Dialogues on the Death of Europe: On the merits of democracy

­Gilbert: It will forever be intriguing to people in future, how it was that Europeans came to consent to their own destruction. What we’re living through, it seems to me, has implications even more profound than the destruction of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known.

Gareth: And those are?

Gilbert: Whether democracy, or certainly democracy in the form we practise it, is the best form of government, or even a form of government that is viable over the long term.

Gareth: Wow, so you’re actually questioning democracy now? I knew you’d gone pretty far into the wilds of extremism, but not that far. So how does it call democracy into question?

Gilbert: Well, think about it. It was only in the post World War Two era that most European countries became fully-fledged democracies, extending the franchise to everyone of adult age. Then, almost immediately, something really extraordinary happened. The governments of these countries, just as the point where you would think they would be maximally responsive to public opinion, with the electorate now being fully extended, began to implement policies that were a) overwhelmingly opposed by the majority of the people and b) dramatically against their own interests.

Gareth: And those policies were?

Gilbert: The immigration policies that set in motion the rapid repopulation of Europe by Africans and Asians.

Gareth: The “rapid repopulation of Europe”? Come on…

Craig: Well, demographic projections show an Afro-Asian majority arriving in most west European countries sometime in the latter half of this century: Taking over a continent in one hundred years or so. If that’s not “rapid repopulation”, what is?

Gilbert: There is no historical precedent for this. Even violent conquests haven’t resulted in demographic change of this scale and speed.

Gareth: What about North America, Australia?

Gilbert: Those were continent-size landmasses inhabited by scattered, undeveloped tribes. There was no large, settled society with unified control of its territory. The analogy is invalid.

Gareth: Getting back to the issue, I suppose that after the war, governments felt they had to give everyone the vote since they’d just been through this tremendous experience together, with everyone having to make sacrifices and so on. And the countries also needed manpower to rebuild after the losses in wartime. There’s a temporal correspondence there. It doesn’t really establish a causative link between democracy and what you call “repopulation”.

Gilbert: Consider the countries that weren’t democratic, the countries on the southern and eastern fringes of Europe. They didn’t experience repopulation. Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, these dictators didn’t allow any immigration invasion to take place. But then when those countries went democratic, the invasion began.

Tom: Spain is a particularly telling example. Franco died in 1975. The country transitioned to “democracy”. There were some right-wing governments who held the line for a while. Then the Socialists got in and just threw open the gates. People talk about immigration to Britain under the Blair/Brown government, as if it was something truly exceptional. But it was 3-4 million or so. In Spain at the same time, immigration was around double that. And the relative effect was greater because the Spanish population itself was smaller, only about 40 million (link).

Gareth: But what you’re saying makes no real sense. You’re extolling the virtues of the-democratic age, the 19^th century presumably, when Europe dominated the earth. But at the time Europe was ruled by an oligarchy, a largely aristocratic elite. But it’s this same oligarchy, the elite, that you now implicitly blame for destroying us.

Gilbert: It’s an elite, but not the same one. Democracy replaces an elite of blood with an elite of ideological conformance.

Lisa: But there are countries in Asia that are democratic and don’t have mass immigration.

Gilbert: The democracies in Asia are mostly of recent vintage: South Korea, for example, Taiwan. They only really went democratic after the Cold War ended. It’s not clear whether the ethnic integrity of these countries will survive the pressures of “democracy” over a sustained period.

Lisa: What about Japan? That’s been democratic for a while. There’s hardly any immigration there.

Tom: Immigration has been increasing significantly in Japan, it’s true. But there is strong resistance to it there.

Gareth: Doesn’t this disprove your point that democracy must necessarily lead to ethnic dispossession?

Tom: Maybe. Maybe democracy is only part of the problem. Or maybe Japanese democracy isn’t really mature. They only had one party running it for decades, right? It’s almost like a dictatorship.

Gilbert: It seems to me that whatever this thing is, it’s a European affliction.

Lisa: So democracy might work for others but not Europeans?

Tom: Maybe. I don’t rule that out. But I don’t know enough about these other countries to make a serious judgement.

