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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
One of my favorite short stories is “The Lame Shall Enter First” by Flannery O’Connor. The plot centers on an atheist and widower who takes in a violent teenage orphan and attempts to reform him. Neglecting his own young and motherless son, the father focuses all his love and attention on the delinquent and unappreciative teen, even refusing to acknowledge certain crimes the latter commits.
As is common in O’Connor’s work, the ending is gut-wrenching, with the father realizing his neglectful behavior too late as his own son commits suicide.
This complex morality tale came to mind after reading condemnation after condemnation of the UK’s recently passed legislation that would see the deportation of African asylum-seekers to Rwanda to have their claims heard (which, if successful, would allow them to stay there). A similar measure to what Israel did a few years back, the UK has seen African arrivals from small-boat crossings from France go from zero to over 120,000 in just the past five years.
An obvious deterrent measure and an answer to public anger over questionable “refugee” claims (the Global South has never been wealthier and healthier) and immigration generally being 5 times what it was two decades ago, people like Yasmin Ahmed of Human Rights Watch UK issued a statement focusing on the bill’s supposed “devastating impact on human rights” and on the lives of Africans travelling all the way to the UK (again, through France) “seeking safety” (not Britain’s bountiful welfare benefits).
Sacha Deshmukh of Amnesty International UK called it “deeply authoritarian” and a “hatchet to international legal protections for some of the most vulnerable people in the world.”
The Guardian quoted a train of four refugee advocates who called it “inhumane”, “deeply immoral”, “cruel” and “shameful”, respectively. Similarly framed concerns were repeated by the United Nations and the Council of Europe with the former, as well as one nonprofit called Freedom From Torture, even pressuring airlines not to take part.
Contrast this with what the British masses think, which is that the law is certainly a necessary one—Indeed, the deeply unpopular Tories got an approval-rating boost following the bill’s passage. It is as if common people instinctively know that, as Substack-writer “Eugyppius” recently formulated, ‘borders for nations are like the skin of our bodies or the membranes that protect cells… you won’t survive for very long if you can’t control what enters you.’
Numerous critics have pointed to “alternatives” like just letting them all in on special visas so they can avoid the dangerous Channel crossing from France, as if it is the wishes and welfare of the migrant, not the British people, which is the biggest or only concern.
Amnesty International’s Deshmukh further called the law a “national disgrace”; an ironic choice of words perhaps given his likely inability to think in terms of nations and apparent unwillingness to put the interests of his own nation first—While not an indigenous Briton (he’s of South Asian background), Deshmukh was born in London. For types like Deshmukh, putting the rights of fellow citizens before the interests of foreigners discriminates and is thus immoral.
Philosophy professor John Lachs once made an interesting comparison between nations, national boundaries, and the family unit, writing: “One’s own children cannot be told to get in line with all those needing to be fed; the fact that they are ours gives them priority and imposes overriding obligations on us.”
To forgo the nation and put the foreigner ahead of the fellow citizen—as O’Connor’s atheist protagonist did with his own child—is not a supreme virtue, but a diabolical vice. As O’Connor adeptly shows, the father’s perceived humanitarianism was actually rooted in self-aggrandizement and in relieving a sense of guilt he felt toward the orphaned teen. His actions were self-interested, not based on genuine moral, philanthropic considerations.
Various philosophers have tackled the problem of misguided philanthropy and pathological altruism. Michael Novak once described rootless liberalism as being oddly characterized by both an “exaggerated individualism” and “an exaggerated sense of universal community.” “The middle term between these two extremes” he said—that is, “the term pointing to the finite human communities in which individuals live and have their being”—is “precisely the term that the liberal personality disvalues.” By leaping over their own local and national communities and into the Third World when relieving their altruistic urges, it’s as if they perceive philanthropy only in the abstract. Further, they seem compelled by some sort of guilt complex; due, for instance, to the West’s history of Third World colonialism, or to present global wealth disparities.
It is Novak’s “middle term” of community and nation which is ironically so core to the greater, universal humanitarianism pursued by globalists. As was further said by the great Edmund Burke, “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections… it is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”
The late political philosopher George Grant similarly espoused this principle when he wrote:
It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good. But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings first grasp what is good and it is the juice of such roots which for most men sustain their partaking in a more universal good?
