Monday - February 18, 2008

HAVING A SENSE OF YOUR OWN COUNTRY’S CHARACTER:  The Brit View

HAVING A SENSE OF YOUR OWN COUNTRY’S CHARACTER:  The Brit View

I found this of particular interest, and have done a bit of out of context editing. Which doesn’t change her meaning at all. Anyway, please check the link for the rest of her editorial.  She isn’t quite as conserv. as I’d like her to be, but then again she isn’t isn’t exactly a moonbat lib. either.  Is there such a thing as a lib/con?  Nah..

We don’t need to define Britishness
By Janet Daley

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 18/02/2008

British national identity is becoming more and more like the weather: everybody talks about it but nobody can do anything about it. And come to think of it, it is especially like British weather: so tepid most of the time that it is difficult to describe.

This is not necessarily a problem: having a sense of your own country’s character as a vague, largely invisible thing which hums away quietly in the background. Until, of course, the woolly, taken-for-granted conception is challenged by an internal threat which makes use of precisely that amorphous lack of definition to create malignant - potentially lethal - social divisions.

And that is where we find ourselves. Last week’s report from the Royal United Service Institute went so far as to say that Britain’s lack of clear conviction over the value of its identity and political culture had left it a “soft target” for terrorism - which is not the same thing as being soft on terrorism, as some sections of the media concluded.

The British security services are among the few national agencies not lacking a clear set of objectives. They are not soft on terrorism.

The real argument of the RUSI study was that Britain was leaving itself open to the recruitment of Islamist terrorists by its failure to instil a confident, graspable sense of what this nation believes and stands for, and of what exactly it means to belong here.

Americans are unlike almost all other peoples of the world in that they all either are themselves, or are descended from, people who went to the country as an act of will (apart from those who were taken there against their will whose descendants, unsurprisingly, have had more difficulty in assimilating than almost all later migrant groups).

This makes them ideal subjects for the great 18th-century Enlightenment experiment: a newly invented country with a carefully devised written constitution and a self-conscious assumption of an identity that was defined in deliberate rebellion against an old aristocratic order.

To settle in the US is, in effect, to sign the “social contract” that the founding fathers envisaged: accept the rules and the principles on which this country is established and you can belong here. That’s the deal that is spelt out very clearly to every prospective citizen and, for the most part, it works. Older nations that chose to redefine themselves by overthrowing their history - such as France, where the revolution turned into the Terror - have had less happy results.

Britain is particularly ill-suited to adopting the apparatus of a revolutionary republic.
http://tinyurl.com/2uukzn

Posted by Drew458     on 02/18/2008 at 04:57 AM   
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