Posted on 09/01/2006 1:47:28 AM PDT by NZerFromHK
The U.K.'s proven it will fight the radical Islamist threat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why not in London?
The Prime Minister made a great impression on his recent trip to London. I don't mean just the number of times I was told what a splendid chap this Simon Harper/ Stephen Cooper fellow was. My favourite proximation, by the way, was "Stephen Howard": there's no higher praise than being taken for John Howard's cousin. But, aside from that, I was struck by the way every speech was more robust than the circumstances required. For example, in an all but unreported address to the Canada-United Kingdom Chamber of Commerce (i.e., Air Canada, Alcan Europe and a lot of other go-along-to-get-along global corporate types), he said the following:
"Now I know it's unfashionable to refer to colonialism in anything other than negative terms. And certainly, no part of the world is unscarred by the excesses of empires. But in the Canadian context, the actions of the British Empire were largely benign and occasionally brilliant."
Holy cow! An Imperial Preference PM in 2006! Even with the qualifications Mr. Harper felt obliged to make, presumably for any BBC reporters in attendance, that's the nearest to a real appreciation of British imperialism that the mother country's heard in years. At one level, of course, it goes without saying. If you look at GDP per capita in countries with populations over 20 million, the top four are an Anglosphere sweep:America, Canada, Britain, Australia. As Mr. Harper's audience should surely appreciate, when it comes to delivering sustained democratic institutions and economic growth among large numbers of people, there is simply no comparison with the Britannic inheritance.
And, as Mr. Harper also noted, through the horrors of the 20th century these countries also did more than anybody else to defend and advance the cause of liberty.
But, if something goes without saying long enough, other voices fill the vacuum. And somewhere along the way a quintessentially British self-effacement curdled into a weirdly stunted civilizational self-loathing. The historical balance sheet isn't just about what might not have happened but what might have happened instead. Who would you rather be colonized by? Would you rather have St. Lucia's history or Haiti's? Singapore's or Indonesia's?
And yet Harper's unexceptional observations were incredibly exceptional, because nobody makes them, least of all in Britain. Par for the course is The Guardian's Decca Aitkenhead who, in a column on why Jamaican men are "homophobic', instantly identified the real culprit--the psychological damage of colonialism. "It's a failure to recognize 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation," she wrote. "Jamaicans weren't the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were."
Crikey. If English public schoolboys hadn't taken these guys to the West Indies to be their ebony playthings under the Caribbean moon, they'd have stayed in Africa and grown up as relaxed live-and-let-live types like, er, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, who's accused Tony Blair of a plan to impose homosexuality throughout the Commonwealth; or Namibia's Sam Nujoma, who accused African homosexuals of being closet "Europeans" trying to destroy his country through the spread of "gayism." The magnificent perverseness of Miss Aitkenhead's argument suggests that, if anything, it's the mother country that's been psychologically damaged by imperialism.
These days, wherever I happen to be, I try to picture what the neighbourhood will be like in 20 years' time. Right now, I'm in Australia, one of the few western nations I'm 100 per cent confident will make it. Oz has its multiculti sappy side, too, but it lives in a tough part of the world and its political class is under fewer illusions than most. What of Canada? Like Europe, it's over-invested in a dud idea: indeed, at one level the European Union is merely a more elaborate version of the Trudeaupian animating principle that one's identity is defined by the degree to which one is not like America. For a while, I thought that the best chance of saving the deranged Dominion from Europe's fate was geography: the Americans simply wouldn't permit their nearest neighbor to go kaput. But, after barely six months of a weak minority government in which at least one of the key portfolios is wielded by the emptiest of empty suits, Stephen Harper has nevertheless succeeded in modestly changing the tone. On Afghanistan, on Hezbollah, at the G8, he's been grown up, clear sighted, rooted in a genuine sense of what Canada's values ought to be. This is what leadership is supposed to be about. Given that, whatever their other grievances, the electorate seemed content with the Liberal policy of passing off Canada's global irrelevance as moral courage, Harper could so easily have opted for the usual poll-driven finger-in-the-windiness. Instead, he opted to lead--to raise the rhetorical stakes, to make the case, and hope enough folks are open to persuasion to come along.
But, in a world in which the prospects for the Anglosphere are better than almost anybody else's, there is one bleak exception. At some point soon, we're going to be asking: Who lost Britain? In the weeks after last year's tube bombing, I doubted that the clarion call for a reassertion of "British identity" would last, and so it proved. By the first anniversary, Britain was back in its peculiarly resistant multiculti mush in which the proper reaction to such unfortunate events is to abase oneself ever more abjectly before the gods of cultural relativism. What matters after mass slaughter on the Underground is not the wound to the nation but the potential for hurt feelings of certain minorities. Had the latest disrupted terrorist plot to take down up to ten UK-US airplanes actually succeeded, I'm sure it would have gone much the same--BBC discussion panels on which representatives of Muslim lobby groups warn of outbreaks of Islamophobia. Even as Heathrow and all other British airports were shut down, Shahid Malik, MP for Dewsbury, the neighborhood that produced the July 7th bombers, explained the situation: "The action of Israel and the inaction of the West is contributing to the difficult task of tackling extremism." Deconstruct that--because it's the most artful extension of Jew-blaming in centuries: even Hitler never thought to complain that those bloody Jews were provoking Germans into blowing up their fellow Germans. Of course, it's ludicrous. This plot was well advanced long before the first Israeli strike against Hezbollah--despite the truly contemptible way Reuters, the BBC and other British media outlets inserted reflexively a causal connection.
