Phillips calls on Britain and America to prevent national suicide, sort of

David H. from Oregon writes:

Melanie Phillips’s National Review article, Preventing National Suicide, sounds rather like Lawrence Auster! Better late than never.

LA replies:

Did I get that right? Preventing national suicide? As in, DOING something about it instead of just warning about it?

However, reading the article, I see that by national suicide she means not immigration but this:

Britain is ecstatic that America has elected an apparently antiwar president in a time of war. Some might think this is a form of national suicide.

She does mention immigration once in the article:

It also set about changing the identity of the country. Promoting the doctrine of multiculturalism, it opened Britain’s doors to mass immigration.

But when she sums up the national suicide she remains silent about immigration:

… transnational progressivism, multiculturalism, victim culture, pacifism. and all the rest of it do amount to a national suicide note.

The main point of this article is a very good one—that Obama will try to do to America what Blair did so devastatingly to Britain—hollow out its culture, remove its national identity, kill it from within. I think that that is a very useful way to understand Obama and the threat he represents. However, when it comes to preventing this national suicide (or, rather, this national murder) rather than just describing it, there is nothing here. The article basically repeats Phillips’s oft-made point about how the Blair regime turned Britain into a cultural void thus allowing the Muslims to start taking it over. So the title does not fit the article. The only passage that hints at preventing national suicide is in the last paragraph:

The challenge for conservatives on both sides of the pond is to find a way of conserving the essential values of Western Civilization and defend them against the onslaught being mounted against them both from within and from without—but to do so in a way that is generous and big-hearted rather than narrow and sectarian, and embraces rather than repels.

There’s the general idea of a defending and preserving the values of Western civilization, but no call for Britain or America actually to do anything to defend them—which, of course, has been my number one criticism of Phillips all along. Further, as soon as she makes this abstract, general appeal to conserve the West, she quickly adds the caveat that she doesn’t want to be mean and narrow, but generous and big-hearted! She’s so wary of any actual measures of civilizational preservation, or of being seen herself as right-wing, that even without having urged any measures to defend the West, she’s already covering herself from the charge of being nasty and right-wing!

Phillips wants to preserve Britain, and she wants to remain in orbit around liberalism. But she can’t have both. She will remain a hopelessly conflicted writer until she resolves this contradiction.

However, I repeat, the main theme of the article, which is her analogy of Obama to Blair and the utter ruin he brought on Britain, is very insightful and sobering.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 06, 2008 10:44 AM | Send