Well they gave it their best shot. Maybe World Cup will be the one. At least they still have cricket. Hopefully a riot breaks out right nor or something.
There is not an England.<br/><br/>England has a state church, but not a state. There’s a flag, but it doesn’t fly from any public buildings. An arts council, a national opera, some sports teams, and a Defence League: all the little medallions and accoutrements of an actual country, but there’s nothing there to pin them to. All our songs are about something that can’t quite wrench itself into reality. <em>Till we have built Jerusalem. It’s coming home.</em> Strictly speaking, England does not even have its own territory; the <em>real</em> England is hundreds of miles away, a peninsula bulging into the Baltic Sea, universally acknowledged to be part of Germany. The dynastic seat of the heir to our throne is still on that peninsula: Glücksburg Castle on the Flensburg Fjord in Anglia, that peat-bog desert from which the pagan warriors came. England is one of those countries, like Benin or Ghana, that’s chosen to name itself after a place not actually within its borders. Which makes sense: <em>There’s some corner of a foreign field…</em> England only exists outside itself. Once this meant an empire: cricket fields on the Irrawaddy, mass graves in the silt. And it continues, in those stretches of the Spanish Riviera where there’s nothing to eat except beans on toast, but elsewhere things are stranger. In the refugee camp that once sprawled outside Calais, I saw a shanty version of England. There was a small shop there, selling small necessities – energy drinks, thick socks for climbing over barbed wire. The building was made from scrap and cardboard, and the sign over the door read <em>Tesco Metro.</em> Other signs named the Jungle’s streets and gave them London postcodes. Muslims flying the cross of St George. The Syrians and Afghans and Sudanese who lived in this place had built an England far more English than that drab island across the Channel. More English because England is a fake country, an imitation of itself, an unrealised idea that can only phase into existence across its seas – and the camp was like that in every respect, but more.<br/><br/>There is not an English language.<br/><br/>What we speak is an idiot pidgin, a grunting caveman version of Anglo-Saxon, stripped down enough to be understood by the rampaging Danes. The only Indo-European language without any grammatical gender; a dramatically simplified system of conjugation; the faintest ghost of a declension, now mostly limited to the personal pronouns; a flowing poetical syntax, now jammed up in rigid word orders. Actual English, with all its grammar intact, is something very foreign; unremembered and unintelligible. <em>Hwæt ic swefna cyst hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte.</em> Present-day translation: <em>Alright, let me tell you about a cool dream I had last night.</em> If the Saxons could hear us, they’d think we had brain damage, and they wouldn’t be alone. Those who didn’t grow up speaking our idiot dialect tend to notice something hard and ugly there. Poetic turns of phrase that would be completely unremarkable in French or German become something else when translated into English: either an obnoxious <em>floweriness</em>, or else cliché. People who try to write elegantly in English end up sounding like twats, because this is an argot born in the ashes of monasteries and composed of burning books. It’s for raiding and trading, establishing quantities of one thing and their equivalent in another – wool, barley, bond certificates, lives. A pared-down grammar for people who do not share a common world. The writing schools encourage a plain, frank, simple style – if you want to be successful, if you want to turn words into cash. Language itself becomes something like money, the blankness of a universal equivalent. No wonder English took over the world. It’s a speech already atomised; for hundreds of years it prefigured the emergence of capitalism. A flow without codes. Hence the much-celebrated vastness of its lexis: any word of any origin can be incorporated, <em>eaten</em> by English, so long as the digestive process melts away all its grammar, all the structures that make it part of a system of meanings and not just an agglutination of sounds. You can see it happening today, in the mania for scratching off every grammatical gender we encounter. <em>Latinx; filipinx</em>. Unpronounceable in Spanish, but so what? Even the last remains forms of English grammar are being eroded from the inside out. Business emails: <em>Can you action this by Tuesday?</em> Supermarket posters: <em>Time to organic your September.</em> Slogans: <em>Get that deliciousness feeling! Unleash your fierce! I’m hamburgers it!</em> This kind of thing couldn’t happen in any other language; when people want to commit such barbarisms in non-English-speaking countries they’re forced to replace the native words with English. Because English is not a language, but the slop and mulch that remains once language has disintegrated. A puddle without syntax, where oiled lexemes sprawl over each other, each point frictionless and interchangeable; adjectively gone nounish, verbs to interjectioned, and conjunction to preposition of but when after in…<br/><br/>There is not an English people.