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This is a diary entry, not a deep and well-thought out piece.
I think that collective known as "the West" is suffering a cultural malaise and a crisis of purpose that is best personified by post modernism - narcissistic, joyless, deeply cynical and incurious.
The trouble with the master/slave relationship is that you need an exchange of recognition. This requires affect on the part of the slave and so-far Silicon Valley/DARPA has not been able to fabricate feeling in their robots in any way that humans find truly satisfying. This makes us unreplaceable. Future generations of helots will be bred to ensure that the ruling classes get the thrills they need.
When I visited the landing beaches in Normandy, there was a military gathering with veterans. I stroke a conversation with one of the old timers as I was in my late teens and he told me that my generation is missing ourselves “a decent war”. Whereas he couldn’t know I grew up in war torn Croatia, I think I get his point - we have indeed evolved into this weakness of an existence. We don’t need a war but we sure as hell need something to create a new generation of strong people.
It's sad that I find myself agreeing with it. I've relished the past week for it's ability to choke out all the sobering statistics we're sure to here about this coming winter.
Whether it's cope or not, the broad reaction to this death here has provided hope of what could be. Few leaders today would find a people willing to form an orderly queue for hours just for a few moments beside their coffin.
One day the people of these islands, will find a new centre and purpose (whatever make-up) that might be. However, we'll have to learn what it's like to be irrelevant and what it's like to struggle for survival. I just hope that we can pass on enough of our heritage to those that live after us.
I hope that you are right. But the English need leadership if they are to survive. The political class will do everything they can to perpetuate the mess.
You misunderstand: I thought that after corona the British people had utterly lost their spirit and I began to hate my countrymen. However in the past week I've seen that something ancient in this country still exists and it has an enormous power. The leaders of the world came to us for once, instead of us going to them. HMQ was an enormous figure *because* of the Throne, notwithstanding her own decent and faithful character. This will persist. Charles will probably be a weak king, average perhaps and William is still a toss-up. This has always been the case with monarchy.
The point is that whilst Eastern Europe has been dismembered by one hideous empire after another we have persisted. World wars, empires, plagues: all these things and we have persisted. Although horribly mangled and cut off from our culture by ignorant foreigners and the survival of the poison of Communism in its cultural form, from our architecture being mutilated or replaced by something so ugly that it can only be a form of envious humiliation, we still persist. There are *trees* near me that are so old that only a guess can be made as to their age, the estimates being made in centuries.
There are a lot of hard times ahead but I am now for the first time in years optimistic. The buildings can be replaced. The foreigners can be assimilated or expelled. This winter will be hard but the British know each other better now after the past week. The foreigners rioting over their imported ethnic squabbles are living on borrowed time.
The news good or bad is this 🇺🇸 must change from the present geriatric interlude - its not just Biden it’s all of them - and it is changing. That will mean a contraction. That is the chance for you, for Europe. Take it.
The Commonwealth for instance lies fallow, and you are of course a nuclear power and therefore truly Sovereign.
(Non-nuclear powers are not Sovereign, as Ukraine has discovered, they are either wretched vassals or left alone as not worth the bother).
I'm in Australia and of Greek extraction, so have a complicated view of the monarchy. I think the monarchy has been beneficial but Australia should become fully independent but what form that takes is quite tricky. We need to balance the self-interest and indifference of our"representatives" with someone who is not beholden to them. The Queen filled this role but only symbolically since her power was negligible. But as you say, her power lay in the way she represented "Albion", that long history full of glory and despair and riches and hunger and blood. I hope there are many of your fellow countrymen like you who find hope and patience and the will to persist. London is the key.
Well that's the thing: the monarchy *does* balance the two and provides a sort of cultural heaviness or presence that cannot be ignored despite its actual legislative powerlessness. The current system appears to be working in Australia and has done for some centuries. You are however going down the route of mass immigration like us and I don't think you'll do well. I note that recently some minister or other said they were actively increasing immigration to cope with job shortages. It's always the answer! The same thing in the UK with shortages in care homes: they now want to make the process of moving easier and document checks 'faster' which will mean 'less thorough'. I've only ever reported one nurse to the regulator and he was a foreigner.
The British I think you’ll find make better “friends” than the Americans, ask any of your neighbors.
If you want to be Independent you’ll have to be a nuclear power, you understand this? Nuclear powers are sovereign. Non-nuclear powers are not.
Ask the Ukrainians.
You might kiss and make up with the French, who are looking hard presently outside Europe for friends. To really be friends ask for what the French gave the Israelis- nuclear technology (no, it wasn’t America).
