The young are supposed to be intellectually underdeveloped, for purely physiological reasons. One’s brain isn’t even wired properly before university-leaving age.
However, even considering such low expectations, the students’ union of Cambridge University makes one gasp with incredulity. That body has voted not to celebrate Remembrance Day because it “glorifies war”.
Now if international tables are to be believed, we’re talking about one of the world’s best universities. I can only guess the extent of mental retardation at universities that don’t enjoy such an exalted status.
This dovetails neatly with the piece I wrote the other day, about the cataclysmic deterioration of the post-Christian collective intellect. For my problem with that vote isn’t so much that it’s subversively unpatriotic and morally revolting as that it betokens the inability to use basic logic.
Patriotism isn’t something to be expected automatically, only allegiance is – for as long as one enjoys the country’s protection, one must be loyal to it.
The ancient principle protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem (protection entails allegiance, and allegiance entails protection) is inviolable and non-negotiable. William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, found that out the hard way in 1946 by becoming the last person hanged for treason in Britain.
That Irish-American Nazi propagandist fled to Germany on a British passport. Even though it was fake, the passport put him under protection of the Crown. Therefore he owed it allegiance.
Had he travelled on his American or Irish passport, he wouldn’t even have gone to prison: neither the US nor Ireland was at war with Germany in 1939, when Joyce absconded there. Hence he was a traitor neither to them nor indeed to Britain, whose citizen he wasn’t.
A citizen’s allegiance to his country is thus a matter of law. His patriotism, however, is a matter of personal taste. Burke expressed it with his usual epigrammatic precision: “To makes us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”
I happen to think that Britain is indeed lovely, for all her rapidly multiplying faults and tragic failings, such as Jeremy Corbyn. Then again, we like because of something; we love in spite of everything.
With those provisos, I’m satisfied that, on balance, Britain is lovely – which is why I’m a patriot.
Those Cambridge youngsters obviously feel otherwise, and they’re entitled even to their ridiculous opinion (one reason I’m a patriot is that Britain still retains some, if increasingly less, freedom of expression).
But they aren’t entitled to their own logic: like any other of God’s creations, logic is objective, not subjective. Its rules don’t change depending on how well or badly we wield it.
That doesn’t mean everyone is born equipped with a beautifully tuned logical apparatus. No, the ability to think soundly, along with the knowledge of what constitutes sound thought, must be both taught and self-taught.
It’s blindingly obvious that the students of one of the world’s best universities haven’t had the benefit of such tuition.
Otherwise they would never have uttered something as monstrously cretinous as that mourning the country’s fallen soldiers glorifies war. That’s like saying that a woman weeping for her departed husband thereby glorifies the cancer that killed him.
The bereaved wife doesn’t have to weep for her husband. She might have hated him when he was alive and, now he’s dead, she may be dancing with joy.
By the same token, those pimply youngsters are within their right to say they hate Britain, wish it had never won a single war, and therefore detest retrospectively every soldier who died defending such a worthless commonwealth.
That proclamation would have been monstrous, but it wouldn’t have been monstrously cretinous. What they proclaimed instead is both.
I’d wonder what they’ve been taught over some 15 years of institutional education – if I didn’t know exactly what it was. These young savages have had their heads stuffed to the gunwales with the kind of ignorant, malignant leftie rubbish that Jeremy Corbyn feels they haven’t had enough of.
The entire history of England is, according to these ghouls, one uninterrupted chain of oppression, injustice, slavery, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny and every other sin than which nothing worse exists.
Hence we should spit on the graves of those who died defending this awful place, including presumably those 20,000 Royal Navy sailors who laid down their lives trying to stop slave trade in the early nineteenth century.
And it’s not just the military men. If we still have some saliva left after spitting on their graves, we should also spit on the memory of every hero signposting British history.
Merely quoting Churchill at our universities makes one a target for vicious attacks and ostracism. Wellington was nothing but a war criminal, and a white supremacist to boot. How many of his officers were black, lesbian, disabled Muslim women? Say no more.
And that hysterical leftie fanatic Afua Hirsh agitates for removing Nelson’s statue from Trafalgar Square. (I had the misfortune of meeting Miss Hirsh on a BBC programme, where I tried to explain to her – predictably in vain – that prison is a form of punishment rather than education or social work.)
As to that great empire builder Cecil Rhodes, his statue can’t be allowed to befoul the hallowed grounds of Oxford University, which is even higher than Cambridge in the international pecking order. The administration of Oriel College managed to keep the lynching mob at bay in 2016, just, but it’ll be back.
This kind of poison is in the air, yet no antidote is provided. All that’s on offer at our schools and universities is more, and more virulent, poison.
This reinforces my conviction that university education should be provided for not 50 but five per cent of the population. The predominantly left-wing, Anglophobe dons will still spray their intellectual novichok around, but at least they’ll kill fewer minds.
The intellectual elite have been spitting on their heritage for decades. Someone I know was recently admitted to Cambridge “What, am I supposed to be impressed?” was my reply, needless to say we don’t talk much anymore.