Who killed my England?

Is it time for our second break-up?

Dear M,

The whole point of Impractical Jokers is a few pranksters doing things, on purpose, which violate the norms of our society. This is what's known as comedy. In real life, the whole point of a border is keeping people out who violate the norms of our society on accident. This is what we know as “having a country.”

Now we all know that a country can be comical; but things get serious when too many people from too many countries start violating your norms willy-nilly. For instance, do Americans stand in line or crowd to the front? Do we throw trash in the garbage bins or on the street? How loudly can we play our music with the windows open? And can anybody park on the lawn?

Things get more uncomfortable when you ask, what age is an impregnable women too young? And can you just follow one around if she's alone, or stare at her on the bus? Do you have to wash your hands before making a stranger a hot dog? And should people own actual dogs? And can you blast prayers at six in the morning from the top of a building? And do you have to hold it all in, or can you just shit on the street?

(Fooled you on that last one. In San Francisco almost anyone can fit in except Republicans).

Some other differences go well beyond laws and affect the norms. George Patton writes in his memoirs that when he visited the Sultan in Morocco, a leopard broke out of its cage and ran straight into the harem. A lot of screams were heard, and the Sultan took off. And when he came back, he told Patton (with a calm face) to not worry. It just got one of the concubines in the neck. The real wives were all safe, so they could carry on as usual.

This is the kind of thing that pisses Americans off, but it highlights a crucial difference between American and Arabian society. In 1942 Morocco, a man of eminence could pile up dozens of women of no eminence and sometimes they get bled to death by leopards. In modern America, a woman of no eminence can pile up men of eminence and bleed them dry on her own. This is what we refer to as “alimony” and “child support;” and if a man tries to escape the harem, we throw him in another one where the Sultan is his cellmate.

Thus so far from being against ethnic diversity, I’m for it — somewhere else. The great value of having other countries (and dare I say it: other states) is you can view them from a distance. And the chief benefit of viewing them from a distance is you can find out which things you want to do yourself and which things you want the cops to shoot at.

This is the conservative’s idea of diversity. It’s a plan where clear distinctions lie between “us” and “them” so we can delineate between the two and plan accordingly. And if you like this sort of thing, you believe deeply in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The problem with the leftist’s diversity is that the diversity happens right at home, so by the time you realize you hate something, you’re stuck with it. Also you have to like it. This is the whole point of HR and DEI — to not let anyone at work say “I really support ICE.”

One country I’m really glad is “over there” is Great Britain — for the simple reason that the British will consider anybody “British.” And for the additional reason that if you disagree with who can be British in Britain you can end up in prison.

That’s why more people get arrested in Britain than in Russia for having opinions. It’s also why Mohammed is the most popular name in the country. And when Pakis started raping thousands of little girls, it’s the reason police swept the accusations under the rug. Simply put, Brits wanted to defend everything but Britishness — and that's why the United Arab Emirates won’t send any students to college in England. The UAE took one look at the radical Islamists in Oxford, and decided Oxford was too much like Mohammed to let the Islamic students back into Arabia.

“Totally fine,” he says. “Capital, even.”

Yesterday our forefathers would have burned the whole world because the British wanted to tax us too much. Today our forefathers would burn the whole world because the British tax their citizens to fund all the wrong things. I include here such laudable expenditures as disarming law-abiding citizens, hiding crime by foreigners, feeding terrorists and layabouts, making a joke out of God, and terrorizing the ethnically British. Sixty years ago the whole civilized world was allied against Soviet Russia. Today we have not just an interest, but a moral obligation to have the whole free world ally ourselves against the general ethos of Great Britain.

Whether Russia belongs on our team, in the age of China, is a fair question*. Whether the UK belongs on it without respecting themselves is obvious. A country should always question whether its allies are the kind of people who commit murder. But a country should never ally itself with a country in the middle of a suicide.

Yours,

-J

P.S. Just the other week Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain launched an attempt to free the Motherland from its leftist overlords and Islamic occupation.

I recommend watching the video, but below you’ll find a partial transcript, with beautiful passages such as,

Britain is not just an economy. Britain is not just an idea. Britain is not just a passport. Britain is a nation. Britain is a people: Our people.

And Restore Britain will never allow that to be erased. We will celebrate our Christian heritage and the identity that built and shaped this country. Responsibility, restraint, forgiveness, duty, and fairness. In short, a high-trust society. That will mean defending our culture. That will mean resisting the relentless creep of radical Islam. That will mean banning the burka, outlawing sharia law, outlawing cousin marriages, and reimposing our Christian-based rule of law.

This is how a man’s political party speaks. And I don't believe that anyone who feels differently about his homeland deserves a home. He goes on,

What is necessary will be incredibly painful. But for the first time in a very long time, voters will have genuine alternative, which is truthful with them about the scale of what now has to be done.

The first priority is to control who comes to our country, and more importantly, who stays in our country. Restore Britain will not just stop mass immigration; we will reverse it.

