The First Political Order in Crisis

How do I get you to pay attention to this story? Tragically, if you are reading this, you have likely heard of this story before. I can tell it new, perhaps as a noir story? Because that is what this is. This is a story written in black paint and sin.

You play detective.

I will be a vagrant on the street, catching you by your fine, long coat outside a diner while you smoke. Inside, you ordered your regular apple pie, after the waitress asked, “whatcha feel?” It’s America, in the 30’s, and being American, we eat sweet pie—reflecting the curious history of our nation, which, unlike Britain, was blessed with fruit aplenty, not stuck with meat and gravy. If you are kind, perhaps I can appear instead, not as a homeless freak clutching at you from the shadows, but instead as a veiled widow, walking into your office to break news about a grisly murder, played in by haunting jazz.

And in a way, I, in fact, would prefer to tell this story as a noir story, because the facts alone are so terrible, in the ancient meaning of the word terrere, that of dread, that as a noir, writing this quaint tale becomes more bearable. I am thankful that I write with a keyboard, and not a typewriter, so no actual precious ink must spill these burdened words, because this is not about a grisly murder. This is about four thousand rapes. And selfishly, I will write this as a noir. Because words fail me if I write this as fact.

The hour is late. The night is dark. I catch you by surprise. I say in a sexy, slag voice, “Detective, let me tell you a story.”

Three Bad Cops

“I know you hear migration and think, the Irish were once not white, and they assimilated into America, so will everyone else. Detective, I know you’re a bit liberal, and think immigration and assimilation is fated by history to always occur because this happened in 20th-century America. You think this case is going to be like any other, and in fact, you’re cynical about anything else happening. Nothing ever happens; after all, every case is the same. You’ve been working cases like this for a long time. I can see in your weathered eyes, the arc of history, bent towards justice.”

“Detective—consider a popular idea in the profession of history, that ‘the past is a foreign land.’ We neither assume that the past is like our present, nor our present like our past. This case bears a passing resemblance to stories you have heard before, but this wretched tale is different.”

“So, detective, here are the facts of the case.”

“On dark and violent nights in little Rotherham, a town in northern England, mostly white English girls were gang-raped by mostly Pakistani men, though, for ease, sometimes I’ll call them Sicilians, who coordinated their rape, torture, and abuse. Now, detective, before you look away—I am not a conspiracy theorist. I’m just a person who saw something I shouldn’t have, so I went to the police.”   

“But, like me, these girls were not taken seriously by the police. The police did that thing we know well and blamed the victims. You know all about this. This is popular to discuss. The police also chose, intentionally, to not take the cases seriously because of fears of racism and xenophobia.”

“Here is a third little fact, to assure you that I am not lying, detective, Al Jazeera has written the following:

‘But the truth is that these children were abused because they were girls. They were denied any pretence of protection from the authorities because they were poor. They were targeted because of their race and then ignored by authorities that simultaneously feared being accused of racism while adopting racist assumptions about the sorts of white girls who would “sleep with” brown men. This is about race and class and sex. And misogyny runs through all three.’

And the NYT has said,

The victims identified in the report were all white, while the perpetrators were mostly of Pakistani heritage, many of them working in nighttime industries like taxi driving and takeout restaurants. The same was true in recent prosecutions in Oxford, in southern England, and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale, where nine men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin were given long prison sentences in 2012 for abusing up to 47 girls. Investigators in Scotland have reportedly uncovered a similar pattern of abuse. Sexual abuse of children takes many forms, and the majority of convicted abusers in Britain are white. But as Nazir Afzal, the chief crown prosecutor in charge of sexual violence and himself of Pakistani heritage, put it, “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”

Detective, these cruel facts are only cruel facts. They are not the story.”

“In the 2000s, a small group of feminists began to look around the world and ask about the condition of women. They were motivated by their encounter with Muslim society to try to understand why, despite the inclusion of Afghan women in parliament, the condition of women as a whole had not improved. On a trip to Afghanistan, one of the authors, Valerie Hudson, happily chirped in a Kabul café about women’s empowerment. A female MP stopped her and said, ‘Valerie, my husband could divorce me simply by saying the phrase, ‘I divorce you’ three times. If he did, I would lose custody of my children and have nowhere to live. Even if he does not divorce me, I have little say in when and to whom my children are married. How empowered am I really, Valerie?’

“The feminists, Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen, then wrote the book The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide. In the book, they defined something they call ‘the syndrome.’

