OUR HERITAGE IS UNDER THREAT FROM AMERICA

(published in the November/December 2007 issue of European Action)

by Robert Edwards

So why does the rest of the world hate America, apart for the many wars it has initiated since 1945? The answer, I believe, is much deeper and concerns a threat to the cultural lives of every nation on this planet ... but particularly to we Europeans. The following article calls for a resistance to all things American as the only way forward in the pursuit of the preservation of our own national values. ‘Britishness’ is a concept valued by all real patriots and must not be sacrificed on the altar of the new globalist mono-culture now being promoted by American capitalist imperialism ... the PAX AMERICANA!
The ‘father of British cultural nationalism’ was undoubtedly Sir Michael Balcon. He was thus described recently on BBC TV in a celebration of British film comedy. Who was he, you may ask. "Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the British character", read a plaque erected by Balcon at Ealing Studios when it was sold in 1955 and continued as MGM British. He began as a regional distributor in 1919 before founding Gainsborough Pictures in 1924. After twelve years, he became a director and production chief at the studios in Ealing between 1937 and 1959. That should explain why he is regarded as a key figure in the history of the British film industry, celebrating all of our wonderful British cultural life.
His achievements have to be evaluated in the face of the massive output from Hollywood with all its Dollar power and the mighty movie moguls. He went there early in his career, had a big row with Louis B. Mayer, and returned to his native Britain (he was born in Birmingham) for which many should thank him intensely.
Some of our American readers will understand that my defence of British cultural values will inevitably entail a critique of the influence of American cinema and television on the British media to the point of mass saturation. It is at the expense of our own home-grown talent as well as being a destructive intrusion. But more, much more than this, is the dumbing down, an obsession with gratuitous violence, corruption of the English language replete with the obligatory profanities (principally, incest with your mother) that now deface and defile our television screens.
This obsession with the gun is also something alien to Britain and chiefly associated with the Westerns we watched as children. In this country we regarded these ‘gunslingers’ as fictional characters, too larger-than-life and from a land of which we knew little. Chicago gangsters usually got their comeuppance after behaving badly. They also had ‘attitude’ when armed with a ‘Tommy’ gun.
Ealing Studios, on the other hand, gave gentle insights into a different breed of people, often luckless but triumphing in the end through pure goodness. There were few guns involved, as well. When PC George Dixon (played by Jack Warner) was shot dead in the film, ‘The Blue Lamp’ (1949), it was unprecedented in terms of British cinema. In that era, when you shot dead a copper in real life you hanged for it, regarded by many as ‘the good old days’.
In the world of contemporary music, young British singers must affect an American accent with a drawl as they wail and scream out songs in apparent agony. It is a style that belongs to the United States, like so much other rubbish that is imported. The English accent seems to be a definite disadvantage if you want to get on with the likes of Simon Cowell, for example. Rap singing is not indigenous to the British cultural scene and unashamedly imitates the Americans ... black Americans, to be specific. White youths, called ‘wiggers’, adopt the black ghetto speak of American cities in a rejection of traditional white English values.
The white working class in Britain has been under attack for many decades now and the weapon used is American cultural dumbing down. You see it with the wearing of track suits, trainers and baseball caps ... probably the most ugly of sartorial expression. ‘Hoodies’, of course, complete the ensemble. You see the white boy imitating the American negro again, including the drugs culture and now the hand gun.
As a European, I can speak only for my British homeland first, but the problem should concern all Europeans as the so-called ‘global village’ sucks our entire ancient continent into its sphere of cultural influence. Starbucks here and Starbucks there ... the American multi-national desecrates the soil of our European heartland. The very presence of one of these coffee house rip-offs is a statement of cultural invasion and they should be driven back with the fury that sent the Turk packing at the gates of Vienna those centuries ago.
The destruction of the British character and the destruction of a way of life is intentional and by design because globalist free market exploitation requires populations of producers and consumers to be without national frontiers or any form of unique, separate identity. It is a requirement of some of the most evil forces on our planet, a requirement that believes we are nothing more than economic units in the grand designs of the big money-bags that manipulate governments. Nothing less.
The Americanisation of Britain and the rest of Europe is but one way of standardising the planet in order that the character of each is extinguished ... thus facilitating the free movement of labour wherever ‘free market’ monopoly capitalism requires it. This is on the basis of the old formula that cheap labour means fatter profits.
That is the economic argument. There is another, more invidious, dimension to this act of cultural vandalism and it is based on the misbegotten idea that the American way of life is such a wonderful and beneficial gift to the rest of the world that it must be imposed everywhere and anywhere. This, of course, entails the erosion of indigenous cultures in order that American values predominate.
I have to first confess that my own country practiced something very similar during that period of history when the British Empire held sway over much of the globe. As with the new American Empire today, our British Empire was motivated solely by material gain and greed at the expense of other countries ... gold and diamonds in Africa, along with the dope trade in China, for example. It was all thoroughly despicable. Our army was used in order to quell any opposition to the plunder and exploitation that lasted for more than a couple of centuries.
During that time we practiced the worst kind of self-righteous humbug with the belief that Britain was then giving ‘the natives’ the benefits of English civilisation, without which they would descend into savagery.
The point that was missed is that English civilisation evolved in England and was quintessentially for and of the English. It is best suited to a people of essentially Anglo-Saxon/Celtic stock who know and recognise each other for that.
That was the big mistake of all empire builders who deceive themselves and others that what they are doing is for the good of others, whether they like it or not ... a kind of brutal paternalism.
If we British had not sent our heroes out on storm-tossed seas those centuries ago and laid claim to others’ territory for commercial exploitation, I am sure the rest of the world would have survived without us and evolved and prospered according to their own innate abilities and values. Of course, they would. It is the utmost arrogance to think otherwise.
So it is with America today, hooked on cheap petrol with the arrogant belief that it has the right to take what it wants from anywhere in the world because it is bestowing ‘freedom and democracy’ in exchange. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Now we are the victims of another’s imperialism and our way of life is as much under threat as that of the subjects of Britain’s imperial past. The lesson to learn is that there can not be universal standards for all the peoples on this planet and that the most precious right is that freedom to develop according to the traditions and customs of each community without outside interference. This must be so for Britain and for the rest of Europe today.
A European identity, with Britain in a leading role, could only be expressed in terms of a resistance to the present-day rampaging American imperialism in all its forms. The external threat has always been the main impetus for a struggle of liberation.
Let us return to our Britishness, those qualities that made us distinguishable from the rest of the world but especially from America. We are essentially of the European world in terms of history with its centuries of creative genius and we should always consider that fact first, before going on about a ’special relationship’ across the Atlantic. The rest of Europe has always regarded us with suspicion as a consequence ... and not truly committed to the European ideal.
It is said that we have nothing in common with America except a language and that we have everything in common with other Europeans except a language. We should never allow a difference of language to get in the way of a good friendship. On the other hand, speaking roughly the same language has, in the case of the United States, proven to be misguided and illusionary. The ‘Atlantic Alliance’ has never been a partnership of equals, but, rather, one of master and poodle … of Bush and Blair, for example. That is why successive British governments have been reluctant to embrace Europe completely, looking over their shoulders to see if Washington approves. What kind of independence and ‘sovereignty’ is that?
The more we are Americanised, the less British we become. Other European nations have never been a threat in that sense, maintaining their national characteristics chiefly through language, languages distinctly different to that of the ’Anglo-Saxon world’, although English incorporates elements of many Continental tongues.
I would contend, therefore, that speaking a common language has been to our disadvantage where America is concerned. For a start, it is not exactly the same, is it? There is a difference in the general tone and inflection, along with a penchant for the crass and the vulgar. Such ‘kinship’ is illusionary and should be rejected.
I go back to the great achievements of the Ealing film studios and that wonderful tradition of British humour and British character. It is a rich heritage that is still appreciated by many in our country and reminds us that our best qualities as a people are not so far behind us as we resist constant attempts at sucking us into the global mono-culture with American materialism as its crass role model.
Americans, as a wit once noted, went from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of culture. That is what makes it so impossible to appreciate why so many of our fellow Europeans, given our great cultural heritage, could ever sink so low as to embrace superficial American ‘cool’. They should know better.