- Hitchens, Peter.
The Abolition of Britain.
2nd. ed. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.
ISBN 1-893554-39-2.
-
History records many examples of the collapse of once great and
long-established cultures. Usually, such events are the consequence
of military defeat, occupation or colonisation by a foreign power,
violent revolution and its totalitarian aftermath, natural disasters,
or other dramatic and destructive events. In this book, Peter
Hitchens chronicles the collapse, within the span of a
single human lifetime (bracketed by the funerals of Winston
Churchill in 1965 and Princess Diana in 1997), of the culture
which made Britain British, and maintained domestic peace
in England and Wales since 1685 (and Scotland since Culloden in 1746)
while the Continent was repeatedly convulsed by war and revolution.
The collapse in Britain, however, occurred following victory
in a global conflict in which, at the start, Britain stood alone
against tyranny and barbarism, and although rooted in a time
of postwar privation, demotion from great power status, and loss
of empire, ran its course as the nation experienced unprecedented
and broadly-based prosperity.
Hitchens argues that the British cultural collapse was almost entirely
the result of well-intentioned “reform” and “modernisation” knocking
out the highly evolved and subtly interconnected pillars which
supported the culture, set in motion, perhaps, by immersion in
American culture during World War II (see chapter 16—this argument
seems rather dubious to me, since many of the postwar changes in
Britain also occurred in the U.S., but afterward), and
reinforced and accelerated by television broadcasting, the perils of
which were prophetically sketched by T.S. Eliot in 1950
(p. 128). When the pillars of a culture: historical memory,
national identity and pride, religion and morality, family, language,
community, landscape and architecture, decency, and education are
dislodged, even slightly, what ensues is much like the “controlled
implosion” demolition of a building, with the Hobbesian forces of
“every man for himself” taking the place of gravity in pulling down
the structure and creating the essential preconditions for the
replacement of bottom-up self-government by self-reliant citizens with
authoritarian rule by élite such as Tony Blair's ambition of U.S.-style
presidential power and, the leviathan where the
road to serfdom leads, the emerging
anti-democratic Continental super-state.
This U.S second edition includes notes which explain British terms and
personalities unlikely to be familiar to readers abroad, a preface
addressed to American readers, and an afterword discussing the 2001
general election and subsequent events.
November 2005 