At my age, high school is mostly just a dim blur in the rear view mirror with only a few specific memories standing out. One of these was a presentation by a Catholic priest in my humanities class (something that would never be allowed today!) and, specifically, his comments that the concept of "human rights" and respect for women is rooted in Christianity. It doesn't natively exist in other cultures; and where it exists today, it is because of their exposure to Western Civilization.
I posted yesterday how with the decline of the influence and power of the West, native cultures are reasserting themselves, using Afghanistan as an example as it has once again legalized slavery and eliminated many protections for wives. But it is happening in the West as Western leadership has abandoned the principles of Christianity even if they still pretend to honor those principles.
A good example of this is Great Britain which is increasingly becoming a bizarre mashup of atheism and Islam. Instapundit linked to an article by Dexter Van Zile entitled "The Rape Gang Crisis: Modern-Day Slavery on British Soil." He begins by noting that sociologist Orlando Patterson, in his 1982 book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, "defines slavery not primarily as a legal relation of property , but as 'the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.'"
He argues that this condition constitutes social death, a profound form of existential exclusion where the enslaved person is rendered a non-person in social terms. Slavery, in Patterson’s view, entails three key constituent elements:
- Violent domination—the constant, naked exercise of force and total power over the slave, approaching limitless control from the master’s perspective and total powerlessness from the slave’s.
- Natal alienation—the slave is severed from all legitimate claims of birth, kinship, ancestry, and social belonging; they cannot form or inherit independent social ties, rendering them “socially dead” from the moment of enslavement (and often by birth in hereditary systems).
- General dishonor — the slave is degraded, stripped of honor, publicly shamed, and treated as inherently inferior or worthless, reinforcing their exclusion from the moral and symbolic community.
In the grooming gangs cases (such as those in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and others), thousands of vulnerable young girls—predominantly white and British—were systematically raped, trafficked, and exploited over extended periods by organized groups of men, largely of Pakistani Muslim heritage. The victims were subjected to prolonged sexual servitude akin to slavery.
Applying Patterson’s framework, it’s clear these girls experienced a modern analogue of social death ....
After discussing how the victims of the grooming gangs meet the criteria for slavery and "social death", Van Zile continues:
These young women—born and raised as citizens in the UK—were effectively enslaved in their own country, reduced to non-persons whose suffering was tolerated or ignored. This was facilitated by a tacit coalition: the perpetrators who exercised the domination, and elements of native British elites (police, social services, local councils) who, according to multiple official inquiries (e.g., Alexis Jay’s 2014 Rotherham report documenting ~1,400 victims abused 1997–2013), repeatedly failed to act decisively—often citing fears of racism or cultural sensitivities.
By turning a blind eye or downplaying the crimes, authorities effectively sacrificed these girls to maintain fragile social order. They purchased compliance from segments of the Pakistani/Muslim community, avoiding backlash that might have demanded greater assimilation and a badly needed cultural reckoning with the ideology of Islamism.
With the rape gang crisis, we see a perverse exchange where the social death of vulnerable girls was tolerated to manage tensions in a multicultural democracy. The result was not chattel slavery in the classical sense, but a grave, organized form of modern sexual enslavement that inflicted profound, lasting social death on its victims.
He concludes that by tolerating--or, more correctly, covering up--these events, "British elites have likely poisoned intergroup relations in the United Kingdom for a long, long time." It is too bad that Van Zile was not familiar with the research by Robert D. Putnam regarding social trust and social capital, because then Van Zile would have recognized that the destruction of social trust was not caused by the toleration of the rape gangs, per se, but is inherent in a "multicultural" society. Merely having large populations of Pakistanis in the UK destroys social trust even if the Pakistanis had been upright citizens that worked to assimilate.
But back to question of why or how was this allowed to happen. Van Zile focuses on the expedient answer: British officials were willing to sacrifice these girls--even though they numbered in the thousands--to maintain civil order. (In other words, they feared if it got out, it would be their heads that would roll--figuratively speaking of course).
But there is a deeper reason which is that the strong, confident Christianity that made Britain a great power is gone. British elites, both the elected and unelected, are no longer Christian or patriotic. Many are from alien cultures.
Here is an example of how far Britain has fallen from when Britain was great. "In December 1829," this BBC article notes, "Lord William Bentinck, the first governor general of British-ruled India, banned sati, the ancient Hindu practice of a widow immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre." Violation of the ban was treated as murder and punishable by death. It is from this background that we get the response of Sir Charles James Napier--Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India from 1843–1847--to a Hindu priest’s objection to the prohibition of sati:
Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
Unfortunately, though, that was not the end of the matter, and after the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, the British softened the law against sati in order to appease high-caste Hindus who had played a leading role in the rebellion.
The 1862 regulation repealed both the penal provisions which said that sati would be punishable as culpable homicide and the other imposing that the death penalty in aggravated cases. It also meant that it allowed the accused to claim that the victim had consented to her life being terminated at her husband's funeral, so it was a case of suicide rather than a murder.
Mr Mitta writes that the dilution of the sati rule was a "response to the simmering grievances against social legislation" - outlawing of sati, a 1850 law empowering outcaste and apostate Hindus to inherit family property and a 1856 law allowing remarriage of all widows.
But the immediate trigger for pushing through a diluted law was the "outrage among upper-caste Hindu soldiers" who were incensed over reports that cartridges had been greased with cow fat.
In the first half of the 19th Century, the British confidence and Christian culture led them to ban, at pain of death, the killing of women in India. Within 50 years, that confidence had diluted to the extent that to keep the peace, the British were willing to sacrifice the lives of untold numbers of Indian women to appease the Indian elites. Now, 200 years after the British tried to eradicate the practice of sati, the British culture and its Christianity is so weak the the elites had no compunctions of sacrificing the lives of thousands of native British girls to appease a foreign population on British soil. What next? Jizya taxes? Looking at the benefits that Muslim immigrants receive, that apparently is already in place. Blasphemy laws? Britain has them. Executing those who dishonor Muhammad? Coming soon to a council near you.
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