This Ingerlan
Today Ingerlan played Wales at Old Trafford (sorry, The Theatre of Dreams™) in a World Cup qualifier, running out 2-0 victors, not unexpectedly. Normally I wouldn't give a toss, my attitude towards Ingerlan being one of agressive disinterest. All week the Press, even the feckin' Grauniad, was full of fluff hyping up the "big match" which I was able to skim over. Then I figured I'd go into Nottingham centre this afternoon so that I could both avoid the match on TV/radio/sub-ether waveband and take advantage of a nice quiet city centre. At one point in my wanderings I made the mistake of walking into Dixons to look for some cheapo headphones, and of course the Ingerlan match was on the big plasma-screen TVs with volume turned up. And what was the first thing I heard? "God Save the Queen"! And not the Sex Pistols version either.
This says it all about this country, This England, This Happy Breed (cough!), that the lumpen vanguards of its patriotism sing a song celebrating subjection and imperialism, which invokes a stolid, jaw-jutting, racist, lachrymose "my country right or wrong" nationalism and a nostalgia for a mythical glorious past when Ingerlan ruled the waves and Johnny Foreigner got a dose of cold steel if he was uppity. Another of their fave grooves is Land of Hope and Glory, an even more blatant imperialist celebration, with the immortal line "Britons never ever ever shall be slaves" sung without any sense of irony by the red-shirted 3-lions-on-my-shirt hordes working as wage-slaves in crap jobs in an economy ruled by multinationals and a State more authoritarian than any other in Europe, which itself is under the subjugation of the US hegemony. Britons have never been more enslaved than they are now, but these Sun- and Star- and Daily Mail-reading knuckledraggers haven't the consciousness to comprehend this simple fact. And these little ditties are positively family-friendly compared to the old favourites of "No surrender to the IRA" and "I'd rather be a paki than a Turk".
I despair of This England: backward, reactionary, deeply racist, and in terminal decline, its people with the political consciousness of a lobotomised fruit fly. A people that nurtures the rise of the petit-nationalist and petit-bourgeois UK Independence Party, wonderfully described by Jeremy Hardy as "fascism lite", and the dangerously fascist BNP. A people that accepts as normal the presence of Nazis in council chambers in Northern towns. A people that accepts the dehumanisation of refugees and their incarceration in modern-day concentration camps. A people that bullishly celebrates its own decline and its deliberate isolation from the rest of the world. A people that, even now, a year into the invasion of Iraq when even the most brain-damaged knows that it's a war of plunder the excuses for which have been shown to be complete and premeditated lies, gives a 42% approval rating for the invasion, not far down from the 53% support at the start of the war [1]. Can you believe it? Still, after all that's happened, nearly half of the UK public supports the war. Staggering.
There's no hope left for Ingerlan. Come the inevitable Euro referendum it will just as inevitably vote No, isolating the UK from the EU and putting it further into the US sphere of control. As the country declines, economically, socially and politically, its rabid nationalism, a form of national paranoid schizophrenia, will become every more virulent and violent and xenophobic.
[1] YouGov poll, 7/10/04
This says it all about this country, This England, This Happy Breed (cough!), that the lumpen vanguards of its patriotism sing a song celebrating subjection and imperialism, which invokes a stolid, jaw-jutting, racist, lachrymose "my country right or wrong" nationalism and a nostalgia for a mythical glorious past when Ingerlan ruled the waves and Johnny Foreigner got a dose of cold steel if he was uppity. Another of their fave grooves is Land of Hope and Glory, an even more blatant imperialist celebration, with the immortal line "Britons never ever ever shall be slaves" sung without any sense of irony by the red-shirted 3-lions-on-my-shirt hordes working as wage-slaves in crap jobs in an economy ruled by multinationals and a State more authoritarian than any other in Europe, which itself is under the subjugation of the US hegemony. Britons have never been more enslaved than they are now, but these Sun- and Star- and Daily Mail-reading knuckledraggers haven't the consciousness to comprehend this simple fact. And these little ditties are positively family-friendly compared to the old favourites of "No surrender to the IRA" and "I'd rather be a paki than a Turk".
