0 comment Saturday, November 29, 2014 | admin
Jean Raspail Speaks of "Big Other"
Jean Raspail is interviewed for French TV about his book, 'Camp of the Saints.' The phrase 'Big Other' is his pun on the familiar 'Big Brother', and is the title of the new preface to his book.
You can view the video at GalliaWatch, where Tiberge offers excerpts translated into English. If your French is good enough, you can watch the complete interviews at the links on GalliaWatch.
From her excerpts:
''And The Camp of the Saints ends badly� badly or well, according to your opinion. There are four hundred pages. Imagine all the questions it raises in our minds - on a social level, on the national level, but also on the inner level of each person. What do you do? If you allow in such a mass, what happens to the country? If you don't allow them in where is your Christian charity? Where is your pity, and many other things like that�
[...]
If civilizations have disappeared it is because they were engulfed by the tidal wave of the more advanced newcomers. With us, the situation is the reverse. We have an old civilization in Europe, in France, and we find ourselves before gigantic masses of people. Europe does not have a billion people, yet we face hundreds of thousands, millions, billions. Logically, we should be forced to defend ourselves, but how?
[...]
In truth, charity does not consist of opening our doors and our arms to invaders. No, it does not consist in returning the flags of Lepanto, as Paul VI did, to the Turks, who have no knowledge of repentance. It does not consist of kissing the Koran as Pope John-Paul II did, in an unfortunate gesture.
No, it does not consist in offering lands of our old Christian country, as the French bishops have done, to build mosques or worse, to accept the transformation of churches into mosques. That is the opposite of charity, a turning away from charity; it is inversion, subversion, corruption.''
Read the rest at the link.
Jean Raspail is interviewed for French TV about his book, 'Camp of the Saints.' The phrase 'Big Other' is his pun on the familiar 'Big Brother', and is the title of the new preface to his book.
You can view the video at GalliaWatch, where Tiberge offers excerpts translated into English. If your French is good enough, you can watch the complete interviews at the links on GalliaWatch.
From her excerpts:
''And The Camp of the Saints ends badly� badly or well, according to your opinion. There are four hundred pages. Imagine all the questions it raises in our minds - on a social level, on the national level, but also on the inner level of each person. What do you do? If you allow in such a mass, what happens to the country? If you don't allow them in where is your Christian charity? Where is your pity, and many other things like that�
[...]
If civilizations have disappeared it is because they were engulfed by the tidal wave of the more advanced newcomers. With us, the situation is the reverse. We have an old civilization in Europe, in France, and we find ourselves before gigantic masses of people. Europe does not have a billion people, yet we face hundreds of thousands, millions, billions. Logically, we should be forced to defend ourselves, but how?
[...]
In truth, charity does not consist of opening our doors and our arms to invaders. No, it does not consist in returning the flags of Lepanto, as Paul VI did, to the Turks, who have no knowledge of repentance. It does not consist of kissing the Koran as Pope John-Paul II did, in an unfortunate gesture.
No, it does not consist in offering lands of our old Christian country, as the French bishops have done, to build mosques or worse, to accept the transformation of churches into mosques. That is the opposite of charity, a turning away from charity; it is inversion, subversion, corruption.''
Read the rest at the link.
Labels: Demographic Warfare, France, Globalism, Mass Immigration, National Identity, Population Replacement
0 comment Friday, October 10, 2014 | admin
Tom Sunic, in an Occidental Observer piece called White Identity in Postmodernity, discusses the minefield of "White identity". He writes of how many Whites in the West, wary of expressing a White identity, choose instead a sort of neutral national identity, as with most Republicans whose identity is bound up exclusively with national patriotism and loyalty to 'the American idea'. For many on the left particularly, who have been schooled to regard White identity as not only illegitimate but as prima facie 'racism', their choice is often to identify with some subculture. He cites the examples of Whites who champion the cause of Tibet or, in his words, 'exotic Afro or Asian escapism.' These types are very common among those who are politically leftist. Everything they do and everything they enjoy is meant to express their desired solidarity with some Third World culture or cause. They may wear 'rasta' dreadlocks or tattoo themselves like tribesmen of some sort or wear some kind of Third World ethnic garb, and listen to Third World music and eat exotic foods and worship at the altar of Asian religions or some kind of syncretic faith which involves Third World traditions.
