The Monarchist 1.0
Defending the British Crown Commonwealth and the English-Speaking Peoples
[+] HONOURING OUR PATRON, SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, VICTOR OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
[+] HONOURING OUR QUEEN, ELIZABETH THE SECOND, ON THE 80TH YEAR OF HER BIRTH (1926 - 2006)
[+] HONOURING OUR KING, SAINT EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, ON THE 1000TH YEAR OF HIS BIRTH (1005 - 2005)
[+] HONOURING OUR HERO, LORD NELSON, ON THE BICENTENNIAL OF THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR (1805 - 2005)
[+] HONOURING OUR SONS, THE QUEEN'S COMMONWEALTH SOLDIERS KILLED IN THE 'WAR ON TERROR'
Chief Warrant Officer Robert Girouard, 46, Royal Canadian Regiment, Nov 27, 2006 (Afstan)
Staff Sergeant Sharron Elliott, 34, Intelligence Corps, Nov 12, 2006 (Iraq)
Private Jacob B. Kovco, 25, Royal Australian Regiment, April 21, 2006
[+] HONOURING OUR VETS ON THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE VICTORIA CROSS (1856 - 2006)
Sunday, September 24, 2006
A peoples who dare not speak their name
I'd like to strike a discordant note. It is trye that we good ol' Tories love a bit of Hell-in-a-Handcart-ism: I suppose it makes us feel rather validated. We spend years of our lives harumphing over the morning's Telegraph and declaiming to long-suffering loved-ones that if things like these are allowed to go on we'll all be dead or enslaved by 1974 or some such thing.
Very sadly, then, I must say that I can't agree with your delightfully pessimistic evaluation of the United Kingdom's national future. Aside from the remarkably obvious fact that we are the only country in the Anglosphere in which the opposition is more robust about the terror threat than a pro-Iraq War government, there are, I think, a few pointers that we're not all doomed yet.
To quote from Melanie Phillips' excellent book, Londonistan, "[I]n the US there has, at least, been a counteroffensive. The grip of the left-wing intelligentsia has been loosened by the growth of conservative think tanks and publishing houses, talk radio and now the internet bloggers. In Britain, by contrast, there has been no equivalent insitutional challenge to the hegemony of the left... In the United States, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout."
It seems rather self-evident that her very writing of those words invalidates them. And it is not just her. Michael Gove has argued the case even more eloquently in Celcius 7/7. And in the blogosphere, as Jim Bennett has demonstrated, all the English-speaking world occupies the same Information Space, with just as many hard-left multicultists and paranoid conservatives in London as there are in Ottawa, Washington, Canberra or Wellington.
Moreover, in Britain's case in particular, my keen desire to see only disaster just can't carry me that extra mile. To quote Melanie Phillips again, this time concerning the Danish Cartoonistan demonstration in London, "Not only was such open incitement to murder and terrorism allowed to go on, but at the time the only action taken by the police was actually directed against those passers-by who objected to such displays. People who tried to to snatch away the placards were held back." Quite so. Ordinary Londoners, not all of them owners of white vans, tried to resist, regardless of the attitude of the State.
To conflate the national character with the policies of a nation's State would be to condemn half the world to the status of violent, ignorant savages - and while we may be tempted to do that sometimes, we must admit in our more rational moments that it is not so. A government is not the same thing as a people.
Put simply, if this is really 1938, as many seem to suggest, then so what? The Churchills were still voices in the wilderness, and national self-abasement seemed a small price for Peace in Our Time; but when the fat hit the fan, it did not take months, or weeks, but a matter of days before British people had stopped telling themselves that Hitler would be a good little Fascist if only we behaved sensitively, and had instead started crawling through Burmese swamps with machetes, saddling up the camels in the Ethiopian mountains, training bootless Gold Coasters in the art of plastic explosives and deposing the King of Egypt at the point of a Lee Enfield.
Already decades past our prime, the old imperial spirit was dug out from wherever it had been put, and the world trembled. To quote the great GK Chesterton,
"Smile at us, pay us, pass us, but never quite forget
That we are the people of England that never have
spoken yet."
Give us a chance, laddie. We'll surprise you yet. We always do.
Lastly, even if you are right and Olde Ynglande is done-for, I can't really despair. England is not a place, or a people, but an idea. All of us - you and me, and Stephen Harper and John Howard and George Bush and even the Prime Monster of New Zealand Helen Clarke - we are all That Corner of a Foreign Field, even though I'm the only one with a British passport, and I'm from southern Africa.
There is a word for what we share in common, for that intangible Thing which makes Canada more like Australia than like Korea. That word is 'British', whether or not Clarke & Co would like to admit it - and in fact it would take several sessions of dental torture to make many of you in the former Dominions admit it, in spite of the fact that it is demonstrably true. We are the civilisation that dare not speak its name. Rome fell, but it was rotten to the core anyway and its spirit lived on in the East. No Byzantine felt sad for Rome because they were the repository of its Genius and Rome was only a few ruins.
