What Happens When Moral Cowardice Trumps The Virtue Of Courage?
There is no place for patriotism, national pride or the spirit of duty in a culture that has morally disarmed itself.
No one should be surprised with the findings of a study published in The Times that showed that that half of Generation Z – those aged 18-27 – believe that Britain is a racist society and only a tenth would risk their life to defend their nation in a war[i].
It is evident that patriotism has little meaning for a generation when only 11 per cent of them stated they would fight for Britain and 41 percent indicated that there were no circumstances at all in which they would take up arms for their country! What a significant section of 18-27 year olds are really saying is that their nation has no real significance for them and that therefore they bear no responsibility for its future.
Though a minority, - 41 per cent of young people indicated that they were proud to be British – it is evident that they possess a thin version of national pride, one that has little place for duty and sacrifice. What is truly disturbing is that there is considerable evidence that the numbers of young people who are proud of their country is significantly lower than twenty years ago. If this trend continues in 20 years time young people will become almost entirely estranged from their national culture.
When so many members of the younger generation have become averse to the idea of defending and fighting for their own country it is evident that society is in big trouble. Yet it is important not to blame Generation Z for the mood of moral disarmament that they exhibit. It is not at all surprising that they believe that they live in a racist society when that is what they constantly heard in their classroom and on the media. It matters not that racism in Britain today is far less prevalent than in the past. The reason why the numbers of young people who believe that their country is racist has increased from 34 percent in 2004 to 48 per cent in 2024 is because the promotion of anti-British ideas has become an integral dimension of their socialization.
The claim that society is thoroughly racist is an important feature of the mode of socialisation adopted by educational and cultural institutions. This claim is supported by a radical revision of the meaning of racism. The meaning of racism has expanded to the point that it is applied to a bewildering variety of circumstances. Paradoxically the expansion of the meaning of racism has occurred at a time when less and less people perceive themselves as racist.
It is remarkable how a sharp decline in expression of racial pride or of racial superiority in Britain has been paralleled by a huge increase in public accusations of racism. One reason why such accusations are on the rise is because the definition of racism has changed to the point where it has almost nothing in common with the original meaning of the word. These days, any heated dispute between people of different cultural or ethnic backgrounds has the potential to be branded a racist incident. In his disturbing study, The Myth of Racist Kids, Adrian Hart reported that new anti-racist policies in British schools have led to the rebranding of everyday playground insults as ‘racist behaviour’. Following the lead of other institutions, schools have adopted an expansive definition of racism that includes name-calling and excluding a child from games.
The impact of such anti-racist policies in schools is that youngsters are labelled ‘racist’ even before they have reached an age where they might grasp the meaning of racism. Hart reported that most of the cases of ‘racism’ in schools concerned children aged between nine and 11. Between 2002 and 2009, around 250,000 racist incidents were reported in schools across England and Wales.
These days even babies have become endowed with racist attitudes!
Take the Labour-run Islington Council in North London, which has produced a poster campaign claiming that babies can be racially biased. The poster tells the public that ‘at three months, babies look more at faces that match the race of their caregivers’. This is no doubt because they’re looking for faces that match those of the adults who look after them. To see this form of infant behaviour as evidence of ‘racial bias’ is unhinged. It smacks of an irrational commitment to interpret just about every human behaviour through the prism of racism.
Then there’s the Welsh Labour government, which, alongside Nottingham City Council, has signed up to a programme designed to ‘decolonise’ the nursery. The programme, devised by an ‘anti-racist training consultancy’ called Black Nursery Manager, assumes that nurseries are breeding grounds for racism. Which is as absurd as it sounds.
The fantasy of widespread racism is driven by a conviction that, regardless of what individuals say or do, many of them are actually unconscious or unwitting racists. Since the early 1980s, racism has been subtly redefined as a psychological problem. The redefinition of racism from an act of conscious oppression to an unwitting problem of the mind was boosted by the former British High Court judge, Sir William Macpherson, in his 1999 report into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the murder of a black London teenager, Stephen Lawrence. The Macpherson report defined institutional racism as something that ‘can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’. The key word here is ‘unwitting’ – this depicts racism as an unconscious response driven by unspecific emotions. The idea that people can be racists unwittingly means that literally anyone can be a racist – whether they know it or not.
