The New Sovereigntists: No. 6
On the Impossibility of Imported Substitution
The Trials, Recorded
Against the Financialist Architecture
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We are looking for the newcomer who becomes us. We should be looking at every ground where it was tried.
We are led to believe that a people brought in from outside can stand in our place and, in time, become us. It cannot be done, and the earlier essays have shown why. We are not a set of halls, courts, and codes that any occupant may take over and run. We are a people who came, across thousands of years, to a habit of high trust: the word kept past kin, with no deputy in the room, the impersonal and deferred honor of a widened folk. We who carry that habit are the institution, and the halls, the courts, and the codes are only the works we have raised. A newcomer may occupy the works for as long as they continue; he cannot become the people who raised them. The only joinings that ever held were joinings of cousins, Angle with Saxon, and Dane and Norman after them: strangers, often enough, yet of the same broader stock, who already priced blood in assembly, found law among themselves, and carried the common measure of what a word was worth. Inside that bound the folk widened. Outside it the thing has been tried many times, across more than two thousand years; and wherever a people not of the habit has been set in the offices and on the ground a people of the habit raised, the forms have stood for a time only, the habit has not passed, and what those so set built there after was what they had brought with them.
Yet the regime requires that we go on believing it. It does not require that it be true, and those who force the stranger upon us have no interest in its coming true; he is fetched to occupy and to pay while the waiting lasts, and he is not fetched to succeed. The belief is wanted because it keeps us waiting, and while we wait the lands and the assets pass. So each time the substitution fails, its advocate does not abandon the claim. He offers a further condition, one after another while the replacement proceeds, each presented as the circumstance that will at last make the newcomer one of us; and for as long as there is another plea still to be heard, we are led to do nothing. Those pleas, and the trial each has already had, are the matter of this essay.
The basic case put before us most strenuously is that a people brought in and settled will take up the habit. The further pleas, in order, are these. If mere settlement fails, let them be reared inside the institution from childhood. If the rearing fails, let the institutions and the codes be laid over them where they stand. And if that fails, let the whole order be handed to them, complete and working, upon ground the heritage stock once held. Each of these has had its trial, and when the last has been heard there is no fifth. In every trial one condition will be found: the forms held only so long as the heritage people remained the dominant force at the center and on the ground, and no longer. And what is preserved through every trial, and through the waiting each trial requires, is the book, the great ledger of foreign ownership.
Rome tried the basic case. When the older citizen body had ceased to be the decisive element, the empire settled whole federate peoples inside its frontiers and enlisted them in its defense; the Goths were admitted across the Danube in 376 and settled as federates in 382, under their own chiefs and their own law. It propped the arrangement with a professional army paid in coin, an expanded bureaucracy, and successive reforms of its currency and administration. By these means the center and the collection were preserved for generations; but no people was thereby reconstituted who could hold the order without them. The peoples Rome had displaced and resettled across the Danube and the Balkans did not become Roman by being moved. Their older lines reasserted themselves whenever the central restraint weakened, and the ground was left so mixed that conflict upon it can be turned on and off to this day, nearly two thousand years after. The institutions outlived the stock, and they did not replace it. Machiavelli, looking back for the point at which Rome’s ruin began, found it in the enlisting of the Goths, from which day the strength of the empire passed out of Roman hands. He was writing in an Italy whose cities had in similar fashion given their defense to hired captains, and he warned that arms not one’s own are useless and dangerous; and what he wrote of soldiers holds of every office, for a people brought in whole will hold it for their own.
