Our Offensive National Flag

Jeremy Clarkson heads the program “Top Gear” at the BBC, one of the funniest shows on TV. Since it has absolutely nothing to do with politics or religion, only with cars, it is one of the very few programs at the Burka Broadcasting Corporation still worth seeing.

I have to disagree with Clarkson regarding the English national flag, though. Discrediting national flags as signs of “bigotry” is happening all over the Western world[1].

And no, you are not being robbed of pride in your national heritage because of your colonial history. I’m Norwegian. We don’t have a colonial history, yet we are still subject to similar attacks[2]. They don’t do this because you are English, they do this because you are Westerners and — dare I say? — white. British colonial history is just a convenient excuse.

From the Times Online[3], “We’ve been robbed of our Englishness”:

Today, things are rather different. Mention the war and you’ll be told by an outreach counsellor that we must empathise with the Germans, who are coming to terms with their mistakes of the past. “And you know, children, it was actually the British who invented concentration camps...”

Empire? When I was at school, teachers spoke with pride about how a little island in the north Atlantic turned a quarter of the world pink, but now all teachers talk about is the slave trade and how we must hang our heads in shame.

Right. So we must forgive Germany for invading Poland. But I must beat myself to death every night because my great-great-great-grandad moved some chap from a hellhole in Ghana to Barbados. In fact I can’t even say we’re British any more because then all of Scotland would rush over the border, pour porridge down my trousers and push a thistle up my bottom.

I believe people need to feel like they’re part of a gang, part of a tribe. And I also believe we need to feel pride in our gang. But all we ever hear now is that we in England have nothing to be proud about. In a world of righteousness we are the child molesters and rapists.

Our soldiers were murderers. Our empire builders were thieves. Our class system was ridiculous and our industrial revolution set in motion a chain of events that, eventually, will kill every polar bear in the Arctic.

And it gets so much worse. Because if you say you are a patriot, men with beards and sandals will come round to your house in the night and daub BNP slogans on your front door. This is the only country in the world where the national flag is deemed offensive […]

Then there’s our national character. In the past, boys were told in school assembly that their mothers had died and were expected to get over it in a nice game of rugby. Crying only happened abroad. Not any more. We were ordered to weep like Americans when Diana died, and no local news report is complete today without some fat oik sobbing because his house has fallen over[…]

Do you see? We can’t be proud of our past because it’s all bad, we can’t use British humour because it’s offensive and we can’t use understatement to deal with a crisis because the army of state-sponsored counsellors say we’ve got to sob uncontrollably at every small thing.

Source:

https://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/12/our-offensive-national-flag.html

1. https://www.thelocal.se/8401/ 2. https://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2475

3. https://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jeremy_clarkson/article2935442.ece