I wanted to share with you an interview I did on the Peter McCormack Show. Do please have a listen and let me know what you think.

And, if you know a good publisher, do please put me in touch.

Permanent war

The only way Jews can be sovereign in Israel'/Palestine is to keep the 3 million Palestinians of the West Bank, the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza, and the 1.5 million Arabs of 1948 Israel weak and subjugated, or to expel them. In addition, the Jews have to at least deter the Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians and Jordanians who may consider coming to the Palestinians’ aid, and to prevent them from giving the Palestinians enough freedom to wage an insurgency from their territory. This requires the regular threat or actual use of overwhelming force.

And yet, the Palestinians believe they have no choice but to fight.

After Israel signed a peace agreement with the Palestinians in 1993, in which it committed to a Palestinian state being established in the West Bank and Gaza, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubled from 111,000 to 234,000 by 2004. It has since risen to nearly 800,000.

These settlements are built by expropriating private and public lands under dubious legal reasoning. The Palestinians have concluded that the Israelis do not want peace, but that they will use peace to further their expansionism. After all, the Israelis did not settle in south Lebanon, because there was an active armed resistance. In the Golan and the West Bank, there was no armed resistance, so they settled there.

Confidence and force

Israel is too insecure to permit the prosperity of potential enemies on its doorstep. Israel knows that a wealthy and capable Gaza or West Bank, populated by former refugees who still long to return, is a threat. The Palestinians would always demand the implementation of various UN resolutions that entitle them to return to the territories from which they were forcibly expelled. And, if they were strong enough, they would certainly wage war: they are willing to wage war even when they are weak and poor. How much more of a challenge would they be if they were strong and prosperous.

Furthermore, Israel has no strategic depth. To maintain its place, it needs to dominate the entire Middle East, even though it is the size of Sicily or Crimea. A territory that small, with a handful of power stations, two airports and four ports cannot maintain such a position indefinitely – except through the periodic use of extreme force to keep its enemies weak.

Muslims and war

Islam requires its adherents to keep on fighting Israel, both for control of the Holy Land and because the Israelis are seen as occupiers. With Muslims so severely outnumbering Jews, extreme force is the only way Israel can win while maintaining low casualties. With the anti-Israel groups’ willingness to place military equipment in civilian areas, and given Israel’s consistent willingness to target civilian assets, the consquences of the use of force are regularly borne by non-combatants. And yet, this is seen as acceptable by most Muslims.

Furthermore, there will always be Muslim powers supporting their Palestinian co-religionists. For Muslims, Israel is the symbol and instrument of Western hegemony. Its destruction is necessary for the establishment of a new order that liberates the region from the legacy of Anglo-Saxon dominance. This would be the only way to end the Islamic decline that began with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire.

Last, even if, somehow, Israel was to ever succeed in throwing out the Muslim Palestinians to Jordan, that country would turn into a missile base for Iran, or for whichever Islamic power replaces Iran, aimed at the destruction of Israel. A Palestinian-run Jordan would be Gaza on steroids. Even if Israel took all the West Bank of the River Jordan, war would continue.

For Israel, there can be no peace with the Muslims, only lulls between battles.

A dark alternative

The alternative to the modern state of Israel is not a state where Muslims, Christians and Jews are equal. There are no Muslim-majority countries where the Muslims give the minority equal rights. This is as true of Bangladesh as it is of Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran or Iraq. Islam views itself as the religion of government and gives itself the right to rule over all others. Islam has never been able to separate its theological claims from its claims to worldly power.

Throughout its history, Islam acknowledged that non-Muslims it ruled had some rights. Ahl al-Dhimma, whence the word dhimmi comes, means “those to whom we owe protection.” But the protection offered here was always closer to a racket, involving special taxes and a second-class status, and, sometimes, the provision of slaves as tribute in exchange for peace. “Protection” by Muslims also implied losing the burden of self-determination: non-Muslims could decide for themselves issues such as marriage and inheritance, but nothing more.

Islam was always weary of the non-Muslims it ruled, knowing full well that they rejected its claims of supremacy, of being the final and unadulterated word of God. This required Muslims to maintain a tight leash on populations they subjugated. This is unlikely to change.

The cost of defeat

If the Jews of Israel were ever defeated, what they can look forward to under Islamic law would be the killing of their fighting men, the enslavement of their women and children, and the expropriation of their property. The Jews who would be left would become Ahl al-Dhimma, a nominally protected minority that is subject to near constant humiliatio: Islam is a particularly unforgiving religion, insisting repeatedly on the need for “an eye for an eye”, and the Muslims have been getting humiliated for quite some time.

Let us assume, however, that the Palestinian Muslims somehow defeat Israel, and then choose not to apply Islamic law. Their only demand would be the return of Palestinian refugees from nearby countries, and the reclamation of land and properties lost to Israel, with the Jews being allowed to live in relative peace.

What would such a state look like, with an Arab Muslim majority? How would triumphant and yet resentful Muslims who want to reclaim their land and property deal with Jews? What would be the response from the Jews, who spent three generations building the only industrial and technological powerhouse in the region, only to see it taken away from them? What kind of grudges would they hold?

Another civil war would seem inevitable, and, indeed, the Muslims would easily anticipate that. Their response would be to subjugate the Jews more harshly, just as the Jews had done to them, to pre-empt their challenge.

Like South Africa and Rhodesia before it, an Israel ruled by a Palestinian majority would, within a generation, revert to the mean of its neighbours. It would resemble Syria, or Egypt, or, at best, Jordan. And, like Rhodesia and South Africa, the new rulers would want to milk their former oppressors for every penny.

This is the choice the Jews of Israel face: Either the Jews remain sovereign and prosperous, at the cost of perpetual war, and the subjugation, death and destruction of their neighbours – and the toll that takes on a human soul – or the Jews are “offered protection” and are subjugated themselves.

There are no good outcomes here for both peoples, only for one at the expense at the other.

There has been a marked change in the legal atmosphere in the West in the last few decades. Efforts to silence dissent, previously a hallmark of the tyrannical Soviet Union, Ba’athist regimes in the Middle East, and assorted left-wing nationalist governments, have taken hold.

In France, people get fined regularly for criticising Islam and immigration. The gilets jaunes were beaten and tear gassed for their protests, and not a single Western government expressed the mildest disapproval.

In Germany, there is talk of banning one of the most popular parties in the country because it believes in the nation state and opposes immigration. Even though it is led by a lesbian, it is accused of being far right, hollowing that term of all meaning.

In Canada, protesters against lockdowns had their bank accounts frozen and were imprisoned.

In the United States, a presidential candidate is facing 91 indictments, most of which are laughable.

In Britain, minor anti-immigration riots led to courts being opened 24 hours, and a raft of charges and prison sentences, including against individuals who were merely present, or who said unkind things on social media. This in a country where violent criminals regularly get early release or no prison sentences at all.

By contrast, Arab dictators, when the “Arab Spring” protests began in 2011, made extensive efforts, at least rhetorically, to reach out to the public and accept some of the protesters’ grievances. Western governments are showing no such consideration.

What explains this draconian turn?

We argue that, throughout the West, the state, the establishment media and the civil service are basing their worldview on a series of fantasises and lies. As the establishment loses the ability to defend the lies on which it is basing its policies, its reaction will not be to moderate, but to exercise extensive repression.

We attempt to catalogue some of these lies below, in the hope that their rejection by the public will weaken the encroaching tyranny.

Lies about society

Wealth and power

Those with wealth are always more powerful than those without. Egalitarian claims to the contrary are delusional, yet these egalitarian delusions underpin all modern Western democratic systems.

Parties that promise to hold the rich to account – while taking their donations and gifts – are especially lacking in credibility. They are likely to talk a good game while further empowering oligarchs.

In an aristocratic system, those with wealth and power are well-known and are constantly in the public eye – at least as far as their peers and neighbours are concerned. In multiparty democracy, donors are often hidden from view but wield enormous power.

The wealthy can fund media and other institutions that bestow credibility and legitimacy, including political parties. The plebians cannot.

Allowing the wealthy to hide their power is detrimental to the public, as it removes the tools that keep the powerful in line: the threat of public humiliation, and the opprobrium of their peers. That is why egalitarian ideologies are in effect more tyrannical than most hierarchical ones.

Any cursory glance at the role of lobbyists and large corporations in modern Western governance shows that it is the oligarchs who are truly in charge. Egalitarianism enables oligarchs to rule unchallenged.

Aristocracy and oligarchy

Aristocracy addresses the question: how can we have meritocracy, despite the universal human tendency to nepotism? That answer is to create a class of extremely competent individuals related by blood.

Aristocracy gives the intellectual and military elites great responsibility and independent wealth and encourages them to intermarry. Their offspring then have the greatest possible chance to win the genetic lottery while being economically secure enough to develop their potential to its fullest.

Those who shine from among the lower classes are gradually elevated to the ranks of the aristocracy. Those who do not – who invariably constitute the majority – are protected by a stable political system that gives them clear roles and responsibilities. 

The alternative to aristocracy is for those who manage to succeed financially to use their wealth to further their own economic welfare. That is oligarchy. Those business tycoons then proceed to acquire the organs that shape public opinion – as occurred with Fox News or Twitter or the Washington Post. The oligarchs can then influence politics according to their commercial interests. These commercial interests can include offshoring industries, dismantling trade barriers, and flooding the labour market with imported workers. Oligarchs have shown their willingness to destabilise the lower classes just to gain a little more wealth. Aristocrats, for all their faults, require functioning lower classes to maintain their position.

Both aristocracy and oligarchy have been tested by time. The first created the greatest civilisation known to mankind, the second is collapsing it.

Therefore, the duty of a state is to elevate the aristocracy and discipline the oligarchy.

Therefore, oligarchs serving lengthy jail terms, or having their assets seized, or even “falling” from buildings, is better for society than oligarchs only ever being fined.

In Britain, the stated purpose of the state has been to flatten society, removing any traces of hereditary inequality.

This will merely make it harder for those with titles and wealth to challenge nouveau riche oligarchs. The oligarchs must be delighted, as challenging them requires resources and education, and is not easily done by the disorganised masses.

Lies about sexuality

Marriage

Western governments and societies forget that homosexuality is a novel concept.

Of course, there was always male on male sexual activity, including in nature. However, such activity was seen as perverse and as temporary, rather than a lifelong bond akin to that between man and wife.

Contrary to popular belief, Greek and Roman thinkers saw the practice as abominable. However, in the last few seconds in civilisational terms, a new concept arose: that of “marriage equality,” whereby individuals of the same sex can be “married”.  

In reality, there is no marriage without the theoretical possibility of procreation, however remote. The institution of marriage is built around having and protecting children. Its primary purpose is to safeguard women and children by creating a permanent bond between parents. In situations where procreation is in theory and in practice impossible, marriage is also impossible.

It is fanciful to claim that marriage is merely about love and desire, rather than about duty, responsibility, the passing of traditions and the preservation of community, especially women and children. Yet we see precisely that attitude from almost all parties in the West. So much so that what was always considered perverse is now considered a protected characteristic, with the state willing to use its coercive powers to prevent people from speaking the obvious truth: homosexuality is perverse.

Feminism

Feminism is the claim that the differences in form and biological functions between males and females do not imply a difference in social, economic and political functions.

Feminists claim that women and men are equal, or should be equal, or could be equal, even if their roles in rearing children are obviously and necessarily different. Feminism is the claim that evolution and biology should not inform the sexes’ social, economic or political roles.

As Chesterton put it, feminism is the claim that a woman is enslaved when she helps her husband but free when she serves her employer.

It is self-evident, therefore, that feminism is very convenient for oligarchs: it depresses wages.

And yet progressives, the oligarchs’ self-declared enemies, universally champion feminism.

Transgenderism

The logical consequence of feminism is transgenderism: if the biological differences between men and women do not imply social, economic and political differences, then why not the other way around? Why can a man not adopt the social or economic profile of a woman, and then claim to be a “real” woman?

If biology does not matter in one direction, why should it matter in the other?

That said, the usefulness of transgenderism to the oligarchy should not be underestimated. If the oligarchs can make you say that a man is a woman, they can make you say anything else. In this sense, asking you to “affirm” transgenderism is a test of loyalty and obedience, as we explain here.

Be very mistrustful of oligarchs who support this tyrannical lunacy.

Lies about the economy

Welfare

The official Western stance on welfare is that it is temporary, that people want to work, that its benefits outweigh the cost, in that it permits those temporarily out of a job to continue spending, preventing the economy from crashing in a recession.

Human nature, however, says otherwise. Welfare enables leeches.

If we can get paid without working, our natural tendency to sloth will lead us to do so regularly. Welfare is not a temporary arrangement to bridge difficult times. It is a permanent crutch used by those able to work but who choose not to.

This becomes increasingly true in a society that loses faith and community. Without faith to provide a conscience and private motivation, without community to provide shame and public motivation, those who can live on welfare will increasingly choose to do so.

Providing welfare to foreigners is especially destructive, as it gives the impression that this is a weak society ripe to be taken advantage of. Yet this is precisely what the Western state is doing – most London social housing is occupied by those born outside the United Kingdom, and illegal migrants are housed in four-star hotels. Western governments are doubling down on hosting illegal migrants and providing them with benefits. They are prioritising foreign leeches over productive citizens.

Pensions

A state-sponsored pension system is destined to bankrupt the state, due to the perverse incentives it creates. The state cannot indefinitely pay seniors’ pensions for the simple reason that the presence of state pensions disincentivises men and women from having children. This shrinks the workforce and the tax base and increases the tax burden.

In reality, seniors can only depend on their children to provide for them during their old age. If society is safe and stable, they may be able to rely on their savings. Outside a safe society, the elderly and frail are, at best, robbed and left destitute.

Society consists of a generational chain of mutual obligations, and the provision of a pension by the state breaks that chain.

Throughout the West, neither supposedly conservative nor liberal parties recognise this truth. In Britain, politicians insist on raising pensions at rates higher than inflation, thereby increasing the burden of pensions on the economy and stiffing future generations.

This is social suicide.  

Net Zero

Wealth is characterised by high energy consumption. A sensible political leadership that wishes to increase its society’s wealth would want to maximise energy consumption, not outsource it to China.

Cheap and abundant energy is a key mechanism for generating wealth. The West had already achieved energy abundance. Net Zero mandates replacing existing efficient infrastructure with new, inefficient and unreliable infrastructure.

However, gas and coal need to be maintained anyway, even under the Net Zero utopia, as so-called renewables are unreliable (and expensive). Therefore, the West will be paying to maintain infrastructure that it already has, while buying new infrastructure that is less effective than the existing one.

The result is rising energy prices, weaker industry, and poorer households. And more wealth for the net zero oligarchy, who happens to have outsourced industrial production to China anyway.

The oligarchs are profiting from economic suicide.

Lies about identity

Belonging and ethnicity

Rishi Sunak was not described as Britain’s first Kenyan-origin Prime Minister, but as Britain’s first Indian-origin Prime Minister. Even though his family came to the UK from Kenya.

Why did residence in Kenya not make the Sunaks Kenyan, whereas residence in Britain somehow made them British? And what does the Sunaks’ identification as Indian, rather than Kenyan, say about belonging, ethnicity and religion?

Modern Western states tend to forget that tribe, ethnicity and religion are the building blocs of political organisation. People naturally have affinity towards those who are like themselves and naturally reject outsiders.

We therefore observe that ethnic enclaves are a universal human norm. Some become seemingly benign cultural curiosities, like Chinatown or Little Italy. Some are dangerous, like the Banlieux or Birmingham, or like Little Italy during the heyday of the Mafia.

Diversity is almost never a strength. Diversity means that people have different allegiances, and different values. That in turn makes it impossible to agree on a common good.  Politics turns into conflicts over each community’s portion of the economic pie. I explore this at length here.

The Lebanese of West Africa remain Lebanese, not African. And the Siddi Africans of South Asia remain a separate community and are not Indian or Pakistani. When Indian Muslims come to the West, they live among other Muslims, not with Hindus and not with the ethnically European. And they marry other Muslims, usually from their own ethnic group – those who do not often face stern rejection from their community.

The truth that the Western state tries to hide is that those who belong to the West are those who are ethnically European and culturally Christian.

For oligarchs, however, the supply of cheap labour and additional consumers is worth it.

Religion and cohesion

Western states no longer recognise that liberalism is a Christian compromise, based on the Protestant notion that religious authority does not reside in the Church, and on the Catholics’ decision to no longer press that issue through warfare.

The separation between Church and State, by contrast, is a fundamentally Catholic idea which refers to the separation of administrative authority between the ecclesiastical and temporal authorities.

The modern West incorrectly assumes that Muslims or Hindus or even Communist atheists can maintain such a separation, despite history demonstrating that all political community must have an ideological or religious basis. The leadership of Britain fails to notice that Hindu and Muslim Indians rally to different sides. Their supposed Britishness does not bridge their religious divisions.

It is bizarre to expect non-Christians to adopt Western values when they do not adopt the faith that underpins Western values.

The state in the West does not understand that communal cohesion is maintained through shared faith. Rather, Western progressives are trying to make “Islamophobia”, or legitimate criticism of Islam, a crime.

Islam and democracy

Almost no one mentions that far more British Muslims joined Islamic State than the British military, let alone asks why.

Furthermore, moderns assume, incorrectly, that Islam and democracy are compatible. However, Islam views itself as the natural religion of state that is entitled to govern Christians and Jews – it does not accept that they can govern themselves in shared territories and still implement the law of God. And if the Christians or Jews do not implement the law of God in accordance with the Muslims’ understanding, then Muslims are entitled to fight them. The result is perpetual warfare between Muslims and non-Muslims until Islam establishes itself in government.

Islam also permits the ruler to judge whether anyone is guilty of “waging war against God” or of “causing corruption in the earth”. When the ruler deems it necessary, he is entitled to kill that person.

This combination of militarism and license to kill easily leads to despotism.

It is bizarre to expect Muslims to work towards maintaining free and democratic states in the West, when they have never built any at home. Recall the hopes that greeted the “Arab Spring”. Consider how it ended.

Immigration and democracy

Given the reality that migrants will not adopt Western values – unless they embrace Christianity and practice it for a few generations – bringing in foreigners and giving them citizenship is destructive. It is an especially dangerous experiment when done in large numbers – a handful of Pakistanis may wish to adapt and/or convert, but if they move in their thousands, they will form parallel communities and face no pressure to integrate. And indeed, this is what the West is witnessing.

Mass migration from diverging cultures paves the way to civil war. Westerners forget that chaos, enmity and conflict are the norm in diverse societies. Diversity is not a strength, but a burden, and is fundamentally incompatible with democracy – diversity needs to be managed with authoritarianism, as the alternative is either political paralysis or communal conflict.

Democracy, by contrast, requires a bedrock of deeply shared values that permit the governing party to trust its opposition rivals enough to hand them power peacefully. In a diverse society, there is no shared understanding of the common good – diverging identities make it difficult to define what is common, and diverging values make it difficult to define what is good. Trusting your rivals with power is therefore suicidal. Increased immigration brings the West closer to a point where accepting the outcome of elections is seen as suicidal.

Lies and tyranny

The West’s political establishment, including the media and civil service, is wedded to a series of blatant lies. These lies are economically and socially toxic, but empower the oligarchy.

It is impossible to defend lies, especially lies of the magnitude of those adopted by Western states, without repression, intimidation and violence.

Unsurprisingly, Western governments are using draconian measures to defend these lies, including with absurd “hate speech” laws intended to prevent the discussion of difficult truths, restrictions on social media to prevent the spread of “misinformation”, de-banking of dissidents, and punishments against peaceful protesters.

The lies that have been spread by the establishment, and the measures taken to protect those lies, have broken down the trust required for democracy to function. Without trust, there can be no peaceful transfer of power, no democracy.

That is why the repression from establishment parties will intensify. There is no other path open to the current ruling classes.

The truth can be established peacefully, with reason and good example, if one is willing to sacrifice enough, as the Christian martyrs were. Dissidents must insist on speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, by the grace of God. No matter the consequences.

According to this distinction, Islam is merely the religion: neutral, uniquely ‘spiritual’, and not to be feared. It is Islamism which is the threat, with its aspirations for world dominance. 

The intended implication is to claim that most Muslims separate their political and religious views. And while this may well be the case for many Muslims, the thinking behind this is naïve and intended to reconcile liberalism with the mass migration of Muslims to Western shores.

Using the term Islamism is an attempt to define Islam using Western Christian categories because, even when the proponents of the term do not in fact practise Christianity and might even reject it altogether, their political worldview remains profoundly Christian. For it is only Christian thought which makes such a distinction between Church and State.

Secularists who speak of this separation do not really understand what it is. It is merely a delineation between secular and church hierarchies, not a separation of values. No religion or belief system of whatever type can ever be totally neutral and not seek to affect society. Even less Islam. 

The human mind is religious and ideological. All human beings seek to shape their social and political lives according to their beliefs. Muslims are not unusual in that regard. Catholics (like this author), Evangelicals, Marxists and the woke all want their values to influence the public sphere.

Some Muslims are more religiously committed than others and want their values to play a role in politics because of this. Other Muslims utilise their identity to improve their standing in their community and gain political power. Other Muslims still are indifferent. You can substitute Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Wokes or Marxists for Muslims in the previous sentences, and nothing would change. Such is human nature. 

It appears to me that Westerners are unable to say the obvious – that Muslims want to live in accordance with Islamic values, and that they identify with Muslim causes, from Kashmir to Palestine to the Rohingya. There is nothing exceptional about this. Christians, Marxists, Jews or liberals naturally want to live in accordance with their values, and identify with their own causes. There is nothing extraordinary in accepting that values and causes differ between these groups.  

Westerners perhaps fear saying this because they may be called racist. For them, racism is the greatest sin. For any serious Muslim, Christian or Jew, however, harming one’s neighbour without cause, abandoning one’s own, blaspheming, murdering or stealing are much bigger sins than stating that different groups of people are, in fact, different, and may have different values and espouse different causes.

Those who use the term Islamism hope that, somehow, Muslims might adopt liberal values. They do not explain why Muslims would adopt values which normalise blasphemy and sexual immorality, and prevent society from telling apart men from women. What exactly is liberalism offering Muslims so that they should adopt it?

It is important to be honest about religious conflict – liberalism is in conflict with Islam, just as it is in conflict with Christianity and just as Islam is in conflict with Christianity and Judaism, and as Christianity and Judaism are in conflict with one another. 

The conflict may on occasions be respectful and polite, on other occasions violent. But conflict there is. These religions might, in certain places and times, learn to live alongside each other. As belief systems, however, they are ultimately exclusive of each other.

This was understood by everyone throughout history, until liberalism’s own self-perception changed from being a culturally unique exception to a universally applicable system.

The Fatiha, the opening verse of the Qur’an, ends with a prayer asking God to guide the faithful to the straight path, not that adopted by those under God’s wrath (the Jews) or those who have gone astray (the Christians). 

The Qur’an has many verses attacking Christians and Jews, and at least one clearly calling for war against them until they submit in humiliation. It also has some praise for them. Islam is a complex religion. And yet, somehow, most liberals believe that any jihadi, when exposed to liberalism, would adopt it, rather than recoil in horror.

Liberalism has helped Islam improve its standing in its perennial conflict with Christianity, in that it has allowed Muslims to dominate some historically Christian cities without a fight. 

It has allowed Muslims to gain political relevance, and sometimes power, in countries with no history of having Muslim populations. Why would a Muslim adopt the ideology that has so visibly enfeebled Islam’s only civilisational rival?

