Look at the horse.
Not at the flags. Not at the gate. Look at the horse and notice what it's missing.
It has no engine. It has no horses in front of it. It isn't standing on a ramp that slopes down towards the city. It moves for ONE reason only, and that is that someone is pulling.
And then look at who's pulling.
It isn't the men sitting inside the horse. They're sitting still. They have time. The ones pulling are the silhouettes in the foreground of the picture, and they look like us. Same clothes, same language, same schools. They were born in the city whose gates they are hauling open. They believe, presumably, that they're pulling Freedom in. And some of them believe it so much that they'd hit you if you said otherwise.
Let me remind you of the story - because we have been here before.
Troy didn't fall because the Greeks were strong.
Troy fell because Troy itself pulled.
I've spent a lot of posts on who sits inside the horse, and who walks in the procession, and why the two walk in the same procession when each of them wants something different from the world.
Tonight I want to go somewhere else. I want to go to the rope. Because the hatred of the West didn't come from outside. It was manufactured here, exported from here, and now it has come home.
Yes. You can look it up.
Sayyid Qutb, the thinker who more than anyone else gave Islamism its language, lived in the USA from 1948 to 1950. He came home and wrote about a people without a soul, a culture of machines and merchants, women without shame and churches that looked like dance halls. At first glance it sounds like a man who saw something foreign and shuddered. But if you read his footnotes, a different picture emerges.
Because when Qutb has to explain why the West is sick, he quotes Alexis Carrel, a French physician and cultural critic from the 1930s, who believed that modern civilisation was a mistake that was breaking Man down. So Qutb didn't invent the image of the soulless West.
He bought it in Europe and took it home with him.
Khomeini said "gharbzadegi". It means "Westoxification". The word wasn't his. It was Jalal Al-e Ahmad's, an Iranian writer, who had it from the philosopher Ahmad Fardid, who had it from Heidegger. Yes. From Heidegger.
The Iranian revolution's curse word against the West is a German philosopher's disgust with his own age, translated into Persian and put in the mouth of an ayatollah.
And before both of them stood the Russian Slavophiles of the 1800s, writing exactly the same thing about Europe - rotten, rational, rootless, a culture of contracts without warmth, of rights without honour. They had it from the German Romantics, who had it from their own disappointment with France and the Enlightenment.
The hatred always has the same shape, no matter who carries it.
The city that is Babylon.
The merchant who is without honour.
The reason that is cold.
And the woman who goes out without a veil and belongs to no one.
Notice what those four things are. It isn't the West's power. It isn't the West's oil, soldiers or trade agreements.
It is the West's picture of what a Human Being is.
The question I asked you the other day - and asked you to answer.
The city, where you can be unknown and still be in the right. The merchant, who trades with strangers without first having to swear them loyalty. The reason, which may ask about everything, even about God. And the woman, who is her own.
Four faces of the same thing -
A Human Being who answers upwards - not to the clan, the party or honour.
That is what the hatred wants gone.
Not what we own.
What we are.
When it's shouted in the streets, it's called America, because America is the place where the four faces are most visible. But it isn't the country that is hated.
It is the Human Being the country was built for.
....
So why do they walk in the same procession?
You don't have to take my theory for it. Look at France this weekend.
On the 17th, half a million people took to the streets against the cost of living and for the secondary school students who have been blockading their schools since September. The call came from the Yellow Vests and "Bloquons tout", block everything, and behind them stood the CGT, France's largest and oldest trade union with roots in the Communist Party, La France insoumise, Mélenchon's party, the union Solidaires, the CGT's more radical little sister, the farmers of the Confédération paysanne, and Les Soulèvements de la Terre, a militant climate movement the government tried to dissolve in 2023.
The same month there's another call. It's called "Bloquons la machine de guerre israélienne", in English - block the Israeli war machine - and it's a whole month of actions against the French companies that sell parts for Israeli weapons. Just like the one you saw against Maersk and others.
The initiative comes from BDS France, which wants to boycott Israel, and the Association France Palestine Solidarité, and 56 organisations have signed. Read the names. CGT. Solidaires. La France insoumise. Parti communiste. Confédération paysanne. Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Extinction Rebellion. And next to them Samidoun, a Palestinian prisoners' network that is banned in Germany and was listed as a terrorist organisation by the USA and Canada in October 2024, the Parti des indigènes de la République, which holds that France is still a colonial power over its own citizens, and a small party that calls itself Perspectives musulmanes.
