The Evil of Degeneracy on Both Sides of the Atlantic

At IBA I found a copied and pasted article about the odious Polanski case by one Rob Taylor who was so far unknown to me. The good thing is that I thus hadn't to give him a link, the bad one is that now I DO know who Rob Taylor is and that he irritated me enough to comment on something I'd rather prefered to ignore.

Basically, it is all about "the evil of Old Europe’s degeneracy" and while the author doubtlessly managed to show how well read he is (whatever that is worth), he failed to prove what, about Polanski's crime as well as about those who defend him, is particularly European. At the end of the day, we have just another pretentious bit of pseudo-intellectual hogwash that serves as an excuse to vent some pretty unpalatable resentments insupportable by reason. Frankly, anybody who talks so much about "degenerates" and what they are doing, gives some reasonable cause for the suspicion that he is somewhat obsessed with it and that gives me the creeps.

Not too surprisingly, this valiant degenerate-buster isn't all that accurate when it comes to facts and I think facts do count, even or maybe particularly if somebody is in the middle a full-blown self-righteous moral outrage. Polanski did NOT "rape that girl violently". If Taylor had bothered to read the notes of the victim's evidence at The Smoking Gun (but then, maybe he has and just doesn't care because it stands in the way of his own verbosity) it would have become obvious even to him that if Polanski would have raped the girl, as opposed to "statutorily raped", the court would have had him by the balls for rape and not for "statutory rape". But then, maybe the court was staffed with evil degenerates from Old Europe. As it really was, the girl maybe complied. She admitted that she had sex before, and at a previous "photo op" Polanski had made her pose topless as well, so she, sexually experienced as she was, must have had at least a whiff of what he was up to. Yet she STILL went with him again to a second "photo session". Obviously the court didn't believe her half-hearted claims of having resisted or -- again -- they would have gotten him for rape and not for statutory rape.

What to make of a mother who lets her 13-year-old daughter go on a hop with such a DOM I better don't say here and no, I am NOT defending Polanski. The fact that his victim was maybe complying (and her mother plain and simply gutter trash) does NOT make him ONE LITTLE BIT better. To make that clear once and for all: A man who has, IRRESPECTIVE OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES, sex with a girl of 13 and knows, as Polanski did, about her age, ought never to leave his prison cell again or at least not entire.

My point is, rather, to speak up for "Old Europe", not to relativize what Polanski did and I think I have a strong case. In evilly degenerate Old Europe, be it back in the Seventies or now, you'd have trouble to find a mother who would be so readily prepared to pimp her underage daughter, whereas in morally upright, clean and family-values-orientated America they just have -- I have covered the topic before -- a cult of "beauty pageants" and "children's beauty pageants" that has elevated the pimping of little girls to an art form and an industry. I don't think it's easy to make a seven-year old girl look like a 30-year old cheap hooker, but they manage.




All this, mind you, is NOT evil and degenerate and, above all, does NOT cater for pedophiles, it is just an expression of healthy, jolly-hockeysticks American family life.

You'll have, too, to go a long way, to find in evil Old Europe, chock-full of degenerates, a Photoshop-service like that, if at all:

Different from the evil, sick and degenerate Old Europeans, Americans are also refreshingly up-front when it comes to the question of what all this is about:

Sadly, it is not a bit funny and if I see Polanski's victim plus Mommy Dearest now posing together, I catch myself first rummaging for my pukebag and then asking myself whether all this is maybe very much in line with the American culture of female attention whoring:

Samantha Geimer (the victim), right, and her mother Susan Gailey arrive at the premiere of the HBO Documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" in New York, on Tuesday, May 6, 2008.

Fancy that: There are two women, one the victim of pedophilia, the other one the pimpette mother of same victim and here they strut, preen and simper at the premiere of a documentary as if it were about them and not about the man who had had illicit sex with one of them as a child while the other one was, practically, consenting.

