A Man May Make His Words

Around this time people start and stop their resolutions for the new year. I am no fan of largely symbolic and easily forgotten efforts such as "lose 50 pounds" or the like. I am, like most people, disinclined to any major effort outside one's usual areas of expertise and so the few previous attempts at carrying through resolutions have failed.

This is where one expects to hear the usual "This year is different!" but there isn't any such declaration here. More the situation is always changing and different for whatever the multitude of life makes it. Perhaps it is better to say I have now come not to a resolution as a declaration but rather the better term is Beginning of the End.

I have a relatively philosophical disposition and this, mixed with a very unusual childhood, has left me excelling in areas of logic but often a failure at interpreting the signals of most Westerners. The philosophical disposition of Westerners is also a matter of interest and I have found it increasing tied to their emotional states. While this hardly counts as a Grand Unified Theory, it does make a number of valuable connections and makes for a far more stable and coherent idea of why people do and did various things.

These emotional drives seem minor on the small scale but the quirks that result seem to increase exponentially at the higher levels. Perhaps it is because people generally try to put highly intelligent and (theoretically) rational people in guiding positions. What people (and they themselves) frequently forget is that these planners also have emotions and their grandiosity is often the "ghost in the machine" that becomes the unconscious means by which people perceive things.

Also notable is that highly educated people may be no more insightful but are often more articulate meaning that people will accept their ideas even if they are only subconscious rationalizations for whatever the person wants. We live in a serious age of wishful thinking and on such a scale that we rarely undergo a return to reality that we can survive.

While this may be depressing in the overall picture, the foreground is some slight professional achievement.

The Lonely Sheepdog

One remarks easily one the vast philosophical gulf that separates people engaged in different professions even when there should be not reason for it.

Having dealt with a friend who chose to go into theater acting, I was not surprised that she was a pacifist but she was extremely surprised and horrified that I had joined the military. She simply could not folly the chain of logical arguments of why I believe killing is an acceptable and necessary part of civilized life. Here goes my stab at discerning why we differ so much.

Human beings live in a world of limited resources, attention span, and time. The need to act well before we can form a fully logical proof is clear and we do so whatever our consciousness says. Some people understand the limited nature of their experience and try to live according general principles and will only act if they have a logical reason to. That approach requires either a perfectly understood and applicable philosophy or one that is flexible enough to deal with the muddle of existence.

Our limits of attention (if you stare at the bird all day, you won't notice the bear creeping up on you) mean that we must theorize based on limited information. In most modern cases, the ubiquity of entertainment means that the drama of the screen is unconsciously taken be be close to reality. The result is that people form their understanding of military and police operations from movies that currently depict the "dirty Harry" archetype of a bad cop. Feeling that to be the most prevalent type of activity, most halfway decent and nice people will form an aversion to such activity and the professions of policing and arms by extension.

Given the largely unreflective nature of the very peaceful life in the West, people do not often think about violence and its place in society. The efforts to preserve the settled nature of society have been so successful that people now take it for granted.

Normally, I would reject the assumption people's different experiences lead to their philosophies but recently (with much shock) I have begun to realize apathy and boredom are two of the strongest forces in human psychology. She has always lived in a wealthy, safe, and free society. I did not. I grew up in the crime ridden neighborhoods of a major city. I did not believe all the fuss over tolerance due to seeing (up close and personal) the actual state of race relations where the supposed weaker minority was far from concerned with anything but their own power and wealth. Later dealings with such a bureaucracy have left me with a wonderful degree of cynicism.Conflict was all around me and I observed with a rational mind.

The essence of conflict is desire. The desires of two people or actors may be covering the same thing without conflict(both want a new street) but when what they want is exclusive (A wants the street, B wants pristine scrub) there is a conflict. That does not mean they will resort to violence but simply that one person acting on their desires will inhibit the others desires. It is the wonderful achievement of society and civilization that we are able to cooperate and limit our desires for a moment in order to achieve greater things.

This is a social arrangement that allows people to accomplish their desires or to be guided in them in such a way that people are mostly free but not unduly inconvenienced. Unfortunately, some will simply see people with things they want and will try by various ways to get what they want without complying to the ways permitted by society (e.g. a person just deciding to drain his company's account in order to buy a fancy car) in such a way that is harmful either specific people or to the society as a whole (often by presenting a bad example or humiliating the honest). There are many ways to deal with such people but the generally peaceful environment of society means that if a person uses threats of force to impose their will, few will resist as they do not have the experience, tools, or aggression to do so.

