I accepted a few years back that the country of my childhood was gone. I don't specifically mean the national pride, but the everyday culture and people. Besides, given all the foreign wars "our" country has caused and how we've been lied to, I've been gradually been re-evaluating what it all really means anyway. However, the loss of the culture and things hitherto taken for granted has been a terrible thing, but it's behind me now. Today, I try to be open to the future. Nothing lasts forever, especially a new world order.
Entirely agreed. I have let go, to a great degree, a lot of the patriotic baggage. It's gone and there's no sense in torturing oneself over it. Cultures come and go and morph unexpectedly. Something is on the other side of all of this; it's just an adventure nobody sodding asked for!
"What did my grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather put their lives on the lines for in the trenches and on D-Day? What was the point? What are we becoming?"
We have , as you also wrote, become a country where 'imbecilities in our national life' are the norm. It's to be expected when the majority of the population has become infantilised. Who would indeed vote for that ...
Meanwhile, we better batten down the hatches and hope that we can survive the coming Labour onslaught.
Bring it on, I say. I'm curious to see how bad it might be. Then again, I assume it will just constitute more of the same gradual, depressing slide into dysfunction.
Indeed - how bad could it be when there's not even room for a cigarette paper between Lab and Con: we've been used to Lab since 1997 - remember the 'Heir to Blair'. It'll be fun to watch taxation climb and climb - wasn't it around 90% in the 1970s?
I am English with extended family in Eire. Many years ago I made a choice - I am not Irish, but English. Since then any opinion voiced to support the UK and specifically England is seen by the elected MPS and associated Public Sector as something beyond the worst possible situation.
We are deliberately made to feel unwanted.
Should this ever be invoked on certain other communities we would be instantly awash with multiple legal actions from an armies of solicitors and barristers. It is a two tier country, with the resident underclass expected to pay for any abuse the elite care to impose. However, this particular road will come to an end, and soon. It is going to be brutal for all.
For much of history, Britain has been waging wars. The plebs manned either the plough at home or the canon. We thought that God was on our side. Today the establishment tells us that Britain welcomes all faiths. The establishment is blind to the stupidity of this statement. Faith ( not football) is the backbone of culture, values and national identity. Introduce more than one faith and the nation fragments. The fragmentation will continue until either one faith becomes dominant or Britain once again goes to war, in which case everything will be thrown up in the air and only God knows what will be left. The British establishment wants war, that much is evident.
You said: Unlike most I feel no burning allegiance to either side in the Israel/Gaza perennial disaster. No longer a world power, such matters should not concern us overly.
Are you serious? You have no allegiance to defending justice, rule of law, democracy, human rights and common human decency all of which Israel betrays? Why on earth did Britain go to war in the First and Second World Wars if not to defend those principles and to fight brutal military occupations?
You are not overly concerned with an issue created by the British where the Palestinians, because of British actions, have suffered the longest holocaust in modern history and the most bestial, sadistic, brutal military colonial occupation. Not overly concerned you say when British weapons and actions fund, support and promote the Israeli genocide against the native people of the land it has stolen. Remember Lord Balfour? Remember the British encouraging Jewish colonists to set up in Palestine, well aware that the Zionists and the Israelis when they invented themselves, had a plan to exterminate or expel every last non-Jew. Well, maybe a few compliant slaves could remain.
Not overly concerned in the most evil military colonial occupation for centuries which your country helped to create? Shame on you.
You see clearly the aggressive Islamisation of Britain and anticipate a backlash yet you view the war in Israel and Gaza as remote and irrelevant to you. I would say they are just two parts of one and the same fight.
I sincerely hope that their privations and sacrifices were not for nothing - after all, Europe lost many of its finest young men in those wars. Yet, I'm not sure that them not foreseeing what would happen (who can?) alters the fact. The time elapsed since those mighty conflicts of 1914-1945 is miniscule in the grand scheme of things, yet the path taken has so rapidly pushed us down a path of unutterable stupidity. Clearly we have a moral aspect to our answer of 'what was the point?', one that makes the horror of it all a bit more palatable, but I don't think it smooths over the basic fact that millions suffered and died for their countries to be given up within their lifetimes.
As for democracy, who knows. You are right in what you say but when the franchise was more limited we had a different set of standards governing the mores of those who had earned the vote. Who would risk handing sole control to their modern equivalents?
It's a sham either way. You'll always have an elite, regardless as to whether it is dressed up in the alluring lingerie of democracy or not. They'll always be the ones calling the shots.
