London Has Fallen

Southport riots, free speech and Islamic subversion

When Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons in June 1940 and declared Britain would not give up the fight, he delivered the greatest speech of his career and one of the most powerful moments in British history.

We shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

It was no exaggeration to say “alone.” The Nazi scourge was fast engulfing Europe. In two years, Germany had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and by the time Churchill spoke, Norway and France were weeks from surrender. In less than a year, the Luftwaffe would drop incendiary bombs on the chamber where he stood and burn the roof off Westminster Hall itself.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end.

And so they did. After France fell to Germany that month, Britain stood alone against the Axis powers in Western Europe. Hitler readied to invade Britain, but the Royal Air Force defended her skies, making invasion untenable and marking the first major German defeat. It helps that my mother is part British and my father was an Air Force pilot, but the main reason I became obsessed with the RAF as a boy was because of this glorious last stand, because when the light of life was all but smothered out, and the rest of Europe cloaked in Nazi red, when the Luftwaffe launched its aircraft across the English Channel, and the mouth of hell yawned open, Britain got its lick back.

The Battle of Britain was one of the most dramatic and decisive conflicts of the war. I think I even cheered aloud reading about it for the first time, and one of my most prized toys was a model of the Supermarine Spitfire that helped win the fight, which remains one of the most elegant fighter planes that ever flew.

After the battle, Churchill famously remarked, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Supermarine Spitfire

But my friends, London has fallen. Britain is without the kind of spitfire leadership that guided it through the dark days of the war, and the threats of today are not the kind that you can shoot down. The scourge that is spreading across the map of Europe today is not the Nazi path of conquest by airstrike or tank, but a cultural force, a subversion of Western European values that is intangible, invisible, inimicable. It has taken over so subtly and over so many years that as it was happening, those few who noticed and spoke out were dismissed as paranoids or fools.

But London has fallen. The grand and glorious nation I grew up admiring from afar has been cut down. The reason for the fight in the first place, that proud purpose for which so many British gave their lives, and was carried for decades after the war, seems to have simply washed out with the tide of the last decade.

A few days ago, a British police officer issued a fixed penalty notice to a woman for thinking in the wrong location. The woman was standing outside an abortion clinic. She was not protesting, not holding a sign, not chanting slogans. As she explained to the officer, “I’m not doing any actions. I’m just simply thinking, silently in my head.”