England Used to Be a Country of Men (Something has changed in the English character)

With London succumbing to looters and muggers, it’s time to ask what happened to the once-manly English people. The August 9 issue of the Daily Mail, for example, includes a photo of a young man taking off his pants on the street as an impatient looter waits with the emasculated Briton’s sneakers and shirt already in his hands. Luckily the feeble Englishman chooses boxers over briefs, but I can’t help wondering if men such as T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, or Lord Acton could have stomached the state of manliness in this generation of Englishmen.

Consider that this latest explosion of looting, robbing, and burning began in Tottenham, a dicey corner of north London, after police shot and killed a 29-year-old Tottenham resident named Mark Duggan. As typically happens, two competing personality profiles of Duggan are being told, depending on the politics of the teller; some say Duggan was a hardened drug dealer, others say he was a beloved family man. What we do know is that police pulled over a taxi in which Duggan was a passenger. Police say they heard a gun fired, which prompted them to shoot and kill Duggan.

The facts of this incident may be in dispute, but the unmanly actions of Tottenham’s gangster youth are not. In retaliation for Duggan’s death (or using it as an excuse for mayhem), they’ve burned autos, looted stores, and mugged people along Tottenham’s High Road and around parts of London. This reaction says something horrific about the culture in these neighborhoods, just as much as the 1992 Los Angeles Riots displayed that all wasn’t right with the culture in the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

For context, consider the “Tottenham Outrage” of 1909. Two men in Tottenham, armed with semi-automatic handguns, attempted to rob a payroll truck, but the guards resisted. After one robber fired his gun, police came running. The robbers fled on foot. The chase lasted two hours and covered about six miles as other officers and armed civilians pursued and engaged the robbers. One of the thieves committed suicide and the other later died in surgery. One officer and one civilian also were killed. The bravery of the officers and civilians prompted the creation of the Kings Police Medal and the funeral processions for the slain officer the civilian passed through streets lined with mournful Londoners. Those weren’t the kind of people who demonize police officers or take off their pants for thieves.

Well, okay, sure, the English people did for too long accept the unmanly ditherings of Neville Chamberlain before World War II. Nevertheless, something has changed in the English character. These aren’t the proud men who once made the whole world look them in the eyes. I submit that one of the chief causes of their now emasculated spirit is the loss of so much of their individual liberty — like a child used to a parent fighting his or her battles, a people dependent on their government for everything cannot take care of themselves and are prone to childish outbursts.

By giving up their natural right to self-defense, for example, England’s law-abiding citizens have become defenseless both physically and psychologically. The loss of their right to self-preservation has created a culture of dependency on government (for protection and so much more) that has helped neuter the English male. This has also prompted some English citizens to blame the police for the crime rates that law enforcement is legally constrained from doing anything practical to fight.

Britain’s licensing of gun owners and the registration of their firearms made it easy for the government to take guns from law-abiding citizens after a mass-murderer in Hungerford killed 16 people in 1987. Within the next decade, British politicians criminalized possession of most handguns — the final deadline for turning them in was Feb. 27, 1998. (This is something liberals would like to do in the U.S., too.) Yet, few have subsequently pointed to the victims of this anti-freedom gun confiscation. The English papers haven’t interviewed victims of rape and other crimes and asked what they might have done if they had the ability to defend themselves from criminals.

Curbing violence, naturally, was the goal English politicians said they’d attain in return for law-abiding citizens’ handing over this basic human liberty; however, after the U.K. disarmed its population, England attained the highest burglary rate and one of the highest rates for violent crimes of the industrialized nations, according to the International Crime Victims Survey carried out by the Dutch Ministry of Justice in 2000. As the Guardian put it on Feb. 23, 2001, the study “shows England and Wales as the top of the world league with Australia as the countries where you are most likely to become a victim of crime.” More recently, on July 3, 2009, England’s newspaper the Daily Mail reported that “Britain’s violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European Union, it has been revealed. Official crime figures show the U.K. also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa.”

