Wednesday 11 July 2012

Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan


Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2011, viii + pp.267, Notes, bibliography, Index, ISBN 978-0-300-16671-2


I consider it to be the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in the plan not to hesitate to say so

General Einsenhower immediately before General Montgomery’s briefing for Operation Overlord, 15th May 1944


© Frank Ellis 2012 All Rights Reserved

Anger and shame assailed me when I was reading Losing Small Wars: anger with a corrupt Prime Minister (Blair) for the lies used to justify the deployment of British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan and the professional collusion of senior officers and the security services in the dissemination of the lies; and shame for the untold misery inflicted on Iraqi and Afghan civilians, the deaths and maiming of our soldiers and the lies used to comfort their families and to mislead the public. As if this was not bad enough, we are confronted at every turn in these badly judged deployments with far too many examples of incompetent political and military leadership in theatre. With all these failings and the scale of the invasion and occupation in Iraq, and the NATO mission in Afghanistan, Ledwidge’s title hardly does justice to what is revealed. In any case these are hardly ‘small wars’: the lying alone was and remains even now on a mass industrial scale.

If, having read Losing Small Wars, I had to identify the single most important failing about the disastrous British interventions in Iraq and, currently Afghanistan, it would be the failure on the part of the British government and its military advisers to spell out quite clearly why the British armed forces were ever deployed to these two parts of the Middle East. Factor out the obvious lies disseminated by Blair and his political-military clique that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that these weapons posed a threat to Britain and there was no justified reason for Britain’s ever having had anything to do with the US-led invasion of Iraq. Bush’s ravings that Saddam Hussein was another Hitler reflect the appalling ignorance of American presidents about the world. Such claims were intended to provide some weak justification for Saddam Hussein’s removal from power. Nevertheless they are pitiful claims. By the standards of Arab leaders Saddam Hussein was averagely repressive. Oil is a factor on the Middle East but did it require that the US and others invade Iraq and inflict such dreadful misery and suffering? If we went there to impose democracy and other Western abstractions then that too has been a catastrophic failure and one that was bound to be in a part of the world where Islam rules. Why do Americans and their too willing British allies not realise that the liberal democracies that evolved in a small part of northern Europe among small groups of racially homogenous peoples cannot be just imposed on what are Third World tribal societies? Here we see a deadly serious failure of imagination, caused by what Pat Buchanan has correctly identified as democratic fundamentalism and which has been made to appear fallaciously plausible by the malevolent ideology of multiculturalism and neo-conservatism.

As for the British Army’s being in Afghanistan, no British politician has yet provided a convincing argument for the deployment. Brown’s claims that British troops in Afghanistan made the UK safer were obvious lies and so obviously clumsy one wonders why he thought he could get away with peddling such nonsense. Equally mendacious are the claims that UK forces are helping the Afghan population to build a better future. Do the Taliban – they are part of the Afghan population – want our help? How do we help people by laying their country waste and imposing utterly alien institutions such as elections and education and undermining the foundations of a tribal society? Other possible reasons for our being there may be related to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and fears about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (and oil, of course). But even these are not that convincing when trying to find an explanation for why Britain has expended so much blood and treasure. Remove any geo-political considerations and one is left with the interests and rivalries of the three services. Ledwidge refers to remarks made by General Dannatt to a British diplomat that if the British army, with an exit date from Iraq established, did not redeploy its battle groups to Afghanistan, they would be removed in any Strategic Defence Review. Ledwidge also suggests that the British army wanted to go to Helmand to show what it could do and attempt to compensate for its less than glorious performance in southern Iraq. Another factor prompting the deployment was, as always, a desire on the part of senior British politicians and officers to ingratiate themselves with the Americans, to try to rebuild their damaged stock.

British woes in Iraq started well before the first tank crossed the border. Ledwidge convincingly argues that senior British officers failed not only to challenge demagogue-politicians, especially Blair, before the invasion, but also to ask the necessary hard-headed questions about what would happen after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. In a reference to a very short British document entitled ‘Iraq – the aftermath – military options’ which was dated 4th March 2003 Ledwidge makes the telling point that the fact that this document was prepared as late as it was ‘speaks volumes for the priority placed on the “what now?” question’.1 That these and other questions were not asked by senior officers and pushed, if necessary, to the point of resignation, amounts to a clear dereliction of duty. The lack of planning for the occupation phase and the failure to realise that if the British did not provide firm and fair governance less desirable local entities would seize the initiative, helped to create a situation in which law and order collapsed and the militias were able to pursue their vendettas.

Matters in Basra were exacerbated, according to Ledwidge, because the view was held among senior British officers that the lessons of Britain’s previous counterinsurgencies from Malaya to Northern Ireland comprised a body of knowledge and experience that was readily applicable to Basra; and that this historical background made the British army uniquely qualified to engage in counterinsurgency operations unlike the Americans. Ledwidge devotes a lot of space to trying to demonstrate that the experience of previous counterinsurgencies, especially Malaya and Northern Ireland, was not always helpful and often hugely misleading; and that the Americans mastered the problems whereas, the British more or less withdrew to their base and waited for the end, as the security situation in Basra deteriorated.

Expertise in fighting a counterinsurgency in northern Europe, argues Ledwidge, ‘does not imply such prowess elsewhere’.2 On the contrary, I suggest it most certainly does imply such prowess. Counterinsurgencies, for all the specific racial, geographical, political, religious and cultural differences, have themes in common which make it possible to derive general principles and observations. For example, I am not aware of an insurgency that is so unique such that experience gained could not be applied elsewhere. In fact, were such an insurgency known to have existed, one might well be justified in considering it not to be an insurgency at all. The British Army’s track record in waging counterinsurgencies does, in my opinion, justify the expectation that this expertise/prowess could be applied beyond Northern Ireland. That this expertise was not properly applied is another matter.

In attempting to weaken the validity of any experience gained in Northern Ireland and then applied to Iraq, Ledwidge points out that we the “Brits”, as we were named by IRA/Sinn Fein, knew the opposition very well. The cultural, historical links made the task of dealing with IRA/Sinn Fein that much easier. Gerry Adams used to boast that the “Brits” would negotiate with people they condemned as terrorists because they always have done before, as in Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Adams was right. However, there was a crucial distinction between the counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain’s post-1945 counterinsurgencies. Britain could negotiate a settlement with former Mau-Mau leaders and leave. If no negotiated settlement was possible the option of just walking away and leaving the natives to it was always an option. If IRA/Sinn Fein could demonstrate the necessary stamina, it could reasonably expect to be sitting down with British politicians at some stage. Where Adams and other IRA/Sinn Fein leaders were spectacularly wrong was in holding the belief that the British government would be able to abandon Northern Ireland to its fate and that IRA/Sinn Fein or any other group would take control. What was a feasible option in Kenya and Aden was not possible in Northern Ireland, the UK. Northern Ireland was not Kenya. The UK government could not abandon Northern Ireland, however much it might want to, and it took a very long time for IRA/Sinn Fein leaders to grasp this brutal fact. Once Adams and his colleagues realised this the way was set for some kind of negotiated settlement. Alongside this political reality was the fact that IRA/Sinn Fein had been subverted, penetrated and monitored so totally by MI5/GCHQ that its chances of imposing any kind of solution in Northern Ireland were nil. This furthered the chances of a negotiated political settlement.

And here we might find the incunabula of the deal done by the British with Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia in Basra, which Ledwidge sees as a disaster. By 2005 it was crystal clear to all but the seriously deluded that the invasion had gone horribly wrong; that Blair and his close circle of civilian and senior military advisers had demonstrably lied about WMDs (for which they remain unpunished); that no planning had been conducted for the post-war/occupation phase; and that Blair and his clique wanted out of the hideous mess and carnage they had inflicted. In these circumstances an accelerated deal with the militia gangs based on what had taken place in Northern Ireland seemed attractive. However, by the time the British and IRA/Sinn Fein started negotiating Britain troops had been on the ground in Northern Ireland, in large numbers, since 1969. Moreover, IRA/Sinn Fein, even with, at best, the treacherous indifference of US law and order agencies to British requests for extradition, and, at worst, with the treacherous collusion of a whole swathe of the American political caste (Democrat and Republican), was losing what it called the “armed struggle”. Factors that made a negotiated settlement possible with IRA/Sinn Fein - specifically the longevity of the “armed struggle”, the obvious successes of the British army and MI5 and the realisation, eventually, by some of the more enlightened members of IRA/Sinn Fein that no British government could walk away from Northern Ireland – did not obtain in Basra or anywhere else in Iraq. It took 30 years before serious negotiations with IRA/Sinn Fein could start. Britain could not afford to wait 30 years before it started serious negotiations with Iraqi insurgents. Political factors in the UK which militated against hasty deals being done with IRA/Sinn Fein in the 1970s encouraged premature deals with militia gangs in Basra. Everything was done with indecent haste and presented as a solution which it was not. The time factor was one of the key lessons of Northern Ireland and other long-running insurgencies that were ignored by the British and by the Americans. In fact, Ledwidge concedes that the time factor was one of three factors that could be used to defend British policy: (i). the war could last forever; (ii) the Iraqi army was being trained and (iii) there was a view that the British Army was part of the problem.3

