Being English

Being English: The Original Sin

The leftists believe in Original Sin. To be born white to people of this mindset is a sin. To be born white and English and male is a heinous sin which requires a lifetime of penance.

I don't know what came over me, what possessed me to do it. What was I thinking? It was bad enough to choose to be male, I suppose somebody has got to do that, although the comrades in the labs are working on it. But to choose to be English, not just British, but English, shows a flagrant disregard for the sensitivities of the blacks the Muslims and the Irish which is just hateful. How did I ever come to make such a terrible choice?

To compound the sins of that choice I went on to become heterosexual. But here I'd like to say a few words in my defence. I didn't just take to the heterosexual role out of spite or bloody-mindedness. I gave bisexuality a fair go. I really did. I tried very hard to drink enough to make a pass at a friend I had in college, we got very very drunk, but somehow it still wasn't quite enough. I didn't fancy him and he didn't fancy me either, but we were willing to give it a go, I think, but I didn't manage to pull it off. Actually we didn't even get as far as pulling them out let alone pulling one off. But I want to state clearly for the record here that I am not heterosexual through choice, I just can't get over the way I'm made. While there's nothing about homosexuality I find offensive, and the activities involved look like good fun for those who like that sort of thing, sodomy is right up my alley, but I just don't find men sexually attractive. The sex part I have no philosophical or practical difficulty with, it's the kissing and going to bed together part I just can't get past.

Not only did I come to terms with my heterosexuality I went on to break the ultimate taboo. I got married and had children, and it gets worse, the woman I married was the mother of my children, but and here's the worst bit of all, the children were conceived after my marriage and took my name, as did my, if you pardon the obscenity, wife. What was I thinking of? Didn't I know about the struggle?

Yeah. But it never was my struggle, comrade.

It has taken me a long time to figure it out but now I can say I am finally free of it. I have given up any notions of being anything to do with the left or the politically correct, or arseholes as the rest of us know them as. I am no longer looking for political progress, there is no utopia I can envisage just around the corner, I'm just trying to stop politically motivated idiots from ruining the world I want my children to enjoy living in. Politics can never be about the perfect state of man because of our irredeemably imperfect nature. But I am not by nature a conservative, I am a radical liberal, I just have the good luck to live in a world in which my radical ideas are accepted as if they were somehow rather unremarkable and almost normal. A hundred years ago I would be dismissed as an extreme radical for my views on the rights of women, my lack of concern about the future of the white race, my toleration of open relationships and homosexual couples and especially my views on God. They are radical views and I am not going to let some idiots dismiss me as if I am wanting to take the world backward to a former time. We are living in times when radical and liberal views are commonplace, the ideas put forward by men such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, some in works they would not want publishing in their lifetimes, are now quite mainstream. This is something which makes me feel good. These are my views, once radical, always liberal, in the true sense of the word before American leftists stole and besmirched it, never conservative, no matter where the centre of gravity of politics shifts to. To me conservatives live in the past and try to turn things around so we can go back to a future which is just a better past, they are often afraid of the future and see the long term future as something dark and sinister. I see the past as flawed, the future is exciting, but there are always risks, and usually these take the form of misguided utopian idiots who want to change human nature so it fits their plan. Socialists and leftists are like psycho-girlfriends from hell: they tell you they love you, but want to change you to make you better, because they love you so much, you have to change to fit their ideals, even if it hurts, and it always hurts. Because they love you so much.

That's not the way I see the world. People are the way they are, and our governments and political structures should adapt to our nature and not try to make human nature fit political theory. The job of a government is to sit on the levers of power, thereby ensuring they don't fall into any worse hands, but unlike the extreme libertarian right I don't think that the optimum amount of state activity is none at all. There are things which can be done better by a monopoly, and only a state can do monopoly with any hint of fairness because only a state can represent the interests of consumers and outsiders as well as producers. How much activity, and which activity, can be safely and efficiently done by the state is not a question that can ever get a single once and for all answer, I'm not going to write it in a book and I don't expect to see the answer in a book either. You never let go of the steering wheel, no matter how confident you are of your direction of travel. Fortunately democracy allows for this process admirably.

People may mock and scoff and say I am right wing, but that is a meaningless concept. What is right wing? Monarchism? Fascism? National Socialism? Anarcho-capitalism? Reactionary rule by the military? Rule on the basis of race? The term has no meaning. Is Colonel Gaddafi a left winger or a right winger? I don't think anybody wants to say he's on their side! Right wing means whatever the people using it want it to mean and often they just want it to mean wrong, and whatever they see as a position which challenges their agenda. I will stand up for what is right and oppose what's left.

I will not try to make myself feel bad or apologetic about my nationality or my colour. I don't believe in original sin. I have nothing to say sorry for. I did not run any empire, found any colony or trade any slaves. I was born in 1963, and I didn't have any choice in the matter at all. I am what I am and what I am is not ashamed. Neither am I stupidly proud of something I have not achieved. The idea that the English are a pure race of uniquely free and freedom loving people is bollocks. So too is the idea that the English are a mongrel race full of cross-bred vigour, made up of a patchwork quilt of identities, tribes and nations. We are neither especially pure nor especially mixed up. Nothing about our national character depends on either national purity or diversity. Neither of those features is a benefit and we didn't become great through either racial purity or multicultural or multiracial diversity. We are what we are. Just a bunch of people with a common language and some common culture. It is the language and culture which is great.

The notion that the English have always been free and had superior justice to the rest of the world is simply not true. Slavery was common in Britain before the Romans came and in Saxon times too. We don't have a history which is perfect. There is no central thread running through our history. Over time we have become better, developing the rule of law, establishing rights through law, then establishing the rule by parliament, then bringing democracy to parliament. It was a long process. It involved some big struggles, hundreds of thousands of men and at least one king had to give up their life to achieve it. No, that's wrong, giving up your life achieves nothing. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed during the struggle. Struggle achieves nothing, neither does giving up your life. Only victory matters. It is hardly surprising that countries which try to achieve in decades what England has taken centuries to achieve fail. Does this mean I am proud of England. You bet it does. But I didn't choose to be English, or fight to be English, so that doesn't mean that much.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that to take pride in a nation requires one to pay the price of the nation's guilt or to be forever apologizing or trying to make amends. That's not the way it works. If I said I really like a particular rock star and his music do I have to apologize when he gets arrested for having sex with under-age girls? No. It is perfectly possible and reasonable to associate with the good and not the bad, especially when dealing with something outside yourself, but even in your own behaviour it is reasonable to say that you are proud of your degree and your children but ashamed of that time you were arrested. Actually in my case I'm proud of getting arrested too, somebody needed to make that very English protest, turning up in a black cab, getting chained to the railings under the shadow of Big Ben, arrested, processed and bailed in time to be treated for tea at a west end gentleman's club. What a jolly wheeze it was. It achieved sweet FA of course, the electoral system is just the same now as it was back then, but we expected that. Sometimes a situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part. And we were just the guys to do it.

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Being English

Being English: The Original Sin

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© 1999 - 2012 by Martin Willett.

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