I am planning to begin publishing here on Substack, some time during the present month of August, a regular newsletter consisting of short commentaries on so-called “current events” in Europe and around the world. Those who have followed me on X – a platform I am likely to be using less, or not at all, in coming months – will be able to anticipate the tenor and orientation of the short essays in which the content of this newsletter will consist. My perspective on the “trending topics” of the day has been, and will surely continue to be, a “right-wing” one but one which at the same time directs its fire principally against the most popularly – and populistically – appealing of the stances taken by the Right. So that this self-exposure to being “shot by both sides” is not mistaken for mere contrarianism – nor for that “ethno-masochism” that it has sometimes also been mis-explained as – I want to publish as a sort of preface to the forthcoming newsletter a long programmatic essay in which I will try to set down the outlines, at least, of the general theoretical understanding of the nature of our present historical and political juncture which tacitly underlies and frames all my interventions on such “trending topics” as the rapid rise of nationalist-conservative forces to the right of the established Conservative Party in my native country of Britain.
The central notion – namely, that of the “queen sacrifice” – which I will employ in order to expound my political philosophy of the present juncture both in this essay and in a second essay of around the same length that I will be publishing before the end of August[1] was one which first took form for me, in fact, as I struggled to understand what might be going on under the surface of the moral panic around “British Pakistani rape gangs” that has been for several years now perhaps the main preoccupation, and main means of expanding their support base, for these new right-wing forces in Britain. I have published here on this Substack in the course of the past year several short essays under this title, Queen Sacrifice, dealing specifically with this “rape gang” mass hysteria and its political exploitation. The observations I have made of British and indeed of world politics in the course particularly of the past few months, however, have led me to consider the possibility that the “queen sacrifice” notion – and the broader ludological/politological template it forms a part of – may provide a key to a much broader range of current political developments than I initially imagined it would or could. The following pages pave the way for the specific concrete studies of the newsletter by engaging in a tentative exploration of this possibility on an abstract, theoretical level.
1.
In the great political confrontation of the last dozen years “our side” has, generally speaking, had too low and contemptuous an opinion of “the other side” to characterize the contest going on between us as a “chess game”. We’ve spoken a great deal, it’s true, of the man who seemed for years to be our champion, Donald Trump, as playing “3D chess”. But to say this is in no wise to say that “the other side” is playing “3D chess” as well. On the contrary, the image it evokes is that of a master chess-player up against rank amateurs who treat the chess-pieces on the board, the different powers and properties of which permit the construction of strategies of the most exquisite subtlety and sophistication, as if they were the indistinguishable and interchangeable pieces in a game of checkers.
In this summer of 2026, of course, as we watch Trump blunder and bluff his way ever deeper into the quagmire of his Iranian adventure, the application of the “3D chess-player” epithet to the current US President is becoming progressively more absurd. For all that, however, the globalists and the communists appear still to be persisting, on their side, in moves of the extremest crudity and predictability. In most of the largest countries in Western Europe, for example, that most direct and literal of all globalist policies – the replacement of indigenous European populations by non-European ones through the promotion of legal and the tolerance of illegal immigration – has been persisted in, these last thirty years, with such fixity of purpose that the traditional parties of government in France, Germany and the UK are on the point of being displaced by parties that, until recently, were not considered even to lie within the respective countries’ constitutional or cultural pale. Trump’s pitiable decline notwithstanding then, the notion still enjoys considerable resonance and credibility that “their side” is playing checkers while “our side” is playing chess, or at least that the chess game that many on the Right are proving capable of playing is one of far greater sophistication than the novice’s game being played by a still-ascendant – but precisely thereby foreseeably inevitably declining – “gay race communism”.
