Is there any such thing as a pristine Englishman? Our language is a
mixture of French, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norse, and so are our genes. We talk
about people having Roman noses. Many of the words we use, have originated from
India and the rest of the British Empire. Old English would be incomprehensible
to most of us and Middle English, barely comprehensible.
Around 6 million people living in Britain are said to be of Irish descent, including me. Given that we're a mongrel race, a mixture of all sorts of cultures, and have colonized and conquered much of the world, I find it strange that so many people in Britain, are fixated on colour and race and have an aversion to foreigners. At the end of the day, we're all part of the human race.
In 1940, Bill Connor, of the Daily Mirror, wrote: "Our children are guarded from diphtheria by
what a Japanese and German did. They are saved from smallpox by an Englishman's
work. They are saved from rabies because of a Frenchman. From birth to death,
they are surrounded by an invisible host - the spirits of men who never served
a lesser loyalty than the welfare of mankind."
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1 comment:
Absolutely, the correct perspective with regards to nationality. I find it equally incomprehensible that too many people see themselves in their immediate context. They make no effort to understand how their own families may have been affected by population movements or to learn more of their own ancestral backgrounds. Instead, they see themselves as exclusive to a particular nationality or culture. Based on a misguided belief in their own superiority and that of the nation or culture with which they identify. The difficulty in counteracting such beliefs is that they are founded on a limited thought process and they are not constructed on intellectual evaluations. So any effort to educate is either dismissed or not understood.
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