As the West disintegrates, its frenzy of self-affirmation becomes more grandiose and grotesque. Our elites, the manufacturers of what passes for culture, arrange mass rites that attest to their greatness and benevolence. The people stand in awe, and just as critically, they are entertained. Nowhere in the United States is this more evident than at the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is not simply a profit bonanza for casinos and network television or mere proletarian distraction; it embodies a potent means of social control. Played in the first week of February, the National Football League’s championship game sets the tone for advertising and entertainment in the coming year. It is also a useful platform to propagandize and condition a population of 300 million. America clearly enjoys its indoctrination, as all too many revel in this spectacle’s base nature. People who have not the slightest interest in football will excitedly gather around billboard-sized TV screens to watch the unveiling of a new commercial for erectile dysfunction pills.

“We should expect tyranny to result from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty”.

-Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 564 a

This December, as many Americans attended to their rituals of shopping, spectator sports and celebrity voyeurism, the 2012 fiscal year’s National Defense Authorization Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It has now been signed into law by President Obama. This legislation has attracted some controversy, if characteristically muted, thanks to one of its provisions in particular. The U.S. military will be granted the power to detain citizens on the soil of the Land of the Free for indefinite periods of time. All that’s needed to do away with due process is the suspicion of involvement with “terrorism,” an activity elastically defined[1].

Well-meaning commentators have expressed some shock at the passage of an act that enables martial law and interminable vacations to Guantanamo. America was founded on the concept of inalienable rights! Critics and opponents of the liberal order, however, are in no way surprised at this development, for it was decades in the making. With the NDAA, our policy elites have appropriated a mask of legality to manage the chaos they themselves engineered. The rights once upheld as inalienable were ultimately a fanciful construct, a fiction employed in the service of enlightened government.

As Western democracy evolves and extends its power across the world, its ascendance must be secured and made absolute. Serious resistance abroad and at home will surely be crushed. With hearty approval of the new act, Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that America had now assumed its place as a segment of a much larger battlefield for freedom. Old fairy tales of civic virtue have outlived their usefulness in an age of globalism; the new narrative of universal terror assures us liberty and equality forever. A CIA officer-turned-security consultant explains the need for ubiquitous surveillance and government intrusion into all spheres of life:

If we watch – in the United States, in Germany, Sweden, the U.K. – things are constantly at a low boil and we always need to be on our guard…This can take place just about anywhere.

Terror and tyranny are inevitable byproducts of democracy, the one legitimate form of rule permitted by Washington to the tribes of humanity. Our struggle for the rights of man must by necessity incur some casualties, but such bloodshed waters the tree of liberty. Tabulated (or not) as collateral damage, Pashtun villagers are ripped apart by Hellfire missiles launched by drones so that one day girls from that very community may go to an NGO-run school and learn about voting and contraception. Yet when a Pakistani who has taken U.S. citizenship attempts to blow up Times Square in revenge, no one in America’s political and media establishment seems the least bit curious as to his motives. The entire affair is written off as business as usual in the Open Society--after all, it could have taken place anywhere. This regime is the culmination of liberalism’s logic; it is what U.S. forces patrolling the Hindu Kush and all other corners of the earth defend. We fight them over there to invite them over here, for peace and unity in our world must first be enforced through universal war.

While accessing a video about dinosaurs on the BBC Newsbeat, I came across another, which struck me as rather peculiar: Gemma Massey on Life as a Porn Star.

Silly me. There was I, expecting a grim tale of drugs, plastic surgery, and venereal disease, when I was treated, instead, to an upbeat feature about the joys of being an international porn star, in LA, complete with finger-snapping dance music, camera shutter sound effects, and dynamic editing.

It rather looks like a fashion feature or Hollywood report on a youth channel.

For two minutes we experience a 28-year-old female, disfigured by sun-beds, implants, peroxide, and Botox, talking about how she makes ridiculous amounts of money; has cars and houses and plastic surgery paid for at the click of a finger; and works subject to rigorous health and safety standards, much safer, really, than regular dating.

I would have expected this type of reporting from Channel 4, a slick multiculturalist organ that caters for middle class liberals and has a well-established track record of scabrous titillation in the guise of either youth entertainment or gritty or thought-provoking documentary.

This is the BBC.

It may be difficult for those overseas, unfamiliar with this once great British institution, to appreciate exactly how far the goalposts have moved, vis-à-vis present interpretations of providing a public service, so it is worth reminding ourselves of what the BBC used to look and sound like:

Bear in mind that the likes of certain well-known military historian would still consider that a degenerate version of the BBC as defined by Lord Reith, the corporation’s controller from the latter’s inception in 1927 until 1936.

Indeed, the BBC was set up by the British government as a public service (funded by tax-payers) and Lord Reith’s mission was to educate the audience through serious programming. He—and I have spoken to at least one person who remembers this—insisted that radio announcers wore dinner jackets while on air. Addressing the Empire was a considerable responsibility, and one had to rise to the occasion.

One now thinks of Lord Reith in his grave, and can only wonder at how many revolutions per second he spins.

The inequivocal message sponsored by the BBC in 2011 is that for a girl to have herself filmed naked, with genitals in full view and copulating with strangers for money, is a rather brilliant career choice: after all, even Massey’s parents decided that it was quite alright after she told them how much money she was making for relatively easy work.