Since most Muslims in the West are practising, but most Christians are not, liberals are unable to understand what ‘the rise of Islamism’ is: a symptom of the religious conflict between Islam and Christianity, in which liberalism is a handicap to whoever adopts it. 

This misunderstanding, a direct result of the liberal worldview, allows Muslims to be open in their disdain for the modern West, while the West falls all over itself trying not to be ‘Islamophobic’. 

Anyone familiar with the history of the conflict between Islam and Christianity, however, should have some trepidation about the expanding numeric and political power of Islam. As Muslim numbers grow in the democratic West, we should expect more Muslim assertiveness and more Islamism. 

Those who oppose Islam within the secular rules of the game - tricking themselves by the use of the term ‘Islamism’ - end up having to resort to crass racism and/or Islamophobia, or to hate speech laws that are easy to circumvent for sophisticated and truly dangerous radical Muslims, and that mostly get used against the nationalist or religious right. 

Put more simply, you can oppose Islam for religious reasons. You have theological, moral and historical arguments to consider it mistaken. But any non-religious argument quickly descends into a rejection of people and their way of life: you don't like how they behave, how they take over whole areas of a city, how they don't integrate, and so on. 

But that kind of opposition is shallow, ineffective, and lacking in fortitude and resolve. And it backfires, in that it invites Muslims to be even more assertive.   

Racism and Islamophobia are not the real challenges to Islam, and neither are hate speech laws, secularism or liberalism. The only true challenge to Islam is Christianity, because Islam is best understood as a Christian heresy. 

In major ways Muhammad rewrote Christianity, including denying the key Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, and claiming that Christ was never crucified. In doing so, he hollowed out Christianity, permitting himself greater freedom in the use of political violence and escaping the oversight of the Church.

I say the above without the slightest intention of disparaging Muslims or Islam, just as a Muslim who quotes the Qur’an saying that those of us who believe in the Holy Trinity are kuffar (infidels) is not necessarily seeking to disparage me personally. I accept that he wishes me what he considers best for me, which is my conversion to his faith. I reciprocate.

My view is that the Qur’an is wrong, morally and theologically, but that it contains enormous wisdom. It is possible to have cordial, neighbourly relations and indeed lifelong friendships with Muslims while being aware of the religious and civilisational conflict dimensions of Christian-Muslim relations. Conflict, disagreement and even enmity are not reasons for hatred, as Christ teaches us.

The attempted distinction between Islam and Islamism aims to disguise an increasingly necessary debate about the number of Muslims in the West, and a much more important conversation about the role of Christianity in building the values that define the West, and the permanent religious conflict that will always define Christian-Muslim interactions. 

We should therefore understand ‘Islamism’ for what it is: a nonsensical neologism created to comfort the materialist liberals who have so badly enfeebled Christendom. 

For while a radical Muslim would see authentic Christianity as a real opponent - to be defeated but to be taken seriously - he correctly views liberalism as a distasteful joke. 

At most, the committed and politically astute Muslim views liberalism as a game that he has to play in his quest to take over the weak West. He would warn his children against adopting it, while wielding it as a cudgel against his Christian enemies. 

Christianity is a solid door to be knocked down. Liberalism is a rotting door, hanging loosely on its hinges, effectively inviting him in.

The ubiquity of carnage

Ethnic cleansing is not limited to animals. During the Peloponnesian Wars between authoritarian Sparta and democratic Athens, the Athenians tried to convince the wise leaders of Melos – a small island colony of Sparta – to surrender to Athens and submit to its rule. The Melians tried to argue, unsuccessfully, that it was in the Athenians’ best interests to respect the independence of a weak colony like Melos, so that moral, merciful, and just conduct could be expected, even if one day a stronger state conquered Athens herself. The Athenians said: “You know, and we know, as practical men, that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength, and that the strong do what they can, and the weak submit… We know that men”, the Athenians continued, “by a natural law, always rule where they are stronger. We did not make that law nor were we the first to act on it; we found it existing, and it will exist forever, after we are gone; and we know that you and anyone else as strong as we are would do as we do”. After the Melians failed to convince the Athenians not to attack them, and insisted on fighting for their independence, the Athenians killed the men of Melos and enslaved and dispersed its women and children. The colony was erased.  

The Romans would often enslave their enemies’ women and children and kill their men. During the siege of Alesia in Gaul, Julius Caesar is said to have refused to enslave the women and children, as had been expected, choosing to starve them instead, as a means of pressuring the besieged warriors into surrendering. Most famously, Rome utterly destroyed Carthage, killing or enslaving every man, woman and child, razing the city and salting the ground.

These were Rome and Athens. Our exemplars as democratic societies, and some of the most intellectually and technologically advanced societies in history. Many religions were based on the need to murder and subjugate neighbours – African animists, the Aztecs and many others lived such faiths. American tribes like the Comanche, Apache and Sioux were famous for their viciousness. They would torture men, gang rape women and murder babies without a hint of guilt. And it was not just the men who engaged in such practices. The women partook in the cruelty and torture with glee, skinning and burning captives alive. There were never any noble savages there. There was only savagery. In comparison, the Babylonian and Persian norm of merely forcibly displacing nations, rather than murdering and enslaving them, seems positively merciful. And indeed, it was.

Throughout history, including Christian history, sieges were the norm. An army would surround a city or enemy fortification, cut off supplies, and wait. Starvation and disease would weary the people, with the very young, injured and very old being the first victims. Our ancestors never saw anything immoral about a siege and the ensuing suffering. It was just another tactic in war, unpleasant but necessary. Often, it was considered that the blame for civilian suffering was on the leaders of the army who refused to acknowledge their own weakness. The punishment meted out to civilians during attempts to root out insurgents was similarly blamed on the insurgents themselves. This was the view of Christian reactionary philosopher Joseph De Maistre, among others.  

A similar view was accepted by the Allies during the Second World War. The nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the bombing of Dresden and of Japanese cities, the Russian rapes and pillages throughout Germany, and Germany’s own murderous attacks on Slavs, Jews, Gypsies and others, are part of the modern world’s legacy. The carnage has continued into modern times, with Saudi Arabia’s siege on Yemen’s ports and airports, fully backed by the United States, Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh, the jihadi genocide of Nigerian Christians, Iraqi Yezidis and others, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s sieges on various opposition- and jihadi-held cities, and the jihadis’ own sieges against towns held by Assad’s forces.

Materialism, faith and morality

There is no secular, material reason to oppose targeting civilians, genocide or ethnic cleansing. If human beings are merely poorly evolved chimpanzees, as atheists claim, why should we not behave as chimpanzees? Materialism can lead to hedonism, or scientific racism and genocide, or nihilism. But there is simply no pathway from materialism to accepting the value of every human soul and seeking to protect non-combatants. One may attempt the utilitarian argument, as the Melians did, claiming that recognising the dignity of others will protect our own dignity, and it will fall just as flat. The moral objection to genocide and ethnic cleansing rests on a faith claim. We accept, on faith, that God endowed every human soul with the same dignity as every other human soul, and that God loves every human soul that He created. Accepting God’s love and justice, we spare the innocent, and we refrain from engaging in our base and bloody impulses. Or at least we try. Or say that we try.

Not all faiths lead to this conclusion, nor is having faith a guarantee against practising human cruelty. The prophet of Islam killed his male Jewish enemies and sold their wives and children into slavery, in line with Roman and Greek morality. Christians of all persuasions practiced slavery. Christian Europe excelled at organised violence, which allowed it to rule the world. The Old Testament made it clear that Israel was commanded to wipe out certain nations due to their use of human and child sacrifice. Jewish rabbis often cite Old Testament passages to Israeli soldiers before the Israeli army launches offensives. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relied on Biblical verses that refer to Amalek to justify the severity of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

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This prelude helps us take a broader view of the rules of war, in the hope that this can help us understand the current conflict in Israel and Palestine. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a dispute among people with shared values over who governs which territory. It is not a civil war within a single nation. It is a total war between two peoples, only one of whom can fulfil its ambitions. Victory is necessary because defeat could lead to annihilation. Simply, it is a pre-modern conflict intended to eliminate the other side as a fighting force. If the other side is a people, rather than a military, then victory may require destroying the other side as a people. Therefore, mass killings, attacks on civilians and ethnic cleansing may well be necessary and therefore acceptable. It is not an “us versus them” conflict. Rather, there will be an us, or there will be a them.

Israel’s View

Hamas claims that its legitimacy stems from Islam, and from the fact that it is a people’s movement launching a people’s war (like many other Islamic militant movements, Hamas features an amalgamation of left-wing and traditional Islamic discourse). The reality of the situation is that, contrary to most narratives that cast Hamas as extremists within a Palestinian national liberation movement, Hamas was the party that most recently won an election in Palestinian territories, and would likely win once again hands down.

Hamas media constantly emphasises that it has full public support. Anyone who does not support Hamas or the resistance to Israeli occupation is cast as a traitor, and the average man on the street probably agrees that siding with Israel is treason. The Resistance Axis – the militant forces led by Iran – boasts that its civilians are the sea in which they swim, and that civilians embrace their ideology. Criticism of Hamas’ militancy is extremely rare, in part because Hamas would repress any criticism in Gaza, and in part because Hamas is seen as a genuine popular resistance movement.

Schools and hospitals in Gaza are run by Hamas, and Gazans allow Hamas to have tunnel openings in their own homes. The civilians, from Israel’s perspective, are complicit.

Moreover, Hamas and pro-Palestinian propaganda more generally keep insisting that, no matter how many battles Israel wins, in the end the war will be won with demographics. Palestinian women will produce more men than Israel is killing. Those civilians who are killed by Israel will be avenged by their relatives, born and yet to be born. Israelis are being told that they will be outbred and subjugated if they use force sparingly.

Furthermore, even if neighbouring countries temporarily accept Israel, then countries further afield will tap into Islamic sentiments and support an insurgent movement, meaning that there can never be peace so long as Palestinians live side by side with Jews. The rational – not moral – conclusion is to use force unsparingly and without mercy to force as many Palestinians as possible into neighbouring states, and then to use conventional military deterrence against those states.

Additionally, Israel has tried peace, only to end up confronted by a Second Palestinian intifada and a wave of terrorism from Hamas that targeted Jewish civilians and in which the Palestinian Liberation Organisation – which had signed a peace treaty with Israel – was complicit. This was not the first time the Arabs had rejected peace, or so claim the Israelis. Rather, it is common for the Arabs to reject peace, fight a war, lose, then demand that the earlier peace offers be placed on the table - is this not the logic animating the Arab demand for Israel to return to its 1948 borders, after having attempted to invade Israel in 1948 and 1967? Even withdrawing from Gaza in 2005 did not appease the Arabs. Rather, Hamas used the absence of Israeli ground forces to build up its war fighting capabilities. Therefore, if the Arabs and Hamas will never be appeased, if Hamas has launched a people’s war against Israel, and is indeed backed by the Palestinian people, then, from Israel’s perspective, it is justified to launch a war against the people of Gaza.

Crucially, Israel’s combat style of bombing civilian areas, using overwhelming force and forcing civilians to flee is the norm in the Muslim world. Muslims rarely protested Syrian President Bashar al-Assad killing Syrian civilians. They certainly did not protest Saudi Arabia killing and starving hundreds of thousands of Yemenis. Hardly anyone protested Iran ending unrest by shooting a thousand protesters. No one protests the ongoing mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Muslim countries have even sided with China despite the alleged human rights abuses against Muslims in Xinjiang. Why show pity to Muslim civilians if Muslims are so pitiless to one another? Out of fear of the public’s reaction? It is clear, to Israelis, that the world’s reaction is driven by anti-Jewish sentiment, as evidenced by its comparative silence about other more bloody conflicts. Muslim anger is driven not by any particular atrocity, such as besieging civilians or shooting protesters, but by the identity of the party committing it. Muslims ignore Saudi and Iranian atrocities but focus on Israel.

And in any case, Muslims will never become Zionists. They must be compelled to accept Israel through the threat of force, as that is the only language that they understand. Even in countries like Egypt and Jordan, which have a peace treaty with Israel, there is no public acceptance of the Jewish state whatsoever.

Moreover, from Israel’s perspective, its demographics do not permit it to fight long wars of attrition. There is no way the world’s 20 million Jews can win a war of attrition against the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. Therefore, Israel must fight viciously and swiftly, inflicting enormous damage on its enemies quickly to impose deterrence. Anything else would play into its enemies’ numerical strength.

Crucially, from Israel’s perspective, Jews have nowhere else to go. If they do not win, they would return to being stateless wanderers, vulnerable to expulsion due to the cruelty and caprice of locals who never view them as true compatriots. There is nowhere better to be a Jew than among other Jews. And so, the Israelis believe, the modern nation state of Israel must survive at all costs. Never again will there be a genocide or pogrom against Jews, so long as Israel survives.

Last, and to some, most importantly, God gave this land for the Jewish people to occupy. It was God’s will that they return to it after their great suffering in exile. The Jews’ presence in this land is not an act of colonisation, but of decolonising the land from the Muslims who had usurped it. The land promised to Israel was from the Euphrates to the Nile. Modern Israel occupies only the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean - the Arabs can have the rest of the land if they let the Jews live in peace.

Hamas’ view

For Hamas, there are no Israeli civilians. Israeli civilians, male and female, are all in theory reservists, and many are armed or have access to arms. Therefore, killing a civilian, any civilian, is killing a potential soldier. Furthermore, as settlers and occupiers of Palestinian lands, the very presence of Israeli civilians is the reason why Israeli military forces are attacking Palestinians. Therefore, actions taken to target Israeli civilians and force them out of the land are a legitimate means of ending the occupation. After all, Israel is supposed to be a safe haven for Jewish people. If Israel is not safe for Jews, then the raison d’etre of Israel is undermined. Attacking the idea that underpins the state is a means of ending the state.

Additionally, there is no difference, from Hamas’ perspective, between killing civilians in airstrikes, as Israel does, and killing them in face-to-face attacks, be they stabbings, car rammings, shootings or suicide bombings. The result is the same, regardless of the means. If Israel kills civilians, then Hamas is justified in killing civilians, be that in suicide bombings or rocket strikes or any other method. Calling Israel’s killing of civilians collateral damage, while describing Hamas’ killing of civilians as terrorism, is just another example of Israeli media manipulation and Western hypocrisy.

The Israelis, from Hamas’ perspective, are cowards, as expressed in the Qur’an, and they dare not fight face to face. They remain in their armoured vehicles or in their jets, rarely risking their lives. Therefore, to defeat them, it is necessary to frighten them enough to get them to migrate to the West, or to anywhere else.

Besides, the Jews themselves launched a series of massacres at the inception of the state of Israel to put the Palestinians to flight. How can using the same terrorist tactics that Israel used be immoral? After all, the Qur’an says that God commanded the Jews to take a life for a life and an eye for an eye, and indeed the command is there in Exodus. Importantly, the Jews can easily be made to leave, or so Hamas believes, and thus, all Hamas must do to win is to weaken Israel enough to make the prospect of leaving more enticing to Jews than the prospect of staying.

There is no moral or religious reason for Hamas and other Palestinians to give an inch of Palestinian territories. Jewish migration to Palestine was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs through the British mandate – the Palestinians were never consulted. The legal legitimacy of Israel rests on the Versailles Conference, the League of Nations and the United Nations, where Arabs and Palestinians were either not represented or not represented adequately.

And anyway, the point is moot. The land is holy, and God only accepts Islam as the true religion (Quran 3:85). It is not up to men to reverse God’s commands and to give away the Holy Land. God may have given the land to Israel in the Old Testament, as affirmed by the Qur’an, but Israel disobeyed and did not follow God’s prophets Jesus and Mohammad. Thus, modern Jews forfeited their claim to the land. The descendants of ancient Jews who converted and mixed with other Muslims are now the rightful heirs to God’s promise.

Moreover, whatever suffering must be endured on the path of God is a blessing, for suffering to defend truth, justice and morality is how believers affirm their faith. Martyrdom, of combatants and of civilians, while tragic on the personal level, is of no concern in the great scheme of things, if this fight is for God. Resistance Axis leaders’ wives and children have been killed in this fight, as have the leaders themselves. Israel’s ability to kill civilians and combatants is no reason for surrender.

In addition, from Hamas’ perspective, the alternative to war has been tried. Hamas offered a long truce, but Israel rejected it. The PLO signed a peace agreement with Israel, but Israeli militants killed former Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin, and did their best to settle the West Bank after the Oslo Peace Accords to make sure a two-state solution would not be viable. The Israeli public voted repeatedly for right wing politicians who rejected the two-state solution and promised to expel the Palestinians. Why should Hamas do anything other than fight back? Israel took this land by force, and it will be taken back by force.

From Hamas’ perspective, it must launch a people’s asymmetric war, because Arabs tried to fight in conventional military formations and failed. Furthermore, the West dominates modern military technology, and therefore it is pointless to try to compete in high tech modern warfare. Israel must be beaten through a lengthy war of attrition, in which each battle ends in a truce, and each truce is used to prepare to enter the next war with greater strength than the one before. And the war must be fought – the alternative is for people to accept Israeli dominance and learn to live under it, as happened in the West Bank from 1967 to 1987. This would cause a loss of momentum and make the struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation harder. It is pointless to focus on anything other than war, as war is inevitable until Israel is destroyed. That war impoverishes the Palestinians does not matter - those who are rich and weak, like Israel and the West, will not be rich for long, but those who are strong and poor can quickly become rich.

For all these reasons, Hamas believes that it is right to use every advantage that can be had, including by hiding among civilians, wearing civilian clothing during combat or using civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals. If Israel responds by targeting civilian areas, Hamas can use international outrage against Israel to force a ceasefire and prepare for the next round. Israel’s carnage can then be used to rally support in the Muslim world and to secure funding and arms to keep up the fight.

If Israel, as the stronger party, will do as it will, then the Palestinians, as the weaker party, will do whatever they must to defeat Israel, regardless of the rules of war. This is not cynicism, but rather a demonstration of Hamas’ patience, popularity and resolve. If the West and the Jews do not like it, the Jews can go back to wherever they came from.

Peace?

The modern rules of war, that civilian lives should be protected, that civilian targets are to be spared, that civilian suffering should be minimised, are a modern and unusual construct, based largely on Christian values, the trauma of the Second World War and the perception that the Christian West would forever dominate the world, and that therefore earlier cruel practices were no longer necessary. They reflect utopian thinking.

It is hard to accept the modern rules of war when the two sides in a conflict are evenly matched, and when the value systems and identities of the two sides are irreconcilably at odds.

The Israeli - Palestinian conflict is a people’s war. Both sides have legitimate grievances, display strong nationalism and hold deep religious faith. If one side was clearly and completely wrong, there would be no tragedy, only a call for justice, and the conflict would be easy to resolve.

The two-state solution is unattainable. An Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank will go as well as the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. No Palestinian government can recognise Israel and maintain its legitimacy, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has learned. The Muslims will never accept Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land.

The conflict could end with either a Muslim victory and the subjugation and expulsion of Israel’s Jews, or with the Israelis annihilating enough Muslims to force them out of the Jewish ethno-state. However, even in the latter scenario, Israel’s lack of strategic depth and small population size would not make this a stable outcome. As the Good Book says, “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”. As the Athenians said to the Melians: “We did not make that law nor were we the first to act on it”.

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I became a political analyst because, as a teenager in Lebanon, I remember waking up to an airstrike in the middle of the night and cursing Israel, because I remember fighting Muslims and Christians who hated me for being Druse. I wanted to understand why. And I did understand, as I hope my writing above shows. Because I understood, I became Catholic. Now I pray for peace through the conversion of both houses, Hebrew and Arab, Jewish and Muslim.

Each of the two sides views itself only as a victim, and the other side only as an aggressor. Peace requires both sides to see themselves as aggressors, not just as victims, and to acknowledge that the other side is also a victim, not just an aggressor.

Peace, true peace, as opposed to both the Muslims and Jews being subjugated by a foreign power, or one of them successfully ethnically cleansing the other, requires at least one of the two sides to love its enemy. And that concept is alien to both religions, yet it is a prerequisite for peace.

Join me in praying for peace, for it appears that there is little else that we can do.

What is diversity?

Diversity in the sense used by the sloganeering “diversity is our strength” crowd refers to there being people from different places or of different races who share the same exact woke religious dogma. This crowd believes in castes of holy victims – non-whites, queers, women, etc... They believe in their version of Original Sin – slavery, racism, and colonialism. They believe in a soul that transcends physical appearance – a sexualised, corrupted soul that they call “gender identity”. They replace eschatology with climate change, giving themselves an Armageddon – the climate crisis – and a paradise – Net Zero. And they excommunicate heretics – you get cancelled for blaspheming against the woke orthodoxy, not for actual sins. The woke embrace major oil, arms and banking corporations that profess woke dogma. Yet they cancel, with cruel intolerance, any small-time conservative dissidents they come across. In this version of diversity, there is only the woke and the far right. This faux diversity tolerates no disagreements about values, no conflicts among separate groups, and no nuance. This form of faux diversity is precisely skin deep – it stops at skin colour.

Actual diversity involves people living within the same polity while having fundamentally different values and interests. It involves people who define themselves as different from one another and who are in conflict with one another. In Lebanon, in the Congo, in pre-partition Cyprus, in Nigeria, in the former Yugoslavia, in Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in Libya, in the Ukraine, in Iraq, in Malaysia, there is true diversity.

In these countries, there are competing identity groups. Religion, tribe, ethnicity, historical narratives, origins, values, and interests divide these identity groups. They coexist as separate but neighbouring communities in the same geography and often under the same nominal political or state authority. In such communities, peace and the functioning of the state are not taken for granted. Chaos and conflict are constantly around the corner. Loyalty is reserved for one’s own. That is perfectly natural, as men prefer those who share their identity, beliefs, history, and experience.

No sane man prefers strangers to his own people.

Diversity in action

In a diverse society, competing groups disagree on first principles, such as what is good for the community, who are our friends and our enemies, and what is the aim of our lives. The rival groups’ value systems are different, so their definition of what is good is different. Their identities and loyalties are different, so their idea of what is common is different. It is impossible for there to be a shared definition of the common good, as they disagree about the answers to the questions “what is good?” and “what is common?”.

Under these conditions, competing ethnic and religious groups organise for collective action along group lines, delineated by values and identity – mixed groups simply cannot operate. The competition between diverse groups for the control of scarce resources of a limited geography will naturally be vicious. Inevitably, the diverse groups are in conflict, violent or non-violent, as what is good for one group is usually bad for another. Indeed, any advancement of one group is immediately seen as a threat by the other groups.

Therefore, the first casualty of a diverse society is trust. In a diverse society, it is assumed implicitly, and sometimes stated explicitly, that your neighbours, who do not share your identity and interests, are going to look after their own kin, therefore harming your interests. And this is a perfectly reasonable assumption. The Lebanese express it as: “you grandfather’s enemy is your enemy” (عدوّ جدّك ما بيودّك). Your neighbours in a diverse society will tend not to treat you as an equal or in good faith. They will attempt to undermine you if you grow strong, and take advantage of you if you become weak. They will pass you over for promotion, and reserve profitable endeavours for their kin. There is no reason to be honest or fair with those who view your people as enemies and rivals. Trust goes out the window.

