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Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, EDL, English Defence League, Multiculturalism, Tommy Robinson
When the Manchester United football team play Manchester City, a physical crowd of 70,000 people is these days almost guaranteed. A similar number can be expected at other rivalrous matches like Everton Vs Liverpool, Celtic vs Glasgow Rangers, Tottenham vs Arsenal, and Chelsea vs Human Decency.
These crowds are not drawn by the promise of entertainment (or at least not by that alone) but by emotion and genuine sentimentality.
Tens of thousands of people, young and old, male and female, show up at football stadiums periodically to unload the kind of hatred, loyalty and aggression that was, perhaps only 70 years ago, confined entirely to the battlefield.
And as on the battlefield, the entrenchment of division over extended periods of time has spilled naturally over into personal animosity. Manchester United fans – for example – are known to detest their Manchester City rivals with a racial intensity, often leading to acts of deranged, pointless violence. The same is true of the other examples mentioned.
Every football club in Britain therefore has its own army fit and willing to engage in massive co-ordinated action. The genius of the English Defence League was to try and tap this enormous resource and redirect the energy expended on the irrational into something rational. To take, that is, the hollow love for a corporation (because that is all modern football teams are) and channel it into a love of country and culture.
Indeed, the original name for the EDL – ‘Casuals United’ – (‘Casual’ is an English phrase for a football hooligan hidden among ordinary supporters by the wearing of inconspicuous casual clothes) suggested a unification of the nation’s hooligans into a common formation; one in which all differences would be suspended under a single banner to combat a menace that recognises no distinctions.
And how it worked!… For while at least.
Crowds came out in thousands. Shivers trickled down the coward spines of Islamists in every city. Streets were, for a while, reclaimed – repatriated to the soil beneath their urban paving and all its socialist rot.
And then in Walthamstow, the Socialists fought back and by numbers the EDL was humiliated in a way it never recovered from.
Months later, sensing the ship he built beginning to waver, leader Tommy Robinson converted to moderation, leaving confused and betrayed masses scrambling for land and meaning.
They have since failed to find any.
The EDL is dead. Deader than the BNP, National Front or any other ‘far-right’ political body to which it was once erroneously compared.
Those armies the EDL plucked from the fancy of sport are now steadily returning to the terraces. All their anger will soon be again directed at millionaires booting a ball of leather on a green-grass pitch, and not spent on protesting the encroachment of a religious community who would forbid such gatherings altogether. A sad irony.
Those who still fancy a fight for cultural survival are turning their gaze to the cultureless Thatcherites of the United Kingdom Independence Party; a clique obsessed by money, Europe and rural freedoms.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that as it relates to Jihadism, UKIP is a blunt sword. Nigel Farage, his oratorical brilliance aside, is nothing more than a corporate dandy, politically deep and ideologically shallow.
We would of course be better off under a UKIP regime in the short term, but the long term would likely emerge unaffected.
The search for a viable resistance continues. It is to accelerate that search that we should be frank about the EDL’s demise. It has ceased to motivate or to inspire and should now be disbanded.
D, LDN.
Defend the Modern World 
.. the destination of transnational government, under a common system of law, in which national loyalty will be no more significant than support for a local football team.” – Roger Scruton
It seems ‘Casuals’ are found in more places than surrounding a pitch. Left without traditional moorings of heritage and the kindredness it evokes, the places of the West are doomed. Nationality is composed of land, together with the narrative of its possession. The EDL, the Parties, etc. seem every day nothing more than competing treacheries. We know them more by what they find distasteful in others and little of what they believe essential, transcendental, civilizing. Burke was right. Mill was right. Enoch Powell was right. I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a renaissance. Before I thought that possible I would like to hear apologies all around.
“Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favor of the government against the rest.”
– John Stuart Mill On Representative Government, 1861
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If just one politician of Enoch Powell’s intellectual type arose in England today, he would win by a landslide. That man – despite what many in the country think – is not Nigel Farage.
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The EDL might be weak and worthy of being disbanded, but the impulse that formed it is far from turning insipid. A few months ago, I got to see the photograph of Lee Rigby’s girlfriend and her friends wearing their tattoos. They’ve committed themselves to something, and it’s greater than honoring the fallen soldier. These young people are aware that a conflict is raging, and that by their ancestry and allegiance to English culture and the nation that Lee Rigby was defending, they’ve taken a side. They can’t declare themselves neutral. The Britons, the indigenes will all go through a similar process in which sides will be chosen and the fight will be made.
If you are English, an indigene, your very face dictates a certain course. It is the community you came from, or the community you would imagine. It is reality or fantasy.