Gilbert: Democracies haven’t been running for long enough elsewhere to allow definitive conclusions to be drawn.

Lisa: But what would be the difference between them and us?

Craig: You say it’s a European affliction. I’d say the affliction has a name: Jews. They don’t have Jews. We do. It’s that simple.

Gareth: So Jews plus democracy equals ethnic destruction? But democracy works OK without Jews?

Craig: Maybe.

Gareth: What do Jews do then that makes democracy not work? What is this “Jew effect” you posit?

Gilbert: Democracy is essentially a public conversation, an ongoing conversation about a people’s past, present and future. In various ways Jews come to unfairly dominate that conversation. They are therefore able to steer it, and consequently the country’s future, in ways consonant with their ethnic interests but injurious to the interests of others.

Lisa: How do Jews “unfairly dominate” the public conversation?

Craig: Hate speech laws.

Tom: They pass laws criminalising free expression.

Lisa: How can “they” pass laws? Jews are a tiny minority in every country they live in except Israel.

Gilbert: They prevail upon politicians to pass these laws.

Lisa: How do they do that?

Craig: Money.

Tom: Right. Financial donations are part of it. It’s a demonstrable factual truth that Jews account for a share of overall political donations that is vastly disproportionate to their share of the population. (link)

Gilbert: They are also overrepresented among the ranks of journalists, politicians, academics, wealthy people generally. They have higher average IQs, at least among the Ashkenazis, Jews who lived in the central Europe region. Their average IQ is 112 to 115 and they excel particularly in verbal IQ. One quarter of all Nobel prizes have been won by Jews even though their global population has hovered around the 15 million level.

Craig: Give or take a pogrom or two.

Tom: Yeah. So you have to imagine that level of intellectual power applied to other fields where it can’t be measured as easily.

Gilbert: The element of ethnic self-abnegation is clearly present in Christianity. That is the essence of it. It started by rejecting the inherent racism of Judaism, with St. Paul saying “this message is for the Gentiles too”.

Lisa: So the Christians are to blame, not the Jews?

Gilbert: My point is that it’s too simple to blame just the Jews. Both the American and French revolutions affirmed a non-ethnic idea of peoplehood. Yet there was hardly any Jewish influence in those countries at the time. The movement away from kin group preference, which could be considered the default moral code of the human race because it is the one programmed into our genes, clearly has deep roots in Christianity and in Europe. The Jews have taken ruthless advantage of a potential that was already there.

Craig: If Europeans had been obsessed with astrology or crystal ball gazing or some nonsense instead of the idea of Equality, the Jews would have found a way to work that too, using it to advance their ethnic interests and harm the interest of non-Jews.

Gareth: So, basically, you’re saying it would be better to have a dictator because the dictator would ignore this “public conversation” that is unfairly dominated by Jews. The dictator wouldn’t care. He would just issue a decree to keep the darkies out?

Gilbert: Yes.

Gareth: Seriously?

Gilbert: Yes. Obviously, you’re framing it in deliberately crude terms. I don’t care. Your shame games don’t work on me. That is indeed the substance of the point I’m making.

Lisa: You don’t think a dictator might do lots of other things you don’t particularly care for: like locking people up who criticise him and so forth.

Craig: We have that now.

Lisa: We do?

Gilbert: Certainly, all of these “hate speech” laws are just designed to delegitimise criticism of government policy. They even locked a chap up for 3 years in Britain just for protesting against the “myth” of Jewish privilege (link).

Tom: They imprisoned an 87-year-old woman in Germany recently because she said Auschwitz hadn’t been proven to be a death camp, which was construed as “Holocaust denial”.

Lisa: Well, I would say that these measures are aimed at preventing hurt feelings in members of vulnerable groups.

Tom: It’s curious that these vulnerable groups just happen to relate to government policy. If it really is about preventing hurt feelings, why are there no laws to protect the hurt feelings of fat people, or ugly people or old people? And why are there no anti-discrimination laws to protect them? Those people do face genuine discrimination that does indeed adversely affect their life chances. But hardly a word is heard about it. And there is no legal shield for them.