A major criticism I would make of Losing Small Wars is that the author in his determination to expose British failure to scrutiny is far too willing, certainly as concerns Iraq, to see success in American efforts and very little else. This distorts his message. Whereas, according to Ledwidge, the Americans are willing to learn from their mistakes the British remain trapped in the Malaya-Northern Ireland paradigms. It is worthwhile reminding ourselves of the errors made by the Americans. If the British failed to plan for the occupation so did the Americans. They then made things many times worse by the programme of de-Baathification which was inspired by the de-Nazification of Germany in 1945. Whatever the Baath party was, it not the Nazi party and Saddam Hussein was not another Adolf Hitler. The de-Baathification programme denied status and support to the Iraqi technocracy the very people needed to get essential services running properly. It turned qualified Iraqis against the Americans. Another disparity can be noted. Ledwidge mentions the charges of torture against the British military interrogators in Northern Ireland in the early days yet he has nothing to say about the appalling abuses carried out by the Americans in Iraq immediately after the invasion in 2003 in Abu Ghraib which were way beyond anything perpetrated by British soldiers in southern Iraq. The Americans, specifically the CIA, also failed to identify the significance of the Fedayeen and their role in the insurgency. And why is Ledwidge, a lawyer, so deafeningly silent about the American state torture chambers in Guantanamo Bay and so-called “extraordinary rendition”? Guantanamo is not even in the book’s index. Why does Ledwidge bypass these American outrages when berating the British Army for minor infringements? If internment without trial and Bloody Sunday are now seen as propaganda gifts to the nationalist cause, what about the routine mass killings of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, carried out by US forces? On a finding of fact Ledwidge even gets the date of Bloody Sunday unforgivably wrong: he says it was April 1972 when it was, in fact, 30th January 1972.4 Recent events in Afghanistan would suggest that the anarchic spirit which led to Abu Ghraib and much more, before, according to Ledwidge, the Americans set the new standard in counterinsurgency and in winning friends and influencing people in remote tribal societies, is alive and well. In the new model American counterinsurgency paradigm, for example, it is acceptable to have yourself filmed while you urinate on dead Taliban fighters, burn the Holy Koran and leave your base in the early hours of the morning to kill Afghan families.

Once again, and wilfully ignorant of some of the realities, Ledwidge pushes the multicultural agenda in the military, praising the way Americans have been quick ‘to appreciate the benefits of such people [immigrants]’.5 Ledwidge has obviously not heard about what happened at Foot Hood in Texas in 2009 when, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a US army psychiatrist due to be posted to Iraq, and already known for his anti-American statements, murdered 13 people on the base. On the clear dangers posed by multiculturalism to the military Ledwidge is just as wilfully blind despite his repeated warnings that our analyses must be based on hard evidence not wishful thinking. To quote Ledwidge: ‘What happens on the ground is rather more important, and that depends on having a true appreciation of what one is doing. In turn, that appreciation must be founded on hard fact, not on the kind of wishful thinking that passes for military assessments of “effect” ’.6 Ledwidge is guilty of precisely this “wishful thinking” when he pushes the agenda of multiculturalism in the military or believes that it can work. Consistent with Ledwidge’s assertion that we must deal with facts and things as they are, not as they ought to be, then it should be pointed out that, quite apart from the fact that they degrade operational efficiency, Western women in uniform are extremely offensive to Muslims and that Iraqis do not like – to put it mildly – blacks in Western armies. So how do Ledwidge and his feminist/multiculturalist colleagues in the British Army propose to deal with that situation, an appreciation based on ‘on hard fact’? For example, were it necessary, in order to demonstrate to the people, say, Iraqis, that we were sensitive to their culture would we be prepared in the name of operational flexibility in a counterinsurgency only to deploy units comprising white male soldiers or is the ‘wishful thinking’ and self-esteem of feminists and multiracialists, with all the antagonisms it arouses among Iraqis, going to be allowed to set the agenda?

Iraqis, the Taliban and all the other indigenous groups that resent Western interference have every right to feel aggrieved. However, they need to be clear that when Western nations cease to interfere in the affairs of tribal states, as they should, it means just that. It means that no food aid when populations spiral out of control shall be donated (only sold at the full market value); it means that Western expertise in victim search and rescue in the aftermath of an earthquake or tsunami shall not be free but will be paid for either in hard currency or free access to natural resources (gold, platinum and oil); it means that drugs that can prevent malaria, bilharzia and even cure AIDS shall be available at market prices to those in Africa that want them; and when the latest African dictator orders the slaughter of some rival tribe Western troops will not be sent to sort the mess out; and it means that Haiti will forever remain mired in primitive savagery. No longer will Western troops impose, or attempt to impose, abstract concepts of free speech, the rule of law, free and fair elections on people who do not understand them or do not care for them. In short, Third World states or tribes are quite right to resent being invaded and lectured to by First World powers on how to lead their lives. They should be left alone provided they represent no threat to the West (and Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan were/are not threats to the West). That said, when they request, or normally demand, Western aid, these we-will-not-tolerate-being-lectured-to-by-Westerners states whose people are conscious of their dignity and who demand to be treated as equals should bear in mind that any assistance that Western states might consider to provide shall at all times be subject to terms and conditions - pacta sunt servanda - and if you do not like them then you can eat your dignity and use your sangomas to cure your children of malaria. This is the new world order.

Ledwidge would have us believe that these days there is very little animosity towards the Russians in Afghanistan. I can only assume that this assertion is intended to create a contrast with the way the British are currently regarded in Helmand and thus to imply that the Russians performed better than the British. The comparison is somewhat flawed. The Russians – they failed abysmally - are gone: the British are there (and failing); they provide a new focal point for Afghan xenophobia. If the British went and the Russians returned tomorrow Afghans would transfer their xenophobia back to them and start saying nice things about the British. Ledwidge’s source for these claims is Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy (2011) and on at least two occasions Braithwaite is cited incorrectly and in a manner that distorts Braithwaite’s original. For example, Ledwidge cites Braithwaite as having written that ‘there was no grudge against the Russians’.7 Braithwaite’s original is conditional and far less assertive: ‘Perhaps it was because of the horrors that followed that the Afghans did not in the long run seem to nurture a grudge against the Russians’.8 The ‘horrors that followed’ is a reference to the civil war that ensued after the Russian withdrawal. Ledwidge cites the page number from Afgantsy incorrectly (p.332!!/p.333☺). Ledwidge then cites Braithwaite as having written that he, Braithwaite, was ‘told by every Afghan that he met that things were better under the Russians’.9 Braithwaite actually wrote: ‘I was told by almost every Afghan I met that things were better under the Russians’.10 I would expect an author with a legal training to show greater attention to detail. Having listed a great many of the fine qualities now attributed to the erstwhile Russian invaders by Afghan interlocutors – apparently they never killed women and children – Braithwaite concludes that: ‘As history much of this was travesty’.11 On the other hand, Ledwidge is unaware of this or it suits his purposes to ignore the bizarre Afghan assessment of the Russian occupation which as Braithwaite points out is a travesty. In fact, both authors fail to consider the possibility that when Afghans praise the former occupiers and their policies to the present occupiers that they could just be engaging in a bit of Brit-baiting not pursuing serious historical analysis.

Some of the most devastating parts of Losing Small Wars deal with what can only be described as the super abundance of middle-ranking and senior officers in the British Army. Ledwidge notes that there are 12 brigades in the British Army and thus allowing for leave, illness, training, extra-unit postings and retirement one might expect there to be about 24 brigadiers. There are a staggering 190 and this is 20 more than in 1997.12 But it gets worse. There are 2 divisions in the British Army. Divisions are normally commanded by a major-general and we have 43 major-generals.13 There are also 5 full generals (and that is just the army). In all, the three armed services have about 500 general officers (brigadier or above14). To cite Ledwidge: ‘To put these figures into perspective, there are far more generals in the British army than there are helicopters, or operational tanks. There are considerably more admirals than ships, and about three times as many RAF officers of one star or above than there are flying squadrons’.15 The comparisons with the US Marine Corps, US Army and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF is similar in size to the UK’s) are grotesquely embarrassing. To cite Ledwidge again: ‘There are proportionately eight times more generals in the UK armed forces than there are in the US Marine Corps, four times as many as in the US army, and an astonishing ten times as many as the Israelis have’.16 It will almost certainly be the case that many of these senior officers will have been promoted beyond their abilities. Below the hordes of generals are the hordes of colonels and majors: ‘There are no fewer than 5,500 officers of full colonel or lieutenant colonel rank (or equivalent) in all three services, and 9,550 officers of the rank of major’ […] ‘An entire division, with all its ancillary support, could be manned by army officers over the rank of major’.17

Most of these officers will never command active units and will be employed as administrators and, judging by the profligacy of MOD, not very efficient ones. Not only do these officers clog up the rank structure, denying talented officers their professional dues, but they provide all kinds of non-military incentives and promotion opportunities for those who wear a uniform but are in fact not soldiers (the same thing happened to the British police a long time ago). In this MOD, office environment, the kind of skills and qualities required for promotion and other rewards will be based on being adept at social net-working, presenting an impression of comme il faut, getting noticed by one’s superiors and avoiding any association with failure but making every effort to get linked with any sort of success. It also raises the possibility that social connections, something we had thought had long been consigned to the rubbish bin will make a come back, if they ever went away, in career planning and rewards. Officers who have secured promotion and rewards by such methods will use the same methods to reward their favourites and will learn to expect deference when they are wrong instead of being corrected by competent staff officers. Long term the damage is very severe and professionally dysgenic: it actively discourages and punishes those with drive, new ideas and unusual approaches, rewarding the mediocrities and time servers. Sign up to all kinds of human rights’ legislation regardless of the consequences for those soldiers who actually do some soldiering and who run the risk of being killed and losing their legs in an IED explosion and who have to make split second decisions about whether to open fire in a threatening situation - Ledwidge’s analysis of this situation is woefully inadequate - impose the politically correct orthodoxies of diversity, feminism and homosexual rights, again, regardless of the real-world consequences, and the stage is set in which absolutely no officer of any rank challenges anything for fear of missing his promotion, posting, medal or knighthood. It should also be pointed out that these officers receive very generous allowances, especially for sending their children to public schools and equally generous pensions when they retire or are made redundant. The case for a pitiless cull on the grounds of operational efficiency and cost savings is overwhelming; and long overdue.

