I really don’t know the definitive date when the Rubicon was crossed. Like many of these things, rather than an instantaneous change, we have been subject to a corrosive deterioration of good sense, moral values and ethics to the point that any weight brought to bear on the superstructure of our society results in it crumbling like insignificant dust in our hands. Nowhere is this sorry analogy more prevalent than the recent Kyle Rittenhouse debacle, a perverse political show trial in the guise that some will undoubtedly consider a historical precedent. I refuse to be dragged down the avenue of considering the minutia of this tragedy, for the damage to the individuals concerned – but moreover to society as a whole – is clearly beyond incalculable. If nothing else, what was clear from the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is that the defendant demonstrated a level of maturity and self-control that seemingly the majority of American citizens seem to have willingly abandoned. That it takes a teenager in a modern day “David versus Goliath” struggle to scratch the hardened conscience of both sides of the political divide should ring alarm bells far and wide. Where have all the responsible adults gone?
As a lifelong pseudo-pacifist, I find the whole concept of violence abhorrent. I would far rather that we all rub along to get along, even if that means separate nation states with disparate and incompatible cultures being kept as far apart as humanly or geographically possible. As the old saying goes, good fences make for good neighbours, and that well weathered idiom is true on so many levels. Not only does it protect those inside the fence from the intrusion of undesirables, it also acts as a cultural veil where any potential offence committed by yourself is shielded from the sensitive eyes of your neighbour. A good example of this would be the classic example of the naturist or the streaker, the individual who wants to sunbathe naked in the privacy of their back garden. Excusing the pun, this was butt of long running jokes from comedians Sid James to Benny Hill and beyond. The narrative was simple, you had the freedom and right to behave as you wish, no matter how eccentric or potentially offensive, provided you remained within the safe enclosure of your own back yard. Of course, there was always a “Peeping Tom” around to catch a glimpse of unadorned flesh, but the message was clear. Both sunbather and voyeur had entered into a contract, and both received the due payment to their tacit agreement. The sunbather was allowed to wallow in the narcissistic reinforcement of their beauty being admired from afar, the voyeur the satisfaction that their “Accidental” glance resulted in a stimulating eyeful. The trouble, like then, occurs when either party decides to jump over the fence, or indeed bulldoze it entirely. The fantasy suddenly becomes gross reality, and we all know that reality is the mother of cynicism and heartfelt disappointment to all but the most closeted of idealists.
Realistically though, I understand that as long as homo-sapiens walks on the face of the earth without a just God to literally intervene, we will have violence and disorder. Has there ever been a time when the world was at peace with itself? If we are to take the bible at face value, Cain slew Abel over a matter of faith; how God was to be worshipped. Hence the unarguable precedent that religion would be a source of much conflict through the ages. While some would argue that religion plays much less of a part in today’s secular and humanist society, nowhere is this ironically more pertinent than in the USA, where politics are so clearly fractured down the lines of faith. To use a very crude demographic sledgehammer, the “Religious right” are diametrically opposed to the “Liberal left”. Of course, there will be considerable idealistic crossover, but perception has little time for fact or reality. Both sides believe what they believe is right with a cult-like (if not religious) intensity, and the enforced polarisation that follows from such dogmatism inevitably results in the destruction of what common ground both sides may have, ergo there is something very wrong with the American dream. Both sides, if they dare allow themselves a moment of lucidity, would heartily agree upon this point. Both sides, however, would then rapidly diverge on the cause and the solution.
Here lies the ultimate paradox of our time, a troubling question that both sides of the political abyss need to address honestly and without bias if we are to see anything approaching healing in our respective nations. This question is a sobering one, and depending on your perspective, the truthful answer to it will make you extremely uncomfortable no matter what side of the political spectrum you rest upon. It is a simple yet a profound one – When is violence morally and ethically acceptable?
In the good old USA, the tolerance towards bloody violence is much greater than here in Europe. Having being pretty much gutted of any social and legal permission for the individual to possess firearms, we are left in the perilous position of having to trust our long established institutions to execute justice, freedom, law and order by distant proxy. What happens though, when these institutions become corrupt or indeed deliberately act against the will and consent of the people? When your only option is protest or the ballot box, such measures become a democratic miasma, for they have little real effect on the perpetual hand of power. That, as many people are discovering to their shock and horror, is the hidden danger of only being able to truly hold those in power to account once every five years or so. The rest of time, the endless machine grinds on, executing numerous policies and strategies that are undesired, unwanted and far from the manifesto promises and sound bites that breed like maggots during the election cycle. If you are fortunate, you may discover some oblique reference in some obscure party political material, but to the average voter the end result is that they consider themselves betrayed.
Much is said about “Writing letters to your MP”, voicing your opinion in the local press etc., but as we have discovered, certainly since Brexit and DJT blew the door wide open on the hidden goals of the political and globalist establishment, is that such actions are pointless unless a critical mass is reached within the population, forcing the iron arm of political will. Pragmatically, politicians, certainly this side of the pond, depend on our apathy and will do everything in their power to prevent individual voters from waking from their semi-decade of slumber. Such behaviour is abundantly clear from the “Pandemic”, where obscene amounts of money has been spent on furlough payments, effectively a cash bribe to go along with the “Build Back Better” narrative.