<br/><br/>There are fetishes: an umbrella, a roundel, a breakfast, an armoury of sexual neuroses and different ways of taking tea. There is a history and a literature. But there are not the English. The traditional account distinguishes between <em>British</em> – an abstract political unit, broadly indifferent to race – and <em>English</em>, the tribe, the metaphor in blood. Because England is not a state, to be English seems less like being French, and more like being a Frank. This is why I still don’t like being described with the E-word: yes, my people came here on a boat, but we did not leap into the surf with war-axe and wooden shield; yes, we built our shrines in this new land, but they were never sacred to Woden. But that concept is changing: now, nine-tenths of the country see no connection between Englishness and ethnic origin. They’re correct, because in fact the tribe never existed. Defoe had it: <em>From a mixture of all kinds began, that het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman… A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction, in speech an irony, in fact a fiction.</em> It’s not just the disparate origins that are always the basis of ethnogenesis; the Englishman was always a <em>political</em> project, long before the Acts of Union. Today, July 12th, marks one thousand and ninety-four years since Æthelstan of Mercia proclaimed himself <em>rex anglorum</em> and brought a new political category into being. But this was not achieved simply through the unification of the Anglo-Saxon tribes: instead, July 12th, 927 is the day that the Celtic kings of Alba, Strathclyde, Deheubarth and Gwent accepted Æthelstan’s hegemony over the entire island of Britain. Why did the creation of the English require the assent of people who were <em>not</em> English? The only possible explanation is that the English are not the same as the Saxons; that they’re not a people, but a <em>process.</em> A swarming, a stamping boot, a subjugation. Once, the English occurred in the act of colonial conquest, from Ireland to every corner of the globe; now, sport substitutes for war. International fixtures set the wheels of Englishness turning; the Tebbit test defines it by your willingness to participate in the fate of our cricket team. This year, England’s footballers seemed to embody an Englishness without ethnicity: these nice lads representing all the diverse communities of our land, kneeling before every game, leading the way towards a kinder, better, more progressive version of English nationalism… Is that really what was going on? Notice that it only lasted as long as England kept winning. As soon as the nice lads missed a few penalties, a sudden explosion of racism. Ethnicity emerges again, in the ugliest form. It’s not just that Rashford and Sancho and Saka have lost the protective sheen of Englishness; it’s been denied to everyone.<br/><br/>But they could only ever lose. The process is always interminable, and victories must never be total, because England and the English always remain outside themselves; without a horizon the system would collapse. An England victory would have made it impossible to chant <em>it’s coming home</em>; it would have brought something which categorically can not exist into the agony of being. In this country, made of unrealised and unrealisable hopes, absent to itself, unpeopled and atomised beyond speech – in the middle of this void, do you really wonder why it is that we lost the Euros on a penalty?
<a onclick="highlightReply('382477', event);" href="/leftypol/res/370918.html#382477">>>382477</a><br/>Because it suits the British deep state to keep them around as a symbol of servitude and former imperial majesty. They are so cucked they are completely pliable to whatever the spooks want, and the price of the royal family is piffling in comparison to what wait they gain. Given they are basically in control of all royal assets, they also serve as wonderful fund and refuge for all kinds of ops. The spooks control the media, the BBC, telegraph, spectator, guardian, sun, so on, so mounting some kind of campaign against them is basically doomed to be a failure.
‘Only in UK’: Shocking clips show ‘prankster’ in SPIDER-MAN costume assault female staff, shoppers in London supermarket (VIDEOS)<br/><a href="
https://www.rt.com/uk/530103-spider-man-attack-london-supermarket/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.rt.com/uk/530103-spider-man-attack-london-supermarket/</a><a onclick="highlightReply('398890', event);" href="/leftypol/res/370918.html#398890">>>398890</a><br/>This would always be my tactic in a supermarket fight as well. <br/><br/>Anyway, came here to ask: which industry sectors are the most ripe for revolutionary activity in britian? Which could be organised into the most radical unions? <br/><br/>Which are not already unionised, or are unionised poorly ? <br/><br/>Speaking from my own perspective, hospitality is horribly under unionised, and as it’s mostly youths you could probably get them to be quite radical. Also generally people I would say do have consciousness of the fact they are getting fucked, and by whom, what is low is the union conciousness, which is devastatingly low and in most cases none existent. It’s a real struggle to get people to properly grasp the concept enough to buy into it, but it’s basically a case of “yeh that’s sounds like a good idea, but you’re not actually serious are you?” <br/><br/>What about in your works?
