Rotherham has made its splash, had its fifteen minutes and is gone, assuredly with a sigh of relief from the media and politicians on both sides of the big pond. But it left a lot of unanswered questions in its wake, questions that are not going anywhere.

For thirteen years, something on the order of 1400 girls in Rotherham, a typical Midlands industrial city of roughly a quarter-million, were carefully groomed and then turned out as whores by members of the city’s Pakistani Muslim minority. The motive of the Muslims is transparent: Mohammed said it was okay. The reaction of the city’s populace is less so. For thirteen years, not a government official, not a policeman, not a journalist, not a teacher, not a citizen let out a single peep.

How could officials have ignored this state of affairs for so long? In a monolithic governmental culture, attitudes and practices come down from the top and are expected to be followed in detail. The UK is much more monolithic in this sense than the U.S.  What came down in Rotherham was Political Correctness and multiculturalism, with Muslims as a protected class whose behavior was not subject to judgment, no matter how odious or dangerous. Rotherham is another example of bureaucracy in its final state, a limbo where no results transpire and the bureaucrats themselves live only for the golden pension at the end. See Theodore Dalyrmple for further examples.

But the real question involves the people.

1400 girls is a large number, even in a city of 250,000 plus. It is likely that everyone knew at least one of them. They knew what was happening, what those girls were enduring, and who was behind it. And yet, there was no uproar, there were no demonstrations, not a voice raised.

And there is no sign of another class of action, the kind of response that takes place in the shadows, and is spoken of in whispers.

When I was very young, a neighborhood girl was assaulted. This was before rape law reform, and since there were no eyewitnesses and little physical evidence, the police could do nothing. But the description told neighbors exactly who it was, and they informed the girl’s father of his identity.

It happened that the father was connected, but he chose not to use his connections, instead taking his two eldest sons and tracking the rapist down. I’m not sure what happened at that point -- “He’s not going to try that again,” was all I heard. There was no investigation and no arrests.

The question of legality is beside the point. In a very real sense, such actions are beyond legality. A man’s highest duties lie in protecting his children. Particularly daughters who, due to physical constraints, generally cannot protect themselves.  A daughter is one of the jewels of a man’s existence, and his actions in protecting her from harm -- particularly sexual harm -- are simply beyond judgment by outsiders.

That is how things were done. That is how they always have been done, up until recently. We turn much of the responsibility for order and punishment over to society with the understanding that we will be protected. But when a society fails, for whatever reason, we are not, by the very nature of things, obligated to continue honoring the bargain. We are free to act in our own defense, as our ancestors have done since the Serengeti. This is sanctioned by tradition, by religion, by psychology, and by biology.  Modern liberalism devotes much energy to combatting this. It appears that in the UK, it has to a large extent succeeded.

This factor appears to be no longer operative in Rotherham. Over 1400 girls, over a period of a dozen years, were picked up, gang-raped, beaten, humiliated, broken, and then sent out onto the night streets to turn tricks for the sons of Allah.

Apparently, these girls had no male relatives. No fathers, brothers, uncles, or cousins to come to their defense and rescue. There exist no men’s associations that could be appealed to, no amateur sports teams, no workshops or factories staffed by rugged, no-nonsense males who know the ethos of the street. There are no war veterans who understand the skills of combat. There are no churches with devoted ministers or priests to raise the alarm and speak out for morality. Rotherham is a strange town, inhabited only by whimpering capons, female victims, and Islamist trash. Oh, and the bureaucrats too. Let’s not overlook them.

There were no violent confrontations, midnight ambushes, or raids carried out by infuriated, vengeful men. Even the local teenage rowdies failed to so much as nudge a Muslim off the curb. We know this never happened because if it had, the town would have been filled to the brim with social workers, police reinforcements, activists, and media types out to protect the poor oppressed Muslims under siege by white Midland louts. The BBC would have pronounced unctuously on the racism of the “labouring classes” and the Guardian would have published a series featuring photos of the beaten-up pimps at age twelve. Prime Minister Cameron would have given an agonized parliamentary speech, and the EU would have rumbled about multinational intervention. Since none of this happened, we can assume that not a single Islamist nose was bent.

This bodes ill for the future of Britain -- far more so than any separatist urges to the north. It appears that the British have been thoroughly tamed. The Brits were once the wild men of Europe, the “Goddamns,” with an exquisite sense of their own status coupled with a propensity for savage violence (as my ancestors in Armagh well knew.) British commoners were not serfs, but a yeomanry, who had to be courted rather than ordered around. Unlike their continental relatives, monarchs in England spent considerable time on “progresses” through various shires to show themselves to the people and enlist their support.  

All this began to change with the Victorian era. There’s a famous “morality painting” diptych dealing with that transformation. On the first panel, circa 1760, a highwayman levels his pistol at terrified stagecoach passengers. On the second, set about a hundred years later, a jolly conductor in the exact same pose collects tickets in a rail car. (Evelyn Waugh, who purchased the paintings, had a third panel painted in the same style set aboard a 1950s passenger plane with the wing ablaze and a screaming stewardess.)

This is not a bad thing -- highwaymen are in no way necessary for a healthy polity. But it can go too far, and, under the pressure of the welfare state, mass media, the bureaucracy, and a corrupt educational system, it has gone too far in the UK. Britons are becoming Orwell’s proles, spineless and cowardly, living for handouts and sports. The girls of Rotherham are the latest victims.

The U.S. is not Britain. America is a frontier culture, with a tradition of do-it-yourself justice expressed by vigilance committees and citizen posses. That legacy remains strong. When the political establishment fails to keep order in this country, citizens organize to destroy the criminals and often run off failed politicians and lawmen as well. This has occurred repeatedly – in the Carolinas in the 1760s, San Francisco in the 1850s, New Orleans in 1900, Chicago in the late 20s, and Tennessee in 1946. It is the American way of maintaining order, and it works more often than not. If something of the enormity of Rotherham were to arise in much of this country, we could expect that the perpetrators would be shut down in short order.  (And yes, I am referring to armed men taking direct action. There are circumstances where this is the only viable solution, and this is one of them.)

But keep in mind, the same forces are at work here as in the UK. PC and multiculturalism are just as powerful, the media and the educational establishment just as corrupt. The elite care no more here than they do in Blighty. Furthermore, our government is headed by a man with an obsession over the reputation of Islam that is inexplicable if we fully accept the assurances of his supporters. Official America has largely acquiesced to the Rotherham mindset. It remains for the basic America to hold the line.

There are places in this country that would fold as quickly as Rotherham. There are Americans -- you can’t call them “citizens” -- who exist as proles, living from handout to handout, willing to follow orders and turn their backs. Some would give up their daughters as a dhimmi tax without even a whimper.

Rotherham is a warning sign. Corrupt government and ideology, it seems, possess the power to undermine the most basic instincts, the most deep-set relationships, at least among the weak. The people of Rotherham have joined the gute Deutsche, looking the other way as their neighbors vanish into the cattle cars, and the New Soviet Man, drowning his self-loathing in gallons of vodka as his country slides into terminal stasis.

The glorious England of Drake, Gordon, and Churchill may well have vanished with the towers of Ilium. We have to see that the same doesn’t happen here.