Both the violent offender and the preserver of order (police or soldiers) use violence as their tool. The most powerful type is killing. We humans are so inventive that often the easiest way of dealing violence is to kill and so the preparedness to do so is necessary to preserve society. Several people have explained it as Sheep, Sheepdogs, and Wolves. The sheep are peaceful but are week and can stray into danger. A wolf can easily kill and eat a sheep and would meet its desires well by doing so. The Sheepdog may look like a wolf (both have fangs and aggression) but its job is to protect the sheep from themselves and wolves. The sheep may resent to oversight and hate the sheepdog but he keeps them safe.

To me, this is clear. To her, it is not.

I think that it is most largely due to people subconsciously assuming that that which is not necessary in their individual life is not necessary in public life and that all people think roughly the same way. Not everybody needs to be a cop but society needs somebody to do the job. People are free to choose their job so they don't often get exposed to the need for other jobs.

That effect is allowed to exist in relatively safe environments in which people have been disciplined enough while young or self-controlled enough that they won't start a major fight in the street or kill and rob a person for a phone. The job of the police is to prevent such things by continuously exerting their presence to make people quietly give up any hopes of gain by violent means. Most people even don't realize theft and assault are frequent in other areas and deplore the violence of the police in securing the area.

That one person is peaceful and lives in a peaceful and orderly world leads a person of normal attention span to ignore the reason for the armed men does not give them a serious understanding of life at the edges of order. She hopes (and from movies assumes it is possible) that opponents may be non-violently subdued. She has never dealt with determined people with guns.

So where is the second part of the initial question? What of the different professions? She is an actress who by definition works in the land of dreams. I am a soldier who must deal with the nastier parts of human desire and their consequences (without much opportunity to escape cleaning up). The normal process of life reinforces in me the need to deal with ever-present problems of life, death, and the general survival and welfare of most people. She deals in hopes and despairs. The very movings of the human heart. Certainly war and killing have a very strong emotional impact but they are largely impervious to wishful thinking or often the result of it.

The boredom of most people in the Settled and Civilized West is such that people make movies about whatever pathos or cause can exert some emotional pull. That people do not seem to live and die by those decisions allows people to be lazy and go with whatever they feel to be nice or the general consensus of idealism. They attach their emotions not to the accomplishment of the task but to the struggle for a better world (while being disconnected from the hard task of doing the accomplishing) and base their goodness on their role in such struggles.

The result is an odd almost-narcissism as people fail to recognize that other people do not have the same values and may be perfectly willing to kill anybody who prevents them from achieving their goal. The result, people with limited attention spans are shaped often by their environment as they will not often think seriously about anything other than that which directly pertains to them.

Infiltration!

I joined Facebook at the urging of a friend and spend very little time on it. In one of the occasional bouts of activity at the direct urging of my friend, I joined a series of groups.

One of those groups was nothing I would find objectionable (amazingly rare) and so I joined it. I had better things to do for several months than spend time on Facebook (lying on the floor of my apartment motionless for hours on end is more enjoyable) but a return stimulated by curiosity about the JIDF brought me back.

For a slight diversion, the JIDF is the Jewish Internet Defense Force who took over a few pro-Islamic Terror Facebook groups. Relevant to this is that Jihadist or anti-Semitic activists hacked or took over various previously innocent groups.

Sadly, one of them was the one I was in but I never noticed it until today. The last change made was a week ago but I am still filled with shame at my lack of vigilance. Nonetheless, I have seen my bit of the online proxy war.

Small Link

I find this website quite interesting.

It provides a somewhat different European perspective (like most Europeans, I regard most Americans as sub-par in terms of intelligence) that deviates from the usual leftist myopia.

Money Grubbing Idealists

I am amazed at some of the ego-boosting measures that go on in even supposedly hard-headed organizations. I signed up for an organization and a few weeks later, and admin specialist handed me an "award" for signing up.

Apparently, some people still haven't heard of motivation crowding. That is the phenomenon that people can only operate on so many motives before one has to disregard some. Even if all motives draw one in favor of one action, some motives will be forgotten.

If you try to recruit people based on honor, that is one motivation. If you try to recruit them bases on self-improvement, that is another. If you try to recruit them based on financial benefits, that is yet another motive. At some point, constant iterations of all of these will crowd another out.

If you try to motivate with a nice salary, college tuition, bonuses, service, adventure, and self-improvement, the theme most iterated will be viewed as the focus for participating. Even if one motive is very strong, its relative weight will decline with every instance that another motive is focused upon. The result is that if you try to motivate people based on money, you will will have people primarily focused on money even if they joined for other reasons.