Otherwise you can call yourself whatever you like, no nukes=not sovereign.
TLW, the reserve powers of the Crown are significant, but they are now entirely in the gift of he prime minister of the day. The monarchy is a tool of the political class and does not serve any role that remotely resembles the one theoretically ascribed to it.
During the covid crisis Australia's prime minister Scott Morrison got the Governor-General (the Crown's locum tenen) to issue a series of secret ministerial commissions to him (Morrison) to enable the prime minister to covertly exercise power without the knowledge of the majority of his own cabinet. The vice-regal buffoon was a constitutional catspaw. The monarchy is now nothing but a PR exercise in misdirecting the attention of the masses and offering false reassurances of probity and legality.
There is no way King Charles would repeat his mother's role in the dismissal of an Australian PM. Whitlam was sacked at the behest of the US after he threatened US satellite relay bases on Australian soil. The governor-general, Sir John Kerr, was in military intelligence in WW2 and appears to have consulted London covertly. There is still a lot of mystery about it all but a lot has come out.
I just read your gong piece on Britain, you may not be Canadian but you are Torontonian nonetheless. I have a request, please do a piece on Toronto the post national city. 
Quite: a lot of people (inc. Brits abroad) who thought that the country to which they had emigrated was their 'home' suddenly found during corona that the homeland called. The next few years will be hard and I don't see how those without a family or society to protect them will cope when (hopefully) Truss starts chopping benefits.
Ceremonial or not, end of empire or not, IMHO the Queen could have played a more direct role in using her symbolic power to remind her subjects of what it means to be British. She did not have to make speeches against integration and unrooted anywhere cosmopolitanism. But she could well have found appropriate ways of doing culture while holding back on politics.
Of course that is just my preference and I am not only not the Queen I am not even British. So she did what she did, and may have fully endorsed the many changes that she oversaw in her time on the throne. But I do find it odd that the world is asked to admire her restraint when that restraint is connected deeply with the hollowing out of the nation. It is almost as if her symbolic power enabled her subjects to forget the long term enervation she presided over. Well, we still have the Queen! And then when she is gone the loss is felt all the more when people have to come to grips with the losses she helped disguise.
How do you know she didn't? Charles had his 'black spider' letters: foolish man. However the Queen met the PM of the day *every week*. She was a woman of subtlety and was an excellent politician, or was at least surrounded by an excellent political operation. Charles has a former cop and MI5 head on his team which is alarming but means that he's not pissing about. I've moved from one to the other a bit but the point is that HMQ was able to exert influence quietly but significantly.
I keep reading that the Queen 'had no power' but she clearly did, enormous power as popularity and tradition *are* power. The thing that most little politicians desire so desperately like celebrities she understood has to come from something deeper. She couldn't just hand out freebies to her supporters so had to use something else.
The English shall now have to confront their predicament without the reassurance that the late queen provided. The conspicuous indifference of the recent immigrants reveals the fatuity of the queen's obsession with the Commonwealth.
I don't think she was obsessed at all, I think (educated guess) she spent far more time in the Anglo world than in some tinpot Afro-Caribbean dump. Again, it gives the UK a sphere of influence that is not an empire of course but is something considerably more than any other European nation has. Note the sudden interest in the Caribbean in removing HMQ as head of state when the Chinks come calling: the latter wouldn't bother if it wasn't seen as a threat of some kind.
What do you want me to say? She wasn't obsessed and was Queen of the Commonwealth. It was her job and her obligation as well. I don't know if you're a Yank but if so you don't seem to understand that the Queen wasn't some kind of absolute ruler who summoned Blair to the Palace and demanded as many Mandingos as Heathrow could manage. It's far subtler than that.
"It’s okay to treat this place in the most mercenary and self-interested of methods. Extraction is applauded, provided that wealth is spread around to those that assist you in the matter."
As an Irish citizen, I have zero time for all royalty but her visit here in 2011 especially at the memorial for 1916 Revolution dead did a lot of good.
Britain, as Dean Acheson, memorably said in 1960s has lost an empire but not yet found a role. It still has not other than as ally to USA but that is a disproportionate 'special' one. It does as US requires - Iraq illegal invasion, frustrating peace efforts in Ukraine etc.
See a report this week that UK has slid down the world's top income countries while still a wealthy country, and has been overtaken in GDP in 5th place in G7 by India.
De Gaulle was correct in believing they would not be adaptable to EEC. Blair pushed reckless expansion of EU and NATO, basically compromising both. London is almost second home for many Irish but we were not noticeable due to colour and language, and Common Travel Area. Other incomers are visually more prominent.
