What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

There's Life in the Old Girl Yet - I

While in Italy, I had little time to keep up with the recent unpleasantness in England. But now that I'm home, I've had time to do some catching up, and was delighted to come across this wonderful diatribe by Peter Hitchens, who has been warning for years where the British welfare state was leading and here allows himself a well-deserved "I told you so":

"Bitter laughter is my main response to the events of the past week. You are surprised by what has happened? Why? I have been saying for years that it was coming, and why it was coming, and what could be done to stop it.

"I have said it in books, in articles, over lunch and dinner tables with politicians whose lips curled with lofty contempt.

*So yes, I am deeply sorry for the innocent and gentle people who have lost lives, homes, businesses and security. Heaven knows I have argued for years for the measures that might have saved them.

"But I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades. The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates - fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.

"Just look and see how many shops are protected with steel shutters, how many homes have bars on their windows. This is not new.

"As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally..."

* * * * *

Advocates of "socialism with a Christian face" should take special note of what Peter Hitchens has been saying, these many years, in all those books and articles he mentions.

Comments (26)

btw - the best of several brilliant rhetorical strokes, here, is this:

"it is not a tide; it will not go back down again."

If only *I* had thought of that.

"it is not a tide; it will not go back down again."

A nice bit of rhetoric, but not very good prophecy. The future has a way of taking the least expected path. This has been proven time and time again, since history is anything but boring.

The Chicken

time will tell, mc.

MC, I think the quote has a lot of insight, though I admit it could be wrong as prophecy. The nay-sayers and ostriches will see the waves, that sit on top of the flood, surge forward and recede, and when they see the wave tops recede, they will call that the tide flowing back out - or "the swing of the pendulum". But the residual water level aside from the wave tops remains many feet higher than it had been. The residual barbarism remains far forward of where it was 30 years ago. In ancient Rome after 100 or so, the barbarians were defeated many times in battle, but gradually there remained new barbarian tribes ever closer to Rome than before.

Even if the forces of law and order overcome this turmoil (and yes, things have settled down some), the net result is not the status quo ante: there remains a well-grounded fear in ordinary people, and thus a greater willingness to give up some of their freedoms for so-called "security" if despotic overseers can be found to promise security if given a free hand to deal with the barbarians.

there remains a well-grounded fear in ordinary people, and thus a greater willingness to give up some of their freedoms for so-called "security" if despotic overseers can be found to promise security if given a free hand to deal with the barbarians.

Oh, I'm not saying it won't happen all over again, don't get me wrong, but local and global views of evolutionary cultural processes are often quite different. What looks like two parallel lines close up might actually be two intersecting sides of a triangle from far away.

What bothers me is that these were riots confined to youth in large part. Part of me thinks that within a few years the cultural landscape will change and that change will be sudden and rapid because the large influence of the old ways holding society by the aging Boomers (who, regardless of their claims of non-conformity, can't quite divest themselves of all that their parents taught them) will disappear almost overnight, like ligaments being washed away by acid. The thing is, the youth, today are so fragmented as to ideology that it is hard to predict what will replace the Boomer age. I suspect, violence, for a while, but most youth, today, have been socialized into passivity so I think that a return to a brutal peace will be fairly rapid.

Who knows.

The Chicken

My impression is that things have settled down just because the anarchists decided to stop, not for any reason having to do with the forces of law and order, who were mostly a joke. In other words: The looters won and can do it again any time they like.

Lydia - *exactly*. The looters won.

Can anyone please offer a quick explanation of what this means?
" ...life on most large estates."

I lived in the East Midlands for several months, but I never picked up that use of the term "estate". I'm thinking it means "neighborhood" maybe?

Even if the forces of law and order overcome this turmoil (and yes, things have settled down some), the net result is not the status quo ante: there remains a well-grounded fear in ordinary people, and thus a greater willingness to give up some of their freedoms for so-called "security" if despotic overseers can be found to promise security if given a free hand to deal with the barbarians.

Heaven forbid that the state simply say to the law-abiding with respect to violent criminals attacking them "do what thou wilt (to your assailants) shall be the whole of the law." Don't want to get the entire contents of a high capacity magazine emptied into you? Don't commit a violent crime. Causality carries an inherent justice in such cases.