In some professions that may not be such a bad thing but in others, the psychological side is much more important as one faces extreme situations. The problem is reduced if the benefits are given but not frequently mentioned.

Sadly, this escapes even the more professional organizations and the variety of effects this creates is interesting to watch but not to work in.

Occasions for Dress

It is interesting to observe the various movements within culture. One of these is clothing. The old manners are giving way to new ones and one of these is the degree of formality an occasion can tolerate.


The concept of a child going to school in suspenders, white shirt, black pants, and leather shoes is unthinkable in certain parts of modern society. Such a child would be subjected to horrendous pressure to get him to change into what they view as more appropriate for the occasion. For many, an adult version would be glaring at anyone who would dare to wear a suit into a bar. The expectation of the appropriate degree of casualness is enforced with an opprobrium not deployed in other aspects of life.

No longer is there even just one scale of casualness but many. It used to be little more than two decades ago that one need only wear jeans to be considered casual, now the process has become far more complex. The theoretical simplicity of casualness used to be that work clothes were dirty, dress clothes for Church and social occasions, and home clothes whatever was decent and clean. No longer is that the case. People must now find jeans with the proper rips, fading, dyes, and other paraphernalia to demonstrate their superior gaudiness.

Formality, then a practice refined by expense, is now easily achievable thanks to cheaper fabric and rising living conditions. Ironically, as formality becomes ever more affordable, fewer and fewer people dare to dress that way. Perhaps it is the fear of becoming an "organization man" and of losing one's individuality in the society.

The result is that there is/are one or at least very few ways of being formal but many different and complex ways of being casual. The failure to be sufficiently casual can haunt some people for years as their peers judge them based on that standard.

For me, I rebel against the casual by becoming formal. Life is worthy of respect.

Spam, the African Specialty

I am sometimes surprised at the effort that goes into some of the spam or information theft schemes I run into. The ones that get past the spam filter are frequently entertaining in their quality and delightful in their language.

This is likely due to many of the people writing them using a more formal English education imparted during the British colonial period. This superior understanding of the English knowledge interestingly sets them apart from legitimate offers by their very correctness of language. The expectation used to be that information thieves would be distinguishable by their bad spelling and poor grammar. That is no longer the case among at least a small sample.

My "offers" had ranged from an offer of financial aid from a king in Yorubaland, a need to quickly transfer money out of a bank in Sierra Leone, a desperate need for companionship by a very rich woman, winning a UN lottery, and a bank account of a dead miner in South Africa.

These are all quite entertaining if approached in the right way. Clearly, someone has at least been trying to craft initially plausible cover stories and doing so with a better grasp of written English than I can muster. It has gotten to the point where I expect to see errors in my departmental e-mails but open spam messages just to read the delightful English.

Are these people intended thieves? Yes. Are they enjoyable writers? Yes. It is almost sad that these people are spending more time trying to steal from me and others instead of trying to write a book.

Mind Games

It is amazing how sometimes philosophical papers can be so vapid and yet unexpected media can be more acute.

Here is a selection of video clips from an excellent computer game.







These are but a selection from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Normally, one does not expect philosophy in their game but the plot written into the game is far above the standard to which such things are subjected to. The whole field of Science Fiction is more about understanding oneself in a more dramatic variant of the literary method coupled with more "hands on" approaches.

Unlike many who publish in Philosophy journals (or more accurately those trying to be interdisciplinary between Philosophy and Political Science), game producers see a benefit in being understood and erudition for them is more likely to mean reference to interesting ideas instead of field specific jargon.

One can only look at much of what is considered the "geek" part of American society and sigh at the missed opportunities such people are.

Diversity, We Hardly Knew Ye

One hears much in America and Europe about Diversity. The concept seems to be the assumption that all cultures are inoffensive to each other.

It seems absurd to talk of Diversity as simply the mixing of nice Indian exchange students or Chinese businessmen's sons seeking a career. When talking of a diverse society, people speak of them as ideal and tolerant places. Having lived in a few, my reaction is more skeptical.

This immediately becomes difficult to believe when one observes even just the effect of migrating to the US by Mexicans reared in a different culture. Where back in small villages in Mexico there were social controls on young men and a clear set of expectations and punishments, there are an entirely different set in the US. Young men needing to show that they are men pick up on the old show of force coupled with the urban underclass resentment and disdain for education of both rural Mexico and the underclass culture they are assimilating into.

