This is part one of a three part series. Part one can be found here.
A translatio imperii, albeit one of a more modest sort than Toynbee and the Milner Group foresaw, had already been accomplished once before in English history. In the fourth volume of A Study of History, Toynbee describes — for some reason in the third person — a nine-month tour that, at the age of twenty-two, he took across Greece in 1911. It was at this time that, on an unnamed mountain in Crete, he chanced upon the ruins of an 18th century villa:
“It was a house which might have been built for a contemporary nobleman in England, and have been lived in — had it stood on English ground — by its builder’s descendants down to the tenth generation in the writer’s own day; but, having been built, as it happened, by Venetian hands in Crete, this piece of modern western architecture was as utterly ‚dead and done with‘ — as veritably ‚a museum piece‘ — in AD 1912 as the Minoan palaces at Knossos and Phaestus which the traveller had been looking at a few days before […] he reflected that the four and a half centuries for which Venice had been mistress of Crete were a longer span of time than the present age of his own country’s rule over the earliest acquired of her overseas dominions […] that baroque ruin in Crete, as it stood in AD 1912, was a memento mori for an England that was then still alive, as well as for a Venice that was then already dead.”
It could not have been unknown to Toynbee that Venice, and the world to which it belonged to, was hardly so dead as this picture of desolation suggested. Though the bright sun of the Serenissima had long ceased to glow, its radiance clouded by the apparition of the Ottomans in the Eastern Mediterranean and the general eclipse of that marine body’s trade by the opening of the Atlantic and its junior partner the Baltic, the actions of a “creative minority“ allowed the Venetian way of life to play out on a far grander stage than it had ever enjoyed in Ionia, Crete, Cyprus, or its further-flung commercial outposts.
This Atlantic shift occurred for unimpeachably Harem Financerian reasons. The commercial and colonial exploitation of these new lands multiplied the “food and fuel” (in Wallerstein’s pregnant formulation) that could sustain European civilisation on a hitherto vaster and more complex scale than before, and Europe’s anarchic state system made grabbing a piece of the pie necessary for survival. In Toynbee’s telling, “challenge and response” is the mechanism of historical progress par excellence. Like the Milnerites, the commercial elite of Venice and its old seaborne rival Genoa perceived their way of life disintegrating around them and, relying on their financial preeminence to channel the tides of history as they had once tamed the waters of the Adriatic, strove to secure their political influence and their way of life beyond the approaching horizon when the growing material power of the Atlantic seaboard kingdoms, their resources consolidated using administrative techniques developed in Italy, would supersede the Italian city states as bases for projecting worldly power.
The evacuation of the Italian lifeworld across the Alps proceeded in several movements. The Genoese led the way as financiers first of Portugal’s maritime expeditions and later those of Spain, intermarrying with the aristocracy of both countries and taking up influential positions of court — from then on, their fortunes rose and fell with those of the Iberian peninsular states. A descendant of one of these bloodlines, General de Spínola, would later play an inglorious role during the Carnation Revolution, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. Venice took a different course: though Venetian advisers were valued for their know-how at the courts of Henry VIII and James I in much the same way that Britain’s world-beating professional services sector is today in Dubai, Muscat, and Washington, there is no record of the lagoonal elite transplanting themselves onto a foreign polity as the Genoese did in Madrid and Lisbon — a curious missed opportunity which has given rise to lurid speculations that it in fact did occur, albeit in secret. Given the well-documented record of Venetian institutional transfer across the Alps, it is quite legitimate to ask why the patriciate did not strategise the handover from the Rialto to the Court of St. James as the Genoese had done in Iberia, especially since Venice’s intelligence network provided it with the systematised insight into European courts that the Genoese lacked. This would be a question much in the same spirit that Zimmern asked why the Athenians of Pericles’ day failed to encode their way of life in an imperial idea during that empire’s lifetime, as the posthumous endurance of Athenian thought has proven that they could. But Toynbee, writing in media res, could hardly presume that the values of his own time would survive in either temporal or spiritual cast, and neither, alas, may we, and so we must contemplate the afterlife of Venetian institutions as were we priests at her temple rather than detectives prying open her empty crypt.
