IN JOSEPH Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness, which is ostensibly about the European colonial experience in the ‘Dark Continent’ of Africa, the tale of a man following the trail of Kurtz into the African jungle is introduced by a scene on the River Thames with a narrator pointing out that ‘this too, was once one of the dark places of the Earth’.
Heart of Darkness, this prefiguring and framing of the text tells us, is not just about Africa. It is not even primarily about Africa. It is framed by reminding us that to the Roman legions of the first century AD, the mists and marshes of what would become England when Rome’s four centuries of rule were done, the chill dark woods and the pale-skinned men holding spears who watched from the arboreal shadows, were just as mysterious, barbarian and seemingly savage as the heart of Africa appeared to the 19th century Christian explorers, traders and missionaries who ventured there.
The novel (or really novella: it is a short piece that packs an awful lot into a slim volume) provides us with this opening as a sort of warning that for all the intensely symbolic and lushly written geography that will follow, the subject is really about the human heart and mind, the power of the imagination, the fevers of obsession and delusion, and the manner in which a dividing line between civilisation and barbarism exists within every one of us.
All this may seem very far from the results of a Democratic Party primary for the right to become the next Mayor of New York, but really isn’t.
Today, there are no blank spaces on the map to fill, and certainly no Western expeditions of exotic discovery. The modern reality is of the rest of the world coming to the West, in vast numbers, bringing its ways and values and barbarian manners without the slightest need to integrate or adapt to the conditions and values of our civilisation.
Conrad told us that the line between barbarism and civilisation runs through every heart, whether the skin above it is black or white. Modern realities on Globalisation, Globalism, human trafficking, open borders and mass migration tell us that so long as strenuous efforts to build walls don’t exist, the compartments of First World and Third World are now effectively meaningless. Child bodies slain in voodoo practices have floated down the Thames in London. The muezzin’s call floats above the streets of Paris. The flags of Hamas and global intifada fly from windows in New York.
These three greatest cities of the West are all Third World shit-holes now, if we are bluntly honest, made so by those who claim to have enriched and ennobled us, turned dangerous and filthy and dark by those who most pretend that these places are even more shining, utopian and advanced than they ever were before.
We are supposed to hail the flood of Diversity as the life blood of Utopia, even as it delivers a sewer’s worth of consequence. From riots in Paris to street stabbings in London, and from obscenely high housing and rental costs to exploding levels of crime, we are supposed to pretend that the mass decanting of the population of the world into these great cities has only increased their greatness, which in everything but numbers is the most obvious of lies. It’s true of course that each has welcomed arrivals who added to their glory. Conrad, after all, was such an arrival, a Polish man born in Kiev when it was part of the Russian Empire who wrote in his second language, English, with the mastery one would expect if it were a language he had invented.
The reality, which any cocktail mixer might know let alone any decent economist or patriot, is that an addition may add when it does not overmaster the whole, and can only detract when it utterly erases the substance and flavour of the original concoction. As long ago as Theodore Roosevelt (1858-19190), for all of America’s utterly unique relationship with immigration, this was sensibly known by the majority and couched in rather modern language too when Roosevelt warned against hyphenated identities and argued that any American, no matter their origins, should be solely identified as American, by themselves and others. For joining something to have any meaning at all, there must remain something to join, which cannot be the case when the thing is replaced altogether.
Anyone who has ever been through the Muslim enclaves of London and Paris knows this to be true, and that their alien homogeneity of mosque, madrasah, halal stores and women in burqas is no diversity at all. Our greatest cities are divided between a few gigantic corporate holdouts, an extremely wealthy class or caste of business and administrative ideologues who profit from the mess, and a growing seething population of utterly unintegrated foreign hordes.
The only people without a place there any more are the people for whom and by whom these cities were originally built. London, Paris and New York today are the places where Luxury Beliefs create entirely Foreign Streets, where the worst of our own import the worst of elsewhere and, in doing so, drive everyone sane as far from those city-sized ghettoes as they can get. A very advanced stage of soft, pampered, civilised decadence becomes completely aligned with and utterly indistinguishable from the hardest, fiercest and most savage forms of barbarism. They agree with each other. They work together. The first funds the second. Both are in complete agreement that you and I and everything we cherish, from the safety of our children to the memory of our ancestors, should be destroyed.
