Here I am, no longer young but following my own advice. The inside front cover of my blue booklet reads:
“His Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of His Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.”
This statement is unequivocal: the British state intends to keep up its end of the bargain. It will do all it can to protect His Majesty’s subject when he travels abroad – and it “requires” that other countries follow suit.
“Or else” used to be implied, a threat that was then taken more seriously than it is now. You mess with a British subject at your peril – few countries tremble on hearing that nowadays, but the text still survives.
This is part of the broader contractual arrangement between state and citizen known since time immemorial as protectio trahit subiectionem et subiectio protectionem (protection entails allegiance and allegiance entails protection).
Like all contracts, this one is bilateral: we exchange our allegiance for the state’s protection. Our passports remind us of one side’s obligations, but what does the other side undertake?
This seems to be straightforward: we must remain loyal to the state, which for these purposes embodies the country. That implies any number of things, including our duty to defend the country when the country needs us.
If someone isn’t prepared to do that, the arrangement unravels. Since that person denies the state his allegiance, he is no longer entitled to its protection. By refusing to do his civic duty, he has forfeited his citizenship rights, such as the one to bear the passport.
Sorry to spend so long on such obvious things. My only justification is that for many of our young people these things aren’t at all obvious. In fact, they dismiss them out of hand.
A recent Times poll of Generation Z youngsters showed that only 11 per cent would fight for Britain – and 41 per cent said there were no circumstances at all under which they would take up arms for their country.
Let’s see. If a Russian airborne brigade landed in Kent and advanced on London, almost half of the people eligible to fight would refuse to do so, while most of the rest would only agree to defend their country if they thought her cause is just.
The view that Britain isn’t worth fighting for thus varies between widespread and dominant among young Britons. And what exactly has made Britain so unworthy?
Almost half of the respondents explained that Britain is a racist country mired in her awful past, against a small minority who felt otherwise. This marks a great shift from 20 years ago, when 80 per cent, almost twice as many as today, said they were proud to be British. Also, back then 60 per cent thought the country was united, against a mere 15 per cent today.
Assuming that the findings are statistically significant, the conclusion is dire. A revolution has occurred, and Britain has lost.
Before revolutions explode in city squares they detonate in people’s minds. Yesterday’s saints become today’s demons, objects of veneration turn into targets of mockery, old truths are seen as lies. And barbarians lie in wait, ready to pounce when the critical mass of nihilist anomie has been reached.
Hilaire Belloc described that situation poignantly: “We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”
At some point, those creatures with unsmiling faces may decide their time has come: the revolution has already taken over people’s minds. Now it must claim its due in city squares.
That poll shows that we are now reaping the harvest sown years ago, when the liberal mind began to realise its full ideological potential. It was then that children began to be indoctrinated to accept new for old, abandoning spiritual and intellectual certitudes for what their teachers described as progress.
Patriotism gradually became ‘uncool’, British history got to be portrayed as generally evil and barbaric, equality was proclaimed the highest goal and everything standing in its way as a wicked hindrance. It wasn’t so much the long march through the institutions as the long march through the minds – and it has borne fruit.
If that poll is to be believed, and I see no reason not to believe it, Britain is lying defenceless in the face of any danger lurking in an ambush. It’s not guns that defend a nation, but the people firing them. If they aren’t prepared to do so, no amount of defence spending will ever protect the country.
Alarm bells should sound all over the land: our education has failed to inspire patriotism in our young. This isn’t its greatest failure, but one that can have the most devastating consequences should some barbarian regime fancy its chances against a morally enfeebled Britain.
Far be it from me to suggest that children should be brainwashed in the spirit of jingoism. One task of education is to help pupils develop a capacity for critical thought, and unquestioning nationalism isn’t conducive to that.
Moreover, patriotism is a relatively new virtue in the pecking order of loyalties. Pupils used to be taught to love their God, their families and their parish before love of the country even came up.
But come up it did, because it was logical to extrapolate from the particular to the general. Their country was a place where most people worshipped the same God, loved their families and their neighbours, helped one another.
A country was a sum total of communities just like theirs, and they knew that any failure to defend the larger entity would also put the smaller ones at peril. The liberal mind loathes all that.
It inculcates a generalised, impersonal, abstract love of mankind, ‘our planet’, ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and so on, all the way down the list. No extrapolation from large to small occurs. The supranational large is all there is.
Children who grow up to become a generation with its own initial, in this case Z, learn to criticise their country but not how to think critically. Uncritical loathing precludes the development of that faculty as surely as unquestioning love does.
Pupils leave school as deracinated individuals owing no loyalty to anyone or anything: their God in whom they no longer believe, their parents whom they tend to resent, their community that they happily leave behind.
And their country? Oh well, it’s racist, isn’t it? Homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, polluting, torn apart by social and economic inequalities – all those things they’ve been brainwashed to hate as affronts to the ‘liberal’ mind.
When France declared war on Nazi Germany three days after the latter attacked Poland, Left Bank intellectuals would sneer: “Mourir pour Danzig?” Today’s young Britons pick up the Anglophone echo: “Die for Britain?” The idea sounds just as preposterous.
All we can do is cross ourselves, or our fingers if such is our wont, and hope that the need to defend Britain by force of arms never arises. If it does, we are in trouble.
The reason is existential, not ideological. Generation Z will say it’s because they don’t want to fight for #notmyking and a neo-imperial establishment that is raping Greta Thunberg’s tree on Prince Andrew’s paedo island to prop up capitalism…. or some such tripe. They do mean it, but the deeper reason is fear. Young people today have a greater fear of death than any previous generation. Hardly any of them drive for this very reason (they will claim it’s because it’s too expensive) This death anxiety extends to all facets of life. I recently stayed in a hostel in London, and went on several nights out with young men and women from various European countries and North America. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up in terms of drinking, (I was always a lightweight) but found to my surprise that I was by fair the heaviest drinker there. ‘Zoomers’ are, on balance, much more health conscious than Millennials.
For a while I thought the cause of this phenomenon was mass atheism, surely those who are confident that death spells only oblivion would be more desperate to avoid it. But observing how hypochondriac (specifically germophobic) Muslims can be put that in doubt, unless of course you think that Islamic piety is largely a sham (which I suspect it is)
So I really don’t think that a lack of patriotism is the crux of the issue, Andy McNab for example, was never especially patriotic, but being a literal psychopath (which comes packaged with a severely limited fear of death) he was up for the adventure of life in the Army as a Royal Green Jacket and then an SAS trooper. Now in his day (b. 1959) there were plenty of neurotypical men who were mentally robust enough to fill the various slots in the military, same with Gen Xers and my lot, but it seems as if the youth today are simply too frightened (again, largely because hardly anyone believes in life after death) The trouble is you need normal folk to wield weapons because there simply aren’t enough clinical psychopaths to form a warrior caste.
The devil of it is that I don’t see a solution to this that is not pharmacological. It’s no good trying to whip up some specious ‘cultural Christian’ play act that would crumble as soon as the first shot was fired.