The three institutional heritages that Venice bequeathed its transalpine daughters were central banking, central intelligence, and a certain ideal of republican government; “the cause of the Venetian Republic” as Disraeli put it in Coningsby. A fourth legacy was the system of plantation slavery that the Venetians had pioneered in Crete, but this would prove shorter-lived. The first three institutions all found fullest flower in England, and the fourth in her overseas colonies, although this took time and the route of transmission was seldom direct. Venetian methods of intelligence gathering and analysis were known and imitated in England as early as 1569, when the first documented English version of a Venetian relazione appears on commission of William Cecil, an ancestor of the Cecil who as Lord Salisbury had provided Milner’s young men with his political backing (fans of The Hound’s journalism will be no doubt amused to discover that the current head of house chairs both the London Defence Conference and Reaction dot life). Cecil’s system of central intelligence was carried on and systematised by his son Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, although the apparatus Cecil pater et filius set up languished following Salisbury’s death in 1612. William Paterson, the founder and theorist of the Bank of England, had learned his trade in Amsterdam, whose premier financial institution, the Exchange Bank, was a direct copy of the Banco di Rialto, although in terms of its functions the early BoE was much closer to the Genoese Banco di San Giorgio (with which Paterson had at least a cursory familiarity) or the Venetian Banco del Giro (with which he did not) than to that august Dutch institution. The passage of Venetian ideals across the Alps has been well-documented by Gilbert, Pocock, and Skinner, as well as from a different angle in a recent monograph by Eloise Davies, who emphasises Paolo Sarpi and a purported “Anglo-Venetian Party’s” aristocratic republicanism (does this sound familiar?) as a counterweight to Contarini’s familiar theory of mixed government. But since we are concerned with charting a historical movement rather than exposing a conspiracy, the specific mechanisms of transmission and the finer points of doctrine are of but secondary importance: our free-trading world of republics linked by knit together by high finance and governed by shadowy intelligence agencies is so transparently Venetian that we might wonder why we ever thought of ourselves as anything else.
Toynbee gives central banking, central intelligence, and Veneto-Florentine political theory barely any consideration in A Study of History; the Italian gift to the North Atlantic that interested him was a different one. Tyranny was a reaction to the increasing complexity of tasks that the Italian city states were called upon to handle as the competitive pressures of the Italian state system spurred them to expand their territory and develop the administrative capacity to efficiently mobilise the resources at their disposal. It was a wholly pragmatic approach to government, unpopular with the theorists to whom Pocock and colleagues trace the Atlantic republican lineage, or indeed with Davies’ Anglo-Venetian Party. Tyranny or absolutism was, in Toynbee’s telling, a necessary instrument for the Atlantic princes to overcome “feudalism”, albeit one that only one of them ever fully made use of. England could only embrace something approximating the Veneto-Florentine ideal because there the central government had decisively asserted its authority, which the Glorious Revolution then placed in the hands of an aristocratic junta rather than a prince. By 1832, the cause of the Venetian Republic had been scuttled for good, to be dredged up from time to time by conservative fantasists like Dominic Cummings, but never again put to sea. With Northcote-Trevelyan in 1854, the kingdom took the first step towards its present-day triumvirate of the Crown, a meritocratic civil service embodying the principle of tyranny, and their idiot brother the Commons.
But we are once again getting ahead of ourselves. What, in Toynbee’s day, posed Britain the question to which Venice had responded by becoming “the education of the modern world”? The challenge was twofold; namely the opening of the Pacific and the invention of the railroad. In the old contest between thalassocracies and terrestrial powers, the railroad decisively tilted the balance in the latter’s favour. The railroad facilitated the large-scale movement of goods, capital, and troops throughout the continental interior; it created a new, artificial geography that extended the centre’s zone of control and set off a scramble for territory in which the peripheral regions of the earth, hitherto coastal outposts of European civilisation overlooking a formless hinterland, were to be shaded in in a gaudy patchwork of hues. In Europe, the railroad accelerated an existing trend towards the consolidation of moth-eaten old duchies into rivalrous nation-states. It was thus left to the United States of America to take the lead in exploiting the potentials of the new technology for shaping a monadic continental order. The American Civil War was fought over whether the continent’s integration would take place along the old lines set down by Ol’ Man River or the new ones germinating in the minds of the northern industrialists; in other words, whether the American Republic was to be a plantation colony producing for European markets or a self-sufficient economic zone drawn up by the central planners on Wall Street. The Union’s drive for autarchy and Lebensraum set the standard for other great spaces to follow, and viewed from London, it would have seemed but a matter of time before Russia was to follow, with Europe and East Asia in more distant pursuit. Britain could not simply exterminate the brutes any more than Venice could have batted away the League of Cambrai, and such was the background against which Milner, Curtis, and Toynbee began drawing up the empire’s will and testament.
