Barren Wasteland
In one of his best-ever columns, Peter Hitchens opens fire on the permissive, politically-correct culture, and the politicians who enabled it:
Our ancient culture was a forest that took a thousand years to grow and less than half a century to cut down. Now that the trees are all flattened, the people who massacred them find that they are shivering in a howling wilderness that they are powerless to restore to its former shape.
All the funny money “private finance initiatives” in the world, all the taxes they can raise, all the concrete and plastic they can buy, cannot rebuild a forest.
This is why nothing that they do works. The old mechanisms of loyalty and respect for authority – which these revolutionaries despised – are broken. They can shout all kinds of instructions at us, but nobody is really paying attention to anything they say.
They decree better schools and hospitals, and produce sinks of infection and ignorance, because they have destroyed conscientiousness and dutifulness, and sabotaged obedience.
They decree an end to “anti-social behaviour” but the loping packs of feral youths pay no attention, and carry on kicking people’s heads as if they were footballs.
Is this any surprise in a country whose leading minds have devoted the past half-century to dismantling absolute morality, the married family and the idea of punishment?
Hitchens is talking about modern-day Cool Britannia, of course, but the message is plain to us here in the United States as well. Only our innate conservatism has so far managed to hold off most of the miserable excesses of those “leading minds”—but it should be noted that the same process is nevertheless firmly embedded in our public school system, in our universities, and in our corporations.
As conservatives, we are accustomed to looking to the lessons of the past, to avoid making mistakes in the present—and those lessons, it should be noted, are often contemptuously dismissed as being “outdated” or “irrelevant in today’s world” by the Leading Minds.
Well, when it comes to the dismantling of our Western culture, we Americans no longer need to look to the past to see the results of earlier dismantlings: we need only look across the Atlantic to see the contemporary results.
Let’s be perfectly clear about the consequences of reckless destruction of our culture: as Hitchens points out, without cultural underpinnings to maintain standards and “absolute morality”, all that’s left are politicians’ thin decrees.
And decrees, as the miserable Brits are finding out, don’t work.