Many less exotically-identified American liberals instead choose to identify with black Americans or Afrocentric culture. Their counterparts back in the 1970s and 80s may have been more likely to pick ''Native Americans'' as their ersatz identity.
What seems to be the important thing in adopting such a false identity is to express solidarity with some 'underdog' or downtrodden group, apparently as a way of assuaging their hyper-developed consciences about history's wrongs. For the last 40 years or so, Whites have been taught at every turn that their identity is in itself a guilt-saturated thing, because their ancestors were the authors of most wrongs in the world.
Sunic mentions that many Europeans or European-descended Americans may not discover any ethnic or racial identity without being threatened by someone else's national identity, and he uses the example of the break-up of Yugoslavia to illustrate his point.
He also emphasizes how victimhood and victimology are at the heart of the many competing minority identities which are proliferating in the West. There is inevitably a hierarchy of victimhood, and in our country blacks and to some extent Jews enjoy primacy in this department, though the exponential increase in the number of Hispanics in our country threatens to topple the current victim-order.
When I was in college in the 70s, as all this victim-veneration was just reaching a new peak, I noticed, to my surprise, that blacks did not like to share the victimhood mantle with other minority groups; there was instead a competition among the minority groups as to whose suffering was most intense or most prolonged. Blacks at that time fell back on frequent references to '400 years of slavery', sometimes extended to '500 years of slavery' or '500 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow' or some such claim. American Indians were enjoying a vogue in the 1970s, and there were many Ward Churchill types running around campuses, their identity being based on having supposedly had a remote ''Native American" ancestor. Asians were also in the victimhood sweepstakes, and their claims centered on past expulsions of Asian immigrants or the internment of Japanese during World War II.
But I noticed that these groups did not work together; they were all intensely ethnocentric, and quite competitive or jealous when it came to sharing the victimhood spotlight. They might put aside their rivalries to participate in some anti-White demonstration on campus but generally they were wary of each other, or outright unfriendly to one another.
As Sunic points out in his piece, when victimhood is claimed, that implies a victimizer, or a 'monster' as he says. It does seem to be an ironclad rule: the common thread in all the victimhood narratives is "Whitey did it." It is Whites who are to blame in every case; there is always a Honky in the woodpile when a cry of victimhood is raised.
And as Sunic says, the victimology leads to conflict not only between the vicitims and the accused (and automatically convicted) White victimizer, but among minority groups scrambling for their place in the hierarchy and their share of the spoils. If 'reparations' for blacks are to be paid, there will be outcries from Hispanics, who will demand payment for the 'theft' of their fictional Aztlan. What happens when the spoils are no longer so plentiful?
And more importantly, what will happen when the goose that laid the golden egg is moribund?
Sunic says that an authoritarian society is necessary to manage all the divisiveness that is inherent in such an unstable system; his words are that 'high levels of social control' are needed. We are seeing that happening. And many of us wonder if that is not one of the reasons why our rulers have purposely introduced so much diversity into Western countries: to break up any natural cohesion and racial integrity, and to produce instability as a prelude to their further plans. Otherwise we can only conclude that our ''leaders'' are utterly incompetent and clueless. Either explanation is sobering to say the least.
Sunic describes the psychological state of Western White people as being overwhelmed by the constant barrage of guilt and the clamoring by the various voices of grievance and discord. I think this is taking a toll, as he implies, and I think it may reach a tipping point before very long, unless the cacophony of complaints and accusations stops. Is this too part of the plan, I wonder?
