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BOATLIFT is the story of the largest maritime evacuation in history. On 9/11, over 500,000 people were rescued from Manhattan’s seawalls in just nine hours. How did this happen? What heroism made this possible? The answer lies in the resilience of the every day people at the scene that day, and the brave community of mariners who ply the waters of New York’s Harbor.
A worker inspects the Christ the Redeemer statue which was damaged during lightning storms in Rio [EPA]
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Begin the Beguine!
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Today's selection--from This Was Hollywood by Carla Valderrama. Arguably the greatest of Hollywood’s leading female dancers was Eleanor Powell:
“Mayer signed Ellie to a seven-year contract and gifted her a portrait of himself, inscribed, ‘You are my lucky star!’ MGM built her a special rehearsal hall with two dressing rooms attached, each with its own bath. They also built bleachers on her sets to accommodate the spectators like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable, who always dropped by to watch her dance.
“But what audiences really wanted was to see her dance with Fred Astaire. She would soon get the chance, with Mayer deciding he wanted to pair her with Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940. The only thing left was for Ellie and Fred to meet to make sure their height was a match. At their fateful meeting in Mervyn LeRoy's office, Ellie measured in at five feet, six and a half inches in her stocking feet. Fred, whose height (or lack thereof) was often a subject of debate, would find a way to make do.
“Fred smiled, and the ice was finally broken. Both were perfectionists and often worked straight from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. without noticing the time. Ellie later said that they rehearsed as though they were ‘creating a cure for cancer.’ Eventually, they had to set an alarm clock so the piano player could take a break. They spent two weeks just rehearsing their arm movements for their nine-minute-long routine to Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine, hailed by critics and still regarded as a dance classic.
“As Ellie's career blossomed, so did her love life. Blanche had instilled a fear of premarital sex in her daughter, and Ellie remained a virgin until her wedding day, when she was nearly thirty-one years old. One day in May 1942, she met an up-and-coming actor named Glenn Ford. ‘I had only seen her in black-and-white movies, and in person I was struck by her coloring, her chestnut hair, worn in soft waves to her shoulders, this glowing complexion, and beautiful cornflower blue eyes,’ Glenn recalled. ‘And when she smiled, I was just captivated.’
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For the old Anglo-Saxon nobility, it was a near genocidal catastrophe. Almost all of the Anglo-Saxon nobles saw their lands and property seized by their conquerors. Within a few short years most of the greatest lords were dead, if they hadn’t already been slaughtered at Hastings.
Some of their lesser kind tried to sustain rebellion and resistance, the most famous of these being Hereward the Wake, who would become a particularly beloved English folk hero subject to revivals of interest in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. But customary brutal efficiency of the Normans proved more obdurate than Saxon resentment as the years rolled on, and eventually all of these rebellions petered out.
Others from the previously ruling Anglo-Saxon nobility fled into foreign exile, as they had done more briefly in the power struggles between themselves or in the years of Canute and his sons, with some even becoming exotic members of the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire. There’s a fascinating little known quirk of history that saw a significant exodus of the English flee to the patronage of the Byzantine Empire. Some have asserted that for many generations a kind of New England existed under Byzantine patronage in what is now the Russian controlled Crimea, with four separate chroniclers between the 11th and 14th centuries claiming that between 235-350 ships fled from England to this distant region after the Conquest. All of these chroniclers claim that the refugees founded towns and villages that the Byzantine Emperors allowed them to create and govern, so long as men from these areas served in his military forces and personal bodyguard. Subsequent history and stages of Byzantine collapse swept these English links away, perhaps becoming just a buried DNA trace shared by small numbers of Ukrainians and Russians utterly unaware of their ultimate origin.
Back in England, the Conqueror was coldly determined to break all resistance, and chose overwhelming force of response as the means of doing so. When the remaining northern Anglo-Saxon Earls rebelled, William had ample excuse to remove the last truly significant Anglo-Saxon noble families from positions of influence. His savage response was an orgy of destruction known as the Harrowing of the North, which laid waste to towns, villages and settlements across the entire northern regions of the newly conquered kingdom.
Many historians have argued that the North never fully recovered, and that the modern North-South divide was essentially set by these events almost a thousand years ago. William was so brutal in suppressing revolt that effectively some of the richest regions of his realm became, seemingly permanently, significantly reduced in wealth, population and influence.
What was unique about the Norman Conquest was not the fact that the English had been subdued, or even how close the English came to extinction, but the permanence and the totality of their defeat. Two centuries earlier the English faced eradication and replacement by the Vikings (genetic and cultural forefathers of the Normans, who were merely Gallicised Vikings settled at the mouth of the Seine by treaty between Rollo, first Duke of Normandy, and a French king desperately seeking to buy off persistent raiders). Before Alfred the Great’s miraculous turnaround, it might be accurately said that the English had been reduced to a handful of outlaws in a pestilential marsh. There, perhaps, they had come closer to complete eradication than they did following 1066.