Without realising it, Ledwidge provides evidence that a toxic mixture of keeping one’s head down, saying what one is expected to say and political correctness are contaminating the Staff College at Shrivenham. For example, he notes that a senior officer at Shrivenham complained that many of the officer students ‘were simply not interested in discussing, for example, why they were fighting in Afghanistan’.18 This is deeply disturbing because it suggests to me that the reasons have less to do with genuine ignorance or lack of interest and everything to do with the infiltration of politically correct ideas into the heart of the military. Those student officers knew full well – and the instructor referred to by Ledwidge knew it as well – that any officer attending a course at Shrivenham who asked hard-headed questions about the role and presence of UK armed forces in either Iraq or in Afghanistan and brushed aside the obviously mendacious reasons given by Brown, Cameron and the senior military establishment (keep the streets of Britain safe) would find his career very badly damaged. The student officers know it and so does the instructor (and Ledwidge). Imagine a similar scenario in some Metropolitan Police Service course where white officers were asked for their views on the Macpherson Report (1999). Would they attack this vicious anti-white racism and its Marxist hatred of England or would they grovel and make conciliatory, snivelling noises about “institutional racism” so as not to damage their careers? To quote Ledwidge: ‘Without a clear understanding of what one is doing fighting a war, for what one is fighting and how, the mission is highly unlikely to succeed’.19 Ledwidge is quite right and here is the perfect opportunity for Ledwidge to explain to the reader – although such an explanation should have come much earlier – what exactly the British are fighting for in Afghanistan. Ledwidge, having routinely excoriated senior British officers and politicians for evasions and turf wars, largely true, nevertheless fails to offer any clear cut explanation for the British presence in Afghanistan. Ledwidge never tells us. Maybe he has access to sensitive sources and has succumbed to the cult of secrecy in Whitehall which he has earlier lambasted. Either way he has nothing to say on why British armed forces are in Afghanistan, offering no convincing explanation for their presence at all, an astonishing lacuna in a book of this kind even more so when he attacks senior officers for muddled thinking or lack of any thinking.

Recalling that other students and he at Shrivenham were silenced when they started considering certain areas of the legality of the Iraq war20, Ledwidge then compares the way sensitive questions are dealt with at Shrivenham with civilian institutions: ‘Nonetheless the kind of difficulty I encountered would be completely unheard of in most serious civilian institutions’.21 If Ledwidge really believes that he must be an ostrich or a troglodyte. If you cannot raise awkward questions about the legality of the Iraq war at Shrivenham in 2006, rest assured you cannot raise awkward questions about race and IQ, the consequences of mass immigration and the corrupting effects of feminism in a British university in 2006. Soldiers obey orders and so a commander having weighed up the situation gives his order. Universities, on the other hand, promote themselves as institutions of free thinking, free speech and academic freedom yet are utterly cowardly and corrupt on issues of race and feminism, totalitarian in fact. Universities will not permit conferences on the theme of race and IQ because some of the administrators are too frightened of the truth and determined to suppress it. What happened to Satoshi Kanazawa at LSE in 2011 merely confirms the dire state of academic freedom at British institutions of higher education. Ledwidge decides to look elsewhere for inspiration and his quest for the ‘critical soldier’22 takes him once again across the Atlantic. Unfortunately for Ledwidge the US military and its academies are corrupted by feminism and PC as well. Moreover, Ledwidge is obviously not aware or prefers not to notice that the kind of censorship which exists at Shrivenham also pervades the US military and indeed American society, especially the universities. For example, any senior officer who attacked the damage done to the US military by “diversity” (quotas for blacks and women) would have his career terminated in very short order. US Major Andy Messing waited until he had retired before he criticised racial diversity in Special Forces as a liability. The most recent FBI report on gang activity in the US military, 2011 National Gang Survey: Emerging Trends also highlights the dangers of diversity and how it can undermine morale and unit cohesion.

A fundamental question and one not dealt with by Ledwidge is the purpose for which the UK armed forces exist. If the primary aim of the UK armed forces is the defence of the UK and UK interests, then this will necessitate armed forces configured to wage highly mobile war. Why should we train British soldiers to engage and to kill the enemy then complain, as Ledwidge does, that units like the Parachute Regiment are not the best troops for certain missions where it is necessary to engage with civilians? The counterinsurgencies in which the British army has been involved since 1945 were related to colonial withdrawal (now over), and long-standing historical grievances in Northern Ireland, which have been addressed. The insurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Northern Ireland were forced on the British government. That was not the case with the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan which were the direct result of going where we have no right to be. Defining vital British interests to mean an obligation to spread democracy, aiding the allegedly oppressed or preventing the spread of WMDs is an attempt to hide the fact that our motives are not honourable; that our real intentions are to impose the tyranny of democratic fundamentalism on remote indigenous populations so as to control them and if they resist we will kill them.

The specific causes that led to the disastrous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan will be fought over for years to come. Losing Small Wars and other titles on these wars leave me in doubt that one of the primary causes of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan was dangerous wishful thinking that persuaded civilian and military planners that tribal societies in the Middle East really did want liberal democracy, human rights, education and the idiocies of feminism imposed upon them. Ledwidge makes a convincing case that senior British officers – colonels and above - colluded in these disasters by putting personal career considerations before their duty or because they lacked the moral courage to challenge politicians. Thus they refused to confront Blair’s dangerous fantasies about saving the planet with hard-headed questions. The problems now are all about reforms. Once the men have been brought back from Afghanistan we should avoid involvement in further military adventures unless there is a clear and vital British interest and one that can survive full and open scrutiny. Above all we must decide whether counterinsurgencies are suitable operations for a modern army – I suggest they are not – and if that view is upheld we must concentrate on the core tasks of defending the UK, vital overseas assets (Falklands & Gibraltar) and our trade routes. We can leave nation building and saving the Third World from itself to the Americans: they have the men and money; we do not. Senior officers and civil servants in the MOD cannot be trusted with these reforms. They are clearly part of the problem. So to whom does it fall to implement these reforms?




1 Losing Small Wars, p.31
2 Losing Small Wars, p.164
3 Losing Small Wars, pp.49-50
4 Losing Small Wars, p.162
5 Losing Small Wars, pp.237-238
6 Losing Small Wars, p.239
7 Losing Small Wars, p.101
8 Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989, Profile, London, 2011, p.333
9 Losing Small Wars, p.101
10 Afgantsy, p.335
11 Afgantsy, p.335
12 Losing Small Wars, p.110
13 Losing Small Wars, p.111
14 Losing Small Wars, p.111
15 Losing Small Wars, p.111
16 Losing Small Wars, p.112 (emphasis in the original)
17 Losing Small Wars, p.114
18 Losing Small Wars, p.241
19 Losing Small Wars, p.241
20 Losing Small Wars, p.243
21 Losing Small Wars, p.243
22 Losing Small Wars, p.244

Friday 22 June 2012

The Rise of New-Variant Liberal Totalitarianism and the War against England


You know how the game serves us. It has a definite social purpose. Nations are bankrupt, gone. None of that tribal warfare anymore. Even the corporate wars are a thing of the past. So now we have the majors and their executives. Transport, food, communication, housing, luxury, energy. A few of us making decisions on a global basis for the common good […] Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it has ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions.
Mr Bartholomew, Rollerball(1975)

The threat to liberty posed by communism was so direct and obvious, and the doctrine so discredited at present, that it is hard to see it as anything but totally exhausted throughout the developed world. A future left wing threat to liberal democracy is much more likely to wear the clothing of liberalism while changing its meaning from within, rather than to stage a full frontal attack on basic democratic institutions and principles.

