BY ALEX STORY
Truth is the first casualty of war.
Opinions on a conflict depend deeply on the prevailing culture, erasing nuance in the process.
The less of it there is, the easier it is to convince yourself of your righteousness and your opponents’ wickedness.
For instance, the current Iranian question divides the world into three main groups:
The first staunchly believes that the Israeli tail wags the American foreign policy dog, working around the clock to recreate Israel’s “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates” Old Testament borders as described in Genesis 15:18.
The second will accept the long-standing Islamic Republic of Iran’s evil nature but believe that one cannot brutalise a regime, the core philosophy of which is perpetual warfare for the propagation of a 7th-century antediluvian creed, leading in due course to the unbeliever’s submission. As David, an exiled Iranian, said: “I’m caught between wishing the end of the regime and the very real prospect of its entrenchment through external violence.”
The third will argue that the Iranian leadership should be obliterated. Expediting the current regime’s five-decade-long barbarism, exemplified by the slaughter of “40,000 Iranians” across the country in January 2026 in Prince Reza Pahlavi’s recent words, would make the “world a better place.”
Having lived by the sword, the Mullahs should die by the sword, they will say, adding that few will miss them.
Positions taken turn into intellectual fortresses at the speed of light, fed by a constant stream of “news” destined to harden preconceived ideas yet more.
Little is provided that offers any hope of peaceful coexistence.
Data is used, ignored and abused, thus ensuring escalation.
Pious lying thus becomes the accelerator for a world on its irrevocable path to war.
But while Truth dies early in the antagonists’ deadly exchanges, War reveals.
And its revelations, when they materialise, tend towards the astounding.
In our case, Britain is now effete, irrelevant and defanged.
It is flotsam on rough international seas, bullied by some, ridiculed by others and ignored by all who have not yet castrated themselves.
The United Kingdom, the former global hegemon and the only European country to come out of World War II justified, is no more, dismantled stone by stone by its own establishment haughtily arguing for its own demise over the decades, all the while encouraging others, partially successfully, to follow down to the Gates of Hades.
Our end, however, cannot all be pinned on Starmer, Hermer, Sands, the Fabians and purple-haired socialists.
The blame needs to be shared equally and ought to be pinned on the (un)Conservative Party, a pro-LGBT paganistic Church of England fully ignorant of the Gospel, and an Islamophilic Monarchy, among others.
The institutions that proudly carried the flag of our boastful difference and our staggering multi-century over-performance swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the self-destructive beliefs that have led to our current situation.
To many, having conquered all institutions, the Fabians have won, leaving in their wake the ruins in which we stand.
As a result, we have nothing to say internationally because we have destroyed the idea of what made us who we are internally.
Beyond the shores of Europe, that formerly impressive beacon of hope and technological prowess, the world is turning its collective back on us as we worked ceaselessly towards dismantling our legacy, unable to see how repulsive we have become.
Over time, Great Britain has become an obese consumer, unable to move, feeding off the future because she devoured her own past, shaking her flabby fists and bingo arms at those who decided that life was worth living, clinging to the belief that she, in her debilitating immobility, is virtuously progressive.
Her gravest affliction, though, is her inability to define who she is and from whence she came.
Indeed, Starmer, that spokesman for supercilious irrelevance, believes that patriotism is multiculturalism.
For the Fabian Society, he wrote in 2020, “patriotism is an attempt to unite people of different backgrounds.”
Multiculturalism as patriotism is, of course, a treasonous inversion of the word’s meaning.
Patriotism is, in fact and simply, to love one’s country more than someone else’s.
One loves one’s country because one understands her without needing to explain her quirks. De facto, these make sense and become a source of pride.
In addition, bestowed on your unconsciousness over time are her heroes, her past, her languages, her architecture and, most importantly and without which there is no culture, her religion.
In England: An Elegy, the late Roger Scruton wrote: “a patriot is someone who can look with respect on the patriotism of others, and who values the different nations of the world as the necessary context of the one he loves.”
It is the love that makes the marriage between man and his nation work and the cornerstone on which all is built.
From this springs the music, the architecture, the history, the a priori and, in a few hallowed cases, the Glory.
Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is the solvent designed to break that same nation apart.
The nation cannot survive the smothering of the former to make way for the latter, a ruthless competition between cultures within the same polity, forcing the human rights lawyer to choose the victim, often a recent “newcomer“, for a fee, over the reactionary, mostly the generational native.
However, our slide into mediocrity and irrelevance, while significant, might not be totally irrevocable, in particular if R. F. Delderfield was right and God is indeed an Englishman.
We can see the symptoms all around us. It behoves us to agree on the cure.
If we are to rescue ourselves from the quicksands of permanent perdition, we must confront all ideas, at least since 1884, the year the Fabian Society was founded, that have led us down that path and ruthlessly reverse direction.
To jettison all ideas that have led to our indebtedness, our inability to act, our absence of borders, the unimaginable rise of both rapes and thefts, and our loss of say in world affairs won’t be easy. Naturally.
In the way stands officialdom and those who are warmed temporarily by their proximity to the flames generated by the fires of our country’s funeral pyre.
If we don’t, though, like Prince Reza Pahlavi, we will be talking about our country in exile, spiritually and physically, unable to do much for the Great Britain we once loved, apart from “giving a voice” to our fellow compatriots, who will live in fear for the thoughts they have, the flags they wave and the notions they hold.
Drowning in lies as we are, it feels we are already in the cruellest of wars.
But after the darkness comes the light.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.