The Fireplace Of Parliament Is The Answer To Political Arson

We cannot afford to import America's dysfunctional civil war mentality to the rest of the civilised world because of her post-WWII economic and military dominance. We must reject colonial brawling tribalism for the wisdom of our forefathers, who contained the fires of division to their own stadium.

Alex Coppen Michael C R Reiners

Alex Coppen, Michael C R Reiners

— 12 min read
The Fireplace Of Parliament Is The Answer To Political Arson

In a TV newsroom in Los Angeles, TMZ staff were heard cheering and laughing while a presenter was given the news on their political enemies had been murdered at a live event. The broadcaster was forced to deny they were celebrating via the barely-plausible excuse they were watching a car-chase. It came a short time after MSNBC analyst Matt Dowd had to be fired for describing the murder victim as "hateful."

The next day, eight universities were evacuated due to threats, real or false: Massachusetts, Hampton, Morehouse, Virginia State, Alabama State, Southern, Clark Atlanta, A&M, and Spelman. The DNC headquarters was also sent into panic.

What happened this week was an act of mindless political arson by a deranged group of people who had given in to their desire for evil, driven by their inculcation in quasi-religious storytelling by university academics and its repetition within social media echo chambers. Yes, a group.

Our American family are emotional and fiery. While they can boast the world's finest hospitality, they can be intemperate. It's what makes them brilliant and extraordinary; they are heroic, enterprising overcomers. We, however, are adventurous villagers. The sectarian conflict of Manifest Destiny or Northern Ireland comes naturally to their conquering stoic character. We are a nation of four or five separate peoples who have stumbled out way into managing our disagreements in the rule-making order of one building and the cathartic laws of sport.

What we are experiencing is the inevitable Americanisation of British politics because of the electronic spread of their cultural might. Talk of "civil war" in the United Kingdom between nationalists and multiculturalists directly echoes the rhetoric found in US political circles. This week, we all had a taste of what it means.

Kirk, a political heavyweight, was murdered in cold blood on live broadcast in front of his wife and children. His three year-old daughter was only feet away and instinctively ran towards her father because she was scared of the noise. She couldn't reach him through the stampeding crowd, because his struggling body, gushing arterial blood and limp from spinal trauma, was being panicked into a security vehicle.

A 0.3 inch bullet traveling at 2,800 ft/s inscribed with "antifascist" slogans had been fired out of a Mauser Model 98 hunting rifle 182 yards away, which tore through the bottom of the left side of his neck. It shattered into shrapnel as it bounced off his bone, and the "wake" behind it created a temporary tissue cavity who tore his spinal cord and blood vessels into pieces. His body reflexed into decorticate posturing from brain stem damage as blood from his left carotid artery flooded out at 10.3 pints/minute across the stage.

Even if they move and horrify us, these ways are alien.

We do not kill each other physically. We murder each other intellectually, with words and reason, in the gladiatorial arena of Westminster. Maybe even every Friday, in the Parliament of the Pub.

What is important to understand is the US civil war was the first non-religious conflict in the Western world where humans targeted other humans, for their group allegiance. Up until the conflict, wars had always targeted strategic things: ground, buildings, infrastructure, and so on. During this bloody contest, Americans didn't merely war for territory; they murdered each other en masse because they belonged to the other group.

The trenches of WWI concerned retaking territory, feet by feet. The campaign against Hitler was to disarm Germany's industrial machine. Suez was about strategic region control. The Falklands conflict was to regain the land.

Religious wars (e.g. Catholic vs Protestant), while brutal, operated through theological difference which had deep cultural and theological roots. The civil war was different - it was Americans targeting other Americans based purely on political positions about governance, economics, and social organisation. Perhaps the first time warfare became explicitly about forcing an entire population to abandon a political worldview through targeted violence and destruction.

The war increasingly became about destroying not just the Confederate military, but its society's ability to sustain its political vision. Union strategy evolved to target the social and economic foundations which supported the Confederate political project and its people.

Southerners weren't targeted because they were ethnically different, spoke a different language, or worshipped differently; they held and acted upon specific beliefs - about slavery, about federal authority, about what kind of society America should be. A Southern slaveholder and a Northern abolitionist might have been identical in every other way - same religion, same ancestry, same language - but one became a legitimate target because of what they believed about human bondage and political organisation.

The US civil war was about which side you were on, as a person. Sherman's March to the Sea specifically aimed to destroy the South's capacity to continue fighting by targeting civilian morale and its economic base. It was about demonstrating to Southern civilians their belief system (that they could maintain an independent slaveholding society) was unsustainable. The goal was to make people abandon their political convictions through direct pressure on their communities and livelihoods.

Death for allegiance, demonstrated by a flag or uniform, is American custom, by historical record. It is not ours.