Rome itself also first gave the first further plea its earliest trial, rearing the sons of the leadership class inside the institution so that they would return and rule their own peoples as Romans. The sons of the local elites, of client kings, of tribal chiefs, and later of federate leaders, were brought to Rome and schooled as Roman elites, in the language, the law, and the military habit, often given citizenship or rank, and sent back to govern. Arminius is the early and classic case: raised inside the system, a citizen and an officer of Rome, he turned in the year 9 and destroyed the three legions of Varus in the Teutoburg forest. In the later Empire the practice was extended to Gothic, Frankish, and Alamannic leaders, many of whom served as officers and federate commanders. It was one of these, Alaric, who had led Gothic troops in the emperor’s own wars, that sacked Rome itself in 410; and it was another, Theodoric, schooled for ten years at the emperor’s own court in Constantinople as one of its own, who went home to his people and took Italy from the empire in 493. The children learned the forms; the habit did not pass back with them.
The same plea received its later and more extreme trial among the janissaries. Boys taken from the Christian villages of the Balkans, the same ground Rome had emptied and resettled, were raised from childhood inside the corps, converted, schooled, and drilled, forbidden to marry or to trade, and bound to no kin but the corps and to no master but the Sultan. If an institution could of itself make a people of the institution, such a people would have been made there. Yet the corps held only so long as its men were forbidden houses of their own, and an institution that must forbid its men sons in order to keep them has made no people. No sooner were they allowed to marry and to enroll those sons than the corps became a hereditary caste, in which places were bought and sold and pay was drawn by men who never carried a weapon, and which ran itself by the only order the lands they were taken from had ever known, kin and favor. When Osman II moved to raise a new army and bring them to heel, they killed him in 1622; when Selim III built troops of his own, they deposed him in 1807; and only in 1826 did Mahmud II end them, by turning cannon upon their barracks. They had been given the whole institution, and they made of it a clan with the state’s arms in its hands.
The later empires sought not to repeat Rome’s error, and in avoiding it they gave the second further plea its trial. They did not bring the subject peoples in. Over the peoples of India the British, and over those of North Africa and the Levant the French, and in the near east both, laid railways, telegraphs, cadasters, and legal codes where those peoples stood, which made the collection regular for as long as the external power held the ground. They held it by ranking and balancing the subject peoples, and by forcing them together on the same ground, so that no single stock could consolidate a refusal. But the technologies and the codes created no successor people of the habit. What the forced mixing created was a ground on which conflict and violence can be turned on at will, one community at a time, by those who hold the claims upon it: a community is left in peace until it has raised a surplus; its neighbor is then set upon it, and the harvest is taken under cover of the quarrel; and when the taking is done the peace is restored, that across several generations thereafter the next surplus may grow. That remains the condition of the east of Europe more than sixteen hundred years after the Romans; it is the condition of the Middle East and North Africa after the French and the English; and it is the condition of much of Africa today, after colonialism. India was parted in blood in 1947, the very year the British left it; and Algeria, when France withdrew in 1962, drove out nearly a million settlers of French stock and within a generation was at war with itself. Nor did the institutions fare better than the peace. Britain left a parliament in each land it released: Pakistan’s constitution of 1956 was set aside by its army in 1958; Ghana was a one-party state within seven years of its independence; and Nigeria’s parliament fell to its soldiers within six. The method secured land title and the rents, and it secures them still; but it depended, as Rome had, on the empire’s own heritage people remaining the dominant force on the ground and in the higher offices, and once that force was withdrawn no successor of the habit appeared.
There remained the last plea, that the order be left standing and handed over entire; and it was tried within living memory, in Rhodesia and in South Africa. Here the case runs from the other side, for these were not strangers brought onto our ground, but the order our people had built in another land, handed to the people of that land. In both, a stock of the habit had built the farms, the mines, the railways, the towns, the courts, and the surplus, and the majorities around them had lived inside that order for generations, had worked in it, been schooled by it, and drawn their bread from it. In 1980 and in 1994 the institutions and the ground were handed over, and the transfer was explicit and complete. In Zimbabwe the farms were seized from 2000, the land that had fed the country and its neighbors went to waste, and by 2008 the currency had failed so utterly that it was abandoned the year after. In South Africa the grid that had lit the south of the continent went dark by rotation for years together, and murder runs to tens of thousands a year. Large portions of the prior productive class were driven out or killed, and no later thickening of administration, and no technical layer, has reversed the loss. Those who had lived inside the order all their lives could not hold what was handed to them once the heritage stock that had built and held it was removed from dominance.
