British columnist Melanie Phillips fears that the War on Terror is being lost. In 2006 she published a book, titled Londonistan, which outlines the growing Islamic threat and Britain’s weak response. Among her insights you will find the following indictment of British political culture (which applies, as well, to the United States): “Britain has become a decadent society, weakened by alarming tendencies towards social and cultural suicide.”
You see, we’re all destined to live in a “global village,” and the nation state stands in our way. We are encouraged to become “multicultural.” At the same time, national ideals and traditions are blamed for xenophobia, war and racism. An egalitarian utopia takes center stage. God and country must therefore be trashed. It is no wonder, in the midst of this new dispensation, that our culture has become a counter-culture; that our traditions are openly attacked by “empowered” malcontents.
Once upon a time, in the small town of Dewsbury, a bitter battle” occurred “when the parents of twenty-six white children refused to send them to an overwhelmingly Muslim state-run primary school” that was thought to be “privileging Asian and Muslim culture.” According to Phillips, “Eighteen years later, Dewsbury woke up to the fact that it had been the home town … of Mohammed Sidique Khan, the apparent leader of the July 7 suicide bombers.”
What are we to understand by this? Quite simply, the British system has lost its instinct for self-preservation. It allows foreigners to impose alien ideas on native-born citizens. According to Phillips, “This collapse of national self-confidence arose from a combination of things.” Especially, it arose from the advent of European nihilism and egalitarianism. The British establishment has become, in Phillip’s words, “particularly vulnerable to the revolutionary ideology of the left, which took deepest hold during the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world, at the core of which lay a hatred of the mores of Western society.”
For those with eyes to see, the gravity of the situation became painfully apparent during the 1980s – when conservatives were busy congratulating themselves for victories they did not win. Ronald Reagan was a good leader, but the cultural environment that enveloped him was already saturated with delusion-producing opiates. While the Reagan Doctrine was proclaimed by the president, it was hardly supported by the nation or by the bureaucracy in Washington. It is therefore no accident that an effective defense against Russian intercontinental missiles has never been deployed, that the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan heralded the emergence of al Qaeda, that President Daniel Ortega has taken back Nicaragua, that Jonas Savimbi lost the Angolan Civil War to the Communists, that South Africa fell to the ANC, that Congo is likewise Communist, and Venezuela, and Bolivia, etc.
Who really won the Cold War? It seems incredible to entertain the thought; but maybe, more than we can ever comprehend: History is something that didn’t happen told by people who weren’t there. The 1960s brought sinister changes, the 1970s brought crisis, but in the 1980s everything gave way under the banner of “Morning in America.”
Consider the reality: The heralded return to traditional values was largely fraudulent. The fall of Communism was engineered from Moscow. The public schools got worse and worse. The growing trade with China was a cancer. An increasingly forgetful president was outmaneuvered and undermined by renegades and appeasers in his own administration. “Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote George Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” Not only was the president’s memory failing. America itself had developed Alzheimer’s. How else can we explain the popularity of Francis Fukuyama’s egregious confessional, The End of History and the Last Man?
Here we find a rationalization of hedonism for the ages, and a reason to forget the holocaust, to forget the killing fields of Cambodia’s Marxist butchers, to forget the Soviet gulag, to forget the butchery of Tiananmen Square, to forget the totalitarian legacy and deny its readiness to recur. Fukuyama’s Last Man is a specialist, an insect of the hive, a nonentity, a bureaucrat – with false notions of nobility that reverse high and low. The Last Man is hobbled by the down-going logic of egalitarianism. The Last Man no longer aspires, no longer looks to higher things. His gaze looks down to the gutter, not up to Heaven.
It is undeniable, though many would shrug or laugh, that a handful of statesmen have sustained the West. Where are these statesmen now? The conscript fathers of the ancient senate have given way to the Last Man. Confusion reigns while the U.S. government ignores the first lesson of twentieth century politics: Do not underestimate evil. The government’s critics, however, have foolishly ignored the second lesson of twentieth century politics: Appeasement of evil promotes evil.
And what happens when good is confused with evil? Stay tuned and watch what follows. According to Melanie Phillips, Middle Britain thinks “that America is the fount of all evil, that George W. Bush is a greater war criminal than Saddam Hussein ever was, and that Israel poses the greatest threat to world peace.” This would be shocking, but we’ve suffered so many shocks already. We’re numb, and there’s little feeling left. Perhaps it is later than we think. Perhaps the longstanding alliance between Britain and the United States is over. What appeal, what correction, what remedy is there for chronic stupidity? Phillips is right to say that “Britain has become a decadent society.” More than that, she adds: “The relentless demonization of America and Israel by the British media … have acted as powerful recruiting sergeants for the jihad….”