Gareth: Getting back to the dictator issue, surely you have to admit that a dictator would probably be corrupt, help himself and his family to public money.

Gilbert: We have that kind of corruption now too. But to answer your point: yes, I acknowledge that a dictatorship would bring many negative consequences in its wake. We could expect it to stifle the creativity of the country in some form. We would expect the personal flaws of the dictator to impair the freedom or harm the well-being of his people in various ways. I simply submit that the harm suffered is likely to be much less than that caused by repopulating the country with ethnic aliens.

Gareth: And who is this dictator going to be? How do we select him?

Tom: Let me be clear. I am not saying I want a dictatorship. I want a democracy, a genuine democracy, meaning a government that does what the people want it to do. What I am saying is that I would prefer a dictatorship to what we have now, a flawed pseudo-democracy.

Gareth: Well OK, but let’s run with the dictatorship thing because I find this fascinating. Who is going to be the dictator? How would we select him?

Gilbert: I don’t know. I don’t think it matters.

Lisa: It doesn’t matter? You’re seriously saying we should give absolute power to someone and it doesn’t matter who it is?

Craig: It doesn’t matter that much, assuming the dictator isn’t a total deviant in some way. Any ordinary person would do. We could have elections.

Lisa: Elections to select the dictator?

Gilbert: Yes. Or we could simply appoint someone of proven worth.

Lisa: This is incredible. You’re saying just give absolute power to any old person. It doesn’t matter.

Gilbert: I’m saying if offered a choice between the pseudo-democracy status quo and a dictatorship where the dictator was selected by random lottery of the population, I would take the latter.

Lisa: (bursts out laughing) Select the dictator at random? You’re serious?

Craig: It would be better than what we have now, most likely.

Gareth: What if the dictator was a Muslim? A person of colour?

Craig: A person of colour! You’re seriously saying that?

Gareth: Why not?

Gilbert: A person whose ancestral origins lie in the great continent of Africa, south of the brooding Saharan desert.

Craig: A person skilled in the chucking of spears.

Gilbert: A person whose DNA has undergone significant adaptations to meet the challenges of the harsh jungle and savannah environments where only the fastest, the fittest and the finest survive.

Craig: Until another nigger comes, knocks their brains out in their sleep and steals all their stuff.

Tom: Leaving only the true nigger genes left in the pool.

Gareth: Can we get back to the discussion? What if this randomly-selected dictator was your ultimate nightmare, a Jew?

Craig: Obviously there would have to be some restriction to ensure the person selected was ancestrally part of the tribe and not some interloper.

Tom: Personally I think the problem is not democracy per se, but representative democracy. Democracy is a government that does what the people want.  But the European peoples did not want to become ethnic minorities in their own lands. It has been forced upon them by a conspiracy in their ruling class. Any form of government that allows such conspiracies to take place and succeed is flawed.

Gilbert: I think the conspiracy angle is sometimes pushed too far. One of the scariest things I’ve ever read was a book about immigration into Britain, “British immigration policy since 1939: The making of multi-racial Britain” by Ian R.G. Spencer. The chap was caricature leftist. He welcomed these new “brown Britons” and the “vibrant enriching diversity” they brought. The whole book was cast in the form of an accusation against the “racist” politicians who had tried to stop this invasion as it began, unsuccessfully obviously.

Lisa: Why was it scary?

Gilbert: It was scary because it became clear that his accusation was essentially well-founded.

Gareth: That the politicians were racist and tried to stop the immigration of non-whites?

Gilbert: Yes.

Lisa: And why is that scary?

Gilbert: Because they couldn’t.

Lisa: Why couldn’t they?

Gilbert: They weren’t willing to publicly impose what, back then, was quaintly called a “colour bar”. The measures they took were almost all covert. They’d pressure the governments in the source countries to try and obstruct the flow in various ways, make it more difficult to get travel documents and so on. And it had some effect in reducing the numbers for a while. But they’re weren’t willing to do the only thing that might have worked long term, namely pass a law saying “Brownskins Keep Out”. 

Lisa: OK. And how does this relate to our discussion about democracy?