All this, again, does not make Polanski even a bit better and I fail to see what Polanski's work has to do with it anyway. A pedophile is a pedophile is a pedophile. I find the argument of the "great artist" sickeningly amoral. Let's say, for argument's sake, that Polanski would have spent all the years since 1977 in prison or at least in a situation where he couldn't approach and ensnare barely pubescent girls. What would we have missed? Yeah, right. A couple of good movies. Not more. Get your values in perspective!

Is this a feminist point of view? Good joke! Predictably, those loud-mouthed jerkettes, the most vicious enemies of other women, were the first ones to speak up for Polanski, see... [The links to the cases of feminists defending Polanski I'd provided are dead now. As I've learned about a petition from 2009 demanding a pardon for him in the meantime, I'd like to mention a couple of names from the signee roster and the names of others who defended Polanski publicly: Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Whoopi Goldberg, Kate Winslet, Natalie Portman, Meryl Streep, Catherine Deneuve. So what do we have here? A pedophile, a DOM, several women who stridently supported the unspeakable and unspeakably false-faced #metoo campaign, and a woman whose denouncement of same campaign doesn't seem quite so stellar anymore, now we know that. - The Editrix January 2018.]

Talking about feminism and back to the children's beauty pageants: I wonder what those pimpettes mothers who groom their little daughters for such contests have to say about "women's rights" and the "sexual liberation" of women. I remain adamant that no sane, red-blooded father wants his little girl to pose like that and that they would forbid it had they only the balls. So I boldly claim that those female corruptors of their own children have very probably the upper hand in the family already, if they aren't "single mothers" to begin with, that is. But then, I may be wrong here. After all, I was born and bred in evil, sick, degenerate Old Europe and although OUR fathers may be like that, what do I know about the joys of the non-degenerate life of American families.

I realize quite well that a penchant for very young females is a biological male trait. I am not naive. Maybe you won't believe this, but I know from the time I used to work with horses that even stallions recognize the younger ones and prefer them. I just think that childhood is, if not a biological, but a civilisatory achievement and to end it for the sake of sexual gratification is uncivilised, barbaric and a civilisatory advanced society needs to taboo and severely penalise it.

Another aspect is that I doubt Samantha Geimer, the victim, has done pre-and barely pubescent girls in other cultures a favour with her tawdry exhibition of "forgiveness" towards and exculpation of Polanski, but what the heck. Any- (But ANY-!)thing for some minutes in the limelight. Can you imagine a boy who'd been sexually abused as a child and who'd then pose in "sexy" clothes in front of an audience, an audience, mind you, that is fully aware of his history? I can't.

One last thing and I wasn't sure whether I'd go too far here, specifically as this will exceed the topic of feminism for which this blog stands. However, this "evil degenerate Old Europe" bit made me increasingly angry in the process of writing this entry. So here it is:

Dear Rob Taylor, Old Europe may not always have behaved as well as human decency would have required it towards people of your skin colour (or towards people of their own skin colour) over the course of its history, but, believe me, different from your country, blacks, few as they were here, have never been enslaved at this side of the Atlantic, and even with the feudal system in place, NOBODY has ever been enslaved here. And with which the Kennedy family got away in -- notabene -- 20th century America... that would make any European Renaissance prince, including those of Borgia ancestry, faint.

---

In the process of the modest research for this entry I was appalled to find that "child beauty pageants" are held, albeit not very profusely, in Britain as well. But Britain, this staunch ally of bright and beautiful America, doesn't fall under the definition of "Old Europe" in the Rumsfeldian sense anyway.

Fatherless Generations

In an entry from Monday, The moral development of women, Female Misogynist discusses the integral moral and ethical blindness from which the female sex is suffering. In the comments section she pointed me at yet another entry's comments with the following information regarding German history:

In his Back to Patriarchy, Daniel Amneus said:

"One cannot help thinking of George Kennan's theory that the enormous number of fatherless families created in Germany by the slaughter of World War I was a principal cause of the rise of Naziism, a system satisfying the fatherless child's pathetic search for a father-surrogate with whom he could find himself in sympathetic resonance."

