The Decline and Fall of Merrie England

“Remember you are an Englishman and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.” — Cecil Rhodes, British imperialist, 1910

“Almost the entire population of Britain looks as though it has let itself go.  Where once emotional restraint and self-control were admired, now it is emotional incontinence. It is no surprise that the British are despised around the world.” — Theodore Dalrymple, British author and psychiatrist, 2018

A new dystopia, rising from the ashes of World War II, now rears its ugly head and casts its shadow over England’s no longer “green and pleasant land”.

Merrie England! Was it ever that merry? A beautiful mirage! Maybe such a happy land never existed except in fantasy and in the perceptions of a privileged few blessed with all the felicities of the Good Life. And yet it has always existed in longing, where all utopias and earthly paradises germinate, as in the fevered imagination of William Blake who longed to build ‘Jerusalem’—Civitas Dei, or the City of God—in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. Blake’s thoughts on this subject will be presented at the end of this article in one of the most beautiful and profoundly moving videos you are ever likely to see on the internet.

Meanwhile, let this literary gem by George Orwell on the three main races inhabiting the British Isles—the English, the Scots and the Irish—serve as a light-hearted introduction to this otherwise sombre article. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”

The English, by common consensus, are the maddest of the bunch.

Once famous for their stiff-upper lip attitude to life, a characteristic still found among the educated upper classes and a conservative older generation, the British as a whole have undergone a startling change of national character in the last two decades. This is almost certainly due to the toxic influence of television, trashy Hollywood movies, and the mind-destroying excesses of the internet. The Brits have lost their self-confidence, their customary aplomb, their cheerful joie de vivre. Why? Because  they have become demoralised. Thoroughly demoralised.  “In every face”, to quote William Blake, you now see “marks of weakness, marks of woe”.

The narcissistic younger generation in particular, confident in their own omniscience, bear little resemblance to their parents and grandparents whom they tend to belittle as inferior beings with all the wrong ideas and attitudes.

The new Brits tend to be an emotional bunch. They get easily upset. They are outraged by six appalling things before breakfast. They insist on having their “safe spaces” in universities, for example, where no idea is allowed to penetrate that might possibly ruffle the tranquil waters of their intellectual somnolence. Dare to disagree with them even on some minor point and they will snarl at you for crossing their “boundaries”. Getting on their nerves is easy. All you have to do is exist.

British Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (1852–1928) once noted dryly, “Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.” The older I get, the more I appreciate the truth of the witty aphorism that youth is wasted on the young. Apropos of which, one is reminded of the old French adage that says it all: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillese pouvait. — “If youth but knew, if age but could.”

To attract attention nowadays, if the ads in fashion magazines are anything to go on, young men need to look darkly dangerous and young women anorexically deranged. The passport to peer approval is an air of decadence, if not degeneracy. The tragedy is that this immature attitude to life, previously confined to the young, has now infected the general population at large.

British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple has written much on this subject. He says:

All kinds of princely personages—footballers, rock stars, actors, actresses, and the like—display their inner turmoil. They parade it as beggars in some countries display their amputated stumps. They seem to be saying, ‘We too suffer, despite our wealth, privilege, and fairy-tale lives, which you falsely imagine to be enviable and without blemish.’

Sufferers and victims are turned into heroes merely on account of their suffering or victimisation, so that those celebrities who confess to misery, drug addiction, and alcoholism, are even more to be adulated than they already were.

It’s no longer safe for a young man to flirt with a female colleague at work. Simply looking at her with interest is now classified as a “microaggression” and could get him reported for “sexual harassment.” These uppity feminists keep telling everyone around them, much to the irritation of most intelligent men, how “oppressed” their grandmothers were and how “liberated” they are now.

No wonder misogyny and male suicide rates (see below) have shown a sharp increase in recent years, keeping pace with a rise in rampant feminism and soaring hemlines that leave little to the imagination.

—   §   —

I was relieved to find that Dalrymple’s views on Brexit coincided with my own. The fact that 17.4 million people voted in a referendum a little over two years ago to sever all ties with the European superstate is, according to Dalrymple, not only a triumph for democracy but also a victory of the wiser older generation over the Clueless Young. For it was the young who voted fatuously to remain tied to Europe’s apron strings, whereas it was the oldsters who voted overwhelmingly to escape the diktats of a sinister superstate that seeks to banish all borders between countries and turn Europe into a multicultural zoo.

