POWER PLAY

The most dangerous aspect of the modern British Left is its craving for political power. As I discussed in the first issue of British Intelligence (Sore Winners), Leftists already control British society by virtue of their ideological domination of the media, academia, the police and armed forces, the public sector (including the BBC), and the entertainment industry. If a Labour government actually came to power, they could finish the job of Sovietising Britain, and in particular England - a country they particularly despise - by mandate as well as sustained cultural influence.

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Of course, the word ‘Left’ and its cognates are compound. The Left, once embodied in Britain by the term ‘Labour’, is now an amalgam of globalism, post-Modernism, Marxism (always present as a trace element), and the exacerbation of faddish additions which have been hung like vulgar Christmas tree baubles on a once-noble cause: racism, feminism, transgenderism, Islamophobia and so on ad nauseam and seemingly ad infinitum.

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Let us attempt a matricular division between Left and Right, without nuance and without partisanship. Firstly, let us look at freedom.

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There are two main freedoms which separate Left and Right: freedom of speech and expression, and economic or market freedom. The latter is the province of economists, and we merely note in passing a phrase whose provenance I have been unable to confirm to a certainty, but may have come from Bernard Lewis, the noted scholar of the history of Islam;

Astrology became astronomy. Alchemy became chemistry. I wonder what economics will become.

We will concentrate on the former freedom.

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The Left in the UK are violently opposed to freedom of speech. In the last few years alone, ‘hate speech’ laws have multiplied and been applied to the detriment of the policing of actual crime. While knife crime and acid attacks rose across London, for example, Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan felt it necessary to divert police financial resources to something called a ‘hate crime hub’, with citizens encouraged to report anything they simply didn’t like on social media. The use of one law to smuggle in a raft of others is well known in political history, and the Left has used Islam as their Trojan horse, as it were.

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‘Islamophobia’ is a portmanteau word introduced by the Muslim Brotherhood to further Islamic aims both in the UK and across Europe. Phobos, an Ancient Greek word meaning fear (the original Phobos was the child of Aphrodite and Ares, the Greeks being given to embodying semantics within mythology), became -phobia in modern English, usually used as a suffix, and its meaning changed slightly to become an irrational fear. The Left excel in changing the meaning of language – John Derbyshire warns that we should not let our enemies dictate vocabulary to us - and anything phobic is now given the meaning of hatred or extreme prejudice.

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Language, for the Left, is a key battleground. Once they had ‘Islamophobia’, it was a simple procedural matter to add ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’. The recent death of Sir Roger Scruton should serve to remind us of his coinage, oikophobia. This Greek construction, granted that phobia has shifted once more from meaning ‘irrational fear’ to ‘hatred’, oikophobia means ‘hatred of home’. This neatly defines the Left’s attitude to Britain and, in particular, England. But we are still left with the knotty problem of how the Left gain actual, tangible power.

The Left certainly cannot seize power. Gone are the days of revolution. In the UK, there will be no 1789 or 1917. Apart from anything else, as Sir Oswald Mosley pointed out, there can be no revolution in a country with a loyal and well-organised militia. The UK may be being eaten away by Leftism from the inside, like a wooden house infested by termites, but it is not in Latin America or Africa. Instead, as we have seen, a Gramscian route march through the institutions has long been in effect. As Napoleon and Yevtushenkov suggest in Notes from the Playbook:

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Communists stopped throwing bombs and began writing textbooks for [American] public school teachers.

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This form of ‘quiet revolution’ also allows outside influence to control what appear to be spontaneous movements. As Kerry Bolton writes in Revolution from Above:

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Could it be that the so-called “youthful rebellion”, including the New Left and the hippies and other supposedly youthful forms of “non-conformity” are “Establishment”- contrived?

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The most obvious example of an apparently spontaneous Leftist activist movement which is slowly being exposed as the provisional wing of outside agents is Antifa.

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Antifa has its origins in 1920s and 1930s Europe, when genuine fascists were opposed by the militant Left in Italy, Germany, and Spain. Now, the self-styled descendants of those anti-fascists have motives and motivations which have shifted in line with the current trends of globalism and neo-Socialism. They also use their supposed origins as a moral buttress. We are fighting, they argue, against the modern-day Hitlers and Mussolinis who could have been stopped back in the 1930s. This is false equivalence, a familiar sleight of hand used by the hard Left.

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At street level, what is left of debate is tending increasingly towards violent action, and Antifa are orchestrating the violence. Antifa are far from being an anarchic rabble. In action, they are organised into three tiers. The front line are the shock troops, prepared for violent clashes with either police or counter-demonstrators. Then there is a second group running interference, while a third group take no part in any violence, but provide an anonymous crowd into which the agitators may disappear. This is the reason Antifa dress in their quasi-military uniform of black clothes, ironically imitating both Mussolini’s and Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts.

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Having said that violent revolution is out of the question in the UK, then, it would seem that violence is still a component in the Left’s push for ultimate power. John Reed, in his laudatory first-hand hagiographical account of the October Revolution, recounts a speech by Martov in which he says the following:

The first question before the Congress is the question of Power, and this question is already being settled by force of arms in the streets!

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But non-violent political power continues to elude the Left, despite their best efforts to skew results at the ballot box. The anti-Semitism which appeared to plague the Labour Party before the last general election was no mere symptom of prejudice, although it was also that. The Labour Party know very well that the number of Muslims in the UK, a number they would like to increase, far exceeds the number of Jews. There is no better way to capture the Muslim voting bloc – and Muslims vote – than to display a hatred for Jewry. This is how a party skews democracy.

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And democracy is a double-edged sword for the modern Western Left. On the one hand, their contempt for ordinary people forces them to attack the democratic apparatus when it does not deliver the desired result, and on the other they recognise that it is still a force to be controlled if they are to complete their machinations. Democracy is a concept which seems beneficent, but disguises deeper malfeisance. Lee Harris notes in Civilisation and its Enemies that:

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As the student of European fascism Ernst Nolte has observed, parliamentary democracy was an essential precondition of the rise of both Mussolini and Hitler.

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Democracy, such as it exists now, is also a deceptive concept. Another Greek portmanteau word – as so much of the lexicon which retains genuine meaning tends to be – it combines demos (the people) with kratos (power), and looks good on paper, even on parchment. But there is much in Guillaume Faye’s summation in Why We Fight, that the West’s pseudo-democracy is actually a neo-totalitarian oligarchy. As the hippies were fond of saying in the the 1960s, whoever you vote for the government always gets in.

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A contender for the Labour leadership is a woman called Jess Phillips. She is running under the following slogan:

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Speak Truth. Get Power.

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The first half of the construction, for a Labour politician, is of course fanciful. We must hope that the same holds for the second.

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​Mark Gullick is a philosophy PhD from London, England, who went on holiday to Costa Rica four years ago and forgot to go home. He now works there as a musician. He blogs at https://postcardsfromtraumaville.blogspot.com/