Gilbert: My point is that these conspiracy theories you sometimes hear – that it was all a plot by Marxists or Jews or whoever to destroy the white race – don’t necessarily correspond perfectly with reality, even if such conspiracies may have had some influence.  In many ways, the truth is even more troubling than that.

Craig: What could me more troubling than a successfully executed plot to destroy our entire race?

Gilbert: The notion of conspiracy is comforting in some ways because it simplifies. There are Goodies and Baddies. The Baddies could be exposed and defeated. Or you could perhaps even persuade some of the conspirators to desist. But if the problem is systemic then there are no such easy solutions.

Lisa: What do you mean systemic?

Gilbert: Non-volitional, not the result of conscious intent.

Gilbert: The fact that the politicians wanted to stop non-white immigration but couldn’t is far scarier to me than if it had been a plot. What kind of system imposes ethnic dispossession on a people when neither the people themselves nor even their leaders wanted it to happen? It’s like we’re in the grip of some infernal machine.

Gareth: And that “infernal machine” is democracy?

Tom: Representative democracy. In a real democracy, one that reflected the actual will of the people, this wouldn’t have happened, since neither the people themselves nor the leaders wanted it to happen. I think it illustrates something profound about the nature of representative democracy. It seems to force politicians to adopt a morality that is a kind of public fiction, something artificially exalted, a morality of the highest common denominator you might call it.

Gareth: So, in opposition to representative democracy, you posit what, direct democracy?

Tom: Yes.

Gareth: So people would actually physically assemble in a town square, like in Ancient Greece, and vote on which laws should be passed?

Tom: No. Of course that isn’t practical. With modern technology, we could improve on that. You could have something like a Parliament Channel. People at home would have some device, a handset or whatever, keyed to their unique bio-signature. They would just vote laws up or down while sipping coffee at home.

Gareth: Meaning there’d be no room left for politicians?

Tom: They could still exist. But they’d just be orators. They’d argue a case for a certain proposal. People would listen to it and make up their minds.

Lisa: A government by permanent referendum then?

Tom: More or less.

Gareth: So if we had this “true democracy”, it would all be OK? Our problems are the result of conspiracies in the ruling class or “systemic” distortions caused by flawed institutions that somehow obstruct the will of the people, these almost mystically insightful “dumb plebs” in whose bundle of instincts and prejudices the sagacity of the ages is somehow said to repose?

Tom: I don’t say we’d suddenly be living in paradise, but the problem of ethnic dispossession would be solved very quickly.

Lisa: Because the dumb plebs would vote to stop immigration?

Tom: Right.

Gilbert: I have to say I think you’re giving these dumb plebs too much credit. You’re casting the European masses as almost a Magical Negro character, a quasi-supernatural being that is somehow in touch with the universe and just knows whatever the right course of action is to take instinctively. Whatever your take on this is, whether you attribute the root cause to Jews, Marxists, Christianity or whatever, these “dumb plebs” have been suckered into accepting it. You can’t exculpate them from that.

Craig: Dumb plebs need to be led. And they have been led. Into the abyss. They need to be led out of the abyss by someone else, someone better, not handed some fucking handset and, in between football matches and soap operas, told to vote on whether the European people should survive, as if this was some fucked-up X-Factor contest.

Tom: I don’t agree. I have to say, contemplating everything that has happened to us, I’m left with enormous respect, awe almost, for what we might call the “instinctive wisdom of the tribe”.  The fact is that ordinary people got it right. When all of the intellectuals got it wrong. As an intellectual, I find that shocking. But also liberating in a way. That knowledge has changed me.

Craig: At every point in this process, these tribal sages, the ordinary punters, could have voted to make it stop. Sure, you could say the anti-immigration parties have been treated unfairly, hate-speeched, persecuted in the courts and the like. But the fact is that at almost every election there has been at least one party people could have voted for – a button they could have pressed, in effect - that would have made it all stop. But they chose not to press that button.

Tom: They were intimidated and disinformed. It was a rigged game.

