The British are Anti
Italian Snobbish Louts
The ANNOTICO Report
Those who have read my Reports regularly have heard me rail against the British
and their Anti Italianism. The British Snobbery
is not easy to accept from a pasty faced, substantially unattractive,
group that walk around with a rod up their rectum. These people our Italian
Ancestors brought civilization to TWICE.
I can partially understand their apparent insecurity when they have basically
the Changing of the Guard and
Here is an article from the London Times that admits to this obnoxious British
behavior, and is optimistic that the more "worldly' the British become,
the less "damning" they will be of others.
The particular references to Italians in this article are:
(1) "Frogs are slightly better than Huns or Wops, and foreigners are
fiends.”
(2) “Would you stop snivelling? One might think
you were Italian!”
(3) “
(4) "Hell is of a place where the Germans are the police, the Swedes the
comedians, the Italians the defence force . .
.”.
HAVE PREJUDICE, WON'T TRAVEL
LondonTimes
Ben MacIntyre
We used to be happiest at home, away from 'bloody
foreigners'. That was before cheap air fares
THIS SUMMER, as an antidote to all those books rhapsodising
about the Tuscan sun, you could dip into The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian
World, which may qualify as the most intolerant travel guide ever published.
Driving over lemons? Mrs Mortimer would rather drive
over foreigners.
Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, an
Englishwoman who started out as a children’s author, published three
volumes of travel writing between 1849 and 1854, covering the globe from Asia
to Africa to the Americas. She was even-handed, in a back-handed way: she
despised just about everyone and everything.
The Portuguese, as well as being “the clumsiest people in
Lao-Tzu, the father of Taoism, is dismissed as “an awful liar”.
Roman Catholicism comes off little better: “A kind of Christian religion,
but a very bad one.” Oddly, however, she professes a soft spot for
Nubians: “A fine race . . . of a bright copper colour”.
Mrs Mortimer’s guide (which comes out in
paperback next month) provides a strange glimpse into the blinkered mind of a
middle-class, middle-aged bigot in Middle England in the middle of the 19th
century. Her sweepingly negative generalisations and
racial stereotyping seem even more remarkable for the fact that this doughty
world traveller didn’t go to the places she
described and disparaged. The sum total of her foreign travel was one childhood
trip to
This was once an acceptable British way to travel (or, more exactly, stay at
home and not travel). Mrs Mortimer’s
all-embracing xenophobia was probably extreme, but it was far from unique.
Those sorts of casual prejudices were part of the arrogance of empire, but also
reflected a deep-seated insecurity. Mrs Mortimer was
terrified of anybody un-English because she stayed in
Other countries have chauvinists, but the blanket disdain for Johnny Foreigner
was a peculiarly British phenomenon. “Don’t go abroad,”
muttered George VI, speaking for his class and most of his realm. “Abroad’s bloody!”
Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew ventured abroad
once, but “four years in
There is a delightful line in
Cheap and plentiful foreign air travel may be killing the planet, but at least
it has finally killed off the sort of prejudice that was once the hallmark of
the British armchair traveller. Britons today wander
in vast droves, and are informed about Abroad in a way that would have been
entirely foreign to our grandparents. Mrs Mortimer
insisted that the English “like best being at home, and this is
right”. Today the English like best being on a cheapo flight bound for
somewhere as far from home as possible. And this, it seems to me, is right.
The World Cup will bring with it the usual bout of soul-searching when some sunburnt, beer-drenched oik
insists on performing the “Don’t mention the war” sketch in
downtown
Racism persists, but gone is the fear of foreignness. The British are as likely
as ever to complain that the French smell of garlic and the Germans have no
jokes. The difference is that the vast majority of Britons know the stereotypes
are not true. We no longer laugh with Mrs Mortimer
— as she points to the clumsy Portuguese and the scurvy Greeks —
but at her.
No politician could now declare, as the Earl of Crawford, a former Tory Cabinet
minister, did in 1929: “I am a xenophobe, particularly as regards the
French. I look upon
The Second World War reinforced that sense of superior isolation. The MI5
officer responsible for interviewing suspected foreign agents during the war
compiled an official report offering observations such as “
For some time after the war, the British island mentality meant defining our
nationality in contradistinction to others. “For the English,”
David Frost and Anthony Jay once wrote,“the
best definition of hell is of a place where the Germans are the police, the
Swedes are the comedians, the Italians are the defence
force . . .”. Today, according to Crap Towns, the best English definition
of hell is
We owe Mrs Mortimer a debt, for her little book is
the shining example of how not to travel in the British manner, a reminder of a
way of thinking that has gone forever.
Mrs Mortimer wrote her own
epitaph: “They always laugh when they hear of customs unlike their own;
for they think that they do everything in the best way, and that all other ways
are foolish.” Was this some sudden flash of self-knowledge? No, this is Mrs Mortimer, sticking the boot into the Bechuanas of South Africa.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
article/0,,6-2197267,00.html
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