At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.
Someone will draw the line somewhere, somehow, before it’s too late, won’t they?
I’d like to address this question — not answer it, for there can be no answer — in an oblique way, by coming at it indirectly.
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For over a thousand years the normal form of European governance was the hereditary monarchy. Modern European democracy grew out of venerable monarchical structures, which were not destroyed (nor made vestigial) until after the devastation wrought by the Great War.
But where did hereditary monarchy come from? The institution did not spring full-grown from the head of Zeus. It was not the customary form of government throughout antiquity.
Hereditary monarchy — generally speaking, the primogeniture of a sovereign’s male offspring, usually accompanied by a divine seal of approval — arose during the Middle Ages, as the institution of kingship stabilized and was consolidated into the feudal system.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, much of Europe was overrun by various Germanic tribes. Within these groups kingship was quite different from the imperial Roman model, and also from what arose several centuries later in northern Europe. It was not at all hereditary — although being the son of the king could give a man a leg up, in much the same way that a child of a Hollywood star is more likely to become a success in the movies than others in his age group.
The English word “king” derives from a Common Germanic root, kuniŋgaz, which developed into the regional variants cyning, kuning, and koning, and eventually into the words for “king” that are found in the Germanic languages today. It was made up of two particles, which were, in effect, kin and ing. “Kin” has the obvious meaning, “those related by blood”, and the suffix -ing means “one belonging to or having the characteristics of”. These parts were combined into “kin-ing”, so that the king was an exemplar of his tribe, someone who best represented his own kind.
The office of kingship existed at more or less the tribal level. The king attained to this position through a combination of valued characteristics: prowess in battle, physical strength and courage, organizational skills, and all the other traits which might cause a man to be respected by his fellows. Gaining the office did not always require personal combat, but no king could retain his position without the skills of a warrior. The greatest kings — and the founders of what would later become dynasties — were those who were acclaimed in battle and also shrewd in political matters, who combined skill with intelligence, who mixed muscle with brains.
Based on his prowess and skills, the king was chosen by acclamation within the local group or tribe. During the early Middle Ages the landscape of northern Europe was a patchwork of local kings who, using today’s nomenclature, might be more accurately identified as tribal chieftains or warlords.
These were uncouth barbarians by the standards that arose five or six centuries later. They were violent, brutal, and unscrupulous towards anyone outside of their domain. Towards their own tribe — their kin — they were loyal and protective. The king dispensed justice within the group, and if he were not lawful and fair by the group’s standards, he would not remain king for long, for there were always competitors eager to supplant him.
Do these early kings — rude barbarians who took care of their own — remind you of anything?
Hint: it’s something that we’ve been discussing here recently.
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I don’t know about you, but the cyning and his tribal brothers put me in mind of the Danish chapter of Hells Angels.
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During the Middle Ages, as what eventually became European civilization was emerging, local kings warred with one another over resources and territory. Kingdoms met and coalesced, either by conquest or mutual agreement. As a kingdom incorporated its neighbors, the territory governed by a king became larger, and what used to be neighboring kingdoms became duchies, counties, earldoms, and other smaller political units within a larger kingdom. These components could be traded or captured through warfare, so that the map of Europe resembled a crazy quilt of shifting political allegiances.
The feudal system was the glue that held the new system together. When a duke or count became subordinate to a king, he entered into a tributary relationship. The vassal owed tribute — in the form of monetary wealth or service — to his suzerain. Only within the feudal system could an entity as large as Normandy levy war against a comparable political grouping across the English Channel.
From a local lord’s point of view, inter-state warfare was bad enough, but lawlessness and brigandage within a kingdom were even worse. Lawlessness called into question the effectiveness and legitimacy of the sovereign, so that it was in the interest of the king to claim a monopoly on violence within his realm, in order to secure the political stability of his reign.
Thus was born the King’s Peace, the precursor of modern civil society and the rule of law. By denying the right to commit violence to anyone other than agents of the crown, the king guaranteed a peace in which the commonweal could flourish. Provided that he acted justly and without evident corruption, a king who kept the peace retained legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects.
The heritability of the royal office was part of the process of political stabilization. A kingdom in which rival contenders strove for the crown upon the death of the monarch was likely to be weaker and more fissiparous than its rivals. The institution of hereditary monarchy was a natural Darwinian response — the kingdoms that adopted it were more likely to survive, expand, and incorporate their rivals than those which did not.
