I just came back from three days on Mount Athos, the Orthodox Christian monastic enclave on an isolated peninsula in northeastern Greece. To enter Athos and its archaic monastic culture is to leave time, at least for a few days. To come back down the mountain and go back to the world is to return to history. And these days, history is moving vividly and fast—and for Europe, towards some sort of cataclysmic reckoning.
What more can be said about the Islamic rape gang scandal in the United Kingdom? Not enough. Not enough until something massive and substantial happens to right what has gone very, very wrong in that country, which has been cursed by its ruling class in government, academia, media, and other institutions.
On Wednesday at Prime Minister’s question time in Parliament, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch made a complete fool of Keir Starmer, who could only twist and turn as he tried to avoid accountability for the atrocities. But it is also true that Badenoch’s party, which held power from 2011, when reporting in the Times of London first revealed the phenomenon—and there would be many more revelations to come—until last autumn’s Labor victory, did nothing substantial to address the problem. This is a crisis that consumes the entire British establishment, even King Charles, who disgraced himself with a Christmas address in which he burbled the usual platitudes about diversity being our strength.
The ongoing scandal in Britain stands for the crisis throughout Western liberal democracies, in which leaders and institutions, in the grip of ideology, failed both by commission and omission to deal forthrightly with the problems in front of them—and usually made them worse.
The Catholic Church got there first. From the moment the extent of its cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests began to be uncovered in 2002, starting with the situation in Boston, the behavior of the Catholic hierarchy has been lamentable overall. Yes, there have been some needed reforms, and enough apologies to take up a shelf in the Vatican library. And yet, Pope Francis continues to indulge and protect alleged sex abusers favored by himself. Last week, he appointed the archliberal Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego to the archbishopric of Washington, even though McElroy unquestionably turned a blind eye to the sexual depredations of his mentor, the disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Meanwhile, the moral authority of the Catholic Church having crashed, the Church continues to hemorrhage members. And yet, the pope and the hierarchy carry on as if nothing could touch them. With Europe threatened by Islamic violence—both of the terroristic kind, and of the sort carried out by Muslim rape gangs—Francis persists in lauding Islam and condemning “Islamophobia,” and in hectoring Europeans to keep open the doors for mass migration.
He is not alone. The rape gang scandal in Britain shows that UK officials—from the prime minister down to local council officials and police officers—repeatedly refused to come to the aid of working-class white British girls being drugged and gang-raped by Pakistanis. They did so out of fear of being racist, and being thought racist. They did so out of fealty to liberal ideology, one aspect of which is the belief that any culture other than one’s own is right and good, and must be kowtowed to. To do otherwise is bigotry.
We have been here before. In his extraordinary 2023 book Wonder Confronts Certainty, Gary Saul Morson, a leading scholar of Russian literature, writes of how Russian novelists and writers of the 19th and early 20th century dealt with the big questions that would haunt the 20th century—and our own.
In Morson’s telling, the conflict among writers of the period had mostly to do with reality versus ideology. That is to say: Should we strive understand life as it is, or as it should be?
Those Morson calls the “great realists”—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and others—insisted on telling the truth no matter whose ideological convictions were offended. Their opponents—writers whose names have been all but forgotten in the West today—believed that art and literature should be judged by ideological criteria.
In the mid-19th century there arose a class in Russia called the “intelligents”—the equivalent of our woke scholars, journalists, and their sympathizers throughout institutions. Education does not make one an “intelligent”; a shared dedication to progressive ideology does. Even if one does not agree with the intelligents, one keeps one’s mouth shut to protect one’s own career and reputation. As one Turgenev character says, “today even those who dislike progressive ideas must pretend to like them to gain admission to decent society.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We see in that line an explanation for why so many otherwise sensible people—even conservatives—kept their mouths shut about the rape gangs, about mass migration, and so many other ills that mostly afflicted those outside “decent society”—like working-class white English girls.
As time went on, the intelligents came to idealize ‘the People,’ not based on who the Russian people actually were, but rather as a totem to help them deal with their own psychological feelings of guilt for their own privilege. Citing the work of two lesser-known Russian writers, Morson says that they “exemplify the troubling consequences of basing politics on guilt, which may lead people to adopt whatever solution promises psychological relief even if it does not help—or even positively harms—the victims on whose behalf guilt is felt.”
