Posted on 01/04/2003 8:00:25 AM PST by Republic of Texas
I grew up believing that it couldn’t happen here; that the intrinsic decency, good sense and ironical detachment of the British would have precluded Nazism or anything like it from taking root in our sceptred isle. Now I am not so sure. Utter vileness does not need a numerical majority to become predominant in a society. The Nazis never had an electoral majority in Germany, yet Germany offered very little resistance to their barbarism. Of course, it is highly unlikely that history would repeat itself in anything approximating the same form; but evil, unlike good, is infinitely multiform. We can invent our own totalitarian evil. There is little doubt that we have prepared the ground very well for evil’s triumph.
Despite years of unprecedented prosperity, a larger proportion than ever before of the population is dependent, or partly dependent, upon the state as provider. Only this week, an unmarried woman with three young children by the same man told me that when she asked him for money to buy them shoes that they needed, he told her to take a loan out from ‘the social’; that, he opined, was what it was there for. He had in any case made it abundantly clear that under no circumstances would he part with any money for the upkeep of his children, and so far had been as good as his word. The exact proportion of British fathers who have abrogated their parental responsibilities to the state in return for the right to use their income purely as pocket money to spend on their vulgar distractions is not fully known, nor that of mothers who accept this abominable arrangement; but it is not small and it is growing.
Not only are such people severely lacking in ethical standards, but they also live in permanent fear of the power that they have ceded to the state; and no one who has any dealings with the bureaucracy of welfare, child support, housing and so forth can be left in any doubt as to its power to grind people up and spit them out. Hedonistic egotism, fear and resentment form the character of a large proportion of our population, and it is a character that is ripe for exploitation. They have made themselves natural slaves.
Whenever I have dealings with British bureaucrats, an insistent question is at the back of my mind: is there any order you would refuse to obey? From my observations of their conduct, my guess is that, in general, there isn’t; that they would prefer mass slaughter to the loss of their jobs and that, in the event of a post facto trial, all of them would fall back on the old excuse, I was only obeying orders. Let me give two examples. It is well known that moving very old people from where they are settled to a new location results in an increased death-rate among them; that is to say, it kills them. Recently, arbitrary government regulation has meant that many perfectly adequate residential homes have closed down, and their residents decanted into large and impersonal homes that meet the bureaucratic requirements, where many of them swiftly die. Is it likely that any British bureaucrat, at any level of employment, has resigned rather than implement this murderous policy in any individual case? No: better a hecatomb than a mortgage unpaid.
Recently, I received a circular headed New Ethnic Categories that began with the words, ‘As you may know, we are required to monitor the ethnic origins of our staff.’ Who was this ‘we’ of whom the circular spoke: no names, only ‘The Human Resources Unit’ (Orwell could have done no better). And no decent reason for this fascistic practice was given; the ‘we are required’ being the final and irrefutable argument in its favour. Again it is a fair bet that not a single peep of protest was uttered in the office of the ‘Human Resources Unit’ when this circular was sent round.
Would anyone have mentioned the fact that the Dutch bureaucracy’s refusal to destroy census data on the religious affiliations of the Dutch population on the eve of the German occupation greatly aided the subsequent elimination of Dutch Jewry? It would have cut no ice anyway: let there be genocide so long as I have money to go clubbing at the weekend. Every public service has been weakened by the ethos of obeying centralised orders. Doctors, teachers, the police, social workers, prison officers, crown prosecutors, university dons have all been emasculated by the ‘need’ to obey orders that they know are fatuous at best, and positively destructive or even wicked at worst.
The organised lying that results from centralised information-gathering not only blunts critical faculties and makes it impossible to distinguish true information from false, but also morally compromises those who participate in the process: everyone is made an accomplice of the central power, and so less and less does anyone feel able to make a stand. The more state employees conform to the rules laid down, the more helpless and degraded they become, which is the ultimate purpose of these rules. When you go to the doctor nowadays, you are not seeking his advice; you are finding out what the government has told him to do. Only appearances remain the same; the reality is changed utterly.
There has been virtually no resistance to this sinister process, no protest and few resignations. The public, gorged with bread and benumbed by circuses, is completely indifferent. I can’t help thinking of the murder of psychiatric patients and the mentally disabled in Nazi Germany. Neither the public nor the medical profession protested to any great extent (though, instructively, those few doctors who did protest were not punished for it). This terrible crime was made possible, though not inevitable, by an entire cultural context.
We, too, are now creating a cultural context in which great state crimes are possible, though perhaps not yet inevitable. When I see the routine inhumanity with which my patients are treated by the state and its various bureaucracies, often in the name of obedience to rules, I think that anything is possible in this country. Yes, when I see the baying mobs of drunken young people who pullulate in our city centres every weekend, awaiting their evil genius to organise them into some kind of pseudo-community, and think of our offices full of potential Eichmanns, I shudder. Our fascism will no doubt be touchy-feely rather than a boot in the face — more Kafka than Hitler — but it will be ruthless nonetheless. Timeservers led by scoundrels: that is the future of this septic isle.
