As the courts empty, a new profile of the perpetrators is emerging. The usual suspects of gangs, mindless thugs and opportunists are the majority but how do you explain the real estate agent, the lifeguard, the chef, the postman, the 17-year-old ballerina, the millionaire’s daughter, the 2012 Olympic ambassador or the university grad with a promising career in social work now undermined because of her newly acquired criminal record? They have all swallowed the poison that makes them truly believe we can achieve equality and justice for all at the expense of the rich. Add to this the secularism that socialism relies on to provide its moral base and you have no hope of a properly formed conscience. The false morality of entitlement trumps the immorality of theft when the decision is taken to smash the glass and grab the iphone. The excuses of multiculturalism, class or opportunism all fall apart.
Whether you dress it up as conservative or liberal, the political values and principles in the West, to a lesser or greater degree, are about the state being provider, teacher, parent and entrepreneur. The real tragedy that the riots of London, Vancouver (and just about any G20 you care to name) show, is that for that moment in time the veil is peeled back to reveal the rot of amorality and enslavement to a culture of self-esteem and self-absorption that the West has adopted like the proverbial boiled frog. Socialism relies on pride and self esteem to demand our ‘rights’ to that which it tells us we are entitled.
The insidiousness of socialism is that is plays to our higher self
The insidiousness of socialism is that is plays to our higher self. It tells us we can be a free society, a good society, willing to look after those in need and value ‘rights’. In short socialism is the Utopia we all seek. God and the Judeo Christian moral model that shaped the West, is replaced by the state. What is crucial is that socialism destroys the freedom of the individual. It is against liberty, property and limited government. It is for equality and sameness; rational control by government and the diminishing of freedom and power in the rest of society. The relationship between the state and the individual replaces the relationship between people in families or within civil society. The world view of socialism is materialistic in that is seeks to alleviate everything – poor health, poverty, unfairness of social class or absence of talent by throwing money at it which leaves no room for the free will of the individual.
Labour governments have always been disastrous for the UK but in thirteen years of Tony Blair’s New Labour, not only did he manage to politicize every great British institution from the judiciary to the civil service and police, Labour has created massive national debt, a bloated bureaucracy, and an expanded and unfair welfare state with its attendant victim culture. As case in point: figures out this week show the number of young men claiming disability benefit have risen from 1.1 million to 3.2 million since 1992. More than 124,000 males aged between 16 to 24 are claiming up to £125 (US $ 205) per week – a fivefold increase since 1992. A closer look into the figures reveals people with drug and alcohol problems, asthma and ‘unspecified’ back pain are just some of the claims filed. Why work when you can wheeze your way into your state employed doctor’s office and get the rubber stamp to bag an easy pay check for nothing? And it’s probably more than the immigrant builder or fruit picker gets because he costs less to the employers who have to pay huge taxes to keep our ‘disabled’ in the style they have been accustomed.
Of course there are the truly needy which used to fall to extended families, faith groups and charities to step in and help. But now we only have personal conscience to rely on making the right choice of grabbing at a handout or working hard because you can and it’s the right thing to do. And therein lies the worst aspect of what a socialist mindset does, which is it blinds man to the truth about himself – that there is a natural order, that there must be a mastery of the will to do the right thing, that we are bound by morals and a responsibility to other people – by our own choice and by means that we decide as individuals, not by a government taking your money and doing it all for you so you don’t have to think about anything but yourself and pursuing pleasure.
A London police sergeant I spoke to understands this all too well because the Met deals with these thugs all the time. Most of the gangs that went on the rampage are already well known to police. They deal with them every single Saturday night in just about every UK city centre you care to name. They come from welfare backed families with lousy or absent parenting and get thrown in front of magistrate’s courts on a regular basis and back into the streets within days in some cases. As the sergeant puts it’ “these feral yobs (hooligans) are well aware of their human rights, but no one has told them about their responsibilities”. Taxpayer billions have been spent on youth clubs but the interviews on TV have the masked young men claiming to get on their best trainers and go looking for work with a CV and ‘talk most polite like man’ and ‘they ain’t noticing me, so this is payback’. Just what tells them they are entitled to that job?
Socialism fails to understand the truth about human nature. When we speak of truth today in relative terms , i.e. your truth is not my truth, or that it depends on the context or circumstances (a favourite with politicians) then we dilute the ability to understand truth. This leads entire societies to lose a sense of reality. This has happened throughout history. The Nazis took Weimar Germany in 13 short years from a Judeo Christian philosophy into the ability to categorize entire subsections of society as sub-human and act to annihilate them. When you lose a sense of duty and responsibility to other people what happens is that a sense of nihilism creeps in. Nothing matters anymore.
Seeing that play out is truly shocking as we saw this week when Asyraf Haziq, a Malaysian student bystander, bleeding from his broken jaw was “helped” up by two thugs, who then promptly robbed him. Or worse the 68-year-old white male who tried to put out a fire and was bludgeoned to death, or the three Asian youths mowed down and killed by a car driven by black youths. Some commentators have tried to spin this into a race issue, but the magnificent dignity of Tariq Johan, the father of one of the victims, came on our TV screens and pleaded for everyone to come together and stop the madness. Every race was involved. It was humbling to watch his exemplary behaviour and plea for young people to stop ruining their lives. Asyraf Haziq demonstrated such an impressive and gentle demeanour of forgiveness, odds are every Brit looking for a holiday will be hot footing it to Malaysia.
Multiculturalism is not the reason for discord in society but the tool for the left to pit people against one another so that they can step in with their egalitarian answers and solutions. Oppressed peoples have traditionally fled to free societies like Canada and the US to escape, but socialism is claiming those cultures as well. Pierre Trudeau’s social engineering program in Canada has now firmly chomped down on the veins of civil society and replaced the flow of the blood of freedom with transfusions of human rights law and bureaucracy . Obama is doing his level best to ensure the same fate for America.
In Britain our so called conservative PM David (just call me Dave) Cameron is even now promising the state will do more to support the families and victims of violence. More welfare, more benefits. The rot is so deeply set, that if you try to cut the benefits or don’t create new ones, you lose the votes.
Let me end by saying London is a really great place to live. The vast majority of people living here of all races are decent citizens and friendly to boot with great senses of humour. ( We need it!) They labour under heavy taxes and complex and nonsensical liberal regulation that are the fruits of socialism. Maybe this display of anarchy has made them angry enough to try and change the political philosophy behind it but that will be a long and painful road. If you were considering coming to the Olympics next summer and now are not, you can be sure the politicians will spend what it takes to keep the games and London safe. There are so many glorious buildings, museums, restaurants, shops and the richness of British history. Come and spend your tourist dollars here because once the cost of this mess comes to light, we are going to need them.
