Midsomer Murders and The War on the English
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May 27, 2011 — 106 Comments
Brenton Sanderson
In the last fifty years the culture of critique has reengineered
public discourse in the West so successfully that laudatory references
to European ethnic groups, such as the English, are today widely held
to be morally repugnant. This reality is confirmed by the recent
experience of Brian True-May, the co-creator of the internationally
successful television series Midsomer Murders. One of most successful
British cultural exports of the last decade, Midsomer Murders draws
large audiences around the world – particularly in the United States,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The long-running series is known
for its quaint English village setting which provides the backdrop for
classic (if clichéd) murder mysteries.
The program made international headlines in March when True-May was
suspended by ITV. Asked in an interview to account for the show’s
international success, he said his winning formula was quite simple:
keep it as English as possible. He pointed out that the series simply
‘wouldn’t work’ if there was any racial diversity portrayed in the
sleepy village set in the fictional county of Midsomer. ‘We just don’t
have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English
village with them,’ he told the Radio Times. ‘It just wouldn’t work.
Suddenly we might be in Slough … We’re the last bastion of Englishness
and I want to keep it that way. Maybe I’m not politically correct …
I’m trying to make something that appeals to a certain audience, which
seems to succeed. And I don’t want to change it.’
Predictably enough, an ITV spokesman immediately issued a statement:
‘We are shocked and appalled at these personal comments by Brian True-
May which are absolutely not shared by anyone at ITV. We are in urgent
discussions with All3Media, the producer of Midsomer Murders, who have
informed us that they have launched an immediate investigation into
the matter and have suspended Mr True-May pending the outcome.’ ITV
was captured by the Judeo-Marxist establishment long ago, and Jewish
editorial control at ITV has been ensured for the next generation with
the recent appointment of the 32-year-old Jonathan Levi as head of
ITV’s arts and popular culture division. The situation at the BBC is
little different.
Behind the suspension of True-May was a tacit threat: his program
needs to modify a successful formula in the interests of promoting the
multicultural ideal of Britain’s cultural-Marxist (and Jewish-
dominated) intellectual establishment. This ‘last bastion of
Englishness’ must cease, even if this means undermining the very basis
of the program’s success. The apparent concern is not that Midsomer
Murders is inaccurate in its portrayal of the typical rural English
village – which, to the dismay of many, are still overwhelming white –
but rather that the program constitutes, in some sense, a
‘celebration’ of this fact, and by extension, exploits a nostalgia and
yearning for England as it was prior to mass Third World immigration
and state-sponsored multiculturalism. This is anathema to an elite
which is fiercely anti-White, has contempt for the White nation state,
a profound dislike of any deference to White culture, and an
incomprehension of the web of traditions and prejudices once revered
by the English.
Roger Scruton
Observing the contemporary assault on the English, conservative
philosopher Roger Scruton notes that ‘every practice in which the
spirit of England can still be discerned seems fated now to arouse
contempt.’[i] Unfortunately Scruton cannot see, or simply refuses to
see, the Jewish elephant in the room as he attempts to account for
this pernicious trend:
Quote:
The forbidding of England is a strange phenomenon and one that is hard
to explain. The country was always victorious in war, and was not
impoverished even by the loss of its empire. No outside force
compelled it to relinquish its national pride and culture. The process
came from within, and seemingly without resistance. George Orwell
commented on the disloyalty, the anti-patriotism and ‘intellectual
sabotage’ that had helped to weaken England during the 1930s. He
attributed the phenomenon to the fact that the old imperial society
excluded the intellectuals, and therefore drove them to take up a
negative posture towards it.[ii]
Scruton apparently fails to notice the pursuit of Jewish group
interests manifest in the various intellectual movements that have
formed the basis for what he terms the ‘culture of repudiation’ that
subjected the old virtues, customs and religion of England ‘to
humiliating scorn by the makers of public opinion.’[iii] He is
correct, however, in observing that this ‘culture of repudiation’
found particularly fertile soil in the cultural landscape of post-war
England.
