It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely negative creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity.  Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse’.  Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence.  If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’.  If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous.  It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue.  The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel.  A modern nation cannot afford either of them.  Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.  It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

George Orwell, sounding very modern as he commends love of country in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, published in 1941.

Given our dissident purpose it is fitting that this, MR’s first full calendar year of operation, brought a sharp spate of nasty surprises to our liberal elites.  I mean, of course, 7/7 and 21/7, the Katrina lawlessness, the black v brown riots in Lozells, the 18 days in Paris and beyond and, latterly, the white backlash in North Cronulla.

Naturally, some of these events were greater than others.  But all, in their way, were unprecedented.

Blacks have looted often enough, but always in times when a moral bonfire was to be expected.  No such pass could be extended in post-Katrina NO, where the white norm would have been to rise to the challenge.  Instead, white Americans glimpsed hopeless, irredeemable Africa in their midst and for a moment the narrative of white racist causality, so precious to liberals, was falsified.

Although its scale was relatively small, Lozells also punched a neat hole through the myth of white racism.  What use was it in the face of an entrenched and murderous, mutual hatred between Caribbs and Pakistanis?  The kind of ethnic competition and polarity for which our big provincial cities are heading obviously won’t be resolved by demonising the English.  But liberalism simply has nothing else to offer.

If the broad Parisian avenue to assimilation ever beckoned to multiculturally-tired, post-9/11 English liberals it has been barricaded forever now.  Those 18 days of fire singed every elite hair in France.  The calls for more openness to difference, more cohesiveness, more social justice go out.  But they are reflexive.  What sane Frenchman is not even more suspicious of les banlieus than he was before?

North Cronulla showed why he should be.  It came to pass because liberalism recognises no point beyond which progress is barred.  Indeed, it has no strength of its own by which to bar progress, if one may call it such.  “Freedoms” thought absurd yesterday – like same-sex marriage and, now, gay adoption  - pass onto the statute books today.  The eternal pursuit of individual freedom opens the way for every favoured group to have more and more of what it dares to want.  At its core, liberalism cannot parent any kind of assimilation because, actually, it parents self-indulgence.  Liberalism does not exist to unite or assimilate anything but, to borrow a Jungian expression, to individuate everything … to disperse us all upon a sea of perfectly blind non-judgementalism.

In North Cronulla the tide turned.  Non-judgementalism was swept away by righteous white Australian anger.  Those 5,000 young Aussies did us all a huge favour, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for having the guts to do it.  That the press and politicians tarred them by association with neo-Nazis says nothing about them and all we need to know about liberals.  I trust ordinary Australians can tell they are being manipulated so as not to damage the grand project in the same way.

These four events were all extraordinary.  But there is absolutely no doubt that the greatest shock of all for liberals in 2005 was detonated by the four “British” suicide bombers on 7/7 - and so nearly replicated two weeks later by Somali immigrants.  Other attacks  have been thwarted according to London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone.

It is hard to over-emphasise how damaging 7/7, in particular, was for the racial egalitarian aspect of liberalism’s grand project.  “Home-grown” Islamic suicide bombers leave no elbow room for the usual catch-all of white racism.  The intense and high-powered effort to convince us that mainstream Islam is tolerant and peace-loving is merely a sticking plaster, and the elites know it.  For the first time, our professional hand-wringers and bien pensants are having to think about demanding change from Muslims, and they clearly don’t know how to set about it.

There won’t be any change, of course.  Competing EGI’s aside, Islam is too deep-rooted and too deeply critical of the liberal West.  How sweetly ironic it is that our modern addictions to consumerism, libertinism and alcohol and our respect for the rights of woman should protect us from liberalism’s racial-egalitarian goal.

Taken together, then, these six events from the second half of 2005 look very like harbingers of a stressful future.  There will be more of them.  That’s just what comes of the God-awful mess our elites are at once responsible for creating and incapable of acknowledging.

Fortunately, we are still free to draw our own conclusions.  Mine are broadly positive.  No matter how hard our elites try, they will never possess a degree of control sufficient to liberate the accursed white heterosexual male from his propinquity to, in left-speak, oppress and emiserate others.  There will never be sufficient propagandising, never sufficient RDNE pseudo-science, never sufficient MSM distortion, never sufficient “academic” black martyrs, never sufficient human rights, never sufficient institutions to wreck, never sufficient incarcerated “haters”, “deniers” and “neo-Nazis” to keep the grand project on track.  Impossibly, wonderfully indomitable human nature will always pop up somewhere and put a spoke in the liberal wheel.

And if it isn’t our own particular strain of human nature that performs this precious task, don’t worry.  It will be somebody else’s.  Pakistani and Somali Muslims sick-with-religion, an acquisitive black American underclass, the sullen misfits of les banlieus … there will always be these and countless more like them to model for us the strengths of a diversity we cannot accommodate, much less assimilate.

The elites, of course, will learn no humility whatsoever from this.  As the stress-fractures mount up so they will lecture us that, ultimately, it is our fault.  We have failed the vibrancy test.  We English, we French, we Dutch, we Americans and Canadians, Australians, Austrians, Germans and Swedes … we the white-skinned have been insufficiently inclusive, insufficiently open to difference.  We are responsible for diversity’s failures.  We are responsible for everything.

