Three Philosophers, Giorgione (?), 1509
Six months is a long time.
I tried living in the real world
Instead of a shell.
But, before I began,
I was bored
Before I even began.
Morrissey, Shoplifters of the World Unite
2019. Another country. They did things differently there. On an October London day of indeterminate weather, two old friends and a recent acquaintance visited a number of the capital’s watering holes to discuss publishing an online magazine. A few weeks later, exactly six months ago, on the first day of 2020, British Intelligence was born, the infant emerging blinking into the maternity ward, being roundly smacked on the arse, and preparing to make its circle in the world. Very heaven it was to be alive.
2020. Ophthalmologists use it as a calibration for perfect eyesight, but even the most eagle-eyed could not have foreseen a year like this, which still has half its race to run. Ravaged by the twin viruses of COVID-19 and BLM – to paraphrase Flamineo in John Webster’s White Devil, ‘what a terrible thing it is to die ‘midst acronyms howling’ – and left reeling punch-drunk against economic ropes about to be given the traditional 13 wraps of the hangman’s noose, the Western world had better have some fight left in it, because this bout is not over yet.
British Intelligence was clear in its mission statement; It would exist to reward intelligence. Don’t dumb down, quoth the editor, wise up. Western culture, which surrounds us like a malevolent ether, is fundamentally concerned with maintaining a level of ignorance, often cosmetically enhanced to resemble sophistication. The television, endless Netflix series, ‘modern art’, race-quota novels, anti-theatre, the sewage that is pumped from Hollywood, the party political broadcasts masquerading as ‘news’ – for the media is a political party now, effectively the opposition party to the political class – and the heavily policed and rigorously censored idiot’s agora of social media, all of these are designed to reward stupidity, just as the lab rat is rewarded with a food pellet for jabbing its paw at the correct button.
Incipit British Intelligence. The title itself is a scarecrow, self-consciously designed to ward off the dim, the slow-witted, the seekers of titillation and tawdry and pulp ideas. The scarcely literate adverse criticism we receive often takes as its theme that our writers are stupid, low IQ, lacking precisely in the intelligence we brandish in our very name. What they mean, of course, is that we are of the wrong political stripe.
To be right of centre, politically speaking, in this age of cheap plastic, facial piercing and training shoes, is to be an immediate target. The Left have become increasingly shrill, less open to debate or the consideration of any viewpoint other than their own egg-bound mantras, a summit whose geographical reference they are ultimately unsure of. The Left don’t really know what they stand for, but they know what they stand against.
The family. White people, white men in particular. Joy. Border control. Christianity, although not religion in general as Islam is an ally. Debate. Humour. A biological basis to gender. Hierarchies. Intellectual discipline. Physical discipline. Law. Authority. History. Tradition. White art, white literature, white philosophy, white music, even white science, as though science could have been somehow wondrously utopian if Ugandans had constructed its conceptual apparatus. Everything, in short, that tends towards a civilized world, by any standard that has meaning. The Left are against nature. They have set their Quixotic tilt (a reference they would not understand) at reality, and reality is, to quote Philip K. Dick, that which does not go away when you ignore it. To go even further back into white wisdom, Horace reminds us that you can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she will always come back. We don’t invoke whiteness as some sort of Klan-like, D W Griffith imprimatur, but because at British Intelligence, we like to tell it like it is.
The Left are nihilists, anarchists, miscegenists, liars, bullies, idiots without the savant. They are the living, breathing instantiation of Nietzschean ressentiment, a seething, inchoate mass of unfocused rage, determined to make every town and city in the West into a theme park for their own bilious desires, with their illiterate graffiti on every wall like a mad alchemist’s scribble, and their ideas on every street, flung like a mad woman’s excrement.
And they are winning.
They are winning precisely because governments, far from slapping them into place and restoring the civilised order they threaten, are siding with them, feeling their pain, seeing their side of things, no matter how wall-eyed and astigmatic that vision is. If you are their target – and if you are reading this, you are, unless you are reading it for malevolent reasons – the police and the judicial systems will not help you, the media will not reflect your concerns fairly, and the public sector will not employ you, a mandate which is being eagerly followed by a pressurised private sector.
While you are made fools of in your stupid and ineffectual masks, while you are lied to about a second wave and a new strain and the need for a vaccine, while you are herded and huddled and locked down, while the statues of the men who made you topple, the Left and their enablers are having immense, cackling, ill-intentioned fun at your expense because none of this applies to them.
But, just as Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 had a small, unobserved space in which he could sit and keep his diary, so too British Intelligence would like to think of ourselves as succor, release and relief, a chance to think when thinking is being discouraged and outlawed. Come in and look around. You will find something here for you. And, if you walk away enlightened or at least thinking, tell someone else. This is capillary marketing, away from the behemoth of the selling machine, the personal recommendation you might make to someone like-minded that there may be a small respite from the howling gale of unreason, a separate peace from the raging storm.
To read and enjoy British Intelligence – and we hope you do both – you don’t have to be British. Just intelligent.