England Used to Be a Country of Men

[Feuer Frei!]

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.

SOURCE

All I can think of is this:

If you hear the phrase or anything remotely like
'We're the Government and We are here to help/protect you'

Arm yourself to the teeth and make sure it's hidden really well.

[Armistead]

Too many soccer games and beer.

We have some riots once in a while in big cities with gun control laws, only the looters have guns, down south we shoot back.

[FIREWALL]

Originally Posted by privateer

All I can think of is this:

If you hear the phrase or anything remotely like
'We're the Government and We are here to help/protect you'

Arm yourself to the teeth and make sure it's hidden really well.

...privateer

[TLAM Strike]

If you are making a Police State Britain, as some say: you actually have to police it!

[breadcatcher101]

A far cry from Rorke's Drift to be sure.

That article is funny. It even has an obligatory chamberlain reference.
I did wonder what on earth he was going on about, then I realised it was just a typical NRA talk radio showcase for gun nuts.

These are day's of defuring responsibility to reason, politicians have mastered this.

[Skybird]

One of my most favourite authors is D.H. Lawrence, whose vitality yearning for liveliness in his writings in parts is both result of and at the same time causal expression of his description how male workers lost their dignity during the industrial revolution, almost being castrated by the rule of the machinery and the clocks that now regulated their life all day long. I agree that there is a general loss of manliness, not only in Britain but in most of the Wetsern world, if not all, but in case of britain it seems to me it is an especially illustrative example. While that process got a boost in and since the 60s (in Germany as well), and before may have been boosted by the excesses of manliness being perverted in the developements that led to WWII, it nevertheless is a long-lasting cultural erosion that imo goes back until the uindustrial revolution, when man became comparavble and exchangable with the machine and by that necessarily loost part of his value and dignity as a human. Capitalism, for which man is just another form of capital investement, and totalitarian ideologies coming to rise, of course helped massively in this.

Yesterday or tweo day ago, in anothe rthread, I mentioned the infantilsation that our present society, it'S rules of behavior and our media formats are being haunted by. This also has something to do with it.

Last, there was the extreme polarisation at the other end of the specturm that wasd caused by feminism, and from that: a trend thatnot only wanted equality of women, but in fact led to a demonisation of manly qualities - although one must admit that some of the more reasonable, open-minded feminsts in the past 10 years or so have seen this trend as dangerous, too, and started to relative their own once extremist positions in order to counter-steer this demonisation of everything male in quality.

How could all this happen? The rise of the machiones. And a general decline of cultural integrity that just is part of the hsitoric cycle every ower and every empire must undergo: rise, climax, fall. For us Westerners i thge present time, the wheel of time no longer is moving upwards, but downwards. Like Rome declined last but not least in decadence, lacking both the will and the vitality to defend itself, we seem to suffer the same fate now. Desintegration of social consent on vital values is just a symptom of the bigger event unfolding all around us. Socieities are the more complex the more "civilised" they are, but everything in nature that dies again, does so in hierarchical layers, with the more complex superstructures collapsing first, making the underlying, earlier and more primitive structures that had been surpassed, more obvious again. From bottom to top you build it, from top to bottom it collapses again.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

That article is funny. It even has an obligatory chamberlain reference.
I did wonder what on earth he was going on about, then I realised it was just a typical NRA talk radio showcase for gun nuts.

Aw come on....it makes a change from the US bashing posts of late.

Aw come on....it makes a change from the US bashing posts of late.

yes but honestly, who on earth would swallow that crap?(OK apart from the fellow on a current break who had severe paranoid hysteria about raging mobs coming to get him).
The article is just a reworking from the French riots with a few words swapped, the same dodgy stats and made up "facts".

[MH]

Wanna be men....go to war.

Seriously though what is the talk about losing of manhood since industrial revolution.
Industrial revolution allowed the rise of middle class.
How people had been living before that?


Its more about people who don't care anymore about their country.
Feel cheated by politicians.
Being an English has no meaning to them anymore.
Death of some sort of national pride,unity and what comes with it maybe?

Its a tribal war.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

yes but honestly, who on earth would swallow that crap?(OK apart from the fellow on a current break who had severe paranoid hysteria about raging mobs coming to get him).
The article is just a reworking from the French riots with a few words swapped, the same dodgy stats and made up "facts".

I was thinking the same thing.

Ah well...back to the kettle chaps.

I was thinking the same thing.

Well maybe there is a point...Britain is worse for violence than even South Africa.
See the point is that you don't even have to see that Mr gun nut is taking his manlyness statistics from the Daily Mail to know that is absolutlely laughable.

[STEED]

David Cameron is getting...ROBUST.

And

I'm getting bored of him saying it.