August 28, 2007
The twentieth century saw the rise of numerous dictatorships. While different in many ways, all such regimes have one thing in common: they all believe that their ideals and aims are absolutely correct, and, as such are not only unquestionable, but that the government itself can enact any law against anyone it like because they are simply right, even when it flies in the face of their own beliefs and aims.
Britain’s Labour government is just one such a government. No, it has not set up any gulags, work camps, etc., nor is it executing people. It is subtler, more patient. Its plan of social engineering will have reached absolute fruition in fifty years, not five, but at the end of that time brave new Britain will contrast to traditional Britain as Communist China contrasted to Imperial China.
Sooner or later, all revolutions must deal with their contradictions, and Labour’s radicalism has led it to the point where it is necessarily immersed in contradictions. Contradictions in society appear when there is a breakdown of accepted norms. The 18th century “ often referred to as the Age of Enlightenment “ which was supposed to be the century in which reason replaced religion, was effectively the age in which an extraordinary proportion of Europeans were engaged in mystical pursuits, and in which séances and mystical healing were regulars even behind the closed doors of some governments.
Modern political revolutions are aided by the fact that Western society is inherently contradictory. I do not refer to the idea of multiculturalism (though there one can detect contradiction by the use of “cultural” and “ism”), but rather to the stuff of daily life “ diet chocolate bars; walking machines in gyms for people who refuse to walk 3 blocks before hailing a taxi; lipsticks given away with magazines aimed at eight year olds; etc. Small coffee is “Tall,” and “collateral damage” indicates, as we all know by now, not damaged building, but the number of people killed during a military strike or campaign.
We are all becoming fluent in Newspeak, the language of the party George Orwell called “Ingsoc,” (an abbreviation of “English Socialism”). In Newspeak, words no longer have their familiar meaning. Hence Labour’s “multicultural” revolution is, like China’s Cultural Revolution, absolutely anti-culture; it works in the name of Britain and the British, but is fundamentally anti-British (and especially anti-British establishment).
Another accomplice to modern political agitation and revolution is, as I have already alluded to, that our modern individual-orientated “culture” is in league with government, sometimes, though not always, literally. We are busy creating our own 1984s. Think of the social networking website, MySpace. Once signed up on Myspace I set up a photo, some blurb about me (whether true or not) and collect “friends” like baseball cards. I also delete my friends as I like, leaving no trace of them in my life. The messages they have posted to me “ once viewable by all “ disappear. When I send a message, my photo goes with it for all to see, but when I change my photo on my page, it changes everywhere. Messages I posted a year ago suddenly have the new photo. The old one is gone, erased. It never existed. And I can be anyone I want, it would seem. Oscar Wilde is particularly active on MySpace, as are a number of other dead people.
Overhauling a society has rarely been easy, but today in the West it seems as about as easy as it can get, because, despite his suspicion of “government,” the Westerner (the white man or woman) has an uncomfortable feeling that he is in a sense a member of the elite, and “ through his train of P.C./Ingsoc thought “ the government, the wrongdoer. He is cyber Big Brother controlling his personal profile Web-world, and with abbreviated web-speak “ “lol” “ and an inadequate grasp of the English language he speaks Ingsoc naturally “ “my bad,” “it’s like so you know,” “just doin” my thing,” “that’s cool;” throw in the usual liberal platitudes “ “I think everyone should just get along,” “we”re multicultural” “ and your home “ with the door left unlocked and the windows wide open.
The more we become our own personal Big Brother the more we want to identify with the victim. It’s Stockholm syndrome. We buy coffee for five dollars a cup knowing full well that the African farmers get next to nothing for it, and then complain about the injustice of the world. Westerners are the only people who would march in the streets to get illegal immigrants permanent residence of their country, but won”t march to help the nation’s poor, whose jobs the newcomers end up taking. Similarly, the British seem to routinely take it on board themselves to reenact (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6490625.stm) the hundred mile marches that slaves were forced to endure, unable to admit that their ancestors were enslaved too. And all the while there are women and girl slaves sold into prostitution all over Britain.
Predicting our current situation, Aldous Huxley spoke of a society populated by abnormal people who act normally because they are immune to the outrageous perpetuated by society itself, because of their social conditioning:
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. (Brave New World Revisited, p. 20)
Perfectly illustrating this delusion, I saw a young man, recently, who was wearing a tee-shirt bearing the slogan, “I am an individual,” underneath which ran a list of qualities that supposedly made him, the wearer, an individual. “Fashion” “ which has replaced style “ is itself predicated on this delusion. It says I am an individual who can express himself like everyone else. My individuality is endorsed by big business, big brands, so I can”t be wrong “ right? We have finally reached the age in which we are so cut off from tradition and continuity that, stranded in the unbearable now of an insecure existence, we crave the endorsement of the mass that we supposedly reject.