Our civil wars produced parliament itself.

A recent study paints a stark picture which is more dramatic than any essay. Political violence is higher now than any time since then. And it is occurring on the same fault lines, which we are all importing to our old, ancient countries.

A Scheduled Revolution Every Five Years

There is a reason we do not have separation of powers. The fusion of executive and legislative power creates clearer lines of authority and responsibility. Voters know exactly who to hold accountable for government performance, unlike systems where blame can be shifted between branches. Gridlock and deadlock are inevitable outcomes when branches are pitted against one another.

Parliament is a fireplace for the destructive power of partisan fire. It is democracy's hearth – containing, channeling, and making productive use of political heat which might otherwise become destructive arson.

The fusion of powers means political energy gets directed toward actual policymaking rather than burning through endless partisan warfare between branches.

Parliament creates a direct link between electoral outcomes and governing power: the party or coalition which wins a legislative majority gets to form government immediately, without the possibility of divided government where different parties control the executive and legislature. Rather than letting tensions build until they explode in uncontrolled ways, it provides a regular outlet for opposition criticism and government defense - like a fireplace which safely contains and directs combustible energy.

Prime ministers, the link between royalty and MPs, can be removed through votes of no confidence, providing a mechanism for replacing failed leadership between elections. This creates ongoing accountability which doesn't exist in presidential systems where leaders serve fixed terms regardless of performance. Governments must maintain legislative support to survive, encouraging responsiveness to both parliament and public opinion. When a government becomes truly destructive or incompetent, parliament has immediate tools to extinguish the problem. Republics let political arsonists act for years regardless of damage, but parliament can quickly remove failed leadership before the damage spreads.

The constant accountability of parliament prevents the buildup of grievances and institutional tensions which can ignite into constitutional crises. Regular elections, ongoing legislative scrutiny, and the need to maintain coalition support act like regular chimney cleaning - removing the buildup causing dangerous flare-ups.

Multiple parties must work together to keep governance functioning, preventing any single faction from either extinguishing democracy or letting it burn out of control.

The Soft Tyranny Of Leftism

At the heart of the appalling reactions we have witnessed is the unspoken subtext if you fail to uphold left-wing social conventions you should expect punishment, or even execution.

This is not acceptable, under any circumstances. It should be entirely rejected by any reasonable-thinking person. There is no world in which refusing to endorse a worldview should result in prejudicial suffering, distorted consequences, or acquiescing to the ruin of one's material life. Dissent is the means to creativity and the mechanism of exchange and error correction. It is entirely antithetical to everything we believe and all which has made our lives prosperous and free.

As the Telegraph rightly notes about Weimar Germany's reporting, amid the mysterious deaths of AfD candidates:

On ZDF heute journal, the fortress of Germany’s mainstream media, presenter Dunja Hayali began: “Kirk’s murder cannot be justified by anything”. A decent start. But then, in the same breath, she reminded viewers that Kirk was guilty of “abhorrent, racist, sexist and misanthropic statements”, branding him a “radical-religious conspiracy adherent”.

We didn't agree to these terms.

This is not a new "social contract" we implicitly endorsed by default.

We did not agree, ever, people can be "guilty" of possessing sentiments which violate left-wing conventions, or they somehow can be characterised as having "invited" their own murder by their perception in their opponents' imaginations.

At the intimate core of this violent university Maoism is the doctrine preached by Herbert Marcuse by sociology professors on US university campuses:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger.

I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest.

In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities.

The humanities have been evangelising this utter poison for fifty years: imminent fascism is around every corner, so even the speech of opponents must be crushed before it emerges, for the sake of revolutionarily-minded minorities. This hellish insanity is compounded by the dystopian bio-prison prose of Michel Foucault and his disciples like Judith Butler and Julia Serano, parallel with the lunatic fringe politics of Marxified education and "critical legal studies."

We have now seen the realisation of Marcuse's ideas: murder.

Dialogue Needs Two

We need to have the conversation about left-wing violence whether the left-wing wants to have it or not, and the unwillingness to even take the issue seriously does not indicate this will be a simple task. It is compounded by the fact, outside of eurocommunism (aka "democratic socialism"), left-wing ideologies have no mechanism to achieve consensus or any limiting principle. The dictatorship is baked in.

What exactly is the constructive way to respond to this?

The events of the last few years will be familiar to those who lived through the 1960s, where Mao's Red Guards pillaged and murdered throughout China, Pol Pot's thugs murdered a quarter of Cambodia for "social justice," and America's New Left bombed US government institutions and spat-on soldiers, which apparently never happened. It'll be familiar from the 1970s, where the animal rights movements murdered scientists.

The index – not the catalogue itself – is a horrifying top sheet:

Then of course we having the "doxxing" and online "cancel culture."