In London this alliance of decadent civilisation and imported barbarism has flourished in the form of the Mayoralty of Sadiq Khan, elected again and again through the power of the Muslim bloc vote. There is not a single Luxury Belief nonsense that Khan does not endorse and fund. He is a very vocal believer in Diversity and Equity. He is a Net Zero and Green fanatic, hated by what few ordinary Londoners remain for a surveillance and taxation system of allegedly green monitoring and harassment that charges people for every single car journey in or out of London. He is a strong supporter of Pride festivals and LGBTQ+ activism and trans ideology. Thanks to Khan, the whole of London has become a billboard of Luxury Belief virtue signalling.
In Zohran Mamdani, backed by the maddest of Democrat billionaires (a distinction one has to be exceptionally vile to obtain) while spouting the language of Marxist Revolution, New York’s putative new Mayor will continue that city’s rapid decline while following a model previously established in both Paris and London. New York will be an entirely foreign city to any patriotic or decent American, regardless of background. For let us be completely honest about what Mamdani is.
He is the meeting point, in human form, of Western decadence and non-Western barbarism. All the softness and degeneracy of the modern West he inherits as the pampered university ‘educated’ son of a wealthy film-maker who cosplayed as a rap artist and producer before he started to cosplay as a politician. Mamdani, like so many Western Marxists, embodies every privilege he claims to oppose. His family did not come to America with nothing and build something, with no handouts on the way, as better immigrants once did and in some cases (always the legal arrivals, by the way) continue to do. Rather, Mamdani has only ever known what it’s like to be a rich Westerner whose ethnicity and original background today simply access another privilege in addition to wealth, kudos and ace card of darker skin. Like every other Hamas-loving worthless shitbag on the campus or in Congress, Mamdani is a spoilt rich kid adopting any loyalty he can find which justifies his disloyalty to the nation as a whole.
Much has been made of Mamdani’s appeal to Generation Z, which says as much about his worthlessness as it does about the worthlessness of much of that generation. He’s the exotic, borderline handsome, Luxury Belief Prophet of Freebies, hugely popular with New York youth on the basis of seeming to offer them free flats on the public purse and free food in State-controlled grocery stores (which worked so well in the Soviet Union, of course). His background in ‘housing advocacy’ was in pure Marxist and Black Supremacist activism, based on the idea that little realities like paying for your accommodation shouldn’t apply to vulnerable groups (darker skin tones). In modern progressivism, helping people squat in property they don’t own, bankrupting anyone foolish enough to become a landlord, and advocating that race status excuses you from all adult responsibilities, constitutes an enlightened quest for a better world. In reality of course it simply delivers a world in which the State goes bankrupt, people are rewarded for refusing to pay their way, and incredible burdens are put on the few remaining taxpayers.
Mamdani is sold as something new. First Muslim Mayor, first Indian-Ugandan Mayor, First Millennial Mayor, and First Voice of the generation below that. But in every way imaginable he’s selling old soiled goods in barely fresh packaging. He’s a knock-off copy of the already trivial and mediocre Mayor Khan in London. He’s carrying around Marxist ideas that have been utterly failing for over a century.
One of the great ironies of Modernity is just how old it is. That was physically manifest in the decrepit Democrat gerontocracy of Sanders, Pelosi and Biden. But it’s spiritually and ideologically true even more of the generations coming to replace them. Young and dumb meets old and evil in exactly the same way that decadence meets barbarism. This is the true ‘intersectionality’ of progressivism, its ability to endlessly recombine the same constantly failing bullshit, working every element of grievance into new recipes of destruction. Neither the long history of non-Western barbarity, something no sane person should want to return to, nor the long history of Communist and Socialist error and harm, registers with these people. Their Now is a Now With No Past and No End.
Ignore the dead bodies floating by. Ignore the grotesqueness of the moral inversions at play. Free groceries and global intifada are the way.
If you live in New York, London or Paris and aren’t one of these lunatics, I suggest you move. And if you’re one of those leftist elite New York Jews insisting Mamdani’s hatred of Israel isn’t hatred of you, you might well be in for a rude awakening.
This article appeared in Jupplandia on June 25, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