America’s debut at the world’s ball was anticipated and provisioned for well before Toynbee arrived on the scene. Cecil Rhodes and his favourite journalist W.T. Stead (equally well known for his harrowing reports on child prostitution as for his book “The Americanisation of the World”) were not the only ones to dream of transatlantic enosis: in the wake of the Venezuelan crisis of 1895, which nearly brought the two countries to war, the energetic schemer Joseph Chamberlain — at that time Secretary for the Colonies, though this title belied the influence his remarkable qualities allowed him to accrue — and the ambassador at Washington, Julian Pauncefote, cooked up a plan to overturn a century of Anglo-American enmity and convince the Americans to take up the white man’s burden at Britain’s side. This “great rapprochement”, largely the two men’s personal initiative and apparently carried out independently of Rhodes and Milner (Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, was an accommodating if sceptical sponsor), was accomplished through a series of diplomatic masterstrokes. In the closing years of the century, Britain provided logistical support to the United States during the Spanish-American War, drove a wedge between Washington and Berlin by backing American claims in the Pacific, and, through the Open Door — the product of discreet lobbying by Chamberlain, Pauncefote, and an obscure Anglo-Chinese customs official called Alfred Hippisley — aligned British and American policy on China against Russian ambitions. When Bismarck made his oft-cited remark that the fact of the Americans speaking English would be the most important one of the 20th century, Chamberlain’s diplomatic revolution is what he was referring to.
Chamberlain and Pauncefote’s preference for diplomacy was based on a fundamental pessimism as to their country’s chances in a war against the United States. This being so, why did Alfred T. Mahan patriots fall so easily for Chamberlain’s schemes? Why did — as later in Japan — the proponents of a big naval swoop against the enemy to the south win out against those who favoured a land war against international bolshevism to the north? The simplest answer is the deep intertwinement of British and American capital via the gold standard. In the same year that Britain and the United States nearly went to war over Essequibo, the U.S. Treasury was forced to resort to an emergency liquidity provision agreement with August Belmont Jr. (on behalf of the Rothschilds) and J.P. Morgan (who had built up his business as a local broker for European capital) in order to remain on gold, binding America into the British-led monetary order. One might at this point ask why the post-Civil War United States returned to the gold standard in the presence of viable alternatives, but the answer is buried in the conspiracist historiography of the American populist tradition which Sandbatch, Cal Crucis, or Thom van Skujk can recount with infinitely more flavour than I, and which need not concern us here, other than to say that there are layers upon layers to Britain’s mysterious presence in the world. Perhaps even stranger operators than Chamberlain, Milner, or even Messrs. Morgan and Rothschild accompanied these men in the king’s work, although for the time being, we must let sleeping dogs lie, for once again, we have strayed too far from our protagonist.
Toynbee enters the frame only after the strategic picture had once more changed, and it became apparent that the imperial handover had to take place sooner rather than later, for the United States was an untrustworthy custodian of the values that the dying god strove to transmit to posterity. This was in part due to the new geography of war: the Great War, like the war between Athens and Sparta that was never far from the Milnerites’ minds, had showed up British thalassocracy through the failure of the Hunger Blockade to knock the Central Powers out of the war for almost four long years, although its devastating impacts on civilian morale were, as the group could not yet know, to profoundly alter German perceptions of the possible and the acceptable in wartime. The development of aerial warfare (as foreseen in Locksley Hall) had to a great extent nullified Britain’s old Channel defences, and we find occasional reference in the Milnerites’ public pronouncements — for example, a speech by Jan Smuts in 1923 cited in Quigley — to the French wielding the aerial threat as a tool to force British acquiescence to Paris’ policy. In Germany, Haushofer would cite the indefensibility of the German Reich’s borders against an aerial bombing campaign (bar a small region north of Hof in Franconia) to argue for Pan-European consolidation, and we find similar suggests made in Toynbee, albeit with the weariness of historical inevitability rather than the boldness of action.