Let that be the measure of what is now attempted upon our own ground. If the order could not be held by those who had lived in it, on soil we once held, it will not be taken up by those who never knew it, set down on soil we yet hold; and it is these who are brought in by the many millions, from the former empire and its rim, from lands where that handover was made and failed, and from lands that never had even the borrowed order that once stood in Rhodesia and South Africa.
Nor would it go otherwise if a stronger stock were brought. The Russians and the Chinese hold their own ground by the habit each formed on its own soil across its own centuries with its own extended kin and blood. Their courts, their administration, and their armies work where they stand because those institutions grew out of those peoples and out of the trust each built among its own. Neither habit can be lifted out and set down here. A Russian or Chinese administration placed on our ground would not become our institution any more than ours, placed on theirs, would become theirs. Both have been tried. The Russian order set over the east of Europe in 1945 lasted exactly as long as Moscow was willing to use the Russian army that held it there, and in 1989, when that army was ordered to stand aside, it fell in a single season; and the courts, the ministries, and the army we raised in Afghanistan across twenty years were gone within days of our own leaving, in 2021. The habit is not a grade a capable people can reach. It is a particular thing made on particular ground by a particular people across vast stretches of time. If even such rare peoples as have become an institution could not stand in our place, the peoples now brought in, from lands that never held an order of their own making, cannot even conceive of such.
Jefferson saw as much. In his Notes on the State of Virginia he asked whether the rapid importation of foreigners for the sake of numbers was sound policy, and he answered that it was not. Immigrants, he wrote, bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in early youth; or, if they throw those principles off, they pass to an unbounded licentiousness. In proportion to their numbers they will share in the legislation, infuse their spirit into it, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent mass. He preferred a more homogeneous, peaceable, and durable government, and he doubted the expediency of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements; the useful artificer was one case, and the mass importation of those formed under other principles was another. Nor was it a young man’s passing remark. Thirty years on, in 1817, he wrote to George Flower that foreigners should be discouraged from settling together in large masses, where, as in the German settlements, they keep for generations their own languages, habits, and principles of government; and of the English alone he said that they differ from us in little.
What, then, does a people brought in do? It does what Jefferson said it would, and what the guest not of the blood has always done. It does not take up the habit of the house; it builds in the new land what it had in the old, the clan before the stranger, the favor before the rule, and the peace kept by its own men in its own streets. And it can build more freely here than at home, because here it is safer to build the pattern of being they know, and because the host’s provisions carry it while it builds. The record of our cities shows exactly that building, and shows it in the state’s own reports, if they are read past the gross adjustments that have been made to them.
It begins by keeping its own peace. In Sweden the police have for years listed by name the districts they call vulnerable, where criminal networks hold sway and parallel structures keep their own order beside the law. In 2025 there were sixty-five such districts, nineteen of them especially vulnerable, and to them were tied some six in ten of the country’s shootings between 2022 and 2024. In 2022 the country recorded three hundred and ninety-one shootings and sixty-two dead, and in the year following its prime minister told the nation that Sweden had never seen anything like it, and that the armed forces would be brought in to help the police. In France the fire brigade has for a quarter of a century entered the sensitive quarters under police escort when tension runs high, and in 2024 alone more than fifteen hundred firefighters were assaulted. Where the police must keep a list of districts by name, and the fire brigade must enter under escort, what has formed is a rival people incapable of the habit.
