Mark Steyn: Bystanders in their own fate

Orange County Register ^ | 24 May 2013 | Mark Steyn

[rjbemsha]

On Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country honorably in the hell of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, emerged from his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who crowed "Allahu Akbar!" as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the street like so much roadkill.

[Slings and Arrows]

Ping!

[JLS]

Mark Steyn ping.

Freepmail me, if you want on or off the Mark Steyn ping list.

Thanks for the ping Slings and Arrows.

[Travis McGee]

File it under "Suicide of the West."

.

[wintertime]

. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing passivity to this scene: a street full of able-bodied citizens being lectured to by blood-soaked murderers who have no fear that anyone will be minded to interrupt their diatribes.

You mentioned the passivity of the Brits.

...It is coming soon to the U.S. Our Marxist dominated teachers colleges have stuffed our nation's socialist-entitlement ( and godless) K-12 schools full to the brim with Prog-Marxists who are emasculating our boys and tuning our nation's girls into befuddled proggy zombies.

.....Christians and conservatives let them! And....Christians and conservatives continue to allow these "schools" to remain open.

God will not save our nation. Why should he when every day we turn our nation's children over to the enemy?

[wintertime]

Oh this pesky HTML! This should read:

Nevertheless, there is a disturbing passivity to this scene: a street full of able-bodied citizens being lectured to by blood-soaked murderers who have no fear that anyone will be minded to interrupt their diatribes.

You mentioned the passivity of the Brits.

...It is coming soon to the U.S. OurMarxist dominated teachers colleges have stuffed our nation's socialist-entitlement ( and godless) K-12 schools full to the brim with Prog-Marxists who are emasculating our boys and tuning our nation's girls into befuddled proggy zombies.

.....Christians and conservatives let them! And....Christians and conservatives continue to allow these "schools" to remain open.

God will not save our nation. Why should he when every day we turn our nation's children over to the enemy?

[wintertime]

One in 10 Britons under 25 now is Muslim.

England is in serious trouble and it is coming soon to the U.S. if the Proggy-Marxists continue their grip on all of our most influential cultural institutions. ( Schools being the most important.)

[kingu]

And in the UK, dozens have been arrested and charged with hate crimes for posting pretty much what you just posted, being characterized by the local politicians as being ‘terrorist extremists’ who ‘must be banned in a civil society.’

In the bizarre circus, the two who were filmed with bloody hands, one of which who stated for the world to hear that this was revenge for the Muslims killed by British soldiers, they are referred to as ‘suspects’ in the British media. Someone arrested for tweeting a picture of Islamics committing violence is not a ‘suspected hater’, but immediately tried and convicted in the press for their hate speech.

Tweet a pic, go to jail. Run over a soldier with a car, leap out, slash him, attempt to behead him, and have thousands rush to defend the faith that spawned such an atrocity, and jail any who expose the connection, or condemn the actions of Islam.

Yes, such acts of terror shall never defeat the British way of life or free speech. Indeed, the politicians are correct in this. As free speech has already been defeated, not by acts of terrorists, but by acts of cowards who already surrender to Islam.

[wintertime]

This bizarre thinking and action is the result of the “Demoralization” that Yuri Besmenov warned.

And...Just one more generation of Proggy-Marxist indoctrination in the schools and from the Prog-Marxist media and our nation will be just as confused and ripe for the fall ( if not already.)

[spodefly]

I am a man out of time, a dinosaur, a relic ...

I had always held that a civilization has to be forcefully protected from barbarity, not to invite it in, not to coddle it ...

But apparently, most people are fine with neutered men, “empowered” women, a police state, and a government that is both God and Daddy ...

And when the barbarians show up to behead them and burn down their neighborhoods, they rationalize it and pretend for another day they will not be ultimately consumed by the barbarity.

F&%$ ‘em ... I’m staying out of it, on my own turf, and God be with you if you come to mess with me.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

This is from our correspondence in January after a gun debate:

"Looking at Fox News for the truth is like reading a direct propaganda message from Mr Murdock who would love to take over the Republican Party. Piers Morgan is doing a fine job of putting some hard questions in front of the US public. Up until recently, few have dared challenge the NRA .... I would rather it be your legislators from all political wings, but if it takes a Brit to stir things up first, so be it *:) happy."

Yes, from my Brit friend.

Tell your friend that it is only too easy to be led by monopolistic journalism. In Britain they have the BBC, but Americans have their own journalism monopoly centered on the Associated Press. And the first thing any journalism monopoly will tell you is that it is objective - which, seeing that no one can know that they themselves are objective, can only be self-deception, or a lie. It does not matter how many people agree with each other, if you know that they are all members of a mutual admiration society. For when any one of them is wrong all of the others will automatically swear to it. Adam Smith called them out perfectly when he said that      

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)

Your friend will protest, no doubt, that things are not that bad. The answer can only be that in America they are indeed - at any give time there is always a propaganda campaign afoot to embarrass someone - someone who in reality is being used as a “typical example” of a Republican.

