MARK STEYN: Moving On to the Next Phase.
The most important thing I linked to this week was an interview by onetime Steyn Show guest Louise Perry with David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College, London. If you’re not into links, well, here’s the whole thing:
Louise has the voice of a lovely English rose and Professor Betz is a mild-mannered soft-spoken Canadian, and such accents calmly discussing the road to “civil war” makes it far more unsettling than if it were just another blowhard roaring from his cyber-bunker. Especially when Mr Betz, who has advised governments around the Commonwealth on “counter-terrorism”, says right at the end that it’s too late to prevent it, and it’s time to work on mitigation strategies to secure the nation’s great artistic treasures and its nuclear weapons.
The idea that Britain and France are either a) lost or b) doomed to civic collapse would be dismissed by those whose principal concerns are capital gains and school fees. But both of these superficially stable nations have made recent territorial adjustments: the United Kingdom’s present borders date all the way back to, oh, 1922, and until the Sixties French Algeria was divided into administrative départements no different from Provence or Normandy and inhabiting much the same psychological space in the national consciousness: in 1962 the million who fled, in a few months, from Algeria to metropolitan France was the biggest population displacement in Europe since the Second World War. As Professor Betz observes, during the thirty years of the Irish “Troubles” a few hundred terrorists were able to carry out destabilising operations at the highest levels of the British state, killing prominent politicians and members of the Royal Family, blowing up the Prime Minister’s hotel, and putting a rocket through a Downing Street window.
Go back to the riots over the three girls slaughtered in Southport last summer and the ensuing lies by Starmer about who did it and why. The Troubles were maintained by a couple of hundred active insurgents drawn from a broader population of half-a-million “nationalists” in Northern Ireland. If you take seriously the bollocks peddled by the government and its media poodles, the biggest threat to social tranquility in the UK comes not from “refugees” or ongoing Islamisation but from the “far right”. Okay. If you say so. In that case, do the math: England has a population a hundred times the size of Ulster’s Catholic community. A take-up rate equivalent to the IRA’s would be tens of thousands.
By doing what the uniparty has done in Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, etc, the state is not only delegitimising itself, but teaching the citizenry that nothing can be changed through peaceful civic participation. Eventually enough of them will draw the logical conclusions of that lesson.
Before the end of this decade, we will be in an entirely new phase.
This headline, which arrived shortly after Steyn’s article is a reminder that England as it was once known is essentially over: The last surviving Battle of Britain Pilot, John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway DFC, passes away. Hemingway was 105.