Every single illegal migrant will be securely detained, and then deported. The message will be unrelenting: If you are in this country without permission, you will be removed. For the foreseeable future, far more people must leave Britain than arrive.

If a foreign national is unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime, or even actively hates our way of life and wishes to do us harm, then they must leave, or be made to leave.

Sounds like poetry to me.

Restore Britain will make our communities safe again for women and children. That I promise you. If that means millions go, then millions go.

We’re constantly told that the economy needs vast swaths of low-skilled migrants. We know that’s simply not true. What we need is to get millions of healthy Brits back into work - a radical overhaul of how welfare is delivered. Protecting those in genuine need, but not funding healthy shirkers to live off the back of hard working men and women. If you can work, you must work. It really is that simple.

And furthermore,

The state has definitively become the enemy of the people. Restore Britain will burn away suffocating taxes on work and enterprise. We will slash unnecessary regulation. We will dismantle bloated quangos and the overbearing HR culture. We must crush parasitic Britain. We will restore long-term, stable, logical policy, so that business can plan and invest and grow again.

No country which refuses these principles deserves to be safe. No person who refuses these principles is worthy of life. What Rupert Lowe signifies isn’t just right vs left. In the lines laid out starkly above, it is smart vs stupid, light vs darkness, honor vs dishonor, and life vs suicide — in the once-upon-a-time greatest, once-upon-a-time brightest, once-most-beautiful country the world ever saw. And I believe it is our duty, not just as Americans, but as free citizens of any country, to make life harder on any government on “our team” which tries to. And yes, that means I want us to invade Canada.

Despite what I said above, the U.K. — and specifically England — still represents to me a beacon of wholesomeness, manners, genius, dignity, character, style, and progress absolutely unparalleled in the history of mankind. It means C.S. Lewis and Winston Churchill; Samuel Johnson and Thomas Babington Macaulay; Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter, Big Ben, and Queen Victoria.

Speaking of England evokes images from Pride and Prejudice. When I hear England I see Edmund Burke in the House of Commons. It means winding, cobblestone streets in ancient alleys; the cozy, charming countryside hedges and villas; the desperate fight against King Louis XIV and Nazi Germany; Shakespeare and Charles Dickens**; Greensleeves and Scarborough Fair; Edward Gibbon, Francis Bacon, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

To me, England is the grandfatherly prose of Orwell and the common sense of Locke. England means Adam Smith and David Hume. Lord Clive conquering the earth*** and Lord Nelson ruling the seas. The tremendous gift of civil liberty. The desperate fight against autocracy and popery. England, to anyone who really loves it, means a long history, stretching back to Roman times, through horror and desperation and Viking incursions, giving us a link to the past — a foothold in time; a character, still evident but fading, in the manners and principles of our nation.

To say I hate England would be wrong. The truth is I am in love with England. And because I’m in love with England, watching what’s happened to it in the last 50 years has made me almost ready to nuke it.

*At this point I don’t even recommend an alliance with Russia. White American men are the most right-wing they’ve been in generations. White American women are probably the worst they’ve ever been. Russia has killed off their men and has millions of the best women on the planet up for grabs.

I don’t want the US and Russia to make some kind of a trade pact or an anti-Chinese NATO. At this point I just want the US and Russia to get married.

**Theodore Dalrymple, the most eloquent (and probably sharpest) critic of British degeneracy, writes, in Our Culture: What’s Left of It,

This scene takes me back to Pyongyang. I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People’s Study House—all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata—when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, ‘Do you speak English?’

An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, ‘Down with Big Brother!’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life.’

It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself. Orwell and Huxley had the imagination to understand why—unlike me, who had to go to Pyongyang to find out.

What Britain represents to me isn’t just the place that made Dickens and Shakespeare. It also means the people which made Shakespeare and Dickens mean home.

***Who is Lord Clive? And why should you care?

Macaulay writes, in his short biography of Clive,

We have always thought it strange that, while the history of the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest.

Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa. But we doubt whether one in ten, even among English gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won the battle of Buxar, who perpetrated the massacre of Patna, whether Sujah Dowlah ruled in Oude or in Travancore, or whether Holkar was a Hindoo, or a Mussulman. Yet the victories of Cortes were gained over savages who had no letters, who were ignorant of the use of metals, who had not broken in a single animal to labour, who wielded no better weapons than those which could be made out of sticks, flints, and fish-bones, who regarded a horse-soldier as a monster, half man and half beast, who took a harquebusier for a sorcerer, able to scatter the thunder and lightning of the skies. The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards vanquished, and were at the same time quite as highly civilised as the victorious Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, viceroys whose splendour far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have astonished the Great Captain.

It might have been expected, that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not only insipid, but positively distasteful.

Macaulay blamed historians for being so boring — and he corrected this mistake by writing one of the most fascinating, fun, and shocking biographies ever penned by a Victorian.

You can buy all of Macaulay’s works on Amazon for $1.99.