The Heirs of Waterloo

The ones the Duke of Wellington called "Scum of the Earth"

The Duke of Wellington is generally agreed to have been one of the best strategists in history. Of course he is most famous for Waterloo, but people who study military campaigns put that particular battle lower down on the list of his victories.

The Peninsula Campaign, where he kicked the French out of Portugal and then Spain is more impressive in terms of how he managed to beat a numerically superior force on what was more or less home ground, but probably even more impressive is his early career in India where he defeated simply enormous armies of Indians and foreign mercenaries with comparatively tiny forces.

One of his tricks, in both India and Iberia, was getting his men to take cities by storm - a thing that only worked because his troops were, compared to the defenders, unbelievably fierce warriors who would outfight any three defenders. Of course it didn’t always work, and when it didn’t he lost a lot of troops, but it worked often enough that he kept on doing it.

The troops that did this were described by him variously as scum, drunkards and other insults, but there seems no doubt that he respected their fighting ability too. Hence the quote in the picture.

Those men, and their naval brethren in arms, are what gave Britain its empire. Some of their descendants kept the Empire when the Indians rebelled and others conquered large chunks of Africa, defeated the Chinese and so on. Now it is true that in many cases the British troops had better technology and better logistics, but if the men at the pointy end aren’t willing to fight then all the technology and logistics won’t help.

My friend Sarah Hoyt has written in various places that WW1 killed the best of much of Europe and, by implication, that might be thought to have included the maniacs who fought for Wellington and the empire, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Almost a century after WW1, thanks to a series of ROE, logistical etc. screw ups, a British army patrol in Basra, Iraq, fixed bayonets and charged their Iraqi assailents:

“When the order came to dismount and attack, it was just like what we’ve done dozens of times in training,” then-Pvt. Anthony Rushforth told the Sun. They then ran across open ground, dove into a trench, and came face-to-face and hand-to-hand with the enemy.

They ran across 600 feet of that open ground, stopping only to dodge enemy fire. Once on top of the Mahdi fighters, the British bayoneted 30 of the militia. Fierce hand-to-hand combat followed for five hours. The Queen’s men suffered only three injuries.

They Fight

On the whole the one thing you can’t describe the British working class as, is unwilling to fight. That’s often considered a source of embarrassment by less violent, managerial class British sorts, but despite all their nanny state efforts they haven’t managed to eliminate it. If you walk around a British town or city around midnight on a weekend, you realize that the tradition of going out on the piss and then having a fight on a Friday or Saturday night is still alive and well. No, not everybody is doing it and perhaps there are fewer than there used to be, but fewer is not none.

Lest I sound terribly snobby, I should point out that traditionally the upper classes have also fought. From boarding school bullies and Rugby games to commanding forces in wars and joining in the mayhem - see e.g. Princes William and Harry and their Pedo Uncle Andrew - and drunken brawls at university, there are plenty of examples of the upper classes also being good for a scrap. And again, you can say that there are fewer of the upper class sorts who fight, but I reply again that fewer is not none.

This willingness to fight is, in my opinion, a clear difference between the British (and Irish) and most of the rest of the world. I’m not saying that other people don’t fight, what I’m saying is that British men fight for fun and then, often enough, having whacked each other, buy each other a pint next time they meet. I have an Irish friend who thinks this is the Celtic influence, and he may have a partial point, but I don’t think it’s just the Celtic genes, or for that matter culture. However, it also worth differentiating this from the macho posturing that evolves into fights when rival gang members decide to fight for turf or girls. That latter is what has driven the epidemic of “youth knife-crime” in Britain and it is mostly¹ caused by people of a very different ethnic background.

Now that’s not to say the British working class (or these days dole class) male is a model of good behavior apart from liking a fight. In an article at Unherd about Dundee which seems to be saying that it’s OK that brown skinned men rape white girls because white men do too, Kathleen Stock makes it clear that they aren’t saints at all:

[T]here’s the scary tower blocks in places like the Hilltown and Lochee — known locally as “multis” — their stairwells adorned with “human shite, junkies shooting up, groups of neds and a dead dog”, as one disgruntled local resident recently described the situation. I had female friends who grew up in the multis; they were frequently plied with alcohol in their early teens then assaulted and raped by groups of local men.

However the unstated point here is that the ‘neds’ are violent rough sorts and quite likely the descendents of some of Wellingtons Scottish regiments.

Curiously, until the arrival of immigrants from places like Somalia, Britain didn’t have a knife-crime problem. I recall, back in practically the stone ages of the 1980s, being able to purchase commando knives, throwing daggers and Crocodile Dundee sized bowie knives as a pimply teenager and no one was worried. Random teenagers did not enter dance studios and stab little girls. There was no war on pen-knives or kitchen cleavers because people bought them to use for their intended purposes. Almost every one of the football hooligans who fought each other in the stands and the streets could have been armed with a poket knife of some sort - in fact I expect many were. But they didn’t use those to stab each other, they used their fists and little more, because the point of that fight wasn’t to kill the other side.

