Britain is dead, long live Britain (some day)

Like Melanie Phillips, Roger Scruton protests the application of Britain’s law prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals to the area of adoption, but, also like Phillips, he has nothing to say against the sexual orientation anti-discrimination law generally, he criticizes it only when it comes to adoption. Adoption is different, he says, because it involves a duty that one voluntarily takes upon oneself to provide for the care of a child; it is about serving another person’s needs, not about pleasing oneself. There is, he insists, no right to adopt a child, and therefore the very idea of having one’s “right” to adopt denied is false.

Ok, I suppose that’s a decent argument. But there are two problems with it. Scruton accepts the banning of discrimination against homosexuals in every area and activity of life except adoption. And, having accepted that totalitarian law for the whole of society, his plea for a single special exception to it stands on weak ground.

Scruton, of course, is one of Britain’s leading “conservatives.” He doesn’t even have Phillips’s excuse, which is that she is a self-described liberal.

Let’s face it, folks. The British, the great people from which our own country was born, are dead, they are finished, they are kaput. And that goes for their “conservatives” too. Before there is any possibility that they can become a decent and strong people again, they must first be melted down and destroyed as they now exist.

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From: Jeff in England
Subject: JOURNEY THRU DARK HEAT

Melted down and destroyed? Is that a nuclear style threat by Larry Auster on the British people? Ha! I think that’s a crime under British law.

LA replies:

You’ve read Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. The British as a people have developed a “false personality” that has taken over and controls them completely. If they are to have any hope of getting back to their “essence” again, their false personality (in Christian terms, their body of sin) must be melted down, which can only happen through tremendous suffering.

Jeff replies:

Good analogy.

Sam H. writes:

Alas, I have not read Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Where should I start?

LA replies:

P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous. While the title is vivid and memorable, it does not convey the kind of book this is. Ouspensky was a Russian intellectual and author, a seeker of hidden knowledge pertaining to the possibility of man’s evolution. Around 1915 he met George Gurdjieff in Moscow and St. Petersburg and this is his account of Gurdjieff’s teachings, which were transmitted to groups of students in Russia through the period of the Revolution. The focus is on the idea that man in his ordinary state is “asleep,” not aware of himself, and needs to develop true consciousness. Essential and fascinating reading touching on all kinds of topics, for example, the octave structure of the cosmos. Ouspensky has a lucid and authoritative style of writing.

I mention this and related books in my reading list.

RB writes:

In reality the British masses can be described in the following Gurdjieffian syllogism for the normal condition of men. “Man is governed by external influences. He has no will. He cannot ‘do’. With him everything happens. And it happens just like it rains or it snows.” It is, to use a Gurdjieff term, the British ‘Hasnamusian’ elite in government, the media and education that has wrongly crystallized and must be melted down.

One of Gurdjieff’s ideas expressed in his Beelzebub’s Tales, that may be particularly relevant today, is where he states that the division between the Shi’ites and the Sunnis is most fortunate for the West. If they ever united the zealous violence inherent in Islam would be turned on us. Gurdjieff knew Islam quite well from the inside. He not only studied with Christian monks and Tibetan lamas, but with a number of Sufi masters as well.

Gintas writes:

I think you’ve crossed the Rubicon when you state:

“The British, the great people from which our own country was born, are dead, they are finished, they are kaput. “

Up to now you’ve never explicitly stated such a thing about any Western country. It’s truly sad that you say it not about France, or Belgium, but about Great Britain. Perhaps you should write a formal VFR Obituary for England.

LA replies:

I teared up when I read your e-mail. What you say is true. I never said it quite that way before.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 24, 2007 07:34 PM | Send