'Nosferatu': Sex, Death, Bloodsucking

And: Why Keir Starmer Ought To Have Read Dostoevsky

Count Orlok just wants to hold your hand

“You going to see Nosferatu?” my friend Isaiah asked. No, I said; I’m not a fan of horror, even though I really liked what the director Robert Eggers did with The Northman.

“Too bad,” he said. “It’s like watching a chapter from Living In Wonder.”

What? I read a review of the movie (trailer here), and saw what he meant. It’s a film about how a demonic evil being, Count Orlok, comes to menace a group of people, and indeed an entire city. Because nobody there understands that the nature of the evil they’re dealing with, evil runs rampant for a time. Ah, yes. This I have to see.

So, last night I watched the film, and oh boy, is it ever scary, and well done — but it has a major religious flaw, from my perspective. Nevertheless, it is a near-perfect parable of the cost of disenchantment. Let’s get into it.

Eggers’ Nosferatu is set in 1838, in the fictional northern German city of Wisborg, a rich, modern, Protestant mercantile town. It opens with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), reaching out as a teenage girl to anyone who can relieve her loneliness. As we learn, she has always been psychically sensitive, and, as a Roman exorcist told me when I interviewed him for Living In Wonder, the thing about demons is that when you call them, they really will come. Ellen is seized sexually by a demon, an incubus who forms a relationship of some sort with her — but she can’t tell if it’s real, or if it’s just a dream. The borderland between her dreams and her material reality becomes porous.

When she marries ambitious young Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), Ellen’s mania wanes. Thomas works for a real estate agent, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), who sends him to Transylvania to conclude the sale of a ruined castle near Wisborg to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Ellen doesn’t want him to go, but Thomas insists, saying that making this deal will ensure their financial future and entry into the Wisborg bourgeoisie. He leaves her in the care of her friend Anna Harding (Emma Corrin) and her husband Friedrich (Alan Taylor-Johnson), a rich young couple with children.

Arriving in Transylvania, Thomas takes up residence at a grubby country inn, where the locals warn him to stay away from Orlok’s castle, because evil lives there. He observes gypsies carrying out a strange occult ritual to try to rid the community of evil. He is a man of the Enlightenment, though, and finds all this merely distasteful. Off Thomas goes to Orlok’s creepy abode to present the deed of sale to be signed.

The Count and his castle could hardly be more frightening (this is a sensually intoxicating film). Orlok sets upon Thomas, feeding on his blood. Thomas escapes, and is found near death on the banks of a river. Orthodox nuns and a priest revive him and try to exorcise him. When Thomas recovers a bit, he sets off for Wisborg, against the warnings of the nuns, who tell him he’s not yet well enough to travel (they mean spiritually). But he fears for Ellen, and departs.

Meanwhile, Orlok has contrived to have himself shipped in his coffin by ship to Wisborg. His plan is to get close enough to Ellen physically to consummate their passion in the flesh. We learn that in life, Orlok had been a black magician, and that his body — a rotting corpse — is now inhabited by a demon who allows him to live (“live”) after dark. The demon seeks incarnation, you see, and the greatest pleasure of incarnation: sexual congress with a young maiden.

In this, Eggers is on firm demonological ground. Watching the film brought to mind a story told me in college by N., a friend who had dabbled in the occult, with automatic writing. She was a serious person (and still is, by the looks of it: though we lost touch, an online search shows that she has since risen high in the legal world), and not religious. She told me how, after doing automatic writing for a while, she gained the ability to travel outside her body at night. She sensed that there was an unseen male presence traveling with her. Eventually he asked her to have sex with him. Naturally she found this deeply disturbing, and resisted. One night, sleeping in her dorm room, she awakened to feel the grip of hands around her wrists, some unseen entity pinning her to the bed, and trying to force her legs apart to rape her.

“Did you pray?!” I asked. No, she said; she was not a Christian. She told me she imagined the purest possible light, and concentrated on it. This loosened the incubus’s grip on her enough for her to reach over and turn on the bedside lamp. The thing disappeared. She got out of bed, destroyed her automatic writing notebooks, and never again had a problem. I knew she was telling me the truth. N. was not religious, or even, well, weird; this seemed out of character for the young secular woman I knew, but she could hardly have been more serious. Many years later, researching the world of the demonic, I read similar accounts, and knew that N. had told me the truth.

