I often fondly recall the final sentence from the seminal work of the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." It’s from The Great Gatsby, and it resonates with truth except in one tragic way. Humans have created technology that alters this idea of being "borne back ceaselessly into the past." One day, the present will be the past. But unlike before, today is not merely a repetition of yesterday, thanks to technological change. Human nature has proven remarkably consistent, and humanity does not act rationally to the waves of change as they reach the shore.
For a while, I bought into the idea that technological progress had stalled. I borrowed that notion from thinkers who observed that, aside from the internet, we had seen no breakthroughs as transformative as flight, electricity, or the materials revolutions of the past. The Industrial Era was full of miracles. But others have challenged that view—and now, I’m starting to agree with them. Change is here, and it’s massive. We are deep into the Information Era. The wars we see, and the new tools we use at work and play, are the product of that era. In fact, pick a headline and you’ll find a story of the wave that is coming in.
One of America’s most astute historians and writers, Walter Russell Mead, recently wrote in Tablet Magazine:
But the impact of internet-empowered work from home (WFH) went far beyond helping us get past COVID. Without anybody really noticing, and with some of the world’s most acute observers lamenting the end of progress, the technological basis for a total transformation of the American workplace, urban landscape, and even family had quietly taken shape offstage. The characteristic workplace of the Industrial Revolution, the large, centralized workspace to which white-collar workers commute like clockwork five days a week, is no longer an economic necessity. The megacity of the Industrial Revolution, with an economically dominant central business district surrounded by rings of suburbs, is no longer a natural and inevitable form dictated by the nature of work. The potential for mass WFH also points toward a profound change in the nature of the family of the industrial era—when, uniquely in human history, most children and most parents in nonelite families spent most of their waking hours living separately from each other.
Mead goes on to point out that in the early days of industrialization, it was widely believed that agriculture was the true basis of all wealth—that land had to be improved for work to have real value. But that turned out not to be true at all. As wealth increased dramatically, many former agricultural lands went fallow, and then wild again.
He also notes that with each new wave of technological change sweeping the land, our institutions fall further behind how we actually live. Take Social Security, for example—it was designed during the peak of the Industrial Revolution. Today, it’s woefully mismatched to modern life. First, people live longer. Second, they have fewer children. That math ain’t mathin’. Massive social programs can’t be based on the assumption of industrial-era careers anymore, or modern birth rates. People no longer spend 40 years working in the same factory or field and then retire. They don’t have four kids. Many have no kids, yet they stay on Social Security longer than they worked. Who pays for Social Security in this instance?
Another facet of modern existence is how much faster change is happening. My lifetime stretches back into the pre-internet era—and I’m not that old. I’m still perfectly healthy and fully engaged in this Information Age, but my early years were spent in the tail end of the Industrial Age. My dad did work in a factory. My grandfather did work fifty years for a limestone company that blasted the sides off mountains to get the rock needed for the interstate highway system.
And yet, here I am, writing on a PC about change—and publishing it to a website that anyone, anywhere in the world, can read.
The Neolithic Revolution, associated with settled agriculture and the invention of writing, came thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was only about two centuries old when the Information Revolution started to hit late in the 20th century. Increasingly, especially with advances in genetics and the science of the brain coming so quickly, it looks as if we are entering an age of permanent revolution in which radical technological and social changes cascade across the world largely nonstop. For people in our time, rapid and accelerating change is the norm; we hardly know anymore what stability feels like.
Change is constant now. It effects how generations adjust to each other. I’ve noticed that I’m much closer to my kids than I ever was to my own father. He lived most of his life in the Industrial Era, before the Countercultural Revolution. He was on one side of the 1960s and ’70s; I was on the other. We were different. That gap couldn’t be bridged just by being related.
Rapid change can alienate fathers and sons—but it can also tip entire societies into chaos. This is the great fear of our current era: that it will bring too much change, just like the last, but faster.
The wars brought on by industrialization were the most horrific the world had seen up to that point. Nothing the West has experienced compares to the death toll and destruction of the First and Second World Wars—and that was before the weapons made possible by the Information Era.
