The power of symbols and national traditions was on display in Britain last week with King Charles III’s coronation and JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin noted that it had significance for more than just that monarchy. The way the ceremony linked that country’s present to its faith and history is meaningful at a time of an ongoing leftist war on Western civilization. While Americans don’t need or want a king, the coronation was a reminder that the effort to preserve national identity and a unified culture rooted in the great achievements of the West shouldn’t be considered a lost cause.
Tobin was then joined by British journalist and JNS columnist Melanie Phillips who pointed out that while the jury is out on whether King Charles will play a productive role in the “great fight for Western civilization that Britain like America is now engaged in,” the coronation did embody the traditions that are worth preserving.
Phillips describes the current assault on the West that seeks to overturn traditional morality and values, and replace it with racialist bigotry as a rerun of the past. “We’re in a kind of French revolution going backwards,” said Phillips. “Instead of the age of reason, we are living through a revolution to impose the age of unreason.”
While noting that the antisemitic British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had been replaced by Keir Starmer, Phillips was not sanguine about the battle against antisemitism in Britain because of the way the country’s liberal elites have accepted woke ideology. Antisemitic incitement and violence continue. Britain’s Jewish community is willing to speak up against Corbyn but fails to do so against the ongoing threat from Islamist Jew-hatred.
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