Black Lives Matter - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

What’s the difference between a country and a camping site?

Published: 7 October 2022 ~ UK Identity Crisis and its Impact on Patriotism

In 2014, Russia ditched daylight-saving time and switched to permanent wintertime, which is good in some respects as it negates the need to remember when clocks should go forward or back one hour. How many times in the UK have you forgotten to apply this rule and as a result have woken up either an hour too early or an hour too late? Admittedly, some people seem to revel in the confusion, possibly believing that by gaining an extra hour in bed they have become the master of time, rather than time the master of them. For we who are lifelong insomniacs, however, that extra hour in bed is something to be abhorred: arrggh, another hour of torment!

Permanent wintertime removes this obstacle but replaces it with another, which is no less disorientating for my circadian rhythms.

In summer, should I have forgotten to put the blackouts up, at 4am the sun blares through the window as objectionable as Tony; in winter, especially in the depths of winter, it is as though we have been plunged into eternal night. It is dark until 10am and dark again at 4pm, and the filling in between is like the illusory light of white privilege (or should that be the illusory white of light privilege?).

This is not something that our cat, Ginger, unduly worries himself about. No matter what time I stagger out in the morning, he’s there to greet me … rolling around, stretching, purring away. He doesn’t have to worry about getting up for work, driving home at night, paying the gas and electricity bill, Liz Truss devaluing the pound, virtue signalling by changing his avatar or wearing a tight green T-shirt. And if you happened to mention mobilisation to him, he would possibly think you meant that it was time that he took a turn on the balcony.

Ginger Mick Harts cat Kaliningrad doing the twist 'Bet you can't do this!' — **Bet you can’t do this!**

It was presumably for this reason that a when a friend from the UK, who would no doubt be a friend of Gingers if he did but know him, attempted to engage me in a discussion on mobilisation, Ginger did not to take part.

Our conversation on this topic prompted speculation about the reaction of the UK populace should a similar situation ever arise in Britain. And it was then that we went all historical goosebumps.

UK Identity Crisis and its Impact on Patriotism

At the outbreak of the Second World War ~ and, incidentally, I am using this purely as an example and not trying to pre-empt events with predictions of a third world war, as I would be expected to do if I worked for the UK media ~ conscription was introduced and was, by all accounts, successful. By the end of 1939 more than 1.5 million British men had been called up for military service. Times change (don’t they just!).

A survey undertaken by YouGov in 2018 revealed that only 20 per cent of male Brits said that they would volunteer for service and as many as 39 per cent said they would avoid conscription. Not surprisingly, the highest percentage of males within the avoidance bracket, 34 per cent, fall within the millennial category (ie, the age group which the media likes to refer to as the ‘entitled generation’).

Now, as an oldie, I am not in a position to pass judgement one way or the other, or I could end up sounding like one of the elder generation from the First World War: “By George, If I was your age; I’d be going with you!” But I suspect that the abstention figures from an updated 2022 survey would cause even greater concern in the corridors of power (or, knowing our government, perhaps not) and among the British military establishment’s chief of staff, when it comes to evaluating Britain’s ability to raise the manpower needed to respond to a major conflict. (Oh, I’m sorry! Tut, tut: and the women power, and deviant power, etc)

In trying to define this seismic shift in attitude, we have to look beyond the response of the entitled young millennials, who could be seen by some as the enlightened entitled young millennials, as there is more to the changes in Britain than living at mum’s and breakfast in bed.

Back in 1939, Britain still had a sense of who it was. It drew for its identity on its history, its traditions and the glories of its past. Its people were largely united ~ or as united as a country can be, given its class divisions ~ and the need to defend the realm, should that need arise, was questioned, when it was questioned, by the relative few.

Fast forward to the 21^st century

In case you’ve missed it, twenty-first century British society bears little or no resemblance to the social and values composition of its 1940s’ forebear.

Today’s Britain is, to put it bluntly, a cosmopolitan catastrophe, a place of muddled multicultural mayhem, a country divided and fragmented along exacerbated fault lines and manipulated sectarianism, the proponent manifestations of which are diversity, race, religion and gender transmutation. In short, the UK of the twenty-first century is in a terminal state of identity crisis.

This in not to say that if the balloon went up, there would not be any number of English men who would volunteer for national service. I can clearly think of some who would be champing at the bit to go and do their bit, but what about the rest ~ the liberal anarchists, the illegal migrants ferried into Dover each day by the Roya Navy taxi service and the entitled enlightened young millennials, who demonstratively have what it takes to take but not, it seems, what it takes to give.

Then there is the question of the ethnics, which is one that is easily answered. The Black Lives Matter mob are hardly going to rally around the flag, are they? They are far too busy defacing and pulling down statues and rallying around luxury goods, such as widescreen tellies and the latest iphones, which always seem to go missing during ‘largely peaceful’ demonstrations. Terrorists don’t as a rule rally around the flag, do they? In fact, they usually burn the flag of the country to which they have run for sanctuary.