A lack of education is far less problematic in a rural village and men have always needed to show they are independent. The difference is that a lack of education is a major hindrance to the urbanized and technological society that is the US. The different social evolution of Mexican society had its own means of restraining the violence of young men but the aversion of Americans to use force or to condemn a person disarms them in the face of such aggressiveness. The expectation in Mexican villages is that the larger community will know the troublemakers and being willing to deal with them in various ways. The more anonymous American society is averse to violating a person's privacy in such ways.

Every solution breeds new problems.

This gets to the heart of social evolution as the changes made to accommodate one problem alter the overall situation accentuate features at another part of the society.

Mexican society is the evolution of the myriad ways to deal with certain problems. Just as Russian engineering culture evolved radically differently from American engineering when approaching the same problems, the divergences are due to selecting a different technique to deal with the same problem. No technique or situation is identical and so they bring different effects that create yet more situations to deal with and thus does the circle continue.

When the social evolution of Mexican villages resulted in different attitudes than American social evolution demands. The result is a mutual disdain in some parts, a mutual meeting in others and a whole lot of stress everywhere else. The meeting in some parts is seen in the Mexican men who join the Marines and put their youthful aggressiveness to socially useful purpose. The hostility between Mexican gangs and Black gangs is famous and both attack the societies of each others trying to drive them out. The reason is partly out of hatred and partly out of trying to expand the social environment they can operate in. In other areas more educated Mexicans can use their numbers to invoke White Guilt and to pose as the defenders of the downtrodden poor Mexicans.

The downside of this diversity is that there is an ethnic conflict between poor Mexicans (most Mexicans are poor) and Blacks, there is a large Mexican underclass beholden to Nationalist feelings egged on by richer members of their community hostile to the larger American society. The effect is to create a large and dangerous division between faction of American society.

From Shrinkwrapped:

One of Murphy's laws that is germane to this discussion is that "Nature always sides with the hidden flaw." Simply put, when a system is deeply stressed, any flaws become fault lines. To the extent that we favor a status quo that minimizes individual differences in the interest of a social compact based on designed to provide the illusion of absolute equality, we are setting ourselves up for significant social problems.

Ultimately, when there are different ways of doing something, there needs to be a decision mechanism. If the question is if raped women should be comforted and helped in prosecuting their aggressors or if they should be stoned, a population divided between the two philosophies will not resolve the problem. They will not meet in the middle and say "fine, stone them but stone the rapist too". The two positions are irremediably opposed. If the positions of both philosophies are about equal, there will be a painful stalemate until demographics, conversion, or force resolve the dispute in the favor of one or the other. Diversity is no help if it can lead to an impasse. Diversity helps if it broadens perspective but not towards forcing rival factions.

All would describe Bosnia as Diverse. The mutual hatreds and suspicions entailed orientation towards different communities for protection. While people lived side by side, they also were suspicious of each other and anarchy gave opportunity for people's sadism against the despised other groups. Diverse? Yes. Tolerant? No.

South Africa is known as the Rainbow Nation for its many peoples. What is less publicized is the brutal murders of members of different groups. Boers (White South Africans of Dutch heritage who dominated the old government) are subject to numerous murders such as an attack on a supermarket where several children were shot. All White South Africans worry about farm murders and attacks on urban homes. Zulus feel the anarchy in their poor outskirts where it is estimated that 1 in 2 women have been raped. Zulus hate the Shona who dominate the key families on charge of the ANC and who have been the only ones feeding at the political trough of the South African government. Coloreds are derided as white underlings and must show their racial allegiance by condemning Whites. Indians get the worst of it as they are not part of the White social network but are hated for their wealth and productivity. Somali immigrants are murdered by crowds.

South Africa is far from anybody's ideal of tolerance but is a very diverse place.

Washington DC is roughly 1/3 White and 2/3 Black. Neighborhoods are spread in between each other but Whites and Blacks mix very little.

Yugoslavia broke apart for obvious reasons. The once diverse USSR is now the somewhat less diverse Russian Federation and other states. Iraq is contending with its ethnic diversity in other ways.

Another thing to note is that Austria has long been considered a diverse society in contemplating its pre-WWI period. Autria then was a state encompassing Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, parts of Poland, and Transylvania. Sadly, Czechs were insisting on greater political power in Bohemia and the struggles over political power used National identity as a source of support. The effect was to heighten chauvinism. It should be remembered that Hitler was referred by critics as "the Bohemian" (he lived just across the internal border with Bohemia in Austria) as he had imbibed much of the worst of the political culture of Austrian Germans. The result of the struggle to keep Austria together led to a recourse to demonizing a third party (the Jews). Hitler made many claims about Jews dominating the Professions in Germany that were inaccurate as applicable to Germany but were accurate in Austria.