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man(1992)

© Frank Ellis 2012 All Rights Reserved

(Click here to watch Dr Ellis deliver this talk to the Traditional Britain Group at the Enoch Powell centeniary dinner )

Abstract Summary: In this lecture/article I examine what I consider to be the war being waged against England. There are in fact two wars being waged against the English: one is a war similar in aim though not as murderous in scope (yet) to that being waged against the Boers in South Africa and directed, for the time being, primarily at displacing whites from the large council estates in the big cities (council estates are broadly analogous to Section 8 housing in the USA) or rendering them fragmented, inert and willing to accept their fate as a racial minority in their ancestral lands. The violence used against whites in these housing concentrations is random, spontaneous and unplanned and has all the hallmarks of its being no more than crimes against the person and property. Yet crimes against persons and property pursued for purposes of material gain are also consistent with being committed for racial or ideological reasons. Killing a person for his race does not preclude stealing his wallet. The 2011 August riots and murder which blighted London and other English cities are a prime example of what I have in mind. These attacks start not because government agencies, especially the police, actively support them, but because they fail to take the necessary measures to prevent the attacks and then to deal with them when they occur. The other war is an ideological war being waged among the professions and by the professions. This war is aimed at the cultural, political, national, economic and legal destruction of England. The striking thing about both these wars is that they are not being prosecuted by the agents and soldiers of an occupying force, as would have been the case in 1940 had we succumbed to Nazi invasion. The most active persecutors of the English are not African or Pakistani immigrants but their fellow Englishmen and Englishwomen: the police; the social services; a corrupt and cowardly teaching profession; politicians and whole swathes of business.

Introduction

I
n the immediate aftermath of the miracle evacuation from Dunkirk when Britain led by Churchill rejected Hitler’s offers of a deal, Hitler’s blandishments and appeals to common sense gave way to snarls and threats and the Luftwaffe attacked England as the precursor to a full-blown invasion of our island. For all the loss of blood and treasure World War Two was a good war. The enemy was clearly defined, his goals obvious and what we had to do was clear to all: fight or perish. After 1945, specifically in 1946, in Fulton Missouri, it once again fell to Churchill to articulate the nature of the new threat to the free world. The Cold War had started and until the mid 1980s the West had to live with the possibility of a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany and the escalation to nuclear war. Even allowing for the attempts of people whom I can only describe as traitors, especially in the universities, to play down the nature of the Soviet threat and, despite all the evidence of Soviet intentions, the Cold War was also a good war. The huge tank armies stationed in East Germany trained and ready to cross the inner-German border in their surge to the English Channel, the nuclear arms race, the series of Soviet interventions to crush any assertion of national independence in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1979) and the threat to invade Poland (1981) left no doubt about what was at stake. If we did not maintain our defences we would be blackmailed and threatened with war and subjugation.

The end of the Cold War with the breaching of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the external threat to the West from major military alliances (the Warsaw Pact). These series of events prompted Francis Fukuyama to claim in a brilliant essay which was later expanded into a book - The End of History and the Last Man(1992) - that liberal democracy had triumphed and that this more or less marked the end of history. Unfortunately, this was not the case and was never likely to be the case, given what we know of the last two and half thousand years.

The main threat to the West and one that it is still not widely recognised is not the rise of militant often terroristic Islam or even the possibility that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons. Fraught with danger as these developments undoubtedly are, the danger to the West stems from an undeclared Civil War; not from a clash of civilizations but from the clash within the civilization (the West). The aggressors, the instigators in this Civil War are those who now regard the nation state as irrelevant, an obstacle to their global political and economic ambitions. They have no master plan but have successfully exploited a series of opportunities which have emerged after 1991. The trends and direction of travel are obvious. A striking feature of the war against the nation state has been the unholy alliance, a kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between international business and the left-wing ideologues who have theorised and articulated the cult of multiculturalism and its associated doctrine of political correctness. Powerful forces are thus ranged against the nation state. The victims in this Civil War are the indigenous populations of Western Europe who reject the internationalist assumptions and doctrines of the United Nations and the European Union and who see their primary loyalty as being to their own nation, its history and culture.

The Pursuit of Power

Wars, as the Greek historian, Thucydides observed, are waged for reasons of fear, honour and interest. To this insight we can add the better known Clausewitzian adage that war is a continuation of policy pursued by other means. It is important to keep the insights of these two masters always in mind when examining England’s Civil War since at the heart of both is the understanding that war is ultimately pursued for power and it is in the nature of power that it will sacrifice nations, institutions and people in order to reach its goals. Whatever the cause, whatever the nature of the state, the exercise of power is never bloodless.

The pursuit of power is always present in the great millenarian and revolutionary movements which have struck Europe. This is not always immediately obvious since the would-be revolutionaries preach selflessness, self-sacrifice, the brotherhood of man, human rights, universal love, righting injustice and feeding the poor and now the Third World; anything but the pursuit of power for its own sake. Yet all these demands for an allegedly better world require the exercise of power and all too often the extermination of a class of people deemed to be the oppressors. The French Revolution (1789) the violence and savagery of which was so brilliantly apprehended by Burke, Lenin’s seizure of power in 1917 and Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the 1960s and 1970s all resulted in unprecedented mass violence, and in the case of the Soviet Union and China, led to the systematic and deliberate extermination of tens of millions of so-called “class enemies”.

The failure of an economic system based on the common ownership of the means of production, one of the primary causes of the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991, has not meant that the striving towards utopias and universal planning has ceased. Quite the reverse in fact: vacuums of power and ideology do not remain for long and multiculturalism whose essentials were articulated by Soviet ideologues well before 1991 and adapted by Western fellow travellers has emerged as the threat to the integrity of nation states to replace communism. The primary target of multiculturalism, as was the primary target of global communism and all forms of socialism is the ideological, the political capture of the advanced economies of the West. The Soviet Union envisaged and planned for a military strike, were certain conditions judged to be suitable, but parallel with the military option it devoted enormous resources to the subversion of the West from within. In 2012 there are no obvious military alliances threatening the West and so in the early phase, the phase we are currently experiencing, the drive to capture and to own the West and its institutions relies primarily on ideological and cultural war. The main, and for the time being, the immediate task of those who are committed to the ascendancy of global, multicultural/racial politics and the destruction of the national and the parochial or at the very least rendering them inert, is the establishment of totalitarian regimes in the West.

This totalitarianism will not be the same as that which evolved east of the old Berlin Wall which had to rely on violence and police terror. Instead it will rely on evolutionary-revolutionary pressures in order to bring about a condition in which all facets of our lives are finally subject to excessive and pervasive state control. Once that has been achieved active resistance, even armed resistance which is sometimes justified, becomes very difficult. To distinguish this new form of totalitarianism from the historical Soviet and Chinese forms I shall call this politically correct version of totalitarianism new variant or liberal totalitarianism. Given that the word “liberal”has now lost any connection with the meaning of liberal – an Orwellian transformation typical of so many English words - liberal totalitarianism is not an oxymoron but reflects something real, a striving to enslave us.

A key difference between the old and the new forms of totalitarianism consists in the fact that control will primarily be psychological and cultural and anti-intellectual rather than overtly violent. Free speech will, therefore, be an absolutely crucial battleground. In my opinion, it is the crucial battleground. The extent to which people are willing to defend the institution of free speech and, as importantly, to exercise the rights thereof will determine whether England survives. It is not enough that the rights of free speech are enshrined in tradition and, in the case of the USA, in the Bill of Rights (1791). These rights must be exercised. I emphasise the need to exercise the rights to free speech since a country whose citizens enjoy the right to free speech but are too frightened to exercise the right because of some implicit or encouraged belief that “one is not permitted to say these things anymore” or “you’re not allowed to say that” cannot be said to enjoy the right to free speech. I suggest that something like that now obtains in England. Left-wing psyterror from all kinds of directions is intended to intimidate people such that they will be deterred from exercising rights to which they are still, just about, entitled. The aim is to put the use of certain words deemed by the left to be “offensive” beyond use by whites regardless whether these words are used by blacks (read the “lyrics” of rap and you will see my point). This ban also extends to shutting down any kind of public discussion of black crime or unacceptable immigrant behaviour. Such a situation clearly exists and it marks a very significant and ominous shift away from a presumption in favour of free speech, towards a weakening of its status. It is a major step towards cultural totalitarianism and a formal suspension of free speech and the diminishing of its range and application. The danger is both short and long term. In the short term, pressing issues dealing with race are not openly discussed or addressed because theGuardian­-reading classes censor discussions or analysis. In the long term, a people, who become accustomed to not exercising rights to free speech with regard to themes deemed to be off limits by the left, even if these themes are serious matters of concern, will eventually accept further severe limitations on rights of free speech. What, at the moment, is a social or psychological sanction resulting in ostracism and condemnation in the monopoly stream media and levelled at whites for pointing out the flaws in multiculturalism, but possessing no legal force, will, eventually, give way to formal legal sanctions being enacted against certain words and the discussion of certain ideas (race and IQ, for example). In British universities these formal sanctions already exist and have done for some time. By the time these formal sanctions are enacted a largely cowed population will have been fully habituated to not raising awkward questions and will accept censorship on anything to do with race, or any other theme for that matter, as something normal rather than its being a perversion and a regression to darker times.

The new totalitarians are well aware of these developments. After all, they have initiated them. They know full well that the success or failure of their plans will depend on the ability of their zealots and ideologues to bypass the established protections afforded free speech. So-called “hate crime” legislation is just one measure used to intimidate opponents of multiculturalism from articulating their opposition. The sole aim of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the successor body to the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), is to police and to punish incorrect utterances on anything to do with race. A politically incorrect utterance on the subject of race is defined as anything that the EHRC considers to be politically incorrect. This is ideologically consistent with Recommendation 12 of The Macpherson Report (1999) and the report’s Neo-Marxist ethos.