Item: if anyone knows where in George Kennan's work he presented this theory, please let me know.

So in Europe between the World Wars, we had a generation growing up without fathers, a circumstance which consistently leads to delinquency, and a couple of dictators playing father figure to the masses who had been deprived of real fathers. And we all know where that led.

This is a challenging thought, and, no doubt, explains a lot of the woes we are discussing here. But can it be applied 1:1 to German history?

Some data first: Wikipedia has the following figures for WWI-casualties. My brief exerpt below covers the deaths shown as the percentage of the population (military and civilian) and it is everybody's own guess how many male deaths it includes. Apart from one notable exception, which I will discuss below, the figures for the relevant countries are more or less within the same range. Notabene that in the theatre-of-war-countries the civilian losses were much higher and would thus lower the male contingent within the allover percentage.

United Kingdom 2.19%: The United Kingdom stayed safely clear from all dictatorial temptations. How much other woe was caused by the absence of so many men is beyond the scope of this entry.

France 4.29%: Well, France is France. No dictatorship, BUT...

Italy 3.48%: VERY second rate dictatorship, I'd say, and: Italy is Italy...

Bulgaria 3.41% / Romania 9.07% / Kingdom of Serbia 16.11%
The Balkan: The same applies basically to the Balkan. The overproportional number of civilian deaths in Serbia and Romania was due to food shortages and epidemics. Would all those countries have fared better without the loss of so many men? Certainly. Decisively better? I am not sure.

Russian Empire 2.08%: I do not think that the rise of Communism had much, if anything, to do with the losses of male lifes in WWI, but with the fact that Russia was a huge, backward country with a population still deeply steeped in the Middle Ages.

Ottoman Empire 13.72%: The overproportionally lage percentage comes from the huge civilian losses caused by famine, disease and the Armenian Genocide. Still, the military casualties were, with 771,844 deaths and 400,000 wounded, huge. Yet the Ottoman Empire developed later into the only country within the Islamic world that adopted, even if only partially, some modernism, Western values and institutions. Why that is so certainly calls for further questioning.

Austria-Hungary 3.05% / German Empire 3.82%
Nazi Germany: It shouldn't just be asked why Germany adopted a dictatorship, but why Germany adopted a dictatorship whose singular goal was the destruction of the Jewish people. I know that some Jews are deeply offended by the following, although I fail to see why and it's nothing but a fact: Germany would very probably have won WWII had it not invested its main resources into murdering the Jews of Europe. But then, WWII would have made no sense without that goal. It was only ostensibly about righting the (real or perceived) wrongs following WWI. Germany's way to the Holocaust was not a freak of history. In his epochal book "Ideology of Death. Why the Holocaust happend in Germany" John Weiss (a gentile, by the way) bursts that bubble.

The Holocaust happened in Germany, historian Weiss argues, because "the special nature of German and Austrian history" gave an utterly racist form of anti-Semitism "immense power." Weiss examines anti-Semitism's "Christian legacy" in Europe; the role of Martin Luther; the weakness of countervailing Enlightenment ideas in Germany and Austria-Hungary; and the central fact that, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "racism was increasingly used by upper-class reactionaries, middle-class nationalists, and lower-class populists as a weapon against the growing influence of democratic liberalism, economic modernization, and calls for social reform." Weiss reviews the rise of the Nazi movement and its fuhrer, Hitler's relationships with German elites, German (and Austrian) involvement with the death camps, and the postwar efforts of many German leaders (often with Allied support) to hide their prewar racial attitudes.

(From a Booklist review at Amazon.)

I do not think that a fatherless generation could have caused all that. Furthered it? Certainly. But caused? No.

However, I agree thoroughly with the last part of Female Misogynist's quote:

And now we have a large percentage of Americans and Europeans without fathers. And it seems that the Islamic world is willing to offer father figures, ones with a sinister agenda that is nonetheless at least not weak and feminine.

