The situation
facing Europe’s old and young illustrate the difficulties of a welfare state in
collapse. First the old. Britain’s establishment has been wracked not
only by the pedophilia scandal at the BBC but by scandalous performance of the
the National Health Service. The NHS, which its creators boasted would be the
‘envy of the world’, has been found to have been responsible for up to 40,000
preventable deaths under the helm of Sir David Nicholson [1],
a former member of the Communist Party of Britain. “He was no ordinary
revolutionary. He was on the hardline, so-called ‘Tankie’ wing of the party
which backed the Kremlin using military action to crush dissident uprisings” —
before he acquired a taste for young wives, first class travel and honors.
The stories of the
pathetic deaths of the elderly under his care — 1,200 in one hospital alone —
have scandalized the British public, especially when it emerged he spent 15
million pounds in taxpayer money to gag and prosecute whistleblowers — often
doctors and administrators who could not stomach his policies.
The public money
spent on stopping NHS staff from speaking out is almost equivalent to the
salaries of around 750 nurses.
The figures were
revealed after a two year battle by Conservative MP Steve Barclay, who
eventually obtained them after tabling a number of Parliamentary Questions.
The figures show a
total of £14.7m of taxpayers’ money was spent on almost 600 compromise agreements,
most of which included gagging clauses to silence whistleblowers.
In reality it is
the NHS, not James Bond, who has the real government license to kill. Cruelty
to the old has become the new normal. It is now as acceptable as that other
once unthinkable thing: infanticide. Now it is nothing, just move along. The
highest priority of the system is to keep up appearances.
When incompetent
doctors amputate limbs unnecessarily or kill patients in horrifying numbers the
critics are simply silenced and the Doctor Deaths left to practice their trade
— to this day — unmolested. The taxpayer pays for his own noose.
Yet even after the
damning reports described a mayhem that would put a major Great War battle to
shame, the British political establishment, including the Liberal Democrats,
the Conservatives and the Labor party continued to support “Sir” David,
presumably because he knew where the bodies were buried, both figuratively and
literally. Sir David Nicholson is unconcerned; he’s not even remorseful. Both
the Guardian [2] and
the Telegraph [3] —
on opposite sides of the political spectrum — registered their disgust. But it
is to no avail: the former Communist who boasts of his “passion” for the job
will Bury You.
The European Youth
will remain outside the Death Pathways for some time yet. But they will spend
the time waiting for their turn at affordable, caring and passionate medicine
in poverty and hopelessness. With the exception of Germany youth unemployment in
Europe is over 20% [4]. “A full 62% of young Greeks are
out of work, 55% of young Spaniards don’t have jobs, and 38.7% of young
Italians aren’t employed.”
The Lost Boys
A whole generation
is finished. Like their counterparts a hundred years ago, the European young
are being sent to their professional death in millions. The carnage at both
ends of the age spectrum — with the old being killed off and the young’s
professional lives essentially buried — is a sign that the welfare state, the
future on offer to “Julia” and Sandra Fluke, is now an empty box.
The guys who voted
for Hope and Change voted for nothing. The cupboard is bare. Everything that is
left in the dying system is being spent to provide a luxurious lifestyle for
people like Sir David Nicholson.
It’s broke. Bust.
Finished. It’s not true, as Mayor Bloomberg [6] confidently
says that government, unlike ordinary people, doesn’t have to pay their debts.
“We are spending
money we don’t have,” Mr. Bloomberg explained. “It’s not like your household.
In your household, people are saying, ‘Oh, you can’t spend money you don’t
have.’ That is true for your household because nobody is going to lend you an
infinite amount of money. When it comes to the United States federal
government, people do seem willing to lend us an infinite amount of money. …
Our debt is so big and so many people own it that it’s preposterous to think
that they would stop selling us more. It’s the old story: If you owe the bank
$50,000, you got a problem. If you owe the bank $50 million, they got a
problem. And that’s a problem for the lenders. They can’t stop lending us more
money.”
It’s not true any
more than it was true that machine gun bullets wouldn’t kill you at the Somme
if you went over the top kicking a soccer ball, as some did.
And who is the they who
can’t stop lending Bloomberg’s government money? Is it the guys who make food,
coal, iron, goods, services or stand watch on a wall in exchange for printed
paper with Lew’s signature on it? Why do they have to keep doing it? Because
Bloomberg can’t believe they’ll stop; because that’s the way its always been in
the past? The establishment genuinely thinks the music will keep playing. And
they won’t believe it will stop until it actually does.
The current elite
has abused, as very few elites have abused in the past, the power of trust.
They’ve taken legitimacy built by generations of competence and used it to
paper over mediocrity and madness. The trust they had to squander was
immense; and they squandered it.
When the crash
happens the disillusionment will be tremendous. It won’t be the kind of
disillusion that loses elections or topples a government. It will the kind of
disgust that pulls down a civilization. The kind that pulls Mr. Bloomberg
and Mr. Obama’s world down so low it will be a hundred years before the
survivors can even reflect on it objectively. F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night [7] understood
the immensity of the tragedy in terms of his own era. The leaders of his world
had squandered more than the lives of a generation. They had destroyed love,
truth, faith and home.
This land here
cost twenty lives a foot that summer.
See that little
stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to
walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing
forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a
day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do
that again in this generation.
This western-front
business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they
could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not
this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the
exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians
weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental
equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember
Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés
in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and
going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.
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