Hitler was as much a product of Diversity as is Tex-Mex fast food.

A few of Murphy's laws might be germain to the conversation.

Nothing is as easy as it looks.

This is applicable in that no culture is the same as its appearance. That Bosnia was a region that had existed for hundreds of years as one region under the rule of other countries did not mean it could remain integrated on its own.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Over time, there will be some idiot who might form any manner of group or movement. The relative proportions may differ but eventually some connection will be made. One does not normally think of Pakistanis and Punks in one sentence but there are Pakistani Punks in Northern England.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

This is quite common as various crises divert attention and resources away from one front to another. This permits activity that had once been suppressed. Serbs wanted to be free from Roman (Byzantine) rule and when Roman forces were diverted in fighting Muslim attacks in the East, the Serbs had the opportunity to defeat the residual Roman forces in the area and become independent. People take crises as opportunities thereby putting much more stress on the system.

Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

No individual has a full understanding of a situation and bears into the old aphorism that "none of us are as dumb as all of us" when individual parts of an organization try to to work in different directions. Time will bring up the fact that anything that can go wrong will and there will always be a weakness that is not considered. Few thought that privatizing a large part of the US Army's logistical functions to private contractors would prove so expensive. The idea may have worked in the confined conditions of US bases at home but not when deployed in the middle of fighting in Iraq.

Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics
Things get worse under pressure.

This refers back to people having to make hard decisions. When Bosnia was fracturing along ethnic and religious lines, neighbors would face the problem that people they had known for decades would now spit at them and curse at them. The opportunity to achieve their differing goals tore people apart and pressure the various sides applied only made the hatred and violence grow. The habit of Muslim politicians to intimidate suspected recalcitrants made for a painful situations for Serbs in Muslim territory who were now victimized by Muslims seeking to prove their bona fides. The political pressure of having Muslims in Serb territory made Serb leaders decide that mass expulsions were their best option and hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from where they had lived for hundreds of years with attendant recruits for the Muslim armies. Pressure from internal and external actors made people more desperate at optimistic in achieving their goals. They hoped to ride out the pressure by even more forceful acts that stimulated more hatred.

The first myth of management is that it exists.

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

My response to these two is merged by their commonality in both expression and applicability. It is an error to suppose that politicians know enough to engineer a society. They are frequently average human beings (thus fallible) fulfilling a necessary role that is more to maintain the system than to cope with great stress. Usually, we do not need insightful leaders, just someone to be the ultimate arbiter. That means that while we cannot ignore the occasional burst of insight from a politician, we cannot count on it. They are working within they system they were brought into and frequently operated on the imagined society of their youth or propaganda, not life on the ground. They get ideas but these are frequently selected for their reinforcement of their current conception of life by similarly isolated people.

The Aquinas Axiom:
What the gods get away with, the cows don't.

This refers to the tendency of the rich to share a common culture of wealth. Among expatriates living in Eastern Europe, there is little distinction between American, Australian, Brazilian, Sudanese, Israeli, Pakistani, or Lebanese. They are bonded by their common luxury to a common popular culture oriented away from the concerns of survival that the rest of the population faced.

The wealthy also can afford to live in the fantasy that everybody is the same by virtue of living in segregated neighborhoods. Few places are as stark in this as Washington DC. The division between the White and Black parts of the city are very clear. Black parts rarely had lawns and if they did, any blade of grass would feel lonely. Garbage littered the streets and the signs of people unconcerned with order were evident. The White parts were distinctive by the cleanliness and order but also by their luxury and frequent orientation towards recreation.

As hostile as most of these Whites likely are to segregation, they accepted that Blacks and Whites (usually referred to as Poor by Whites for fear of offending) did not mix well and Public Transit did not reach far into White areas where higher-class commercial services were. A phrase the more polite Blacks used to describe Whites was that they were "not from around here" even if they had lived in the area their entire lives. The racial distinction was politely concealed but that detracted none from the animosity.

