The Saxon in Winter
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Feb. 25, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
07:33
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| In much of the Anglosphere, Europe, Britain and England in particular, things are terrible. | |
| There is a creeping sense of dispossession that is affecting even the regular people of the country. | |
| Every day I speak to normal folk who can't understand why the country is going downhill so very quickly and they don't know how to handle it. | |
| We are so totally lost in the fog of postmodernism that nothing even seems to make sense anymore. | |
| Every day we are treated to a slate of utterly baffling headlines which simply do not make sense. | |
| How could it be that our professors, commentators and politicians have allowed this state of affairs to come about in the first place, let alone allow it to carry on? | |
| A decade of leftist subversion has saddled us with a deep confusion over everything, such as what we ought to expect from politics, what it is to be right and wrong on any subject, even to who we are as a people, or if there's even any such thing at all. | |
| Our countries are slipping through our fingers like sand. | |
| We madly grasp out in a futile attempt to at least hold on to something. | |
| But it is clear that everything we thought we had is actually unravelling around us. | |
| We are a civilization having a slow motion meltdown and no one seems to understand why this is happening nor what we can do to stop it. | |
| So I think it's time to let go of the old paradigm. | |
| The way things were done then is not sufficient to deal with the problems of now, and we ought to step back, clear our minds of the detritus of our daily lives, and consider what it is we must do next. | |
| I am of the opinion that what we need to do is spend some time in deep contemplation of our worsening condition, our place in the world, and what it is that we are losing to the decisions that have been made on our behalf. | |
| We must understand the underlying nature of our society as it stands now and its place in the cycle of civilizations to truly comprehend what is at stake. | |
| We need to consider how bad things are now and how bad they will get if we do not stiffen our nerves and summon our fortitude to turn away from the yawning desolation that is opening up before us. | |
| We must, I think, explore the lowest reaches of our own souls, pass through those boundaries imposed upon us, and look for the core of who and what we are, and what kind of civilization we intend to rebuild out of these ashes. | |
| This is the purpose of issue three of Islander magazine. | |
| For my own part, I have become somewhat obsessed with Old English elegiac poetry, in particular those poems describing exile. | |
| Though the mechanism of their dispossession was obviously different to that of our own, there is mercifully less bloodshed for us than there was for them, the end effect is still the same. | |
| The predictable nature of the psychic landscape we enjoyed has gone. | |
| The deep web of sentimental safety we unconsciously fell back into has disappeared, and in its place is the cold, hard reality that we are a people without representation and without support. | |
| We are overawed by a power which has set its face against us, extracts our resources from us to redistribute them to strangers, and will punish us if we raise too rowdy a complaint about it. | |
| The more the blade of the law cuts against us and in favour of the other, the more we are rendered effectively stateless. | |
| The understanding that this is the world in which we live now is slowly dawning upon people and it is a cold realisation indeed. | |
| For this issue of Islander, I commissioned a new translation of the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, the Earthstepper, the most famous of the old English elegies. | |
| I spent many hours with a professional translator to interpret each line of the poem to properly bring out the implications of each word and turn of phrase and reveal the depth of feeling contained therein. | |
| And as a companion piece to this, I've written an extensive essay exploring the parallels that the wanderer has to our experience of modern England and the soulful simulacrum of our own loss. | |
| This was an almost spiritual experience for me, and for long hours I pondered his fate and how it echoes our own. | |
| I felt myself gazing back across more than a thousand years into the blue-grey eyes of the exiled Anglo-Saxon, and I realised that though we are different in many ways, in our essence, we are the same. | |
| I think it's time for us to reflect on our place on the great continuum of our peoples and what we are doing wrong, how we are failing. | |
| In much the same way that Alfred the Great lost himself in thought on the Somerset Moors, we ought to ponder the nature of how we have failed to maintain that which was handed to us in trust and what we must do to redeem ourselves in the eyes of our descendants. | |
| How will we meet the gaze of future generations when they look back at us to see how we felt about things now? | |
| How will we be able to hold their eye and tell them that we did our best? | |
| And this is, of course, assuming that there will even be future generations who would recognise themselves as a part of us and us as a part of them. | |
| This is what Islander magazine is for. | |
| We have collected a series of piercing essays from the most incisive thinkers of our age about the current place of our civilisation on the Great Wheel. | |
| Each one is written exclusively for us by people at the very top of their game that you will likely already know and if you don't you will be glad you have discovered. | |
| Each of our authors is an expert in bringing forth the most hidden revelations that are obscured by the neon glow of modernity. | |
| Islander issue 3 is now available to purchase from shop.loadcity.com and a link will be in the description. | |
| The entire artistic theme of the issue is around this civilizational winter and it's all been beautifully rendered in a classic English aesthetic. | |
| We did have some problems with the distribution of issue 2 but these have been resolved and we can guarantee that you will receive your copy in a timely manner with regular email updates as to what the status of it is. | |
| I look forward to hearing your feedback on what this issue prompts within you because it has become clear to me that this is not an individual task. | |
| Collectively, we will be the ones who trace new paths and discover unexpected truths about ourselves, our world and our future. | |
| It may be difficult, but nothing is over, nothing is inevitable, nothing is preordained. |
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