‘The Syndrome is “the patrilineal/fraternal system of kinships, clans, and tribes who strive for security through dominance. They do this by creating systems of male fraternal bonding that are dependent on the use of violence as a means of control and the commoditization of women’s and girls’ bodies to cement bonds between families. To assess the Syndrome across countries, the authors measure on a sixteen-point scale the presence of eleven different cultural practices as indicators: (1) the practice of patrilocal marriage, where women move in with the man’s family; (2) early or childhood marriage; (3) personal status laws that benefit men and give women few rights; (4) laws restricting women from property ownership; (5) bride price and dowry customs; (6) the preference for having a son and thereby a sex-ratio alteration; (7) marriage between cousins; (8) polygyny; (9) impunity for the killing of women; (10) the rape of women being viewed as a property crime against men; and (11) physical violence and force, which is used universally to dominate and control women. Looking at this list, we may be tempted to think that such kinships are operating in a minority of countries. The opposite is in fact true. According to this scale, the Syndrome currently exists in 120 of the 176 countries assessed.’

Societies with the syndrome are generally status societies.”

“We can also note an opposite. Call it the best cure we have.”

“In Western societies, for the most part but not entirely, the syndrome was eradicated by three forces, we call the Enlightenment, industrialization, and feminism. Consider them a gang of cops that worked the streets long before you, before the streetlights went out, Al Capone took over, and the bright arc of justice blinded you.”

“The story goes that agrarian and mercantile countries in Western Europe and North America generated excess capital over many decades, which allowed the substitution of capital for labor, or industrialization. The class that benefited from this, which Marx called the bourgeoisie, then sought to make the world more just and equal, tearing down the old class structures, serfdom, and aristocracy. Commodification, capitalism, and wealth exploded in an emergent planetary commercium, born from the intersection of Renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation. Women, who for most of history had been, despite romantic fantasies of a lost primordial equality, restrained in their education, agency, and property rights, burst upon the scene of history at a never-before-seen scale, of their own accord, seizing enlightenment rationality for their own end of liberty, buoyed by industrialization and bourgeois property rights. Nothing in this story is assured by fate. Millions engaged in the vast labor, the vindication of the rights of woman.”

“These societies without the syndrome are generally what we can call contract societies.”

“This created a new condition, not a syndrome, a practice of sex-equal, contract-mediated, civil society, what, detective, we might call a new form of civilization, that replaced the patrilineal/fraternal system of kinships, clans, and tribes with a new form. The cops beat the mob.”

“This new form of civilization has the following characteristics: men and women jointly move into a new home for marriage; men and women marry at later ages; personal status laws support women and prevent domestic abuse; laws allow women to hold property; the dowry is merely the quaint cultural practice of the bride’s family paying for the wedding; people are glad for female and male children, femicide is absent; consanguineous marriage is illegal and not practiced; single-partner marriage is the norm; there is equal prohibition and punishment for the murder of men and women; the rape of women is a crime against women, not male property; and there is a general prohibition on violence and force, both to dominate and control women, and in general, to resolve political questions.”

“Now, detective, this did not happen everywhere, all at once. No, this story—the Enlightenment, industrialization, and feminism—happened in very few places over a long period, nearly two centuries, not as one vast change or revolution. This story has strange arcs—prohibition, for example, which was tied to pacifism, the end of domestic violence, and suffrage. Importantly, illegal and not practiced are different words and concepts, and we were fortunate to have the syndrome mostly be illegal and not practiced.”

“This new form of civilization is what we might call, modernity. That is why we say, ‘modern civilization.’ Like all cultural practices, modernity can be taught, forgotten, passed down, misremembered, replaced, and changed. Modernity is not a temporal but a cultural practice. There is nothing in time of modernity—there is only what we call modern in practical human activity.”  

“The syndrome has eleven defining features. Abandoning each and every one of these takes time, and usually, the violent, brutal force of the state, the revolutionary power of industrialization and capitalism, and both the Enlightenment and feminism. Many societies beyond the Western origins of these three cops—Enlightenment, industrialization, and feminism —have abandoned the syndrome in part or in full. South Korea, for example, has a terrible problem of domestic abuse of women, but also has many other critical dimensions of women’s progress, including property inheritance. In China, while women may inherit property, they have a male-to-female ratio of 105.07 to 100 because of femicide.”

“These nations, like many others, have had their own enlightenments and feminist revolutions. We know that this syndrome is not easily discarded or removed. The syndrome governs life, love, reproduction, property, who lives and who dies, where you live, and how. This is no small or meagre thing to change, this is more deeply rooted than anything else, far deeper than that Sicilian thing you always have to fight, detective, that leaves old and young men, dead, lying in the darkness of the street.”

“That is why we use the word ‘enlightenment.’ We meant we could see the bodies and hunt the killers. We had cops to protect us from the Sicilians.”