He says that Whites don't have the option of claiming victimhood themselves, but actually some do just that; for example in our country, those who see their immigrant ancestors as having been victimized by founding-stock Americans a hundred or so years ago are rather good at bringing up their grievances, and these same people all too often side with illegal immigrants and work towards open borders and the third-worldizing of America.
America is perhaps more disunited than other Western countries in that respect; those European countries which are monocultural and monoethnic have a decided advantage over those countries with more than one nationality within their borders. This is illustrated by the comments on this AmRen thread discussing Nick Griffin's remarks about Black and Asian residents of the UK not being Britons. Someone asks whether ethnic Irish in the UK are ethnic foreigners, and several answer 'yes'. A squabble then erupts between posters who appear to be Irish-descended Americans and Anglo-Americans or British posters. It's an interesting but complicated argument, with people citing British celebrities who are supposedly ''really'' Irish. There seems to be some confusion about Irish people of Anglo-Norman descent, or people of mixed English and Irish descent. So even in the United Kingdom there are elements of ethnic conflict, though among closely-related peoples. America is not the only English-speaking nation with internal divisions among close kin.
These are issues that have to be addressed, along with ideological and religious divisions in our country and other Western countries. If we lack the capacity to put aside our other differences in favor of uniting based on our kinship connection, we really don't stand much of a chance.
Many less exotically-identified American liberals instead choose to identify with black Americans or Afrocentric culture. Their counterparts back in the 1970s and 80s may have been more likely to pick ''Native Americans'' as their ersatz identity.
What seems to be the important thing in adopting such a false identity is to express solidarity with some 'underdog' or downtrodden group, apparently as a way of assuaging their hyper-developed consciences about history's wrongs. For the last 40 years or so, Whites have been taught at every turn that their identity is in itself a guilt-saturated thing, because their ancestors were the authors of most wrongs in the world.
Sunic mentions that many Europeans or European-descended Americans may not discover any ethnic or racial identity without being threatened by someone else's national identity, and he uses the example of the break-up of Yugoslavia to illustrate his point.
He also emphasizes how victimhood and victimology are at the heart of the many competing minority identities which are proliferating in the West. There is inevitably a hierarchy of victimhood, and in our country blacks and to some extent Jews enjoy primacy in this department, though the exponential increase in the number of Hispanics in our country threatens to topple the current victim-order.
When I was in college in the 70s, as all this victim-veneration was just reaching a new peak, I noticed, to my surprise, that blacks did not like to share the victimhood mantle with other minority groups; there was instead a competition among the minority groups as to whose suffering was most intense or most prolonged. Blacks at that time fell back on frequent references to '400 years of slavery', sometimes extended to '500 years of slavery' or '500 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow' or some such claim. American Indians were enjoying a vogue in the 1970s, and there were many Ward Churchill types running around campuses, their identity being based on having supposedly had a remote ''Native American" ancestor. Asians were also in the victimhood sweepstakes, and their claims centered on past expulsions of Asian immigrants or the internment of Japanese during World War II.
But I noticed that these groups did not work together; they were all intensely ethnocentric, and quite competitive or jealous when it came to sharing the victimhood spotlight. They might put aside their rivalries to participate in some anti-White demonstration on campus but generally they were wary of each other, or outright unfriendly to one another.
As Sunic points out in his piece, when victimhood is claimed, that implies a victimizer, or a 'monster' as he says. It does seem to be an ironclad rule: the common thread in all the victimhood narratives is "Whitey did it." It is Whites who are to blame in every case; there is always a Honky in the woodpile when a cry of victimhood is raised.
And as Sunic says, the victimology leads to conflict not only between the vicitims and the accused (and automatically convicted) White victimizer, but among minority groups scrambling for their place in the hierarchy and their share of the spoils. If 'reparations' for blacks are to be paid, there will be outcries from Hispanics, who will demand payment for the 'theft' of their fictional Aztlan. What happens when the spoils are no longer so plentiful?
