Football Anglophobia

 

It is the eve of one of the biggest international football matches of the calendar, the European Cup Final in which England will take on Spain. What you see above is a house flying the flag of Spain; but this house is not in Spain, it is in Scotland. Also several of my Facebook friends from Wales and Ireland posted the memes below last week when England were playing the Netherlands. In sporting tournaments, people from the so-called, and wrongly called, "Celtic" countries will often support any team that is playing against England. Scotland is by far the worst of these nations in this way, but it's also a habitual attitude in my own, Wales. Sometimes this is just light-hearted, typical competitive banter; but it disguises a genuine deep-set historical hatred. I always joke that the only reason Italy was brought into the Six Nations was so that England could play just one game that was not a grudge match. I find it sad and uncomfortable to realize that this hatred is a central part of our national identity. In fact it has even become, in a strange way, a part of our self-esteem. It's an addiction in fact, a cult of self-pity. I sometimes wonder how we Welsh, the Scots and Irish would survive in a world where we were deprived of that lovely lovely cheesecake called victimhood. They will never admit it, but I suspect many people couldn't cope. They would lose all sense of patriotism and national identity. In a perverse way they literally need England to exist as an object of resentment so that they can exist. Without nasty old England, in a worst case scenario, these nations would culturally collapse and cease to exist as human tribal entities. I don't think that is healthy; it is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called "slave morality". What's more, we've seen it elsewhere. Look at how British special interest groups are fighting each other over who is to be lauded as the most "oppressed!", see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-fall-of-diane-abbott.html. In the case of our lands, this grievance is based on a legitimate interpretation of the past. It is fair to say that during the last millennium the primary dialectic of the history of the British Isles has been the expansion of England, with its culture and language, at the expense of the other native demographics, but those days are over. In the 21st century we live in a very different world. The order of nation states is at an end; it has been replaced by a network of federations, military or corporate alliances and trading blocs; all are answerable to some undiscussed yet omnipresent world authority. All the nations of these islands are now just pieces on a globalist chessboard and those who still talk about "big bad England" are living in their own historical fantasy theme park, like the characters in the film The Village, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/04/village.html. It is this delusion that has allowed Wales, Scotland and Ireland to be swallowed up so easily by the modern empire in Brussels, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/05/plaid-cymru-and-eu.html. I know how important tomorrow is to a dedicated football fan, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of light-hearted mockery; but please don't take it too seriously!

See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2019/10/brexit-portal.html.
And: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/political-correctness-portal.html.

And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2024/01/visiting-senedd.html.