We may have passed the first anniversary of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th, but all eyes remain on Israel. The sole Jewish state is trying to rid itself of terror threats from Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, with waning financial and moral support from its infighting Western allies. Protests on American college campuses and European cities have convinced left-wing politicians to cower before the Keffiyeh. Under Elon Musk’s less-censorious stewardship, X has become a theatre for debates about Israel’s response. Why has this war become an obsession of so many so far from it? Why have not only progressive protestors, but also social-conservative commentators paid so much attention to Israel?
History podcaster Darryl Cooper incensed the internet last month, claiming, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War”. This provoked an antibody reaction from Tucker’s ostensible allies. Historians Andrew Roberts and Victor Davis Hanson catalogued the factual errors in Cooper’s account. Commentators like Konstantin Kisin then accused Carlson of “Woke Rightism”: adopting contrarian opinions and White identity politics as a defensive posture against the progressive attack on the history, culture, and statehood of European peoples. Sir Niall Ferguson said, by platforming Cooper, that Carlson has become “an enabler of fascists”.
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Indeed, Cooper’s revisionism prompted a Pavlovian response from those tired of seeing their heritage subject to slander, all while Hitler’s translated speeches are going viral on TikTok. Their concern is understandable: nobody right-minded wants to see a Fourth Reich emerge. But l, without inferring the motives of Cooper & Carlson, would wager the fault line here runs deeper than mere Nazi apologia.
Since October 7th, we have become aware that our politics still operate according to a paradigm established after the Second World War. This has led to a fascination with revisiting and revising its events. As Yeats’ centre fails to hold, the post-War consensus is being messily renegotiated. Our ragtag band of recovering liberals, Christian intellectuals, Hellenic vitalists, and observant Jews, loosely called “the Right” is strained by unresolved disputes. For a coalition to survive, each group’s grievances must be heard.
The story a civilization tells itself comprises its culture. In its resolution to establish a unified “European historical consciousness”, the EU characterized “crimes committed by Nazi, fascist and communist totalitarian regimes” as a “‘negative foundation myth’ [to] provide a strong sense of purpose for the European peace project”. Since the horrors of the Holocaust, the modus operandi of European culture has been to fulfil the pledge, “Never Again.” In doing so, it adopted a politics of value-pluralist liberalism, antithetical to Nazi racism; and built institutions to enshrine this ideology, with the express purpose of making nations play nice. In 1948, the UN proclaimed its Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and the Congress of Europe convened in the Hague, where Churchill declared “In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law”. The UK became the first country to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights in 1951. It assented to the UN Refugee Convention that same year, with the protection of Jews who fled Nazi persecution and were turned away in mind.
Churchill is an avatar of this post-War political consensus. To misty-eyed patriots, his statue in Parliament Square stands testament to the moral legitimacy of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War. Plans to build a Holocaust Memorial beside Parliament has befuddled some, as Churchill’s statue already represents our role in stopping it. Only two plausible motives to attack his legacy are conceivable. Either race-communist revolutionaries find his nineteenth-century vocabulary insufficient for modern sensibilities; and act as if he poured libations to Poseidon to conjure a cyclone and cause the Bengal Famine. Or, anyone citing legitimate failings — such as handing Poland and the Cossacks over to Stalin, to die in the gulags described by Solzhenitsyn — are trying to draw a false equivalence between Churchill and Hitler. Thanks to progressives crying wolf for decades, a handful of online Nazis try to seek refuge in socially conservative circles. When found out, they are cast out. But they try, nonetheless.
However, a third reason has emerged to revisit the events and aftermath of the Second World War. Carlson and Cooper lament how London, no longer majority English, has lost its parochial identity. I have lived here for a quarter-century, and can attest to how unpleasant my city has become. This is due to unprecedented demographic change: with 1.2 million migrants moving to a country the size of New York state every year. When a criminal foreign national is due to be deported, human rights lawyers frustrate the process with appeals to Article 8 of the ECHR. This same statute was cited in an ECHR ruling which compels all signatories to take costly climate action because hot weather violates the rights of pensioners who want to take “longer holidays”. The rights enshrined in different political and technological conditions have been strained beyond credulity, and that’s without mentioning the Soviet meddling with the UN’s Declaration. As David Starkey states, they exist now not to protect individuals, but to enable aggrieved ‘minorities’ to attack ‘majorities’. There exists a painful contradiction between the story Brits tell themselves: victors of the Second World War, but penalized by costly immigration and cultural degradation. Any complaint is met with accusations of being “Far Right”, a racist, and a Nazi.
Churchill is not the monocausal culprit of this state of affairs. But his legacy is complicated by his involvement in establishing institutions and treaties that have outlived their purpose. Some are captured entities: like the UN’s Human Rights Council, counting China, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar among its members. Others are antiquated, with the definition of “refugee” stretched to encompass billions living below Western economic standards, and Muslims who, since October 7th, have broadcast genocidal intent toward the very Jews these laws were written to protect.
