Like doctors overprescribing antibiotics, modern civilization’s social engineers are gradually killing our most valuable defenses. Consider Ezra Levant’s fight as that of a doctor battling to preserve the antidote.
At Cjunk I consider how far Europe has gone in letting pathogens run wild:
No wonder then, that the call to prayers echoing across the rooftops of British cities or vast no-go Muslim zones in France are replacing open, frank, and truly free speech. No wonder then, that the creep of hyper-chauvinism into European culture is greeted with hardly more than a sigh.
What most Europeans don’t even realize, is that they’ve effectively killed off the most effective antidote to civilization-killing pathogens like Islam; free speech.
I consider how far Europe has gone in letting pathogens run wild…
I’m Sorry, I pray that doesn’t happen…ever…
At what point do the Brits start pouring into Canada as refugees?
As long as the “Brits” don’t bring their poison with them.
It is just like the 1930’s all over again, except this time it is not Fascism and memories of the slaughter of WW1 that is putting on the blinders, it is expansionist Islam and Political Correctness.
“The People” are also “The Sheep” and are walking blindly into the next global mess.
It’s coming, just a matter of time.
At what point do the Brits start pouring into Canada as refugees?
I hope they don’t get into Canada or here in the US unless they can provide voting records and some proof that as anything other than a socialist grazing sheeple they raised their cud chewing head and wrote a scathing letter to the BBC or Guardian at least once in their sorry lives.
Overrun by fleeing Euroweenies who never lifted a finger to stop the rot or Mexican illegals, I’ll pick the later as a better deal for our future as a democracy.
Right now there are tens of thousands of white South Africans trying to get the hell out of their old country, where they are being killed at a record pace, to a civilized Anglo/Western society. We should be begging these people to come here. They are educated, hard working, and likely to be excellent citizens.
I am less enthused about British refugees. It seems that this country has self-destructed in a generation – the unions, the NHS, the multiculturalism debacle, and an incredible decay in morals.
We, actually the whole world, owes Britain for the civilization they helped spread when the British Empire ruled. The history of the rise of the West is the history of Britain basically. Britain bore the brunt of WWI and WWII out of all proportion to its size. But now, I think they are simply a an exhausted society. Too many of their sons dead in wars, too many of their colonies coming back to get their revenge on the former colonial masters.
Sadly, all we are likely to get from England now are people aged 50 and higher who remember the way it used to be, but don’t have the vigor or life-span to contribute what Canada needs at this time – either economically or reproductively.
Against the current inertia of the government and the system, I don’t think the average European or UK subject has much more power to affect the situation than the average person in the fascist countries prior to WW2. And I am seeing more than the usual number of British and German folks scouting out “vacation homes” out here in East Canada, but I know what they’re really doing, and will halfway admit it when I actually bring up the subject.
Excellent post, Barry at January 16, 2008 8:52 PM
Liberalism and the concept of political-correctness that it touts can be described as nothing more than a cancer on our society.
I am not throwing around a cheap and simple insult. I mean “cancer” in every sense. Those on the left are very much like cancer cells: They start off as potentially useful cells that are capable of helping to support the body.
But, somewhere along the way, something in the nucleus that is their way of thinking goes awry. They become useless, start multiplying faster than their neighboring “healthy” cells – producing more and more useless cells.
They are able to maintain their levels of life-support and proliferate because they have found a mechanism whereby they can siphon off the nutrients of the healthy productive cells (we call them “taxes to help our less fortunate neighbors”). As time goes by, they eventually crowd out and complicate matters for their neighboring cells until finally the body (nation) dies.
And I’m afraid that, at least in Europe and Canada, the cancers have metasticized and it’s now terminal. Those of us healthy cells who would otherwise feel motivated to stand up and make a fight are instead overwhelmed with having to work and pay all those taxes so that we can continue to support the cancerous cells.
I hate to be a fatalist. But, I don’t see any way out of this.
