Kulturkampf: Britain’s capitulation to cultural Marxism

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There can now be no question that our lifetimes will be where this great reckoning must take place.’

This article is written by Ben Harris-Quinney, Chairman of the Bow Group, and features in Bournbrook’s eleventh print issue, which can be pre-ordered here or purchased as part of a subscription here.

Hermann Goering said of WWII: ‘The Germans lost the war because the German people have a hard hand but a soft heart, the British people have a soft hand, but a hard heart.’

We are in the grips of a total cultural capitulation to Marxism, imposed not by a groundswell uprising of the workers of the world but by a tiny minority of useful idiots, and an even smaller group of their manipulators.

As Chairman of the world's oldest conservative think tank, I used to write an article in the advocacy of conservatism every week. I stopped writing with any frequency some years ago, because I didn't feel that they made any difference against the tide of disinformation and propaganda that now dominates our media and society. Nor do I think writing this will make any difference to what happens, but it may be that this note survives as a record of our tragic decline.

I write to the future readers of the lost and obscure who I hope have overcome the coming dark age, and may be bewildered as to how and why it happened.

We have reached the stage where our civilisation has demonstrated itself to be so riven with flaws as to be unsalvageable, without a great reckoning. To quote a more celebrated German, the future will be decided not by speeches and majority decisions, but by iron and blood.

If you watch the mainstream media you would be forgiven for thinking the culture war is already over and this is the reckoning. Its opponents have been, if not executed, cancelled. Its adherents exalted.

One such adherent is the famous actress Emma Watson. Following George Floyd's death in Minnesota, she posted three black squares on her social media pages.

More than fifty million people die each year, many of them in brutal and unjust circumstances, many of them this year because of the pandemic we find ourselves in the midst of. George Floyd dying was more significant though, because even though there is a 0.03 per cent chance of a black person dying after being arrested for violent crime but a 0.04 per cent chance of a white person dying, and even though there was no conclusive evidence that a police officer intended to kill anyone, and no evidence that if he did it was because of racism, the conclusion of our cultural masters was that this event meant that Western civilisation must begin to dismantle itself in haste.

Due to her celebrity intuition, Emma Watson realised almost immediately after the mainstream media had created the acceptable narrative, that she had to take a brave stance against the powers that be. The powers that be were inexplicably not considered to be the mainstream media, not her Hollywood employers, not trillionaire oligopoly tech companies, not the vast global corporations that still wilfully engaged in slavery, not the political leaders in the Democrat run state of Minnesota that administered the police force, but the long dead founders of Western civilisation who had the disgusting temerity not to adjust their behaviour to the social mores of hundreds of years into the future, all whilst being largely white.

Unfortunately, in so bravely posting these black squares, Emma Watson missed something: she missed that the borders of the black squares were white. When this was discovered by the woke paragons of social media, she was called a racist. In a testament to our departure from reality, rather than declaring the claims absurd and nonsensical, Emma Watson said that she accepted these valid criticisms and would endeavour to do better in future.

At the time, the public debate was still largely focussed on police brutality. The white borders problem was a simmering sign of things to come, and to come still.

For centuries scientists, anthropologists, and natural historians, all knew that prejudice was a survival function that permeated almost every living thing in known existence. They knew recent theories such as racism were cultural identifications of that natural biological and cognitive process, and that natural inclination would never be completely eradicated from existence, without eradicating existence itself.

Racism was a relatively recent theory that developed from the root of the identification of prejudice. It originally determined that some people treat other people less well for a myriad of reasons, but one may be based upon their race. There was huge societal and historical evidence for this, and for many years it was accepted that the direct practice of treating other races negatively was the practice of racism. This definition of racism and its evils is something that almost every member of Western society abhors, and has done for hundreds of years at least. This abhorrence grew largely from the now derided Judeo-Christian faiths, which preached all men were equal before God.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, those from academic backgrounds who had grievances with society began gaining control of academic institutions. They knew they could break society by using the hard science behind the natural phenomenon of prejudice to slowly advance a social science narrative that would eventually declare all things to be unacceptably prejudiced, and further declare that the eradication of all existence was a superior alternative to living with this natural prejudice.

In 2020 we traversed the final stage of this process. If the colour black having a border was racist, then anything could now be racist: a children's cartoon dog could be racist, a breakfast cereal could be racist, a chimney sweep with inadvertent coal dust on his face could be racist, every single atom, reality itself, and everything in it past, present, and future could be racist, and once declared racist, would have to be destroyed.

A swirling cultural black hole has been opened, which unreckoned with must engulf anything in its path.

The leaders of the world that have now come of age have been educated in the very institutions that taught them that all things could be racist, and that death and destruction were superior alternatives than being declared racist themselves.

Our leaders capitulated to the fear that even if they survived a few more years in power, eventually they, their offspring, and their legacy would be sucked into the black hole.

The notion has been established that there is a right and a wrong side of history: the wrong side is opposition to cultural Marxism, and that if you are found to be on the wrong side you must be eradicated and expunged from the record.

Marxism in all its incarnations has always reached this point; it is directly opposed to human nature, but when faced with that reality its supporters opt to destroy humanity rather than abandon their ideology.

If this assault on Western civilisation or humanity as a whole is survived, it will not have come from foreign invasion or cataclysm, but the eternal truth that those who God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.

There have always been angry people, there have always been insane people, and dwarfing them both has always been the vast quotient of stupid people. The bulwark against this in Western civilisation had been the intelligent, learned, and sensible people who knew that fashions and mobs come and go but a strong breadth of history and tradition sustains society. Whilst there had been peaks and troughs, it had sustained the Judeo-Christian West for more than three millennia.

The reason I believe the reckoning is still yet to come, is that all this sound and fury has occurred without much dissent from the silent unconsenting masses. The news tells us we are in the grips of a popular Marxist revolution, but every election or pub chat tells us a very different story.

Why Britain's Conservative Party insists on placing itself on the opposite side of the battle with the resurgent armies of Marxism and against its own supporters remains a mystery to all.

I believe, however, Britain's soft hand will soon give way to that aforementioned hard heart, and this shall be the true reckoning. When Napoleon declared Britons a nation of shopkeepers he misunderstood that ordinary people usually unconcerned with politics and affairs of the day are far more doughty when forced onto the field of battle than their demeanor portrays.

It may therefore be that this account can be read in our lifetimes rather than by a befuddled future historian, but there can now be no question that our lifetimes will be where this great reckoning must take place.