While the same strategy has been used in the USA, there is much stronger kickback to the enforced vaccine mandate to our West. Across society, military, medicine, the public and private sector, people are voting with their feet and either changing jobs or resigning in the face of such totalitarian abuse. This, in part, is due to the fact that our American friends are much more independent and distrustful of big government, but in reality, it boils down to one simple difference. There are more guns than people, and what is more, the people know how to use them. When push comes to shove, it will be a brave and very foolish President that decides to confront this lobby head on, although in the pursuit of unbridled and relentless authoritarianism, such common sense will not stop this from inevitably happening. The narrative has been achingly persistent; gun ownership by the individual is evil and anyone who suggests otherwise is a curse upon civilised society. Such hypocrisy conveniently forgets that while such moralising targets the law abiding, the real culprits – the criminal, the military industrial complex, the very financial system itself – use violence and coercion or the threat thereof to regularly achieve their ends. I could go on, but the list of protagonists and physical manifestations of force is seemingly endless. From the bullet to losing your livelihood, while the former is crude and bloody, the latter holds just as much terror for many. It is for this very reason that the Fathers of the Republic enshrined the right to bear arms, and forever codified a moral law that up until now has remained widely unchallenged – Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.
Those who would defend the UK’s strict firearms policy would point out that we are a much safer nation because of our highly restrictive gun laws. On the surface this might seem a cohesive argument, certainly with the overall decrease in the legal availability of guns since the world wars has seen a decrease in gun crime. If you have been sentenced to more than 3 years in prison, merely possessing a firearm carries a potential 5 year sentence. To the pragmatic criminal, such laws are just a stone upon which to sharpen cunning and ingenuity. Gang members will force children or girls carry weapons, knowing full well that the police and courts will be unable or unwilling to enforce the full penalty of the law. Then, of course, there is the ever creative criminal mind to contend with. Ban guns? Let us use cars. Ban cars? Let us use knives and machetes. Ban knives and machetes? Let us use bricks. On and the on the cycle perpetuates, never recognising that the criminal doesn’t care for the law, and quite frequently the law inadvertently punishes the genuinely law-abiding as well as the wrongdoer. We may have superficially removed the scourge of violent gun crime from our streets, but we have donated a substantial level of personal responsibility to our political masters and more than a modicum of self respect in the process. Just ask the farmer Tony Martin.
This explains, very neatly, why the American political fault-lines are so clearly drawn along religious lines. On one side, you have the God fearing, those who understand that freedom is a gift from above, and to maintain this, man must be willing to accept that to a significant degree while there are rules, he is autonomous, and carries a significant responsibility for his actions, including both life and death. This ethic transcends race, colour, intelligence and can be summed up superficially in the pithy phrase “There ‘ain’t no thing as a free lunch”. On the other hand, you have group that have rejected the long-held Christian traditions of the Republic and taken freedom to a point of perverse license. Not only is there a refusal to accept even a tacit amount of common sense, truth and reality, but a post-modern Statist replacement for God and His considerable work of law upon which pretty much all of the Western world rests.
Nowhere is this more prevalent in the flawed belief that the ends justify the means, situation ethics being the order of the day. The great irony, of course, is like the flasher and the voyeur, the American public cannot see the clear symbiotic relationship between the two sides. Both would say unequivocally they are driven by a moral imperative, the only difference being the cause, the guilty party and the punishment. Both believe they are right, both believe they stand for the truth. Both so easily fall into the pit of distraction whilst hurling bullets, bricks or whatever missile of choice at the other side, forgetting the real enemy is laughing hysterically as he plays both sides against each other with such skill and seeming anonymity.
This is why I would very gingerly hypothesise the following. The only reason I do so, is as a seeker of the truth, an objective observer, a man who has some very difficult decisions to make. I do not condone violence, but I realise that sitting upon that idealistic hill may soon become a pipe dream as my enemies may very well come to surround me with the full weight of a violent, corrupt and godless State behind them. What if the far Left are actually in possession of the moral high ground? Could it be possible that they have smelled the distinctive odour of national rot long before we have? I know such a thought is wrong on many levels, but let me highlight one particular stubborn thorn I am having considerable difficulty removing from my flesh. Once we strip away the utterly selfish reasons for civil disobedience and revolution; greed, criminality, immorality, how do we account for those that believe what they are doing is right and they consider it is the only option when the political system has left them genuinely disenfranchised and without a voice? Or to use another well worn idiom, how do we reconcile “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”? Turning the argument totally on its head once again, are we any better than those looting, burning and killing when we advocate and push for revolution with the heads of our respective politicians on stakes? More awkward still, how can we justly condone violence when the boot is on the Right foot instead of the Left one?