“But the streetlights went out, detective, Al Capone says we can’t afford them, and that is why this is a noir story.”

Differences

“Now, let us investigate the conditions of women in Britain and Pakistan. This is really where the story begins.”

“In Britain, patrilocal marriage is not practiced; in Pakistan, patrilocal marriage is practiced. In Britain, women typically marry at around 30; in Pakistan, women often marry at around 18. In Britain, personal status law is English common law and empowers women; in Pakistan, personal status law is rooted in the Quran and Hadith. In Britain, since before the 20th century, women have been able to inherit, own, buy, and sell property; in Pakistan, while women have legal rights, in practice, patriarchy, tribal custom, and family pressures prevent women from exercising them. Regardless of the law, when the law clashes with the syndrome, the syndrome often prevails. Bride price and dowry customs are historical concepts in Britain, but are essential for marriage in Pakistan. In Britain, femicide in the form of the murder of girl infants and honor killings of women is unheard of; in Pakistan, this is a crisis. In Britain, bigamy was made illegal in 1604, but in Pakistan, polygamy is permissible. Would you believe me, detective, if I told you Pakistanis who settled in Britain reintroduced the practice of polygamy? That, though the law says this is illegal, the practice thrives?”

“Detective, honor killings are common in Pakistan, not Britain. The rape of women in Britain is a crime against a woman, and while Pakistan has legal relics that proclaim this a crime against women, but in fact, revenge-rape and violence to defend ghairat, male honor, is a common practice. When law goes to war with the syndrome, the syndrome wins, unless— and this is a vital and absolute fact—one has a powerful, active state. In contract societies, the state mediates individual relationships. In status societies, the state is merely the strongest clan.”  

“Collectives enforce law through relative status and kinship; individuals enforce law through the state.”   

“Fear of someone, or the fear of offending them, confers a type of status upon them. Consider the fear of a man in debt offending their lender, of how little men shake when the big Sicilians come by for protection money, or of how servants long ago quaked in fear of aristocrats.”

“Detective, though we think of law as an absolute, there is a deeper law. The law of the first political order, the distribution of rights, duties, and things between men and women. Politics, is after all, who gets what: who gets life and when; who gets rights or not; who gets property or not; what sex children are allowed to be; how many spouses one has; and who gets a detective to investigate their case when they are beaten and raped.”  

“And finally, though not listed in the syndrome, in Britain, girls are able to walk around freely without male protectors, what is called in Islam a mahram, and if they are harmed or violated, the law—not the clan system, not male honor, not the tribe—brings them justice. In Pakistan, while women may walk freely in some places, this is only true in certain distinct locations at certain times, and the best practice per tourist sites is to have a man with you.”

“Detective! I know most rape in Britain is done by British men, but consider detective, I am not inquiring about those cases, but this particular case, because we now are concerned with this particular crime. It is true, detective, that the majority of murders in America in 1932 were not done by the Sicilians, but we are in fact investigating that Sicilian thing.”

“People with the syndrome, introduced into Britain for the strange reason of cheap Deliveroo and textiles, did not change. In fact, the pressure of change at the moment of their introduction was towards fragmentation, not assimilation, because to change culture is to lose honor, and unlike those Sicilians in 1932 who could move to Iowa and never see a Sicilian again, these Sicilians in fact maintain ties to their homelands through modern technology. These Sicilians moved to Britain in much larger numbers, all at once, and, because of the history of colonialism and the liberal attitudes of the state, no police are forcing them to assimilate. Nobody is breaking out batons, as would have without a doubt happened had Sicilians had mass gang raped WASPs in New York in 1932. In this enlightened era, we do not use batons.”

“A similar case, though with different facts, but nonetheless a part of this story can be told in 21st-century London, through posters, where female genital mutilation has been imported. To combat FGM, the police are not raiding homes—that would be fascist—the state is kindly asking, begging, Al Capone to please stop cutting off a young girl’s clitoris, please. In this enlightened era, the state does not use batons, but uses posters and the ‘Changemakers Program in partnership with The Five Foundation, and funded by Firebird Foundation.’ I wish, in fact, we were dealing with Al Capone, and that Sicilian thing, which was a crime and not a ‘we’ thing, and a ‘practice.’”

“In America, the police beat the English language into the Sicilians, Cajuns, and the Cherokee. Forcible assimilation was a necessary tool of the Enlightenment, industrialization, and feminism. But we now know that beating people to change them is wrong. Al Capone has told us so. Posters and foundations are doing the trick, Mr. Capone has promised.”

