The Left's War on Nostalgia

 

 

 

I saw this photo recently that evoked "dark nationalist feelings" in my soul. Its location, which I managed to find with a reverse image search, is Grays in Essex, a place I lived in for about three months in the early nineties and considered the most depressing place I had ever seen, and that was largely pre-diversity.

The photo, taken in 1960, of a parade of shops that I'd estimate to have been built sometime in the 1930s is a snapshot of a very different England than we are being subjected to today.

It is a photo of a well-ordered society, of a clean street with no litter. The only street furniture is a traditional red telephone box. No yellow lines hinder the owners of the four beautiful, British-made cars.

The parade of shops itself is simply wonderful to my eye. All the shop fronts are original, and the signs are wooden, presumably hand-made and not plastic. They show British names: Cooper, Green, and Smith. Even the newsagent is run not by a Mr Patel, but by a Mr Whiting. Fonts are simple, functional and pleasing to the eye.

The shop windows are not covered or obscured by advertising stickers offering low-cost calls to a third-world country. Tobacco advertising, which I have a particular fondness for, is still allowed, simply encouraging one to "smoke Player's cigarettes". Even the yellow paint on the corner shop is comforting and reminiscent of a better time, like the Wall's ice cream they sell inside. No security shutters are necessary in this land of high trust and low crime.

The men appear dressed as adults, not oversized teenagers clinging to their fading youth. One rides a bicycle while the other emerges from the corner shop where I like to think he has just purchased a packet of cigarettes or perhaps some pipe tobacco, sans nannying health warnings and horrific images of death and disease.

But am I longing for a place and time that never existed? Am I suffering from some false folk memory syndrome? Is this an AI-generated image? That is what the left would like us to believe.

I kept this photograph on file and in mind for a few weeks with the vague idea that I may write something about it without knowing what. But then, whilst perusing another curse of the modern age, Twitter, the theme of nostalgia and the differing attitudes of the political left and right regarding the subject presented itself.

Carl Benjamin published a tweet describing an England of the past before the rot had set in.

Cue the screeching of a thousand bitter, hateful and dishonest leftists.

For the modern left, particularly the Globalist, Blairite, middle-class left, this type of nostalgia is a very frightening thing. It is a thing that, at least when the dreaded white working classes engage in it, is to be derided and scorned. In the comments underneath Carl's tweet was this passage written by the late journalist A.A. Gill. Published around the time of Brexit, it is an incredible, sneering attack on nostalgia and our memories of The Beforetime, which was received with spiteful glee by those who view progress as the destruction of all that is familiar and comforting to the British people that they hate.

The substance of Gill's article, strung together with vacuous rhetorical devices, is to attack various cultural artefacts, pastimes, traits and desires that define us as a people and some that have been recovered directly from Gill's arse for snide literary purposes. After all, there is nothing unreasonable about opposing our dispossession and displacement in our homeland, despite his mocking. There is nothing wrong with hedges, church bells, fudge or gooseberries. There is nothing wrong with Cricket, a gift from the English to the world, and certainly nothing wrong with deference and respect unless your worldview is that of a destructive, juvenile Communist.

Britain is by almost every measure observably worse than it was at "some foggy point in the past". No inane attack on country houses, cottages, national heroes, inventors and steam engines can detract from this reality. Our nostalgia does not indicate a desire to remain in a dark, inward-looking past. Instead, it rejects a dystopian present and carries hopes for a better tomorrow. It is the hope for a future in which we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is the hope that we may both live in The Shire and colonise Mars. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Finally, Gill claims that the young are not "infected with Bisto nostalgia" precisely because they have no memory of The Beforetime. And that is at the centre of the left's war on nostalgia - the erasure of your memory.

And it is a war on nostalgia. Whilst reading the comments under Carl's Tweet, one mentioned a Guardian article claiming that the far-right uses nostalgia as a recruitment tool. I decided to do a Google search for the terms "The Guardian", "far-right", and "nostalgia". What I found was a large number of articles hysterically attacking nostalgia.

Being a front of the culture war that, like much else these days, takes place online, what seems to irk them most is the popularity of nostalgia memes and social media accounts that "peddle" these inconvenient excursions down memory lane. For sure, these accounts are not likely to be run by leftists, but it seems like ridiculous hyperbole to suggest that nostalgia peddling is far-right. I guess Fascism isn't what it used to be.

With the left, there is always a double standard or hypocrisy lurking. After all, leftists don't mind talking about the fabled Golden Age of Islam, and we have even seen attempts to rehabilitate Weimar Germany. Indeed, nostalgia, a memory tinged with regret for something lost, is a universal human trait. To deny us this is fundamentally anti-human. It is our memory specifically that they find problematic.

The truth is that the destructive left hates everything good, especially when it stands in the way of their brave new world of borderlessness, bugs, pods and whatever other awful, inhuman future they have planned for us. Our reminiscences of a more harmonious society - of a White society, impede a deracinated future and must be memory-holed. The English people must be memory-holed. That's why you find a glut of Guardian articles and sneery comments in response.

The left isn't interested in the lived experience of White people. It's not interested in our oral history. Even the world of living memory is a gross inconvenience to them.

The world shown in these old sepia-tinted photographs was real, and the war on nostalgia is an exercise in gaslighting. But it's not us that are the madmen.

The photograph at the start of this article is from 1960. A precise date, considering it's supposed to be a foggy point in the past that nobody can identify. With the aid of new-fangled technology, I was able to find the exact location on Google Maps.

It's probably not the starkest then-and-now comparison, but I think you'd have to be mad to prefer the modern version. What do you think? Which do you prefer?