That a global, multiracial order cannot succeed on a non-coercive basis –largely for the same reasons that socialism can never work – means that coercive, even violent measures, measures which we in the West had believed to be long consigned to the past, will be used in an attempt to make the multiracial experiment work. That all the precedents predict failure and in the case of socialism murderous and genocidal failure is of no help. Utopians are like investors: they are not interested in past mistakes only in the next utopian cycle. There is one crucial difference. An investor who ignores the past and flouts the accrued wisdom of investing harms only himself: the fanatical utopian that co-opts a state in order, he hopes, to build paradise, harms all of us.

From Class to Race

The Marx-Engels view that all history was the history of the class struggle paid little or no attention to race and race differences and where they were acknowledged to exist they were explained away as the legacy of primitive feudalism which would be overcome with the dispossession of the property-owning classes. In the Marx-Engels analysis of the world the driving force was class and class struggle and the class consciousness of Africans and Indians once awakened –naturally - by white middle-class agitators inspired by Brecht’s plays would make them see that their best interests lay in class solidarity and not in waging tribal vendettas and wars. Unfortunately, it was clear to anyone not blinded by the promises of utopian socialism that racial, tribal and national loyalties did matter – and still do matter - and that people were prepared to fight and die for them. The outbreak of World War One should have been the end of the brotherhood of man fantasy and, indeed, the end of the view that wars could be abolished.

The Lenin revolution marked the beginning of an era in which the working man and the working class were regarded as some special raw material that if manipulated in accordance with the ideology of Marxism-Leninism would bring about a classless society and war would be finally abolished and something akin to a secular paradise would ensue. The cult of the working class was not confined to the Soviet Union. By the end of World War One it had spread to Germany and Hungary and in the 1920s started to make itself felt in Britain that bastion of international capitalism and the gold standard. The working class view of the world was not ideological but essentially material. Socialism meant, so English workers were led to believe, better housing, a whole series of benefits, a job for life and a rising quality of life. English factory workers might have applauded the rise in literacy in some backwater of Africa but it would not have bothered them too much if a reactionary African ruler had outlawed reading classes, burned the books and eaten the white missionaries. English socialism, like German socialism and French socialism was parochial and insular, very conservative in fact and very patriotic. This working-class conservatism was a major obstacle to world revolution and all forms of internationalism. The working class might go on strike for better terms and conditions, some of the union leaders might talk as if they had just returned from a Soviet-sponsored course in political agitation and there is no doubt that some senior trade unions’ leaders would put the interests of Moscow – did put the interests of Moscow - before England. But if Johnny Foreigner tried it on the working class would fight and die for their country. The same has always been true of the English aristocracy.

In traditional Marxism the economy is everything. Once all the factories, railways, banks, shipping companies and mines have been nationalised and the whole economy has made the transition to one based on the common ownership of the means of production then the path to full socialism is secure. As it turned out and as it was obvious to some of the early critics of Marxism, the economy was the weak link in Marxist planning. No man, despite what he might say in some public meeting, was prepared to live and to work according to the hideous slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Among some on the left, most notably Antonio Gramsci, there was an early realization that world revolution would not be made with the working class in Western states who were too easily suborned by material incentives. The way to control Western states was to control not so much the means of production and the associated and unionised working class but to control the means of expression, above all language and culture. Language emerges as the critical lever here since all culture or what we regard as the essentials of culture – law, bureaucracy, literature, politics, philosophy and the mass media – relies on language: all culture is language. Thus the deliberate changing of language for political ends holds out the possibility of controlling everything or at least everything that matters.

What is at stake here is the possibility - and the possibilities are now enormous in a computer-saturated society – to create and permanently to maintain a view of the world that very large numbers of people are willing to accept as a true and accurate one and where, if the view of the world which they receive, differs from what they experience, they will accept the one offered and reject the one experienced. That this can happen was well and truly demonstrated in the startling and disturbing set of experiments carried out by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. It matters not that significant numbers of people will not be fooled. What matters in a democracy is that sufficient numbers can be fooled or should I say they want to believe. In other words, it would be wrong to lay all the blame on the media manipulators. It is not the fault of the banks that people spend more than they earn. The BBC and ITV are clearly culpable in producing repulsively vacuous and depraved propaganda programmes. But is it the fault of commercial or state-funded television that adults accept Lies as something veracious? Adults should know better than to believe in fairy stories. We should not attack the author or the story teller.

Mass immigration combined with the increasingly widespread articulation and promotion of the cult of multiculturalism and political correctness necessarily removes the special status that the white working class has traditionally enjoyed in left-wing politics. Now the white working class is but just one group or ‘community’, to use the word favoured by the multiculturalists, and expected to identify with the oppressed and exploited of other races. This has not happened and was never likely to happen. Mass immigration has led to low socio-economic status (SES)-whites being marginalised in the provision of state housing, goods and services and employment. It is a measure either of the contempt that middle-class leftists feel towards their erstwhile brothers-in-arms in the class struggle or complete naïveté that multiculturalist ideologues could believe that millions of aliens could be imported into the UK and be permitted to overwhelm the white working class without arousing animosity.

Every moment of contact between the white indigenous working class population and the immigrants provides opportunities for resentment: provision of housing; education; religion; health and the widely diverging cultures. It is not just that the white working class sense that it is being denied the goods and services to which it feels entitled – rightly or wrongly – traditional English culture, its allegiances, its insularity, its pride and sense of past are all perceived to be under attack, which, of course, they most certainly are. There is also the perception that the police are far less aggressive in pursuing black criminals than they are in dealing with whites and that when whites are the victims of racial crimes the police, the political caste and the monopoly stream media make every effort to deny the racial element, whereas when blacks are victims of white violence – the Lawrence murder is the obvious example –something akin to an outbreak of religious fanaticism and hagiographical fervour grips the police and the BBC.

Mass immigration has been a catastrophe for low-SES whites. They have been financially and spatially squeezed, disenfranchised and mocked. Perhaps worst of all is the fact that the people to whom they would naturally look for guidance and leadership, above all the Labour Party, have abandoned and sacrificed them. Just consider the contemptible remarks that Gordon Brown uttered about a life-long Labour voter when in Rochdale during the 2010 general election campaign. After Gillian Duffy had expressed opposition to the high levels of immigration, Brown, secure in his car and believing himself free to say what he thought about the encounter, gave us his real thoughts on the Labour rank and file: ‘She was just a bigoted woman’. The morally squalid existence of people, indigenous or non-indigenous, in the underclass is good for Labour: it is paid for by taxing the productive, rewards the feckless and creates a huge dependent class that can be mobilised and exploited in order to prevent any change. This is a demonstrable betrayal of England and one of Labour’s traditional constituencies.

Capturing the Professions

Crucial to the success of liberal totalitarianism is the capture and retention of the professional classes. Total control though desirable is not possible but in any case not necessary. Provided that a substantial number of like-minded individuals are in these professions and can be deployed against dissenters then these professions may be regarded as having been fully brought under control. Gleichschaltung, a term from NS-ideology, characterises the process perfectly. In fact, the occasional dissenter assists the cult since it creates an illusion of healthy disagreement, an impression that the cult of politically correct opinion does not enjoy a total monopoly. In England, the two institutions that have done more than any others to impose politically correct views and to police them and to persecute dissenters are the universities and the BBC. The importance of these institutions for the success of liberal totalitarianism cannot be overstated.

The university is one of the crowning achievements of the West. In some ways the university might be said to be reflect the essence of the West: a restless search for, and interest in, knowledge for its own sake; a desire to understand and explore the physical world at hand and immediately beyond one’s own immediate environs (mountains, above and below the oceans, sky, deserts, tundra, taiga, polar caps, space and deep space); and the building of intellectual systems. There is a direct line from Plato and Aristotle through the universities of the Renaissance to Cardinal John Henry Newman’s vision of the university in the nineteenth century.

Of all the institutions created by man the university is the one that would, it seems, be devoted to the pursuit of truth wherever it might lead. University charters proclaim the sanctity and importance of veritas, its overriding function in their existence, yet in the twentieth century the university has far too easily succumbed to the ideological fanatic, becoming the base - al Qaeda - from which revolutionaries and truth-haters have plotted to destroy their societies as the prelude to some ghastly socialist utopia. We have seen this happen in the Soviet Union where universities were purged of students deemed to be from socially incorrect backgrounds and where the word of Lenin and Stalin decided all matters. In Nazi Germany, we had the spectacle of the Feuerspruch as Nazi students burned forbidden books. And in the 1960s Western universities capitulated to the middle-class Marxists paving the way for the incubation of the relativist doctrines of postmodernism and the final emergence of political correctness and multiculturalism in the late 1980s. Now, we are assured by insolent Neo-Marxists and media intellectuals that there is no such thing as truth: truth, like sex and sex differences and race and race differences, is a social and political construct; truth has been deconstructed, neutralised and exposed in its many monstrous, protean guises; truth is variously patriarchal demon, the class enemy, the homophobe, colonialist, fascist, sexist, heterosexual white male and above all the West. At the heart of the idea of the West, claim the middle class revolutionaries, is not the pursuit of truth or moral and intellectual reasoning but exploitation and suppression; the West is a brutal fiction which has been finally dethroned.

