Whither patriotism? By Dan Hannan in The Washington Examiner.
US versus UK:
A new arrival in the U.S., unless he ends up working in a university or for a federal agency, is surrounded by a patriotic and self-confident culture. Even if he gets a government job, he will pass plenty of flagpoles on his way to work. He will be invited to Fourth of July parties. He will watch uplifting movies.
In Britain, the story is a much bleaker one. Our intellectual elites are so self-loathing that flying the national flag feels subversive, almost as if the country were under occupation. Hence the bizarre phenomenon where, in working-class districts, people will fly British or, more often, English flags from lamp-posts, signaling their contempt both for mass immigration and for their governing caste.
This culture makes it much harder for the children of settlers to integrate. All the crimes I listed above were carried out, not by immigrants, but by the products of British schools. Their parents might have felt a sense of pride in their new country, but the authorities of that country soon knocked it out of their children. …
Did you know?
A century ago, Britain was occupying the ancestral homelands of many of its immigrant communities. Yet, in two world wars, their young men enlisted in huge numbers.
The Indian Army formed to fight in World War I was the second-largest volunteer force in the history of the human race. The largest? The Indian Army formed to fight in World War II.
Reading those volunteers’ letters home — there was no conscription outside the U.K. itself — you are struck by the sense they had that they were defending something worth fighting for, that the values of the Anglosphere were preferable to those of the European autocracies. Mahatma Gandhi was explicit in urging his countrymen to join up. “India would be nowhere without Englishmen. If the British do not win, to whom shall we go claiming equal partnership? Shall we go to the victorious German or Turk or Afghan for it?”
Those words would be greeted with jeering incredulity in any British classroom now, so entrenched is the White Man Bad narrative.