A LOOK AT BRITAIN
THE NEW BRITANNIA
The Depraved City
by Mark Steyn
The last sigh of liberty will be heaved by an Englishman.
-Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu,
letter to William Domville (July 22,1749)
Sometimes you do live to see it. In America Alone, I pointed
out that, to a 5-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria's
Diamond jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it
would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth
birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have
shrivelled to an economically emaciated, strike-bound socialist
slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar)
the government ran the hospitals, ran the automobile industry,
controlled much of the housing stock, and, partly as a
consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and
confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge
abroad....
Permanence is always an illusion. Mighty nations can be
entirely transformed mighty fast, especially when history comes
a-calling. The "something unpleasant" doesn't have to be
especially so: national decline is at least partly
psychological-and therefore what matters is accepting the
psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the
German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once
were bloodily militarist, and as militantly "European" as they
once were menacingly nationalist.
Well, who can blame 'em? You'd hardly be receptive to pitches for
national greatness after half a century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar,
the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.
BRITISH GREATNESS
Yet what are we to make of the British? They were on the
right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and
they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the
world-perhaps the single greatest force for good. In the second
half of the twentieth century, even as their colonies advanced to
independence, dozens of newborn nation-states retained the
English language, English parliamentary structures, English legal
system, English notions of liberty, not to mention cricket and
all manner of other cultural ties. Insofar as the world functions
at all, one can easily make the case that it's due largely to the
Britannic inheritance. Today, from South Africa to India to
Australia, the regional heavyweights across the map are of
British descent, as are three-sevenths of the G7, and two-fifths
of the permanent members of the UN Security Council-and in a just
world it would be three-fifths. The usual rap against the
Security Council is that it's the Second World War victory parade
preserved in aspic, but, if that were so, Canada would have a
greater claim to a permanent seat than either France or China.
The reason Ottawa didn't make the cut is because a third
anglophone nation and a second realm of King George VI would have
made too obvious a simple truth-that, when it mattered, the
Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of
liberty.
BRITAIN TO USA
And then there's the hyperpower. The transition from Pax
Britannica to Pax Americana, from the old lion to its
transatlantic progeny, was one of the smoothest transfers of
power in history-and the practical, demonstrable reality of what
Winston Churchill called the "English-speaking peoples;' a
Britannic family with America as the prodigal son, but a son
nevertheless and the greatest of all. In his sequel to
Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Andrew
Roberts writes:
Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman
Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when
we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will
bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led
and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking
dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first
centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep
of history they had so much in common-and enough that
separated them from everyone else-that they ought to be
regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars
and pedants will try to describe separately.
TRUE GREATNESS
As to what "separated them from everyone else," there has
always been a distinction between the "English-speaking peoples"
and the rest of "the West," and at hinge moments in human history
that distinction has proved critical. Continental Europe has
given us plenty of nice paintings and mellifluous symphonies,
French wine and Italian actresses, but, for all our fetishization
of multiculturalism, you can't help noticing that when it comes
to the notion of a political West-with a sustained commitment to
individual liberty and representative government-the historical
record looks a lot more unicultural and indeed (given that most
of these liberal democracies other than America share the same
head of state) uniregal. Many Continental nations have
constitutions dating all the way back to the disco era: the
United States Constitution is not only older than the French,
German, Italian, and Spanish constitutions, it's older than all
of them put together. The entire political class of Portugal,
Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under
dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget
how rare in this world is sustained peaceful constitutional
evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere. "The
English-speaking peoples did not invent the ideas that
nonetheless made them great," writes Roberts. "The Romans
invented the concept of Law, the Greeks one-freeman-one-vote
democracy, the Dutch modern capitalism...." But it is the English
world that has managed to make these blessings seemingly
permanent features of the landscape. Take England out of the
picture and there are not just a lot of holes in the map-but the
absence of most of the modern world.
