'Why is Beheading Always in the News, is This Really 2015?'

Mark Steyn spots a telling reader comment in the London Daily Mail and notes, “This reader assumes that societal development only goes in one direction: it advances”:

I’ve written previously about the mainstreaming of decapitation. Responding to today’s Beheading of the Day — on a quiet residential street in West London — this Daily Mail reader from Leeds comments:

Poor woman. Why is beheading always in the news, is this really 2015?

You can chop some people’s heads off, and it wouldn’t make any bloody difference, because there’s nothing up there. The foolish assumption behind that comment helps explain why our civilization is sleepwalking off the cliff: Oh, my! How can beheading be “always in the news” if this is “really 2015”?

This reader assumes that societal development only goes in one direction: it advances.

But that’s not true. If you’re as careless with our inheritance as we are, society can go backwards, and get worse. Much worse.

Why is beheading in the news if it’s really 2015?

Answer: It’s because it’s really 2015 that beheading’s in the news. If this was Britain in 1975 or 1955 or 1925 or 1885 or 1835, it wouldn’t be in the news. But it’s 2015 and beheading’s on the upswing.

Beheading was introduced to England by William the Conqueror after 1066, but was generally reserved for the highest of the high – men of noble birth, for whom execution by decapitation was felt to be the closest thing to death in battle – and for the lowest of the low – traitors. So the last person to be beheaded in Britain was Lord Lovat in 1747, and the last corpses to be beheaded were those of the Cato Street Conspirators in 1820, who had their heads severed posthumously by axe.

And that was it until the 21st century, when for the first time soldiers were beheaded on the London streets in broad daylight, and octogenarian widows in the privacy of their gardens, and now unfortunate ladies with intemperate husbands. Unless you’re prepared to do something about your immigration policy, get used to more decapitation. It’s 2015, and beheading is just one strand in the vibrant tapestry of the multicultural utopia.

Of course, that “vibrant tapestry” is beginning to look rather threadbare. Speaking of the London Daily Mail and societal development moving in a horribly wrong direction, in its headline section, Hot Air links to a Daily Mail piece titled “Without its Jews, Britain would not be Britain.” As one of Hot Air’s readers presciently notes in the comments under the article link: “That’s what every country says (substitute country name) just before the Jews are forced to leave.”

And as Glenn Reynolds adds at Instapundit, “Most of the British Jews now concerned with growing antisemitism probably voted for Labour, because they thought it was progressive and caring.”

Arguably even more so than the majority of American Jews in 2008 and 2012, they chose poorly.