Before stepping out into the global community, one first needs a firm grounding in the global community’s basic unit: the nation. Showing love and dedication to one’s own seems an obvious prerequisite to extending the same to strangers. How, for instance, can one show an understanding for the needs, values, and traditions of other nations when they disregard those of their own?
Ian Smith is an attorney in Washington, D.C., and a contributing blogger with immigration enforcement advocate, the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
“ Britain’s bountiful welfare benefits”
Stop that and the problem stops.
The Rwanda law is nothing but propaganda, it will never be enforced and was a stupid extreme move to make it look like the establishment cares.
Join the dots.
British people voted to leave the EU because of mass immigration, since then it got ten times worse, same thing happened in the USA.
IOM.int is a part of the UN and openly calls for REGULAR mass migration.
Suicidal altruism, in the West, comes from Christianity not from atheism.
Jesus of Nazareth being crucified to death to save undeserving sinners is pure suicidal self-sacrifice, pure self-immolation for undeserving others.
Of course, there are atheists (and Jews) in the West that believe in suicidal altruism too, but they got the ethics of suicidal altruism from Christianity, not from atheism.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.
The faintest familiarity with Scripture reminds people to reject reason, science and facts in favor of faith, the supernatural, and miracles, to believe that “love of money is the root of all evil,” that “a rich man cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” that “the meek shall inherit the Earth,” that self-sacrifice is morally “noble,” that self-esteem and pride are “sinful,” that “it’s better to give than to receive,” that we must serve neighbors and become our “brother’s keeper” while “turning the other cheek” to one’s enemies so they might strike us repeatedly, with impunity. It’s clear that right-wing conservatives embrace such anti-life, anti-capitalist notions, while simultaneously claiming the welfare state shouldn’t be so big or taxes so onerous. As such the religious right is unavoidably hypocritical. In contrast, the religious left is at least consistent, albeit in a perverse manner, especially when it concedes openly that its case for the welfare state rests on Scripture.” – Richard M. Salsman, “Holy Scripture and the Welfare State
The THX Beer Drinking Game is open. Altruism and Christianity and an endless flow of Beer. Let’s up the ante. Kilt Lifter for everyone!!
Enjoy, Objectivist haters who see through THX’s tired attempts to blame Jews Christians and altruism for all of our problems.
He’s even enlisted ol’ Richard Salsman to help in his futile quest to get one or two followers. I mean if you can’t get Little Lenny Puk-off and the dead Rand Woman to work their “double double toil and trouble” magik you have to enlist Little Richard, right.
This must be the 50th time you have posted this worn out drivel. Has it worked yet? Are they lining up at your door? My guess is no. A big fat goose-egg for you again.
Guess what, you could always stop and just let the West go as it will. Even a couple of weeks off might do you some good, loser.
Got a Kilt Lifter buzz on yet?
Th thing that you are missing is that, in Christian theology, Jesus gets to do9 the far-reaching stuff because He is God. The Bible’s view of politics is otherwise relatively conservative, with Paul saying that the man who does not work should not eat, and the Torah telling farmers not to reap right to the edges of their fields, so that some of the crop is left for the poor to glean.
I am sorry to say this, but the only way illegal immigrants will stop coming north and invading once partially cohesive societies is by severe repercussions for trespassing. If those boats were turned back in the Channel, or citizens patrolled the beaches in armed brigades and forced the illegals back on pain of death, that would be understood.
Of course, so called immigrants already in the country should be bound to a strict code of conduct that if breeched will incur significant repercussions, Stop arresting native citizens for protesting gang rapes, and simply round up the rapists and perform surgical castration upon them.
The little boy commits suicide, at the end of :”The Lame Shall Enter First” because he peers through a telescope, which his fater had bought for the delinquent, and thinks he sees his mother waving to him, from heaven.
The delinquent refuses to wear an orthopedic shoe, which the man has bought for him, He also accuses the man of molestimg him
You wznt to read a Flannery O’connor story with a devastating ending? Try “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
Any group of “refugees” made up of mostly military age males is an INVASION and they would have been shot or arrested and deported pre 1960 as they should be now.
Just look at ANY images of WW2, WW1, Vietnam/Korean war genuine refugees, all oldies, women and children.
How anyone can call an ideological-economic invader a refugee is beyond me.
But as I have posted often, those allowing them entry want to change the ideology and the racial status of every western country and NOT for the better.