What the Luftwaffe Couldn't Do...

...a small bunch of malodorous inchoate commies could: close St. Paul's Cathedral. Douglas Murray writes in the Wall Street Journal:

On Oct. 15, a group emulating New York's Occupy Wall Street decided to set up in the City of London. They originally hit the stock exchange, but after police told them to move on, they've now settled at the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Initially welcomed, the militant campers have spent the last fortnight claiming the area as their own. Dozens of tents litter the cathedral's courtyard; the outdoor walls of businesses surrounding St. Paul's are plastered with messages and posters—some coherent, others less so. Last week the church closed temporarily for the first time since World War II, and the toll of the protesters is sparking public concern for a building that survived the Luftwaffe.

Part of that toll has been the resignation of the Cathedral's chancellor and dean: the former, who is sympathetic to the miscreants and doesn't wish to be around when the police eventually clear them out (as they must) and the latter, who can't see them cleared out soon enough. Murray writes further:

There is no longer one culture in Britain. There are, broadly, two. One of them—remaining dominant at least in name—clings on to the country's traditional, respectable ways. But it is self-flagellating, permanently contrite and never misses an opportunity to abolish itself. The other is constituted of all sorts of narcissisms, special-interests groups and organizations actively devoted to the destruction of our society. Unless the older and finer culture becomes willing to reassert itself, then at some point it too will be completely pushed aside. The culture that wishes to take its place not only asserts itself unapologetically—as it did back in August when riots broke out around the country—but is also not held back by any knowledge, curiosity or pity for what went before.

The States have seen a parallel of this in the decay and disappearance of the once predominant Anglo-Saxon, i.e., WASP, hierarchy and culture. What a peculiar phenomenon it was, hegemons turning on themselves, with their own church, the Episcopal Church, leading the charge. It was inevitable, I suppose. When, in the 1960s, the Episcopal Church (like its forebear the Church of England) placed social change over its already insipid soteriological and moral teachings, the WASP culture lost whatever feeble underpinnings it might have had and would be washed away in the relativistic flood of the later decades.