A peace kept for the clan is not kept for those outside it, and to an order so built the host stands outside its law. In Rotherham, a town of a quarter of a million, some fourteen hundred children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 by gangs the victims mostly described as Asian, many of Pakistani heritage, while council and police looked away. In Germany the federal criminal police office counted, in its report for 2024, seventeen hundred and forty suspects of violent crime for every hundred thousand Syrians, and seventeen hundred and twenty-two for every hundred thousand Afghans, against one hundred and sixty-three for every hundred thousand Germans; and behind those figures stand Solingen, where in August 2024 a Syrian whose asylum had been refused, and whose removal had not been carried out, knifed three people to death at a town festival, and Aschaffenburg, where in January 2025 an Afghan whose claim had been rejected killed a man and a two-year-old child in a public park. Beside them stands Paris, where in 2015 men who had come from the former empire and its rim killed one hundred and thirty. That is not the peace a clan keeps among its own. It is the host treated as prey.
What is done to the host’s children and in the host’s streets is done also to the host’s purse, which such an order takes as spoils. In Minnesota a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, with the sites it enrolled, claimed to have served some ninety-one million meals during the pandemic, and took about two hundred and fifty million dollars of federal money for meals never served. By early 2026 seventy-eight people had been charged and fifty-seven convicted, and the prosecutor’s own figures put about nine in ten of those charged among the state’s Somali community. Officials had seen the signs early. When they held back approval of new sites, the nonprofit sued the state’s Department of Education in Ramsey County, in November 2020, charging racial discrimination. The department stopped payment in March 2021, resumed it the next month, and went on paying until January 2022; and the judge in the case afterward stated publicly that no court had ever ordered it to pay. From there the cases spread into the Medicaid programs, housing stabilization and autism therapy among them, until federal prosecutors offered a preliminary estimate that at least half of some eighteen billion dollars paid through fourteen such programs since 2018 may have been fraudulent, some of it spent on resorts and property overseas. Let no one suppose that these were men who failed to understand an impersonal system. They understood it well enough to empty it.
The same order does not stop at the purse. When the guest is made a citizen it goes to the ballot, and it goes together as a bloc, sharing in the legislation, as Jefferson warned, in proportion to its numbers. In Sweden, in September 2026, more than one eligible voter in six had been born abroad; seven in ten voters of non-European origin went to the left; Rinkeby went to it ninety-four in a hundred; and the government that had tightened citizenship and deportation fell by three seats. In its place stands the party that held the door open in 2015, carried by partners who want it opened again. The guest has voted on how the door is to be kept.
It will be answered that what the newcomer does not learn, his children will be taught in our schools, and that what he cannot do in an office, the thinking machines will do for him. Both answers are illusions. The schools teach nothing worth the name: the colleges must now give remedial arithmetic and English to the very entrants the schools have passed, so that what is handed on is a certificate and not a mind. And the machines do not think. They imitate fluent speech, and speech is neither thought nor reason; whatever sense appears in them was put there by the people who built them and who keep the current running to them. Turn off the power and the illusion is gone in an instant, the machine silent and the schooled man standing beside it with nothing in his own head to take its place. Nor need anyone turn it off. It is enough that it fail, as it has failed in South Africa, where the grid a people of the habit built was handed over and went dark. A substitution that lasts only while the lights are on is no substitution, and the lights are kept on by the very people being replaced.
Nor is it any remedy to bend the offices themselves until they fit the newcomer, which is the last thing tried when the schools and the machines have failed. An office adapted to those who do not keep its rule is at once turned by them to the support of their own, and against the heritage people who raised it. We have seen it already in this record. In Minnesota the offices that questioned the claims were answered with a suit for racial discrimination, and of their own accord, under no order of any court, went on paying, until programs raised for the children and the infirm of that state were feeding one community within it. In Rotherham the managers of the council’s own services told their staff not to name who the abusers were, so that an office raised to protect the town’s children protected the men who preyed on them. And in England in 2025 the Sentencing Council instructed the courts that a pre-sentence report, without which a community sentence generally cannot be passed, would normally be necessary for an offender from an ethnic, cultural, or faith minority, an instruction set aside only when ministers objected and Parliament passed a law forbidding it. In each case the office was adapted to the newcomer, and in each the adaptation was made at the cost of the people the office was raised to serve.