So I'll fight for the Motherland if it gives me the opportunity, but if we lose and I'm still alive at the end of it, I'll be off Down Under or across the Atlantic - not as an exile but, as Joe Chamberlain himself might have put it, as redistribution of population within the nation.
POSTED BY CATO FROM LONDON, ENGLAND
POSTED BY: The Monarchist AT 12:01 a.m. | LINKS |
I'd like to strike a discordant note. It is trye that we good ol' Tories love a bit of Hell-in-a-Handcart-ism: I suppose it makes us feel rather validated. We spend years of our lives harumphing over the morning's Telegraph and declaiming to long-suffering loved-ones that if things like these are allowed to go on we'll all be dead or enslaved by 1974 or some such thing.Very sadly, then, I must say that I can't agree with your delightfully pessimistic evaluation of the United Kingdom's national future. Aside from the remarkably obvious fact that we are the only country in the Anglosphere in which the opposition is more robust about the terror threat than a pro-Iraq War government, there are, I think, a few pointers that we're not all doomed yet.
To quote from Melanie Phillips' excellent book, Londonistan, "[I]n the US there has, at least, been a counteroffensive. The grip of the left-wing intelligentsia has been loosened by the growth of conservative think tanks and publishing houses, talk radio and now the internet bloggers. In Britain, by contrast, there has been no equivalent insitutional challenge to the hegemony of the left... In the United States, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout."
It seems rather self-evident that her very writing of those words invalidates them. And it is not just her. Michael Gove has argued the case even more eloquently in Celcius 7/7. And in the blogosphere, as Jim Bennett has demonstrated, all the English-speaking world occupies the same Information Space, with just as many hard-left multicultists and paranoid conservatives in London as there are in Ottawa, Washington, Canberra or Wellington.
Moreover, in Britain's case in particular, my keen desire to see only disaster just can't carry me that extra mile. To quote Melanie Phillips again, this time concerning the Danish Cartoonistan demonstration in London, "Not only was such open incitement to murder and terrorism allowed to go on, but at the time the only action taken by the police was actually directed against those passers-by who objected to such displays. People who tried to to snatch away the placards were held back." Quite so. Ordinary Londoners, not all of them owners of white vans, tried to resist, regardless of the attitude of the State.
To conflate the national character with the policies of a nation's State would be to condemn half the world to the status of violent, ignorant savages - and while we may be tempted to do that sometimes, we must admit in our more rational moments that it is not so. A government is not the same thing as a people.
Put simply, if this is really 1938, as many seem to suggest, then so what? The Churchills were still voices in the wilderness, and national self-abasement seemed a small price for Peace in Our Time; but when the fat hit the fan, it did not take months, or weeks, but a matter of days before British people had stopped telling themselves that Hitler would be a good little Fascist if only we behaved sensitively, and had instead started crawling through Burmese swamps with machetes, saddling up the camels in the Ethiopian mountains, training bootless Gold Coasters in the art of plastic explosives and deposing the King of Egypt at the point of a Lee Enfield.
Already decades past our prime, the old imperial spirit was dug out from wherever it had been put, and the world trembled. To quote the great GK Chesterton,
"Smile at us, pay us, pass us, but never quite forget
That we are the people of England that never have
spoken yet."
Give us a chance, laddie. We'll surprise you yet. We always do.
Lastly, even if you are right and Olde Ynglande is done-for, I can't really despair. England is not a place, or a people, but an idea. All of us - you and me, and Stephen Harper and John Howard and George Bush and even the Prime Monster of New Zealand Helen Clarke - we are all That Corner of a Foreign Field, even though I'm the only one with a British passport, and I'm from southern Africa.
There is a word for what we share in common, for that intangible Thing which makes Canada more like Australia than like Korea. That word is 'British', whether or not Clarke & Co would like to admit it - and in fact it would take several sessions of dental torture to make many of you in the former Dominions admit it, in spite of the fact that it is demonstrably true. We are the civilisation that dare not speak its name. Rome fell, but it was rotten to the core anyway and its spirit lived on in the East. No Byzantine felt sad for Rome because they were the repository of its Genius and Rome was only a few ruins.
So I'll fight for the Motherland if it gives me the opportunity, but if we lose and I'm still alive at the end of it, I'll be off Down Under or across the Atlantic - not as an exile but, as Joe Chamberlain himself might have put it, as redistribution of population within the nation.
POSTED BY CATO FROM LONDON, ENGLAND
POSTED BY: The Monarchist AT 12:01 a.m. | LINKS |
Comments:
Can't see the comments?If you are unable to see the comments, your browser may have javascript turned off or may not support javascript. Check your security settings. Otherwise you can click here to access to comments in regular HTML from the TheirSay! Comment Server.
.gif){kind=small}
.gif){kind=small}