But then, post-Sixties lawlessness or better: prostitution of the law and general moral decline in the West has played a major role here. If I think of all the many German war-widows, many of them destitute refugees from the former German Eastern provinces, who have brought up their children, now in their Sixties and early Seventies, to be functioning, stable and upright citizens, I can not believe in a DECISIVE role of fatherlessness pre-Sixties. But then, those women had still internalized the values of the patriarchal society and were not spoilt rotten -- rather the reverse.

Of course, one can discuss now how many of the leading figures of the so influential and so destructive "68"-movement, who are of exactly that generation, had been fatherless, but that would be fodder for yet another entry.

This entry ends here and the picture below has only marginally to do with it. I happened to find it while I looked for WWI-casualty figures at Wikipedia:

A German prisoner helps British wounded make their way to a dressing station near Bernafay Wood following fighting on Bazentin Ridge, 19 July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Yep, evil white men oppressing helpless womyn.

Nine Million Women or: No Lie Is Quite Too Dirty

I oppose the term "Femi-Nazi" because it is a-historic and blurs the borders between two different phenomena. However, sometimes I am stunned by the affinity of certain totalitarian world views. Here is an excerpt from my latest Roncesvalles blog entry:

At a time where Christians are killed by Muslims, copiously in the Third World and, yet and just, separately elsewhere and both without much interest from public and media, where the world got its collective knickers in a knot that the pope is Catholic, the following from the information site "Katholisches – Magazin für Kirche und Kultur" is of particular importance. "Katholisches" (which means something like "Catholic matters") introduces a book "Toleranz und Gewalt ("Tolerance and Violence") and forwards some details about the dreaded Inquisition, evil incarnate and second only to the 20th century Holocaust of the Jews (if that), in a historical context: Informationen und Zahlen über die Heilige Inquisition aus dem Buch "Toleranz und Gewalt".

According to that book, the Spanish Inquisition has, within the 160 years between 1540 and 1700, passed 44,674 sentences. Of those sentenced, 826 were executed. The book compares this to the Spanish Civil war, where Communists murdered within a time span of six years more than 7,000 priests and monastics. The Roman Inquisition had, between 1542 and 1761, exactly 97 people executed. Another example: Secular jurisdiction executed within the same time span 939 people in the city of Nürnberg alone.

Burning of witches was almost unknown and strictly rejected by the popes. In the 17th century, when all over the Protestant regions north of the Alps the stakes were burning (there is an estimation of 25,000 victims), not a single witch trial was performed. In Spain, about 300 "witches" were burnt at the stakes, in strongly Catholic Ireland 2.

The frequently traded number of 9 million victims can, interestingly, be traced back to Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in the "Third Reich", who intended to fuel thus anti-Catholic resentments. In fact, even his "research team" couldn't fabricate more than 30,000 victims.

Thanks to feminism, the history of the European witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries has become ideologized and bent out of shape to their liking and, interestingly, 9 million is the number incorrectly and widely bandied about. While witch hunts were seen in the early 1900s as outbreaks of religious hysteria for which an ever-sinister and oppressive Catholic church was responsible, in the Seventies, feminist revisionist historians claimed that they had been a systematic campaign by the patriarchal system to do away with the remnants of -- Yeah, right! -- goddess-worshiping pre-Christian religions.

While both concepts are wrong, somewhat predictably, the more idiotic one has prevailed. As Laura Miller puts it in Salon.com:

For a summary of this now-widespread misperception of the "Burning Times," we need look no further than a passage from the best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code": "The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. 'Malleus Maleficarum' -- or 'The Witches' Hammer' -- indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of freethinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture and destroy them. Those deemed 'witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world.' Midwives were also killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth -- a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During 300 years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women" [internal quotations original, source unidentified, but definitely not "Malleus Maleficarum"].

This is an impressively erroneous passage, incorrect almost from beginning to end, but it is contaminated by one morsel of fact: The "Malleus Maleficarum" is indeed a spectacularly misogynistic and twisted book, compiled by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published in 1486 and an essential guidebook and inspiration for witch hunters throughout Europe.