Craig: Oh, sure, it wasn’t fair. But that’s the point. They allowed themselves to be intimidated. They allowed themselves to be disinformed. They allowed themselves to be suckered into playing a rigged game. It’s a failing for which they, the dumb plebs, or the tribal sages as you would put it, are responsible. 

Tom: The point was made earlier that democracy was really just a public conversation. We need to restore the purity of that conversation. It is because of the various distorting influences it is subject to currently that it isn’t working.

Gareth: What are these distorting influences?

Tom: Hate speech laws, biased media reporting, partly driven by journalist’s codes of conduct and the like that. Political donations, governments giving subsidies to politically active organisations, concentrations of media power, including in public broadcasters like the BBC, indoctrination in schools. The result is that some voices in the conversation are artificially amplified; others are suppressed entirely. If we removed these malign influences, if we simply created an environment where European peoples received accurate information about what was happening and were allowed to talk freely about it, they would somehow find the right way forward. I believe that.

Gilbert: But this is like diehard Communists talking about Communism. “It’s never been tried!” Well, it has been tried and it produced utter devastation. Democracy has been tried too and it is bringing about the genocide of every people that lives under it. You posit a set of ideal circumstances that are unrealisable in practice. It’s like Leftists talking forced to talk about why negroes commit so much crime. They too can give you a set of circumstances in which negroes would be as successful as Europeans: Oh if only they had jobs they wouldn’t commit so much crime. Why don’t they have jobs? No qualifications. Why don’t they have qualifications? Because they’re less intelligent? No, er, it’s because … the curriculum is too Eurocentric. We need to throw in some stuff about the “great civilisations of Africa” to get the blacks interested in learning.

(general laughter)

OK, so we do that. Are blacks successful now? Do they pass their exams? Er, no. Still some problem there somewhere down the line. Ah, it must be their self-esteem. That’s it. The young negro, sensitive soul that he is, someone senses the contempt white people feel for him. This wounds his self-esteem. And it is this low self-esteem that prevents him passing his exams.

Craig: So Whitey is to blame?

Gilbert: Yes. Again. The solution to the negro problem is to purge Whitey’s mind of impure thoughts. Ridiculous, obviously. But somehow by creating a set of magically ideal conditions, we are expected to believe we can stop negroes from doing harm. Your defence of democracy sounds just like that. With your set of ideal conditions, we can stop democracy from doing harm. It doesn’t occur to anyone: perhaps it’s better not to have something that inflicts harm under all circumstances except hypothetically perfect conditions that have never been realised in practice and may well be unrealisable.

Tom: I come back to the fact that the peoples of Europe didn’t want this. That is the core truth around which this discussion has to revolve. So you can’t blame democracy. Something prevented the majority will being implemented at the policy level. That something, I submit, was "representative" democracy, which doesn't work because it's not democratic and not representative.

Gilbert: I come back to the fact that our peoples are on the brink of extinction. That is the core truth around which this discussion has to revolve. Consider what was said about democracy all through the centuries before it was introduced. That it would be ruinous, that it would destroy any country that tried it. You said you have been humbled by the thought that these dumb plebs got it right while the intellectuals got it wrong. Well, I am humbled by the thought that for centuries - millennia even if you go back to Plato - intellectuals forecast that democracy would be a disaster.  Now we’ve tried it for only a few decades and our entire civilisation stands staring into the abyss. The forecasts were right. Democracy has been a disaster.

Tom: It worked OK for Athens.

Gilbert: That's debatable. You could debate whether ancient Athens even qualifies as a democracy, with the franchise so heavily restricted.

Craig: Women denied the vote. Maybe that's the problem we have.

Lisa: Very funny.

Gilbert: And the whole thing really resting on an edifice of slave labour, which is what gave the Athenians the leisure to engage in their "democratic pursuits". And don't forget, it didn't last: democratic Athens was conquered by oligarchic Sparta. 

Tom: It produced a lot of splendour while it lasted.

Gilbert: Yes, but it didn't last. And among the splendours it produced were two great philosophers: Socrates and Plato. The first was de facto murdered by the democratic mob; the second, no doubt influenced by this, came out against democracy in his writings. He, like many intellectuals throughout the ages, warned of the dire consequences of democracy in practice. Those warnings should have been heeded.

