THE ALLIANCE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

From: The English-speaking century (Keith Windshuttle, The New Criterion, February, 2007)

World hegemony, however, has many costs. Like the Romans, the English-speaking peoples would be envied and hated by others. They would sometimes find, Roberts argues, that the greatest danger to their continued imperium came not from their declared enemies without, but from vociferous critics within. One of the constants of their common culture’s freedom of expression has been its propensity to harbor a degree of internal censure that among many other peoples would probably prove fatal.

As early as 1901, British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was complaining: “England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy.” He wrote this about the critics of his policy on the Boer War, an encounter which Roberts demonstrates has ever since been perversely and unfairly blamed entirely on Britain. Winston Churchill was later to remark in a similar vein: “I think I can save the British Empire from anything—except the British.”

The Anglosphere is a little bit like the British Constitution in that it is unwritten, irrational and by all logic unable to withstand one good riot. It is characterized as much by incessant bickering and suspicion as by any natural affinities its peoples can recognize. The Americans have a very long and popular history of anti-English policies and sentiments, the Aussies are adolescent in their chippy hang-ups about “Poms”, Canadians are eternally paranoid the Americans will suck out their precious bodily fluids and the British are too divided and confused about Europe these days to even focus on why they don’t like the rest of us.

Moreover, there is nothing like a public pledge of fidelity to the fellow members of the Anglosphere to get a politician in any of its members in big trouble fast. In Canada, everybody will cheer a call for improving relations with France, China or God-knows-where, but a government that tries that with the States will get hammered. Canadians or Americans who wax poetically at noon about historical ties with England will be pilloried as racist apologists for every Imperial sin on the evening news. The British are so sensitive to the charge that they are lackeys of the “cousins” that anti-Americanism comes in both left-wing and right-wing flavours.

Yet slowly, quietly, we drive the world’s economy and are the only peoples in the world to come together more or less dependably to stand up to worldwide threats like Nazism, communism and now Islamicism. Sometimes we do so enthusiastically, while in other cases we’re dragged in kicking and screaming (and whining) after waiting far too long or spending years headed in the wrong direction. Frequently we do so in the face of bitter, near-seditious opposition from our intellectual classes who ape all the intellectual pretensions of feckless, self-destructive Europe. Yet by some mysterious alchemy we just keep on truckin’ as one when we should have destroyed one another years ago. After all, we tried hard enough.

So the question is, if Roberts is right that the 20th century belonged to the English-speaking peoples, will the key to keeping it that way through the 21st lie in never touting the Anglosphere publically? Are we well-advised to be like the Masons and hand down truth and loyalty privately from parent to child while denying any particular affinity in public? Should we stay mute when our beautiful people keep talking like Europeans, knowing that although we can’t publically defend the irrational, we will always line up (whining)with the Americans when push comes to shove and others cower. Are we history’s first counterintuitive world order?