For many years, such volumes of demonology ("findings" on the behavior of demons, witches and their master, the devil) were the main sources for historians of Europe's witch hunts, including such revisionist feminist historians as Margaret Murray and Anne Llewellyn Barstow. The trouble is, demonology texts like "Malleus Maleficarum" -- alarmist calls to arms in a society where many people were skeptical about the threat posed by witches -- amount to advertisements and arguments for the profession of witch hunting. When it comes to what actually happened in the real world, they're about as trustworthy as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In the past two or three decades, however, many historians have turned their attention to more reliable source materials on the witch hunts -- the local records of trials and executions stashed away in hundreds of small towns across Europe and Great Britain. As the historian Jenny Gibbons has pointed out in her admirably lucid 1998 essay "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt," this is hard work, sifting through vast amounts of dull documents written in archaic and often frustratingly obtuse language, but it's the sort of thing real historians do.

Let me repeat: That's the sort of thing real historians do.

No doubt, the knowledge thus retrieved painted a somewhat different picture of Europe's witch hunts and at the end of the day, it was what we all know anyway because people do not change that much. Petty feuds among neighbors, resentments within families, disagreeable local characters, the schemes of power hungry public figures big and small and the disgusting psychosexual interests we know in various forms all anyway. The quotation of the phenomenon Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil" is very apt indeed.

Interestingly, too, some 20 percent of the European average of those tried for witchcraft were men. In some cases, the accused were children. Now try to get that in line with the evil patriarchy.

As indicated in the excerpt of my other blog entry quoted above, the Inquisition was not greatly involved in witch burnings. It was rather a matter of the Protestant sub-culture and while the justification for witch trials was religious, the trials were not performed by churches of ANY denomination, but held in civil courts and prosecuted by local authorities as criminal cases. It shouldn't be forgotten, either, that the power vacuum that developed through the fragmentation of political and legal powers in Germany in the post-Reformation era, made it possible for panics like witch hunts to get their own momentum, when all kinds of moral fundamentalism, that saw the Devil's hand at work in all opponents, run rampant.

In her book "Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany" Lyndal Roper explains in detail that Germany in the late 16th century was a place where marriage and children were difficult to attain because of the estate system and laws that prevented people from marrying unless they could prove that they could support a family, and where illegitimate pregnancies were outlawed and harshly punished. To be a wife and mother was thus a privileged station in life and the target of envy, the base for many accusations of sorcery and witchcraft, different from the political correct history that tries to sell us that witch hunts were organized campaigns by a patriarchial society and a church hell-bent on eliminating all "ancient wisdom". But married women and mothers were by far not the sole targets. When all else is said and done, there are always women who will begrudge other women even their eyesight, and so, somewhat predictably, the cases Roper quotes suggest the opposite to the evil patriarchy scheme, namely that the chief accusers, and the initiating force behind the trials against women, were often -- women, and that the pagan cultures, so glorified in many feminist and "alternative" circles, have, what little records they have left, proven to be every bit as capable of misogyny and brutalizing outsiders and misfits. To summarize: Pagans were no better than Christians, women no better than men and village communities no better than any other human society.

A gift of baked goods that comes with a barbed remark about the recipient's own culinary skills, a quarrel over the price of apples, irritation at someone who doesn't come promptly to dinner when called -- these are the sorts of incidents that precipitated the hideous cruelty of Europe's witch hunts. "It is difficult to comprehend the sheer viciousness of the way villagers and townsfolk attacked those they held to be witches," Roper writes. Then again, if you've ever lived in a small community, is it really that difficult to see how they got started in that direction, if not how they managed to get so far? It may take a village to raise a child, but history also keeps telling us that it takes a village to burn a witch.

So Laura Miller.

Although all that is something anybody with a modicum of common sense knows anyway, there remains a feeling of weird awe towards those women who turn the truth upside down and inside out, who abuse historiograpy to their own twisted ends and who do not shy away from even the most debased of libels and lies, not even those fabricated by a Heinrich Himmler, one of the most effective mass murderers in history.

