Posted on 08/10/2011 11:06:11 AM PDT by yetidog
The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
What Dalrymple says here is true in the US as well. Our black population has probably had more public money spent on it than any single group ever in the entire history of the US, and we are getting exactly what one should expect: resentment and demands for more.
But as the welfare state has spread out its net of dependency, catching people ranging from members of the skilled trades (dependent on government make-work jobs and protection) to university students (living off of grants and "loans" that they do not intend to pay back), we have built a large, seething, sullen group of dependent people for whom whatever is done will never be enough.
Consider the concept above in terms of "foreign aid," with "dependent people" replaced by "dependent nations."
Good question. There are several answers:
1) Ivy league types believe in social engineering, the kind that says we can win the war on poverty, the war on drugs, etc. This goes against human nature (and the wisdom of the Bible) in the sense that as the Bible says (paraphrase), We will always have the poor. Unfortunately, there is injustice in the world and no man-made plan can eradicate all of it man is a fallen creature. Ironically, the socialist Utopian plans for human perfection have actually created more misery imaginable (100 million dead in the last century from national and international socialism). But these Ivy League types refuse to give up on their blinkered idealism and continue to say, That really wasnt socialism and we just have to keep trying. In other words, they dont learn anything from reality.
2) Related to the first point is the idea that these professors have created their careers on this type of leftist thinking and they are not going to jeopardize what took them a whole life time to create they are not going to say I was wrong. (Actually some have like David Mamet, David Horowizt, Norman Podhoretz, Thomas Sowell, Whittaker Chambers, etc.) Many of these professors bought into the ideas of the Frankfurt School (communists) at a time when they themselves were students protesting the Vietnam War as part of the bigger picture of American imperialism. They knew they couldnt change the system from without through protests or violent revolution in the street but from within (through the institutions). The university provides cover for all sorts of anti-American, anti-capitalist activity under the disguise as education: post-colonial studies, radical feminism, Queer theory, Gender theory, Critical theory, Multiculturalism, Post Modernism, etc. This is all part of Cultural Marxism and it carries on today in the humanities and social sciences with professors hiring similar minded professors who have come up through the ranks as students.
3) Many of these professors are atheists and Social Justice or socialism is like a religion to them it provides them with a seemingly higher purpose and a feel good morality. To quote from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion. And this religious strain or higher purpose also contributes to a fervor that makes them to feel quite superior of the common man. It gives them, in great part, their smug elitist attitudes or the belief that they should be able to dictate to the masses for their own good. No wonder they wouldnt want to give that up.
To sum it up in a nutshell: human pride.
Was Thomas Sowell originally on the left?
Yeah, he was a Marxist student at the U of Chicago. Working for the government opened his eyes. There are some good videos on Youtube where he talks about his conversion.
Thank you.
Wasn’t that a great book!
You assume that the "American Intellectual Class" actually believe the dreck they spout.
An "intellectual", pretty much by definition, is somebody who uses his skill in rhetoric and argumentation to convince others about some theory, or persuade others about a course of action. They do not necessarily believe what they say any more than a salesman or marketing executive believes all the claims they make about the superiority of their products.
They want a centralized planned economy because they think they would thrive as members of the State's propaganda machine.
We live in a world where technology is the new God, served up by men who ridicule the believers of our ancient faith.
We live in a world where grand theft of an entire industry is chuckled at by the millions stealing movies, music and books on the Internet.
We live in a world where it is a crime to mention God in a public grammar school or high school. Where prosecutions have occurred for those who actually prayed in a school and we consider the rioters mad?
We live in a world where human fetuses are considered garbage to be thrown out in a trash can and when human life is worth so little, why should I respect a store front.
When you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything.
They pray to the Internet but it brings no value to live by only a call to aimlessly follow. Vast segments of our own society are lost, ‘like a huge throng running naked in a circle in hell, being stung by bees, chasing a man with a banner.’ Aimless, amoral hordes, taught that faith is for idiots, and then put into prison-like schools where their brains and morals addle, while the children of their progressive overseers are sent to elite private institutions to be hopefully cordoned off from the hopelessness that is peddled to the masses.
Now we have raised an army of jackals.
No acts of faith will ever be declared heroic. No mention of the power and accomplishment of faith is ever taught only to the effect that crimes against humanity can be attributed to it. The progressives have set out on a Stalinist course of destroying religion and the world now reaps the harvest of their insidious labors.
I was struck once watching a news clip of a neo-nazi klan rally being violently chased through the streets by a crowd of mixed races. They fell upon one Klansman who collapsed and lying prone, defenseless, was being kicked and punched to death. A black woman, who had nothing to gain but only her communion with the Lord, dove on the helpless Klansman and yelled “STOP” and saved his life. It was a moment for me when the heavens opened and I saw the hands of God and I finally understood the Gospel and the words of Jesus Christ. When that defenseless Klansman stood for the annihilation of her race, and this black women risked her own life to save his, this act of selflessness deeply showed me the essence of our Christian faith. If we could take her faith and her charity and her selflessness and multiply it to these millions of godless souls, we could stop this insanity and make the world a better place.
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