Nothing happened in London that the generous application of NATO 5.56x45 couldn't handle with aplomb.

Respectabiggle,

An "estate" in the British context is what we call here in America public housing. Like our public housing, living on an estate leads to the predictable consequences of grouping large numbers of poor, unwed mothers who rely on public aid to survive and who raise their kids without much help from their kids fathers.

Mike T,

Sometimes you are a delight. One of Mencius' favorite old quotes is some French expression about a machine gun that I can't be bothered at the moment to look up.

A stronger police state would have quelled the violence more quickly, but I think Hitchens realizes that the problem is deeper. Britain has a feral underclass, and it's growing. What is to be done about it? The left says pacify it with free goodies; the right says deport what you can and slap into submission what you can't. But both programs there presume that the underclass is a minority...what happens when they aren't?

A stronger police state would have quelled the violence more quickly

A law-abiding population that was legally allowed to carry firearms, that was then enthusiastically told to do its civic duty to defend its community with deadly force against the rioters wouldn't need a police state.

I hear that too, but I don't know. Gun owning America has had riots before. The main difference between our riots and the British ones seems to be body count. If the upright can own guns the underclass can too, and I don't see why the law-abiding would necessarily get the better of that confrontation. In LA in 1992, it took the National Guard to finally put a stop to it.

@ MikeT: "Heaven forbid that the state simply say to the law-abiding with respect to violent criminals attacking them 'do what thou wilt (to your assailants) shall be the whole of the law.' Don't want to get the entire contents of a high capacity magazine emptied into you? Don't commit a violent crime..."

I'm afraid that something much more dramatic than these riots will have to happen before such a thing becomes thinkable, in today's England - arguably the world's foremost exemplar of what Samuel Francis called "anarcho-tyranny."

@Matt: "The left says pacify it with free goodies; the right says deport what you can and slap into submission what you can't. But both programs there presume that the underclass is a minority...what happens when they aren't?"

Well, what happens then is what invariably happens in present day Latin America: a resentful dark-skinned majority perpetually dominated by a corrupt light-skinned oligarchy, with occasional outbreaks of revolutionary violence, all of which eventually end in the reestablishment of oligarchy, sometimes with a dark-skinned figure-head, sometimes not.

Such a delightful way of life.

"Gun-owning America" still isn't what Mike T. is picturing. I've just been reading on another blog a discussion of the dangers a person encounters even if he jumps through all the hoops to have a concealed carry license and if he actually has to shoot someone on the streets in self defense. Best-case scenario appears to be that the police don't prosecute him but that he gets hit with a big civil lawsuit and is in danger of his life from the friends and relatives of his attacker against whom he had the gall to defend himself.

Moreover, if one were "merely" shooting in defense of property, and especiall if the young thug one shot happened to be (gasp!) a minor, one would probably be crucified by the court system.

"Gun-owning America" still has a long way to go before it, as Mike T. suggests, actively encourages and clearly permits defense both of persons and property from looting, anarchic gangs. We're better than Britain, but we aren't to the point of actually having an active citizenry fully empowered to defend itself. In the Old West, sure. In, say, Detroit 2011, not so much.

That last comment was in response to Matt's about the riots in America, btw.

Steve, I think that the arrangement you picture in Latin America is realistic, but I don't see the necessity of it perpetually being based on light-skinned domination over dark-skinned. Certainly in Africa the have dark-skinned thugs dominating other dark-skinned people. Zimbabwe and Nigeria are two examples. One could imagine scenarios of revolution putting the light-skinned oligarchs and their kin completely out of the running - as the French Revolution permanently changed the landscape.

Jeff, you're probably thinking of "pour la canaille, la mitraille". ("For the rabble, the grapeshot.") Moldbug used it on two occasions that I could find: here and here.

If you want to suppress their lust for power, a lust which grows in the heart of every man, you can do so. All it takes is a bit of gear and the will to use it. As Wellington said: pour la canaille, la mitraille. But then, my dear professor, you are really reinventing colonialism - not just pretending to do so, for an audience as ignorant, hypocritical and naive as yourself.

The melodious form of the phrase predates machineguns - mitraille indicates case shot, grapeshot or scattershot fired from a cannon. With a machinegun, it would be "pour la canaille, la mitrailleuse".