What Men Perceive as "Romantic Evil"

I happened to find the following by mere chance, while searching for some information on Piper Bill Millin and Lord Lovat at Flickr and it had me floored. I think it fits brilliantly the ongoing discussion about what makes men and women tick so differently.

La Style Anglais

Bad behaviour is more interesting, more downright entertaining, than goodness and rectitude. This is a great gift to the Devil of course, but there's no getting away from it. Who ever heard of a soap opera about sober, sexually continent people who go to bed early and take their holidays in Redcar?

I think this explains why the generals of the Wehrmacht High Command, with their whiff of arrogance, cruelty and romantic evil, have always received more attention than their equivalents on the "good" Allied side. For every biography or television documentary about Viscount Slim, or Alexander of Tunis, there must be a dozen about Guderian or Von Rundstedt and a hundred about Rommel. Yet there were some eccentric and flamboyant characters among the commanders of the wartime British Army...

Guderian? Rundstedt? And -- of all unlikely people -- ROMMEL as examples for "romantic evil"? For heaven's sake, Rommel looked exactly like what he was, the son of a small-town schoolteacher, Rundstedt looked exactly like what he was as well, namely the scion of a family of generations of dour Prussian career officers and Guderian, the only one of the three who shows a smidgeon of dash, looks basically too like what he was, namely the son of another Prussian officer, albeit from a lesser family. All three of them, whatever they may have in fact been, look like the archetype of sober, sexually continent men who go to bed early and take their holidays maybe not in Redcar, but in Warnemünde.

Rundstedt

Rommel

Guderian

The discussion following the "La Style Anglais" picture at Flickr may serve as a key to such an (I think) obvious misconception:

Well, thats a DSO and bar, OBE, MC, 4 ww2 stars (one with a bar, maybe 8th army?), ww1 pair with an MiD, and probably the silver jubilee medal. Don't think there are too many out there with that combination. He looks like a poof but the medal bar proves he's solid English oak.

Alas, with the red hackle on his bonnet and the sword guard of his claymore poking out of the bottom right this 'solid english oak' is most likely a scotsman :) the red hackle is the regimental distinction of the Blackwatch regiment.

The soldier in question is a Commanding Officer from the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). I believe he is Lt Col Critchley a very distinguished soldier and a gentleman. his son carried on the tradition of serving in the Regiment. Neither of which were in the least bit a poof nor English.

Why couldn't he have been a hero and a poof?

Indeed, and that's what men find so hard to understand. I see neither arrogance, nor cruelty, let alone romantic evil, in the German archetypes, just austereness, sobriety and professionalism, and I'd like to know how other women react to the different archetypes. My money is on the Brits, and not on the Germans in their demonstratively sober uniforms, who shout "straight" in marked difference to the elegant, flamboyant, dashing, bordering on the sexually ambiguous, Brits, who show more than just a whiff of arrogance, as I understand it.

Interestingly, the author of the "La Style Anglais" entry contradicts himself by quoting from Evelyn Waugh's "Men At Arms":

He was the great Halberdier enfant terrible of the First World War; the youngest company commander in the history of the Corps; the slowest to be promoted; often wounded, often decorated, recommended for the Victoria Cross, twice court martialled for disobedience to orders in the field, twice acquitted in recognition of the brilliant success of his independent actions; a legendary wielder of the entrenching tool; where lesser men collected helmets Ritchie-Hook once came back from a raid across no-man's-land with the dripping head of a German sentry in either hand.

Frankly, that is not exactly a prime example of goodness and rectitude and a scenario in which the boringly sedate mugs of neither, Guderian, nor Rommel, nor Rundstedt seem quite to fit.

At my other blog there is an entry about Rex Whistler, another one of the Brit archetype, again one who carries that sexual ambiguity, and again one who was found irresistible by many women (and men), a feeling to which I can relate.


