Once you sacrifice the first innocent man then the rest are an inevitable consequence
By Richard
Fernandez
A survey in Australia [1] found that “close to 50 per cent across
all age groups disagreed with the statement that marriage is an outdated
institution.” What is remarkable is that anyone should think it would be. For
much of human history, individuals relied on themselves, pairings, families,
extended kin (or tribes) and the broader cultural and linguistic context of the
nation to provide them with stability and safety. Families of some sort have
formed the basis of social organization from the beginning of the species. And
so too did Home; the hearth at which could be found the “ashes of their fathers
and temples of their gods”. Only in the last hundred years has dependence
consciously been shifted to the institutional state.
But the
institutional state is now bankrupt. It is bust. Living on borrowed money,
unable to sustain itself with shrunken birth rates. As a result, whole
populations are finding the “safety nets” on which they counted on shot
through. Ripped to uselessness even while the institutions which used to
shelter humankind for eons are no longer in evidence. The Japanese have coined
the term parasaito shinguru [2](“parasite single”) to denote a person who has made no family
plans of his own, confident in the belief that the state would support him in
his old age.
They
fought arithmetic at the behest of the welfare state, and arithmetic won.
The
result over time in Japan has been a “super-aging” [3] society unprecedented in history. “By
2030, one in every three people will be 65+ years and one in five people 75+
years.” And the economic implications of that collapse mean that the
“universal coverage in public pension and health insurance [achieved] in 1961″
will be without any means of support. Japan has been living on deficit
spending for decades. Today it spends 25% of its state budget on meeting
interest payments on bonds alone. And now for the first time the interest on
those bonds is rising. The game is up, or nearly so.
The
language of the War on Terror has masked the fact that Islamic immigrants to
Europe are to a great extent also voting against the death of the tribe and the
family. While the riots in Sweden and the unrest in the UK are typically
portrayed as a struggle between the enlightened multiculturalists and bigoted,
white racists, the reality is that the major opponents of multiculturalism are
the very Islamic immigrants in whose name multiculturalism is advanced.
What Islamic
radicals reject in clear, unambiguous, and often strident terms — if we would
only listen to them — is the entire premise of multiculturalism. They do not
want to dissolve their families in the acid bath of the welfare state. They do
not want to give up their religion, as have so many of the white citizenry
around them, for the pablum of green-atheism and pop culture. They want the old
things: the dominance of their tribe; the triumph of their culture and the
subjugation of their rivals. What they want, to paraphrase Aldous Huxley’s
Savage, is “Allah, poetry, danger and sin.”
They
want the ancient institutions, the things that the BNP, the English Defence
League, and the Swedish Democrats are never going to be allowed to have. And
because they do not consider themselves bound by the laws of the tribe they
have no intention of joining, the Muslims will probably get it.
For all
of their ideological defects, the Muslim “hate preachers” gave Michael Adebolajo [4] what Europe could never impart to him: a
sense of nation, community, belonging, and belief long denied to him. Men
through history have felt the need for pride in community, so when the cultural
elites made “English” a bad word and after they turned “British” into a synonym
for bigotry, they unintentionally created a powerful vacuum the hate preachers
filled. To the question “who am I?” the radical preachers in mosques in default
of anything else said ”Muslim” and the rest followed.
It is
impossible to understand the Muslim riots and terror in Sweden, France, or
Britain without first appreciating that the Muslim immigrants aren’t fighting
to become like the gelded natives. On the contrary, they are fighting to bedifferent. It’s not
multiculturalism they want, but their own culture. This impulse used to be
normal once — like marriage. And the wonder is that it no longer is.
To be
“normal” in the context of the welfare state is first to become abnormal in the
context of long history. What could go wrong?
The
importance of this point of view will grow as the ruin of the mega-state system
advances. Japan is merely further along the road of social insurance collapse
than Europe. But giant, unsustainable states will come to the same lonely
dilemma. And then we will find what happens when governments destroy culture,
family, belief ,and language in exchange for a welfare check they can no longer
write.
The
other night I was watching Judgment at Nuremberg [5], a really wonderful movie that explores the process through which
civilized men do uncivilized things. At the heart of Rolfe’s defense — played
by Maximilian Schell — is the idea that the survival of the tribe is the
highest value. He argued the Nazis did what they did to survive, as would
anyone, and therefore their main mistake was in losing the war. In his view,
the only judgment Americans could deliver at Nuremberg was the revenge of the
victor.
Although
the Nazis lost the war, ironically the West bought the Nazi point of view. Have
not the sophisticates rejected Spencer Tracy’s argument that the defense of
civilization begins with the sanctity of the individual “because once you
sacrifice the first innocent man then the rest are an inevitable consequence”?
That smacks too much of the sacred, and we don’t do the sacred anymore.
But we
do abortion and eugenics. We follow orders. And, most importantly, we do
suicide, whether of the individual or civilizational kind.
The
lesson Europe appears to have learned from the Nazis is that Western
civilization is irredeemably possessed by a moral devil, which will return
unless the culture is crippled. Therefore all spirits are viewed askance. It’s
fascinating to contrast the world of Judgment at Nuremberg, where
the only defense against the death of millions is morality, with the world of
the Boardwalk Empire, where no morality is possible, as if the world recently
emerged from the shadow of death understood its value more than we do now after
70 years of safety.
The man
who hacked off the British soldier’s head waited for the bullet. And though I
despise what he stands for, it is undeniable that he stood for something.
However misguided his beliefs, there was something he believed in.
What do
we believe in? Insofar as I can see, we solemnly believe in nothing. How
proudly we — the sophisticates in the media and academy — proclaim that we are
empty of convictions, bereft of patriotism, devoid of faith. We are a
civilization compelled to shout from the housetops, “I am excrement because I
walked with myself.”
That is
our conviction, our creed, our profession of unfaith. But if we continue to
adhere to it, we shall lose to the Islamists, who at least are willing to fight
their corner. We will lose and we will deserve to lose.
[1] survey in Australia: http://www.theage.com.au/national/more-marriages-over-once-children-go-20130526-2n58t.html
[2] parasaito shinguru: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_single
[3] “super-aging”: http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/4/425.full
[4] Michael Adebolajo: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/05/24/victim-of-london-terror-slaying-one-attacker-idd/
[5] Judgment at Nuremberg: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002CR04A/wwwfallbackbe-20
[6] The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B006SOCAO6/wwwfallbackbe-20
[7] Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MH19XI/wwwfallbackbe-20
[8] No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1453892818/wwwfallbackbe-20
[9] Tip Jar or Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://wretchard.com/tipjar.html
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