The most dangerous people in the world

Imagine a group of ideologically driven people spread throughout the world whose wish is to ruthlessly shape the world in their own image. Imagine that their ideology is such that it has  severely damaged the societies in which its proponents have gained  influence and power. Imagine that this group is immune to reason, adhering to their ideology regardless of how it corresponds to reality or  how much damage it does.  Imagine  that  the ideology is such that it requires its followers to transcend all natural group affections such as the tribe, clan or  nation. Imagine men and women to whom treason is so much second nature that they have no conception that what they do is treason.

What groups might meet those criteria? Catholics during the Reformation would fit  much but not all the bill,  Marxists would be a near perfect fit for  much of the twentieth century and radical Muslims would make a fair fist of the description now. But there is another such group in the world,   a group which has existed for more than two centuries and which is now far more powerful and universal in its reach than any other ideologically driven group  in history and consequently  more destructive. ,

As a revolutionary political creed, the group’s ideology  has evolved from a desire to engage in the reckless reformation of  a nation’s natural economy  linked with a vague idea of the universality of Man, to a political position which includes the  deliberate settlement of its  territory by millions of  foreigners and the removal of  the ability of  the native population to meaningfully to protest through non-violent means by the transfer  of the country‘s sovereignty to supra-national powers by devious means. This group is not called terrorist; its proponents  hold and implement their ideology unhindered by the law in the most advanced societies in the world and in many of those societies   it has become the elite’s creed.

The ideology is liberal internationalism. It originally rested on  the laissez faire economics of so-called free markets (so-called because they rely on state intervention to prevent monopolies forming)  and free international trade bound in with the Enlightenment idea of the Universality of Man.   To this original portfolio has been added  the idea of  unrestricted movement of peoples across national boundaries, with labour treated simply as a factor of production , and the  totalitarian system of thought we know as political correctness, a propaganda system designed to both underpin the liberal internationalist ideal and deal with the social frictions created by  the implementation of the ideal. (Political correctness meets the criteria for a totalitarian ideology as  it potentially  touches every aspect of life because  the concept of discrimination can be applied to any human situation and because it claims that the only acceptable view on any aspect of life which it touches is the politically correct one).

You think it is absurd to say this group is the greatest existing threat to world peace or our own society? Not if an objective assessment  is made  of   the damage – economic, political, social and cultural – which they have caused in their various guises over the past century and a half.

Take the British example. Islamic terrorism has to date produced a toll of just over 50 dead and 900 injured in Britain, all from one dramatic event in July 2005  The peripheral effects of  these terrorists have been a reduction in the legal safeguards for those accused of a criminal offence, a worrying increase in the surveillance powers of the British state and a  decrease in the freedom of speech through both fear of Muslim reprisal and  zealous action by the state in repressing criticism of Islam.

That is serious damage, which will doubtless become more serious as time passes, but when compared with the consequences of  liberal internationalism for Britain since the middle of the 19th Century its significance is utterly dwarfed, for that is a litany of  catastrophic periods of economic failure,  enhanced class hostility, the wilful creation of racial  and ethnic strife,  war and the destruction of  democratic control. Indeed, one of the malign consequences of liberal internationalism is the  modern Islamic extremist threat to the West,  for that  is the child of mass  Muslim immigration to the first world, the gross provocation offered by  aggressive wars against Muslim countries by liberal internationalist war-mongers and the willingness of politicians under the spell of political correctness to pander to extremist Muslims within their societies.

These are the most dangerous people in the world; men and women to whom treason is second nature; quislings in the service of liberal internationalism

 

English National Identity

 The idea that the English are not a nation or have no sense of themselves as a people would have seemed very strange indeed to any generation of Englishmen and women before the present day. Cecil Rhodes’ belief that “to be born English was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life” would have fitted very well with the sentiments of the average Englishman at most times in the past seven hundred years.

The roots of English identity are ancient. England was a cultural entity before it became a political state. When the Northumbrian monk Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History in the early eighth century it was the Ecclesiastical History of the English not of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes nor of the various kingdoms of England, By the ninth century the English called themselves Angelcyn (Angelkin) and lived in Engalond speaking Englisc. When the Norsemen came they were opposed by the beginnings of a people. Certainly the bare rudiments  of  English national feeling existed from the time of Alfred. The various authors of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which began in Alfred’s reign (871-99) and continued for two centuries, had no doubt that the English existed as a separate people. Here is the Chronicle in 886: “The same year, king Alfred occupied the city of London and all the English turned to him, except those who were in the captivity of the Danes”.  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is, incidentally, the longest continuous  record  ever written in Europe which  says  something about the strength of the early English sense of nation.

