Prepare for the tsunami - " An ungovernable tumult roiling with rage"

There can hardly be anyone left who believes that Brexit is just about the EU. It has come as a shock to the Patrician establishment that all this .. hostility .. to everything they hold dear has come out of left field, and 'Remain' is coming to mean not only remain in the clutches of the Federation, but to remain in a Britain ruled by this scabrous elite.

Two professors of War Studies at Kings, London, have written a piece for the Bruges Group (HT Delingpole) that is recommended reading. It is a succinct precis of much that we have featured here over the years. And the outcome is not encouraging.

They write about 'State Capture' - the process by which the Patrician elite have progressively taken over the State -

"Here are different kinds of political ice cream for sale, but when licked they all turn out to have roughly the same unpalatable taste: a bland, socially progressive, anti-traditionalist, globalist, corporatist flavour."

"... At the same time a technocratic political elite has arisen that is willing to contract out decision-making to supranational organisations like the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and United Nations on just about everything from finance, the law, border security, and the environment."

"With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture."

Well, we won't have it. We want our Parliament back, our democracy back, our public administration back, our schools and universities back and an independent unshackled media free to speak. But just what will it take? Will we spawn a domestic Gilets jaunes movement? And this is where I have difficulties. I deprecate violence and disorder. I hate riots. I can never advocate such action except in the case of foreign invasion, for the preservation of our realm. And yes, I can anticipate your responses. The profs go on to say

"Cumulatively, over the past three decades, then, the empirically demonstrable lesson is that violence and threats work. Crudely, there is simply no arguing with the fact that violence is the deus ex machina for changing the way people think and act. Physical force is a method of political communication, and when it is sustained it invariably succeeds in changing minds and changing policies.

Under the threat of violence, it is often easier for governments to knuckle under for the sake of maintaining a semblance of peace, to wax piously about societal cohesion and resilience, and to climb onwards as though the status quo ante were not crumbling beneath them. The progressive factions of academia, culture, and media cheer them for it. So, if the populace don't really react in the face of such threats and actual violence, and merely light candles and hug teddy bears, then the bet of the political classes is sustained. They have gambled correctly."

And here in intense self-examination I ask whether writing this blog is on the candle-lighting and teddy bear-hugging side of the spectrum, or on the side on which thirteen Gilets jaunues have already been blinded by State munitions? But then this blog is utterly irrelevant in the face of the tsunami about to engulf Britain, a crashing mass of reform that will sweep away the deep ordure from the Augean stables our nation has become. Betz and Smith write

"But we are expert on these matters. We have for decades studied why things fall apart, how a stable, essentially self-policing, productive society can turn into an ungovernable tumult roiling with rage. We know that this happens at first very slowly, a creep-creep-creeping to the limit; and then very fast indeed after the limit has been passed. We also know that no amount of free beer and pizza parties will swiftly return a society deranged by the shattering of the social contract by its own elite back to normality."

Should Parliament betray Brexit, that limit could be passed next week.

Please be very careful in the comments.

David Betz is Professor of the War in the Modern World, Department of War Studies at King's College London.
MLR Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory and Head of Department, Department of War Studies, King's College London.
=============================
Apols to those expecting the HRA today - I'm holding this over