John Derbyshire proposes a useful addition to Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell:
If I had written The Divine Comedy I would have added an extra ditch to the ninth circle of Hell—where dwell traitors, fraudsters, and sowers of discord—for the Nation Wreckers.
Putting together my Radio Derb podcast for November 16th I thought I should say something about the Brexit business, now coming to some kind of climax. I haven’t followed the negotiations, and am anyway out of touch with British politics; but it’s plain the Brits are having much difficulty wriggling free of the European Union and setting sail once again as an independent sovereign nation.
That’s a reminder of the cosmic principle that some processes are hard to reverse. “The toothpaste’s out of the tube,” we say; or in Chinese, “The wood has been made into a boat” (木已成舟).
It’s also a reminder of how glibly the Brits were talked into this nation-sized death-trap.
There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.
That was Prime Minister Ted Heath in 1973. Heath would be one of those I’d expect to find in the Nation Wreckers Ditch, along with the unspeakable Tony Blair from the following generation, and Cameron the Clueless and May the Mediocrity from more recent years.
There’d be plenty of Americans in there, too. The U.S. equivalent of Heath’s assurance was of course Ted Kennedy’s speech to the Senate when moving the 1965 Immigration Act:
First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset …
Into the ditch with him!—and Hart and Celler and McCain and Schumer and Ryan and McConnell, and all the liars, fraudsters, and fools of Britain and the U.S.A. who, from either malice or stupidity, transformed settled, stable, well-governed nations that did not want or need transforming into Afro-Latino-Islamo-style corruptocracies.
I don’t think a ditch in the Ninth Circle is sufficient. Grant them their own deeper circle filled with even more hellish torments, for they are literally the very worst people that history has ever known. Even the great evils of history, the Arnolds, the Quislings, the Hitlers, and the Stalins were not as awful as the glib-tongued Nation Wreckers have proven to be.