by David Webb

We are told that US/NATO wars are “for democracy”. This is clearly important in terms of their perceived legitimacy. The US is engaged in a proxy war in the Ukraine because—it is implausibly claimed—that country is a democracy. The US wouldn’t be there if there were no human rights angle. I have to tell you, gentle reader, this is hokum.

Democracy and nationalism are linked in their historical emergence. The reason why Disraeli felt confident that the working man could be brought into the franchise was because of the power of national identity. Democracy requires a demos—a defined group of people who feel their common destiny, a nation—to make its political, economic and cultural choices. John Stuart Mill himself in Considerations on Representative Government (Ch XVI) pointed out the importance for libertarianism of the fact that the population of a country such as England was a cultural demos. I will cite only this paragraph, but recommend reading the whole:

“A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves, or a portion of themselves, exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.”

The idea that the Chinese and Tibetans in Tibet should hold a vote on whether Tibet be allowed to be an independent country, with the Chinese having an equal vote, would expose to ridicule the concept of a democracy where there is no demos. Should the Tibetans accept being outvoted? In the Holy Land, the number of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is nearly equal (7m to 6m), but they are not a demos, and those Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip do not have the vote. Looking at any conflict in the world, it becomes clear that holding a vote among peoples who have rival identities is not a genuine exercise in democracy. Democracy is the expression of a people and its desire for self-government. It is necessarily not universal.

Put this way, the lurch into globalism as a political theory of the Western elite since 1990 marks the end of democracy. Steve Sailer has appropriately summed up globalism in the slogan “Invade the world, Invite the world”. The twin policies of invading countries to impose supposed democracy and mass immigration in the US, the UK and other European-stock countries shows the Western elite has abandoned the national idea. For the US elite, this is an attempt to remain a hegemonic power: its wars form part of a geopolitical strategy, and are not genuinely designed to spread democracy. At the same time, the policy of immigration will turn the US population into a divided mass of subject peoples who are not a demos at all, and whose rivalry within America itself will call for constant state intervention to manage fractious relations within the citizenry, a fractiousness created by government immigration policy itself. This is not a national conception of America, but rather a globalist conception of both America and the world.

This follows the view of Zbigniew Brzezinski that the US should take the opportunity provided by the fall of the Soviet Union to become a traditional-style hegemon, now that anti-communism had run its course. All empires have a propaganda line to back them up. The British Empire proclaimed Pax Britannica and the rule of law in a way that did genuinely have many millions of adherents among the ruled colonial populations. The Roman Empire proclaimed a similar Pax Romana. The US empire claims to promote democracy, the rule of law, civil society and freedom, as if the US were telling those in the US sphere of influence that they will be better off for being under US hegemony.

You could well argue that countries like Britain were lucky to be under US hegemony and not Soviet domination. Was US hegemony always benevolent in each country in the world? The Cubans (host to a base they do not want there—despite US claims to adhere to the internation rule of law), the Salvadorians and Nicaraguans, the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Yemenis and many others might claim that the US empire had been less benign—to them. The numbers of imperial war dead as a result of US hegemony runs into the many millions. Maybe this is why countries with a majority of the world population refused to back the US-sponsored General Assembly resolution condemining Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. These include China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, etc. Interestingly, the UAE voted for the resolution, but abstained in the UN Security Council vote that preceded it. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Mexico have avoided criticising the Russians, although they did vote for the General Assembly resolution. The leaders of the 10% of so of the global population in the core Western countries proclaim that Russia ia a “pariah state”. The other 90% of the global population have no real say in this.

Britain is a key backer of US imperialism. Interestingly, the Second World War was fought to enable Britain to remain independent of both German and American control. That was the initial aim (see Peter Hitchens’ The Victory Delusion). Britain had two foes in World War II: Germany and the US. Britain was thus comprehensively defeated by the US in the war. Forced to hand over all our gold reserves, and all our equities and bonds in the US (privately held, but required by the US to be nationalised without compensation by the British state, sold off, and then all the money run through before Lend Lease could be contemplated) and then encouraged to wind down the entire empire. That, my friends, is a comprehensive strategic defeat, not at the hand of the Nazis, but by the White House. Yet, as shown in The Bridge on the River Kwai, a defeated Britain was staffed by an elite of people desperate to feel like they were still relevant and playing a role in all the global summits. Just as Colonel Nicholson in that film agreed to help the Japanese war effort in exchange for the respect of Colonel Saito and constant convivial meetings in the commander’s hut, Britain enthusiastically performs US foreign policy in exchange for summit meetings and a feeling of respect as a still relevant global power.