Barry–agreed, excellent post.
Don’t you think, though, that part of the problem in Britain is self-selection? In other words, those who were free thinkers, independent, hard-working, entrepreneur types left England long ago for the U.S. or Canada or Australia. Britain today is not the same as Britain in 1680 or 1780 or even 1880. It’s a different crop of people.
My own ancestors came to Canada from 1880-1910, and built their lives from the ground up. Those who were willing to work hard and wanted to see a good reward for it got out.
I’m not saying that the old British spirit is dead; simply that most of it migrated. And while it still exists in pockets, it’s much rarer there today than it was a century ago.
bryceman, I hear ya and sympathize with you sharing your exact thoughts from time to time, but don’t forget the premise of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone: it is the last western country to be reproducing at a growing rate, and the good news is that it is not the Lefties that are reproducing, it’s the beer and Jack drinking, God-fearing, Christian, military supporting, traditional values crowd that votes Republican! But you may be right, Canada may be just at the top of the swirl of countries going down the toilet.
SheilaG. Interesting thought, and probably there is some truth in it. But, to my mind England was still great at the end of WWII. Their decline started within a few years thereafter.
While one could argue that WWII was the last heroic gasp of a society already in the process of waning, I think the correlation between the end of WWII and the onset of the decay is strong, and I am not sure that emigration away from England was a big thing in the 30 years after WWII. I could be wrong.
A look here (http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/jobrien/reference/ob62.html
can’t say how authoritative this is, but it’s the first thing Google came up with) indicates that Britain took more casualties than any other Allied power except the USSR. 400K dead, 300K wounded seriously. Their population at the time was 48 mil. What kind of impact could this have on a nation? Unimaginable by today’s standards when the death of a single soldier is headline news.
The thing one realizes though if one looks at this table is the devastation wrought on all of Europe by WWII. I think that WWII is one of the root causes for the collapse of European and British identity and the current disaster that is unfolding in slow motion in that place.
Bryceman, Doug. I think Canada is at the cusp now. I think we can still step back from the disaster that is unfolding in Europe, but the next 10 years will be the deciding factors.
-are we going to get Lib/NDP in power in Ottawa? Another decade of those people putting their idealogues into positions of power in government and courts and there will be no way to ever fight them.
-will the heroics (and showboating, and that’s needed too) of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn enter the public consciousness, and will they inspire a new wave of public commentators to defend Western values for the first time in a generation?
-are we going to continue to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees and immigrants from parts of the world that produce nothing but ignorance and misery, and bring that ignorance and misery here, and house and clothe and feed and support and provide healthcare these people at huge public expense with no return other than further production of future delinquents, whiners, victims, and Canada haters? Or will we come up with an immigration policy that truly benefits this country.
-will the US wake up from its slump and provide a leader that inspires people there and elsewhere to believe that American ideals are the ones to emulate. We can go on about that issues all day and all night, and I am not a Bush-hater, nor do I have strong feelings on the war in Iraq, but GWB has not presented the kind of face of America to the world that inspires people. I hope that the US can do better real soon, but I look at the current crop of retreads, opportunists, and religious idealogues, and I don’t really see who that would be.
These things, and others, might still decide where Canada, and North America ends up. I haven’t given up on Canada yet.
Europe and the UK, to my mind are lost. Hopeless. Too far gone, too late in the game to come back now.
You can speculate about the causes or roots of the civilizational decline but it is what it is – communism. Long after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed there are still hordes of useful idiots fighting its global revolution. Destruction is their objective.
Wasn’t the point the loss of free speech?
It is extremely scary that the HRC has become the thought police. Where are the reporters in this country?? Every single one of them should be screaming for the right to voice an opinion. W/O this right they do not exist. They become the voice of the ‘rulers’.
While I do not personally appreciate some works out there (whether visual, print or audio) which denigrate, I shout the right for them to be created and shown to the world. At this moment I have the right not to approve and not to look, read or listen. The other important side of the coin of freedom.
