Britain’s civilizational suicide is taking place, as you might expect, under the politest of veneers. These affairs don’t have to be messy and loud, now, do they? Every act of cultural surrender and self-abnegation is taking place with the most rational of explanations. And so as that once green and pleasant land goes gentle into that good night, it is comforted by the thought that as its demise approached, it never once lapsed into anything so tasteless as “racism,” “Islamophobia,” or a desire to preserve (heaven forfend!) its own history, heritage, and national character.
The latest polite self-erasure of Britain comes from the venerable Bank of England itself, which has unveiled a grand plan to remove images of national heroes such as Winston Churchill from the nation’s currency. After all, with Britain in the process of denying and setting aside all that it has ever been or aspired to be, it simply won’t do to have British heroes on British banknotes.
The lesson of this is clear: There are no British heroes. There are heroes of Islam, and of Pakistan, and their images would have replaced those of the British heroes on the British banknotes were it not for the fact that Islam prohibits such images, so as to avoid the temptation to idolatry. And so a stopgap measure has been decided upon instead.
That stopgap is, as always, cloaked in the garb of sweet reason. Victoria Cleland, the Bank of England’s chief cashier, explains, according to the National Pulse, that “the main goal is to improve counterfeit resilience.” And so images of animals will grace British banknotes in place of the images of Churchill, Jane Austen, and other great Britons. Cleland explained: “Nature is a great choice from a banknote authentication perspective.”
That explanation was meant to sound reasonable, but it falls apart with a moment’s thought. The National Pulse remarked drily that “it is unclear why a banknote featuring a picture of a badger should be harder to counterfeit than a banknote featuring a picture of Churchill.” Robert Jenrick, Shadow Chancellor for the Reform Party, remarked: “It says it all that [Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury Secretary)] Rachel Reeves is replacing Winston Churchill on our banknotes with a squirrel.”
Yes, it does. After all, “Churchill is a frequent target of far-left protesters and academics, who portray him as a ‘racist’ and a ‘white supremacist,’” and so it’s clear: This isn’t really about a picture of a squirrel having magical counterfeiting-prevention powers that a picture of Churchill doesn’t have; it’s about bowing to the leftist mob and acquiescing to its version of British history, in which the heroes are villains and vice versa.
For leftists, Churchill is not the man who stood against National Socialism’s bloodlust and vowed: “We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” He is, instead, a racist, a colonialist, a “white supremacist,” and a symbol of everything that is evil and must be rejected.
Amid this, the choice of animals to replace British heroes on currency is bitterly ironic. For another recent example of the nation’s cultural suicide is the fact that, as the Daily Mail reported last Thursday, “sixty-seven dog breeds could be banned in Britain if new breeding guidelines set by parliament become mandatory, campaigners have warned.” The banned dogs include beagles, dachshunds, mastiffs, great danes, boxers, and Saint Bernards. Once again, a seemingly reasonable excuse was offered: these breeds are unhealthy, a parliamentary group claimed, and consequently, the humane thing to do will be to put them to death.
Related: UK Mulls Banning 67 Dog Breeds for ‘Animal Health’ — but Is That Really the Reason?
The much more likely reason for this draconian measure, however, is that Islam hates dogs. Islamic tradition records that Muhammad ordered that dogs be killed: “Abdullah (b. Umar) reported: Allah’s Messenger ordered the killing of dogs and we would send (men) in Medina and its corners and we did not spare any dog that we did not kill, so much so that we killed the dog that accompanied the wet she-camel belonging to the people of the desert” (Sahih Muslim 3811).
Once the leftists and the Muslims have been duly appeased, what will be left of Britain’s rich native culture and heritage? Nothing much. Maybe there will be reservations where people can visit and view the quaint old ways of the defeated native people, defeated, this time, by their own hand. But even that, too, like the images of Churchill on banknotes, may well be “racist.”