WHY BRITAIN FAILED
As always, Britain's decline started with the money. When
Europe fell into war in 1939, FDR was willing to help London
fight it, but he was determined to exact a price: not just a bit
of quid pro quo (American base rights in British colonies) but a
serious financial and geopolitical squeeze. The U.S. "Lend-Lease"
program to the United Kingdom ended in September 1946. London
paid off the final instalment of its debt in December 2006, and
the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly
surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support
during a war fast fading from living memory z Look at how Britain
shrank during those six decades. In 1942, Winston Churchill told
the House of Commons, "I have not become the King's First
Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British
Empire."' But in the end he had no choice. The money drained to
Washington, and power and influence followed.
BRITAIN AND USA AS ONE
In terms of global order, the Anglo-American transition was so
adroitly managed that most of us aren't quite sure when it took
place. Some scholars like to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943.
One month, the British had more men under arms than the
Americans. The next, the Americans had more men under arms than
the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And,
if it didn't seem that way at the time, that's because it was as
near a seamless transition as could be devised-although it was
hardly "devised" at all, at least not by London. Yet we live with
the benefits of that transition to this day: to take a minor but
not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the
post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory.
As its name would suggest, that's a British dependency, but it
has a U.S. military base-just one of many pinpricks on the map
where the Royal Navy's Pax Britannica evolved into Washington's
Pax Americana with nary a thought: from U.S. naval bases in
Bermuda to the Anzus alliance Down Under to Canadian officers at
Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London's military ties with its
empire were assumed by the United States, and life and global
order went on.
One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of
Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas
Jefferson's parting words to his fellow British subjects across
the ocean: "We might have been a free and great people together."
But ultimately, when it mattered, they were. Britain's eclipse by
its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language,
same legal inheritance, and same commitment to liberty, is one of
the least disruptive transfers of global dominance ever....
OBAMA SEND CHURCHILL BUST BACK
Winston Churchill, under the touchingly naive assumption
that this would endear him to the natives. Whereas, of course,
to almost all members of Britain's current elite, quoting
Churchill approvingly only confirms that you're an extremist
lunatic. I had the honor a couple of years back of visiting
President Bush in the White House and seeing the bust of Sir
Winston on display in the Oval Office. When Barack Obama moved
in, he ordered it removed and returned to the British. Its
present whereabouts are unclear. But given what Churchill had to
say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust
was almost certainly arrested upon landing at Heathrow and
deported as a threat to public order.
ANTI-BRITISH EMPIRE GEEKS
Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of
selfdeprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy
self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from the
Daily Telegraph:
A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its
controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations
that it was "distasteful." The 136-POUND-a-head Emmanuel
College ball was advertised as a celebration of "the
Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences."
Students were urged to "party like it's 1899" and organizers
promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West
Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.
But anti-fascist groups said the theme was "distasteful and
insensitive" because of the British Empire's historical
association with slavery repression and exploitation.
The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton
and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word "empire" will be
removed from all promotional material.
The way things are going in Britain, it would make more
sense to remove the word "balls."
PEOPLE FORGET
AND SO COMES....
It's interesting to learn that "anti-fascism" now means
attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism
in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany's
invasion of Russia. And it's even sadder to have to point out the
most obvious fatuity in those "anti-fascist groups"' litany of
evil-"the British Empire's association with slavery." The British
Empire's principal association with slavery is that it abolished
it. Until William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the
brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an
institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as a
constant feature of life, as permanent as the earth and sky.
Britain expunged it from most of the globe.
It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave
"anti-fascists" are. Yet there is a lesson here not just for
Britain but for America, too: when a society loses its memory, it
descends inevitably into dementia. And, if la creme de la creme
of the British education system so willingly prostrates itself
before a historical balderdash, what then of its more typical
charges? If you cut off two generations of students from their
cultural inheritance, why be surprised that legions of British
Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to
school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their
country of nominal citizenship other than that it's responsible
for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms
of the world. If that's all you knew of Britain, why would you
feel any allegiance to Queen and country? One of the July 7 Tube
bombers left a famous video broadcast posthumously on Arab TV,
spouting all the usual jihadist boilerplate but in a Yorkshire
accent: Ee-ooh Allahu akbar! Eaten away by Islam and welfare,
much of Britain is on a fast track to Somalia with chip shops.
