We live in an era where fake news is real, and real news is fake. A recent furor in the U.K. concerned the involvement of Cambridge Analytica—President Trump’s favorite data jockeys—on the Leave side of the E.U. referendum. Overspending! Collusion! Betrayal! The Observer drew itself up to its full height—imagine a kind of moral Danny DeVito—and fulminated that Democracy Dies Without Transparency.
Apparently our freedoms had finally flatlined when Cambridge Analytica—cast as the overall Svengali of the Leave campaign—had helped channel work to a small Canadian data-muncher called Aggregate IQ; and done so in order to break spending rules. This conspiracy was outed by a leather-jacketed Observer journalist live on Sunday-morning TV. The bien-pensants pushed away their muesli in disgust that people with computers had weaseled us out of the West’s last bastion of democratic values, the European Union.
Cometh the next edition, cometh the retraction. “For the record”—buried on page 50—“we did not intend to suggest that AIQ secretly and unethically coordinated with Cambridge Analytica.” For posterity, let it be remembered how a left-wing British newspaper does not suggest such a thing; with the words, “it is already established that Aggregate IQ is linked to Cambridge Analytica through IP agreements; this weekend…alleges that the links between the two go much deeper, such that their activities became confused.” Deep and confusing, yes. Secret or unethical, no. Got that? Neither have I.
While still giddy with its own investigative brilliance, the paper had further trumpeted that election rules are about achieving a “level playing” field under conditions of “openness and transparency.” So what about looking at the millions in tax money that were poured into the Remain campaign? That idea was dismissed from the outset on the—somewhat contradictory—basis that this “wasn’t a party political issue.” It remained for the right-leaning Spectator to drill into the real issue of data analytics: namely how the connected home will allow us to be micro-targeted with political messaging. Grouchy because you haven’t eaten for a while? Time for a message from a demagogue. Smug from having put out the recycling? Time to hear from an environmentalist.
The above cycle of loud claims and quiet retractions is amplified by social media. Accusations take off like wildfire, while their corrections splutter like a November barbecue. This asymmetry is quietly abetted by mainstream campaigns becoming ever more invested in the paranoid politics of conspiracy. The U.S. leads the world in this regression toward flat-earthism. Its original architect was Hillary Clinton, who managed to convince her base that negative stories had nothing to do with her faults—she didn’t have any—and everything to do with a VAST right-wing media conspiracy. With heady claims of an election-rigging now rebounding on the Democrats, the rest of the world has stopped trying to keep up.
In Britain, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has been stress-testing the politics of conspiracy to their limits. When he soft-pedaled on Russia over the Salisbury poisoning, a BBC discussion program used a montage backdrop of him against the Kremlin. Rather than responding to Corbyn’s doe-eyed public embrace of authoritarianism, his supporters dropped a massive red pill on the public: The reactionary stooges at the BBC had Photoshopped his fisherman’s cap to make it look more Russian! The ensuing “Hatgate” discussion actually took over the news agenda—yes, really—forcing the BBC to dignify the accusation with a denial. Meanwhile, anyone who knows left-wing semiotics was left wondering how a “Lenin cap” could be made to look more Bolshevik than it does in its natural state.
Now it appears Labour’s curated suspension of disbelief is finally collapsing. The inflection point has been Corbyn’s long-running anti-Semitism bursting into the open with revelations that he posted approvingly about a Protocols-of-Zion-style public mural. It showed plutocratic Jews playing Monopoly using a board balanced on the backs of good honest volk, with a bit of Masonic imagery thrown in for good measure. When its removal was scheduled—and the “artist” started bleating about his free speech—Corbyn reassured him that it was a “very beautiful piece of art.”
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“God in heaven, Russia on Earth.” So say the Serbs, who have been programmed to see Russia behind every turn of good fortune. Westerners are now being programmed to see Russia behind every turn of bad fortune. To the Kremlin, it is the same difference: Both mean the Third Rome is strong. This perceived strength serves multiple narratives in the West—that the U.S. didn’t really want Trump, nor the U.K. Brexit. Yet with every Russia panic, the Western media burnishes Vladimir Putin’s armor a little brighter. After all, if he is powerful enough to swing Western elections, what hope have ordinary Russians to challenge him? It is an achievement of some aplomb for The Guardian and The New York Times to have become some of the Kremlin’s most powerful mouthpieces.
A fortnight ago, Putin tested this media amplifier with a speech describing various new Dr. Strangelove-style military capabilities. Underwater missiles! Winged missiles! Nuclear-powered winged missiles! London shoppers were soon exposed to headlines in the—Russian-owned—Evening Standard about a ‘New Arms Race.’ It took the boring specialist media to conclude that nothing much had changed strategically, and that the speech “was almost entirely for domestic consumption and geopolitical posturing.” But by then the message had gone out—showing that propaganda remains the Kremlin’s most cost-effective weapon.
Now Russia has blown a foghorn into this global media microphone. Last Sunday, a former GRU colonel and British intelligence asset named Sergei Skripal was exposed to a Russian-made nerve agent on British soil. He and his daughter are now critical, and the U.K. in a media and political paroxysm. Granite-faced Home Secretary Amber Rudd has swooped down to Salisbury—where the attack took place—her skirts billowing like Cruella de Vil. Theresa May’s hand has gone to her hip, only to find there is no saber there to rattle. The initial range of possible countermeasures—banning Russia Today from the U.K.; withdrawing from the Russia 2018 World Cup—revealed an absurd asymmetry. Skripal was a naturalized British citizen; collateral damage has been wide (38 people, including one British bobby in serious condition); and the attack took place in the home of the U.K. Land Forces, which are headquartered on Salisbury Plain. Numerous current and former high-ranking military personnel live in the area with their families, which is why Skripal was selected as a target. For Britain to deploy to a similar environment within Russia would be beyond fiction.