Meanwhile, British politicians have reacted to the irrefutable failure of their gun-control schemes by calling for more of the same. They’ve even recently banned starter pistols. Given that they’ve disarmed the law-abiding public and obviously can’t disarm the criminals, what else can they do in this time of violence? What some in the government would like to do can be chillingly found in a July 2002 English government “white paper” titled “Justice for All.” This paper argued that the government needs to: allow the use of hearsay evidence in trials; remove the double-jeopardy rule for serious cases, including cases that have already been resolved under the current system; and eliminate the right to trial by jury in many cases.

As the English hand their government more of their individual liberty — and thereby their self-reliant manliness — their government becomes more authoritarian. Individuals have diminished means for protecting themselves and their property, which should have made London’s looting, vandalism, and other crimes very predictable.

I’ve had several recent conversations with Englishmen, who have led me to conclude that the English people will continue to hand over their liberty in the hopes that one day — despite all the lessons from history and human nature — their government will create the peaceful, socialist utopia they’ve long been promised.

For example, I recently broached this topic with an English salesman at my favorite shoe company, Johnston & Murphy. He commented that he’s frightened by America’s “gun culture” and added that Americans needs to drop “their Wild West attitude.” I listened patiently before pointing out that England currently looks a little more like the Wild West. He wasn’t swayed. I pointed out that gun rights are women’s rights, as they make the frailest woman the equal of the strongest male. He kept shaking his head.

So I used a largely forgotten piece of history that always makes Englishmen blush: After Dunkirk in May of 1940, only the British Navy, an outnumbered British air corps, and about 20 miles of water protected the English people from German invasion. In their retreat back to England, the British forces lost much of their firearms and weaponry; meanwhile, gun-control laws passed after World War I had mostly disarmed British civilians, leaving the English people helpless.

Aware of their plight, a group of Americans, headed by C. Suydam Cutting, established the “American Committee for Defense of British Homes,” a group that ran an ad in the National Rifle Association’s official journal American Rifleman that read in part: “Send a Gun to Defend a British Home.” The NRA subsequently sent more than 7,000 private arms to England. The U.S. military, of course, sent many more. Winston Churchill said, “We had become a hornet’s nest. Anyhow, if we had to go down fighting . . . a lot of our men and women had weapons in their hands.”

After relating this history, I told the English shoe salesman that “if your people ever need to protect their freedom again, Americans will be there for you.” He wasn’t so sure.

Now I wonder, after seeing that Englishmen strip for a looter, would it even matter? Meanwhile, the only way we’d be able to help them — and the world — is if we keep our manly liberties intact here in the U.S., a prospect far from certain.

— Frank Miniter is the author of The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide, and, more recently, Saving the Bill of Rights.

I wish they hadn’t cited the raging sadomasochistic homosexual T. E. Lawrence as an example of manliness. Even the best his apologists can do is explain his later behavior on his having been raped and humiliated by the Turks as their prisoner.

Otherwise, a officer paying enlisted men to flog him is unseemly at best, and fraternization at worst. But be that as it may, he is as much a homosexual icon today as is Oscar Wilde or Quentin Crisp, “One of England’s stately homos.”

Liberalism has taken over from religion.

The original sin is racism (they tried global warming, too, but the solar system wouldn’t play along).

You must give to the poor (funneling through the government, of course, who will reward based on how faithful the receiver is to the cause).

You must petition the government for mercy, bounty, charity, etc.

Tithing (to the gov’t coffers) is no longer limited to 10%.

Britain has bought into this and been cowed into the state they are in.