The second casualty of a diverse society is cooperation. Since trust is a prerequisite for peaceful collaboration, cooperation across groups becomes almost impossible. The natural impulse to cooperate, or to set rules for competition, that prevails in a high-trust society, does not pay off in a diverse society. True diversity leads competing communities to conclude, usually correctly, that the wellbeing of their neighbours will be at their expense, and that it is best to organise along group identity lines rather than attempt to cooperate across group identities. As such, it would be wiser to give preference to your far away religious or ethnic kin, rather than to your neighbours who do not share your group identity. As this way of thinking becomes embedded in the psyches of the competing groups, their impulse to collaborate is dulled, and is replaced by a crabs-in-a-bucket mindset. That is, whenever one sees one’s neighbour improving himself, one attempts to tear him down. As that impulse becomes more ingrained, the prospects for society to develop are reduced, and building a meritocracy becomes impossible.

The cooperative, constructive, and institutionalised civic life that one takes for granted in the West is only possible in a high trust society. However, a high trust society requires a level of homogeneity within it. Outside the West, civic life is organised along ethnic or religious lines.

A secularised, deracinated fellow may say, but what if two neighbouring competing groups simply intermarry, become united and share the wealth. That fellow fails to grasp that doing so would erase both groups and create a chimera unrecognisable to either. Try telling the Israelis and the Palestinians that they need to intermarry, coexist in peace, and focus solely on their economic development. Such a solution would simply erase both groups. But will the Jews erase themselves first, or will the Arabs?

The fellow’s error is in assuming that a diverse society seeks to generate wealth. Nonsense. In a diverse society, each group’s priority is security and survival. To consider wealth is a luxury that one can turn to only after survival is secured. And often, survival is only secured by eliminating, or at least generationally weakening, the rival group. Meaning that preparing for conflict and weakening rival groups takes precedence over generating wealth.

Let us take Lebanon as an example. Lebanon is a truly diverse society. There are five major religious sects (Maronite Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christians, Druse Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims) and fourteen other smaller sects. Most Lebanese are individually armed, though there is no group in Lebanon that can contend against the organisational capacity, training, numbers, and equipment of Hizbullah – the Shia militia that is loyal to Iran and its Islamic Republic governance model. The Lebanese disagree on whether the aim of Lebanese political life is to enrich Lebanon's residents in peace, or to wage jihad until the Jewish state is annihilated and American supremacy is overthrown. They disagree on whether to open up to the West or to close the country to everyone except Iran, Russia, China, and their partners. They disagree on whether the West is an ally as a fellow Christian civilisation, or a predator seeking to loot what little wealth Lebanon still has, as Hizbullah and others believe.

There is no democratic way to resolve differences of this magnitude. The communal identities are too different, the value systems are too far apart, and so the conceptions of interests are zero sum. Hizbullah will not give up its belief in a global Islamic armed revolution just because most Lebanese voted that it should. The Christians will not align with Hizbullah just because Israel is a threat or the West is woke – Hizbullah, and Muslims in general, are seen as an even bigger threat.

Thus, Lebanon remains paralysed. There is no rule of law. Elections are entirely meaningless. What prevents civil war is each side’s assessment of its own military power – more clearly, Hizbullah is too strong for the Christians and Sunnis to challenge it, and they know it.

Democracy and Diversity

Democracy can be used to resolve differences of opinion on how to pursue the collective interests of a cohesive group. First, however, there must be agreement over the fact that it is one group, and over what its collective interests are. In turn, this requires an agreement on identity, beliefs and values.

In pre-modern tribal societies, one can often find democratic councils of elders or of fighting age men. The external environment and the enemy tribes nearby constantly threaten the existence of the tribe. Therefore, the tribe has a strong identity, and the overarching shared interest is collective survival. Pursuing individual survival is not an option, as individuals simply do not survive outside a tribe. Therefore, within the tribe, there is a high level of trust in the intent of other tribesmen. The trust is deep enough to give all men a say. Under this system, when a tribe becomes too big – that is, large enough for parts of it to survive on their own – it naturally fragments into subtribes or clans. And the pattern repeats.

In a modern society, democracy can function well when there is a national consensus that is broad and deep enough to allow the losing side in the democratic contest to accept the strategies and policies of its rivals, or at least not to contest them violently or outside the bounds of the law. That in turn requires a level of homogeneity and cohesive identity – otherwise, there would not be enough trust towards the winners for the losers to allow them to govern.

When adequate homogeneity and consensus exist, it is possible to arbitrate political disagreements by way of legal processes, rather than violence. It is possible to conceive of a separation of powers, of courts overseeing the legislative process and limiting the excesses of majority rule, of an unbiased administration that executes the will of elected executive officers.

These niceties, while theoretically appealing, can only operate under preconditions of trust and shared interests that stem from social homogeneity. In Lebanon and in Iraq, all the ideas of separation of powers, rule of law, neutral courts and an unbiased civil administration are enshrined in these countries’ respective constitutions. But they exist on paper only. Obviously, what is on paper never finds its way to reality.

When homogeneity, shared values and collective trust break down, when the sense of shared identity is not strong enough to permit the losers to accept the rule of the winners, the result in a nominally democratic system is at best political paralysis, as we often see in Belgium, Kuwait and Lebanon, at worst political violence, as we see in Yemen, Iraq and, increasingly, the United States.

When cohesion breaks down, political rivals are demonised and accused of treason. Political paralysis and gridlock become the norm. Legal proceedings are used to obstruct duly elected rivals from attaining their political objectives, delaying a violent reckoning but at least keeping the peace. Obstruction becomes an end in itself, as it prevents rivals from consolidating and accumulating power. This, naturally, is an unstable and therefore temporary state of affairs.

Diversity and minority contests

Throughout the world, the best option for a minority group that does not wish to be overrun by a majority, that is, if the group lives in a diverse and chaotic environment, is to acquire arms. That way, the group raises the cost to other groups that seek to ignore and sideline it, or to impose their will on it. With the threat or use of force, the group can create political paralysis, and force its rivals to negotiate with it as an independent actor. This is the essence of sovereignty – to create a fiefdom and maintain it by force of arms, and compel others to recognise that fiefdom and its leaders as sovereigns.

Within a nominally sovereign but diverse state, such as Lebanon, Iraq, or Yemen there are often several groups that view themselves as sovereign, and which have enough access to weapons to keep the formal security forces at a distance. They can therefore impose political paralysis. This condition of paralysis can turn violent: in 1920s Turkey and Greece, 1970s Cyprus and 1990s Yugoslavia, the various actors attempted genocide and/or ethnic or religious separation. But, when the violence stops and there is no clear winner, the result is again political paralysis. The bloodshed is a spasm within an extended period of minority contests characterised by conflict and chaos.

Usually, when the violence abates without a decisive victory for one of the groups, or without successful ethnic or religious separation, there is an imperfect temporary agreement on the redistribution of the state’s resources, enforced by the threat of violence. Rival groups remain more or less in control of their own turfs, bicker on the margins of their turfs and do their best to loot the state to enrich their own supporters, as we see in Lebanon, Nigeria, or post-US invasion Iraq. Under such forms of sectarian, ethnic or tribal power sharing, each tribe, each ethnicity, each group, uses whatever power it has within the state to further its own interests, through nepotism, patronage, or government policy. One group may end up controlling a ministry responsible for infrastructure, another group energy, a third industry, etc… with no prospect of cooperation or coordinated state action. This obviously leads to chaos. The application of the rule of law becomes entirely selective and capricious. Peace may be maintained for as long as there is enough loot to go around, or for as long there is not enough access to weapons, or for as long as no single actor can consolidate and defeat its rivals.

Diversity and Order

The paralysis that diversity can generate cannot be resolved over the long term except with one group somehow taking over the state. That group can then concentrate all power in its own hands and redistribute the benefits of state capture as it sees fit. All groups in society are made to understand who is in charge, and to understand that inter-group competition is prohibited. Intra-group competition remains permitted, but only if success is measured in terms of services rendered to the ruler and his group.

Under this model of minority rule, one cohesive group – a family, a political party, an ethnic group, or a tribe – sets the agenda and the priorities of the state, even if other groups disagree. The group in power can then benefit from diversity if it so wishes, by drawing on the talents of different communities, so long as the individuals it recruits implement its policies loyally.

This is what we see in Syria under the Alawite-led government of President Assad, who successfully recruits Christians and Druse to help lead his government. This is what we see in Israel, a state that explicitly prioritises the welfare of the Jews above all other groups, but that allows Druse and Bedouins to hold some senior positions in the security forces. This is how Saddam could have a Christian foreign minister. This is how the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were maintained.

This dynamic – minority rule combined with recruitment from a diverse talent pool – explains the phenomenal rise to power of the tribal Gulf Arab states. They were able to attract labour and talent from across the globe. However, the cosmopolitan pool of talent and labour that they employ has no say in setting the strategic priorities of the state – the foreigners can advise, propose, and work. They cannot decide or set policy. The relationship is not one of equals, as one side is sovereign and the other is subject.

A sovereign group can be consultative, or even democratic, within its own group and with its allies, as we see in the Gulf states, so long as there is no dispute over who the sovereign is. The certainty over the identity of the sovereign permits the autocratic state to overcome the problems of trust and cooperation that are created by diversity. There is no need for intergroup trust – all groups must simply accept the ruler, and trust him as individuals, not as a group. There is no need for intergroup cooperation, as cooperation is imposed on individuals from rival groups who are loyal to the ruler, despite their misgivings, and as all groups have to cooperate with just the ruling group, not with each other.

However, when the autocratic state inevitably decays, the previously described condition of diversity, paralysis, violence, and chaos naturally ensues, until another group consolidates power.

Diversity and rights

Under minority rule, those who challenge the ruling group are punished severely and spectacularly. The rulers understands that the alternative to their rule is a state of anarchy, war, or genocide. The rulers do not guarantee individual rights, but they guarantee the protection of every group from the possibility of attack by its various rival groups.

As such, preserving order preserves the right of the populace to live in peace, and peace is rightly understood as a precondition for attaining security, property rights, and prosperity. Punishing dissidents spectacularly discourages other challengers and preserves the collective rights of all, including the communal right of each group to simply exist. When the leading group in a diverse society understands that the alternative to keeping the peace is chaos, keeping the peace becomes far more important than Western notions about individual rights.

That is why rulers like Gaddafi, Saddam and Assad had to be brutal autocrats, why human rights, especially freedom of expression, are not priorities in the Gulf Arab states, why Iran filters who is allowed to run in its elections to ensure that they are loyal to the regime, and why Putin does not tolerate separatist movements, or liberals whose very ideology inadvertently paves the way for separatist movements. These are not irrational choices emanating solely from personal ambitions and reactionary sentiments. These are actions that fit both, the narrow interests of the ruling group and the collective interests of a diverse society. As such, they are rational and moral. It is far more irrational and immoral to permit delusions about individual rights to destroy diverse polities and to drive them into civil war, as Obama and Bush did to Libya, Syria, and Iraq.

Order is a precondition for rights. Absent strong, cohesive rule, there is no room for rights in a diverse society. There is simply chaos, and might becomes right. Groups survive if they can. Individuals prosper if they can cheat and lie their way to the top, aided by their community or by foreign interests, or if they inherit prosperity. Equality of opportunity is entirely absent. Equality under the law is relevant only in theory. In practice, the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. The concept of individual rights is entirely alien in a diverse society for the simple reason that an atomised individual cannot survive in such a society. There are only collective rights, specifically, the right of the group to exist, and, if it is strong enough, to regulate its own internal affairs. And even that is not so much a right. Rather, it is a function of military prowess.

Diversity in the West

Throughout the West, religious and ethnic minorities concentrate in enclaves – I am not talking just about French banlieux, where it can be argued that government policy led to segregation. I am talking about how the Somali community in the US tends to congregate in Minnesota, how the Lebanese congregate in Dearborn, how African Americans congregate in certain neighbourhoods of DC, Chicago, or New York, how the Armenians and Persians flock to parts of California. Similarly, most European cities having ethnic neighbourhoods that are dominated by Moroccans, Kurds, Turks, Somalis, Syrians, or other groups. The Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in the UK congregate in East London or Birmingham. Self-segregation is the norm, and mixing is the exception.

This is increasingly seen in politics, with the rise of religious and ethnic based organisations throughout the West. Diversity in the West is no different from diversity anywhere else. People naturally prefer those who look like them and who share their identity, values, experiences, and origins, and they organise for political conflict accordingly.

The values and interests of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are fundamentally different from one another, and from the values and interests of Westerners. Yes, certain migrant communities integrate better than others, but the underlying dynamic of different values and different interests is inevitably the same. And, just like all other groups, Africans, Asians, and Middle Easterners prefer their own people to strangers. The regular conflicts between Asians and Africans should have made that obvious by now.

Thus far, the full effects of diversity have not taken the extreme forms we see in the Middle East and Africa, for several reasons. First, there is higher state capacity in the West – unlike the Middle East, Africa and most of Asia, Western states have entrenched bureaucracies and institutions. Second, there is wealth and economic prosperity, as well as a strong welfare state. Thus far, Westerners have not felt the same kinds of economic pressures that push diverse polities towards breaking down along ethnic or religious lines. Third, there is the Christian legacy of the West, which encourages Westerners to treat groups of strangers with a degree of compassion that would not be found in a Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian society. Fourth, Western media and Western governments have actively worked to numb Western populations to the consequences of diversity – “diversity is our strength” is parroted on every news channel, in every newspaper, by every politician. No one states obvious facts: Europeans cannot become Malays, Japanese, or Africans. This statement is widely accepted. Even Boers, who have been in Africa since the 17^th Century, are not recognised as truly African. But, by the same token, Malays, Japanese, Indians, Arabs, and Africans cannot become European. Yet, many pretend otherwise.

With the West entering economic decline, Western governments unable to maintain the welfare state, the ongoing degradation of infrastructure and of competence, Christianity backing away from the emasculated “refugees are welcome” faith and turning to its more muscular dogmas, the rise of right-wing populist parties, and the hostility of the woke faithful to ethnic Europeans, things in the West are very likely going to revert to the human norm.

The West will either attempt to expel migrants – though how that will happen with Westerners’ current birth rates is unclear. Or there will be authoritarianism and minority rule – that could easily be Islamic rule, rather than rule by Westerners. Or there will be political paralysis alternating with civil conflict, and chaos and fragmentation will ensue. Most likely, a combination of all three will take place, exactly as happens everywhere else in the world. It is delusional to assume that the West is immune to the human condition.

The Catholic Solution

Diversity is ordained by God. It is neither good nor bad in a society, in and of itself, but rather it has good elements and bad elements, depending on the form of government in place at the time. Too many Catholics have taken to bleating mantras like “refugees welcome” and “diversity is our strength”. They believe, incorrectly, in my view, that when Jesus commands us to help the poor and the weak, he means that Westerns must welcome entire communities of hostile foreigners into their countries, even as these communities hold beliefs that are antithetical to Christianity and incongruent with Western societies. There is a difference between helping the individual and importing rival communities wholesale; confusing the two issues is disingenuous.

To be clear, nothing in Catholic doctrine calls upon us to welcome illegal migrants, nothing calls upon us to bring real and fake refugees into our own countries by the hundreds of thousands, even if we are called to assist in some way. Westerners are not commanded to wreck their children’s futures and plunge them into future civil wars by welcoming an endless number of economic migrants. This must stop.

Too many Western Catholics fear admitting to harbouring any national sentiments or national pride, even though the idea of differing nations, and of loving one’s nation, has long been part of Catholic political thinking. Even though nations are clearly recognised in the Old Testament. Perhaps, Western Catholics hear St Paul saying that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, and mistake that for the apostle saying that there can no longer be Greeks nor Jews. That is manifest nonsense.

No Catholic in the Middle Ages was under the impression that Germans, Italians, and Iberians were the same nation, even if they were obviously united in Christ. How much bigger are the differences between a modern Polish Catholic and a modern Hindu or a modern Pakistani Muslim, than those between a medieval Iberian and Frenchman? We as Catholics are one in Christ and are part of the mystical body of Christ. But we are not one nation, nor are we one with Muslims, pagans, animists, or atheists. We accept that all human beings share in the divine spark given to us by God. But we do not accept that all faiths are equally true, or that we are not in conflict with other faiths. We as Catholics are realists, and are meant to tell the truth, especially when most prefer that we did not.

Now that diversity has taken hold in the West, possibly irreversibly, Catholics need to make a far greater effort to show the rival communities in Europe, especially the Muslims, the errors in their faiths. Now is a time to convert the newcomers, while understanding that many of them will remain irredeemably hostile, and preparing accordingly. Catholicism does not forbid self-defence nor communal defence. Now is the time to understand that stability depends on maintaining shared values – especially faith – and that the consequences of an unstable, diverse society are chaos and war. Westerners should not wish this outcome for their children, nor for their grandchildren. It is therefore incumbent to spread Catholic values, to convert the newcomers and the woke faithful who welcome them, to limit the numbers of newcomers, and to build Catholics’ capacity to govern both themselves and others, readying ourselves for when the inevitable collapse comes.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister, who, by convention, must be a Sunni Muslim, and Lebanon’s Speaker of Parliament, who, by convention, must be a Shia Muslim, had a rare moment of unity that, for a change, did not involve stealing taxpayers’ money. The two great men met on Thursday, 23 March, and they had a lot to discuss. Lebanon has no president or fully legitimate cabinet. The banking sector has collapsed. Most savers have lost their deposits. Strikes are paralysing the public sector. The country’s telecoms and internet connections are at risk of collapse due to the electric grid failing. Food delivery to prisons – which host jihadi prisoners as well as run of the mill criminals – are about to stop, risking riots and prison breaks. The salaries of security officers are officially less than $20 dollars a month, though, thankfully, Qatar is donating $100 per month to top up each enlistted man’s pay. Salaries for security officials had ranged between $400 and $3,000 before the banking crisis. The currency has lost almost 99% of its value and remains in freefall. And thus, during that meeting between the leaders of the executive and legislative branch, after a discussion lasting no longer than one minute, the two eminent statesmen reached a momentous decree. They decided to delay the start of daylight saving time, which was scheduled for Saturday 25 March. They gave the country around 60 hours’ notice.

During COVID-19 lockdowns in March 2020, Israel had for a few days considered not implementing daylight saving time as scheduled. Health authorities had speculated that reducing the number of daylight hours in the evening would stop people from socialising and reduce the spread of the virus. But Israel found that the undertaking was far too complex for markets, airlines and telecoms, and decided not to go ahead with it. Lebanon’s august statesmen, having no regard for markets, technology or Lebanon’s vital travel and tourism sectors, were not held back by these petty concerns. They were motivated by bigger ideas.

The reasoning of these sage statesmen was simple. Ramadan started on 23 March. During Ramadan, Muslims are supposed to stop eating and drinking at dawn and may not eat nor drink again until sunset. Daylight saving time does not change the number of hours one is required to fast, as it does not change the number of hours between sunrise and sunset. But the issue is not just about the number of hours fasted, but where these hours fall within people’s working day and sleep schedule. If one goes to bed at three am (which is the norm during Ramadan, as people typically feast and spend all night with friends and family), and wakes up at eight am to get to work at nine, one would have to hold out without food or drink until 6pm before DST is implemented. Once it is, one would have to hold out until 7pm. Proceeding with daylight saving time would mean that the day feels an hour longer, because, by the clock, the sun would be setting an hour later. And that makes it harder for those fasting. So, Lebanon’s august statesmen decided, let us make it easier for those who fast Ramadan. Funnily enough, while this is a decision motivated largely by the two upstanding statesmen wanting to appease their Muslim base, I can find no evidence that there was any popular demand for it in the Muslim community. People grumbled that DST would be inconvenient, as one would expect, but there was no serious expectation or demand that it would be changed. People were prepared to just get on with it. But, in the midst of the country’s collapse, the astute duo who run Lebanon’s cabinet and parliament just wanted to do something popular for a change. And it spectacularly backfired.

You see, this clumsy decision was made without even asking Lebanon’s Christians what they thought. Although the decision was ratified in the council of ministers after the premier and speaker had reached their historic agreement, many Christian ministers were boycotting the council. And, since they were not asked, and since the decision was made purely for populist sectarian reasons by two particularly despised figures, the Christians had to object. First, it was the Christian political party most hostile to the prime minister and speaker of parliament that piped up. Then, one by one, the other Christian parties joined in, achieving a rare instance of Christian unity. By Saturday, the Maronite Patriarchate – the preeminent Christian religious institution in Lebanon – announced that it would go ahead with implementing daylight saving time regardless of what the government said. And so now, people ask if you are operating on the Patriarch’s time, or on the Speaker’s time.

Lebanon’s national carrier, Middle East Airlines, immediately announced that all its flights from Beirut would now be taking off an hour before the time shown on tickets, while arrivals to Beirut would land an hour earlier than announced. The company can neither disobey a cabinet decree nor change its schedule. Surprisingly, aviation schedules in the rest of the world do not bend to the whims of Lebanon’s rulers. So, the airlines and Beirut airport kept their schedule intact and told their customers to figure it out. People went into a panic over whether their phones and computers would realise that DST has not yet begun – mobile telephone networks and internet service providers’ equipment is all pre-programmed to shift to daylight saving time, so they did not. For the next month, any prescheduled alert, business meeting, or appointment is going to be negotiated between those who are adhering to Speaker Berri’s time and those following what is being also referred to as the “international time” by those who want to avoid calling it the “Patriarch’s time”. Two Christian-run TV stations, the most popular in Lebanon, said they would stick to “international time”, and were excoriated by Sunni religious authorities for their sectarianism. Then, as if to defuse the situation, the third most popular TV station, which happens to be Muslim run, joined them in saying it would implement DST. Catholic schools, which dominate Lebanon’s educational system and have large numbers of Muslim students - in some cases a majority - announced that they would implement DST. Muslim and state schools said that they would not. Most business leaders - from both religions - are tearing their hair out. Their employees could be dropping their children off to school on one timetable and going to work on another. Worse, if these employees have children in different schools, the different schools could be operating on different timetables. And if these businesses have Muslim employees but do not implement DST, their employees could become deeply resentful. Even if these businesses wanted to be accommodating, they cannot implement one timetable for Christians and another for Muslims. Not to mention that Ramadan is already a low productivity month due to the fasting and reduced working hours. With all that said, the best approach was taken by the central bank of Lebanon. It said it would adhere to both times, regular and DST. Its international systems – connected to global markets – would operate on DST, but its working hours would be on regular pre-DST time. The institution most responsible for Lebanon’s economic collapse had a rare moment of sanity.

Now, even if the cabinet wanted to defuse this situation and back away from a clearly unserious diktat, as is being rumoured, it may not be able to. You see, the Prime Minister had taken the opinion of the Mufti of Lebanon’s Sunni community – that is, the highest Sunni religious authority – who supported the decision. For the prime minister to back away from the decree because Christians objected would be to betray the Mufti. The Speaker of Parliament, a Shia, will naturally be backed by the Shia religious establishment, even if they view the decree as ridiculous (and they probably do). To make the situation even more “enriching”, some Muslims are objecting to the Christians’ objection. “Don’t you want to make Ramadan easier for us?” To add insult to injury, Lebanon’s prime minister has been doing media rounds attacking his rivals – the Christians, that is – for being sectarian, and concerning themselves with the time rather than focusing on the big questions facing the country. As if this decree came from Mars, not from him personally.

