The Wild West, 2024

Welcome to the New Meme Landscape

The movie High Noon was released in 1952. The following year came Shane. My Dad took me to see these films. At the time I didn’t realize that I was watching moral tales. How could I? I was under ten years old.

I had no conception of the fact that each of these stories carried a message that was quite as powerful - more powerful in fact - than the stuff meted out to me every week at Sunday School in the local Methodist chapel.

In High Noon, U.S. Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper), just about to retire from the law to become a storekeeper with his new wife, Amy (Grace Kelly), is threatened by a villain that he brought to justice as part of his successful campaign to bring law and order to their town. But the villain, now fresh out of jail, wants revenge.

So, should Will get out of town fast with his wife before the villain arrives on the noon train, or risk losing her by staying and confronting his enemy?

The story is introduced and accompanied by the Ballad of High Noon, “Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’”, with the moral imperative clearly stated:

I do not know what fate awaits me
I only know I must be brave
And I must face a man who hates me
Or lie a coward, a craven coward
Or lie a coward in my grave¹

Then there is the different shade of morality of Shane. This film is set in the wide-open spaces of 1890s Wyoming Territory where a group of homesteaders, legally operating under the Homestead Acts, are being harassed by a ruthless cattle baron who is intent on driving them out.

Shane (Alan Ladd) rides into the picture - the laconic, iconic super hero. Quietly but decisively he changes the balance of power and helps the homesteaders overcome the wicked intentions of the cattle baron. At the end of the film, with the bad guys defeated, Shane rides off into the landscape. He has been shot and we do not know if his wound will prove fatal.

Corny, huh? Well, maybe, but both of these films made an impression by promoting a philosophical package that included the rights to a safe place to call ‘home’, rights of property ownership, the rights and obligations of citizenship, and the mutual support and dignity that comes with all of these within a framework of the rule of law.

Both films are about ‘civilization’ in its broadest sense. Both films are about both rights and responsibilities. In particular, the concept of ‘home’ is very important, as are freely acting individuals within a co-operative whole. The use of violence to achieve one’s ends is to be abhorred BUT, as one of my childhood story books put it …

I don’t like guns and I don’t like destruction, but sometimes you have to meet fire with fire.²

All of this carried a greater resonance back then, of course, because, just a few years earlier, the Second World War had devastated so many lives. In fact, quite near to the cinema where I saw these films, a bomb crater that my contemporaries and I used to play in, was tangible evidence of that upheaval.

But then we come to today …

The medieval practice of hostage taking …

In some ways we seem now to have gone back to a time that long predates the Western ‘civilization’ that typified the post-war period.

Just a few days ago there was a prisoner swap between Russia and the US. Good news, I hear you say. And I agree.

BUT, a key point is that journalist Evan Gershkovich, former US marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and others released by Russia should never have been incarcerated in the first place. They had done no wrong.

Whereas those imprisoned by the West had committed crimes, as, for example, Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov who, in 2019, murdered a Chechen dissident.

I don’t doubt that hostage taking, like slavery, is as old as the human race, but I associate it particularly with the medieval world. Isn’t it astonishing that such a medieval practice is so much in evidence in the 2020s?

The most egregious recent example, of course, was its occurrence as part of the hideous assault by Hamas on Israeli citizens on 7 October 2023. More than 1,200 people murdered and more than 250 hostages taken, all accompanied with generous helpings of rape, torture and gleeful video selfies. Unspeakable. Unforgivable.

A case for meeting fire with fire? Yes, I believe so.

… and a wave of violence

As we all know, in a textbook example of hybrid warfare tactics, Hamas’s horrific behavior led to mass protests in support of the vile, antisemitic aggression.

Week after week, in city after city, thugs masked and draped in the Palestinian keffiyeh and flag have been spitting venom across the West. In Britain, the great British bobby has looked on, often with an almost avuncular air: “There, there - these lads and lasses are just lettin’ you know what they think. Nothin’ to worry about.”

But, of course, people do worry. And they worry a little bit more when, on being voted into the UK parliament, a handful of new MPs say that their election victories are a victory for Gaza rather than for their local areas. It’s just that such a statement is alien to traditional British practice and many find it discombobulating.

And then of course, if other events occur to further feed the discombobulation the volcano may erupt. And that’s what has happened, not limited to but including …

… a British Army officer set upon and stabbed multiple times.

… an attempt to remove a child from a reportedly unsafe home environment leading to three days of rioting in the city of Leeds.