Why, then, is a thing that has failed on every ground where it was tried, and that neither school, nor machine, nor adapted office can mend, still pressed upon ours? Because it was never meant to make a people. It was meant to preserve the book, the great ledger of ownership, whose titles, in the reckoning of those who hold them, run back to Rome. The record already recited shows what is kept when all else is lost. The collection of Rome was preserved for generations after the people who had raised it had ceased to count; the Sultan’s title stood through two centuries in which his corps was a clan; and the empires secure their land title and their rents to this day on ground where nothing else they built has stood. The habit can fail to pass; the people who raised the order can be thinned or removed; the ground itself can be spent; and the ledger and its holders remain.
The failure of the substitution is therefore no miscarriage of the holders’ design. It is the design, and it pays them twice: once while the failing lasts, and once when it is complete. While it lasts, it pays them as it paid the empires. A ground on which unlike peoples have been forced together is a ground on which conflict and violence can be turned on at will, community by community, so that each may be left in peace until it has built up its surplus, and then be set upon and harvested in its turn. The second number walked that harvest across our own soil: the soldiers of the Revolution, in a drought of money made for the purpose, selling their certificates at two shillings in the pound to men who were paid twenty for them in 1790; the farmer after 1873, when silver was struck from the coinage and the long deflation made his note crueler every year he carried it; the citizen whose gold was taken in the trough of 1933; and the household of 2008, sold up in a collapse that left the claims against it whole. On mixed ground the same harvest needs no drought, for the quarrel is the cover. The Balkans, which Rome mixed, were set alight again in the 1990s, neighbor against neighbor; Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria have burned by turns on the lines the French and the English drew; and Rwanda and the Sudan have done the same since the colonial powers withdrew. The forced mixing of our own lands has brought the method home, and the first fires are already lit: in Leicester in 2022 Hindu and Muslim fought in the streets of an English city; in Dijon in 2020 Chechen and North African did so in a French one; and the shootings Sweden counts by the hundred are the wars of the networks in its listed districts upon one another. That strife, people against people and clan against clan, consumes the imported themselves and keeps any broader refusal fragmented; and a refusal that is fragmented refuses nothing.
And when it is complete, it pays them the whole. A people that believes the newcomer will become it waits; while it waits, it is spent; and when it is spent, the lands and the assets it held pass to those who hold the claims upon them. The passing has begun, and nowhere among our lands is it pressed faster than in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. In 2004 fewer than one in ten of those living in the United Kingdom had been born abroad; by the census of 2021 it was one in six; and by 2024 it was very nearly one in five, thirteen million in all and the highest share ever recorded, the net inflow having reached nine hundred and forty-four thousand in a single year, while in the year to December 2024 a hundred and fourteen thousand more British nationals left the country than came home to it. In Ireland, a land that within living memory sent its own children abroad, about one in five is now foreign-born. And as the ground passes, so do the high offices. Within these few years the offices of Prime Minister, of First Minister of Scotland, of First Minister of Wales, of Mayor of London, of Home Secretary, and of Taoiseach have each been held by a man or a woman born abroad, or the child of a parent who was; and what is seen at the head of those states is seen in ever greater numbers in the councils, on the benches, and in the ministries beneath them, there and all across our lands.