Diversity here made a major difference. Blacks had conspiracy theories blaming Whites and sometimes Jews for their troubles. Whites could feel a condescending "compassion" from their large suburban houses out of the way of the many poor Blacks and isolated from them in their everyday lives. Even Apartheid South Africa likely had more interaction in daily life between Whites and Blacks. Whites living in comfort isolated from Blacks could then suppose a number of reasons for Black ills but the distance made accurate assessments near impossible. The anti-intellectual nature of Black leadership and the focus on emotionally absolving oneself from blame are key aspects of the Black culture there. General unwillingness to focus on anything other than entertainment was a major feature among Black children. The effect of this on a society is to produce poor workers who lack the mental focus to rise. The will to rise was also destroyed by the insistence on the impossibility of it.

Were the claims of Racism true? Yes, no one who has seen the unconscious reactions of a White in DC when a Black man approaches him would deny that it existed. The problem is that its effect is assumed to be much larger than it is in impeding individual growth. The mutual suspicion is just another price of Diversity.

With such a upbeat example to end on, lets end on these observations.

O'Toole's Commentary
Murphy was an optimist.

NBC's Addendum to Murphy's Law
You never run out of things that can go wrong.

Our Island History's Home

As one looks at the current state of England, one becomes both amazed and saddened by how such a once proud and stoic country turned into a poor and pale comparison to what it once had been.

The refusal of the British Home Office to permit the entry of Geert Wilders is hardly in the spirit of free and intense debate that once marked the British Parliament from the 1500s onwards. The worry of the official who barred him was that his film contained hate speech against Muslims. I hardly believe quotes of Islamic leaders and from the Koran and Hadith would be hate speech. The problem is instead a moral complacency mixed with cowardice.

The complacency is that there will always be an England recognizable as the one they have known or idealized, the cowardice is that they will not confront Muslim intimidation and even terrorists for fear of the public disruption it would cause.

Such sentiments are hardly new, Churchill confronted them in his day.

The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. But never will you have friendship with the present German Government. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.

What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure. It is to prevent that that I have tried my best to urge the maintenance of every bulwark of defence - first, the timely creation of an Air Force superior to anything within striking distance of our shores; secondly, the gathering together of the collective strength of many nations; and thirdly, the making of alliances and military conventions, all within the Covenant, in order to gather together forces at any rate to restrain the onward movement of this power. It has all been in vain. Every position has been successively undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.

We do not want to be led upon the high road to becoming a satellite of the German Nazi system of European domination. In a very few years, perhaps in a very few months, we shall be confronted with demands with which we shall no doubt be invited to comply. Those demands may affect the surrender of territory or the surrender of liberty. I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press, for it will be said - indeed, I hear it said sometimes now - that we cannot allow the Nazi system of dictatorship to be criticised by ordinary, common English politicians. Then, with a Press under control, in part direct but more potently indirect, with every organ of public opinion doped and chloroformed into acquiescence, we shall be conducted along further stages of our journey.

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1189

The difference here is that unlike the 1930s, very few people today are willing to even think about the threat to the freedoms of people that stems from a totalitarian ideology such as Islam. One factor influencing this is that Westerners are almost exclusively from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Judaism and Christianity are religions of internal moral searching and condemn forced conversion and view such acts as despairing of any moral effect. Islam is vastly different in its focus not on inner spiritual obedience to God but to the submission of all public acts to Allah.

The societies based on the Judeo-Christian concepts of Morality (not as exclusive as the terms implies as almost all other religions agree) are inherently contradictory with those based on Islam. Islamicists recognize this as do some Westerners but States are not run by those people. Western governments are led by a usually incestuous class of leaders, bureaucrats, and journalists with a few public intellectuals to give it a veneer of respectability. Rarely do they look beyond good intentions as a basis for their policy and perceptions.

In this, the state of modern England is far different that in the 40s. Then the cowardice was from explicit self-interest that could be reasoned into fighting for its survival. Now it is a wilful blindness of those who fear excommunication from the society of the Bien Pensants. The social responsibility of the "great" and "good" will now be our suffering and potential ruin.

Churchill was not blind to the dangers of facing Nazi Germany, it is for that reason that his most memorable speech lives down today as the basis for many poorer imitators. He spoke of the situation with honesty and without any expression of false hope. He wrapped the truth of the bleak situation in the honor and glory of those who fight for right in the face of massive odds. And yet he communicated the threat of invasion, urban warfare and all the suffering that entails, as well as a perpetual war fought by the remainder of the British forces for the liberation of their once proud home.



He was a great statesman not only for his perceptions (which are revealed as all the more insightful than previously thought save when dealing with Stalin in personal meetings and with Yugoslavia) but in his ability to rouse people. To paraphrase Jim Hacker, "Sadly, we have no such people now for want of a comprehensive education to make up the wont from the Comprehensive Education."