The moral argument for granting to displaced European Jews their homeland is compelling; but it came at the cost of the British Empire. The funds secured by sacrificing the Mandate for Palestine founded the new state religion: the NHS. Those who use the service least pay the most into it, and were forced to sacrifice their careers and social lives to “protect” it during the COVID pandemic. Whereas Britain’s Empire lasted three hundred years and ended the transatlantic slave trade in the single most expensive humanitarian venture in history, America’s subsequent attempt to play world-police has been less successful. Failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are within living memory for Millennials and Gen Z. It should surprise nobody that those for whom the Second World War presses less on their conscience are most inclined to question the shortcomings of its resulting consensus.
Churchill is collateral damage in this attempt to rid ourselves of institutions well past their expiration date. The fault line for the Right is fast becoming post-War liberalism. Without recognizing and dispensing with its limits, the Right will not survive.
Theodor Adorno wrote, “There can be no poetry after the Holocaust.” Philosophy, sociology, psychology, art, and politics were marshalled to ensure the guard towers of Auschwitz are never resurrected. The racial determinism of the Nazis was found to be indivisible from their genocidal acts. The moral valence ascribed to various volks led ineluctably to justification of their extermination. However, as Rusty Reno documents, an overcorrection followed. Karl Popper placed a premium on “Open” societies, to prevent exclusionary national identities producing “racialists” and “state worshipers”. Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality sought to identify “potential fascists” everywhere — not just in deNazifying Germany. In the decades since, Europe’s leaders have refused to draw moral distinctions between cultures, for fear of falling afoul of reductio ad Hitlerum.
This was reified during the Cold War. Jewish-American academic Yoram Hazony charts how William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank Meyer brought free-market liberals, Christian conservatives, and foreign policy hawks into coalition against Soviet communism. Fusionism, the movement which delivered Ronald Reagan the presidency, was ideologically liberal. As was its British counterpart, Thatcherism: borrowing heavily from Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Having fled Austria in 1932, Hayek warned “it is Germany whose fate we [in Europe] are in some danger of repeating”. Anxiety around the return of Nazism, as the apex predator of collectivism, animated conservative anti-communism more than a desire to conserve a given national culture. Hence why Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society” — only free floating atoms with competing self-interests, bound together by the coincidence of geography.
This abstinence from cultural preference comes from the antagonistic relationship between nature and culture in classical liberalism. Both Thatcherism and Fusionism shared an anthropology of man’s natural state being a free rational actor, with any limit on his autonomous choices equated with oppression. Just as the state exists as an uneasy compromise to secure private property, Patrick Deneen points out that culture is treated as a deterioration from man’s egalitarian source. The enterprise of liberalism becomes divining universal values to overcome cultural differences, and resolve all conflicts. It aimed to spread the self-evident truth of these values through economic prosperity. The “Golden Arches Theory” promised free-market capitalism could avert another World War. Both Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall lent legitimacy to Francis Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democracy had brought us to the End of History.
The ideologies that followed — neoconservatism in the US, and neoliberalism in the UK — share these premises. Emily Finley explains how Leo Strauss, patron intellectual of neoconservatives, sought to “transcend the actual” of culture, custom, and tradition with universally applicable values. Matthew Goodwin establishes the ideological connective tissue between Thatcher’s fiscal libertarianism and Tony Blair’s social liberalism in Values, Voice and Virtue. Hence why Thatcher named Blair as the element of her legacy she was proudest of. All shared the view that human nature is subject to economic and educational circumstances.
When confronted with the imperial ambitions of Islam, liberals did not course-correct. The bizarre conclusion of the American empire’s foreign misadventures was not that people can’t be bombed into democracy, but rather the landmass people live on was the problem. Surely, if they were imported en masse to Europe, their indigestible tribal priors would dissolve, and contact with our soil, education system, and economic opportunities would render them indistinguishable from the native host population? It’s not like they would hold civilians collectively responsible for the wars waged by their states, and commit acts of terror in revenge, is it?
Lives have been lost to dispel this myth: the Manchester Arena Bombing, the murder of Sir David Amess MP, the Bataclan Massacre, the rape of thousands of English girls by Pakistani grooming gangs… And this year, the bi-weekly marches after October 7th. Ten hours after the murders and rapes in Re’im, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign informed the Met Police of their plans to stage their first protest. The bitter irony is that the liberalism which sought to guarantee “Never Again” has brought genocidal barbarism within our gates. And yet, politicians are still unwilling to remove it for fear of being called racist.
