As the purveyor of a family-friendly website, I have been reluctant to join in the popularization of the epithet "cuck" - as in "cuckold", as in "cuckservatives", etc. Yes, yes, as a practical matter, most mainstream conservatives are hopeless squishes who haven't conserved a single thing and for whom, as I complained to John Oakley in Toronto the other day, no hill is ever the hill to die on. But cuck-talk's not my bag, and, as a Chaucer fan, I dislike the way it advances the cyber-porn fetishist's re-definition of "cuckold" - a man who is not only aware of his wife's infidelity but turned on by it - as opposed to its ancient meaning, of an oblivious fool of a husband who discovers too late he's now grown cuckold's horns.
Oh, and also I see that one of the super-butch pseudonymous warriors over at YouTube calls me a "cuck" for being so "beta" as to interview a girl. So Mr "Schuldkult" has apparently further re-defined "cuckold" and, indeed, "beta male" to mean anyone who consorts with women: Apparently a real man prefers to sit in his bedroom and maintain the "purity of his instrument", as Mimi Rogers complained of her ex-husband Tom Cruise.
Nevertheless, I think we should make an exception to our general "cuck"-free-zone rule for the case of contemporary Britain, which is literally descending into the United Cuckdom - that is to say, an entire nation that sits back and accepts that its women are to be preyed upon. Eight days ago The Sunday Mirror reported on "Britain's 'worst ever' child grooming scandal". The headline editor's sub-quotes are most prudent: This is the "worst ever" at the time of writing, but who knows what'll come along next week? This time it's the Shropshire town of Telford:
Hundreds of young girls raped, beaten, sold for sex and some even KILLED
If you're saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Telford? Surely you mean Rotherham? Or Rochdale? Or Oxford? Or [Your Town Here]?", well, yes, this story reads (especially for yours truly, who spent several days with the poor damaged young 'uns of Rotherham) with a certain numbing familiarity:
"Hours after my second termination, I was taken by one of my abusers to be raped by more men.
"The worst moment came just after my 16th birthday when I was drugged and gang raped by five men.
"Days later, the ringleader turned up at my house and told me he'd burn it down if I breathed a word of what had happened."
As in Rotherham and everywhere else, all this was happening in plain sight. The Spectator's Douglas Murray:
Every arm of the state – including council staff, social workers and the police – allowed the mass gang-rape of children to go on in their town. And we learn – once again – how fear of accusations of 'racism' meant that the identities of the culprits were hidden and cases were not investigated.
Because, as in Rotherham, it was white working-class girls being gang-raped by "Asian" men - "Asian" being the coy euphemism for Muslim males of Pakistani origin, notwithstanding that it's immensely insulting to Indian Hindus, Sri Lankans, Chinese, etc. When Douglas indicts the various "arms of the state", we should also add the politicians - Labour and Tory - for whom these stories are not helpful to the multiculti narrative. Which is why, in the week of Telford, they chose to ban and deport more explicit threats to public order and social tranquility such as, er, Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone. But, as Douglas notes, we should also indict another arm of the state - the dominant national broadcaster. The BBC was so panicked by the mass sex-slavery of Shropshire children by Pakistani men that, as the German media did after the Cologne assaults, they chose not to cover it at all. It wasn't on the BBC News homepage, or the BBC England homepage, or even the BBC Shropshire homepage - although in fairness, after 36 hours of negative online comments, someone from BBC Radio Shropshire managed to file a report on the subject that you'd be forgiven for not spotting because it got less prominence than a compilation called "My Telford", the usual bit of feelgood community boosterism.
When the child-sex crimes of lifelong BBC presenter Jimmy Savile were posthumously exposed, Commander Spindler of the Metropolitan Police piously announced:
Jimmy Savile groomed a nation.
But Savile's old enablers at the Beeb and Spindler's colleagues in the British constabulary are also grooming a nation. They're grooming Britons to accept that the serial mass gang-rape of English girls is just a social phenomenon, part of the natural order - regrettable perhaps, but nothing to be done about it; and thus the mountain of human debris is merely a small price to pay for the benefits of vibrant diversity. Which means the real problem is these ghastly types boorish enough to draw attention to the sacrifice of English maidenhood to the volcano gods of multiculturalism. By contrast, the BBC knows that the proper response is a brief story on Radio Shropshire followed by Part 457 of the "My Telford" diversity fairytale.
