Daniel Jupp

Long, long ago, on the grey shore of a green isle, two rather small armies met, a few thousand on each side. One group came from a tiny islet barely large enough to hold even their few numbers. The land was mud and reeds, and little else. A silver bend of river snaked it’s way inland, but a causeway covered in waves at high tide blocked their passage. Only when the tide ebbed could they reach the actual shore, and there stood the second group of men, not all that different from the first.
Among them stood an older man, almost ancient by the average standards of the day, but straight backed, still strong, still proud. An old man with a young man’s vigour, but ready to die. A man with the scars of old battles on his flesh, and an inexorable confidence about him, like one who has weighed the days of his life already, and counts them full, and is content This was Byrhtnoth, a Saxon Earl, 68 or 69 years old, a counsellor to King Ethelred the Unready, and one of the most respected warriors of the time. He was the head of the party at court that opposed paying tribute to Viking raiders, and preferred instead to meet them in contest of arms, giving nothing except blood and blows. On 11th August 991 AD he would do so for the very last time, giving up his life on the Essex coastline near the town of Maldon.
Where the Battle of Maldon was fought there is now a park with play areas, a small zoo, a miniature golf course, and a lake. Look in one direction and you get views of the River Blackwater where the Viking longships came to the low strip of land that is Northey Island. Turn away from the water and look inland and you can see that a few boats and ships are still mooring at the landside edge of the causeway, and above that a hill with a pretty view of clustered houses and a Norman church. Look back to the water again, and you’ll see at the furthest edge of the land, at the tip of the causeway that remains, is a modern statue of Byrhtnoth, a rather crude but unusually respectful and poignant one. The old warrior defends the coast still, sword in hand, arm upraised, standing on a round plinth marked with semi-abstract scenes of the battle and the words of his last, dying, very Christian prayer.
It’s a spot I’ve visited many times.
Byrhtnoth represents what leadership is, what leadership must be, when nations are formed or threatened. The task he took upon himself, the task that killed him, was the central task of any ruler worth the name. To defend the land, and the people, to give your life if need be, for theirs. Your right to status and privilege and wealth flowed from this and this alone. That when it mattered most, you would be there. You would be the one ready to face the foe at the waters edge. You would die for your country, and not just ask others to do it. Nations, you see, old nations, real nations, are things of blood and bone. They aren’t just dreams, and they aren’t just treaties and parchments, laws and language. They are built from a people and a place, and the thing that binds these together, the thing that binds them when they are born, is the same thing that binds a family.
Blood. They are bound in blood.
It’s in the veins of the Earl and his men, the King and the peasant also. The same blood. And it’s spilled to gain that place, and it’s spilled to keep it too. Borders are marked in rivers and oceans and mountain ranges. But the old ones are always marked in blood too. This is what makes those borders sacred.
Even in 991AD of course there were men who were too comfortable and too privileged to know this. After all, these men thought that they could give gold away to raiders and keep their power. Even then, Byrhtnoth was notable for the severity and completeness of his recognition of the first duty of government. But it’s something all good governments know, all great leaders know. They know that borders matter, and they know that a nation state is about sacred, shared things, including a uniqueness to a particular people, that demands protection. The government that does not protect its borders does not protect its people, and all the legitimacy of its power rests solely on its desire and competence in that protection. Every tax, every law, every expression of authority, rests on the assumption that our rulers will guard our borders. There is no point to a nation state without that.
Rulers who will not or cannot defend their people are simply thieves in control of the law. It’s been famously said that there should be no taxation without representation.

That is true, but there is an even older law than that. There can be no rule without protection, and no legitimate leader who would not die for his country. If you would not do what Byrhtnoth did, you are not fit to rule a single man, woman or child in your nation.
This willingness to defend a border is the clearest signal we can give that we love our people, that we care about their safety and their rights, that we defend their land and their liberty as we would our own. It’s intimately connected with tyranny in multiple ways. First, because it means we will protect our people from the imposition of any distant and foreign rule which, by it’s very nature, is more likely to be tyrannical towards them. Second, because it means that we ourselves, as a ruling class if we are lucky enough to be in that social group, still so strongly feel ties of loyalty to the ordinary mass of our populace as to be unlikely, ourselves, to inflict harm and tyranny on them. It’s true that many tyrants might vigorously defend their own borders, but it’s certain too that the tyrant who doesn’t is a worse monster then the one who does.