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I like your optimism, but what about a scenario like that of Sweden, where the popular will is hooked up to a welfare-drip until they become more in need of government than government is in need of them? When state-dependency reaches a certain point, the majority will accept a long-term dispossession for the sake of short-term gain.
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The threat of complacency is real. My impression is that in the case of England, where the crimes, insults and outrage against English indigenes will become commonplace, there will be backlash. Sweden did not go through the Wars of the Roses, they did not behead a king. The English did. And they did so in response to absolutist rule.
A full plate means nothing if there is no food you want in it.
A home is meaningless if you are constantly having the property you secure stolen.
Islam will make a mockery of British society, no one will be safe in his person or in his property.
I just can’t imagine the English accepting such a scenario.
But I can see such a scenario very clearly on the horizon.
In Late Antiquity and the Medieval eras, England had to endure several rounds of invasion and occupation by various types of tribes, with anti-civilization. I’m sure that this history is being trotted out with the lullaby– we’ll be all right, we’ve endured this before.
The problem is that such a view disregards the Plantagenet and middleTudor years, where power was fought for brutally. England, like Spain, will have a Reconquista. I’m sure of it.
If Islamic rule is so good, then why did the Spaniards fight over a period of 700 years?
The answer is that it wasn’t so good, and in spite of their divisions, the Spaniards got rid of the vermin by sheer resistance. England will do the same.
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I know it seems odd to have someone simply believe in England, but I do. I just believe in you. Always have. And that’s from an American.
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I appreciate the solidarity. Perhaps, ultimately the fate of Europe will depend in part on what America becomes; a beacon of freedom and democracy, as of old… or the mirror-image of an imploding Europe.
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The U.S. is a pluralistic society. Diversity is not an ideal here, it is reality. The problem is that the Ummah has the objective of destroying diversity. To accommodate them is to force a totalitarian unity on the people.
We must disavow unity to protect diversity, if indeed we are committed to doing so.
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Today was a bad day for me. I learned that Peter Tatchell has become a patron of Tell Mama. I can hardly think of a clearer case of siding with your enemy. There is one homosexual activist that I know of in the EDL (he makes videos and speaks at demos). He said that he has tried to interest friends but they say the EDL is homophobic. If they and the middle classes believe the EDL are a greater threat to them than Islam then we may have actually found a real use for the term “false consciousness”.
You wrote in another article about the middle class disdain for the uncouth EDL. It’s true there is a lot of plain snobbery about the issue but the EDL don’t exactly help themselves with their demonstrations, long on noise and “we are the EDL” and short on thought provoking messages. Their turnouts have dwindled since the post Woolwich surge in numbers but I don’t see a benefit in their disbanding. I think the next development will be another atrocity (they can’t help themselves can they?). Perhaps it will take a string of atrocities for the British public to wake up and not go back to sleep again. People will realise that their leaders have been lying to them, and if the EDL are still ticking over when that happens they could be one focus of mobilisation. What really needs to happen of course is for the middle class to get over their politeness. I fear it will take a bomb in Highgate or outside the offices of the Guardian or the BBC to rouse them.
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I agree that the EDL have made criticism rather easy. This is par for the course though, given its open membership plan.
I hope that after the EDL finally recognises its mortality, a better disciplined variant can be formed in its place.
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Quote:
You wrote in another article about the middle class disdain for the uncouth EDL. It’s true there is a lot of plain snobbery about the issue but the EDL don’t exactly help themselves with their demonstrations, long on noise and “we are the EDL” and short on thought provoking messages.
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But the EDL does have members who are articulate, and their reasons for existing are not to be taken lightly. Class is wonderful, yes, it’s an organizing principle. But it does not trump issues and ideas, and the EDL has had to travel into some strange waters. The workingmen who make them up have been forced to think about just what they are doing, and have found a rational purpose behind it. Their campaign is not mindless racism.
It has to do with historical identity, cultural space and integrity, and the freedom of worship (not the freedom of one religion to dictate to others).
Are the Ummah really better friends? Even if they are your class? I would suggest that they are not.
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thanks & good for you eib. amazing how the edl is written off most of the time on this
site. not a positive word is spoken about these brave people. always negative
gloom from ‘elevated’ college intellectuals. there is much more to the edl than
people care to acknowledge. “walk a mile in my shoes” i say.
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It always astounds me how the British put class before everything else. The EDL may not be aspirational Guardian readers with a guilt complex about their identity, but neither are they the stupid apes that your press relentlessly makes them out to be. What else is incredible is the vast amount of Britons who fall for it. Of course, it’s all good and well to have a working class when you need cannon fodder, but don’t associate with them on their home turf. Pathetic.
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