In Lebanon, the answer to: “what time is it” might as well be: “are you a Muslim or a Christian?”. And this is how diversity is the gift that keeps on giving. In times of trouble, a diverse people is even more likely to splinter into herds, to turn violent and to make mountains out of molehills. Now, an oafish decree from two insufferably corrupt oligarchs has become another source of sectarian conflict, in a country where that is the last thing it needs. As a result, we Lebanese cannot agree even on what time to set our watches to, while in the midst of a catastrophic decline that may soon have us relying on sundials.

NB: I had said at the beginning of this article that, for once, the two leaders agreed on something that did not involve stealing taxpayers’ money. Rumours in Beirut are that the two statesmen agreed on a car import deal where custom duties would be paid using an older, cheaper rate, potentially earning them millions. This is not being discussed as everyone is busy with the time question. If true, I stand corrected, and I bow down to the ingenuity of our leaders and to their dedication to their craft. Here we are debating what time it is while they make off with another few million dollars.

Holy Victims

The centre of Christianity is Christ, described in the Mass as a Pure Victim, a Holy Victim, a Spotless Victim. It is the duty of Christians to see Christ in every man, woman or child, and to treat each person as they would wish to have treated Christ during His own time on earth, and therefore to glorify the victim rather than abuse him. It is worth emphasising how unique this is. In Hinduism, the downtrodden Dalits, known as Untouchables, are seen as deserving their misery for their actions in a past life. No holy victims there. Similarly, the notion of a holy victim who deserves adoration and who inspires us to care for other victims and treat them as holy, or at least, as worthy, is not what underpins Roman or Greek morality. I would imagine that, outside of offering human sacrifices, the concept of holy victims living amongst us would also have been alien to an Aztec or a Viking.

In the background of all Christian societies is a sense that the oppressed should be elevated and celebrated, for they shall inherit the earth. Therefore, it is perfectly rational for a society that carries Christian cultural baggage but is no longer actively Christian to seek new holy victims, if only out of force of habit. It is natural that it is only in the Christian West that one can expect apologies for colonialism. In the Middle East, where the Muslims successfully colonised Iraq, Egypt, North Africa, Persia and Turkey, the notion of apologising for Islamic colonialism is laughable – doing so would undermine the entire history of the Mohammadan faith. China will never apologise for colonising Tibet, Xinjiang or Mongolia – unless it becomes Christian. To this day, the Mongols remain proud of Genghis Khan. It is only a Christian society that can be shamed for not being sufficiently magnanimous when victorious over its enemies. The fundamental claim of the woke is that Europeans failed to consistently treat Africans, native Americans, and other vanquished peoples as though they did see Christ in them. This expectation of dealing fairly with defeated populations is not consistent with the Athenians’ “the weak suffer what they must,” or with the Romans salting the earth of Carthage to prevent it from ever rising again. It is thoroughly Christian. By tapping into this Christian sentiment, Western societies have manufactured new groups of holy victims, and granted them special privileges through affirmative action and racial quotas. A non-Christian society would have looked at defeated peoples as subjects to be kept down – as, for example, Gulf Arab states look at their own cohorts of foreign labourers – not as people they should elevate.

Heretics holding rituals on British streets

Original Sin

The woke faithful need to transpose Christian concepts upon their societies. This is most evident in the discourse over “whiteness.” Whiteness, in mainstream academic and media discourse, is associated with white supremacy, white privilege, white tears, white victimhood, white violence and other racist tropes. Why do whites tolerate such tropes? Why would any European man accept having his country be called racist, when he knows full well that it is far less racist than China or India or anywhere else in Asia or in Africa? The reaction of a Chinaman, an Arab or an Indian, when confronted with allegations that he is unduly privileged, exploitative, violent, hypocritical and dangerous would be, rather naturally, hostility and resentment towards his accusers. And yet we see white liberals falling all over themselves to bend the knee for BLM, to confess their “white guilt,” and to admit to being all what they are accused of and worse. Why is there such a lack of survival instinct? Again, the answer is not brute stupidity – the most liberal people are those who have passed multiple college examinations, gone to elite universities and attained a modicum of professional success. The answer is that in a Christian society that sorely misses Christ, a faint sense of Original Sin still survives. Original Sin is a wonderful truth. It forces us to look inwards, to examine our conscience, to remove the beam in our own eye before we look at the speck in our neighbour’s eye, to accept that the line between good and evil is in the heart of every man. This philosophy, this truth, is necessary for building a peaceful, cooperative, high-trust society. But without Christian joy, without Christian love, without Christian celebration to balance this sense of Original Sin, its fumes turn into vicious, wanton self-loathing. This is precisely what we see today among the woke.

Whites doing penance for racism

For the woke, Western colonialism, racism and slave trading are elevated above all other historical eras because doing so provides new holy victims that fill the Christ-shaped hole in the woke psyche, while satisfying their psychological need for Original Sin. A woke person is incapable of accepting that slavery and colonialism predate the European age of empire, or that they are simply reflections of human nature. The woke are not interested in the fact that slavery was the norm in all societies. The woke absolve black slave raiders who targeted nearby African communities and sold them onto white merchants. The woke are not interested in Islamic slavery, which predated Christian slavery and outlasted it, and which was more barbaric in its castration of boys to supply eunuchs. The woke are not interested in how the European colonisation of North Africa stopped Muslim pirates from conducting slaving raids against European ships and European shores. The woke are not interested in the fact that ending slavery globally was a uniquely European enterprise, which happened even though Europeans could have benefited from slavery even more greatly than they did. Why the woke’s lack of interest? Not because they do not know the facts, and not because they are unintelligent. The woke choose not to process these facts due to their religious need to attribute to their society a form of Original Sin. Indeed, it is this need for Original Sin that makes Western societies susceptible to woke propaganda that demonises it. Western societies remain Christian, and long for Christian morality.

Eschatology

No religion is complete without eschatology and penance. In the Christian faith, the Revelation to Saint John in the book of the Apocalypse is always true of our times, calling on us to repent, do penance and keep the faith, lest we be separated from the righteous when the end times come. Climate change plays a similar role in the woke faith. It is a call for penance – a call to live frugally and to consume less– so that we may avert being destroyed in the end times – in the coming climate catastrophe – and enter with the righteous into the golden age of justice – by completing the Green Revolution. The mindset of Western wokes precludes thinking about climate change practically – as a phenomenon that we must adapt to while trying to maintain Western living standards. Rather, their mindset is punitive, wanting to make the West cripple its own industries, destroy its energy sector and impose a poorer life of its citizens. The religious nature of climate change activism also shows itself in how the woke do not limit themselves to observable facts and winnable arguments, such as the importance of preserving ancient forests, preventing the extinction of rare species, reducing the level of pollution in our air and water, and adapting to the possibility of a change in climate rather than reducing Western living standards. Instead, climate activists choose to emphasise their certainty about the need for penance today to escape mother nature’s wrath in tomorrow’s climate catastrophe. Therefore, the woke environmentalist slogan is the punitive call to “just stop oil,” not the practical “make carbon capture work” or the constructive “build nuclear power.”

"Repent, Judgement is at hand."

This religious mindset of climate activists, which drives young environmental activists to sincerely believe that human life as we know it will end due to the West’s consumption of hydrocarbons, stops them from processing any other relevant facts. Take the fact that China is increasing its coal consumption to an extent that makes Western emissions cuts irrelevant, or that industrialisation and advancement for the developing world – whose population massively outnumbers that of the West – requires consuming far more energy, or that de-industrialisation in the West destroys the Western working class, or that Western carbon emissions have already been dropping drastically. The woke cannot tolerate any discussion of these issues. Even drawing attention to hypocrisy, like Al Gore’s and Barack Obama’s multi-million dollar beach front properties, or the number of private jets attending climate summits, gets you nowhere. Making these arguments and expecting them to win the day ignores the eschatological role of climate change in the woke religion. Due to the original Western sin of racism, Westerners should do a special form of penance that involves the destruction of their living standards; failing to do so will bring about the apocalypse. Conversely, since non Westerners are holy victims in woke theology, they are guaranteed their place in the coming utopia after the end times, and so they do not need to make penance in the same way. Thus, Chinese coal plants are forgiven and forgotten.

The soul

If one looks at the essence of the trans movement, one finds the following claim: there is something beneath the physical that determines the true identity of the individual. That the movement is highly sexual, materialistic and inconsistent is unimportant when compared with this essential claim. The claims that the trans movement makes are not material claims, rather they are spiritual claims. Consider the myriad gender identities such as Maverique, Intergender, Graygender, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, Aporagender, Queer and others. Look these identities up. They all boil down to the claim “I am unique, and my identity is not entirely represented by my physical state.” That claim, regardless of the gender identity cult and the bizarre sexual fetishes of the trans movement, and regardless of the great evils it inflicts on women and children, is obviously and undeniably true. It mirrors the original religious voice that says that Man is more than just another animal, that he is endowed with a special dignity that entitles him to freedom, even when material conditions are adverse. That said, it is a testament to the tragedy of our current state that youngsters choose to make that uncontroversial Christian claim under the umbrella of the Satanic transgender movement, and to use that claim to attempt to escape from the inescapable material reality of their bodies.

Discourse on the unimportance of physical appearance and the superiority of the soul.

Excommunication

For what do you get cancelled? Not for hanging around with Jeffery Epstein while he raped young girls, as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew did. Not for destroying the global economy as the titans of finance did in 2008. Not for leading America and Britain into the disaster that was the Iraq war, lying about weapons of mass destruction, and unleashing Sunni and Shia extremism upon the Middle East. Not for offshoring most industrial activity and turning your working class to paupers. No, none of these things gets you cancelled. However, if you say that trans women are mentally unwell men, or that there is no way to reduce energy consumption without reducing living standards, or that European colonialism involved more organised violence but less mindless brutality and far more charity than any other conquests, then you would get cancelled. Cancellation, or excommunication, is not punishment for ordinary sin. It is punishment for blasphemy and heresy, for deviating from woke dogma. This is entirely consistent with wokeness being itself a form of Christian heresy. Christians do not excommunicate ordinary sinners but call on them to repent. Christians excommunicate apostates, heretics and blasphemers, however. Therefore, the cheerleaders of the Iraq War or of offshoring industrial capacity can escape accountability if they adopt woke positions and affirm correct dogmas. Conversely, if a black man or woman adopts conservative positions, the woke will describe him or her as a coconut – black on the outside, but white on the inside. He or she is no longer a member of the tribe of holy victims, but a heretic damned to hell who has abandoned the dogma. And so, he or she gets cancelled. Furthermore, the path to readmission into the fold is the same: it is to affirm that you have sinned, that is, to confess, and to do penance, by donating to the appropriate charity and showing the necessary humility. As you might do if you were a Catholic.

A Christian answer

The great Catholic thinker GK Chesterton said that “every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion” and that “heresy is a truth that hides all other truths.” These are perfect descriptions of wokeness and the way it takes certain truths to mad extremes at the expense of other truths. European colonisers did not consistently see Christ in the peoples they vanquished, but they did so more than any other conquerors. Without European colonists, much of the world would still live in premodern times, without education systems, healthcare, indoor plumbing, modern transportation, power or much else. And by abolishing slavery from most of the world for the first time in history, Europeans have more than atoned for their sins. The woke are correct that we should be concerned about nature and about climate change, but our concern for the wellbeing of humans, our own societies and our working classes should be even greater. Climate policy should not be allowed to ruin the West’s industry and scrap its infrastructure. And yes, there is more to us humans than the flesh and what meets the eye, but our flesh is important and is a crucial part of our reality. Men cannot become women, and the human body should be used for its proper functions, rather than be mutilated by Mengele-type medical professionals. And while maintaining social cohesion, on which the existence of human rights depends, should require us to police certain kinds of speech, this policing should not be left in the hands of people who cannot tell apart man from woman, who do not understand human nature, and who have no concern for their own people. Rather, it should rely on a conception of the common good that has survived the test of time.

Because wokeness is so out of balance, its solutions – open borders, energy starvation, collective guilt, medical mutilation and self-loathing – are worse than the problems it claims to confront. Defeating wokeness is important, as it is doing grave damage to Western societies. Despite their flaws, these societies are still a bright light unto the world. The silver lining in the social acceptance of wokeness is that that acceptance reflects a malformed longing for a more Christian world. It is evident that wokeness is built on a Christian framework, and its success means that Christianity can dispel its influence. Western societies are subconsciously craving a world that is more in accordance with their heritage and their inherited faith. A more ordered, more Christian world in which the working class is respected, not looked down upon, in which human well-being is placed before profits and before hollow slogans, in which the rich understand their duties towards the poor, in which man sees Christ in his fellow man, in which man assumes his proper responsibility for nature, and in which society is intolerant of attacks against the Faith that built Western civilisation. This is a world of celebration and joy as well as recognition of Original Sin, of fraternity rather than collective guilt, of building on Christian Western achievements rather than demonising the lapsed Christian West.

Let us imagine that it is 2027. Russia has been decisively defeated in Ukraine – despite its threats, it balked at using nuclear weapons and accepted that it must surrender all Ukrainian territory it seized. President Vladimir Putin has been overthrown, and a more hard-line, insular, incompetent and autarkic regime that is incapable of projecting power abroad is left standing. With terrible demographics, a collapsed economy and a defeated military, Russia cannot compete with the West for a generation, at least. What now?

Turkey, which had been fighting Russia in the Caucasus, Libya, Syria and Central Asia, is now empowered. Jihadi groups in Libya, backed by Turkey, are on the ascendant. With Libya as their haven, jihadis are pushing hard against European interests in West Africa, targeting Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria and other West African countries with attacks against European assets and European-backed governments. Russia is out of the Central African Republic, where jihadis are also empowered. This instability pushes even more migrants out of Africa, first into Libya and then to Italy. People smugglers and jihadi groups profit handsomely. Europe and the US find themselves needing to redouble their efforts in Africa, lick their wounds from past failures, and try again, this time with African populations and European populations that are more hostile to more interventions in Africa.

Turkey gains the initiative in Syria. Without Russian support for President Assad, the jihadist Syrian opposition defeats Syrian government forces, and expands to confront Iran in Iraq and in Lebanon. The civil wars of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon restart the streams of migrants and refugees to Europe seen in 2015. Turkey, naturally, uses that to pressure Europe, helping migrants enter Europe both through its own borders and through Libya.

In the Caucasus, chaos reigns. Bereft of Russian backing, Armenia has to depend more on Iran, or to risk being defeated decisively at the hands of Azerbaijan. Parts of Armenia’s Christian population are put to flight, massacred and subjugated. Georgia attempts to reclaim Abkhazia and South Ossetia, triggering another humanitarian disaster. Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis and others, who suffered disproportionately large losses during the Ukraine war but got no benefits, alternate between fighting Russian forces to gain independence, fighting each other and turning to jihadi ideology. The Atlantic Council’s dreams of de-colonising Russia begin to come true. Russia, with Iranian backing, sends more forces to repress unrest in the Caucasus, while Turkey steps in to protect its ethnic and religious kin. Turkey and Iran are increasingly in competition over succeeding Russia as security guarantors in the region, risking stoking worse Sunni – Shia violence in other regions.

In Central Asia, the legacy of Stalin’s borders reignites old conflicts, with Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen competing with one another. Various minor border wars break out, with China stepping in to guarantee security and prosperity. At a price: China gets unimpeded access to Central Asia’s natural resources, rerouting pipelines and supply routes to benefit its own industries. There is a worse potential case still: Central Asia becomes the scene of conflict between China, Iran and a US-backed Turkey, creating chaos, migration and more resource shortages. In either case, China makes further gains. A weakened, sanctioned and militarily crippled Russia has no choice but to offer the Chinese massive discounts for its resources, helping drive the Chinese economy. The CPC’s digital surveillance dictatorship focuses its efforts on gaining its Lebensraum, with Russian and Iranian assistance and resources.

China continues with its cyberwarfare intended to steal Western technologies, and uses the technology to promote exports that compete with European exports. As the manufacturing superpower for lithium batteries, solar panels and wind turbines, China profits handsomely from the delusions of the “Green New Deal” . China’s trade with developing countries also keeps expanding. And, to boost its economy, it follows its reversal of the one-child policy with active pro-family policies, reducing the demographic pressures it faces from a rapidly aging population.

Europe, for its part, is worn down. The inflationary crisis it is facing eventually leads to a banking crisis, as households and businesses fail to pay their debts. It becomes clear that Italy, Spain, Greece and others have no hope of managing down their debts except through inflating them away. The European Central Bank prints more money, driving more inflation, making the crisis worse. That makes energy even more unaffordable, and with Russian energy still inaccessible, Germany and its industry suffer greatly, pulling the rest of Europe downwards with them. The demand destruction that ensues from prolonged high energy prices raises unemployment even further. Policymakers are paralysed: inflation and rising unemployment mean that all policy choices make at least one of them worse. Saddled by enormous debts, unfavourable demographics, higher unemployment, lower exports, more expensive energy and a constant flow of migrants who do not integrate but, along with the aging population, require more welfare, Germany and Europe keep losing competitiveness against China and the United States. Furthermore, with welfare taking up more and more of European budgets, the ability to provide law enforcement and basic services is reduced. The younger, recently arrived migrants, finding no economic opportunities, an ageing population and weakened security, do what most young men in their situation do: they turn to criminality, drugs and extremism. Some migrants are inspired by successful jihads in the Caucasus, Syria, Libya and sub-Saharan Africa, and embrace terrorism. Right wing parties become more popular, but are thwarted at every turn by their own incompetence, by heavily indebted economies, by an ageing population and by the relics of the European Union’s bureaucracy. The reconstruction of Ukraine is forgotten. The Balkans are out of control, again. Moldova tries to regain control of Transnistria. Romania’s Hungarian minority clamours to re-join the homeland. The EU tries to centralise decisionmaking to deal with these crises, but to the extent it succeeds it creates more resentment, and in any case it mostly fails.

A poorer, weaker and preoccupied Europe harms both British exports as well as London’s role as a financial centre. The flow of migrants is not limited to continental Europe, with record numbers of illegal migrants entering the UK year after year. Higher cost of living, faltering services and communal conflicts all enfeeble Britain and render it more dependent on the US. The US, for its part, refuses to offer Britain a Free Trade Agreement, and the UK, with its problems as bad as Europe’s and in some cases worse, is in no position to compete with China or America for new export markets. It becomes much harder to keep Northern Ireland and Scotland within the Union.

This may seem extreme, but this is only the third worst case scenario for Europe and the world that could emerge from the Russia – Ukraine conflict. The second worst case scenario is one where Russia does use tactical nuclear weapons to ensure that it retains the annexed Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson. If Russia does not face massive consequences for doing so, Russia’s actions would embolden China, India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea to use tactical nuclear weapons against their own rivals. The result would be the normalisation of the use of nuclear weapons, and a planetary disaster. And there is a worse possible outcome still: Russia uses nuclear weapons, faces massive consequences and the result is a full scale nuclear exchange with the United States. And remember, Russia could still win this war and keep the provinces it has annexed without resorting to nuclear weapons.

For Western foreign policy on the Ukraine question to be realistic, it is not enough to say that Russia is an aggressor that must be sanctioned economically and defeated militarily. Moralistic bombast is useless here. Rather, we must have an appreciation of the role of other countries, even hostile countries, in preserving order in parts of the world that we do not understand and cannot police. We must appreciate balance, the interests of other powers, and the need to remain engaged with them. We must appreciate the second order consequences of a Western victory, not merely the potential consequences of Ukraine’s defeat. We should be aware that weakening Russia only strengthens Iran, Turkey and China, and creates more instability, not less. We should remember that while Russia most certainly has many grudges against the West, they are nothing compared to those held by China, or Iran, or Turkey.

A realistic appreciation of the failures of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would lead to the following conclusions: Russia will never transgress against a NATO nation, because its conventional military is third rate, and it cannot directly confront the United States without risking its own annihilation. Therefore, the consequences of Russia gaining control of Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine are much smaller than the consequences of Russia losing. The latter include a resurgent, global, Turkish-backed jihadism, conflicts across Asia and Africa, new migrant flows to Europe, and a China empowered by access to Russian and Central Asian resources. Is empowering China, Turkey, Iran and the global jihadi movement better than letting Russia control Russian speaking territories in Ukraine? I doubt that. Is the West able to guarantee security in Central Asia, Africa the Middle East and the Caucasus if the delicate balance in those regions is upset by Russia’s absence? The West’s experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Sahel and Libya does not suggest that. Are we certain that attempting to defeat Russia militarily would not trigger a nuclear conflict? I, for one, am not certain, and Ukraine is not worth finding out.

The Druse are an offshoot of Ismaili Shia Islam founded 1,000 years ago in Egypt. They draw on the Platonic heritage, referring to Plato as The Master. They are a monotheistic, monogamous, esoteric sect that believes in reincarnation. They do not practice the Five Pillars of Islam, but, to prevent their persecution by Muslims, ban conversion into their faith and claim to be Muslims themselves. They reside in the hills and mountains of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. They were eliminated in Egypt shortly after their faith was established, and are viewed as heretics or apostates by Sunni and Shia Muslims. They call themselves Unitarians, but are known as Druse. They excommunicated Nishtakin al-Darazi, the preacher of Unitarianism who was sent to the Levant, and after whom they were named, shortly after the faith had spread. The community is led by feudal families, the most prominent of which today is the Jumblatt family, to whom my family owes allegiance.

For most people, their first political memory is of some sensational world event. The signing of the Oslo Accords. The Iraq War. 9/11. A scene from a TV screen.

For me, it was this. A Christian boy next to me on the school bus in Amman, Jordan, was being picked on by another, Muslim, boy for being Christian. There was some tut-tutting and disapproval, but the other boy kept at it. I chose to step in. I knew I was different too - I am Druse, and my mother had always warned me to never tell anyone in Jordan that. If asked, I was to say that I was Muslim.

I leaned over to the Christian kid and told him not to mind. We were both different from the Muslims. “I’m Druse,” I told him. This was my little act of solidarity. I could not pick a fight with the Muslim boy because others would back him, and this was the best I could do.

The next day, we were getting on the bus. The Christian boy did not know that I was behind him. He asked the bus driver: "Ammo, esh ya’ni Druse [what does Druse mean].”

“Allahu a’lam [God knows best]. Hol zay el yahood. [They are like the Jews].”

This was in Jordan in the late 1980s. The height of the first Palestinian Intifada against Israel. I would not have been older than 8 at the time.

The first political joke I had learned from a Jordanian kid at school went something like this:

There was a contest to see who could last longest in a pigsty. The American went in, and he ran out after half an hour. The Jordanian went in, and he ran out after five minutes. The Jew went in, and an hour later the pigs ran out.

This was perfectly normal in Jordan and in much of the Middle East, where hatred of Jews is a state religion. At school, we learned regularly about Palestine and how horrendous Israel was. Everyone knew that the Jews were bloodthirsty, greedy and downright awful. Details, nuance and tolerance were unimportant. To put it mildly, being called a Jew was no laughing matter. The lesson was clear. Solidarity and sympathy were risks that I could not afford in this hostile land.

A few days later, religion came up again on the school bus. The Christian boy asked me: “what did you say your religion was again?”

“Muslim.”

“No, you said something different.”

“No, I said I was Muslim.”

Fortunately, he got distracted and dropped the subject.

We returned to Lebanon after the civil war ended, in 1991. Now, mother said, we could proudly tell people that we were Druse.

A few weeks after we returned, some kid at school said to me, “great, one more idiot Druse.” I punched him without a second’s hesitation.

I was home, and I could fight. That is what made it home.

