There is not much in a society which matters more than its culture. Indeed to a great extent the culture of a society describes its character and quality, and defines its boundaries. It is that which makes a society coherent and different from other societies. Our own British culture is much more than either the Royal Opera House or X-Factor. It is the 2000 years or more of shared experience which have shaped us and formed us together. Small groups of migrants over this period have been successfully integrated into the wider cultural matrix, even while preserving aspects of their minority culture. Certainly there have been Jewish communities, but the wider culture has not been undermined by their presence. Likewise the integration of French Huguenots, of Poles during the Second World War, and even Greek-Cypriots after the invasion of Cyprus by the Turkish Army.
There have certainly been periods of major upheaval which have caused cultural changes of a significant nature. The Roman invasion introduced elements of advanced civilization for a while, but when the legions abandoned Britain in the 5th century the island peoples returned to their own native culture. Likewise the subsequent dominance of Angles and Saxons, though it drove many of the British nobility to the West, hardly mattered to the bulk of the population who exchanged one master for another. Nor was the English culture so very different from the native British. More successful at the time, but still a culture of kings and warriors, of wooden halls and golden treasures. Nor were there so many immigrant Romans or English that our native blood was too much diluted. If any of us are of British ancestry then we share the same ancient British genes, overlaid to some extent with Angles and Saxons, and some of the small groups of migrants who have made these islands their own home with us.
That last and successful invasion of William the Bastard took over a going concern, and the Domesday Book shows us that the small number of Norman warriors and their followers who defeated Harold, the last English king, were not interested in starting from scratch, nor did they scour the country clean of English, but they wanted to milk them of the last drop of their wealth.
As important as any invasion of Romans, the English or the Normans, the introduction of Christianity into the British Isles in the first century, and its growth during the Roman and post-Roman period, and its national establishment in the time of Augustine, the missionary bishop sent by Pope Gregory, and then Theodore of Tarsus, the Syrian and Orthodox Archbishop of Canterbury, has had even greater consequence for the formation of our culture. Every aspect of our lives is touched by some aspect of the Christian message, irrespective of personal faith.
Who are we? We are a people who share a culture formed by Christianity, in the context of several transforming invasions, but with very long periods of general stability, certainly in terms of further invasion. There was conflict at the edge of the Romanised zone in Britain, but most of Britain enjoyed peace for several hundreds of years. There were internal conflicts within and among the British and English kingdoms until England itself was formed, but no further invasions, and the British and English shared substantially the same culture. Even after the Norman invasion, with several centuries of conflict between Norman factions, there was increasingly a sense within these islands of being one English people, and the outnumbered and tired army that defeated the French at Agincourt in 1415 was essentially an English one, with an English King, or a King of the English at least, at their head.
We have not been disturbed by the regular and routine tramp of foreign armies crossing and recrossing our borders as almost all European nations have been. If there has been war, it has been between Englishmen. Not so in Europe where one region could be French one day and German another. Not so in Europe where the armies of Napoleon and Hitler both attempted to produce an Empire whose culture would dominate all.
Our long cultural gestation has produced something unique, often out of the most unlikely of ingredients. We have a culture that has changed the world and is worth preserving, for it is us and without it we cease to be who we are.
Is it any wonder then, that having failed to subvert our culture by conquest, our latest enemies are seeking to destroy that which we are, that which makes us British and English by attacking our culture directly. We have our own Quislings, those politicians who are willing to collude with the enemy and bring about the hegemony of a different culture altogether, and if a different culture then a different people. The invasive forces of this anti-culture are now becoming more and more obvious. They form a union of the damned. That of cultural marxism, with its successful social engineering agenda, that has made even speaking out against the subversion of our culture a thought crime that we self-censor, and now that of an aggressive and confident Islam, which represents a culture essentially and absolutely at odds with our own, with a different history, and a different socio-religious philosophy at the heart of it.
These two agencies of cultural genocide each hope to use the other to maximise their own advantage, and each have as their ambition the elimination of traditional, British and especially English Christianised culture. They understand entirely that our culture defines us, and forms us, and if our culture is destroyed then we become merely people who live in a place, rootless and easily marginalised. But we are not people who live simply in this place rather than another, as if we were lodgers with no lasting claim. These are the British Isles because we British live here and they are ours and we are theirs. This land is England because it is the land of the English, and of none others. Our ancestors for hundreds and thousands of years are buried around us. We are no bastard nation. On the contrary, those of us with lasting connections to England share mostly the same ancient British genes. We are all of us related. We have, as ancestors, everyone who lived in England in the 14th century and earlier.
But we have always been an open and generous people. Not in the way our enemies suggest, as though there were no such thing as the English. Small groups of migrants have been welcomed, and have integrated, and have made our English culture their own to a great extent. they have become British and even English.
The great danger we face now is from an invading force that has no desire to integrate at all, and wishes to colonise our own British Isles with an alien culture, as though it were part of Pakistan, or Bangladesh. We have no history of tolerating such a thing. It must mean the end of England and the English. How can any country and any culture survive when the majority of births is to a foreign people? How can any country and any culture survive when its own native people are now a minority in its own capital city?
