All countries have their fault-lines, but there is perhaps something unique about the tensions in English society. The higher society, the elite, has a contempt for its culture and heritage. So much so that to prove one's high status it makes sense to treat one's national identity with contempt. It is almost the test for belonging to the higher status class to demonstrate what would now be termed "woke" opinions. Nonetheless, this is a longstanding trait in the English national character. Nowhere was this unique aspect of our character more clearly illustrated in contemporary times than during and in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum. A referendum on national sovereignty in large part split down lines of class. The less-educated, the more poorly paid, those who often would have voted for the Left, backed national independence, demonstrating a belief in their country. Meanwhile, as if to show their social status the upper middle-classes on the whole, in attempting to demonstrate their lack of attachment to national identity, voted against national sovereignty and looked with contempt upon the honest patriotism of those they saw as being of a lower social status. Being unpatriotic and regarding one's compatriots with contempt was a way to indicate high social status.
The Brexit referendum merely highlighted in sharp relief a longstanding national tension. And where did it originate? So deep in the metaphorical DNA is this trait and tension that we must look far back. Perhaps Sir Walter Scott, highlighting the deep division in his novel Ivanhoe, with the outside perspective of a Scot reached the heart of the matter - the divisions left by the Conquest. He pointed to how words to describe livestock are English, while words describing the meat itself are French - demonstrating the way the conquered English serve the invading French.
Has anything really changed? Many of the most powerful families in the country tend to be from the Conquest and many of these elite have contempt for our national identity, focusing instead upon cosmopolitanism, open borders, and destructive liberal social reforms that are killing the country demographically. Many of the powerful must have a deep sense of being from elsewhere and having an identity above the native identity of the serfs and peasants. As middle class families go through universities they learn the best way to indicate their new social status is to hold their heritage in contempt and adopt so-called "woke" opinions.
Perhaps we might develop this point further to understand the different characteristics of Anglo Saxon and Norman. The Anglo Saxons were focused upon the homestead, their faith and their farms. There was no standing army. Alfred the Great organised the translation of the Bible into English. Monks, peaceful and spiritual were subject to the raids by the cousins of the Normans, the Vikings.
And that is where we also can find the root of the Norman character - Vikings settled in the North of France after raiding and piracy succeeded. Just as in Sicily, where the Catholic Normans plagued the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, in the North of Europe too on the stormy waters of the North Sea, in their own world, the Normans were pirates.
It is not in the insularity and conservatism of our Anglo Saxon forebears and fathers that we find the character enthused by so-called Anglo Saxon economics that uproots communities and focuses on international trade. The Normans brought to this island the spirit of piracy. Even on the side of Brexit there are the Normans, wanting to turn this ancient homeland into a Singapore of the West, rootless and cosmopolitan, preoccupied with treasure and lucre. Whereas the Anglo Saxon yeomanry of England voted leave to secure their borders out of concern for loss of identity through out of control immigration.
Perhaps in the enthusiasm amongst our political class for foreign wars we see again that pirate Norman spirit. And it is our Norman blood that leads us to try to destroy Russia, with our addiction to the geopolitical Great Game. Here we inevitably think of a Russian thinker so critical of Anglo Saxon geopolitics, Aleksandr Dugin. He has resurrected interest in British geographer Mackinder, who saw geopolitics as a clash between liberal, free-trading sea powers and the heartland of Eurasia, focused on tradition and roots - the large empire based on God and Monarchy, not filthy lucre and trade.
Surely our island is in itself a microcosm of this geographical division. There is real conservatism in England and a rootedness to the land and our heritage. Contrast this with the enthusiasm of our elite for liberalism both socially and economically. The elite pushed the sexual revolution. The elite pushed the economic revolution. Sharks and bullies from lower status exploited the opportunities in making money and the working class has been destroyed by social liberalism and the sexual revolution. These revolutions were led by the elite with its Norman blood, with no real sense of rootedness or the ethics of the ethnos.
Another tragic trait of being conquered is a sort of obsequiousness of the subjugated as elites send our young men to die, exploiting our lionhearted bravery, or send their jobs abroad. Patriotic as we are, our trust in the elite has meant we have allowed agendas that destroy our identity and past to be pursued, from mass immigration and multiculturalism to sending jobs abroad. We are forced to abandon our history, our traditions, our faith to accommodate the multicultural society that suits the powerful.
That surrender to our current masters goes back to a pacific Anglo Saxon attitude post-1066 to accept the new masters. Nonetheless, the picture is nuanced. The Norman Royals ensured they married into the Anglo Saxon House of Wessex. The monarchy is the institution supported by the ordinary people even today and mocked by the shallow elites, who being alienated from the beginning have no affection for our history.
Not all the Anglo Saxons accepted the Conquest. Men of deep Christian faith they sought refuge, not in Papal Rome with the Great Schism still echoing through Europe, but in Orthodox Constantinople, joining the Orthodox Emperor's Varangian Guard and taking the fight to the Normans in Sicily, only to be slaughtered by their old enemy. It is said though that many Anglo Saxons were settled by the Emperor by the Black Sea as a "new" England.
The matter of the Great Schism is also of import here. Today's Russian Church recognises pre-Conquest Anglo Saxon saints as Orthodox. As an island England was untouched by many of the Papal innovations. From the point of view of the Orthodox the Anglo Saxons remained Orthodox. The schism only occurred a dozen years before the Norman Conquest. It seems, given their choice of refuge the Anglo Saxons also saw themselves as Orthodox at the time, not Roman Catholic.
In England post Conquest, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, was to redefine the understanding of salvation as satisfaction by Christ's death to God, pictured as some feudal Lord. Anselm was canonised by Rome, but this theological innovation separated Roman Catholicism further from the Orthodox Church.
And what does this tell us about how we as the English should live today? The Anglo Saxons were a peaceful and deeply Christian people, an Orthodox people it seems. We can either metaphorically look to Constantinople or accept the settlement of the Norman Conquest. This does not mean political schemes, but rather a spiritual change - rediscovering our lost spiritual heritage. To some extent that would put us in the tradition of the English reformers such as Tyndale who reverted to the Greek rather than the Latin to try to rediscover a less legalistic faith. Of course that English reformation was seized control of by the elites and became instead an orgy of iconoclasm, very contrary to the spirit of Orthodoxy.
We need to rediscover the Grail of the faith. We need to return to English Christian spirituality prior to the Conquest and no longer accept the co-option into the Papal institution by our Norman conquerors. We must return to the faith of our fathers.
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