More on the passivity of the English, and of the Israelis

A follow-up from my correspondent in England:

The English are both indolent and complacent. They have developed many social problems such as mass Third World immigration, poor educational standards, crime, etc., but they prefer not to see them. They go into denial and tend to ignore and minimise any disastrous developments, hoping that they can be swept under the carpet and will eventually go away or sort themselves out. As if by ignoring and denying their existence they will, as if by magic, disappear. Of course such problems do not disappear, they just get worse with inaction. This is compounded by a naiveté and belief that everyone wants the same things as they do, which they do not and never have done. This naiveté is particularly disastrous when dealing with Third World immigrants. Their tendency to believe everything they are told about refugees, asylum seekers and other illegal and legal immigrants has lead to the perception of England as a “soft touch” for immigrants. It undoubtedly is, and has accordingly attracted some huge population of illegals and highly undesirable characters. The Third Worlders are in the majority, rapacious, manipulative and mendacious. However English passivity tolerates them in the hope that they will develop with time into “Englishmen” and not remain as disturbed Africans and Asians.

This attitude of avoiding conflict and ugly realities means that the English never react until the problem is utterly catastrophic. This is why they are complacent and largely undisturbed by this month’s bombings and the PC clamp-down on free speech. It will take a far larger disaster than that to provoke a reaction.

My reply:

You’re describing a kind of living death, or a willing acceptance of death. Living people would not passively and unquestioningly consent to the continued existence in their country of an alien and openly hostile population that produces terrorists that might unsuspectedly enter a bus, a subway, a crowded restaurant, anywhere, any time, and turn 20 or 30 or 50 people into a cloud of flying body parts. The same passivity was seen in Israel. After the first or the second or the third bus bombing in the mid-1990s, if the Israelis had been living beings instead of passive Eloi, at least a significant number of them would have called for—would have demonstrated in the streets demanding—the transfer of all Palestinians from west of the Jordan. As I’ve said before, in any previous, i.e., non-liberal, period of human history, expelling such a dangerous population is the least the Israelis would have done. Instead, like the English, they prided themselves on their refusal to let terrorism disturb their daily routine. Indeed, far from removing the Palestinians, the Israelis for the next ten years left the Green Line open and unguarded in many spots, allowing suicide bombers to walk freely from the West Bank into Israel and do their fiendish work, even as the Israelis like sheep continued boarding their buses and gathering at their fashionable watering holes and periodically getting transformed into body parts. There is something deeply wrong with a people that accepts such a situation, or that accepted it for so long before they finally, after lengthy debate, erected a security fence making it much harder for terrorists to enter Israel. But that’s liberalism. Being liberals, Western people will allow the intolerable to go on for some time. But, being human, at some point even they will find the intolerable to be intolerable. And then they will, with much hesitancy and reluctance, take some action to protect themselves, but only after great and irrecoverable damage has been done.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 19, 2005 05:14 PM | Send