But suppose Mr. Malik's words were true--that the actions of the Zionist Entity are so repellent they drive British subjects to plot mass murder against their fellow British subjects. What does that imply? That, well before push comes to shove, the primary identity of those nominal "Britons" is not British and never will be.
Tony Blair, it seems to me, will go down as a tragic figure. Unlike Jean Chrétien, who was almost eerily unmoved in the wake of 9/11 and unmoveable in the months afterward, the British prime minister grasped immediately the bigger picture and outlined it better than President Bush. He still does. But the citizens of the United Kingdom never accepted it as their war, and they still don't. Even after the July 7th bombings. Historians will be baffled by Blair, a man who thinks nothing of diagnosing the ills of distant continents but is rendered inarticulate and incoherent when it comes to a strategy for the home front. To read Londonistan, Melanie Phillips' superb analysis on the jihad's gaming of Britain, is to realize that the country is increasingly a more sophisticated version of Afghanistan, Lebanon or Somalia--a husk of a nation in which darker forces have set up shop, and in which establishment complacency, hard-left multiculturalism and an ever more Europeanized bureaucracy have made it all but impossible for the state to rouse itself. Britannia has demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq that she can still just about summon the "war will" on the battlefield. On the broader cultural front, where this war in the end will be won, there's little evidence of any kind of will. When one considers the impunity with which the country's incendiary imams incite treason, it requires a perverse genius on the part of Tony Blair to have found the political courage to fight an unpopular war on a distant shore but not the political courage to wage it closer to home where it would have commanded far more support. That's the sad lesson of the July 7th bombings: the British government has a strategy for southern Iraq but not southern England.
Britain's language, culture, legal system and political tradition have been the greatest single force for good in shaping the modern world. But discarding its own inheritance and yoking its future to a Eutopian pseudo-federation has left it constitutionally (in every sense) incapable of resisting the depredations of more motivated forces. Unless things change in a big way, there won't always be an England.
Mark Steyn on Britain Ping!
Transcript of her interview on Fox News last weekend - http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,209626,00.html
You can watch her interview here - http://www.foxnews.com/journal/
Her webpage - http://www.melaniephillips.com/
At Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594031444/sr=8-1/qid=1145483122
The sad part of all of this is when I had the priviledge to serve our nation by flying for the USAF in Europe during the 80's, I was most impressed by the unwillingness of the Thatcher government to tolerate the unhealthy views of foreigners by denying those that would be troublemakers (today's Imams preaching violence for example) access to Great Britain. NO VISAS and/or swift deportation. A nation-state does have not only the right but the responsibility to protect its citizens from those who plan to harm the nation and any leader that will not excercise their authority by removing these foreigners are guilty of malfeasance and/or treason.
(((.)))
LOL! None of this sounds anything like the England I've just left after 10 years to return home.
The UK has said it will never have an amnesty on illegals and even deports them to countries like Algeria where they may be imprisoned or tortured on their return, meanwhile our govt wants open borders and full amnesty. They tend to tolerate muslim extremists because when they plot atrocities in the UK they are much easier to monitor and stop than if they are doing it in Pakistan.
It's real easy to criticise the Brits from here, but in England the national flag is the flag of the crusaders and hangs proudly in most streets. They are always ready and armed when we call a war, even if they don't think it's a good one. It doesn't pay to confuse the media image of Britain with the reall brits on the street that I know well.
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...there are several factors for the backwardness of the Muslim society. First and foremost is their illiteracy in general and women illiteracy in particular. Another major reason of Muslim fall is the fact that hardly 16% of population is involved in industrial production. It is important to note that 60% of Christian population is engaged in industry. High population growth is another major factor for Muslim backwardness because this rapid population rise neutralizes whatever economic development takes place in Muslim Societies. Human Development Index prepared by UNDP gives a very dismal picture of the status of literacy, health and economy of Muslim nations. In the first 25 best countries listed under HDI (2002), no Muslim country figured in the list. Barring few small oil producing Muslim nations, majority of the Islamic world lies in the middle and low categories of human development, a clear indication that the Islamic nations needs to increase their focus on human development. Latest data (2002) about the Human Development Index (HDI) and Per capita GDP of some of the important and large populated Muslim countries are as follows;
read more...
http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_251_300/status_of_muslim_societies_aroun.htm
Speaks for itself IMO.
Trying to reach such people is futile. They have their fingers in their ears and their eyes squeezed shut.
They will silence any voice that threatens their delusions--American Leftists e.g. on university campuses by shouting down voices of dissent, criticism, or unpopular opinions; Muslims e.g. through the capital punishment of dissenters, critics, and those who present unpopular opinions.
The Western Left and the Muslim world have this--and much more--in common. The big difference is that the Western Left is confused, decadent, self-condemnatory, and determined to appease and retreat. The Muslim world is not.
Outstanding article. Thanks for posting. Thanks for the links.
Thank you - and well said. This is not the end game and the liberal-luvvie-lefties do not represent the true Brit.
Don't write us off.... there is danger in the Islamic cult but heck, that's life.
Europe will fall, Britain MAY survive. I hope it does. I have been to Britain many times. One of the things that always impressed me were the war memorials everywhere. They are a nation of warriors.
Ivan, want to weigh in?
It doesn't pay to confuse the media image of Britain with the reall brits on the street that I know well.
&&&&&
How do you explain the real brits who support
the abolition of foxhunting,
disarming rural people,
stiffer penalties for defending oneself than for the actual home invasion,
etc.
I hope you are right. Could you give me some specifics? I have close contacts in Wales, and am not hearing positive things about the general progress of events.
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