The British government is now engaged in shuttle diplomacy, with the normal range of financial and political sanctions being discussed. As usual, Britain’s role as a hub for overseas Russian money—recently dramatized on the brilliant McMafia—is under scrutiny. “Diplomats” are being expelled with the ridiculous assertion that Russia’s 21st-century intelligence capabilities will thus be degraded “for decades to come.” Up to a dozen suspicious deaths—including one that came immediately on the heels of Salisbury—are now to be revisited by U.K. law enforcement. At the hardest end of retaliation appear to be NATO reinforcement and cybermeasures, including potential damaging leaks about Putin’s self-enrichment program.
Yet all but the last of these will only strengthen Putin as Russia goes to the polls this Sunday. Like the waning, sclerotic dictatorship it is, Russia is seeking isolation. With domestic expression now severely curtailed, the economic pain of isolationism has no political outlet. This is why Mrs. Thatcher resisted sanctioning South Africa in the 1980s: because she knew such measures would punish those below, not those at the top. The same is now true of Russia, with which engagement is at a low not even seen during the Cold War. Yet the pressure weighing on Theresa May means she must now build Putin’s wall of sandbags higher (to the extent of issuing a travel warning on Russia). Acting against Britain’s community of regime oligarchs—in the notional hope they will rise against Putin—will similarly consolidate his power at home by disrupting a safe harbor. And forcing the inhabitants of Londongrad to cooperate against the Kremlin? Well, Salisbury has shown us what comes of that. No wonder Putin responded so sardonically to a walking question from a BBC reporter this week.
Russia’s ability to leverage the West to her own advantage also has deep cultural currents. The “social justice” revolution under way in the West was seeded for decades by Russian influence. This process was plainly outlined by a much earlier defector, Yuri Bezmenov—who explained how demoralization was a key stage toward undermining the cultural mores of a free society. The vicious divisions emerging in the West are in large part the result of this nu-Marxist thinking.
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The Icelandic state is considering a ban on child circumcision—with predictable reactions. Secular humanists claim victory while religious groups claim persecution. Yet their very reaction only reinforces the straw-man view of faith as something both absurd and sinister. Like Kierkegaard’s lunatic—who reminds every passerby that the world is round—New Atheists ridicule the notion that a supreme consciousness could be connected to such a practice. And so the bifurcation grows between what people of faith understand religion to mean, and what their opponents understand it to mean.
“Religion,” wrote U.S. churchman Eugene Peterson, “is like the bark on a tree. It is dead: yet it protects something living.” He reveals that external attributes of religion are not an end in themselves; they are merely the props toward internal transformation. Yet because modern society chooses only to see the externalities, it discounts the transformation. This view—ironically—mirrors the iconoclastic reforming movements of the past, which also caricatured ritual as an end, not a means.
Some denominations hurry to agree, stripping away the bark of their religious practice in the hope that the sap will rise unaided. Yet rewriting your own rule book is a dangerous business. Historical religious practice creates both intellectual discipline—reminding adherents they are the equals, not the superiors, of past generations—and the practical discipline of following a rule. Such means provide the vessel for personal transformation, the effects of which eventually overflow into the world.
This view of religion—as a meme that provides successive generations with the opportunity for individual change—is distinct from a supernatural or intercessory understanding. Its distinctness lies in the fact that, being existential and evidential, it is irrefutable. The change that took place in Elder Dobrev—a Bulgarian ascetic who died last month at the age of 100—is not open to question from humanists. And yet the existential transformation wrought in him was undoubtedly aided by supernatural belief; indeed probably rested on such belief. What then is the relationship between the metaphysical elements of religion and its tangible results?
The first is openness. We have enough to address in life not to be hindered by thoughts of our mortality. Accepting at least the possibility of life after death frees us to act in the world. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, we can only understand everything with the aid of what we don’t understand. Rather than creating paralysis, accepting the limits of our knowledge releases us from it. The second role is metaphorical. Metaphysical concepts such as eternal life and eternal death can be read into the world around us. The tortured face of a meth addict reveals a living hell; the beatific expression of Lindsay Lou singing about the River Jordan, a living heaven. Even the great religious metaphor of rebirth can be found in the quotidian. Someone of faith is reborn not once but every day, shedding the encrustations of the past and embracing the present. The third is scientific. In his new book Science and Spiritual Practices, British biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has examined the neurological and sociological dividends of a variety of religious practices. Prayer, gratitude, ritual, and unison singing: All lead to better brain functioning as well as better social cohesion. There couldn’t be a stronger indication that religion leads to personal transformation—and that such transformation has helped drive our evolution as a species.
How can this transformation be characterized? First, it contextualizes our individual consciousness within the race as a whole. As conscious beings, we are endowed with creativity. When this creativity goes too far, we seek to impose our consciousness—or ego—without restraint. The extreme example is the total transformation imposed by Communism and Fascism. By failing to acknowledge any higher authority, their progenitors sought to become God—with disastrous results. Yet true religion also guards us against the opposite extreme of fatalism, which remains unacceptable to the demands of both conscience and self-realization. We find a balance within the unitary worldview of faith, learning to exercise our creativity within safe limits. We similarly learn to mitigate our competitiveness, finding natural limits to our individualism as well as our authoritarianism.
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“Now, that represents a degree of hypocrisy I’ve hitherto suspected in you but not noticed, due to highly evasive skills.” So says the eponymous lead character in the cult comedy Withnail and I. We have the same reaction to the global charity Oxfam having covered up extravagant sexual exploitation of women and girls in Haiti. Around the world, donors are looking with nausea at the monthly payment that was supposed to make them feel moral. And now this!
Oxfam has come a long way from its founding in Oxford to alleviate Greek wartime famine (hence Ox-Fam). It has since evolved into a social-justice behemoth with not one but six stated goals—ranging from “ending poverty” to empowering women. Upstream, its proffering of a moral economy is now deeply embedded among Western consumers. You can franchise a music festival knowing the local adulation will be merely a by-product of Oxfam’s higher goals. Ditto kitting out your person and house in the latest fair-trade ethno-produce. The West has learned how to package virtue—and Oxfam has it down to a T.
