May 10, 2006

Violence, Justice and Freedom

Kobayashi Maru tipped me off to this wonderful essay posted at Quid Nimis. It's a great read and I feel touches exactly on what is wrong with liberalism today.

The essayist writes:
Michael Savage is probably the most inflammatory of the so-called Talk Radio crowd. He is certainly the most incendiary of all that I have heard. In the past, I have found it very difficult to listen to his broadcasts. I could barely stand it during the 2004 election year when I first heard of him. But lately I find myself tuning in, and not just because I'm on the road frequently in the late afternoon these days. Something in the near hysterical urgency of his message resonates with me.

Then he said something that I had been thinking for a long time. In a long rant that sprang out of the Moussaoui verdict, he began talking about how the powers-that-be in Europe were letting Islamists walk all over them, all under cover of political correctness and civil discourse. Then Michael started shouting, "The soccer hooligans are going to be the ones who save Europe!"

For decades now, at least as long as I have been reading The Economist (since 1979, or thereabouts), so-called "soccer hooligans"-presumably in Europe they are "football hooligans,"- have been an embarrassment to Britain on the Continent. They are rowdy, ill-behaved, bottle throwing ne'er-do-wells who are unabashed descendents, culturally, if not biologically, of the low-life types who were routinely chronicled by Dickens and equally routinely transported to penal colonies in Georgia and New South Wales. Except that the 20th and 21st century versions are carrying forward a trait that Briain is losing rapidly in the face of Globalization, the European Community, and the ever-increasing tide of immigrants from the Commonwealth: the willingness to defend, indeed, promote at the point of a beer bottle, a British national identity.

Read the whole thing.

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