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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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That the romantic English identity described, or which shines through, in the writing of the country's greatest poets and playwrights and novelists is essentially limited to the England of the top 5%, which has its own culture and values, and which is in effect a nation unto itself.

Not buying this at all.

I think your theory would need to be substantiated with genetic analysis. My understanding is basically the complete opposite of your theory: due to the higher fertility and lower infant mortality of the upper classes, the continent experienced persistent downward social mobility through generations and significant evolutionary pressures like the black death. This resulted in essentially the genetic replacement by the upper classes of the lower classes some times over.

The effect was the emergence of a middle class and giving even the lower classes a higher quality, such that a few of them could go to a new world on a new continent and build a civilization in the blink of an eye.

It's been awhile since I read Gregory Clark's work, but that was the impression I came away with, and I'm not buying that there's a significant genetic differentiation between the classes that at all resembles, say, the Indian caste system.

I'm also not buying that you are trying to relegate English identity to only 5% of the population. Let me guess- you are not English. I imagine you have some pretty latent hostility towards the English to come up with a cockamamie theory to remove them from their own ethnic heritage. In your view, the half-Jew half-Brahmin elite will have a better claim to English identity than the English. I wonder why you believe that...

Consider this, since you're on the far right yourself: why was Enoch Powell arguably the only major 20th century British politician to express major reservations about mass immigration and to attempt to stop it?

It's a consequence of the post-war ideological realignment that made racialized thinking for European people taboo. You are trying to reduce this behavior to class interests, but it's better explained by a post-war ideological upheaval. Opposition to mass immigration is associated with the far right, which is now indelibly associated with the Holocaust. High-status people have a strong incentive to stay in the walled garden of a prevailing civic religion.

A half-Jew, half-Brahmin is not English and never will be, no matter how many times he attends Wimbledon or what a piece of paper says. Why is it only the "far right" recognizes this fundamental, physical reality of English ethnic heritage, while it faces so much hostility from everyone else (including you) who even deny that such a thing exists? My answer explains this phenomenon better than yours.

The main critics of Powell were other conservatives of high birth.

Some were, some weren't. Edward Heath (leader of the Tories) and Iain Macleod (highest ranking liberal Tory) weren't. It's true that most supporters of Powell were working class, but you'd expect that if they were a purely representative sample of the British public.

What is more significant is that Powell found an issue that cut across party lines, so that e.g. Labour-voting dock workers supported him.

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