Government has become a significant participant in this moral marketplace. The British foreign-aid budget was ring-fenced throughout the financial crisis—with significant funds going to organizations like Oxfam. Lobbying governments for both money and outcomes has in turn become a primary charitable goal, obscuring the original purpose of charity as a private means of alleviating suffering. Unsurprisingly, the British government is now experiencing moral blowback from the scandal. It was simply unprepared for the events in Haiti to shatter the illusion of the irreproachable aid sector. Worse is now expected.
Many privately admit such a dénouement is long overdue. What do you expect jaded Westerners to do on their own time, while out in the field? Sex workers have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the deployed military, so why not aid workers? And by what standards should we judge the girls themselves, who stripped off to don Oxfam T-shirts? There is not yet any evidence of coercion, although testimonies are now being gathered. But there are darker indications further up the chain. Local drivers were told to procure girls or lose their jobs. When a whistle-blower went straight to the head office in London with news of underage sex parties, there was a cover-up.
If this sounds familiar, it should be. The response mirrors that of the Catholic Church as it faced the abuse revelations that first emanated from Baltimore. The fallback position was that because the organization’s goals are beyond reproach, its name must be defended from scrutiny. Like the Catholic Church, people quietly moved off into new roles in precisely the same environments—for years. Like shamed churchmen, they now appear ambivalent if not tone-deaf regarding criticism (perhaps mindful of left-wing sensibilities, the country director responsible has taken particular umbrage at the suggestion the villa used was “chic”). Given the organization’s stated goal of empowering women, it has presumably been rooting out identical behavior from local elites for decades. And yet it has held itself to a lower standard.
This speaks to a curious shift in the modern world: the institutionalization of morality. Now, institutions have always been the repository of morality—just ask the Church. But whereas institutional morality used to be the summa of individual morality, it now seems to have supplanted it. The aggressive juxtaposition between personal and institutional standards seen at Oxfam is now common across the board (not least in left-wing parties on both sides of the Atlantic). Yet because morality is one of our strongest innate impulses—as Ayn Rand knew—expropriating it for institution-building remains tremendously powerful. Sniffing out the power of the moral baton, even corporates are now flooding Twitter with social causes (I tweeted Volvo to ask how their cars are achieving gender equality; they tweeted back).
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Britain’s international relations have acquired something of Paris in the spring of 1871. Having achieved a lightning defeat at the hands of Prussia, the inhabitants of the French capital ignored the Teutonic army at their gates and descended into bloody civil war. With Brexit at our gates, Britain has likewise descended into civil war; with different elements of the body politic sending out competing negotiating teams. And yet, unlike the French, our opposite number at the negotiating table in fact lost the preceding conflict, namely the EU’s campaign to keep Britain as a member.
But our situation is worse in at least two regards. At least the rebel Paris Commune didn’t send out its own unofficial negotiating teams (as rebel elements of the British body politic have done). Meanwhile it has been forgotten that our opposite number at the table—the E.U.—in fact lost the preceding conflict, namely the campaign to keep Britain as a member. It is a defeat that threatens the bloc’s main trading relationship—it has a significant trade surplus with the U.K.—as well as places its future budgets in fatal doubt. Yet the E.U. appears to be dictating the peace, threatening to veto Britain’s independent bilateral trade arrangements and extracting an indemnity of between €50bn and €100bn before negotiations even start. Britain’s engrained negative self-image means such moves are nonetheless hailed as victories by our media.
Presiding over these non-negotiations is the grayscale figure of Theresa May. Like Hillary Clinton, she desperately wanted to be the first female British premier (and was put into a jealous fury when Margaret Thatcher beat her to it). Like Hillary, she set out her stall on stability and experience—successfully censoring abundant warnings to the contrary. Like Hillary, she overpromotes her own political creations, with many top posts now filled by alumnae of her “Women2Win” organization. Like Hillary, she nurtures bitter personal feuds against those who conflict with her, regardless of their capacity for public service. And, like Hillary, she has led her party to electoral disaster—wiping out the Tories’ first parliamentary majority in over two decades by calling a superfluous election in 2017. Pundits in the U.K. are consigning the Tories to an irrelevance as deep as that of the U.S. Democrats: quite an achievement for a governing party.
Yet the main comparison to Clinton—as she is portrayed in the campaign biog Shattered—is that May seemed to want power for its own sake. On the greatest issue of our time—if, why, and how we are leaving the European Union—she has maintained a studious neutrality. When asked how she would vote if a second plebiscite were offered, she refused to answer. Now, such tactical neutrality is nothing new in British politics. Blair and Cameron both occupied the center ground so successfully that they often said as little of substance as possible, for fear of losing voters—rather than as much as possible in order to win them. If pushed, they said whatever the moment demanded, before quietly pursuing their broader agenda.
Yet May’s neutrality is not such a tactical means to a greater end. It rather appears to be part of her political makeup. She presents as a civil servant at heart—a “chief cop,” as one observer puts it in private—dedicated to delivering the wishes of a greater master. In theory, this master is the electorate. But after two decades of negative politics from Blair and Cameron, the electorate has no idea what it wants. Like a caged chimp whose sedatives have worn off, it is lashing out in every conceivable—and contradictory—direction: wanting to leave the E.U. without really knowing why; turning against elites while depending on them for Brexit; even entertaining the knowingly dangerous agenda of hard-left opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. Against such a backdrop, Theresa May’s vague technocratic centrism is desperately out of date.
The political vacuum has created a vortex that is being compounded in at least four ways. First: The government is plucking random placatory policies from the tornado beating around its head, and invariably making itself appear ridiculous. Reintroducing Britain’s pre-E.U. passport design was supposed to be a Christmas gift to Brexiters. It was a patronizing move that served to reopen Britain’s identity crisis, before tipping into further absurdity when it was revealed they were to be made abroad (yes, abroad!). Second is the inability to confront Jeremy Corbyn’s vision with a liberal-conservative alternative. Instead the party is reduced to aping—and thereby further empowering—elements of his Marxist agenda.
