The England We Lost:
The Sixties Began Fifty Years Ago
Britain...used to be in the Empire, and then the pagans got it.
John Masefield, Basilissa, p. 121
Introduction: Death Prepared
Some countries have faced revolution only once or twice in their histories. However, these revolutions have been extremely violent and the countries have never been the same since. France and Russia are examples. Although the revolutions that England has faced in its history have not necessarily been extremely violent, England has had to face them almost permanently ever since the Norman Occupation of 1066.
For example, after the Norman deformation and genocide in the 11th century came the Norman civil war of the 12th century. Then came the 100 Years War, which lasted on and off for over 100 years until the 14th century. This war, or rather series of wars, was in fact a civil war carried out against France and conducted by England’s Norman and French invader kings. Then, in the 15th century, came more civil wars – this time, the Wars of the Roses. In the 16th century came the genocidal and Machiavellian Henry VIII and his ‘Deformation’, with the plundering of compromised Roman Catholicism and its reduction to anti-sacral and anti-sacrament Protestantism.
This was followed in the 17th century by the violent Republican civil wars, resulting in the usurping of power by the inglorious revolution of 1688 and the imposition of a Dutch puppet-prince by a Parliament of oligarchs. All was ready for the eighteenth century secularism of the ‘Enlightenment’, with its German kings, collectivist land-grab by the rich in the ‘Enclosures’ and so the ‘Industrial Revolution’. In the nineteenth century came imperialism and in the twentieth the Great European Tribal Wars which Europe turned into World Wars. These led to the national bankruptcies of 1917 and 1940, which forced Great Britain to surrender its sovereignty to foreign powers, first to the US and afterwards to the EU.
As a result of financial bankruptcy, in the second half of the 20th century there came a new bout of secularism, a cultural revolution of spiritual, moral, economic and cultural falls. Beginning in the 1960s, it intensified and led to the monetary (but most definitely not spiritual, moral and cultural) conservatism of Thatcher, followed naturally by the disastrous presidential republicanism and warmongering dictatorships of Blair.
A Spiritual Fall
1950s Great Britain was a country which had emerged from two World Wars, been bankrupted by them and lost its colonies and international prestige in ‘winds of change’. As a result, on the face of it, there should not be a great deal of nostalgia for the post-War 1950s, with its millions of War-crippled, homeless, ill-educated and deprived, deadly polluting smogs in London and other industrial areas, the children in the north-east going to school barefoot, and the insular ignorance, tastelessness and cheap shabbiness of so much. As someone once said, the odour that summed up post-War Britain was boiled cabbage and the taste was stewed tea. And yet there is nostalgia for this decade.
This can only be because not all of it was so bad and because what followed it was in many ways even worse. Behind what followed the 1950s was the anti-human decadence which had accumulated over the centuries. This had erupted in the technology which had killed millions in two European Wars, become worldwide, and threatened a nuclear and so final Third World War. The lack of repentance for two World Wars was both the result of and the cause of a massive loss of faith.
In this vicious circle, this loss of faith was justified by many senior Church of England (and from the Continent post-Vatican II Roman Catholic) clergy. They wished to adapt to the world and, under the cloak of ‘honesty to God’, justify their own loss of faith. In October 1960, the writer of ‘Honest to God’, Bishop John Robinson of Woolwich, blaspheming against holy communion, made himself notorious by speaking in favour of the publication of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. If he had really wanted to be ‘honest to God’, he should simply have admitted that he had lost his faith, resigned and stopped taking his generous bishop’s salary under false pretences and admitted that sin and hell still existed – they existed in his own words of apostasy.
A spiritual fall, signifying the loss even of that which had kept Britain alive since 1066, the loss of faith and so the loss of a way, was the explanation for all that followed. As nature abhors a vacuum, so the loss of faith in God was expressed in the 1960s by the slogan ‘God is dead’. This was the arrogance that ’we are right’, and so now we shall play God and create a new age and a new civilisation. But as this new civilisation was Godless, so began the civilisation of Death.