I despair of This England: backward, reactionary, deeply racist, and in terminal decline, its people with the political consciousness of a lobotomised fruit fly. A people that nurtures the rise of the petit-nationalist and petit-bourgeois UK Independence Party, wonderfully described by Jeremy Hardy as "fascism lite", and the dangerously fascist BNP. A people that accepts as normal the presence of Nazis in council chambers in Northern towns. A people that accepts the dehumanisation of refugees and their incarceration in modern-day concentration camps. A people that bullishly celebrates its own decline and its deliberate isolation from the rest of the world. A people that, even now, a year into the invasion of Iraq when even the most brain-damaged knows that it's a war of plunder the excuses for which have been shown to be complete and premeditated lies, gives a 42% approval rating for the invasion, not far down from the 53% support at the start of the war [1]. Can you believe it? Still, after all that's happened, nearly half of the UK public supports the war. Staggering.
There's no hope left for Ingerlan. Come the inevitable Euro referendum it will just as inevitably vote No, isolating the UK from the EU and putting it further into the US sphere of control. As the country declines, economically, socially and politically, its rabid nationalism, a form of national paranoid schizophrenia, will become every more virulent and violent and xenophobic.
[1] YouGov poll, 7/10/04
5 Comments:
On the subject of the UKIPs, I rather enjoyed the article in The Guardian by Tania Gold in which she decribed its would-be leader in the following terms: "Kilroy-Silk joined the party four months ago, but speaks like a man who has given it his life. Like a human bottle of hairspray, upright, golden and faintly poisonous, he begins. 'I've been dying to meet you,' he drawls, as if the assembled ranks of Ukip supporters were a woman he is trying to seduce".
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments you expressed via your other blog on the subject of ID cards. Foucault had a lot going for him. It is impossible to enter public space without your image being captured by the lens of a surveillance camera, the technology available to render "privacy" an obsolete concept, the boundary of the home no longer sacrosanct. I despair with you at the naive faith placed in the state by its subject(ed)s. Increasingly I am glad that I live in exile beyond the Channel where waiting lists are shorter and authoritarianism does not bite so hard.
You went into Nottingham town centre and you didn't get shot? You must at least have seen some sort of gunplay? Perhaps a showdown at noon in the Market Square as 2 desperadoes squared up?
I did watch the football, and they thing that staggered me was not so much that the minute of silence for Ken Bigley was ruined by some shouting idiots, as the fact that the majority of the crowd suddenly as spontaneously reacted to this with a loud and sustained booing. I share a lot of your opinions on this country and on football fans in particular, but I thought that was (although not exactly heart-warming) a small gesture of protest at the idiot minority.
When the minute was over, they then of course all roundly boo-ed "Land of my Fathers".
You mention 2 political parties one starts with British and the other with UK. Not exactly English parties!
I disagree alot with what you say about the English and their national identity. What is deeply racist about the National Anthem? What is so inherently wrong with glorifying the days when England did rule the waves and made Britain what it is today?
All this accusation of racism does my head in: this year people were stopped from flying the cross of St. George because councilors in the North East deemed it racist, fearing it may offend people from other backgrounds. Asians aka British Muslims, I call them Pakis. But oh how we must cater to their needs. Since when did they ever cater to the needs of the English?
Bad jobs, poor wages, discrimination? Yes they exist, no-one ever forced Javed and Ali to come here though and there will always be a plane back from Heathrow if you don't like it.
Your argument that England fans are knuckle-dragging racists simply doesn't wash. You seem to forget that beside the mindless few, the rest are there to support their team and their country, regardless of which dipstick is in charge. And what are they supposed to sing?
I would rather follow cricket than Galatasaray?
What people like you forget is there is such thing as banter, taking the mickey and having a laugh. At the end of the day a bit of harmless fun. At least we don't go around fire-bombing schools, busses and public underground services.
Thank you for your comment, O Anonymous one, as it makes my points far more eloquently than I ever could. "Pakis" was rather a giveaway as to your attitudes towards those of non-English descent, but I'm sure you're comforted to know that you're in the mainstream majority in Ingerlan. And if anything, that majority is growing...
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home