Posted on 08/01/2005 6:10:11 PM PDT by 1066AD
Blair must overturn 40 years of mistakes By Mark Steyn (Filed: 02/08/2005)
On July 7, when the official explanation was still "power surges", I thought of Conrad's great novel The Secret Agent and its signature image of the lone terrorist padding the streets of London with a bomb strapped to his chest: "He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable - and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men."
The power of the image lies in the bomber's isolation from the tide of Londoners all around him, all blissfully unaware. But, as became clear very quickly after the July 7 slaughter, that's not quite the world we live in.
It's not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there's a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.
And at the end of this chain of shades of grey is you. And, be honest, were you surprised at any of the developments of the past four weeks? Was it really shocking to you that young men born and bred in the United Kingdom are willing to take bombs on to the Tube and buses? Were you stunned that cells of Islamic terrorists from countries with which Britain has very few traditional or historical ties are living at taxpayers' expense in London council flats? Were you knocked for six to discover that bookstores in Leeds sell video games where Muslim men can play at slaughtering infidels? Were you flabbergasted to hear Birmingham's senior and famously "moderate" Islamic cleric, invited along by the West Midlands Police to their press conference, argue that the men named as responsible for the attacks were merely innocent commuters?
Or were you utterly unsurprised by any of this? Was it, indeed, all too predictable? If it were only the bomber, it would be relatively easy. The more we know about the events of July 7, the more it seems likely that at least some of the suicide bombers were set up, that they were happy to kill others but not themselves. That's good news: it suggests that the jihad has limited appeal in Leeds, at least as a participatory sport. If, as the clichés have it, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were really creating "a thousand bin Ladens" every day, there'd be bombs on the Tube every day. But, if you have to sucker suicide bombers into signing up for the gig, that indicates a certain operational weakness.
Yet the bombers are, so to speak, able to hide in plain sight - pests in a street full of pests, in a Britain where clerics freely incite violence; and where the Guardian hires a trainee reporter knowing he's a member of a radical Islamist group banned in other European countries; and where the BBC cannot bring itself to drop its preferred euphemism of "militants", even as suicide bombers advance from the Zionist Entity to the corporation's own Tube station at Shepherd's Bush. "Why do they hate us?" was never the right question. "Why do they despise us?" is a better one.
It's these insulating circles of grey - the imams, lobby groups, media, bishops, politicians - that bulk up the loser death-cult and make it a potent force. We complain about "unassimilated" Muslim immigrants, but in some respects they've assimilated too well. Witness the suspected Tube bomber who on his arrest last week cried: "I have rights!" He and his colleagues demonstrate an impressive mastery of the salient features of the advanced social democratic state - the legalisms, the ethnic pandering, the bureaucratic inertia.
In Mayor Giuliani's New York, they used to talk of the "broken window" theory of crime - that if outward symptoms of petty crime were on display for months on end (broken windows) it signalled to more serious criminals that the town was open to do-badders; crack down on petty criminals and you create a less favourable climate for the hard cases. Her Majesty's Government might usefully learn from that: right now it's the windows of the kingdom that are broken, and through them climbs pretty much anyone who wants to be here. In 2001, after a Dutch crackdown on benefit fraud, 10,000 Somalis moved from Holland to one East Midlands town - Leicester. Why wouldn't a Somali jihadist fancy his chances in such a country?
Tony Blair talks a good talk, explaining the rationale for war far better than President Bush. But he now needs not just to talk but to act. In France, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has just expelled another dozen Islamists. By contrast, Mr Blair seems paralysed. In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought 40 years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister has a more difficult task: he has to rethink 40 years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.
He has to regain control of Britain's borders from the EU and of Britain's education system from the teachers' unions and of Britain's welfare programmes from wily Somalis and others. In 20 years' time, no one will remember whether Tony Blair abolished the House of Lords or foxhunting: that's poseur stuff. They'll judge him on whether or not he funked the central challenge of the times. If "the images of ruin and destruction" come to pass, it will not be because of the bombers but because of a state that lacked the cultural confidence to challenge them.
Worth repeating anywhere these fanatics are trying to sow chaos and blood.
Sounds pretty much like the job GWB has ahead.