To help members of the British ruling class feel better about themselves, the whole of Britain had to be wrecked through mass migration and deliberately turning a blind eye to the evils done by non-white Britons. (The same logic explains the rampage of gender ideology, which has resulted in the lifelong sexual mutilation of gender-dysphoric British children.) As Morson explains in chilling detail, the utopians of the Russian Left, once they gained power in the 1917 revolution, sacrificed the lives of tens of millions of innocent people to pay homage to ideological principle. Yet as Dostoevsky—and only Dostoevsky, in Morson’s judgment—saw, the seeds of the 20th century’s mass murders were already in plain sight in the writings of the 19th century progressives.
What Britain has lived through—and what many European countries are living through as well—is the cost of the utopian ideals of their liberal elites, of both the Left and the Right. After all, what was conservative German chancellor Angela Merkel’s infamous 2015 declaration opening Europe’s floodgates to migrants, “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”), if not a manifestation of liberal utopianism? Britain today has a feckless Labour government in part because the Conservatives in power, despite all their stated convictions, also lived by these hollow beliefs.
The raped working-class girls of Britain are the price people pay for liberal ideology. Morson writes that the great Russian realists refuted progressive theories not by taking them on directly in their novels, but by showing what it means to live by them. Well, Britain now has its answer—and so does every European country cursed by migrant rapes and other crimes.
The rape-gang scandal makes it abundantly clear that liberalism, as it has been practiced for decades in the West (as distinct, for example, from its Hungarian version), is the suicide note of a civilization. Both the UK and the European Union are rapidly approaching a decision point.
A cataclysmic reckoning will be a horrible thing to live through. But the only thing worse is no cataclysmic reckoning at all, just resignedly going gently into history’s long and barbarous night.
We saw what happened to Russia when those in positions of leadership refused to take the warnings of its Dostoevskys seriously. The same is true of us, in our time. Indeed, it is happening right now. The West is burning, while the Starmers, the Scholzes, the Macrons, the Von Der Leyens, and even the Pope—all fiddle.
On Mount Athos, a priest told me that the monks there are so removed from the world that they were late to learn about the existence of the Second World War. I’m not sure if that is true, but experiencing how cut off they are, deliberately, from the outside world, even in the Internet age, it is at least plausible. But the monks, in their medieval peninsular redoubt, have an excuse for not seeing what’s happening in the world beyond their personal horizons.
We do not.
What Russian Literature Tells Us About the Muslim Rape Gangs
British PM Keir Starmer and Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Wikimedia Commons
I just came back from three days on Mount Athos, the Orthodox Christian monastic enclave on an isolated peninsula in northeastern Greece. To enter Athos and its archaic monastic culture is to leave time, at least for a few days. To come back down the mountain and go back to the world is to return to history. And these days, history is moving vividly and fast—and for Europe, towards some sort of cataclysmic reckoning.
What more can be said about the Islamic rape gang scandal in the United Kingdom? Not enough. Not enough until something massive and substantial happens to right what has gone very, very wrong in that country, which has been cursed by its ruling class in government, academia, media, and other institutions.
On Wednesday at Prime Minister’s question time in Parliament, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch made a complete fool of Keir Starmer, who could only twist and turn as he tried to avoid accountability for the atrocities. But it is also true that Badenoch’s party, which held power from 2011, when reporting in the Times of London first revealed the phenomenon—and there would be many more revelations to come—until last autumn’s Labor victory, did nothing substantial to address the problem. This is a crisis that consumes the entire British establishment, even King Charles, who disgraced himself with a Christmas address in which he burbled the usual platitudes about diversity being our strength.
The ongoing scandal in Britain stands for the crisis throughout Western liberal democracies, in which leaders and institutions, in the grip of ideology, failed both by commission and omission to deal forthrightly with the problems in front of them—and usually made them worse.
The Catholic Church got there first. From the moment the extent of its cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests began to be uncovered in 2002, starting with the situation in Boston, the behavior of the Catholic hierarchy has been lamentable overall. Yes, there have been some needed reforms, and enough apologies to take up a shelf in the Vatican library. And yet, Pope Francis continues to indulge and protect alleged sex abusers favored by himself. Last week, he appointed the archliberal Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego to the archbishopric of Washington, even though McElroy unquestionably turned a blind eye to the sexual depredations of his mentor, the disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Meanwhile, the moral authority of the Catholic Church having crashed, the Church continues to hemorrhage members. And yet, the pope and the hierarchy carry on as if nothing could touch them. With Europe threatened by Islamic violence—both of the terroristic kind, and of the sort carried out by Muslim rape gangs—Francis persists in lauding Islam and condemning “Islamophobia,” and in hectoring Europeans to keep open the doors for mass migration.