Anyway, when Orlok arrives in Wisborg, he brings with him a plague, carried by infected rats, that grips the city. Installed in the ruined castle thanks to Herr Knock, who, we learn, is a secret occultist who has become possessed in service to the Count, Orlok appears to Ellen, and demands sexual congress. During Thomas’s absence, she has been in the grips of what everyone around her thinks is mania, but what anyone who knows anything about the demonic recognizes as partial possession. Ellen refuses the demon, who warns her that he will return for three nights, and until she yields to him, he will cause death to spread in the city.

In the face of her manic episodes, the respectable Friedrich calls in his friend Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson), the very incarnation of scientific respectability, who diagnoses hysteria, and who tries to treat it with drugs. Eventually Sievers confides that this is a case he cannot manage, and advises that they bring in Prof. von Franz, a brilliant Swiss doctor who has been exiled in disgrace for his unorthodox dabbling in the occult. Von Franz, played by Willem Dafoe, is clearly based on Carl Jung, who was also an occultist; indeed, Eggers puts a famous line of Jung’s into Von Franz’s mouth. It comes when the skeptical Friedrich, scandalized by Von Franz’s theories that what’s going on is spiritual, not medical, asks him how he can possibly believe in such things. Says Von Franz, using Jung’s words, “I don’t believe; I know.”

There is another demonologically correct aspect to the Eggers’ tale. Orlok tells Ellen that Thomas has signed a contract divorcing her (he has done this unawares), giving her, in effect, to Orlok. But it cannot be consummated without Ellen having sex with him. As exorcists will tell you, demons are excellent lawyers; paradoxically, these lawless entities are bound by contracts and legalisms. Every experienced exorcist will tell you that possession only takes place by consent of the victim — and no exorcism can succeed unless the victim wants to be free.

What Eggers gives us is a tale of supernatural evil causing mayhem in a modern city where nobody save Von Franz is capable of grasping the true nature of the phenomenon — a phenomenon that has both spiritual and material effects. (The border between the material and the spiritual is indeed porous). The crude peasants of Transylvania understand very well what they’re dealing with; the sophisticated bourgeois of Wisborg do not. In their world, such things do not exist because they cannot exist; they are remnants of medieval superstition. Herr Knock loses his mind, becoming terrifyingly possessed (biting the heads off of live birds to suck their blood), because he had sought enchantment through the dark arts. And now, Ellen, in her longing for companionship and satisfaction, has summoned the demon who is murdering his way through the city as a way to compel her to surrender to him sexually.

Sex is a major theme in this film. Ellen calls the evil spirit into her life naively reaching out for bliss. He comes, and they have incubus sex, which marks her permanently. Yet the demon is not content to know her in an imperfect (that is, non-physical) way; he must come to her sexually in a body he inhabits. When Nosferatu shows up in her chamber, he tells her that he is all “appetite”. He cannot be completed absent sex with her. For her part, she needs sexual communion to be whole as well. This longing for (sexual) possession, and this compulsion to possess (spiritually and physically, is the shadow side of human sexuality, Eggers seems to be saying. Surrendering to it outside the law (that is, outside of love and marriage) invites spiritual evil. Once again, if you talk to exorcists (even if you just listen to The Exorcist Files — try this three-part account of a trucker drawn into demonic captivity by sex with a witch), you see that illicit sex can be a vector of demonic possession.

Ellen calls Nosferatu her “shame” — which I read as the embodiment of the torment she feels over having summoned him for sex and companionship in the first place. Shame possesses her, and drives her. Eggers seems to be saying that there is something about the life force encountered in sex and sexuality that opens us to forces, both psychological and spiritual, that may consume us. I’m reminded of something that Peter Brown, the scholar of Late Antiquity, once wrote about how the people of the Greco-Roman era regarded sex. Brown writes that for them, sex

was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodge in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods of from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.