Quote:
[The] English emerged from two world wars in a condition of moral
fatigue. … An overwhelming sense of guilt seemed to paralyse the
country – guilt at its own successes, and an awareness of their cost.
… Rather than risk the accusation that they were so bellicose and
xenophobic as actually to believe in themselves, the English preferred
to apologise.’ Therefore, one ‘of their most endearing traits became
their nemesis. … The sneering and jeering at Old England was caused
not by the country’s strength but by its manifest weakness, which
means that it could be despised with impunity.[iv]
From a Native Culture of Dissent to the Culture of Critique
The English were particularly susceptible to being enlisted as vectors
of the culture of critique given their psychological predisposition to
individualism and moral universalism (a characteristic of northern
Europeans generally, discussed by Kevin MacDonald here). This tendency
is a theme that finds repeated expression through English history.
Scruton observes that ‘the peculiarities of the English’ can be traced
to what ‘is sometimes known as their “individualism” – that is, their
disposition to affirm the right and responsibility of individual
action in all spheres of social life.’[v] Their individualism was
manifest in their national character:
Quote:
The English, it is generally agreed, were distant, cool, reserved.
They had friends, but they did not make them easily, and when they
made them, they held them at a distance, embarrassed at the natural
flow of human affection, and taking steps to avoid it whenever it
might erupt. This reserve was part of loyalty; their affections were
cool but steady. They deplored the volatile humours of the
Mediterranean people, and the fickle sentimentality, as they saw it,
of the Irish. Because their attachments were slow to form they were
also slow to dissolve: for one attachment must be driven out by
another, and meanwhile takes up its place with the same discreet
informality as a member takes his armchair in his club. This reserve
was observed not only between friends, but also between lovers,
spouses and members of a family, where it could coexist with the
deepest love and a mutual identification of aims and interests. It
amounted not to a lack of feeling, but rather to a lack of self-regard
– a refusal to display a feeling just because it happened to be yours.
[vi]
The inherent individualism of the English led to the evolution of a
nation of strangers. ‘Strangers do not live together by affection, by
family sentiment, by swearing bonds of blood-brotherhood in the manner
of the Arabian tribes. They live together by law, convention and a
silent appeal to precedent. They settle disputes not by violent
quarrels of vengeance, but by laying their grievance before an
impartial judge, himself a stranger at one further remove.’[vii] The
advent of the common law and devotion to the rule of law is regarded
as the embodiment of the disposition of a people ‘who came to England
from Jutland, Saxony and Scandinavia’ who ‘were distinguished by their
litigiousness.’[viii] For Scruton, England has always been a land of
dissent:
Quote:
Important sections of English society have scorned its traditions, its
compromises and its aristocratic ways, seeing only the bare bones of
power and oppression and the hypocrisy that has kept these things in
place. Lollards, Luddites, Puritans, Dissenters and Roundheads stood
always in the wings of English society, moving centre stage in times
of crisis. Chartists, trade unionists and republicans have relayed
their dissenting message to the modern world.[ix]
That the modern culture of critique represents a profound
discontinuity with this native tradition of dissent is revealed by the
‘undomesticated’ nature of the new form of dissent. Scruton points out
that:
Quote:
The English contained among their number a great many sneerers and
scoffers: but they formed an accepted part of the organism, a chafing
away from inside which created the comfortable impression that England
itself was impregnable, since its quarrels were purely internal. … In
their overseas adventures the English could be insolent and cruel. In
Ireland and North America and sometimes in India, Englishmen behaved
like despicable criminals. Yet they were schooled in self-criticism,
and unwilling to excuse a crime, merely because it was theirs. The
narrative of their crimes was itself written by Englishmen and their
excesses were no sooner committed than condemned.[x]
The moral universalism and naive idealism of native English
intellectuals, a legacy of their evolutionary development at northern
hunter-gatherers, was doubtless intensified by the nation’s fortunate
geography. Centuries of safety behind the shields of sea and navy
created the illusion that the world is a much kinder place than it
really is, and thus allowed the arguments of idealists to flourish.