The same unions. The same parties. The same climate people. Or whatever they are. On one piece of paper it's about school desks and petrol prices. On the other it's about Gaza. And on the other piece of paper they're sitting next to people none of them would ever invite home.
School desks, climate, Gaza.
Three flags. One rope.
And if you want to know where it ends, I wrote about Tudeh the week before last. Iran's communists, who carried Khomeini to power because they thought they were using him. He used them first, and then he hanged them.
That story isn't an anecdote. It's the key. Because the radical left and Islamism don't share a goal.
The left's Dissolution of reality wants the foundation gone, so that nobody is allowed to say what a Human Being is anymore.
Islam's Submission wants Freedom gone, so that nobody is allowed to ask about anything at all anymore - other than what the right answer in the book is.
Each wants its own world - and in the one, there is no room for the other.
What they share is the Horse in the picture.
And in 2026 the Horse has a name.
It says Free Palestine on it, because that is the only cause where the radical left and Islamism can walk in the same direction without having to explain anything to each other. One sees an oppressed people, the other sees the ummah, and both see the West on the other side of the gate. That's why it isn't the climate or the school desks painted on the side of the horse, even though they're on the same signature lists.
It's Palestine.
It is the ONE cause that can carry both flags at once.
And the ones pulling mean it. Most of them would never climb into the Horse, and they don't know who's sitting in there. They aren't the problem. The problem is that the Horse can't tell the difference. It carries the same thing in, no matter who's pulling.
What they share is the only place they have ever stood side by side. The day after the gate, they kill each other. Just as they did in Tehran. That isn't a theory in a book. It's a graveyard with thousands of bodies, and it's the left's bodies lying there.
And it's no accident that it goes that way. The radical left has, at best, a critical theory from some university nobody much cares about. Islam has a complete cosmological house. A theological description of reality from top to bottom, innermost to outermost, God's pure word and final revelation. The Truth.
The left's "critique" can tear the gate down, but it hasn't the faintest chance of holding it, because once the gate is down it has nothing to put in its place, only a new item on the list of what has to go.
Islam, on the other hand - it comes as a 1,400-year-old, hard-tensed muscle, a Law, a God, an order for the family, the body, the street and the state, and a view of Man that knows exactly what it wants with you.
The one can tear down. The other can move in. And that's why it ends in the same place every time. Not because the Islamists are cleverer. Because they have a house, and the others only have a no.
Hatred of the West is the only thing they have in common.
And hatred can't build.
It can only pull.
....
And then there are the two that some people are sitting and waiting for. Because if the West is hated this much, surely there has to be a great power behind it, somewhere with a fleet and a plan. Russia and China are in the picture. Just not where people are looking for them.
Russia isn't behind the hatred. Russia has it itself, and has had it longest. The Slavophiles of the 1800s, Dugin today, "the decadent West", it's the same song Qutb sang and Khomeini sang, and it is just as home-made in Europe as the others. Moscow calls itself the defender of traditional values, of the family, of the church, of everything the West has lost. But notice what it is that's being defended. A country that kills its journalists and fills its prisons with people who think out loud isn't defending the Human Being I write about, the one who answers upwards and not to any Tsar. Russia is defending the Tsar.
Then there's China. But China doesn't hate us. Although one would probably be wise to regard them as an ideological enemy of a kind. It's worth saying, because it makes the picture clearer. But China wants to win, and that's a different thing from hating. China doesn't need to sit in the Horse or walk in the procession. Because what China does is sell the wheels for it. It just needs to keep us pulling, and as long as we do, the bill isn't China's.
....
So here we are.
A horse without an engine. A hatred that was thought in Jena and Paris and Freiburg before it was prayed at Friday prayers in Qom and Cairo.
Two fronts that only agree on what has to go. One great power that sings along, and one that sells the wheels. And at the front, with our faces and the rope over their shoulders, the city's own children.
There is NOBODY who can pull that Horse in who doesn't live in the city. There never has been. That's what the picture shows, and that's what Troy taught us three thousand years ago, and that's what we don't want to hear, because it's easier to be attacked - than to be complicit.
But it's also the only good news in the whole picture.
The rope is ours.
Nobody has taken it from us.
Let go of it, and the horse stands still.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good week, friends ☀️