Is this really both sides, because... Jan 6?

The list is endless. The one above doesn't even come close to doing it justice or even reflect reality.

How much is too much? When do we have the conversation about the criminality and violence or left-wing political groups and their adherents; their inability and refusal to take part in the debate? Their resorting to murder and reckless destruction when they lose?

The answer is always the same: whatabout, whatabout, whatabout. It's not all Muslim extremists; it's not all left-wing activists. Nobody agreed a false imaginary threshold of 100%: how many is too many? 10%? 50%? 90%? 40,000 extremists, or does it need to be 1.6 million?

All of this is covered up by sympathetic academics who deliberately cook the books to skew the argument, working as apologists for their friends. They, in turn, are quoted by sympathetic "journalists" who also work as apologists and apparatchiks.

This all pales in comparison to the record of so-called "trans" violence as a per-capita subgroup, which far, far outweighs any other, outside Islamic extremism, which is too enormous to begin to dive into:

Kirk was murdered as he discussed the incidences of "trans" violence known as "trantifa." Social media immediately speculated on the cause being trans-related. Unsurprisingly, the murderer inscribed "trans" slogans on the bullets and was in a sodomitical partnership with a "trans" individual.

The answer from left-wing activists? It wasn't left wing; he was a "groyper"; Kirk was evil and had it coming; the others should be next.

Putting Violence Back In Its Cage

There are concrete, practical things we can do to restore sanity back from the humanities' insanity grab. Not ideas, or polices; actual action to deal with this downward spiral of moral degeneration in our political culture.

Proscribe so-called "antifascist" groups

It is not 1933. "Antifaschistische Aktion" began as an explicitly communist vigilante movement within Nazi-era German ghettos. Jewish leaders in the 1960s condemned violent groups seeking revenge after WWII who acted like gangsters hiding under monikers the BBC and the Guardian still describe today in glowing terms ("anti-extremism group Hope Not Hate", "researchers from antifascist charity Hope Not Hate."). There is no excuse for masked "black bloc" thugs arriving at protests but not being prosecuted because they lack a Mafia-style "hierarchy."

Ban malicious NGOs exploiting the Charities Act

Until 2006, charity was a private endeavour, which actually meant... charity. Blair's reforms transformed "charity" into US-style 501(c)(3) non-profit patronage organisations claiming their "mission" as "human rights" while being functionally used as vehicles for dark money funding. These groups circumvent political behaviour restrictions by using dual structures to import foreign money. Dozens of these organisations are reported every year.

Disqualify the apologists for violence from civic participation

If you advocate for murder, perform apologism for it, justify it, excuse it, equivocate for it, or otherwise suggest serious criminality is an acceptable substitute for rational dialogue when you feel upset, you have no place in public life. Period. Full stop. No interviews; no funding; no MP candidacy; no public office; no directorships; no dark money payments; no coverage. There is absolute no excuse for allowing anyone who incites or advocates moral infamy to hold any position of influence.

Re-classify "gender" pseudoscience as mental illness

There is no reasonable scientific case – whatsoever – for the magical thinking of presenting tertiary sex characteristics (sex preferences, aka fashion) as a form of subjective self-reported "identity," or biological sex being determined by linguistic conventions. Identity is recognised, it is not "asserted." This madness re-erupted in the 1990s and has to be stopped. It has already resulted in prescribing children drugs used in chemical castration.

A royal commission to study psychotropics

There has been a clear link between SSRIs and extreme disorder since the 1980s when Seroxat became infamous for gun violence incidents. It's obvious hormone therapy changes people's behaviour and characteristics: that's the whole point. Psychotropic medications have been indicated and correlated endlessly with violent behaviour. Medical studies have indicated there is no reliable evidence depression is caused by a "chemical imbalance."

Punish universities for fostering radical communism

Communism has killed over a hundred million people. It is not acceptable to intellectually advocate the virtues of national socialism, or conduct apologism for it; neither is it acceptable to portray this tyrannical framework of hell as a heavenly missed goal. There is absolutely no excuse – whatsoever – for universities who accept or depend on taxpayer money to tolerate professors rehabilitating this vile ideology in classrooms or grooming students into revolutionary fervour.

Punish seditious violence harshly

We cannot expect to have a nation when we allow radicalised students to vandalise our most sacred monuments or perform "mock assassinations" on statues. This isn't free speech or legitimate "artistic expression": it is symbolic pretend killing, and also even approaches the Miller Test for obscenity. There is plenty of room for dissent, critique, polemic, and even virulent protest. Accusing Britain of perpetrating slavery, attacking military bases, chanting Hamas slogans, attacking candidates and MPs, and everything else outside the basic mechanisms we trust to produce consensus must be treated as the destructive cancer they are.

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