Can an individual or a society overdose on progress? Can the rate of social, economic, cultural, and technological change drive a particular society into a political, psychological, and moral spiral of crisis and dysfunction? Judging from the history of the Industrial Revolution, the answer is yes. The Russian Revolution and the Nazi rise to power are only two examples of societies overwhelmed by the social and political stresses that rapid modernization brought. The Industrial Revolution and the international conflicts that accompanied it shook the foundations of social order around the world and produced a uniquely stressful international situation. Tested to the breaking point by the combination of the domestic and international consequences of the Industrial Revolution, Germany fell into one kind of abyss, Russia into another.
There is, of course, nothing to be done about the pace of change. It’s happening—the tech genies never go back in the bottle. Even the so-called Dark Ages still had flickers of light, and our own era’s light won’t go out unless something takes down all of humanity.
This era offers incredible promise. It creates new freedoms and will generate untold wealth. But if history is any guide, it will also bring staggering violence and depravity.
Mead concludes:
Our story of progress is not a made-for-children television special. History is rated X, not G, crammed to the bursting point with violence, injustice, foul language, nudity, and smoking. We’ve sailed on bloody seas to get to where we are, and the outlook is for more of the same. Trigger warnings should be posted in every delivery room. The world is not a safe space, and the arc of history is nobody’s poodle.
The whole article can be accessed here.
It is to history—and its consequences—that we now turn. The First World War was the jumping-off point for the violent 20th century, the era that shaped my grandfathers and my dad. At its outset, the British led the most advanced society in the world and held the largest global empire, both in land and industrial capacity.
What happened next? It's absolutely relevant to our own time, as we shall see.
Crippling Debt ‘In Our Time’
I’ve been quite surprised by the recent interest in digging up the long-interred history of Winston Churchill to perform a kind of post-historical autopsy. The great, cigar-chomping former British Prime Minister has been showing up in my newsfeed quite a bit lately, and his actions are under renewed scrutiny.
I can’t say for certain that this is all a result of an interview Tucker Carlson gave to a history podcaster named Darryl Cooper, but Cooper’s remarks about Churchill have drawn sharp criticism from across the internet. Cooper himself has been widely derided. And now, Churchill is cropping up again and again.
Given how much history Churchill made—or was caught up in—it seems entirely fair to take a fresh look at the man and to ask whether the stories we now remember as foundational myths are actually rooted in fact. Whether they are or not, I’m not prepared to say. But I’ve noticed that the Chamberlain–Churchill–Hitler axis keeps coming up lately. Just a few days ago, I heard the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, refer to it on the Honestly podcast, repeating the standard version: that Chamberlain appeased Hitler, which emboldened the maniac, and Churchill then had to step in and lead the Allies to victory.
Fair enough. Still, Churchill was no saint. The choices he made—many of which still shape our world—deserve close examination, and the man is not above criticism. A great article from the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas presents a compelling series of events from before World War II that shed light on how Churchill operated well before he was called upon to ‘stand up’ to Hitler.
This story is about a much more pressing issue for Americans today: our incredible debt. Before the First World War in 1914, the United States was mostly debt-free. It had deployed troops to several countries but had never been called to fight in Europe, where the major European powers still maintained standing armies and used them to support their colonial empires. The Germans were late to this game, and that was one of the many causes of the war.
Author Will Morrisey picks up the story:
Wartime loans by the United States to the U.K. began in April 1917, after President Wilson had requested a declaration of war against Germany. Until then, America maintained neutrality, hoping to sell merchandise to both sides. But since the mighty British navy blockaded German ports and the German navy couldn’t reciprocate in kind, German strategists adopted a “unrestricted” submarine warfare policy—that is, not blockading but sinking U.S. merchant ships headed for the British Isles.
The Americans were aiding the British, while the Germans were sinking American ships—putting Germany and the United States on a collision course. Even before U.S. troops set foot in France, the United States was financing the Allied war effort by selling U.S.-backed bonds to the public.
Congress authorized the loans to Great Britain and the other allies, stipulating that the money would be repaid with interest. To fund $200 million in loans and the costly military effort, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo proposed a tax increase and what he called “Liberty Bonds,” purchased by American citizens. Mellon purchased $1 million, and his banks purchased another $60 million. By the war's end, the Allies had bought $7 billion of war materials, mostly from the United States, all on credit provided by the American government, ending the war with a $20 billion national debt, half of it due to the loans. The policy worked, militarily; American troops, money, and materiel tipped the scales of the war. The price was economic recession and inflation, postwar.