Agreed! I just read another excellent article by him (in National Review) on the sad state of affairs (w/r/t lawlessness) there. Is he making his work available online?
Echoes of Soviet-style societal distortion. It's becoming ever more difficult to declare victory in the Cold War. (I mistakenly posted this to abuse first - mods please disregard)
I don't think he is. He's just supplying the minutiae.
Note, though, that such regimes have to have scapegoats, somebody to blame for when things don't go just right (and of course they won't). For the Nazis it was the Jews. (Other disenfranchised groups including the homosexuals and gypsies of course entered the mix.) For Lenin (or was it Stalin, haven't had my coffee yet) it was the kulaks.
If Britain goes down this road it will no doubt be the "Pakis", or maybe all Arabs.
It's funny that this post is on a Nazism thread. Substitute the word "Jew" for "Mexican," and I notice a striking similarity to things I've read from the past...
Now why would you say that? It's not like we are starting to put cameras all over the place ;-) (FWIW, I've been to London, and while many people don't have a problem with cameras all over the place, it was creepy as hell to me, and I kept thinking "Stalin and Hitler never had the ability to monitor their citizens like the Brits do now).
You'll get no argument here. Ironically, I was just looking to see if Dalrymple posted his work online, in one place (so far: no, but a number of columns are out there). The following is from a review of his book:
"LIFE AT THE BOTTOM"
Many writers have described the plight of the poor who live on society’s bottom rung. But few have climbed down beyond simple material scarcity to the world of psychic desolation inhabited by the underclass. Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor practicing in London’s slums for the last 20 years, made the journey, and he details his experiences in this fascinating and horrifying collection of essays.
Multiculturalists and moral relativists beware: Dalrymple has spent too much time in this wasteland to accept fashionable theories about the liberating effects of free love, free drugs, and the absence of acceptable rules of behavior. The cast of characters he encountered in this dark and seamy carnival is unforgettable: tattooed skinheads with their malignant glares; terrified young Indian women returned by the authorities to murderous husbands; foreign doctors with their altruistic illusions shattered under obscene abuse from their welfare-state wards. In merrie England, attempted suicide is the most common cause of emergency-room admission for women.
Dalrymple describes the direct results of "enlightened" social policies propounded by elite academics and their followers who set governmental policy. The quality of education has collapsed, creating a vacuum to be filled by a corrosive popular culture. True self-esteem has been sapped by a nanny state that keeps body but not soul together. Public housing grows more violent, while the police become ever more tolerant of the criminal activity they have come to see as inevitable. Meanwhile, an ever-expanding class of criminologists and social theorists spin opaque theories of victimology to justify it all.
The epidemic is truly multicultural. British natives, blacks, Indians, and Muslims all have been infected, and the cancer is spreading into the middle classes. One need only witness the shocking behavior of formerly reserved British fans at soccer championships in Rome, where shouted obscenities and street violence are now the once-proper Englishman’s calling cards. The lifestyle of much of the upper class offers little hope of help. While the typical aristocrat can easily recover from a weekend binge, the underclass denizen who apes his behavior suffers generations of misery.
This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Dalrymple has real fear for the survival of England as a civilized nation. Memo to America: social policies propounded by academics and elites are bad for our national health.
See here for more.
Actually, while I do not desire to defend Germans in general or Nazis in particular, the fact is that this statement is not quite historically correct. The fact is that when the institutionalized did start getting killed off, their families did protest very loudly, and the Nazi regime did have to back off a bit. The Nazis did in fact proceed with their intentions, but they had to be a lot more quiet and deceptive about it than they had been initially. This same pattern of cover-up and deception was carried over into the "final solution" project against the Jews, which is a big reason why so many Jews put up so little resistance against being transported into the camps, and why most of the rest of the world -- including preposterously many Germans -- apparently were so surprised and shocked about the dimensions of the Holocaust when the truth finally became known, too late.
The Nazis were brutal to ANYONE who didn't slavishly lick their behinds, they outlawed every other political party and tortured, murdered or imprisoned the opposition. THEY DID NOT TARGET HOMOSEXUALS for imprisonment or death. The Nazi leadership was not only well-larded with sodomists and pederasts, but their philosphy was founded on homosexual/militarist wackos, up to and including Neitzche. Hitler opened a temple to Neitzche. If you want to know more of the link between homosexual theory, behavior, and the rise of the Nazis, please read The Pink Swastika - on line at http://www.abidingtruth.com/
Homosexual revisionist historians want to present themselves as equal opportunity victims alongside the Jews but it is a lie.
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