Third is the cost to May’s international profile, coming precisely when the power optics of Brexit demand the Tories draw on their once-brilliant diplomatic heritage. Instead, Theresa May has been forced into a de facto withdrawal of her personal invitation for President Trump to visit the U.K. This awarded a huge victory to opponents like London mayor Sadiq Khan and Corbyn—who had pursued their usual insidious combination of incitement and victim blaming by repeating, ad infinitum, “Don’t blame me if there’s violence!” And yet Emmanuel Macron—presiding over a country with chronic public-order problems, where President Trump is more mistrusted than Putin—pulled of a successful state visit. This stunning indictment of May’s authority meant British voters instead had to look to Piers Morgan for some presidential insight and Anglo-American rapprochement.
Fourth—and most fatally—her inability to lead is creating a Jurassic Park-like environment within government. Political beasts large and small now roam free with little fear of rebuke. Brexit figurehead Boris Johnson—who arguably enjoys greater overseas recognition than May herself—alternates between blundering non-diplomacy and barely disguised stump pitches. Chancellor Philip Hammond—“Spreadsheet Phil”—offers the press contrary briefings in favor of Brexit lite, also without sanction. May’s very own creatures—not least transgender champion Justine Greening—are promoted in great flurries of grandstanding and then resign with equal fanfare. When a headstrong International Development Secretary was recalled for pursuing renegade diplomacy with Israel, the political media broke out the popcorn and tracked her returning plane. Outside the immediate fold of government, canny yet inexperienced backbenchers—notably the self-parodying British gent Jacob Rees-Mogg—burnish their social-media profiles. Yet rather than bringing in new blood—which is both desperately needed and amply present in Tory ranks—repeated cabinet reshuffles vainly shore up the Prime Minister’s waning position. The latest overpromoted loyalist is a fresh-faced Defence Secretary, who has already become a figure of fun.
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We have just witnessed a curious phenomenon in the U.K. Bloodthirsty conglomerate Virgin unilaterally withdrew the Daily Mail from its public-transport arm. A preening statement that the paper “did not align with the company’s values” grabbed SJWs as irresistibly as the tractor beam of the Death Star. Twitter cried “victory!”—while Virgin execs listened for the pitter-patter of tiny feet signing up to their wider raft of branded services.
Others were not so generous. Brexit Twitter took up the cry of “censorship!” Contrarian gruffalo Rod Liddle went a step further and handed out free copies of the Daily Mail on a train platform—only to be asked if he had “permission” to speak to the public. Somewhere at Virgin HQ, a soy latte paused on its way toward a goateed chin. Censorship? But isn’t that—like—bad? And so the ship was smoothly turned around. Richard Branson said that he hadn’t known of the decision; and he would never have supported it. Soon the rustle of ethnocentric newsprint was once again heard on Virgin Trains. Ah, deniability: the elixir of the corporate hypocrite!
The right claimed a rare victory against the march of bastard capitalism (that is, the adulteration of business with social engineering). Yet many liberals—myself included—found no fault with a brand-building exercise gone wrong. British railways are privatized, and it is the purpose of private companies to seek advantage, wherever it may lie. Where others saw the machinations of cultural Marxism, I saw the market in all its cynical glory. Companies have forever placed bets on the values of their consumers: What was the Marlboro Man other than an expression of rugged individualism? Now brands hitch their wagons to new sociopolitical movements for similarly mercenary purposes. The mystery is not that they should attempt such outright mendacity—but why it is accepted by the public.
An example: Even as Virgin Trains was taking a wrong turn over the points of public opinion, its sister company Virgin Health was happily suing the National Health Service for lost earnings. Recall that the NHS is the holiest cow ever to graze the pastures of the British media (let alone the British treasury). Where were Virgin’s communitarian “values” then? Or indeed when Virgin Trains tripled the levy on local business operating at their station franchises? As part of his rearguard action, Branson had the temerity to say that the company shouldn’t be seen as moralizing. Yeah, we noticed.
Such empty posturing is now endemic in the West. This may be what future social historians find most noteworthy about our era. Fakery is espoused by corporates at every level of their operations—from the grandstanding hypocrisy of Virgin Group to the humble “still fresh” section of the supermarket (which houses produce that is no longer fresh). It is the lifeblood of leftist politicians who rush to procure private services for their families while raising public barriers to the same. It is the needle in the arm of popular culture, as millionaire celebrities preach social revolution between trips to their tax lawyers. It oiled the #MeToo campaign, as the enablers of the Weinstein culture donned rat-size masks and dived from the sinking ship. (One of the U.K.’s most vocal liberal inquisitors—a journalist called Rupert Myers—was revealed to be a failed philanderer of epic proportions. Ditto VICE, where a staff of impeccably liberal credentials turned out to be nothing more than base libertines.)
Against such a backdrop of engrained double standards, the greatest transgression is honesty. Blond songstress Taylor Swift has been denounced as an “envoy for Trump’s values” for the simple crime of sticking to her day job (the left revealing its misogyny by expecting to co-opt her hard-won professional success for its own purposes). The liberated women of France went one further and denounced #MeToo on the basis they could manage their own affairs (pun intended). Yet such pips of honesty are few and far between on the moral radar of our times. The truth is that people have a huge appetite for being lied to—because it helps them lie to themselves. How else to carry the flickering torch of social justice into our well-heated lounges, or green-wash our SUVs, or espouse female dignity while casually flicking onto Pornhub? Social justice without social sacrifice has been the touchstone of Western morality since it was first offered by Blair and Clinton in the form of the “Third Way.” It is no surprise that corporates like Virgin have now sniffed out a role as midwives to our hypocrisy.