Eggers here trafficks in the Freudian concepts of eros and thanatos — that is, the life-drive and the death-drive. In Freud’s thought, the desire for life manifests itself in part through sexual desire, through an eagerness for life, and doing things that promote life. The thanatos drive is entirely about destruction. Freud observed that in patients who had been traumatized by war, they frequently dreamed about death — in particular, the events that traumatized them. Freud theorized that there is within all of us an unconscious desire to die (thanatos), but it is usually held in check by the desire to live (eros). Whatever you might think of Freud’s theories — and they are not held in high regard today — we see in Nosferatu the destruction that occurs when Ellen confuses eros with thanatos — or, to be specific, when she directs her eros toward thanatos. She does this under the influence of the demon Nosferatu, who perverts her craving for love and companionship into a desire for death, and in fact pleasure and wholeness when she experiences erotic fulfillment while sexually possessed by the spirit of death.

If you can’t see the implications in that for the way we live today, you are blind. In Nosferatu, Ellen’s disordered sexual desire summons a catastrophe that envelops her entire society. This is not a politically correct point to make, but then, Eggers never has been interested in flattering our prejudices. Indeed, he makes a twist on the traditional vampire story that I’m not going to spoil, but that turns Ellen into a kind of occult Christ figure.

You may wonder: why not the real Christ? Why don’t any of these people call on the church to help? Could it be that the respectable bourgeois Protestantism of Wisborg is powerless in the face of true evil? Yes, I think that’s part of it. Anna, trying to comfort Ellen in her distress, advises her to think about how God loves us and wants the best for us. In her view, God is like a cosmic butler whose role is to make sure the house, so to speak, is in good order. Soren Kierkegaard, the Protestant philosopher, was not given to speculation about spiritual warfare, but this is exactly the kind of Christianity he lacerated in his late writing: a puny form of the faith whose role is to spiritualize the middle-class, materialist order, and to serve as a psychological prop for the bourgeois.

But reading this great Substack piece by Eric Cook and Titus Techera about the movie and the vampire genre, it appears that Eggers deliberately chose to exclude Christianity as a force capable of defeating demonic evil. Prof. von Franz, a student of the occult (if not a practitioner), is the only person among them capable of understanding that they are dealing with a demon. In this, say Cook & Techera, Eggers is unfaithful to Bram Stoker’s novel, and instead throws in his lot with F.W. Murnau, the Weimar-era director (and occultist) who made the 1922 silent film Nosferatu. Cook & Techera:

Further, Eggers draws on both the Weimar film & the Victorian novel, thus reminding us that this desire for meaning is not new—it’s the famous crisis of Western civilization. Nevertheless, his attempt to marry Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Murnau’s Nosferatu itself creates certain difficulties. At the heart of Stoker’s novel is a conflict between heroic people & an anti-Christ figure that can only be defeated through a self-sacrifice guided by religious submission to Christ via the sacraments. Murnau’s Nosferatu, contrariwise, substitutes occultism for religion, & offers not a saving but an abandonment of Victorian civilization after WWI, through a psychology of sacrifice which may preserve Romantic Wagnerian redemption. Eggers is famous for anchoring his films in the worldview of his source material rather than the fashionable ideologies of 21st c. Progressives, but in this case, he was faced with the choice forced on him by his sources, & decided for the occultism of Murnau.

Naturally this disappointed me as a Christian, and not because Eggers let down the side, so to speak. It disappointed me because having made an excellent point, with immense power — that the desire for re-enchantment in the face of boredom with scientific materialism, consumerism, and bourgeois respectability can bring destructive spiritual horror into our lives — Eggers turns his back on the only force that can truly defeat the evil. Instead, Eggers basically tells us that only white magic can defeat black magic. His Prof. von Franz appeals to demons and angels to subdue Nosferatu, and on the counsel of an antique occult text counseling that only the sacrifice of a maiden can deliver humanity from this wicked spirit.

In my view, this is not only a mistake; it’s a lie, and a dangerous one. I don’t know much about Eggers’s personal views on metaphysics and spirituality, but anyone who sees his Nosferatu and takes seriously its potent warning about the cost of dark enchantment, and the impotence of science and materialism to deal with its consequences, and who does not turn toward the God of the Bible for help — is living a perilous falsehood.

