‘The Sun Never Sets On The British Welfare System’
From her headline on, Ann Coulter explores the pathetic state of post-war socialist England, as highlighted by this week’s London riots:
Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country.
Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the “disabled” (according to the British benefits system) seem to have miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.
Congratulations, Britain! You’ve barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!
With a welfare system far more advanced than the United States, the British have achieved the remarkable result of turning entire communities of ancestral British people into tattooed, drunken brutes.
I guess we now have the proof of what conservatives have been saying since forever: Looting is a result of liberal welfare policies. And Britain is in the end stages of the welfare state.
As Coulter writes:
This is how civilizations die. It can happen overnight, as it did in Revolutionary France. If Britain of 1939 were composed of the current British population, the entirety of Europe would today be doing the “Heil Hitler” salute and singing the “Horst Wessel Song.”
But the stage was already set for the dissolution of England, even as Hitler was mobilizing, as Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard reminded readers in 2005, back when American unemployment was a robust 5.0% and everybody loathed the US economy and its president:
In 1933, the Oxford Union – a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion – held a debate on the resolution “this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country.” The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England’s leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: “There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate.”
Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of “that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . ” So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater “a group of bespectacled intellectuals” who, to his shock, “remain[ed] firmly seated while ‘God Save the King’ was played.”
These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a “threat to peace,” but instead worried that the “panic that the Right was spreading” would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would “then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections.”
In an important sense, the British Empire’s strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.
How ironic that the British comedy troupe Monty Python once did a sketch about a high-rise apartment building that would topple if the residents ceased to believe in it.
I’d respond that the natural aspect of the British (or rather, English) people is one of general brutish drunken-ness. This was the observation of Caesar, upon the Britons, and the view of Papal emissaries to the Saxon kings ruling much the same genetic stock/population. Hogarth’s Gin Lane famously captured a decadent, widespread drunken population. It was common in Jane Austen’s time for a man step over the drunken, sleeping body of a child prostitute younger than 13 in the tony parts (then) of London.
It was the magnificent victory of the Victorian reformers to offer a good dose of sexual, and other urge repression, with (if overly sentimental) a focus on family and faith and nation. This worked, for a goodly long time. Britons had faith, quite literally, in their morals, families, patriotism, duty, God, and Monarchy.
All that died in the mud of the Somme, in Flanders fields, in places like Ypres. Over 50,000 men died in the first hour of the Somme, and all that was left after the victory was a thousand yards of territory. All those intellectuals could only look backwards, to the horror of the Somme, and not forwards, to the horror of Blitzkrieg, the Blitz, unrestrained bombing, the Holocaust, and general decimation in the Balkans, Greece, and Eastern Europe-Russia. But then having basically an entire generation of young men wiped out for basically nothing tends to provoke that reaction.
And Coulter is quite wrong. France has still survived, with much the same social structure. Old Aristocratic families remain, perhaps not what they once were, but the same type elitism, semi-decadence, and so on exists. The countryside is just more stable, with peasants now small landholders and intensely conservative (in the way that having just a bit of land creates, thanks Napoleon!) instead of a seething mass of resentment. Indeed no matter what else he did, giving all those peasants bits of land by Napoleon, created an intense investment in France proper. The French were bled nearly dry at Verdun, and still fought on (though with increasing mutinies). After WWII, unlike the British, the French fought to retain both Vietnam and Algeria, key colonial possessions and the European equivalent of the Frontier.
Much of what ails Europe today is that there is no way for young men to go out and earn their fortune, as they could in the days of colonialism, circa say 1700-1929. For nearly two hundred years Europe put off reforming itself so that it could find growth for its young men internally (instead of through colonialism). America too if you believe Andy Lees of UBS quoted on Zero Hedge has the same structural problem. Young men (and every one else) can’t find their fortune in an America that has basically financed consumption through private and government credit cards. Growth comes only from opening a frontier, colonizing backward peoples (and establishing plantations or factories), or railroads, electrification, a national highway system, aerospace, computerization, and the like that are transformative technologies. Not Ipods which are just a more convenient Sony Walkman (without the cassette tapes). Nor smart phones either.
Growth solves problems. Unfortunately no one has any idea on how to get that growth, and young men in particular make trouble when all they can look forward to is the dole.
One can speculate on innumerable theories about why “Britain Has Fallen.” Let me just add one more. As a first generation (British father) U.S. citizen, I have always been interested in the British and their history. One of the striking features of Britain’s history is that in the early 16th century they literally created their own religion. And, even more startling, was the object of their religious faith… the idea of England and Englishness in “The Church of England.” The title to a once popular novel “God Is An Englishman” sums it up nicely, although it should actually have been “English[men, ness, geography) Is A God." Today the churches are all but empty and the Anglican Archbishop is a joke.
While the population retains a unified culture and worldview, such a narcissistic attachment to one's home can not only work, but provide a positive contribution to "the stiff upper lip" stubbornness to overcome obstacles and problems. Unfortunately, once the floodgates of immigration are not only opened wide but are meant to allow "victims of colonialism" to right the scales of [cosmic] justice and drain the wealth of a people… well, your days are numbered. When the English surrender their self-respect, they become second class. The Scots have their own “parliament.” Do the English? Hmm, NO. Can the English turn the State’s domestic “anti-colonialist” policy around and return to a productive and prosperous culture? Toothpaste… meet tube.