7 Comments
author

No need to be fatalistic. Fighting for values worth fighting for is not a lost cause!

Expand full comment
author

Digby- Difficult to answer your question. However in the West -Stoicism, the value of courage, duty and sacrifice have less purchase than in other parts of the world. That might change but for now the western military is loss averse while its enemies are more prepared to put up with the risk of casualties.

Expand full comment
author

Perhaps not wide open but open enough to create big problems for our society

Expand full comment
author

Have to agree with you.

Expand full comment

Mostly ascribed to Orwell is the following....'We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those that would do us harm.'

The will to fight. We will fight for our families. In the West though families have been under siege for 150 years or more. And now the gates are wide open.

Expand full comment

So many immigrants have different cultures, histories and loyalties abroad. "...to reappropriate of the traditional values of honour, duty, nation and courage..." is a forlorn challenge among the occupoants of what is a hotel not a country anymore.

Expand full comment

Very good point in stressing the importance of education as a means of transmitting the Elite's estrangement from National Identity. It would seem that the Educational establishment has substituted one National myth for a series of disparate narratives based on certain key Identities: which themselves don't cohere. It is perhaps worth considering is that the Post Warrior, Post Heroic, and Post National Elites won't defend it's own values of tolerance and inclusion in the face a traditional, patriarchal, militarized culture from outside the West: a mundane example of this is fate of the Pride flag and its removal from many of the recent pro Palestinian protests.

Expand full comment