While the Great War transformed the operational geography of war, in the wider strategic picture it only hardened Anglo-American bipolarity, hastening the final confrontation between Britain and the United States. For there appeared no other powers left: Germany appeared fatally drained by the previous war, and would in any case have its hands full with France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in the event of a new one. Russian continental integration had been safely taken out of the picture for the time being by civil war and sclerotic economic policies (not to mention, if we believe Galkovsky, cryptocolonisation, but there is no evidence that this understanding played any role in Toynbee’s or the Milner Group’s calculus). Most importantly, the war had failed to produce a final resolution on the one question over which the powers had reason to fight, namely China, now contested between the United States and Britain’s traditional ally Japan (Craigie-Arita agreement WHOOOO remembers?) The America of Philip Dru, having stayed out of the war only to intervene decisively at the last moment, appeared a far more independent-minded player than anyone in London had anticipated, and the contrast between Wilson’s fourteen points and American aloofness was no less offensive to the Milnerian sensibility than had been the discrepancy between Athenian ideals and praxis. The poets could do little more than simmer against “Woodrow” in their dingy guelphish haunts on the Starnberger See and wherever it was that Pound spent the interwar years, but the spooks had to find an answer, any sort of answer, to the challenge from across the Atlantic.
In his Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean (1925), Karl Haushofer first made that observation to which we have alluded in passing and might now finally devote our full attention: that the opening of the Pacific would sublate the old Atlantic-centred world system as the Atlantic had done to that of the Mediterranean. China, as Galkovsky noted, was the great prize of the 20th century — a claim that, unlike much of this great Russian historian’s wisdom, requires no deep reading in the esoteric masonic sources to substantiate. China presented European capital with an enormous, civilised, but economically underdeveloped and poorly governed playground for the type of galactic returns that would eventually materialise once order was imposed later in the century — this was obvious from very early on, and the vast latent potential of the Chinese people appears as a truism in contemporary sources as diverse as Karl Kraus and Madison Grant. In London, Berlin, and Tokyo they knew (quite literally) which way the wind was blowing. It was this ancient civilisation’s destiny in the 20th century to be the antithesis of the New World; an anti-America glowering across the Pacific. Did Britain have a word to say here, apart from the Singapore sling?
Toynbee thought that it did. He laid out his reasons in a November 1931 essay ominously titled The Next War: Europe or Asia? in the journal of the Institute of Pacific Relations, a Chatham House affiliate funded by the Rockefellers and later investigated by the McCarran Committee as a Soviet front organisation. “What is the least dangerous region of the world to live in nowadays?” begins Toynbee, and, after briefly surveying the European situation, suggests the British dominions on the Pacific coast as the most likely candidate. The instigator of the coming Pacific conflagration was to be a Japan unable to satiate its impoverished rural population’s hunger for bread and labour by colonising Manchuria and therefore impelled to turn its attentions southward. For whatever reason (Toynbee does not explain why), this Japan would perceive the need to strike a decisive blow against the United States in order to incapacitate that country in the defence of its Southern Pacific allies. So far, so good, but neither Toynbee’s belief in Japanese naval supremacy (which he “credits” to British policy through the Washington Naval Treaty and its successors), nor his prediction that aerial warfare conducted from an occupied Alaska and British Columbia was to be the main feature of a conflict in which “Canada might be doomed to play the part of Belgium in 1914”, were in the end borne out. His analysis of the postwar strategic picture, however, is more prescient:
“In any case, whatever Canada did or did not do, the ultimate outcome of a Japanese-American war (and God forbid that such a war should ever be fought) can hardly be in doubt. That war would be a Punic War, with the United States playing Rome and Japan playing Carthage. It would end in the Carthaginian belligerent’s annihilation; but, if there is anything in the analogy, the destruction of Japan would not be the end of the story, but rather the beginning of a new chapter of history, as far as the United States was concern.
[….]
In a word, a life-and-death struggle between the United States and Japan would leave the United States exercising an unavoidable hegemony over all the countries with seaboards on the Pacific, and these countries cover some two-thirds of the inhabited world. In fact, the world would find itself a long way on the road towards the Roman solution of our present international anarchy. This Roman solution is the unification of an unconscionably non-cooperative world by brute force; and the ancient example of this violent denouement shows that it solves the problem at the price of dealing a mortal blow to civilisation in the process.
There is, of course, another possible solution to the problem. World-unity may be achieved in an evolutionary instead of a revolutionary way—by the voluntary cooperation of the sixty or seventy fully self-governing states that display their colours on the political map of the world today, as a happy alternative to the forcible unification of the world by a series of knock-out blows. In the belief of the present writer, this is the actual choice before us: a choice between voluntary and forcible unification.”
