Letters From the Culture War

The tale of one man's lonely battle in the Culture War writing letters to the editor of the Daily Telegraph that remained unpublished. And the Telegraph is supposedly a 'conservative' publication.

From Christian Order

By Michael Willis

What follows is the Preface to the author’s book published last December. It is available here.

The work contains over two-hundred unpublished letters on the side of common sense and fairness with which the author has bombarded the Daily Telegraph for the last decade. Pithy, satirical and humorous, together they relate the decline of British standards and the Gramscian Long March through once treasured Institutions.

The Brexit victory over the elites, the hypocrisy of the Paralympics, the Wuhan virus terror, uncontrolled migration, indoctrination of our children rather than education, shenanigans in corporate board rooms, the wasteland of modern manners, the deification of the NHS, the concerted attack on family life, free speech and the sanctity of human life. All this and much more come under scrutiny in a search for common sense in the chaos which is post-modern Britain. Despite the increasing madness of the last decade his reflections retain a sense of humour and point towards the changes required for a more hopeful future.

Attractively set out on 130 pages dotted with a dozen diverting illustrations, the letters are topical and entertaining. Although the vast majority were rejected, rather than take no for an answer, and in true ‘Quixotic’ fashion, the writer believed they were good enough to be collected together in this publication.

I'm delighted that he did so. For they also constitute an edifying and uplifting testament to one man’s evangelical Christian perseverance; a commitment that has not wavered even in the face of grave injustice suffered at the hands of the Cancel Culture Gestapo. With true Christian grit, he refuses to bow down to this tyrannical denial of free speech, and fights on, under grace.

- The Editor

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Letters From The Culture War

MICHAEL WILLIS

I am currently stuck in a trench in the middle of a war zone. I don’t have much left in the way of ammunition and not exactly sure who is with me but the enemy has been attacking on all sides. On the Scottish front, where I was stationed over 35 years ago, the enemy seems to have outflanked me. The Wuhan virus may have something to do with it. This has given the enemy a new lease of life as a ‘crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant’ (Madison) and, anyway, why waste a good crisis! These days I am reduced to lobbing over an occasional grenade; more to signify I have not gone away than inflict any real damage. They will no doubt return to mop up the stragglers.

Welcome to the culture war which has been raging for years, but very few even know we are in a war and remain indifferent to which side they should be joining. How does the saying go? There are three types of people – those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; those who wonder what happened. Well, the third group is the largest, seduced by materialism and creature comforts; preferring to be left alone and not have to put up with radical change. These are the sort of people who want to stay in the pandemic lockdown until it is 100 per cent safe before they emerge from their bunkers. These are the ones I attempt to stun into action with the sound of the grenades. I don’t think they realise that the ancien regime has almost been overthrown and a New Age is about to emerge from the chaos. This is termed the ‘new normal’, where personal freedoms continue to be curtailed in an attempt to coerce and direct our thoughts, actions and beliefs.

Gramscian strategy

There is an ideological war being waged on our culture; a war on the way we do things around here in Scotland and the Christian West. The enemy General is the Marxist – Antonio Gramsci; not many have heard of this former leader of the Italian Communist Party. He is the General von Schlieffen of the invading forces, the man with the plan, or in today’s terminology, the road map. His is a much more complex plan than von Schlieffen, the German military strategist and Chief of the General Staff who determined before World War I that on no account should the German army fight on two fronts in the quest to avoid encirclement. The plan dictated a swift defeat of France by marching through neutral Belgium, then turn and take on the Russians before they were able to mobilise. In a similar way Gramsci theorised that communism and its handmaid socialism has to march on all fronts through the Institutions of our civil society and colonise them.

Classical Marxism predicted that the Russian Revolution would spread to Europe through the spontaneous uprising of the workers where the capitalist-bourgeois stage had been reached; that they would seize control of the means of production and overthrow the capitalist-bourgeois system. This spontaneous revolution just did not happen. Gramsci argued that before the economic and political levers of power can be seized the culture first has to be colonised. He understood cultural hegemony as the key to control and power. Change the culture and then seize political power. In Gramsci’s Prison Notebook, he outlined the task thus:

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

We can add to this list the institution of marriage where the heterosexual married family is just one of a number of options now on offer cafeteria-style. The police force which, rather than preserve law and order and protect life and property, would rather be seen not as marshals for Gay Pride marches but actively participating whilst in the Queen’s (Her Majesty the Queen’s) uniform. The armed forces are persecuted by war crime prosecutions, budget cuts and woke recruitment policies; at the same time military leaders attack their own forces as being sexist, racist and bullying homophobes. This terrifies me but delights our enemies.