Of these emotionally overwrought  young idealists who voted to remain in the EU and lost, Dalrymple has this to say:

Nearly half of the young people who voted to remain [in Europe] either wept, or felt close to weeping, afterwards. They felt that their future had been stolen from them by those who voted for Brexit. The fact that the youth unemployment rate in Belgium and France is 25%, in Portugal 30%, in Italy 39%, in Spain 45% and in Greece 49% did not seem to worry them. They were not of the youth-unemployment class.

The British are now a traumatised nation, Dalrymple believes. The evidence for this lies all around us. We only need to open our eyes. There is a moral relativism in the air. The result? Moral anarchy. Knifing people to death in the streets or throwing sulphuric acid in their faces, disfiguring them for life, has become the crime du jour. “A sense of lawlessness and fear is sweeping across Britain,” I read in the Daily Mail today. “Violence is soaring on the streets, police are grossly overstretched and the prison system is sliding into crisis.”

The country is certainly in deep trouble when its prisoners are marching through prison corridors, brandishing machetes and clubs, while the prison officers are cowering in their back offices behind chain-locked doors.

The country’s National Health Service (NHS) is in meltdown, with vast numbers of people being denied vital operations. People are going blind because there are not enough doctors to give them cataract operations. You have to be in agony before they give you a hip replacement or repair your hernia. So how are the politicians trying to solve this problem?  They are letting in more immigrants to add to the overload of patients requiring cataract operations, hip replacements and hernias! And how are these empowered pundits helping to solve the doctor shortage, a shortage entirely of their own making? They are importing more immigrant doctors who can barely speak the English language and are often medically incompetent, if not downright dangerous.

A report in today’s Daily Mail (24 August, 2018) carries the headline: ‘The UK streets where more than 3 in 4 babies have migrant mothers.” Apart from an enormous influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, particularly from Poland and Romania, vast numbers of illegal immigrants and so-called “refugees” have swarmed in from Asia and Africa. The top five countries contributing to non-white immigration, in order of their high numbers, are Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Somalia. Between them, these now make up as much as 7.2 per cent of the British population.

In 2017, 28.4 per cent of births were born to mothers outside Britain. In some parts of Britain, it was as high as three children in four. It was the largest percentage since 1969. Campaigners said the statistics were a striking illustration of the way mass migration is changing the face of the country — and placing additional pressure on public services, including hospitals, schools and housing. The proportion has risen every year since 1990.

The floodgates were thrown open with a vengeance in 1997 when the mendacious war criminal Tony Blair became prime minister after a landslide victory. Blair was later to be rewarded for his services to multiculturalism by being awarded the prestigious Charlemagne Prize by the EU in 1999, a distinction he was to share with Angela Merkel who was to bag the same prize in 2008 and was to eclipse even Tony Blair in her misguided enthusiasm for mass immigration. This is not the place for expatiating on the crackpot theories of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the ideological godfather of the EU. Suffice to say that this Austro-Japanese promoter of miscegenation and mongrelisation through mass immigration was to be the first recipient of the Charlemagne Prize (in 1950), which is why it is also sometimes known as the Coudenhove-Kalergi Prize. Other recipients of this coveted prize, all politically correct promoters of multiculturalism, have been Henry Kissinger (1987), Bill Clinton (2000), Pope John Paul II (2004), Pope Francis (2016), and Emmanuel Macron (2017).

Which brings us back to the Brits, now in the process of fighting for a meaningful Brexit which would help to free them from the shackles of the European superstate, hellbent on flooding every European country with as many foreigners as possible. The correlation between high levels of immigration, especially from Third-World countries, and high and escalating levels of crime are now so blindingly obvious in Britain (and indeed elsewhere) that it’s hard to believe that this correlation is not only hotly denied by the authorities but denounced as “racist” if it should even be suggested. One has only to open the newspapers in Britain to see that not a day goes by when monstrous crimes are not being committed by criminals who are disproportionately of immigrant stock, mostly of African or Asian origin.

Two cases, both plucked from today’s Daily Mail, will amply illustrate this correlation. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Not unless such coincidences occur several times a week:

A mother-of-two stabbed by a knifeman targeting lone women at night was saved by her thick coat.

The victim, in her 60s, was walking home with fish and chips on Friday night when a stranger leapt out and knifed her in the stomach…. The terrified pensioner thought she had been punched as her thick clothing stopped the blade from plunging deeper into her stomach.