The precariousness of tolerance

When the Christian Maronites in my mountainous village, Bzebdine, wanted to build a church, the Druse supported them. My family chopped down pine trees to use in building the roof. Pine trees are a treasure. The kindling was used to bake bread. The cones and the pine seeds’ shells were used to start fires in wood burning stoves in winter. The branches chopped during pruning or felled by snow were used as firewood. And the pine seeds are a delicacy used in cooking and desserts. Felling a pine tree is not done lightly. When the Maronites wanted to consecrate that church, they consulted the Druse. The Maronites wanted to dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. The Druse said no. It had to be a warrior – perhaps St Elijah, depicted with a raised sword stained with the blood of the priests of Baal, or St George, dragon slayer, both revered by Muslims and Christians alike. The Maronites chose St Elijah.

During the civil war of the 1840s, the Druse of Bzebdine, led by my great, great grandfather, and the Christians, led by a man named Geryes Ghusteen, exchanged house keys. It was agreed that if Druse forces entered the village, the Druse would protect Christian homes, and if Christian forces entered the village, the Christians would protect Druse homes. Thankfully, neither force entered the village, and life went on. The agreement was untested, but it generated a great deal of goodwill down the generations.

During the 1975 civil war, my father, his cousin, and a friend brought the first 25 AK-47s to the village. My father was deputy commander of the village’s Druse militia – a platoon sized formation. When Syrian President Hafez al-Assad's forces assassinated the leader of the Druse, founder of the Progressive Socialist Party, Kamal Jumblatt, the Druse went on a rampage. Against the Christians. They were impotent against the Syrians. In my village, the Druse shot up the Christians’ homes and forced them to flee. Disgusted, and his life at risk from his own side for objecting, my father left Lebanon. After working in a few Arab countries, he ended up in Jordan. And this is where I was born. During those years, the Druse were briefly on the backfoot in the civil war. Many of my family had to evacuate the village ahead of the advancing Maronite militias. Some houses were burned, and there was much looting.

Eventually, the Druse, with support from Assad’s Syrians – yes, the same Assad responsible for killing the Druse leader Kamal Jumblatt – and the Palestinians, regained the advantage against the Christians. The allied forces robbed, looted, and burned the Christians’ houses in my village, stealing valuables, furniture and even removing the tiles from the walls and floors, the copper from the electric wiring, and the classic Lebanese red tiles from the roofs. Only the walls were left standing. The lessons were clear. Generations of friendship and peace can be abruptly upended. Tolerance is precarious. Diversity is often a scorpion that stings without warning.

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The Jumblatts

I cannot discuss being Druse without discussing the community’s leading hereditary feudal lords, the Jumblatts. The Jumblatts have played a prominent role in the history of Lebanon since the 1600s. When Lebanon was still a restive part of the Ottoman Empire, in the 1820s, my family sided with Sheikh Bachir Jumblatt, nicknamed Pillar of the Sky, in his feud with Emir Bachir Chehab II the Great, who ruled Mount Lebanon on the Ottomans’ behalf. My great, great, great grandfather, Selim, sheltered the chief of the guard of Jumblatt after the latter’s defeat. Jumblatt and Chehab had waged a battle, and their chiefs of guard had duelled. Legend has it that Jumblatt’s chief of guard, a relative of my family’s, had chopped his rival in two. Although the Emir won the battle and the war, he was furious at losing his general in such a spectacular manner. Selim, my ancestor, sheltered Jumblatt’s chief of guard and helped him escape to Hermel, north of the Bekaa, reportedly with a treasure. For this, my ancestor became a wanted man. Emir Bachir Chehab retaliated by sending his forces to our village, and stabled their horses in the Majlis, the Druse house of prayer. Some of the Emir’s horses perished due to being placed in such an unsuitable setting, and word was sent to him to ask if the rest could be removed. The emir insisted on humiliating my family until my ancestor surrendered, ordering his troops to keep their horses in our majlis “so long as there’s a single horse in Bachir’s stables”. His soldiers took the family’s grains, slaughtered the livestock and pillaged and robbed as best they could. Eventually, mediators convinced Chehab to pardon my ancestor. When he was on his way back to the village, he caught a fever in Mdayrej, along the Damascus Road, and died. Chehab’s reaction upon hearing the news was, “Blessed be God, He got to him before I did.” Chehab had had no intention of sparing my ancestor. This land is never ruled without violence, cruelty and vindictiveness.

My family had been loyal to the Jumblatts since well before the 1840s, though we do not know for how long. We have never not been Jumblattis. I see no choice before me but to hold on to this feudal loyalty. I do so despite Walid Jumblatt’s representative admitting to Jumblatt having smuggled USD500 million out of Lebanon, while my father’s pension is blocked in a bank, as are the pensions and savings of hundreds of thousands of others. I have to trust the Jumblatts to lead the Druse, not because of a particular policy that I agree with, but because I do not trust that any other faction will reciprocate my allegiance during whatever future crisis Lebanon will throw up. This choice has been made for me before I was born. Who am I to question it?

I support the Jumblatts with hesitation, however. My doubts come from the fact that Walid Jumblatt, our current leader, and his late father, Kamal, are revolutionaries and Arabists and so are insufficiently parochial. Kamal Jumblatt, Walid’s father, went against the advice of his mother and became a socialist, founding the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) in 1949, originally a cross-sectarian party (!). The PSP promoted secularism, by which it meant in practical terms more Muslim power; a stronger social safety net, by which it meant a more centralised state overseeing healthcare, education, social security and other forms of welfare, thereby usurping the religious institutions that regularly played that role; and opposition to imperialism, by which the PSP meant opposition to the West and to Israel, and not to Arab or Islamic imperialism. Kamal Jumblatt’s idealistic stances led Lebanon to disaster. To push forward progressivism in Lebanon, Kamal Jumblatt sided with the militias of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) after they entered Lebanon in 1969, and against the Christians. In doing so, he helped start the 1975 civil war, which, to the Christians, was about protecting their identity and political power against its usurpation by Islamic forces. To the Muslims, it was about fairness and progress. The Christians lost this war, and the consequences included even worse governance than before the war, even more inequality, worse education and healthcare and a chronically bankrupt and incapacitated state.

Walid Jumblatt, one of the richest men in Lebanon, still leads the PSP. His son, Teymour, is in the process of expanding his role and influence there as he is groomed for succession. The PSP has become a vehicle for the Jumblatts’ feudalism. I do not object to feudalism for the same reason that I do not object to imperialism, or, indeed, to elephants, wolves or sheep. Feudalism is a part of nature, just like imperialism, communal hatreds and human frailty. I just prefer my feudalism without the progressive veneer. My family have put up with revolutionary progressivism through the reign of two Jumblatt generations. We are patient. But three generations may just be too much. That said, Walid Jumblatt seems to have learned his lesson. He is now focused solely on his community, not on being a national Lebanese leader or on some hollow idealistic claim or the other. And that is good enough for me. I owe him loyalty for serving and protecting my community. The risks are too high for regional adventures that are far bigger than us, temptingly grand as these adventures may be.

Being Druse

Every Druse I know describes how, when they cross a certain point in Lebanon, they can again breathe easy. After that rock, after that tree, after that turn, there starts the territory he calls home. For me, it is when the car turns left in Bhamdoun, away from the Beirut – Damascus Highway, towards Qraiyeh, and begins its descent down the road of the Hotel Ambassadeur. From there, I know it is my territory. I know that help is not more than minutes away. I know that I have family in almost every village. I know it is enough to say who my father and grandfathers are, and that that would guarantee me shelter or aid. In my village, I know that there are people who would fight and die for me, even though I have been away for nearly 20 years. I know that whenever I am back, I am among family, no matter what changes. It is unimportant that there may be other families next door with whom we were feuding. It is unimportant that some relative or neighbour holds a particularly nasty grudge. It is unimportant that some people in my village would rob me blind in a heartbeat, and perhaps murder me. I have no romance about this – small communities are full of intense, petty and parochial hatreds, as well as great loyalties. What is important is that when I begin the descent into that valley, I am home, this is where I am from, this is where I belong, and here I can and will fight.  

To be Druse, and to survive, requires one to be certain about human nature. It is tribal, hostile, jealous, fickle and dangerous. To be Druse is to know that you cannot afford illusions, or sometimes even sympathy. To be Druse is to be certain that freedom is limited to certain spaces and enclosures, and that freedom is communal before being individual. To be Druse is to be certain that there are obligations to family and community, that they, whoever they are, are out to get me, that my only refuge is with my own, and that I do not give up our mountains, because there is nowhere else I can be myself. The mountains may be hostile. I may be a minority even in my own village. But it is my village, and there, I can make my stand. Even if it is against another Druse family, even if it is against the whole world. This mountain is mine. My ancestors tamed its rocky crags and made it fertile. They defended it against many enemies, failed sometimes and succeeded many others. They survived. Even if it is just a rock, this rock is mine. If my feet are on this rock, the rest of the world can be damned.

This bond to the land and to the community, this commitment to communal freedom, this understanding of freedom as bounded and local, combined with the broad hostility towards the Druse from all other communities, explains much of Druse politics. These reasons are why the Palestinian Druse chose to side with the Israelis rather than leave their homes. They offer their military skills to the Jewish state but gain experience that will be invaluable should the Jews ever lose the land again. And they get to remain Druse. This is why the Syrian Druse support Assad. Like the Israelis, Assad guarantees the Druse their communal freedom - not their individual freedom - allows them to mostly limit their military service to their own regions, and, in exchange, the community remains loyal to the state. This is why the Lebanese Druse do not want a fight with Hezbollah. They accept that Iran is the ascendant empire, they are uncertain that they can defeat Hizbullah, and, if they lose against it, they might lose their land and therefore their existence. The Druse will compromise with whatever the power that be happens to be today, in exchange for communal autonomy and survival. All they want is that space where they can make a stand when there is nowhere else to go. To be Druse is to know that, while adventures are tempting and may show early success, eventually, there will be nowhere else to go. To be progressive, to be Arabist, to be socialist, to have great hopes and grand ambitions, is to take a gamble with the survival of the community. Idealism, novel loyalties and perfectionist ideologies are luxuries that we cannot afford.

Druse and Christian

To avoid misleading you, dear reader, I must here confess that I was baptised into the Catholic faith three years ago. This obviously affects my views, much as I would like to claim to be neutral and objective. I offer you this disclosure so that you can assess my views while fully informed of my biases. I can never not be Druse, even if I do not believe in the Druse faith – indeed, one feature of the faith is that most of its adherents do not know its content – this is a community based on tribal loyalty first and foremost. The chains that bind me to my community and my land are what they are, regardless of my faith. My faith is what it is, regardless of those chains. To say that I am conflicted is an understatement, but I am also whole.

Culturally, the Druse today are much closer to the Christians in their way of life and their values. Most middle-class Druse families today, and, traditionally, most Druse families of all classes, regularly visit Christian shrines to make vows for loved ones, travellers or the sick. If they were but a little humbler, and more focused on conversion than on power, the Christians of Lebanon could benefit from the Druse’s legendary fighting prowess. The Druse could benefit from the Christians’ education, skills and culture. But for that to happen, the two communities must focus on the reality that there is no Druse village in Mount Lebanon without either a Christian community or a neighbouring Christian village. The two communities are completely entangled. They are the only two communities in Lebanon who share a fundamental reality: they can only be themselves in Lebanon. They can only rule themselves and be autonomous in Lebanon. It is only on this mountain that they share, and nowhere else, that they have any relevance. They have no true foreign patron, like Iran for the Shia or Saudi Arabia for the Sunnis. The Christians of Egypt are a crushed and often humiliated minority, and that may end up becoming the fate of both the Christians and the Druse. In Syria, Christians and Druse are only protected by the Alawite government – the Sunni majority would subdue and humiliate them both. In Iraq, Christians are all but extinct thanks to the US invasion that unleashed Sunni and Shia Islamic radicalism. The West does not care about the Levant’s Christians, let alone its Druse. We are both alone, and we are in Lebanon together. The tragedy is that this makes the two communities even more hostile to each other than they are to anyone else.

The supposedly progressive stances of Kamal Jumblatt, which Walid has inherited (and which I pray will not be inherited by the heir apparent, Teymour), still drive a wedge between the Christians and the Druse that makes Lebanon ungovernable, even at the local level. The Jumblatts are obsessed with keeping the Christians down, out of fear that a strong Christian leadership would threaten Jumblatt’s position. Some Christians, for their part, are obsessed with Jumblatt and with the Druse, out of a false belief that Jumblatt cannot effectively represent their interests, or out of parochial jealousies, or as a means of showing their toughness by taking a stance against him. The split between the two communities means that the two Lebanese minorities that are most certain that they have nowhere else to go are constantly at each other’s throats. This prevents the emergence of a unified Mount Lebanon that can move away from the Sunni – Shia struggle that is ravaging Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria. Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shia cannot help being part of that struggle – it is theirs, whether they like it or not. But the Christians’ and the Druse’s best reasonable option is to minimise the impact of these struggles on them, rather than be divided and paralysed. The first step towards achieving this is to heed Christ’s call: Love thy enemy. Love thy neighbour. The Christians and Druse are neighbours – and enemies – with nowhere else to go. Now is the time for the two communities to be sufficiently parochial to get along. Alas, in a land of long grudges, of mistrust of tolerance, of pettiness and by parochialism, this reminds us of the final tragedy of being Druse: to be Druse is to be irrational, just like everyone else.

On 6 September, Dr Al Mulla, made some comments about homosexuality and the LGBT movement on his personal Twitter account. He used the term “shudhoodh”, which best translates as deviancy, to refer to the LGBT movement and to homosexual acts. The term is commonly used in this manner throughout the Arabic speaking world by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Dr Al Mulla said that a movement that promotes sexual deviancy is, by definition, atheistic, as it rejects the teachings of the creator. Therefore, Dr Al Mulla’s said, promoting deviancy and presenting it as moral is inherently an act of disbelief, in contrast with practicing homosexuality in secret while knowing that it is sinful. Dr Al Mulla contrasted the idea of “my body, my choice” with mainstream Islamic orthodoxy, which teaches that the human body belongs to God and is to be used in accordance with His will.

On 9 September, in a spectacular show of tolerance and support for dialogue, Baker McKenzie issued a statement saying that they had parted ways with Dr Al Mulla, after over 30 years of partnership. Baker McKenzie said that “Baker McKenzie strongly believes that however much we may disagree with the beliefs and personal views of others, we must find ways to disagree respectfully, encourage inclusive dialogue and to ensure an inclusive work environment for all. Any social media comments by Dr Habib represent his own views and not those of the Firm”. This, to say the least, is a rather bizarre redefinition of tolerance, dialogue and inclusiveness. Dr Habib Al Mulla and his firm are now no longer associated with Baker McKenzie and the two sides are dissolving their partnership.

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Cultural imperialism

There is a message in this episode to lawyers in the Muslim world and in the developing world: if you aspire to join the ranks of one of the world’s most prestigious law firms, you must set aside your own beliefs and values, and adopt those of the firm. And the message is not only to Baker McKenzie’s own staff. Rather, every single global law firm is now faced with the expectation that it would do the same to any employee who expresses a mainstream religious opinion on issues such as sexual deviancy, killing unborn children and other moral and religious questions. Critically, this issue is not limited to Baker McKenzie. The World Economic Forum, where all global companies go and meet, is fully on board with the LGBT agenda. This agenda is also backed by the United Nations though its Global Compact and its “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights”, where the UN insists, falsely, that “transgender women”, that is, men who claim to be women, are in fact women. Given the high-level institutional support, it appears clear that this type of incident will keep on happening in the Islamic world and in the developing world. Indeed, Argentina and Uruguay have reserved 1% of all public sector jobs to transsexuals, which was celebrated by the World Economic Forum. African countries are constantly attacked in Western media for rejecting homosexuality. Even Bangladesh was considering a law to give tax breaks to firms whose manpower is 10% transsexual, or who have more than 100 transsexual employees. The homosexual agenda has become a particularly nefarious form of cultural imperialism. Recall that at the height of Western colonial power, no Western official would have dreamed of making a Muslim drink alcohol or eat pork, which Christians view as natural, or to change their religion. Now, global companies are trying to make Muslims embrace sexual deviancy in all its forms.

Battle in the Muslim world

Muslim governments and societies must be made aware of how the normalisation of homosexuality, same sex “marriage”, and now transsexuality was done in the West. These ideas were introduced through a combination of human rights campaigns, positive media coverage, and claims of oppression. The homosexual and transsexual movements used emotional appeals to claim that their members were being oppressed, and that all they wanted was to live normal lives. When Western societies granted them all the rights that normal people had, the homosexual and transsexual movements initiated a two pronged attack, against adults and against children. Adults in the West are being pushed into acceptance of, or at least silence towards, the homosexual and transsexual agenda through the threat of professional retaliation. Almost all major companies have policies that ban employees from speaking publicly in a manner that harms the reputation of their employer. Speaking out against the homosexual agenda is considered harmful to these companies’ reputation, at least according to these companies’ human resources and senior management. Therefore, any employee or business associate who objects to homosexuality is at risk of dismissal and loss of income, as Dr Al Mulla has just found out. Furthermore, hate speech laws have been enacted in much of the West, including the United Kingdom. Saying obvious truths about homosexuality – that it is sinful, that it is unnatural, that it harms families and societies – can be punished under these laws with fines and prison sentences. Additionally, with much of the private and public sectors in the West seeking to increase diversity, homosexuality can bring to workers professional rewards. Adults in the West who speak against homosexuality can be silenced by the law and can lose their incomes. They can also gain financially if they embrace it. Baker McKenzie’s actions show that now the same template will be followed in the Muslim world.

The second target of this two-pronged attack in the West is children. Schools throughout the West, except for places like Poland, Hungary and Russia, are now telling children as young as three years old that homosexuality and transsexuality are normal. This is intended to weaken the minds of children and introduce them to sexuality at a far too early age. Disturbingly large numbers of youths and young adults now identify as homosexual or as transsexual, a phenomenon which is partly driven by social contagion and perhaps by influence from teachers. The more this is normalised and glorified, the more youths will adopt it. Worse, more and more children are claiming to be transsexual. In some cases, these children are being mutilated by doctors as they “transition” from male to female or from female to male. Doctors are in some instances removing the breasts of girls, and are removing boys penises and cutting open holes between their boys’ legs and calling them vaginas. For girls, they are moulding penises from tissue in other parts of the body and grafting them on. Baker McKenzie – the firm that ended its relationship with Dr Al Mulla – has committed itself to choosing up to 20% of its workforce from among the victims of such monstrous medical experiments. Its website says that it wants a gender balance among its workforce of 40: 40: 20. I do not know how else to explain that.

Screenshot from Baker McKenzie’s website

It is worth noting that this battle started in the 1960s and the 1970s in the West. It was a slow process, during which first homosexuality was normalised in cinema, in media and among the public. Then the battle over homosexual “marriage” started, ending with a victory for the homosexual movement. Rather than this resolving the issue, it led to worse outcomes: Hate speech laws banning objections to homosexuality were enacted, and the transsexual movement took the forefront. Now, this madness is embraced fully throughout government and the business community, including almost all global businesses.

In the Muslim world and in the developing world, the pace of the battle will be far more rapid. It is worth recalling that Netflix reduced negative coverage of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, in exchange for Saudi Arabia permitting more LGBT content. It is also worth recalling that Kuwait’s constitutional court struck down a law banning men from “imitating” women and women from “imitating” men, on the grounds that its terms were not clearly defined. However, most Western media interpreted the law as a victory for the transsexual movement, and was celebrated by global human rights campaigners as being so, even though the ruling was narrow and technical and made no mention of transsexuals.

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Options for Muslim governments

In its drive for “tolerance”, Baker McKenzie has shown that it is utterly intolerant of any mainstream religious views. Dr Al Mulla’s views are well within the mainstream of Muslim society, and I dare say also represent the views of most Christians and Jews. Previously, the fight against religious faith was focused on the West, with only minimal attacks on the Islamic world itself (though there have been many attacks against Islamic values targeting Muslims in the West). Baker McKenzie has fired the opening shot for the battle in the Muslim world. Unless it receives a response, other companies will follow its example.

If governments in the Muslim world permit this to stand, their societies will pay the same price that the West is paying today, much sooner than they think. If they choose to fight back, they can introduce new laws banning transsexual behaviour, this time making the definitions extremely clear to prevent activist lawyers from overturning them. They can ensure that the schooling system does not permit any indoctrination that favours the homosexual and transsexual agenda, as Russia and Hungary have done. They can also simply blacklist any company that imposes transsexual or homosexual employment quotas, or that imposes trainings normalising homosexuality and transsexuality. The loss of business faced by global corporations would see them bending over backwards to respect Islamic sensibilities. The Christian world would be grateful for such a stance by Muslim governments, and the Muslim world would be spared much misery. Baker McKenzie has declared that it wants to fight this battle. Why not make it the first casualty?

In my view, the key tool that an analyst must bring to the table is empathy. Unfortunately, the mindset of too many analysts is not open enough to empathise with those whom they disagree with. Here, I note a few key errors that prevent analysts from having empathy with so-called deplorables, that is, groups and individuals who do not adhere to mainstream liberal orthodoxy. These could include groups as varied as nationalists, people of faith, tribesmen, fanatics and ideologues. In this piece, I will address errors include materialist thinking, globalist thinking that does not respect national or religious identities, a lack of appreciation for ideology and the power of a committed minority, and a misunderstanding of the nature of the relationship between the executive, the oligarchs and the public, and of the public’s fear of chaos. 

Many of these errors come from the socio-economic and cultural background of most analysts, who often have advanced degrees from rather dogmatic but highly accredited centres of learning, and whose careers usually start with internships or in low paying positions. To make it through, analysts typically need to come from better-off, cosmopolitan backgrounds where ideas such as nationalism or faith are anathema, and where a strong national, religious or tribal identity is perceived as backwards. Whatever one thinks of national identity or religious faith or ideology, however, they are key drivers of collective action. Having empathy for such beliefs is a prerequisite to correctly understanding the world. 

Materialism

The third most important error analysts make is to think materialistically. I recall two major errors that taught me the limits of material thinking. The first was in 2011, after NATO toppled the regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya. I assumed, incorrectly, that the size of Libya’s oil wealth relative to the small size of the population meant that there would be more than enough wealth to go around, and that civil conflict would not be necessary following Gaddafi’s overthrow. Even the most barely competent government could easily figure out a way to divide the oil wealth relatively fairly, and in doing so buy social peace. That obviously turned out to be false. Humans are by nature envious and competitive. We are not satisfied with having a lot if our neighbours have even more. Our neighbours’ wealth makes us insecure, as they could use it against us to dominate us and take away what we have. Decades and centuries of tribal hatred and mistrust will not be erased with a few cheques. 

The second big error relating to this issue was in 2014, when I assumed that the currency devaluation in Egypt under President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi would trigger unrest against the government. In my defence, this was not an uncommon mistake. Bread riots, a reference to the 1979 protests following Egypt’s attempt to raise the price of subsidised bread, was a common trope deployed in analysis circles to warn of the consequences should basic goods become unaffordable. Notably, however, the 1979 bread riots were easily put down by the state, with some public support, as the protesters turned to looting. The regime remained intact. What toppled Sadat was not his tinkering with economic policy, but his decision to make peace with Israel – which led to his assassination. A peace agreement undermined Egypt’s Islamic identity, at least from the perspective of the assassins and their cheerleaders throughout the Muslim world. Furthermore, President Sisi’s regime was actually made more stable by the devaluation. The economy improved, his ability to reward political allies and loyalists in the media and the military increased, and the Egyptian middle class, which had been a big driver behind the 2011 protests, was forced to focus on quotidian living standards questions, rather than political activism. Coercion and starvation are very effective means of retaining power, at least for a while. And in Egypt that could be a long while indeed. 

I see errors relating to materialist thinking often repeated. Analysts said that it was not in the economic interest of Russia to invade Ukraine. Now they say that it would not be in the economic interest of China to invade Taiwan. While it is perhaps true that such actions would not have economic benefits (though Russia’s currency is more valuable now than it was before the war), these are gross misunderstandings. A nation that is secure can build wealth, but a wealthy and insecure nation is easily plundered by its enemies. Security, therefore, must always come before wealth. For Western leaders, however, life has become so secure that it is sometimes assumed that the sole purpose of politics is to increase wealth, even then, just GDP, which is just one metric relevant to thinking about wealth. I fear that such naivete can only be cured through hardship. 

This is not to say that material questions are unimportant. The number of tanks and planes, the level of technology, the productive capacity of an economy, the availability of food, fuel and energy, the number of armed men and the quality of their training, are all critical questions. Indeed, for some time in 2013-2014, I believed Lebanon would fall into a civil war, due to the inability of the political class to compromise and the availability of weapons. I did not consider the skill of Lebanon’s security services in disrupting Sunni militant groups before they could establish themselves, the overwhelming capability of Hizbullah, and the absence of a leadership committed to violence among the Sunnis. I missed critical material factors. 

The importance of material questions is in understanding the options facing decision makers, not their priorities and intentions. People and leaders make commitments based on communal identity, faith, ideology, the need for security, ambition, vindictiveness, cruelty, and even principle. They execute these decisions using material means. We ought to keep that in mind when we hear the common refrain Democrats use against Republican rural voters: that these hillbillies are voting against their economic self-interest due to their opposition to welfare and “free” healthcare. For these voters, something else is at stake – a sense of dignity, an identity, an ideology pertaining to how America works and what it is all about. Indeed, it is an undisguised blessing that voters do not merely prioritise economic self-interest – what kind of friends or family would you have if everyone in your life cared for material things above all else? 

Perhaps the best expression of how to think about the economy and about material questions in general is found in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “The economy is a means, not an end.” This is correct. All material questions relate to means, not to ends. This of course has an impact on our understanding of economic policy. What matters in determining economic policy is not merely GDP figures. Economic policy is determined by questions of security, as we are seeing now with the US CHIPS Act. It is determined by the need to protect the nation from outside intervention and pressure, as we saw with Russian efforts to reduce dependence on the American dollar. Economic policy is determined by questions of identity, as we see with South Africa’s policy to prioritise black ownership, or Malaysia’s policy to raise the influence of Malays. It is determined by special interest groups, as we see in the UK with the banking sector, or in France with the farming sector, or in the US with its own myriad lobbies. 

Identity and belonging 

Wherever you go in the world, you will find that people there hate the evil bastards over yonder hill, for they are treacherous heathens who are ignorant of correct worship and traditions. To love your own and to dislike - or at least mistrust - strangers is the default human position. This is quite natural and is found everywhere. It is a bizarre claim of current liberal thinking that identity is primarily personal and socially constructed. Throughout the world, from India to China to Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, and throughout European and North American history, identity was, is and always will be communal and largely built in. A favourite Lebanese proverb of mine is “in times of strife, each goat returns to its herd.” Another excellent Lebanese proverb is: “your grandfather’s enemy is your enemy.” It is easy to imagine that this is thinking that is common to poor societies, and that wealth changes things. But that is simply not true. If it were, a country as wealthy as Libya would be at peace. It is also easy to imagine that education would cure people of such thoughts. But that is again not true. The leaders, and very often the members of jihadi and nationalist movements tend to be rather well educated. One could argue that education is necessary to develop a sense of grievance and historic wrongs that can then be used to form an identity hostile to that of the current elite. Communal identity is part and parcel of the human condition. At best, one would follow the Quranic injunction – “We have made you into peoples and tribes that you may learn from one another.” But at no point can people stop belonging to communities greater than themselves. And if each generation switches its communal loyalties, it becomes impossible to think long term and to build up a people. Alternatively, because identities are always in competition with their neighbours, people with a weak generational identity get taken over by people with a stronger one. 

This is not to say that identity is flat or one dimensional. It is not. This is not to say that identity cannot evolve or change. Of course, it can, though probably more at the margins than at the core, and very, very slowly. This is to say that there is an inherited and mostly fixed complex of identities within every human being. Nationality, tribe, ethnicity, race, place of birth, do not shift. They may wax and wane in importance, but they do not really change, and when they change it happens in unpredictable ways. Recall that Tamil migrants in the West played a critical role in financing the Tamil Tigers, and Irish Americans financed and armed the IRA. Recall that second generation Pakistani migrants to the UK are often more militant and committed to their religious identity than their parents. Being away from the source of one’s identity for too long can result in the identity becoming stronger, more aggressive and more insular. We as a species hate being cut-off from our roots, and react to it badly. 

Minority privilege 

The cohesion of the minority is where power lies; it does not lie in the preferences of the majority. 

Firstly, it is easier to muster in a minority a sense of grievance, a sense of historic injustice, a sense of fear, and to use that to keep the minority united in the face of a fragmented majority, and in doing so to gain more power than the minority’s numbers would otherwise permit. Furthermore, the minority has a much better chance of coordinating its actions than a slothful and divided majority. The threat from the majority, real or perceived, makes the minority more committed to protecting its interests, retaining dominance or achieving victory. The minority naturally keeps more to itself, and so is less vulnerable to infiltration. The minority can agree on what constitutes its shared interests more easily, as it is more concentrated. The minority also can cooperate more effectively, due to the advantages of secrecy, smaller numbers and shared interests. Finally, when dividing an economic pie, it is easier for the minority to obtain a bigger share for itself than its numbers warrant, due to these advantages. Having a disproportionate amount of resources then reinforces all the other advantages I mentioned above. 

These dynamics were key to how President Bashar al-Assad in Syria managed to win the civil war. He put his own minority community, the Alawites, in a position of both power over the majority and fear of it, and unleashed them against a highly fragmented Sunni opposition. Judging by numbers alone, many believed, as I did in the first years of the war, that Assad would not survive. I and others like me were clearly wrong. The Alawite minority was able to keep other minorities on side, and together they were able to keep much of the Sunni majority either neutral or actively fighting on their side. This coalition successfully beat the Sunni majority. 

Too many times in my career, I was asked variations on a question addressing the same issue. An example of that question was: but surely most Libyans do not want a civil war, or, surely most Turks do not support Erdogan, or, surely most Syrians do not support Assad? The opinion of the majority in all these cases, however, does not really matter. In Libya, the civil wars are driven by militias that are sufficiently committed to their own power and interests. In Turkey, the Erdogan government has enough control over the judiciary, the police, the economy and the military. In Syria, the intelligence agencies, the media, the business elite and the military leadership all remained loyal to Assad. Under these circumstances, numbers do not matter. Elite cohesion – the ability of the ruling minority to stick together – is what matters. In democratic societies, the average person is baffled by this, even the average analyst. However, analysts need to ask themselves how wokeness, which, at its inception, had next to no public support, managed to capture so many institutions and become the dominant ideology of large and historic parties like Labour and the Democrats. It was elite cohesion, enforced through a media that shared a common identity as being educated and enlightened, that paved the way for the spread of wokeness. Democracy is not immune to this dynamic.

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Faith and Ideology

An often underestimated factor that ties together identity, minority organisation, and the ability to transcend materialism is faith, or in some cases, ideology. In my view, faith is successful ideology, and ideology is failed faith.

Faith – or ideology, depending on your view – is what allows the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hizbullah to face down the United States and Israel, expand themselves into regional powers, and defeat US plans such as the war on Syria, the attempt to remake Iraq, and the Greater Middle East project. Recall that Iran entered this confrontation with the US in 1979. At the time, since the days of the Shah, Iran was wholly dependent on US weapons and economic and military advisors. It was then thrust into an eight year war against a better armed and internationally backed Iraq, where the very survival of the Islamic Republic was at stake. Iran held its ground, despite the cost. Similarly, Hizbullah, though representing a minority of Lebanese Shia at the time, managed to force Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, and to fight the Israeli army into a humiliating draw in 2006, scoring a massive political victory. The material conditions were not in Iran nor in Hizbullah’s favour when their struggle started. Hizbullah and Iran eventually made the material conditions work for them by starting from a strong ideological foundation.

Similarly, Islamic State, though by no means representative of most Iraqi or Syrian Sunnis, managed to become the dominant force in Syria and Iraq, and would have had a strong chance at taking Erbil, Baghdad, Aleppo, Homs and Damascus were it not for US and then Russian airpower. The power of ideology is such that it can permit a sufficiently committed minority to fight against numerically and even technically superior foes, and sometimes win. 

Another misunderstood aspect of ideology is its ability to influence the mainstream. Hizbullah, and before it Imam Musa al-Sadr, the first ideologue of political Shi’ism in Lebanon, managed to transform the Lebanese Shia community. The community had been backwards, weak, uneducated and under the control of a few feudal families in South Lebanon and a few tribal leaders in the Bekaa. Through the power of their rhetoric and example, Sadr, the godfather of both AMAL and Hizbullah, and the two parties that drew inspiration from him, managed to neutralise the Shia intelligentsia, which leaned heavily to the left, and the Shia feudal families, which were conservative but arrogant, out of touch and incompetent, and to transform Lebanese Shia into perhaps the Levant’s most formidable political community. In the Shia world, Mohammad Baqer al-Sadr created the idea of wilayat al-faqih. When Saddam executed him in 1980, the Islamic Revolution of Iran had just taken power, and was facing an existential war launched by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, as well as internal insurgencies and threats. Today, Iran under wilayat al-faqih is the most formidable threat that a far more advanced Israel faces, is more than equal to NATO-member Turkey, has weapons that can overcome the most advanced US air defences, and is courted by India, China and Russia. Neither Musa al-Sadr nor Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr lived to see the success of their ideas, and how they became mainstream in their societies.

Similarly, there is nothing to suggest that most Chinese people supported Communism and the Communist Party of China in the 1920s. But now Chinese national pride is inseparable from the CPC’s leadership. There is nothing to suggest that most Indians supported the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) when it was established in 1925. Yet now that movement has one of its members as Prime Minister of India, and Indian nationalism is now a most potent force.

Examples of this sort abound. Ideas that bring about major change start at the fringes. They are adopted by a committed minority. Then they spread and become mainstream. Therefore, ideas are not to be assessed by popularity, but by by their ability to resonance with the identity of those whom they address, by the commitment of those who hold them, and by the social circumstances at the time when they are presented. In this sense, successful ideologues manage to shift the Overton Window and move the political discourse, even if the originators of these ideas never themselves gain power.

The state, the oligarchy and the people

A common American way of thinking that has slipped into the subconscious of too many analysts is to view the state as the main threat to individual liberty. This may be true when the state is strong, for example, in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. That said, the removal of Saddam created space for thousands of mini-Saddams, who are not as patriotic, effective or fearsome, but who are just as callous and cruel – take Muqtada al-Sadr, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, Abu Azrael, or Abu Dera’ as some of the more infamous examples. A similar dynamic emerged in Syria and in Libya, where the vacuum created by the state’s absence was filled by something much worse than Assad or Gaddafi: the rule of thuggish, competing militias whose leaders aspire to surpass Assad or Gaddafi. Too many analysts and policymakers perceive the alternatives a society faces as being a binary choice between freedom and despotism. Not only is this a spectrum that is full of gradations rather than a binary choice, but there is also something far worse than despotism: the chaos that stems from the reign of legions of competing, despotic thugs. This is why the Qur’an says, correctly, that “fitnah [instigating civil strife] is worse than murder.” In societies divided by competing regions, ethnicities, religions, tribes or races, that is, throughout the world, only a strong and capable state can keep the thugs in check. 

The threat from thuggish, powerful people does not come only in times of war. It emerges in times of peace as well, through oligarchy. The main threat to freedom in the West today is not from the state, but from special interests that have captured different elements of the state. In Norway, a woman was arrested for saying men cannot become women. In the UK, the police told a man not to debate politics on Twitter because he posted a limerick about transgenderism. This is the handiwork of well-funded trans rights activists who have captured the police and much of the establishment. In America and Canada, the tech oligarchy that consists of Meta, Alphabet and Twitter, and the banks and payment processing companies (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal) have the option of un-personing anyone with incorrect views, from Alex Jones to General Michael Flynn to uppity Canadian truckers. They can cut off an individuals’ access to the modern public square, that is, to social media, as well as to banking services and even, if they wished to, to mobile telephony and the internet. Such unaccountable, oligarchic power cannot be controlled by the people – the state needs to rein it in. Indeed, it is common in history to find that the executive, often represented by the monarch, is in alliance with the people against the oligarchy, represented by a corrupted nobility. This is natural. The main threat to the power of the executive is not the public – which lacks resources, the ability to act in concert, a cohesive identity and a shared set of interests and beliefs - but the oligarchy. Therefore, as Adrian Vermeule says, it is reasonable to expect even a corrupt executive to act in its own best interests, and to prioritise the interests of the public against the oligarchy in order to wield the public as a club with which to threaten the oligarchy. Once this idea is understood, it becomes obvious why in China, the public may detest their local government but support the CPC, or why Russians who lived through the chaos of the 1990s support Vladimir Putin, or why even Shia Iraqis are sometimes nostalgic for the days of Saddam Hussein.

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A structural problem 

Far too many analysts and journalists are not equipped mentally, psychologically and socially to understand these things. To get a position as an analyst, it is often necessary to go through long internships and a host of unpaid or underpaid positions, meaning that analysts, like journalists, tend to come from a relatively comfortable socio-economic background. Most analysts, journalists, foreign policy experts and the like are based in Brussels, Paris, London, New York, Washington DC, or other cosmopolitan cities where being proud of your people and your land is a major social faux pas. They are typically graduates of universities that teach about global citizenship, and that claim that all identity is socially constructed. In these universities, analysts learn that identity is a relic from the past that must be overcome in order to become better global citizens, without understanding that “global citizen” is itself a tribal identity, or that without shared identity there can be no society. Often, analysts in these cosmopolitan cities with their transnational backgrounds find themselves in social milieus that view nationalism as evil. Their friends view every populist as a future Hitler and view the world as a global village. And they see liberal democracy as the highest form of government, often believing that it can be spread anywhere in the world. They cannot conceive of a participatory and consultative system of government that is not parliamentary, nor can they accept that it is possible to have rights outside a liberal democracy. 

I fear that this often places analysts in a mindset where they cannot empathise with people of faith, nationalists or anyone who is not liberal. Indeed, in my experience, the prevalent attitude towards nationalism and religion is one of undisguised contempt. However, love for one’s own and distrust of others is a rather popular position, and most people around the world are somewhat religious. This is what elections in Brazil, India, Russia, and the United States tell us. This is what policies in Japan, China, South Africa and Malaysia tell us. This is why every Muslim country in the world has a strong Islamist movement, why China is so nationalistic and why India chooses Modi. Having contempt for people of faith and for nationalists prevents analysts from understanding perhaps the majority of people around the globe. People who share the typical analysts’ worldview therefore cannot understand the appeal of Victor Orban - they therefore cannot understand Hungarian elections, policies or positions. Such people find Modi to be a backwards fascist, rather than an expression of the wishes of the majority. They view Trump as a threat to democracy and a danger to the republic, without any awareness that the functioning of a republic requires a national identity and a willingness to acknowledge the grievances of the majority. And they view religion as belonging to an age of myth and ignorance, rather than the driver and defining feature of civilisation.

This mindset affirms what G.K. Chesterton said: “there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.” As a result of not being aware of their own liberal dogma, far too many analysts suffer from a deep lack of empathy towards the subjects of their analysis. No amount of knowledge or training can overcome a gap in empathy. To understand terrorists, to understand nationalists, to understand communists, to understand ideologues, it is necessary to appreciate that what animates them is real, that they genuinely care for the causes that they espouse, that they are not merely mouthing some focus-grouped message, but that they have genuine conviction. It is necessary to absorb their way of thinking, to see the world as they see it, and to empathise with their actions, even if we find them sinful, criminal or abhorrent. This is what it is to follow Christ’s command to love thy enemy. It is not a call to submit to your enemy. It is a call to understand him, to see his perspective, to correct your own errors that you may perhaps only notice when you look at the world through his eyes, and then, if you must, to fight him only over the irreconcilable differences that remain. Understood in this light, each and every analyst, to be any good, must heed Christ’s command and love the subjects of his analysis, even if, especially if, they are his enemies.

Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, the animating principle of British foreign policy, and afterwards of American policy, was to keep Russia away from India and the Persian Gulf. Allowing Russia to reach “warm water ports” was seen as an existential threat that would make Russia too big of a threat to manage via European diplomacy and warfare. However, in July 2022, Russia reached India via Iran. Russia loaded a cargo train in Moscow. The cargo then went to the Khorasan-Razavi station on the Turkmenistan – Iran border. From there it continued via Iranian ports to India. This was the first time that the International North South Transportation Corridor, announced by India, Iran and Russia in 2000, was activated, after a dry run in 2014. The corridor involves countries like Oman, Pakistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and others. With Western sanctions escalating and Finland and Sweden joining NATO, the logic for the route seems stronger than ever, and so now it will probably be continuously upgraded and improved. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Shipping Lines (IRISL) also announced in July that it was dedicating 300 containers to transporting goods between India and Russia, with the option of increasing that number further. Trade between India and Russia normally goes through the Suez and takes 40 to 45 days. The new route reduces transport time by up to 25 days and the transport cost by up to 30%.

India’s logic

Although this transport corridor was two decades in the works, its activation now – at India’s request – in the face of Western attempts to crush Russia’s economy with sanctions, is indicative of how thoroughly India now ignores the West. India, among many other developing countries, insisted that it would maintain its trade ties with Russia regardless of American and EU sanctions. Of course, India and Russia have had warm relations since the days of the non-aligned movement and the Soviet Union. Even though India relies on a wide range of suppliers for military hardware, Russia is perhaps the most preeminent. But what has happened since July 2022 is different. Now, the two countries have a trade link through Iran, which is also a strategic partner for both. India’s perspective is probably as follows: India needs to work with Iran on their shared interests in Afghanistan. Both do not want Pakistani-sponsored extremism spilling over into their countries, an interest which they share with Russia (and with China). Furthermore, India must be fearful of China and Russia getting too close. Together, they would combine the world’s most prominent natural resources superpower with the world’s manufacturing superpower, and India would lose influence in Russia and in the world. So far, India has relied on Russia to maintain a sort of balance against China. Sacrificing the relationship with Russia would only ensure that China gets more Russian natural resources at a greater discount. And so, India now must move closer to Russia to ensure that its voice retains its importance in Moscow. Russia and India have had talks about trading in their national currencies. For now, however, they appear to be trading in the UAE Dirham, the euro, the yuan and other currencies, bypassing sanctions. They also now have a trade corridor through Iran that is much less vulnerable to Western air and naval power. India is increasing its purchases of Russian oil, going up from 25,000 bpd to 600,000 bpd over the last few months. Coal imports have also increased significantly. Since India needs both Iran and Russia for energy and for security, there is no chance that India will increase its compliance with sanctions. Rather, India will increase its efforts to assist both Iran and Russia to evade Western sanctions. The Anglo-American alliance has lost India, and the loss seems irreversible.  

Iran’s gains

Iran, for its part, is keen to deepen its partnership with Russia. Russia and Iran are partnered in Syria, and to a lesser extent Lebanon and Iraq, where the two countries share an interest in containing Turkish and American influence. There has been a deep recent history of mistrust between the two countries – Russia needlessly delayed the opening of a nuclear reactor in Iran and allows Israel to continue attacking Iranian targets in Syria. But now that Russia is a pariah that is even more tightly sanctioned than Iran, the two countries will grow closer. Iran needs Russian help to contain Turkey, which they both distrust due to its position in NATO and due to their historic competition with it, though Russia probably prefers to play the two countries against each other. Iran needs Russian grains for allied countries like Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, where Iran has a preeminent role, sometimes alongside Russia. Iran needs Russian military technology, though apparently Russia needs Iranian assistance with UAVs. Russia and Iran are naturally competitors, but for now they have no choice but to stand together to increase their trade and security cooperation. There is a range of fields of cooperation, in energy, food products and consumer goods manufacturing where the countries can be rather complementary, despite their competition in energy export markets. The two countries are now attempting trade in their national currencies, and want to boost their trade from an annual USD4 billion to USD8 billion. This is a small amount, but is important nonetheless, and the transit trade can accelerate its growth significantly. With the strength of the Western response to Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Russia will almost certainly intensify military and economic cooperation with Iran in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, with a view to pushing out American influence. Recall that in 2016, Russia temporarily deployed nuclear-capable strategic bombers in Iran for the first time, allowing it to cover the airspace of Persian Gulf Arab states all the way to Bab al-Mandab. By working with Iran, Russia may well end up with strategic bombers deployed on both ends of the Middle East, in Syria and in Iran.

Turkey’s lack of options

Magnifying Anglo-American humiliation is this: during the Great Game, Britain did its best to keep the sick man of Europe – the Ottoman Empire – on life support for as long as possible. Britain understood, correctly, that Turkish weakness would translate into Russian gains, just as Russian weakness could easily translate into Turkish gains. Now, however, Turkey is competing with Iran over the good graces of Russia. Turkey, like India, China and many other countries, is also seeking ways to continue trading with Russia using either national currencies or non-dollar currencies, as Turkey has done with Iran. It would be absurd to not assume that Turkey will increasingly ignore Western sanctions in favour of deeper ties with its rival Asian powers. Turkish warehouses are reportedly full of Western goods that will be sent to Russia. And Turkish businesses are eager to take advantage of Europe and Russia’s continued dependencies by playing middlemen.

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Despite their historic rivalries and numerous localised conflicts, extending from Libya to Syria to Ukraine, there are economic and political reasons for Turkey to grow closer to Russia. Economically, Turkey’s current account problems and imploding currency mean that it cannot risk antagonising its two main gas suppliers, Iran and Russia, even as Turkey seeks to develop its own domestic offshore natural gas production. Indeed, during President Erdogan’s August visit to Russia, he and Putin agreed on deepening economic cooperation and on boosting trade to USD 100 billion. This is not the first time this objective has been declared, but it is clear that Turkey now needs to reduce its current account deficit by expanding its trade with Russia and using national currencies more, allowing Turkey to offer Russia consumer goods such as washing machines, furniture and clothing in exchange for abundant and cheap Russian natural gas. Furthermore, Turkey, Iran and the UAE are discussing the possibility of building a supply line from the UAE to Bandar Abbas in Iran to Mersin in Turkey. This would bypass the Suez Canal, and place goods from Iran, or the UAE, or India, at the gates of the Black Sea – a major security boost to Russia and a revenue boost to Turkey. Moreover, there is no reason for this transport corridor not to extend to Izmir or to a Black Sea port. Naturally, this route would compete with that via Kazakhstan and via Azerbaijan. But this means that Russia has multiple routes to India, and that the International North South Transport Corridor is even more viable. Anglo-American policymakers ought to realise that this is of far greater importance than the lost cause of Ukraine.