When Britain supports globalism, it is carrying out another country’s foreign policy and serving another country’s interests. Just because the US is “Anglo-Saxon” does not mean that US interests are British interests. Lord Palmerston stated the Britain has no permanent allies, only permanent interests. The fact that British politicians are unable to think in terms of our own interests shows our political class is now staffed by foreign agents—people who ideologically adhere to the foreign policy of another country. Why did we embark on mass immigration and multiculturalism? It was to ape the US. Interest in things like homosexuality and transgenderism is also, basically, US policy, which insists on such things among allies, and is openly to hostile to countries like Hungary who refuse to play along. Britain joined the Iraq wars and Afghan and Syrian campaigns, tagging along, despite the lack of any British interest, to feel “adjacent” to the real centre of geopolitical power in Washington. Britain has sent ships into the South China Sea to rile the Chinese, at the behest of the US. Britain sent a ship into Russian waters off the Crimea for the same reason, and is now a leading enemy of Russia, despite the lack of any discernible British interest in the Ukraine. In fact, as Dr Kissinger said recently, Russia has frequently been a guarantor of a stable European order, and our interest is in maintaining that. Over the unpredictable long term, the intentions of Germany and France may change, and so, as AJP Taylor pointed out, Britain and Russia are natural allies in the balance of power in Europe.

British leaders are not nationally minded at all. I don’t mean we should adopted the most boorish form of nationalism, but that our policies should be adopted for the interests of our country, and not calibrated for some kind of global policy set by the global hegemon. Once upon a time, British leaders were nationalist: on May 26th 1900, it is said both lords and paupers danced together at Piccadilly Circus in celebration of the Relief of Mafeking. In 1900, if government ministers allowed themselves to be reduced to tears (a big no-no, in the days of the stiff upper lip), it would have been in response to a British reverse. Yet when NATO withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, Ben Wallace, the British defence minister, cried on camera in contemplation of the fact that he was not able to bring more Afghans to this country. He is not a nationalist at all, but a globalist. His passions are invested in the US proclaimed ideology of democracy, human rights, etc. It is quite likely that terrorism and child rape on a mass scale will be the result of the policy of flying 20,000 Afghans to the UK. Another 20,000 were brought in from Syria. Nearly 100,000 have arrived from Hong Kong in response to Britain’s attempts to tell China how to rule China (the Hong Kong Chinese are unlikely to be involved in terrorism or crime, but form a rival identity group that is not part of our demos). Large numbers are arriving from the Ukraine, often from cities 800 miles away from where any fighting is taking place like Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk.

Are Britain and America sincere in wanting democracy? As stated above, the lurch into globalism since 1990 actually marks the end of meaningful democracy in the West. In the US, the basic underpinning of democracy, in the form of a culture that favours free speech and tolerance, is now absent. We have a culture of denunciation, cancellation (where you lose your job if you express the wrong political opinion) and even violence (where US judges are willing to hand down US$1 fines for serious left-wing political violence). The US deep state conspired to undermine an elected US president via the Russiagate hoax and prevented Donald Trump from pursuing his campaign policy of better relations with Russia by means of a long-drawn-out investigation that very early on the US Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, knew to be a canard. US oligarchs who control Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc, conspired to throw the elected president off social media and to prevent dissemination of news on a scandal surrounding Hunter Biden. US judges have handed down politically motivated judgements, including that by Emmet Sullivan, who refused to drop charges against Michael Flynn, despite evidence the FBI colluded to frame him for perjury while their own internal notes showed that Flynn did not lie to the FBI. Truthful comments about the likelihood the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese laboratory were not permitted on social media: what happened to democracy during the pandemic?

In Britain, access to democracy is controlled by Blairite bodies such as the Electoral Commission, which refuses to register parties whose political stances it opposes (the right-wing Patriotic Alternative, or PA, which opposes non-white immigration, has repeatedly been refused registration). The Press Complaints Commission also imposes requirements that newspapers refer to transgender women as “she”. Members of the PA had the door kicked in by counter-terrorism police over claims they distributed a flyer with the wording “2066, Google it”. I don’t think the sticker was well-worded, as it is entirely unclear what is being referred to, as no other words were on the sticker. But it refers to projections by Oxford professor David Coleman that current demographic trends show “white Britons” will be in a minority in this country by 2066. In our Potemkin democracy, even mentioning this is not allowed. The Malicious Communications Act governs what may be said online: malicious communications by the left, include threats to kill on social media, are not acted on by the police, however. The dominance of the BBC in our press is a problem, as a shrill ideological line highly at variance with majority views is promoted. But in fact nearly all public- and private-sector bodies have been captured by the same “woke” views, reflecting the defection of the entire professional middle class from patriotism to wokery since the 1950s, a process that is now complete. The hysteria against Brexit and the attempts by civil servants and the judiciary to prevent is sit ill with claims that this is democracy.

