ONLY one week on in the war against Iran. Yet impatience and doom-mongering beset the press. It’s had me wondering how Brits would cope today with a four-year war of Iran’s bombs dropping on our soil.
Not well.
But never fear: it won’t happen. Our revered leader would prove an able Marshal Pétain to the ayatollahs’ Hitler before the first bomb was dropped, or so his antics in Westminster Hall indicate. Our Vichy France would be Brummie, Manc and Londonistan Britain. Mr Farage would take refuge at Mar-a-Lago as the leader in exile, leaving it to Tommy Robinson and Urban Scoop to run the underground resistance at home.
Who would supply such a resistance with stealth airdrops of arms? Any EU country? I doubt it. No, we’d have to wait for a US land invasion to rescue us while a new British Gestapo rounded up and tortured the dissidents. Just a bad dream catalysed by a week when one minority ethnic group dictated Britain’s foreign policy; when an anti-Islamophobia tsar was announced, and which saw the devout Muslim Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, staggeringly claiming that she calls herself English ‘without reservation or hesitation’. Watch the clip if you haven’t. Insensitive doesn’t begin to express it. And I thought the Left condemned cultural appropriation.
Along with the activities and attitudes of Labour, I also saw a worrying number of what Daniel Jupp has termed the ‘Woke Reich’ (or right) rearing their heads on social media to deplore war and the ‘Zionist plot’ behind it. Mirror images of the Islamic left’s new friends, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, people who seem happy to ‘park’ Iran’s monstrous global (about to be nuclear) terror regime. Depressing.
A severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, maybe. But Carlson’s statement that Trump’s Iran campaign is ‘absolutely disgusting and evil’ speaks to something else about our modern feminised and emasculated society and its underlying attitude to war itself. A suicidal inverse moral relativism that says we are not even allowed to defend ourselves; that no war can ever be purposeful, let alone righteous.
Only the West has fallen prey to this. Russia endures its war because Russians still believe that fighting for their country has a value, so the Russian blogger Simplicius wrote on the fourth anniversary of the Ukraine war a couple of weeks ago: ‘In the tradition of steel sharpening steel, there is a reason that Slavic people and Russians in particular have retained the most credible warrior culture of all ‘European’ peoples to this day . . . conflicts . . . help maintain a sense of that ancient primal edge now missing in most “modernised” nations and their people. This opinion may be controversial, so it’s understandable that many will disagree . . .
‘In today’s world, which slips hourly into the irresolute crevasses of post-modernity, men in particular find fewer and fewer pure or truly worthwhile pursuits, much less reasons to exist altogether. Meaning is being entirely eroded by the frivolities, ambiguities, banalities, and outright psychological oppressions of our current digital, and now AI-en-sloppified, information-panopticon-age. In a spiritually dissolute — and desolate — world, where not only meaning has been lost, but the future feels for many not even worth living nor dying for, what more tangible and pure a mortal pursuit could there be than war?‘
Good question and powerful stuff. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth understand, no doubt, but how many others? The ever-sceptical Mark Steyn asked how ‘one man in twelve months can change the wholly corrupt, dysfunctional and self-serving culture of a military whose “joint chiefs” boast in the media that, if the President is minded to try anything, they’ll dial the enemy and give him a heads-up . . .’
Steyn is talking about the contaminated war culture of our time. A culture that is undoubtedly rooted in the feminisation of society — the five-decade silent revolution that’s created successive generations of ever more lost boys, emasculated men and mucked up the West’s mental health to boot.
It is something I’ve been trying to warn of since the early 1990s. As I was reminded by an email last week from the director of the Christopher Dawson Centre in the US. It relayed a conference at which Erica Komisar, a specialist in childhood development and author of Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, had spoken.
Mothers, she said (as she’s been saying for years) are not just emotionally necessary for the child’s development but biologically necessary. Particularly in the first three years. Lack of the mother at this crucial stage is what’s ultimately behind the significant increase in mental illness in the West.
What an irony that our war-averse society is prepared to be so cruel to defenceless infants! But what the email forcefully brought to mind is that the same pro-feminisation policies that have corrupted every policy arena and institution are all premised on that first fundamental act of separating a mother from her baby. The outcome? An army of unempathetic, bureaucratic managerial women (see any quango or NHS trust and who runs them) on the one hand and a dysfunctional national male psyche represented by Keir Starmer — today’s modern man — on the other.
Will, can, Farage’s new faces make any difference to the political and social dead end we are at? After reading a Critic article last week that asserted old Tories are what Reform needs (rather than the ‘lunatics’ that initially populated the party) I despaired. It was a poor argument and hardly inspired confidence that the best hope of an opposition we have has any idea about the suicidal forces that have so weakened our society. Boilerplate Tories like Jenrick don’t ‘get it’ any more than Kemi B does. So his speech at last Monday’s Reform UK press conference showed. I could have been listening to a Tory Chancellor’s speech at any time in the last 14 years. Their only boast that they can’t possibly be worse than Labour is just not enough to save us.
Several ‘affirmative’ emails last week — praising TCW and our output — kept me from sinking into despondency. If I have failed to thank any of you, please take this as a big thank you!
