Redstate

Should they chuck it, too?

Let's not get too complacent here, either. I can see this type of national self-loathing in several corners of the United States as well.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/12/nwedd12.xml

Heck, I didn't even think "fun" was permitted under Sharia. At least they are going to let the infidels attend rather than kill them. But of course if they break any of the rules...

it is just that in the civilized world we don't put floggings, stonings, and beheadings in the "fun" category.

that anyone under about 40 has a clue what that phrase means unless they found it themselves or went to a private/religious school.

I couldn't believe the way that young lawyers who worked for me butchered even "legal Latin" in both pronunciation and usage.  I wanted to throttle them every time I heard "rez jew-di-kay-tah" or "stair-ray dee-sigh-sis."  

...unionists, monarchists, quick with the head-butt, and policemen and customs agents the world over fear them.

OY!  OY!  OY!

--furious

militant Christendom and English particularity, both of which are obstacles to the brave new world.  Muslims no doubt really are offended by the sight of the cross, which at least proves that they are still men, but they are being used by the state for its purposes, not using it themselves.  When the last church has either been boarded shut or reduced to preaching unitarian universalism from a bowdlerized Bible, the busybody class will come for the mosques, too.

of English identity as Blair.

actual complaints. The implicit threat is already embedded in the British psyche. During the "cartoon demonstrations" earlier this year a cop threatened to arrest an angry British truck driver heckling the demonstartors, telling him that "we don't want to make them angry" --- implicit in that is "we know what they do when they get angry."

I think the British and Europeans are in a race with themselves. The race is to see if they can transition to Eurabia before the people rise up and toss the Muslims out, citizens or not.

I reprinted Chesterton's magnificent poem "Lepanto" here just six weeks ago. It is said that in the trenches ofthe Western Front during WWI, the English soldiers read it aloud and it gave them hope. We should renew that tradition on battlefields (which are our own cities, it seems) of today.

My reading of this article indicates that this is, at present, the suggestion of a few clergymen and that the Archbishop of Canterbury has yet to make up his mind on the matter.  Before we proclaim the dying gasp of Britannia, might we wait a little while and see how the public reacts?

Legions of Englishmen and women were out in force for the World Cup bearing St. George's Cross on flags and faces.  I also still hold out hope for David Cameron and the Conservatives to come on strong when Blair finally gives up the wheel on the ship of state.  

Don't lose hope!

Cardinal Newman said that to be self-taught is a great misfortune. What would he think of an entire generation whose only learned men are self-taught?

When the Spanish abandon him I'll really get concerned.

below the article, there seems to be a great deal of outrage about this, which is encouraging. One poster stated that England won't be recognizable in 50 years. I believe it.

I just wonder how much of this nonsense the average Englishman and woman will take before they finally say enough and take back their country from the sniveling leftists that govern and minister over them.

The Church of England is pretty much the Church of Nobody these days. They can do what they want. In the real world, you see more English flags than Union Jacks in many parts of England.

The British have faced awful threats before. There are nearly 60 million of them, and only 2-3 million Muslims. The multi-culti nonsense will stop when the average Briton starts to feel really threatened. If the Tories dont't step up and defend British nationhood, then the BNP will.

What if you were never taught Latin?

It's sad to see what the Christian West has become.

I do agree that in a lot of the countries of the west there are people who feel as helpless about this foolishness as we often do.  But at some point you have to rise up and say "No More!"

There, and here.

Thanks for dropping by.

now you know why it exists, although a term repellant to certain portions of our population.  Still, what we are witnessing is a culture dying right in front of us, in historical fast forward.

    The fruits of Western modernity and progressivism are turning rotten before our eyes, in a time span almost unknown since the written word.

Europe is becoming an outpost for America rather than it's own civilization.  And what does the main line of defense do when the outpost is lost?

     Bombs may not be the deciding factor, relativism and a forced hyper-tolerance may be enough.

The Spanish hold Sant'Iago in high enough regard anymore to officially abandon him...

He's like an abandoned relic on the side of the road.

I seem to remember that even the hint of a crescent in the memorial was enough to drive y'all into a feeding frenzy that would make a Piranha blush.

But I guess it's okay if it's your political correctness agenda.

This is an Anglican problem. After all, the Vatican is getting it right:

“Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It’s our duty to protect ourselves.” Thus spoke Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican’s supreme court, referring to Muslims. Explaining his apparent rejection of Jesus’ admonition to his followers to “turn the other cheek,” De Paolis noted that “The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century … and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights.”

Just because the Anglicans are committing suicide, doesn't mean that the rest of the Christian world is interested in joining them.

MacCauley tug the mystic chords of memory in GB any more than Longfellow, Whitman, or Sandburg do here amongst those educated after the 1960s.

For two generations here, it has been possible, even likely, to get a HS Diploma or even a college degree with no exposure whatever to the classical Western literary canon.

Twenty years ago in my profession, written arguments were filled with Biblical and literary alusions.  Today, there are almost none and then only amongst us "oldsters" mostly writing to ourselves and people like us.

In the last days of my career, my whole staff was college educated twenty - thirty somethings.  First, I felt like an English teacher correcting everything they wrote; some of it looked like I'd slit my wrists over it.  Chatty, colloquial, no sentence or paragraph boundaries; and these were mostly law school graduates.

There was no point in any literary writing at all and certainly no point in alusion and all the other tools of indirect communication; it was lost on them and on the triers of fact and decision makers to which they were writing.

The government schools with their dumbing down and political correctness have eliminated the chords of our culture and I have no reason to believe they haven't done so in GB as well.

The Ablative Absolute almost made me suicidal. But reading Medieval Latin is one of my great joys.

