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Entry: Englishmen, and Other Aborigines Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/englishmen_and_other_aborigines#2702 Post contents: We must, I think, distinguish between a number of different things: 1. Nationality/Citizenship, together with the shared politcal culture and historical background that go with it (i.e. the story of the British State and its extension in the Empire/Commonwealth). This can be be bought into by a variety of cultures/ethnic groups, of which the Englsih are one, and the largest. 2. Culture/Ethnicity. The problem with multi-culturalism, which, in its innocuous manifestation simply means an acceptance that a given polity may contain multiple ethnicities (unlike the ultra-homogeneity of, say Korea or Japan), is that in the UK it fails to recognise Englishness (in all its different regional and class manifestations) as itself one of those cultures and ethnicities, and generally denigrates it as not containing anything worthwhile, a totally senseless attitude which of course leads to alienation and backlash. The same goes, in a much lesser sense, for Welshness, Scottishness (both Lallans and Gaelic), and Irishness, (both Scots-Irish, Hiberno-Irish, (Gaelic and English speaking) and Anglo-Irish) escpecially when those cultures/ethnicities are bound up with religion: the mentality just critiqued always loves to hear stories of cruel Irish Catholic childhoods from Blarneyed chancers over in London to make a fast buck. 3. Religion. Multiple ethnicities can exist within a given religion, and, in theory vice versa. Judaism is the limiting case here, since it is in some sense both, although perhaps Sephardi/Ashkenazi/Mizrahi etc. are themselves "ethnicities". The problem I think is that just as with the Russians and their empires (both Tsarist and Stalinist) as Geoffrey Hoskins has pointed out, the English, by imagining and building the state in which they live, and the Empire/Commonwealth of which that state is the heart, as merely England writ large, they have poured themselves into that state while neglecting to take care of their own culture, which has become hollowed out by an equation of English and British. Englishness has lived vicariously through Britishness, or since the collapse of the empire, through "Westernness" or "the free world", or whatever label one might wish to attach to the US global project. With the collapse of one and now quite possibly the other, the English are suddenly realising to their horror that they have nothing to fall back on as their contribution to any future world order and culture, having disowned everything that made them distinctive. It's not even a question of a culturally exhausted metropolitan elite falling back on still vital provincial cultures, as due to the chronic cultural centralisation of English life which has accelerated under Thatcher-Blair (witness for example the effective demise of regional ITV, or meaningful local government), those have gone too. The only saving grace of all this is that the backlash can never go very far: the fascist thugs of the far-right feed off primarily ENGLISH cultural and ethnic dislocation, but organise as the BRITISH National Party, which, thankfully, limits their ability to really get off the ground. I hope this proves useful. Sent at: 2008 12 01