Yesterday her distraught daughter told how her mother might have been killed, but when her attacker went to stab her a second time, ‘she saw the glisten of the knife and just ran’.

Bleeding, she managed to stagger back to her home…. Police are linking the unprovoked attack to the stabbing of another single woman in the same area over the Bank Holiday weekend.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: “In both cases the suspect is described as a black male, aged around 40….”

(Abridged, see Terrified pensioner stabbed on way home)

The second case involves a bloodbath perpetrated by an out-of-control Afghan immigrant:

A mother and daughter were stabbed to death in a frenzied attack outside their home yesterday morning. Neighbours in the quiet suburban street initially thought their screams were the sound of foxes.

Last night police were hunting Janbaz Tarin, 21, for the murders of his former girlfriend Raneem Oudeh, 22, and her mother, Khaola Saleem, 49. The women were originally from Syria but have lived in the UK for at least 16 years. Tarin, who is originally from Afghanistan, worked in a corner shop.

Wendy Brown, 76, who lives nearby with her husband, said: “We have lived here for 40 years. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It is terrifying.”

(Abridged, see Manhunt after mum and daughter knifed to death)

What the native-born English lady is saying, if you read between the lines, is that 40 years ago, before the invasion of her country by outlanders from foreign parts, she was living in a relatively safe and crime-free country. No longer. Most of the criminals you hear of nowadays no longer have reassuringly familiar names the average white Brit can pronounce, like Winston Smith and John Brown. The five doctors mentioned in the paragraph below, for example, all convicted of sexually assaulting their White female patients, happen to be without exception of Asian origin. Coincidence? Most unlikely. Forty years ago, for a start, doctors groping and taking obscene photos of their female patients surreptitiously, were extremely rare events. Today they are all too common. And the names they bear are disproportionately foreign. The five doctors featured here—hardly a ringing endorsement of multiculturalism—all sport pretty weird names most Brits would get wrong in a spelling test: Dr Gosul Islam, Dr Rajeskumar Mehta, Dr Syed Bukhari, Dr Jaswant Rathore, and Dr Thair Altail.

The average older Brit now feels like a stranger in a strange land.

—   §   —

Dalrymple sees the British as finding refuge for their many sorrows in a cheerless hedonism, drinking themselves into a stupor or seeking consolation in the pleasures of the flesh. Quite a few male doctors, often of immigrant stock—see here, here, here, here, and here—have subjected their female patients to sexual abuse on an almost epic scale. The politicians are at it too, sexually harassing and groping their female staff in the House of Commons or watching pornography while supposedly engaged in high-powered affairs of state. These are the people running the country. Having lost control of their own impulses, they are nevertheless given licence to lord it over the lives of millions of their fellow citizens.

Is it any wonder the country is going to the dogs?

THEN (1958) . . . and NOW (2018)

—   §   —

The last two centuries have seen enormous technological progress but human nature is pretty much the same with one significant difference: a huge number of Brits are now committing suicide at the drop of a hat, especially young men. Suicide is now the biggest killer of men under 50, with 84 taking their own lives every week. Though not far behind in the suicide race, women are more likely than men to develop serious mental complaints and to be on medication of some kind. The number of people I notice talking to themselves in public places nowadays, twitching spasmodically or jerking their heads round from side to side like marionettes gone mad, is truly frightening.

The worst fate, according to Dalrymple, is to be an intelligent and sensitive person born into the British underclass. “The social pressure on you to fail is enormous,” he notes.  “I remember a girl who wanted to study French but ‘they said I was stupid because I was clever.’ Can you imagine growing up in that environment?” British education, he concludes gloomily, involves “people who come out of school knowing less than when they went in.”

The country’s cultural level has plummeted. The Brits are so degraded culturally they can’t even answer the telephone properly. They were once known for emotional constipation. Now it’s emotional incontinence.

Tolerance has become the new vice:

A society that tolerates everything is rather bad. Shouting, screaming, intimidation. We are prepared to tolerate public vomiting, but if you use the term “actress”, you are a sexist. A very well-educated lady told me public vomiting is all right: “They can clear it up.” This is how the élite thinks. They are so anxious not to seem narrow-minded or bigoted, or of being “judgmental”.

Dalrymple thinks it’s a puzzle as to why Britain has become more degraded than all other comparable countries.