As I told Mark Steyn Club members last year of my meeting with the victims of Rotherham:
To Mad Ash and his fellow 'Asians', the likes of Jessica and Katie are 'white slags'. To Her Majesty's Constabulary, they're mere 'Paki-shaggers', and thus unworthy of valuable police resources. The girls recall the night Mad Ash's brother Bannaras was in his car having sex with a twelve-year-old. A 'jam sandwich' - a police cruiser - pulled up alongside, and the officer rolled down the window. 'She's just sucking my c**k, mate,' said Bannaras Hussain.
The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain's twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like 'a pack of animals', for a thousand and more 'Paki-shaggers' and 'white slags' all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away ...and leaving them.
Jessica kept a detailed diary of what had happened to her. She took it to the cops. It 'disappeared'. There was one kindly officer, but the others told him to back off, and, when he didn't, he died in an accident. Katie puts the word 'accident' in air quotes. Rotherham is a land of coincidence. 'Some of these things can happen, but not all of them, not in one town.'
And not all the same coincidences, all the same rationalizations, the same write-offs of "Paki-shaggers" and "white slags", in town after town after town. And the same insistence by authorities that this time they've learned their lesson, and it won't happen again. Until the next time, in the next town, in Yorkshire, in Lancashire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire...
And still the police and the social workers and the politicians and the media roll up their windows and drive away.
Oh, they can get worked up over ancient disc-jockeys who copped a feel on "Top of the Pops" in 1973 and thereby committed what the illiterate coppers call "historic" sexual abuse. But, in the face of truly "historic", truly unprecedented sexual abuse of thousands of English girls day in, day out, year after year, all they can manage is a fatalistic shrug. "Cuckolds" in the contemporary sense is a good word for the British state's attitude to what's happening. So is "wittols", the 16th century neologism for those who are aware that they're being cuckolded and go along with it. It seems reasonable to assume that the mass sexual exploitation of young girls is occurring in every English town with even a modest (as in Rotherham) "Asian" population, boundlessly cocksure and assertive, and a feeble British officialdom too cowed and appeasing to resist. The real word for what is happening is evil - for a society that will not defend its youngest and most vulnerable girls is surely capable of rationalizing many more wicked accommodations in the years ahead.
To channel Chaucer, British officialdom in Shropshire and elsewhere does not "demen of myself that I were" a cokewold - believe itself to be a cuckold; it simply accepts that, with all these different cultural traditions, a town shal nat been inquisityf of where its daughters are every night. A prudent sensitive man confines himself to celebrating diversity, and of all those complicating factors he nedeth nat enquere.
What happened in Telford is shameful; when a nation declines to be ashamed, that is far worse, and very telling.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my guest-hosting stint for a full hour of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and culminating with a very different kind of telly in Paul McCartney's lovely song for Cilla Black's variety show. In between came a brace of St Patrick's Day observances - featuring Hillary on parade and Liam Neeson fighting the Irish Civil War. Oh, and don't forget the latest Mark Steyn Show, in which I talk to Canadian free speech heroine Lindsay Shepherd. If you were face down in the Guinness and a bag of pickled-onion Taytos all weekend, we hope you'll start your week by checking out one or more of the above.
~Programming note: Today, Monday, I'll be live with Tucker Carlson, coast to coast across America at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, with a rerun at midnight Eastern.
If you prefer me in non-vision, I'll be here tomorrow, Tuesday, with another of our Clubland Q&As, in which I take questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 4pm Eastern in North America - that's 8pm GMT, 9pm in Europe, 10pm in the Middle East, 11pm at the post-election victory knees-up in the Kremlin ...in other words, an hour earlier than usual due to the western hemisphere moving to Summer Time a fortnight or so before the Europeans and others do. If you'd like to join The Mark Steyn Club and shoot me a question, you'll find more details here. Or, if you're personally antipathetic to me but the lady next door's quite partial, why not sign her up for a Gift Membership, or treat her to a SteynOnline gift certificate?
