The Wave

Till over us we heard the waters close.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx— Dante, Inferno

The wave that gathered off our eastern shore,
Rose on the horizon, blotted out the sun,
Engulfed in darkness the lighthouse towers
That might have warned us of its swift approach,
Drained the springs that flowed from our hills
So that all in its path was made barren,
Unable to resist or to flee its threat,
Which held the flotsam of a thousand shipwrecks,
The debris jettisoned by foreign hands,
Frothy with scum and littered with their waste,
Not the envious seige of less happy lands
But a poisoned flood unsustaining of life
And deadly to everything it overcomes
With the weight of its black and teeming mass,
Has broken upon us.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAnd now we are drowned.
Now everything is caught in the ebb and flow
Of forces beyond our control, and all
That we built lies in ruin. Our planted fields
Are turned to swamps, our cities to cesspools.
Our homeland is lost beneath the dark waves
And we can never come home again.
For we are dead in our native soil,
Overrun by incompatible seeds
That have yielded a crop of rankest weeds
And rotting fruit; infested by locusts
That devour the labour of our fathers
And breed in the bodies of our children.
The bloodline of a race that once ran red
Through the veins and flags of an Empire
Now bleeds into drains with the detritus
Of a thousand years of history.

Listen to our cries, like gulls returning
To dry land only to find the abyss
Of a whirlpool sunk to the ocean floor
And filled with the voices of the drowned.
What wings will bear us on our exile
Who have lived with our wings clipped in the nest?
On what hostile shore will we find a home
Who have made ourselves willingly homeless?
In the parched soil of what foreign land
Will an English rose grow out of our graves?
From which scattered seed, in what nation’s womb,
Will our island people be born again?
Where is the wave from whose flames will rise
A child to reclaim our conquered land?

— London/Hong Kong, August-October, 2025

• • • • •

The epigraph is from Laurence Binyon’s translation of the final line from Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, in which Ulysses recounts the circumstances of his death to Dante during the latter’s descent into the Underworld: ‘infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso’. Unlike Homer, Dante did not return Ulysses to Penelope but sent him from Circe on a voyage into the West on which he would ultimately perish. My first encounter with this passage, however, was not in the Inferno but in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (1947), where, in the chapter titled ‘Il Canto di Ulisse’, the author struggles to recall it to a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz.

The ‘envious siege of less happy lands’ is a reference to Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King Richard the Second (1595-96), in the famous passage that so accurately describes England today, in which John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, on his deathbed, prophesies the downfall of England under the youthful and feckless king (Act II, Scene 1, ll. 43-66):

This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
[ . . . ]
Is now leased out — I die pronouncing it —
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Although I drew on Dante’s image of the engulfing wave when trying to describe the fate of Britain and Europe, which to my knowledge is unprecedented in the history of conquest, I realised afterwards that, beside that of Dante, my other (and more positive) image of the wave was from Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (1869), where it carries to these shores the defender of Britannia against invasion:

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:
And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried ‘The King!’

14 thoughts on “The Wave

  1. I sometimes listen to Morgoth’s Review on YT. He’s a right wing nationalist. You’re a Communist. Yet you sound like you both share totally common ground. All these labels have dissolved now, drained of any real meaning by the detergent tide of surveillance corporatocracy. We’re all just trying to survive now a few more years, clinging to the wreckage of our culture. How has it cone to this…?

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    1. Not wanting your country to be destroyed and your countrymen replaced by foreigners isn’t Right-wing, except to the woke Left. I’m not sure what nationalist means these days, but believing in the sovereignty of the nation state and feeling commonality with people from it also isn’t Right-wing. Whether you think China is a communist state or not, the Chinese aren’t keen on losing their sovereignty or being destroyed either. I think most of the people in Britain would call these beliefs common sense. But I agree, to a certain degree, that these old terms mean little within the context of the programme of replacement immigration.

      Never in the history of conquest has a country been conquered without a shot being fired in its defence by invaders the native population has paid to conquer it. But then, never in the history of Britain has such a generation of fools and cowards been produced. At the basic level, Britain is being conquered because its men are too weak to defend it. The few children they have will live under Sharia law, if they aren’t already; and the British people who stay in these Isles will be bred into a mongrel race by millions of sub-Saharan Africans, while the Muslims rule the Caliphate of Britain and Ireland.

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      1. Very much agree. These designations (“far right” etc) are just Regime spell words to shut people up. Morgoth is only a “right wing nationalist” because, like you, he sees his country being overrun and destroyed. If not that, he’d just be a normal bloke, fishing, walking the dog, seeing his mates down the pub, harming nobody. Ironically it’s the Muslims who have radicalised him, and behind them, the Regime.

        The question as always is what to do. You rightly say how weak we all are – but we are also atomised, spkintered into 1000 different substack voices and YT channels. There’s no commons anywhere for us to meet, no political party, no unions, nothing. If anything showed signs of growing, the Regime is so utterly adept at subverting and destroying it, or riding it for its own purposes (Reform UK, anyone?)

