Those of you who read Friday’s Five Quick Things column are probably expecting this to be an I-Told-You-So after rioting broke out in Belfast in response to a Sudanese migrant’s savage attempted beheading of Steven Ogilvie, in the middle of a street, captured on viral video.
And… sure. This is an I-Told-You-So.
But it’s much more basic than that. What is happening in Belfast is utterly inevitable.
They’re burning buses, because migrants ride the buses. They’re burning shops, because migrants own the shops. And they’re burning houses, because migrants live in the houses at taxpayer expense. The violence in Belfast isn’t random, it’s systematic.
It’s ugly and it’s very rude and there is collateral damage, to be sure. But the message being sent by the black-clad rioters is one the government in all of the U.K. — more accurately, all of the governments of the West — have refused to hear for decades.
You have not done your most basic job, is that message. You have not preserved our society. When our people are murdered openly in the street in front of our houses, by foreigners, you have failed; and your failure is deliberate with malice aforethought.
Therefore you may pretend to govern from the councils of power, but we will govern on the streets, and the policy we will enforce is that migrants will not live among us. Not anymore. Not after Steven Ogilvie was mutilated in front of us by a barbarian you inserted in our midst.
And this is a message that must be taken seriously. Gravely so. If for no other reason than where it comes from.
Belfast, after all, spent decades as the West’s capital of urban guerilla warfare. There are still men of fighting age with firsthand experience of how that works.
Northern Ireland, and Ireland as a whole, for that matter, is a place where a populace having an intolerable reality imposed on it will endure horrific deprivations and civil unrest over a significant length of time. The Irish are somewhat like Russians in this regard; they’re sufferers. And while the Irish have gotten very comfortable in the peace of the 21st century, the national character still contains a heaping amount of pain tolerance.
Upon reflection, importing unwanted immigrants who are given preferential treatment to the local peasantry is the stupidest possible path to open revolution among Irish north and south. That’s been done before, and it led to centuries of misery and violence that have shaped the Irish people to their core.
And now all of the British Right is viewing Belfast not as an outrage and a tragedy but as a blueprint.
This is very dangerous, it shouldn’t have to be said. Because no one knows who wins the battle of wills playing out on the streets of Belfast — a battle that could easily spread to the streets of all of Europe.
And once the civil war begins — which this may well have been the opening of — there are really only two possibilities.
The first is that the rebels succeed in chasing the migrants out of Ireland and the U.K., and even all of Europe. Doing so probably also involves chasing the political elites from the halls of power and installing new elites whose values will likely hew to those of their Irish and British forebears. But that might or might not include the liberal democracy post–World War II Europe was built on.
The other possibility is that the rebels are routed by the agents of the current political elite. But the stakes of the civil war, which might possibly be starting in Belfast, are that if the revolt is put down, liberal democracy is a likely casualty.
And if you have a conspiratorial mindset, you can find sufficient evidence to indicate that this was the game all along.
I’m not talking about Jan. 6 as a Reichstag Fire incident, per se, though I suspect many of our readers would look at that fiasco as an example of what totalitarians in charge of nominally free countries might be capable of.
Consider the pattern, which repeats in nation after nation (including here in ours)…
- Import alien cultures incompatible with that of your own;
- Publicly embrace the values of those cultures and alienate the bulk of your own people;
- Immiserate your own people with oppressive economic and social policies justified on the basis of race or “the climate”;
- While intentionally failing at the most basic functions of government;
- Then warn of “radicalization” and use that warning to smear political dissidents while engaging in aggressive two-tiered censorship;
…and wait for the inevitable fuse to be lit.
And the minute you see the spark, you’re now “justified” to drop the hammer and introduce the authoritarian police state you’ve wanted all along.
It was hard not to conjure up that pattern in one’s head when Nancy Pelosi surrounded Capitol Hill with razor wire and National Guard troops, or when Merrick Garland sicced the FBI on Catholics attending the Latin Mass. But very little in the United States is as redolent of the insidious abuse of the institutions of a free republic as has been seen again and again across the pond.
Our own leaders have warned the Europeans time and again that unless their governments commit to protecting individual rights and stop substituting maladministration for administration, we cannot justify blood and treasure to be spent in the defense of those governments. Their response, in many cases, has been to take Iran’s side in the current conflict as the Iranians fire drones at commercial ships and civilian targets in neighboring countries.
And to create the circumstances that make a Lee Rigby, Henry Nowak, or Steven Ogilvie inevitable, and lay in wait for the response of a betrayed people increasingly conscious of their own immolation.
Are the Belfast fires Reichstag fires, in the sense that the people lighting them were deliberately pushed into creating the emergency from which Britons and Irish will not soon emerge?
“Never let a crisis go to waste,” after all.
Or are the schemers in the halls of power, whose mentors in the elite schools and their half-considered and poorly-vetted ideological tomes convinced them that man could be perfected if only the right dose of political control could be applied, too smart by half?
We might be about to find out.
The lights haven’t gone out in Belfast. They seem to be burning quite brightly now. And what they illuminate is not the West we were promised.
