On Nowak and What Comes After

I will not recount here the tragic and senseless murder of Henry Nowak, nor the perfidious treatment accorded to him by the Southampton constabulary, nor, indeed, the repulsive cowardice of Starmer, Lammy, and company. I do not have to. What even a scant few years ago would have been relegated to samizdat is now international news. The self-destructive complacency clouding the hearts of the people of the West seems, at last, poised to lift.

What will we see when it does lift, though? That, more than any horror our great and noble elites inflict on us, is what keeps me up at night.

I believe I am well-placed to speak on this matter. I am, like Nowak’s killer, of immigrant origin. Unlike him, and unlike the legions of his supporters who would have his crime and those of his ilk swept under the rug, I love Great Britain, and I love Europe. I love the Mother Continent and all her children with the desperate fervor of a man who refuses to abandon ship. I love her for her history, her wisdom, her learning, her valor, her storied peoples who are sundered kin to mine; but above all, I love her for her Faith: the Catholic Church, established by Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ the Son of God and Master of Mankind.

For it was this Faith that I came to revere and honor—this Faith which, finally and for all time, snapped the tether of my ancestral religion; it was this Faith that set me free.

That Faith is the invisible architecture of everything I cherish in the West and specifically in Britain. It taught my people in the East the dignity of the individual soul, the radical possibility of equality of all before God (and thus, in time, before the law), the sanctity of conscience, and the possibility of ordered liberty. It built the cathedrals and the universities; it enabled the honoring of the weak and, thus, the possibility of true romance; and (at least in the Mother Continent) forged high-trust societies capable of self-government.

Yet, today, this Faith is treated as a private eccentricity at best and an embarrassing superstition at worst—while other less forgiving religions are granted public deference in the name of “diversity.” My brethren in Britain—nearly all those without my Faith and an alarming number with it—live their lives as though in penance for some unnameable sin. As though building, for all its evils, the most gallant and boyish empire ever to grace the world (and then giving it away) were a crime.

I am, by vocation, a historian; and tracing the growth of the death-drive that powers this shame and so much of public discourse is a task that feels overwhelming at times. This is not the place for it, but I sense that we cannot understand how we came to this pass otherwise.

Were I a fool, I would have rejoiced in the outrage that Nowak’s murder has (rightly) triggered. I would have reveled in it and cheered on the Reform and Restore Britain marches. But I cannot, or at least not with a full heart. You see, even when I stand by my friends at the protest rallies, I am frightened.

I am frightened because anger, even righteous anger, can quickly curdle into something ugly if the angry begin to enjoy the sensation. It can harden into resentment, or hatred, or self-righteousness, all of which are parasitic on the true and the good. Not a one of them ever ends well. There is the further danger—and in the longer term, the greater—of untethering the outrage from the moral grammar that the Faith gives us.

Our temptation in the short and medium term will be to meet the tribalism of the ethnic enclaves with nativism of our own. The marches are necessary. So is, now more than ever, the ethnic confidence of the European man. (Some of my friends call me an “off-white nationalist.”) But we cannot lose sight of what once made Europe master of the seven seas and her sons lords of men: love for and loyalty to the Crucified Lord and all that that means.

What must come when the fog of self-destructive complacency clears—and it will—is a return: to Christ and to His Church. To love, to honor, to romance, to gallantry, to chivalry; to the poise, conscientious self-possession, and playful erudition that once set Christendom apart from the heathen nations. If the reverse happens—if we answer hostility with aggression and sporadic violence with organized violence—then there will, indeed, flow rivers of blood.

No one excels at fighting so much as the European. God has filled the ranks of His armies from the faithful of that land—and will again. Yet what kind of Europe can we build on the skulls and blood of Moors and Indians and Ethiopians? I don’t know—but I don’t want any part of it. For God will spit on such a land; and His saints and angels will turn their faces away from such a people.

As for myself, I did not turn away from the strange gods of my ancestors just to watch my chosen people willingly retether themselves to gods even lesser and stranger.

I stand, therefore, with those demanding justice for Henry Nowak and ethnic and cultural survival for Britain—not with a fool’s unalloyed cheer, nor the mad grin of the bloodthirsty, but with the sober love of a man who has chosen what he loves and thus knows what is at stake. The Mother Continent—animated by her Church and her God—calls her children, native and adopted, to defend her. Let us answer with valor tempered by wisdom and love fierce enough to preserve what is true, good, and eternal.