He recounts an experience he had in Manchester, where he was staying at an hotel: “There was laughing and screaming outside at 1.30 in the morning. When I went out the next morning, I found that someone had been nearly murdered—he was in hospital, in a coma. You can’t tell the difference in England between people enjoying themselves and someone being murdered.”

Dalrymple’s comments quoted as an epigraph here are worth repeating. He notes ruefully, that “the entire population of Britain looks as though it has let itself go. Where once emotional restraint and self-control were admired, now it is emotional incontinence. It is as if they had undergone potty-training in reverse.” The person who controls himself is not only a figure of fun, but a traitor to his own best interests.  “It is no surprise,” Dalrymple concludes, “that the British are despised around the world.”

—   §   —

I hate to see the British described in these negative terms. In fact, I have to disagree that the Brits are “despised around the world.” If anything, the opposite is true. Most White Americans still regard their British ancestors with affection, admiring their accents and taking pride in the blood and soil of their forefathers. The blood that flows through their veins is, after all, the same blood that flowed through the veins of the Pilgrim Fathers and the veins of Shakespeare, Milton and Newton. Even India secretly mourned the demise of Pax Britannica when the raj came to an end and the burra sahib, weary of conquest, packed his bags and went back home.

There’s one virtue the Brits have always enjoyed in abundance, far more than any other country. This is noblesse oblige, an innate compassion for the underdog and a hatred of the bully. Their sense of honour, even now amid their desolation, has never left them. This virtue, needless to say, is more often to be found among the well-bred upper classes and is conspicuous by its absence among the nouveaux riches and the lower pushy types who are forced to live by their wits.

You will notice this, too, if you live long in Britain: the kindest people in the country are the older generation, especially its valiant brigade of dotty old ladies. Ever ready to drop their coins in a beggar’s bowl or buy a takeaway tea and sandwiches for some homeless bum, these charitable old dears are also most likely to fall victims and be fleeced alive by scam artists. Meanwhile, it’s the young and trendy who are the most heartless when it comes to derelicts. Never expect even a smile from them if ever you go begging, let alone a penny for your pains.

We need to cross the Atlantic to see what has happened to the Brits. The same malaise, or creeping soul sickness, that has afflicted their American cousins, has now fallen on the Brits with a vengeance. In the words of an American psychiatrist, this new plague is known as “shit-life syndrome”.

Let Guardian columnist Will Hutton explain:

US doctors [have] coined a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”. Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in life is close to impossible.

Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall, Hutton adds, and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. “Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.”

Many Americans are now in poor health. In physical pain. They are so depressed that they not only need antidepressants but opioid painkillers. To this they add alcohol, drinking themselves into a stupor. It’s a never-ending cycle of misery. “They have much to be depressed about,” Hutton glooms, adding the significant fact that these dead-enders all tend to be ardent Trump supporters. “They, and tens of millions like them teetering on the edge of the same condition, constitute Donald Trump’s electoral base.” Mostly marginalised and maladjusted White Americans, they live in hope that their president will one day wave a magic wand and rescue them from futility.

The parallels between America and Britain, Hutton tells us, have now become obvious:

Shit-life syndrome is not just a feature of a US city such as Baltimore, where the difference in life expectancy between the richer and poorer districts is as much as 20 years, it’s a feature of our cities, too. Within the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the difference in life expectancy between richest and poorest is 16 years. And the trends are deteriorating.

Too many of England’s towns are becoming crucibles of shit-life syndrome. They have become inward-looking, urban islands in which despair and despondency are too prevalent. Train and bus fares are so high that travelling within them has become prohibitively expensive. Stripped of power by the most centralised system in Europe, they are disempowered and sullen about the present and apprehensive of the future.

All this can and must change.

But nothing changes.

Two years after Brexit, Theresa May—famous for her catchphrase “Brexit means Brexit”—has yet to deliver on her promise to cut free from Europe and reclaim British sovereignty.

Having stabbed the British public in the back by openly aligning herself with the Europhile enemy in recent months, though affecting a need for fair play and a desire to give the British public what it voted for on 23 June 2016, Mrs May would be only too happy to see Brexit fail.

This is what democracy has come to mean in Britain: you are free to vote only if you vote correctly. Stalin was right when he said, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”

VIDEO  :  3 mins
‘ENGLAND’S GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND’

Dr. Lasha Darkmoon’s other writings can be accessed on her website.

59 replies

Comments are closed.