While the ground and the offices pass, the title does not. Wherever the imported have settled in force, as in the listed districts of Sweden and the sensitive quarters of France, the deed is still recorded and the rent still falls due, for the courts and the badge protect titled ownership, domestic or foreign, wherever those instruments can still reach. Physical possession and ordinary enforcement recede beneath that title; the police and the services enter by special arrangement or not at all; and the holder of the title can afford the interval. He borrows against what paper remains, and he has long since moved his wealth beyond the reach of any people’s court or collector: for as the British empire receded from the lands it had mixed, the City of London kept for the holders of claims a web of island jurisdictions, Jersey, Guernsey, and Man at its door, and the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda beyond the sea, the spider’s web, in which the title to a spent country may be held in perfect order while the country itself goes dark. So it was that a fund registered in the British Virgin Islands bought an old debt of Zambia’s for some three million dollars in 1999, sued that country in the High Court in London for fifty-five million, and in 2007 was awarded fifteen. From such a place he can wait through decades, or a century, of collapse on the ground he has left, since inside the regime a claim need not be extinguished for its holder to outlast the ruin. Nothing in the record shows the holders of claims restoring a spent people: Rome did not reverse its later composition; the empires raised no high-trust successors in the lands they released; and Rhodesia and South Africa have not recovered the order that was handed over. To wait upon such men to restore what they mean to take is therefore the very step that completes our ruin.
All of this depends on our doing nothing, and we will do nothing only so long as we believe the replacement is working, or soon will. If we were shown the true numbers of the atrocities against us we would cease to believe it, and we would act. That is why the numbers are kept from us; and governments, which answer first to those who hold their debt, keep them from us in three ways. The first is that they do not record who commits the crimes. In Rotherham the staff told the inquiry that they had been afraid to name the ethnic origins of the abusers for fear of being thought racist; and when a national audit was delivered in 2025, more than a decade later, the ethnicity of the perpetrators still went unrecorded in two cases out of three, a statutory inquiry opening only in 2026. The German police record a suspect by his passport alone, so that the newcomer, once naturalized, is counted as a German; and Sweden has measured the origin of its suspects only three times in a quarter of a century. The second is that they change what is counted as a crime, narrowing the definitions and raising the thresholds for a charge, so that acts once counted are counted no longer. The third is that they let the offender go. At the end of 2025 more than nineteen thousand foreign offenders who had served their sentences and were liable to deportation were living free in Britain, up from under twelve thousand in 2022; and the killers at Solingen and at Aschaffenburg were both men the German state had already ruled must leave. Not one of these measures makes a single atrocity less. Nor was Rotherham alone. In Telford an inquiry found in 2022 that more than a thousand girls had been abused across forty years, while the authorities kept silent out of what it called nervousness about race. And when some twelve hundred women were assaulted in the streets of Germany on the last night of 2015, the police of Cologne reported the next morning that the night had passed mostly in peace. What actually occurred is far beyond the numbers that remain in the record, and people already know the scale of what has been kept off the books. The pleas and the measures only keep us from seeing it whole, and so keep us believing, and keep us waiting.
Waiting is how every people in this record lost its ground. The Romans waited on their federates, the Sultan on his corps, and the Rhodesians on a settlement, and each lost what it did not defend in time. We are asked to wait in the same way, on a newcomer who has never once become the people he was brought in to replace, and who was never meant to. That is the whole of the matter. The substitution is impossible. It has failed on every ground where it was tried, and the belief that it may yet succeed is kept before us only so that we will not hold our own ground and refuse the book of claims while we still can. And we still can. What has been broken in us is the exercise of the habit and the will to defend it, not the capacity for it. The capacity is still carried in the houses that choose and rear, and we are yet many.
But a people that means to hold its ground will find that the offices it would act through are no longer its own. The offices that should count the true numbers, charge the true offenses, and refuse the taking are the same offices that kept paying in Minnesota and kept silent in Rotherham. More each year they are held by men who never carried the habit those offices were raised to serve: the imported, who run an office as their fathers ran the clan, and beside them men of our own stock whom the habit once kept out of such offices. The regime places both there, and neither keeps the institution. What they make of the offices they hold is the conversion of institutions from within, and it is the matter of the next number.
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The New Sovereigntists will continue.
No. 7 will take up the conversion of institutions from within.
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