Ironically, we claim Britain is a beacon of democracy, with freedom of speech and a free press, but the British press is nearly 100% on the side of the Ukrainian government, apart from Peter Hitchens’ column in the Mail on Sunday. What differentiates our press from Pravda in the Soviet Union? In Britain’s free and democratic media, how often have you heard about Ukrainian losses in the war, which must be equal to or more than Russian losses? The philosopher Juergen Habermas wrote of a public space or civil society as important in a democracy, and not just a bare electoral mechanism. As the political and media classes seemed to have melded in the West, I don’t feel it is correct to refer to the BBC, the Mail, the Telegraph, Channel 4, Sky, etc, as being “civil society”. In the theoretical sense, this needs to be a space not controlled by the state and its allies for independent organisation and thought. We don’t have that. Ergo, we don’t have civil society, but are prepared to mouth off on the world state as if we did. Britan’s rule of law does not extend to state officials. Cressida Dick, the former head of the Metropolitan Police, faced no charges over the extra-judicial killing of de Menezes on the Tube, despite the fact the officers who killed him knew before they killed him he was not a terrorist. The Hillsborough tragedy where over 90 football fans were crushed to death saw a long-running and successful conspiracy by state officials to avoid accountability. When patients in Staffordshire hospitals died after being denied water, the nurses who told policemen summoned to the ward that everything was in hand faced no charges.

Does America support democracy in its foreign policy? Or does it promote its own geostrategic interests? The US bombing of Serbia (pro-Russian) in the Yugoslav wars was not authorised by the UN Security Council, and has led to the hiving off of Kosovo, in defiance of international law. Support for Israel has included allowing Israel over decades to push Palestinians out of their land. Recent condemnation of the Ukraine war came only months after the US recognised Jerusalem as the capital of the Israeli state, as well as the Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Are Britain and America countries that don’t approve of conquest and annexation? No, they are not. Do you remember the sanctions on Israel during the Lebanon war when Israeli troops surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and sent in a Christian Lebanese militia to kill up to 3,500 Palestinians? I don’t remember those sanctions either, as there were none. The US supports Saudi Arabia, an ally that is not a democracy. The chopping to bits of Jamal Kashoggi in a Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018 led to no sanctions at all: the US argued that Saudi Arabia was a key ally and so would not be sanctioned. In Syria, the US and Britain back al-Qaida offshoots in a war against the Damascus government. A US ally, Qatar, backs the Islamic State extremist group in Syria, all designed to pin Syria in constant warfare. Peter Hitchens’ blog has documented the fake claims that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

The Western governments that support the rule of law back Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen and misused a UN Security Council resolution to overthrow the Gaddafi regime in Libya. As the Caesar-like Hillary Clinton said “we came, we saw, he died”. A fake claim that the Iraqi army was killing babies in incubators in Kuwait was used to justify the first Gulf War. The second Gulf War was justified by fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction, plus claims that Saddam Hussein fed opponents into meat grinders. Nothing was heard again of this claim after the war.  The democratic US government refused to heed a resolution of the Iraqi parliament to leave Iraq (the Ukraine has the right to choose its allies, but Iraq can’t? What about Iraqi democracy?), shortly after the US—illegally—killed an Iranian commander Soleiman. Attempts to fabricate an Iranian attack on shipping in the Persian Gulf did not work, but the US deep state clearly does have elements that favour fabricating attacks to justify a war with Iran. The killing of 500,000 people in Indonesia under Sukarno was backed by the US. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ordered Britain to decolonise the Diego Garcia territory in the Indian Ocean and hand it back to the Chagossian people who were deported en masse to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Can you guess what a country like Britain that claims to back democracy and a rules-based order did? Reader, I will not leave you guessing. Britain has blithely ignored the ruling. Revelations by Bradley Manning, Philip Snowden and Julian Assange on the conduct of the US, including serious human-rights abuses and video footage of them, led to the imprisonment of Bradley Manning. Snowden has fled to Russia and Assange was arraigned on invented Swedish charges designed to see him extradited to the US. The UK arranged with Ecuador to breach the sanctuary the Ecuadorian embassay had afforded him: British policemen marched straight into the embassy to arrest him, in an action that would be widely condemned if Tibetans or Uighurs were dragged out of foreign embassies under a deal with China.

