Surviving the Coming Civil War

The Centre Cannot Hold

African migrants arriving in Kent; Decline of Carthage, by JMW Turner; the Fall of Rome by Thomas Cole; a protest by Extinction Rebellion in contemporary England.

I’m not an alarmist, but recently I’ve become convinced that civil war is probable, even inevitable, in England, but also in many countries across the West, as the ideological divide becomes an abyss, and our governing elites not only fail to understand the concerns of the native populations, but simply ignore them. Many of you will have seen the viral video interview on Louise Perry’s channel, Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, with Professor David Betz, a historian of war at King’s College, London, and an advisor to the British government and others. (In case you haven’t, it’s episode 124, on YouTube.) In it, Professor Betz outlines why he thinks civil war is inevitable in Britain in the next five or ten years. The reasons are familiar to anyone who follows Writing Dangerously. Since I have discussed most of them detail before, I won’t repeat them in detail, but just refresh your memory. I may add one or two of my own!

First, we have an elite that not only dominates government, but the NGOs, quangos, the educational establishment, the media, entertainment and the arts, and this elite is largely leftist, and almost exclusively globalist-liberal, with an unwavering belief in a rules-based order, and institutions like the UN, the EU, the WEF, WHO and so on—all run by unelected bureaucrats drawn from their own ranks. Nearly all of these people believe in a borderless world, or claim to. In a way this is a survival of classical liberal economic doctrine, which held that free trade and free movement of labour were essential for prosperity. In the nineteenth century, to a large extent, when travel was slow, difficult, dangerous, and expensive, it largely worked. Now it doesn’t. The vast numbers of immigrants entering Europe now, some illegally, but the majority of them legally, are threatening the European way of life, as they cannot be absorbed and integrated. Everyone who knows Paris is aware that there are Muslim areas which are beyond the jurisdiction of the police, and unsafe for outsiders to visit. This is true of many areas of British cities too. Even Portugal, which until very recently was extremely safe, now has no-go areas, particularly in Lisbon. One million immigrants have arrived in the past 3 years—that might not sound like much, but it’s 10% of the population. Even small cities are beginning to have a majority Bangladeshi and Pakistani population, and the great majority of these migrants are young men, so the chances of them integrating are remote. On the other hand, sexual assault and rape have risen dramatically everywhere that immigration has exploded, unsurprisingly, as the so-called ‘grooming gangs’ (in fact rape gangs) scandal in Britain demonstrates.

I am not surprised that the native population is mostly unhappy about this, but whenever ordinary people protest, certainly if they are working-class and white—they are labelled as ‘racist’ by the elites, and, as Keir Starmer openly stated during the Southport riots, would be brutally suppressed. On the other hand, we witnessed Muslim demonstrations—those in favour of Gaza and Hamas, particularly, but others too—degenerate into anti-Semitic chants and violence, and yet the police stood by. Anyone doubting the Establishment’s desire for a two-tier judicial system can no longer deny it, when directives from the British government to the judiciary have been given that custodial sentences—i.e. prison—should be examined and considered more carefully in cases involving women, ethnic minorities and religious minorities. In other words, everyone is to be viewed leniently except the wicked white men. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer wished Muslims a happy Ramadan—can anyone imagine him wishing Christians a happy Lent?—and the hapless king packed dates with his consort, Queen Camilla, for the iftar feast with which Muslims break their fast. In other words, there appears to be a collusion on the part of our elites to promote Islam. Why should this be? Why should the globalist Left support a patriarchal religion that explicitly upholds men’s superiority, to the extent that a woman’s testimony is worth only half of a man’s in Sharia courts, and girls can be married at the age of nine? Moreover, this is an openly homophobic religion whose adherents have frequently thrown homosexuals off very high buildings. On the face of it, it’s very strange indeed.

And yet there can be no doubt that the Left have entered an alliance with Islam. The intention must be to destroy the roots of Western civilization, since all communists have attempted to erase the preceding culture before instituting their own ‘utopia’, from Lenin and Stalin in Russia, eradicating the aristocracy and the kulaks and the church, to Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia and Mao’s genocide and cultural revolution in China. Incidentally, although each of these did work, in the sense that most of the culture was erased, they all failed to create the envisioned utopias.

