The greatest social problem within the UK is the demonisation of those you disagree with. With the removal of shared values based on national norms, traditions and identity the scope for demonisation is so great that no word, no phrase, no action is off the table. Here in the UK, or rather in England, political disagreements are now not just points of divergence within a civil conversation; they are now fundamental insults to people’s whole lives.
This disturbing trend really started from the 1940s, increased into the 1980s and then went into overdrive in the 1990s to today. It all started after the Second World War when the definition of a British citizen was extended to all members of the Empire and Commonwealth citizens. Though this made practical sense with the need to bring in people after a destructive second war nearly bankrupted it, it was the first step toward removal of a nation bound not by ethnicity or race (we have always been a multi-national and multi-racial society if you distinguish Angles from Saxons from Celts) but by a shared national history. Though Britain had an Empire it by no means went through the same experiences in the day-to-day. The life of a Canadian was not the same as that of a Northerner in the UK. But we believed, if not naively, that the shared WW2 experience was felt all over the Empire, despite no blitz appearing in any other part of the Empire, save some Japanese bombing on Australian targets on a very restricted level. This, coupled by a new desire to rebuild, cost Britain on the first step towards a kind of societal breakdown.
To clarify before we go any further, this is not a demonisation of migrants of people far removed from the British indigenous experience but the policies enacted by the authorities at the time.
In the 1980s, Thatcher did what was necessary by implementing a sort of money-making society which revolutionised so much of society, removing some very salient community aspects including local economies which were in effect too expensive to maintain. Though this was as a reaction to the bankrupting of the country due to the propping up of local economies, it ushered in the era of the individualist and people drew further and further away from the community and more and more into their houses, which at least they owned!
In the 1990s Blair decided to use this concept of hyper-individualisation to enact a state-sponsored reform of the national society itself. This is because this is really easy in Britain/England. Whereas other countries have national safeguards that easily distinguish the ‘natives’ and thus help to maintain some semblance of a community (like a national dress, a national parliament, national distinctive societal traditions), England has no such societal or national community safeguards. It has no parliament. Being English was never really a ‘protected’ identity. Being English simply meant sharing certain values that were so clear and so taken for granted that you didn’t need the sorts of things you see in other countries (like in Scotland with Tartan gear, clans and a vehement dislike of the English). Blair saw this as an opportunity to reshape what it meant to be English and franchised it to the world. Now anyone can be English (and by proxy British), simply if you embrace not values deeply rooted in history, mostly because those values are becoming hundreds of years old, but values as ordained from the state. It was boiled down to ‘democracy’ because all we had really to remind us of our history was parliament, but through the door of ‘democracy’s came the sorts of things social liberals and radical progressives foam at the mouth with today. Inclusion, diversity, multi-culturalism. Universal Human Rights. All of these things were associated with the one last vestige of what it meant to be English. Multi-Culturalism, seen so synonymous with pluralism of ideas, suddenly took over and became so important that to many being English means you MUST embrace multi-culturalism; so much so that we developed something called ‘asymmetrical multi-culturalism’ where you could embrace and celebrate all cultures except for being English.
Gone are the values that distinguish Englishman from Englishman. Gone is the history that descendants could be proud of. Gone is the sense of decency, fair play and adherence to the rule of law. Gone is society where you care for your fellow man (derivation of human). And when all of this is gone you no longer have any way of trumping your political feelings towards someone with the knowledge that they are in the same national community as you. Now, when you walk around town you do not see a fellow community-goer, you see someone summed up by their political, sexual or racial identity, and THOSE are what denotes a community. If you are the same political, sexual or racial identity as someone, regardless of where they are from then you can perhaps find common ground aside from politics.
But that was not enough. Now all of these new identity groups MUST have the same politics or you are out of the community. Are you gay but don’t necessarily believe in gay marriage? You are out. Are you black but believe in the strength of the nuclear family and are OK with limited government? You are out. Are you white but believe that we should have strong national borders? You are out. New smaller communities, with their self-appointed leaders, now require a political alignment in order to be part of these intersectional groups within the husk of a nation.
If you are out of these groups due to an unaligned or actively adversarial viewpoint then there is no possible other attachment you could have to other people. It doesn’t matter if you are British, English, from the same town, from the same social class or are neighbours. You are the enemy.
In a truly good community you must have shared blood, shared gods and a shared enemy. This has been the case for human existence since the dawn of time and we arrogantly believe we are of such a heightened intelligence that we have moved on from it. You can’t change human nature despite what Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Marx said, We have new communities that now create a disjointed society. Why? NATIONS FORM THE BEDROCK OF SOCIETY. It allows millions upon millions of people to live and work together. When you create multi-cultured, multi-entrenched communities then society breaks down. You cannot achieve community or indeed national autarky (self-sufficiency) and so you must, must, must derive meaning and importance to the nation. It is the largest possible means by which people can feel part of a community. Nothing bigger (like the EU) or smaller (like Just Stop Oil) can ever work because it can’t create a cohesive working society. It’s impossible. It’s been tried before. It failed.
Why do you think ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘far right’ and other disgusting words are thrown around so much? The price of intersectionality and the breaking up of a national society is the demonisation of your neighbour. It’s how civil disobedience starts. It’s how a state gets overwhelmed. It’s how civil wars start. We have only avoided civil war up to this point because our intersectional communities are too small for an uprising, but as enemies acquire more common and wide-ranging names so too do rival communities came together to go against the other. We have that now as the ‘far left’ mobilise against the ‘far right’, when so many on either side are just scared of the other and do not necessarily subscribe to the nutty ideas of their group’s leaders.
Watch the Disney film ‘Pocohuntas’. It’s a fantastic animated film, but if you listen to the song ‘Savages’ it brilliantly symbolises the demonization ramped up to the point where war is clearly the only course of action to sort things out once and for all. Nature (a symbol perhaps of ‘the state’) can do nothing about it and must stand back as increasing rhetoric is met with equally increasing action.
In the UK it is even worse than the film. The state now actively supports one side of the rhetoric, instead of being the ‘referee’ of society. The Labour Party have actively engage with one side encompassing a plethora of groups determined to maintain their mini communities and gods within the country. They are creating the backlash we have seen and now demonisation is coming from the government, the media and corporate institutions. This is the symptom of a broken national society undergoing the results of a failed multicultural experiment which has removed civility, goodwill and harmony in favour of a crime-ridden suspicious and hateful people on this island. People distrust their neighbours. The state has done this to us, and it is now actively working to make sure it stays this way.
No one should be called in any way a ‘savage’ so long as they adhere to the laws, traditions and norms of the land. Outside, it is up to those communities. We cannot have many tiers of society. We cannot have different courts or legal systems among our own people to the extent we do have it right now (UK Law vs Sharia Law in many parts of the country for example). We have imported tensions outside of the UK (Hindus versus Muslims in Leicester for example) and now people are listless as they feel they have no community that will welcome them (white working class people or conservatives in some towns and cities). You need a community. You cannot exist on your own. The nation used to be your home. Now the four walls of your tiny room in a shared flat is your home. No wonder mental health is at an all time low; the national community that would have taken care of you is gone (and no, the Welfare state is not a community, it is an economic burden used to bludgeon you with more multiculturalism).
This all seems rather bleak but know this; in order to defeat a demon you must first know it’s name, for then it will not stand up to scrutiny. Know the real enemy. It is not your neighbour, it is the people who made it this way in certain positions of authority, people who ought to know better.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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