Read on Twitter
I'd rather be deeply embedded in 1 culture & language, which is my own & thereby provides v strong roots, than have a passing relationship with several different cultures, or an unhappily close acquaintance with the homogenised quasi-American 'culture' of cosmopolitan urbanites
This is why, despite them being rivals and always ripe for a good ribbing, I rather admire the French. They are (mostly) deeply and intricately entangled and rooted in their own history and culture in a way that gives a hearty Gallic middle finger to the yanks. I respect that
They are, like all the best English people, totally baffling to outsiders, possessed of an utter indifference to what the outside world thinks of them, determined to uphold their distinctive way of life against the forces of dispersion and dissolution that threaten to engulf us
Why shouldn't England be included in such a way of thinking? Many on the Left are all up in arms about a distant Amazonian tribe or the aboriginal people of Australia (etc) having their culture attacked/undermined. I agree with that, I just think the logic should extend to us too
I think many on the Left see Britain in its entirety as implicated in e.g. imperial attacks on the native cultures of other places. Actually, most British people outside of a v small elite had nothing to do with it & were in a sense almost as much 'colonised' as foreign peoples
This is what is amusing: contemporary elites wanting to blame the great mass of English people for the crimes of Empire. It was usually the ancestors of those woke elites who were doing the colonising. My relatives were slogging their guts out on farms and docks
Actually, the contemporary woke elite are still more ready colonisers. 'Global Justice' warriors are just invoking 'The White Man's Burder' redux. DFID sends military missions to save the natives from themselves in the name of aid. They all want to impose their values universally
It's no surprise that the most vicious imperialists were the liberals of their day (Mill etc). They wanted to use Empire as a tool of making native peoples 'civilised' (i.e. just like themselves). Tories were much more likely to want to leave the locals to themselves
