Two Kingdoms: Celebrate Diversity!

Yesterday I told my daughter of several things that she should note when she visits England in a few weeks. In addition to climbing up on the back of one of lions in Trafalgar Square, as I did while deployed to East Anglia with the SR-71 in the 1980's, I told her to visit a nearby statue of one of my heroes, Sir Charles James Napier.

So I was a bit alarmed to read this:

The statue of Sir Charles James Napier was put in the southwest corner of the Trafalgar Square in 1855 in honour of this British general. It was designed by George Cannon Adams and paid for by public. Sir Charles James Napier fought in the Peninsula War against Napoleon and then went to India where he was knighted after winning major battles near Hyderabad. Nowadays, the future of the statue (together with the statue of Major-General Sir Henry Havelock in the southeast corner of the Trafalgar Square) is uncertain. The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, thinks that these two statues should be replaced with figures ordinary Londoners and other people would know."

How sadly ignorant. Ignorance and indifference to history and tradition is not merely an American problem, as some would suggest. Rather than discovering why previous residents so respected Napier that they would build a statue in his honor with their own money, Londoners today assume that what they know is all that matters. The past has nothing to teach them. They have ignored the wisdom of their fellow Londoner, G.K. Chesterton:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Such provincial ignorance is particularly ironic because England today is in very big trouble due to multiculturalism, and their chronological snobbery has blinded them to a lesson from Napier that they very much need right now, who once said this to angry Hindus, while he was Govenor of India:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; then beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

Today, the practice of sati remains illegal and is all but nonexistent in India.

Celebrate Diversity.