In the omnipresent murky world of public-private 'consultancy' there exists a British firm called 'Capita' what is known as 'consultancy.' Large swathes of British and Irish institutions 'outsource' the jobs that they should be providing themselves, to companies like 'Capita.' The problems that this produces are on a vast scale and resembles a guava worm in a bottle of Mescal, getting plastered for free.

In 2000 the British army numbered 110,000. The last count, in 2023, we were down to 77,000. The Ministry of Defence now, through Capita, faces a wave of BAME recruitment targets. This means that recruitment is targeted towards women, gay, and ethnic minority groups. Call me old fashioned -- but this is no way to run an army in the 21st century, with multiple arena threats from China, Russia. However, the biggest threat to the West, especially the UK and US, is domestic terror -- the terror of liberalism.

Shakespeare wrote of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, where the English, outnumbered by the French, hungry and decimated, defeated a French army. The English King Henry V fought in battle himself, in hand-to-hand fighting:

'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood'.

War was unwelcome and protracted negotiations had been ongoing with the French for about a year. Unfortunately, Henry's 'reasonable' offer -- two million crowns for the captured John II, most of the territory of Northern France and the hand of Charles IV's daughter plus a dowry of two million, was rejected by the surly French. In 2010 in the U.S., a belated 'trial' of Henry V took place through justices Ginsburg and Alito and Henry V was found guilty in his absence, ostensibly for the killing of French prisoners of war. The Nuremburg trials were nearly as futile. The Russians raped and murdered two million German citizens in their march to Berlin in 1945. Of course, this was 'omitted' at Nuremburg. Replying to a question by the judge as to why he was in court -- Goering famously replied 'Because we lost.'

Now we have liberalism in all its grubby silliness. The precis here is not to favour any nation or cause, or to rewrite history, but to highlight the special liberal 'metaphysic' of war: the abandonment of moral ideology by liberals; the relativity of liberal notions of justice. We cannot face abhorrent threats, from wherever, with the liberal mannequins of war, with 'sexualised' youth or transgender quotas. It is what defeated the U.S. in Vietnam. It is the poison which is nullifying UK preparedness for war, as they talk of conscription. Will we have to rename the British regiments -- no more the 'Irish Guards', 'The Gurkhas', '1st Royal Regiment of Foot', 'The Queen's Own Light Dragoons'. Now we shall have the '2nd Transgender Infantry', 'The Black Lives Matter Infantry' and the 'Queer Fusiliers.' The corruption of the liberal worm, that cancerous germ which James Burnham noted in the 1950s in his seminal The Suicide of the West, has come home to roost.

For there is a queer confusion in liberal thinking. Tolstoy opines in War and Peace that:

“To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.”

Beneath these same stars of Christianity, a commonality exists. Now this community and spirit is destroyed by liberalism. It is dissected by reason, split into parts, examined. It is called liberal reason. The final straw of liberalism is its nineteenth century joining to capital. It is the abandonment of everything to the market. It is the 'ptolemisation' of liberalism, its death throes. Black Lives Matter, Greens, Armies, Families, Corporates become another market for capital. War is a gargantuan business; the European firms fishing in the Zelensky River of Keynesian funds. The BlackRocks and Halliburtons, the happy 'merry go round' of death. Homo Liberalis, unlike other species, cannot rest easy, there must be constant 'progress' and progress is defined by scientism, technology, and war.

The end game of liberalism, its corruption, its denouement, is this neglect of any political theology, any underlying metaphysic or principle. We need a Copernican revolution. Nietzsche had proclaimed that 'God is Dead,' but what replaced him? Augusto del Noce, the Italian philosopher of the postwar period, saw this secular wasteland as the logical outcome of reason and technology. This nothingness, this apathy eats away at the soul of homo liberalis.  Now, with wolves at the chicken run, they will ask the white working class to take up arms against the 'enemy.' From Kensington in Philadelphia to the slums of Glasgow, the heroin-infested cesspits of Naples or the ethnic, broken sink estates of Sweden -- the white working class can't hear the trumpet calls.  They have been told for a generation they are at the bottom of the ladder. Worthless scum compared to the transgenders and the ethnic groups at the forefront of cultural Marxism. No more rallying calls from Henry V, no poppies blowing in the red-blood skies of the Somme. No flags at Iwo Jima. It is the nadir of the West, of liberalism. Nothing matters but the dollar and the loyal boys of Agincourt won’t be coming to their rescue this time.

Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as 'The American Spectator', 'Asian Affairs', 'Deliberatio', 'L'Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica',  ’The National Interest’, ‘GeoPolitical Monitor’, ‘Merion West’, ‘Voegelin View’, 'The Montreal Review', ’The European Conservative’, ‘Visegrad Insight’, The Hungarian Review' ,’The Salisbury Review’_, ‘The Village’, ‘New English Review’, ‘The Burkean’, ‘ ‘The Daily Globe’,  ‘American Thinker’, ‘The Internationalist’, ‘Philosophy News’. His new book- Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century is published now by Ethics International Press.

Image: Fred Benenson