I've long advocated being a gentleman.
To do so, though, requires that you constitute yourself a defender of your country and its civilization. It is not enough to say, as did Dutch humanist Oscar van den Boogaard:Today I read about men who were no gentlemen.
"I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."No, that is not a gentleman, though he wears the finest clothes and writes the finest novels, keeps the best society, and has the finest manners. He has only the accidents of a gentleman. He has nothing of its essence.
The essence is to bear arms, in defense of country and civilization. That is the real thing, the root of the tradition. The arms may be symbolic, or they may be actual. The defense must be devout.
On the afternoon of July 4 in Washington DC, a teenager with a knife boarded a crowded metro train and attacked a 24-year-old man, Kevin Joseph Sutherland, stabbing him 30 or 40 times and kicking his head repeatedly until he was dead. No one tried to stop him....The basic theory I advanced more than ten years ago in "Social Harmony" was that we need old men to be dangerous. This 18 year old was totally un-moored from our civilization. He was a murderer, an armed robber, and his society was so soft that no one in a train car full of people tried to stop him. Older, larger men did nothing. Even if they were too late to stop the killing, as knives work fast, they needed to stop him from leaving until police could arrive. A virtuous citizenry would have that courage. They would pull together to enforce the common peace.
That no one did displays not just cowardice but also a callous and unthinking selfishness. The Reddit eyewitness had no idea at the time how many more people Spires would kill, no idea if he would attack the 52-year-old woman or an elderly passenger. He just let him walk off the train into the subway, covered in Sutherland’s blood.
This is essentially the opposite of the spirit of United Flight 93—the heroic selflessness that prompted a group of courageous passengers on 9/11 to attack their hijackers, forcing them to crash the plane in a Pennsylvania field.
Maybe we've become too nice, and not rough enough. Present company excepted, of course. A dangerous world can only be tamed by what Louis L'amour used to call "men with the bark on." This guy isn't nice, he dresses and grooms himself in a terrifying manner, and he uses obscene gestures and language. Yet he has the spirit of the thing. He's a guy who dares to be an apostate from Islam, a convert to Christianity, and a proud American. He has understood what is valuable about our civilization, and he has constituted himself a defender of it.
We must do better.
5 comments:
Slaves are supposed to be virtuous now? If so, why did the slave owning Democrats look down on blacks and abolitionist Republicans, they thought the slaves had even more virtue than white aristocrats?
"This guy isn't nice..."
I'll bet he's quite reliably nice to his friends, and those he comes across in normal social interaction. I'd also bet he's not much of one to suffer fools lightly.
One of the most motivational speeches I've ever heard about America and what it means to be an American was from a former ARVN infantry colonel who escaped and made it here after the fall of his republic.
This guy is good, too. We need more of this and less La Raza, and fewer Americans who not only won't defend their country, but will run it down and attack it publicly.
On a side note, 'English and Proud' links to www.patriotstore.co.uk, which has some interesting apparel, like a Knights Templar polo, Taliban Hunting Club pin, etc. For some reason, you have to prove you are human to access the site.
I tell you what, I'd take as many guys like this as want to immigrate. I had a great Korean professor too, one who had escaped from what was turning into the wreckage of North Korea back during the Korean war by joining the US side of the battle. He was allowed to emigrate to America and, eventually, to become a citizen. You never met a more patriotic American than that guy.
Also, when he says:
"...eat from their food, and drink their water... and want to turn around and start killing police and kill American citizens?"
That's huge in this particular honor culture. You ate our salt. You drank our water.
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