Add aristocratic inbreeding to the mix, and by the time we arrive at the 18th and 19th centuries, the brawling barbarian strongmen of the Germanic dawn had given way to the effete noblemen with their inherited wealth and privileges.
Say goodbye to Gorm den Gamle. Say hello to the Habsburg lip.
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A decline in the quality of kingship did not necessarily inhibit the general welfare, provided that the monarch could maintain the rule of law that allowed civil society to flourish. If justice was seen to be done, it didn’t matter that the warrior kings had devolved into wastrels, madmen, and pallid fops.
As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, the task of enforcement and tax collection was removed from the king’s men-at-arms and handed over to the servants of an expanding bureaucratic state. When the Industrial Revolution kicked in, the growth of the state became exponential.
By the time the 20th century arrived, the massive bureaucratic state had developed a life and logic of its own, and was only marginally affected by the personality of the monarch — or indeed by the decisions of parliamentary bodies. Kings, queens, governments, ministers, factions, and parties rose and fell, but the state behemoth continued its expansion regardless.
It’s important to remember that no cataclysmic events — not even the Bolshevik Revolution — interrupted the functioning of state bureaucracies. The Czar’s bureaus became Lenin’s bureaus, and the agents of the Okhrana continued their work for the NKVD.
The inexorable logic of the mass bureaucratic state is what has led us to precipice on which we teeter today.
The internal dynamics of a bureaucratic organism require it to grow, and grow, and grow. To grow it must expand its control over its subjects. Hence the welfare state, which sends the tendrils of the bureaucratic regime into every nook and cranny where ordinary people live out their lives. Hence the proliferation of laws, rules, and regulations.
Technological advances increase productivity, and as soon as it appears the additional wealth is vacuumed up by the ravenous maw of the modern bureaucratic state. Our productive surplus has been used to build the infrastructure and hire the employees assigned to control the people who produce the wealth — the “free-range serfs” of modern post-industrial society.
The state is everywhere, doing everything: keeping you safe, telling you what to eat and drink, setting limits on what you may say, and to whom. The state minds your kids, arranges your transportation, pays for your health care, puts you in a nursing home, and finally euthanizes you when your usefulness is at an end.
Above all the state gets your mind right.
One of modern bureaucracy’s primary functions is to get your mind right, so that your actions serve the purposes of the state without the necessity of armed guards and constant surveillance. With a near-unanimity of ideology within the apparatus of government, the media, the academy, and public education, coercion is all but unnecessary. The gulag is in the mind of the citizen.
This historical process has unfolded inexorably to reach the endgame we are now facing. From the Enlightenment through Marxism and the Progressive Movement to post-industrial Social Democracy, the trend has been towards an ever-expanding bureaucracy, which of necessity requires more and more socialism, regardless of what name the reigning ideology bears.
As the 20th century progressed, the bureaucratic leviathan chafed at its final limitation: the nation-state. Only by dissolving borders and distinct national identities could the power of the bureaucrats continue to increase. Once again an inexorable logic drove the progression of ideological events as the century unfolded: universal suffrage, universal human rights, the elevation of “discrimination” to the rank of deadly sin, inclusion, diversity, multiculturalism, the EU, the NAU, and the UN.
To fulfill the global plan, our nations must be destroyed by incorporating people from alien cultures so as to dilute our separate national identities and remove the last barrier to the worldwide hegemony of the socialist superstate. Ideological indoctrination through the schools and the media has entrenched the idea that resisting the incorporation of foreigners is racist, xenophobic, and deeply sinful. The result is that it’s difficult now for most people to whole-heartedly support nationalistic ideals. No one can contemplate the defense of his own culture without a sense of moral uneasiness.
The international Islamic jihad has slipped a blade into that hairline crack of self-doubt and widened it into a gaping fissure. The cracks are now spreading, and threaten to bring the entire edifice of Western Civilization crashing down around us.
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Unfortunately for the mandarins of the international socialist bureaucracy, the strategic rot that they introduced into the system infects all participants at every level, so that the elite managers and the hoi-polloi alike have acquired the same allergy to national and cultural self-defense.