And what if you don't have Islam to turn to? The
transformation of the British people is in its pestilential way a
remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them
nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which
is that their society is a racket founded on various historical
injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.
"We don't need no education," as Pink Floyd sang. When a
broke British government attempted to increase the cost of
university education, "students" rampaged through Parliament
Square, set fire to the statue of Lord Palmerston and urinated on
that of Winston Churchill. The signature photograph of the riot
showed a "student" swinging from the Union Flag on the Cenotaph,
the memorial to Britain's 700,000 dead from the Great War. Who
was this tribune of the masses? Step forward, Charlie Gilmour,
stepson of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, a geriatric rocker
worth $150 million or thereabouts. When he went up to Cambridge
University, Charlie's parents had two suits made for him by a
Savile Row tailor so he could swank about the groves of academe
in bespoke elegance. Yet young Mr. Gilmour still thinks the
government should fund his education. "Hey, teacher, leave us
kids a loan," as his dad's rock group almost sang.
What's he studying at Cambridge? History. Despite that, and
despite the prominently displayed words "THE GLORIOUS DEAD," he
had no idea that the monument he was desecrating was a memorial
to Britain's fallen soldiers. As the columnist Julie Burchill
observed, Charlie no doubt assumed "the Glorious Dead" was a rock
band.
In 2008, when the economy hit the skids, Gordon Brown and
other ministers of the Labour Government fell back on stillborn
invocations of "the knowledge economy" that will always make
Britain an attractive place to do business because of the "added
value" of its educated workforce. (You hear the same confident
bluster from American experts entirely ignorant of the academic
standards of Asia.) Are you serious? Have you set foot in an
English state school in the last fifteen years? The well of
cultural inheritance in great nations is deep but not bottomless.
What happened to England, the mother of parliaments and a
crucible of liberty? Britain, in Dean Acheson's famous post-war
assessment, had lost an empire but not yet found a role.
Actually, Britain didn't so much "lose" the Empire: it
evolved peacefully into the modern Commonwealth, which is more
agreeable than the way these things usually go. Nor is it clear
that modern Britain wants a role, of any kind. Rather than losing
an empire, it seems to have lost its point.
..........
For those who have really studied history, and the land of
Britain, they will know that the elder brother (of the two
brother peoples - Britain and the USA) has always been the
GREATEST!! It was a great land before the Romans came; it was a
great land after Rome left; it was a great land when France and
Spain tried to conquer it; it was a great land as it built its
Commonwealth; ir was a great land when Germany twice tried to
conquer it. It's history of GREATNESS has been LARGER and LONGER
than anything the USA ever had.
It was promised by the Eternal God to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and
to Joseph that Ephraim would be GREATER than his brother Manasseh
- Genesis 48,49.
It has come to pass in no uncertain way that that was the factual
case of the GREAT BRITISH EMPIRE!!
AND indeed she was the first in the Western world to abolish
slavery, and set the example for other nations to eventually
follow.
Britain for 2,000 years had a PURPOSE. Today it does not have a
purpose unless it marches into war in Iraq and Afghanistan along
with brother USA. Apart from such situation Britain has lost its
purpose - hence it is down and out in having any leading role in
the world.
The USA is fast going the same way, and in the end it will be so
for that brother nation also. Then the TWO brothers will have
little impact on the world of the future. And as those brother
nations are ever departing from serving the Eternal God, the day
will come when their God will need have to punish them in
captivity and slavery to their lover enemies. All explained for
you on my website as I expound to you all the prophetic books of
the Bible.
......
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