I went to a public high school, and lucked out with two great Latin teachers. Law school was painful on the ears. ("Rez ipsuh lockwitter," "prymuh fashiuh," etc.)

the article didn't mention any Muslims actually complaining about the flag. It smells more like pre-emptive PC to me.

While we fret about offending people, our enemies fret about how many of us they can kill at once. It's a losing formula.

is immaterial, its the principle that counts :-)

there is not a British nationalist on the British political stage today. The UK is in a slow but inevitable death spiral towards becoming a feifdom of Brussels and part of Eurabia.

Some are fighting a valiant rearguard action but you can't find a British politician in the mold of a Thatcher or a Churchill.

And give it your best run.

Half of my Latin is self-taught. Four years' isn't enough to master the language, just enough to get the basics down and be able to read all but more esoteric work. And the Latin program where I went to college was awful.

It will be as effective at reversing the decline as the American silent majority was and has been.  Which is to say, not effective at all.  The lights are still out across the entire European world.  

Those reading this may want to note that in a couple of months, a new G. K. Chesterton book will be out with an extensive collection of his remarks about war and those who lack the guts to fight it. The planned title is Chesterton at War.

Chesterton is perhaps the best modern spokesman for an all-too-rare-today Christianity with a backbone and for the idea that everyone from individuals to nations should fight for what they believe against those who would regiment them.

His "The Ballad of the White Rose" (in G. K. Chesterton's Early Poetry) chronicles King Alfred's brave stand against an invading, paganized terrorism. It was so inspiring that the Times of London placed a quote from it on their front page on one of the darkest days of World War II. The almost Churchian words came from from a vision in which Alfred is told to fight whatever the odds:

"I tell you naught for your comfort,

Yea, naught for your desire,

Save that the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher."

Chesterton's great epic "Lepando" describes a critical naval 1571 battle--the last fought with galleys--that turned back an Islamic invasion of Southern Europe which would have made St. Pauls in Rome into a mosque. The battle began when the head of the Christian fleet, Don Juan of Austria, ordered his helmsman to steer straight for the flagship of the Turkish fleet, challenging the Turkish commander to single combat in an age when fighting ships meant boarding and hand to hand combat. Aided by a change in the wind at precisely the right moment, by courage, and by superior tactics, the invading Islamic fleet was defeated and Europe spared the sorts of repressive regimes that even today dominate the Middle East.

Perhaps most interesting of all, in "The Ballad of the White Horse," King Alfred keeps reminding the English to repair the White Horse that stands on a hillside above their villages. It represents a past and a history that needs to be kept alive and taught to each succeeding generation, much as modern English school kids need to learn about St. George.

Like many RedStaters, I travel to the U.K., and have been since the 70s (oops! Dating myself).

Except within a small fairly conservative circle of acquaintences - I cannot find what I once knew as the British character. I never associated with the Bernie Wooster/Jeeves-type of folk so far as I know (unless they were in uniform) - just the old gutsy, in-your-face outrageous Englishman that I alternatively loved and eschewed; but always recognized and respected.

No more.  I am certain that that character still exists in the U.K. but  only know of one place to find him when I travel there.  Alas, it seems that the England of St. George (and Arthur and Robin-the-Hood, and Guy Fawkes) is gone.

It might just be me but I have had for some time the sinking feeling that the anti-monarchists might prevail in that country.  Love or hate the Crown, that institution remains emblemmatic of all that is and once was Britain.

I have a difficult time choking down the vision of the U.K. finally slipping beneath the surface of a political muck comprised of nothing but scurrying, banal, self-centered and greedy little parlimentarians.

Paul Cella, is that image you are using for this article in the public domain? Would you mind providing a link to where you got the image from? Its very neat, and I'd like to use it for a project if its either in the public domain, or I could get permission to use it from the owner/artist.

Thanks.

Some "modern" Christians seem to be under the delusion that Christ's role was to repeal the Old Testament (where fighting evil was done with the sword) and now the only thing that should be done (to face down evil) is die bravely. I don't think "lose to evil bravely" was Christ's message.

to these people that St. George (if he existed at all) never fought a muslim in his life?

today, you have to be self-taught.  My oldest step kid just graduated from Eastern Washington.  He has never in his life read a whole book, and I don't know how you'd get him to because God knows I tried.  He has a feel for politics because he sat at the dinner table in a very political home, but he has no intellectual underpinnings for the politics.  

I was fortunate that my Dad had a more classical education (starting with about 400 years of Latin at a Christian Brothers high school and going downhill from there) insisted that at least part of it rub off on his kids.

Translating Latin is like linguistic calculus.  It isn't literal at all, so there's a lot of figuring out what it means.  Beyond that, it is pretty useless except to show off and sometimes to call BS on modern translations of the literature.  I'm not good enough at it to do much of that, though

I wouldn't let my staff use it in briefs or memos and wouldn't let them use it orally unless they could pronounce and use it correctly.  They learned the concepts in English pretty quickly; just like they learned how to write simple, declarative sentences.

in Georgia in the sixties, it took two years of Latin AND a foreign language to get a college prep diploma.  Now they don't let them do college prep diplomas because it might damage the self esteem of those who only got a regular diploma or, heavens forbid, a GED.

My grandmother went to what passed for public education in rural Georgia in the 1890s - '00s and two years of "Normal School."  Even in her eighties she could rattle off long passages of Caesar's Gallic Wars and do all those complicated conjugations and declinsions.  She always told me that if I couldn't speak, read, and write Latin and at least read Greek, I'd always be a barbarian.  I guess she was right!

I just wonder how much of this nonsense the average Englishman and woman will take before they finally say enough and take back their country from the sniveling leftists that govern and minister over them.

There is hope in this, I suppose: but what force the opinions and convictions and sentiments of "average Englishmen" may have is not easy to discern. They may all detest what their leaders are doing to their country -- and yet be powerless to stop it.