Gareth: They said the poor would plunder the “defenceless” rich. They would vote to take all their money and give it to themselves. That hasn’t happened.

Craig: Hasn’t it?

Lisa: We still have rich people, mega-rich people even. Inequality is at record levels.

Gilbert: The plundering has happened, but not primarily of the rich, because the rich are not defenceless. They can buy politicians, buy newspapers, use their money in various ways to influence the climate of opinion and thus protect themselves from their would-be plunderers.

Craig: They can also move away.

Gilbert: Correct. So the plundering has been of the people who don’t have those self-defence options available.

Lisa: And those are?

Gilbert: The unborn.

Lisa: Meaning debt?

Gilbert: Yes. We have accumulated huge levels of debt that will be unaffordable over the long term. People have voted to give themselves stuff they are not funding through their taxes, the repayment burden being imposed on future generations instead. This is illustrative of the failure of democracy. Politicians promise more baubles and free stuff to the plebs, and the plebs vote for it.

Tom: Insofar as there is any rational element to the immigrationist lunacy, that is it.

Lisa: What do you mean?

Tom: Well, the politicians grasp that the welfare-taxation systems they have set up are not actuarially sound, meaning people on average get out more than they put in. But the pay-ins are front-loaded while the take-outs are back-loaded. So you can keep it going for a while as long as you have more people paying in than taking out.

Craig: It’s a pyramid scheme. Pay in £100, get £300 back after a month. As long as you have a continuous flow of new entrants, you keep that going for a while and some people will indeed get their £200 profit.

Gareth: So you’re saying immigrants are the new entrants that keep it going?

Tom: Well, in the minds of the politicians, yes. Of course, in practice, almost all immigrants are an enormous economic burden. But because our rulers are fixated on the idea of equality, they can’t admit that people aren’t all the same.

Gareth: What’s your basis for saying “immigrants are an enormous economic burden”?

Tom: There are various studies showing this, studies that do actual hard counts of the amount immigrants pay in and take out.

Gareth: I could cite you lots of studies showing the exact opposite.

Tom: In my experience, those studies tend to be primarily abstract, rather than empirical. They’re not hard counts. They’ll take a limited set of data, run it through a theoretical model with a lot of assumptions made to fill in the unknowns, and voila you have your result: immigration is great for the economy.  

Gareth: Cite me one of these “hard counts”.

Tom: Well, there aren’t actually that many, which is revealing in itself.

Lisa: What do you mean?

Tom: It’s difficult for anyone other than a government to acquire the kind of comprehensive data needed to make these assessments. But governments are determined not to disclose it.

Gilbert: Given the magnitude and historical significance of the project our elites have embarked on, repopulating entire countries, a whole continent, with alien peoples, until those aliens become the majority, and citing economic benefit as the rationale for doing all this, you’d think the economic benefits of immigration would perhaps be the most studied subject in all of history. I mean if you’re going to sign your ancestral homeland away for a bag of gold, you’d think you’d want to make sure there actually was some gold inside the bag first.  

Gareth: I’m still waiting for you to cite a study showing this.

Tom: In 2013, the Norwegian financial newspaper Finanzavisen did a study into the economics of immigration (link). They got government data for this. It wasn’t easy. The government didn’t want to give it to them. They had to file lots of freedom of information requests, wring it out of them bit by bit. But, in the end, they got it. When they put it all together and analysed it, the results showed that immigrants from only four countries were making a net positive contribution to the Norwegian budget. Those countries were Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Britain.

Gilbert: One of the things said of democracy in the age before it came was that it would only work in small countries. Or city states. And I think there’s something to that.

Gareth: What makes you say that?

Gilbert: Look at the resistance to immigration and Islam in Europe, as expressed in the form of political parties. The largest, most successful anti-immigration, anti-Islam parties are in small countries like Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria. Almost all small countries have them and, quite often, they are now the largest parties in their respective countries. There, democracy produces a response to the problem. When the established parties won’t acknowledge it, a new party emerges to address it. So it works. But in big countries, there’s almost nothing. Spain, nothing. Britain, what do we have? UKIP.