Now, when those same hooligans and their descedants are attacked by knife wielding immigrants they are likely to respond in kind. These people understand “deterrence” and the deterrent effect of killing someone because if they are dead they can’t do it again. The only thing that stops them, for now, is that the real fear of two tier justice where they get extra punishments for being “racist” while the other party gets to walk free because of “cultural issues” or being a victim of racism. Americans and others on Xitter and elsewhere have asked why British men didn’t stand up for their girls. The answer is right there: when they tried to they were at best ignored or worse punished for being racists. When the full power of the state is against you it’s hard to resist short of going Killdozer.

However, that doesn’t stop the underlying anger, in fact it probably just strengthens it. If you ask these people they are generally all in favor of the death penalty for murder, child sex abuse and the like, and as I’ve mentioned previously, their solution to the migrant boat crisis is the simple one of sinking the boats in the Channel and optionally machine-gunning the survivors as they bobble in the water. They don’t tend to answer pollsters with these answers any more - at least not in depth. The reason for that is that they’ve been denounced enough times as savages or similar, but get them drunk and relaxed and that’s when it comes out. It also comes out in more upper class circles too, if they are sure nobody is listening, and the reason for the reticence is identical. I think that the dam on this kind of speech is close to breaking and when it does there’s going to be a realization that these feelings are in fact widely held.

They Scare The PM(C)

The Duke of Wellington’s quote about his men frightening him applies 100% to Two Tier Keir and his fellow Professional Managerial Class sorts. This is something that has been true from time to time in Britain, but I don’t think it has ever been quite so clear. The outrageous jailings for Xeets after last year’s Southport killings and subsequent riots were symptomatic - just as the J6 prosecutions were in the USA - of a government that is so scared of its citizens that it will do anything it can to try and cow them back into obedient subservience.

A year ago it worked. But I’m not sure it’s going to work this time. “Operation Raise the Colours” is so clearly peaceful and so clearly driving the government batty. Moreover the Raise the Colours groups (and the pink ladies protesting the hotels) are doing something that also scares the government - organizing locally - but that they can’t really fight. The censorship of the OSA doesn’t stop this. It may stop some of the actual racists getting their message out - though I’m skeptical - but it is completely unable to stop local groups using existing local associations to organize protests.

For now the Raise the Colours groups are peaceful. The migrant hotel protests are mostly peaceful. Both are, however, a warning and a threat to the government. I’d say the last time the UK faced a similar level of threat was the Miners’ Strike against Mrs Thather’s government in the 1980s. There were a number of ugly incidents, but for various reasons the miners never managed to convince enough of the rest of the country that they were in the right². This time that does not apply. The migrant issues are affecting people everywhere from Epping Forest and Bournemouth³ to deprived inner cities.

So far, the fact that people are not specifically racist, means that, as Frank Furedi⁴ notes:

When I interviewed the people going around and raising the flag of St George on the lamppost of Faversham, I was struck by their initial defensive justification of their action. They spent the first two minutes of our discussion trying to reassure me that they were not racist, but patriots fed up with the way their flag was devalued. It was only after I explained that I was on their side and supported their objectives that they felt confident to drop the ‘we are not racist’ rhetoric and discuss the concerns that motivated them.

They aren’t racist, they are patriotic. In addition to being proud of being British/English they are increasingly annoyed at how the government and official meda portrays them and tries lump them together with other sorts. In fact, there’s some unspoken context that can be easily missed. Everyone in that conversation in Faversham is well aware that there are violent racist dole-class sorts. For now the “good people” flying the flag and protesting the migrants haven’t allied with them.

For now. Not yet. People like Rupert Lowe are saying things that seem extreme to most flagger sorts today.

But that could very well change. Over in the US Devon Eriksen Xeeted this

The same applies if you replace the F word with the R word (racism). And right now that’s pretty much where the UK is headed.

When it does so, the British dole class are going to find themselves supported by the other classes. The ones who don’t go for a fight on a Saturday night, but who probably have a (great)grandfather or other relation that did. That prospect frightens the living daylights out of the governing PMC people, just not enough for them to listen to the complaints and actually deport the migrants and the rapists.

1. Yes, sure you can find ethnic white British youths as some of the criminals arrested, but an overwhelmingly large proportion are not - that’s why the London Police were told to stop “stop’n’frisk” because they were choosing to stop and frisk certain browner ethnicities far more than others for good reason.

2. There are numerous reasons why they didn’t, but a large one is that they were very very regional and it was realtively easy to link them to the evil communist Soviet Union because their leaders were indeed linked to the commies.

3. The collapse of Bournemouth

4. Suddenly the English Nation Is Astir