… an altercation at Manchester Airport, where two men attacked police officers, breaking a female officer’s nose.

… Worst of all, by far, in Southport, Lancashire, a hideous knife rampage at a children’s dance event resulted in the deaths of three children and the wounding of, and trauma to, many more.

… and “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed”

These and other crimes have led to an unsettled and unsettling mood in Britain. No surprise, it seems to me, that there is public unrest.

But what was surprising and disheartening, to me, was what I consider to be the inappropriate response of Britain’s new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer.

He who swiftly ‘took the knee’ when the Black Lives Matter issue came to prominence seems to have no such mutual sympathy for those in his own country who are struggling to comprehend how and why the metaphorical walls that once defined their territory and beliefs are crumbling to dust.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of these times is the manipulation of ideas and language (let’s call it The New Meme Landscape) to disorientate people into a confused acceptance of ideas and activities that are diametrically opposed to formerly received wisdom.

Take, for example, “Diversity”.

Today, we are told to regard Diversity not only as good but as a strength. In fact, one exponent of this view, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has twxxted …

London’s diversity is our greatest strength.

What utter tripe. But he’s not alone. Far from it, in fact. ‘Diversity is our greatest strength’ has become a mantra of the New World Order. And yet, it is interesting to note that the leaders of the original New World came to the opposite conclusion:

The Founding Fathers saw diversity as a reality and as a problem: hence the national motto, e pluribus unum, chosen by a committee of the Continental Congress consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.³

Later, Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (between September 1901 and March 1909) said:

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

In his remarkable book, The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) also says:

The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism.

Huntington, an American political scientist, adviser, and academic, spent more than 50 years at Harvard University. He was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor. But, nonetheless, in the almost three decades since the book was published, the West, on both sides of the Atlantic, has assiduously gone directly against his advice.

To be crystal clear, none of what I’m saying here is that immigration is wrong. Far from it. Immigration is fine when there is some attempt to attract people who do actually have some liking for the society they are about to join, and where newcomers are prepared to join in. However, if that is not done, there is the inevitable risk of ghettoization and, consequently, a splintering of the entire society.

Indeed, one does have to wonder whether or not, as far as some elites are concerned, there is an active intent to splinter our societies or, at least, crush traditional Western societies. Here a little more of the New Meme Landscape …

U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris has been promoting a strange mantra:

What can be, unburdened by what has been.

What does this mean? Well, I can’t see it as being anything other than a Year Zero call. It seems always to be the case that, for some, the idea of starting the world over again without all the accumulated baggage of the past is very alluring: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if ….. (fill in whatever your supposed glorious-future idea here) ….. ?

The problem is, every time this has been attempted thus far, it has led to some version or other of The Terror, and the deaths of innocent people on an industrial scale. Think French Revolution, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

And these wacky ideas aren’t the only ones. In addition to multiculturalism, hyper-diversity, and a Year Zero restart, we are told that we should aim for equality of outcome for everyone (rather than equality of opportunity) and, even, a dismissal of the recognition of biological sex - “Ooh, congratulations on the birth of your new little one. What gender has it been assigned?”

By the way, the cross-head, above, is from George Orwell’s 1984. I doubt he imagined that his fictional concept would so quickly be taken up by those who are using its logic to grasp power.

Personally, I have come to believe that Samuel Huntington was right when he stated:

In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.⁴

And the rise of civil disorder here in Britain, and elsewhere in the West, is because the multiculturalization project targets the West. Exclusively. The West. Hence The Wild West, 2024.

More on this topic in future posts, including why fault-line arguments and confrontations between the different civilizations are inevitable … and so, so dangerous.

In the meantime, here’s a rather more cheerful snippet, about folks actually getting along. The ‘farmers versus cowboys’ theme that was central to the Shane plot also featured in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma, that opened on Broadway in 1943 and, in 1955, came out as a movie.

So, to conclude, here’s The Farmer and the Cowman:

The farmer and the cowman should be friends,
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
One man likes to push a plough,
The other likes to chase a cow,
But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.

Territory folks should stick together,
Territory folks should all be pals.
Cowboys, dance with farmers’ daughters,
Farmers, dance with the ranchers’ gals.

That’s more like it!

Thanks for reading.

1. High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me), by Dimitri Tiomkin / Ned Washington, performed by Tex Ritter.

2. E.C. Eliott. Tas and the Space Machine (1955)

3. Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)

4. Samuel P. Huntington. Ibid.