From an essay in Strategic Culture purporting to explain how the Taliban won:

When an imperialistic society is as corrupt as Britain has been since the creation of the British East India Company in the year 1600, and as America has been since the end of World War II in 1945, with its takeover and control by the MIC (military-industrial complex), which has inevitably produced the cancerous growth of America’s permanent-warfare state, what, then, is a reason to continue living by remaining merely as a colonist or vassal-regime (or even as the imperialist regime itself), which means — when the imposed regime is so profoundly corrupt as any imperialist power necessarily is — to accept such corruption, as this? There’s something that is worse than dying, and it is to continue living under a regime that one utterly despises. That’s a dragged-out death, instead of a quick death. A regime which is as corrupt as any imperialistic regime inevitably is, will be intolerable for a significant number of the residents in any one of its vassal-nations or “colonies.” Death, for them, isn’t such a bad choice, if it means that they will go down fighting to overthrow it. They are driven by the motivation, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” This is a motivation that few, if any, of the imperialistic regime’s hired soldiers (regardless of whether conscripted or not) can match. And when they are foreigners who are fighting on a foreign soil (instead of locals who are defending their land’s own locally determined rulers), they especially and certainly cannot match such motivation, because only the locals can be fighting with a patriotic spirit. This is an intrinsic weakness in any empire. And imperialist leaders tend to ignore it, because they don’t want to understand how repulsive they are to virtually anyone but their own boot-lickers.

I don’t agree with all of that essay, but this is a point worth considering. We have read accounts in recent days — and a source of mine with extensive experience in Afghanistan confirms this — that the Afghan regime we set up was spectacularly corrupt. The author of that essay seems to lionize the Taliban, which I strongly reject. Nevertheless, the fact that the Taliban are scum does not negate the wisdom, if wisdom there is, in his analysis.

I wonder how long it will be before a sufficient number of people in the West — I’m thinking of Europe and the Anglosphere — draw similar conclusions about their own regime. Woke excesses are a staple of this blog, but consider these two recent examples in light of Afghanistan. Here is what Canadian schools are teaching children:

This story appeared in Britain’s Daily Telegraph the other day (I link to the Daily Mail rewrite, because it’s not behind a paywall, but the text below is from the Telegraph:

Police are replacing patrol cars with “hate crime cars” to encourage people to report incidents such as social media comments.

Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke said that the cars painted with the police insignia and rainbow designs are now “part of our vehicle fleet” and will be driven daily by officers on patrol.

However, critics have said that forces should instead focus on policing “real” issues such as knife crime and rape, with the latest figures showing poor prosecution rates.

Ms Cooke, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s (NPCC) lead on LGBT issues, released a video on its Instagram account explaining why police have rainbow vehicles.

Describing them as “hate crime cars”, she said that forces are “always replacing vehicles” and they get the police insignia and “there will normally be then something added on that is to do with the rainbow side of things”.

A spokesman for the NPCC said that they did not have figures on how many had been painted as forces operate independently and it is up to individual forces how many cars they want to convert.

Ms Cooke, who works at Cheshire Police, added that the “cars are there in the communities on normal policing patrol just to show the community that we want you to come forward… It is there to try and give confidence to our LGBT+ community, but also to other under-represented groups”.

She said that the “cost is quite minimal”, but the impact is “huge”.

The number of hate crimes reported to police have more than doubled in recent years, with allegations of transgender hate crime seeing the sharpest rise.

However, cash-strapped forces across the country have faced criticism for focusing on the allegations, a large number of which stem from social media comments.

Even where a crime has not been committed, police record the allegation as a “hate incident”, which could show up on a person’s criminal record checks.

Harry Miller, a former police officer and founder of campaign group Fair Cop, said: “We don’t see the Met with special cars for knife crime, even though the number of stabbings in London is appalling.

“The problem is that the second that you see a rainbow car, you know that it is a police force that has made its mind up about some very contentious issues. You no longer see a police car or a police officer who is there to support everyone, from all political persuasions, without fear or favour.

“They have literally tied their colours to the mast and painted their cars with their political leanings. They are painting rainbows on their cars when we have figures showing that only seven per cent of violent crime ends in a prosecution.

“They have moved from policing crime to policing thoughts and speech, because it is easier.”

How can any morally sane person not have contempt for a social order that behaves this way? What is going to happen when enough people have had enough of it? What happens politically? What happens outside of politics — especially in the US, where many, many people who despise this kind of garbage are armed?

What happens when the New Woke Army, led by SecDef Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs head Gen. Thoroughly Modern Milley, ends up alienating the Southern Scots-Irish who make up the bulk of our fighting forces? What happens when these men and women wake up and realize that their country’s military sees them as problem to be solved rather than kinsmen to be cherished?