There is more truth to this than most realize. History is not kind to superpowers. Those nations that are able to establish empires and fight the world’s wars, inevitably lose so much of the “warrior gene”. Not all men carry this. Those predisposed to military and law enforcement service carry it to a larger degree than most but even in those cases not all do. When your nation is at war over a long period of time, that pool is naturally reduced. It happened to Rome, it happened to Spain, it happened to Britain, France and Germany and Japan. Now Germany, France and Japan were never superpowers but they were very much regional powers with global imperial aspirations. Will it happen to us?

Of course you might also draw the connection that the reduction of the “warrior gene” in the national stock leads to a parallel effect of increased socialism as well. Government imposed socialism acting as a false promise of protection and provision for those who refuse to do for themselves and their community. Just some thoughts I’ve been tossing around lately as I’ve been reading about the Roman Empire and comparing it to the recent violence in England and our own national decline.

From AmazonUK, a British man's review of a (non-shooting, non-sharp) self-defense item:

Kubotan [Misc.]

Offered by HAYES SPORTS & FITNESS

Price: £2.99

Availability: In stock

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Cheap, well built but useless, 8 Sep 2010

This review is from: Kubotan [Misc.] (Misc.)
The item itself arrived in perfect condition. It is sturdy and very comfortable to grip. Itss what it says on the tin, but there's a catch...

All the information I found on the Internet suggests that carrying a keyring-kubotan is futile. The moment you use it to defend yourself it becomes a damage inflicting weapon and you become a criminal (and can be prosecuted as such). The only scenario where you can legally use a kubotan outside your home is: "comming back from/going to martial arts training (in use of a kubotan), you were attacked and could only respond with equal force by making use of a kubotan". Anything else is interpreted as: "you were carrying an object that has an obvious use as a weapon"; it's basically the same (in the eyes of the law) as buying a spiked baseball bat with a small loop that holds keys. This should be clearly mentioned on the product page. You do not have to believe me, do your own research.

If you are a skinny/weak guy like me, the best advice in self-defence I can give is: learn to run faster, scream louder and avoid leaving your home.

Two World Wars killed off the best of the English stock.

***************************************

There is much truth in that. I have heard (very drunk) Russians discuss this with respect to WWII and Stalin’s purges as well. They called the phenomenon of killing their best stock ‘devolution’.

I would add to this that socialism is dehumanizing. It suppresses normal human creativity and ambition, and substitutes a numb servility that is hard to shake. England is rotten with it, and already started with the mindset of ‘subjects’.

I kinda disagree. We have seen vids of men in towns and neighborhoods band together to fight back.

**********************************

There, as here with the Tea Party etc., the resistance comes from what the coddled ‘elites’ would dismiss as ‘lower classes’. It is the same in Russia. “Bitter clingers”, in other words.

“For nearly a thousand years England has not seen the campfires of an invader. The stormy sea and our royal navy have been our sure defense. Not only have we preserved our life and freedom through the centuries, but gradually we have come to be the heart and center of an empire which surrounds the globe.

It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has served to form a state; an hour may lay it in dust.

What shall we do? Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.

Would the invaders consent to hear Lord Beaverbrook’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Mr. Lloyd George? Would they agree to meet that famous South African, General Smuts, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it. I have borne responsibility for the safety of this country in grievous times. I gravely doubt it.

But even if they did, I am not so sure we should convince them, and persuade them to go back quietly home. They might say, it seems to me, “you are rich; we are poor. You seem well fed; we are hungry. You have been victorious; we have been defeated. You have valuable colonies; we have none. You have your navy; where is ours? You have had the past; let us have the future.” Above all, I fear they would say, “you are weak and we are strong.”

-Winston Churchill (1934)

There was a time when a gentleman could dispatch a thug with a pistol if need be and if any legal action resulted, both actors reputations would be entered into evidence.

Law abiding, upstanding member of the community vs. a character with a known criminal past = end of the matter.

If this system returns, we will have civility.

