I happened to be in a hair salon when the news first hit. The shock was palpable as word spread from the employees to their clients. There was surprise, then sadness. It was one of those moments some people will always remember exactly where they were and what they were doing at the time.
Upon returning home, sketchy details emerged on internet-news sites, and the Facebook and Twitter-sphere were abuzz as people came to terms with the sad reality.
Amy Winehouse was dead.
This particular singer, who’s only semi-legitimate claim to fame was an appropriate ditty about her refusal to go to rehab, should have surprised no one who bothered to care when she reportedly topped her own previous attempts at excess with a mix of cocaine, heroine and horse tranquilizers; or if you’re to believe her parents, a lack of alcohol.
This singer-turned-public-spectacle became the latest martyr of the Me Generations who elevate practitioners of extreme-hedonism-to-the-point-of-death to romantic notions of victimhood. You know, troubled creative geniuses struggling with enormous and unexpected success. Pushing a 27-year-old body to the point of death through partying takes actual work, and an absolute inability to control one’s cravings.
The next weekend, news hit that a Chinook helicopter had been shot down during a raid in Afghanistan, killing all 30 on board, including 22 Navy SEALs, many reportedly from the elite Team 6. Loss of life during a time of war is tragic, but military casualties are an expected and necessary evil and cost of wars fought for an ostensibly greater good.
But there’s something especially devastating – both psychologically and militarily – about losing so many of the very best. To the extent the internet blogosphere and Facebook are any indications of public sentiment, at least among certain demographics, the public expressions of sadness and grief at this event was mostly confined to those few pro-military individuals. The public expressions of shock and sadness were far less than the number reserved for the drug-addicted dead singer/public spectacle, and only one brave person in my sphere of online friends dared to call out the general population on their sad priorities.
Too often, only the fallen are referred to as “heroes”. The men aboard that Chinook were just as heroic in life as they were in death, but even in wartime, the term “hero” seems reserved for victimhood. We celebrate those killed or captured and ignore most of the every day military heroes – from those filled with enough bravery simply to serve, to those who save their fellow soldiers and kill more enemies. Honoring men like Jimmy Doolittle or naming streets and highways after war heroes, living or dead, seems like a quaint relic from a long-forgotten era.
Within days of the Chinook tragedy, Britain was set ablaze by barbaric rioters and looters. Excuses were made, from the melee erupting in response to the police shooting of a supposedly unarmed man in Tottemham, to blaming the general unrest on the economic downturn.
This meme defies credulity when one considers the thugs and looters have no regard for human life, rights, property, the rule of law, or civilization itself. Some rioters, speaking to reporters, claimed this was about showing “the rich” they could do what they wanted. These acts weren’t about economic wont, or racial inequity, or police brutality; this was straight-up moral degeneracy. Many of these people have no desire to actually work in exchange for money because they’re now several generations down the line of the dependent class.
In Britain, as in America, the “poor” have computers, smart phones, and high-definition televisions, but they’ve been taught for decades they’re owed something from someone else. They’ve been taught wealth is not the result of hard work, but something that should be taken from those who have whatever they do not. They’ve been taught family is meaningless and that reproduction’s greatest purpose is to ensure delivery of another government check.
They’ve been taught the rule of law is a joke because in Britain so few of them are actually enforced. In America, we have “hate crimes” applying to white-on-black violence, but a Justice Department that refuses to enforce laws when the violence is black-on-white. Both countries have a court system with such a high burden of proof and lack of will to adequately enforce prosecutions that the criminal class can rest assured their bet is safe when it comes to beating the system. The system doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway, because it’s broken or non-existent.
Britain represents Leftism’s great achievement. In two or three generations, they’ve successfully turned a large segment of the population into moral monsters. As Max Hastings described in the U.K. Daily Mail: “They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.”
They weren’t born this way, but they were raised this way by Leftism run amuck and left unchecked. They are a mob, and the mob is growing and spreading and becoming more aggressive. They are parasites quickly sucking the blood of what’s left of civilized society throughout the Western world, from Greece and France to California and Wisconsin. We’ve been told for decades any unrest of this sort resulted from the haves vs. the have-nots, or from a racist society bent on keeping blacks and Hispanics down. In Britain, the many of the rioters and looters are white and middle to upper class, and many of them are female.
Here in America, when this sort of thing happens many of the perpetrators are black – again, not because they were born that way, but because they’ve long represented the easiest target for left-wing social engineers bent on creating as many dependents as possible for the sake of their own power and control. It’s in their interest to keep as many people morally bankrupt, uneducated, and covetous as possible as a vehicle and excuse for their redistributive policies.
America, as well as the rest of the Western world, faces the crisis of rapid decline and destruction, and sadly for us, the parasites represent a growing segment of the population. The Left loves to point out how far ahead of America the Europeans are, and in this regard they’re correct.
