The Madness of Civilized Nations

"Prison authorities at the Ayalon Prison in Ramle discriminated against Jewish security prisoners on Holocaust Day. Authorities forbade the prisoners to leave their high security cells to attend the ceremony but allowed Arabs prisoners to attend instead. Prison authorities said they refused the request from the Jewish prisoners to attend the ceremony for their own safety."
IsraelJustice.com

There is one root moral imperative that must coded into the political DNA of any nation and that is to protect its own survival. Nations whose political classes transgress against this first and foremost imperative are perverted into legitimizing their own national self-destruction. Their rituals, their most sacred memories become symbols without substance and words without meaning. Their greatest national impulses are transformed into a crazed babble, a self-wounding madness. Their altars are shattered, their flags torn down and in their sacred documents defiled by their own doing.

Patriotism, nationalism, the flag, the anthem, the great speeches and banners are all means of promoting identification and sacrifice for that core value, survival. With that allegiance the individual understands that national survival is also individual survival and that individual survival is also national survival. A nation without individuals willing to work for it and fight for it is a hollow house. An individual without a nation of his own, be he Israeli or English, American or Dutch is prey in a world ruled by entities based not on rights but on power with no defense left but money and some fragmentary humanitarian appeals.

The modern State of Israel was founded at a time when even the Western superpowers were approaching the precipice of no longer believing in their own national survival and it suffers from the same infection. An infection characterized by guilt, apathy, fear of action, the political radicalisms of the petty and an elite class that despises the idea of nationhood and cares for nothing more than their own ambitions and their own pockets.

To look at the political, cultural, academic and business elites of first world nations is to see the face of a dog, holding no allegiance to anyone but to their own greeds and destructive impulses. To listen to them is to hear the senseless howls and barks of a courtyard of hounds loosened from the reins and gone mad. The language and beliefs of the left are mad and they have infected the ruling classes of first world nations and compromised them into insanity so that over them madness reigns.

Beneath them the ranks of mid-level employees, the officials and bureaucrats, the managers and teachers, the officers and others who work beneath them and are answerable to them, fall into line. And though they may not understand the ideas and rules they now promote and defend, they promote and defend them with the unthinking reflex of obedience, that vestigial animal organ so often mistaken for patriotism, that has brought them to the station they occupy.

And so a nation goes mad. Madness is a departure from reality that it is both compartmentalized and self-destructive. Like a boat drifting away in the mist, the mad are cut off and drifting away from land. Yet to them it seems as if the land is drifting away while they remain in place.

This is the State of the West today, the political and cultural elites drift away from the land listening to the siren song of the left, but like many madmen they compensate for their detachment from reality with their gifts of language. The greatest weapon of the mad is their ability to draw you into their distorted world through their speech discharged from minds that no longer hold to the moorings of sanity. And so millions of people remain bewitched while still more millions burn with frustration and bafflement that the reign of madness should have fallen over formerly civilized nations.