The following notes, however, are intended to point up the limits of this notion’s credibility. They are intended to encourage the Right to give at least some serious consideration to the possibility that our opponents are playing a more skilled and sophisticated chess-game than they may, prima facie, appear to be playing. The notion of sophistication and skill in chess that I will be proposing to my readers here is not, indeed, one that requires, in order to be developed, the introduction of a “third dimension” into the game. The lessons that the Right needs to learn here all lie firmly within the lore and wisdom of the game as it has been played for several thousand years: on a flat board moving pieces solely horizontally. What’s more, I owe it to my readers to confess, here at the start, that I am not myself a chess-player, let alone a chess theorist. This lack of special competence may prove, however, in this case to be an advantage rather than a drawback. I have been able, I hope, to make use of the naivety, not to say stupidity, of my own thinking in these matters in order to clarify, for myself and perhaps for others, what may be wrong in the thinking of the Right today.
2.
Consider, for example, a development of the tempting “chess analogy” that I’ve just alluded to that would run along the following lines:
Any attentive and honest observer asked to assign to the various policies that have typically been pursued by Western governments in the course of the past fifty years the relative values that are assigned, by chess theorists, to the various pieces in a chess-set would certainly assign the highest value – the ‘10’ reserved in chess theory for the king – to that policy of mass demographic substitution (the so-called “Great Replacement”) which has resulted in the native white populations of countries like Britain and France shrinking from 90% or more of the total in 1970 to circa 60% in our present mid-2020s. Other policies might be named, indeed, that have been commonly pursued during the last half-century by almost every leftist, centrist and even nominally “right-wing” government all across the West: a certain consolidation and expansion, for example, of the political rights and legal freedoms enjoyed by women (in short, a certain “feminist” agenda); likewise, on a rapidly increasing scale especially these last twenty years, an environmentalist agenda consisting of political, legal and social interventions aimed at “saving the planet”. But these policies, were they to be drawn into the analogy and likewise ranked as chess-pieces, would all have to be assigned values lower than the ‘king’s 10’ just now assigned to the policy of mass demographic replacement. No insignificant proportion of the activity of Western governments in the past fifty years has consisted, indeed, in the consolidation and expansion of women’s rights (equal-pay legislation, decriminalization of abortion etc.), so there would seem naturally to fall, in the analogy we’ve adopted, to this aspect of Western governmental activity the (serendipitously appropriate) role of the second most important piece, the queen, and a value, say of 8 to the king’s (demographic replacement’s) 10. The policy of “planet-saving environmentalism” likewise, though it has clearly occupied an important role in the policies of Western governments of every political complexion especially since the turn of the century on, clearly cannot be ranked as a concern of these governments equal in importance to their concern to promote and facilitate mass third-world immigration. It might be analogized then, on the analogy we’ve adopted, with, say, a knight or a bishop and assigned a value of 5 or 6.
The subordination, indeed, and inferior valuation of these two latter typical component elements of globalist-era governments can be stated in other, still crasser terms. An argument might be mounted to the effect that, if “demographically replacementist” governments have tended also to be governments pursuing policies of expanding the political and social power of women, this has been because the latter policies are by their nature ancillary to the policy of the Great Replacement. For reasons too complex to go into here, the greatest enthusiasts for “open borders” tend to be women, and the more “empowered” women are in a nation the more easily and thoroughly can that nation’s borders be dismantled.[2] Especially in light of the developments of the past ten years, the same “ancillarizing” argument might also be made with regard to the second “minor piece” we have mentioned. “Save the planet” and “open the borders” discourses have displayed, in the last decade, a strong tendency toward convergence (“climate-change refugees”), so that a cynic, or a sceptic, might well be tempted to suspect that the former may have been invented with a view principally to reinforcing the latter.
3.
Now, my doubts about certain aspects and details of the account of things offered here are already of long date. For years, it has seemed to me open to question whether, in the concrete policy-making of the “local management teams” appointed by the broader, international structures of globalism to administer the “production-and-consumption zones” that were once nations, the prosecution of the demographic agenda tends always and everywhere to override and instrumentalize the prosecution of the gender-political one. Until very recently, however, my contestation of this account of things would have stopped short of challenging the analogical frame in which it is couched. My questions here, in other words, would have consisted just in asking whether, at certain political junctures, feminism or ecologism might not, even if only for a time and “conjuncturally”, move into the “king’s place” that this model reserves for a “replacementism” which it envisages as being, in the final analysis, synonymous with “globalism” as a whole.[3]
In the last year or so, however, prompted by more and more frequent encounters, especially in commentaries emerging from the Right, with this analogy drawn between our current political conflicts and the game of chess[4], I’ve made a belated attempt to familiarize myself with the rudiments of chess theory. This has brought me to realize that the problem with the model laid out above lies at a deeper and more fundamental level than I previously thought it did. The fact is that this particular chess analogy lies quite at odds with the theory of chess as this latter has, historically, been practiced. Chess theorists, where they have deigned to engage at all in this practice of ascribing relative values to the six piece-types (king, queen, rook, bishop, knight and pawn) that make up a chess-set, have tended not to favour the practice of ranking these latter in the manner that we have above: namely, on a single continuous scale. Specifically, most chess theorists have set the king aside as something sui generis, that is to say, as something unsituable upon the same scale of fixed and determinable value as the other five piece-types. A frequently-heard dictum in this area of theoretical endeavour is, for example, that “the value of the king is equal at once to zero and to infinity”. This paradoxical proposition reflects the paradoxical state of practical affairs that the king is, strategically speaking, one of the weaker pieces in the chess-set, extremely limited in its power of movement as compared to the queen and even to the rook, bishop and knight – even in the endgame, when the king comes most into its own as an offensive piece, eminent chess theorists such as Emanuel Lasker have assigned to it only the value of “a knight plus a pawn” – yet it is, at the same time, the only piece in the chess-set that is unsacrificeable by definition. A pawn sacrifice, a rook or bishop or even queen sacrifice, can yield advantage and even ultimate victory. But there can be no such thing as a “king sacrifice” since the loss of the king is by definition the loss of the game.
4.
The question we face now is the following: once we’ve revised this schema of the ascription of “values” to chess-pieces in the manner that I’ve just sketched out – a manner, as I’ve noted, which brings it back into accordance with the actual historical practice of chess theoreticians – can we persist in using this schema, so revised, to analogically illuminate the ongoing political struggle between globalist and anti-globalist forces?
Clearly, some difficulties stand in the way of doing so. Principally, that of forming an idea of what would correspond, politically, to this entity “whose value is equal at once to zero and to infinity” with which we have now come, on the ludological level, to have to do. The specificity of the ranked and relative values that we’ve felt justified in ascribing to the various policies pursued by Western globalist governments has been correlated, hitherto, with the specific nature of the policies themselves. This would suggest, then, that whatever would correspond, on the political plane, to that thing “whose value is equal at once to zero and to infinity” that the king, on our revised theory of chess-piece valuation, has come to embody would be that prima facie paradoxical thing: a policy of entirely unspecific nature. One might, in this light, describe what occupies, on this revised analogy between chess and politics, the “place of the king” as “pure politics”. Or one might alternatively, drawing on the common definition of politics as “the science of social power”, describe what occupies this reconsidered and reconceptualized “place of the king” as “pure power”.
This “pure power”, admittedly, is not an idea that even two and a half millennia of political theory and political philosophy have succeeded in defining. In the last fifty years in fact what meaning is best ascribed to this phrase, indeed whether it bears ascription of a meaning at all, has become less rather than more clear. The massive posterity enjoyed by Foucault’s work of the 1970s, for example, has made talk about such a thing as “pure power” appear, in 21st-century academic circles, obtuse and philosophically naïve. Such was not the case, however, as short a time as thirty years before Foucault’s promulgation of his final thoughts on these matters. It was still, for example, declaredly part of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s enterprise, in his long monograph On Power published in 1948, to identify a pure and essential “Power in se” underlying as their substance all merely accidental relations of dominance and governance within society:
Précisément le fait qu’il existe sur tout ensemble humain un gouvernement, cela aussi mérite d’exercer l’esprit. Que son mode diffère d’une société à une autre, qu’il change au sein d’une même société, ce sont, en langage philosophique, les accidents d’une même substance, qui est le Pouvoir. Et l’on peut se demander, non plus quelle doit être la forme du Pouvoir - ce qui constitue proprement la morale politique - mais quelle est l’essence du Pouvoir, ce qui constitue une métaphysique politique,