Politically, since President Barack Obama adopted the disastrous policy of supporting the PKK’s offshoot in Syria against Islamic State, Turkey has found itself increasingly dependent on Russian and Iranian cooperation to secure its territory against what it perceives as the existential threat posed by that Marxist, nationalist, separatist movement. Turkey became convinced that the West, led by America, does not care in the least about its views. More substantially, rival Asian powers like China, Russia or Iran are threats to Turkey’s interests. The West’s messianic zeal for its Current Year values (LGBT, globalism, obedience to American sanctions and trade rules, anti-terrorism finance laws, procedural liberalism, permitting the Western perspective to dominate the domestic press, etc..) makes it an existential threat to Turkey. The adoption of Current Year values would deprive Turkey of any ability to define, maintain and develop its own values, and so of any ability to develop and pursue its own strategies and interests. If Turkey were to do the West’s bidding, legalise gay marriage, let its regulators obey those of Washington, DC, end its support for Islamic causes, allow nondescript technocrats to run its government affairs, have media that would only parrot the New York Times, and subscribe to the West’s current approach of apologising for everything the West’s ancestors ever did, Turkey may well become like Sweden. But Turkey is rather proud to be Turkey, and rightly so. It has no intention of becoming Finland, Sweden, or any other faceless, irrelevant, obedient Western country. The West, in its arrogance, cannot understand why other countries do not want to emulate it in every respect. Russia has no illusions about creating facsimilie copies of itself in other parts of the world. Turkey would rather deal with a Russia that accepts it for what it is - even as it competes with it - than with an America that wants to remake Anatolia into California.

Russia’s perspective

Chinese Russian cooperation is beyond the scope of this piece. It suffices to mention that China is desperate for Russian resources, naturally would want more of them shipped overland to evade American naval and air power and is willing to creatively bypass Western sanctions without jeopardising its interests in the West. Rightly or wrongly, China now believes that it was the West that put Russia in a position where it had no choice but to use its military to secure its interests, and that the West is pursuing a similar gameplan to provoke China into invading Taiwan. As such, China’s interest is in developing deeper ties with Russia, not in minor skirmishes over territories in Central Asia that they can both benefit from, so long as Western interests are kept at bay.

Where does this leave Russia? All the major Asian powers – with the exception of Japan and South Korea – are trying their best to deepen their trade relations with it. Central Asian countries are trapped in a Chinese – Russian vise, and while they may try to play one side against the other, any hint of supporting the West to destabilise one of the anti-Western powers can be met with swift punishment. Moreover, Russia is free to play off Iran against Turkey in the Middle East. Both of them need Russia, but Russia is not dependent on either of them. Furthermore, Russia has good relations with other Middle Eastern powers, from Algeria to Libya to Egypt to Saudi Arabia to the UAE. All this means that Russia is free to develop markets in the Middle East, Asia and Africa without any serious fear of military threats from rival Asian powers. This leaves Russia free to concentrate its military efforts in a single front against the West. Considering the sheer expanse of Russia’s borders and its vast strategic depth, this is quite an advantageous position. It permits Russia to develop capabilities and economic power within its vast frontiers, and to concentrate its military power against just one relatively small front. US and European sanctions against Russia have backfired spectacularly. Rather than isolating Russia, they managed to build a single economic bloc in Asia that is keen to separate itself from Western influence. Over the course of the Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies, the United States and its allies have managed to turn all of Russia’s serious nearby rivals into partners and even allies. This is truly spectacular incompetence. Russia has never had it better.

Donbass

Meanwhile, the battle for the Donbass is ongoing. In addition to beginning to breakthrough outside the city of Donetsk, Russia is pushing towards the Ukrainian defence line running from Siversk to Soledar to Bakhmut to Kurdiumivka. The next Ukrainian line runs from Sloviansk to Kramatorsk to Kostiantynivka. Should Russia break through these two lines, its path would be clear all the way to Dnipropetrovsk, also known as Dnipro, on the Dnieper River, where the Ukrainians have concentrated some reserve forces. The Donbass has the highest concentration of Russian and Ukrainian forces, and the Russians are close to a breakthrough there. Crucially, the region is also where the best and most experienced Ukrainian forces are concentrated. The defeat of these forces would very much limit Ukraine’s military options. Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) DPR officials have set themselves a deadline for the end of August for this to be achieved.

Kherson’s importance

The reasoning behind the counteroffensive in Kherson appears to be to isolate the Russian forces in Kherson with a view to regaining that region, while the attempted destruction of the bridges suggests that Ukraine is not expecting to regain territory further east – including Crimea. For Ukraine, capturing Kherson would fulfil at least three objectives:

Firstly, it would allow Ukraine to release some of the forces concentrated in Nikolayev and Odessa and use them in future defensive and offensive operations.

Secondly, it would allow Ukrainian forces to establish a defensive line behind the Dnieper River without the threat of Russian forces flanking them from the south. With Kherson in their hands, the Ukrainians would be in a better position for the winter of 2022 - 2023 and would be in a better position to negotiate terms with Russia. Should Russian forces remain in Kherson, however, they would be able to move up both banks of the Dnieper River after the battle of the Donbass is done, making future battles much harder for Ukraine. Russia would also have the option in late 2022 to move west from Kherson towards Transnistria, effectively cutting off Odessa and the Black Sea coast from resupply by Ukraine and bottling up the units in Odessa. Russia could then negotiate terms under which Odessa would simply be surrendered.

Thirdly, capturing Kherson, or at least launching an offensive there, would prevent Russia from organising a referendum for Kherson to unify with Russia. Such a referendum would represent a major media victory for Russia, and, if coming on the heels of a Ukrainian defeat on the Donbass, would reduce the appetite of Western publics for the Ukraine war and for the cost of sanctions.

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Outlook

That said, my view is that it is highly unlikely that a Kherson counteroffensive would succeed. Destroying bridges is extremely difficult, and, while the bridges have been damaged, the Russians have shown that they can repair them in quick order and increase the availability of air defence systems. In addition, the Ukrainians lack adequate offensive air support as well as natural cover, making them highly vulnerable to Russian artillery when they attempt any advance. Furthermore, the time that the Ukrainians have for a counteroffensive is limited. The battle of the Donbass is nearing its end and may well end by September, allowing an experienced and skilled Russian force to launch offensives in multiple directions, as well as allowing Russia to reinforce Kherson. The objective of the counteroffensive may well be to simply slow down Russia in the hope that Russian forces would have to spend winter in an unfavourable position, while Ukraine is rearmed by the West. On the other hand, should Russia defeat the Ukrainians decisively in the Donbass and in Kherson before September, then Ukraine would find itself in a very difficult position, with winter making the digging of new defensive positions much harder in Ukraine’s north, while the south remains vulnerable for a longer period to attacks by Russia. Ukraine would not have enough left to maintain the fight, and Russian advances could accelerate significantly. This would make it more likely that Ukraine would accept peace terms imposed by Russia.  

Ed: I had said in a previous piece that I expected political instability in the United States to intensify following the Ukraine war. I wanted to clarify what I meant and elaborate on the business implications.

Republicans plan regime change

According to this apparently thoroughly sourced Axios report, allies of former President Donald Trump, who is almost certainly considering running for the 2024 elections, intend to put into effect a new executive order that would permit an incoming president to place up to 50,000 senior, policy-making positions of the civil service at risk, and strip off any employment protections that they have. They are also building a database of thousands of loyalists whom they can place in key positions across the intelligence community, the justice department, the national security apparatus, the homeland security department, the state department, and the Pentagon. I believe that the aim would be to rid American institutions of senior personnel who support gender theory, critical race theory, open door immigration, free trade, green energy and offshoring of manufacturing jobs. This would be nothing short of regime change and would break what American dissidents variously describe as the uniparty, the permanent state or the deep state.

It is worth noting that the Axios story claims that Trump’s PAC had more money than the DNC and RNC put together. In America’s electoral system, money does not always win elections, but it strongly correlates with winning them. Furthermore, Trump’s endorsement is one of the most powerful political weapons a Republican candidate could have, and the perception of the GOP is that the nomination is Trump’s if he wants it. According to the Axios story, much of the establishment that surrounds the GOP has been moving away from what I would describe as the liberal interventionist and economically libertarian policies of McConnel, Bush and Reagan to favour those of Trump. It is also noteworthy that popular alternatives to Trump, like Ron DeSantis, only have a chance to win the Republican nomination because they are seen as more effective and capable than Trump in executing an America First agenda. As such, any Republican who wins the presidency in 2024 would probably implement the plan detailed by Axios and attempt a thorough purge of the executive branch. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that the base of the Republican Party identifies with America First and with Trump, not with the more mainstream Republican political figures. It is unclear how much of the Congressional Republican Party will sign onto an America First agenda, but a future America First Republican administration will have much greater authority over the party than the first Trump administration did. 

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Democrats can and will fight back

The Axios story itself reflects an intensive intelligence collection effort on the part of the Democrats. Clearly, the Democrat establishment and their media allies are highly concerned about the return of Trump. It is worth recalling that prior to the 2020 election, mainstream media and the tech companies (Meta, Alphabet, Twitter) had prevented the spread of various damning stories emanating from the Hunter Biden laptop, which has shown conclusively that the now-President’s son had had highly suspicious dealings with China and with Ukraine. Perhaps burned by the impact of their coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016, the media and technology oligopoly chose instead to push the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.  It is also worth recalling that, in the run up to the 2020 elections, the Democrats had put in place an operation to ready significant street protests if Trump had won, and to and pressure CEOs to get them to push Trump to concede if he lost. A similar operation is probably in the works for the 2024 elections, with the dual aim of rallying business leaders against Trump and readying street protests as a fall back option. Furthermore, an America First agenda would threaten the interests of various big businesses that rely on offshoring, cheap imports, H1B visas and other practices to cut costs and increase their profits. Such businesses would almost certainly finance Democrats in their opposition to America First. Tech companies, for their part, would also view the rise of America first as a threat. Firstly, America First would threaten their ties with China, undermining their profitability. Secondly, America First would seek to punish them for their perceived overt bias against Republicans, their support for radical ideas about race and sexuality, and for their willingness to use technology to harm the well-being of Western youths to increase their profits. As such, tech companies will probably also support the fight against Republicans. It is worth recalling that in addition to Facebook suppressing the story about Hunter Biden’s questionable dealings with China and Ukraine in the 2020 election, Mark Zuckerberg personally gave USD300 million to “protect election integrity” which was seen by Republicans as an attempt to support Democrats. He will likely double down on this bet, despite his worsening relations with American progressives who demand that Facebook exercise more censorship. It is true that various companies are increasingly intimidated and frustrated by the woke fringe of their own staff. I do not believe that this is enough to get them to accept an America First administration, even if the nominee is not Trump. And so, we are likely to see an alliance of some major businesses, social media companies, traditional media and far left activists that seek to disrupt the agenda of an America First administration through a combination of lawfare and unrest. Unrest can easily rise to the scale seen during the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd.  

Commercial implications

It is certain that tech companies will have to spend billions to appease America First, should the movement emerge victorious from the 2024 elections. Furthermore, companies like Amazon and Alphabet are likely to need to spend considerable sums to fight off anti-trust lawsuits that an America First administration would probably bring against them. Companies with a high reliance on China, like Walmart, Target and Amazon, will also probably be impacted by even stiffer tariffs and trade disruptions. Green energy will probably see its subsidies cut or threatened, while oil and gas stand to benefit from a more favourable regulatory environment. That said, energy investors in America will be hesitant, as they fear that the Democrats would emulate precedent that America First is planning to set, meaning that regulations risk swinging back and forth in a highly unpredictable manner. Investors will probably require higher returns to deal with this risk. Furthermore, it is likely that a populist America First administration would target pharmaceutical companies, trying to force them to reduce the cost payable by both the state through Medicaid and Medicare, and by the public. Healthcare will likely be a battleground issue. America First will use against the pharma companies their support for the mutilation inherent in transgender conversion. America First will also probably shine a light on pharma companies stock buyback policies, which cost them far more than their R&D.

That said, an America First movement will likely continue with tax cutting policies, high defence spending and probably greater infrastructure spending. There is, however, a risk that companies that wish to benefit from contracts with the US government will have to abandon controversial, radical policies on abortion, race and sexuality. The question the populists will face is how to finance their ambitions, given America’s soaring debt to GDP ratio and already high budget deficits. Furthermore, the base is sick of endless wars, but the America First movement may well end up escalating the confrontation with China, without reaching any compromises with Russia.

The civil service and the Democratic Party will confront an America First administration on each of the issues. Their resistance will take the lawfare, with blue states’ attorney generals coordinating lawsuits to stop a new Republican administration. The risk here, however, is that the Trump administration worked with Senate Republical leader Mitch McConnel to fill thousands of judicial positions, as well as to turn the Supreme Court to the right. Democrats could easily turn to deligitimse the court system, creating undermining the stability of the republic and of the rule of law. The Democrats’ and civil service’s resistance will also include media leaks intended to undermine a new Republican administration. The Democrats will also use their various activist outfits to organise protests, including in Washington DC, New York, California and other jurisdictions that are soft on crime. In places such as Austin, TX, where there is a Democratic majority in a Republican state, the risk of violent confrontations with police will be much higher. Throughout the US, I expect rioting and arson attacks to increase. The deep state will not allow America First to rein it in without putting up a serious fight. Given how high the stakes are, the tactics used will be harsher than ever.

Ed: In a previous edition of this article, I mistakenly said that the Trump camp was preparing lists of 50,000 loyalists. They are preparing lists of thousands, but the application of Schedule F would place 50,000 federal government jobs at risk. I apologise for the error.

In the media, at companies, in sports events, everywhere and always, white people are told that their societies are structurally racist, and that it is their racism that is holding back “people of colour”. The latter category lumps together everyone from Middle Easterners to Indians to Chinese to Africans – peoples who have almost nothing in common – to create a binary between whites and non-whites.

In this set up, not being white is a handicap, as it is only whites who have “white privilege”. Furthermore, whites have benefited from a legacy of colonialism and slavery that is unique in history.

The slavery committed by whites is, for some reason, not comparable to anything else in history, even to Islamic slavery, which claimed more victims, lasted longer and was in some ways more brutal.

It is alleged that, without slavery, the West would not have prospered. However, it is never explained why the Middle East does not prosper still, despite having engaged in the same type of slavery.

According to this worldview, any discrepancies in outcomes between whites and non-whites are the result of a single factor: structural racism. By merely being white, whites benefit from this structural racism and from the oppression of non-whites. 

Everything, and I mean everything, is suffused with racism. The media has published articles claiming that veganism, tipping waiters, the orcs in Lord of the Rings, soap, Mary Poppins, Artificial Intelligence, yoga, fighting obesity, showing up on time, mathematics, Mozart, fried chicken, the wine industry, bra colours, camping, hiking, and, of course, the police, history and capitalism, are all racist.

How is hiking racist? The equipment costs too much and non-white people are assumed to be poorer.

How is fried chicken racist? It perpetuates stereotypes. (I am sure that stopping yourself from having fried chicken because you are thinking of black people does not perpetuate stereotypes).

How is Mozart a symbol of white supremacy? He is known by one name, and black artists are not (is 2Pac one word or two?).

The list goes on.

It is comical, at first, but it quickly becomes farcical and then menacing. The point is to force the question of race on every single aspect of life. The point is to stop people from taking any action that is not “racially conscious”. This, we are told, is anti-racism, and it is superior to simply accepting people as they are.

Being an immigrant to the UK who can pass as white and as Middle Eastern, I find myself in a privileged position: I get to play both privileged white and oppressed person of colour. Plus, I am an outsider - no ancestor of mine was enslaved or traded in slaves. So, please permit me to pose some questions about structural racism.

The first question I would like to ask is, which society, other than Europe and the US, had ever banned slavery in the history of humanity? Which society, other than the white, Christian West, ever used military force to end slavery?

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The British Royal Navy and the US Union soldiers shed blood to end slavery, and it was the first time in history anyone had gotten that notion. The British military even fought against blacks to stop them from enslaving other blacks – slavery was normal in Africa and was a key source of wealth for all African empires.

The charge for abolition was led by people we would call today the religious right. The religious right of the 1800s campaigned effectively to get their governments to commit military resources to ending slavery – resources that presumably they could have used to plunder poor indigenous people, as the currently fashionable narrative goes.

The British Royal Navy went as far as to patrol the eastern coasts of Africa to stop the Islamic slave trade as well, not just the trade that its own former colonies were involved in. This kind of mentality would have made absolutely no sense to an Aztec or a Viking or any other kind of pagan.

It makes no sense to a Muslim, either. When the British ambassador told the Muslim Sultan of Morocco to end slavery, the sultan’s response was that it is natural, and has been since the time of the Sons of Adam, and no one would ever argue to remove it. Today, we see that wherever an Islamic society breaks completely free from the Western-led system, slavery returns, as we saw in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Throughout the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, a modernised form of slavery is permitted. Forced labour is common, and you can be worked to death with almost no pay if you are a labourer from the Indian subcontinent.

Yet, we never hear the “anti-racist” voices criticise these oil rich countries. Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and others all lecture their Western customers about structural racism. They would never speak out in front of their customers in the Gulf, though.

Yes, there is in the West a shameful history of slavery. It is only shameful, however, because Christian morality says that slavery is shameful. Aztec, African, Roman, Greek or Islamic societies would not call slavery shameful. They would call it natural.

In addition to the shameful legacy of slavery, there is also a proud, luminous history of British, American and other white, Christian people heroically and selflessly fighting for equality and justice. And these people fought to spread a ban on slavery well beyond their borders to benefit peoples that are not theirs. This is truly exceptional.

The second question that white people should not ask, but that I might be permitted to ask, is this: where in the law is there evidence of structural racism? I am not asking whether there are racist people. There are, in every race, everywhere. Indeed, I would argue that a global and historic perspective would show that it is more common to be racist than to not be racist. Opposition to racism is a religious idea that comes from universalist monotheistic religions that claim that every human being is created in the image of God with inherent dignity.

Based on this idea, in the West, there are explicit and broad bans against racial discrimination, along with grievance processes and compensation mechanisms. A private employer may not openly prefer people of his own race – unless he is not white. Universities can be historically black and favour blacks in the USA, but they may not be historically white and favour whites.

Affirmative action or “positive” discrimination is permitted in most Western societies, but discrimination in favour of the white majority is forbidden. It is worth recalling that the norm in Africa, Latin America and Asia is discrimination against foreigners in favour of the native majority. Mexico, Chile, Nigeria, South Africa, Israel, the Persian Gulf and China, among many others, all pursue forms of economic nationalism, seeking to improve the economic wellbeing of the majority and to boost domestic capital. It seems intuitive that the state would protect the native population and domestic producers. To my mind, it is natural for Malaysia to seek to enhance the economic power of Malays, as it does, or for South Africa and Zimbabwe to seek to enhance the economic power of black citizens, as they do.

From a global perspective, what is surprising is that Western governments ban policies and practices that openly favour their own white majority. This is inconceivable in any other part of the world.

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The third question I would like to respectfully ask is, if white society is so racist, why do so many minorities do so well in it? Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Indian and Korean British and American people earn more than white British and American people. Why would racist societies allow this? Why are white working-class young men in the UK the demographic least likely to go to university? How does this fit with these being structurally racist societies?

I was once told that the presence of good economic opportunities for minorities is not evidence of absence of structural racism – dismissing the question out of hand. I am not sure how that could be true, though.

If the system permits fair economic opportunity, and people can advance regardless of their race or country of origin, then what exactly does structural racism mean?

The fourth forbidden question is: are there things that some minorities can do to improve their own situations? Is there perhaps a difference between the culture of black Americans in the South Side of Chicago and that of second generation Ghanaian Americans?

Could the underperformance of black Americans be related to fatherlessness, the glorification of degeneracy and violence in pop culture, or a preference for ostentatious consumption over thrift?

Is there a cultural explanation for why Koreans or Chinese do better in the West – and at home – than African or Middle Eastern people?

Are we to pretend that all cultures are equal, even though evidence to the contrary is staring us in the face?

I know that a crippling culture of deceit, vanity and disrespect for time holds back people in the Middle East. Some manage to transcend this culture and perform exceptionally well, others do not, and that culture continues to hold them back. Could something similar be happening with other groups in the West?

Should we not have an honest, courageous conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of various cultures? Perhaps that would help more than claiming that all cultures are equal.

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The fifth question that is bound to land you in hot water if you are white, but you could get away with if you are not, is this: if white society is so racist, why are so many non-whites desperate to get to white majority countries? The poorer residents of the Third World walk and swim to the West. The middle classes have their babies in the US or Canada to benefit from birth right citizenship. Alternatively, they send their children to study in Europe in the hope that the children would gain employment and citizenship. And the rich park some of their assets in the West to benefit from various visa schemes and to enable their children to live there.

Why would the residents of the Third World, across all social classes, be so desperate to move to a society that will only supposedly oppress them? Clearly, Third World citizens like me did not come to the West because we believed in the white privilege, non-white victimhood myth. We did it because the very opposite is true.

It is only in the West that we stand a chance of fair treatment, or as fair as life ever treats anyone.

The final question one must not ask is, what presumed glass ceiling needs to be broken for us to say that the West has defeated racism?

Is Barack Obama twice winning the popular vote in the US not enough? In the UK, minorities dominate the ruling Conservative Party’s front bench - that is, they hold the most important positions in the British government. How is this consistent with claims of institutional racism?

How is the underperformance of white working-class people in the UK and the US somehow construed as evidence that the system is stacked in their favour?

Is racism over only when everyone in the West ends up in their local version of Chicago’s South Side, or Haiti?

Or is racism over only when we are in the communist egalitarian utopia? What milestones must we pass before we can say that we have beaten structural racism?

Or is structural racism an eternal crusade – or, more likely, an eternal scam?

Historic comparison: The current energy crisis, brought about by attempts to impose green energy and by the sanctions that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is being compared to the 1973 crisis. It’s worth noting that the inflation that began with the energy crisis of the 1970s was not tamed until the 1980s. No one had the heart to make the tough political decisions needed to address it. It is impossible to assume that the current energy-driven inflationary wave is transitory – the cost of living crisis is going to lead to demands for higher wages and is going to force governments to spend to support companies and consumers, until the situation becomes so bad that the political cost of severe action becomes lower than the political cost of evasion. Even now, the Federal Reserve continuing with quantitative easing, meaning that the global supply of dollars is increasing.

Scope: I view the Euro, the pound, the Australian dollar, the yen, the Canadian dollar and the American dollar as inseparable, for the simple reason that in every major economic crisis in recent memory, the Fed has to engage in currency swaps with these countries’ central banks to bail them out. Furthermore, US sanctions end up impacting all these countries – if the US says you cannot do business, banks in these countries will follow the US’ diktats. The combination of bailout power and regulatory power that the US has over these countries means that we can think about the Western bloc holistically, though I appreciate that there are many nuances and differences that I am not aware of.

Inflation: The 1973 crisis triggered double digit inflation in most of the developed world. Inflation calculations in much of the West have changed, with the cost of electronic goods, for example, being assessed against the supposed improvements in technology. Essentially, the bean counters claim that your enjoyment of your mobile phone has doubled due to better technology, but prices have only risen by half, and so the net effect is lower inflation. It is very likely that if Western bean counters were using proper methodology, inflation today would be in the mid to high teens.