Parallel with the suborning of the universities other institutions comprising some of the essential foundations of our society were also under covert attack: primary and secondary education; the social services; the police and even the armed forces. But there comes a moment when the move from covert to overt attack must be implemented if the revolutionary transformation is to succeed. An all out overt revolutionary assault of this nature and scope requires a crisis moment. A crisis moment can be manufactured or it is a natural disaster or a military defeat that can be used to initiate wholesale change which would not normally be possible to implement. For the Labour government determined to accelerate the pace of Britain’s transformation into its vision of a multiracial utopia the crisis moment was the Macpherson Report. The primary function of this dreadful, in essence thoroughly and viciously racist, anti-English report was ideological and concerned less with an inefficient police investigation and far more with devising ways to impose multiculturalism on a deeply sceptical nation. The general thrust of the seventy recommendations is entirely consistent with a government seeking totalitarian control over the lives of its citizens. The primary ideological assertion, akin to the Marx-Engels incantation that all history is the history of the class struggle, is that diversity is an undisputed good and that those who oppose diversity are presumed to be malevolent. Those who are sceptical should read and reflect upon the implications of recommendations 11, 12, 13, 14 and 39. These recommendations have no place at all in any English legal or quasi-legal instruments. They represent a direct attack for ideological purposes on long-established English freedoms so that England can be broken and remade into something alien unto her people.

Those university departments and subjects that have succumbed to the ideology of multiculturalism – much of the humanities and arts –require a means of disseminating their ideological worldview and dehumanising their enemies. The BBC is the ideal loudspeaker since it is something of an artificial multiracial construct employing people who fervently believe in the multicultural experiment (If they do not believe they keep quiet and when Mandela dies, they will make sure that they are seen to produce some tears in order to dispel any suspicion that they are thought criminals). Moreover, many of them are wealthy leftovers from the 1960s and will have selected and nurtured a new generation of liberal-leftists. The BBC enjoys other massive advantages: money is not a problem since the BBC is funded through the coercive instrument of a license fee (scarcely believable in an age of global digital television); it has a global reach; and it still enjoys something of a reputation for honesty among the gullible especially outside of Britain. All these advantages mean that the BBC is well placed to disseminate the propaganda case for multiculturalism and in some ways, more importantly, to deny access to opponents and their arguments or to present them in a distorted fashion. In this regard there is no difference at all between the way the BBC reports dissenters and the way Pravda dealt with anti-communist dissidents in the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the BBC does not have things all its own way. The Internet has undoubtedly weakened the BBC monopoly over the dissemination of news and ideas and done much to undermine the BBC’s reputation for impartiality and expose its hypocrisy.

Liberal totalitarianism is at its most dangerous in the professional classes since these are the groups that do so much to shape and to control our country. Independence of mind and a willingness to speak out in the face of injustice have typically been regarded as virtues and the hallmarks of a liberal-democratic society. In the days of heavily unionised labour a small group of Marxist union leaders, exploiting the absence of free and secret ballots and the closed shop were able to determine who worked and who did not (echoes of Trotskii here). Far more seriously, the Marxist, ideological control of the heavy industries on which so much of the country’s prosperity rested meant that Marxist revolutionaries could blackmail the elected government of the day. This industrial gangsterism was eventually dealt with and the damaged inflicted on the country was reduced to an acceptable level. Parallel, however, with the decline of the unions multiculturalism and the doctrine of political correctness have emerged to replace the unions’ physical gangsterism with an insidious ideology of relativism. Relativism lies at the heart of political correctness since a politically correct opinion or position is one that is consistent with the views of those – the universities and the BBC – who are trying to maintain their ideological ascendancy.

Why have so many politicians and academics succumbed to the claims of multiculturalism when all the evidence worldwide shows that“diversity is not strength” and that there is huge opposition to the consequences of mass immigration? This may be a very complicated question which is beyond the intelligence of one man and his limited knowledge to answer or it may be a very straightforward question. In my opinion, it is a complicated question or rather the consequences are but one can identify the enemy’s objectives from the way he behaves and the sort of policies he supports and enacts.

Like most millenarian movements there is a small group who manipulate and set the agenda and a much bigger mass that are content to follow and to be manipulated. Multiculturalism is no different in this regard from Marxism-Leninism, National-Socialism and Maoism. Multiculturalists use the language of rights, equality, freedom and the brotherhood of man and call for a world without borders in order to destroy the nation state and its institutions. It is critical for the success of multiculturalism that a country’s institutions – the ancient universities and professions, parliament, the Church of England, the Armed Forces – institutions which in normal times would be the natural defenders and articulators of the national spirit, be subverted from within, and if that proves to be impossible, they must be destroyed or discredited. One can see here that the process of subverting a nation, while assuring a bewildered people that the change is for the good of the nation, the lie implicit in the claim that “Diversity is a strength”, is something that can only be accomplished by national politicians not by aliens.

A Labour Member of Parliament (MP) representing a Birmingham constituency who comes from Germany (Gisela Stewart) shows herself to be an alien interloper when she defends the corporatist, quasi-fascist EU and the euro disaster. Likewise, a Ugandan attired as the Archbishop of York whose brazenness and ignorant effrontery goes so far that he tells me, an Englishman, that “diversity is a strength” is for me – I shall not speak for others – so obviously insincere, intellectually mediocre and hostile to my country that he arouses my contempt and disgust. He is quite clearly allowing himself to be used by more insidious and nimbler minds as indeed was the case when he lent his name to the Macpherson Report. When, on the other hand, a senior English cleric instructs us that we must accept the starving millions of Sub-Saharan Africa or at the very least we must donate hundreds of millions of pounds in aid to stop them starving to death he finds an audience; his poisonous arrows infect us; he has a lever to move our hearts for other, more malign purposes. That the dire state of Sub-Saharan Africa is due to the reckless breeding of Africans and their uncontrolled savagery and incompetence is never mentioned.

Globalization is not just or even about the increase of wealth; it is about the globalization of power and the opportunities it creates for those who wish to wield that power. Striving for the global opportunities of power can only place you at odds with your own country since at some stage the prerogatives of, say, England will clash with the prerogatives of the New Global Order. In order that any national politician can make the transition from being a parochial, national politician to an international figure he must demonstrate his willingness to place the prerogatives of the New Global Order before the land of his birth. Blair – I realise he is not English –went along with the crazed American neo-cons in Iraq and Afghanistan and permitted England to be flooded by millions of immigrants. One of Blair’s advisers has gone on record as saying that flooding England with immigrants was done to punish the right. Never mind the right, such an act of wilful and deliberate treachery punishes England. This is surely what Gillian Duffy, a life-long Labour voter, had in mind when she mentioned the dangers of mass immigration to Gordon Brown.

To grasp the scale of Blair’s treachery and betrayal of Britain, being continued by Cameron and Clegg, and the staggering reduction of the intellectual and moral qualities of leadership it betokens, one needs to go back to the summer of the Spitfire and Hurricane. After the miracle escape from Dunkirk Hitler made all kinds of offers to Churchill which were rejected. Churchill rejected Hitler’s offers because he was of England, he knew her and believed in her destiny. Churchill knew that any deal with Hitler would be an act of folly but also that it would have betrayed the very spirit of England. When Churchill pondered the deal of a separate peace with Hitler his resolution to fight and to resist was steeled by Alfred, the Tudor Queen (God bless her), Cromwell, Wellington and Nelson. The words of English resistance throughout the ages would have come easily to the Prime Minister: “I have the heart of an English lion”; “Steady the Buffs”; “England Expects”; “Up Guards and at em”. When sixty five years later the same temptations of power were laid before Blair and now Cameron by continental politicians both succumbed. Blair and Cameron have betrayed this country. Worse still is their insistence that their deeds and often inaction are necessary and beneficial; that surrendering our destiny to cabals of the EU is in our interest. It was not in our national interest to surrender to the Neue Ordnung in 1940, nor to capitulate to Soviet military blackmail between 1945 and 1985, and in 2012 it is not in our national interest to remain part of the United States of Europe.

The Future

The divisions separating those who exploit multiculturalism and its related agendas and those who regard it with horror are as profound and unbridgeable as were the divisions that led to the English Civil War in the 17th century. Divisions of this nature cannot survive indefinitely: they have to be resolved. They must be resolved because they create intolerable tensions and stresses throughout our country which if left unchallenged will eventually destroy a nation’s cohesion (this works in favour of the totalitarians). There are a number of ways in which the challenges of multiculturalism and the tensions it arouses could be met: all significantly potential opposition can be neutralized (in all sense of the word); governments can continue to permit mass immigration so as to overwhelm the indigenous population with immigrants; and some form of armed rebellion cannot be excluded.

