Saturday 11 November 2006

The Hatreds of Elites

I've never understood why the people who work for the state, paid for by taxpayers, donations, or entrance fees, seem to hate this country so much. I picked this up from Nanny Knows Best:

English Heritage have been recently doing their bit to expunge history, they are working on a project to highlight the links between landmark buildings and slavery.

Researchers will scour the history of stately homes and other sites looking for connections to the slave trade, which was banned in Britain 200 years ago next year.

FYI, Britain was the first country in the world to ban the slave trade. Oddly enough, it still continues in some parts of Africa and has experienced something of a modern renaissance in the spawning of the sex slave industry in Eastern Europe and the Far East.

However, we must never allow facts to get in the way of one of Nanny's "bright ideas".

One of the English Heritage's commissioners, Maria Adebowale, claimed that the project would help people recognise how much of Britain's historical wealth was built on "human misery".



It isn't that I don't want to recognise Britain's past, but tell me a country whose wealth isn't based on the oppression, enslavement, or defeat in war of its enemies. What do EH think will happen when people "recognise" this truth? That no-one will go to the stately homes anymore? That people will shake their heads in contempt for Britain's past? How is that good?

In what way does this project have anything positive to contribute to the past? Why aren't EH studying how many of Britain's stately homes have connections to people who ended slavery?

Enough questions already. I wonder why we put up with constantly being told that our country's past (and therefore its present) is evil and why there are so many people willing to take the country's money to pursue this. Probably because people such as Maria Adebowale don't give a flying fuck what most people think, as long as the Guardian would approve; and as long as it brings their personal views into the public sphere.

Jon Snow is another one. Unashamed to wear a Make Poverty History band on tv(according to today's Torygraph), he feels that a poppy is too much..."making a statement" - more like making a statement that self-righteous, self-absorbed and utopian-minded lefties don't agree with.

I've just done the two minute silence by the way, and thought sadly of the terrible waste of life in war. Yeah, poppies and Remembrance Day really glorifies war, doesn't it? I mean, I'm just itching to get my head blown off hundreds of miles from home. And I bought a poppy so that the old buffers can be cared for with a little more, erm care. I am still unsure how white poppies actively support these old guys; far from being a statement of peace, they're primarily a statement of hatred and contempt, an adolsecent pacifist wank. Radio 5 Live interviewed one of the anti-poppy tossers on Friday morning and he made his case extremely well (ho ho). The main plank of his argument was that Britain has interfered too much in other countries' affairs....like in 1939. Struggling to keep my car on the road, I waited for him to expound on this. Ncky Campbell asked him about the Holocaust. "Oh that only started later" - tell that to the Poles and Polish Jews being murdered and herded into ghettos in 1939-40.

I know the British Govt didn't act with honour in the 30s. But "interfering" on the invasion of Poland was the right thing to do. Obviously.

Of course, it's Iraq that has done so much to delegitimise Remembrance Day. But that doesn't mean we should forget the millions we sent to their deaths in the defence of France (1914-1918); or in the defence of anything that is civilised (1939-45). They were asked to accept filth, privation, blood, and death every day of their service. They were told to die. They did.

In 2001 I heard on Radio 5Live of an old boy who had just died in a mental hospital. He had been sectioned since 1921 and had dreams of explosions and murder and mayhem every night of his life, from 1917 to 2001.

That's why the red poppy is good and the white poppy is just a middle class moralistic group shag.

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