As long as the multicultural regime had no one to deal with but its own Western clients, this problem had no serious consequences. Where the internalization of PC ideology is insufficient, shaming, ostracism, and the threatened loss of employment or government benefits are generally enough to keep the sheep in the fold.
However, the system has now incorporated the elements of its downfall. The imported foreigners come pre-indoctrinated with an alien ideology — Islam — which is resistant to the suicidal tenets of modern political correctness. Not only that, the same ideology sanctions ruthlessness, brutality, theft, murder, rape, mendaciousness, and any other form of vile behavior that will protect Islam and inject it successfully into its new host culture.
The erstwhile guardians of our society are helpless in the face of the invaders. The only techniques that are available to them — tolerance, understanding, education, persuasion, dialogue, compromise, social pressure, and brief prison sentences — are ineffective against the parasites they so thoughtlessly imported. The newcomers are not only resistant, but even turn the principles of their host culture against itself. The guardians of the great Western enterprise can only stand by and wring their hands while the alien culture employs all the forbidden violent techniques to subdue and subvert the decayed socialist experiment that they now inhabit.
None of the former bulwarks of the West — the military, the police, the legal system, the churches, the schools, the government — are effective against the vigorous and deadly hostility of the newcomers. The native populace lies open to the depredations of its Muslim guests. The scimitar is at our throats, and our only recourse is to submit, to hand over all our wealth and women, and then await the instructions of the new emirs.
If there is to be a resistance, it must come from atavistic elements within the native population, from those in whom, for whatever reason, the precepts of the new metrosexual multicultural indoctrination have failed to take hold. If there is hope, it lies in the proles: the rednecks, the peasants, the crackers, the boors, the rubes, and the churls.
The old ways never died; they just retreated far from the salons and soirées of polite society. Hengist and Horsa did not vanish, but they seldom appear in the drawing-rooms of the bien pensants. If anybody is to defend and reclaim the heart of our culture from the inroads of the Mohammedans, they will be the ones.
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And so we return to Jønke and the Danish chapter of Hells Angels.
If our police and military academies are more interested in graduating a diverse group of cadets than in preparing young men to fight and defend us, then to whom are we to turn? What group of rough men will stand ready to do violence on our behalf?
Make no mistake about it: such rough men will arise to resist the incursions of a violent alien culture. There may not be enough of them to win the confrontation, but even so they will rise up to engage the enemy. Violent resistance in some form will emerge. It is inevitable.
As of this writing, there is no sign that the traditional protectors of the citizenry are prepared to undertake this task. The police and the military do their heroic best, but they are hobbled by the insane rules of PC and operate under the thumb of superiors who are themselves in thrall to multicultural ideology.
Militias, motorcycle gangs, organized criminals, and other marginal groups are bound by no such civilized niceties. They are ready to ride out and do battle when their interests and their own kin are threatened.
So imagine that you are a working-class father who just barely gets by. You go to work, support your family, and do your best to live right. Thirty years ago your neighborhood was a modest but lawful inner suburb inhabited by people like yourself and your family.
But cultural enrichment has changed all that, and your twelve-year-old daughter has just been gang-raped by a group of immigrant thugs. The police promise to do their best, but their best isn’t much. Statistically speaking, there’s less than a 10% chance that the perpetrators of this abomination against you and your family will ever be caught, prosecuted, convicted, and punished. And then — even if the wheels of justice somehow turn in your favor — after a year or two the young punks will in all likelihood be free to roam the streets and repeat their monstrous crimes.
Now imagine that a local chapter of Hells Angels opens up just down the street. You notice that the muggings and assaults in your neighborhood decrease dramatically. You find yourself feeling reassured when one of those Harleys roars by your front stoop.
And, more than anything else, you notice what happens to the gangs of marauding punks who target little white girls. After the most recent incidents, the perpetrators — who are well-known locally for committing these crimes, even though the police can never gather enough evidence to convict them — run into a little “rocker” trouble. They turn up in back alleys with serious disabling injuries, and are sometimes found dead in dumpsters with bullets in their heads.
And you know what? You don’t really mind.
You know that what is being done is against the law, and that it ought to disturb you. It violates what used to be your sense of right and wrong. But you also know at a gut level that your neighborhood — neglected for decades by the politicians and the legal system — is now safer than it was before, and that you and your children can finally let go of some of the fear that you have been living with for so long.
