Tuesday 15 September 2015

Corbyn, the MP for Absurdistan, is happy to belt out "The Red Flag" but refuses to sing "God Save the Queen"

The new Labour leader is a pacificist who would like Britain to follow the lead of mighty Costa Rica in doing away with its armed forces. Presumably, he'd also be happy to follow Costa Rica's lead by turning the United Kingdom into an impoverished, crime-ridden, third world hellhole. That's the problem with holding bat-shit crazy extremist political views - you inevitably end up in Absurdistan (which is, I believe, the parliamentary constituency he represents).

You know you're in the presence of an Absurdistani when you discover they're happy to tunelessly murder "The Red Flag" at the drop of a hat (or, in Corbyn's case, at the announcement of his victory in the Labour leadership election), but then absolutely refuse to soil their vocal chords by singing "God Save the Queen", even during a 75th anniversary service at St Paul's Cathedral commemorating the men and women who sacrificed their lives in the Battle of Britain so that their countrymen wouldn't end up being ruled by an extreme left-wing totalitarian vegetarian atheist fruit-loop who considered murderous anti-semites his "friends" and absolutely loathed England and its Monarchy. (Yes, I know -  reductio ad Hitlerum and all that, but it's just too hard to resist.)
Old Looney dreams of replacing the National Anthem with "Imagine"
Given that poor old Jezza only managed two "E"s at A-level, perhaps he simply finds it hard to remember the words of the National Anthem, in which case he should just move his lips in the manner of the unfortunate John Redwood, who, after being appointed Secretary of State for Wales in 1993, found himself having to pretend he knew the words to the Welsh anthem at a televised convocation of Tory taffs. But whether or not Corbyn was let down by his powers of recall this morning, there was really no excuse for the tediously symbolic red tie or studiedly ill-mannered unbuttoned shirt collar. That's the kind of silliness you'd expect from a truculent, spotty, 15-year leftist herbert who's just managed to struggle through the first ten pages of The Communist Manifesto while moving his lips rather than from the 66-year old leader of the second biggest political party in the fifth biggest economy in the world. Even Alex Salmond realised that, no matter what your views, if you want British electors to vote for your party, you don't insult the Queen or the armed forces or those who sacrificed their lives for their country.

But, then, I suspect Corbyn doesn't have the slightest interest in winning a general election. Like Michael Foot before him, he knows in his heart that he's really just a posturing old ninny who, by some odd quirk of fate, and quite unexpectedly, has found himself leading a mainstream political party, and he's buggered if he knows what to do with it. The main difference between Corbyn and Foot is that the latter was a wildly impractical intellectual, while the former gives every indication of being a wildly impractical dunce.

"The Red Flag" is an anthem which celebrates a political belief system which caused the death of over 100,000,000 human beings during the 20th century, and is still claiming victims in demonic dystopias like North Korea. It celebrates division, hatred and bloodshed, and represents the mad, murderous philosophy of enforced egalitarianism born during the French Revolution. The second line of the song is "It shrouded oft our martyred dead." As the vast majority of those massacred by adherents of the Red Flag have been non-communists, I have no idea how any but the most poisonously hate-filled lefty could sing that line without a deep sense of shame.

Turning to the anthem which Corbyn refuses to sing - true, there are certainly references to crushing Britain's enemies, presumably by violent means:
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks...
But if you don't want your nation's enemies scattered and their knavish tricks frustrated, then you presumably want Britain's enemies to succeed. This suggests that David Cameron should be extremely circumspect when it comes to sharing intelligence regarding national security with the current leader of Her Majesty's Opposition: the PM should probably confirm that we do indeed have military forces, nuclear weapons, and spies, but I don't think there's really any need to go into more detail.

The sixth and final verse of the National Anthem might, however, prove problematic for someone of Corbyn's passionately pacifist bent:
Lord grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring
May he sedition hush
And like a torrent rush
Rebellious Scots to crush
God save the King
But, then, as Labour has itself just been crushed north of the border, wouldn't its leaders rejoice to see "rebellious Scots" similarly trounced and forced back into the Labour fold? Certainly, Field Marshal George Wade isn't likely to appeal to a confirmed white-flag waver like Corbyn, but, apart from his military exploits and foiling sedition, Wade is credited with having built bridges and proper roads in Scotland, and those are the sorts of things lefties are always banging on about (as long as they're funded by higher taxes on bankers, obviously). In any case, the final verse is now usually omitted (along with the fourth and fifth, which are all about, respectively, spreading brotherly love around the globe and saving the Queen from assassins), so, really, there's no excuse for Corbyn to go on acting like a petulant, ill-mannered schoolboy.

7 comments:

  1. No prizes for recognising who wrote:

    In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box ...

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    1. I have never read Orwell's essay. It is brilliant. Thank you very much David Moss for providing the link.

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    2. It's a shame Orwell went to Eton. If he hadn't, I suspect it would never have occurred to him to become a socialist. I see from this week's Spectator that the excellent left-wing Nick Cohen has finally turned his back on the Labour Party, and I'd be surprised if Rod Liddle hadn't done so by the next general election - they'll never be Conservatives, but they both belong somewhere on the lively, sceptical, practical, right-wing end of the political spectrum, where Douglas Murray currently resides.

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    3. England Your England is Part I of Orwell's long essay/short book The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. I'm very glad you enjoyed it, SDG. It was the advent of Corbyn that reminded me of EYE, obviously, and that closely observed "querulous" impotence of the left-wing ideologue. But I couldn't remember much else and had a re-read before getting back to you.

      I'd forgotten about Orwell's distinction between naval power nations and land power ones. Sounds clever. Someone else not I can do the PhD.

      The pre-eminence of patriotism, English gentleness, hypocrisy is vital, ... nothing prepares you for the juvenile Shopkeepers at War (Part II) and The English Revolution (Part III), you wouldn't know they were written by the same man.

      The war is an opportunity, apparently, for revolution. We can get rid of all the useless rich people, no poor people are useless, planned economies work, laissez-faire capitalism is dead and Franco didn't really win: "Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary. By revolution we become more ourselves, not less". Querulous.

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  2. For me the really irritating thing about Comrade Corbyn is that he chose to sing The Red Flag with Billy Bragg. Billy has been spouting left wing drivel for nearly as long as Jeremy. At the drop of a hat he will talk about the benefits of mass immigration and the evils of Conservative governments. However, for some reason known only to himself, he chooses to live in leafy Dorset, a beautiful county that is almost exclusively white and hasn't had any socialist representation in its history. I can't understand why he doesn't move back to east London with its rich and diverse ethnic mix and its plethora of socialist councils and Labour MP's.
    It's baffling.

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  3. More to the point, Billy Bragg has an unpleasantly whining nasal voice, a ploddingly Play-in-a-Day strum by numbers guitar technique and writes teenage agitprop songs with lyrics that read like an International Times editorial from the 1960s.

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  4. What confuses me about Billy Bragg (his hypocrisy is taken as read) is where did he get enough money to buy an enormous house on the Jurassic Coast? He's never sold many records and I can't believe his live appearances are particularly well attended, or that he would feel comfortable charging high ticket prices. Besides, being a compassionate socialist and lover of humanity, wouldn't he have given his money to good left-wing causes and his various pet victim groups rather than spend it so lavishly on his own comforts? Anyway, having seen photographs of his estate, the good thing is that he could offer homes to at least 40 Syrian refugees - probably more - and has no doubt already done so.

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