The other reason for the Left’s slavish adoration of Islam is demographic. The thinking goes like this: the Muslims are the only ethnic group whose population is growing, so if we help them and give them special privileges and benefits, they will vote for us, and our position is assured. So far, to some extent, this has been successful. London, which is now under the tutelage of Sadiq Khan, votes Labour. Quite a few Labour MPs are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage and campaigned on Gaza. However, given the contempt that most British Muslims have for western decadence, which they demonstrate in the 80 or so Sharia Courts they have set up in the country, we can expect that before long they will form an Islamic Party and jettison their support for the socialists, whose aims do not accord with their own.

The vast scale of the immigration only benefits the upper and managerial classes. The migrants provide cheap labour, and thus keep costs down in the service industries. They also keep rents very high, which is excellent for rich landlords, but not so good for ordinary young working people struggling to set up a home. No wonder indigenous British people find it hard to start families when rents and house prices are astronomical, largely due to the shortage caused by immigrants, and when half or more of their salaries go on taxes, much of which funds benefits for immigrants. 78% of Muslim women in Britain are on benefits currently. These populations are not a net economic benefit to the nation, but a net loss.

I could go on for hundreds of pages, as Douglas Murray does in The Strange Death of Europe, but won’t. Read Murray. Listen to Betz. As Matt Goodwin says repeatedly, our elites are not listening—in fact, they are ignoring the wishes of the electorate. Democracy is no longer taking place, or even a semblance of democracy. Our governments have become illegitimate. This is obvious in Britain, where only 20% of the electorate voted for Labour, and most of those now strongly disapprove of Labour’s policies. But similar problems exist in Germany, France, Romania, and other countries. Across the continent, ordinary people are livid.

So what will civil war look like? Betz predicts that it’s not likely to be an armed conflict with armies fighting it out, as in the American Civil War, or the English one of the seventeenth century. It could be more like a ‘dirty war’, like the one in Colombia, for example, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, and relied on guerrilla attacks, sabotage of infrastructure, and so on. Increasingly, the cities are inhabited by immigrants, on the one hand, and the rich, who retain the prestigious addresses. It would be easy for the indigenous English to cut off supplies to the urban areas, by choking off food supplies and sabotaging power stations and so on.

What are the best strategies to survive a war of attrition like that? First, Betz suggests, live in the country. That’s where the food is produced, and where the great concentrations of indigenous population lives. Make sure you’re part of a community, rather than living the life of an isolated digital nomad. If you can, grow your own food. Communities need to be strengthened. Inter-sectarian violence is likely to break out. I would deplore that, although I think our churches should be defended.

We can’t blame all this on our imbecile ruling class, although they are certainly guilty of much of the problem. In Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler posits that history is cyclical, that civilizations rise and fall inevitably, usually in periods of about a thousand years, and that ours, which he calls the Faustian civilization, for its infinite striving, was already clearly in decline when he was writing, a little over 100 years ago, and would be collapsing about now. Although Spengler has been criticised for his lack of knowledge of some European civilizations, and the fact that some, like the Chinese, have lasted far more than a millennium, I believe he is broadly right. Anyone who compares Europe at its height, say between 1650 and 1800, with the twentieth century, could hardly fail to notice the inferiority of our architecture, our music, painting, and poetry. But above all, the dispassionate observer notices that whereas we used to have cohesive high-trust societies, united by common values, particularly religion, that’s no longer the case. We have become godless materialists, for whom the universe is meaningless, and thus lacking in dignity and purpose. We deride our own history and our ancestors. At least the elites who dominate our educational system and media do. Such a society cannot hope to survive. So expunging the elites and starting mass deportations will not solve our problems, although that might be an excellent start.

To renew our civilization, we must return to our traditional values, which would mean embracing Christianity again, and the classical tradition—or else we must find new ones. The men of the Renaissance built modern Europe on the ideas of the Greeks and Romans. Could we do that again? I think we could. This is the theme of Lord of the Rings—a return to ancient English values (those of ‘the Shire’) in response to the threat of barbarism and tyranny. We must either find the courage to form a new fellowship of the Ring, a new Knights of the Round Table—or we perish, or become slaves.

(PS: the blog has grown fast in the past month—almost 300 subscribers now, and close to 500 followers. I thank you all. I try to respond to all courteous, relevant comments. Do engage with posts, please: it helps the algorithms, and helps us build community.)