Mark Steyn - After America

Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of self-deprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from the Daily Telegraph :

A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was “distasteful.” The £136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of “the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences.”

Students were urged to “party like it’s 1899” and organizers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.

But anti-fascist groups said the theme was “distasteful and insensitive” because of the British Empire’s historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation.

The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material. 18

The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”

It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups’” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it.

Until William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as a constant feature of life, as permanent as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.

It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. Yet there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for America, too: when a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. And, if la crème de la crème of the British education system so willingly prostrates itself before ahistorical balderdash, what then of its more typical charges? If you cut off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? One of the July 7 Tube bombers left a famous video broadcast posthumously on Arab TV, spouting all the usual jihadist boiler-plate but in a Yorkshire accent: Ee-oop Allahu akbar! Eaten away by Islam and welfare, much of Britain is on a fast track to Somalia with chip shops. 19

And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is in its pestilential way a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.

“We don’t need no education,” as Pink Floyd sang. When a broke British government attempted to increase the cost of university education, “students” rampaged through Parliament Square, set fire to the statue of Lord Palmerston and urinated on that of Winston Churchill. 20The signature photograph of the riot showed a “student” swinging from the Union Flag on the Cenotaph, the memorial to Britain’s 700,000 dead from the Great War. Who was this tribune of the masses? Step forward, Charlie Gilmour, stepson of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, a geriatric rocker worth $150 million or thereabouts. 21When he went up to Cambridge University, Charlie’s parents had two suits made for him by a Savile Row tailor so he could swank about the groves of academe in bespoke elegance.

Yet young Mr. Gilmour still thinks the government should fund his education. “Hey, teacher, leave us kids a loan,” as his dad’s rock group almost sang.

What’s he studying at Cambridge? History. Despite that, and despite the prominently displayed words “THE GLORIOUS DEAD,” he had no idea that the monument he was desecrating was a memorial to Britain’s fallen soldiers. As the columnist Julie Burchill observed, Charlie no doubt assumed “the Glorious Dead” was a rock band. 22

In 2008, when the economy hit the skids, Gordon Brown and other ministers of the Labour Government fell back on stillborn invocations of “the knowledge economy” that will always make Britain an attractive place to do business because of the “added value” of its educated workforce. 23(You hear the same confident bluster from American experts entirely ignorant of the academic standards of Asia.) Are you serious? Have you set foot in an English state school in the last fifteen years? The well of cultural inheritance in great nations is deep but not bottomless.

What happened to England, the mother of parliaments and a crucible of liberty? Britain, in Dean Acheson’s famous post-war assessment, had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Actually, Britain didn’t so much “lose” the Empire: it evolved peacefully into the modern Commonwealth, which is more agreeable than the way these things usually go. Nor is it clear that modern Britain wants a role, of any kind. Rather than losing an empire, it seems to have lost its point.

Having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, in what other ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old lion? First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After empire, Britain turned inward: between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further. 24

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: you can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford—cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commit-ments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?

In the grim pre-Thatcher nadir of the 1970s, the then Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, confided to a pal of mine that he thought Britain’s decline was irreversible and that the government’s job was to manage it as gracefully as possible. He wasn’t alone in this: an entire generation of British politicians, on both sides of the aisle, felt much the same way. They rose onward and upward, “managing” problems rather than solving them. You can already see the same syndrome in Washington. While Obama seems actively to be willing U.S. decline as some sort of penance to the planet, many others have accepted American diminishment as a mere fact of life to be adjusted to as best one can. Yet, as noted, national decline is always at least partly psychological. Even in the long ebbing of imperial grandeur, there was no rational basis for modern Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom , written with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944: