THE ENGLISH REBORNby
James ReedThe Archbishop of York John Sentamu
- Britain's first black Archbishop has recently said that the English people should
reclaim their national identity. He admitted that multiculturalism has effectively
deracinated these people: "Multiculturalism has seemed to imply, wrongly
for me, let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the
majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys, its pain."
(The Australian, 23 November 2005, p.10)
There is a good reason for this that
the black Archbishop did not touch on - multiculturalism is intrinsically a parasitic
doctrine which dilutes the major ethnic culture to the benefit of all others.
This is simply a matter of mathematics - the "richer" and thicker the
"diversity" - the less of us.
National culture is a zero-sum game,
meaning that there are winners and losers. And to date the English people, as
distinct from the Irish and Scots, have been the subject of a relentless cultural
attack which has deracinated them and destroyed their sense of ethnic identity.
Sentamu recognized this in calling for the English to celebrate St. George's Day
on April 23. The Irish freely, and with the blessing of the ruling elites, celebrate
their own tribal day, St. Patrick's Day and by multicultural right, so should
the English have their own tribal day. Sentamu said: "I speak as a foreigner,
really. The English are somehow embarrassed about some of the good things they
have done… not all the empire was a bad idea."
Sentamu went on to
examine the question of what it means to be "English", saying: "I
think we have not engaged with English culture as it has developed. It is a culture
that whether we like it or not, has given us parliamentary democracy. It is the
mother of it. It is the mother of arguing that if you want a change of government,
you vote them in or you vote them out. It is a place that has allowed reason to
be at the heart of all these things, that has allowed genuine dissent without
resort to violence."
Anthony Browne, Time's European correspondent addressed
these same questions, at a slightly deeper level in an article in The Spectator
23 July, 2005 "The Left's War on Britishness". The article was set in
the context of a comment on the terrorist attacks on 7 July 2005. Why did Britain
become the first western country to produce its own home-grown suicide bombers?
Other countries have imported their suicide bombers, but not Britain. Browne traces
this difference to a civil war which the Left have conducted against British identity.
Multiculturalists, led by New Labour's Lord Parekh, have called for the end of
England and the creation of a "community of communities". Self-loathing
is a national occupation of Britain's traitorous intelligentsia.
Browne goes
on to give a spirited defence of being British. It is well worthwhile to quote
some punchy paragraphs from this article:
"It is true Britain gave the
world its most popular sport - football - which emerged in the 13th century in
the north of England as a holy day game, and was given the modern rules in 1848
by undergraduates at Cambridge University. But Britain has also given the world
almost every other internationally played sport. If you can score points by hitting
or kicking something, it was almost certainly invented by Britain's leisured classes
keen on exercise, team spirit and clear rules. Golf originated in Scotland in
the 15th century. Cricket emerged 700 years ago, and evolved into the game we
have today.
The French may have invented the nearly obsolete real tennis,
but the Victorians created modern tennis. Britain's rain prompted indoor tennis,
and table tennis was born Harrow School gave the world squash; Rugby School gave
the world rugby; the Duke of Beaufort copied the game poona from the Indians and
gave the world badminton; the Marquess of Queensberry took bare-knuckle pugilism
and turned it into modern boxing, complete with gloves.
Every time people
play table tennis in China, football in Brazil, cricket in Pakistan or golf in
Japan, they are enjoying Britain's gifts to the world. Any other country which
gave organised sport to the world would enjoy it as a proud part of their national
identity; but not Britain.
The one thing we do say about ourselves is that
we are a nation of inventors, but few of us realise just to what extent. A recent
survey by the Science Museum complained that 58 per cent of Britons didn't realise
we invented trains, and 77 per cent didn't realise we invented jet engines.
In
fact, we didn't just invent railways, but our engineers helped revolutionise the
world by building them across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. In 1698 the
military engineer Thomas Savery patented the first steam engine (later improved
by James Watt), while in 1821 Michael Faraday invented the electric motor.
In
1876 the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone; 50 years later
John Logie Baird demonstrated television; and in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented
the internet.
And so it goes on and on - the traffic light, the electromagnet,
the underground train (which first ran near the site of the Edgware Road bomb),
light bulbs, the pneumatic tyre (thanks, Mr Dunlop), radar, the steel-ribbed umbrella,
the Thermos flask, the pocket calculator (thanks, Sir Clive), vaccination, penicillin
and cloning (thanks, Dolly).
Britain's scientists have done more to unravel
the mysteries of nature than any others. Of the four main forces of nature, Brits
unravelled the mysteries of two - Newton with gravity and James Clerk Maxwell
with electromagnetic radiation. Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection,
while Watson and Crick unpicked DNA. Of the three planets unknown to the ancients,
two were discovered by the British. Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus in
1781, while in 1841 the Cambridge maths undergraduate John Adams, using orbit
calculations, discovered Neptune (beating a French rival by a few months).
Britain
is second only to the US in the number of Nobel prizes it has won - twice as many
as France and seven times as many as Italy and Japan.
Britain didn't just
give the world industrialisation, but the belief in economic and political liberty,
in free markets and democracy, leading to the modern world's unprecedented affluence
and freedom. Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill won the arguments, and
Britain's global influence spread them. Britain
didn't invent democracy, but matured it over centuries and ensured that it became
dominant. Britain's greatest creations are the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
all stable, affluent, successful liberal democracies which have for more than
a century been a magnet to the rest of the world. No other European country ever
managed such an achievement. All stayed free of the tyrannies of fascism, communism
and military dictatorship that benighted almost everywhere else. In the dark days
of the second world war, Britain and its former colonies were just about the only
democracies in existence; now democracy embraces much of humanity. Of
the G8 countries, all but Russia (and arguably even she) owe their current status
as free-market democracies to Britain and its former colonies. The English-speaking
economies amount to more than a third of world GDP.
With just 1 per cent of
the world's population, Britain has united the world with a truly global language,
allowing people to speak unto people for the first time in history (French was
little more than a language for elites).
These islands make up less than a
fifth of 1 per cent of the world's land area, and yet their capital dictates to
the rest of the world its time zones and degrees of east and west Britain's
cultural influence is far smaller than its scientific and political influence,
but in the written word it is unrivalled. Moliere and Goethe cannot challenge
Shakespeare as the world's most important writer. More recently, British musicians
from The Beatles to Dido have a global audience unmatched by those of any country
other than its former colony, the US. Our TV producers increasingly enjoy a similar
status - is there any country that hasn't yet suffered Big Brother or Who Wants
to be a Millionaire?
Our national story is the most extraordinary there is.
The patriotic French are obsessed with 'les Anglo-Saxons' because they see our
achievements far more clearly than we do ourselves. As Luigi Barzini asked in
The Europeans, 'How... did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to
world domination?' Thomas Sowell, the leading
African-American intellectual, wrote in his epic Conquests and Cultures, 'Much
of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social,
cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial
revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the
world.'" However, after telling all this
Browne concludes by saying that the story of Britain is one which "anyone
can join". This is the same madness which drives multiculturalism. Ethnic
dilution of the Anglo-Saxon people will lead to a collapse of Britain just as
surely as a dilution of the racial stock of ancient Greece led to the demise of
that classical civilization. Early in this article Browne quoted the philosopher
Georg Santayana who said: "A country without memory is a country of madmen."
He has obviously not understood this maxim. |