Walking home from the movie last night, I thought of J., an unbelieving high school friend who studied psychology in college. Home one year for the holidays, she told me she had done a workshop in which she had to serve as an intern at a psychological hospital. A number of the patients were teenagers and young adults who had been deeply involved in the occult, and had fried their minds with it. It puzzled J., a good secular liberal, that every one of these patients had become hardcore Christians (“fundamentalists,” in her view), because as they saw it, only faith in Christ could protect them from the evils they had foolishly embraced. (I just looked J. up online; she did not go into psychology, but into a more lucrative field, and has done well in it.)

I also mused on an early encounter with the world of the demonic, in my first job as a journalist. It was around 1991, and I found myself interviewing a Baton Rouge psychologist, a respectable Lutheran who was one of only two professionals at the time trained in treating multiple personality disorder. She told me of the day authorities brought to her a young woman in her mid-twenties suffering from the disease. The woman had been raised in a Satanic cult, and had been ritually raped throughout her childhood before escaping. The psychologist was staggered when from the beginning, demons manifested through this woman, speaking in strange and menacing voices, controlling the lights in the office, and generally behaving like an outtake from The Exorcist. I don’t have room to go into the story here, but one result — aside from the poor soul’s eventual deliverance — was this psychologist learning to her great shock that there is far more to the spiritual world than she had imagined.

Then I phoned the head of the occult crimes division of the Baton Rouge police. In our talk — this wasn’t yet on the record — he told me details of things he had investigated, and said that the nice people of our city would find it hard to believe the things that actually happened there, behind the veil of normality.

I took all this to my editors to ask them what I could do with it, and they roared with laughter at the gullibility of the young reporter. Though not yet a Christian, I had been so shaken up by what the police detective and the psychologist had told me that I was not going to put myself in spiritual peril so these skeptical journalists could make fun of me. I dropped the story. These men, these editors, are the kind of people Eggers mocks in Nosferatu — those who insist that these things do not exist because they cannot exist. The Cajun grandmother from Bayou Pigeon whom I would later meet, an assistant to an elderly Catholic exorcist, knew much better than they.

It should be obvious, then, why despite its major theological flaw, my friend Isaiah said this movie is like a chapter from Living In Wonder. The world truly is much weirder than most of us in modernity think. What’s more, the search for enchantment in the dark side can only lead to death and destruction. When these things manifest, all the powers of the scientific, materialist world can do nothing about it, aside from giving people the false assurance that everything is under control, that there are no monsters under the bed. But sometimes, there really are, and only educated fools fail to see them.

Eggers’ Nosferatu, then, is a very dark but powerful parable with lessons for our own time. As I note in my essay on Eggers’ terrific The Northman, the young visionary filmmaker, now 41, told a journalist that one of the only things he’s afraid of is “surrendering to the occult.” You would have to be insane to leave Nosferatu and want to mess around with the dark arts. In fact, the film is at a basic, simplistic level a stark warning against that sort of thing! But I wonder if, in some sense, Eggers has done that in Nosferatu, in the sense of presenting an occult solution to an occult problem.

Here’s what I mean. Prof. von Franz, as I said, is an intellectual who has ruined his career by studying the occult as a partial guide to reality. He is a Romantic-era alchemist, as Jung would be in the 20th century. All Von Franz can do is fight the occult with the occult. He says in this scene that:

We have not become so enlightened as we are blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the Devil as Jacob wrestled the Angel in Penuel, and I tell you that if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists!

That’s true, but it’s an ambiguous truth. A Christian means one thing by it, but a Jungian means another. Von Franz is stating here the Jungian maxim that life has a shadow side, and that we cannot control the evil within us, and in our world, without first acknowledging it. He’s not talking about “ordinary” evil — murder, theft, and so forth — but the evil that resides deep within us all. For Jung, the shadow side is the part of our consciousness that we have repressed because it is too painful or shameful to deal with. At one point, Ellen says that Nosferatu represents her “shame” — shame, presumably, over having summoned the demon (in her words, “a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort, a spirit of any celestial sphere, anything”) to deliver her from her teenage loneliness and, it is clear, to satisfy her sexual longing.

