‘The West is better. Our societies are better. Not superior, just better at producing the kinds of things that human beings seem to want.’

Konstantin Kisin uttered the statement during his sold-out speaking tour of Australia. The message was received with firm nods from the audience, but perhaps a slight awkwardness from public-facing Liberals who have not yet embraced an unapologetically enthusiastic view of Western democracy.

They will shout about conservative economics, but shuffle in their seats over the nitty gritty of what makes culture tick. It is this which fractures conservativism into Liberals, libertarians, freedom parties, and the rest who are fed up to the point they would rather vote for a stray cat than a politician.

‘Self-criticism’ has been considered a mark of academic thinking and higher learning for so long that Australia has forgotten how to cheer and praise, an idea Kisin quietly nudges at the edges of his jokes.

We suffer from civilisational Tall Poppy Syndrome made worse by Australia’s pervasive ‘sorry’ culture that has been pushing politically-minded people under the surface, baptising them in the rivers of white guilt and colonial sin.

Even those of a conservative mind who are aware society is in trouble – perplexed by she/thems, chest-feeding, misandrist razor ads, and 6-foot blokes in skirts knocking women to the ground in sport – ask for help from cultural warriors like Kisin while dripping in the remnants of their former virtue.

They must be coaxed into sanity, and that is the task Kisin’s questions set out to achieve. He draws them forward, one intrusive thought at a time.

It becomes more difficult to argue against Kisin’s observation about the greatness of the West when he asks, ‘How many Australians are climbing onto rickety boats with their children, willing to brave shark-infested waters, in search of a better life?’

The beauty of such questions is Kisin did not need to provide an answer, it formed in the minds of the hesitant, quite without their permission. In this, he is an excellent commentator – maroon-clad and bleeding facts. Half his words are unwritten and his most salient points are never uttered.

Many will know Kisin from his viral Oxford Union performance and as co-host of the Triggernometry podcast. Or perhaps they have read An immigrant’s love letter to the West. Others in the audience had never heard of him, through no fault of Kisin’s. There are many conservatives who linger in the age before social media highlighting, perhaps counter-intuitively, that the rebellion to restore historical norms is being waged on modern platforms.

My speech at the Oxford Union is finally available. The debate was "This House Believes Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far".

As promised, I didn't hold back ? pic.twitter.com/yV0bAPqAQB

— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) January 13, 2023

Kisin’s Sydney performance, hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies at the NSW Library auditorium, attracted a crowd. This, and other events like it, are building a movement in opposition to Wokeism, but they have a lot of ground to cover.

Australia’s education system is producing illiterate and innumerate young adults who think socialism is preferable to democracy. It is a belief based on the lie that socialism will be exactly like the society they enjoy – except the government will give them lots of free stuff and they’ll never have to work. You may laugh, but this is what they believe.

A walk down George Street will greet you with posters for Marxist, communist, or socialist ‘club’ events every week. They are recruiting revolutionaries from within our universities.

"This is like a scene from Game of Thrones!"

Protestors at my event at Sydney Uni with Tony Abbott trying to break down the door. Unsuccessfully. A soy diet will do that. pic.twitter.com/JdIdYZtIEb

— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) March 4, 2024

It’s a social trend that worries Russian-born Kisin. Despite living in the shadow of China, a mixture of propaganda and ignorance has kept Australians naive to the horror of collectivist thinking and there aren’t exactly lots of little Kisins running around giving cautionary talks. When Kisin was invited to speak by the Sydney University Conservative Club alongside former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the intolerant mob of half-its marched on the Great Hall chanting, ‘Tony Abbott go to hell, take the Liberals there as well.’

The specificity of the chant, leaving out Kisin, hurt his feelings. ‘Where are my crowds?’ he demanded.

Early on, Kisin described Australia as an interesting experiment in human civilisation. Something which the British did more than once when setting up colonies.