That in the twenty years since the fall of Soviet communism, the liberal democracies, the victors in the Cold War, have embarked on external and domestic policies that have more in common with their vanquished Cold War foe tells us something about the nature of historical progress and process. I am reminded of the scene in Grossman’s Life and Fate when the SS interrogator tells his Bolshevik prisoner that the ideas of the defeated will live on in the other’s victory. The scale of the ideological changes that have been forced on England since 1991 are truly immense: an enervating moral and intellectual relativism has corrupted the political class; our universities have totally capitulated to the anti-intellectual ethos of politically correct dogma; our police force or “service” now sees policing priorities not in terms of law and order and its objective and impartial implementation but in actions that are ideologically consistent with the latest politically correct directives. Anyone who doubts my claims should recall the way the police reacted to publication of the Macpherson Report. Developments in British policing are especially ominous since a politicised police force is a pre-condition for any kind of totalitarian state. The Gestapo, the NKVD, the KGB and the Stasi existed to protect and to enforce the ideological worldview of their masters, the party, definitely not the people. Doubtless the political caste in this country has always looked after its own interests. That said, a politician who uses public money to buy duck ponds and second homes can be exposed to ridicule, thrown out of parliament, fined and imprisoned. Justice will then have been done. On the other hand, the MP who is scrupulously honest in his financial transactions but who wants to pass laws outlawing any criticism of multiculturalism and who is happy to destroy England’s national sovereignty by the transfer of power to the EU is a deadly Quisling.

Despite all the assurances which we have heard over the last sixty years that immigration would be brought under control nothing has been done. Those politicians who should be responding to the problem have been cowed into silence, an ominous development in itself (see my earlier remarks about free speech). It can be said with absolute confidence that today, in the House of Commons, there are no politicians of Enoch Powell’s honesty, never mind his other qualities, who are willing to state the consequences of mass immigration. Any serious discussion of mass immigration and the dangers it poses takes place outside the House of Commons. The consequences of mass immigration are stark and brutal. Millions of aliens entering legally or illegally into a small country do not produce the brotherhood of man: they cause bitter racial antagonisms which are often exacerbated by religious divisions, especially if it involves Islam. If the millions of immigrants currently resident in Britain (overwhelmingly England) cannot be induced or bribed to leave and the government lacks the will to deport them, then the future for the white indigenous population is at best uncertain at worst disastrous, maybe catastrophic. Meanwhile, the flood of mass illegal-legal immigrants continues.

Permit millions of immigrants from failed Third World states with cultures that place a high premium on polygamy and aggressive often reckless breeding to flood into England, a country with a First World medical service (just about) and a population explosion is inevitable. Overpopulation is the common denominator that runs through every problem afflicting the Third World. Now, because of a cowardly and irresponsible political class who failed to consider the consequences of signing various treaties and other documents, Third-World overpopulation and all its consequences are being visited on Britain. Attitudes towards overpopulation complicate the search for a solution, or at least a solution that would be considered consistent with the norms of English law and custom. A brief allegory makes my point. If a tundra wolf told an ant that he could not see how he, the ant, could possibly live jammed in so close with millions of other ants, the ant would look at the vast expanse of sub-arctic tundra, the wolf’s homeland and shudder in horror. How can you, the ant would ask, bear to live such a lonely existence in this semi-frozen wilderness? An immigrant from a typically filthy, disease-ridden, noisy and hideously overpopulated Indian slum-city ends up in Birmingham or Leicester and is not at all put off by the population density. By the standards of India and Mexico City it is positively denuded of people.

As the percentage of immigrants in England increases relative to the size of the indigenous population, there will be major cultural and political changes. Many are already evident. The more people that live in a finite amount of space, the more potential for conflict and friction. This would be true were they all racially and culturally similar. This means more rules, regulations and laws and greater power on the part of the state to interfere in our lives; and that is not just domestic laws and rules. The fact that we are in the EU means that EU officials can and will interfere in, and invade our, legislative process. One very likely consequence of rampant Muslim immigration is that eventually Sharia law will be introduced and that it will be officially recognised. Any indigenous resistance to the recognition of Sharia in Britain will be outflanked by the simple expedient of appealing directly to the EU and various Human Rights instruments so forcing Westminster to surrender (yet another unintended consequence of this legislation). This will accelerate, increase and widen the spatial concentration of Muslims in the United Kingdom and, in my opinion, would lead ineluctably to the creation of an independent Muslim state on the territory of England. Given the already high spatial concentration and segregation of Muslims in England, these areas are already very close to self-governing status – the outcome of the Bradford West by-election supports that view – and so the final step to full-blown independence would be the logical result. One way for Muslims and their allies to cause trouble for the UK government would be to hold a series of local referenda under the Local Government Act (1972 & 2000) in areas with high concentrations of Muslims and ask whether Bradford and other regions should be declared independent Muslim constituencies which together would constitute an incipient Confederation of Autonomous Muslim States. The government is not bound by the outcome but it would be a highly effective club with which to strike Cameron. Muslims could argue that if the independent Gibraltarian referendum in 2002 was recognised by the last Labour government, even though it lacked any formal status, then there is a precedent for recognising Muslim independence referenda.

The declaration of an independent Islamic state some time in the next two decades would, however, be precipitate and dangerous for Muslim politicians and their accomplices. Were such a state to be created before the demographic transition in favour Muslims had been accomplished it might serve as something of a Munich moment for the indigenous population and provoke resistance. From a Muslim perspective the alternative to trying to establish an independent state too soon would be the settlement of other parts of Britain so expanding Muslim influence and power, thereby increasing representation at Westminster. This is the long-march strategy which if pursued over the decades would lead to Muslim dominance of Westminster and ultimate control of the country. It remains to be seen whether Muslim politicians and their fellow travellers have the self-discipline to pursue such a policy and are able to control their more impetuous followers.

That the attempts by the political caste to impose multiculturalism could lead to a civil-race war is not beyond the realms of possibility. In many parts of England, especially in the inner cities where there are large concentrations of immigrants a low-intensity urban war is already being waged against the police and against parts of the host population. For the most part this war is contained within these areas, occasionally bursting out in spectacular fashion in an orgy of rapine and violence as it did in August 2011. If it is argued that the real problem here is crime not any urban race war, I shall counter by stating that when large numbers of aliens are permitted to enter England and then, with no regard whatsoever for English customs and laws and frequently with undisguised contempt, proceed to engage in the sort of criminal behaviour which is the norm in Jamaica (drug dealing), Pakistan (a gangster, narco-klepto-state) or Nigeria (awash in oil yet wallowing in poverty and corruption) this amounts to a declaration of war against the host, indigenous nation (England). When police and politicians refer to this as merely crime they are trying to hide and to deny the nature of what is taking place: low-intensity war. An example of this sort of criminal-insurgent behaviour, mercifully way beyond what we are currently experiencing in England can be seen in many large US cities and in those US states which have the misfortune to share a border with Mexico.

Low-intensity war is waged for a number of reasons all of which are related to short and long-term survival. First, aliens in large numbers in a strange land must secure a territorial zone in which they are not threatened. This is a primary biological imperative of all animals and an immediate survival requirement for soldiers finding themselves behind enemy lines: this is gaining lodgement, the secure patrol base. Once their beachhead is secure they can consolidate and expand. Second, criminal activity – prostitution, drug dealing, tax evasion, forged documents, fraudulent and polygamous exploitation of welfare – is economic activity. Economic activity which bypasses the tax regime of the host nation (England) provides a revenue stream for supporting agitation-propaganda networks, the purchase of weapons and explosives, and the establishment of front organisations (an acceptable face). Third, criminal activity carried on by aliens, especially when the police are too frightened to do anything, are being bribed or have succumbed to the ideological narrative that “diversity is our strength” is deeply threatening to the law-abiding hosts.

There are only two ways to deal with this low-intensity war. First, the full force of the law should be brought objectively to bear. If necessary, this means that lethal force shall be used against rioters and mob violence. Second, the political class can continue to permit the immigrant-insurgents to escape the full consequences of their actions and accept the immigrant-insurgent narrative – the one sponsored in universities - that they are the victims of persecution and that their rioting, mugging, murdering and looting is the natural consequence of their being oppressed. The failure to implement the first and proper option means that immigrant-insurgent behaviour goes unpunished. Appeasement never works. It merely encourages the immigrant-insurgents to believe that further concessions –grovelling apologies, tolerance of tax evasion and illicit economic behaviour and transfers of wealth – can be extracted. Aliens brazenly flouting the laws of England and who are seen to escape punishment induce enormous stress and psychological disorientation among the indigenous population. From the point of view of liberal totalitarians this is a desirable outcome. The two social groups that suffer the most are the working class or what is left of them and the middle class who must bear the ever higher financial and psychological costs of mass immigration and the appeasement of hordes of the unwanted ‘other’ in their midst. Overall, we lose our trust in the police; we fear that the world about us is falling part; we are overwhelmed by a sense of anarchy and political vacuum; we fear for our loved ones; we fear for our children’s future. In Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the battle to occupy this vacuum caused by the collapse in law and order, which was facilitated by a police force from which all those hostile to the Nazis had been purged, was won by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In England, in the twenty-first century, this battle is being won by the liberal totalitarians.

One can now appreciate the importance attached by the political establishment, or at least that part dedicated to the multicultural enterprise, to the corruption of language and weakening the English national identity and demonising any sense of English national solidarity. Denying an invasion by calling it a diversity-enrichment process or refusing to acknowledge that immigrant crime is not independent, culturally-specific economic activity but crime and frequently low-intensity war does not change the physical nature of what is happening. It does however cause confusion. However, if the monopoly stream media can get a viewer to deny his own experiences and accept the new one mediated by the television and print media –England does not exist, has never existed, drug dealers attacking the police is not crime but self-defence - that confusion has been resolved in favour of the new orthodoxy. After so many years of England’s being vilified and mocked and sacrificed for multicultural ends in an unprecedented, largely Labour-sponsored racist-hate cult, Ed Miliband’s urging that the English should be more assertive and comfortable with Englishness is a obscene hypocrisy.