London has a mayor who accepts no responsibility for crime etc but expects to be heard on every other topic esp foreign matters. Think he recognises the nature of his city better than his critics, as an international nation-city which is located on the island of GB.
But what a city still!!!
Londoners have had to watch Russian billionaires conquer the city just like Arabs in 1970s. The hatred expressed now is legitimised and created by mass media but is expressed in a way still not possible with Arab oil states
and in the end, perfidious Albion elaborate schemes backfired against her
The prodigal son resulted a not so prodigal one
Yes, he "saved" mom's prestige and face (because nothing else was really in danger, the so-called bully living 4 houses away kinda respected her) at the price of her estate , inheritance and privileged place at the dinner's table.
Like an old, nostalgic woman reminiscing of her youth, she became dependent on the whims of the prodigal son, who sought to impose his ideas and his way of micro-managing not only in her charming and crumbling Victorian mansion, but in the whole neighborhood populated by the same naive boomers that previously squabbled every now and then about critical matters like who had the biggest dick.
Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you (be nice!), and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already.
This is a diary entry, not a deep and well-thought out piece.
I think that collective known as "the West" is suffering a cultural malaise and a crisis of purpose that is best personified by post modernism - narcissistic, joyless, deeply cynical and incurious.
The lack of real outside threats has been a disaster for the west
Definitely, it's allowed many to mess up without having to face the consequences.
Fortune has provided inside threats.
Fortune? You are discrete to a fault.
Bello Fortuna as Cesare Borgias troops used to say...
Agreed, but what does it say about a society that can't function without an enemy to define itself?
The society that did and does this is High Society.
We are enemies, they won’t have any world where there’s no underclass so they be overclass.
We can either accept the situation or perish.
The trouble with the master/slave relationship is that you need an exchange of recognition. This requires affect on the part of the slave and so-far Silicon Valley/DARPA has not been able to fabricate feeling in their robots in any way that humans find truly satisfying. This makes us unreplaceable. Future generations of helots will be bred to ensure that the ruling classes get the thrills they need.
When I visited the landing beaches in Normandy, there was a military gathering with veterans. I stroke a conversation with one of the old timers as I was in my late teens and he told me that my generation is missing ourselves “a decent war”. Whereas he couldn’t know I grew up in war torn Croatia, I think I get his point - we have indeed evolved into this weakness of an existence. We don’t need a war but we sure as hell need something to create a new generation of strong people.
Hammer meets head.
It's sad that I find myself agreeing with it. I've relished the past week for it's ability to choke out all the sobering statistics we're sure to here about this coming winter.
Whether it's cope or not, the broad reaction to this death here has provided hope of what could be. Few leaders today would find a people willing to form an orderly queue for hours just for a few moments beside their coffin.
One day the people of these islands, will find a new centre and purpose (whatever make-up) that might be. However, we'll have to learn what it's like to be irrelevant and what it's like to struggle for survival. I just hope that we can pass on enough of our heritage to those that live after us.
You don’t have to be irrelevant.
You are a relatively rich, resourced, nuclear power.
Its a choice.
Vietnam you know is not irrelevant. Because they chose.
I hope that you are right. But the English need leadership if they are to survive. The political class will do everything they can to perpetuate the mess.
You misunderstand: I thought that after corona the British people had utterly lost their spirit and I began to hate my countrymen. However in the past week I've seen that something ancient in this country still exists and it has an enormous power. The leaders of the world came to us for once, instead of us going to them. HMQ was an enormous figure *because* of the Throne, notwithstanding her own decent and faithful character. This will persist. Charles will probably be a weak king, average perhaps and William is still a toss-up. This has always been the case with monarchy.
The point is that whilst Eastern Europe has been dismembered by one hideous empire after another we have persisted. World wars, empires, plagues: all these things and we have persisted. Although horribly mangled and cut off from our culture by ignorant foreigners and the survival of the poison of Communism in its cultural form, from our architecture being mutilated or replaced by something so ugly that it can only be a form of envious humiliation, we still persist. There are *trees* near me that are so old that only a guess can be made as to their age, the estimates being made in centuries.
There are a lot of hard times ahead but I am now for the first time in years optimistic. The buildings can be replaced. The foreigners can be assimilated or expelled. This winter will be hard but the British know each other better now after the past week. The foreigners rioting over their imported ethnic squabbles are living on borrowed time.
One may hope, and I’m ☘️🇺🇸.
But it’s horrible to see 🇬🇧 so run down.
