My Mum was born on 7th May 1945. My Nan (quite the socialite) used to complain that on the day of the biggest party ever she was stuck in a hospital with a new born baby. My Mum was born to a working class family from London. By all accounts it was quite the clan, all living in the same housing trust in their native Fulham. My Mum tells stories about family gatherings, the celebrations that would go on for days with all the neighbours getting involved. Speaking of which, the family knew all of the neighbours, the children would play together in the courtyard and parents and grandparents would keep a watchful eye over not only their children, but their neighbours’ children too. Those children would all go to the same schools, they would be sent on errands for the elderly or infirm neighbours. Weekends would be spent playing with cousins, friends, or visiting grandparents and aunts and uncles in their homes.
There’s a word for this, it’s one that has been all but forgotten in modern Britain.
Community.
Somewhere along the line all this was lost. Somehow the roots that tied generation after generation to the same home and the same community were severed. Those communities dissolved as the younger generations drifted away. Communities that had been built over generations fragmented and were lost forever. This brave new world had no place for such obsolete concepts. Britons were now expected to uproot and move to new areas, new towns or cities in search of better employment opportunities, the dream of a two up two down in the suburbs, a nice car and a foreign holiday every year. This churn fragmented existing communities and prevented new ones from developing; at least native ones. Technology delivered ever more means of entertainment and recreation. Stay in and listen to records or play video games instead of visiting grandparents. Families glued to the television as they eat their dinner instead of sitting together at a table in conversation. Pay someone else to look after your parents or grandparents in their old age because we no longer have the time nor the inclination to do so.
The so-called liberalisation of women also had a dramatic effect. Gone are the days when a typical working class father could support a family on his income. Now mothers must work too in order to make ends meet. It’s all so wonderful and liberating! Isn’t it? The result is generations of children raised in front of first a television, but in more recent years games consoles and tablets. Even worse when you consider the modern parents who are only too happy to leave their child to be raised by an electronic device whilst they indulge their own pursuits. Let the state education system take up the slack left by the time and effort you don’t spend with your own children. You know those same state schools infected with leftist teachers who will fill your child’s head with all the usual left wing and PC tropes. Fuck the Tories, punch a Nazi, black lives matter, Jeremy Corbyn is just a nice old man who will make everything fairer and more equal…Brexit is terrible and those awful old racists have cheated you out of your wonderful future in the glorious EU.
Critical thinking is most definitely not on the curriculum.
Few realised it, but Britain had apparently stepped into a nice warm bath of post-colonial depression and self loathing, dosed up to the eyeballs on a bizarre cocktail of materialism and socialism before cutting open the veins in its wrists.
When one looks at the parlous state of our society today; the relentless materialism and consumerism, the overbearing self entitlement and selfishness, the children unable to communicate face to face because all they’ve ever known is a screen, the total lack of national identity or awareness of heritage, the absence of work ethic, individual and collective responsibility, the sheer soul destroying apathy and disinterest in anything beyond the work-consume-work-consume cycle, like a herd of bovine livestock shuffling towards the Halal abattoir braying their virtue signalling on social media….
It can all be traced back to that dissolution of community. This was the enabler, the process that allowed the growth of the state, the growing authoritarianism to the point where we find ourselves today, mass immigration, child sex slavery, the massive welfare state, the evils of political correctness and thought crime, the selling out of our sovereignty to a de-facto Fourth Reich. All threads lead back to that initial fracturing of family and community.
How can we ever possibly expect a child who only sees their grandparents or cousins a handful of times each year, who doesn’t play in the street with the neighbour’s kids, whose parents don’t even know the neighbours’ names, who travels ten miles to school every day and best friend lives in the next town, who can only communicate via an electronic device…
…how can we expect them to even grasp the concept of community, let alone appreciate the value of it?
I grew up in the 1980s and 90s. I only ever knew a small part of my Mum’s family. By the time I arrived it had long since fragmented and scattered to the winds. I never knew the neighbour’s kids. My parents never talked with or took the time to get to know the neighbours. I travelled eight miles to school every day. My best friend lived seven miles away. My Dad worked about thirty miles away, my Mum about seven miles away. I was was close to my immediate family, my parents and siblings, but beyond that there was little connection with the rest of the world.
Strangely enough when I went to sea at age 22 I got a glimpse of what real community must have been like. Anyone reading this who has been to sea will tell you hundreds of men living on top of each other in a steel box in the middle of the ocean will develop a sense of community very quickly. You work together, spend your free time together and socialise together. Bonds form quickly and a sense of group identity and belonging follows soon after. You may not necessarily like everyone but the bonds of community exist nonetheless. The absence of this has been something I’ve found difficult to come to terms with since I left the service.
When I think of this current state of affairs I come to a disturbing and unpleasant conclusion. If one were seeking to usurp a society which had won its rights over many hundreds of years, rights that had been enshrined into the law, into an unwritten constitution and written with the blood of generations – if one sought to replace this society with an authoritarian plutocracy, a modern incarnation of feudalism then this is exactly how one would go about doing it.
Community is the very foundation of society. Common interests, mutual cooperation and protection. The ability to communicate and share information and ideas. The ability to organise. A sense of identity, of belonging, of “this is my home and these are my people”. A purpose and a role for the individual within the group.
If you rob people of their community you can isolate them. You can sever their bonds of loyalty and shared identity. You can far better control the information they receive and limit their ability to share it. You can remove their support network and force them to become reliant on the state through welfare. You can make them acquiescent. Their isolation and lack of connection to a community leaves them no other choice than to be what they’re told to be. With natural communities gone we can create groups based on artificial identities at will, set them against each other and then destroy them when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Intersectionalism; divide et impera. Without communities to protect and defend men can be more easily emasculated generation by generation. Likewise by usurping family and community, by replacing the husband and father with the welfare state women can be distracted by such poisonous nonsense as third wave feminism and plunge society further into dysfunction.
You can buy a fancy car, a luxury holiday, a seven bedroom house with double garage and an acre of land. You can’t buy family and you can’t buy community or shared identity. They are the most precious things we can lay claim to, they are the real wealth and without them we are bereft. They’re the very fundaments of a free and open society, the tree from which social capital grows. The more you think about it the more you will come to realise how crucial these things are for us and our future.
This is why the bonds of family, community and shared common identity MUST be rebuilt. If not we have no hope of recovering the situation before it’s too late.
© Æthelberht 2018
