So it happened again.
Another attack in London, another half dozen or so broken bodies in pools of dark red ooze. More families ripped apart, more parents mourning lost children, more pain, more anguish. Hands up everyone who’s shocked?
Anyone?
Anyone at all?
Not even up the back?
Just like last time the platitudes were flowing thick and fast.
Just as they will next time.
Just as I predicted, just as anyone could have predicted.
At some point it stops being sad.
At some point you stop getting angry at the people carrying out these acts; after all they are clearly not cowards, regardless of what public figures might piously proclaim. They have a cause they’re willing to kill and die for, and then go out and do just that.
You can accuse the perpetrators of these attacks of a great many things; lacking the courage of their convictions is not one of them.
It’s easy to get angry at the politicians, after all they are put in the positions they hold so as to protect their citizens from danger, a role they are clearly failing at. The weasel words they use to excuse continuing as usual on immigration and multiculturalism, making no change at all to the current trajectory, grate upon the ears like broken glass onto the soul.
But it’s hard to hate a politician for being a self-interested mendacious coward; in my lifetime at least the Western world has known no other type.
It’s even hard to blame the average leftist for “not waking up”. As I pointed out after the Manchester bombing, the average well-educated leftie is about as capable of waking up to the lies into which they have been drilled as they are of breathing in a vacuum.
At this point I no longer bother to get angry, there’s simply no point.
I’m starting to laugh instead.
On Sunday I had to pull over the car as my laughter had grown to such an extent that it was threatening the safety of myself and other road users. An unfortunate professor from ANU was on ABC radio trying to explain what should be done to avoid further attacks like the one in London.
The ABC presenter didn’t ask any questions, I’m not sure he could have slipped a word in edgeways if he tried. The good professor talked non-stop for fifteen minutes, recycling every trope you’ve heard over and over these last fifteen years.
The poor man sounded close to panic. The words tumbled out of his mouth in a cascade and every sentence seemed to be a well-rehearsed puzzle piece fitted at random into the outpouring of well-worn excuses. I found myself following his train of thought, predicting which arrow of tired dogma he was about to unsheathe from his quiver.
At one point he even stopped to remind everyone that we didn’t know the motives of the attackers, as if he hadn’t just spent ten minutes making apologies for the one particular religious community we all knew the attackers hailed from.
He certainly came across as an intelligent, educated man. It was just so obvious that almost everything he was saying was either utterly irrelevant or utterly wrong. And it was even clearer that he was beginning himself to suspect it.
He wasn’t on the radio that morning trying to convince the listeners or the presenter of anything. He was trying, very hard, to convince himself.
People don’t like being told that what they believe is wrong. They really don’t like it when events prove their beliefs wrong. Usually the more intelligent a person is, the more brainpower they have to twist reality to suit their own preconceptions.
If you’re a professor in the current academic establishment, then there’s more than just your worldview at stake.
If the leftist cosmology that has formed the dogma of last five decades or so is not just wrong but dangerously wrong, then not only you but your colleagues, your friends and the mentors who you idolised and respected were complicit in helping to destroy the Western world.
If you were a Professor that had fought and clawed his way to the top of the academic tree to gain status, respect, authority and financial rewards by propagating ideas that might turn out to be disastrous for the very societies you thought you were serving, how easy would it be to recognise that? How easy would it be for you to change your mind?
There’s a video from a camera-phone going around from inside one of the restaurants in London Saturday night, where two men are hiding under a table peering out as police struggle to contain the situation on the street outside.
One of the men curses the practitioners of a certain major world religion in an angry voice before being corrected by a more politically aware fellow under-table dweller that he shouldn’t be so hate-filled and divisive.
Some might find such wilful delusion scary, or rage inducing. Some might wonder how the hell someone could get to the point where they are making excuses for the people murdering innocents outside while you hide cowering in fear.
Years ago I used to wonder about such suicidally stupid people. Four or five attacks ago I still got angry at them. I don’t do either anymore.
Now I just laugh.
There’s nothing else to do.