<a onclick="highlightReply('401371', event);" href="/leftypol/res/370918.html#401371">>>401371</a><br/>A lie made by 'historian', Simon Sebag Montefiore, a literal bourgeois whos entire family were bankers in London and who is currently the heir of the wealthy philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. <br/>So his families wealth and his family (as bourgeois class) literally dates back hundreds of years<br/><br/>He offers no footnote or reference to this: <br/>There is direct quotation of the girl in question's later memoirs, none of which infer any rape or even romance. But from this Montefiore imagines his own story.<br/><br/>He cites a statement by KGB head Serov that supposedly confirms the story but there is no actual reference to this document in the bibliography, nor an image of the document in question. The only direct quote from this source is: “J. V. Stalin started living together with her.”<br/><br/>And we know the two were indeed living in the same house so for all we know, this is just Serov confirming what we already know and not really any romantic/sexual relationship or even one of victimhood. <br/><br/>Incidently, Porky Simon is also behind the "heart of stone" rumour <br/>In an enlightening article in how 'history' is written by bourgeois propagandists this guy tries to find the origins of the heart of stone comment but it's impossible because of how Simon Sebag organises his footnotes <br/>So instead he asks Grover Furr if he had any information on it and he responded with <br/><span class="orangeQuote"><Montefiore is completely unreliable, in all his works on Stalin.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><Moreover, he organizes his “footnotes” so that it is impossible to discern precisely what he bases his statements on.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><No researcher takes his stuff seriously, not even the anti-Stalin researchers.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><This statement comes from Iremashvili, who knew Stalin as a child and became ferociously anticommunist.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><Trotsky says that he became “somewhat of a National Socialist.” Must be true, since he got “political asylum” in Berlin, where he died in 1944.</span><br/><span class="orangeQuote"><Some anti-Stalinists call his memoir “valuable.” That’s nonsense, of course. Iremashvili shows no hint of objectivity, without which no account is worthless.</span><br/><br/><a href="https://diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2020/11/23/following-the-footnotes-debunking-stalins-supposed-heart-of-stone/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2020/11/23/following-the-footnotes-debunking-stalins-supposed-heart-of-stone/</a> All I am seeing in this thread is a lot of poor person jealousy. Like half the posts are so cringe! You’d flip your lid if someone of a class was running you and your poor existence down but it’s ok for you to run them down. You obviously were not raised any better. Just get over it, who cares as to whom is rich or poor.<br/>I was raised in a very deprived area of Leeds, toasting bread on a gas bar fire for days at a time as we had no electric…<br/>I now have 3 cars, a farm yard (no farming though), a few horses for the wife. The children go to a fantastic public primary school but will be going to a private secondary school to have a more focused education. Plus my daughter can take her horse to school… And all I had to do to achieve this is work 75+hrs a week. Yes I’ve literally burnt my arse off, but I can now chill a bit enjoy life and time with my family…<br/>So hard work and determination got me here, but from the perspective of most, if we were to meet today would be “toff”, “over privileged”, rathe than, “shit, the blokes worked hard for him and his family”… the lower classes have always been the most judgmental.<br/>Try not being jealous and work harder… and I know this isn’t and can’t be the case for some but for the other 90% of you it’s no excuse.
<span class="quote">>keep up with the news after a hiatus </span><br/><span class="quote">>finally feel totally hopeless</span><br/><span class="quote">>log onto leftybritpol for a hopepill</span><br/><span class="quote">>realise you're not just totally hopeless, but nobody else cares</span><br/>This really is a hopeless place to live isn't it? I feel like the only glimpse of hope is to leave. <br/>There's no use doing anything here, nobody will care. You're just the idiot that cares about things nobody cares about. Why even continue?<br/>What a disappointing place to be born. What a depressing place to live. I don't get why people immigrate here, and I've met them. It's a country which offers nothing but heartbreak and defeat. You're leaving somewhere you can change for a boot on your neck. A truly hopeless place.<br/>It's all so tiresome, maintaining the decaying shithole where everyone hates you. <br/>You'll never own a home, you'll never have a family, you'll never be represented in government, you'll never have a voice. You exist to make the rich richer. You exist to earn a profit for your boss, and the rest is for your landlord. The majority of the population love this as they love property and business, and you're their slave.<br/>We've been totally defeated. There's nothing we can do to stop this. I can't take it anymore. <br/>Every Tory must die for what they did to this country. None of them deserve to live. Every last one of them from MP to voter, to media shill and influencer. They have to go.<br/>I'm going to continue just to inflict suffering on these fucking cunts that have not only turned the UK into a place nobody wants to live, but the whole planet. They all deserve to live in the misery they've inflicted on the people that serve them.
<a onclick="highlightReply('407184', event);" href="/leftypol/res/370918.html#407184">>>407184</a><br/>It’s really not the case. Yes the stereotype meathead does exist, but join any serious strength training groups on Facebook or something, go to the gyms. All the big guys are just nauseatingly like positive and “you can achieve your goals all you have to do is sweat” types, but overwhelmingly, beginners and lightweights, people with disabilities, etc aren’t bullied by these guys, they are the ones there writing walls of text of advice and does and don’t. They absolutely love giving advice and “every body has to start somewhere anyone can do it as long as you put the work in and ear right” a positive reenforcement and stuff. From what I’ve seen anyway. Probably there are toxic gyms and stuff, but from what I’ve seen, the toxicity of there is any would be toxic positivity not masculinity
<a onclick="highlightReply('415049', event);" href="/leftypol/res/370918.html#415049">>>415049</a><br/>Yeh but it’s not just in activist spaces. I regularly speak to random old people who used to be in the communist party. There is a whole cohort of earlt millennial/gen x trots who were in the whole SSP thing before it collapsed. Most of these people are now in the SNP. You can walk into numerous Celtic pubs with che and Gaddaffi flags, fsln flags, etc. Glasgow itself is covered in various socialist memorials such as Spanish civil war memorials. There is a festival in paisley where they literally burn an effigy of a boss, although Paisley is technically not on glasgow, technically. No, you are correct there isn’t really a guiding party, but there is a huge communist and socialist culture. It’s a city where you extremely regularly meet people whose direct family (dads, uncles, grandads) were in the iRA/are currently in the IRA. The largest football club is explicitly anti fascist and lead the anti fascist movement for years. Being a Tory is a social faux pas, basically nobody who isn’t an out and out tarquin would ever admit to being a Tory. Toryism is shamed and bullied.
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