A people that is conscious of itself as a people with a long and glorious history cannot be easily suborned and displaced in its own lands. However, if sufficient numbers of the English can be persuaded (ideally, since I teach cultural studies and feminism) or browbeaten (why not, that’s what we in the BBC are for) and or subjected to legal and other punitive sanctions (can’t wait, I am in the Macphersonised Metropolitan Police Service and we defend multiculturalism) above all through the education system and the monopoly stream media to accept even reluctantly that the English nation, with its history is a fiction, a social and political construct, then potential organised resistance to what is actually happening - physical, racial and cultural dispossession - is weakened. There is a yet another striking parallel here with the Soviet system. Any manifestation of national sentiment – Ukrainian, Belorussian, Volga German, Jewish, Baltic – was regarded as counter revolutionary. The aim was to compel people to accept that their national origins and allegiances were backward and politically primitive since all progressive people were internationalist in outlook. Once a significant part of the population has been neutralised either by persuasion or by accepting the falsehood that England does not exist remaining elements that reject the new deconstruction narrative are easier to demonise as extremists and bigots, as enemies of progress and fairness. Moreover, people who have succumbed to the lies and sense their own cowardice will resent those who reject the lies and will turn on them. So, here we have the beginnings of an effective policy of divide and rule.

Enoch Powell’s famous warning about the dangers of mass immigration was issued 44 years ago. In many ways the Powell vision has turned out to be all too accurate. Mass immigration, legal or illegal, is the single biggest threat to this country and at the time of speaking it is slowly and relentlessly destroying us. The present coalition government is doing nothing to reverse this invasion. The most dreadful thing about the changes which have afflicted us since Powell’s speech has been the participation of the political caste in the racial, cultural, physical dispossession of their own people while disseminating the lie that diversity is strength or some form of virtue. I suspect that no politician, even one of Powell’s abilities, could possibly have foreseen the degree to which and the manner in which the political caste in this country, people charged with the defence of our country’s interests and very existence, have exploited the cult of multiculturalism as a way to destroy this ancient creation called England.

What will England look like, be like in another 44 years, in 2056? Predictions are risky but in order to try to have any chance of dealing with the future, they have to be undertaken. Our past and our judgement are all we have. I put two possibilities before you.

The first is that England will finally succumb to mass immigration and that her descent into Second World and eventually Third World slum-status will be irreversible. One consequence of this decline will be a huge increase in the number of people who are not just unemployed but completely unemployable. The trends are already clear. Even without mass immigration we now have a massive parasite underclass in this country largely created by the welfare state. Permitting the influx of millions more illiterates from the Third World and Africa merely accelerates the decline. This huge influx of illiterates and unemployables will accelerate the spatial concentration of affluent whites as they seek refuge from the squalor and incompetence which will more obviously blight the country. Vast swathes of what is currently land designated as Green Belt, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and National Parks will be targeted for high-density building to house the immigrant population. If organisations such as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) and groups of rural dwellers protest the destruction of our countryside, they will be denounced as racists who have closed their hearts to their immigrant brothers and sisters fleeing Africa in search of something better. In any case, peaceful, intelligently articulated protest will be ignored precisely because it is peaceful. Laws conceived in the spirit of anti-English hatred will be obeyed and the protestors will be quietly crushed by totalitarian bureaucracy and overwhelmed by immigrants. Mosques will spread out of the city and will be a common sight – and sound - in rural England. No longer will the bells of our ancient churches ring out in splendid isolation.

Relatively small groups of people, already wealthy, will become wealthier. As cohesion breaks down even among the indigenous population and the middle class is impoverished the political centre will fracture. The two-party status quo will be go for good to be replaced by a myriad of political parties and organizations all vying for a share of the nation’s assets. Here will arise the first opportunities for Muslim leaders, sponsored from overseas, to make a claim for the creation of an independent Muslim state somewhere in the territory of England. This claim will encounter no substantial resistance of any kind from any quarter and will remain uncontested. In fact, one can expect the corrupt and cowardly Church of England by now fully controlled by African evangelicals to welcome such a move.

The second outcome is war. The Clausewitzian dictum noted earlier does not solely apply to armies. It applies with equal and relevant force to insurgents, militants (← as the BBC calls them), organised protest, terrorists, student sit-ins, strikes and all forms of organised protest pursued for political and ideological ends. War and violence pursued for purposes of national liberation and in defence of certain rights and freedoms deemed to be inalienable are also the prerogative of the patriot. When some unctuous, cowardly and ignorant politician tells you that it is never right to take up arms against the government you can always remind him of Oliver Cromwell, 4thJuly 1776, the Boer resistance, the IRA Easter Uprising, the Warsaw Ghetto, the students of the White Rose, and even some German officers (20th July 1944) and the founding of the state of Israel. And what about the so-called Arab Spring and all the support for Arabs in open rebellion against their governments? Let us hope that in two or three decades Arab governments do not decide to bank roll armed Muslim insurrection in Britain in support of a separatist Islamic state.

Even as they are changing what used to be a liberal democracy into a totalitarian state, the political caste will attempt to maintain the fiction that repressive legislation is consistent with ancient freedoms (in 2015 this means that the Magna Carta celebrations will be enlisted to serve the purposes of enslavement). There are precedents for such things. In the mid 1970s there was a very real concern that Britain was heading towards becoming some kind of communist People’s Democracy; that the communists who had infiltrated the Labour Party and who were controlled by Soviet bloc intelligence agencies and assisted by the unions, would abandon parliamentary democracy and control and impose some form of permanent state socialism. In Eastern Europe after 1945, communist parties used democracy as a way to secure power and, having secured the levers of power, executed and imprisoned political opponents. Hitler’sErmächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act, 1933), the essential foundation of arbitrary Nazi rule and terror, was intended to achieve the same outcome. In those circumstances, where governments ignore their obligations towards their people and violate long-established freedoms in pursuit of a revolutionary neo-Marxist agenda or, in the case of the Nazis, in pursuit of conquest, armed rebellion and resistance are in order. The words of the colonies’ declaration of independence have lost nothing since they were first uttered in 1776.

Yet I have a sense that the English will fade away with barely a whimper; that there will be no substantial protests let alone any rebellions. The majority will continue to elect governments such as the present one that actively seek to destroy the country and integrate it ever deeper into the global power structures. Fed on ever new forms of toxic, recycled celebrity waste and other poor-grade media fertiliser, the television-electorate, TV-Man and TV-Woman, manipulated and indoctrinated to accept multicultural consensual policies as the highest possible civic virtue, will continue to vote for manager-politicians who, in turn, will continue to betray them. By then, they will have lost any sense of their history and past. England will no longer have any meaning. These people would find it incomprehensible that someone should fight a war to protect a homeland or that they should even care about millions of immigrants occupying English cities. The very notion of something uniquely“ours”, as something that excludes the “other” will be regarded as wicked and monstrous and a relic of a savage past. Psychologically, this destruction of any sense of deep personal allegiance to one’s country and the lack of any willingness to defend her will mark the transition to the mass, collectivist, media-controlled personality, Mass-Media-Mensch, as foreseen by José Ortega y Gasset and Richard Weaver; the final triumph of Marxist-Leninist socialism. It would be the logical outcome of the internationalist, anti-English agenda and the demented assertion that national identity, our English national identity, be open to all. The flag of the United Nations, the flag symbolising the liberation from the prison of national identity will fly over the offices of the United Nations Representatives located, appositely, on the site of the old House of Commons (the first institution to surrender and to betray England). The corporations, aided and abetted by the Neo-Marxists, and having used immigrants as their canon-fodder vanguard to overwhelm us, will have won.

Multiculturalism and globalization are not cosmic forces – tsunamis, earthquakes and meteorites – over which we have no control. They are man-made forces. One may grant – I find it difficult - that some of the adherents have what they believe to be noble motives. Yet their naiveté is all too readily exploited by those schooled in the ways of tyranny, forces cruel and wicked, depraved and unforgiving, mendacious and cowardly, and these forces, with the collusion of the gullible and the viciously stupid, ensured that England perished. Those who saw the dangers, such as Enoch Powell, Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, Thilo Sarrazin, Pat Buchanan and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, uncompromising Prophets of universal truths, yet loyal in their own ways to their distinct national beings, were mocked and derided as dissenters and bringers of strife and were cast out into the wilderness. And so an ancient nation so often resilient in adversity throughout her history disappeared because her sons and daughters of all classes and strata succumbed to love of squalid luxury, ideological compassion for aliens and accepted the false promises of equality rather than dedicate themselves to the burdens of survival, even as the liberal totalitarians were forging the chains to enslave them. We must understand that no nation has a right to exist. It arises and survives by self-assertion and defence of its interests; a nation sees itself as having a unique destiny. When that sense of special purpose or divine blessing no longer moves hearts and minds, when sufficient numbers no longer assert their national identity and defend it from hostile forces, internal and external, the nation mutates into fractious rubbish, and ceases to exist.