world had ever known and, in terms of land mass, one of the biggest (even to this day), the annihilation of the cultural identities of those they conquered soon followed. Locals were raped, pillaged, subjugated and enslaved.

Coinage was a far more important tool of propaganda then than it is now, and Alexander had his armies confiscate gold and silver bullion everywhere they went; melt it down and then re-struck with Greek gods: Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; Nike, goddess of Victory; Zeus, god of power; and Heracles, god of strength, portrayed in the likeness of Alexander himself (at this point rulers had not yet started depicting their own heads). Conquered people quite literally had their own history and legend struck off. Alexander’s coins meanwhile were standardised throughtout his empire.

As well as “Romanizing” the Celts - imposing Roman language, law, custom and governance on them - the Romans actively persecuted Celtic druids and destroyed their sacred groves.

After William I conquered Britain, he took Anglo-Saxon land and gave it to his cronies; he imposed heavy taxes, strict laws and a new kind of feudal system; he replaced Anglo-Saxon English with Norman French in the courts and other centres of rule; he made ecclesiastical changes to better control the church. Any kind of rebellion met with swift and ruthless repression.

Even if 1,000 years later, World War Two was not so different. Both the Nazis and the Japanese did everything in their power to strip those they conquered of their cultural identity.

As well as possession of land and confiscation of wealth, the annihilation of local history, myth, hero and legend has always been a tool of the conqueror, part of the suppression and subjugation that follows invasion.  

Even today the US, not technically an empire and forever trying to distance itself from anything imperial, nevertheless controls much of the globe and its prime resource, oil, with its military. It also exports its culture in such a domineering way that everyone else confuses their own history with that of the US. Like its military, American cultural narratives dominate the world, and distort everybody else’s. You would think, for example, that there had never been any slavery in history, except for that in America, in the 200 years from when the nation was formed to its outlawing in 1865, never mind that the British outlawed it 2 generations earlier. In fact, slavery has existed since before civilization began and still goes on today, with some 21 to 45 million trapped in it. In just seven years between 1938 and 1945, Germany enslaved a number equivalent to 400 years of Transatlantic Slave Trade. Include Japan and the number is double. American cultural narratives dominate.

But here is what is so weird about what is happening today, under the rudderless leadership that is representative social democracy. In the past if you wanted to occupy the lands of other people, you would have to conquer them and take their lands by force. Today no such force is required. In fact, in Britain, Tony Blair actually legislated for it. So did Boris Johnson. Not only do we import our own invasion, we actually subsidise it. The £8 million a day spent housing illegal migrants in hotels is just one example of this.

Once imported, we then start re-writing our own history or apologising for it; from positive discrimination in the media to invisible casting (for some but not all) we change of our stories to better represent these new people, both at the expense of the locals and opportunity for them and at the expense of truth.

Here, for example, is what, according to the BBC, an English family in Roman Britain looked like.

The latest nuts example from the BBC. The plague was clearly racist.

With headlines like that, we satirists are being put out of a job.

We all know about the anti-white middle-aged man narrative of recent years - pale, male and stale and all that - and the discrimination he now encounters when attempting to find work. We have all seen how the modern British family is represented in advertising: there is, it seems, no such thing as a non-multi-cultural family. The latest evolution is anti- young, blonde women. I know this because my partner works in advertising. There is now a widespread agenda not to have them in adverts.

It is not even the immigrants to this country who are actively stripping us of our history and thus cultural identity (with a few exceptions). We are doing it to ourselves. I won't say voluntarily, because there are a lot of people who don't want this to happen, but such is the system of rule we have in place, with state-planned everything and the mindset of the state and most institutions dominated by one worldview, anyone who opposes may as well howl at the moon. 

A king would represent his people. He can make decisions quickly. His decisions, when they come, are acted upon. With representative democracy every decision is seemingly made with short-term headlines in mind, and rarely legacy. Decisions are often so contested the resulting legislation is watered down, or undermined by the Blob enacting it. Much of the time there is no decision at all because of the imagination required or the career risk of putting your head above the parapet. We are no longer one people with one common memory. We are a splodge, a mishmash of different cultural identities with, following the death of Christianity, no coherent ideology at its core beyond the new religions of climate change, multi-culturalism (whatever that means) and the NHS. 

It is a system bereft of thought for the future, bereft of strategy and long-term planning of any kind. The Victorians thought with legacy in mind. They built for the future. Today we do no such thing. We build with nothing in mind but short-term profit and the satisfaction of arbitrary building regulations. This will not change until we change our system of rule. 

The simplest, most bloodless way to do this is to change our systems of money and tax. You design a society the way you tax it. We must have independent money that no body has the power to create at no cost to itself. A non-bloodless alternative - in other words some kind of violent revolution - is not possible, because the state is armed and you, the citizen, are not. This mismatch dooms not just the UK but all of Western Europe. There will not be a revolution.

What’s more, the state - the police and the media especially - does not treat people equally, something former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, articulated to her cost. So I fear for anyone who does revolt.

Those who come here do not have the same history as us. They do not have the same experience or collective memory, the same shared values, the same background or the same heritage. Theirs may be superior. Theirs may be inferior. It does not matter. The point is they do not feel the same allegiance or the same loyalties. They do not have the same values or the same goals, nor should we expect them to. They do not come here to be British. They come here to seek their fortune. That is quite natural. That is what people do. That does not mean we need to sacrifice ourselves.

We are doing the conquerors’ job to ourselves.

I sometimes think that China with its lofty ambitions of world dominance must look at the west, and, every time it is thinking of doing something, then think, “Actually no, we don’t need to do anything here. The west is destroying itself by itself”. Keir Starmer is doing the same looking at the Conservatives. The hundreds of thousands that are coming to the UK each year are doing the same looking at us. 

And we are powerless to do anything about it.

It makes me sigh. And more.

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