The Kingdom of Despair

(More comments have been posted here on August 28.)

John D. writes:

I just read this article in the Sunday Telegraph that complains of the social and cultural ills that have befallen Britain. I am deeply saddened by many of the despairing comments from the article’s readers. Many of them seem to be absent any hope at all for the future recovery of their once grand and noble country. Even the author [John O’Sullivan, former editor of National Review] renders a sense of melancholy that seems to be void of any likelihood that things will ever change for the better.

You are quite accurate when you describe Britain as a dead or dying nation.

LA replies:

I read that article earlier and intended to post the below from it as a “quote of the day”:

The police have become little more than the paramilitary wing of The Guardian, sniffing out “racist” or “Islamophobic” attitudes rather than investigating serious crimes… — John O’Sullivan, The Telegraph, August 26, 2007.

On the readers’ comments that you mention, the passivity, the lack of any fight, is the most stunning thing. No one says: We’ve done X, Y, and Z that have brought us to this sorry pass, let us call for a reversal of those things. Let us fire police chiefs who don’t arrest violent criminals because they believe that Britain is an unequal country that deserves to have lots of violent crime. Let us withdraw from the EU and dismantle all EU-based “human rights” and “anti-hate” laws which are really totalitarian laws used by the state to eliminate any resistance. Let us stop all Muslim immigration, outlaw all religious activity in support of sharia, and remove all Muslims who support jihad.

Yes, of course, those things cannot be carried out tomorrow. But the absence of even the thought that those things could and should be done and that it would be worthwhile to fight for those things and that even to call for those things would be a sign of life, indicates the spiritual death state of which that I have spoken. It comes down to the lack of any vision of how things could be different. This is why I have been so tough on the “Usual Suspects,” who constantly bewail the Islamization of Britain but suggest not a single thing to be done about it. Such people have no vision. They don’t like the present condition of Britain, but have no notion of what a different condition would be. Why? Because deep inside they still accept the left-liberal principles that govern today’s Britain. If they didn’t accept those principles they would crying out against them, and calling for the dismantlement of all policies based on them.

The British are finished unless a new Arthur or Alfred appears among them to stir them back to life. It doesn’t have to be one leader, it could be many. But there must be leaders.

LA continues:

I suppose the closest thing to the counter-revolutionary program that I say is needed in Great Britain is the platform of the British National Party. The BNP is to be praised for going beyond its past single-issue focus on race and immigration and making itself into a genuine political party dealing with the gamut of national problems. However, their most recent national platform, for the 2005 general elections, is almost too diffuse, split up among 16 different web pages. It seems to me that, now that BNP has done the necessary work of articulating positions on all the important issues, it needs to do the reverse job and boil down the crisis of Great Britain to a much more concise statement saying this is where Britain has gone wrong, and this is what we intend to change. And to make clear this presentation of an alternative direction for Britain, it needs to identify the core principles that have brought Britain to this state, and the different core principles that must replace them.

James P. writes:

O’Sullivan identifies the “social acids” that broke down the strong British culture of civic self-control: (1) the cultural liberalism generally associated with the 1960s, (2) the ethnic and religious diversity introduced by mass immigration, and (3) government-promoted “multiculturalism” that encourages minorities to retain their culture and identity. Without a doubt, all these acids are operating here, too, and we are also afflicted with a political class that not only is not trying to stop these processes, but is actively promoting them. We are just as finished as the Brits if we let these trends proceed unchecked.

LA replies:

As I said in another thread recently, complacent U.S. conservatives keep favorably comparing our situation to that of the British and the Europeans (sorry, my Anglo-American prejudices still make me think of England as something distinct from Europe per se). Yet if the existing trends are allowed to continue, we will in some years be in the same situation as the British and the Europeans to whom we currently feel so superior.

It’s another example of how mainstream conservatives’ motivation is not to talk about reality, but to maintain their own self-congratulatory world.

(At the end of this blog entry, see my description of my exchange with Richard John Neuhaus on the above point at NR in 2004.)

Rich B. writes:

In your post, you say:

“The British are finished unless a new Arthur or Alfred appears among them to stir them back to life.”

What if, heaven forbid, they are stirred back to life by a new Adolf?

LA replies:

What if, heaven forbid, Britain allowed two million sharia-believing Muslims into Britain, began investigating and arresting people who made truthful statements about what these Muslims were up to, began allowing savage murderers complete liberty of action in Britain, began arresting and imprisoning people for defending their lives and property, made any refusal to deal with homosexuals a crime, handed over its national sovereignty to a totalitarian transnational organization, …

Whoops, Britain has already done those things, and many more equally as bad, hasn’t it? Once a country has destroyed its morality, its culture, its national sovereignty and identity, its system of liberty under the rule of law, anything can happen to it, can’t it? Including being taken over by an Adolf figure. So doesn’t it seem that, if Britain doesn’t want an Adolf-type leader of Britain or some other equally horrible scenario, it must stop and reverse its present course NOW?