“Britain, for cheap labor, imported people but did not change them. This allowed the introduction of syndrome practices into a culture that had destroyed them. Men with the syndrome in Rotherham saw pretty white girls walking alone. Which means these girls were undefended, as they had no clan or male escort. White fathers do not have ghairat, no AK-47 bought from Afghans hidden in the closet, and no practice of revenge killings. The police, these men know—like the police in Pakistan, I mean Sicily—are not that big a deal, because the job of the police is ensuring stability, not law and order, not serving the arc of justice. You don’t have to take them seriously. The police proved them right. Al Capone paid off the cops, but here, the cops said, ‘justice has to be blind, and anyway, we thought this was just child prostitution.’”

“Detective, don’t expect the Pakistani women of Rotherham to help—they have the syndrome too, which requires men and women to survive, in an ouroboros of rape. On TikTok live, they discuss how to help their men, accused of crimes by the vicious, white supremacist state, persecuting them unfairly for raping girls. While some of them condemn these acts of violence, many do not. 

‘I encountered Suju, the wife of another jailed groomer. She was afraid of him but she, too, thinks white girls are: ‘Filthy. How they dress. They have no shame, no fear of Allah.’ Was it OK to hurt them the way the men did?, I asked. ‘No. You can’t hurt people. Allah does not want that,’ she replied. ‘But it is the girls who should be careful. They did something to him, maybe bad magic. I am now alone, no money, no life.’”

“These groups are often more conservative than their kin and clan back home in Pakistan.”

“Perhaps this is the result of a natural collectivist reflex that arises in people with the syndrome when they encounter individualism in so stark and abrupt a way.”

“Perhaps, this is because they are freer and prosperous in Britain than in Pakistan, because while in Pakistan other clans will punish them, in Britain, they are left alone, in fact, subsidized by the state, which provides welfare to people readily and generously. Especially if they have many wives, because though polygamy is quite illegal, when the syndrome goes to war with the state, the syndrome wins.”

“Perhaps the freedoms, liberties, and individualism that have been won for women in the West are what make them vulnerable to a pre-political system of collective domination, satisfaction, and control, so men simply take advantage of this.”

“Or maybe, perhaps because the Enlightenment, industrialization, and feminism did not happen to these people, they are acting as they always would have, and raping vulnerable people.”

“The story could be that simply, different cultures interacted negatively, with no deep meaning or broader social or political context. But the fact is that while being raped, the girls were called white cunt and kafir.”

“Detective, is this all speculation to you? Racist gossip and vagrant fearmongering.”

White Men will Get Ghairat

“Detective, I ask because I have noticed something happening, which is that societies that have defeated the syndrome can be reinfected with the syndrome.”

“White men will start to have ghairat, too. Because the state only loses to the syndrome when the state acts, not like a state, but like a losing clan.” 

“Western societies will become more conservative the more the syndrome is imported to provide cheap labor. Feminist progress relied upon the elimination of a series of nearly a dozen social, biological, and legal practices, which, if the state retreats, cannot survive an encounter with patriarchal kinship networks. That means that individuals encounter collectives. Exactly as lone English girls, allowed to walk around alone, were preyed upon by actual gangs, who acted collectively, in the traditions of their culture. Western society will revert to collectivism in the encounter with other collectives, along racial lines, because of events like Rotherham.”

“So, long-term, the condition of women will be more and more regressive. Of course, even then, the most extreme Western conservatives do not do honor killings.” 

“This regression will begin as an aesthetic, because status is symbolic.” 

“Here’s a little evidence. We have a white woman saying that as a pretty English woman, she wants a Somali man, a man from a culture with the syndrome, to leave, begging men to save her. By the way, after the pretty blonde English woman posted that, the man on TikTok ‘jokingly’ threatened to rape her.” 

“Then, we have a feminist site, the 19th, writing in ‘How the Imagery of White Women Victims is Being Used to stoke Anti-Immigrant Fear,’

‘I will fight like no one has ever fought before to ensure that what happened to this American daughter, this incredible American, that this never happens to any other daughter or anyone else ever again,’ Trump said in Rome, Georgia, on March 9, during his first rally after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for president. During the event, Trump also said he would protect ‘suburban housewives,’ who ‘want security’ and ‘don’t want illegal immigrants coming into this country.’ Deborah Kang, an associate professor at the University of Virginia who studies U.S. immigration and border policy, said such language about security highlights a much longer history, especially in the American South, of white supremacists fighting to protect White women from perceived threats posed by men of color. She added that it echoes a kind of nationalist paternalism. ‘So for Trump, one could argue that protecting the homeland and protecting so-called White womanhood are two sides of the same fight.’ she said.’