It is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of the antipathy elites feel for their own people.  Consider how the Western press perceived “youths” in Clichy-sur-Bois, and was so very coy about skin-colour.  Jacques Chirac perceived racism, but only in the (real) French.  In more contrast still, the Australian MSM perceived drunken violence and neo-Nazis at North Cronulla, and even – as Mark has pointed out - white supremacist cells.  Terrorists yet.

Lawrence Auster adds the cogent observation that:-

… there are no Nazis, there are just thousands of Australians who are deeply upset and angry at the invasion of their country by hostile and often criminal and violent aliens whom the police do nothing to quell, who are changing the very feel and character of Australian life and turning Australians into strangers in their own land. The rioters of Crunulla were telling the liberals, “By taking away our historic society based on a common culture, ethnicity and race, a place which is ours and where we feel at home, by imposing these unassimilable foreigners on us, you are not enhancing our humanity, you are robbing us of the most basic human values. And we’re not going to take it anymore.”  It was this spontaneous reaction of normal humans against the inhuman reconstruction of their society that the liberals label as “white supremacy” and “Nazism.”

That the liberal elite, including that part of it which considers itself of good Conservative character, is as psychologically incapable of understanding love of kind as ever it was in Orwell’s day is perhaps the abiding political mystery of our age.

But North Cronulla and Paris also reveal how little liberals actually think about events that should shake them to the core.  Among journalists there is an extraordinary capacity to behave like a flock of starlings on the wing.  The deft uniformity with which the party-line was adopted demonstrates how unthinking news presentation has become in the Pee-Cee age.  Somebody somewhere in the flock flexes a wing tip in a certain, correct way, typing the word “youths” or “neo-Nazis”, and the self-same movement ripples flawlessly through the rest.  Some Kelly-style political calculation – a branch of animal cunning – attends proceedings, perhaps.  But of real, critical thought there is scarcely a sign.

Post-7/7 Britain is probably the one genuine exception to the brainless starling phenomenon and, to continue the bird-brained analogy, the best cockpit right now for observing the thought processes of worried liberals.  But that is only because the British model of multiculturalism had been pretty effectively holed below the water line by CRE chief Trevor Phillips over a year before Britain’s “home-grown” Islamic terrorists wrote their little page in history.  It was a debate the left forced on itself.  Mohammad Sidique Khan and friends certainly quickened it.  But I suspect that their principal contribution to British life has been to substantially alter the way policing is conducted:-

Police are to be given sweeping powers to arrest people for every offence, including dropping litter, failure to wear a seat belt and other minor misdemeanours.

The measures, which come into force on Jan 1, are the biggest expansion in decades of police powers to deprive people of their liberty.

… Officers will have to satisfy themselves of “a person’s involvement or suspected involvement or attempted involvement in the commission of a criminal offence” and that there are “reasonable grounds for believing that the person’s arrest is necessary”.

They will also have the power to take digital photographs of suspects on the street when they have been arrested, detained or given a fixed penalty notice.

… many people fear that the move will create a vast database of photographs of innocent citizens which could be kept even if the police decide not to take any further action against them.

In another context, again in yesterday’s Telegraph Boris Johnson MP observes that:-

In its time in office, Labour has produced more than 700 new criminal offences, criminalising behaviour at 10 times the rate of any previous government, and in far too many cases we cannot be entirely sure who is meant to be affected, and what conduct proscribed.

The effect is very sinister: it leaves the interpretation of the law up to government agencies or, in the case of the Attorney General, government ministers.  It leaves us all with a sense of free-floating dread that we could be pounced on, at any time, for doing something that thousands of people are doing every day.

The “What to demand of Muslims?” debate, meanwhile, is showing signs of coalescing around that most surprising of requirements: patriotism.  The earlier concentration on imams’ loyalty and “Britishness” has been jettisoned by the Home Office.  It was, anyway, all just words.  So now the search is on to find something meaningful, something really capable of uniting everybody.

But again Orwell – the good Blair – is our guide:-

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you.  However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time.  The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul.  Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing.  And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen.  That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not.  A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip.  It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.

Liberals can only answer as to “what England is” in terms of civic values: tolerance, tolerance, diversity, respect, diversity, tolerance, tolerance, tolerance.  Etcetera.  They haven’t got a hope in hell of making this work.

This is how Orwell finishes his essay:-

This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges.  There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue.  Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour.  The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change.  In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier.  The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed.  The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies.  It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture.  The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

It is obvious now, is it not, that Orwell’s “everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past” is the England-loving English themselves.  Only the English can answer as to what England is, for it is all of a piece with their own love of kind.

Our elites will never recognise this simple truth.  The years will roll on with them disregarding every stress fracture, moving us ever closer to the total state because no other agency will offer any purchase on the situation.  We shall stand and suffer the dispensations of our diverse new friends as they pursue their genetic and other interests.

Let us hope that the conclusion, when it comes, will be peaceful as well as peacefully illiberal.  But there will certainly be another twenty or thirty New Years to see in - perhaps some years even as interesting as the one just passed - before that good day dawns.