Ben W. writes:

Is Britain dead?

It appears that Great Britain no longer recognizes the boundary between the human and the animal (see story). This comes from a belief in Darwinian evolution. But also from a late liberal society that does not affirm an essential human nature (transexuality, homosexuality, etc), does not know whether a foetus is human, and anthropologically cannot distinguish between racial identities. The human being is dead in British society and human cells are becoming material for animal admixture.

Of course this society is dead because the human being qua civilized human being is dead.

Britain’s leading scientists have made a final plea for the right to create the first animal-human embryos for medical research using eggs taken from dead cows.

The issue is controversial because it involves scientists taking an animal egg, removing its genetic material and putting DNA from a human cell into it.

An Indian living in the West writes:

I can only speak from my observations about London which I sometimes visit and which the British have turned into the world’s boarding house.

It would be one thing to say that London is on its way to becoming majority non-white (something perhaps unthinkable just thirty years ago). But actually, even with the whites in London, a large percentage are not native to the British Isles. This is because there has been a large influx from Eastern Europe recently and of course there is also a large number of white Americans, Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians in addition to the sizable number of Western European professionals working in the finance industry.

If London is in England, its a good question as to what percentage of London is actually English. As a pure guess, I would say the percentage is probably no more than 30 percent. And of this 30 percent, the majority would probably be underclass English whites who are stuck in rotting council estates and have nowhere to go. The English middle class is mostly AWOL. They do work here but they live in the country and commute up to two hours each way getting there.

If you actually asked educated middle class English people what they think about London, a good number will tell you that it is a “jolly good thing” and that London is now the world’s capital city—it couldn’t have become that if it was just a provincial English town.

I actually think that Thatcherism had something to do with it—perversely, her economic reforms were so successful that they almost enshrined her “Rand-esque” economic ideology, i.e. there is no such thing as society, capitalism is the greatest thing about the West etc. When the Thatcherite economic arguments won, the ideology of “economism” won over country and community. Of course, there was no alternative to it. The left’s alternative was universal non-discriminatory socialism and economic ruin.

James N. writes:

Rich B. raises the Nazi boogyman, saying, in effect, “the only alternative to surrender is Hitler, and that’s unacceptable, so let’s surrender.”

This is a remarkably common trope among the left. What is the power of the Nazi imago for them? Why keep recurring to something so obviously in the past?

Why are they more afraid of imaginary Nazis than real Moslems?

Simon N. writes from England:

You write: “I suppose the closest thing to the counter-revolutionary program that I say is needed in Great Britain is the platform of the British National Party.”

I think the BNP will remain handicapped by its neo-Nazi roots. Its program today is largely indistinguishable from that of a democratic-populist party, but it does retain some elements such as a ban on non-white BNP membership that mean it can be legitimately described as racist; it rejects ‘civic nationalism’. The British have always been very suspicious of anything that smacks of Nazism or Fascism; although many do seem to have been seduced by the modern hegemonic ideology of cultural Marxism. Genuine racism is traditionally seen as un-British by the broad working and middle classes, not just the liberal elites. This doesn’t mean they’re keen on multi-culturalism either, though. A democratic-populist party untainted by Nazi associations, such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, can do very well in Anglo-Saxon societies—and One Nation caused a realignment in Australian politics that has greatly strengthened their society. This seems unlikely in Britain as things stand; most likely the BNP will continue to grow slowly in response to social pressures (immigration, crime etc), but a breakthrough is unlikely. We can hope for a John Howard-esque leader to emerge, but the EU has mechanisms designed to squash populism in its subject provinces, and unfortunately continued cultural disintegration seems more likely.

Alex A. writes:

My pessimism that the British people will ever neutralise the social acids which John O’Sullivan says have dissolved the conservative consensus, is based on the apathy that I observe everywhere in this country. You are quite correct to identify British passivity as the key failing which has not only allowed the “great liberal experiment” to wreck our culture, but continues to make a virtue out of suffering in silence.

I’ve just started to the read VFR and, encouraged by the very high standard of writing here, I intend to make it a daily source of intellectual refreshment.

Jeff in England writes:

As the very recent articles from the last week by McKInstry seem unavailable for some reason, here’s one from a couple of years back. He comes closer than any British mainstream columnist to portraying the situation as it really is, but like every other Suspect British mainstream columnist, he refrains from proposing immigration restriction, particularly of Muslims.

Peter G. writes:

I attended school in England in the early seventies, prior to the initial Muslim colonization later in that decade. It was still the old order at the time then London was invaded by hordes of wealthy Arabs—rich on petro-dollars extorted from the West courtesy of the OPEC embargo. Real estate, businesses were being gobbled up by middle easterner as locals couldn’t resist or defend their interests from such a large influx of capital.