The news good or bad is this 🇺🇸 must change from the present geriatric interlude - its not just Biden it’s all of them - and it is changing. That will mean a contraction. That is the chance for you, for Europe. Take it.
The Commonwealth for instance lies fallow, and you are of course a nuclear power and therefore truly Sovereign.
(Non-nuclear powers are not Sovereign, as Ukraine has discovered, they are either wretched vassals or left alone as not worth the bother).
I'm in Australia and of Greek extraction, so have a complicated view of the monarchy. I think the monarchy has been beneficial but Australia should become fully independent but what form that takes is quite tricky. We need to balance the self-interest and indifference of our"representatives" with someone who is not beholden to them. The Queen filled this role but only symbolically since her power was negligible. But as you say, her power lay in the way she represented "Albion", that long history full of glory and despair and riches and hunger and blood. I hope there are many of your fellow countrymen like you who find hope and patience and the will to persist. London is the key.
Well that's the thing: the monarchy *does* balance the two and provides a sort of cultural heaviness or presence that cannot be ignored despite its actual legislative powerlessness. The current system appears to be working in Australia and has done for some centuries. You are however going down the route of mass immigration like us and I don't think you'll do well. I note that recently some minister or other said they were actively increasing immigration to cope with job shortages. It's always the answer! The same thing in the UK with shortages in care homes: they now want to make the process of moving easier and document checks 'faster' which will mean 'less thorough'. I've only ever reported one nurse to the regulator and he was a foreigner.
The Powers of the Crown are not negligible- the Crown can dismiss PM’s of the Commonwealth- and has.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis
The British I think you’ll find make better “friends” than the Americans, ask any of your neighbors.
If you want to be Independent you’ll have to be a nuclear power, you understand this? Nuclear powers are sovereign. Non-nuclear powers are not.
Ask the Ukrainians.
You might kiss and make up with the French, who are looking hard presently outside Europe for friends. To really be friends ask for what the French gave the Israelis- nuclear technology (no, it wasn’t America).
Otherwise you can call yourself whatever you like, no nukes=not sovereign.
TLW, the reserve powers of the Crown are significant, but they are now entirely in the gift of he prime minister of the day. The monarchy is a tool of the political class and does not serve any role that remotely resembles the one theoretically ascribed to it.
During the covid crisis Australia's prime minister Scott Morrison got the Governor-General (the Crown's locum tenen) to issue a series of secret ministerial commissions to him (Morrison) to enable the prime minister to covertly exercise power without the knowledge of the majority of his own cabinet. The vice-regal buffoon was a constitutional catspaw. The monarchy is now nothing but a PR exercise in misdirecting the attention of the masses and offering false reassurances of probity and legality.
There is no way King Charles would repeat his mother's role in the dismissal of an Australian PM. Whitlam was sacked at the behest of the US after he threatened US satellite relay bases on Australian soil. The governor-general, Sir John Kerr, was in military intelligence in WW2 and appears to have consulted London covertly. There is still a lot of mystery about it all but a lot has come out.
https://strategic-culture.org/news/2020/06/13/sacking-gough-whitlam-and-royal-intention-behind-five-eyes/
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/06/01/john-pilger-the-forgotten-coup-against-the-most-loyal-ally/
NB TLW if you check out Strategic Culture, look up Alastair Crooke's stuff. You won't be disappointed. https://strategic-culture.org/contributors/alastair-crooke/
You are Canadian she’s your queen as well. 
I'm not Canadian. Sorry to disappoint.
You may need a monarch in Croatia Nico. 🇺🇸 we are changing, if we are not leaving we’re certainly going to be pre-occupied for a spell of time.
I just read your gong piece on Britain, you may not be Canadian but you are Torontonian nonetheless. I have a request, please do a piece on Toronto the post national city. 
Toronto? 
How long can the situation of Beata and Jermaine last however?
“It’s not my city, it’s not my country, it’s not my people. “
It’s not Beata’s * or Jermaine’s either. I am merely asking- how long does that last?
*Beata will soon enough live through the next partition of Poland, so where can she call home?
Quite: a lot of people (inc. Brits abroad) who thought that the country to which they had emigrated was their 'home' suddenly found during corona that the homeland called. The next few years will be hard and I don't see how those without a family or society to protect them will cope when (hopefully) Truss starts chopping benefits.
Hope you are right.
They call it Dubai West here
Ceremonial or not, end of empire or not, IMHO the Queen could have played a more direct role in using her symbolic power to remind her subjects of what it means to be British. She did not have to make speeches against integration and unrooted anywhere cosmopolitanism. But she could well have found appropriate ways of doing culture while holding back on politics.