But that was not a permanent reduction, that was not a reduction that would define the difference between the working class and the upper class in England for the next thousand years. The Vikings were a cruel storm, whereas the Normans were a permanent change of climate. It’s estimated that 70% of the private land in England is still owned by families descended from the 20,000 Normans who landed in 1066. While some Normans (and the Bretons who formed part of their number) married Saxon women, it was Norman blood, primarily, that would from that point on flow in the veins of the English upper classes. It’s only amongst the top 1% of our society that Norman DNA had a significant impact, whilst the rest of us (save for some other minor Viking influence) remained solely a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Briton.
One of the things which is therefore odd about the history of the English and of English genetics is that despite numerous conquests most of us were ethnically very homogenous, with part of our heritage stretching back thousands of years before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and part of it coming from the Anglo-Saxons exclusively. For almost a thousand years no further conquests came to complicate either our blood or our ways. Immigration was minuscule, statistically irrelevant. Modish modern recasting of our past is that English identity is one of the most mixed on the planet and always has been, a view which exists solely to suppress the uniqueness of England and its people and to deny them any priority in their own land. But it’s a false narrative, shaped solely by modern race hypocrisies and modern ideological impositions.
It’s far more historically accurate to say that the English had the kind of homogeneity you would expect of an island nation with some martial prowess to its name, and certainly far more internal cultural unity than we now possess.
Even the Saxon and Norman division was eventually healed. The Normans were an unusual people, both unusually ruthless in imposing themselves on others, and unusually adaptive to any environment they found themselves in. They tended to quickly conquer, but then relatively quickly assimilate. In France they learned French ways. In England, despite brutally suppressing the people they had conquered, they eventually learned English ways.
It took multiple generations, but there did come a time when no Norman descended lord spoke French as his first language, and when none would think of themselves as Norman rather than English. They came, they conquered…but then they too were conquered, assimilated into the same identity as those they ruled. The Anglo-Saxons won back by time, rather than by arms, what they had lost on the battlefield. While the same people ruled then, those people thought of themselves differently.
They thought of themselves as English. So who, in the end, conquered who?
That provides the English today with a comforting precedent, but it’s not likely to be one that is repeated. Because today the English are at a greater threat of non-existence than they have been since Alfred hid in a marsh. Today, they face an enemy in Islamic arrivals who have all the brutality of the Normans and none of their adaptability. Islamic arrivals have not and will not assimilate to the point of considering themselves English too, or of adapting to and respecting English ways. Instead, Muslims create Muslim only areas where the English are at risk.
What’s worse, the current political and media elite in Britain is completely happy for these arrivals (or others) to entirely replace the English. Imagine if instead of 20,000 Normans there were millions, and imagine if instead of fighting the invasion, every Anglo-Saxon leader had, from the start and with a calculated dishonesty, preferred the invader to their own people.
The fact is that there has been a long and multi-pronged attempt to eradicate the English, conducted quite often by the English themselves, by their educated and indoctrinated elites, by their comfortable and unaffected middle class who still support open borders and hard left parties from a position of being in the least diverse and most safe parts of the country.
Many years ago Orwell noted that the English intellectual despises his own Englishness and despises even more the poorer working class who do not share that learned and affected self-loathing. But what was a sort of sado-masochistic belief of those most removed from reality has become the operating belief of the society as a whole. It used to be thought that rough Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, a certain realism that disdained abstract approaches contrary to perceivable reality, was a feature that protected the English nation from the excesses that wracked their Continental neighbours.
The English were too sensible to fall to communist revolution. The English were too in touch with reality to go for extreme hard left social positions. For centuries English compromise was not moral compromise, but a sane man’s avoidance of insanity. It gave English governance a stability found nowhere else in Europe, and even when fanaticism did lead to civil war, what is remarkable about the English is that both sides were chastened by it, and learned to compromise better. that’s what the Restoration showed, and it’s what the bloodless Glorious Revolution showed too.
Eventually Saxon common sense had so blunted Norman cold ambition that the English were better at resolving the differences between themselves than other places were, especially the differences between the social classes.
All this survived so long as they were essentially one people….and so long as the intellectuals were not directing the social attitudes of the nation. The strongest defence of English sanity and its often unwritten constitutional settlement, was that not many of us went to university.
Now though, the attitude that Orwell wrote about is totally dominant, and it welcomes invasion and the subjugation of the English with open arms, indeed with active and malign assistance from its police, its judiciary and its media and political class.
For long years the English were quietly but consistently being replaced, abused and betrayed, the demographics of their nation fundamentally altered against their will, whilst at the same time their very existence, their own ethnicity, was denied. They have been told for 70 years that they do not in fact exist, that they are invaders themselves as if a millennia and a half of ownership counts for nothing and as if their blood ties to an even older Briton heritage don’t exist either. Looking at the difference between 19th century and 20th century talk on these topics is remarkable.
English school texts used to talk about the history of the English race, knowing full well there was such a distinct thing and that it was distinct and valuable not just ethnically, but in terms of its culture and achievements too. Today, the race is dropped except when calling them racist. Today, it has become ‘you do not exist…and your existence is the greatest evil there ever was’.
