The way I see things these days, more or less the entire British political class – Labour, Lib Dem, and Conservative – have signed up to the EU ‘project’ in a way that the British people have not. And they haven’t just signed up to the obvious economic benefits – open borders, free movement of people, etc – but also to a federal European superstate in which Britain will be just another region. Sovereign nation states, some of them many centuries old, are to be dissolved. We will all be governed from Brussels. Richard North of EUreferendum has desrcibed it as “a slow motion coup d’etat“.
In fact, we already are more or less entirely governed from Brussels. And the British government (and other European governments) are now engaged in concealing this fact from their fellow countrymen, by acting as if they were still the government, even though the EU calls more or less all the shots. If the EU were transposed onto the USA, the British Prime Minister would be like a State Governor of, say, Ohio pretending to Ohioans that he could overrule the President of the United States in Washington (aka Brussels) any time he wanted.
It’s perhaps the principal reason why the UK parliament has become corrupt and self-serving (expenses scandals, etc): it’s become an empty institution, a hollowed-out backwater in which very little can be done, and so very little is done. If our Westminster politicians no longer bother to try to represent us, it’s because the UK parliament has ceased to be the seat of representative democracy. And all the ambitious politicians have headed for Brussels.
Now it seems to me that if the federal EU superstate is to be a success, Europeans have to develop a European identity. And we can only gain a European identity if individual national identity is suppressed. In Britain, we cannot be allowed to be British any more, but must become European. And if you are going to eradicate any sense of being British, you have to demolish every single British cultural institution.
The English pub is one such cultural institution, and the UK smoking ban has dealt it a mortal blow.
And perhaps that’s the whole point of the smoking bans which have multiplied across Europe? They are intended to fragment national cultural institutions – the English pub, the French bistro, the Spanish cantina – and replace them with an ersatz, ‘smoke-free’, Euro-bar.
But pubs aren’t the only cultural institutions. Churches are also cultural institutions. I’m not a church-goer, but I was raised as a Roman Catholic and I know how important churches are for a great many people.
And so I took note when the last Archbishop of Canterbury remarked that the (Protestant) Church of England was being “denormalised”. It meant that what was being done to smokers (and pubs) was also also being done to an entire church.
And a comment today from John Mallon in Ireland reminded me that the same has been happening with the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. He wrote:
When news of their child molestation continued over ten years in the nineties, the Irish en-masse turned away from the Catholic Church in the South.
Later he added:
The feeling of betrayal runs very deep in our society and priests are not safe walking outdoors at night in Ireland.
That’s the death of a cultural institution. And one which played a far greater role in Catholic Ireland than it does in Protestant England.
And it’s a bit of a puzzle. Here’s an institution which has been educating children for many centuries. Yet it’s only now we find out that they’re child molesters. Why wasn’t it known 500 years ago?
Or is it just that the churches are being silenced, because for all the child molesters they might generate, they also produce the occasional Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
And then there’s another sort of cultural institution: the TV celebrity. These have been falling like flies too. The first to go was Jimmy Savile, unmasked as a serial child molester a year after his death. And now any number of other celebrity disk jockeys are being questioned by the police, and seemingly found guilty without there being any trial at all.
How long will it be before Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger are denounced as child molesters as well? After all, teenage girls would bodily hurl themselves at them back in the 1960s. Is it going to come back to haunt them in their old age? Very likely it will, the way things are going.
Yet these people are iconic figures, and cultural institutions.
The pubs. The churches. The celebrities. These are all very different cultural institutions. And yet they all share one common characteristic: they are all under threat of extinction. And that is a very strange coincidence – because they were all doing very well not so long ago.
What’s left?
Well, in Britain, there is also the central national cultural institution of the Crown. And this above all must also be under threat. It can be no more possible for Britain to be a member of the EU and retain a Queen or King than it would be for Ohio to have a king or queen. It’s going to have to go.
