The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  The constant recourse to these ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ shibboleths just renders their meaning more and more vacuous. And so conservatives need to establish their own shibboleths and encapsulate them into skilful panegyric: tradition, heritage, rule of law, conservation (in the broadest sense), freedom and independence perhaps. Without such a referential frame, social conservatism will continue to flounder. It has lost direction, listing like a ship heeling to one side. Conservatism has forgotten its basic principles, and it is high time for a renaissance. It needs to rediscover its language, the terms that frame its philosophy.

  In short, we need a new cultural grammar to underpin the multi-polar, anti-globalist philosophy. We don’t need speech codes or double-speak, but we need a a set of rigid principles. A cultural grammar that can show rational, sensible people that ‘tradition’ and conservatism in the apolitical sense is not xenophobia as the liberal globalists want us to believe. It has nothing to do with that. This cultural grammar must show that it represents an idealism of its own (and not just an antipathy towards liberalism), one that is not based on arbitrary whims but enduring realities. As such, it would be a real cultural grammar that described concepts pertaining to real, tangible things and not intangible ideas of global governance. This cultural grammar would rise up against the censorship, and self-censorship that is enveloping us and that allows the multiculturalist project to go ahead unheeded. We must dispel the tapestry of lies that suggest this is incontrovertible ‘progress’.

  Currently, our freedom and freedom of speech appears to be conditional on these liberal shibboleths. That is to say freedom of speech only exists in the sense that it conforms to the heavily politicised notions of ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’. If we must have hate-speech legislation, then it should protect the ethnic majority, not criminalise them and legislate only in favour of the minority. If the German MP Stefanie von Berg addresses the German Bundestag and tells her peers that Germans must be a minority in their own cities, then that might be considered hate-speech. If we need the legislation, then that would surely be a more rational basis to litigate upon.

  The problem with conservatives appears to be that they take their inspiration from the past, from traditional social structures and institutions whereas the Left seeks to reject all moral authorities that transcend human purposes. Any objection to this is a manifestation of bigotry. The conservative agenda is perceived to be ‘unprogressive’ because it is not socially meliorist and does not favour ‘progress’ over ‘tradition’ (Pabst, 2010: 66). Meliorism is a noble effort no doubt, but meliorists tend to overlook the fact that man is in Gehlen’s language a Sonderentwurf (‘a special project’); his heterogeneous life-world is more complex and less malleable than the meliorists presuppose.

  There is a necessity for Europe to present itself as ‘modern’, but it cannot do this by appealing to its authentic antiquity. The telos has to be apparently secular, and thus post-Christian. But we cannot continue the European legacy without the ‘archaic’ idiom. ‘Progress’ would appear to be the sine qua non of any forward-looking society, and any philosophy that is part of that society. But of course one can progress without abnegating all one’s customs, traditions, sense of morality etc. There are few politicians who would not stand under the moralising banner and embrace ‘progress’; there are perhaps even fewer that would not advocate ‘social justice’. But the ‘justice’ or the ‘progress’ that has been discussed always refers to the group (not the individual), and it is a universal abstract progress. The Left might not hesitate to put down or hold back an individual, but provided the group can pass by unfettered, then that is progress. Their objection to selective Grammar Schools in England is an obvious example of this. The demonisation of clever people can never be progress.

  The Left has a vision — a flawed and unrealistic one — but it has a vision, whereas traditional conservatism has a legacy. Or at least, that is how the Left wishes to present it. It is perhaps this ‘legacy’ criticism that enables Leftist thinking to assume an a priori correctness. But far from being a positive anthropology, Leftist liberalism, as we have seen, is uniformly negative. It wants to undermine Western values in the name of economic competition, ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ which, as we have seen, are code words for concepts which are potentially rather sinister. There is nothing positive in supporting an ideology which does little more than attempt to negate every inherited value and institution in the book. This has to be one of the platforms from which Leftist thinking can be attacked and undermined. It is not an ideology of ‘progress’ at all, but one of annihilation, a case of schafft sich ab (‘doing away with itself’; Sarrazin, 2010). It is an admission of defeat at a time of Islamist extremism, and it is defeat without even the hint of a struggle. It is a case of kein Kampf, with rather a lot of topspin being put on the word kein.

  But if the ‘voice of dissent is the voice of the hero’ (Scruton, 2015: 59), then perhaps the time for new conservatism, and the return to the local, has come, since it is surely time to dissent against the cultural repudiation that Leftist thinking has imposed on us. Future migration crises might shatter our societies. Certain globalist political leaders have refused to listen to their respective electorates, perhaps because their overall agenda reaches beyond them. We must liberate ourselves from the truth-denying rhetoric that feeds off false conflicts, and prevents us from drawing conclusions based on common sense. The point that has been made throughout this book is that there is really nothing to be gained from embracing cultural nihilism. In order to look forward to a less tragic telos of modernity, we must understand this.