Of course that is just my preference and I am not only not the Queen I am not even British. So she did what she did, and may have fully endorsed the many changes that she oversaw in her time on the throne. But I do find it odd that the world is asked to admire her restraint when that restraint is connected deeply with the hollowing out of the nation. It is almost as if her symbolic power enabled her subjects to forget the long term enervation she presided over. Well, we still have the Queen! And then when she is gone the loss is felt all the more when people have to come to grips with the losses she helped disguise.
How do you know she didn't? Charles had his 'black spider' letters: foolish man. However the Queen met the PM of the day *every week*. She was a woman of subtlety and was an excellent politician, or was at least surrounded by an excellent political operation. Charles has a former cop and MI5 head on his team which is alarming but means that he's not pissing about. I've moved from one to the other a bit but the point is that HMQ was able to exert influence quietly but significantly.
I keep reading that the Queen 'had no power' but she clearly did, enormous power as popularity and tradition *are* power. The thing that most little politicians desire so desperately like celebrities she understood has to come from something deeper. She couldn't just hand out freebies to her supporters so had to use something else.
Very fitting that just when the Queen died, Leicester erupted with Indo-Pakistani riots. A taste of New Britain?
The English shall now have to confront their predicament without the reassurance that the late queen provided. The conspicuous indifference of the recent immigrants reveals the fatuity of the queen's obsession with the Commonwealth.
I don't think she was obsessed at all, I think (educated guess) she spent far more time in the Anglo world than in some tinpot Afro-Caribbean dump. Again, it gives the UK a sphere of influence that is not an empire of course but is something considerably more than any other European nation has. Note the sudden interest in the Caribbean in removing HMQ as head of state when the Chinks come calling: the latter wouldn't bother if it wasn't seen as a threat of some kind.
You can cope all you want but her actions don't lie.
What do you want me to say? She wasn't obsessed and was Queen of the Commonwealth. It was her job and her obligation as well. I don't know if you're a Yank but if so you don't seem to understand that the Queen wasn't some kind of absolute ruler who summoned Blair to the Palace and demanded as many Mandingos as Heathrow could manage. It's far subtler than that.
"It’s okay to treat this place in the most mercenary and self-interested of methods. Extraction is applauded, provided that wealth is spread around to those that assist you in the matter."
Karma's a bitch!
As an Irish citizen, I have zero time for all royalty but her visit here in 2011 especially at the memorial for 1916 Revolution dead did a lot of good.
Britain, as Dean Acheson, memorably said in 1960s has lost an empire but not yet found a role. It still has not other than as ally to USA but that is a disproportionate 'special' one. It does as US requires - Iraq illegal invasion, frustrating peace efforts in Ukraine etc.
See a report this week that UK has slid down the world's top income countries while still a wealthy country, and has been overtaken in GDP in 5th place in G7 by India.
De Gaulle was correct in believing they would not be adaptable to EEC. Blair pushed reckless expansion of EU and NATO, basically compromising both. London is almost second home for many Irish but we were not noticeable due to colour and language, and Common Travel Area. Other incomers are visually more prominent.
London has a mayor who accepts no responsibility for crime etc but expects to be heard on every other topic esp foreign matters. Think he recognises the nature of his city better than his critics, as an international nation-city which is located on the island of GB.
But what a city still!!!
Londoners have had to watch Russian billionaires conquer the city just like Arabs in 1970s. The hatred expressed now is legitimised and created by mass media but is expressed in a way still not possible with Arab oil states
Bet Stan Kroenke is pissed he had to pay Usmanov top dollar for his Arsenal shares rather than waiting for a fire sale a la Abramovich and Chelsea.
There are more interesting cities.
About the Queen I think the significance is less to do with the loss of empire than the disappearance of a world with 1950s norms and stability.
To anyone particularly interested in London I’d recommend Christopher Hibbert’s book ‘London: The Biography of a City’. Brilliant social history.
Sweet burn.
and in the end, perfidious Albion elaborate schemes backfired against her
The prodigal son resulted a not so prodigal one
Yes, he "saved" mom's prestige and face (because nothing else was really in danger, the so-called bully living 4 houses away kinda respected her) at the price of her estate , inheritance and privileged place at the dinner's table.
Like an old, nostalgic woman reminiscing of her youth, she became dependent on the whims of the prodigal son, who sought to impose his ideas and his way of micro-managing not only in her charming and crumbling Victorian mansion, but in the whole neighborhood populated by the same naive boomers that previously squabbled every now and then about critical matters like who had the biggest dick.