It occurred to me this week that I find it hard to remember my life of before, or more broadly, the way things used to be, and not so very long ago. So much has changed in four years, or rather, so much change has been forced upon us and keeps coming.
I think a lot about remembering and memory, how it's memory that enables us to know who we are when we wake up each morning. Remembrance is vital for individuals, but also nations. If we forget who we are on account of dementia, perhaps, or other neurological damage, then we're just bodies without identities.
Something similar is true of nations when they're stripped of the mythologies and traditions that are the national foundations. I say the nations of the West are being made to forget who they are, who they were, and that it's no accident. National personalities, what it has been to be British, what it has been to be French. What has been to be American, Canadian, Australian. All of those national identities and more are being dissolved before our eyes.
Or rather, I would say deliberately and malevolently dismantled by those who see the dissolution of identity, the onset of national forgetfulness are steps towards something else, something else they would prefer. Where there has been a presence, all too soon there will be only an absence instead.
Neil Oliver shares his thoughts on the loss of the identity in the West
GB News
Look at Britain now at other European countries besides, look at the USA, Canada, France and ask yourself if you still recognise those places. Ask yourself as well whether those places still recognise you or in the manner of an elderly relative afflicted with dementia. Have they forgotten you?
When I say the changes are no accident, I think about how it has been accomplished. The truth is that the techniques have been used before, found to work, and are being used again. I get myself into trouble when I talk about the centralising of power, about globalism. Let's use another word instead. Collectivism maybe.
At the tail end of World War II at the Yalta Conference in early 1945, US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with Joseph Stalin of the USSR and gave him in effect on half of Europe. And in that Eastern Bloc, the consequences of collectivism came into the fullest flowering. Stalin's power to control the production and distribution of food made possible the Holodomor, the man made famine that killed, or rather deliberately murdered millions of Ukrainians and neighboring Russians between 1932 and 1933.
Ukraine, that benighted place fought over and so tortured by Nazis and Communists, by one ideology or the other. Ideologies that in truth, you couldn't slip a cigarette paper between in terms of their consequences for populations living under either. The mass starvation was no mistake, no accidental misfortune born of hubris. It was made possible by collectivism.
Stalin wanted rid of the Ukrainian peasantry, and control of the food supply gave him the means. He particularly loathed the so-called kulaks, those farmers, a generation or so out of serfdom, who had acquired a few fields, some livestock, maybe built a decent house. Kulak was a pejorative, a name meaning tight fisted, part of a carefully choreographed campaign by which anyone with any kind of independence, and therefore any kind of resistance to the collectivism, was demonised and set up for being murdered.
Food. Every source of food right down to the last seed, even the leaves on the trees, grass in the fields were seized and taken from the countryside and into the cities. A systematic and ruthless denial of any and every form of sustenance to the rural population, applied by soldiers and activists, returning again and again to every village, every house ensured no one had anything to eat, nothing at all, not even worms or bugs scavenged from the soil.
Broken and driven mad by hunger, people descended into madness, finally lay down and died in their millions. Some will say those days are in the past, that it's ancient history. They will insist there is no similarity between what happened in the second half of the 20th century in the countries under Stalin's thrall and 21st century centralising policies of progressives and so-called liberals. I say what happened before it can happen again, the worst of times included. And if we don't waken up to the threat now that it surely will.
There's talk again of collectivising farming, plans afoot to seize farmland, forcing the farmers away and so taking control of food. I say the threat no longer comes from the east, but it's home grown, living right here in the form of those who treat the citizenry without and out contempt, who worked day and night to seize every last drop of control over our lives, who would silence and even jail those with opinions that run against the mainstream, who would tighten the stranglehold on freedom of speech, who would leave the people, their own people, cold and their homes while funneling billions of pounds into profitable wars and proxy wars abroad? Wealth shamelessly laundered back into the pockets of the rich.
Who advocates for centralised digital currency, giving the state moment by moment control over what you can do, where you can go, what food you can buy. I said the centralising collectivist totalitarians of the Soviet saw to the dismantling and dissolving of national identities. I say it's the goal of all totalitarian regimes.
We're invited to believe all that is behind us now, invited even to forget it ever happened. And yet the ideology walks among us to this day in different clothes, with different acronyms, and ideology that is always anti-human, anti-family, anti the individual, anti-human. Part of the stripping of identity has been anti-Christian, anti Christianity. Of that there can be no doubt.
It's no recent phenomenon either. Early in the French Revolution, the land once known as the eldest daughter of the church, cathedrals and churches were destroyed by the revolutionaries. Priests and nuns murdered, the so-called festival of reason saw the destruction of crosses, the mocking of Christian figures. Much of the same followed the Russian Revolution.
Across Europe, for the past few centuries, there has been a unilateral disarmament of faith. Christianity ridiculed. Driven out. Abandoned. Continues to this day. Churches are burned to the ground in France, targeted by arsonists. It's been going on for years. Most recently, the 19th century Church of Saint Omer was gutted by a fire deliberately set. National identity is made of many elements and the loss of each is telling, ultimately ruinous.
A quote often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has it that when people stop believing in God, they don't then believe in nothing, but rather in anything. Loss of meaning in people's lives is endemic and has taken another tool on identity.
Tyrants of old like Henry VIII or Louis the 14th, and then totalitarians like Stalin and Mao had aspirations limited at least to some extent by their reach. All the secret police and citizen snitches in the USSR could not quite reach into the minds of every citizen.
By now, the technology of the 21st century has overcome those limitations. Now hose who crave total control of wealth, energy and food have the means at their disposal. Witness to the attitude of the World Economic Forum and the politicians in its thrall. Listen to the notion of you’ll own nothing and be happy, and remember that collectivization under Stalin, under Mao in China was about abolishing private property, making it impossible for a middle class to aspire to far less achieve any kind of independence from the state.
By now, the education of children has been all but captured too - infected wherever possible, with the nonsense doublespeak of critical race theory, gender studies, diversity, equality and inclusion. All was the claims that such topics do not feature in the curriculum. But while the curriculum describes what is taught, what matters most is how it's taught.
Conservative and Christian author and commentator Pete Hegseth has used the Greek word pedia to describe the enveloping atmosphere in which a child is taught, from which the child absorbs the abiding culture, just as the fish is enveloped by the water in which it swims and breathes.
The all conquering nature of progressive culture has all but rendered our schools and our universities into places not of education, but of indoctrination. The indoctrination is all about pushing the cultural forgetting, the forgetting of the national identity of before driving the cultural dementia.
It's in this way that education too, has been centralised as never before. And wisdom tells us that the pupils of today are the governments of tomorrow, brainwashed and ready to serve, and so perpetuate the ideology that indoctrinated them.
Here's the thing, I miss the identity we used to have, the people we used to be, and I have not forgotten. I've not forgotten the thousands of years of history that got us here. I have not forgotten the good or the bad, horrors included. I have not forgotten the history or the traditions or the Christianity that underpins what used to be called Christendom. I'll always remember.