Go into any of those outmoded things called a bookshop and you can find whole walls of texts devoted to this message. Do a Google or an Amazon search on the English or on the British Empire. Post-colonial grievance porn will predominate what you find. For every mild defence of English history and heritage, the kind of still too polite and still too diffident rebuttal offered by a Douglas Murray or a Niall Ferguson, there will be a hundred books spreading the poison of what is essentially Anglophobia (a far, far more real thing, with far, far less justification, than ‘Islamophobia’).
We live in a nation that teaches hatred of our own officially, while pretending that hatred of the Other is the really big problem.
Third generation immigrants comfortably settled in England (and doing very well socially and financially, thank you very much) will tell you how utterly vile all English history was, how the English invented racism and conquest, how the British Empire was worse than Nazi Germany, how Churchill was in favour of gas chambers or Britain invented concentration camps or how India was ruined by the Raj or how Churchill (again) deliberately starved millions in Bengal.
All of these are lies, of course. But they are the common intellectual understanding of the people who rule the English now, and the half-arsed, hypocritically racist truisms with which anyone who gets to an upper level of media and politics has been schooled. They are the ‘I know a tiny fraction of history, but I don’t know enough to know the truth’ version of history that you will encounter in online debates and from both students and professors at English universities.
I don’t think people realise just how fully bizarre it is to have the common assumptions of a people become both that they don’t exist and that their existence explains all evil, at the same time, and for everyone to go around acting as if this is normal. The only other people in the world who have been subjected to this level of hate and gaslighting regarding their identity are the Jews, who have of course suffered this for longer and who also have very many of their own doing it (again, indoctrinated leftists).
Under Conservative governments, we have had people embarrassed to fight back or oppose any of this, or people who support insane levels of demographic replacement for purely selfish economic reasons. Official conservatism has from the 1960s on (and really sooner than that) been terrified of the social stigma of Englishness and of celebrating Englishness. Like others in their social class, alleged conservatives of the Official Blue Party learned at university and at dinner parties that actually liking the English was vulgar and unsophisticated, and that sneering at them was much more nuanced and acceptable.
Attitudes to Englishness divide primarily on class grounds, with the people with the least money and power considering it natural and good to favour your own, and the people with the most money and power considering it natural and good to prioritise and favour anyone else except your own. Once you had that intellectual disdain for the English (based on revisionist and malign history often penned by outright Marxists) percolate through the whole of ‘polite society’ and become the normal lesson of the education system, you ensured that you would eventually get a government that really does want to see the English wiped out.
Not just culturally. But actually extinguished. As a history, as a people, as anything at all except an evil that has been rightly removed from the world.
That is the government and the ruling class that the English have today, even though its membership is primarily white still and many of its chief commissars and apparatchiks are genetically English themselves.
According to now official mantra and even sentencing for crime, the only English that are decent and tolerable are the English who accept, welcome and speed their total demographic replacement and extinction. You can have a place at the top table for one or two more generations if you work assiduously to ensure that your people no longer exist in any meaningful way. If you hate them and despise them, if you base your own idea of self-worth in denying their worth, then you can become a Prime Minister or a Home Secretary or a sitting Judge. But ONLY if you pretend that it does not matter that a million little white children were raped, and that talking about that is far worse than doing it. ONLY if you pretend that footage of huge armed Muslim gangs terrorising white people isn’t real, whilst you imprison people for sharing it.
My American friends and Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders too experience something similar, but I think as adjuncts and versions of this Anglophobia in power. When the US is demonised and hated it is specifically the white portion of America that is demonised and hated, and even more specifically the Anglo heritage of this successor nation. The same is true in Canada, or in Australia, and especially true in New Zealand (as an interesting aside on these attitudes, the Māori people designated as especially worthy by being indigenous have been in New Zealand a shorter length of time than the English have been in England. But the English are never recognised as indigenous, nor is any other white population anywhere in the world).
Kamala Harris recently praised Joe Biden as one of the most consequential Presidents in US history. In one sense, if you take consequential as a positive, it is an absurdity. But in another way it’s probably the most honest thing she has ever said. The half-dead zombie that is Biden is not consequential in any positive fashion or as an individual imposing himself on history. But he is extremely consequential in terms of the impact of his administration, from the nature of its illegitimate arrival to the nature of his personal ignominious departure. He is toweringly consequential if you take that to mean negative consequences inflicted by his administration in his alleged period of rule.
Keir Starmer in the UK is already similarly consequential, after only a month in power. What Blair began, he will finish, just as what Obama began, Biden continued. And that’s a war on the English, a racial war on the English and anything they ever built or their descendants ever built (even their rebellious descendants).
Not since 1066 has a government in my land so hated and despised the people it rules, and been so determined to enslave, reduce, deny, exploit and destroy them. What is happening with mass immigration, with unacknowledged but real Muslim conquest, and with erasure from both the history books and the streets, represents a deliberate attempt to expunge a distinct people from the world, to consign them solely to history. And if you don’t believe that is true, visit the parts of Birmingham or London or Bradford where it has already happened, and find me an Englishman there.
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