Interest rates: For most of the 1970s US and UK interest rates were in the double digits. Interest rates must be raised above the level of inflation if there is any hope of reducing inflation. Anything else makes inflation last for longer. Negative real interest rates also disincentivise saving – your dollar consumed today is worth more than your dollar saved for tomorrow. The reduction in savings reduces the pool of available investment, hobbling the economy in the long term and reducing the future supply of goods, also raising future inflation. With lower output and higher prices, the West is entering a period of stagflation that will last as long as the low interest rate regime is maintained

Interest rates will rise, dramatically, to levels well above inflation before this wave of inflation is tamed. It is not a transitory wave. However, there are political constraints on the ability to raise interest rates in the West. Firstly, the number and value of mortgages in the economy are today far greater than they were in the 1970s. A large increase in interest rates would make many borrowers unable to stay in their homes. Given the expansion in the number of people with mortgages, this is political suicide. Furthermore, with debt to GDP levels where they are in the West post the 2008 crisis and post COVID, it is very likely that many states with large deficits would be unable to afford to refinance their debts if interest rates were considerably higher. Western states are also under pressure to increase military spending as they are now in a full blown confrontation with Russian and China. Finally, states will find that they are under pressure to significantly raise wages and pensions to keep pace with inflation, which they also cannot afford due to the impact this would have on inflation and on fiscal deficits. The West is facing a perfect storm.

Banking crisis: We are heading towards a situation where governments cannot print more money, individual borrowers cannot afford their mortgages and already overextended governments cannot afford their debts. This is a recipe for a banking crisis that will be considerably worse than the 2008 crisis, when at least the system had both some fiscal and monetary options. With so much fiscal and monetary ammunition expended to deal with the 2008 crisis, COVID and the current crisis, there will be far less room for government action. Already, there is a wide number of European banks that are insolvent and highly vulnerable. My gut instinct is that some banks need to be destroyed for a stable and strong banking sector to emerge.

The dollar’s position: Already, most developing countries have rejected Western sanctions on Russia (it is safe to say that they will reject sanctions on China even more vigorously). The African Union sent a delegation to meet with President Putin and find a way to continue to obtain Russian food and energy. The BRICS are talking about adding new countries, building a shared banking infrastructure, establishing a ratings agency and doing what is necessary to be able to trade fully independently of the US and its auxiliary, the EU. What underpins the dollar’s position is a combination of factors: the size of the US economy, the US’ ability to maintain high deficits, the depth of the US’ capital markets, the petrodollar and the perception of US military might. The ongoing crushing defeat that the Ukraine is facing, the willingness of the world to pay for Russian energy and food in roubles, and the coming economic crises that the US faces all challenge the dollar’s position and with it challenge the US’ economic and political model. Any move away from the dollar will be gradual, and then sudden. The gradual part has already begun.

Political impact: The 2008 crisis birthed the Tea Party, which eventually gave us Donald Trump. It ended or mortally wounded many political parties in Europe, and European politics are still unsettled. Now what? Now, Europe faces a situation where the US is offering it more neoliberalism – as in, the combination of free trade, de-industrialisation, financialisaton and gig economy work – and where Russia is offering cheap energy and food, military prowess and social sanity (see my two pieces in the links to understand what I mean by that). Russia has the means to support populist parties in Europe and will almost certainly do so. Any attempt to bailout the banks and not the consumers will be met with public rage that gets fuelled by Russian media, but that will be very genuinely felt by European citizens. There will be a political price to pay for what will be the first response of various Western governments, which is to try to impose on the whole of Europe what was imposed on Greece in 2008. I expect this crisis to topple many governments, trigger many early elections, and force a rethink of how we have run our affairs for the past generation. Already, the government in Bulgaria has fallen, and the UK’s Boris Johnson is in an untenable position. The governing coalition in Germany also looks vulnerable. The political turmoil will continue until a movement that is seen as a clean break with the past, and that offers hard but necessary solutions, emerges. I also expect that there will be an increase in support for various countries exiting the European Union, though it is impossible to say which will go first. For the US, if there is a global loss of confidence in the dollar, this will generate an enormous populist backlash which may pull Europe along with it.

Energy policy impact: It is not unrealistic to assume that a political change in Europe and the US will come with a reversal on renewable energy policy. The key risk is that political parties could emerge that openly oppose renewable energy, while sanctions against Russia and opposition to hydrocarbons remains within the establishment. This could lead to a situation where investors find it unsafe to invest in both renewable energy and in hydrocarbons, while some public opposition to nuclear power continues. This would ensure energy starvation.

Call for feedback: I wrote this piece in rather general terms to appeal to a wide audience. I’d be most interested in hearing about the specifics of your country and in any views you may have.

It is almost impossible to write with brevity about the transgender movement. The insanity of it is so astounding and so pervasive that one hardly knows where to begin. But begin we must. As for brevity, my defence is that insanity is much harder to catalogue and explain than sanity. And with that, I throw brevity out the window.

In this chapter, I show that transgenderism is nonsense. Its spread is primarily due to support from the establishment. All major institutions – from Fortune 500 companies to NATO – now fully back this movement. Why would they do so, however?

Because making you “affirm” that “trans women are women” is a test of loyalty and obedience – those who object can be ostracised, those who play along have effectively committed to supporting their superiors through any lie. So, to cleanse yourself of this lie, say it loud and say it proud: trans women are men, trans men are women, and they always will be.

Educate yourself

The first thing that a gender activist will tell you when you assert the obvious fact that there are only two genders is: “educate yourself”. And so we shall. According to the trans movement, a trans person is someone whose gender and genitalia do not match ‘our assumptions’. Gender is now something separate from sex, you see. The World Health Organisation says that “‘Gender’ describes those characteristics of women and men that are largely socially created, while ‘sex’ encompasses those that are biologically determined. However, these terms are often mistakenly used interchangeably in scientific literature, health policy, and legislation.”

Unlike sex, gender identity cannot be ascertained by simply looking at genitalia, studying DNA, or any other such luddite practice. The UK government’s Office of National Statistics, following broader government guidelines, says that “gender identity is a personal, internal perception of oneself and so the gender category someone identifies with may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.”

President Biden’s then-spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said that cross sex hormones – which damage children’s bone density, limit their brain development and leave them infertile – and surgical procedures to graft imitations of the genitalia of the opposite sex on minors are “best medical practice”. CNN even once claimed that there is no way to determine sex at birth. Presumably, this means that even sex is just a social construct.

Notice the language used by the gender movement. Sex is “assigned” at birth, rather than objectively observed. This is an important tell. It suggests that the gender activists do not believe in an objective reality. To understand the full absurdity of this, note the following: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who US President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have now placed on the US Supreme Court, said during her Senate confirmation hearings that she could not define the word ‘woman’ because she is “not a biologist”. If she cannot simply state that a woman is an adult human female, how does she know whether or not she is one? Is being a woman merely a feeling – a question of self-perception? 

In the absence of evidence and reason, there is only compulsion. So, gender identity needs to be “affirmed”. Gender affirmation, to put it bluntly, is the process by which we all debase ourselves by pretending to share in the delusions of others. We agree to pretend because to do otherwise is to risk ostracization by friends, colleagues and employers.

Throughout the corporate world, policies are worded so that companies can dismiss employees who damage the employer’s reputation, and publicly saying the obvious truth, that no amount of medication, surgery or willpower would make any female mammal a male, is considered damaging to your employer’s reputation and can lead to your dismissal. And, even before your dismissal, almost all social media companies would censor you. Effectively, if you tell the truth, you risk your ability to speak in the online public square and you risk your ability to earn a living.

This ruthless enforcement is necessary: non-compliance with the diktats of gender activists would constitute a microaggression, and it is because of people who commit microaggressions that trans individuals have a 40% suicide attempt rate. Yes, 40% of trans individuals attempt suicide, and 80% consider it.

You may not use this data to infer that the trans community is struggling with a tragic, staggering amount of mental illness, and that the compassionate, charitable thing to do is to treat it. You must merely accept your own complicity and guilt. To atone, you must affirm the validity of obvious delusions such as the genders below:

• Demiboy, or someone who can be cis (as in, normal) or trans, who partly identifies as boy, man or masculine, but who can also be anything else, and who, by identifying as demiboy, does not wish to tell you anything about whether they were born male or female. 

• Genderfluid, a concept which I find indistinguishable from mood. The gender of this person is fluid, as the name implies, and there is no limit to how or when his or her gender can change, or what it can change to.

• Aliagender, or someone who claims to not fit into any gender.

• Novigender, or someone whose gender cannot be expressed in words, just like Maverique, Intergender, Graygender, Genderqueer, or Aporagender. All real categories, or as real as these things can be, all of which are defined as genders that are between boy and girl and are tough to explain. Just like genderfluid and aliagender.

It is unclear how one ascertains with any scientific rigour that he has discovered a new gender. How would a concerned parent know if his or her child is novigender or graygender? What empirical test would be used? Do these terms signify different medical needs? Would two doctors examining the same child reach the same conclusion about the best path forward for treatment, if treatment is needed? We do not know. How could we know when objective reality does not seem to exist?

The cult of affirmation

The common thread tying the aforementioned gender identities is that they probably appeal to people who wish to say that they are suffering through something difficult that they cannot easily communicate.

Which leaves us in a bind.

On the one hand, human suffering is deserving of dignity. We would not wish ourselves to suffer without any consideration from those around us. And, obviously, those who attribute to themselves such absurd identities are indeed suffering. We should be considerate of their pain.

On the other hand, suffering is the most common component of the human experience. Your ancestors thought that suffering should be dignified with fortitude and silence. And suffer they did – wars, famines, plagues – with fortitude, in silence.

But with the transgender types, one cannot help but think that their suffering is not only notable in its depth and breadth – 80% of them have considered suicide, after all – but especially in its narcissism. They want the world to invent new grammar and new pronouns. Men want to go into women’s spaces. Women want to be men and want society to pretend that they are. They want the entire world to know and to respond to their ever-changing mood swings. And they are mood swings: some trans people claim that they cycle through four or five genders a day.

It is difficult to take seriously the person who went from maverique to graygender half an hour ago and now wants you to use newer, new pronouns, like zir instead of xer. There is something tragicomic to the whole thing, and one cannot help notice that it is self inflicted – bold, brave rejection of reality underpins their suffering, and simply accepting the facts could cure it.

Rather than just accept observable, objective, biological reality and move on, we are told that gender identity – that is, the incongruence between a transgender person’s mood and his observable, objective, biological reality – needs to be affirmed. It needs to be affirmed by allowing men to compete in women’s sports, including, one assumes, in sports like rugby or American football. A man was allowed to compete in a combat sport against a woman and to beat her face into a bloody pulp; another man had previously cracked his female opponent’s skull.

Injuries to female athletes do not matter. Equity matters more than women’s bodies.

Indeed, things have gotten so out of hand that progressive bastions like California and the UK allow male rapists to be recognised as women, and then place them in women’s prisons. And when these predators are let loose among vulnerable women, the consequences are so very predictable. California, in its wisdom and compassion, now distributes condoms to female inmates, in the hope that their rapists would have the decency to wear them before proceeding with the act of rape. The power of the trans movement is so overwhelming that this does not get a response from the #MeToo movement.

If you had told anyone a decade ago that this would be normalised, you would have been laughed out of the room. You were regularly told that the slippery slope is a right-wing trope.

Today, if you laugh at this madness, you are a Nazi.

An elite scam

At least a part of this madness stems from the incredible support given to the transgender movement by the establishment. After all, its bizarre ideology is parroted by the governments of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, among others. It is fully supported by the United Nations, the WHO, NATO and at least 83% of the Fortune 500 companies. Throughout the Western world, media outlets dutifully report that a woman with a penis raped another woman – media outlets that challenge the trans narrative are few and far between. The trans movement is fully endorsed by the Davos club– the World Economic Forum regularly publishes in support of transgenderism. So, one wonders, why is the elite so supportive of something so obviously insane? Do Jeffery Epstein’s and Harvey Weinstein’s friends really care about rights so much that they view basic biology as a violation of rights?

It is possible that the elites of our world have embraced this collective madness just because it is fashionable. It is worth noting, however, that for the elites, this particular madness is also quite useful.

If the oligarchic class can make you say that that the man with a beard and a penis is in fact a woman, they can make you say anything else. They can also be assured that they can subsequently say anything else to you and that you will simply nod in silence.

After all, the mark of tyranny is not the absence of elections or human rights. Gaddafi, Assad and the CCP have always held votes and elections and proclaimed their love of rights.

The true hallmark of tyranny is that the truth is not accepted as a defence: you must affirm the lie to be safe.

When you parrot an obvious lie enough times, you accept that there is no objective reality. You accept that the only truth is what your superiors tell you. If corporate can make you disbelieve your own eyes and surrender control over your own words, and bleat the obvious lie that “trans women are women”, what integrity do you have left? None. None at all. You have surrendered your mind, your words and your will. Your leaders have tested you and found you to be an obedient subject. You have been subdued – if you are a conservative, or just a realist, and in your heart, you do not agree with this madness, you have been found to be sufficiently submissive not to be deemed a threat. You have accepted the humiliation ritual involved in hearing this blatant lie without responding. You have been neutered.

Now, your superiors can be assured that you will embrace – or at least acquiesce to – other lies when they need you to. In large organisations, where staff are transitory, unreliable cogs, this kind of loyalty and obedience makes you valuable. It shows that when semi-legal, very immoral activity takes place, you will toe the line.

And this is why one finds that ambitious middle managers in large organisations are often the first to put pronouns in their email signatures and their LinkedIn bios. They are not telling their underlings their pronouns. They are signalling their loyalty to their masters. Promotion material indeed.

Of course, oligarchs want more of these types.

Say it loud, say it proud

It is worth pausing for a second. Ask yourself this. Before they broke you, before they could make you say birthing person and not mother, pregnant people and not expectant mothers, and chest feeding rather than breast feeding, what other, smaller lies did they slip past you? What million little things did they deceive you about? Did your past acquiescence to their lies embolden them? What lies will they ask you to parrot tomorrow?

If there is no limit to the extent to which you will debase yourself, will there be any limit to their lies?

The simple answer is no, there will not be. They will not stop. You must stand up and make them stop. You must reject this humiliation ritual.

You must tell them, to their faces, that trans women are not women, that trans people are, at best, mentally ill, that it is cruel to encourage their delusions, that the truth is the only path to salvation.

Trans lies matter, and it is time to end these lies.

So say it loud and say it proud: Trans women are men, trans men are women, and no amount of medical mutilation, drugs or willpower can change that. 

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The result of the endless expansion of rights has been a mental and moral muddle, where it is easier to assert new rights than to examine whether the old ones stood on solid ground. In this essay, I will try to examine whether rights are universal or located within a culture and a society. I will then highlight a basic misunderstanding: we once understood rights as being a space permitted by society to the individual to act in accordance with his duties; we now understand rights as claims an individual can make against a society. I will explain why this is nonsense: nature shows that we are born and reach adulthood indebted to family and society, not that we can make claims against society the moment we enter it. I assert that without returning to our original understanding of rights, we will continue down this path of madness and decline.

Universal rights and freedoms?

It is not clear to me at all where a right to life can come from, except from God. Atheistic claims, such as the right to life coming from an innate concept of fairness, are simply hollow: the strong have no need for fairness, and in fact constantly seek to subvert it. Moreover, secular ideologies that derive from Christianity, such as Marxism, have never recognised a right to life, and had no problem with eradicating entire classes of people. Communists and socialists in Russia, China, Cambodia, Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, and others were universally murderous. Furthermore, every pagan religion involves some form of human sacrifice. Offering for sacrifice the lives of virgins, slaves and, often, children, was seen as the most effective way of appeasing the gods by peoples such as diverse as the Incas, the Aztecs, the Vikings, the Carthaginians and the Dahomey. Indeed, child sacrifice is still practised by pagans today. All three monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, fought and vanquished faiths that practiced human sacrifice, in part to assert that the innocent and the weak also have a right to life. 

Equally, there is no cross-cultural consensus on a right to liberty, or, indeed, a definition of liberty. Slavery ended in the Islamic world thank to Christian firepower and dominance. The minute there was an opening for an Islamic group to impose a literalist interpretation of Islam, slavery resumed, as we saw in Syria and Libya. Slavery in Africa was practiced before the arrival of Europeans, probably for centuries. Slavery was not expressly prohibited in any culture until Pope Eugene IV did so in 1435, nor was slavery eradicated at any point in history until Europe and the Union forces in the United States took it upon themselves to eradicate it. The concept of liberty, individual or collective, did not exist for much of the world. It is, simply put, a European and Christian construct.  

Furthermore, freedom did not always mean unfettered individual freedom, as it seems to mean today. Freedom was always understood as bounded, but, now, with the abortionists and the trans movement, freedom is asserted even against biology. People now demand that their “sex assigned at birth”, that is, the sex objectively observed from their genitals, be subject to review at their whim. Women and men demand the right to dispose of unwanted babies, as a means of addressing their lack of responsibility and commitment. Now, through euthanasia, we are demanding the freedom to kill the sick and the elderly because they are inconvenient, all under the name of liberty and the right to choose. This has reached such terrifying proportions that in the Netherlands the law permits teenagers to be killed by doctors for being depressed. 

Some progressives demand freedom from religion, by which they mean preventing communities where a faith predominates from publicly living in accordance with their faith, lest that offend a single individual's sensibilities. Such people are willing to force schools to ban collective prayer because a single atheist family complained. This is an inversion of rights – rights may have at one time meant that the collective cannot impose its will on the individual. Now, rights mean that the individual does have in fact the right to impose his will on the collective. That this conception of freedom destroys the coherence and cohesiveness of society is not something that is considered by progressives. They believe in the perfectly atomised individual, who is not tied down by things like religion, traditional morality or God. 

Clearly, this is nonsense. It is nonsense because it goes against human nature, which is religious, as well as society’s wellbeing. A good and functioning society is a precondition for there to be any rights, and so our thinking of rights must be bounded by our need to protect society. Furthermore, the definition of freedom has never before included freedom from obligations towards the collective, or freedom from biology, or freedom from order. Liberty can only be within an order. Anything else would be more appropriately described as chaos, in which millions of petty tyrants would daily flourish and die.

Rights and freedoms are not universally applicable for the simple reason that many societies do not agree with the Western definition of rights, which derives from Christianity, or even with their existence.

Indeed, from an atheistic perspective, it is unclear why Man would have any rights. Are we not merely poorly evolved chimpanzees, according to Christopher Hitchens, or the Third Chimpanzee, according to Jared Diamond? Why should chimps have rights or freedoms? 

Defining rights

We are confused about what the word rights means. It used to mean a carve out granted by society to the individual, so that the individual may act in accordance with his conscience. It was correctly deemed necessary for an individual to enjoy things like privacy, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech to enable him to exercise his conscience in an informed manner, though it was also always understood that these freedoms are bounded. 

Today, however, the word rights refers to claims that an individual can make against a society, such as a right to be provided with healthcare, education, or welfare. This conception of rights is applied today even when the individual in question is completely alien to the society against which he makes claims, as in the case of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants. 

In the first meaning of the word ‘rights’, we refer to society recognising the duties that Man has towards himself. This includes his duty to preserve his own life and that of his family, his duty to act in accordance with his own conscience, his duty to be true to the Truth. In this sense, Man has a right to life, a right to self-defence, a right to liberty, a right to freedom of conscience, and a right to speak the truth freely (which is not quite the same as freedom of speech). The word “rights” used in this sense refers to duties that he has to live up to in order to be worthy of being called Man. In this sense, the word rights is used to signify that society recognises that all men are burdened by these duties, and should act accordingly, for the benefit of society as a whole. In this conception, no man has absolute authority or complete access to the truth, and so society creates these carve outs, or rights, to permit Man enough freedom to reach the Truth and live and act in accordance with it.  

The second sense of the word rights has become more and more common in modern parlance. As such, we hear about the right to free healthcare, the right to free education, the right to asylum in a foreign land, the right to safe spaces, the right to travel across international borders, the right to reside in foreign lands among foreign peoples and foreign cultures, etc… In this sense, the word “rights” refers to claims that individuals can make against a society, even against a society of which the individual is not a member, or even against a society towards whom the claimant is in fact hostile, as in the case of a large proportion of asylum seekers or economic migrants. It is the opposite of the original meaning of the word. 

One can argue, convincingly, that one wishes to live in a society that does feel and act as though it is obligated to provide healthcare, education, and welfare for every resident. However, one must also ask what the individual owes to such a society. And one must address the question – are equal rights to be given to everyone who claims them upon arrival into a society to which he has no relationship, or are there prior debts than one must pay before one can claim rights? 

Rights or duties?

Man is born in debt. Man enters society owing it his life, his knowledge and his talents, and not with claims against it. 

A woman’s body will involuntarily abort a baby she is carrying if she is stressed enough. While breastfeeding, her milk will stop flowing if she is placed under sufficient pressure. Basic biology shows that any child who makes it to five owes a debt to fortune, or, more precisely, providence, and owes a far bigger debt to the society that protected him and his mother to allow her to nurse, shelter and raise him. If it is a society where the norm is for a mother and father to be involved in the life of the child, the child’s debt is even greater, as this is a society where some of the male’s baser instincts have been at least partially tamed. A father who resists his baser instincts and stays to raise and protect his family passes to his sons the obligations to do the same, and to his daughters the expectation that their husbands will eventually do the same. Survival within the confines of a loving family confers on the child a debt to his family and society, not obligations that his family and society have towards him. 

Similarly, one does not choose to have, say, musical talent. And he who has such talent may not even know that he has it unless it’s discovered by someone else. Even then, unless he’s helped to develop his talent, sometimes with the help being given before there is any indication that such talent exists, his talent is of no use. As such, the musically talented man owes enormous debts to those that help him develop, and the same logic applies to any other kind of talent - carpenting, building, painting, engineering, etc…. A man whose talents have been discovered and refined owes enormous debts to those who discovered his potential, to those who taught him, to those who came before him to discover and teach his teachers, and to all of those who enabled the functioning of a society in which the discovery and development of talents was rewarded. Similarly, one born into a position of privilege, such as wealth or political power, has greater obligations than one who is born destitute. He has received a bigger gift from providence, and owes in return a greater debt. Such a man also owes a debt to those who permit a legal and political order to function well enough for power and wealth to be passed on. 

Rather critically, the debts men owe are specific to a society. We owe our first debts to our parents, their parents, their friends and community; to our teachers, to the discoverers of our talents, to those in our immediate neighbourhood and vicinity, and not to people halfway across the globe with whom no one we know has ever had any interaction. Our debts tie us to specific people, places, legal traditions, cultures and religions.  Our morality must be based on the reality of these debts and obligations towards our society, not on the baseless abstraction that is individual rights. Only by recognising that can we begin to escape the dangerous moral and mental muddle that modern human rights law has become. 

A Path Forward

There is no point in being a conservative - there is almost nothing left to conserve in Western institutions. Our goal is restoration.

To begin this difficult task, the first step must be to impose a limit on the rights culture. We must return to our original understanding of rights - a set of necessary carve outs that permit society to function well, without sacrificing its cohesion or sanity.

We must insist on the right of society to restrict who enters it, as a necessary part of maintaining social cohesion and social sanity. We must exclude from our conception of rights those whose inclusion would only promote madness and division.

We must insist on the right of society to impose minimal norms of decency.

We must clearly oppose the idea of rights as claims that an individual can make against a society, and insist on the duty of a society to compel its members to pay their social and cultural debts.

It is only through such an understanding of society and the relationship between its constituents that we can begin to return to sanity.