And of course, Lord Lovat, the man who triggered off this entry, makes an excellent romantic hero as well:


There is hardly anything more endearing about the male sex, and I am not cynical or jaundiced here, than the trait, which sees something romantic, even if it is romantic evil, in Guderian, or Rommel, or Rundstedt. The great tragedy is that their women are meanwhile eloping with Evelyn Waugh's Ritchie-Hook.

Cross-posted at The Evil Style Queen.

The Corporate State - Blessing or Curse?

At her highly intriguing blog A Letter To The Times, Cassandra Goldman published yesterday the thought-provoking entry Aristocracy fosters high achievement. Bringing back the monarchy seems indeed too weird a concept to merit serious contemplation. But is it really?

The sacred cow, or perhaps I should say golden calf, of “equality” is wreaking immeasurable damage on our society. It started with a principle that at least sounds good, that of “equality before the law”. Of course, equality before the law precludes any sort of nobility or aristocracy, and now we are feeling the lack of those.

The principle of equality before the law had its first major exploitation when feminists demanded that women be treated precisely the same as men by the law. The problem here is that women are not the same as men. Women have different capabilities and needs. Women require more protection from roving criminals; men are more apt to be able to defend themselves... Naturally, the attempt to force the law to treat men and women equally has backfired in a thousand ways, and by now, of course, the legal inequality has simply been adjusted...

The mania for “equality” has created in most people a pathological intolerance for being shut out of anything. It has also led to an excessive emphasis on age, as children or adolescents are among the few people who can still be justifiably discriminated against. In the introduction to a recent edition of one of E. Nesbit’s novels, a modern woman told us everything that was wrong with these nonetheless charming novels. (I don’t have a sarcasm font, but let me assure you that the sarcasm is very much there.) She attacked a scene in which a man took one of the boys aside for a man-to-man talk about how he shouldn’t be mean to his sisters because girls and boys are different, and have to be to do the grownup work of women and men. She was furious at how “patronizing” this was; personally, I wish that the boys I was forced to associate with as a child had patronized me that way. She was also outraged that these upper-class children gave orders to the family’s adult servants, and demonstrated better judgment than they did. She did not explain how she thought the children and servants ought to have related to each other, but I hazard a guess that she thought that these children, who would grow up to have a measure of power and influence in their society, ought to have been deferring to, taking orders from, and perhaps even learning from their servants. Reflect for a moment on whether you wish your laws to be made by people who were taught about the world by servants, or whether you wish your retirement fund to be invested in the stock of a company run by such men, and you will see how absurd the notion is.

[...]

... We are now even seeing various proposals to prevent people from leaving their own property to their own children, because God forbid that those children should have any “unearned” privilege. That parents work for the express purpose of creating a legacy which can be passed down to their descendants, a legacy of property or beliefs or codes of behavior or skills, seems to elude these egalitarians. Deprive people of the right to bequeath a legacy to their own children - which is precisely what schools do when they teach children values different from those of their parents - and soon there will be no more reason for achievement of any sort. We have to endure a bit of “inequality” in order to enjoy the benefits of civilization.

[...]

I submit that people had a healthier attitude towards inequality when it was institutionalized - that is, when we had an aristocracy. A thousand social customs and laws reminded people from day to day of the very real differences in rank and station. This constant reinforcement of inequality of rank no doubt aided people in accepting differences in ability, made it easier for them to accept that some people were better at things than they were. They were used to being unequal; encountering a different sort of inequality was just a fact of life.

In addition, the modern attacks on ability were unknown, because ability was one of the few ways in which those born to a low station could hope to rise. Nowadays we punish people for superior ability. Bright children are expected to wait for their duller agemates to catch up, because what is important is that everyone go through precisely the same indoctrination routine, not that they be taught anything. Capable men see the jobs they have spent years working towards being given to less qualified women who then demand the right to be paid the same amount for part-time work. Such madness was unknown a mere century ago.

Bring back titled aristocracy and we will become a meritocracy again in no time.

