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November 18, 2006
Tributes to Western stupidity and self-loathing elites
Mark Steyn turns his poison pen to the latest examples of rot at the core of British -- and American -- politically correct, multi-culti mumbo-jumbo.
A year ago, London’s Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone unveiled a new statue on the famous “empty plinth” in Trafalgar Square. Sharing the heart of the capital with King George IV, General Sir Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock these days is Alison Lapper, an armless woman heavily pregnant.
At the unveiling, Miss Lapper said the new statue would force Britons to “confront their prejudices” about disability.
As my old editor, Charles Moore, pointed out, Trafalgar Square already has a monument to persons who’ve overcome disability: the one-eyed one-armed Admiral Lord Nelson standing on his column and no doubt bemused by the modish posturing below.
... So the point of the fourth plinth was to send a message that warmongering white males no longer had the Square to themselves: the statue of Miss Lapper is a monument not to disability so much as to the psychological self-crippling to which so many Britons are prone.
Another monument: the Arizona 9/11 Memorial. It is a remarkable sight. Five years after the slaughter of thousands of Americans, one had long ago given up all hope that the nation might rouse itself to erect, as James Lileks put it at National Review Online, “a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles”.
But, even so, the Arizona memorial is an almost parodic exercise in civilizational self-loathing, festooned in slogans that read like a brainstorming session for a Daily Kos publicity campaign:
“You don’t win battles of terrorism with more battles.”
“Foreign-born Americans afraid.”
“Erroneous US airstrike kills 46 Uruzgan civilians.”
And this is the official state memorial. Governor Napolitano called it “great” and “honorable”. It isn’t. It’s small and contemptible.
Assuming it survives, future generations will stand before it and marvel – either that the United States is still around or that such an obviously deranged country even needed an enemy to lose to.
It's astonishing that the men who saved the world from Hitler gave birth to the current generation of simpering we-are-the-world weak-willed sob sisters who are ashamed to accept the moral superiority of the West -- and would deny the importance of self-defense, the most universal of human rights, whether it be for an individual or a nation.
It is to laugh.
Posted by Mike Lief at November 18, 2006 12:33 PM
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