And more importantly, what will happen when the goose that laid the golden egg is moribund?
Sunic says that an authoritarian society is necessary to manage all the divisiveness that is inherent in such an unstable system; his words are that 'high levels of social control' are needed. We are seeing that happening. And many of us wonder if that is not one of the reasons why our rulers have purposely introduced so much diversity into Western countries: to break up any natural cohesion and racial integrity, and to produce instability as a prelude to their further plans. Otherwise we can only conclude that our ''leaders'' are utterly incompetent and clueless. Either explanation is sobering to say the least.
Sunic describes the psychological state of Western White people as being overwhelmed by the constant barrage of guilt and the clamoring by the various voices of grievance and discord. I think this is taking a toll, as he implies, and I think it may reach a tipping point before very long, unless the cacophony of complaints and accusations stops. Is this too part of the plan, I wonder?
He says that Whites don't have the option of claiming victimhood themselves, but actually some do just that; for example in our country, those who see their immigrant ancestors as having been victimized by founding-stock Americans a hundred or so years ago are rather good at bringing up their grievances, and these same people all too often side with illegal immigrants and work towards open borders and the third-worldizing of America.
America is perhaps more disunited than other Western countries in that respect; those European countries which are monocultural and monoethnic have a decided advantage over those countries with more than one nationality within their borders. This is illustrated by the comments on this AmRen thread discussing Nick Griffin's remarks about Black and Asian residents of the UK not being Britons. Someone asks whether ethnic Irish in the UK are ethnic foreigners, and several answer 'yes'. A squabble then erupts between posters who appear to be Irish-descended Americans and Anglo-Americans or British posters. It's an interesting but complicated argument, with people citing British celebrities who are supposedly ''really'' Irish. There seems to be some confusion about Irish people of Anglo-Norman descent, or people of mixed English and Irish descent. So even in the United Kingdom there are elements of ethnic conflict, though among closely-related peoples. America is not the only English-speaking nation with internal divisions among close kin.
These are issues that have to be addressed, along with ideological and religious divisions in our country and other Western countries. If we lack the capacity to put aside our other differences in favor of uniting based on our kinship connection, we really don't stand much of a chance.
Labels: Balkanization, Diversity, Ethnocentrism, Identity Politics, Multiculturalism, National Identity, Political Correctness, Western Decline
0 comment Sunday, September 28, 2014 | admin
I came across this discussion at a traditional music forum which is frequented by many people from the UK.
English culture -- what is it?
If you read through the thread, (scrolll down the linked page), you will find many exasperating responses which illustrate vividly how far the leftist/globalist/multicult agenda has penetrated into people's thoughts and feelings about their own country and heritage. It ain't pretty.
I have to say, sadly, that if you posed a similar question among a group of American 'folkie' or trad music types, that the responses would be just as dismal. Still, I suppose there is a case to be made, however weak and politically correct, that America has no native culture, but is merely a patchwork of various immigrant cultures. I disagree vehemently, of course, but still there's no denying that for the last 150+ years, America has absorbed a lot of immigrants from various places, and that some melding of cultures has occurred. But the UK, or Great Britain to use an older name, has not been a magnet for exotic immigrants until the latter half of the 20th century. I am aware that various smaller waves of immigrants have come to England, but their effect on the overall way of life there was negligible, unlike the present wave of Third World interlopers.
The media, the government, and the educational establishment in the UK are much more dominated by hard-core leftists and multiculturalists than even our institutions, and they seem to have accomplished their aim of mostly obliterating the sense of a national identity and culture.
The original poster on the thread simply asked a question, and was greeted with an incredibly hostile and venomous group of responses. What a plague on Western society leftism and ''liberalism'' are. They have truly left our Western countries sick unto death with their pernicious and malevolent ideas, and we have to work to find an anti-venom for this societal toxin or it will be the end of us.
