Who Are You? Remembering the English

On St George’s Day, a commentary on English struggle.

Many years ago I read an article on English football hooliganism. In the 1980s there were many such articles. The vast majority of course were not interested in any way in understanding the tribal loyalties being displayed or the reasons for them. Where violence from other demographics or groups tends to be excused and pored over for other causes by the academic class, the actions of English football hooligans were never analysed in any way that might stray too close to sympathy.

And to an extent this was morally correct. I don’t think violence in the name of a football club or a national football team is excusable or laudable. Football hooliganism of all nations have been involved in heinous acts.

But I did notice that the British media were especially incensed by English football hooliganism. They never mentioned or noticed it elsewhere. They had nothing to say about sectarian and racist propaganda from the Scottish club Celtic. They had very little to say about Eastern European football hooliganism or Turkish football hooliganism, or the fact that many other nations had worse problems with football related violence, never tackled it the way Britain did, and still have those problems long after English stadiums had become family friendly places and corporate controlled entertainment facilities where violence is incredibly rare.

The only article that stood out, in a period of maybe ten or twenty years where the British media were obsessed with “England’s football thugs” who “shamed the nation” at various tournaments came at the tail end of the activity of the ‘firms’ of violence oriented fans linked to major English teams. What was stunning about this one article was that it included a segment that was accidentally moving and sympathetic.

In it the writer described watching England fans square off with rival foreign fans also intent on violence. By this stage Britain has clamped down very hard on these groups and their organisation. The vast majority of English football fans were interested in the football, rather than fighting. Many leaders of the football firms were banned from travel, known to the police both at home and abroad, and prevented from attending matches. But the same hadn’t happened with the football hooligans of other nations. What this meant was that English hooligans looking for violence were always outnumbered by their foreign counterparts. The writer didn’t reflect on what this said about which nations were most responsible for violence at football matches or outside them. He just described watching small groups of English hooligans encountering larger groups of non English hooligans.

Outnumbered and frequently out armed too, the English were often defeated in these impromptu, amateur little wars. The writer described the English groups breaking against larger foreign forces, then fleeing. But it’s the bit that came after that which was oddly and unintentionally inspiring. The writer recounted how amongst the fleeing English he repeatedly heard the same cry go up, which would rally the small group and turn them around to resume the fight, despite the odds being against them. He repeatedly heard people in these drunk, angry, hopeless collectives shouting “Remember you’re English”. It was this that turned them around to face more punishment.

The working class thugs remember what the comfortable middle class forgets. Nations are tribes, and tribes tend to fight, and those who forget what side they are on are lost more than those who are merely outnumbered are. The first at least have some chance to rally, but the second do not.

These aren’t comfortable lessons. They aren’t polite lessons. It just so happens they are natural lessons. It just so happens that those who entirely abandon a tribal sense of nationhood are not faced, when they do so, by like minded gentle people who only want to live in amity and accord sipping coffee beneath an array of brightly coloured flags, but by other people who want to fight and haven’t forgotten how to do so.

While most football fans of all nations want peace and sport, and even many citizens of many nations are the same, there are nations that are war zones, nations that are full of tribal savages, and nations that produce people who aren’t going to sit smiling in the sunshine sipping coffee when a pretty girl of a different race walks by. Across much of the globe a kind of law reigns that makes the savagery of football hooliganism look very tame indeed, and it is the law of brute strength, and evil intent, and grasping whatever you want all the more eagerly if the response is too civilised and notably weak.

I was reminded of that during the Southport riots. In an incident totally ignored by mainstream media and the British political class, one of the violent attacks that occurred happened at a pub on the edge of a Muslim neighbourhood. You can watch the footage, if it hasn’t been scrubbed from the internet yet. You can see a lone white Englishman come out from the pub. Gradually, the edges of the street beyond the pub fill with what are obviously non white Muslims. A large group of Muslim men are looking for white English victims to attack. Bravely, foolishly or both the lone Englishman doesn’t flee, but stands his ground. There’s a brief delay, a flurry of pretty incompetent attacks from both sides, and the pack act like hyenas trying to take down a solitary lion. Inevitably, their greater numbers tell and the lone defender falls beneath an outdoor table on the grounds of the pub while being beaten and kicked.

Apparently, he managed to survive, with the pack moving off in search of another victim rather than lingering to finish the job.

The authorities of course presented the Southport riots as an explosion of organised Far Right violence from white supremacists and racists threatening poor vulnerable communities of huddled, terrified Muslims. There was no space in this narrative for the fact that old men holding up banners protesting against grooming gangs should not be put in prison for doing so, and no space for acknowledging that the police let armed Muslim gangs enforce violent vigilantism and anti white patrols looking for victims to attack based on skin colour, and no room for either the government or the media to pay attention to that lone man attacked by a pack of assailants outside a pub. It is also very easy to find footage of the police telling armed Muslim gangs that none of them will be arrested, and footage of huge gangs of armed Muslims patrolling ‘their streets’ on this occasion and others too.