The vampire Nosferatu is the embodiment of her shame, the corporeal manifestation of her illicit teenage desire. He torments her, and destroys friends, family, and even parts of her city. Her “exorcism” of her shame is, to my eyes, unsatisfying, and I imagine feminists will be enraged by it. But I think Eggers is faithful to his occult sourcing, in the sense that what Ellen does is what the occult manuals say must be done to banish this demon. It is not pretty. It is, in fact, revolting. But again, as in The Northman, Eggers wishes to present a particular pagan society as it actually was, and to show the shadow side of humans as they really are, not serve our preference for a welcome narrative, be it Christian, feminist, or sexually progressive.

In my Christian reading of the film, Ellen is in one sense the victim of a rigid, repressed society that doesn’t know how to cope with female desire. It doesn’t make one a feminist to recognize this. There was only one way in bourgeois German culture of the period for respectable women to be: without desire, at least not publicly. In one quick scene, Friedrich tries to steal a kiss from Anna out in public, but she chastises him for behaving inappropriately. He tells her he cannot help himself. It’s an innocent moment, but it manifests a core tension in the greater narrative. Note well, though, that in that brief moment, the woman has the power to permit or deny the appetitive male’s desire. We see this return later, with Ellen and the vampire, who needs to feed on her sexuality as much as he needs to feed on her blood. It is a life force, and only women have it. Male sexual desire untethered from women is mostly a death force (and if you don’t believe that — that is, if you credit the happy-clappy propaganda of our time, then I invite you to read this pseudonymous First Things account of a gay man who sought sexual oblivion in the orgy clubs of Germany; I have heard similar things from gay male friends — not, note well, lesbians — when they have had a couple of drinks and been frank). If you have not recognized that these are age-old, pre-Christian ideas, then you have been reading too much contemporary ideology that wishes to banish this shadow side of human social psychology.

As I read Eggers film — and I keep hesitating, because I’m not sure what the director’s intent is — he is saying not that we can ever finally be delivered from these dark truths about our erotic nature, but is rather saying that if we deny them, they have the power to destroy us. Though no Jungian, I agree with that.

Again, the redemption the film provides is bleak as hell, and at last a statement that death can only be conquered by death — by sacrificing life. And yet, is this not, in one sense, a Christian story? At Easter, we Orthodox sing the joyous paschal hymn: “Christ is risen from the dead/Trampling down death by death/And upon those in the tomb bestowing life.” For Christians — at least we Christians of pre-modern beliefs — Jesus of Nazareth took into himself the old pagan beliefs about blood and sacrifice, fulfilled them, and conquered them. It is surely no coincidence that the film’s action takes place right at Christmas, a season marking the entrance of God into the world to save us from death and demonic darkness.

Death wins in the Nosferatu story; it loses in the Christian narrative. These poor souls in Eggers’s film ought to have gone to the church for help. But if they had, would there have been any pastor willing or capable of helping them? In darkest Transylvania, the Orthodox priest and nuns, with their mystical awareness, did help (though Thomas left them too early), because they understood the nature of the evil upon him. Would any of northern Germany’s Protestant pastors of the post-Enlightenment era been able to do the same? German Protestantism was at the time undergoing an Awakening, but it was a distinctly modern phenomenon, one given to personal piety and charitable public works. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but they seem to have absorbed the disenchantment of modernity, such that even an apparently churchgoing family like the Hardings — at least Anna is a believer — cannot grasp the true nature of the evil that has invaded their lives.

This is a lesson for us today, too — and not just for rationalistic, pious Protestants who wish to consign the demonic and the woo to the medieval past. I’ve mentioned before once having gone to an Orthodox priest who believes demons are real, and asked him to help a a Protestant family whose house was haunted by a specter that family members had seen. He grew visibly scared, and refused to go there to pray. What cowardice! Similarly, my Orthodox exorcist friend Father Nectarios has publicly called on the US Orthodox churches to train exorcists, and to turn away from its indefensible neglect of this ancient ministry. Strange as it may seem, the film Nosferatu is not only a call away from modernity’s “gaseous light of science,” but also a charge to Christians to arouse from the comforting slumber of buffered modernity, and to reacquaint themselves with spiritual reality.

