After America

Suez moment.

AFTER THE BALL

To point out how English the globalized world is, is, of course, a frightfully unEnglish thing to do. One risks sounding like the old Flanders and Swann number:

The English, the English, the English are best.
I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.

Which is the point of the song: English braggadocio is a contradiction in terms. You need some sinister rootless colonial oik like me to do it. No true Englishman would ever descend to anything so vulgar. But there’s a difference between genial self-effacement and contempt for one’s own inheritance. In 2009, Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and soidisant Islamophobe, flew into London and promptly got shipped back to the Netherlands as a threat to public order.¹⁵ After the British Government had reconsidered its stupidity, he was permitted to return and give his speech at the House of Lords—and, as foreigners often do, he quoted the Winston Churchill, under the touchingly naive assumption that this would endear him to the natives.¹⁶ Whereas, of course, to almost all members of Britain’s current elite, quoting Churchill approvingly only confirms that you’re an extremist lunatic. I had the honor a couple of years back of visiting President Bush in the White House and seeing the bust of Sir Winston on display in the Oval Office. When Barack Obama moved in, he ordered it removed and returned to the British.¹⁷ Its present whereabouts are unclear. But given what Churchill had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust was almost certainly arrested upon landing at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order.

Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of self-deprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from the Daily Telegraph:

A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was “distasteful.” The ?136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of “the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences.”

Students were urged to “party like it’s 1899” and organizers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.

But anti-fascist groups said the theme was “distasteful and insensitive” because of the British Empire’s historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation.

The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material.¹⁸

The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”

It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups’” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it.

Until William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as a constant feature of life, as permanent as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.

It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. Yet there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for America, too: when a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. And, if la creme de la creme of the British education system so willingly prostrates itself before ahistorical balderdash, what then of its more typical charges? If you cut off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? One of the July 7 Tube bombers left a famous video broadcast posthumously on Arab TV, spouting all the usual jihadist boiler-plate but in a Yorkshire accent: Ee-oop Allahu akbar! Eaten away by Islam and welfare, much of Britain is on a fast track to Somalia with chip shops.¹⁹

And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is in its pestilential way a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.

“We don’t need no education,” as Pink Floyd sang. When a broke British government attempted to increase the cost of university education, “students” rampaged through Parliament Square, set fire to the statue of Lord Palmerston and urinated on that of Winston Churchill.²⁰ The signature photograph of the riot showed a “student” swinging from the Union Flag on the Cenotaph, the memorial to Britain’s 700,000 dead from the Great War. Who was this tribune of the masses? Step forward, Charlie Gilmour, stepson of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, a geriatric rocker worth $150 million or thereabouts.²¹ When he went up to Cambridge University, Charlie’s parents had two suits made for him by a Savile Row tailor so he could swank about the groves of academe in bespoke elegance.

Yet young Mr. Gilmour still thinks the government should fund his education. “Hey, teacher, leave us kids a loan,” as his dad’s rock group almost sang.

What’s he studying at Cambridge? History. Despite that, and despite the prominently displayed words “THE GLORIOUS DEAD,” he had no idea that the monument he was desecrating was a memorial to Britain’s fallen soldiers. As the columnist Julie Burchill observed, Charlie no doubt assumed “the Glorious Dead” was a rock band.²²

In 2008, when the economy hit the skids, Gordon Brown and other ministers of the Labour Government fell back on stillborn invocations of “the knowledge economy” that will always make Britain an attractive place to do business because of the “added value” of its educated workforce.²³ (You hear the same confident bluster from American experts entirely ignorant of the academic standards of Asia.) Are you serious? Have you set foot in an English state school in the last fifteen years? The well of cultural inheritance in great nations is deep but not bottomless.

What happened to England, the mother of parliaments and a crucible of liberty? Britain, in Dean Acheson’s famous post-war assessment, had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Actually, Britain didn’t so much “lose” the Empire: it evolved peacefully into the modern Commonwealth, which is more agreeable than the way these things usually go. Nor is it clear that modern Britain wants a role, of any kind. Rather than losing an empire, it seems to have lost its point.

WORLD WITHOUT WANT

Having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, in what other ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old lion? First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After empire, Britain turned inward: