Atmospherics

Insider Attacks and Flag Shagging

For months, England has been resplendent in flags. They mark motorways, roundabouts, urban housing estates and village zebra crossings. They are very hard to miss. That is, unless you live in the postwar British government’s new multicultural nation within England, the contiguous minority-English territory I’m calling New Mercia.

I wrote in June 2025 when discussing the likely decline into low-intensity conflict about the “lack of accompanying symbols that have not been co-opted by the state. Waving the England flag either identifies you as an ethnonationalist or a supporter of England’s ethnically diverse football team.” This clearly needs an update.

Seeing the England flag, like Northern Ireland's Irish and Union flags, now marks your entry into the contested and shrinking ethnic English territory within England. This is seen most clearly in the North of England. When driving through Dewsbury, for example, you will see South Asian pedestrians in traditional (face-covering niqabs for women and long robes for men) and modern dress walking around flag-free neighbourhoods, then as your route crosses into an Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood, suddenly the flags appear and the people change.

The use of flags as ethnic territorial markers is clear in segregated Northern England

In my home city of Peterborough, like much of urban England also highly segregated, the flag has been painted on roundabouts into the Pakistani part of the city and in surrounding English villages. Flags on lamp posts mark the western entrance to the city, flown next to the government's asylum seeker hotel housing 146 military-aged men between two children’s play areas in the woods. But at ground level, the area sees flyers promoting Wagner-affiliated sub-Saharan militarists. The flags in this case mark a liminal space, between two worlds. On the one side is the withdrawing old England, and on the other, the British state’s new nation.

Why Are Flags Important?

When deploying the military into an area, it is important to collect data on “atmospherics”. How this is done varies, but the aim is to give an insight into the social environments that security forces operate in. Chairman Mao identified the local people as the water his Red Army swam through, and in New Mercia this water appears to be becoming murkier.

When operating in England, American soldiers are currently advised to keep their heads down. There are rules for social contact outside of bases due to a mixture of the ever-present threats of Islamist terrorist attacks, Chinese and Russian spies, criminals and domestic nationalists usually grouped under the term “far-right”. It’s no conflict zone, but it’s no South Korea either.

There is a nationalist threat to the American military presence in Britain, shown in a “green on blue”-style insider attack from a GCHQ worker. The attacker Joshua Bowles, described in court documents as an autistic loner, attempted to assassinate an American servicewoman with a knife by her gym, and was stopped before killing her. When detained he said, “I make a pretty shit terrorist, don’t I?”

The attack was played down publicly as incel terrorism from a disgruntled former civil servant, despite the attacker first selecting a male target. The judge did not believe that the target’s American nationality had no bearing. Just before the attack, Bowles had searched for non-traditional WW2 narratives about the Allies massacring German civilians, usually completely ignored by British WW2 documentaries, which from personal experience are more likely to show you footage of leggy blonde German women enjoying themselves at holiday camps with ominous background music to make you distrust and fear them. The non-traditional view of history is a common talking point among European nationalist groups, and the attacker wrote about waging war against those demoralising and replacing him. A cursory reading of postwar European history will show that the population displacements occurring due to mass immigration have arguably been consequences of the American occupation of Western Europe.

Sentencing Remarks from R v Joshua Bowles (highlight added)

Anti-Americanism among English nationalists is currently low. There is a generalised anti-Americanism present in Europe, but intense enough for minor political demonstrations or snide remarks, not currently intense enough to provide an ideological basis for frequent attacks. With the Trump government’s pivot to promoting the interests of native groups in occupied Europe, nationalists have aligned with right-wing Americans against “woke” and some discuss population displacement, rather than rejecting the American presence as a whole. They are operating within the American Overton Window, without questioning why the wall around the window is there in the first place. It would be unwise to expect this situation to last forever.

At some point, European nationalists may take out their pens and paper to draw a simple timeline and see that American soldiers arrived in their country before mass immigration started. They’ll scratch their heads and wonder if their countries could in fact be occupied vassal states. Could it be that having no independent foreign policy (and having the hegemon blow up your gas pipeline without consequence if you try to have one) and having the hegemon’s soldiers everywhere means that you’re living an Empire, not an independent nation-state? Why do the media give so much coverage to events in small-town America? How can a new American government switch from supporting mass immigration to declaring woke over and fundamentally change your country’s political environment?

I write this from a cafe inside what was a Roman settlement. Even without my crayons and paper I can see that there was an overlap between Roman soldiers being here (Gloucester if you’re wondering), Roman influence on local government and this being a part of the Roman Empire. It is not a great leap to recognise that this cafe is now in the American Empire. But do the people walking into this American cafe wearing American-style blue jeans (stolen from the French of Nîmes but that’s another story) recognise that they’re in an Empire? Probably not.

Nerva, Emperor of Greggs (Gloucester)

Something in the Atmosphere

The West Country is not so far in New Mercia. Flags are not widely used as ethnic markers until moving further north into the Midlands. Despite Gloucester being multicultural, the local English have not yet left in great enough numbers for its city centre to have been effectively abandoned. For now, the atmosphere is such that the local English do not appear to feel insecure enough to assert their identities through displays. Yet, just up the road in Cheltenham, a native man was radicalised enough to carry out an attack.

Monitoring atmospherics in this case requires more than looking around the neighbourhood and talking to people. Social media sentiment analysis is also important. This is now less useful for analysis of individual communities due to the proliferation of chatbots, but the bots themselves give an indication of the information environment the locals inhabit. Perhaps most of the comments someone reads on X are written by AI accounts run by engagement farmers and information warfare operatives, but we can assume that those operations are at least partially effective. Monitoring X accounts allegedly paid by Israeli information warfare operatives to promote anti-Muslim content was useful for measuring European ethnocentrism by proxy when predicting the 2024 UK race riots.

Monitoring legacy media is also important. Tracking specific content is useful, but British state and other mainstream media are similar to Soviet propaganda in that you have to listen to what they don’t say. Like most legacy media within the American Empire, they are notorious for giving prominent coverage to White criminals and burying stories of non-White criminals, or hiding or playing down their ethnicities if they are forced to cover the story. A useful atmospheric indicator for local ethnocentrism in this would be the degree to which the media continue to behave in this manner. A shift in coverage could indicate fear of instability from the state.

Recognising the influence of the American metropole on the periphery also helps. It’s very rare for honeypots and broader political warfare operations to be officially acknowledged, but they do have an impact on the periphery’s social environment. From the outside looking in, America’s strategy appears to be to shore up European ethnocentrism just enough to support the forever wars in the Middle East by keeping it defined in opposition to Islamist groups. It will pay to consider the long-term consequences of promoting inclusive Christian nationalism and multiracial anti-Islamic street demonstrations while the UK rapidly fragments along genetic lines.

The demographic change that occurs during American-style “diversity is our greatest strength” social transformation is relatively predictable, thanks to decades of detailed American and British census data. We know what happens when large numbers of different people move into an area. In the base case scenario, the British state, operating within a fundamentally American ideological framework, will continue to import millions of people genetically distant from the English. This is, Detroit-style, causing the local White population to rapidly leave. Politically, this is forming a contiguous new national territory with the rough borders of the old Kingdom of Mercia.

If the British state implements its plan of stopping censuses forever, monitoring where the flags are flown would serve the dual purposes of identifying ethnocentrism and seeing whether a neighbourhood is still English, or has been taken over by the state’s new nation.

Overall, monitoring atmospherics can give us an idea of how the operational environment is changing for American and other security personnel in the UK. As the country moves into its fragmented future with an expected low-intensity civil war following native disenfranchisement, keeping track of the diverging attitudes and behaviours of its people will help keep operations running smoothly.

Charles Small is an open-source intelligence consultant. Get in touch for a consultation: charles@csmall.co.uk