Unrest in the U. K.

Three Dreher pieces at the top of his 'Stack.'  I am especially interested in comments from U. K. readers.

Britain: This Machete'd Isle

'A Riot is the Language of the Unheard'

Tommy the Savage

Is the world coming apart or is the world coming apart?

Filed under: Decline of the West

(369 entries and counting)

Comments

[Joe Odegaard]

I am glad to see the riots. Maybe the Mother Country will survive after all.

[Junius]

Englishman here. Dreher is largely correct and says most of what needs to be said. Blair is, as is usually the case, the architect of all our woes. It also must be added that for many poor people their primary concerns now are the rising cost of living and immigration. They have been told to shut up and put up since 1997 about the latter by the party which was allegedly founded to represent their interests - Labour. If they resisted they were insulted. After the recent election, the Labour Party immediately indicated that it intended both to raise the cost of living by increasing taxes and cutting benefits for the elderly (which might well be economically necessary - but they denied they would do this as aggressively as they are now doing), though they have given large pay rises demanded by striking unionised workers who are already paid far above average salaries and have caused much misery for the general population with their strikes (few of the poor now work in unionised industries). Labour’s first act in power was to reverse the only possible plan to control immigration which was to deport failed asylum claimants to Rwanda, thereby solving the vexing issue of what to do with those who arrived without documentation. So after decades of policy failure from both parties where will these people turn? Our electoral system makes it very hard for any party to succeed except two: Labour or Conservative. Both parties represent the elite but each a different segment of the elite: Labour is the party of the public sector elite; Conservative that of the private sector elite. The Conservatives at least have the advantage of representing the sector which actually creates growth, but neither has any real particular interest in poorer people, who are anyway nowadays far less likely to vote than the well to do. Many of the latter believed they had an opportunity to meaningfully vote on immigration during the EU referendum - but after voting for Brexit were vilified as racists and morons and saw most of the elite jump through hoops to try and prevent what it had voted for. After that, why vote again?

Americans must recall that Britain does not really have anything like their great nation’s idealistic conception of itself. Britain and its culture simply is what its history and people made it - largely the result of fortuitous circumstance and the brilliant imaginations of certain statesman, inventors and the like, as well as the common people. It never decided on a role for itself in some founding moment, and even if at times it has realised a role for itself, such as at the height of the Empire, this was as much the reflection of the self-belief of a race than of any abstract ideology. America can assimilate immigrants relatively easily because it can teach them a set of values that are quite explicit - and abstract - and call them ‘American’. But British values are far more embedded simply in our way of living. We are not so conscious of them and therefore struggle to teach them to outsiders. One example would be the irony-laden British sense of humour which can be confusing to foreigners who do not know the ‘code’ to decipher it, as it were. In that sense, we are not straightforward or explicit. We are a little like the Japanese - we have complex rules for manners and rituals that we often don’t really understand ourselves - it simply is our way of doing things. This is perhaps our undoing - because so many of our elites did not realise how specific our values were to our own context, they did not realise that they were not easily spread to others, and certainly not easily restored when lost.

(I do not mean by any of this that there is a racial basis to our civilisation. Race is significant only insofar as it is a mark of likely cultural difference. But there are many people from a number of racial or ethnic backgrounds who have assimilated or acculturated with relative ease and this was to the host population’s gain. Indeed, a large number of my friends and some of my family (by marriage) are immigrants or descended from immigrants.)

But the real naïvety among our elites was the belief that because secularisation had expanded so rapidly in the post-war era in Britain, it would inevitably spread to those who came to live here. This was fundamentally a failure of imagination - the British elite class for the most part having so little religion itself could not believe that religion was really particularly consequential to anyone else, and they thought that once out of the yoke of theocracy or the bonds of communitarianism the immigrants would simply drop their religion as we did - or retain it as an aesthetic veneer. This was sheer foolishness. It is rather obvious that a family moving thousands of miles from its native home is likely to retain its religion as an identity-strengthening force in an alien landscape and use it to enter a network of co-religionists rather than face the considerable difficulty of entering the economy and culture with no letter of introduction. This is not such a problem if the religion in question is benign - but what if it is a particularly reactionary form of Islam or African belief in witchcraft?