A sampling of the comments, for those who don't want to wade through a very long and obnoxious thread:
If you want to "know" about "English" Culture I suggest you join the BNP...
****
What might be marvellous is England as the first culture free nation. Done with our reformation, civil wars, slavery, industrial revolution, class division we free ourseles [sic] of the burden of culture for a voyage of new discovery without a backward glance.
Heady stuff that.
*******
"My prob with the whole kulture game is it assumes there are shared resonances which elicit a unified response"
I'd disagree with that. I think we should celebrate the diversity and eclectic nature of our culture and fight against the uniformity that is creeping in - especialy [sic] the Americanisation and the threat to our wonderful family high street shops and small food-producers posed by the big supermarkets and ludicrous EU regulations.''
A question: why is everybody ready to see the threat from ''Americanisation'' and the EU (which is indeed a threat) but unable to see the threat posed by mass immigration and cultural Marxism? They have been schooled to believe that 'fascism and racism' are the only threats.
Back to the comments - beginning with a post by what seems to be a third-world immigrant:
Is it only English people who can comment on what English Culture is? I should think that, for people living in a sizeable proportion of the globe, "English Culture" is a mess of lies with which Public Schoolboy colonizers tried to replace numerous indigenous cultures.
[posted by a 'Guest with no English connexion']
Followed by a raving multicultist:
"Okay, let's put this in some sort or rational context. There is a vast difference in being interested in one's heritage and wanting to select through rose-tinted spectacles a romantic image of a Merrie Englande. The critical word here is 'select'!
I repeat my first post. In answer to the question the simplest and most accurate response is DIVERSE. In other words every bit of England (and everywhere else) has its own culture that is unique to that area, and the influences on those cultures are manifold and frequently not English in origin. For god's sake let's celebrate the diversity!
And a programmed lefty:
''The BNP are such a load of congenital idiots they can't even get the flag right. If it's British it should be the Union Flag and not the English Flag.
The whole lot are complete arseholes and - yes - I want my flag back please, and I want it to be looked on as a proud symbol for ALL who live in England.
Next, a dedicated multiculturalist:
"English culture as opposed to what other culture?
Do you mean something intrinsically English that doesn't occur anywhere else? You won't find anything, neither will you in any other culture.''
The original poster makes a valiant effort to counter the responses she gets, which are mostly hostile to her personally and to her question. And as you can see, the BNP are special targets of opprobrium. The leftists have done a bang-up job of marginalizing and (to use an obnoxious leftist word) 'demonizing" the BNP, and any kind of national feeling at all.
Sadly, though, she yields to the race-baiting and protests more than once that she is ''not a racist'' and that she, too, loves diversity. Bad mistake. Never give in to their game and never give any credibility to their name-calling and their 'racism' nonsense. That's letting them define the terms and create the rules of the game. They must be somehow put on the defensive. But why are we on our side so lost when it comes to doing this? Too often even the more politically incorrect at some point give in to PC and begin to protest that they are not ''racist'' or ''haters.'' Or worse, they start sniping at others farther to the right as a way of showing that they are not ''fascists'' or ''racists." This needs to stop.
There are a couple of common-sense responses that at least defend the existence of an 'English culture' which is identifiable. One such post seems to come from an American:
I think there is a definitive English folk music culture. I think this maybe the point of this
discussion. Certainly you could define the North Country Border rural music as "English" or areas such as Cornwall. There is an English ballad singing style. A.L. Lloyd or Ewan McColl has popularized it. Louis Killen as well. There seems to be a fiddling style that's unique to England.
I think Elizabethan Pro-Musica defines a tradition of Campion and Dowland which is
definitively English.
There is a Cockney music culture which as analogous to the city music halls of early America such as early Broadway or Second Avenue.
As in any country, there are regional styles that are a composite of the overall "culture".
As an outsider, I find that an English culture tends to be more subdued than the American one which is more bombastic like the German culture. These are gross generalizations, of course.