although this grand structural and “metaphysical” ambition becomes obscured and smothered, in the view of the present author, in the half-thousand pages of close historical detail that make up Jouvenel’s “natural history of power’s growth”. [5]
But astonishingly, it was Orwell, writing at exactly this same time, who (inspired, as is well known, by the ex-Trotskyist conservative James Burnham) provided us with the closest we have to a useful notion of this pouvoir à l’état pur which would in fact be the only plausible occupant of the place of a “king whose value is equal at once to zero and to infinity”:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power [...] Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
The philosophical novelty, and the especial horror, of O’Brien’s speech here are thrown into relief by the fact that competing accounts of power – accounts that make “the acquisition of power” a policy among other policies in the sense of the chess analogy as we initially tested it out or that treat power, in other words, as something that can be, and needs to be in any critical political analysis, assigned some fixed “value” lying above zero but below infinity as playing an instrumental function in a whole – are also articulated in 1984. The perverse fraternity or filiality that binds, in Orwell’s fiction, Winston Smith and O’Brien might be described, to borrow a theological-historical vocabulary, as a fraternity or filiality of “pneumatics” in a world of “hyletics”. From Winston’s own point of view, indeed, the cited speech of O’Brien’s is redundant, since he has understood viscerally from the very start, no less than O’Brien has, that the power that occupies “the place of the king” in the society of Oceania is something spiritual, incommensurable, sui generis: something to which no “value” can be assigned in any terms other than itself. The division that runs between him and O’Brien is just the relatively small division of two distinct relations to this power. It is hardly a division at all in comparison to the chasm that separates Winston and O’Brien both from a “hyletic” like Julia who, although she is crushed and destroyed by this power quite as cruelly and pathetically as Winston is, is clearly so made that she cannot gain even an inkling of what the thing that’s destroying her really is.[6]
5.
I don’t delude myself that the few schematic and impressionistic remarks that I’ve thrown down in the course of the last few paragraphs suffice to clarify this very difficult notion of “the place of the king” in the polities that exist across the whole of the West at our present historical juncture’s being occupied by “a policy that is no specific policy”, by a “power” that resembles the king in classical procedures of chess-piece evaluation in having no specific value – put alternatively, “a value equal at once to zero and to infinity” – due to its having no specific nature, or a nature that is only tautologically expressible in terms of its equality with itself. Unclear as this notion remains, however, I intend to trace out in the following pages, even if only tentatively and heuristically, what consequences follow for the critical political analysis of our contemporary world from our ceasing to understand, as we did on the account of things which I outlined at the beginning of this essay (and which is, I would insist, an account tacitly embraced by a large proportion, indeed very likely the majority, of the thinkers of the New Right today), the key position within the “great game” of politics as it is being played out in this twenty-first century as being occupied by that crudest and most literal form of “globalization” that is mass demographic replacement and beginning to understand it as being occupied rather by this “policy that is all policies and no policies”, this “power comprehensible and expressible only in terms of itself”, certain aspects of which I’ve been touching on over the past few pages.
The first and most general thing that can be said about these consequences can be said, thankfully, in very simple language. The steps that we have hitherto taken of (a) removing “the place of the king” from that single rising order of places and values at whose topmost end it was situated by the first (and flawed) chess analogy that we briefly entertained above and (b) reconceptualizing this “place of the king” as a place sui generis, occupied by a value sui generis to which the other “places”, which on this revised model form a separate order of their own, continue to relate but with which they do not through this relation become commensurate – all this has, on the most crude and obvious level, the consequence of “everything being knocked down a notch”. The policy of mass demographic replacement can’t, for example, any longer occupy the “place of the king” since, on this reconsidered and revised schema, this latter place – its “own place” now in that most pregnant sense in which the mind is for Milton’s Satan – can’t accommodate anything specific, i.e. anything other than a tautologically self-related “power in se”. It is impossible to deny, however, that our present-day globalist governments continue to devote, more or less irrespectively of their declared political complexions and orientations, a significant proportion of their joint and separate energies to importing third-world populations into the former first world, so that there falls naturally and indisputably to the policy of the Great Replacement the highest place on what is now, on this revised schema, a hierarchy of places and powers that does not comprise “the place of the king” but stands in a constant strategic relation to this latter, distinct and separate place. The policy of the Great Replacement, in other words, slots naturally, on this revised schema, into the place of the queen, the place of the most strategically powerful and significant of pieces.