So we have very deep problems with large numbers of unassimilable people - in a small county town recently I saw the absurd sight of dozens of Muslims marching in protest against Israel. Not one white person or non-Muslim was among them. This violence has been in the works for a long time. It cannot be expected that the overworked and underpaid, poorly educated and often not very bright poor whites (I exclude the underclass or lumpenproletariat who deserve little sympathy) are to make all these subtle distinctions of race and creed or follow convoluted economic arguments about how immigration allegedly benefits them (the elision of skilled and unskilled immigration’s benefits is common among the elite and clearly duplicitous). Simply put, many feel threatened and excluded from their own country - and unlike many of the immigrants they simply have nowhere else to go; Britain is all they have. Enoch Powell predicted this in 1968, though he was inaccurate in the details. Most people are just surprised it took so long - but we are a tolerant people, and more lazy than we are tolerant; indeed, we have frequently confused our laziness with tolerance.

The deeper problem is that we face a completely novel phenomenon - global decadence. It is not simply one civilisation that is on the rocks but the entire world. So there is nowhere to escape to. I know a number of very decent people who are trying to gain British citizenship - not easy or cheap to do if one goes through the official channels - because life here is still better than elsewhere. They would rather be here than in Russia, India, South Africa and so on. But I am reminded of a phrase in Gibbon concerning another civilisation in its decline - ‘to resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly’.

[oz the ostrich]

Comment from UK reader here.

Protests on both sides often result in a small group of agitators causing violence.

My concern is that all protesters are labelled as 'far right'. Not just my concern. If you look at the comments on almost any video of the protests, this is a common complaint.

Muslims would surely complain if they were labelled 'Islamist extremists' or just 'religious extremists'. But they aren't.

[BV]

Oz,

This is my concern as well. Conservatives are labelled 'far right' by their leftist enemies when conservative positions, by any reasonable, historically-based, standard are moderate positions. Or at least this is true of the majority of conservatives on this side of the Pond.

I challenge anyone to argue that DJT's positions are extreme. He counts as conservative but I am unaware of any position of his on any issue that could be reasonably called extreme.

The positions of Kamala and her Veep, Tim Walz, are by contrast quite obviously extreme.

[BV]

It says something, doesn't it, that the once-but-no-longer respectable Dem Party now sports a terrorist-supporting 'Hamas wing' populated by Squad members.

>>It’s no accident that Squad members like AOC and Ilhan Omar were first out of the gate celebrating the Walz pick. Bernie loves it. Hamas apologists like the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah were tweeting like giddy teenagers, “TEAM WALZ!!!!!!!!!! ITS OUR TIME!!”

What about moderates and independents? It seems counterintuitive for Kamala, who has accumulated a grand total of zero primary votes, to tap one of the most brazenly left-wing governors in the country as she attempts to walk back a raft of unpopular positions that were staked only a few years ago.

Like Harris, the folksy Minnesota governor has proposed socializing health insurance and eliminating fossil fuels. Like Harris, Walz wants to effectively decriminalize illegal immigration by signing laws to pay for the health care and tuition of illegals, and allow them to have driver’s licenses. Like Harris, Walz has taken a maximalist position on abortion, signing a bill codifying the procedure as a “fundamental right” into the ninth month, on demand with no questions asked. Walz also signed a bill that let’s children with gender dysphoria be mutilated by doctors.<<

https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/07/tim-walz-is-a-folksy-socialist/

[BV]

Junius,

Thank you for your penetrating commentary.

>>America can assimilate immigrants relatively easily because it can teach them a set of values that are quite explicit - and abstract - and call them ‘American’. But British values are far more embedded simply in our way of living. We are not so conscious of them and therefore struggle to teach them to outsiders.<<

Assimilation to American values used to occur, but is now something belonging to the distant past. This will likely be our downfall. The problem is not just the promotion of illegal entry by the Left and the 'cuckservative' failure to oppose it by RINOs; the problem is the change in LEGAL immigration policies that occurred in the '60s.

Clearly, only some people are equipped to assimilate to our values. I have gone over this many times. See my Immigration category.

In the current civil war over the soul of America, the main battle concerns whether the republic as the Founder's envisioned it will survive, or whether it will be replaced by a woke-globalist form of corporate-socialist totalitarianism.

What we have going -- and what could if we are not careful lead to hot civil war -- is a conflict of visions, to invoke the title of Thomas Sowell's eponymous book.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465002056?tag=bravesoftwa04-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1&language=en_US

[BV]

Junius,

Have you read my From Democrat to Dissident? It goes into great detail on a lot of this. https://philpapers.org/rec/VALQDT

[BV]

A view from the Hard Left: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-ideology-driving-far-right-riots-in-the-uk/

>> The networked nature of the modern far right means that rather than coalescing around a physical leader, they instead organize around a shared ideology and aim: the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which can be defeated via a race war.

