Dependence Day

by Mark Steyn - January 2011 - The New Criterion

If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.

I have written recently in a couple of different posts on the incredible number of progressive young couples who have declared they will not have children even as they get married. This incredible desire to end mankind is a form of self loathing that is hard for many of us to imagine. Yet that commitment has become a grand ideal in the minds of our youth. What could the teachers that created such self loathing have been trying to accomplish? If that is not sliding off a cliff, the phrase has no meaning.

This article by Mark Steyn will leave anyone who loves our nation depressed. It walks us through a reality that we all know is true but all ignore because it is so wrong in so many ways. Or should be wrong. For three generations there has been a war to destroy what makes America great, a culture war. For three generations Americans have been too busy living their lives to listen to the occasional prophet who pointed out the consequences of our insanity. Now as those consequences move from the far future into the near future, some are starting to pay attention when people like Steyn point out the depressing reality of the changes we have permitted. However it is also becoming clear, we have probably left it too late to change it. We have squandered our future even as we have sold our souls to our enemies. Steyn talks about the incredible stupidity of spending money we don't have by borrowing from avowed enemies.

Within the next five years, the People’s Liberation Army [China], which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers. When they take Taiwan, suburban families in Connecticut and small businesses in Idaho will have paid for it. The existential questions for America loom now, not decades hence. What we face is not merely the decline and fall of a powerful nation but the collapse of the highly specific cultural tradition that built the modern world.

What tradition is that? Our enemies have convinced the young of our planet to deride England and America as fascist and pro-slavery. Steyn speaks of this insanity when he says:

It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.

Even here in America, there was always majority opposition to slavery. We are denounced despite the fact that slavery was always existent in less than half our states. Close to half a million Americans died to end the scourge when the democratic efforts to end it were starting to work and civil war broke out. These dead were our best and brightest and their letters home acknowledge their pride in ending slavery. Today our nation is not admired for what we did, but denounced for what those we defeated did. Why is there a stain on our nation when any decent observer has to acknowledge that the blood of these dead should have brought us admiration instead?

What else but unjustified self loathing could be the basis of attitudes such as these?

Steyn uses examples of the decline in England to indicate the kind of decline that we are unquestionably facing here as well.

Last year, the “Secretary of State for Children” (both an Orwellian and Huxleyite office) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under twenty-four-hour cctv supervision in their homes. As the Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.” Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he would have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.

There seems to be no end to the willingness of our so-called leaders to micro manage every minute of our lives. Here in America, having made our toilets so inefficient that you have to flush 3 times and taken light bulbs away under lies about efficiency, there are already plans to take away anti-bacterial soap as the next step in controlling every iota of our existence.

The final line in this article is the heart of the problem. "Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world." That world will not be as good as the one we currently live in. Not even close.