June 10, 2009

Is liberty a threat to tradition?
As J. Enoch Powell once said to Margaret Thatcher regarding her lofty defense of abstract principles:  ?No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.? ~Matthew Roberts

Well, I guess we?ve reached a point where I part ways with Matthew, and Enoch. Quite frankly, if America completes its current trajectory towards pomo socialism, I think I?ll be headed for the exists. Moreover, I wouldn?t say that Germans who hopped the wall fleeing the GDR were all wicked cowards who weren?t brave enough to fight for their country.   

There?s also a contradiction at the heart of Matthew?s argument: On one hand, he states that ?liberty? is just an abstract concept, a phantom of some philosophe?s imagination, with little meaning and, on the other, it?s all too real in that it leads people to embrace hedonism and The Flavor of Love. Well, let?s think about this. Any way you measure it, over the past decade our liberties have been restricted, and over the past year dreaded ?globalization? has been dramatically reversing. Is the end of reality TV and revival of traditional folkways just around the corner? I think not. 

Though, as I said before, I don?t like the ?Liberal Fascism? argument, there is a sense in which the BNP is basically Old Labuour, in term of many of its programs as well much of its rhetoric. And let?s not forget that it was as a sheltered, collectivized community under the postwar welfare state that Britain mutated from an ordered, productive nation to the vulgar and increasingly out-of-control public we see today. 

 

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