PING!
Posted on 04/27/2007 12:07:23 PM PDT by GMMAC
Feral Britain
Melanie Phillips
The Daily Mail (UK)
April 23, 2007
For many years, those of us who have been writing about the potentially catastrophic effects of epidemic family breakdown have been warning that its impact won’t be limited to damaged individuals or a rising crime rate.
If it is on a large enough scale, it is also likely to cause the destruction of civilised values and even the most basic human instincts.
One can’t help but think in these terms when reading about last week’s appalling court case which heard how a mother, Zara Care, from Plymouth goaded her two toddlers into fighting each other like dogs — and filmed their ordeal on a camcorder in front of her mother and two sisters, who in turn were egging on the children to ever greater violence.
On the film, the women were heard laughing as the two-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister were encouraged to hit and punch each other. The boy was seen crying and trying to hide after being punched in the face by his sister, but was told by one of the women ‘not to be a wimp or a faggot’ and to hit the girl back. At one point, someone threw a hairbrush at him to encourage him to hit her; at another, he was given a rolled-up magazine with the spine on the outside for more impact.
Such behaviour towards very young children by their own mother, not to mention their aunts and grandmother, would strike any normal person as wholly unnatural. Far from showing love and care to these children, they displayed cruelty and sadism as they turned them into instruments for their own vicarious aggression, taking pleasure in their distress.
Some of us found it difficult even to read such a sickening account of the tormenting of two toddlers. Their mother actually filmed it.
A healthy society would show its revulsion at such behaviour by jailing these women. Instead, they were each given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to do 100 hours of community work. Yet on the same day, another court sent a man to jail for staging a real dog fight in his house. Is the welfare of a child assumed by the English courts to be of less importance than the welfare of a pit bull terrier?
In letting these women walk free, the court displayed once again the feebleminded sentimentality with which so many judges tend to regard the state of motherhood in particular and women in general.
Judge Francis Gilbert — who described the women as ‘cruel and callous’ — nevertheless said the two aunts had children of their own to look after, and that Zara’s biggest punishment was that her children had been taken out of her care. Such remarks suggested this judge just didn’t grasp the significance of what had taken place.
If women can be so ‘cruel and callous’ to a tiny nephew and niece, how can anyone assume they will look after their own children properly? If a mother is so devoid of appropriate feelings of love and care for her children, how can one think that taking them away from her constitutes any real punishment?
According to the children’s paternal grandmother, out of ten supervised visits that the mother has been allowed since the children were taken away, she has turned up to only five.
The mistake the judge surely made was to assume that somehow these women had normal maternal instincts. Clearly, they did not. On the contrary, they regarded these children as if they were no more than fighting animals.
There was no instinct to protect them from harm. They treated them with the chilling detachment of those who do not identify at all with the suffering of other human beings.
If this involved just one sadistic woman, it might have been considered a one-off case of mental imbalance. But no fewer than four took part. This was the product, it seems, of at least three generations of abusive family relationships.
The grandmother, Carol Olver, had a violent partner. One of her daughters had attempted to kill herself over failed relationships. And Zara Care — who, according to her mother-in-law, was regarded by Carol as a kind of child benefit cash cow for the Olver household — had separated from her husband by sending him a text message.
There are tens of thousands of such women the length and breadth of the country giving birth to children who will repeat the same patterns of gross inadequacy, neglect and abuse.
There are whole areas populated by female-only households without a committed father to be seen; where the children are wild and violence is their first instinct; and where many of the women are bitter, truculent and aggressive. The grandmother in the Plymouth case was unrepentant since she thought the children’s dog fight would ‘harden them up’ — and said she had done the same with her own children.
What we are seeing is nothing less than a cascade of abuse and neglect down through the generations, so that the instinct that makes morality possible — the ability to feel someone else’s pain, so there is a desire not to hurt them — is wholly absent.
This has given rise to the emergence of two Britains. The division is not between North and South, nor between rich and poor. Instead, it is between those who adhere to the basic rules of a civilised society and those whose lives are characterised by depravity and disorder. Our culture is now deep into uncharted territory. Generations of family disintegration in turn are unravelling the fundamentals of civilised human behaviour.
Committed fathers are crucial to their children’s emotional development. As a result of the incalculable irresponsibility of our elites, however, fathers have been seen for the past three decades as expendable and disposable.
Lone parenthood stopped being a source of shame and turned instead into a woman’s inalienable right. The state has provided more and more inducements to women — through child benefit, council flats and other welfare provision — to have children without committed fathers.
This has produced generations of women-only households, where emotionally needy girls so often become hopelessly inadequate mothers who abuse and neglect their own children — who, in turn, perpetuate the destructive pattern.
This is culturally nothing less than suicidal. A society reproduces itself by nurturing and protecting its young. If it abuses and harms its children instead, it will end up abusing and harming itself.
If we lose the ability to care for each other, we will lose any sense of a common humanity and stake in a shared future. That is, indeed, what we are doing.
Stable and healthy family life, where children are raised by their mothers and fathers, is the building block of society. It is no coincidence that those primitive societies where fathers happened to be excluded remained primitive or died out altogether.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw the world as a war of all against all. This gave way to the modern belief that society could be improved by encouraging good behaviour and discouraging the bad. This was the basis of Western progress. It was also the basis of social justice and progressive politics.
We seem to be going backwards in time to a more savage, pre-modern era. The Plymouth case sounds a warning to us all. This is the way a society dies.
I didn’t know there were rednecks in the UK.............Do they have mobile homes there, too?.........
PING!
They’re called “yobs”.
And yes, they do have “mobile homes” in the UK. I believe they’re called “caravans”.
You might be a yob, if you......
Thought they were gypsies?..........
No, they have rows and rows of government housing in most major cities which are now producing the 4th or even 5th generation of welfare recipients.
“Travelers”
Amazing. They post signs in parks that say “Do not feed the bears.” but cannot see the same thing happening with humans........
Is “Gypsy” considered a non-PC term now?......
Those aren’t rednecks, they’re whitetrash. If you can’t see the difference you’re living in the wrong state.
Where the Hell are you from anyway?
I believe they called mobile homes caravans in homage of “Gypsy” wagons. I’ve run across the term “caravan” used for a trailer in short stories , novels, and nonfiction works from the UK since the 1970s at latest.
Florida.......we don’t differentiate........
Sounds like the classic overcrowded-rat behavioral sink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
That can't be...they don't have tornadoes there.
They sure DO!.......
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