A Guest Post by AKUS
There must have been many watching the insanity in Britain last week who were suddenly reminded of William Golding’s 1954 novel, “Lord of the Flies”, later turned into an equally disturbing film. Forget 7/7 – this was Britain’s 9/11, and nothing will ever be the same again in Britain.
The premise of “Lord of the Flies” is that a group of boys marooned on a desert island during a nuclear war become brutal savages. Comfortably middle class, they rapidly lose their civilized state and become a mob that turns on one their own, Piggy. In a world long before Facebook, Twitter, or Blackberries, the boys find a conch shell which serves the same purpose of gathering the boys together.
Consider the murdered Piggy as an allegorical figure representing today’s British society, and the book is a prophetic vision of what happened in Britain last week. Given the setting of the novel, the one aspect Golding could not foresee was the way in which British adults joined what have been labeled “feral youths” in the looting and mayhem. The mask hiding the failed policies of the last decade or two has been ripped aside, revealing the some nasty truths about British society.
Those of us who have lived with terror in Israel could feel deep sympathy for the victims – the average citizens – of nights of terror in Britain. But as the riots played out in horrific comparison with the contemporaneous peaceful demonstrations for social equality in Israel there was also grim Schadenfreude directed at Britain as a society which has become the global center of organized anti-Israeli, and all too often, anti-Semitic, activity.
The looters were quickly labeled “scum”, “criminals”, “feral youths”, and so on. We saw street interviews with shocked Britains surveying the results of years of policies that, as Melanie Phillips so brilliantly summarized in her article Goodbye to the Enlightenment, were systematically put in place to destroy (“remake”, the perpetrators would claim) British society. The result she pointed to could be the premise for Golding’s book, with the societal collapse due, not to nuclear war, but deliberate removal of every norm that over millennia was found to make societies work:
… a society that embraces mass fatherlessness is a society that is going off the edge of a cliff. There are whole areas of Britain (white as well as black) where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon; ….
And the unutterably wicked thing is that this catastrophe has been deliberately willed upon Britain by left-wing politicians, well-heeled media feminists and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism, witlessly prattling about poverty and social justice and hurling execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is in general a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women) and that the state should stop subsidising family and social breakdown and start encouraging married parenthood instead.
(By the way, when it comes to fatherless families, the USA is trending in the same direction and for many of the same reasons).
Like Lords of the Flies on Golding’s Island, feral Guardianistas went on a verbal rampage to justify the destructive philosophies they espouse. The commentary ranged from the absurd to the ridiculous. The pickings are too rich to list them all here, but three columnists stood out more than most.
Following Phillips article, Jane Clare Jones, (“a doctoral student in philosophy, specialising in feminist ethics “– who knew that ethics had genders?) dodged the real issues and instead attacked Melanie Phillips and a conservative columnist, Peter Hitchens , for good measure, for “laying the responsibility for violence perpetrated mostly by young men at the door of women”. We are to believe that Phillips was blaming the issue of fatherlessness (more of a solution, apparently, in Clare Jones’ view, than a problem) on the mothers rather than the often unknown fathers, which is simply not true.
Phillips, according to Clare Jones, is a threat to the very concept of feminism, at the heart of which, we are apparently to understand, lies the single mother. Clare Jones, indeed a “well-healed media feminist”, typifies the very destructive lunacy that Phillips protests, and the people responsible for the destruction of a society that once gave the world so much.
There was the Egyptian Mona Eltahaway, one of the Guardian’s most vicious critics of Israel, who fatuously compared Cameron to Mubarak. Yes indeed – what is next for Britain? Will Cameron’s secret police reopen the torture chambers in the Tower and imprison the Moslem Brotherhood? Verbal hysteria has rarely reached this level.
So we might truly understand the dialectical underpinnings of the riots, the Guardian’s resident Bolshevik, Seamus Milne, was called in to interpret the riots as a grand “Failure of Capitalism in Britain”.
Of course, the riots represent the failures of multiculturalism and the welfare state – the antithesis, one might justifiably claim, of “Capitalism Run Wild”. CiFWatch already noted readers’ unprecedented opposition to Seamus Milne’s lunatic article. His article drew the most vehement response we have seen on CiF – currently 2,548 readers believe that Milne simply does not “get it”.
The Guardian’s responses to the riots reveal once more, if proof were needed, that there is something seriously wrong with the way Guardianistas, and not a few Britains, view the world and their society. With respect to the Guardian, this is most evident in its constant attacks on Israel. The Guardian even makes a point of running articles written for it by spokesmen of the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah whose ethos is one of murder, misogyny, intolerant religious fanaticism and terrorism aimed at the destruction of Israel. They have clearly stated their desire to bring about a second Holocaust. I imagine the Guardian would indignantly claim that it does not support that ethos and the actions it leads to. But, in fact, by its editorial policies and actions, it does.
The Guardian supports anyone and any group dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the only country in the Middle East that comes close to actually living the values, in many cases, of a liberal society that supposedly the Guardianistas hope to achieve in Britain. If the argument is one of opposition to Israel’s use of military force to protect itself, or the occupation of the disputed territories, how hypocritical does that sound when Britain is involved, for example, bombing civilians in Tripoli day and night when it has done nothing since the Lockerbie bombing to attack Britain? If Israel responded to every terrorist attack the way Britain has operated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Gaza and the Palestinian areas of the West Bank would be empty wastelands.
Many noted that the riots drew attention to a previously acceptable event that illustrates the sickness at the heart of the attacks on Israel. One of the cheerleaders at a recent Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) conference was Jody McIntyre, now dropped like a hot potato by several newspapers that previously thought it rather fun to run his nasty anti-establishment blog. When he shrieked: “we [must] set the streets of London alight” at the PSC conference he was loudly applauded. A little later the mob actually set London alight. Hopefully McIntyre will now recede into the obscurity from whence he came
It was fun when it was politically correct to aim the taunts, protests and violence and calls at Israel. However, when the call to destroy London was aimed not as a backhanded protest at Israel, or Britain’s imagined support for Israel, but at Britain itself, this did not sit well with the great British public.
The questions I would have for the papers that have dropped McIntyre’s blog, for those supporting the PSC’s 300 member groups, and especially for the Guardian, are:
“Is the obsession with every problem Israel faces not a symptom of the rot in your own society? Which society breeds the Lords of the Flies, and which creates a vibrant, society, sustaining itself in the face of real threats that supports al l that liberals and the Left should stand for? Will you realize in time that the invective, harassment, and violence aimed at the democratic, liberal, ethnically diverse yet strongly cohesive state of Israel (and at British Jews) will, inevitably, rebound onto your own society?”
The riots gave a clear answer, in my opinion, and after the riots, nothing will ever be the same in Britain. Which way it goes remains to be seen.