The proper application of this is fairly similar to the amusingly named 'Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics'. A mitraille is insufficient; the will to consistently use it is also required. A ruler or government that fires only a single shot, then quivers in horror at what it has done, will only incense the mob. Paradoxically, the more the ruler demonstrates his willingness and ability to shoot the mobs, the less he will be required to fire, for the rabble will be too intimidated to riot much. He may wring his hands in private, but the public must see that "pour la canaille, la mitraille" is an iron law, never "pour la canaille, la public housing and le assertion that la canaille has le legitimate grievances". Public housing must be reserved for the law-abiding. Canaille will be shot. Survivors will be imprisoned.
(Or so goes the theory, anyway. A rebuttal might submit evidence in the form of Gaddafi, who went so far as to have military aircraft strafe protesters, and still lost. A counter-rebuttal might argue that the rabble rising up against Gaddafi had the might and will of a Euro-American alliance behind it, and Gaddafi would have been able to keep the peace were it not for outside meddling. And the argument continues.)

Lydia,

I'm very well-versed in how corrupt our laws and legal system are on the state of self-defense and gun ownership.

The only solution to this is stop obeying the law. By the time it's all said and done, I fully expect the average American who used to respect the law to resemble the average Italian or Greek in their respect for the government and its laws.

I'm fine with that if that's the price we have to pay to throw off this yoke.

Mike, I sympathize with your sentiment. Unfortunately, I fail to see how the genie will be put back in the bottle: if the average American grows used to ignoring the law to the same extent that the typical Italian does, and by doing so the Americans achieve the resettlement of due authority along naturally suitable lines, will that average American ever go back to following the law just because it is the law? I fear that it is equally difficult to foresee that return to normalcy in terms of being law-abiding as it is to foresee our populace undergoing a return to personal and public virtues - honesty, chastity, justice, and so on. So, from a prudential standpoint, it makes sense to be cautious, and wait long, before resorting to that level of civil disobedience.

Mike, I sympathize with your sentiment. Unfortunately, I fail to see how the genie will be put back in the bottle: if the average American grows used to ignoring the law to the same extent that the typical Italian does, and by doing so the Americans achieve the resettlement of due authority along naturally suitable lines, will that average American ever go back to following the law just because it is the law? I fear that it is equally difficult to foresee that return to normalcy in terms of being law-abiding as it is to foresee our populace undergoing a return to personal and public virtues - honesty, chastity, justice, and so on. So, from a prudential standpoint, it makes sense to be cautious, and wait long, before resorting to that level of civil disobedience.

Erik,

That's the quote -- thanks for looking it up. Wellington -- Britian could use a leader (or a couple hundred) like that again.

As a proud American, I'm supposed to denounce the British Empire, but I have mostly a strong sense of nostalgia for those days...

If I might suggest a purely speculative answer as to why the riots stopped. It wasn't because of the police, who could only muster a show of force against native Englishmen trying to defend their neighborhoods against rioters. The riots stopped because there were only so many wide screen tvs to steal and those, who had gotten theirs and other loot, wanted to stay home to enjoy fruits of their thefts.

So, from a prudential standpoint, it makes sense to be cautious, and wait long, before resorting to that level of civil disobedience.

I've found from my experience that most conservatives have what I call a "Sean Hannity view of America." That is that we're still a great, free country getting pulled down. If you follow civil liberties news and blogs, you tend to find that the breaking down of our constitutional system is actually much further ahead than most conservatives realize.

In some states, things have improved, but in most they have not or are getting even worse. Kids are getting acclimated to a level of state control unheard of in previous generations via the tight integration of law enforcement and public schools; Texas apparently not only leads the country in executions, but also in creating full time police forces to police its public schools. Having been through a few lockdowns when I was in high school, it sickens me to see how little most Americans realize about the broken state of our system.

Christians in particular need to stand back and reassess their thinking about things like the use of force and how we punish criminals. Virtually nothing about the modern world is Christian, therefore any modern moral argument is automatically suspect. Arguments like it is uncivilized to use force, even shooting to wound, to defend property are modern and ahistorical. As such, Christians should defer to the moral judgments of our ancestors who tended to err on the side of loosing the victim to defend himself with whatever means available to him.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.