Essays















On Nationalism




This weekend, the Armistice and Remembrance days are held. The Metropolitan Police, whose aim is not to enforce the law, but to keep society at peace, are allowing hundreds of thousands of muslims to go about, openly demanding an end to Israel, and secretly desiring the end of Britain as a non-muslim nation. I have nothing good to say about the police for personal reasons; I will say no more about them here; it is a tiresome subject. The Home Secretary, Suella Bravermann, has said enough about them.

What concerns me is, politicians and tradition. A conservative thinker, it is said, must find the words to explain his prejudice in favour of things just as they are. That is what I am doing. Or, better, I would like to force the hands of the clock back. Because, in the past three years, British politicians have taken a turn for the worse, a turn even for the impossibly bad. I am concerned to show how this has happened, and how to fix it.


The degeneration of the English

When I say, which I do here, that 'the present generation of politicians is degenerate’, I have it in mind to say that they are lacking in intellect and virtue. I mean, how else can you explain the irretrievable ruin of the economy by means of the ‘Lock Downs’ of 2020 and 2021. Or explain the catastrophic and epoch-ending defeat of NATO in Ukraine? Or, how explain the thousands of foreign men invading our country every day, with the consequence that the number of aggressive and organised muslims in Britain is so great now, that they exceed the ability of the police to stop them marching and praying, when it is necessary to do so?

These are signs of a very poor quality of leadership, a very poor politics. But our elite political class does not lack intellect. Most senior politicians have been to elite schools, and elite universities, where they succeeded. And they do certainly mean well; they aim to be good, and they are so, give or take some of the usual vices prevalent everywhere, so that they are known to be self-serving. So, Richie Sunak cannot be said to be stupid, and Kier Starmer is not a bad man.

There is a core of job which must be done by a politician. First, protect the nation against its enemies; this also applies to the protection of its borders. Second, to protect the property of the nationals; this can also be expressed as, the requirement to conserve the value of the currency. And these two are the job of the politician at the core. Massive failure in these two principles in recent times.

It can be fairly asked, whether protecting the nation is not ‘nationalistic’? The answer is obviously, yes. The nation state government is composed of men who represent the members of the nation. So they are logically, and necessarily nationalists. They do not represent the ideas or backgrounds of the nation’s people, but rather their mere existence as a culture.

These representatives are traditionally the most wealthy, and some selection of the commoners and poor people; both types are in politics to serve the interests of the British nation. We do not have any other form of government that this ultra nationalistic one.

What the state should not do, is provide propaganda, or attempt to pacify and control the people. This is the job for culture, or in other words, the job of the Church. I have more to say about how, failing to preserve the currency, and to protect our property, or to protect our borders, or to protect our culture, the Sunak type of government is more interested, particularly as we see with the muslim protests these days, in pacifying the mob. The Sunak type of government has seen its primary aim as keeping the peace and pacifying the people of the nation; they have done so by legalising certain crimes, and by crushing any complaints which British people make about this.

They have failed terribly in the chief core job of a political class, and they have stepped into the area of the Church. How do politicians fail in this way? It is not by conspiracy, or by intent. There is no secret conscious plan. Their inept and destructive actions are not due to youth or lack of experience. Pitt, who saw us through the Napoleonic era, was a young man. Age or youth are not factors. Rather, they lack any interest in tradition; they do not honour the nation’s history, or their predecessors. They do not have any respect for higher things than them. An interest in tradition is what they are lacking. Tradition is the muscle of an intellect, and the strength of virtue and good action.

Nationalism, which is another word for love of the tradition and inheritance of the people, is essential to the entire nexus of democracy, and the representative government. Prior to nationalism, kings were the only politicians, and they were dynastic, utterly despotic; they were interested only in their own property and territory. But for three or four hundred years, the nation itself is the king, so to speak. Tribal loyalty to the nation makes a king of every individual in Britain. The nation is the people, the state or the government, is the protector of the nation.

And who are the people? This essential attribute of the state government was espoused by Gladstone and Coleridge, as an expression of the classic vision of tradition and conservatism: the state protects the Church, because we are a Christian people. And so, every man who aims to serve in the state must be a practicing Christian. If he is not a Christian, he may not practice or hold any office. This is how it used to be. The Church and the culture of Christianity is what makes the British an effective coherent people, who can then be served by politicians. Christianity is the nation’s character. And this is the tradition which today they lack. It is the higher thing, which is God; which can be put into words as tradition and history; which keeps men on the right path.

