Let slip the docs of war

That’s Mark Steyn’s funny line, at the Corner, talking about the huge number of immigrant doctors including Musulmen (or is it Musulmans?) in Britain.

As an index of the growing influence of immigration restrictionist arguments among mainstream conservatives such as Steyn, he says this:

That’s one of the lessons from the last few weeks in America: immigration as a societal bonus may be grand and enriching, but a dependence on mass immigration is always a structural weakness, and should be addressed as such.

Truly, that is a most unusual and uncharacterisic idea coming from Steyn, who prior to a few weeks ago had never in his whole writing career uttered a single critical thought about immigration, or indeed any thought at all. Where could he have gotten it? Maybe from my Huddled Cliches, part of which was republished in 2004 at FrontPage Magazine:

[R]elying on a constant supply of high-skilled immigrants has somewhat the same effect on a society that welfare dependency has on an individual: it destroys the need and incentive to become independent. It is an escape from reality, shielding us from the painful fact that we are failing to prepare our own citizens to carry on our civilization. If we stopped concealing that failure from ourselves, we would be forced to respond to it in a serious way, doing whatever was necessary to remain a self-sustaining society.

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“Let slip the docs of war” is of course a pun on Antony’s great speech over the body of the assassinated Julius Caesar, in Act III, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play:

ANTONY

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,—
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 03, 2007 11:26 AM | Send