Andrea
Economically speaking I believe Japan’s miracle after the war was in part due to the fact that they had to start their factories over from scratch since everything had been destroyed. They also imported new ideas from the United States about industrial production. Britain staggered on with its old factories except for the aviation industry. Unfortunately Japan, unlike Germany, did not have a clean-up of their history and have yet to really confront their war crimes.
There seems to be a revival of a tougher spirit in France because of Nicholas Sarkozy, but he seems to be too much of a corporatist to carry the banner of Western civilization.
I think we have a fighting chance, but the wild card is environmental regulations which to a large extent seem to be an indirect way of stifling our economy and, as under communism, eating up our spare time as we are required to do more and more to appease the government and show our ‘good will’.
Barry, great posts. Thank you.
I think there is a point that the WWII casualties played a part in Britain’s demise. It’s not difficult to extrapolate that between Stalin’s mass murdering and Stalingrad Russia lost their most courageous and intelligent men in my opinion leaving needy widows to bring up the next generation.
Anyone besides me notice how feminized socialism, especially the public face on all of its hysterical issues, is? Coincidence?
I tend to agree with abcd that it is communism. To make it more acceptable in the West, it is more often dressed up as socialism with the end result being the same. One could also rightly label them both fascism, since it aims to remove freedom and responsibility from the people.
In Canada there is the deciding battle concerning the right to free speech and freedom of the press, but we continue to allow the state to run our lives in most other areas. I must admit to seeing red when I hear of various governments banning “trans fats” and that is only one example.
As for the Brits being able to immigrate to Canada, we probably need not fear unless there is a complete change in our immigration policy. At the same time I must agree that we certainly do not need any more with the mental disorder of socialism.
Fred said, Jan 16, 8:00 PM,
It is just like the 1930’s all over again, except this time it is not Fascism and memories of the slaughter of WW1 that is putting on the blinders, it is expansionist Islam and Political Correctness.
*The People* are also *The Sheep* and are walking blindly into the next global mess.
It’s coming. just a matter of time.
============ Agreed, yet I think we may have a hope.
This time we have the INTERNET to make up for the selective failings of MSM, just as they failed to alert the *Sheeple* of the 1930s.
There is no case in Canadian law where the AB-HRC can charge the Western Standard for covering the Islamic cartoons story.
If the AB-HRC does make a charge, then we can only suspect they are giving into heavy-breathing *phone calls from Canadian Imams.
strategypage.com/htmw/htterr/articles/20061006.aspx?comments=Y
If Canadians can learn as much about Jihadist fund raising in the name of Islamic charities and the teachings that are happening all over Canada and the USA, as they know about Britney Spears, then there is hope, this time around. = TG
Mexico, similar in many ways to Afghanistan, has a heavy dug production industry.
I remember reading about the Mexican drug lords bringing in *enforcers* from the middle east. [Link is not handy right now.]
Bloodthirsy, yet the language barrier would keep them from learning and spilling secrets.
TheCanadianSentinel.blogspot.com has posted about a second incident of heads being severed in North-east Mexico city.
Draw no hasty conclusions, however we should take note so that further happenings do not take us by total surprise. = TG
Barry and others: Very thoughtful post.
Barry: “to my mind England was still great at the end of WWII. Their decline started within a few years thereafter….I think that WWII is one of the root causes for the collapse of European and British identity and the current disaster that is unfolding in slow motion in that place.”
abcd: “You can speculate about the causes or roots of the civilizational decline but it is what it is – communism.”
Whatlinks these comments, I suggest, is the loss of faith, the unmooring of generation upon generation of Britons and Europeans from their Judeo-Christian faith, a spirituality which had been their anchor, their mainstay, and their strength whenever they faced disaster, war, hardship–and which gave them the courage and determination to rebuild after each debacle. Their faith, for centuries, was the underpinning of their family lives, their civic lives, and their national identity.
