You Are Not Alone
posted by robert - May 22nd, 2007 at 12:31 AMIf you haven’t been reading Bill Whittle’s painfully-infrequent (but always worth the wait) posts, now is THE time to start. Go read his latest two-part presentation, You Are Not Alone:
An excerpt from Part 2 (after the jump):
Throughout history, civilizations rise and fall. They fall for the same reason, by my reading of history: the lack of will to defend her, a cancer which starts not from the bottom but invariably from the top. A fish rots from the head, say the Russians, who ought to know. From Nero to Chamberlain, the elites evolve away from an understanding that retaliation against the lawless and the barbaric is not a vice but a virtue. They take the manifest blessings of civilization as a given and foist their own personal guilt and moral cowardice upon the entire city. They open the gates to the savage peoples who have always stood outside of progress and gentleness and culture.
It has always been this way. If you feel you see it happening now, before your very eyes, well… you are not alone. A society unwilling to enforce the laws that civilize it, that is unable or unwilling to see the advantages of civilization, a society led by the pampered, the narcissistic and the corrupt, is not long for this Earth. Our enemies look at us and see precisely these symptoms, and the symptoms are worsening. Our unwillingness to retaliate when retaliation is called for – indeed, the uneasiness with the very idea of retaliation against betrayal – has them licking their lips in anticipation. They see all this decay and they are right to see it, for it is there.
One thing they do not see, however – also there. They do not see the Remnant. They do not see the power and resiliance of what the irreplaceable Victor Davis Hanson has referred to as “the Old Breed.”