  The Brexit result has given us anti-globalists great hope, the deus ex machina that some of us have been waiting for. It has shown that we can beat the globalists, the multinationals, the overpaid antediluvian bureaucrats with their plump pensions who think they can rule over us without a mandate from their Brussels offices. Moreover, it has shown us that Brexit might mark the beginning of the twilight of liberalist modernity, and return us to a more familiar world of ethnopluralism (every nation has a right to sovereignty). Liberalist pluralism is just at the moment beginning to look rather fragile. There is now a feeling that common sense must at some point prevail. After all, why would any half-proud nation want to schafft sich ab in the manner that Sweden is doing?

  Once we have emerged from the travails of liberalist modernity, from the globalist tyranny that uses multiculturalism to subvert sovereign nation-states, we must only hope that the façade of human sovereignty and the sanctity of the land is not inexorably blemished, and that we can again look over the horizon and find the fields still green. We must hope that more remains than just the banality of the global consumerist frenzy. We must ensure that our ancient farm lands, which have been harvested for generations by families and friends, remain what they are, and are not blotched with cul-de-sacs of tiny, terraced houses with many-hued faces, faiths and fancies staring blankly from the fenestra. Britain and Western Europe will have to emerge from the tangled hinterland of the gigantic tattoo parlour that it has become, and face the coarser realities.

  We have forgotten one important, fundamental lesson on this peculiar relativist track that liberals have tried to lead us down: people perceive life differently because they are different. The objectives of one-world globalism and its universalist view of humanity are based on fundamental flaws about human nature. World citizenship with one proletarian state will never work for this reason. And now it is time to deliver ourselves of a searching point or two along these lines, before we find ourselves truly in the soup: politics needs to be based on reality again, and not fantasy. Politicians must rediscover their mettle and state the obvious as Trump and Farage (with different degrees of aptitude) have done time and time again: multiculturalism has been a hideous failure, political correctness leads to self-censorship, cultural repudiation is nihilistic and serves no meaningful purpose, the EU oligarchic project that has convulsed Europe has for
many nations simply not worked. We need alternatives and these are independence, sovereignty and self-determination. Politicians aside, what we all as individuals must do is ‘speak out’. We must smash the groupthink and speak up for what we believe is right. That is the greatest imperative. We must challenge any infringements put on the freedom of expression.

  Thankfully, not everybody agreed with the former NATO supreme commander, General Wesley Clark, when he said in 1999: ‘There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a nineteenth century idea and we are trying to transition it into the twenty-first century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states’.169 The implied sense of purpose and agency here is worrisome, particularly as this comes from the man who was responsible for the illegal ‘humanitarian’ NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. It was the largest attack ever undertaken by the alliance, and was against a nation that posed no threat to a NATO member state. One might even infer from Clark’s comments that an attempt to preserve a mono-ethnic nation should be met with a NATO onslaught of uranium bombs and cluster munitions. We cannot allow our nations and communities to be melted down by the multi-ethnic discourse like this, and spread like dripping butter on the ideologically perverse toast. And thus when Theresa May says: ‘if you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’, it looks like, in the UK at least, we are edging back to the politics of common sense.170

  Looking over the brow of the hill, there are many things which can be done to counter-attack the kind of globalist liberalism with its rhetoric that has been commented on in these essays. It is firstly imperative that the peoples of other European countries have the opportunity to determine their future in Europe. If a democratic right to a referendum is refused, then that tells us all we need to know about the EU. If member states are permitted referendums from their elected Governments, then we will see the whole project dismantle over the coming years. That is to say, the EU is a false democracy whose Commissioners are pursuing the policies of multiculturalism (to the point of destabilisation) without any mandate to do so. Beyond encouraging democratic referendums in respective European nation-states, other measures that could be taken in the UK might include: repeal the European Convention on Human Rights and rewrite hate-speech legislation to protect the ethnic majority (and not the minority), or else just scrap it. Hate-crimes are absurd, anomalous and Orwellian. We must not waste our time trying to police synthetic anger. But, do not permit me to dwell on some sort of sanctimonious wish-list compiled at leisure over the fragments of small-talk.

  Instead, let us now turn our attention to languorous Sweden where the situation is more alarming because of the deception of the State-sponsored media that likes to indulge in the agonies of perjury. The unthinkable needs to be done: the Swedish welfare state should be reformed. It is true that Sweden has an ageing population, but the solution to this cannot be to import large numbers of people from the poorest countries in the world. The Swedish welfare system is comprehensively abused. Nearly a quarter of a million people were on long-term sick leave in 2015 (for a labour force of just 5.0 million [2014]; in 2002, 298,000 people were on sick leave for a labour force of 4.6 million) and being well paid by the State to do nothing.171 As many of these people as possible need to get back to work, and an Australian-style points immigration system should be introduced to make up for the shortfall in skilled labour. Egalitarianism in Sweden is such that the infrastructure in place is not there to reward people who want to work harder and get on in life. They will be simply punished through higher taxes, and all those benefiting from the system will reap the awards. This system really must be reformed and made far less generous, and then the apparent ageing population problem will soon go away because younger people will be forced back to work, and with much lower taxes they will be motivated to work harder.