Post-War liberalism unilaterally disarmed Europe of the right to exercise an in-group preference for respective countries’ cultures, histories, and peoples. It compelled us to treat everyone with the false anthropology of the Blank Slate: as if all cultural, geographical, and biological differences are inconsequential, and easily remedied by technocrats turning the dials of education and economic opportunity. Liberalism is recalcitrant to recognise how involuntary factors — like ethnic and cultural heritage — may influence one’s likelihood of buying into a civilization’s story. It has, paradoxically, placed upon Europe the burden of unique, non-expungable guilt for past atrocities, thinning out its history to a list of grievances requiring recompense. Such optimism is the furthest thing from Nazi racial determinism; but sacrifices the ability to stake a claim in any one conception of the good. Liberalism is, as James Burnham said, “the ideology of Western suicide”.
The solution? Abandon it, for an international alliance of unapologetic, culturally distinct host majorities. A new Right coalition, founded not on liberal values, but on friendships between self-conscious ethno-cultural groups. This coalition will encompass grateful houseguests, whose harrowing experiences give them a salient gratitude for the values, history, and generosity of their host nations. But choosing friends from enemies requires we recognise and respect differences between peoples. This is already the ambition of the National Conservatism movement — its conferences organized and heavily attended by observant Jews.
This, too, is a source of tension within the Right. There is a perception that the prosperity of Israel comes at the expense of Europe and America. Like Churchill, it has become an avatar of the prices paid for the post-War order. As demographer Paul Morland notes, though Israel is surrounded by enemies on all sides, its high levels of religiosity, above-replacement birth rate, strong ethnic and cultural cohesion, and competitive GDP-per-capita are all enviable. Essentially, we want what Israel has. Unease comes from a feeling of not being allowed to have it; particularly when the writings of some Jews are taken to represent all Jews. Haunted by a history of expulsions, some tried to redefine national identities as a set of universal values which any individual could ascribe to, and be afforded the protections of citizenship. As Eric Kaufmann documents in Whiteshift, writers like Felix Adler and Horace Kallen laid the foundations for twenty-first century multiculturalism with twentieth-century modernism. This has proven disastrous. Renaud Camus once warned of a “Second Career of Adolf Hitler”, caused by importing millions for whom the Second World War holds no moral weight. He said, to a Parisian Jewish forum, that supporting liberal immigration policy and multiculturalism is to be “cheerfully busy sawing off the branches on which they sit”. In seeking protection beneath the umbrella of value-pluralism, some Jews have encouraged Western governments to import Muslims en masse, who now march for their destruction.
Mistrust seems to be behind a century of arguing that Europeans cannot possess a positive national identity, else even the nations who fought the Nazis will commit atrocities. Such mistrust has been met with a withholding of support for Israel since October 7th.
At risk of sounding radioactive: both racial and religious minorities, anxious that the guard towers of Auschwitz will be resurrected, and host majorities, who feel gaslit out of a right to prefer and preserve their home, heritage, culture, and demographic integrity, have legitimate grievances. Both misapprehend the others’ motives, and should be given certain guarantees. There should be a comfort with the indigenous host populations of Europe and the Anglosphere being unchallenged demographic majorities. Morland and Philip Pilkington note that current trends will cause Britain to be majority first-generation immigrants by 2080. A nation ceases to be a home when guests outnumber its owners.
Europeans should not be cajoled into dissolving their distinct identities in a multicultural melting pot. These European host majorities are the most likely to accommodate friendly Jewish minorities. These bonds of friendship between tribes are what protect them — not nebulous liberal values. These European majorities should be allowed to abandon the captured institutions of the post-War order. Nor should they be expected to accommodate Gazans displaced by Israel’s war with Hamas. But they should also give guarantees to allied minorities, to soothe (mercifully needless) anxieties that a Fourth Reich lurks just around the corner.
A line must be drawn somewhere. Many of us retracing the steps of our civilization have turned to Christianity. This does not prevent us from being both perennialists and pragmatists. I have theological differences with Judaism, as I do with Japanese Shinto. But do I wish to culturally evangelize Japan into being less Japanese? Why else would I visit other than to experience and admire its distinctiveness? Being a Christian means to abide by Christ’s instructions at the conclusion of Matthew: to go forth and minister to all nations. This means to make one’s works fit for the ethnic and geographic particularities of peoples. It doesn’t mean ignoring or erasing differences to bring all beneath a universal homogenous state. God reduced the Tower of Babel to rubble for such hubris. Convincing the Nietzscheans among us would require another essay, if it’s even possible.
We should start seeing civilizations as tribes, with whom we have to treat, and apply tests of friendship. This allows us to draw sensible distinctions between those who would do us harm, and the good neighbors who help protect our home. That requires a recognition of difference, impossible under twentieth-century political constraints. We must abandon the trappings of post-War liberalism, before our monuments are toppled by any of the revolutions it has made possible.