After the two wars, tired, discouraged, devestated by the carnage, the destruction, and personal and national tragedies, I suspect that many, quite understandably, got mad at God and jettisoned their faith to the back burner or out of their lives altogether. To their great detriment, however…
Enter communisim in its various guises: radical feminism, the collectivist state over and against the family’s autonomy, the God-is-dead mentality, and, voila!, in just a few short decades, we have a massive loss of identity, a massive morass of confused, angry, and moorless individuals and nations looking for a saviour–who comes in the form of the Nanny State.
We all know, if we’re observant, that sucking at the teat of the Nanny State is far less satisfying and nourishing than sucking at your mother’s breast. Mom’s milk is warm, tasty, and we thrive on it. The Nanny State’s milk is lukewarm (doesn’t the God of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures say that if you’re lukewarm, He’ll spew you out of His mouth?), bland, and eventually we wither away and become waifs.
This is what communism/socialism/radical feminism and all of the other isms have done in their consigning Christian faith and spirituality, which sustained European nations for centuries, to the dustbin.
It is stylish now, particularly for our secular leaders and our chattering classes, to ridicule faith, especially the Christian faith, in our public square. But this “haute” disdain is resulting in societies which are rootless, hedonistic, and barren.
That’s what I think is the crux of the problem–which very few in the West wish to acknowledge. The so-called “leaders” in Britain and Europe seem to have led the charge in cutting their ships of state free from the dock of faith, and these ships are being tossed to and fro, with no known destination except almost inevitably, destruction on the rocks.
So, enter the Strong Man or the Barbarian hords. Now that we’re completely disoriented and weak, we are perfect prey for both.
Kyrie Eleison.
Read George Weigel’s illuminating book The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God.
The Danish cartoons were mild, a couple were almost friendly. How anyone ever took offence against them is beyond my imagining.
As a result partly of the attacks on the Danish cartoons and cartoonists, quite a few really obscene, offensive cartoons have been created and are available online. Many of these are from Dutch cartoonists, who were also motivated by the murder of Theo van Gogh. Just take a look at what “extreme Mohammed” turns up on Google.
Reaction to the cartoons was orchestrated by jihadists with a three month lead time. = TG
BATB, it has nothing to do with belief in some mystical god. All great empires, Roman, Chinese, Greek, Egyptian, Persion or Turk believed in various gods and had their day in the sun and committed suicide as they rotted from within. Caesar’s legions fought for him not Jupiter. As Steyn has written, demographics is everything, the rest is details. Millions perished in WW1 yet there were millions more to die in WWII.
The rise of the nanny state of liberalism/socialism and the focus away from the family as our basic social unit and its concomitant drop in having children from the expanding middle class may doom our society. Everybody has so much stuff yet the most important thing, our next generation, has almost disappeared. Whereas my generation as was typical was out on our own at around 20, todays smaller family offspring is still home at 25-30 not normally marrying, if they marry at all, until at least their late 20’s.
The muslims have no such desire to make a better world, they like where they are and are content to stay there in the 7th century just having lots of children. They will probably continue to expand but as they have no interest in science, nature, thwarted by western medicine up to now, will reassert its desire for balance. Maybe only the Chinese will be left as they expand into Russia and start having more kids again.
Well, dave, you’re entitled to your opinion–and unlike the AHRC Commissar, Shirlene McGovern, I actually mean it.
Though, I do beg to differ.
We do agree, however, on the fact that the West is dying for want of children–which I directly relate to faith issues. Mark Steyn, if I’m not mistaken, makes this point in his book America Alone, pointing out that the U.S.A. is the most Christian of all the countries in the West and that it has the highest birthrate as well.
The two–faith and birthrate–are actually related, as having faith–not in “a mystical God,” as you put it but in–a living Almighty God, gives one hope to continue having children even when the writing seems to be on the wall.
But, you’re entitled to your opinion…honest… 😉