Thus, Kipling chided the naive pacifists of his time for ‘making mock
of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.’
This was an apt criticism of the anti-patriotic Edwardian Fabians that
made up the Bloomsbury Group, who included the type of intellectuals
that, George Orwell noted, ‘are ashamed of their own nationality’ and
who ‘felt there is something slightly disgraceful in being an
Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English
institution.’ To a significant extent this was still true in 1965,
but, with the intellectual force of the cultural of critique, this
once atypical strand of thought and feeling broke out of its bookish
little world to storm the cultural centres of the country, making, in
the process, traditional English patriotism deeply unfashionable.
Roy Jenkins: The face of British multiculturalism is a native
Englishman
The Jewish intellectual class, and their non-Jewish dupes like Roy
Jenkins, were thus able to draw upon a native tradition of dissent,
and exploit it to unleash an orgy of altruistic punishment among the
English. With the destruction and disruption of the Second World War,
the austerity and chaos after that war and the manic suburbanisation
of the country that came with the prosperity of the fifties and
sixties, it was easier than ever for the English to be persuaded that
significant parts of national existence should be altered forever. In
an incredibly short time they turned England into a nation without
heroes and without pride in its past. ‘All those features of the
English character which had been praised in wartime books and films –
gentleness, firmness, honesty, tolerance, ‘grit’, the stiff upper lip
and the spirit of fair play – were either denied or derided. England
was not the free, harmonious, law-abiding community celebrated in
boys’ magazines, but a place of class divisions, jingoism and racial
intolerance.’[xi]
While ostensibly unable to detect the aetiology of his ‘culture of
repudiation’ Scruton aptly defines its conceptual outlines:
Quote:
While exhorting us to be as ‘inclusive’ as we can, to discriminate
neither in thought, word, nor deed against ethnic, sexual or
behavioural minorities, political correctness encourages the
denigration of what is felt to be especially ours. … The gentle
advocacy of inclusion masks the far-from-gentle desire to exclude the
old excluder: in other words to repudiate the cultural inheritance
that defines us as something distinct from the rest. The ‘down with
us’ mentality is devoted to rooting out old and unsustainable
loyalties. And when the old loyalties die, so does the old form of
membership. … We who live in the amorphous and multicultural
environment of the postmodern city must open our hearts and minds to
all cultures, and be wedded to none.[xii]
Into the vacuum left by the collapse of English self-confidence, a new
ideological conformity has emerged. The new empire of ideas reaches
into the most intimate areas of life, and those who do not accept it
are held to be personally at fault, not just politically or
philosophically wrong. It is the most fanatical system of thought to
dominate the British Isles since the Reformation. Indeed, failure to
conform to the new orthodoxy is held to be a moral failing and
evidence of psychopathology. The effects of the culture of critique on
English society have been so devastating that it is entirely fair to
make an analogy with Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China. It has
devalued objective knowledge and attempted to make many thoughts
unthinkable, and has sundered many of the invisible bonds that once
held English society together. The lore of the English tribe and the
stories of their ancestors have largely ceased to be.
Meanwhile, under the banner of ‘social justice’ the ‘oppressed’ brown
and black immigrant communities are given complete licence (and White
taxpayer-funded assistance) to affirm their cultures and aggressively
pursue their group interests. The crucial goal, with regard to the
native English, is to ‘sever young people from historical loyalties‘
and instil ‘a “non-judgemental” attitude towards other cultures that
goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might
had been one’s own.’[xiii] Young English people gain nothing from this
culture save bewilderment and the loss of any sense of racial and
cultural identity.