Black muggers and Albanian drug dealers are a category apart. These groups can be said to have reserved occupations: the first, to relieve the useful idiots, tolerant whites, of their ill-gotten privilege, especially the privilege of walking the streets in safety (Where’s a policeman when you need one? Arresting Englishmen for mean tweets, of course!); the latter working hard to get themselves on the waiting lists for a nice comfy cell in UK prisons. And even if these two factions, and the many others like them, were not gainfully employed as described, would the British flag mean anything more to them than an accommodating table cloth for a line of doctored snort?

It is not just the ‘take me to your free hotels’ and bless-me-with-benefits freeloaders that fall into the ‘useless’ category; homegrown liberal lefties are hardly likely to lower themselves to rise in defence of the realm when their entire life has been devoted to parasitically trashing it.

But I hear, you say, somewhere among this rag bag of worthlessness surely there must be patriots? Patriots? Yes, we do have patriots, but since patriotism became a dirty word in the lexicon of the left, what patriots we do have are supressed by an ideology that they vehemently despise and a virtue-less society which they do not recognise, never asked for and certainly do not want.

Ask yourself this: Would you rally around the flag to ensure that the UK’s liberal elites continue to live and rule in the woke and globalist manner to which they are accustomed?

Ironically, for the past thirty years or more our political classes have been actively engaged in rebranding the British flag as a racist symbol, disposing us to guilt, even imposing fines, should anyone in an illicit moment of patriotic pride hoist it up a flagpole and by doing so commit the cardinal sin, as enshrined within the religion of Woke, of impinging upon the delicate blossom of ethnic sensibilities. (All sing: “Oh, show them the way to go home …”). And yet, a second and saving irony is that ideological dictates such as these are just what the doctor ordered for patriotic verve to flourish and perpetuate.

As good or bad, depending on your point of view, as today’s nationalist disenfranchisement is, the defiance and indifference from which it takes its lead was cultivated and curated during the Vietnam war of the sixties, as epitomised by the then controversial, fabled and now dated but eternally seductive slogan ‘make love not war!’

UK Identity Crisis and its Impact on Patriotism

Doomed to perish prematurely, but not before deflating the fortunes of rubber plantation owners whilst sugaring the pharmaceutical industry’s promiscuity pill, it was what sentiments of this nature were not putting into the perennially voracious coffers of the transatlantic industrial military complex that would eventually ensure that the 1960s’ pacifist movement would be rendered virtually impotent.

Notwithstanding, nineteen sixty was a very significant year in British social history. It was the dawn of a new, new decade and, although no one, with the exception perhaps of the fashion industry, the music industry, the brewers and the dope dealers, fully realised the extent to which it could be exploited, the country was on the threshold of a social revolution.

Affectionately, nostalgically, we refer to this era as the swinging sixties, but as innocent as the sobriquet sounds the fundamental truth is that the pendulum of change that provided its momentum was a force that was far from benign. Each sweep swept away years of traditional norms and mores. It slashed through the fabric of British life and what it left behind, which it left in tatters, was the beginning of the end of civilisation as we knew it ~ a headlong fall into the murky abyss of a post-conservative world.

UK Identity Crisis the Pit and the Pendulum — Illustration shows a man labelled “Consumer” tied to a bed with cords labelled “Graft Tariff”, watching as a pendulum labelled “Cost of Living” with a sharp blade affixed to the bottom swings over his body, coming closer to cutting him in half.
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My caption: 21st century Britain

It may or may not be coincidence ~ the old guard would argue not ~ but 1960 was also the year in which National Service officially ended in Britain.

National Service had been introduced in Britain in 1916 and remained operational until 1920. It was revived in 1939 and continued until 1960. In its latter iteration, physically fit males between the ages of 17 and 21 were duty bound to serve in one branch or another of the British armed forces for a period of 18 months, and then placed for four more years on the reserve list.

I, and my generation, were subsequently excluded from it, although my father wasn’t. His National Service stint coincided with the Korean War, but Lady Luck smiled on him. Possession of a spotless HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) licence and experience of driving some of the then largest flatbed trucks, diverted him from overseas deployment to the not unenviable job of collecting damaged tanks and other battle-scarred military hardware from their disembarkation point at Liverpool Docks and transporting them, depending on their condition, either to repair shops in different parts of the country or, if they were beyond repair, to breakers and salvage yards.

For post-1960s’ Britons, however, the closest yoof came to National Service was watching Get Some In!

On the flip side, I do know people who have been in the army, left the army but never left the army. Case in point: A few years ago, I was strolling peacefully across the English countryside with a friend who had served in the special forces, but, like me, had reached an age where anything more demanding than enlistment in the Home Guard would have been nigh on impossible.

The sun was shining, the birds were singing, it was a perfect day in early autumn, when we approached a large grass meadow that rolled down hill quite steeply, reached a point where it dipped and then travelled back up as steeply again to a gate on the far horizon.

As we entered this field, my ex-military friend espied a pile of stones. They were big, round and heavy. Suddenly he stopped. Came to attention. Glared at the stones and said, in a sergeant-majorly fashion, “I bet you can’t put one of those stones under each arm, Hart, and run across the field with them!” And without waiting for an answer, a stone apiece leapt under his armpits, and he was off across that field like nobody’s business. I stood and watched him go in awe, glad that we hadn’t put money on it.