In the personalities on the stage, eccentricities of comics such as Monty Python,
the Goon Show, Spike Milligan, and even America's Danny Kaye seem to define a different emphasis on humor which tend toward the oddness of the characters. I think that English humor is different than in America which has more of a wise-cracking approach. The English appreciate the role of the clown in comedy. It's no accident that Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin instituted a brand of humor that is uniquely English in my opinion. I find the English Brit-coms equally reflective of British humor unlike the stuff from Stateside.
Ralph Vaughan Williams could not have originated in America, I believe. His music has
a distinctly English character as does Percy Grainger.
The tunes of Henry the Eighth typify an English musical approach. "Pastime with Good Company" could not have been written anywhere in the world except England.
Then there's the poets.
I think a strong case can be made for English culture citing these examples for a start.''
To me this is beyond obvious, and it is almost spooky how the British posters are so angry and aggressive in denying their own culture exists.
This behavior is groupthink at its most blatant, and is evidence of brainwashing. It really goes against all common-sense expectations for people to respond with hostility to the idea that their own people have a culture, that their ancestors created a distinct way of life. For people en masse to deny such things is just bizarre. It is not natural.
And lest anybody think I am criticizing British people too much, I can say we have more than our share of such brainwashed zombies in our country, sadly. If I am critical of the British in this context, it's only because I feel a strong affinity to them, based on common ancestry and history. All of us in America, even those who have no actual British ancestry, have partaken of a culture which has its origins in Great Britain, most specifically in England, so in a sense we are all a part of the extended family. So all of us should feel some distress over what is happening to Britain and to our cousins there, even though they seem not to want to own us as their kin.
I realize the commenters at that forum may be atypical; the 'folkies' I have known here and on the other side of the Atlantic are often, for some reason, rabid leftists. I posed a question before about why this is true, and I can't explain it fully. It makes no sense, on the face of it, to claim to love the traditional music of your people and country, and to care enough about preserving old songs, dances, and stories if you think that your country has in fact 'no culture of its own'. But leftists and liberals, it seems, are adept at holding many contradictory and nonsensical ideas at the same time.
The original poster is accused repeatedly of promoting a nostalgic view of 'Merrie England', which these cynics say never existed, or perhaps never should have existed. Why are leftists so cynical and hateful when it comes to the past? They seem to have declared all-out war on the past, and on memory, as I've said before. I am sometimes accused too of invoking an America that 'never was', a glamor-lensed view of old America. I realize the past is gone, and that no era or place is ever perfect. But by invoking the old America, I am not simply wallowing in teary nostalgia, but trying to awaken amnesiacs and try to bring them to their senses. Suppose an individual has amnesia (maybe it does happen outside movies sometimes) and has no recollection of who he is, where he comes from, where he belongs, and what he has accomplished? Our memory is a big part of who we are from moment to moment. Our memories define us to a great extent. We can't willfully forego our memories, erase our history, and still fully function as we are meant to be. So it is important to evoke the past in a warped world which denies and distorts that past.
I've quoted the following passage since the earliest days of this blog:
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.
Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. " - Milan Hubl, quoted by Milan Kundera in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'
English culture -- what is it?
If you read through the thread, (scrolll down the linked page), you will find many exasperating responses which illustrate vividly how far the leftist/globalist/multicult agenda has penetrated into people's thoughts and feelings about their own country and heritage. It ain't pretty.
I have to say, sadly, that if you posed a similar question among a group of American 'folkie' or trad music types, that the responses would be just as dismal. Still, I suppose there is a case to be made, however weak and politically correct, that America has no native culture, but is merely a patchwork of various immigrant cultures. I disagree vehemently, of course, but still there's no denying that for the last 150+ years, America has absorbed a lot of immigrants from various places, and that some melding of cultures has occurred. But the UK, or Great Britain to use an older name, has not been a magnet for exotic immigrants until the latter half of the 20th century. I am aware that various smaller waves of immigrants have come to England, but their effect on the overall way of life there was negligible, unlike the present wave of Third World interlopers.
The media, the government, and the educational establishment in the UK are much more dominated by hard-core leftists and multiculturalists than even our institutions, and they seem to have accomplished their aim of mostly obliterating the sense of a national identity and culture.
The original poster on the thread simply asked a question, and was greeted with an incredibly hostile and venomous group of responses. What a plague on Western society leftism and ''liberalism'' are. They have truly left our Western countries sick unto death with their pernicious and malevolent ideas, and we have to work to find an anti-venom for this societal toxin or it will be the end of us.
A sampling of the comments, for those who don't want to wade through a very long and obnoxious thread:
If you want to "know" about "English" Culture I suggest you join the BNP...
****
What might be marvellous is England as the first culture free nation. Done with our reformation, civil wars, slavery, industrial revolution, class division we free ourseles [sic] of the burden of culture for a voyage of new discovery without a backward glance.
Heady stuff that.
*******
"My prob with the whole kulture game is it assumes there are shared resonances which elicit a unified response"
I'd disagree with that. I think we should celebrate the diversity and eclectic nature of our culture and fight against the uniformity that is creeping in - especialy [sic] the Americanisation and the threat to our wonderful family high street shops and small food-producers posed by the big supermarkets and ludicrous EU regulations.''
A question: why is everybody ready to see the threat from ''Americanisation'' and the EU (which is indeed a threat) but unable to see the threat posed by mass immigration and cultural Marxism? They have been schooled to believe that 'fascism and racism' are the only threats.
Back to the comments - beginning with a post by what seems to be a third-world immigrant:
Is it only English people who can comment on what English Culture is? I should think that, for people living in a sizeable proportion of the globe, "English Culture" is a mess of lies with which Public Schoolboy colonizers tried to replace numerous indigenous cultures.
[posted by a 'Guest with no English connexion']
Followed by a raving multicultist:
"Okay, let's put this in some sort or rational context. There is a vast difference in being interested in one's heritage and wanting to select through rose-tinted spectacles a romantic image of a Merrie Englande. The critical word here is 'select'!
I repeat my first post. In answer to the question the simplest and most accurate response is DIVERSE. In other words every bit of England (and everywhere else) has its own culture that is unique to that area, and the influences on those cultures are manifold and frequently not English in origin. For god's sake let's celebrate the diversity!
And a programmed lefty:
''The BNP are such a load of congenital idiots they can't even get the flag right. If it's British it should be the Union Flag and not the English Flag.
The whole lot are complete arseholes and - yes - I want my flag back please, and I want it to be looked on as a proud symbol for ALL who live in England.
Next, a dedicated multiculturalist:
"English culture as opposed to what other culture?
Do you mean something intrinsically English that doesn't occur anywhere else? You won't find anything, neither will you in any other culture.''
The original poster makes a valiant effort to counter the responses she gets, which are mostly hostile to her personally and to her question. And as you can see, the BNP are special targets of opprobrium. The leftists have done a bang-up job of marginalizing and (to use an obnoxious leftist word) 'demonizing" the BNP, and any kind of national feeling at all.
Sadly, though, she yields to the race-baiting and protests more than once that she is ''not a racist'' and that she, too, loves diversity. Bad mistake. Never give in to their game and never give any credibility to their name-calling and their 'racism' nonsense. That's letting them define the terms and create the rules of the game. They must be somehow put on the defensive. But why are we on our side so lost when it comes to doing this? Too often even the more politically incorrect at some point give in to PC and begin to protest that they are not ''racist'' or ''haters.'' Or worse, they start sniping at others farther to the right as a way of showing that they are not ''fascists'' or ''racists." This needs to stop.