More recently, we have seen Venezuela’s gold reserves seized by the Bank of England, as the British government decided not to recognise the Venezuelan government. That country was unable to obtain access to its own gold even at the height of the pandemic. The reserves were placed in a country, Britain, that proclaims its adherence to the rule of law. The Afghan government under the Taliban has no access to that country’s US$9bn in foreign reserves, mainly held in the US, despite the fact the country is starving (the UN World Food Programme states that 97% of Afghans are short of food). The US had declared it will release some of the money, but not to the Taliban government, but to international aid agencies, with billions of Afghanistan’s own money to be handed to victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack, by a frankly lawless unilateral decision of the White House. This reflects the fact that al-Qaida had training camps in far-flung areas of Afghanistan before 2001, but actual Afghan involvement in 9/11 is not proven. The terrorists were all Saudi Arabian, with the financing coming from the Pakistani government. General Mahmoud Ahmed, head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, wired US$100,000 to the lead terrorist, Mohammed Atta, before the attack. Ahmed was forced to resign. Afghanistan is not proven to have any involvement, but billions of its money is being commandeered by the US government. This is designed to punish the country for falling into the hands of the Taliban.

The current war in the Ukraine has seen the US close off Russian access to the global economy via its control of the SWIFT payments system. The rules-based order allows the US to do this? US and EU sanctions have been imposed on Russia. Going beyond unilateral imposition of sanctions is the secondary sanctions regime, whereby the US threatens to punish any country that does not implement US sanctions that have not been agreed by the UN Security Council. Where is the rules-based order? The US, Britain and the EU have frozen US$300bn of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves, with no explanation as to the legal basis of this. This is just piracy. Maybe the countries who voted against the UN General Assembly resolution were expressing disquiet at the fact that a handful of Western countries control access to the global economy and can simply seize a nation’s foreign reserves. It is likely that there isn’t a country in the non-Western world that supports this. Yet the US sent emissaries to India threatening them with reprisals should they violate US sanctions on Russia. If the Ukraine can choose its foreign policy despite Russian objections, why can’t India choose its own foreign policy too? Why is US official Victoria Nuland, who has played a leading role in destabilising the Ukraine, flying around the world to Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and others, insisting they take part in the isolation of Russia. Why can’t these country set their own foreign policies? In April, the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean announced an alliance with China, resulting in US threats. Daniel Kritenbrink, US assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, stated “We have respect for the Solomon Islands’ sovereignty. But we also wanted to let them know that if steps were taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence… then we would have significant concerns, and we would very naturally respond to those concerns”. This is almost word for word what Russia said about Ukrainian entry to NATO. Why don’t the Solomon Islanders have their right to their foreign policy? The then Australia prime minister, Scott Morrison, stated that a Chinese military base in the Solomons would be a “red line” for Canberra. Israel bombs Syria every day because of a perceived threat from the Iranian military based in Syria.

As democracy is watered down in Britain and America, owing to our leaders’ adoption of “globalism” as their mantra—requiring the criminalisation of certain points of view and the flowing of power into the hands of regulatory bodies set up by the Blair government—these countries still justify their foreign policy in terms of democracy. Britain is a sad case. Maybe Boris Johnson thinks that if he frenetically backs US policy in the Ukraine, the US and the EU will ease off on their hostility to Britain after Brexit. In fact, both are still insisting that Britain must lose control of Northern Ireland. If you show your counterparts that you are a country that will not stick up for its interests, you will be walked all over. We are just promoting another country’s foreign policy, pointlessly. Large numbers of Conservative MPs are simpy US and/or EU agents.

The US, for its part, is backing a war in the Ukraine as a way of forcing NATO to become relevant again and thus keeping Germany and France in the US fold. There are signs that the Germans and the French know they are being played. The Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe, led by a prime minister who was just a TV actor with US$800m of unknown provenance stashed in Cypriot bank accounts. Most Ukrainians will tell you election results are “vykupleny”: “bought”. During the current Ukraine war, the pro-Russian opposition parties have been closed down by Kiev. One of the Ukraine’s negotiators at negotiations with Russia held in Belarus, Denis Kireev, was arrested by the Ukrainian equivalent of the KGB and killed in the street outside the government office without any pretense of a trial. Vladimir Struk, the pro-Russian mayor of Kreminna in the eastern Lugansk province was gunned down in the street. Large numbers of journalists in the country have disappeared. You wouldn’t know it from the newspaper coverage, but the areas of the Donbass (i.e. parts of Lugansk and Donetsk provinces) that were under Kiev control before February 24th voted by a large majority in the 2019 parliamentary elections in favour of the pro-Russian parties. Those areas of Lugansk voted 49.8% for a pro-Russian party called “Opposition Platform-for Life” and 4.8% for a party called “Opposition Bloc”, the Russian party having squabbled and divided in two. This is 54.6% for pro-Russian parties. The parts of Donetsk province controlled by Kiev voted 43.4% for Opposition Platform for Life and 10.8% for Opposition Bloc, totalling 54.2% in favour of pro-Russian parties. No Western news outlet has mentioned this—or the fact that the now devastated city of Mariupol voted heavily for pro-Russian parties. The other six Russian-speaking provinces voted 20%-34% for the pro-Russian parties; they are therefore less pro-Russian, but have large pro-Russian minorities.