The Monarchy’s role has been seriously weakened both by the behaviour of its members and the media light shone on the Institution. The Boards of Directors of commercial companies cannot wait to jump onto the latest bandwagon and appear more concerned with virtue signalling to homosexual lobby groups, BLM and environmentalists rather than the interests of their shareholders. Charitable organisations and NGOs have been penetrated by ex-socialist politicians and spout the same nonsense as the corporates. The ever-expanding number of ‘quangos’ seem more concerned with meeting their ethnic and gender quotas rather than building a well-balanced board capable of making effective decisions without Government interference, and allocating taxpayers’ money wisely. The Civil Service, which is supposed to help make our system of governance and policy making work, is destroying it from the inside with partisan decisions and actions which go way beyond the legislative context within which they operate.

More recently the very core of our God-given identity – whether we are made male or female – has been questioned by gender theory. The vast majority, whose sex is fundamental to their identity, are being colonised by a tiny minority who wish to be gender fluid, change their sex or not view themselves as either man or woman. The natural complementarity between man and woman has been ambushed by the Gramsci faction.

Even seemingly benign organisations such as The Institute of Directors have been penetrated. Founded in 1903 by Royal Charter and located in Pall Mall it seems, from the outside, to be a fairly staid, sleepy and old-fashioned institution. If you passed on a red London double decker bus and took a cursory look through their imposing facade you would be forgiven for mistaking it as one of those clubs for the great and the good which are legion in the area of St James. In fact the Institute, of which I was a member and advisor for 17 years, is in the vanguard of this culture war. One of the first to virtue-signal their ‘right on’ attitude by proudly flying the rainbow flag outside their premises and introducing single sex rest rooms. I did suggest they fly the papal flag for important Catholic feasts but this was met with short shrift and derision.

As a Catholic I always understood from the message of Fatima that the errors of Russia, following the 1917 Revolution, would spread across the world. We understood the one remedy is for Russia to be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This has yet to be undertaken by the Pope and Bishops. Gramsci, Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, Black Lives Matter and the rest of the Marxist ideologues have planted and fertilised these seeds of error and are beginning to gather a rich harvest.

Pro-life trigger

How did I get sucked into this war and designated to hold this particular part of the Scottish front?

Around 45 years ago, in the early years of our marriage, my wife handed me a photograph of a third trimester child destroyed by a saline abortion. Although this was 8 years after the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act the image of a badly burnt but perfectly formed baby came as a total shock to my senses. I suppose this was my Lord Kitchener moment; I was needed and I was ready to sign up for the battle. At the time I did not have a particular view about abortion as we did not have children of our own and I was not yet a Catholic. I suppose it was God’s grace that I resolved to do something about it because, in my naivety, I felt that if everyone could see this photograph they would have the same response and the same Damascene conversion. Why would anyone, I thought, want to destroy a beautiful baby not yet born? How wrong I was; already the slogan ‘a woman’s right to choose’ had embedded itself into our cultural consciousness and this trumped the right to life for the weakest members of our society. This was my first exposure to the culture war where the first target of the counter-culture was to undermine the humanity of the unborn baby through the perversion of language and rights to drive a wedge between the unborn baby and their mothers.

My first action was to join the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, then under the tutelage of Phyllis Bowman. Good old SPUC, who have kept the banner waving under her successors John Smeaton and more recently John Deighan in Scotland. In tandem with this I became a member of the charity Life, led by the wonderful Scarisbricks in Leamington Spa. I eventually became chairman of our local group in Scotland, working with a team of ladies offering pregnancy care and counselling services.

