WRITING THE RESISTANCE

INTERIM REPORT

Writing the Resistance began six months ago, initially planned as an examination of four seemingly disparate, broadly political, contemporary writers who seem to be united by a common thread in that they all write against power.  All journalists and social commentators, of course, believe that they are speaking truth to power, despite many of them being courtiers in thin disguise.

But our writers are not darlings of the MSM, and in fact are largely shunned by it, and they are addressing a different kind of power to that which the established media would have us believe is running the Western world. The four writers became six, and there are plans for more. It seems there are more nay-sayers than I originally thought.

Here at the magazine, we learned quickly what disunites them. Diana West wrote British Intelligence a charming equivalent of a thank you note when she flagged up my review of her incendiary book, American Betrayal, on her website, and shared it with her social media following.

Diana was only the second writer in the series, and pointed out to us that one of the key figures in the ‘attack team’ that hauled American Betrayal - and its author - over the critical coals when it first hit dissident headlines was the first subject of Writing the Resistance, David Horowitz. When the first two featured writers in a series intended to show a thematic unity are at daggers drawn, it doesn't look like we have much of a consensus.

And yet there is a connecting skein, a thread that runs through all six, as well as interconnections along the way. Our sample group may look - they are - a motley crew, but they are all dissidents in one way or another. The first common element among them is what they are writing against the establishment.

The word ‘establishment’ is almost archaic, applied to a ruling political and cultural clique not officially recognised by the state but nevertheless ‘in charge’, as it were, de facto, of home affairs. It is of an especially British provenance. The English in particular, of a certain generation, think of the satirically named Establishment Club, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, high-court judges and the Freemasons. The 1960s establishment has become, I suppose, what is now referred to as the ‘deep state.’

‘Disestablishment,’ might be a better word to describe the loose-knit but efficient cabal of societal entities which run the West in 2020. Their defining trait seems to be that they will not tolerate the formation or self-maintenance of organic societies of socially valuable and morally dependable people. They wish for the natural order not to thrive but, instead, for a wholly or partially artificial structure to exist which affects the life of all and can be controlled in a way analogous with mechanics, the very opposite of the organic. To this effect, the new establishment manipulates people individually and en masse at every stage of their lives, and always deleteriously.

Whatever we term these wreckers, they have done their work well. They have sabotaged the function of the family unit, rendered education at all ages worthless except as an exercise in propaganda, turned culture - or allowed and encouraged it to turn - into a grotesque carnival, force-fed sovereign states with numerically inappropriate and culturally inimical immigrant masses, made gender a police matter, punished the law-abiding while appeasing the criminal classes, facilitated big tech in doing their work of censorship of even mild conservative views, and done everything in their vast power to destroy the legitimacy and ‘hegemony’ of white males (they make no secret of this entirely racist drive) and the power structures they supposedly wield. The latest acts of this anarcho-tyranny have been the absurd and Jacobin over-reaction to COVID-19 and the lionisation of BLM and their ridiculous and violent street-brawling cultural Marxism. The telos of this malevolent power bloc is well summed up by our first subject, David Horowitz;

‘For behind the revolutionary pursuit of the impossible ideal lies a deep hatred for the human norm, an unquenchable desire for its annihilation’.

The periodic table of disaster above, however, hardly links Guillaume Faye with Jonathan Bowden with Thomas Sowell, at least not obviously. Also, there are many MSM journalists who would agree with the existence of and the danger posed by the inventory of disruption outlined. Why not call Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens and James Delingpole writers of the resistance? Well, they are, and have all written books which deserve shelf space in any dissident library. But, although our subjects have all written journalism of one sort or another, journalism proper would need a separate treatment and, were we to seek for genuine resistance writers in that estate, we would need to widen the territory of our search to include Iran, Turkey, China...

No, my subjects were chosen because they helped me to form an idea that there is something which must be fought against, resisted. There is an active, subversive and interlinked movement stemming from the ruling class and their provisional wings and which seeks to worsen the lives of those who deserve it least. And this is the skein mentioned earlier, the Ariadne's thread which links our first six subjects.

Horowitz and Ayaan are both apostates, Ayaan in the more literal sense of having renounced Islam, Horowitz in that he began as a gun-slinging Leftist and was forced by inescapable personal tragedy to question his beliefs and cross the floor politically. Bowden and Faye both flirted, and more, with both anti-Semitism and what is today rather nebulously the ‘far Right’. Sowell is a 90-year-old black man who, in addition to being an expert economist, swims upstream on matters of race, while Diana West, before writing her account of the extent of Communist influence in America, had originally set out to write a book on Islam. A motley crew, as noted, but a crew all heaving in broadly the same direction.

Between the Enlightenment and 9/11, something went deeply, darkly wrong with the Western world, and here we find our first stretch of common ground uniting our subjects. Not only has this deep fracture already caused vast cultural damage, but, although the means to stop it early were in place, and perhaps its range of effects could still be retarded and even reversed, either the will to do so does not exist at the political level, the required competence is lacking, or the whole fault line was intentional to begin with. How else can Diana West come to the conclusion, concerning that notorious scourge of Communism, that during the 1930s and 1940s, there were;

‘More than five hundred willing and variously able American traitors, many operating at the highest level of the federal government’.

These insurgents were Communists and, as Ms. West has said in lectures, their aim was to facilitate Stalin's aims, which ‘were not primarily to defeat Hitler but to replace him’. How could this be? There are only two possible answers; incompetence or design.

For Jonathan Bowden, Western power brokers have ‘created a modern world that has been taken away from what it could have been.’ Guillaume Faye sees more culpability, in that;

‘The cultural hegemony of the United States and the gradual and veiled colonisation of France and Europe and the Third World are not merely the product of manipulation. We let such things happen to us’. 

Ayaan sees the defeat of the rationalists in the history of Koranic debate, beaten and silenced by the voices of power, as a decisive moment within the history of Islamic dysfunction. Thomas Sowell sees a world threatened by ivory towers crammed with intellectuals whose delightful and entrancing theories cause chaos when unleashed on the real world, a position echoed - or foreshadowed - by Horowitz's rueful reminiscence of his days on the New Left;

‘The core sense our community had of its political mission (was that) the world is cursed by ignorance, and the task of the progressives like us is to set everybody Right’.

Here is our common thread. Each writer is resistant of something which is clearly wrong and must be isolated and labelled as such. This common theme is reminiscent of the book I happen to be reading at the time of writing, Churchill's The Gathering Storm, and Churchill's increasing despair during the 1930s concerning the casual nonchalance shown towards Hitler and Mussolini by the British and French governments. There is no worse tragedy than that which could have been avoided, and we are in the realm of Powell's ‘preventable evils’. Churchill is actually writing here of the physical defences of a nation, but by analogy his example can be applied to the warnings from writers of the resistance concerning the decline of the West;

‘The thought preys upon me. The months slip by rapidly. If we delay too long in repairing our defences, we may be forbidden by superior power to complete the process’.

So, after our brief stop to assess our subjects thus far, the second half of Writing the Resistance can begin. The next half-dozen writers include a medical man, a mild-mannered English expatriate surely too British to merit the term ‘white supremacist’ he is often given, an English autodidactic rabble-rouser, and a half-Slavic internet maverick who wrote two of the most prescient essays of this century, then disappeared.

Stay tuned, and never forget that resistance is not futile.