He is not alone. The rape gang scandal in Britain shows that UK officials—from the prime minister down to local council officials and police officers—repeatedly refused to come to the aid of working-class white British girls being drugged and gang-raped by Pakistanis. They did so out of fear of being racist, and being thought racist. They did so out of fealty to liberal ideology, one aspect of which is the belief that any culture other than one’s own is right and good, and must be kowtowed to. To do otherwise is bigotry.
We have been here before. In his extraordinary 2023 book Wonder Confronts Certainty, Gary Saul Morson, a leading scholar of Russian literature, writes of how Russian novelists and writers of the 19th and early 20th century dealt with the big questions that would haunt the 20th century—and our own.
In Morson’s telling, the conflict among writers of the period had mostly to do with reality versus ideology. That is to say: Should we strive understand life as it is, or as it should be?
Those Morson calls the “great realists”—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and others—insisted on telling the truth no matter whose ideological convictions were offended. Their opponents—writers whose names have been all but forgotten in the West today—believed that art and literature should be judged by ideological criteria.
In the mid-19th century there arose a class in Russia called the “intelligents”—the equivalent of our woke scholars, journalists, and their sympathizers throughout institutions. Education does not make one an “intelligent”; a shared dedication to progressive ideology does. Even if one does not agree with the intelligents, one keeps one’s mouth shut to protect one’s own career and reputation. As one Turgenev character says, “today even those who dislike progressive ideas must pretend to like them to gain admission to decent society.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We see in that line an explanation for why so many otherwise sensible people—even conservatives—kept their mouths shut about the rape gangs, about mass migration, and so many other ills that mostly afflicted those outside “decent society”—like working-class white English girls.
As time went on, the intelligents came to idealize ‘the People,’ not based on who the Russian people actually were, but rather as a totem to help them deal with their own psychological feelings of guilt for their own privilege. Citing the work of two lesser-known Russian writers, Morson says that they “exemplify the troubling consequences of basing politics on guilt, which may lead people to adopt whatever solution promises psychological relief even if it does not help—or even positively harms—the victims on whose behalf guilt is felt.”
To help members of the British ruling class feel better about themselves, the whole of Britain had to be wrecked through mass migration and deliberately turning a blind eye to the evils done by non-white Britons. (The same logic explains the rampage of gender ideology, which has resulted in the lifelong sexual mutilation of gender-dysphoric British children.) As Morson explains in chilling detail, the utopians of the Russian Left, once they gained power in the 1917 revolution, sacrificed the lives of tens of millions of innocent people to pay homage to ideological principle. Yet as Dostoevsky—and only Dostoevsky, in Morson’s judgment—saw, the seeds of the 20th century’s mass murders were already in plain sight in the writings of the 19th century progressives.
What Britain has lived through—and what many European countries are living through as well—is the cost of the utopian ideals of their liberal elites, of both the Left and the Right. After all, what was conservative German chancellor Angela Merkel’s infamous 2015 declaration opening Europe’s floodgates to migrants, “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”), if not a manifestation of liberal utopianism? Britain today has a feckless Labour government in part because the Conservatives in power, despite all their stated convictions, also lived by these hollow beliefs.
The raped working-class girls of Britain are the price people pay for liberal ideology. Morson writes that the great Russian realists refuted progressive theories not by taking them on directly in their novels, but by showing what it means to live by them. Well, Britain now has its answer—and so does every European country cursed by migrant rapes and other crimes.
The rape-gang scandal makes it abundantly clear that liberalism, as it has been practiced for decades in the West (as distinct, for example, from its Hungarian version), is the suicide note of a civilization. Both the UK and the European Union are rapidly approaching a decision point.
A cataclysmic reckoning will be a horrible thing to live through. But the only thing worse is no cataclysmic reckoning at all, just resignedly going gently into history’s long and barbarous night.
We saw what happened to Russia when those in positions of leadership refused to take the warnings of its Dostoevskys seriously. The same is true of us, in our time. Indeed, it is happening right now. The West is burning, while the Starmers, the Scholzes, the Macrons, the Von Der Leyens, and even the Pope—all fiddle.
On Mount Athos, a priest told me that the monks there are so removed from the world that they were late to learn about the existence of the Second World War. I’m not sure if that is true, but experiencing how cut off they are, deliberately, from the outside world, even in the Internet age, it is at least plausible. But the monks, in their medieval peninsular redoubt, have an excuse for not seeing what’s happening in the world beyond their personal horizons.
We do not.
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