        In one sense, the solution is simple, but near impossible: get 30% or more of people to trade in their smartphone for a dumb phone, returning technologically to about 1997. That removes the tech platform for any of this control surveillance, digital ID etc to land.

        But then it doesn’t solve the problems of how Britons can organise to resist this invasion…… What is to be done?

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      2. If, after the real scale of the Muslim rape gangs came out years ago, every mosque in the country had been burned to the ground and every Muslim found guilty was deported along with their family; if no Muslim could be elected to any public office because the British people voted for any other candidate other than them at every election; if the Muslim Council had been outlawed as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, which is outlawed in most other countries including those under Muslim rule; if Muslim businesses had been put out of business through sanctions voluntarily imposed nation-wide by the British people; if any Muslim daring to be preach on the street had been removed, physically, from doing so; if the office of Iman had been made illegal and anyone preaching justification for the rape of British women arrested and deported; if any march of Muslims down streets, or any gangs of Muslims throwing their weight around in small towns, had been met by far greater numbers of Englishmen and persuaded not to do so again; if any school daring to teach Islamic dogma, put British girls into burqas or lead children in Islamic prayers, had been shut down and their staff banned from education for life; and if, eventually, the UK had become such a hostile environment for Muslims that they would have voluntarily left themselves and no more would have come here, we wouldn’t be in the state we’re in now.

        But none of that happened. What happened was the exact opposite. That’s not only down to the treachery of the UK state and successive governments over the past 35 years. It’s also down to the cowardice and stupidity of the British people. In the broad scope of history, people too weak to defend their countries lose them. We are too weak, and we will lose our country, if we haven’t already. I see no hope for Britain. I believe the UK is, in effect and too a degree, already under Sharia law, and the process of Islamification will continue to increase in speed and reach. The solution is obvious and everyone knows what it is, but we lack the people with the courage to bring it about.

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  2. Wow – that was a dish of cold water. And completely unexpected.
    I simply cannot disagree with a word you say.

    We’ve been so weakened spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, socially by wave after wave of trauma since the first world war…economic collapse… second world war… pop and youth “culture” demoralising us and severing the transmission of a great inherited culture… hypersexualisation… hypermanagerialism to manage our hypercapitalist nihilism… the lie that we live in an economy with its implicit – and pointless – goals, rather than as families and communities with a specific culture in a specific landscape… I could go on an on and on (and you could too but infinitely better)…but the point is we have allowed ourselves to become weak, pale, nihilistic, confused, identityless… no wonder your amazing words have never even been entertained. God bless you, Simon Elmer. We need you here…

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    1. No, they’re a hypothetical, but in the reign of Terror being waged in the UK today, they’d be taken as an incitement to violence or at best hate speech, and although I no longer live in Britain, I’d like to be able to visit without being arrested by Starmer’s Thought Police.

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      1. Understood – I won’t.

        Will you return to live here?

        I’m teetering on the edge of selling up and leaving – really, it’s 50:50 whether I will or not. The only consideration is that a) digital ID and subjugation will follow all of us anywhere we go, and b) when our societies collapse (economically, socially) maybe it’s marginally better to be with your own people ethnically rather than a stranger in a different culture. I’d be interested to know what your plans are.

        all good wishes for them wherever they take you.

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      2. I was in London this summer, and I was certainly not among my own people. One day I took a train from Clapham Common to Hackney Wick, and walked through the carriages to get a sense of where I should sit. It was 95% Black. This was consistent with my impressions of Inner London, where I’m not a minority anymore, I’m an endangered species. I sat opposite some of the only English people on the train. We were joined by a Russian woman who sat down and immediately started talking loudly into her smartphone. I asked her not to do so, and reminded her that she was in England, and English people respect other people’s privacy when in public. Whereupon the English people opposite reacted furiously, calling me rude, etc. I think their real horror was me calling England ‘England’, when as we know, such a place doesn’t exist for such people.

        They were middle class, in their fifties or even sixties, dressed like liberals, undoubtedly voted for Starmer, most likely had a Labour councillor amonng them, and would, without a doubt, be on that weekend’s protest against people like me. I can understand, although with horror, that the children in Britain today have been indoctrinated to hate themselves since birth through advertsisements, television, school and university; but I thought about how mature and even elderly adults could be so stupid. I’d guess they were young people on the Left during Thatcher’s first government; suppported the miners’ strike and joined CND; became environmentalists and vegans and anti-Zionists; protested against homophobia, transphobia and racism, and now, at the age of 60, have forgotten any connection between the Left and the working class, whom they now regard and denounce as far-Right racists and fascists. That included me.

        London is filled with people like this. Indeed, it is run by them. I was on my way to the V&A stores, a sort of gallery warehouse, to see the facade they kept from the demolished Robin Hood Gardens estate. In the foyer were two bookshelves of themed displays: one was of the environmental apocalypse we’ve been promised for 65 years and more, the other was books about the mental afflication of body dysphoria, or ‘transsexualism’ as its called by the UK state. Both lies were being promoted by what was presenting itself as an art gallery.