Toynbee’s pessimism was unwarranted. What we might call the New Deal regime — the America that enjoyed its heroic age from Philip Dru’s arrival on the scene to the moment Bill Stephenson’s boys poisoned FDR, and which, after a string of unambiguously LaRouchian victories in places like Egypt and Iran, was finally broken by Vietnam — tried, but came short of, establishing a world empire over the body of the Milnerites’ commonwealth of universal love. Instead, as every child knows, the Japanese turned the failure of arms into a strategic victory — with or without rinderpest balloons. The British Empire was liquidated, but America had not thereby won the prize over which WWII had been fought. The British Airways lounge at Hong Kong remained resolutely open for business, while the Japanese established their Co-Prosperity Sphere from Hokkaido to Ho Chi Minh City. The recriminations over “who lost China?” within sinophile military, business, and intelligence circles (Wedemeyer, Chennault, Corso et al.) metastasised into the nascent conservative movement (still under Gen’yōsha management in the form of Mme. Chennault’s protege Elaine Chao), whose green-gloved hands attacked the New Deal regime in a double-pincer movement alongside the boys from Laurel Canyon and their T.S. Eliot-reading psychologist friends from the Raj. Indian ragas resounded from sea to shining sea as the Process Church got on with delivering Brexit under the watchful gaze of Mr. J. Epstein’s Churchill bust in the Oval Office. Shanti shanti shanti. To think that where now stand Mahmoud Khalil, the Tavistock Clinic, and Britain’s world-beating creative industries, there once stood gods. But this brings us into the secret history of the postwar period, whence we need not stray, for the facts are plain enough.
The duality between the “universal church” and the “universal empire” is the creative tension at the heart of the present-day international system. The “universal church” is “globalism” or the “rules-based international order”; its material basis lies in the relationships of mutual dependence that for eighty years have successfully prevented direct great power conflict. The United Nations, the Five Eyes, maritime commerce, Sandhurst-educated emirs controlling energy bottlenecks and recycling the proceeds back to Maduro’s dodgy mates via Knightsbridge cocaine dealers — this is the Global Britain that we all know and love. Its perennial foil, the “universal empire”, is represented in principle — if not always in praxis — by the United States through its military preeminence and the industrial basis that maintains it, or would maintain it had it not been eroded by four decades of tam o’ shanter economics. At the risk of stating a truism, these conflicting principles in practice tend to reinforce each other. Mutual interdependences can be tools of American policy just as much as they can be wielded against it, and American military power is as much a backstop of the system as American unilateralism is a threat thereto. It was not Toynbee’s nor the Milner Group’s nor indeed anyone’s plan to create this dualistic world order, but creative action through “Venetian methods” (financial engineering, spycraft, the creative exploitation of the “Ottoman” i.e. Soviet threat) allowed Britain to successfully assert a semblance of its values against FDR and his heirs’ attempts to scourge the commonwealth from the earth. Toynbee’s achievement was to clearly articulate these values within a “morphology of human affairs” (as he termed it) whose forms are recognisable in the contemporary world.
To return to Toynbee today is necessary because the universal church and the values it embodies again find themselves under threat from a newly invigorated American imperialism. Despite blocks to the work of change thrown up by Ed Miliband’s climate leadership (Jim Babylon will give you the order of battle), the United States under President Trump became a net energy exporter for the first time in the postwar era in 2019, thereby freeing itself from the shackles of the permanent lodgers of Knightsbridge’s most expensive addresses. As East Asian capital pivots towards the United States as part of a broader process of domestic/hemispheric consolidation — the political dimension of which has been guided Mr. Rubio, and its intellectual underpinning written up in divergent but mutually reinforcing ways by Profs. Vermeule and Grandin — American global strategy will increasingly have little need for the Gulf and reduced interest in maintaining the maritime commercial order. Trump’s war in the Gulf is really a war on the Guelph: an oil shock inflicted this time on the sheikhs, designed to encourage long term global decoupling from the region’s energy while incentivising capital investment at home and in the near abroad, with the annoying correlate of locking in Gulf security dependence on the United States. More importantly, it is a frontal attack on the energy supply of the power that most benefitted from — and can still take up arms to defend — the rules-based international order; namely China. The Epsteinian truce that held London and Washington together in the globablist belle epoque is over; the world is gearing up for a final battle between America and the anti-America across the Pacific.