There are a couple of common-sense responses that at least defend the existence of an 'English culture' which is identifiable. One such post seems to come from an American:
I think there is a definitive English folk music culture. I think this maybe the point of this
discussion. Certainly you could define the North Country Border rural music as "English" or areas such as Cornwall. There is an English ballad singing style. A.L. Lloyd or Ewan McColl has popularized it. Louis Killen as well. There seems to be a fiddling style that's unique to England.
I think Elizabethan Pro-Musica defines a tradition of Campion and Dowland which is
definitively English.
There is a Cockney music culture which as analogous to the city music halls of early America such as early Broadway or Second Avenue.
As in any country, there are regional styles that are a composite of the overall "culture".
As an outsider, I find that an English culture tends to be more subdued than the American one which is more bombastic like the German culture. These are gross generalizations, of course.
In the personalities on the stage, eccentricities of comics such as Monty Python,
the Goon Show, Spike Milligan, and even America's Danny Kaye seem to define a different emphasis on humor which tend toward the oddness of the characters. I think that English humor is different than in America which has more of a wise-cracking approach. The English appreciate the role of the clown in comedy. It's no accident that Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin instituted a brand of humor that is uniquely English in my opinion. I find the English Brit-coms equally reflective of British humor unlike the stuff from Stateside.
Ralph Vaughan Williams could not have originated in America, I believe. His music has
a distinctly English character as does Percy Grainger.
The tunes of Henry the Eighth typify an English musical approach. "Pastime with Good Company" could not have been written anywhere in the world except England.
Then there's the poets.
I think a strong case can be made for English culture citing these examples for a start.''
To me this is beyond obvious, and it is almost spooky how the British posters are so angry and aggressive in denying their own culture exists.
This behavior is groupthink at its most blatant, and is evidence of brainwashing. It really goes against all common-sense expectations for people to respond with hostility to the idea that their own people have a culture, that their ancestors created a distinct way of life. For people en masse to deny such things is just bizarre. It is not natural.
And lest anybody think I am criticizing British people too much, I can say we have more than our share of such brainwashed zombies in our country, sadly. If I am critical of the British in this context, it's only because I feel a strong affinity to them, based on common ancestry and history. All of us in America, even those who have no actual British ancestry, have partaken of a culture which has its origins in Great Britain, most specifically in England, so in a sense we are all a part of the extended family. So all of us should feel some distress over what is happening to Britain and to our cousins there, even though they seem not to want to own us as their kin.
I realize the commenters at that forum may be atypical; the 'folkies' I have known here and on the other side of the Atlantic are often, for some reason, rabid leftists. I posed a question before about why this is true, and I can't explain it fully. It makes no sense, on the face of it, to claim to love the traditional music of your people and country, and to care enough about preserving old songs, dances, and stories if you think that your country has in fact 'no culture of its own'. But leftists and liberals, it seems, are adept at holding many contradictory and nonsensical ideas at the same time.
The original poster is accused repeatedly of promoting a nostalgic view of 'Merrie England', which these cynics say never existed, or perhaps never should have existed. Why are leftists so cynical and hateful when it comes to the past? They seem to have declared all-out war on the past, and on memory, as I've said before. I am sometimes accused too of invoking an America that 'never was', a glamor-lensed view of old America. I realize the past is gone, and that no era or place is ever perfect. But by invoking the old America, I am not simply wallowing in teary nostalgia, but trying to awaken amnesiacs and try to bring them to their senses. Suppose an individual has amnesia (maybe it does happen outside movies sometimes) and has no recollection of who he is, where he comes from, where he belongs, and what he has accomplished? Our memory is a big part of who we are from moment to moment. Our memories define us to a great extent. We can't willfully forego our memories, erase our history, and still fully function as we are meant to be. So it is important to evoke the past in a warped world which denies and distorts that past.
I've quoted the following passage since the earliest days of this blog:
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.
Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. " - Milan Hubl, quoted by Milan Kundera in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'
Labels: British Culture, Cultural Marxism, English Culture, Folkways, Gramscianism, Multiculturalism, National Identity, National Memory, Propaganda, Traditional Music