This is not a matter of race. It is a matter of culture and the determination to overwhelm our own with unsustainable levels of immigration of those who both wish us well and those who wish us ill. For the sake of England and our survival as a people we must resist at the point of our culture. That which is not English must not be allowed, and that which is inimical to our English culture must be prosecuted. We learn that Pakistani men believe it is part of their culture to engage in sex with young boys. This must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We learn that many migrant communities believe it necessary to mutilate their young girls, or to kill them if they are seen to dishonour their families. These must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and with expulsion from our land and our society. We see that many migrant communities, resisting integration believe that we ourselves, the English, must stop selling alcohol, must dress as the most conservative of Muslims, must blacken the windows of swimming pools, must install public toilets that are a hole in the ground.
We will not, and must not. We must resist every effort to subvert our culture because it is the end of us as a people, as a society, if we let that happen. We are finding our voices. Learning each day of the atrocities committed by those who hold views which are inimicable to our British and English culture we are starting to insist that enough has been allowed already, and we will allow no more.
England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy Sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death
And close her from thy ancient walls?
Thy hills and valleys felt her feet
Gently upon their bosoms move:
Thy gates beheld sweet Zion’s ways:
Then was a time of joy and love.
And now the time returns again:
Our souls exult, and London’s towers
Receive the Lamb of God to dwell
In England’s green and pleasant bowers.
A touching lament Peter. I’m sad to observe that it cannot be more. The clarion call is far too late. The essentials have been removed, first surreptitiously, the gradually more blatantly and now with gay abandon. The spirit has been diluted by alien piss. And taking the piss is what they are now doing.
On Saturday last I visited London to help celebrate a grand-daughter’s 21st convened in St James’s restaurant and to take a last look at the Town that I devoted most of my working life to. I drove from Uxbridge to London via the A4020. En route my blood ran cold as I drove through a series of Third World shit-holes. This was no longer the London I policed. It is no longer England.
We drove back to the Heathrow Hotel (where we stayed en route to Norfolk), via the Great West Road and the M4. We were both appalled at the the tawdry densely-packed crap that has been built adjacent to that route since our last visit; the roadside gigantic hoardings with garish adverts, like the worst of the American freeways and cities.
I’m glad it was my last visit. The vandals who have allowed this to come to pass are unspeakable arseholes: myopic traitors, idiots.
Now I hear that Bleary Hazel, the little commie chipmunk, wants to send returning British Pakistani ISIS sympathisers/terrorist to be interned in Norfolk.
I would advise her to visit Norfolk and consult the natives and to make sure that she notifies me of the day, date time and place of her visit.
Thank you Peter: well considered, well written, well fitted to the character of this site – and I suggest well appreciated by regular contributors and probably the majority of the thinking population. I like to think that I talk to all kinds of people, and such sentiments are so widely echoed, as is the frustration, and sadly a resignation to the feeling that nothing can or will ever be done about it.
I am sure that ’twas ever thus, but things are getting serious, more so than ever before in our post-war lifetimes, and, importantly, in ways not previously imagined, at least in modern, relatively civilised times in our country.
KBO Wallsters; as with Her Maj, advise, encourage, and warn (your children and grandchildren – if you can get them to listen) – and put the boot in to the enemy when you get the chance!
Frank: she won’t want any of them in Lancashire, we’ve enough of the buggers round here already.
A good post PfM. It is also worth emphasing that our ancient invaders, such as they were, were all near neighbours from that little North Sea pond littoral. The European experience apart from the ebb and flow of much larger scale war and invasions also introduced larger numbers from further distant realms. The Iberian peninsular to the Russian heartland has all seen much larger transfers and migration of population than these islands have ever witnessed.
Peter a moving and well written post, it shows your clear understanding of who we English are and what England means to us.
I appreciated your choice of “William Blake’s England! awake! awake! awake!” to end with.
Maybe I am an old fool but I am far more optimistic than some might be, every day I see the English and England all about me.
Like Frank, I see heart-breaking changes to the City where I was born and brought up ‘Leeds’ but Leeds is still an English City, as is Sheffield, York, Wakefield Harrogate and Ripon, on the other hand Bradford and Dewsbury perform for us a useful service in keeping the majority of the Pakistani’s corralled within their boundaries.
Baron has missed this poignant essay of yours for reasons he cannot explain, Peter, noticed it only now. Excellent shot at the progressives, dressing the often maligned nostalgia in a coat of a well articulated argument. You may have also touched on the legacy that your culture left on other peoples, an inheritance that still persists.
It pains Baron to say it, other European countries aren’t far behind in writing off their past, it’s a sacrilege what has been done to the indigenous cultures of Europe for the sake of few more shillings, as if happiness is but a function of consumption.
The derogation of the European countries’ historical achievements brought about by embracing the experimental shibboleths of the deluded Left is both unwarranted and malign. What those who have been subverting the centuries old paradigm of a nation state, the continuation of its culture, the observance of its customs, habits and traditions fail to appreciate is that there will come a time they themselves will regret it. But then, it will be too late.