The serendipitous poetry of this powerful “feminine” place in our antagonist’s chess-set’s being taken up by feminism, then, has to be forfeited in this revision. But the policy of female empowerment is far from being eliminated thereby. Feminism, like “replacementism” before it, is only bumped down a place, to the position of such a “minor” indeed, yet still significant and effective, piece as a rook. The same goes in turn for whatever had stood immediately below feminism on the hierarchy of political “chess-pieces” as we had initially envisaged it. “Environmentalism, which might have been on the initial, unitary-hierarchical schema a rook, becomes, on this revised and divided schema, a knight or a bishop.[7] At no point do the consequences ensuing from the revision of the original schema extend so far that any of these so to speak “major minor pieces” are demoted to the status of that “minor minor piece” that is the pawn.
6.
By far the most politically and philosophically important consequence, however, of this revision of the chess-politics analogy as we initially conceived of it relates to the last of the points that I made regarding this revision in section three above. It is really only the revised schema that introduces a notion of unsacrificeability in any really strong sense of this term. The things that appeared unsacrificeable in the first of the two models we looked at – namely, the king that was assigned an insuperable 10-value as against the 9-value assigned to a queen or the 5-value assigned to a rook, or the policy of mass demographic replacement which we suggested should occupy “the place of the king” in any analogization of chess and the politics of our present historical juncture – are more precisely and properly described as only practically unsacrificeable, or even as just verging on unsacrificeability. This inasmuch as their importance is, on this first model’s own stated terms, merely a magnified iteration of the importance of the pieces and policies that lie farther down the single homogenous and continuous scale on which all the pieces and policies, as they are conceived here, are located. A real distinction between the sacrificeable and the unsacrificeable, the dispensable and the absolutely indispensable, is introduced only when this model is revisited and there is posited the existence of two distinct hierarchies of value – even if one of these hierarchies of value is a hierarchy of value of a highly peculiar kind which consists of a class of pieces or policies with only one member and therefore does not admit of “evaluation” at all in any usual sense of the term. (On the revised model, as we have seen, the king, or whatever analogically occupies the place of the king, proves recalcitrant to any specific evaluation since it proves recalcitrant to any specific characterization beyond a tautological “power = power”).
Once the model is revised as we have revised it, therefore, it becomes clear that the practical unsacrificeability that, say, the policy of mass demographic replacement seems initially to enjoy within the array of policies being pursued by Western governments at this present historical juncture does not, in fact, meet the true standard of unsacrificeability. Where the king and “the place of the king” are removed into their own distinct and incommensurable sphere, everything that is left over in the residual “second hierarchy” consisting of all the other pieces – and, on our analogy, of all their policy counterparts – has to be recognized to be, at bottom and in principle, commonly and equally sacrificeable. In our political analogy the policy of mass demographic substitution – the so-called “Great Replacement” – still enjoys indeed, on this revised model, the exalted position of the queen, most mobile and strategically powerful of all the pieces in the chess-set. But, as I’ve already remarked, the queen too is susceptible of being sacrificed. Indeed, it is arguable that the very essence of chess inheres, more than it does in any other move, in the “queen sacrifice”.
[1] The exposition has proven to be too rich and complex to be fitted into a single essay of manageable Substack length.
[2] One crude expression of this intuition that feminist policies may simply be ancillary to “replacementist” policies is the schadenfreudige “What is she complaining about? She voted for it!” with which a certain especially furious and embittered part of the ethno-nationalist Right tends to respond to posts on X and elsewhere recounting the grisly details of sexual assaults and rapes committed by migrants on native British / French / German women.