I can only suppose that they’re waiting for Queen Elizabeth II – a cultural institution in her own right – to pass away and be succeeded by the rather less popular Charles, for the Crown to be dissolved on some pretext or other.
There are other cultural institutions, of course. But it seems to me that we are approaching a time when all our symbols of national cultural identity have been removed. They are all being torn up and thrown away. And when that has been done, an alien European identity will be imposed on us, with its EU flag and its EU anthem.
And it won’t be happening just in Britain, but in every single other European state.
But will it succeed? Will it actually be possible to stop the English being English, and the French being French, and the Germans German, and grind them all down into a sort of de-cultured, flavourless, and readily-interchangeable Euro-paste, without identity or history or memory?
Frank Davis 
“But will it succeed?”
No. Like Eastern European socialism, they are brute forcing fragile structures built upon false model of basic human nature. Any durable forms that may arise in the future will have to be harmonious with the way individual humans are, not with some wishful idea how they ought to be (not greedy, not pursuing happiness their own way, having allegiance to their families and kin with altruism that decreases with genetic distance,…etc). The Eastern European socialism and the Western globalism (with its political correctness, obliteration of individual pursuit of happiness) are both fragile, hastily cobbled attempts to reach the large scale harmony (such as Omega Point of Telihard de Chardin) via cheap shortcuts. They are illusions of solutions resting on foundation of deception and lies. As the Eastern European socialism imploded into its own vapidity, so will its Western counterpart. If for example a European power grid were to go down for a month (e.g. due to some natural disaster), all the superstructure would dissolve, leaving only families and small tight knit communities as self-preserving entities.
This process is a part of general pattern in the universe, where large scale durable harmonization is reached only via the full respect for the lower level laws and patterns (the latter are solutions to harmonization problems at smaller scales). E.g. biological systems, such as cells, form large scale structures which still obey the laws of physics, which are the basic nature of their components (atoms and elementary particles & fields). In turn our laws of physics are a solution to larger scale harmonization of the objects/entities from much smaller, Planck scale (note that there is 10^20 linear scale ratio between our elementary particles and Planck scale objects).
Yes. I agree. These sort of top-down solutions simply don’t work. People aren’t blank slates on which anything can be written. There’s already quite a lot written on those slates already, and it doesn’t rub off.
Frank has put into words what I have seen and felt for a long time. That is, the erasing of history and the complete annihilation of culture, British, French, German, etc. The US culture is fast proceeding down this avenue also. The rugged individual is being replaced by anything that is neither rugged nor individual. The War on Men comes to mind. I am not quite as optimistic as Nightlight but hope that he is right and I am wrong.
One of the links in Dick Puddlecotes Link Tank this weekend was about how 7 year old boys are essentially being ‘de-boyed’ by the PC education establishment;
http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/19/school-has-become-too-hostile-to-boys/
It’s no wonder the western world is going down the pan.
It’s no wonder the western world is going down the pan.
Going down the pan???? It has gone down the pan!!!!!
Even 20 years ago I was attacked for letting my kids (all of them) play “cowboys and indians” (I only interfered when it was time for dinner and one of them required to be untied from a tree……)
One of my kids had a friend whose dad has a HUGE collection of all sorts of old guns, neatly exhibited behind glass. My offspring just HAD to go and see it – when they came back they told me every detail of individual guns and how old they were.
Zero tolerance was originally conceived as a way of ridding schools of violent predators, especially in the wake of horrific shootings in places like Littleton, Colo.
First of all, I actually do know someone who went to Columbine and lived in Littleton at the time of the shooting. His first hand account (not remembering all of it) did not include the availability of guns, he just thought that the shooter was of some kind of strange personality. (He also thought that the media at the time printed a lot of bullshit).
There is a memorial there which one of my offspring visited.
Funnily enough; NONE of my offspring has the urge to stick a knife into anyone, or grab a gun and go on a rampage. They have all grown up being NON-VIOLENT; the one who had a brick thrown at his head (requiring 15 stitches) still cannot see a reason for doing something like this.