Yet such a great bifurcation must have deeper psychological roots. Secular humanism is certainly one component of the whirring dissonances of the modern era. Our love of moral self-exemption—most often heard in the cry “But don’t judge me”—depends on the absence of divine sanction. Such hypocrisies as libidinous male fauxminism or the self-sanctified corporate greed of Virgin could not survive the curt enjoinder found in Ecclesiastes 12:14, that God will judge every hidden thing, be it good or evil. One could also finger Hegel—or at least the dialectical method he introduced. After all, once given the opportunity to reconcile something with its opposite, why not create a synthesis that is nicely therapeutic? A magnificent example is the white race campaigner expunging his guilt with a placard advocating his own immolation—before heading home for dinner and the ball game. The White Queen’s practice of believing six impossible things before breakfast is alive and well among the campaigning classes.
The ’60s is a more recent inflection point, because it was the moment when outright posturing became a prerequisite of public culture. Bob Dylan never rode into town on a boxcar, any more than Johnny Cash served prison time. Yet both became foundation myths for public personas that painted them as hard-bitten existential moralists. “There’s no truth in that,” spat Bob Dylan when introduced to a journalist from Time magazine. “Why don’t you just have a picture of a tramp vomiting in the gutter?” If the buttoned-up journalist had more presence of mind, he might have replied: “Why don’t you perform under your real name?” By the time John Lennon could “imagine no possessions” in 1971, he was already en route to a personal fortune estimated at $800M. Yet his fans believed him.
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It’s that time of the year again. As Coca-Cola’s magic truck trundles across our televisions and Starbucks’ ubiquitous red cups punctuate the daily commute, the terror alerts are flooding in. On Saturday, a knifeman was shot at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. Two weeks before, elements of a nail bomb were found at Berlin’s Potsdam Christmas market. Last week, a Bangladeshi-Brooklyner detonated a homemade pipe bomb in the subway. The New York Times soft-soaped in spectacular style, telling us the bomber was a “good guy” who had been “radicalized online” and—wait for it—got into neighborhood parking disputes. Just your regular guy next door!
European Christmas markets are now encircled by concrete-and-steel countermeasures against vehicle attacks. Some municipalities have thoughtfully decorated these with Christmas trees, provoking a sardonic Twitter backlash. The police are on a hair-trigger response, recently placing London’s Black Friday on lockdown in response to a rumor. Shoppers ran for their lives—from nothing. If the purpose of terror is to terrorize, then it has succeeded.
Repackaging the ideology behind recent attacks has become an urgent imperative for Western liberals. At the core of this discourse is extrapolating secular motivations from divine ones. And so we are told that terrorism is rooted in foreign policy, poverty, disenfranchisement, racism, prejudicial Islamophobia, Israeli self-determination, and—of course—Donald Trump. If you believe the old adage “Don’t talk down to a man with a gun,” the relentless Western rationalization of jihad must be infuriating to its exponents. Not only infuriating but dangerous, as ignoring the self-professed motivation of those whose only recourse is to violence can only lead to more violence.
The need for a secular West to shoehorn religious terrorism into its own frame of reference extends even to terror’s most outright critics. Their go-to sound bite is that most Eurocentric term, “Islamofascism.” Sure, it’s attention-grabbing and accessible: Who doesn’t hate Nazis? Even Christopher Hitchens did his bit to popularize the comparison. For many writers like him who started their journey on the left, Fascism remains the sine qua non of negative dog whistles. Perhaps this is why—if we are really so in need of a secular cipher for Islamism—the more logical phrase of Islamo-Communism has not proffered itself.
What Islam and Communism share—and Fascism lacks—is the pretense to altruism. Both claim to be the universal solution for all mankind, offering peace at the barrel of a gun. For all its iniquities, Fascism was at least honest about its violent purpose: elevating certain groups to the fatal exclusion of others. From that watershed of candor flow the following four streams of difference.
First: Because Fascism did what it said on the tin, it did not share the others’ reliance on the Big Lie. Stalin’s heavily fortified “Frontier of Peace”—known to us as the Iron Curtain—echoes the historical Islamic distinction between the House of Peace (Muslim lands) and the House of War (everyone else). The “Anti-Imperialist” expansionism of contemporary Islamist terror is also reminiscent of the USSR’s “Anti-Imperialist Empire.” Both further employ peaceful forms of address —brother, sister —within militarized societies. The Nazis got straight to the point with “Hail victory.”
Second: Because of their claim to intellectual totality, Islamism and Communism suppress the power of the individual rather than harnessing it. Private inquiry and commerce—the lifeblood of development—are extinguished. As a result, their economies become extractive rather than innovative. The free-extracting Ottoman Empire could only survive while expanding; thereafter, it declined into poverty. The USSR was famed for having its “windows open in winter,” consuming but not creating. It is ironic—daresay hopeful—that both Communist and Islamist governments will always deny themselves the stability they crave for this reason. Yet Fascism looked eagerly to the power of the private sector to advance its cause—as the awkwardness of certain German industrial families testifies to this day.
Third, which is closely related; The super-primacy of ideology in Communist and Islamist systems creates a fatal drive toward self-purification. This point was illustrated in Graeme Wood’s seminal 2015 article on ISIS, which revealed a readiness to point the finger of heresy at unlucky members. Executing people “to be on the safe side” is also more than familiar to historians of the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s humor is never darker than when following Stalin’s thoughts as he stalks his bunker. “Someone has killed all the good people,” thunders the Red Tsar to himself, “and it’s left to me to deal with all the rest!” In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a lifelong Party loyalist finds that his time has come. Imprisoned and awaiting execution, he ponders whether this was inevitable , undoubtedly also a common reflection among shamed Islamists. Under the Ottomans, it was a given that the strangler’s rope awaited anyone who served the Sultan not only badly—but also too well.
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After hitting the skids a few years ago, I moved to Serbia. Hell, it was fun. Belgrade had been bombed in ’99. The laser-guided ordnance was so accurate it could follow streets. The Serbs set up rooftop barbecues and watched. Some wag produced T-shirts emblazoned with crosshairs, which became best-sellers. When the government closed the university and imposed a curfew, the nightclubs opened during the day. By some reckoning it was the fortieth assault in the city’s history on the religious fault line of Europe. So when the bombs started to fall again, they figured: Don’t sweat the big stuff.
