Some people, it seems, are smarting from ‘white guilt’ and looking ahead in hope – of course through pink-lensed spectacles – to a chardonnay-infused, post-colonial future.
One such anonymous person, considerably younger than me I must admit, wrote an open letter to his or her old private school via The Telegraph recently asking it to ‘de-colonise’ its curriculum.
This person’s Road to Damascus moment came, it seems, ‘while studying post-colonialism at university’. Where else! The writer, who is either female or else an effete latte-drinking male of the handbag-carrying variety, claims to have left school knowing a lot more about the Anglo-Saxons than s/he did about the historic treatment of immigrants or the slave trade. Or why ‘the cards are still so heavily stacked in favour of people like me, who are white [and] middle class.’
The demands being made are that the school now depart from its ‘ethnocentric curriculum’ and teach The Black Curriculum (there is already an organisation for this: The Black Curriculum), hire more BAME (Black And Minority Ethnic) staff through a process of ‘positive discrimination’, implement a ‘zero-tolerance racism policy’ (presumably by ending free speech and focusing on perceived ‘micro-aggressions’), and support ‘BAME students’ by giving them lots of hugs.
What a terribly sad letter, made worse by the fact that the north-London school in question has all but given in. If it didn’t, it would face the foaming fury of the mob. Which is what the world has come to, really. Give in or be howled at.
The popular left-wing narrative behind all this is that Britain and the West became rich, from about the sixteenth century onwards, through the plunder and exploitation of other peoples. But this logic has causality backwards. It was not exploitation, but rather the unique culture of English individualism which provided the right conditions for the Empire’s expansion and prosperity. The mistreatment of others, principal amongst which was the slave trade, is a blight on the national conscience but not a reason for the nation’s success.
It is also worth noting that Britain stands alone as the only nation to have voluntarily given up the slave trade – by Acts of Parliament in 1807 and 1833. All other nations (such as the United States) either fought wars over it, or were forced into abolition by treaty and by the policing of the international community. Several ethnic groups claiming ‘BAME’ victimhood status in the UK still practice forms of de facto slavery in their native countries.
At the time of the Age of Reason in Europe, England had become a modern society, free of immobile castes, and one in which the greater social good was recognised above the immediate needs of the ‘tribe’ or of blood relations. Within society the rule of law generally prevailed, and governance was based on a political contract. Reasonable levels of equality had been established between the sexes, and the English social character had been built around the notions of personal responsibility and restraint.
The huge advancements experienced during the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century in turn hinged upon the Common Law, a political and legal system which enforced patent mechanisms and contracts, and the financing of companies through the issuance of stocks. Economist Adam Smith introduced the world to the concept of expandable wealth rather than the previously static mercantilism. By the 1690s the Bank of England had begun regulating commercial liquidity in a sophisticated way.
The defining characteristic of Britain in these times was its colour-blind administrative, legal and political system, and climate of equal opportunity. That’s opportunity, not necessarily outcome – which logically ought to be beyond the state’s control.
A nation’s ‘culture’ is often defined as a combination of its commonly-held beliefs, identity and language. It was a unique cultural proposition of equal opportunity, backed by the reliable and impartial instruments of state, founded upon moral absolutes, and expressed through the English language, which was exported around the world with such great success. It would pay us to look long and hard at this noble gift of cultural heritage instead of the Marxists’ ‘catalogue of outrage’ which now defines the colonial period.
Rather than ‘asset-stripping’ India, burning it to the ground and moving on, as is often, these days, supposed, Britain took over the Mughal administration and one set of foreigners simply displaced another. The regime’s primary focus was far-sighted, providing stable and fair governance for an economy based on trade. Britain’s financial and moral investment was huge, bequeathing the legacy of a legal and parliamentary system, Lutyens’s beautiful government seat of New Delhi, and vast swathes of infrastructure – including railways – criss-crossing the subcontinent.
While India was the ‘jewel in the crown’, this same pattern was repeated elsewhere. Britain’s relationship with its Empire was costly and required enormous investment. With the country exhausted and bankrupt after the Second World War, the Empire came apart for two reasons. The first was (obviously) financial. The second was revolutionary social change at home, which I have previously written about on The BFD. This saw England, in particular, losing its moral imperative and capitulating to a new set of left-wing and socially ‘progressive’ values.
The good relations which exist to this day between Commonwealth countries is testimony to the deep bonds which were built between peoples during the Empire period. These are often manifested in small ways, like the surprisingly frequent references to Mrs Beeton’s 1861 Book of Household Management which continue to be found in India. This is despite the fact that the book is long-forgotten in the UK.
Rather than being an ‘instrument of oppression’, the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed in New Zealand in 1840, was an enlightened establishment document. Reinvented by social justice lawyers during the 1980s and often falsely presented as ‘complex’, it is in truth difficult to misinterpret the Treaty, which achieved three necessary things: the sovereignty of the Crown, the primacy of the rule of law, and the equality of all people (Maori and Pakeha) as British subjects.
To interpret the Treaty any other way is to not only repudiate the cultural values on which our nation was established, but to repudiate the notion of nationhood itself. Because a nation without sovereignty, one law for all, and the equality which citizenship affords, cannot in fact be a nation.
In truth this is what the left wants. In Britain now, vast swathes of the population live apart from the national consensus, claiming – with the clamorous support of an ascendant left-wing, liberal, bohemian middle class – that ‘your rules don’t apply to me’. These people might determine that they owe more to Sharia law, and pledge their allegiance to a distant Ayatollah or Saudi king. Or they might look to radical Maoist groups like Black Lives Matter, an organisation whose lineage descends directly from the Muslim Brotherhood. To which foolish white people in supplication take the knee.
This trend is well established here with our Prime Minister, Miss Ardern, looking to make an extra-legal (that is: outside the law) settlement to the illegal occupants of Ihumatao. And the Minister of Justice, Mr Little, seeking to increase the rights of prisoners to such a level that they are no longer effectively prisoners and the criminal justice system effectively ceases to exist. The current Labour government has an established track record, from the handling of sexual abuse scandals to the almost complete withdrawal of ministerial responsibility, of applying different rules and different criteria to different categories of people based on a new, leftist hierarchy.
The model for this is apparent in the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of the people of Hong Kong. That began under the slogan ‘one country, two systems’ and then became one country with a new system, the old being completely done away with despite promises to the contrary.
Our acceptance of all this is cultural, and we have been primed for acquiescence over many decades. Duncan Williams, an academic, chronicled the change exceptionally well in his 1971 book Trousered Apes (subtitled: Sick Literature in a Sick Society). He speaks of the massive shift in university culture brought about by a decline in Christianity and social values, the rise of divorce, modern music’s cult of personality, and the induced psychopathic selfishness of the ‘me’ generation for whom a common social ‘platform’ had ceased to exist.
Williams’s proposition is that while every preceding historical period had a zeitgeist (or ’spirit of the age’) guiding it and driving its cultural and artistic output, our current period has suffered a catastrophic reversal. In the post-modern age it is our nihilistic, godless and death-obsessed ‘artistic’ and ‘cultural’ output which is driving our zeitgeist or ’spirit’.
We are being driven, in fact, towards the West’s cultural death. And it is specifically the death of western values which Miss Ardern and her comrades seek to accelerate, in order that they might supplant them with a new culture, a new order and a new orthodoxy. In his review of Williams’s book, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of that which passes for culture today: ’nihilistic in purpose, ethically and spiritually vacuous, and Gadarene in destination.’
It’s time to take a stand, people, or else be driven into the sea like swine by Ardern and her ilk’s sacrilegious legion.