I then moved into the political and more direct action of pro-life activity, exposing the corruption of sex education and its link with abortion. This was with Parent Truth and UK Life League, under the leadership of Jim Dowson, the man the Left have come to fear; we were picketing NHS hospitals and clinics most weekends; as the elections came round for the Westminster and Scottish Parliament I worked alongside the indefatigable Josephine Quintavalle and her talented son Bruno, leading the Scottish contingent of the ProLife Alliance. One of the main thrusts of this work was attempting to get the regulators to agree to a televised Party Political Broadcast showing the reality of abortion. This brave attempt failed whilst the BBC continued to show extreme violence in their normal programming.

All the while this was going on I was holding down a busy job as a company director and putting bread on the table for a family of five children. These were good days working within the pro-life family; all highly motivated and committed to protecting life, preserving the family and serving God.

Before social media it was possible to juggle a day job with pro-life activism. My chairman, who did not share my beliefs, requested that l do not cause any reputational damage to the group of companies I was employed by. Despite appearing on television many times, being vilified in the press (on one occasion a leader writer of the Daily Record threatened to punch me on the nose and incited his readership to do the same) it was, by and large, possible to survive. In the social media age of today I would have been hunted down for my hateful, intolerant and misogynist views and have lost my job and my livelihood. Today, I can understand why so many individuals fear for their jobs and reputations and keep their noses clean and their heads down.

Abortion weaponised

I am totally convinced that abortion is the arterial network of the Gramsci road map. Abortion attacks the institution of the family, the role of the mother and the very notion of motherhood. Abortion redefines an unborn baby as the products of conception or a choice.

The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse was in the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and coined the phrase ‘make love not war’, and argued that the Institutions of society were repressing individuals and that they should be sexually liberated. The structure of the family unit was attacked by a philosophy of consequence-free, sexual liberation. Contraception was promoted along with explicit sex education and the notion that unwanted pregnancy would be eliminated by readily available, so-called ‘safe’ abortion. The Papal encyclical Humanae Vitae was attacked within the Church by modernist clerics and those women who were already hooked on the contraceptive pill. Marriage for life and raising children began to look too much like an onerous, self-sacrificial obligation and struggled to compete with ‘free love’, multiple partners and living together before marriage.

The attack on the unborn is demonic and in 2018 accounts for 205,295 deaths every year in England and Wales and 13,286 in Scotland. The accounting of the dead is of 1st World War magnitudes – this is not a phony war; these are real human casualties. This is the equivalent of five Wuhan virus death tolls every year. If a mother is capable of killing her unborn child, where is love? If humanity is capable of glorifying the deaths of these innocents, what hope is there? Of course God is always there through this carnage and assault on the mothers, the fathers and other family relations. Everyone suffers in this silent destruction.

Noble endeavour

Over the last 45 years we have carried a heavy cross of indifference and increasing hatred. For every step forward we have been forced back three steps and now I find myself dug into this trench; only in those rare circumstances where we have helped save an unborn baby did we win some consolation and I suppose that makes it all worthwhile; indeed, many children saved from abortion still write to my wife, thanking her for saving them and giving them their lives and their future. All of the pro-life family were prepared to support women with a problem pregnancy, providing financial help, housing and other benefits and being around when the baby was born.

On the plus side of the balance sheet we have five children committed to the pro-life cause, fighting the same fight with the shield of their Catholic faith and St Michael and the sword of justice. What joy to have the youngest child ordained as a Missionary priest, bringing the supernatural powers of the Church into this battle for souls. Best of all we know we will be on the winning side and that Our Lady will rescue us from our defensive positions and deliver us from our foes. The pro-life cause is a noble endeavour which views all life from conception to natural death as sacred and a gift from God worthy of the utmost respect.

The Church: besieged and betrayed

The Catholic Church has always given us this firm line in the sand, which is why Gramsci et. al. and the errors flowing from Russia want the Church to be taken over and reformed. They seem to be doing a pretty good job of destabilising the Church through the threat of manufactured sex abuse scandals such as the Cardinal Pell imprisonment, the demystifying of the Liturgy and the appointment of wolves within the Diocesan structures.

The appalling appointment of the self-styled public health expert, Professor Jim McManus, as advisor to the English Bishops is a case in point. (Lifesitenews.com; D. Cummings, P. Smeaton; ‘English bishop’s senior health advisor is a convicted thief and lifelong LGBT activist’; 13 May 2020.) It turns out he is an LGBT advocate, who masterminded the closing of our churches during the Wuhan virus pandemic. Even as the Government offered to keep the churches open for private prayer and adoration, Professor McManus advised immediate closure on health and safety grounds. The Bishops seem to be of this world and detached from the spiritual battle we are facing. We need more like Saint John Fisher, the only Bishop to stand up to Henry VIII while the rest meekly obeyed in fear of their lives. Perhaps our Bishops need more of our prayers to sustain them in their role as shepherds.

