From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 9: Goodbye To All That

The Brussels Journal ^ | Fri, 2009-03-06 21:40 | Takuan Seiyo

[ihatedemocrats]

The title of Chapter 9 is borrowed from Robert Graves. Graves (1895 -1985) was one of those people one could find only in Europe: an Anglo-Irish-German, he was an intellectual son and grandson of intellectuals, a poet, classicist and translator from Greek and Latin, Oxford University professor, novelist and author of 140 books, most remembered nowadays for his I, Claudius, made in 1976 into a hit BBC-Television series with Derek Jacobi in the title role.

But Graves was more than that. He was a champion pugilist and a heroic soldier. He served during World War 1 as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and was so severely wounded in the Battle of the Somme that he was given up for dead.

The horrors of the Great War and the imbecility of the British upper classes and military command that led to Great Britain’s hecatomb in that war caused Graves’s great disillusionment with his country. He left Great Britain in 1929 for Majorca, rarely to return for the next 56 years.

Prior to leaving, Graves published an autobiography, entitled Good Bye to All That. Known as one of the fiercest, most acerbic personal memoirs of the Great War, Graves’s book “seethes with contempt for his country, his social class, his military superiors, and the civilians who cheered the carnage from the safety of home. His portrait of the stupidity and petty cruelties endemic in England's elite schools is almost as scathing as his depiction of trench warfare [snip], litany of meaningless death, horrific encounters with gruesomely decaying corpses, and even more appalling confrontations with the callousness and arrogance of the military command.”

[decimon]

Can’t be accused of mincing words.

[dennisw]

BTTT

[Billthedrill]

A BTT. I've been following Seiyo's stuff - not his real name, nor, I believe his ethnicity - for a little while now. His insistence that demographic changes have been deliberately fostered to correspond to ideology is an idea I once scoffed at. I'm not scoffing anymore.

One does see, in practice, the notion that a ruling class may sequester itself against the consequences of its own social experimentation. One also sees, and he quotes Thomas Sowell in this regard, that class loyalty is much stronger toward that ruling class than other previously-used class delimiters: race, ethnicity, language, and even (classical Marxists pale at the idea) economic and labor circumstances. Nothing corrupts like power, and wealth is power.

What is most disturbing in that act of sequestration is that it encourages the false notion that those consequences are permanently for other people, that there will always be a surplus sufficient to support that ruling class no matter how the underlying society is systematically gutted. That is, in fact, only sustainable to the degree to which that ruling class is willing to use violence to insulate itself.

That can come in the form of direct employment of a monopoly on violence: a Zimbabwe, for example. But where the transition is still in flux it is much more likely to occur where that ruling class encourages violence between factions to enervate and weaken both the source of the surplus sustaining it and the greatest threat to its accession: the middle class. The contention here is that immigration policy is one facet of that power grab; that events in London, Malmo, and Los Angeles carry the commonality of being battlegrounds in which the middle class, far from being enriched by "diversity," is in fact being destroyed. And that this is deliberate.

One might have thought this a notion so wildly paranoid that intelligent observers would reject it out of hand. That may be premature.