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Thursday, April 05, 2007
Yes, We're
Briti-phobes.
THE PECULIAR BRIT METHOD OF COUNTING. I began writing this entry a couple weeks ago, before the disgraceful appeasement dance Tony Blair performed with the criminal government of Iran. Here's the original introduction:
Time somebody said it. The
Brits are no longer our allies, but a positive danger. They are
nobody's allies. They are a nation of degenerated caricatures who can't
be trusted to do anything but strike poses. We're speaking principally
about the English, but the Scots and Welsh are also implicated, as are
the Irish. The evidence is so overwhelming, so diverse of origin, so
transparently final that it's hard to know where to begin. But begin we
will.
For a nation that once prided itself on hardship, the Brits have recently acquired an extraordinary ability to pride themselves on a superiority born of brutal empire while simultaneously congratulating themselves for scorning those who inherited the responsibilities created by their own arrogant administration of world affairs. The British slaughtered everyone who opposed them without compunction. Now they stand on the shoulders of the slaughterers and decry from that height the moral feebleness of those who still perceive life-and-death issues in the pursuit of justice. The British amputated Christianity from the succession of Peter in the name of nationalistic autonomy, and now they express universal respect for the trans-national rights of a religion one of their greatest kings crusaded against to prevent the strangulation of their native culture. The British sacrificed millions of their youth to save the isles from the tyranny of Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, but now they sneer at those who believe the preservation of western civilization might be worth the loss of a few thousand lives. Once upon a time the the Brits were the Romans of the modern world, ruled by a patrician class which would bear any burden to extend British hegemony around the globe.
Now they blithely take credit for Churchill, Nelson, Shakespeare, Newton, and Elizabeth I at a time when two-thirds of their children don't know who any of these people are, and all that remains of their domain is a fading tone of increasingly fraudulent authority.
For a nation that once prided itself on hardship, the Brits have recently acquired an extraordinary ability to pride themselves on a superiority born of brutal empire while simultaneously congratulating themselves for scorning those who inherited the responsibilities created by their own arrogant administration of world affairs. The British slaughtered everyone who opposed them without compunction. Now they stand on the shoulders of the slaughterers and decry from that height the moral feebleness of those who still perceive life-and-death issues in the pursuit of justice. The British amputated Christianity from the succession of Peter in the name of nationalistic autonomy, and now they express universal respect for the trans-national rights of a religion one of their greatest kings crusaded against to prevent the strangulation of their native culture. The British sacrificed millions of their youth to save the isles from the tyranny of Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, but now they sneer at those who believe the preservation of western civilization might be worth the loss of a few thousand lives. Once upon a time the the Brits were the Romans of the modern world, ruled by a patrician class which would bear any burden to extend British hegemony around the globe.
Now they blithely take credit for Churchill, Nelson, Shakespeare, Newton, and Elizabeth I at a time when two-thirds of their children don't know who any of these people are, and all that remains of their domain is a fading tone of increasingly fraudulent authority.
Now we have this iconic image of the U.K.:
Brit sailors and marines standing tall after disgracing their uniforms in Iran.
It didn't take months or weeks for these members of the Brit military to yield to the demands of their captors and confess to crimes they didn't commit. It took hours. And now, back home, they are laughing and smiling and accepting a hero's welcome as if their own physical safety really were the only matter of importance in the events of the past two weeks.
For the Brit populace, that's probably a true statement. In all likelihood, Tony Blair will be able to limp through the remaining months of his term in office without serious rebuke for his handling of the affair, and the freed prisoners will not be brought up on charges or disciplined in any way. Meanwhile, the Brit press and public will continue without even the slightest pause in their irrational anti-American screeds, jeering at Bush as their braver ancestors once jeered at Chamberlain.
What's important for Americans to understand about all this? Merely this. It won't do in this instance to attempt the usual American sleight of hand by which we separate truculent or inimical governments from the populations they lead. We tend, for example, to tell ourselves that the Iranian people are not as fanatical, hateful, or deranged as the theocracy that oppresses them. In the same way, we are naturally tempted to believe that underneath the venom of the BBC and the craven policies of the U.K.'s Oxbridge parliamentarians, there is still the sturdy British ally with whom we fought and won two world wars. It's not true.
The Britain of today is late in the process of dissolving into the diseased post-modern nihilism that unifies Europe more profoundly than the tons of paperwork called the E.U. Much more than we, the U.K. has become a wholly secular state. The Church of England is an empty shell. The great cathedrals and lovely country churches are empty of parishioners, and the Anglican clergy is empty of both theology and faith. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge churn out supercilious socialists who, like our own most extreme leftists, hate everything western and yearn for the self-destructive ideal of seeing their own heritage overrun by anti-capitalist totalitarians. Once estimable writers and scholars (e.g., John Le Carre and Richard Dawkins) have degenerated into shrieking maniacs who spew their infantile hatreds in letters to the Sunday Times. Brit movies, television, and popular music are even more imbued with anti-rational political posturings than our own, without the countervailing tension of a vociferous conservative opposition. While the old Tory party is so supine and pitiful that its platform can only be described as Labor-Lite, the Brit masses have been proselytized to sneer at America for its religion, its death penalty, its default role as world policeman, and its bourgeois vulgarity -- even as they mimic that vulgarity in every particular, elevating to the status of religious ideals the gay lifestyle, interracial marriages, hip hop dancing and fashion, Global Warming hysteria, deferral to (exclusively) Islamic religious sensibilities, and the false comfort of constant camera surveillance in all public places and roadways.
If they are our cousins, they are no longer truly family. They have become the embittered poor relations who not only turn their back on the old ties, but actively seek opportunities to join with our enemies for the purpose of doing us harm. The malice may not yet be malevolent enough to conspire in our death, but it is sinister enough that we cannot trust them in a pinch.
You're free to believe any of this or not. I don't care. The evidence is available all around you. Read the online Brit newspapers and op-ed columns. Apart from the expatriates who have plighted their troth to America -- Mark Steyn, Christopher Hitchens, Tony Blankley -- you won't find much that isn't openly hostile and condescending to America. Watch BBC America and see the extent to which politics have crept into the most recently produced TV dramas. Keep an eye out for polls and surveys that monitor the state of Brit education and popular Brit views on the U.S. Look for Brit commenters in blogs -- easily recognized by their patronizing tone and their substitution of the letter 's' for 'z' in words like recognise and patronise -- and note how unanimously they line up with the loonies of the American hard left. They don't write very well anymore. Their overlong sentences no longer cohere grammatically, but they do retain the last surviving vestige of the old empire, the automatic assumption that the Brit commenter is just plain superior to all the Americans in the vicinity.
Why? It probably has to do with the intangibles -- opaque to most Americans -- that made the collaborators pictured above into national heroes. I'm sure they'll try to explain it to us. In due time.
But frankly, my dears, I don't give a damn.
UPDATE. La Malkin hints at the possibility that some Brits may be experiencing a brief bout of humiliation. Don't worry. They'll rise above it when they remember it's all our fault.