I accepted a few years back that the country of my childhood was gone. I don't specifically mean the national pride, but the everyday culture and people. Besides, given all the foreign wars "our" country has caused and how we've been lied to, I've been gradually been re-evaluating what it all really means anyway. However, the loss of the culture and things hitherto taken for granted has been a terrible thing, but it's behind me now. Today, I try to be open to the future. Nothing lasts forever, especially a new world order.
Entirely agreed. I have let go, to a great degree, a lot of the patriotic baggage. It's gone and there's no sense in torturing oneself over it. Cultures come and go and morph unexpectedly. Something is on the other side of all of this; it's just an adventure nobody sodding asked for!
>it's just an adventure nobody sodding asked for!
Laughing at this. It's how I see it.
You ask in your final paragraph:
"What did my grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather put their lives on the lines for in the trenches and on D-Day? What was the point? What are we becoming?"
We have , as you also wrote, become a country where 'imbecilities in our national life' are the norm. It's to be expected when the majority of the population has become infantilised. Who would indeed vote for that ...
Meanwhile, we better batten down the hatches and hope that we can survive the coming Labour onslaught.
Bring it on, I say. I'm curious to see how bad it might be. Then again, I assume it will just constitute more of the same gradual, depressing slide into dysfunction.
Indeed - how bad could it be when there's not even room for a cigarette paper between Lab and Con: we've been used to Lab since 1997 - remember the 'Heir to Blair'. It'll be fun to watch taxation climb and climb - wasn't it around 90% in the 1970s?
I am English with extended family in Eire. Many years ago I made a choice - I am not Irish, but English. Since then any opinion voiced to support the UK and specifically England is seen by the elected MPS and associated Public Sector as something beyond the worst possible situation.
We are deliberately made to feel unwanted.
Should this ever be invoked on certain other communities we would be instantly awash with multiple legal actions from an armies of solicitors and barristers. It is a two tier country, with the resident underclass expected to pay for any abuse the elite care to impose. However, this particular road will come to an end, and soon. It is going to be brutal for all.
For much of history, Britain has been waging wars. The plebs manned either the plough at home or the canon. We thought that God was on our side. Today the establishment tells us that Britain welcomes all faiths. The establishment is blind to the stupidity of this statement. Faith ( not football) is the backbone of culture, values and national identity. Introduce more than one faith and the nation fragments. The fragmentation will continue until either one faith becomes dominant or Britain once again goes to war, in which case everything will be thrown up in the air and only God knows what will be left. The British establishment wants war, that much is evident.
You said: Unlike most I feel no burning allegiance to either side in the Israel/Gaza perennial disaster. No longer a world power, such matters should not concern us overly.
Are you serious? You have no allegiance to defending justice, rule of law, democracy, human rights and common human decency all of which Israel betrays? Why on earth did Britain go to war in the First and Second World Wars if not to defend those principles and to fight brutal military occupations?
You are not overly concerned with an issue created by the British where the Palestinians, because of British actions, have suffered the longest holocaust in modern history and the most bestial, sadistic, brutal military colonial occupation. Not overly concerned you say when British weapons and actions fund, support and promote the Israeli genocide against the native people of the land it has stolen. Remember Lord Balfour? Remember the British encouraging Jewish colonists to set up in Palestine, well aware that the Zionists and the Israelis when they invented themselves, had a plan to exterminate or expel every last non-Jew. Well, maybe a few compliant slaves could remain.
Not overly concerned in the most evil military colonial occupation for centuries which your country helped to create? Shame on you.
You see clearly the aggressive Islamisation of Britain and anticipate a backlash yet you view the war in Israel and Gaza as remote and irrelevant to you. I would say they are just two parts of one and the same fight.
I sincerely hope that their privations and sacrifices were not for nothing - after all, Europe lost many of its finest young men in those wars. Yet, I'm not sure that them not foreseeing what would happen (who can?) alters the fact. The time elapsed since those mighty conflicts of 1914-1945 is miniscule in the grand scheme of things, yet the path taken has so rapidly pushed us down a path of unutterable stupidity. Clearly we have a moral aspect to our answer of 'what was the point?', one that makes the horror of it all a bit more palatable, but I don't think it smooths over the basic fact that millions suffered and died for their countries to be given up within their lifetimes.
As for democracy, who knows. You are right in what you say but when the franchise was more limited we had a different set of standards governing the mores of those who had earned the vote. Who would risk handing sole control to their modern equivalents?
It's a sham either way. You'll always have an elite, regardless as to whether it is dressed up in the alluring lingerie of democracy or not. They'll always be the ones calling the shots.