        I am fully convinced that if one of the African men on the train entered the foyer, grabbed one of the children of the White families and walked out with her, every White person in that foyer would let him do it, would film it on their smartphones, of course, but would wait for someone ‘in authority’ to intervene. For me, that foyer was an image of the UK, rotten within, impotent to defend itself from without. So, no, I won’t be returning to London to live, precisely because these are not my ‘own people’.

        It’s unclear to me to what extent the rest of Britain is in the same state. A few years ago I was on a beach on the Gower peninsula, a place I’ve visited for years. As I was walking along, my girlfriend in her bikini, two Black men approached from the other direction. One of them was filming with their smartphone, and without hesitation pointed it at my girlfriend. I was in a different head-space to the one I have in London, so didn’t react at the time to his rudeness; but later I reflected on the sexual obsession Black men have with White women – evidenced by the now daily reports of a Black man raping a White woman or child – and was worried that this one might share the footage, not only of my girlfriend but of the other White bathers, on a website for Black men with a taste for White women, or simply use it for his own purposes.

        When we got to the end of the beach it became clear why they were there. Maybe a hundred Black people had taken over the entire end of the beach. They had set up a sound system, of course, the noise from which travelled for hundreds of yards, inflicted their desires on everyone else trying to use the beach collectively. They were behaving, in other words, as Black people always do in Britain, annoying everyone around them while conveying the threat that if anyone White dared to protest they’d be set on by all the Blacks like wild dogs.

        This is all daily experience for a Londoner, on the Underground, on buses, in parks, on council estates, in shops, on the street – to the extent that it’s acquired its own term: ‘Black fatigue’. But the Welsh, who were used to this bit of paradise being inhabited by unwelcome but at least well-behaved Englishmen like myself, were completely flummoxed. I could see in their eyes the confusion and disgust that we used to have in ours decades ago when we went through the same invasion. And like us, they did nothing. At the top of a cliff were the several coaches in which the Africans had been bussed in, I’d guess from nearby Swansea, in which, again, I had seen Africans walking around the town centre in that vaguely unemployed and aggressive manner they’re known for in London. I fear, and I very much believe, that this is the fate of every town in Britain.

        As the adverts that exclusively depict Black men with White women and mixed-race kids should make clear, the sub-Saharan Africans are being brought to the UK in their hundreds of thousands every year to breed the British people out of existence. I have no doubt that, under the justification of ‘Diversity’, preferential medical, educational and housing state subsidies will be offered to mixed-race couples, who will be financially incentivised to produce mixed-race kids. At the same time, Muslim and Hindu families will continue their existing policy of marrying within their own race and religion, continuing to rape and groom White girls in their hundreds of thousands under the protection of Muslim-run councils and Muslim mayors, all while breeding like rabbits. This is the way Britain will end, not with a bang but a whimper (while the screams of our children are silenced by the state).

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  3. Yes… it’s all true. I share your barely concealed rage at the betrayal and, under that, the grief at the loss.

    Thank you for taking the trouble to reply at such length.

    I must make my choice soon as to what to do and where to go. I feel that my fate is homelessness whatever I do, whether I stay here or return to HK and wider Asia. Staying here to fight might seem noble, yet there is nobody on our side. The Regime hates us, and its government flunkies will, as the economy inevitably collapses, go into “scavenge mode” (as the excellent YTber Francis Hunt puts it) and steal everything I have via taxes and coercion just to prop us the abusive state and feed the tokenising psychopaths who want to own literally everything all of us have, not just our homes but EVERYTHING. As Britain and Europe die, they will attract, as dying flesh always does, ever more flies and maggots to feed off the remains.

    All we can do now is fight for a bit of time and a bit of free space. It really does feel, as you say, like The End.

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  4. what you say about the ageing liberals on the train is a big part of the reason no change will come – there are too many useful idiots among the natives who have been conditioned to be left of centre consensus centrists. They are terrified of bumping up against some very clearly marked parameters as laid down by the Guardian or Independent as was. I personally have gone on a massive journey over the past several years, as have many people. But I fear it’s too late, especially with so many native fifth columnists.

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    1. I like what you wrote about us living in an economy rather than as families and communities in a cultural landscape. That was the goal of neoliberalism, to erase national and regional cultures and replace them with the monoculture of US consumer culture the Left rebranded as ‘multiculturalism’. Once those cultures have been destroyed, the ethnic cleansing of the people can ensue, which is what’s happening now. I write this as I wake up to the news of the mass-stabbing on the train from Kings Cross. Not a day goes by in the UK now without news of another rape, stabbing or murder of a White person by an immigrant. This isn’t an unfortunate side-effect of the policy of replacement immigration, but part of of its intended process. It’s quite clear that the UK government and state are waging war against us. It’s time we stop protesting, arm ourselves and start fighting back.

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      1. This is so frustrating- if I press the wrong key my whole reply gets deleted… I’m in hk this week if you want to chat more about this? Short notice, though… no worries if you can’t

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