July 16, 2009
The example of Britain. Sound familiar? It should.Britain lost her Empire and most of Ireland, and became a political satellite of America. Her industries declined and largely disappeared. Her crime rate rose by a factor of 50 - not 50%. Her aristocracy was decimated by two Continental wars of unparalleled savagery, and permanently destroyed by punitive taxation. Many areas of London and other cities became unsafe by day, and more by night. Her lower classes, generously augmented by the dregs of the late Empire, achieved levels of squalor, ignorance and degradation perhaps unsurpassed in human history. Meanwhile, the Crown and the Lords disappeared as meaningful political entities, the Commons ceased to be a genuine forum for debate and became a parking lot for party hacks, and political power diffused into a vast, shapeless morass of Whitehall bureaucrats, Berlaymont Eurocrats, mendacious talking heads, and professors of incompetence.
And worst of all, most appalling of all - Britons do not feel they have a problem. Quite the contrary. They have never been better governed. The smarter and more informed they are, the more deeply they thank the 20th century from saving them from the evils of the Victorian age. The educated Englishman of 2009 considers himself the beneficiary of two centuries of steadily improving good government, from Castlereagh to Gordon Brown. -- Unqualified Reservations: Why Carlyle matters
Posted by Vanderleun at July 16, 2009 12:16 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
Aww, C'mon. What a blowhard.
1. You really wanna know why the British went down the tubes? It's called World War One. They made the mistake of fighting that war, managed to drag the US into that war, and pretty much everything else last century to this century follows from that.
Posted by: Eric Blair at July 17, 2009 6:24 PM