Has Britain reached its turning point?

Views from across the Pond: Peter Hitchens says that the degeneracy of British society is now irreversible; it is a "polluted flood ... not a tide." Britain, he says, is "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain," and no longer is it great. The political class has been devotedly destroying what used to be called "civilized society" since the end of World War II while energetically isolating themselves from what they wrought.

Here is an example of how little he [PM David Cameron] knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance. ...

They have all learned what most British politicians somehow cannot grasp – that the more encounters you have with our justice system, the less you fear it. A few ‘exemplary’ sentences – none of which will be served in full, or anything near it – will only help to spread the word that arson, robbery, violence, spite and selfishness are not punished here any more. Indeed these are the things we are now famous for around a world that once respected us.

But maybe not. Charles Moore write in The Telegraph that the dysfunctions that Hitchens describes are neither very old not deeply rooted, and that in fact a consensus is already in place both socially and politically to bring literal discipline back to law enforcement and social order - "How to recover Britain’s streets for civilisation."

As someone who was a young journalist the last time a wave of disorder swept through the country, I am struck by a great change that has taken place. Contrary to what you may have read, this change is not that violence has increased. It was in 1981 that horrible things like attacking fire engines, trying to kill policemen and using riot as a cover for mass looting first showed themselves in mainland Britain. Although the technology is different today, allowing the criminals to bring trouble to more places, the ferocity of violence has been, if anything, slightly less bad than in Brixton or Toxteth 30 years ago.

No, the difference lies in public attitudes to what has happened. This time, the attitudes are much better. Then as now, of course, most ordinary citizens were unequivocal in their disgust at rioting. But in 1981, the prevailing culture among our ruling elites was different. The weight of the BBC, local government, trade unions, officialdom, came down on the police for being too harsh, and, needless to say, on the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, for the same crime. The chairman of the Merseyside Police Authority supported the rioters, saying: “They would be apathetic fools if they didn’t protest.” In Parliament, Michael Foot, the Labour leader, hurled anathemas at the evil Thatcher. In the capital, a young man called Ken Livingstone took over the Greater London Council in a post-election coup, and began attacking the police.

The resuly has been that British police have been thoroughly tamed, subjected to harsh sanctions and even dismissal or actual arrest themselves for enforcing the law too vigorously, which means very much at all. So,

We all saw the police hanging back from making arrests during this week’s troubles. The reason is that, under current rules, arrests are a bureaucratic and legal nightmare. They require at least two officers and inordinate processing time. If there is “insufficient evidence”, the police can be sued for false imprisonment. The scenes all over England this week were uniquely appalling in their scale, but in the character of the police response they were very like what happens in hundreds of towns every Saturday night. Young people tip out of the pubs behaving badly, and the police, worried by what they might be accused of, just watch them.

Yet Moore says that this is n ot in the slightest the atttitude among the political class any more, and that from the prime minister on down, on all sides of the aisles, so that,

In 1981, an MP saying that he supported the police was making a controversial political statement. This week, he was uttering a commonplace.

There is a resolute recognition that the need for civil peace must come first. Mr. Moore does not discuss how all this will find its way into actual law and policy, which is of course the key question.

For us colonials on this side of the Pond the key question is simply: "Is Britain's 2011 August an avoidable portent of America's future?"

In my conversations with people this month and readings I have been struck by how many people here believe that what have seen in Britain is looming in America, not today, not even imminently, but certainly nonetheless. Even Peggy Noonan writes (link may be perisable),

What does this have to do with America? What we're seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here. It hasn't come together in a conflagration, but it is out there, and I think it's growing. And as in Britain, it doesn't have anything to do with political grievances per se.

Philadelphia right now is under curfew because of "flash mobs." Young people send out the word on social media, and suddenly dozens or hundreds of them hit a targeted store, steal everything on the shelves, and run, knowing no one will stop them or catch them. It's happened in other cities, too. Sometimes the mobs beat people up on the street and take their money. There are the beat-downs in McDonald's, where the young lose all control and the old fear to intervene. There were the fights and attacks last weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair. You've seen the YouTubes of fights on the subways. You often see links to these stories on Drudge: He headlines them "Les Miserables."

Whether Charles Moore is right that the flood there can be reversed is not predictable yet. There is a vast chasm between politicians knowing what must be done and summoning the will to do it. One thing is for sure: the cancer has not yet metastasized in America so much that it can't be reversed. But the question of political will here is just as pressing. Fortunately, so far the signs are encouraging.