Kisin said:

‘If you were to conduct an experiment to prove that Western Civilisation is special in some way, you would do what the British did here. You’d find a barren continent on the other side of the world full of venomous creatures. You’d collect a few thousand of your least law-abiding citizens. You’d ship them over, leave them there for a couple of centuries, let them crack on with it. And what would you see? A society that is thriving.’

It was certainly an experiment in the resilience of the British spirit that evolved into the Australian spirit. Although contrary to Kisin’s comments, those tasked with the duty of taking care of the colonies were some of the most upstanding and moral individuals history has produced. We were guarded by souls determined to improve upon the past and shrewd thinkers who constantly averted disaster.

‘Making the best of it’ and being aware that no one is coming to the rescue probably has a lot to do with the Australian approach to life, as opposed to surviving the tight cluster of neighbours enjoyed (endured?) by the rest of the world, or feeling the bones of former civilisations underfoot. Australians did not survive the crucible of constant war, we survived the wilderness of oblivion.

It cannot be an accident that this experimental nation-building practised by the British led to Australia, America, Canada, and New Zealand, to name a handful. These are extraordinary success stories for a robust political and ideological system – or at least they were, until Wokeism launched a collective attack. Our era is one defined by the West fighting off a disease of the mind that is putting our democratic scaffolding to the test.

Kisin’s speech is best described as an awakening.

He asks questions that prompt uncomfortable thinking. He forces the audience to consider long-forgotten first principles. Democracy is good. Okay, why? What makes our society function?

He eventually describes our politics as a theatre echoing the values of the Enlightenment without understanding them. Even the best-meaning people who want to defend Western Civilisation cannot articulate why – and that is a problem when the hard-left engage. They can articulate their monstrous ideology with practised ease, while the conservative is left stuttering. It does not make the conservative wrong. How many adults stumble when asked to describe the mechanics of gravity or why the sky changes colour? How many politicians cannot defend biological gender when under attack from a trans activist?

Established truths are often the hardest to articulate. Western Civilisation has been untested for so long that Kisin is right, we’ve forgotten how to explain its workings to our children.

It strikes me that this hollow performance described by Kisin is similar to how our children perform Shakespeare. They recite the words, Google the moral lessons, dress up and act out these shows as if keeping them alive – but our children are so far removed from the language of Shakespeare and the Medieval world that they can no longer understand it.

We perform democracy as a school puts on Shakespeare.

And what’s happening to Shakespeare? When stories lose their meaning, people stop valuing them. Various schools around the world, including Australia, are attempting to ban Shakespeare because it offends Woke standards. How long, I wonder, before we ban democracy?

‘We have two or three generations who have been taught to hate their own societies, to hate the values of their own civilisation. This is what Orwell talked about when he said that, “He who controls the past, controls the future.”’

Our last conservative Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, admonished the culture wars and refused to defend free speech. ‘This issue doesn’t create one job,’ said Morrison, ‘doesn’t open one business, doesn’t give anyone one extra hour [of work].’

They are comments of such an impossibly idiotic intellectual standard that Morrison can be discounted as a conservative. He is a performance of conservatism in the puppet show of Parliament where Labor, similarly, pretends to care for the working class. (With apologies to the Editor-in-Chief of this publication, from whom I stole the comparison.)

Kisin said that he is happy to be called a culture warrior because Western culture is special and worth fighting for.

Freedom of speech, he added, is about the sharpening of ideas against each other. Morrison may be interested to know that it was freedom of speech that built our democracy, tested it, shaped it, and founded the role of Prime Minister from which he made those foolish comments. Freedom of speech created his job.

Kisin warned that like the days of the USSR, the West is heading toward a society where individuals ‘succeed’ according to their ‘compliance’ to political narratives. This compliance is already tracking businesses and individuals via our ‘carbon footprint’ where carbon accounting is quickly becoming more powerful than currency. Carbon Capitalism will slide into Carbon Communism before people realise the severity of their error.

Kisin is excellent.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.

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