A Moral Fall
After a spiritual fall came a moral fall. With the loss of their spiritual foundations, the old moral standards soon became hypocritical, mere conventions. In 1963, the same year as the publication of ‘Honest to God’, came the Profumo scandal, when a supposedly conservative society destroyed itself. It was the end of Victorian prudery – and also Victorian hypocrisy. The lies of John Profumo, a British politician of aristocratic Italian origin, revealed that much of the ruling class was rotten. (Although in fairness to him, John Profumo did spend the rest of his life in repentance). Without any other example, the rest of society could now live down to the ruling class ‘standards’ of amoral immorality. From this point on began the collapse of family life, which had to be destroyed for the sake of the economic enslavement of mothers and so maximum profit in the name of the mammon cult.
The sending of mothers to factory and office work, their obligatory masculinisation, was demanded by the dictates of modern, GDP-driven capitalism. It was disguised and foisted onto the naive population as ‘women’s liberation’ and emancipation. In reality, like so much in the 60s, it was a delusion, a mirage. In reality, mothers were to be enslaved, saddled with a modest, single salary for a double job – wage slavery – work outside the home and work inside the home. The result was widespread divorce and the gradual break-up of family life. Mothers would be married to the State through benefits, rather than to provident and loving husbands. Thus appeared the new feudalism of the all-powerful State, a slavery financed by taxation, the new worship of old Baal.
Male long hair, which became a symbol of the 60s, has throughout history signified sexual licence. Therefore it signified the anti-Victorian, anti-puritan backlash. This, together with female short skirts, reflected the result of the great 60s money-spinner, the contraceptive pill. This led to sexual depravity and the spread of pornography, another 60s money-spinner, on which the fortunes of various public figures, including one ‘Conservative’ Minister, were made. With commercialisation sex had become a mere commodity.
Women were from now on supposed to starve themselves, as dieting became the norm as part of the new body cult with its cancer-catching sun-bathing. This, together with the tyranny of fashion houses and magazines, sometimes run by woman-hating homosexual men, helped lead to female anorexia. Despite, or rather because of, easy contraception, this depravity in turn led to abortion, which throughout the 60s came increasingly to be seen as a ‘right’. (In the 60s everything became a right - instead of a duty). In reality, the abortion holocaust was as much a ‘right’ as the racial holocaust of the Nazis. The unborn human being was seen as the new ‘Untermensch’, the subhuman to be sucked out of the mother’s womb and burned up in the gas chambers of hospital incinerators.
An Economic Fall
The 60s were an age of consumerism – ‘bread’ for the masses. For some the human-being was reduced to a mere consumer, a source of profit. Manipulated by US-invented advertising, marketing and credit, an organised mass con trick began. People were told that money had made them free and so they were now able to become enslaved to the illusions and mirages of the 60s. As the aristocratic Prime Minister Macmillan had said; ‘You’ve never had it so good’ (You, not we, because he and the rest of the ruling class, unlike the people, had always ‘had it good’).
With the loss of any spiritual and moral defences, drugged by illusory optimism in ‘technology’, some were so foolish, naïve and superficial that they laid aside the serious questions in life and instead consumed. Some consumed in hedonism until, a few decades later, they were sick, obese and enslaved to debt. After the feast comes the reckoning.
In previous ages, either childhood innocence had ended late or else adulthood responsibility had begun early. Now, with the spiritual and moral attack on innocence and responsibility, advertising and marketing manipulators began to build up the cult of youth and invented the teenager consumer – neither innocent nor responsible.
Many spoilt middle-class youths flocked, like the conformists they had been manipulated into being, to spend their money on fashionable clothes, alcohol, other drugs and ‘pop’ music. This sounded like the death rattle of a culture. They became drug-ridden hippies – small-scale consumers. The most successful of these later became money-ridden yuppies – large-scale consumers.
