Britain’s international health service

Under liberalism each (white Western) country exists to serve the needs of humanity, so this situation described in the Daily Mail, which the correspondent who sent it called “ridiculous,” makes complete sense:

Immigrant baby boom puts NHS under strain

Maternity services are under strain because of recently-arrived Eastern Europeans seeking pregnancy care and abortions on the Health Service, experts have said.

Remember, even though the evil EU is now the source of the majority of laws passed by its respective members, such as Britain’s totalitarian Sexual Orientation Regulations, the EU has still granted (but for how long?) its older member nations the power to place limits on the number of immigrants they admit from the new member nations in Eastern Europe. But as I have discussed, the position of the Labor government is that any numerical ceiling on immigration is racist. As a result, instead of the few thousand immigrants from Eastern Europe who were expected, many hundreds of thousands came, in what appears to be the largest immigration in Britain’s history, creating major social dislocations and crushing burdens on Britain’s social services and of course its (Inter)National Health Service. But while many in Britain kvetch mightily about this crisis, no one to my knowledge has challenged the premise that limiting the number of immigrants is racist; no one has advocated a ceiling on the number of immigrants; no one has called for the departure of at least some of the vast masses of foreigners that have already come.

So there you have it. What Britain is allowing to happen to itself is mad, it is suicidal, but it is not ridiculous, any more than the events portrayed in The Camp of the Saints were ridiculous. Britain has opened its doors and there is no one in British politics who has the will to close them or even to say that they ought to be closed.

But even to call this an act of national suicide falls short of the mark, since, as I have said, Britain’s behavior, its demonstated lack of will to take any action in its own defense, its lack of belief that it has the right to take such action, is that of a nation that is already dead. Its only hope is to recognize that as it now is it is dead, and to decide that it wants to live.

In a famous passage in The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot placed Dante’s Hell, where “death had undone so many,” in modern London, but, unlike Dante’s Hell, Eliot’s modern hell presents the possibility, anguished and tormented though it may be, of rebirth:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2007 08:58 AM | Send