Fifteen years later, the gray hulks remained; each one with an impact crater like the hollowed-out yolk of a boiled egg. My bathroom window looked onto one. As the seasons changed, the concrete shell went from a hundred degrees to being choked with snow. The government had left them as a double reminder: to the outside world, of what it had done; and to the Serbs, that the West is not your friend.
In the mountains close to the Bosnian border, the hideouts of recently convicted Ratko Mladić have become local landmarks. “Mladić lived there,” they say with tired ambivalence as you pass a falling-down cabin. It may not be the best claim to fame, but it’s better than nothing. The wars are both present and absent. An industry of NGOs and “transitional justice” organizations are dedicated to keeping their memory alive. None are more keen than regional politicians, who blow with failing lungs on the dog whistles of history. The multinationals too, in their own way. They segregate their staff by nationality, just in case. Like the Clintons, they’ve been indoctrinated in the “ancient hatreds” of the Balkans by a phalanx of foreign writers.
One souvenir of the last war is an epidemic of cancer blamed on depleted-uranium ordnance, which was used not by local combatants but by NATO. Those who assimilated radioactive material during their teenage growth spurt are now in their early 30s. From first diagnosis to the final goodbye often takes half a year. Everyone knows someone. We passed a girl on the street and asked about her boyfriend. “Oh,” she said. “He’s gone.” She was on her way to clean the accommodation they had moved into six weeks before. We offered to help. “No need,” she said, self-sufficient to the end.
True, get a Serb drunk and they’ll start talking about Kosovo. But this is just their brand of knee-jerk pride (they even have a word for it: inat). They don’t really want it back, any more than they want any involvement with Bosnia. The Bosnian Serbs are an embarrassment to modern Serbia. They are the drunken nephew at the South Slav family picnic, with Russia as the interfering aunt. Moscow intervenes whenever a sleight is leveled at Serbia, most recently when the U.N. attempted to recognize Srebrenica as a genocide. Discussion of Srebrenica usually descends into a macabre numbers game: downward pressure on the figure places you on one side of the conflict, upward pressure on the other. This perverse dance ignores the fact that genocide is a qualitative, not quantitative, business; and that even one civilian murder was too many. Russia vetoed the genocide resolution, of course, quickly shoring up her support among Serb nationalists. The West setting the stage for such Russian grandstanding does little to help Serbia’s government, which is trying to move the population closer to the E.U. Yet when the Russian bear offers something material—like this year’s gift of six MiG-29 fighters—her impoverished cub can ill afford to say no.
The younger generation wants to forget the past. They look across the border to huge shopping centers strategically built just inside the pale of the E.U., and stream Western shows to polish their excellent English. “The Hungarians?” said a taxi driver in a pink polo shirt and mirrored aviators. “Their English is terrible…and they dress like idiots!” Those who go on secondment into the E.U. are shocked at how little work people do—at least in Italy. They want a better chance to prove themselves. When Britain revoked visa-free travel—a move that Serbia’s nascent tourism sector could ill afford to reciprocate—it stung deeply.
Even so, Belgrade is going through a weird rebirth. The bombed ministries are finally being covered and redeveloped. A huge sprawl of railway sidings along the Sava River is being turned into a sparkly new CBD. The redevelopment money has come from Abu Dhabi in a deal brokered by Tony Blair, who codirected the most recent bombing (such irony is not lost on Balkan conspiracy theorists). What will now happen to the gypsy encampments that used to line the river is anyone’s guess; not least given how much strong-arming has already surrounded the project. With tremendous élan, the city government stopped a rush-hour tram to hide protests against its signing ceremony. Neither does anyone know who will actually occupy this Ozymandian edifice: The average monthly salary in Serbia is €400 and not going north anytime soon.
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The advent of a White Christmas is now heralded by Black Friday: this infamous moment when the grand coalition of Western capitalism starts whipping its adherents toward the tills. Six weeks later, the same people are spat out into the dawn of a New Year, bleary-eyed and broke. Black Friday gives way to Blue Monday, the “most depressing day of the year.” If Einstein was right—and insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting different results—then the West has it bad.
Everyone knows consumerism is a crock. Yet like a hooker returning to her pimp, it grips us with forces too deep to be escapable. These are partly anthropological. We have human needs, which are expertly subverted into human wants by the marketing machine. We have a desire to compete, which is brilliantly exploited by the semiotics of different brands. We assuage our moral consciences by decrying these appetites, while becoming evermore engorged on them.
This is partly because we castigate our materialism without realizing that consumerism is much worse. The past was nothing if not materialistic; but it was a materialism intended to last. Leonardo would leave The Last Supper for weeks at a time before returning to add a brushstroke. It is a revealing detail for an era when life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and when death by accident awaited at every street corner. To adapt a phrase from Tolkien: If something was worth doing, it was worth doing slowly. Leonardo knew he was only flesh and blood, so the painting would outlast him.
In a consumer society, our products cannot be allowed to outlast us. Quite the reverse. The apotheosis of our relationship with a possession is when we buy it. The moment of purchase is a moment of orgasm. When no longer animated by the thrill of acquisition, the new thing soon reveals its indifference. The high fades, only to be bettered by another purchase. This irrational value proposition is precisely the opposite of historical norms of commerce, which used to mean an object’s value being released over time and use. Now its value is not in its use but in its consumption, which happens in the moment we part with our money. It is, by nature, transient.
And the more transient, the better. Hence the ever-shortening replacement cycles of iPhones; the fickle demands of fashion; the pressure to replace your car without any improvement in its core technology. This drives a huge efficiency paradox in the West. Our markets and supply chains and digital price platforms are minutely efficient, yet we generate mountains of waste. This has a significant bearing not only on our emotional lives but on our shared future. Economic growth may mean making things cheaper, which means making them disposable; but it cannot do so forever.