A Cultural Fall
The spiritual and moral falls meant that the 60s were an age of cultural revolution, cultural vandalism and cultural suicide. National identity was under attack. This was an age of destruction, of the negative, of satire, sarcasm, mockery, the jeering lampoon and the ‘snide’ cynicism, which always appears when faith is absent. Anything traditional, or even worse, ‘Victorian’, had to be destroyed by the new cultural nihilists. Thus the currency had to be decimalised, the imperial system of measurement made metric, replacing apostolic twelves with republican tens. The country and its tenants were thus made ready to surrender to their oft-defeated European landlords.
In the absence of taste, let alone good taste, ‘Modern Art’ largely took over in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘modernisation’. This was the age of ‘pop’ art, plastic, tackiness, the cheap and nasty, the jerry-built and the inhuman. Nowhere was this more visible in the field of architecture with its destruction of many old town centres. Old slums were cleared, new ones were built – the very ones which are now regularly dynamited, as they deserve to be. At sky level tower-blocks visibly proclaimed the age of destruction, decay, decline, decadence and death. The 60s left virtually no architecture of any lasting value because the 60s had virtually no lasting values.
At ground level the same fate would befall the railway network. More efficient than the Luftwaffe, in 1963 a millionaire engineer recommended the destruction of much of the railway network, carried out by governments in league with road transport lobbies in the briefest of periods. This guaranteed chronic air pollution, noise pollution, cemented countryside, road building and traffic jams for decades to come. Similarly, much of the education system also had to be vandalised. Since only one part of the educational system, the grammar schools, had ever worked, because technical and secondary education were vastly underfunded, it was these grammar schools which had to be destroyed. Thus, the one good thing in education, its centres of excellence, was ruined, not for any good reason, but for the ideology of social engineering of the 60s socialist revolution of mediocrity and sub-education for all.
In a pique of envy, camouflaged by the myth of egalitarianism, people had to be brought down to the same lumpenproletarian level. Equality was guaranteed: people, comprehensively but incomprehensibly, would have to be reduced to the lowest educational level possible, so making them equal - except for the ruling elite, which would continue to study in private schools, like the present Mr Blair, Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg. And if government anti-education policies did not work - and Mr Blair continued them with the Leninist mantra, ‘education, education, education’ - TV would do the rest, with as many channels as possible to hypnotise the circus-seeking masses with soap operas providing ‘fun’ and ‘entertainment’.
Conclusion: Resurrection Prepared
To save England, it is not enough to return to the period before the 1960s. The solution is much more radical than that. Cultures only die after centuries, generation after generation, of decadence, decline and decay. The death of culture is carried out by secularising human ideologies and passing fashions, whether they are called Catholicism or Protestantism, conservatism or liberalism. On the other hand, culture lives through what is far greater than any human ideology, through Tradition, which is handed down generation after generation from distant ancestors, from our roots, from the beginning of our now dead, buried and virtually unmourned Christian civilisation.
Tradition and authentic culture are far greater than a mere generation or even a mere few generations of human ideologies and passing fashions. In the 1960s, the Tradition of England, the very roots of England, stretching back way beyond the second millennium to the first millennium, was ignored and trampled on by the majority. As for the ideologies of the second millennium, they were mostly debunked, ‘demythologised’ and ‘destructured’. This was the beginning of the death of a culture.
These thoughts may make pessimistic, grim reading. However, there is nothing here that is necessarily a cause for long-term pessimism. Although it is said that you cannot turn the clock back, we know that this is not true. You can turn a clock back, just as you can turn it forward. Suppose we turned the clock forward, forward to a time when we will take the best of what is in the past and re-use it to live in the future? Suppose, in this third millennium, following this present crisis, we were to return to at least a few crumbs of the Tradition of England, stretching back beyond the passing fashions and ideologies of the second millennium, to the roots of our civilisation in the first millennium, to figures like Bede the Venerable and King Alfred?
Surely, on this eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the onset of the 1960s, it is possible to contemplate a return to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to Goodness, Wisdom and Beauty, to Royalty, Faith and Tradition, to Patriotism, Morality and Spirituality, to Sovereignty, Family and Culture, These thoughts alone should renew our hope. After all, despair need not be inevitable, but hope can be inevitable. It is all a matter of faith.
31 December 2010