Vital apostolate

Back in the 1970s it was drummed into us that letter-writing was one of the most important opinion forming tools available to the pro-life movement. It was free; we could put forward our unadulterated side of the argument and it was often effective. National and local papers, Westminster, Holyrood, School Boards, local Councils, agencies and other institutions of influence were bombarded. My particular favourite is the highly influential national newspaper ‒ The Daily Telegraph.

The letter pages of this august daily provide a wonderful forum for the frustrations, hopes, ideals and observations of letter writers across the country. The name, address, mobile number and landline, form of greeting and sign-off are all a requirement for the intrepid letter writer (although most of the letters now wing their way through as emails). This leaves little room to hurl abuse and obscenities, unlike the goings-on with the unidentified trolls of the Twitter-sphere.

The letter pages of the Daily Telegraph are often a very good gauge of the mood of the country and the silent majority. Filled with humour, humility and self-deprecation the writers often provide sensible insights into what should be protected in our society, what can be improved upon in our institutions and in our way of life. So sensible, that whoever is in power should use these letter writers as advisors on Brexit, free trade agreements, the Wuhan virus panic, PPE logistics, organising sports and cultural events and much else besides. If anyone should be concerned about the socialist long march through our institutions it is the readership of the Daily Telegraph.

Original motivations

This brings me onto the purpose of this book.

I have just discovered a horde of my letters to the paper dating back to 2010. Sadly, many of my earlier letters were erased in a computer malfunction. The forced lockdown of the ‘plandemic’ of 2020 provided the perfect opportunity to organise these letters into some sort of order and assess whether they have stood the test of time. Some of them were certainly very prescient and many of them had me laughing out loud. I detected a tinge of submerged contempt for the hypocrisy of the movers and shakers who talk a good game but are utterly lacking in moral principle. So far, so good then, or is this just a vanity project for a writer with too much time on his hands? It might be worth exploring my original motivations to write around one letter every month over the last 10 years.

Certainly, getting published on that middle page next to the editorials gives one a warm feeling of satisfaction. It is a great way to start the day and beats the dreary alternative of jogging or walking around the locality. But it is mainly about the power of the pen to influence, to draw attention and change public opinion. These missives attempt to throw some light on the culture war and the glaring injustices within our society:Injustices such as the ‘search and destroy’ mission of the medical professionals against the unborn.
The sheer hypocrisy of those promoting equal rights for the disabled; yet, at the same time, they heartily approve of abortion up until birth at the mere suggestion of any form of disability, including a cleft palate.
The realignment and disfigurement of our police from a force for law and order into a service which is on the side of the culture warriors of the left.
Those overpaid Charity bosses who are supposed to be protecting human rights or the vulnerable but seem more concerned about their own earnings.
Overpaid footballers and cricketers come in for a fair amount of stick, as does the general decline in manners and consideration for others.
All politicians and especially bossy and bumptious women like Nicola Sturgeon and Anna Soubry are always fair game as subject matter.
The erosion of freedom of speech and the penalties for not conforming to the new cultural norms are an increasing threat.
That horrible ‘Cameroonian’ term, ‘British values’, which makes me want to scream out loud.
The continued marginalising of Christianity into an irrelevance and the active persecution of Christians; all the while Islam fills the vacuum within Europe through higher birth rates and uncontrolled migration.
The continuing devaluation of sacramental marriage between a man and a woman, by equating it with same-sex marriage.

Sometimes, I just let off steam about my long-suffering wife who got me into this mess and refuses to discharge me from my position on the front line in the culture war.

Tough task

I have been on a mission to alert the readers of the Daily Telegraph to the fact that war has been declared on real British values. Over one letter a month. Not exactly a torrential feed but a steady flow of letters, often written over breakfast, spluttering into my coffee. I would like to think that the mantra ‘one drip at a time wears down the mountain’ has guided my early morning routine; but only a dozen or so have ever been published over this time and a couple of letters have been included in Iain Hollingshead’s excellent Christmas stocking filler, Unpublished Letters to The Daily Telegraph.