The infamous George Zimmerman is an egregious case. Why is he infamous? Well, he has a name which indicates he is white, and he shot a black, and after police questioning was initially released on grounds that it was pretty clearly self defense. And our journalism monopoly, after some prodding by some people with an axe to grind and money to be gained, launched a propaganda campaign against Mr. Zimmerman. It is easy enough to learn, on the internet but not from the journalism monopoly, that:

• Mr. Zimmerman’s parentage, for all that is worth, is quite mixed and his appearance, for what that is worth, is far from standard-issue white.

• Mr. Zimmerman has a background of having actively taken up the cause of a black man who was abused by the local police! Indeed, he is a Democrat.

• The Community Watch organization which Mr. Zimmerman lead was a reaction to serious trouble in the neighborhood, and that Zimmerman had made a number of calls to the police which had been appropriate.

• Mr. Zimmerman expected the imminent, none-too-soon by his lights, arrival of the police. Which one would hardly assume was the time when he would instigate a fight, never mind a murder.

• The police soon found an eyewitness who saw the “innocent little” (to go by the four-year-old photo which the journalism monopoly promotes to the exclusion of more recent photos which the teenager put forward on the internet) teenager atop Mr. Zimmerman and beating him in “mixed martial arts style.”

• The physical evidence available to us matches up with the account given by Mr. Zimmerman and by that eye witness. Including grass stains on Mr. Zimmerman’s back, and blood on the back of his head in agreement with Mr. Zimmerman’s assertion that his head was being battered into the cement sidewalk, and he feared for his consciousness and his life.

I could of course go on and on; the point is made that anyone attending exclusively to the journalism monopoly would have an impression of the case which is at odds with all of the most credible evidence. The case is a molehill seen as a mountain when looking through a microscope.

And something of the sort is being promoted by the journalism monopoly all the time. It is that bad.

The only possible conclusion seems to be that journalism monopolies tend to arise spontaneously, and that any journalism monopoly will tend to promote the importance of the journalist, And that leads directly to a denigration of the people upon whom the public actually depends to get things done. And that leads directly to socialist politics, which is nothing but a bunch of politicians posturing as if they are more reliable than the people who actually have a track record of accomplishment - in league with journalists who cooperate with them.

As to any pride your friend has in cheering on a “brave” attack on the NRA:

The NRA is actually a Civil Rights organization, founded in the aftermath of the Civil War by Union generals. It was founded to promote civil society in opposition to the KKK.

I do not enjoy paying for insurance on my property, but I do - and the fact that I do does not mean that I intend to burn my house down. The purchase of a weapon which can be of substantial use in an emergency would be a similar decision - expensive, and costly in time and attention in order to keep it both safe and readily available in the event of need. A decision, certainly, to take up a burden which any sensible person would prefer to have no need to take up.

But then there is the issue of the meaning of the individual. Is the individual really merely a danger to “society?” Were that so, the individual policeman would be as terrible a danger as anyone else. Or is the individual who is not significantly part of the problem, a part of the solution? One answer to that is merely to compare the number of gun owners to the annual number of gun murders - and learn that that ratio is in the thousands. Thus we know that legal gun owners are not significant contributors to the problem - and almost inevitably are more of a solution than a problem to society. The difference between an armed policeman and a armed but law-abiding citizen is a mere matter of degree. Not the least of those differences is the fact that the criminal is on notice to avoid the attention of the policeman, and so is more likely to be confronted in the act by an armed civilian than by a cop. Should that happen, of course, the rational thing for the law-abiding citizen to do is not to go into a murderous rampage over a trifle, and the rational thing for the criminal, even if armed, to do is simply to withdraw. The incident might go unreported, if for no other reason that the defender knows that the Piers Morgans of the world are ever on the lookout for the chance to make someone who looks too Republican out to be a villain.

[88keys]

Thanks for ping...

I can't help but think that this would not have happened "state-side"! Why on earth were the London "by-standers" so passive?

And why oh WHY do the British police not have guns or any other "restraining weapons" (pepper spray? at the very least??)?

Not to mention the afore-mentioned bystanders...I can only imagine how long it would take to hack someone to death with knives and a meat cleaver, and even a machete (which I seem to remember being mentioned in a news story)...a citizen with a gun could possibly have stopped this.

This is a truly horrifying and sickening "incident"...don't forget it!