THE TROUBLE WITH GEORGE

by Colin Liddell

Today is St. George's Day! So break out the old red-and-white banner (the police are on their way, you racist!), thump the "three lions" badge on your chest, and burst into the rousing chorus of Jerusalem, the stirring hymn that is tipped to become the official English national anthem when the UK breaks up in a few years time.

Notice anything odd about all these icons of English identity? They are all from the Middle East or Africa.

Yes, they are all about as intrinsic to England as the latest boatload of Somalian immigrants bused up from the Italian coastguard camps for a new life in Britain's welfare state. In some deep, dark, mystical way perhaps this explains why these totems of English identitarianism are malfunctioning so badly.

Saint George was a Syrian born in Lydda, now a suburb of Tel Aviv. He never came to England and never even knew that it existed...because it didn't in the third century!

The Christian identity that supposedly underpins Englishness – "Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist" as George Orwell so poetically put it – is, of course, a Middle Eastern excrescence, varnished with a bit of Neo-Platonism, Roman absolutism, and Anglo-Saxon befuddlement.

The natural result of this is a song like Blake and Elgar's Jerusalem, which can only conceive of England attaining perfection by becoming an eschatological manifestation of the original "Hymie Town."

Then there are the lions. The nearest one in the wild is several thousand miles away. Much better to have a badger instead, or a red squirrel – also an interesting symbol of population replacement.

Even the rose, that quintessential symbol of English femininity, is nothing more than a gaudily-coloured Middle Eastern weed, originating in Iran. No rose without a thorn indeed!

"I wonder what badger tastes like?"

James C. Russell's The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation presents us with the reassuring theory that, despite the cultural holocaust of the Middle Ages, Northern Europeans somehow managed to maintain their cultural integrity and identity, and that what was formerly Middle Eastern became Northern European. It therefore shouldn't matter that there are so many Middle Eastern symbols and concepts in our culture. But should it?

Another possibility is that these alien elements simply softened us up for our present fate – a spiritual and symbolic vanguard for the waves of flesh-and-blood aliens that have since poured in.

To stop Islamification and Third Worldism, the English must flaunt the flag of a third-century Syrian while singing about their hope of becoming a Middle Eastern town (Jerusalem) – against a backdrop of African predators and Iranian weeds. Is it any wonder that none of this works?

On the other hand...

Previously published at this site.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia). He is also featured in Arktos's 2016 collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.