THE other day Kathy Gyngell, as TCW editor, wrote an excellent piece about the Iran air strikes. In that commentary, she pondered the topic of resolve, manliness, fortitude and endurance in relation to war, and suggested that the feminisation of politics and society was partly to blame for the very pronounced anti-war sentiments which now come from pretty much everyone. These sentiments, Kathy suggested, are much more than just the wisdom of avoiding unnecessary conflicts or the compassion of lamenting the loss of life that war inevitably brings.
She asked if too many people in our society lack the spine to do the right thing, even if the right thing means war? Are we too feminised? Are we too soft and complacent? Do we have an unrealistic expectation that peace is the natural state of mankind when history suggests this is not the case? Could modern Britain endure another world war with the mighty resolve it showed twice before, or even have enough self-belief and firmness to willingly go through a Falklands conflict, for example, in defence of British citizens when the cause is just?
These are not idle questions. The world isn’t a place where wars can always be avoided just by adopting a pacifist outlook. Peace, that is your ability to live in safety, always has to be defended. And when war comes looking for you, it rarely comes politely, courteously, and ready to pass you by so long as you say ‘it’s not my war’.
It’s true, too, that when enemies come after you, you better hope that you live in a place still capable of producing people who can fight when it’s needed, you better hope that there are tough men ready to lay down their lives for others, and tough women too.
In response to Kathy’s opinion piece, TCW received a fair amount of criticism. One commentator on X bemoaned how the site’s content had, in his view changed. During covid, he said, TCW was a must-go-to source. Now, and I think he was referring to a few other articles as well, it was just like a mainstream legacy media outfit, like the Daily Express or the Daily Telegraph, giving him, as he put it, the content of ‘the CIA and MI5’.
Well, all our bank accounts would be healthier if that was the case, believe me.This, for anyone who doubts it, is a truly independent publication, in no one’s pay, that struggles on minimum donations, while striving to tell the truth in an era when most ‘news’ is indistinguishable from propaganda.
But I get it. During covid virtually all of us who wrote for TCW were obvious rebels. We opposed the economic stupidity of the lockdowns, and we opposed their cruelty too. We argued for freedom and bodily sovereignty and choice from, I thought, a right-wing belief in both individual liberty and sane and limited governance. Some of us, like my friend Professor Norman Fenton, lost their careers for being the voice of reasonable restraint and rational analysis during that hysterical period. TCW was censored by the Government and demonetised. Kathy was banned from Twitter.
Today, the issue of the moment is no longer the war against the people but the war against Iran, and on that different parts of the right are greatly divided. Some of the people who agreed with TCW on covid aren’t amenable to articles that ponder whether, as a society, we are too weak for military conflict, and even less amenable to being told that some of us actually back Trump as a ‘saviour of the West’ and specifically his and Israel’s Iran intervention. For what it’s worth my support of Israel since October 7 has personally lost me many people who were once enthusiastic followers of my writing.
Contrary to the perception of too many people on social media, Israel does not offer huge bribes to everyone who supports them. That’s another irrational myth, just as ludicrous as the idea that a virus follows a floor plan route picked out by directional arrows.
Everything I oppose about the left are things I oppose because they are, to varying degrees, irrational, stupid or evil, with proven records of negative consequence, hypocrisy and injustice. If former (anti-lockdown, anti-covid vaccine) allies become obsessed with Israel and with Jews and start telling me why all wars, all US policy, all the many years of failed conflicts before this one, are the fault of the Jews, I will oppose them. For me that thinking has a proven track record of injustice and evil which is pretty obvious, and which any sane and decent person should avoid.
But all of a sudden supposed Maga influencers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens in the US and Truthers and alleged patriots and liberty lovers in the UK were saying the same things on Western military actions that Ilhan Omar would say in the US Congress or that Owen Jones would put in a Guardian article.
In the UK some people who were my allies against covid tyranny sadly have gone this way, particularly if they were in the ‘Truther’ movement (people who believe that official explanations must always conceal the true explanation). October 7 revealed how quickly some people on the right as well as the left would start excusing and tacitly backing the savage terrorists of Hamas, and how many Truthers went ‘all-in’ for the same interpretation of the Israel-Gaza war as the hard left.
A great deal of their obsession with Israel is about hating Jews, particularly when we contrast it with the lack of attention they’ve paid to other conflicts. The accusation that TCW is in anyone’s pocket or controlled by anyone is not just unjust, it’s untrue. We are doing what we did then, on a pittance or as volunteers: challenging lies, challenging irrationality, and challenging false consensus as we encounter it, from a right-wing starting point and according to right-wing principles.
It wasn’t very popular to be against covid tyranny at the time. It’s not a very popular position now to say that some wars are necessary and just even if others weren’t. Nor is it all that popular online to say that Israel is an ally, that Jews aren’t secretly behind all evil, and that Trump’s struck a pretty good balance between refusing unnecessary wars and taking action where it’s actually needed. But if you want truly independent content, if you want a source that isn’t owned and that will tell you something different to what podcasters are saying or what political parties are saying or what the legacy media are saying, it is here you are going to find it.
Let the right be the place where we tend not to agree with the hard left and with dictatorial, theocratic Islamic regimes, and where we have the wit and wisdom to recognise the difference between imaginary threats and real ones. And, on a larger scale, the difference between our real enemies and Jewish people or the nation of Israel.
Hamas and Iran have already considered us, the US and the Western world, to be at war with them, simply because we are different, simply because we are not Muslim, simply because of our existence. Perhaps rather than saying that Israel drags other nations into its wars, it’s more accurate to say that Israel has taken a disproportionate share of the burden in a war we were already in, without knowing or acknowledging it.
War will not always be your choice. Nor is it sane or realistic to say that war can never be your choice. Absolutes regarding the use of force are for idealists and fantasists. Opposing the strikes on Iran out of pacifism or isolationism is unrealistic, while opposing them out of Jew-hatred is vile. If the right is to serve any purpose at all, it must at the least be more rational than the left. If we can’t recognise the difference between an allied democracy responding to terror, an Islamic theocracy that spreads terror as often as it can, we are no better than the wilder reaches of the left and the people we have been opposing on everything else.
