From: word_chemist@hotmail.com   
      
   'Nobody brought up in post-war England   
   can fail to be aware of the educated derision that has been   
   directed at our national loyalty by those whose freedom to   
   criticise would have been extinguished years ago, had the   
   English not been prepared to die for their country. To many   
   of the post-war writers, the English ideals of freedom and   
   service, for which the war in Europe had ostensibly been   
   fought, were mere ideological constructs-'ruling illusions'   
   which, by disguising exploitation as paternal guidance,   
   made it possible to ship home the spoils of empire with an   
   easy conscience. All those features of the English character   
   that had been praised in war-time books and films-   
   gentleness, firmness, honesty, tolerance, 'grit', the stiff   
   upper lip and the spirit of fair play-were either denied or   
   derided. England was not the free, harmonious, law-abiding   
   community celebrated in boy's magazines, but a place of   
   class-divisions, jingoism and racial intolerance. Look   
   beneath every institution and every ideal, the critics said,   
   and you will find the same sordid reality: a self-perpetuat-ing   
   upper class, and a people hoodwinked by imperial   
   illusions into accepting their dominion.1   
   To refute this vision of my country is not something that   
   I can undertake in this pamphlet: though I have attempted   
   the task elsewhere. It is important to note, however, that   
   this torrent of criticism has been almost entirely devoid of   
   comparative judgements. Indeed it amounts to little more,   
   in retrospect, than a catalogue of failings that are natural to   
   the human condition, which may have been endowed by the   
   English with a peculiarly English flavour, but which will be   
   encountered everywhen and everywhere-even in Scotland.   
   At the same time, precisely because it is in the nature of   
   a protest against the human condition, this kind of criticism   
   is infectious. What began as a jeu d'esprit among intellectu-als   
   very soon translated itself into political orthodoxy,   
   facilitated by the Celtic bias of the Labour Party, and by a   
   European élite intent on extinguishing the memory of the   
   Second World War. Consciously or unconsciously, recent   
   political decisions have had the undoing of England as their   
   real or apparent objective, and the result has been a   
   confusion of identity among the English that might lead one   
   to conclude that, in our case, at least, national loyalty is on   
   the verge of extinction.'   
      
   http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/Scruton_cs49.php   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)