Britain and the Allied powers won the war and imposed a treaty on Germany that, in retrospect, was brutally punitive. The Germans entered a period of national resentment, followed by a series of depressions and bouts of hyperinflation—exponentially worse than what occurred in the United States. Churchill became the British equivalent of the Treasury Secretary, known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he set about persuading the United States to “forgive” the loans and shift the burden onto the American taxpayer.
Churchill foresaw the dilemma. In a 1919 article, “Will American Fail Us?” he argued that America should forgive their wartime Allies’ debt in whole or very substantially, on two grounds. First, the victorious countries could not repay, given the war’s devastation and the tariffs imposed in all the countries, whose rulers hoped to protect the remnants of national industry.
The British were crippled by the war—some might say fatally. The losses were so great that, demographically, the country would never be the same. Churchill knew the loans might not be repayable under any terms the British could realistically accept. So he sought to bind the Americans to the British cause and make the loans feel like a family affair.
Second, the debts were incurred “in the common cause of the war,” not (as in the case of an ordinary bank loan) in the hopes of turning a profit in business. Churchill proposed a campaign to change public opinion based on an appeal to Americans’ sense of fairness. He continued to insist on this policy during his years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, beginning with his appointment in November 1924 by his future rival, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and ending, fortuitously for himself, a few months before the collapse of American stock prices in 1929.
In theory, the British were supposed to receive enough money from Germany through the Treaty of Versailles to pay off their debts. But in reality, it didn’t work that way. The Germans had lost so many men that they were demographically wounded, and their industry was crippled. They were borrowing from the Americans to pay the British, who in turn were supposed to pay the United States.
In its feeble attempt to pay at least some of the reparations, the Weimar Republic borrowed from American banks; in effect, American corporations were subsidizing the European Allies’ debt repayments to, well, Americans. The stock crash “revealed that the American payment system for reparations and war debts…amounted to little more than a house of cards,” although it had worked so long as the American economy roared along in the 1920s.
That it all came to grief is hardly surprising. By 1933, the United States had already been pulled into the global financial and political maelstrom—and within a few more years, the bonfire would burn much, much brighter.
And so, if we go back to the Chamberlain–Churchill–Hitler axis, it seems worth asking whether Churchill was ever truly a friend of the United States—or even of the British. He was present for many of the decisions that led to the dissolution of the British Empire following World War II. Given what the past 80 years have brought to the UK, I think it’s a legitimate question to ask whether the British really “won” either war. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at the so-called Great Appeaser, Neville Chamberlain—so often ridiculed in his time and ours—and ask whether “Peace in Our Time” was really so impossible.
The whole article can be accessed here.
Sacrificing of the Innocents
If someone thinks my question about Churchill and the wars is a bit impertinent, perhaps an update on the mass rapes in Britain will drive home the point that something is very wrong in Mother England. Churchill was at the center of British politics and policy for many decades. He set the course, and here we are. Unless something radically changes, the native born of Britain will be living as minorities in their own country, and Muslims of primarily Pakistani origin will be the majority. And they will subjugate the new minority under a heavy, exploitative yoke. Crazy talk? Please explain who the mass rape of who would otherwise be the future young mothers of Britain, mothers to baby boys and girls', who might ask for ‘more porridge please’ had they not been pimped out by foreigners.
Who commits mass rapes of young girls? Men, of course. But our common language—English—has long been polluted by euphemisms meant to obscure rather than clarify, and few are as audacious and sickening as the phrase “Asian grooming gangs.”
What does that even suggest? A group of enthusiastic Chinese men leaping from alleyways with moisturizer? Of course not. What it refers to—what it should say—is that Muslim men of Pakistani origin have been targeting white, native-born British girls for systematic rape. These gangs have been operating in the UK for decades. Thousands of girls have been assaulted and trafficked, often at so-called private house parties.
Worse still, the police and local authorities knew full well what was going on. And when anyone dared to speak up, they blamed the victims, dismissing the girls as “Paki-shaggers” or “white slags.”