In the days and years to come, we are all going to be seeing bizarre and seemingly inexplicable things. It is not the case that any explanation for them will suffice. Still, the more we imprison ourselves in the iron cage of modernist rationality, the more vulnerable we make ourselves. Eggers has warned us.

Kale Sees UFOs?

An hour ago I got a phone call from my friend Kale Zelden, calling from his daily morning walk. He spied some UFOs (“drones”) in the sky, and called to tell me about it. He told me he would post to X the images when he got home — and he did:

They look like past images of Starlink satellites, to be honest. But I don’t know. What do you think?

Why Keir Starmer Should Read Dostoevsky

My new essay in The European Conservative is about how all the civilization-destroying effects of progressive ideology we are enduring now were all foreseen by the 19th century Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky. That is, they fought an ultimately losing battle for realism against the passions of the left-wing ideologues — who, when they achieved power in the 1917 revolution, unleashed an orgy of mass murder and destruction. This was inevitable, according to the realists — but nobody listened. I based this essay on my reading of Gary Saul Morson’s great 2023 book about this phenomenon. From my piece:

In the mid-19th century there arose a class in Russia called the “intelligents”—the equivalent of our woke scholars, journalists, and their sympathizers throughout institutions. Education does not make one an “intelligent”; a shared dedication to progressive ideology does. Even if one does not agree with the intelligents, one keeps one’s mouth shut to protect one’s own career and reputation. As one Turgenev character says, “today even those who dislike progressive ideas must pretend to like them to gain admission to decent society.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We see in that line an explanation for why so many otherwise sensible people—even conservatives—kept their mouths shut about the rape gangs, about mass migration, and so many other ills that mostly afflicted those outside “decent society”—like working-class white English girls.

As time went on, the intelligents came to idealize ‘the People,’ not based on who the Russian people actually were, but rather as a totem to help them deal with their own psychological feelings of guilt for their own privilege. Citing the work of two lesser-known Russian writers, Morson says that they “exemplify the troubling consequences of basing politics on guilt, which may lead people to adopt whatever solution promises psychological relief even if it does not help—or even positively harms—the victims on whose behalf guilt is felt.”

To help members of the British ruling class feel better about themselves, the whole of Britain had to be wrecked through mass migration and deliberately turning a blind eye to the evils done by non-white Britons. (The same logic explains the rampage of gender ideology, which has resulted in the lifelong sexual mutilation of gender-dysphoric British children.) As Morson explains in chilling detail, the utopians of the Russian Left, once they gained power in the 1917 revolution, sacrificed the lives of tens of millions of innocent people to pay homage to ideological principle. Yet as Dostoevsky—and only Dostoevsky, in Morson’s judgment—saw, the seeds of the 20th century’s mass murders were already in plain sight in the writings of the 19th century progressives.

What Britain has lived through—and what many European countries are living through as well—is the cost of the utopian ideals of their liberal elites, of both the Left and the Right. After all, what was conservative German chancellor Angela Merkel’s infamous 2015 declaration opening Europe’s floodgates to migrants, “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”), if not a manifestation of liberal utopianism? Britain today has a feckless Labour government in part because the Conservatives in power, despite all their stated convictions, also lived by these hollow beliefs.

The raped working-class girls of Britain are the price people pay for liberal ideology. Morson writes that the great Russian realists refuted progressive theories not by taking them on directly in their novels, but by showing what it means to live by them. Well, Britain now has its answer—and so does every European country cursed by migrant rapes and other crimes.

The rape-gang scandal makes it abundantly clear that liberalism, as it has been practiced for decades in the West (as distinct, for example, from its Hungarian version), is the suicide note of a civilization. Both the UK and the European Union are rapidly approaching a decision point.

It’s not just Muslim rape gangs, of course, but also the destruction of the lives and bodies of thousands of gender-dysphoric children by ideologues who perverted medical science to serve their utopian schemes. It’s the destruction of academic and professional disciplines, and institutions, under the sway of ideology. It’s not just wokeness: the Right, with its ideological devotion to globalist economics and (in the US) forever war, has also played a role in the nemesis upon us.