(general laughter)

Gilbert: Nationalism Lite. Germany, finally the AfD has emerged recently. Not much better than UKIP, truth be told, but still something.

Craig: The Jews are trying to ban it. (link)

Tom: Yeah, we’ll see if it lasts.

Gilbert: France is the only big country that has produced a serious political response to the problem.

Gareth: And what accounts for this difference?

Tom: Empathy effects. It’s human nature to empathise with the people we know, the people around us. Someone in Bavaria just doesn’t feel that much empathy for someone in Berlin. It’s a foreign country to them, something they see on the TV screen.

Gilbert: But this empathy is partly driven by genetic similarity or dissimilarity. People who have lived in the same place for a long period of time will be intermarried with one another. Almost everyone will be related to everyone else, even if they don’t know it. In any area with a historically stable population, anyone who did enough genealogical research would find they had a 10^th cousin relationship to the person living next door, an 8^th cousin relationship to the person they worked with and so on. Even when we’re not aware of them, these genetic ties are detected subconsciously and trigger empathy responses. Geography has obviously been a major limitation on intermarriage historically. So people in Bavaria are going to have much greater consanguinity among themselves than they would with Prussians, and this in turn affects the degree of empathy they feel.

Lisa: Prussians? Do we still have them?

Craig: I wish. We could use them now.

Tom: But isn’t this just an illustration of the failure of artificial state structures generally?

Gilbert: How so?

Tom: These “big states” as you call them are contrived imperial structures. The individuals who live within them are not peoples in any real sense, meaning ancestral communities of descent. They are congeries of peoples. Each of these state structures incorporates several real peoples within it. The UK has Scots, English, Welsh, etc; Spain, the Catalonians, Basques and so on; Germany, the Bavarians, the Sorbs and others.

Craig: Serbs?

Tom: No, Sorbs.

Craig: Sorbs?

Gilbert: They derived from the Wends historically.

Craig: The Wends?

Tom: A Slavic people. Forget it.

Craig: OK.

Lisa: What about France?

Tom: Even France is basically artificial. The French identity was forged artificially after the revolution. At that time, hardly any French people could speak “French”. It was really just the language of the Île-de-France, the Greater Paris region. La République submerged lots of local identities and peoples, Bretons, etc. in a slow-motion soft genocide.

Gilbert: Or, in the case of the Vendeans, a fast-acting hard genocide.

Tom: Yes.

Gilbert: That’s been one of the impediments to French nationalism, the different regional identities that still exist.

Tom: Right. That’s why some of their nationalist movements try to incorporate these regional identities rather than reject them, subsume rather than suppress. The Bloc Identitaire, for example. It’s a kind of aggregate of regional patriotisms while still preserving some idea of Frenchness.

Gareth: So, in relation to democracy, your point is that badly drawn state boundaries cause it to not work, because you end up with different peoples in the same land?

Tom: Right. Democracy requires a demos, a people. When you have multiple peoples in the same state, the different degrees of empathy they feel for one another will be a major stress factor in the society. Ethnic antagonisms will be generated and, human nature being what it is, these passions will cloud rational judgement.

Craig: Ethnic antagonism is good. We need more of that, not less.

Right: My point is that people get caught up in the emotional dynamics of some petty internal ethnic conflict and that blinds them to other things, to greater outside threats. It’s like the mind can only handle simple binary scenarios. We can’t multitask conflict.

Lisa: Examples?

Tom: Catalonia. It’s pretty far gone down the road of islamisation (link). But they’re so caught up with their antagonism to Castile that they can’t see the threat from Mohammedanism. There was one Catalan nationalist who actually said a few years ago: “I’d rather be Muslim than Spanish” (link). That’s how non-rational people can get about these kinds of absurd intra-European, historic antagonisms.

Gilbert: Exactly the same thing happened with the Copts in Egypt. They’re now about 10% of Egypt’s population. But they were the original people, the natives. When the Muslims invaded, in the 7^th century, they didn’t really resist.