Perhaps this “Zero Tolerance” has only one effect: to curb boys (and tomboys!) natural exploration, inducing a form of self-hate and guilt to be born male/tomboyish.
Our ever-so-politically-correct 30-ish-year old parents might not be able to handle what they are breeding.
@Pat “I am not quite as optimistic as Nightlight but hope that he is right and I am wrong.”
They can’t destroy fundamental human nature and the natural systems that arise out of it, such as pursuit of happiness, family, kin, community. They can suppress it temporarily at the great expense and effort, but such society becomes non-competitive and another, more harmonious ones, prevail at the end. Lying is lot harder and less efficient in the long run than telling the truth. Having grown up in a communist country before coming to USA, I can tell you that it can be a lot worse, yet the nature still bounces back with vengeance. The greater the suppression the more forceful and violent the backlash.
But don’t people in the UK have an English, Scottish or Welsh identity in addition to a “British” one? I see in many countries a regional and/or ethnic identity existing (maybe uneasily, maybe not) with a larger national identity. We certainly have that in the US.
Well, I was born in England, and I’ve lived in England for much of my life, so I regard myself as English.
Me too, but I’d struggle to say what that means exactly in terms of ‘national identity’.
I was born and raised in Germany and live in England. Nevertheless, I regard myself as GERMAN, although I have a lot of English friends. We often joke about our little different attitudes and usually end up excusing the “shortcomings” with our different nationalities. (My friends usually excuse the “everything-in-german-dashion-triplicates; I excuse the “englishness-of-blandness-of-food”….)
We all live wonderfully this way. One of my friends even calls me “Kraut” – which lead to our greatest laugh; her mother actually thought that my mother must be cruel to have christened me “Kraut”……………)
In short; we are PROUD to be who we are – and we are best friends with some (?cultural) differences.
I can’t believe they can change individual identities, having lived and travelled all over Western Europe I just can’t see it, but then I thought it was obvious that the Euro was a bad idea unless allowed to grow organically from a small group of counrtues with more or less the same economies with others joining as they caught up. Also that a complete smoking ban couldn’t be maintained so I guess my judgement is suspect! still I live in hope.
I find that human nature is not what it used to be even 20 years ago. It’s almost like 50% of the world population caught a virus and turned into “people unknown”. Still living in hope like Cherie and Nightlight though!
“Sovereign nation states, some of them many centuries old, are to be dissolved. We will all be governed from Brussels.”
Sort of like the British Empire that was governed from London? :)
What I distrust is the promises of great advancement, such as this.
Due to healthy living and modern medicine the white male life span has doubled over the last 100 years or so.
Here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
we see that life expectancy at birth for white males has doubled since 1850.
But, the life expectency for a 70 year old white male has only increased by about 3.5% over that same period of time.
In 1850 the 70 year old white male had a 50% chance of living another 10.2 years.
In 2000 the 70 year old white male had a 50% chance of living another 13 years.
80.2 to 83 is a only a 3.5% increase.
While there may be more of us old geezers around, we are not living much longer than was done 150 years ago.
At least back then they could smoke, drink, and enjoy themselves as much as possible.
Due to healthy living and modern medicine the white male life span has doubled over the last 100 years or so.
Right. How come the white male life span has doubled in the last 100 years, considering a lot of them were/ARE SMOKERS?
And then there’s another sort of cultural institution: the TV celebrity. These have been falling like flies too. The first to go was Jimmy Savile, unmasked as a serial child molester a year after his death.
As already said; a dead man cannot defend himself and potential “victims” jump on a bandwagon.
How long will it be before Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger are denounced as child molesters as well? After all, teenage girls would bodily hurl themselves at them back in the 1960s. Is it going to come back to haunt them in their old age? Very likely it will, the way things are going.
Yes, I do remember growing up being told by “older” girls (15 years old at the time) that THE STONES are great and that Mick Jagger was “worth a few sins”.