ENGLAND IS STILL 88% WHITE (or ethnic native if u prefer)...

a fact lost here as we all moan how things there have fallen...and I confess to being a cheerleader

but fact is they are in a much stronger position to preserve their culture

two cavets:

Islam is 2.5% and growing much faster than replacement level whites...this is their big issue...the black population there is only 1.9%...(ours is 12.6)

Then there are the CHAVS...basically what we would call wiggers...there is no other word...do we have to write out the big long explanation about whites who become the low end of black culture?

Without the Chavs joining in...the black riots would have been much more insignificant

We do indeed have folks who come to the US for the dole...no question...but we also have folks come to work for as cheap labor but unlike when i was a kid they do not go home now

Problem England has is the legacy of owning much of the world's real estate and thinking they can assimilate former subjects and that former subjects even want to assimilate.

But what scares me is that we are actually in worse shape if things ever truly go off...in our urban areas....no doubt. And we are farther along the Camp of The Saints highway demographically than England is...we just haven't boiled up the same yet

Those nations that are able to establish empires and fight the world’s wars, inevitably lose so much of the “warrior gene”. Not all men carry this. Those predisposed to military and law enforcement service carry it to a larger degree than most but even in those cases not all do. When your nation is at war over a long period of time, that pool is naturally reduced.

I've always been deeply sceptical of that argument as applied to the British in the twentieth century (as it often is), for a number of reasons.

Firstly because so many of those who fought and died in the two world wars were conscripts, so it was a matter of chance whether or not they had a predisposition to the military life. Secondly because the random nature of the destruction in industrialised modern warfare made it a matter of chance whether those killed were or were not the bravest. Thirdly because the genes of many who were killed survived, either through offspring conceived before their death or through siblings (of both sexes) who shared their genes and survived the wars. Fourthly because large numbers of men carrying the 'warrior gene' were either too young or too old to fight during those war years. And finally because the numbers of fatalities as a percentage of the number serving and as a percentage of the total population, even in the much larger losses of the First World War, were not enough to significantly change the national gene pool.

The August 9 issue of the Daily Mail, for example, includes a photo of a young man taking off his pants on the street as an impatient looter waits with the emasculated Briton’s sneakers and shirt already in his hands

Note how the author of this piece conveniently leaves the race of the perp out....this is what the problem is..when race matters and it sure as hell did the first two nights of these riots then no one will mention it...it was amazing the Daily Mail actually ran the pic

But here...National Review and they won't mention it?

It's ridiculous...this refusal of whites to recognize race issues sitting on their face..even writers for so called conservative magazines.

Imagine had it been a white man or men assaulting a black man....the media would be all over it...and Obama would be too.

Ever look in a newsroom lately?

Gay, Femme, Black and Hispanic...maybe some old white guy waiting to die...sure they use pretty white girls and the occasional mixed race lovely to talk the news but who puts it all together in the process to their newsreader

The very folks who don't want the truth out unless it suits them.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Offered by HAYES SPORTS & FITNESS
Price: £2.99
Availability: In stock


23 of 27 people found the following review helpful: 3.0 out of 5 stars Cheap, well built but useless, 8 Sep 2010 This review is from: Kubotan [Misc.] (Misc.) The item itself arrived in perfect condition. It is sturdy and very comfortable to grip. Itss what it says on the tin, but there's a catch... All the information I found on the Internet suggests that carrying a keyring-kubotan is futile. The moment you use it to defend yourself it becomes a damage inflicting weapon and you become a criminal (and can be prosecuted as such). The only scenario where you can legally use a kubotan outside your home is: "comming back from/going to martial arts training (in use of a kubotan), you were attacked and could only respond with equal force by making use of a kubotan". Anything else is interpreted as: "you were carrying an object that has an obvious use as a weapon"; it's basically the same (in the eyes of the law) as buying a spiked baseball bat with a small loop that holds keys. This should be clearly mentioned on the product page. You do not have to believe me, do your own research. If you are a skinny/weak guy like me, the best advice in self-defence I can give is: learn to run faster, scream louder and avoid leaving your home.