BETRAYED: It is not the land for which the
nation's fallen heroes sacrificied their lives
WHY HAS PATRIOTISM BECOME SUCH
A DIRTY WORD IN THIS COUNTRY?
By Leo McKinstryNovember 10,2008
The question was put to me with stark simplicity. “What was it all for?” asked the elderly lady, a wistful look in her eyes.
“The country that they died for has gone,” she continued, glancing down at the red poppy on her lapel.
I had fallen into conversation with her on the steps of the Imperial War Museum in London. Against such a backdrop, dominated by two mighty naval guns at the main entrance, it was inevitable that our thoughts should turn to war and sacrifice.
She explained that she had lost close relatives in both World Wars and as a teenager had endured the horrors of the Blitz. Mixed with her admiration for family heroes who had lost their lives in conflict, she also felt utter despair at the state of Britain and a profound sense of betrayal.
Although her loved ones had given so much for their country, she now felt like an alien in her own land, living in constant fear of crime and surrounded by foreigners with whom she had no sense of mutual belonging or trust.
Her insistent question – “What was it all for?” – has also been echoing through my mind as I research a book about Bomber Command during the Second World War. It mounted perhaps the most bloody and dangerous British offensive of the conflict, as crews of the heavy bombers flew night after night over Germany through vicious flak from the ground and from Luftwaffe fighters.
long-term chances of survival were minimal. More than half of all men who served in air crews were killed in action. The courage required to step into those aircraft for the long journey in blackened night skies over enemy territory is almost beyond imagination.
Yet thousands of young Britons volunteered for this hellish role, motivated by their deep love of country and an abiding sense of a higher duty to others.
They died for their nation but that nation barely exists any more. It has been destroyed by the politicians, its sovereignty handed over to an unelected continental bureaucracy, its economy sold off to foreign interests, its heritage traduced or ignored, its cities turned into modern Babels full of discordant tongues and wailing mosques.
In this Remembrance Week we hear our political leaders mouthing platitudes about the debt we owe to the fallen. They ostentatiously parade their poppies and bow their heads in silence at the appropriate moments but all their words and gestures are hollow.
Behind the week’s front of piety they have shown contempt for British nationhood, crushing it with their ruthless obedience to the ideologies of diversity, globalisation and European integration.
It is telling that Remembrance Week, which should be a time of solemn national pride, is fast being turned into a vast commemoration of victimhood. In place of honour and patriotism, we now have a remorseless emphasis on the suffering of the men and women who took part in past military conflicts.
It is absolutely right, of course, that we should give our fullest support to the work of the British Legion and other organisations in looking after ex-services personnel, particularly those who bear the physical and psychological scars of war. And it is an outrage that those who risked so much in uniform on our behalf should have to struggle in civilian life.
But what is largely missing today is a respect for that instinctive devotion to Britain which inspired so many millions to take up arms in defence of our country. Patriotism is now a dirty word in too many of our civic institutions, where the Union flag is seen as an offensive symbol of xenophobia and the national anthem is hopelessly uncool.
There was a classic example of this fashionable disdain for national glory on BBC TV at the weekend when reporter Robert Hall, introducing some archive footage from 1918, said crowds in London could be seen “celebrating the peace agreement”.
No they weren’t. They were celebrating British victory and the surrender of Germany. But such terms as “British victory” and “German surrender” are despised within the politically correct BBC so, without any regard for the historical truth, the triumph of 1918 had to be presented as some kind of negotiated compromise.
It is precisely because the political elite has lost all grasp of British patriotism that our nation is now so fragmented and purposeless, a place without a soul, our once green and pleasant land swallowed up by mass development, our justice system left in tatters by the imported human-rights culture. The very idea of British citizenship has been rendered meaningless by the twin malign forces of the EU and mass immigration.
On Saturday, this paper reported the case of rapist Abdullah Al Jaber, a Bangladeshi who had already served six years in the US for a sex crime but was allowed to settle in Britain because he was married to a Pole. Only in the madhouse of our dissolute country would marriage to a Pole provide entitlement to British residency.
This is not the land for which so many sacrificed their lives. During my research, the most moving passages I uncovered were the memories of bomber pilots who flew back British PoWs from Germany just after VE day.
