The Dead Island continues to decay

(Note to English readers: I don’t say things like the above to put you down or discourage you, but to rouse you.)

Clark Coleman writes:

I read a couple of items in an NRA magazine tonight that seemed so absurd that I had to track down confirming stories.

The first is that fire extinguishers are going to be banned in certain places in Britain because most people cannot be trusted to use them properly, so they should call the fire department without trying to use a fire extinguisher first.

The second item tells how, in order to protect its stupid and helpless citizens from themselves, the Nanny State is going to pad lamp posts in London so that cell phone users who are distracted by their efforts to send text messages will not be injured when they walk into the lamp posts.

I wonder what aspects of their lives can be entrusted to British subjects these days.

- end of initial entry -

March 17

Keith J. writes from Britain:

If the Establishment of a Nation is almost totally disconnected from the main body of the people, then one does not use its doings as an accurate index of the condition of the Nation.

LA replies:

I take your point, but my reply would be, where are the signs of the body of the people resisting the Establishment? I don’t see resistance, I see grumbling. Conservative readers’ comments in British publications almost uniformly do not express outrage and indignation at the things going on; they express sad resignation, they grumble. I’ve pointed out many times how even the most supposedly conservative critical voices among the British commentariat have nothing to say beyond some vague protest, like Leo McKinstry’s pathetic remark the other day that the country must “stand up” to the radical Muslims, without his giving any notion of what such “standing up” would consist of. There are no conservatives arguing for a concrete direction different from what Britain is doing now.

Until there is a coherent voice, whether of a prominent individual or a group, rejecting Britain’s entire current direction and calling for something different, then the Island continues to be ruled without resistance by those seeking its destruction, and so can be described as Dead. Yes there is the BNP, but there needs to be a more mainstream voice without BNP’s baggage.

I’m not saying that other countries are better in kind that Britain. The whole West is heading in the same direction. But Britain, to an amazing degree, embodies suicidal leftism. Also, the polite, pacific aspect of the British, which is one of their most attractive features, turns deadly when Britain is under an evil leftist Establishment, because the British don’t seem to have it in them to resist the Establishment. The Anglo-Saxon thing of “not making a fuss” is a fine and admirable quality in ordinary life. But when your country is being destroyed, it means passive surrender to the destruction.

Sage McLaughln writes:

I’d add to your reply to Keith J. that his image of a British people wholly disconnected with its establishment is somewhat misconceived. Average Brits display every bit the suicidal leftism as their government and media elites, they consistently vote Labor and Labor-lite politicians into office, thereby affirming their rhetoric. Most of all, they spend their time doing exactly what the establishment wants them to do, which is to debase themselves and to imitate their outrageously trashy entertainment. British (and, yes, American) conservatives aren’t even able to summon up enough resistance to such bilge to boycott it, much less denounce it publicly. Even when their protests of liberal tyranny are seemingly vital, such protests are often extremely degraded. Witness the response to the ban on fox-hunting, which allowed its emblematic symbol to be two English women standing topless with hunting coats painted over their nakedness.

Sorry, Keith, but that’s a dead people. Or perhaps the British are more like bioengineered zombies, seemingly alive but actually dead, lapping up the degraded sludge their masters have prepared for them. Sorry, but if the English were all that different from their elites, then the BBC would not be what it is—it would have to change or die. Face it—the British (and the Swedes, Americans, etc.) have chosen this path. Americans elected a philandering, undignified s_____g like Bill Clinton twice not because they are so disconnected from their elites, but because they think he represents something worth aspiring to. It might seem hard to believe, but the ’60s generation really did establish a new public standard according to which honest depravity was vastly preferable to the hypocrisy that naturally comes with affirming the good. Now the British can’t even affirm what is good about themselves and their own country, much less aspire to it.

Nope. Dead. And if you don’t see the connection between the moral disintegration of a people and its demise, then you are one of the walking dead yourself.

LA replies:

I want to underscore Mr. McLaughlin’s point that not just the extreme decadence of Britain’s “mainstream” culture, but the fact that everyone seems to accept the decadence as a matter of course, is proof of collective death. Only a total critique and rejection of the current established views and attitudes in Britain—by which I mean not just its embrace of unassimilable and dangerous aliens, but its entire moral character as a society—can save the country. And to do that, people must step outside of what Britain now is, must cease to share its premises. They need to step outside of liberalism and become traditionalists.

LA wrote to Sage M.:

Strong statement!

Sage M. replies:

I am passionate on this subject, because I see in the British what we’re becoming, in our own way, and I loathe it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 16, 2009 11:46 PM | Send