On returning near the end of the seventies, I noticed a profound sense of dread and uncertainty about the future, a recognition that aliens were co-opting England with their own money. This large number of Arabs had an immediate impact on the lives of ordinary British folk, at the street level they lived in fear of young Arabs with their aggressive and financial intimidation of locals. Whoring with the local women and having the means to buy themselves out of nearly anything. The common view was that the establishment was intoxicated by Arab wealth and through the average fellow to the wind. Multiculturalism in Britain was incubated in what I now perceive as dhimmi-lite.

Today, the greatest imperative of the West is not a military conflict but more importantly financial. To halt the wealth transfer to the Middle East, as even now Muslims have profited greatly from the inception of the “war on terror.” With two trillion dollars a year flowing from West to east (some south to other bad guys) expect future amplification of the London effect.

The West needs to establish a quarantine zone and blockade all shipments of oil from this region—and eliminate the global commodity pricing for oil. This will prevent the most extreme scenarios from determining the price of a product that should be determined by regional factors. Let their price of oil go to two hundred dollars a barrel, let’s see if anyone will buy it.

Sound extreme? Well, Saudi and other Arab interests are continually buying control of financial, media and defense industries here as they did in the Britain, what’s the tipping Larry, when you wake up and they’re calling the shots in the Boardrooms of America? Do you realise how many Muslim “Lords” there are now in the UK? Is it any wonder Blair removed the House of Lords from the political process?

Otherwise we’ll be defeated with our own wealth that’s being unmeritoriously being transferred to the enemy.

Scott B. writes from Britain:

I’d just like to disagree with you on one point though (and I say that as someone who agrees with you 99 percent of the time)

I think that your complementary comments regarding the BNP are thoroughly misplaced. Irregardless of the merit of their policy positions as strictly stated, their base, and I’ve met dozens of their supporters at pubs over the years, is made up of the most disgusting football hooligan type scum you could imagine. And I don’t doubt for a second that you would also find their typical supporters to be vile specimens of humanity, because believing that race is real and culture is real and that discrimination on that basis is wholly justifiable isn’t the same thing as thinking its hilarious to post dog-shtthrough the letterboxes of Asian families or to beat up black taxi cab drivers, etc. And honestly, I’ve never met a BNP supporter who would find anything appalling about that kind of behaviour.

And I can’t imagine anything more harmful to our cause of advocating intelligent discriminatory policies (e.g. prohibt immigration from gangster cultures such as Somalia or Bosnia, prohibit immigration from backward tribal cultures such as the mountain Kurds whose entire community implicitly condoned by obstructing the police investigation a recent grotesque “honour” killing, in which a father had his brother and friends rape, torture and murder his daughter, and most urgent of all, prohibit immigration from anyone who belongs to a religion whose prophet was a murderous supremacist who promised the highest positions in heaven to those of his followers who would martyr themselves in the cause of subjugating the whole world to his relgion) than becoming assiciated with crude proponents of indiscriminate discrimination.

LA replies:

I have had zero personal contact with any BNP members. I’ve read intelligent people saying good things about the bNP, including quotes from ordinary middle class voters in mainstream news articles at the time of the 2006 local council elections—articles which treated bnp as legitimate. If Britain is in a death state, and the only alternative to the two death parties is the BNP, then what do you expect people to do—just die? If people vote for the BNP, and if BNP is as bad as you say, then that will push mainstream parties in a better direction.

Dimitri K. writes:

The reader writes: “What if, heaven forbid, they are stirred back to life by a new Adolf?”

Many people would agree that current multicultural/liberal order is the reaction, may be an overreaction, to the nazism. Anti-Semites would say that cunning Jews deliberately staged their extermination in order to enforce multiculturalism afterwards. Liberals would say that current order is a justified measure in order to prevent new nazism.

However, nobody has ever tried to connect the Multicultural order directly to Nazism. The main concept that has to be changed is the target electorate. Hitler claimed he fought for gentile population and the domination of the Arian race, which is a poorly—cpecified term and could include virtually everybody except Jews. The gentile population also hardly benefited from Nazis, taking into account the result of their rule. Multiculturalism/liberalism rather assumes preferential treatment of minorities, which however have a potential to become majorities.

Except this difference in the target electorate, almost all other concepts are the same: 1. New better world order. 2. Unified Europe. 3. Socialist-type regulation of economy. 4. Blaming all problems on Jews/Israel and Capitalism/USA. 5. Anti-Chrystian bias. 6. Alliance with Muslims: Arabs, Chechens, Albanians. 7. Healthy way of life—Hitler himself was a vegetarian. 8. Accent on technical and scientific advancess (often imaginary) as the main source of social progress.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 26, 2007 07:36 PM | Send