Reading Morson’s book gave me a much better understanding of why, starting around 2015, those US immigrants from Soviet communist countries who feared the coming of totalitarianism to the US reached out to me. They knew from bitter experience what happens with utopian ideologues take power, and try to silence anyone who disagrees. Now, in our own less bloody (for now) way, we in the West are living it too.

What can we do about it? Is it possible to save ourselves? Can we be sure that what follows isn’t worse? I love Europe and the UK. I have chosen to live in Europe. I think the former Eastern European countries have a shot at saving themselves. Maybe France does too. But the UK and Germany — man, it’s bleak. They have been done in by their ruling classes.

In his Substack newsletter today, UK conservative writer Ed West reflects frankly on the fact that British society was happy to punish, or remain indifferent to, the suffering of the white working classes so clever people of his (West’s) class and above could feel good about themselves. Excerpt:

Yet the way that racial tolerance came to be promoted as a supreme virtue has often provoked an understandable class gripe. In The New East End, authors Michael Young, Kate Gavron and Geoff Dench described how the Cockney natives of Tower Hamlets were far more prejudiced and hostile to Bangladeshi incomes than were the Yuppies now colonising the area.

The authors noted that ‘the attitudes of the younger, more mobile, individualistic, cosmopolitan, “yuppy” sector of the east London population can reasonably be assumed to be related to their strong position in the modern job market. It is overwhelmingly those with higher qualifications, who can escape whenever they want from the East End, who can take a more impersonal and principled view of the area’s problems. For them, the presence of Bangladeshis may even be a bonus as it gives the locality an exotic aspect and cheap, agreeable eating spots – rather like being on a permanent foreign holiday.’ Splendid!

For the Cockneys, this was their home – the birthplace of their parents and grandparents, and they had no other. Young and co noted how the more ‘connected’ an individual was, measured by the more family members and friends they had in the neighbouring streets, the more hostile they felt towards immigrants – and the individual with the highest connectivity ‘score’, an older East End matriarch type, was the one open supporter of the British National Party. This is the flip side to what used to be called – admiringly – ‘tight-knit communities’, most of whom since left, to be replaced by a different community so ‘tight-knit’ that Tower Hamlets has become notorious for corruption.

East and West London were as distant in my youth as they were in the time of Queen Victoria, and this is not the world I grew up in. Like many people of my background, I have to admit that I didn’t believe the grooming gangs stories when I first heard them; or at least, I didn’t believe the scale of it. It sounded too fantastic, worse than the worst thing a racist would come up with. The story of Charlene Downes, who was groomed, murdered and then turned into a kebab, sounds exactly like a blood libel; except that, unlike the traditional blood libel, it was true.

Indeed, it was only racists who talked about it, initially Nick Griffin of the BNP, and then members of the English Defence League. Although the respectability cascade certainly made it harder for people to share EDL talking points, I don’t agree with the assertion that they made it worse, as some now claim; had the EDL never been aware of grooming gangs, polite society would still have been content to never mention the subject. It’s uncomfortable, and depressing, and involves a segment of society they’d rather not think about – and embarrassing to a moral system which so many are invested in.

West reflects glumly that the kind of lower-order white people made to pay the highest price for mass migration and multiculturalism are also those least able to articulate their grievances in a way that the ruling class will take seriously, and end up making themselves the butt of class-based mockery from their so-called betters. More:

That question of articulation is a source of entrenched class division in a multicultural society. Those without the necessary education or quickness of wit are left defenceless to make arguments about why they are unhappy with changes which in almost every society in history would be considered extreme. As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in his great work, questioning the benefits of multiculturalism has become harder as the system has become more entrenched by taboos, demanding a handling of the dialectic which most people are incapable of. This makes it all but impossible for the less articulate to voice reasonable demands.

‘Erudite philosophers of tolerance such as Jürgen Habermas might possibly have been able to untangle such questions and draw the proper distinctions,’ he wrote: ‘Political elites could resolve them by fiat. But they left the person of average intellect and social status feeling confused and disempowered. A democracy cannot long tolerate a system that makes an advanced degree in sociology or a high government position a prerequisite for expressing the slightest worry about the way one’s country is going.’