Can you Hear the Gods Laughing?
In the 1964 film ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’ at one stage the narrator
says: “A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has conquered
itself from within”. Then, as the mighty Roman Empire starts to crumble around
him, the Emperor Commodus tilts his head to the skies and says to his childhood
friend, now turned foe, Livius: “Livius, if you listen very carefully, you can
hear the gods laughing”.
I’m reminded of the old saying: “Those whom the gods would destroy, they
first make mad.”
Indeed, it made me think that, when we look around our country, maybe the
gods have been having a high old time of it over the last six decades or
so.
It would appear to me that the gods have particularly had it in for
intellectuals, academics, the legal fraternity, pseudo-intellectuals, Mickey
mouse graduates, the majority of politicians, large sections of the House of
Lords, the civil service, the TUC, vast numbers of logically challenged
celebrities, the BBC, the MSM in general, the Liberal Democrats and the Green
Party.
And let us not forget some of their ivory tower institutions: the
judiciary, the police, the NHS, schools, universities, the professions, the
quangos, major charities (special mention for the National Trust), think tanks,
lobby groups, the ‘jobs for the elite’ network and the Honours
System.
Have you noticed that they all appear to be becoming increasingly batty?
And how, with an intense, fervour that some might call fanatical, they all now
appear to be worshipping an assortment of new and strange ‘gods’ within the
inane, totalitarian, ‘political theocracy’ that is Political
Correctness.
GK. Chesterton is reputed to have said:
“When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t worship nothing, he
worships anything”
Can that explain the emergence of the ‘imposter gods’ such as diversity,
fairness, inclusivity, equality, anti-discrimination, entitlement, dependency,
victimhood, homosexuality, anti-racism, gender confusion and transgenderism; and
is it their unwelcome arrival that has angered the old gods?
Or, on the other hand, it could be that the visiting of these lunacies
upon us is simply the well-deserved retribution for the unbelievably arrogant,
childish, utopian stupidities of the last sixty years. And God knows, if you’ll
pardon the expression, there have been plenty of those.
Would it not have been unthinkable for the wartime and baby-boomer
generations to believe that Great Britain, which saved Europe from Nazi
domination, would then see its own freedom and democracy betrayed by successive
political elites, through the secretive surrendering of their power and
independence to the European Union?
Unthinkable also, that our nation’s fine history would be subjected to
malicious revisionist attacks and that the distilled wisdom of previous
generations would be undermined and scorned. Difficult ethical decisions of the
past would be second-guessed by ill-informed, and often vindictive, lesser minds
from the warm comfort of undemanding theoretical safety.
Confidence would gradually be lost in a political and judicial system
that had been adopted by so many other countries. The verdicts and sentences of
the courts would seem to become increasingly bizarre and at variance with what
the public viewed as justice. The characteristics of faith, honour and fairness
that had attracted so many from foreign countries to come and live here would be
mocked, derided and undefended.
Unthinkable that poppies, the symbol of remembrance of the huge
sacrifices of others, would be sickeningly demeaned, by some unworthy and
ungrateful beneficiaries of those sacrifices, as ‘a glorification of war’. They
would also be burned on the streets by Islamists with apparent
impunity.
And the police, once so trusted, would morph into some sort of bizarre
and unreliable social service; far more concerned with mediating over assorted
made up ‘phobias’, fashionable fads, ‘causes’ and tending to the rights of the
criminals, than the protection, welfare, lasting suffering, and right to
retribution of the victims.
“Come forward and you will be believed” would be the rallying cry of the
Prosecution Service to all and sundry. Unsupported allegations, no matter from
how long ago, would seem to become credible proof. The police and no win, no fee
solicitors might choose to trawl among unscrupulous chancers and opportunists
for witnesses and claimants.
Unthinkable that police would paint their cars to show their ‘right-on’
support for ‘rainbow’ rights. Councils would fly similar flags in
virtue-signalling solidarity. Police would paint their fingernails to
demonstrate their anti-slavery credentials.
‘Professional racism activists’, perhaps secretly concerned at its
natural diminution over the years, would have to constantly invent and imagine a
succession of new forms of perceived prejudice and discrimination to fuel and
perpetuate their political obsession. No innocent humour, gentle TV programmes
from long ago, or children’s toy would be safe from their malignant
scrutiny.
Children would be sexualised and propagandised, at even younger ages, and
could be placed on a ‘racist language’ register for asking an innocent
question.
The term marriage and associated gender-related terms would be redefined
to accommodate an imaginary ‘alternative reality’, and to accommodate a ‘rich
spectrum of broad gender self-identity’.
A street Preacher would be locked up for suspected ‘hate crime’ after
quoting the Bible to a gay teenager.
A man would be arrested for quoting passages from Winston Churchill’s
1899 book ‘The River War’. But flag-carrying Islamic terrorism sympathisers
would suffer no such inconvenience.
Bakers would be no longer be free to refuse work they were offended by.
Bed & Breakfast owners would no longer be free to refuse customers whose
lifestyle offended them. But God help them if they inadvertently offended any of
the special, chosen, privileged groups.
Truly, the list of idiocies, injustices, and stupidities is endless. I
have not talked about multicultural madness, mass immigration, open borders,
Hope not Hate, thought crimes and the speech police. But I hope my point is made
nonetheless.
So I ask, have a quiet listen to the heavens. I suspect you’ll hear
contented, celestial chuckling…
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