Once people believe that racism has such a commanding influence over British society than it is unlikely that they will have a sense of pride in their nation. Moreover many educators who promote the conviction that Britain is a racist society also call into question the value of patriotism. In effect Generation Z has been thoroughly educated to become estranged from the sentiment of patriotism. Symbols of Britishness – particularly the nation’s flag – are ridiculed and have become an object of scorn. Media commentators working for the BBC – the nation’s public broad- casting outlet often snigger at displays of patriotism. They associate the flying of the flag with outdated provincialism and borderline racism.
Last year one of London’s most famous fish and chips shop was ordered by the local council to remove a Union flag mural painted on its building. The owner of the shop was left bemused after the flag and the slogan, ‘A Great British Meal’ was deemed inappropriate for the area by Greenwich Council[ii]. In the scheme of things this incident does not appear as such a big issue. But when a country’s symbol is dismissed as inappropriate for the area by officious local officials it is evident that something has gone seriously wrong in Britain.
Stripping symbols of Britishness of any trace of moral authority is not confined to the nation’s flag. Pride in Britain’s important role in defeating Nazi Germany during World War Two is now countered by the claims that downsize this nation’s contribution to the Allies victory. ‘Britain has built a national myth on winning the Second World War, but it’s distorting our politics’, argues one commentator in The New Statesman.[iii] There is a veritable industry devoted to dispelling the conviction that Britain played a unique and historically significant role during World War Two.
The animosity directed at Britishness by the media and related cultural and educational institutions is best captured by the concept of moral disarmament. Moral disarmament means just that – a kind of spiritual rejection that society and its cultural legacy is worth upholding, defending and when necessary, fighting to preserve it. That so many young people have internalised such a strong sense of loathing for their society and its cultural legacy highlights the scale of the problem facing Britain.
At a time of a growing trend towards global instability and conflict the institutionalisation of moral disarmament represents a serious challenge to the wellbeing and security of society. That is why society needs to morally rearm. we need to re-educate the young and acquaint them with the virtue of courage. They must learn that fighting for your nation is not an option but a duty that all responsible adults must embrace.
A society that does not value courage risks losing its freedom. The philosopher Hannah Arendt went as far as to argue that courage provides society with hope and underpins our capacity to live freely. As she put it, ‘courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world’. And she approvingly cited Winston Churchill’s claim that courage is ‘the first of human qualities, because it is the quality which guarantees all the others’.
At a time when the willingness to defend the nation is regarded by so many with such undisguised disdain it is essential to popularise the virtues of patriotism and courage. These virtues are often dismissed as so 19th century but their restoration is essential if we are to successfully face the challenges that lie ahead.
[i] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/gen-z-survey-police-racism-crime-nhs-hlghh0pxw
[ii] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/16/award-winning-fish-and-chip-shop-ordered-to-take-down-union/
[iii] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2017/08/britain-has-built-national-myth-winning-second-world-war-it-s-distorting-our
You are very right Digby. It is the conformism that is key and yet many of these people imagine that they are anything but conformist!!
One can hear many languages in London and near where I live the cafes show Al Jezeera (in Arabic) and signage in English is disappearing. That and other cultural displays show primary loyalties are to a foreign country. This colonisation of the UK is not evenly distributed and so its effects are not uniformly evidenced. I read that there are parts of the UK where English is still a majority language.
But, the moral disarmament promulgated by the middle class is uniformly distributed across the UK through education, which has increasingly taken the form of indoctrination, and school and university graduates have been swelling, and continue to swell, the ranks of this anti-nation infestation of the body politic. Like bacteria in a petri dish the spread becomes exponential. It begins locally and slowly but once a critical mass is achieved the rate of spread rapidly increases until the entire dish is covered. That critical mass of imported people not just loyal to their cultural homelands overseas but hostile to the host country appears to be approaching a critical mass within the next 10 to 20 years. Our moral disarmament is encouraging this. Jesus on the cross may have said 'forgive them Lord for they know not what they do' is not something I feel toward to those who are destroying the culture and traditon of England and rewriting our history.
As Hindus and Muslims fight in Leicester, as Sikhs and Musilms fight in Birmingham, as Turkish and Armenian gangs fight in Tottenham, or Eritrean factions fight each other in south east London, as... as.. the progressive, self-satisfied, comfortable middle class establishment remains in denial over what they have done and appears to be doubling down further through Phillipson's education review and Starmer's and Hermer's cult of obeisance to international law and institutions.
Anerica, thank God, elected a powerful anti-biotic and Vance's speech to the Munich security conference was magnificent. Going by statements on X the closest we have to an anti-biotic (for now) appears to be Rupert Lowe and Robert Jenrick. Neither are in power or near it for another four years. We have to work on our individual immuntiy meanwhile.