“Black Friday Sale!” yodelled the advertisement, with equal measures of mercantilist ecstasy and calendral imprecision. “From November 20-November 30!” Not even the most zealously patriotic Americans are so in thrall to their national Thanksgiving Day – by presidential decree, on the fourth Thursday of November – that they wish to prolong its aftermath in a gigantic sales day for another ten days. But that’s what happened in Britain and Ireland this year, as the subordinates’ imitation of the imperial master’s rites grossly misunderstood the fundamental nature of those rites.
To be sure, this “empire” is volitional, unlike the Russian, Soviet, British or French empires, all of which were formed by conquest and maintained by violence or the threat thereof. The American empire is quite different, in terms of both governance and culture. Nobody in Washington declares that the British and the Irish must ape American ways: They do so out of choice.
It reveals the frivolousness of both polities that they have chosen to emulate the least interesting and the most self-indulgent part of the American calendar rather than follow the example set by the US in other regards – namely a national self-respect, a firm sense of purpose, an inviolable governmental regard for borders and the rule of law within them.
And here, readers will now be sliding off their chairs and breaking a hip, or choking to death in laughter. Quite so: The writer has already broken two hips and digested his epiglottis just writing the last sentence of the preceding paragraph. For where were the qualities of national self-respect, or sense of purpose, or inviolable governmental regard for borders et cetera under the presidency of Joseph Biden? Nor was he alone in his abdication of those qualities, merely following in the abject footsteps of Barack Obama. Time will probably show that Obama was the worst president in history, and Biden merely copied him, but badly, just as the Irish and the British routinely copy some of the less interesting examples of American life, and do so woefully.
The British and the Irish certainly appear to be heading in two different directions, the British downwards, the Irish upwards. But actually, as part of the EU, which is undemocratic in governance and militarily a parasite on the US, Ireland is simply following trajectory that is oblique to Britain’s, but certainly not in the opposite direction. What both islands do in their unprincipled mimicry of American ways is to delude themselves that they are modern and forward-looking as is the US. Not remotely so.
American myths are for Americans. They have no application for those beyond its continental shores. The Thanksgiving ceremonies commemorate the landing and the survival of the “founding fathers” of the US, which is not true. A previous group of English immigrants to American shores had brought with them a plague, probably smallpox or leptospirosis, to which the local sub-group of the greater Algonquin tribe of Indians had no immunity, and were wiped out almost entirely. So the newly arrived Puritans from Plymouth found that they had inherited cultivated farmland which they could immediately use. That first winter, with their firearms, they were able to fend off a raiding party of Indians. The following March the 47 English survivors were greeted by one of the few Indian survivors of the plague from aboriginal peoples, a man named Samoset, who walked into their settlement, crying “Welcome Englishmen, welcome Englishmen. Have you any beer?”
There lie the ingredients that would spell the death of the Amerindian peoples: Beer, disease, firearms, Puritanism and the English language. That said, the civilisation that the settlers created has been the most successful in world history, enabling it not merely to conquer the continent, but much else. Clearly, the great qualities of the first settlers – of fierce independence, of a willingness to take great risks, of extraordinary courage and of far-sightedness – were too closely linked to their religion to be exportable. Far more easily exportable, and more imitable, were the symptoms of the new civilisation: Its music, its festivals, its food.
Generally speaking, the musical imitations have been excruciating, whether it is Elton John (real name: Reggie Dwight) or Cliff Richard (real name: Harry Webb) or Mick Jagger singing in their hideous pseudo-American accents. Their real importance is symbolic of the triumph of American culture, as it is in breakfast cereals, in barbecues, in hamburgers and the displacement of chips in British-and-Irish English by French fries, in American clothes, and most emphatically in film and television.
Most of this is fine: But what is not exportable is myth. It never is. I was in Paris for the 200th anniversary of the French revolution, and the celebrations of the murder-by-guillotine were simply revolting, as were their re-enactments before the Paris Olympics last year. Invisible in the myths of the Revolution is the near genocide of the Catholics of the Vendée, some 200,000 of whom were put to death. England’s Bonfire Night is a re-enactment of the burning alive of heretics, though its “victim”, Guy Fawkes was in fact hanged, drawn and quartered. His fate symbolises the persecution and exclusion of Catholics from power for two centuries in Britain and Ireland, with the Penal Laws in Ireland ultimately leading to the Famine of the 1840s and a million deaths. The Bolshevik coup in 1917, which led to the deaths of uncountable millions, and is still celebrated in Russia, remains one of the most catastrophic events in world history. The 1916 Rising in Dublin began with the cold blooded murder of a 14-year-old Protestant girl and two unarmed police officers and the requisition of the women’s hospital of the poor house, resulting in the deaths of several patients and nurses. They are now forgotten: The man who directly caused their deaths is a national hero.
Europe is free because of American blood and American armour and American gold. But that doesn’t mean we should produce poor imitations of American commercial culture, especially when we don’t understand the implications. The result of the warm welcome given by the Amerindians was the effective extinction of the welcomers. These have since been renamed “native Americans”, as if calling them after a Florentine explorer in Portuguese service and who never set foot in North America is some form of retributive justice. It is not. Quite simply, other people’s national myths are usually lead-ingots with the blood washed off and then painted gold, in short, utter cant. Volitionally copying them is cant squared.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
British defence: Fraudulent, weak and strikes terror into no one