The theory baselessly claims that white people in the Global North are being “replaced” by migrant people from the Global South, aided by feminists repressing the birth rate via abortion and contraception. All of this is supposedly being orchestrated by “cultural Marxists,” a catch-all term that includes liberal elites, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, LGBTQ+ people and Jewish people.

This so-called replacement is commonly referred to as a “white genocide.” To defeat this so-called genocide, the far right wants to incite a civil war – sometimes referred to as Day X or boogaloo – that would result in pure ethno-states. It’s for this reason that the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, warned that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK, in the wake of the riots. While it is far from inevitable, it is the desired outcome of the global far right, who are looking for an inciting incident to trigger Day X.<<

[james soriano]

Bill,

I’m not British, but let me take a cut at the UK riots from the perspective of the mob (with inspiration from the murmuration effect as when a flock of starlings changes direction).

Some examples will illustrate what I’m driving at.

Romania 1989.  We've all seen the videos of Nicholai Ceausescu give that speech from a high balcony overlooking a large crowd of Romanian citizens below. He was talking about raising the minimum wage and helping the poor. Then the murmuring started.  It spread  through the crowd. The murmurs became insults, the insults menacing, and Ceausescu's security spirited him away. Soon there would be regime change.

The Arab Spring, Cairo January 2011.  A month earlier a policewoman in an obscure town in Tunisia helped herself to an apple from a fruit vendor’s cart. He asked payment.  She laughed.  He complained at the police station. No help.  To the mayor.  No help.  In despair he doused himself with petrol and immolated himself on the street.  The Tunisian elite was aghast.  State corruption was a given of Tunisian life, but now it claimed the life of a street vendor.  A breaking point was reached. The death of Mohamed Bouazizi was the trigger for what became the “Arab Spring.” There was an anti-government demonstration, I think among the lawyers’ association. Then two, then three, then an uprising.  Soon there would be regime change.  

Egyptians watched these events on TV.  Weeks passed.  Every Friday they would go to the mosque and after prayers they would go home, swallowing their resentment at their own regime.  The Tunisian demonstrators were showing them up.  They had taken the lead; Egyptians were passive as always. One Friday in January Cairenes went to the mosque for prayers and afterwards as they walked home one looked at another who looked at another. Then the murmuring started and the “Allahu akhbar!” The mosque-goers became a mob. One anti-government demonstration followed another. Then an uprising.  Soon there would be regime change.  

What do these cases have in common?  Can they be applied to the UK?

-- large numbers of ordinary people seething with resentment at their ruling elites and regime insiders
-- the inability to make a decent living
-- a state seemingly in existence solely for the benefit of those on the inside
-- years, decades, generations of passive behavior, of docile populations acquiescing to government mismanagement
-- a trigger event that gives permission for mob activity and violent behaviors
-- no one person in charge; unrest spreads with apparent spontaneity
-- escalation from peaceful demonstrations, to menacing threats, to petty vandalism, to felonious violence
-- after the unrest passes a certain threshold it forgets its proximate causes (corruption, etc.) and replaces them with an attack on the legitimacy of the state itself. Grievance gives way to a generalized power struggle
-- regime change 

The most important characteristic is that the people lose their fear. That seems to be a critical threshold, but it’s subjective. How do you measure it? People no longer fear the police, or arrest, or government intimidation. Fear disappears among them and then it reappears within the regime itself.  

By March 2011 the Arab Spring had reached Syria. In the southern town of Dara’a, a group of high school boys scrawled anti-regime graffiti on a wall. They were arrested and tortured by the secret police. Town residents took to the streets in protest. There was live fire and many deaths. The regime opted for force to remind the people to abide by the rule of fear, but this time the people had lost their fear, even of death. There were more demonstrations, more live fire, and more deaths. In a few months Syria would be in a civil war.

As to the UK, I’d say many of the rioters have lost their fear. Many of them were surprised to find themselves on the streets, even as the authorities were surprised to see them there. “Right wing” thugs are expected to take to the streets, but not ordinary citizens.

Certainly much of the UK's Muslim populations have no fear of the state. Indeed, the radicals among them have nothing but contempt for it.

I hope that the headlines intimating civil war in the UK are wrong, but mobs have a logic of their own.

If the UK today is like Tunisia in early 2011, what country in Europe, watching passively now, will play the role of Egypt?

[BV]

James,

Thanks for the excellent overview of key events of the last quarter century. Europe and the UK appear to be collapsing under the weight of their own decadence and unspeakably foolish immigration policies. Over here we still have a chance if we can get Trump back in office. But that is not an assured result given the near-infinite stupidity of about half of our population.

I hope your present location affords you some safety from the crapstorm that is coming.