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The film industry is often ahead of the game in understanding (and taking commercial advantage of) the mood of the people. Last year Michael Caine starred in the British film release, "Harry Brown."



Hollywood went down that trail many years ago, of course, with the "Death Wish" series starring Charles Bronson in 1974.



And what, after all, is Batman but the precursor to both of these?

Mark Steyn: Lessons for us from London in flames

Mark Steyn: Lessons for us from London in flames

Never pass up anything Mark Steyn writes.

UK riots 2011: Feral children

UK riots 2011: Liberal dogma has spawned a generation of brutalised youths | Mail Online

Max Hastings explains why the riots:

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

Here's the video of that fact.



Hastings continues:

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame. ...

They are essentially wild beasts. ... They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. ...

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality. ...

The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.

The government has made them literally pets of the State, trying to provide their every physical want and need, including a guaranteed income for not working. As Hastings puts it,

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

But the State does not give these people any reason for living nor anything to aspire to. Indeed, the State is itself so deeply anti-British and indeed, against the very notion of "civilized behavior" itself, that the present ruling classes no longer know how to do otherwise. Case in point: Far-left former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who has already said that the riots were caused by decreased government benefits to the rioters.

What the feral kids have learned well, though, is how to play the victim card:

No doubt that punches every liberal-left button there is. Those poor, offended, underpaid, victimized kids! It's bad enough that they are forced by an oppressive society  into venting their frustration by burning cars and buildings, now they have to suffer the indignity of being mocked and insulted because of their choice of clothing!

Britain's chickens coming home to roost

London Riots: Kids and Parents Need to Be Held Accountable - The Daily Beast:

There is an excuse for everything. If they behave appallingly, they are “hyper-active,” and if they learn nothing, they are either dyslexic or have attention-deficit disorder. If they are juvenile criminals, they may, in extremis, be subjected to ASBOS, “anti-social behavior orders,” rather as though they had farted, not mugged a 90-year-old for her pensioner’s purse. We have passed edgily by hooded teenage groups on street corners, even while David Cameron, then in opposition, urged us to “hug a hoodie.” Hug a hoodie? Try asking one of these 13-year-olds to pick up the spent can of extra-strength cider he has just chucked under your feet. There are sink schools where teachers count it as a really successful day when they got through roll call without a riot, and actually teaching is an optional extra. Teachers are told to work more closely with parents on children’s behavior, but as my teacher niece explodes, “Find me a parent, for starters! And then find me a parent who isn’t going to threaten to report me, or worse, for dissing her kid.”

This is the result of Britain's statism, enforced by a ruling class that opposes nothing but its own history, with "moral relativism clothed as cultural sensitivity." Britain's political class has simply surrendered everything meaningful about what used to make Britain, Britain. And the British people, trained through centuries of subjecthood rather than citizenship, let them, and looked on approvingly.

A comment at the article: "[W]what the author is missing is the fact that we punish the people who get up and go to work by giving them a life that is far more difficult than the one funded by the state."

Indeed. When indolence is literally more profitable than industry, something is eventually going to burn. In this case, it's London.

Nietzsche was right about Europe

A long essay by Edward T. Oakes, "Atheism and Violence," discusses and refutes the recent books of Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchen, et. al., that if all humanity would only renounce religious belief, then violence would cease and permanent peace would result. Curiously enough, the rant-filled Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that "God is dead" and originated the germanic idea of the Superman, offers the best argument against these arguments, claims Oakes.

The point, rather, is that Nietzsche saw. However much he (usually) advocated what ought to be most abhorred, he at least recognized that true morality and Christian belief are siblings. Moreover, in tones redolent of Jeremiah he saw the consequences to civilization as a whole when its citizens lose their faith in God. For what will take the place of God will be only a passionate—and largely empty—politics:

For when truth enters the lists against the lies of millennia, we shall have convulsions, a spasm of earthquakes . . . the likes of which have never been dreamed. Then the concept of politics will be completely dissolved in a war between spirits, all authority structures of the old order will be blown into the air—one and all, they rest upon a lie; there will be wars the likes of which have never existed on earth. From my time forward earth will see Great Politics.