Not as long as there are ravens at the Tower of London and baboons on Gibraltar.
But the ravens and baboons are Labour MP's now...
BTTTT
Mark Steyn seems very angry here. More involved than most of essays. He is pretty harsh on the Muslim ummah and it's protectors.
It's not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there's a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.
I want to be able to write like Mark Steyn when I grow up.
As Teddy KGB said: "Pay heem...he bee-eat me...pay that man his money."
bttt
I sincerely hope I am wrong but I really feel it's too late for Britain, the rot took hold a long time ago and what we see now is merely the shell of a once magnificent structure. It would not take much for the whole thing to come crashing down. Years of deriding, mocking, sneering from the media, from the universities, from the so called cultural elites have taken an awful toll and there is simply not enough of a critical mass left on which to rebuild.
They took over the great institutions of state slowly, one by one, first the universities, then the churches, then the media including, especially, the BBC, then the civil service, then the monarchy and the House of Lords, recently the police and judiciary, they even successfully overwhelmed the Conservative party, until the only pillar left undamaged was the armed forces, but we see now that using 'war crimes' trials and cut backs they are just getting to work on them.
It was a fantastic piece of work, a truly long term strategy but phenomenally successful. It starts off by planting your sleepers who work the system and bring in more recruits, then you start making small incremental changes, if anyone objects to these simple 'modernisations' they are immediately labeled as 'reactionaries' and bigots. Eventually the whole apparatus has been changed to the extent that anyone who looks back at how the system worked before is astonished to see a completely unrecognisable organisation but they cannot pinpoint one time, one decision that actually changed the body it was all done so subtly and over such a long period of time.
If you do not believe the success of this process ask yourself when did gay priests in 'the Church by law established' become a commonplace, when did the BBC suddenly stop referring to the enemies of the UK as such, when did it become regarded as normal for police chiefs investigating a muslim terrorist attack to say that terrorism and islam are not connected, when did the candidates for leadership of the Tory party all start sounding like new Labour spokesmen, when did it become acceptable that the British prime minister could publicly state that the IRA was somehow an acceptable variety of terrorists as he did last week? All these changes and many more are now irreversible, if you were to complain about some of them you could actually go to prison, yet they were never voted on, the British population never asked for them, instead they looked on as bewildered bystanders whilst the long series of tiny incremental changes made them strangers in their own land.
If you think my idea that all this was planned is far fetched I urge you to read Peter Hitchens' Death of Britain and The Abolition of Liberty, he has the details; the names, the dates, the stategies, the organisations, it is truly an eye opener.
The Brits are too far gone when it comes to PC. It will be a monumental task to clean up the UK.
Thanks for the book suggestion.
Yes, UK is in many ways a sad state.
I'm glad I left, more and more as time goes on.
As ever, he is fabulous to read.
But Tony Blair can not do this on his own. He needs the British people to accomplish something this big. Will they be there for him, or is it too late?
ping & bttt
"Not as long as there are ravens at the Tower of London and baboons on Gibraltar."
Don't you mean vultures over the Tory HQ and baboons running the Parliament?
Last I heard, Blair was negotiating the Rock's return to Spanish hands. And there ain't no Tory resurgence to stem Labour PCism. Tony's not stupid enough to play the Chamberlain role to the hilt, but give his party time, and it will do the work for him. I think Britain's in trouble if it's depending on Labour for a strong defense. Maybe if it were evil corporate overlords attacking England, then they'd be pulling out the pointy sticks and manning the barricades, but we're talking about the gentle Arab/Muslim culture here, and the only way that Labour is gonna oppose that sort of thing is if they stand in Stockton-on-Tees against a Labour MP.
I've just checked, the first book is actually called "The Abolition of Britain", it was updated a year or so after it was first published and "The Abolition of Liberty" is his updated version of "A Brief History of Crime". I really can't recommend these highly enough particularly the first one, you read in slacked jawed admiration as you see how well planned the whole operation was and who the main movers were in the whole stategy, it goes back to the late nineteenth century in some cases. And no I am not some tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, these people did exist and their ideologies were well thought through. Check these books out in Amazon.co.uk.
Ping
Keep sounding the alarm. Many of us know you are right but prefer to sleep through it.
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