What is abundantly clear is that the “Left” lost patience with current system a long time ago. The exact proportions that are committed to genuine change and a better world and those that have been hijacked and infiltrated by the Globalists is difficult to tell amongst the acrid smoke of battle. What we must admit, if we are honest, is that they have a considerable head-start on the conservative Right when it comes down to the visceral matter of unrelenting political, urban and street warfare. Not only are they more fluent in rhetoric as can be demonstrated by the wholesale capture of the legacy media, but they have clearly united and infiltrated the agenda of every organisation from the local community group to the global corporation. The “Right” on the other hand, stands fragmented, isolated and alone on the gale-swept chilly mountain of idealism, hoping that the moderates within the establishment will burst forth at a minute to midnight to rescue us. If we remain so, history will rightfully condemn us. It is not that we are not good. It is that we have done nothing.
So we are faced with an almost impossible moral dilemma, one which we need to think long and hard about. Having missed the chance to root out the corruption and clear wrongdoing in our midst, what will we do when the secret police come to our door at 4:00 am? Shall we go like lambs to the slaughter as per the 1938 play book, or will we join forces – even if we have to unite with our idealistic enemies – and make a worthy and bloody example of them as Solzhenitsyn suggested? Such thoughts a few years ago would be considered those of a deranged extremist, and I genuinely grieve for the fact that the country I currently live in is not the bastion of intellectual or moral freedom I was born in. Of course, we can just follow along with the harsh hand of the benevolent dictator, but as many are now discovering, such compromise never satiates the empty soul of the dictator.
I am convinced on a number of points, the most crucial being that if the political pendulum doesn’t realistically swing to the other side to redress the current imbalance any time soon, this nation will inevitably take the law into its own hands. The Devil always overplays his hand, and this country is just as vulnerable to a civil uprising or revolution as the USA. I have it on good authority that the army is currently engaged in riot training. This highlights another dilemma, which I have foreseen for may years now. We are being deliberately provoked, with the single intent and purpose of promoting dissent and civil unrest. Once that occurs, the State then promotes and enforces even more stringent measures than are already available to it. What then is our moral duty?
We may not have guns, but we have lost the thick veneer of public decency that protects any society from the more radical and barbaric elements. The death of 27 people, in a life or death gamble trying to reach Nirvana, is a good starting point for a discussion. Their blood, especially that of the women and children, drips from the fingers of successive governments that have encouraged and condoned such recklessness. Anyone who has experienced severe hardship in their life can relate to the intense desire to improve their lot, and those 27 souls have got to be given credit for that final act. In reality though, they were quite probably deeply in hock to the people traffickers, with the safety of families at home being used as surety. The rabbit hole goes deep, and the growing black economy in the UK is testament to this. Again, if we are honest, a significant percentage of our economy relies on organised crime, and this needs to be ruthlessly rooted out, but this is prevented by political lobbyists of every stripe. Irrespective of any economic impact, as a civilised nation we have a duty of care to all, just as a responsible parent has the responsibility to discipline a child who decides to turn the medicine cabinet into a sweet-shop or a main road into a playground.
In the 80’s I had a friend in the Home Office, who testified that even then, the place was in complete chaos. Forty years down the road, we are undoubtedly in a worse position if that is at all possible. Any rational and sensible government would have understood the perils of poorly policed and uncontrolled immigration, but government is rarely rational nor sensible. We are left with a trail of human misery that has implications for everyone, except of course those that can shelter behind their gated communities and can afford to employ private security guards, no doubt paid an absolute pittance once they have undergone “Citizenship” classes and achieved a tick-box certificate of competence. This flagrant dismissal of basic right and wrong perverts the whole concept of duty of care. Rather than saying “No you can’t come here you don’t have any papers” we transpose this to “No jab, no job”. In a totally fucked up version of morality, we turn the full weight of the State against our own, whilst turning a blind eye to the considerable civil and potential criminal wrongdoings of someone who, in all probability, doesn’t exactly hold the West in much esteem as we have attempted to bomb him or one of his distant family into next week.
I am becoming increasingly despondent insofar as there is no real opposition to our current spaff of politicians and parties. If we carry down this treacherous road, with an increasing number of law-abiding and decent folk becoming politically disenfranchised, the outcome is preordained. Individuals and communities will take the law into their own hands, something that has grave perils for any society as a whole. This, should the tipping point be reached, inevitably leads to civil war or revolution. Some would suggest we need the political pendulum to swing the other way, I would suggest that has already happened, certainly in the Clown World mentality that Johnson, his wretched government and our feckless opposition currently inhabit. We have swung from “Democracy” to “Multi-party totalitarianism” and they are both intent in acting out some sort of “V for Vendetta” fantasy, insofar as they seem to think they are untouchable, unaccountable and in control.
I respectfully suggest there are more “V’s” out there than this useless and debased parliament would ever like to admit. Order will inevitably be restored, but at exactly what cost and by whom, remains very much to be seen.
© Rookwood 2021