My Country: Always Wrong

Well, surprise, surprise: pro-IRA, pro-Hezbollah, Marxist imbecile, Jeremy Corbyn, has announced that if (God forbid) Labour win the up-coming General Election, he will seek to indoctrinate British children that the Empire was evil:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/25/jeremy-corbyn-promises-children-will-taught-evils-british-empire/

This abject self-loathing seems to be a trait peculiar to the British Left. George Orwell, writing in 1941, summed it up brilliantly:

“They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesmen and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.”

Of course, nothing in history should be hidden from school children, and I would love to see the details of our Imperial past taught… but to pretend that the British Empire was ‘evil’ is utter nonsense. Whatever minor warts one can dredge up, it was, after all, the British Empire which spread law-and-order, trade, civilisation, progress, education and democracy to all parts of the Globe. Without the British Empire, First World, wealthy, stable, multiparty democracies such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia would not exist. Likewise, India, South Africa and Singapore exist as the nations we know today purely thanks to the British Empire. Also thanks to the British Empire – and as much as it upsets some to admit it – vast areas of Africa which had been, essentially, still in the Iron Age, were dragged into the modern world, as roads, railways, bridges and ports were built, mines sunk and plantations developed. Thanks to the medical advances brought by British Imperial rule, ‘native’ populations greatly expanded in the Colonies. Though Corbyn and his Comrades like to use slavery as a stick to beat the Empire with, in reality it was the British Empire which shattered the Slave Trade, and also which, in India, broke up the murderous Thuggee cult and stamped out the vile practice of ‘sati’, where widows were thrown onto the funeral pyre of their dead husband. It was the British Empire which opposed and brought down all manner of despots, religious nut-cases and tyrants such as Napoleon, Lobengula, the Mahdi, and Hitler, and which stood firm against Communism.

This extract from Kipling’s poem, ‘The Widow’s Party’, gives a feel for the progress which ‘Pax Britannica’ brought to the world:

We broke a King and we built a road —
A court-house stands where the reg’ment goed.
And the river’s clean where the raw blood flowed

Empires have existed throughout history (as has slavery): and compared to pretty much any of the others, the British Empire was decidedly enlightened, tolerant, liberal and benign. Of course some Empires – like those of China, the USA and Russia – have managed to morph into countries, somehow disguising the fact that it was endless imperial expansion which built their nations to what they are today – so no self-loathing needed, apparently.
But why is it, we are left to wonder, that politicians in Denmark and Norway don’t feel the need to brainwash their school kids of the ‘evils’ of the Vikings? Why don’t Leftist Italian leaders demand that their youngsters are indoctrinated to feel ashamed about the Roman Empire?
Closer to home, why don’t we ever hear Zulu leaders insisting that their young kids are taught to hate themselves because of the Zulu Empire?  Indeed, there is so little shame over the murderous imperial expansion which Shaka Zulu oversaw (at the expense of neighbouring tribes), that the airport in Durban is even named in his honour.

As that storied Spanish-American man of letters, George Santayana put it:

‘Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and same oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.’

Given that he has just been denounced by Britain’s Chief Rabbi as a danger to the nation, there is little doubt that Comrade Corbyn is a blackguard, a conspirator, a churl and a fanatic.
We can only hope that his sweaty hands never get within a country-mile of the levers of power.