And all because a violent motorcycle gang finally took action on behalf of you and your neighbors. They, unlike the central authorities, are taking care of their own — which includes you. No wonder you feel the urge to slip them a bill every now and then to help keep their hogs up and running.
The media refer to all of this as a “gang war”, as an “escalation by both sides”, but you know better. You know that what’s really happening is that the only people who are willing to stand up and fight are mounting a local defense against a deadly invasion. You know that the media and the politicians are lying to you, and all your neighbors know it, too. This subversive knowledge is spreading rapidly by word of mouth throughout your entire district.
The process described above is how earth-shaking changes occur and take the Powers That Be by surprise.
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“But Baron,” you say, “do you mean to tell me that you advocate that Hells Angels become the leaders of a new political order?”
No, I don’t mean that at all.
My analyses — as I am forced to repeat ad nauseam — are descriptive, not normative. I describe what seems obvious and likely, speculate on what is less obvious and more unlikely, and try to determine what our choices are.
Suppose we face a stark choice. Suppose our only choice is between swearing fealty to the leader of Hells Angels, or submitting to the hosts of Mohammed.
The Hells Angels are not the kind of people you want to invite into your parlor to drink tea. They are, after all, criminals who are prepared to use violence to defend their turf.
But so are the Muslims. And life under their vile rule would be far worse than anything that Jønke would ever think of doing to you. To pick an example at random, the Hells Angels would never treat women like cattle. Nor would they have the inbred propensity to sodomize their little brothers.
The other day I asked Dymphna: “If your only choice was between the local chapter of Hells Angels and the Muslims, what would you choose?”
She replied, “Hells Angels, no problem.”
It’s quite likely that these will be our only choices. I keep betting there’s a third way, but I’m betting against very steep odds.
In order for another way to be found, it will have to form through the legal channels of our existing society. That means it will have to be done by voting, and that we will have to organize and propagandize against the media riptide that wants to carry everyone out to sea in the opposite direction.
It means that change can only be effected at the margins: a city council here, a parliamentary seat there, a newspaper editor brought around to our point of view.
I don’t think there’s enough time for such strategies to work, but I have to try. I choose to believe that we can save some version of what we have now, but it’s more likely that we are going to have to throw in our lot with the bikers, the militias, the paranoids, and all the other people who fall outside the mainstream — because they will be our only hope.
But I want to try anyway. When we lose civil society, we will be a long time regaining it. During the interim we will have to give up much that we hold dear.
So I’m committed to the effort to find a Third Way.
However, it looks like we are entering a twilight period of chaos, and after a while a new order will coalesce around the strong and the shrewd. Men who are committed to ruthlessness and lethality will then turn up to lead the remnants of the old order against the forces that would destroy it completely. A man of that sort will become the kuniŋgaz, the cyning, the rough champion who can protect himself and his own against the incursions of those who would destroy him.
Later, much later, will come the equivalent of King Alfred, to unite the warlords and restart the engine of civilization.
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So now we return to Robert Spencer’s original question: Someone will draw the line somewhere, somehow, before it’s too late, won’t they?
Unfortunately, the field on which the line would be drawn is rapidly submerging and being eroded. Soon there will no longer be a place on which the line may be drawn, or distinct entities to draw it between.
Right now we are still civilized. We still rightfully recoil in horror from the idea of barbarians and criminals. We still cherish the lawful and refined civilization that we have painfully constructed over so many centuries.
But it may not be ours to keep. Western Civilization carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, and unless enough well-educated and thoughtful people awaken to understand that fact, it may be bound for the dumpster of history, where so many have preceded it.
The existing order depends on what is generally known as the social contract, which gives the state a monopoly on violence in return for its protecting its citizens. But that contract has been broken. Justice is no longer seen to be done.
There is a lag time in the reaction of the populace to this state of affairs, and it has yet to run its course. People are slow to rouse. Nevertheless, the reaction is inevitably coming.
It’s time to examine the real alternatives as they are likely to confront us. Not as we wish they were, not as we hope they might be, but as what is predictable and probable, given the times we live in.
The real question may be this one: When it comes down to a choice between two forms of barbarism, which will you choose: theirs or ours?
Citing “financial austerity” measures, the Government has frozen all student loans while at the same time announcing that it has spent 200 percent of the total student grant budget on foreign aid and the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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