On the street and community level, the current British government and the judiciary and police and media have all been very clear. If you are white English and gather in public to protest against mass immigration, terrorist atrocities, the murder or rape of children, and particular against Islam or crimes performed by Muslims, you will be swiftly targeted and ruthlessly suppressed. But if you are from the protected and favoured Muslim minorities, you can walk armed on British streets, you can rape white English children for decades with the authorities aiding and abetting you, and you can openly support terrorist groups while actually being protected by the authorities in doing so.

Not far from where I live, in the Westcliff area of Southend which has a Jewish community living there, pro Hamas groups organised a march a few days ago. These people marched through a neighbourhood with a schul and a synagogue chanting Death to the Jews. Essex Police, my local police force, allowed this march to go ahead and were present protecting the marchers from any potential violent response (which of course did not come, with both the Jewish and ethnic English communities of Britain being a lot less violent than other ones).

I’m pretty sure that if white English neo Nazis had organised such a march through a Jewish neighbourhood it would have been banned and broken up immediately, a good thing, of course….but not in any way a good thing that if white leftists and Muslim activists organise the EXACT same thing, then it is allowed and protected.

The reality is that the situation of the football hooligans described in the article I refer to above, is now the situation of the English people as a whole. The media and the courts and the politicians are all intensely interested in any crime or disturbance from us, and intensely uninterested in protecting us from crime and violence from others. Whether it’s physical assaults on the street, marches in support of terrorism, who gets arrested for hate speech, whose online commentary is policed, which religion is told they can’t pray in certain areas or are disturbing the peace when they proselytise, whose riots are treated as criminal and whose aren’t, whose children the Prime Minister cares about and whose he does not, who can be discriminated against in employment and who cannot, in every way we now have a two tier kind of officialdom and law which treats the native English and even some peaceful and assimilated minorities as second class citizens.

As serfs, slaves and peasants who exist to be gradually and actually rather rapidly wiped out by demographic replacement, all while obeying the laws, paying the taxes, and remembering not to complain about raped and murdered children.

A process facilitated at every level too by academic, entertainment and media campaigns which pretend that the English where they exist are responsible for all modern ills (Adolescence), the English never existed as an ethnicity in the first place (Netflix’s black Anne Boleyn and the like) or somehow both existed and were uniquely racist and evil (post colonial books like Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Sashi Tharoor, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of EmpIre by Akala and 52 Times that Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught in School by James Felton) AND never existed at the same time that they were racist and evil (Diversity is Our Strength, Britain was Built by Immigrants, We are All Immigrants, We are a Mongrel Nation, Cheddar Man Was Black etc etc).

On St George’s day too our national patron Saint is a commonly deployed progressive means of denying the very existence of the English. The fact that St George was a Roman official from a distant nation popularised by returning Crusaders is taken to mean that the English don’t exist, a thing which is never done to any of the OTHER nations that adopted St George as well. Ask a search engine how msny nations have St George as their patron Saint and in addition to England you get this:

“Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ukraine, Malta, Ethiopia, and the regions of Catalonia and Aragon. Additionally, he is the patron saint of cities like Moscow and Beirut. These claims suggest that at least ten distinct nations or regions have Saint George as their patron saint.”

Nobody, of course, tells Russians that they don’t exist as a unique people because the patron Saint of Moscow wasn’t a Russian. And in the current climate it’s likely that telling Ukrainians they don’t exist for the same reason would see several Western European nations imprison you.

The English cannot win. If they interact with the world and are influenced by anyone foreign in all their long history, they are told that these connections and influences mean that they don’t exist at all. If they reject any foreign influence no matter how malign, they are told that this proves that they have always been xenophobes and racists. If they fail, it is because they are uniquely pathetic. If they succeed, it’s because they are uniquely evil. Past success proves their moral worthlessness. Present decline proves their moral worthlessness. If they are proud, they are to be feared and hated. If they are humble, they are to be scorned and abused. If they assert their existence, they are racists. If they deny their existence, then this is the only circumstance in which they are to be listened to. They must welcome those who hate them and pay for their own replacement, or else they are evil bigots.

They must be silent when their own abused children scream, and scream when the alleged rights of foreign adults are infringed. They must hate themselves with a burning passion, and love others with the same consuming devotion. And only the English who meet these exacting requirements, these suicidal requirements, are respectable and moderate and allowed to occupy positions of authority. To be English and to hate the English is to own the key that unlocks the corridors of power. Only that level of self denial and self loathing acts as a proof of impeccable sophistication. Only that attitude of sneering patrician contempt for the very notion of Englishness serves as the membership card of the social elite.

And the only adequate response, the only possible response for the outnumbered, outgunned, detested English, is to fight the near impossible fight, to oppose the forces of destruction with all one’s individual might, and to do the same as the football hooligans did in their tawdry, sordid, soiled but true recollection of collective greatness.

Remember you are English.

At least remember it before you are gone from this Earth entirely.