End of Part 1
Part 2
The War on the English: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique, Part
2
Under the new cultural orthodoxy the traditional English virtues are
rapidly disappearing. The effect of the culture of critique on a
society whose values were all open to question and whose morals were
dissolving was and continues to be explosive. Scruton observes that
Quote:
having been famous for their stoicism, their decorum, their honesty,
their gentleness, and their sexual puritanism, the English now subsist
in a society in which those qualities are no longer honoured – a
society of people who regard long-term loyalties with cynicism, and
whose response to misfortune is to look round for someone to sue.
England is no longer a gentle country, and the old courtesies and
decencies are disappearing. … Sex, freed from taboos, has become the
ruling obsession: the English have the highest rate of divorce in
Europe, regard marriage as a bore, are blatantly promiscuous and
litter the country with their illegitimate, uncared for and state-
subsidised offspring. … The loss of traditional virtue and local
identity has occurred throughout Europe and its diaspora.[i]
The intellectual war against the traditional White family, a product
of the culture of critique, is one which has had disastrous
consequences for White group interests. Scruton notes that the assault
on the family was part of a great cultural shift from the affirmation
to the repudiation of inherited values:
Quote:
Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, Aaron Esterson, and radical
psychotherapists of their persuasion see the family as a burden
imposed by the past: a way in which parents encumber their offspring
with an inheritance of defunct authority. Schizophrenia, in Laing’s
view, arises because the Self is made Other by the parental imposition
of dysfunctional norms.[ii]
Inevitably, these “dysfunctional norms” were the traditional family
structure and regulative ideas of English society. Following the path
laid out by these radical intellectuals and post-structuralists like
Michel Foucault, ‘radical feminism has set out to deconstruct the
family entirely, exposing it as an instrument of male domination, and
advocating new kinds of “negotiated” union in its place.’ As Kevin
MacDonald notes, this radical deconstruction of the traditional
Western family structure was never accompanied by an analogous
deconstruction and critique of the traditional Jewish family structure
and its regulative ideas — particularly its inculcation of
ethnocentrism and a bunker mentality of ‘us (good) against them
(evil)’, not to mention its extreme emphasis on economic success and
upward mobility.
Despite this ongoing assault on the traditional European family, there
remains a section of society committed to ‘family values’ and to the
division of roles that makes families durable. Nevertheless, this
section of society does not have any real voice in the shaping of
public opinion. The Judeo-Marxist elite have a virtual monopoly on the
points of view found in the mainstream media.
As Scruton points out:
Quote:
The message of the media, the academy, and the opinion forming elite
is feminist, anti-patriarchal, and opposed to traditional sexual
prohibitions such as those governing abortion, homosexuality, and sex
outside marriage. More importantly, the culture of the elite has
undergone a kind of ‘moral inversion’ to use Michael Polanyi’s idiom.
Permission turns to prohibition, as the advocacy of alternatives gives
way to a war against the former orthodox. The family, far from
enjoying the status of a legitimate alternative to the various
‘transgressive’ postures lauded by the elite, is dismissed out of hand
as a form of oppression. … Like Marxism, feminism purports to show us
the world without ideological masks or camouflage. Its repudiating
zeal is not, as a rule, directed against Islam or the cultures of the
East. It is directed against the West, and its message is ‘down with
us.’[iii]
The generations that came after the culture of critique have often
come from families that have disintegrated or are weak, whose schools
do not uphold tradition and racial pride, and whose religious
experience and understanding are non-existent. They have instead grown
up with immensely strong outside influences – almost all of them
radical enemies of White people and their culture. Anyone who controls
a major television network or movie studio (as our hostile Judeo-
Marxist elite does) can use it to pour out propaganda which most young
Whites find impossible to resist, provided it uses the right sort of
codes, language and symbols. This media control has done infinitely
more damage to the long-term group interests of the English people
than anything the Luftwaffe managed to do to them during World War
Two.
From Victorianism to the Culture of Critique
Jewish historian Norman Cantor observed that the Jewish intellectual
movements, which he equated with ‘modernism,’ represented the negation
of ‘Victorianism’. He notes that:
Quote:
Something more profound and structural was involved in the Jewish role
in the modernist revolution than this sociological phenomenon of the
supersession of marginality. There was an ideological drive at work. …
Victorianism liked to build on the heritage of the past. Modernism,
assuming this heritage, wanted to put it aside and concentrate on what
could be discovered anew in the laboratory, in the research library,
in the psychiatric patient’s free association and sexual memory, in
the application of colour to canvas, in words and sentences, in
quantifiable social trends, in the anthropological fieldwork
experience. Their response was a fundamental re-examination of the
postulates of European thought as it had existed in the nineteenth
century. As new men, as recent outsiders, they had no personal stake
or family participation in Victorianism or professional responsibility
to it. They were not restrained by prior commitments from undertaking
the zero-base reconsideration of physics, psychology, sociology,
philosophy, anthropology, and the arts.[iv]
A central concern, in this endeavour, was to deconstruct the
theoretical and cultural basis of English racial pride and
ethnocentrism. This necessitated expunging a view that during the
Victorian era was held by the English as natural and self-evident:
that ‘When considering the human material from which English
civilisation was made’, it was natural to ‘refer to the English race,
this ‘happy breed of men’, whose offshore island was the guarantee of
their racial purity and apartness.’ Scruton invites us to ponder what
happens when a people live together on an island unconquered, as the
English were unconquered during the centuries that made them:
Quote:
There occurs a gradual homogenisation in appearance, in deportment and
in temperament. A bodily rhythm is acquired and passed on. This rhythm
becomes established as an almost physiological trait, recognisable at
a glance to the foreigner in England, and to the Englishman abroad. In
such a case it is not surprising to find our Victorian ancestors
referring to the English race, to ‘kith and kin’, to the ‘island
stock’, and so invoking, though idioms that are now widely
disapproved, a perfectly normal and natural human fact. England was
associated, in the minds of those who claimed it as their homeland,
with a recognisable physical type, with its own varieties of male and
female beauty. Paintings, photographs, poems, novels and descriptions
show that this type existed in large numbers, before immigration and
emigration began to alter it.[v]
To fatally weaken the instinct for racial preservation of the ‘island
stock’, the culture of critique had to overcome a revulsion against
miscegenation which was a longstanding feature of English life – a
feature that reached its apogee in the late Victorian period, and
which was a major source of their imperial strength. Scruton notes
that
Quote:
This fear of contamination is, paradoxically, what made the English
into such intrepid adventurers and explorers. They could go anywhere,
encounter anyone, suffer anything and emerge unpolluted. … The people
among whom they wandered were essentially other, and interesting for
that very reason. But since they were other, they did not belong with
us. … The English made themselves especially offensive to the Indians
by treating all of them, even the Brahmins, as though they were of a
lower caste than themselves, and by allowing them to share their
domestic lives only as servants and never as equals. The intricate
connection between this attitude and the fear of sexual contamination
is well brought out by Paul Scott, in his anti-English novels of the
Raj. … Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more
valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, and
the English knew this.[vi]
This cultural feature found its leading expression in the Scottish
surgeon, anatomist and anthropologist, Robert Knox, best known now as
the chief client of the Edinburgh body-snatchers, Burke and Hare. His
published works included The Races of Men (1850, revised 1862), in
which he described ‘as simply a fact’ that ‘race in human affairs is
everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilisation, depend
on it.’[vii] The highest races were the Germans, the Saxons, and the
Celts; the lowest were the dark races of the Earth. He described the
Jewish race as ‘sterile parasites.’
Though Knox’s work is now almost completely forgotten, it was widely
admired at the time, by Charles Darwin among others, and exerted
significant popular influence. Knox was pessimistic regarding British
imperialism, partly because he held it to be a fruitless task (given
that he believed the dark races were incapable of being civilized),
but mainly because it could eventually lead to the degeneration of a
superior race as a function of miscegenation.
Knox’s views were later given scientific foundation by the
mathematician Francis Galton who, in his book Hereditary Genius
(1869), pioneered the ideas that a ‘man’s natural abilities are
derived by inheritance’; that ‘out of two varieties of any race of
animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most intelligent
variety is sure to prevail in the battle for life’; and that on a
sixteen-point scale of racial intelligence, a Negro is two grades
below an Englishman.
A more systematic development was undertaken by Karl Pearson, another
Cambridge-trained mathematician, who in 1911 became the first Galton
Professor of Eugenics at University College London. Pearson became
persuaded that his statistical techniques (which he called ’biometry’)
could be used to demonstrate the dangers posed to the Empire by racial
degeneration.[viii]
Joseph Chamberlain: English statesman
Meanwhile, as social identity theory would predict, the English racial
type was idealised. Typical was the statement of Joseph Chamberlain
who maintained: ‘I believe in this race, the greatest governing race
the world has ever seen; in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, so
tenacious, self-confident and determined, this race which neither
climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the
predominant force of future history and universal civilisation.’[ix]
A similar view was also expressed by one of the characters in Benjamin
Disraeli’s novel Tancred (1847) who tells us that the historical
success of England is an ‘affair of race. A Saxon race, protected by
an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character
on the century. And when a superior race, with a superior idea of Work
and Order, advances, its state will be progressive.’[x]
At the beginning of the twentieth century the English racial ideal was
embodied in characters like Lord John Roxton in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World, with his ‘strange, twinkling, reckless eyes – eyes of
a cold light blue, the colour of a glacier lake’.
Quote:
He was the essence of the English country gentleman, the keen, alert,
open-air lover of dogs and of horses. His skin was of a rich flower-
pot red from sun and wind. His eyebrows were tufted and overhanging,
which gave those naturally cold eyes an almost ferocious aspect, an
impression which was increased by his strong and furrowed brow. In
figure he was spare, but very strongly built – indeed, he had often
proved that there were very few men in England capable of such
sustained exertions.[xi]
The English were recognised not only by themselves but by visitors and
travellers as a distinct human type. Indeed, some of the best
descriptions were written by foreigners, as they endeavoured to
understand the phenomenon of the Englishman. The Czech novelist Karel
Capek wrote in 1925 that
Quote:
if you get to know them closer, they are very kind and gentle; they
never speak much because they never speak about themselves. They enjoy
themselves like children, but with the most solemn, leathery
expression; they have lots of ingrained etiquette, but at the same
time they are free-and-easy as young whelps. They are as hard as
flint, incapable of adapting themselves, conservative, loyal, rather
shallow and always uncommunicative; they cannot get out of their skin,
but it is a solid, and in every respect excellent skin. You cannot
speak to them without being invited to lunch or dinner; they are as
hospitable as St Julian, but they can never overstep the distance
between man and man. Sometimes you have a sense of uneasiness at
feeling so solitary in the midst of these kind and courteous people;
but if you were a little boy, you would know that you could trust them
more than yourself, and you would be free and respected here more than
anywhere else in the world; the policeman who would puff out his
cheeks to make you laugh, an old gentleman would play at ball with
you, a white-haired lady would lay aside her four-hundred page novel
to gaze at you winsomely with her grey and still winsome eyes.[xii]
The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously enumerated
the qualities of the English as he perceived them in 1922, noting
that:
Quote:
Instinctively the Englishmen is no missionary, no conqueror. He
prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is
rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and
strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly
he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being;
he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the
instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change
him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English
weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in
the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of
mankind. Never since the days of Greece has the world has such a
sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race
when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls and fanatics manage
to supplant him.’[xiii]
For the English sons of British Empire there was certainly deep racial
pride, though it was restrained by benevolence and a fair amount of
modesty. Thus, Thomas Pickles, writing in 1932, could point out: ‘The
almost worldwide domination of the White man does not mean that our
way of life is the only right way, or that peoples of other races are
necessarily inferior; indeed the study of geography shows us that
“coloured” peoples have a great deal to contribute to the well-being
of the world.’
End of Part 2 of 3.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/05/the-war-on-the-english-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1/