All of them said that, as the planes approached the white cliffs of Dover, the ex-prisoners would alternately cheer or weep.
Today, in a nation that has lost its history, the white cliffs have no such resonance.
“The country that they died for has gone,” she continued, glancing down at the red poppy on her lapel.
I had fallen into conversation with her on the steps of the Imperial War Museum in London. Against such a backdrop, dominated by two mighty naval guns at the main entrance, it was inevitable that our thoughts should turn to war and sacrifice.
She explained that she had lost close relatives in both World Wars and as a teenager had endured the horrors of the Blitz. Mixed with her admiration for family heroes who had lost their lives in conflict, she also felt utter despair at the state of Britain and a profound sense of betrayal.
Although her loved ones had given so much for their country, she now felt like an alien in her own land, living in constant fear of crime and surrounded by foreigners with whom she had no sense of mutual belonging or trust.
Her insistent question – “What was it all for?” – has also been echoing through my mind as I research a book about Bomber Command during the Second World War. It mounted perhaps the most bloody and dangerous British offensive of the conflict, as crews of the heavy bombers flew night after night over Germany through vicious flak from the ground and from Luftwaffe fighters.
long-term chances of survival were minimal. More than half of all men who served in air crews were killed in action. The courage required to step into those aircraft for the long journey in blackened night skies over enemy territory is almost beyond imagination.
Yet thousands of young Britons volunteered for this hellish role, motivated by their deep love of country and an abiding sense of a higher duty to others.
They died for their nation but that nation barely exists any more. It has been destroyed by the politicians, its sovereignty handed over to an unelected continental bureaucracy, its economy sold off to foreign interests, its heritage traduced or ignored, its cities turned into modern Babels full of discordant tongues and wailing mosques.
In this Remembrance Week we hear our political leaders mouthing platitudes about the debt we owe to the fallen. They ostentatiously parade their poppies and bow their heads in silence at the appropriate moments but all their words and gestures are hollow.
Behind the week’s front of piety they have shown contempt for British nationhood, crushing it with their ruthless obedience to the ideologies of diversity, globalisation and European integration.
It is telling that Remembrance Week, which should be a time of solemn national pride, is fast being turned into a vast commemoration of victimhood. In place of honour and patriotism, we now have a remorseless emphasis on the suffering of the men and women who took part in past military conflicts.
It is absolutely right, of course, that we should give our fullest support to the work of the British Legion and other organisations in looking after ex-services personnel, particularly those who bear the physical and psychological scars of war. And it is an outrage that those who risked so much in uniform on our behalf should have to struggle in civilian life.
But what is largely missing today is a respect for that instinctive devotion to Britain which inspired so many millions to take up arms in defence of our country. Patriotism is now a dirty word in too many of our civic institutions, where the Union flag is seen as an offensive symbol of xenophobia and the national anthem is hopelessly uncool.
There was a classic example of this fashionable disdain for national glory on BBC TV at the weekend when reporter Robert Hall, introducing some archive footage from 1918, said crowds in London could be seen “celebrating the peace agreement”.
No they weren’t. They were celebrating British victory and the surrender of Germany. But such terms as “British victory” and “German surrender” are despised within the politically correct BBC so, without any regard for the historical truth, the triumph of 1918 had to be presented as some kind of negotiated compromise.
It is precisely because the political elite has lost all grasp of British patriotism that our nation is now so fragmented and purposeless, a place without a soul, our once green and pleasant land swallowed up by mass development, our justice system left in tatters by the imported human-rights culture. The very idea of British citizenship has been rendered meaningless by the twin malign forces of the EU and mass immigration.
On Saturday, this paper reported the case of rapist Abdullah Al Jaber, a Bangladeshi who had already served six years in the US for a sex crime but was allowed to settle in Britain because he was married to a Pole. Only in the madhouse of our dissolute country would marriage to a Pole provide entitlement to British residency.
This is not the land for which so many sacrificed their lives. During my research, the most moving passages I uncovered were the memories of bomber pilots who flew back British PoWs from Germany just after VE day.
All of them said that, as the planes approached the white cliffs of Dover, the ex-prisoners would alternately cheer or weep.
Today, in a nation that has lost its history, the white cliffs have no such resonance.