This is not to say that the plan is without its flaws. The integration of global energy markets and various technical bottlenecks that prevent U.S. refineries immediately switching to non-Gulf oil mean that America’s ostensible energy independence does not shield it from supply-driven inflation and concomitant voter dissatisfaction at home (not that Trump, who has governed almost entirely via executive order, particularly cares about Republican congressional defeats). Trump’s decision to closely involve Israel in the planning and execution of the war has led to calls of foul play from his disillusioned supporters, increasing the likelihood of the Democrats’ recapturing the presidency and thus perhaps returning to power the faction in Washington that wishes to see the President’s AI-driven economic revolution — which has revived American manufacturing and raised the spectre of the autarchic hemispheric bloc of the kind that postwar British foreign policy, guided by Toynbeean principles, worked day and night to prevent — nipped in the bud. “There exist parts of the Western power industrial supply chain that have not had back orders and bids for decades, but now suddenly do” — this is what the entire institutional framework of pacific-centred globalism, the World Co-Prosperity Sphere, was designed to stop; Trump has reversed it. But the Democrats have their own version of the Empire of Guadalupe, and their ascendant wing has little love for a rules-based international order that it perceives as hypocritical, while their dwindling human capital makes them easy marks for a patriotic deep state that will put up a little bit of Wokeness so long as it can keep building data centres. Although, short of war, there are still ways to stop the President’s dark, neo-Rooseveltian vision of hemispheric integration and the reassertion of the continental principle over the thalassocratic, putting a Democrat in the White House is not necessarily one of them.
A word must here be said on Israel, since no one wants to talk about anything else these days. We cannot know what goes on in the smoky backrooms, and it may be that the protagonists really did believe themselves to be acting for the silly reasons they have presented to the public, or because Netanyahu blackmailed them, but viewed sub specie aeternitatis, these proximate causes do not matter and are not worth our speculation. Trump is a realist; he understands that working through the Israel lobby is the most effective way to get things done. What is important is not the contingent mechanisms through which the process worked itself out, but that the United States achieved energy sovereignty under President Trump and promptly set to work undermining the old British allies in the Gulf that had controlled international energy markets for decades. This was among the most crucial of the relationships of interdependence that secured the guelphine principle that Toynbee had defended against the imperialist temptation, and the consequence of Trump’s actions has been to bolster the opposing principle. That this has erased the gains made by Trump’s movement is of no consequence when viewed from this lofty promontory.
J’accuse has always Backed Trump as the fulcrum on which history turns, and I have no intention of yielding that easily defensible ground. But the President’s role is to be the dialectical antithesis in the forward march of progress, and the vision towards which his careful hand is steering the American state would be nothing short of a catastrophe for Western civilisation. The lusotropical America of the AI boom that Harem Financer has so ably chronicled certainly has its advantages from the perspective of imperial management: nothing ever changes in Latin American society but in the direction of placid mass consumerism and periodic outbursts of political zeal for cookie-cutter conservative or left-wing parties whose gains are to be wholly reversed at the next electoral cycle, and it is impossible to run the 1960s on Oaxacan peasants unmoved by the wonders of India and totally impervious to North London values. There is even a light of hope for the old frogs who have trusted the plan all the way to the end of the night: just as the Czartoryskis and the Golitsyns saw their country vanish only to be rewarded for it with plum positions at the St. Petersburg court, the anons at the State Department will have a world to rule as hemispheric hidalgos in Rubio’s petro-pardocracy.
Progress, the ceaseless annihilation of what is to win for it eternal life in memory, is the essence of our being on this earth. Be it freemasonry, usury, landscape gardening, Marxism, the Thule Society, rock music, Jeffrey Epstein (sorry!), the internet, AI singularity — Britain has always led mankind’s evacuation from itself. But man under the eye of an intelligence that can see through his works and divine his hidden purposes is more human than he has been at any time in history, more detached from that spark of godliness within him and reduced to his base, consumptive drives. A human face stamping on a boot, forever. Britain’s deep state has never seemed more helpless; the shadow institutions and still shadowier philosophy that Lord Salisbury’s boys bequeathed to posteriority have languished under our current King Chuck no less than did the political fruits planted by the first Earl Salisbury rot on the vine under the first king of that name. “The exalted position of the emperor on the one hand and the wretched powerlessness of his actions on the other leave it essentially unresolved whether we are watching the drama of a tyrant or the story of a martyrdom play out” (Benjamin). As in Toynbee’s day, there is an urgent need to act, and little time in which to do so.
