The politics of division

and the importance of the number 25

This is a big and difficult topic and I expect there to be a couple more articles around this issue.  There seem to be two important forces at play, one is the classic end-of-empire secular trend where nations are characterised by high immigration and bitter internal division.  The other force is the current political environment, where Leftist thinking dominates large areas of public life and in particular their fixation with intersectionalist analysis.  This thinking, firstly atomises populations into small grievance groups and subsequently attempts to socially engineer a repositioning of these groups, theoretically to create an equal whole.  It is double-think to imagine that you can simultaneously celebrate diversity by emphasising differences in order to improve cohesion.  This double-think is most obviously on display in London with endless “celebrations” of some minority group with simultaneous claims of a cohesive community.

Natural divisions

The Rochdale by-election has triggered a sharp focus on the politics of division, Prime Minister Sunak’s speech on the importance of cohesion was more than ironic given the fact that the Government has been a primary driver of division. I wanted firstly to set out the long term historical perspective.

I am a big fan of a short paper written by Sir John Glubb in 1976 called The Fate of Empires, I suspect readers may have read, or at least have heard of it.  Looking back over 3,000 years of history, Sir John Glubb develops a convincing theory that empires generally last around 250 years and go through the following phases:

What is remarkable about the paper is that fifty years ago he described the following characteristics of the age of decadence;

• Frivolity

• An influx of foreigners

• The welfare state

• A weakening of religion.

Remember that when he wrote this he would not have seen much evidence of these trends, looking at actual data on the last three items in 2024 we can observe that the general traits that he predicted are present in spades.  Importantly, these trends are long term secular trends and are largely independent of which party is in power.

Below is  a sample of one of those trends, which is the decline in Christianity.

His paper describes the paradoxical situation where towards the end of empire, when it becomes increasingly important to work cooperatively to save the empire, the opposite occurs and bitter rivalries spring up.

I think we should recognise that bitter internal disagreements are a characteristic of late stage empire and whilst it is tempting to speculate that divisions are always manufactured in order to create a “divide and conquer” environment, a large part of this division is likely to be unavoidable. I think that both artificial and unavoidable divisions exist together. Before leaving Sir John’s paper I wanted to include a very positive thought, which is that once people realise that they are in a more, or less natural development cycle, then in-fighting could diminish, “If we could accept these great movements as beyond our control, there would be no excuse for hating one another because of them.”

He concludes with the sublime thought that “love is the key to human life”.

The artificial divisions

Back in the temporal world though, we can identify actors who are intentionally creating and driving division, primarily as I mentioned the Government. The following groups manufacture division within the U.K. :

• Far-left intersectional politics

• State propaganda

• Agent provocateurs

Intersectional politics

The Far-left who now dominate large areas of public life and particularly academia and are fixated with intersectional politics, which involves splitting populations down into groups based on ethnicity, income level, sexual orientation and other characteristics and engineering the promotion and demotion of one group’s interests relative to another. Below is a sample of the dimensions along which people can be divided, including a percentage showing the size of each group in the U.K. based on 2021 census:

Remember these are just the high-level summary categories, within many of the above categories are many subgroups, for example there are 17 ethnic groups within ONS analysis.  When the State looks at something as benign as GSCE results, these are expressed in a whopping 34 different categories, 17 groups x 2 for both male and female. 

It is not hard to see that intersectionality spells the death knell for cohesion.  This approach ensures that inordinate amounts of time, political capital and funding are spent on minority interests.  I would guess that around 25% of the U.K.’s political bandwidth is spent on transgender issues, when only around 0.5% of the population is transgender, for most of the remaining 99.5% who retained their gender assigned at birth (or didn’t answer this question) the issue is largely irrelevant.  The process seems to have morphed from protecting a minority into oppressing the majority.

The number 25 refers to the number of emotive binary topics you would need in order to split a country down into 33 million (2^25) isolated individuals who would not cooperate, since they would disagree on at least one topic.  It feels like we have already clocked up a fair number of such issues and each new issues splits us still further.

