"Put a fork in ‘em and turn ‘em over, they’re done."

The Nations of Britain- salute them as they pass.

I was once working outdoors in the centre of a large British city, on a large pedestrianised street lined with franchise cafes and shops. It was a fine afternoon and a good number of people were sat in the sun outside the cafes while a steady stream of shoppers ambled around. Looking up from my task at some point I noticed that there was a little smoke curling up from a public bin. Common enough. Somebody had tossed a cigarette butt still smouldering into the garbage. Because I was busy at my task and other people were far closer, I paid it no heed, thinking that it would just smoulder a little without causing any issue. Perhaps half a minute later and the bin was gushing thick smoke, then as I watched bright flames started licking up over its steel lip. It is true that nobody was in great danger, and the fire was not a great conflagration, but along that street many people were pointing and staring; many even coming out of businesses to gawk with concern. I was astounded to see hundreds of people observe the fire with no apparent motion to extinguish it. After waiting long enough to realise that nobody was likely to I downed my tools, took my water canteen and dropped its meager contents into the garbage fire. It died in three seconds. Not one other person of the many who saw this, not a few of them sitting idly with cups of liquid in their very hands, thought to put out a trash fire in the middle of a major city as it polluted the air and ruined a public convenience. I had black thoughts that day.

These nations are dead. Call it a black pill if you will; I don’t think it so, though it is a black enough realisation. English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish; put a fork in ‘em and turn ‘em over, they’re done. They have not the substance to longer pertain, nor the virtue to justify themselves. I am not glib about this fact. The story of the denigration of these peoples is tragic and much of it is a story of imposed malevolence, but they are now more than threadbare, their last fibers are giving up the ghost. Perhaps most sad to say, the few who are even animated by appeals to their heritage as a people are simply not good enough to shoulder that heritage, and tend only to suck at the waning glory of their modern national myths. The reason that the “Gammon” slur has so much force, however cynically it is employed by craven sophisticates, is that it strikes with a good deal of truth. I will tell you another story:

I was once walking back home very late at night having caught the last train from the metropolis to my own area, which could be called “white working class”, in bold and underlined. As I was walking up one of the last few streets I saw a white man violently shoving a woman up against the side of a van. I went over and challenged the man, who told me in strong vernacular to mind my own business. I could read the situation so far as to see that the woman, probably in her mid twenties, was worse for wear and was either his wife or girlfriend. Though he hadn’t hit her in my sight he was treating her brutally, and though she told me not to get involved she was clearly afraid. I could not pass on, but paused a moment before closing in to put a hand on him; the man was drunk enough too, but not so inebriated that he lacked coordination, and he was well build and tough looking. He was a little shorter than me but had mass and labourer’s muscle, and at the time I was more lightly built and had no real training, though it wasn’t my first confrontation. He was full of blood and ire, and I realised that it was not unlikely that I would be floored somehow and the woman probably put into a worse situation. There was a pub about fifty yards up the road, and I thought I could call out some help from the bar, but didn’t want to leave the woman to fend for herself even for a moment. I got close to the man as if to fight, but when he turned into me I just kept drawing him back up the street, letting him swing and miss and come after me in a rage until he and I were just outside the pub door, the woman left behind. Just then I ducked my head quickly into the bar and shouted something like “there’s a guy beating up his woman out here and I need some help with him!”. Ten, maybe twelve faces all turned towards me, some with annoyance, most with complete disinterest, then turned back to their drinks. Finding no help I was again fielding punches outside the pub window, until somebody in the pub clearly recognised my assailant. Somebody came out and talked familiarly to the wife beater, trying to steer him out of getting into further trouble. Fortunately some neighbor must have been watching from behind a curtain somewhere and had called the police who turned up just as the drunk was being talked down. I guess he was taken off, but I didn’t wait to find out. Now this was an old “heritage” pub; the kind of place that flies the flag and doesn’t go in for political correctness. The men inside were not effeminate hipsters. I think that a few of them must have heard the man loudly harassing his woman and crashing her into the van before I even came on the scene, but when roused to stop a woman getting beaten not one promptly stirred, and it was their affinity with the beater that caused him to pause. They didn’t even offer hard words.

The kind of men in this pub were the kind likely to vote reform; the kind to be obstinately sentimental about their people; the kind perhaps to get very incensed about the Southport incident. I do not say this traitorously; they were not good enough. They were not good enough for the basis of a people. None had simple goodness enough to react to the beating of a girl on the street. Not a one had vigour of manhood nor valour enough to act with uprightness.