In Europe, what happens when waves of Afghan refugees begin to arrive? In 2017, national security academic Cheryl Benard, an expert in refugee crises, wrote a deeply disturbing essay asking why Afghan men in the recent (at the time) refugee surge to Europe were unique in committing shocking sexual assaults on European women. The things Benard recounts shock the conscience. She goes through several possible explanations for this behavior, shooting them all down. But then:

This brings us to a third, more compelling and quite disturbing theory—the one that my Afghan friend, the court translator, puts forward. On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports. Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead. No need to assimilate, or work hard, or try to build a decent life here for yourself—these Europeans are too soft to seriously punish you for a transgression, and their days are numbered.

And it’s not just the sex crimes, my friend notes. Those may agitate public sentiment the most, but the deliberate, insidious abuse of the welfare system is just as consequential. Afghan refugees, he says, have a particular proclivity to play the system: to lie about their age, to lie about their circumstances, to pretend to be younger, to be handicapped, to belong to an ethnic minority when even the tired eye of an Austrian judge can distinguish the delicate features of a Hazara from those of a Pashtun.

I see his point. In the course of my research, I encountered thirty-year-olds with family in Austria who were passing themselves off as “unaccompanied minors.” I met people misrepresenting an old traffic injury as proof that they had been tortured. I learned of an Afghan family that had emigrated to Hungary two decades ago. The children were born there and attended Hungarian schools. When the refugee crisis erupted, enticed by news of all the associated benefits, this family decided to take on a new identity and make their way to Sweden on the pretense of being brand-new refugees. Claiming to have lost their papers during their “flight,” they registered under new assumed names and reduced the ages of their children; the mother declared herself a widow. Now ensconced in comfortable free housing along with their hale, hearty and very much alive father—whom they pass off as an uncle—with a monthly welfare check, they are smug parasites leeching off the gullibility of Sweden’s taxpayers.

Western legal systems are meticulous and procedural, operate on the basis of rules and rights and forms and documents, and consider you innocent until proven guilty. It didn’t take the refugees long to figure out how to leverage this to their advantage. “They’ll stand right there, balding, grey at the temples, and insist that they’re eighteen,” an exasperated Austrian prosecutor told me. Having “lost” their documents, the only way to refute even the most patently absurd such claim is through expensive lab tests. If you have no documents and no shame, you can assert just about anything and then lean back and wait for the system to try and prove otherwise. If you are rejected, no problem: you can launch multiple appeals. Once you have set foot in Europe, it will be almost impossible to get rid of you; indeed, you can literally commit murder. If a court finds you guilty of rape, you need only argue that if you are sent home, your conservative society will kill you for the dishonorable act—then you can’t be shipped out, because EU law forbids extradition if doing so puts the individual’s life at risk. And murderers cannot be sent back to countries that have the death penalty or a judicial system known to be harsh.

… The young Afghan attackers are saying, yes, that they have no impulse control, that their hormones are raging, and that they hate themselves and the world—but most especially, that they will not tolerate women who are happy, confident and feeling safe in public spaces. They are saying that they have no intention of respecting law, custom, public opinion, local values or common decency, all of which they hate so much that they are ready to put their own lives, their constructive futures and their freedom on the line for the satisfaction of inflicting damage.

Read it all. Benard cites multiple accounts of European political authorities and media types downplaying or hiding the horrors. Well, what happens when European publics have had enough, and no longer wish to defend or live by a social and political order that refuses to defend them? Are Europeans still capable of having had enough? We are about to see.

In the US, what happens if the American people lose faith in the regime? What happens when people simply decide to stop obeying, and actively or passively withdraw their consent? What does that look like? What if a significant number of the American people look at the corruption of the elites — governmental, corporate, media, cultural, and so forth — and conclude that this order is not worth defending?

We might be about to see.

This is why these little woke instances I highlight are meaningful. They are broken windows. Remember Broken Windows Theory? It’s a theory from criminology that says the presence of broken windows in a neighborhood is a sign of disorder that conveys to wrongdoers that disorder will be tolerated here, thus breeding more disorder. People assume nobody cares, so they push it further. Specific instances of wokeness are cultural broken windows, signaling to all the presence of a deep disorder in the culture, and inviting more of it.

Those who tell you not to worry about this stuff, that I’m being alarmist, might be sincere and good-hearted, but they are turning a blind eye to something that’s destroying us, rendering us both incapable of defending ourselves, and dispossessed of a cultural order worth defending.