War propaganda

The West has increasingly become involved in unjust wars.  The great wartime propagandist Harold Lasswell made clear that the public should be in no doubt as to whom to hate:

This approach then drives the State’s ludicrous binary position on any conflict situation where we have to “stand with X” and by implication stand against Y.  These simplistic formulations ignore the complex nuance around any conflict situation and instantly antagonise and radicalise members of the Y group.  The standing with X messaging is then rolled out via flags in bios, flags on State and private buildings. This is all part of the applied psychology arsenal of the nudge unit and its MINDSPACE box of tricks designed to prevent wrongthink.

We see this on every conflict and as soon as the Israel-Palestine conflict broke out, the Israeli colours were projected onto the House of Parliament.  At the same time, the police failed to stop pro-Palestinian protestors clambering on to British war memorials.  These combined activities then managed to antagonise and inflame both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel sympathisers.

By signalling unconditional support for one side, it was inevitable that many would feel aggrieved.  This was not a significant problem in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ attack of the 7^th Oct 2023, but over time frustration levels would grow as terrible civilian casualties mounted up in Gaza.     

The war propaganda of course followed hot on the heels of the State’s efforts to smear and marginalise British citizens who exercised their right to informed consent and chose not to take the ineffective and unsafe vaccines.  Ministers regularly told lies about how the unvaccinated were burdening hospitals in order to put pressure on people to get vaccinated.  The State has certainly radicalised me!

Agent provocateurs

Finally we get to the alt-right media talking heads on Talk TV and to some extent on GB News, in particular Douglas Murray, Richard Tice, Lawrence Fox and others.  They regularly smear large protests in support of Palestine and against war in general as “hate marches” or “Hamas supporters”.  I have not been to these marches, but based on video footage it appears that the crowds are remarkably well behaved considering the very large numbers in attendance and are clearly anti-war and not pro-Hamas.

Smearing these people in this way of course radicalises them.  I covered this issue extensively in the Provocateurs video¹.  I also produced a video covering a social media account (Radio Genoa) which is pushing out inflammatory videos designed to create anti-Muslim sentient and anti-immigrant sentiment.  The account is receiving an enormous quantity of fake/bot likes and retweets.  This type of operation would take time and effort and absent any monetisation efforts it is not clear who would do this, or why².   

The long term outlook

Having said all of the above though, it is import to accept that there is a limit (probably a rather low one) to the rate at which any country can absorb immigrants and retain some cohesion.  Immigrants everywhere tend to settle together and become a significant minority/majority in certain areas, that of course is bad news from a cohesion perspective.  Many people have referred me to the Pew research on this issue³.  This is their projection of Muslim populations in Europe by 2050 under a high immigration scenario. 

Under a high migration scenario it is possible to imagine a 30.6% group forming a Government in Sweden, which is not a problem unless this was used to push agenda items of specific interest to that community. So whilst Farage’s claims about sectarian politics in Rochdale are not overly credible, it is necessary to recognise that high levels of immigration do pose a threat to cohesion over the long term.  The answer though is to protect the domestic culture and to limit immigration.  Something that successive governments have refused to do over the past 30 years, rather than to marginalise and smear ethnic, or religious groups already in the U.K.

Conclusion

Bitter internal rivalries unfortunately seem to be a common feature of countries at the end-of-empire stage, however it is still necessary to identify and resist deliberate division.  This is coming primarily from the State due to its war propaganda and unethical use of applied psychology.  The State therefore is successfully radicalising large sections of the country.  Piled on top of this, Leftist intersectional thinking, which is most clearly on display in London is by definition divisive.  The alt-right media are also contributing by smearing anti-war protestors. 

Rather than acting sensibly, the State is instead looking for ways to isolate itself from the consequences of its own stupidity and hence the calls for more security for MPs and the ongoing moves to limit freedom of speech and protest.  It is clear from Prime Minister Sunak’s weak speech on division that he intends to cause the police to severely limit people’s ability to protest against the Israel-Palestine conflict.

So as usual, the people complaining about divisions are the ones causing them.

Let me have your thoughts below and please don’t forget to circulate our material!

Alex

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was one of the first people to highlight the flawed nature of the Imperial COVID model⁴, he is a founder of the Thinking Coalition which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach (www.thinkingcoalition.com)

1. https://rumble.com/v3w6hz1-the-establishment-provocateurs.html

2. https://www.patreon.com/posts/manufacturing-of-95410159?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

3. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/

4. https://twitter.com/ThinkingSlow1/status/1257578069797339137?s=20