Europe leads the charge to the ashbin of history and cultural anarchy, but America follows closely behind. We see it in places like Wisconsin, where the mob either demands more of the property of others through public union thuggery, or seeks outright destruction of it in the form of violence, such as when whites were pulled from their cars and beaten by blacks at the Wisconsin State Fair last week, where one 16 year old assailant told police he attacked whites because they were an “easy target”. The police recommend race crime charges, but precedent suggests this is unlikely, especially if the Obama/Holder Justice Dept. has anything to say about it. The system legitimizes violence when the template is the haves vs. the have-nots, where race and gender are a side note.
Our Navy SEALs, along with the rest of our military personnel, serve as guardians of the Old Order. They serve to protect the freedoms and liberty that created the West in the first place and went on to produced the greatest prosperity the world has ever seen. They exist and fight for the rights of those who value decency, the law, and property.
Britain and other European states became the rotting cultural cesspools they are today because of the American military. Thanks to our superiority, none of these other Western nations had to train men to fight, nor did they need worry much about the enemy next door. They were allowed to grow soft because the U.S. was still hard. Their governments could become bloated service-providers furthering the objective of creating a permanent dependent class because they were safe to do so and no longer had to spend money on defense. America kept the Western safe for cultural destruction. Freeloaders can be freeloaders, because not only do we encourage and promote freeloading, we militarily protect it.
We can create and support millions of Amy Winehouses because others have created the necessary wealth, the social engineers have replaced stigma with romanticism, and the military ensures this path can continue indefinitely. As Frank Miniter noted at National Review Online, back in Winston Churchill’s day, when Britons were fighting off Germans invading their shores, it’s hard to imagine any proud Anglo stripping off his clothes at the demands of some hooligan, as happened during last week’s riots. The Left’s degenerative morality successfully strengthened the parasite while weakening the host, and we all know at some point the host will die.
I once heard a liberal colleague express his secret wish that the “blue” states of the Northeast, or at least Manhattan and certain elite provinces of Massachusetts, break away from the rest of backward “red state” America. My reaction was to wonder how this new elite civilization spawned from America would either support itself financially or protect itself militarily. Leftism has bankrupted most of the blue states, who are forced to take money produced in red states, and we all know most of our military personnel is drawn from hick pockets in the woods of red state flyover country. His response was we’d make a deal, and the new Elitist U.S. would be a protectorate, much like the defense umbrella provided for Europe. At least there was an admission society needed some sort of military protection. Most leftists in America disdain the military, both its culture and its purpose, even though they’re always sure to remind us they “support the troops”, even if they don’t support “the mission”. Redistributive politicians can’t wait to gut the military so they can both transfer more of that money to their dependent classes and surrender our role as world leader.
They’ve done far enough to reach those ends already. Our military existed to protect our way of life and our property; leftism has taught several generations there is neither such a thing as “our way of life” or private property. Therefore, who and what are our brave warriors protecting and fighting for? Do they serve to protect a lawless society comprised of morally bankrupt hippies destroying what human dignity and private property still exist? Or do they serve to protect the few of us who still believe in liberty, decency, and civilization? The Left has divided society by creating nations filled with those who take from those who produce and protect. How can society not, under those circumstances, be extremely divided? Their excuses – racial tension, economic disadvantages, wage gaps – are all created by themselves in the first place and only serve to delay the inevitable destruction caused by their dehumanizing policies. In practice, the U.S. military exists to protect cultural rot, to ensure young people can continue to care about what happens to depraved celebrities, and spend most of their days talking at each other and about themselves on Facebook.
The superior warriors who perished in Afghanistan last week didn’t lose their lives for America, the Anglo-American alliance, or Western-style freedom and liberty. They sacrificed their lives for the shrinking number of us who still believe in things like strength, personal virtue, common decency, respecting our fellow men, hard work, family, and raising the next generation to value the same.
Amy Winehouse and the people who follow, idolize, and romanticize her represent the most selfish impulses of our society. This was a person blessed with a certain level of talent who made riches in a society where it’s possible for a population to spend huge amounts of money on entertainment because of all the hard work of previous generations. She used that wealth to satisfy her own hedonistic cravings to the point her body gave up. Her actions showed a complete lack of regard for her family, her friends, her business associates whose wellbeing depended on her, and her fans.
By contrast, our military personnel are selfless by their very existence. They train hard and put their lives on the line every day, not for any personal gain, but for people they don’t even know so they can live free and pursue their own versions of happiness, however contrary to the mores of the people protecting them that may be.
As our military struggles to find a continued purpose in a world run by those who see it as an impediment to their power which results from the class of dependents they created, we’ll only see the mob multiply, with very little left to protect the host from the parasites. If our military retreats along with the culture that created our strength, we’ll continue to decay until a stronger and less desirable culture enters the void, from the outside or from within.
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