- Joined
- May 16, 2012
- Messages
- 6,028
I would not dare to comment on Sean's lived experience of the English, he knows them far better than I do. He lives with them.
I just don't care for them, their unthinking intrusion into our lives and their self-regarding national myth.
That whole island could fuck off to the Faroes and I wouldn't miss it; a dying culture rammed up its own hole.
The feeling you probably have when they lose in the Euros? That's how I feel about them all the time.
How most of y'all feel about America? That's how I feel about the English.
Don't care about their election, or how many seats Starmer wins or doesn't. Am staggered daily at how much Irish people truly care.
I just hope his experience in Northern Ireland means good things for the future on our island.
Orwell talks about them being a gentle people. And he'd know.
One can learn a good deal about the spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.
The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement.
But he also talks about the contradiction at the heart of Englishness. One he lived as a cop in India.
With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
That's who they are for me.
Ordinary decent blokes, secretly proud they slaughtered their way around the world.
Sorry for going on, but you know what I'm like.