[3] There is, it must be conceded, a prima facie appealing argument to be made for this synonymity. No great semantic violence needs to be done to the terms involved, it’s true, in order to establish feminism or environmentalism as each of them “globalism in practice”. “Women,” famously, “are half of the sky” and, this being so, “globality” in the sense of “entirety” is only to be achieved through the promotion of women’s interests. “Environmentalism” is a “globalism” in an even more perspicuous sense, in that its concerns tend to be presented, at least, as all of them ultimately planetary, “global”. On the most concrete level, however, it is surely “replacementism” that lays the strongest claim to being “what globalism really means in practice”, since it consists in actually physically transposing those crucial component elements of the planetary whole that alone give this latter meaning – the Daseine, in Heidegger’s terms, that are the custodians of planetary Sein – from parts of the globe into other parts, so that a local, a non-global, meaning ceases to exist.
The larger argument of the present essay, however, is one which tends to displace “replacementism” from the absolutely central position that it occupies in mid-2020s right-wing political discourse and, given that we have just described “replacementism” as likely the best-suited synonym for “globalism”, a second important question arises: namely, whether “globalism” itself is really the most useful appellation of whatever it is we are at grips with.
[4] In the very week of my writing these lines, in fact, I note that the US government is having more and more frequent recourse to the “chess” analogy to obfuscate the clear and brutal facts of its outright military defeat in the war against Iran. Trump’s remark about this conflict to reporters on August 10th – “it will work out; it always works out; it’s like a chess game” – once again tacitly adduces the President’s completely specious reputation as a pursuer of chess strategies too subtle and too protracted for the ordinary observer to perceive, let alone appreciate.
[5] De Jouvenel does not cite this particular passage but the great historian Jacob Burckhardt had, already almost a century before De Jouvenel’s date of writing, cited to his Basel students an example of this metaphysical “Power in se”’s emergence into the physical-political world. Speaking of Sparta in the lecture notes that were to be published posthumously as his Griechische Kulturgeschichte, Burckhardt writes: “Power can have a great mission on earth; for perhaps it is only on power, on a world protected by power, that superior civilizations can develop. But the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.” Burckhardt, Werke Vol 5, p. 93.
[6] Orwell portrays Julia as displaying the same “quintessentially female” qualities – a surprising pragmatism in pursuit of her romantic and sentimental goals, once she has fixed on them; a complete uninterest in all matters abstract and theoretical – as are displayed by innumerable female characters in (male-authored) literature before and since Orwell’s time of writing, thereby rendering her unsympathetic to progressive readers. What especially interests us in the present context, however, is the fact Julia’s resistance to the power that governs and structures Airstrip One and Oceania is likewise a “quintessentially feminine” resistance. This fact cannot, indeed, be claimed to come to expression in any lesser degree of courage or resolution vis-à-vis the resistance shown by Winston. Both take the same risks and suffer, ultimately, the same terrible fate. Rather, it comes to expression in the fact Julia’s specific form of resistance is one which takes the power that she’s resisting to be a power expressive of something else, something “real-er”, that lies behind or beneath it. For Julia, the members of the Inner Party are “hyletic” beings like herself. “There’s nothing those swine don’t have,” she tells Winston: an anomalous residual expression, within this universe which is explicable really only in terms of O’Brien’s anti-phenomenalistic account of power as an end in itself, of that “it’s all about the Benjamins” mentality that still leads and misleads the leftist critic of power today. Orwell at no point clearly exposes Julia’s hyletic/phenomenalistic understanding of the power-universe that surrounds her as an inadequate one. But – aside even from those many passages in the novel which signal Julia’s utter lack of interest in matters of theory and abstract thought – that Julia’s understanding of the infernal mechanism in which she dwells is distorted by undue projection and universalization of her own hyletic, feminine experience is indicated by such details as her confident assertion to Winston, during their first tryst together, that any number of Inner Party members would have engaged in the illicit sexual relations with her that many Outer Party members had, even though she admits that none ever have[6] . Julia, in the terrible catastrophe of her existence, is spared, it seems, at least this final horror: the knowledge that the power which destroyed her was, in fact, all along of a nature even more alien and repugnant to her own hyletic, feminine humanity than she could grasp.
[7] The rook, on almost every historical value-ordering of the six chess pieces, is valued higher than knight and bishop, which are often assigned values more or less equal to one another.
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