Such are the contradictions of atheism. With hope in progress gone, with the lessons of the twentieth century still unlearned in the twenty-first, with technology progressing, in Adorno’s words, from the slingshot to the atom bomb (a remark cited in Spe Salvi), with a resurgence of religiously motivated violence filling the headlines, all that the new atheists can manage is to hearken back to an Enlightenment-based critique of religion. But they find their way blocked, not so much by Nietzsche (whom, as we saw, they largely ignore) but by the ineluctable realities he so ruthlessly exposed. Not Nietzsche, but the history of the twentieth century has shown that godless culture is incapable of making men happier. All Nietzsche did was to point out that no civilization, however “progressive,” can dispel the terrifying character of nature; and once progress is called into question, the human condition appears in all its forsaken nakedness.

Comes now Greg Sheridan, foreign-affairs editor of The Australian, in, "European model a wretched failure."

Anarchy and chaos in Athens one week? Cars beyond number burned in Paris in another season? And now this terrible, senseless, causeless violence in London and many other British cities?

And everywhere across western Europe, governments bankrupt or nearly so, living beyond their means, unable or unwilling to tell their people the truth about their finances.

And beyond this the strange, undemocratic and illiberal mechanism, vast and inescapable, but also creaking and slipshod and unreliable, of the European super state, unable to help anything but always able to interfere, taking decisions without any irksome recourse to democracy or national sovereignty, adding a new layer of illegitimacy to societies robbed of trust. London burning like the Blitz, and all of it inflicted by the pride of British youth. ...

The European model right now is a wretched failure. ...

But the European model, and the British version of it, certainly include a lavish welfare state, multiculturalism, a high level of economic regulation, the eclipse of any special place for religion (especially Christianity), and political correctness.

The last is a shorthand term for a general sense of shame and guilt about the true inheritance of Western civilisation, of shame and guilt for British history, and of a postmodern desire to forever subvert the allegedly dominant narrative of the generation before the baby boomers. ...

Western Europe is also perhaps the least religious society on earth. Christianity, in Britain as in much of Europe, is forever "subverted", which in truth means it is defamed, reviled and mocked. ...

The secular mind may rejoice at the post-religious moment of Europe, and especially of Britain. But an unemployed youth, with no tradition and no real education, with enough money more or less but not many prospects, with no source of moral authority and no help in understanding any basis for right and wrong, nothing to control an impulse, and knowing nothing of British history except that it was shameful and sexist and racist -- how exactly does this youth become integrated and whole, and indeed happy?

Why exactly is it that he doesn't help himself to a night's entertainment attacking ambulance officers and stealing TVs?

The British malaise, the European sickness, have no single, simple cause and no obvious answer.

But whatever it is that the gnomes of Brussels have been selling these past few decades, it doesn't work and it has toxic side effects, as Europe shows.

One Gurkha. Thirty Taliban. One survivor. Guess who?

Hero Gurkha handed bravery medal by Queen said: 'I thought I was going to die... so I tried to kill as many as I could' | Mail Online

Corporal Dipprasad Pun defeated more than 30 Taliban fighters single-handedly

Used the tripod of his machine gun to beat away a militant after running out of ammunition

A Gurkha soldier who single-handedly defeated more than 30 Taliban fighters has been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross by the Queen.

Corporal Dipprasad Pun, 31, described how he was spurred on by the belief that he was going to die and so had nothing to lose in taking on the attackers who overran his checkpoint in Afghanistan.

His gallantry award is second only to the Victoria Cross - the highest honour for bravery in the face of the enemy. ...

The soldier fired more than 400 rounds, launched 17 grenades and detonated a mine to thwart the Taliban assault on his checkpoint near Babaji in Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, last September.

At one point, after exhausting all his ammunition, he had to use the tripod of his machine gun to beat away a militant who was climbing the walls of the compound.

"If We Had a Carrier..."

Information Dissemination: "If We Had a Carrier...

So saith the admiral commanding Britain's Royal Navy: "If we had a carrier, we'd be there [Libya]" in greater force. Technically, Britain does have a carrier, HMS Illustrious, but there are no aircraft in any of Britain's armed forces that can be flown off it.

Britannica rules the waves? No longer, no.

To be fair, though, if Qaddafi holds out until 2020, The Royal Navy will be able to kick his tail. The toothless Illustrious is due to leave service in 2016. It's replacement, Queen Elizabeth, will not enter service until 2020 at the earliest. QE and its later sister ship, Prince of Wales, however, will be super carriers rivaling the US Navy's and will be the largest warships ever for the Royal Navy. Curiously, both predecessor ships of the same names were battleships sunk in World War II.

Slow to catch on, but finally.

It only took 236 years, but the Brits finally seem to be getting the right idea.