Craig: Why?

Gilbert: Because they were caught up in a conflict dynamic with the Byzantines. Egypt was part of the Byzantine empire. The Egyptians and the Byzantines were both Christians but the Egyptians had developed some unique variant of Christianity: Monophysitism. Don’t ask me to explain what that is. Even today, hardly anyone can understand it. It’s nonsense. Basically, it’s a dispute about whether five angels can dance on the head of a pin instead of three. But somehow this pin-dancing obsession was so important to them that they fought a war with the Byzantines over it. And the resentment that lingered after the war was over meant that, when the Muslims came, many of them said…

Craig: “I’d rather be Muslim than Byzantine”?

Gilbert: More or less. They thought the Muslims would leave them alone to practise their faith, as long as they paid their taxes.

Lisa: People have limited perceptions. They perceive what’s around them, they hear things from people they know, the people they know.

Gareth: So they can only react to direct experience?

Lisa: It’s a major factor.

Gilbert: But that’s also partly to do with the controlled media. The mechanisms for relaying indirect experience don’t function correctly because of the various distortion effects described earlier.

Craig: They get “Islam is a Religion of Peace” from the television, and only direct contact with Muslims convinces them otherwise.

Gareth: I would dispute that. Indeed, the truth is exactly the opposite. We know that people fear diversity most in areas where they don’t experience it. The greatest support for anti-immigration parties is in places where there are hardly any immigrants. Look at Germany. Pegida has its stronghold in Saxony, in the east, where there are almost no immigrants, not in Cologne or Berlin, where there are lots. We see the same thing in the old East Bloc countries that espouse anti-Islam rhetoric. There are almost no Muslims there.

Tom: That’s a demographic conquest effect. The indigenes are being driven out of the areas colonised by the aliens. There aren’t enough people left to vote for the nationalist parties.

Craig: And the politicians need to appeal to the invaders for votes.

Gareth: Not true. Studies show that even the “indigenes” as you call them tend to be more supportive of diversity in the areas that actually are diverse.

Craig: It’s an unrepresentative sample. People who aren’t comfortable with diversity move out when the brown people arrive: “White Flight”. Those who don’t leave are basically pre-selected for being OK with their ethnic dispossession and disempowerment. You tend to find strong nationalist enclaves developing alongside the colonised areas, populated by the “fled whites”.

Gilbert: Refugees.

Craig: Yeah, asylum seekers. They seek asylum but there is none to be found. The brown people arrive there too soon enough.

Tom: The reaction is coming too late. By the time people grasp the magnitude of the threat they face, the enemy is upon them and they’ve already been overwhelmed.

Gilbert: And that’s how it will be in our countries as a whole. That’s why democracy doesn’t work. We can’t afford the luxury of running this experiment. The price is too high if it fails. If the reaction doesn’t come in time, we cease to exist as peoples. Our civilisation expires. There’s no way back except, perhaps, brutal, genocidal warfare in some future age.  Look at Syria. That’s what’s coming here. A dictatorship now, even just for a few decades, could prevent that. Even if the dictatorship stifled economic growth or cultural dynamism, what does it matter? It’s a triviality compared to the enormity of mass extermination looming in future.

Craig: Fuck democracy.

Gilbert: Yes, fuck democracy.

Tom: I still think direct democracy would work but fuck the democracy we have now.

Lisa: I think you’re all mad.

Gareth: I share some of your concerns about the concentration of media power, but I’m not convinced any of the alternatives would be better. It’s like Churchill said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”.

Craig: Fuck democracy and fuck Churchill. He destroyed Britain.

Tom: Europe.

Craig: The world.

Gilbert: He destroyed western civilisation.

Craig: What a fucking idiot he was.

Gareth: Let’s leave the Churchill discussion for another time.

Gilbert: Yes, perhaps we better. Well, as regards democracy, I think the nays have it. The democratic verdict, the authentic will of the people, is: Fuck it.

Gareth: OK, so who wants to be the dictator?

Lisa: Me please.

Craig: Me. Dictators don’t say please.

Tom: No, me.

(general laughter)