Political aspirations for an English state come early too. The eighth century Mercian king. Offa, styled himself as king of the English and in one document at least as rex totious Anglorum patriae: king of all the homeland of the English. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle progresses, it  is ever more ready to write of England as a single Kingdom. In 1014, at a time of great trouble from the Danes (Cnut was to be king of England within two years), Wulfstan,  Archbishop of York, made in “The sermon of the Wolf to the English”  the first  recorded appeal to the English nation as a whole.  By the time of the Conquest, England was  indubitably a single kingdom covering most of the land we know as England.

The Norman invasion stunted the development of  English national consciousness  for the better part of  three centuries. However, even in those times there were public signs of  awareness of England as a separate entity, most notably in the alteration of Arthur and his knights from an ancient British into  an English myth, and throughout the later  Middle Ages the English delighted in manufacturing  world   chronicles which showed the English occupying a primary role in world history.

Foreign visitors to England persistently reported from the fourteenth century onwards that the English were addicted to thoughtfully telling foreigners how splendid  everything English was and how inferior everything foreign was. Venetian ambassadors seem to have been particularly favoured in this respect especially when they were at the mercy of Thames boatmen. 

   Shakespeare’s echoed this chauvinism:

My people are with sickness much enfeebled; my numbers lessen’d; and those few I have almost no   better than so many French; who, when they were in health, I tell thee,  herald, I thought upon one   pair of English legs did march three Frenchmen. (Henry V)

In the sixteenth century national consciousness took a quantum leap forward. Englishmen began to think of themselves as not merely worth more than your average Johnny foreigner, but as a chosen people, the uccessor race to the Jews. Cromwell believed most passionately that God was on his and England’s side.  By the twentieth century the idea still existed but the responsibilities of Empire had mutated it into a sense of duty.

Perhaps the most persistent and profound evidence for the English sense of themselves as a separate nation is the strong  antipathy towards foreigners which  they  have persistently shown since the employment of Frenchmen at Edward the Confessor’s court after his return from exile in Normandy.  The oft repeated liberal dirge  about  ”this country’s  proud tradition of welcoming foreigners” is so utterly at variance with the historical reality that it is both risible and sinister. The truth is that the English are an  insular people who have ever been  suspicious  of foreigners, especially at various times the French, the  Spanish, the Dutch, Italians and Jews. The truth, like it or not, is that immigration has always taken place in the teeth of opposition from the mass of English men and women.

Daniel Defoe’s poem “A true born Englishman” (written in 1701) is frequently cited by the England haters as proof of the insubstantial nature of English national identity. This is most curious because what Defoe (real name Foe) was attacking  was not a lack of English national feeling but the reverse, a rampant chauvinism and hatred of foreigners which he portrayed as unwarranted because the English  were he claimed an exceptionally mongrel race. But a tale lies behind this poem.  Defoe was a hired pen who would write   anything for anybody provided the work paid – he spent  of his adult life stumbling from one financial disaster to another.  After William died, Defoe sold his services to the Tory Harley without any qualms.  The poem was a piece of Royalist propaganda to make William of Orange’s assumption of the throne seem to be merely the last in a long line of foreign conquests. If circumstances had been different DeFoe would have been as happy to pen a piece extolling the racial purity of the English if it had suited his purposes and   circumstances.

Those who now decry the very idea of Englishness do so on very flimsy grounds. They almost invariably cite trivial aspects of culture when proclaiming the supposed  stronger national identity of other peoples. The inadequacy of such definitions can be easily shown.  The most commonly cited defining characteristics of the Scotch, Welsh and Irish are such things as these. The Scotch are known for tartans, the kilt, the bagpipes, haggis, the thistle, whiskey, golf and Burns. The Welsh are associated with Eisteddfod’s, the Welsh language, choirs, chapels, leeks, rugby and sheep. The Irish bring to mind shamrocks, Guinness,  St Patrick, Catholicism  and folk music.  A similar list of symbols can be made for England without any difficulty: St George, fox hunting, Shakespeare, roast beef and cricket, All of which proves nothing about the respective strength of their national identities. What it does tell us is the nebulous nature of the reasons for despising Englishness which the England haters purvey.

Cultural unity

How far a people are culturally united may be judged by their internal antagonisms. Englishmen recognise one another as Englishmen regardless of class and regional variation. Thus a working class Englishman may genuinely hate an upper class Englishman simply because of his class, but he will never think of him as anything other than English. A Northerner  may curse “soft Southerners”  but  not  as foreigners. Home counties folk may laugh gently at northern manners, but it is done in the form of family chafing.  Such   a sense of natural community is unmatched in other nations of any size.

 The truly amazing political and cultural homogeneity of England is seen in the absence since the Norman Conquest of any serious regional separatist movement within the heart of English territory. There has been meaningful  resistance at the periphery – Cornwall, the Welsh marches and the far north, – but nothing since the sixteenth century.  Englishmen have fought but not to create separate nations.