Mick Hartley

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I’ll be Damned if I’ll Wear the Filthy Thing

There’s a shortage of good articles on the Iran hostage crisis, though I thought Gerard Baker at RCP last week was one of the better ones. Sadly, though, there’s no shortage of rubbish. This (via Instapundit) is so bad I thought for a moment it was satire:

“15 British Agressors [sic] must be EXECUTED.” That was the placard being held up by some beetle-browed Iranian outside the British Embassy in Tehran. Well, I don’t entirely disagree. I certainly think that those British captives who have let themselves be put forward on Iranian TV, that woman wearing a headscarf, and the young man apologizing to the Iranian gangster-rulers, should be court-martialed for dereliction of duty when they get back to Blighty, with shooting definitely an option.

How on earth can Britons behave like that? A previous generation would not have done so. I knew the women of my mother’s generation pretty well (Mum was born in 1912), and I am certain that any one of them, given that headscarf and told to put it on, would have said: “You can hang me with it if you like, but I’ll be damned if I’ll wear the filthy thing.” The men likewise. What on earth has happened to the British? Where is John Moyse?

Well, he is of course on Wikipedia. Who isn’t? To spare you the trouble of reading all through, Moyse was a British soldier of the East Kent Regiment, nick-named “The Buffs” on account of their 17th-century uniforms, which prominently featured that color. Moyse was captured by the Chinese during the Second Opium War of the late 1850s. Taken before a Mandarin, he was ordered to kowtow, but refused. He was thereupon clubbed to death and decapitated, and his body thrown on a dung-heap. Sir Francis Doyle wrote a poem to celebrate Moyse’s defiance of the enemy…

And all this was, of course, brought to my mind by the story of these British servicemen captured by the Iranians. To return to my earlier question: What on earth has happened to the British?

What has happened is multiculturalism. The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries….

And so on.

I could still be persuaded that it’s all tongue-in-cheek, but, really, it isn’t, is it?

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4 responses to “I’ll be Damned if I’ll Wear the Filthy Thing”

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    My mother was born in 1912 too. Like many women her age, she wore a head-scarf from time to time.

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  2. Paul Craddick Avatar
    Paul Craddick

    Mick,
    I don’t agree with you that this piece is self-evidently absurd. To my taste, it’s certainly OTT (and flat-out wrong about some things). However, it’s a useful exercise to separate the substance from the hyperbole, and ask some questions.
    Is it the case that there was a different esprit de corps amongst the British services in days gone by – for example, would servicemen have been expected not to cooperate with captors in ways that we’ve recently seen, and thus would servicemen have been more likely not to do so?
    Was there really such a thing as “British self-confidence” in days gone by? If so, did it rest on (relative) contempt for other peoples? If yes to the latter, it wouldn’t surprise me; Nietzsche, for one, linked up a “noble” ethos with a “pathos of distance.” Anyhow, self-confidence needn’t rest on any uncritical-contemptuous comparison to another person or nation, but rather on an appreciation of one’s own (or one’s nation’s) virtues.
    Finally, isn’t the de facto notion of “multiculturalism” – namely, the imperative to abstain from criticizing any culture except one’s own – a factor which would tend to undermine “national self-confidence” in a country where the idea has wide currency?
    I’m a real Anglophile, and am alive to the dangers of romanticizing any past age as embodying the “good old days” (often the virtue of an epoch is, paradoxically, also its shortcoming). Alas, it’s difficult not to view contemporary Britain as being quite enfeebled, in its reaction/response to the Iranian provocation.

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  3. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    Well yes, there was a British self-confidence. For better or for worse it’s not there any more. In this case I’d say it’s for the better.
    I don’t really know enough about the author of the article, John Derbyshire, but it strikes me that he’s one of those Englishmen in the US who trades on a certain kind of Anglophilia, and, being away from the country, manages to preserve a reactionary and romantic view of the past. No doubt he’d cite multiculturalism as one of the reasons why he doesn’t live here anymore, but pardon me for thinking what he’d really mean is that there are too many immigrants, too many of whom aren’t anglo-saxon.
    And I do think there’s something amusing – absurd even – about basing the article on what his dear old Mum would do, which lifts it out of the ordinary just-a-bit-over-the-top category.
    As for the feebleness of Britain’s response – well, it’s too early to judge. I do find these comparisons with Mrs Thatcher or even Nelson (or Wellington, or Churchill, or Henry V at Agincourt) pretty tiresome though.

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  4. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    I assume this John Derbyshire is the same one who writes for National Review. He’s famous for writing “Kick him again for me” when he first heard about Abu Graib. He is annoyingly anti-gay, for no obvious reason, and he has that strain of carefree rascism-with-a-small-r that other writers at NR have.
    He also writes some wonderful books on popular mathematics.
    He and the guy who calls himself Dalrymple form a genre all to themselves — you might call it the “smart right-wing”. Frankly, I love reading both of them. Even when they are wrong, as JD is in this case (if you ask me), there’s a certain intelligence behind it.

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