People settle together for mutual protection. It doesn’t matter if it is a tribe, a village, a town or a nation. It is premised on the rulers of that place caring about protecting these people from outside threats. And yet today, we clearly see that this is a very rare thing to find in any of our leaders. Very few of them actually respect the borders of their own nations. Even fewer of them are prepared to defend these borders. Most owe far greater loyalty and sense of kinship with transnational bodies and internationalis t ideologies. During the Brexit debate, an entire class of people told the rest of the country that they felt more European than British, and had more love for the EU than they had for their Leave voting neighbours. They were in fact furious with the idea that decisions affecting Britain (Including about our borders) should be made in Britain. The ruling class clearly considered any protection of a border, loyalty to people within that border, and desire not to be ruled from abroad or subject to the tyranny of unaccountable bodies with no real ties to this country, as ridiculously outmoded, embarrassing and unsophisticated stances, even detestable ones.
The post WWII explosion of powerful transnational bodies I mentioned in the first of this series is largely responsible for this shift in attitude, but it’s also a shift enthusiasticall y promoted by multinational companies. As more and more power was gifted to the transnational body, more and more of a politicians time and energy was devoted to those power blocks too. The successful politician was de facto someone who travelled, befriended and interacted with foreigners of a similar class to themselves more than they ever talked to, met or listened to less powerful people from their own country. And it was the transnational body, too, that could reward them more easily in person. A voter can only grant them a tiny atom of endorsement, and at best re-election. But the friends made at trade talks, international conferences, Davos meetings, introductions in Brussels….well those could offer all manner of financial and social rewards on a personal level, or a lucrative alternative post even if the neglected voter back home kicks them out of office.
A tick in a box every four years isn’t a powerful bribe,especiall y as our rulers get better at fabricating votes and discarding votes they don’t like. A directorship on the board of a major company, or a senior executive post in that company, or your selection to a similar vacancy with the EU, the UN, the IMF or the WEF, is a powerful bribe. The people can’t really offer you gifts for your service, but other nations can, other powers can. All you need to do is forget what your national post exists for in the first place, and forget any sense of loyalty to your own people. The kind of person who goes into politics in the modern world generally finds that an easy thing to accept. After all, they have been ideologically conditioned through all this period too to consider loyalty to your own people, especially one focused on the protection of their borders and their demographic identity, as the kind of thing Nazis believed in.
A patriot has a strong sense of the need to protect borders, combined with a strong awareness of the limits of government power over existing citizens. In both cases he believes in boundaries. What others try to do to your people must be limited, what ANYONE tries to do to your people must be limited. There is a boundary at the edge of the nation that exists for a reason. The boundary that exists at the edge of what government can do WITHIN the nation, the boundaries defined by bodily sanctity and individual rights, matter for the same reason that a border matters. They matter because the whole point of a nation is to preserve the liberty of each citizen as a sacred duty. Without liberty there is no reason to defend against foreign tyranny, as it is merely the same condition from a different source. Without borders there is no way to defend the liberty of the citizen, because anyone can arrive and disturb that and because the anarchy of open borders itself becomes a form of tyranny.
The modern contempt for borders and the desire of modern elites to import cheap labour, radically alter existing demographics, encourage mass migrations, show greater loyalty to transnational organisations and multinational companies, prioritise immigrants and denigrate existing majorities, and in many cases deliberately work towards large scale ethnic replacements, inflicts direct harm on every existing citizen, including those themselves descended from migrants. It makes nationhood and citizenship meaningless, and national positions of authority only tools held in the hands of traitors. Any ruler who considers borders unimportant, is also the kind of ruler who is naturally inclined towards tyranny. He doesn’t care what you think, or what you suffer. If he believes in no borders protecting you from others, he also believes in no boundaries stopping himself from harming you. He actually wants you to suffer the results of mass immigration, either from ideological hatred of all you represent or simply as a means of confusing, demoralising and weakening you to the point where you cannot resist his tyranny in any effective manner.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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