So, the mountain remains intact and I suspect that much of the DT readership has failed to notice. This is a pity as the Daily Telegraph is essentially a conservative broadsheet not afraid of espousing a Catholic world view with columnists such as Charles Moore, Christopher Howse, Fraser Nelson and Tim Stanley. Judging by the Letters page there are a number of battle-hardened Brigadiers, Squadron Leaders and Captains who are combat-ready, with the necessary fatigues, and constitute a sizeable proportion of the readership of the Daily Telegraph. I suspect they are spending too much time on their gardens, the golf course and their boats.

Perhaps this collection may stir them from their distractions for the sake of our history, our sense of fair play and common decency and the preservation of the way we do things around here – put simply, our culture. After all, it was a Northumbrian Benedictine monk, the Venerable Bede, who popularised the terms BC and AD to signify the pivotal role of the birth of Christ in our history and the history of the world. It is the followers of Gramsci who have changed this into the secular system of Common Era.

Personal incentive

A second reason for consolidating these letters was to case study the impact of the culture war on my own career.

In 2018 I was sacked from my director training role with the Institute of Directors and suspended from membership for sharing on Twitter similar ideas developed in my letters over the last 10 years. My culture crime was to retweet the writings of the Canadian polemicist Mark Steyn, who pointed out that most of the European leaders in 2018 were either childless or homosexual and invariably pro-abortion.

Steyn wrote that the childlessness of Europe’s political class is the “demographics of Western Europe writ small”. Steyn argued that most of Western Europe is already in the death throes of “demographic suicide” as post-Christian secularists have only 1.3 children per couple. The gap is being filled by indigenous Muslims and migrants who have 3.5 children per couple. Steyn added that “a post-Christian Europe doesn’t really have any faith and it doesn’t have any families either. They are fading into the past.”

In the best traditions of the Stalinist show trials I was accused of causing offence to members of staff and swiftly removed from office. I have yet to find out who my accusers were and what was deemed to be offensive in the re- tweets. Interestingly, in an earlier purge within the IoD, the Chair of the organisation – Dame Barbara Judge – resigned after being secretly recorded and allegedly accused of bullying and making racist remarks. Who would believe that the CEO of an organisation espousing good governance would stoop to such depths as to bug the first woman Chair of the organisation and one of the most connected women in UK business? (Sadly, Dame Barbara Judge died in September 2020.) The CEO, Stephen Martin, who allegedly made the recordings, was soon ‘photo-shopped’ out of the politburo after ‘trousering’ a £450k pay package paid for by the members. It seems this organisation will represent individual business leaders as long as they don’t step out of line. My suspension remains in force and the Gramsci march through the institutions of our culture continues apace.

Join the fightback!

I considered consolidating the letters into themes but decided to leave them in chronological order, which provides a sort of historical overview of the decade. To get your letter published it is has to be sent in speedily and fit with the 24/7 news cycle; on re-reading these letters some of the spelling and syntax has been corrected and hopefully improved. Where l considered it helpful to provide some context for the letters I have included post scripts. With hindsight, where I felt I was too harsh, too curmudgeonly, too sanctimonious, too pompous or angry I apologise to the individuals concerned.

Over 700 letters are received every day at the Daily Telegraph with only room for around 20 to be published. Given these statistics I am more than happy with my success rate. I do hope that the tone of this collection of letters reflects the sense of fair play, equity, humour and common sense of the Daily Telegraph Letters page and that the page remains as a beacon of free speech.

By the Autumn of 2020 the number of letters in this collection has swollen to 200 as the SNP government have imposed ever more draconian restrictions on the Scottish people. If they are waiting for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, then the Scottish economy will be reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble fanned by legions of windfarms. ‘Krankie’ Sturgeon still grips the levers of power and my patience has been stretched to the limit. On top of this we have her smacking ban to look forward to. On 7 November it became a criminal offence to discipline your own child with a smack. Local Stasi informers are encouraged to ring 999 if they witness a breach of the law in person. No doubt smacking without a face covering will carry further penalties. If this attack by the state on the institution of the family makes your blood boil, join me in the culture war and start fighting back.