“The Spanish government pays over $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. This money is taken from real workers with real jobs at real businesses whose growth is being squashed to divert funds to endeavours that have no rationale other than their government subsidies—and which would collapse as soon as the subsidies end. Yet Tim Flannery, the Aussie climate-alarmist who chaired the Copenhagen racket, says we need to redouble our efforts. “We’re trying to act as a species,” he says, “to regulate the atmosphere.”
Er, “regulate the atmosphere”? Why not? We’re rich enough to be stupid with the very heavens.
In his book The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (La tyrannie de la pénitence), the French writer Pascal Bruckner concludes by quoting Louis Bourdaloue, the celebrated Jesuit priest at the court of Louis XIV, who preached on the four kinds of conscience: 1) the good and peaceful; 2) the good and troubled; 3) the bad and troubled; 4) the bad and peaceful. The first is to be found in Heaven, the second in Purgatory, the third in Hell, and the fourth—the bad but peaceful conscience—sounds awfully like the prevailing condition of the West at twilight. We are remorseful to a fault—indeed, to others’ faults.It’s not just long-ago sins like imperialism and colonialism and Eurocentric white male patriarchy and other fancies barely within living memory. Our very lifestyle demands penitence: Americans have easily accessible oil reserves, but it would be wrong to touch them, so poor old BP have to do the “environmentally responsible” thing and be out in the middle of the Gulf a mile underwater. If you’re rich enough to be that stupid, what won’t you subsidize? The top al-Qaeda recruiter in Britain, Abu Qatada, had 150,000 pounds in his bank account courtesy of the taxpayer before the comically misnamed Department for Work and Pensions decided to cut back his benefits.
The green jobs, the gay parades, the jihadist welfare queens, the Greek public sector unions, all have to be paid for by a shrinking base of contributing workers whose children and grandchildren will lead poorer and meaner lives because of the fecklessness of government. The social compact of the postwar era cannot hold. Across the developed world, a beleaguered middle class is beginning to understand that it’s no longer that rich. At some point, it will look at the sheer waste of government spending, the other shoe will drop, and it will decide that it no longer wishes to be that stupid.”
— Mark Steyn
My Comment:
If Mark Steyn thinks that imperialism, colonialism, or Eurocentric patriarchy are long-ago sins, he’s living in a different world from mine. Given his demographic fears (elsewhere, he bewails Muslim birthrates overwhelming European ones and a Eurasian future on the Continent), I can understand his anxieties, but they are as mistaken as the usual multicultural prescriptions.
Still, at least, Steyn admits that multiculturalism is really nothing but “white guilt” and has little to do with the realities of life in the former colonies. It’s mostly a “what-can-I-throw-at-you-so-I-can-forget-about you” gesture from white liberals. However, let’s give liberals credit for at least feeling some sense of responsibility or guilt.
Guilt, you know, is not a bad thing if you’re guilty.
But of what?
If Europeans are guilty of slavery, so are Arabs and Russians and some Africans.
So, no. These sort of historical discussions bring no light but much sound and even more fury and are best left alone. Not because there are no issues of justice involved, but because the expiration date has gone by, the statute of limitations has run out.
On the other hand, the statute of limitations hasn’t even begun to tick on the crimes of empire today.
Thus, the deft sleight-of-hand which rolls the present (white liberal guilt) into the past (colonialism, slavery), shakes both off as irrelevant, and then rolls back into the present (multiculturalism, Islam, socialism) fails to mention, even while admitting we’re broke, what it is really that’s made us “broke.”
That unmentioned is empire.
Just as air war is the white noise that belies all the high-minded rhetoric about defense and collateral damage, empire is the white noise that masks the high-minded rhetoric about middle-class values and thrift squandered in make-work. Jobs programs are make-work indeed, but Steyn doesn’t mention the biggest make-work program of all – the imperial military, of which the middle-class and all classes are the beneficiaries.