Contradictions run through Western and especially British society. In Britain, religion (especially the Christian religion) is thought of as primitive and superstitious, because it has, it is claimed, been disproved by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Yet, at the same time, Western society rejects the implications of evolution: dog eat dog, the survival of the fittest, adapt or die, et cetera. Instead, it legislates against the strongest, the established, etc., taxing the middle classes, or establishing “positive discrimination” (note the contradiction). It is the inversion of Darwinism.
In the West the very notion of the “nation” is eroding. Most troublingly, the cultural language of manners, and established social norms, have already been worn down. Look at a photo of young men or women of a century ago and compare it to one of today’s young men and women and the contrast is shocking. All nobility (and this is a quality that was once found in the working class as well) is gone. Most young people seem so lacking in self-control or self-awareness that they can”t even stand or sit straight. Problematically from a governmental perspective, gone too is the natural allegiance to the nation. There is only an allegiance to Me, Myself, and I.
Increasingly Orwellian, the Labour government has found a solution to this problem, it would seem. Indoctrination must be everywhere and from the moment of conception. Labour is now trying to push through legislation that will require daycare centers, nurseries, and child minders to evaluate and aid the development of babies and young children from birth to the age of five, so that they (the infants) meet targets in no less than 69 categories. For example, babies up to 11 months of age will have to show proficiency in gargling, cooing, etc. According to information posted online by Britain’s National Literary trust, at the age of 3, children should be able to perform a number of very specific tasks, including “pinch some food into a fish tank to develop manual dexterity.”
So far innocuous and idiotic. However, Labour’s political agenda will be introduced to children of 3 years and 4 months (notably an age when most children still believe in Father Christmas), at that point being taught lessons in “citizenship,” meaning, in reality, not British culture but the cultures of recent immigrants to Britain. Information posted by the National Literary trust suggests that by the age of 5 or 6, children should be “aware of their own needs and sensitive to those of others’ cultures and beliefs.” Note the wording. British children are to be aware of “their own needs,” e.g., the need to use the bathroom, or to get a drink of water. It is fundamentally secular and individualistic, rooted in a culture of “me.” British children are to be made aware of the culture of others, not their own. As Melanie Philips of the Daily Mail newspaper has said, “it has turned citizenship into a programme to remake not just national identity but to create a new type of human being from whom all politically incorrect views have been removed.”
As ghastly as this seems, we are less likely than ever before to see the public outraged enough to act. Our brave new world will not be imposed on us by the government, but will be a social contract between the citizens and the government, and it will have been bartered in a firm but friendly manner. Thus the government is currently trying to push through the Equality Act, a law that would make it illegal to discriminate against homosexuals. Significantly, the government has refused to allow Catholic adoption agencies to opt out, and, as such, they will be legally required to adopt out babies to homosexual couples, even though it may “ and almost certainly would be “ against the wishes of the mother. Conservative MP Bill Cash has said that the Labour government has “given more preference to those who stand for gay rights than those who are concerned with conscience, with family and with religion,” but he is missing the point. In the new social contract, “conscience,” “family,” and “tradition” will all have a line drawn through them.
Our relationship to family, and especially to children is changing for the worse. It used to be said that children should be seen but not heard, and this sentiment was eventually seen as indicating that the children were not valued. Today children are valued “ though this “valuing” of children has tragically turned too many of them into a product in our consumer-driven, “me first” society, with wealthy women from Britain and elsewhere buying babies from Mafia organizations on the European continent. Apparently babies sell for about 20,000 pounds (approximately 40,000 U.S. dollars), and are produced to order, with the criminal leaders impregnating vulnerable women in countries such as Romania, then feeding and housing them until they give birth to the product. Natalie Clarke of the Daily Mail quite rightly says this “sounds like something that might have happened in Hitler’s Germany.”
Having a baby is, of course, becoming less of a miracle or a natural joy, and more of a consumer choice. Some fertility clinics in the U.K., Australia, and the U.S. have begun to offer an egg-freezing service for women. Most commonly eggs are frozen by women undergoing cancer treatment, and who want to preserve their eggs so that they can have a child or children once the treatment is over, and the body in a normal state of health. That is perfectly understandable. However, it is reported that about 1 in 5 women are freezing their eggs in order to have a baby later on in life for “social reasons.” Sadly, with babies being manufactured through the abuse of women (out of sight and out of mind to the consumer), or British women storing their eggs for “social reason” on the one hand and the government planning to indoctrinate babies from birth and up, we are seeing the social contract that is ushering in, if only abstractly, the baby factories of Huxley’s Brave New World, through which Huxley’s society is engineered. As Britain erodes its culture, and abandons teaching its history, and its citizens reach not for the euphoric highs of Soma but for alcohol at every opportunity, living for the rootless cool, “living for the weekend,” brave new Britain is a world leader “ alas.