After decades of denial and deflection, even the supine and cowardly British government has finally acknowledged the scale of the abuse in yet another official report. But have there been mass arrests, trials, convictions, and long prison sentences? No—and I’d wager there won’t be. Still, at least now, no one is pretending it didn’t happen.
Why won’t the guilty face justice? Joan Smith at UnHerd summarizes:
The most explosive aspect of Casey’s report is an acknowledgement of data from three police forces that shows “clear over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men”. It confirms that some responsible authorities didn’t want to examine or record the ethnicity of offenders “for fear of appearing racist or raising community tension”. Flawed data was used to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs” as “sensationalised, biased or untrue”.
So, for fear of being called racist, the police allowed mass, industrial-scale rapes of their native female population. Cucks, indeed. But not to worry—because the British establishment can still get good and hard when threatened by what all of Europe now calls “the far Right.”
It goes some way towards explaining why Keir Starmer resisted setting up a statutory inquiry for so long. And he still hasn’t apologised for characterizing people who called for one as “jumping on the bandwagon of the far-Right”. Labour politicians could have avoided resorting to such slurs if they had faced the fact that some men living in this country have dreadful, culturally-ingrained attitudes towards women.
So, all cultures are not equal—and the British have imported masses of people from a radically different culture, only to act surprised at the results. Did these people once rule three-fifths of the earth’s surface? Is Churchill still a hero? Did the British win the two world wars? Ask those thousands of girls.
And what about the report? You’d think that mass rapes would require no changes to the law—just the will to enforce it. Here’s what’s actually in the report:
So in the Crime and Policing Bill, we are introducing: The long overdue mandatory reporting duty which I called for more than 10 years ago. As well as aggravated offences for grooming offenders so their sentences match the severity of their crimes. And earlier this year, I also commissioned Baroness Louise Casey to undertake a rapid national audit of the nature, scale and characteristics of gang-based exploitation. I specifically asked her to look at the issue of ethnicity, and the cultural and social drivers for this type of offending – analysis that had never previously been done despite years of concerns being raised. And I asked her to advise us on what further reviews, investigations and actions would be needed to address the current and historical failures that she found. I told Parliament in January that I expected Baroness Casey to deliver the same kind of impactful and no-holds-barred report that she produced on Rotherham in 2015 so we never shy away from the reality of these terrible crimes. And I am very grateful to Louise and her team that they have done exactly that, with a hugely wide-ranging assessment conducted in just 4 months.
So, a no-holds-barred report was created ten years ago—and now, in just four months, another report has emerged. Woot! They are on it! At some undefined point in the future, they promise more reviews and possibly new laws. As is plain, they’re still shying away from “the reality of these crimes”—not with silence this time, but with paperwork. Why?
Well, I strongly suspect they believe it’s already too late to preserve Britain as a majority white, British country—either now or in the future. They see the demographic trends, they see the growing Muslim population, and they know what that likely means. They can look at Pakistan and draw their conclusions. So they calculate how best to avoid offending these new masses—and future majorities.
And then there's the class issue: it’s overwhelmingly the lower classes, a group the British elite have long despised, who bear the brunt of the rapes. Anyone who has met a true Brit upper class twit will likely not forget the encounter. The ones I met were as pompous as they were unimpressive. And, they were all heavy, heavy drinkers. Britain is dying in a pool of booze as the young women are rapes and impregnated by foreign men. Good job, fellas! Charles, William, Carry On!
This failure will haunt those once-enchanted islands for the foreseeable future. Perhaps—just as has happened many times before—the United States will benefit, when the best and brightest, or the most desperate, flee the rising violence and official neglect of Europe.
It angers me what they’ve done. I like British ladies. My mother’s family were all Brits at one time. They’ve thrown over thousands of would be mothers for the sake of the malignant ‘diversity is our strength’ drivel. Is diversity a strength in Pakistan? Or China? Or anywhere in Africa? No, only in Europe and anywhere the descendants of the Europeans live is diversity considered an asset, against all evidence to the contrary.
America welcomes you, British ladies. Your government will not protect you. Texas could use a few more charming lasses. Bring us your red heads, your Shepard’s Pie eaters, your lovely birds, yearning to breathe free. We lift the lamp by the golden door.
The Unherd article is here.
The report, as sad and depressing as it is, can be found here.