Yet what is the alternative? Capitalism is a natural consequence of free societies; and consumerism appears to be the natural consequence of capitalism. The agoraphobia of endless choice remains more congenial to human instincts than Communism. The average individual may be de facto powerless in the face of corporate marketing, but they are de jure free: No one is forced to make a consumer purchase. As Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Being, the chains that bind them are on the inside.
This is especially true as consumerism works by infantilizing people. It narrows focus to the self and the immediate at the expense of others and the long term. It is emotional junk food. The altruistic consumer does not exist, and neither do corporates want him to exist. The altruist—like the financial saver—becomes economic dead weight. Physical consumerism is further abetted by financial consumerism, driving us toward the next debt crisis
Here is the real toxicity of modern consumerism: that it is a philosophy not of plenty but of lack. The person who has enough is useless to a modern government or a modern economy. Advertisers know this, so they reach for the Big Lie, turning the notion that the “best things in life are free” to commercial advantage. Hence we see businessmen tearing off their suits and jumping into lakes, or the smile of a newborn baby—all mendaciously turned to serve a corporate brand.
The reality is that consumerism does nothing to strengthen the individual, let alone family life. The consumer is a brittle creature, ill-suited to the demands of human cooperation. He is prone to sudden psychoses, erupting into violence to beat someone else to a cut-price product that neither wanted a moment before. This Black Friday saw such fights break out across the globe. In London, the febrile atmosphere led to an affray when two people bumped into each other on a subway platform. The resulting panic and stampede triggered a full-scale terror alert, shutting Oxford Street. As a vignette of twin fault lines acting on Western society, it could not have been better constructed.
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A few years ago, someone opened fire on me in St. John’s Wood. If you’re surprised, spare a thought for me. I was stepping onto the crosswalk leading toward Regent’s Park when a moped approached at speed. There was a moment of indecision: Would it proceed or would I? I stepped back, ceding my right of way with a truculent shrug. As the moped swept by, the pillion passenger turned angrily and waved an arm. There was a loud crack. As the bike distanced itself, a sharp smell drifted past. It was cordite.
I looked around. Sun shone on the neat lawns of the granny flats. Nothing had changed. It was still a nice day and I still had a dog to walk. Walking past the zoo and the school cricket matches, the moment reverberated. Had what I thought happened really happened? I tried to imagine my leaking body attended by a distraught border collie; inexplicably discovered together in one of the most genteel spots in London.
What would the police have thought? Could that really be the same world I still inhabited? The noise had been flat and half covered by the revving bike; nothing like the hearty boom of a 9mm. But the smell was a memory I couldn’t exorcise. As the weeks passed I eliminated the impossible and concluded that what remained, however improbable, was the truth: that in a moment of irritation or exuberance, a stranger had nearly murdered me. Of course, I didn’t report it to the police. It took too long to process, for one. I also had no evidence. And what could they have done?
It transpires those kids were in the avant-garde of moped crime. Fifty a day now occur in London. Together with stabbings, this makes it a more dangerous capital than New York. The pattern is always the same: One or more moped riders draw up, relieve one or more people of their possessions—or even vehicles—then speed off. Like my experience, it is brutally binary. One moment life is normal, then you are confronted with violence, then it disappears up the road. Last week, the Apple Store on Regent Street was subjected to such a three-minute visitation. There is little the police can do—or, increasingly, even try to do. And yet the U.K. has more CCTV cameras than any other European country.
All of which points to an odd paradox of Western life: The more technocratic society has become, the more it has slid into disorder. Government spending as a proportion of GDP is off the charts compared with historical norms. Governments will pay to reassign your gender. They will pay to relieve poverty on the other side of the world. They will take up arms on a whole range of real and alleged discrimination issues. They will remove your children from you if you espouse incorrect views. But the one responsibility they eschew is keeping you safe as you walk home. Signs have appeared in London telling residents not to use their phones in public. Police have similarly concluded that they cannot prevent knife murders, instead issuing “threat to life” notices to at-risk teenagers. Suffice it to say that the social contract isn’t what it used to be. Why is this?
The immediate, superficial debate is about policing tactics. In place of the highly successful zero-tolerance—“broken windows”—approach that cleaned up New York, British cops have adopted “proactive policing.” This means sending concentrated patrols to high-crime areas while removing their deterrent presence from low-crime areas. A recent study has shown this increases crime by giving it freer rein in rich areas while residents of poor areas feel unduly scrutinized. A second debate is about judicial measures to limit the rise in prison populations. But these are all surface questions. The heart of the issue is, what constitutes society? Is it a self-regulating organism? Or is it a simmering anarchy enclosed by rules? If it is self-regulating, what is the glue that binds it? And if it is anarchy, what are the wedges that drive it further apart?
Certainly the posture of the British police has shifted from one assumption to the other. Its founder, Sir Robert Peel, had a vision of “citizens in uniform” to provide a visible unarmed presence to deter criminals. This preventative mission has drifted toward catching perpetrators after a crime, when it is too late for the victim. CCTV itself is a case in point. Funded as a deterrent, it is instead used to gather evidence; although antifa-style face coverings easily circumvent this. Victims of street crime report that the police take testimonies largely as a box-ticking exercise. They now ask the public to report crime online to alleviate the paperwork. The baseline assumption has moved from a fundamentally stable community requiring deterrence to that of an unstable society where crime is the norm. Soon the question will be asked: But why were you using your mobile phone in public?
Although the normalization of crime has been a slow process, there have been inflection points. One such was the London riots of 2011, when large swaths of the city erupted into violent anarchy in response to the death of a suspect. Diners were stripped of their valuables in Notting Hill. Buildings in the suburbs were set alight with people sleeping inside. Even The Economist was shocked out its liberal complacency. “In the absence of internal, moral restraints, external ones can only do so much,” read its lead article. Peel’s vision of “citizens in uniform” once rested precisely on such moral constraints. What had become of them? The left often claims disorder is becoming mainstream due to income disparity and austerity. But such relativism strips the economically disadvantaged of their moral agency, ignoring the fact that there are plenty of law-abiding poor people (not to mention law-breaking rich people).