Do not misunderstand me, I hate what has been done to these people. The white working classes have been ground into the mire and evilly used for time-out-of-mind. Nor do I malign them as disfavourably compared to immigrant peoples, as the media has such a strange penchant for doing. I malign them as disfavourably compared to what they were, and what they should be. Not the working class only of course, it is only that the working class are the last part of the people in whom national feeling still evokes anything visceral; but they are not good enough to carry such a feeling forward. It is no more than visceral, a feeling of the gut and not the soul. It is not a ladder but a crutch, not an ideal but a conceit, however excusable. No class of our peoples shows promise of renovating their nations, and the nations themselves have become untenable. Affinity of genetic material is the only objective vestige that remains of the peoples of Britain, and that affinity is not enough to preserve a people, let alone save it. The people have to bear some tangible stamp of nobility for a natural affinity to take hold on any but the thoughtless or those who crave the securities of solidarity. Family loyalty is good and natural, but if your family are liars, drunks or scoundrels in the main, that loyalty naturally dissolves. But for tenuous blood, the rest of what constitutes our respective peoples is political convention, sports and vague common moods brought about by public relations.

We see our counties being eviscerated in Britain, but they were already dead. I want to say that I don’t care, but it wouldn’t quite be true. Whatever has become of our peoples, their memories are not to be despoiled, and their children should not be abused. I am not without sentiment, and I look on in horror not only at the degradation being meted out to the British people, but to their land and their story. Yet in a sense I have stopped caring what is done to our countries. The dead don’t hurt. There is no entity that is England or Wales that has reality enough to any more be threatened, only the people left over in their traditional geographic boundaries. I do care for these people, but too few of them have the necessary nobility, strength and animation to reform their countries into life and solidity. I have lived in America and I am not sure that it is equally true there. Americans proper are better than the British on average, and though the remaining rump of worthy men there is comparably small they are a small slice of a much larger population, and so might have hope to maintain the life of the inheritance which is America.

All things pass. I believe unambiguously that the nations of Britain are gone in all but form and fancy. It is a sad happening horribly brought about, but some passings are. These countries are not perennial, and though they are not spiritually trivial nor are they sacrosanct, any more than were the Saxons, the Picts or the Khumri. We have wrongly assumed that these nations themselves were our inheritance, but they are not. We inherit was was good of their wealth and example. We might inherit our father’s tools and books and maybe principles, but we fortunately are not bequeathed his corpse after it has ceased in the office of fatherhood.

I think that it is a pitfall for dissidents, in Britain at least, to rally people to old national flags. It is understandable, because at least a few people will rally to a flag, and it seems the most obvious pole by which to unify any resistance to what besets these lands, but it is a sham. I don’t doubt the motive of those dissident voices who proudly wear their inherited colours, attacking modernity from the firm footing of a self-proclaimed Englishman or Frenchman, but these are a few rare individuals. A remarkable individual can make a good show of standing forth in national garb, for whom their nationality is soulful, thoughtful, principled and ambitious, but these men by those very qualities could not be further from the tone of the mass of their countrymen. There are true Englishmen still extant, but those of them with the will and discernment to make use of their inheritance would probably fit in a good sized restaurant, and a club is not a country.

When I hear the news I don’t weep for my country, I weep for families. Conversely, I am fortified when I hope not in my country, but in families. The nations as they were will be swept away like husks, and the majority of the people who inhabited the husks will sadly find the end of their trajectory by decadence, death and intermarriage. Families of worth, probably only few families, who embody an actual nobility, will be obliged to form new historical nations here or elsewhere. I am not speaking of supermen, or of currently recognised “nobility”, but simply those who bear out noble character from whatever class amongst our peoples. Their lines will weave whatever in the future deserves our hope and efforts, and the national trappings of their forefathers will just be another in a long line of the iterations of their lineages.

I am not pie-in-the-sky about what this means. Without the protection of a coherent nation it seems implausible that even a few such noble families can make it out of modernity to form a new proper people. In my bones I feel that a path will be found one way or another, no matter how unlikely, but this does not side-step the issue. We must make the prosperity of such families a very practical concern, as is already being done here and there, but I say that their prospects are not helped by being tethered to the dead images of their heritage which are being flogged so mercilessly. Their true heritage is incorruptible, and the best of its wealth is very portable. We are the tangent.