Instead, they are Liberals, to a very high degree. This is a very harmful and counter-democratic position for politicians to assume.

Today, the full evil of Liberalism in its developed form is now on display. What is Liberalism? It is international, so that the nation today has to elect either Starmer or Sunak, who by necessity then betray them to internationals and international organisations. A Liberal state defeats its own purpose: it is Judas, and Brutus. A Liberal nation is borderless, and lacks any religion of its own, because it is open to all. Every man is for himself; every man eventually ends up owning nothing because his property has no defence. Liberalism cannot build or protect.

Liberalism showed its failure in recent years; its essence if failure, when it is established on the national level. Because it is in full spate, and it is obviously in its plethoric, in its final stage of full flowering, we can see the full excessive degeneracy of it. The Russians defeated more than thirty other combined liberal nations only this year. Also, Liberalism’s external enemy, namely fundamentalist islam, has invaded the liberal nation states. To keep the peace and control the people, they are encouraged to enter into a soporific state (which is what Liberalism values, above all other virtues), the Liberal state is prepared to accept murder and rape as legal actions, if only the peaceful harmony of the people is maintained. This is what happened with the rape gangs, when, until recently, the police and the liberal establishment turned a blind eye to the rape and murder of so many British orphan girls within our own towns.

How did nationalism fade away? It became known as a Far Right idea. Having been classified as such, a couple of generations have been educated to consider tradition and Christian culture to be Far Right. So, when we read anything written, or see anything done by British men, from before, say, 1970, we find ourselves in the company of the Far Right. All of the past and all higher things are far right, these days.

How does liberalism proceed? It proceeds by open borders, the degeneration of the people and the politicians, into atheism and attenuation. The nation accepted this weakness for the following reasons: first, because of an economic prosperity; and second, because of a cultural nihilism and ugliness. Atheistic tolerance and internationalism are the belief system of more or less anyone with any education in Britain. Nationalism simply has no words or proponents at all; for the past two or more decades it has been rendered more or less illegal. But to survive into the next hundred years, the British have to enforce Christian belief on all holders of public office, and all statesmen, and reassert the simple core of national political life: protection of the nation, protection of the property of individual men, and protection of the currency by means of a careful protectionism; and through the revival of tradition.

The sine qua non of a politician, in order for Britain to survive beyond the crises which come on faster and faster as the end of liberalism comes on, is a conservative education in British and Western European history, and communion in the Church. Keeping quiet is exactly what the Liberal state has been trying to make every British person do for the past forty years: it is the essence of Liberalism. It is no coincidence that, for the sake of peaceful co-existence with our enemies, and in general a sleepiness of Liberalism, and because of foreign unbelievers and criminals of all sorts, who have been let in without any meaningful restraint, we are also under greater and greater surveillance, being locked up, being monitored, and under control, and in a more and more futuristic society, that is to say one without a past, because these are the means by which Britain will become entirely international and empty of all culture.

Christianity is British culture.

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Strangers

When Christ said: Blessed are you, etc., he addressed himself to his Church and his followers. Anyone who is not his follower is not due any Christian love at all. Christ did not ask us to indulge atheists and the followers of false prophets, the followers of idols and strange gods. I do not think that followers of factions, such as most foreign people are, should be shown any love or kindness at all.


Welfare

The first signs of Liberalism come with Lloyd George and the young Wynstan Churchill, with their Welfare Bills. The decline of Britain into a Liberal nightmare begins then, at the time of the Great War; the state usurped the place of the Church. It was noted by the prominent commentators of the time that England seemed to have disappeared in a great movement, almost overnight, at that time.


On Christian politicians

See Oliver Cromwell and Milton, and their attitude toward the people, the nation, and the enemy for further guidance on the spirit of a devotional politics. I intend to do so. While Cromwell overturned the dynastic tyranny of the Stewarts on behalf of a stripped down Presbyterianism, it is Orthodox Christianity that the British must struggle for in future.


Jason Powell



Jason Powell, 2023.