“Now, detective, consider lynching. We quite commonly believe in liberal discourse that lynching acted as a way for white Americans to terrify black Americans into submission, that this vigilante terrorism and violence served an extra-legal purpose, a secret purpose, that everyone implicitly understood. The extra-legal imposition of a regime of fear put people in their place.”

“Here is a mysterious fact.

‘Lucy, now 25 but too scared to give her last name because, she said, the men who brutalized her still live nearby, knows about contempt. During an interview at her home outside Rotherham, she recalled being questioned about her abuse by police officers who repeatedly referred to the main rapist as her ‘boyfriend.’ The first time she was raped, there were nine men, she said, one on top of her, another to pin her down and force himself into her mouth. Two others restrained a friend of hers, holding open her eyelids to make her watch. The rest of the men, all in their 20s, stood over her, cheering and jeering, and blinding her with the flash of their cameras. It was November 2002, and Lucy was 13.’

She was raped nine times. She is too scared to give her last name. The men who raped her live nearby. Some of the men involved in these cases have been deported, in cases that took nine years.”

“Detective, if lynching was an act of racial terror carried out over 60 years and which took 4,400 victims, what language can we use to describe the grooming and rape of 4,000 girls over a period of 16 years? Detective, what are we to do if white girls were actually raped by Pakistani, I mean Sicilian, men? Are we to ignore this, for the fear of stoking anti-immigrant fear?”

“Detective, isn’t that why the police didn’t investigate? By ignoring these crimes are we conferring upon rapists, a special status, once held by mobsters and aristocrats?”

Homeland

“Finally, detective, you may know I spoke to the Homeland Party but have not mentioned them one time.”

“That is how normal people feel. Normal people see the Home Office posting about FGM and think, ‘that cannot be our future,’ ‘that is not British.’ And they are right—FGM is an import, a strange practice making strange the isle of Albion. They vote again and again for things to change, scrawling with bare flesh and votes on the wall of Château d'If.”

“Normal people see women, like Lucy Connolly, getting arrested for tweeting unpleasant things and think, ‘We must have the opposite of that.’ Homeland is there, waiting. They’ve gone to court for speech, too, just like Lucy Connolly. Homeland is there, waiting. Just like AfD was there, waiting. Just like Vox was there, waiting. Just like Brothers of Italy was there, waiting. Homeland, is there, waiting.” 

“People will go to them because people want justice. Do you really think you’ll stop FGM with posters? What is the humane option: to allow FGM, to use police to stop FGM, or to remigrate and repatriate those persons back to their country, where they can change their culture themselves?”

“Members of Homeland say and do things which scare normal people. They are even neo-fascist in some respects, just like the Brothers of Italy. I have investigated the facts myself, and this I concede.”

“But, detective, here’s the case I have for you. Investigate this story well and tell me, what scares normal people more: the facts of Rotherham or young men’s posts on X?”

“Then, detective, tell me why Kenny Smith is so confident.  Tell me why Nigel Farage is winning. Tell me why Rupert Lowe is even more popular. Tell me what happened in the Finnish city of Oulu and why that is relevant to events in Rotherham. Tell me why Keir Starmer is quoting Enoch Powell. Tell me, what is more humane, batons or remigration, or doing nothing at all, which is what the police already did.”

“And most importantly, this is the most important thing to tell me of all the things I need you to tell me, tell me why Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Was her dream that someday FGM would be imported to London, ensuring the provision of cheap Deliveroo?”

“Detective, before interviewing him, Kenny Smith sent me a video of a speech he gave at the remigration summit. Do you know what struck me? How constrained his speech was. How normal. The most radical thing he said was that these rapes were an act of domination, like lynchings, and he mostly, entirely, spoke about Rotherham. He did not quote Evola. He did not call for a Reich.”

“Detective, I am beginning to think the world has changed. That the ceaseless beating waves of history have crashed upon us and left us smooth and bare, revealing who chance, accident, and the course of human events would have us be. In the origins and doctrines of fascism, you will find no mention of remigration. You will find remigration in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, in Liberia. Two fasces sit beneath his hands in America’s most sacred monument, his memorial. Fasces are built into the monument to the emancipation of the slaves. Their meaning is quite simple: the state bound a people together in freedom, through force, as an alternative to barbarism.”

“That the arc of justice is bright and blinding, that in the long course of human events we may find that those who have stared longest into this light are those most willing to deny justice to others' sight, because having stared so long, they can now only see acts of justice the blind can see. Acts of justice that leave the neofascists on the side of rape victims, feminists and cops on the side of Al Capone, and detectives, everywhere alone, wondering why the world is written in black paint and why the waves beat upon the shore.”