No-one has commented that the eight Russian-speaking provinces wanted, not fusion with Russia, but just a more tolerant policy from Kiev, recognising that the Ukraine is a bilingual state. Although most Ukrainians told the last census their native language was Ukrainian, Ukrainians who are bilingual will often state this in a reflection of political identity (over 40% of Irishmen claim to be native speakers of Gaelic in the Irish census, despite the real figure being much less than 1%). Only 29.6% of Ukrainians told the 2001 census their native language was Russian, but a survey in 2004 by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology focusing not on “native language”, but the language actually spoken in the home, found that well over 40% (reported on Wikipedia as 43-46%) of the population spoke Russian at home, as many as speak Ukrainian at home, with the balance largely being speakers of Surzhyk (a patois that combines the two languages in ways that are incorrect in either language). Ukrainian is not more widely spoken in the Ukraine than Russian. Russian language use on the Ukrainian Internet runs at five times that of Ukrainian. A 2008 Gallup poll found that 83% of respondents preferred to take the poll in Russian, and only 17% in Ukrainian.

All over the Ukraine, cinemas are forced to dub foreign films into Ukrainian only. If you go to the cinema in a 100% Russian-speaking city like Mariupol, you will have to watch the film in Ukrainian. Russian-language schools are being phased out according to a law adopted in 2017 that bans Russian-language education in secondary schools. Compare this to the way that Swedish is an official language in Finland, for the sake of the 5% Swedish-speaking minority. Access to the Russian-language social media site VK, once ubiquitous in the Ukraine has been closed down. Wikipedia tells us that in 2012, over 60% of newspapers in the Ukraine were in Russian, and 83% of journals and 87% of books, and only 28% of TV programmes were in Ukrainian. A 2016 law requires at least 35% of radio content to be in Ukrainian, risng to 60% for news and analysis programmes. A 2017 law imposes a 75% Ukrainian-language quota on TV programmes. In January 2022 a law came into force that allows newspapers to publish in Russian, but only if a Ukrainian-language edition is published too, which is designed to be financially unviable for Russian-language media. Since 2010 court proceedings have been allowed in Russian, but only with mutual consent of all parties, which may not be forthcoming.

I’m sure people in the south and east of the Ukraine don’t like the shelling of their cities—although Western claims that Putin is targeting civilians specifically are ridiculous—but the Ukrainian government bears a share of blame for refusing to compromise with a large minority in the country. On May 2nd 2014, 42 pro-Russian demonstrators were forced by counter-protestors into the Trade Unions House in Odessa and then burnt alive when the building was set on fire; 32 died of carbon monoxide poisoning and 10 died while leaping from windows to escape the flames. Another six people died in clashes elsewhere in Odessa that day. Why is that the Ukraine has no spirit of democracy, compromise or human rights? Why do activists from the very far West of the Ukraine control policy? Why are they attempting to convert parts of the country that were conquered by the Russian empire from the Turks and have never been Ukrainian-speaking into a facsimile of Ukrainian-speaking areas like Lviv? British and American claims that the Ukraine is a great and flourishing democracy are wholly false.

By supporting the globalist foreign policy narratives, we are calling for World War 3. Why didn’t we bomb Russia in 1968, when the Russian army moved on the Dubcek government in Czechoslovakia? Why don’t we go to war with China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, most countries in Africa and a few in Latin America? The idea that Western countries claiming moral superiority owing to a (hypocritical) commitment to democracy have the right to embroil the world in war is horrendous. The US is refusing a staged and managed withdrawal from the position of Top Dog—and poses a threat to the entire world. Britain is far more interested in Ukrainian sovereignty that British sovereignty and is playing an utterly cowardly role as Stirrer-in-Chief on the world stage. The threat to the world is from Globalism, not Nationalism, but is cloaked in democratic language that we must refute.