A fascinating topic indeed, to which I, a European who was socialized in Germany as well as in England, would very much like to add some points. But before I come to comment on the gist of Cassandra's post, with which I basically agree, I’d first like to nitpick about a certain detail: "Reflect for a moment on whether you wish your laws to be made by people who were taught about the world by servants…". I think most people who grew up in a household that included servants (to which I happen to belong) will disagree with such a summary statement, and specifically the generation of the English aristocracy who were still brought up by nannies. I think it is the easy mutual understanding and acceptance of SOCIAL inequality, an understanding that goes together with a mutual respect as humans, which breeds the positive social climate Cassandra understandably wants to bring back. Case in point: English aristocrats of the old school tend to be uncomfortable around members of the middle classes, but comfortable with the working classes and vice versa. As long as such a "social contract" existed, by the time the parents took over (schools, more likely), the children were very much aware about the world.

The funny thing about my own upbringing is that my father was a Socialist. That, together with the fact that we had a live-in maid (or, as it is put oh-so-coyly today, "help in the house") and a chauffeur who worked in my father’s business as a driver when he wasn’t needed, made me aware at an early age of the absurdity of this outlook. I owe that woman the happy part of my childhood, being lumbered with a mother wo was both, clinging and remote.

In a social climate of jealousy so typical for Germany, we, my mother more than I, were made aware all the time that we were expected to apologize for such a non-politically correct member of the household. I guess it is owing to aristocracy still in situ (socially, even if not politically) that such things are accepted with more grace in England.

But back to the core topic: I couldn’t agree more. I have no children, but what you describe is exactly the reason for the wreckage of lifes I am forced to watch everywhere around me. Beautiful, intelligent children of my friends, now in their twenties, who are wasting their lifes and their precious inheritance, not in a material, but in a spiritual sense, because the parents were unable to convey the values of their class, wrecked families because the live-in-servants were not kept in their places, marrying the wrong partner in the first place and being excrutiantingly unhappy once the honeymoon is over, on a less tragic but still absurd note: women from the oldest of families who are cleaning after their char because they don’t "dare" to tell her to do her job properly. The list is endless.

It is difficult, mind you, to keep up upper-class customs if one is living in a very middle class environment. A friend of mine who was taught (as it is the custom in oldfashioned aristocratic German families) to kiss an old lady’s hand, kissed the hand of the … postwoman as well. I don’t think it is all that easy to teach children social differences if one’s ordinary rented flat in an ordinary block of flats has only one entrance and not a second one for servants, the more as the postwoman may well be living close by and in a bigger one. A corporate society lives from symbols and keeping up the lifestyle of a manor is impossible in a rented urban flat.

However, assuming it would be possible, bringing back the old order would be like trying to put spilled toothpaste back into the tube. If one sees how once respectable (well, as respectable as glossy magazines go) society mags are celebrating scum like the Beckhams, or some scummy pop stars whose names I can’t remember, together with the Royal Family, if one sees (and this is even worse) how easily and gladly the English upper classes are mingling with just that unspeakable scum (Princess Diana and Elton John is only one noticeable example), one loses the faith that “bringing back titled aristocracy” would lead to anything positive, however alluring the thought may be. People degrade so quickly without proper guiding and, worse, irretrievably, and the upper classes are no exception.

That lead me to additional thoughts and maybe I am falling in the same old equality-trap here, but here it goes: I somehow don't believe that the upper classes are full of people magically blessed by nature with better insight and manners and the working classes equally magically endowed with social contentment and lack of jealousy, but that the strict rules of a corporate state forces the people to bring out their best abilities. Moreover, it encouraged the will to get on and maybe to reach a more elevated position, a position that was not just defined by the money one earned (or rather: that comes flowing in) but requires a more intact personality. The haute volée we are currently watching is the antithesis of such a concept, as are the hoi polloi. The corporate state required, too, responsibility from its higher echelons towards society and one's inheritance. To put something back into society as well as into one's own estate was an, albeit unwritten, law. As such, it couldn't be possibly any further away from most American ideals of freedom and liberty. It is as remarkable as interesting, though, that I seem to discover an increasing number of reflections on monarchy by Americans.

Cross-posted at Roncesvalles.