It was the 60s and love was for free. For everybody.
Somehow the hypocrites (usually male) won; whilst it was ok for them to enjoy what was coming their way, they ACTUALLY stated that they didn’t want this freedom for “their” woman.
Nevertheless, I REALLY doubt that ANY of the girls who were picked up by the Rolling Stones in the 60s see it as abuse; it is more likely to be a precious memory of the brief moment in time of FREEDOM.
O/T (or maybe not) – just watched an interesting documentary (‘Ultimate Swarms’, BBC1, 9.00pm) and thought of you, Frank!
The programme looked at the reasons for swarming behaviour among fish, mammals and insects (BTW why are naturalists referring, these days, to insects as ‘animals’ (please don’t tell me it’s so they don’t feel discriminated against :) ?) and how (which the prog explored in a limited way) we can learn about – and improve – human behaviour.
Interestingly, when looking at leaf-cutter ants, the presenter posited that the secret of their success is that ‘no-one is in charge’! This chimed with your thoughts that the smoking population is like a swarm: there is no top/down hierarchy, everybody seems to be doing their own thing….yet you have always been optimistic about the outcome! Seems you might be on to something. They tried a modest experiment: is it quicker to allocate seats on an aeroplane or allow the passengers to choose their own seats – and found that it was quicker to allow them to self-select. The conclusion drawn was that, when no-one is in charge, we have to think for ourselves (now there’s a thought!).
(Also, interestingly, the same leaf-cutter ants have informed our road traffic management in the UK – there are so many ants engaged in the activity of feeding the colony that there must be no hold-ups in the process and, to stop congestion and keep the flow, the ants realise that they must slow down: there mustn’t be a jam and ants mustn’t overtake each other ( you can see where this is going:)) hence average speed limits on our motorways with no overtaking on certain stretches.)
It’s a programme worth watching even for the cinematography (the mayfly swarm is quite beautiful) and the wonder of the survivability (if that’s a word) of different species.
Absolutely spot on, Frank. Like Pat, I’ve long been concerned about what I see as a deliberate (but nonetheless unadmitted) attempt by the EU to erase all sense of national identity and pride in the people of individual nation states in the hope that, as an alternative, they’ll all come to see themselves as part of one great big, happy-clappy European family. Like Nightlight, I don’t think it is destined to succeed, but I think the problem is that before ultimate failure the EU will set-to trying to bludgeon its subjects into conformity and in the process many precious facets of each nation’s culture and history will be ruined irrevocably.
It’s curious to note, for instance, that pretty much everything which has “gone pear shaped” in this country over the last few decades, from the very big things like our (once legendary) legal system and our (once world-envied) NHS, to the more subtle iconic elements like the real British pub and the black London cab – are things which are all intrinsically British. Things we either felt that we did well (often best); things that we did first; or things which only we do/have.
I don’t think it’s just us, either. I’m sure there are similar historical, traditional things in all of the nation states of the EU which have, often after hundreds of years, suddenly “fallen from favour” or “discovered” to be corrupt, inefficient, spoiled or just plain “wrong” for some politically-correct reason (the French café, bullfighting in Spain and the marijuana cafes in Holland spring to mind as recent casualties). It can’t just all be coincidence, surely? Societies change, for sure, but they tend to change very slowly and very gradually, and those changes tend to be absorbed gradually into a nation’s psyche and stay as permanent ones. But as the Eastern Europeans discovered, forcing change on society is much like holding a coiled spring closed – the moment you let go it just twangs back to the way it was before.
I guess we just have to hope that the EU as a political entity collapses before it succeeds in erasing too much of our entire continent’s precious 1000-odd years of history in pursuit of their fantasy of an all-smiling, everything-in-the-garden-is-rosy, European ideal, so that we can all go back to being – and enjoying being – the British, French, Greek, Spanish, German etc people that we all really are, and that we will only ever truly be.
Cultural genocide.
And again, cultural genocide – planned and put into effect.