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The ripples from Harvey Weinstein’s considerable bulk are now lapping at the Palace of Westminster. This week the British Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, resigned over accusations of sexual impropriety—namely, touching a female journalist’s knee fifteen years ago. The knee’s owner is a no-nonsense radio host who has plainly stated she took no offense then or now. Fallon was a minister with a good working style who could even have led the party. Yet he resigned after being unable to provide reassurances that no other such accusations lingered from his two decades in Parliament.
A febrile atmosphere has pervaded Westminster since the leaking of a “sin list” of 36 oversexed Conservative MPs at the start of the week. The list presents an odd mix of seriousness, vigilantism, and prurience. At least one name—the ascetic Old Etonian adventurer Rory Stewart—has since been exonerated. His alleged victim said she was as hurt by the anonymous accusation as he was. This alone indicates the list was put together in a hurry, as is the fact that Sir Michael Fallon—the only beast actually to have been felled—did not even appear on it. Its seriousness was further undermined by backstabbing gossip about consensual affairs appearing alongside allegations of serious harassment.
The most prominent name is the prime minister’s de facto No. 2, Damian Green. A journalist and former family friend has accused him of “fleetingly” touching her knee and subsequently sending a flirtatious text. He survived despite the party very publicly opening ranks, including a prominent progressive MP hinting strongly he should be suspended. It then transpired that another female MP—who herself once harbored the most misplaced leadership ambitions in the party’s history—had contributed to the resignation of her colleague Michael Fallon. So keen are the Conservatives to prove their credentials that they are now shopping MPs to both the press and the police without even informing them.
It is not in dispute that the queasy sexual culture of Westminster is long overdue for serious change. But for the Conservatives to gorge on another of their periodic paroxysms of self-hatred—having just handed away their majority to a resurgent hard-left opposition—is an impressive piece of political masochism.
It is already all but forgotten that the catalyst for the current round of scandal was, in fact, a Labour MP. Nightclub owner Jared O’Mara had been feted as the first parliamentarian drawn from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s personal shock troops, the entryist Momentum group. He was recently revealed to be the most brutish misogynist imaginable, whose bouncers punched a woman in the face. And yet Labour gave him a post on the parliamentary committee for Woman and Equalities. The Party was furthermore shown to have bypassed the most basic background checks, then dragged its feet for days before suspending him.
That episode took place well before the publication of the Conservative “sin list.” And yet, as it unfolded, Theresa May failed to land a single blow on Labour—instead speaking in general bipartisan terms. She is apparently still too afraid of being seen as the “nasty party”—in her own phrase of 2002—to hold Labour to its own rhetoric on safeguarding women.
It gets worse. The most serious accusation by far—an actual rape at a party event—also belongs to Labour. Party apparatchiks told the victim to shut up for the sake of her career, without so much as a cup of tea to calm her nerves. At least one more such event is apparently known about. A climate of misogyny has become so widespread under Jeremy Corbyn that the BBC’s female political editor now requires a bodyguard to attend the Party’s national convention. Labour’s most vocal young female MP has recently said left-wing misogynists are “literally” the worst because they also “think they have so much to give the world.” The comment is reminiscent of the Clinton supporter who—wrong-footed by rape accusations against Bill—quickly produced the defense that “he also did a lot for women.”
The left has clearly adopted the view that its rules of conduct are there to be weaponized for partisan ends rather than obeyed. Nothing is done to disguise the double standard. Before he was suspended, Labour’s Jared O’Mara said that only a Conservative should resign under such circumstances. By instilling the idea that the (female-led) Tory party is the enemy of equality, Labour awards itself a free pass to self-examine at leisure. There has been no Labour “sin list” in spite of rumors swirling of criminal assaults far beyond the odd comment or stray hand. The leadership reluctantly suspended a second MP prone to tumescent frottage of staff only after his victim was forced into a distasteful public testimony (having previously promoted him in full knowledge of such predilections). Yet when the Labour leader distributes platitudes at a feminist book launch, they are still warmly received.
At its most virulent, this partisanship extends to Labour MP Naz Shah saying that the thousands of young girls subjected to gang rape by grooming circles—in mainly Labour-controlled areas—should “shut their mouths for the good of diversity.” When fellow Labour MP Sarah Champion begged to differ—based on firsthand contact with victims in her own constituency—the party forced her to resign as Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities. When she recently requested a meeting with her party leader to discuss misogyny, she was reportedly refused.
And yet, by grabbing the headlines, the Conservatives have managed to place themselves front and center of the current scandal, putting Theresa May on the run. Instead of the reshuffle she desperately needed to shore up her authority—and clarify the battle lines on Brexit—she panicked and appointed an inexperienced loyalist to the position of Defence Secretary. Her party is furious, not least because the new incumbent himself helped engineer Sir Michael’s fall. In the words of one commentator, it is “banana republic stuff.”
Against such a backdrop, Labour’s rearguard action against its “endemic” sexual-abuse problem takes place in the shadows. How has this reversal been allowed to happen? Because the Conservatives have still failed to grasp the nature of Labour radicalization. The party has been turned into a revolutionary movement for which democratic process is only one avenue of political change. Jeremy Corbyn is as likely to be found addressing a street rally as conducting parliamentary business. His ironfisted deputy John McDonnell has reportedly said he would like to see every Conservative MP harassed in the street. Both he and Corbyn have yet to refute their previous associations with terror groups ranging from the IRA to Hamas. If their political mission is too sacred to disassociate from murderers, then why disassociate from sexual harassers in their own party? And why not instead allow such accusations to sow chaos among their opponents? Like the Saudis turning Wahhabism loose on the world to keep it away from their own door, Labour has loosed the forces of social justice on the Conservative Party.
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