  As has been mentioned elsewhere, it is absolutely vital that Sweden establishes an alternative media where the facts can be heard, and not just the Swedish Government multiculturalist ideology that attempts to unscrupulously banish opposing views. Only then will Swedes understand the ultimate paradox: liberalist modernity is not liberal at all. It is quasi-totalitarian.

  These private media channels must lift the lid on the collusion between politics and media, so then the obfuscation can be seen for what it is. Swedes must be freed from the blinding, patronising ideology, so that they can regain their critical awareness and see all the problems that face Sweden not just from the perspective of the mollycoddling Government and not from a perspective that is just immediately deemed to be racist. However, we should not expect the State media to reform because it is obviously in the interest of the ruling Government to have that media as its mouthpiece, as a powerful voice of party propaganda. The media is there to fulfil a political function, to smother the population in its malignant, multiculturalist rhetoric. This rhetoric is so terrifyingly powerful that it is only an outsider who listens to it with such a pained grimace. The ideologised Swedes are apparently blind to its politicised message. The purpose of this book has been to try and address that regrettable status quo.

  It is only once a plausible alternative to the State-sponsored media has been established that the truth about what is happening in Sweden can be known, and the ensnaring totalitarian mentality can be tackled. The lies must end. Then, and only then, can Sweden become the open, free democracy that people think it is and that the erroneous league tables tells us it is. Of course, there are some small private radio channels that tell the truth, but they lack funding and most people have never heard of them. Swedes would be frightened of being labelled a racist for listening to an alternative, un-State sponsored view of what is really going on in this country. In Sweden, people serve the State. They do not ask questions. It might even be frowned upon to ask questions because that would break the bond of conformity. In a country where servitude is expected, individual rights can be suppressed. Swedes have almost no rights for instance when up against the authorities in the Swedish courts. But, Sweden has come to such a point that it is absolutely essential to ask questions. Unquestioning conformity at a time of crisis is insidious.

  Sweden must of course deal with the problem that it has created, that of segregated Muslim communities of outsiders. This is not the place for a discussion of how to go about this, and I do not have the mental complacency to dictate to a country how to run its affairs. One is concerned here with ideologies, and not dry political manifestos. But permit me a few unsubtle observations. One objective measure of integration is surely the ability to speak the language of the host country. If after three years of help and tuition, a ‘refugee’ still has no fluency in the language, then this is probably because a conscious decision has been made not to integrate into Swedish life. Swedish is not a particularly difficult language to learn. Where possible, the future ‘refuge’ options of these people should be reconsidered, as it is obviously in nobody’s interest to create diaspora of unintegrated exiles.

  Sweden should ban shari’ah law, for equality, which is after all the national creed, is blasphemous according to shari’ah — equality for men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals. So, surely, shari’ah must be legislated against. It would be contradictory to talk endlessly about equality, but oppose this. What is blasphemy to them is the raison d’être for many Swedes. The country should send a strong message saying that incomers must adapt to the Swedish way of life, accept the basis upon which Swedish law is founded, and not vice versa. Those that drink, those that are gay, those that are Christian, those that are having extra-marital affairs — I have just described Stockholm — all of them are punished under shari’ah law and some of them would have to be stoned to death. Not a single European country bans shari’ah law.

  As an all signed-up feminist country, other measures that should be taken are a ban on the burqa, niqab and chador, as indeed Denmark has recently done. It is clear that this kind of Islamic dress has no place in the most feminist country in the
world. That is the stuff of cartoons. These are basic, reasonable measures that have a very simple message: if you come here, you respect our customs, public culture and way of life. You have to play by the rules.

  As a good UN member, Sweden should really determine whether those that have sought ‘refuge’ still actually require it. Repatriation is the preferred UN outcome, but that seems to have been forgotten in Sweden. In cases where peace and stability has returned to the country, then the refugees that have not yet gained Swedish citizenship (i.e. recent arrivals) should, where possible, be asked to leave. Voluntary repatriation should be sought in the first instance, but then the cases for the repatriation of recent Afghan and Pakistani ‘refugees’ for instance might be taken up. These few measures alone would send an unambiguous message to any plotting migrants that things have changed, the door has closed and that Sweden, that ‘end-of-history paradise’ as The New York Times called it (December, 2015) has not completely lost its sanity.172

  Arguably, more important than all these measures is the need for the Swedish Government, media and social institutions to foster again a positive belief in Sweden and its heritage. It should be a statement of affirmation, and not hostility to others. The ongoing migration crisis cannot be tackled until this process of affirmation takes place. As has been noted, the crisis of identity in Sweden is unnecessary and entirely self-inflicted, and so the re-establishment of positive beliefs will require a degree of ideological unwinding. In so doing, the Swedish heritage, public culture and social norms must be first defended against all internal and external threats. If they are not, then the prerequisite of social attachment is jeopardised and Swedish society risks becoming undone with adjacent communities living in accordance with very different value systems, as is the case in parts of the war-torn Middle East.