The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

What the Princess Said

Posted on | March 10, 2021 | Comments Off on What the Princess Said

“We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well. For God will care for us, and bring us victory and peace.”
— Princess Elizabeth, October 1940

What sort of suffering has Meghan Markle ever endured that could be compared to what the English people endured during World War II?

In October 1940, when 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth went on the BBC to assure her nation’s children that “God will care for us,” England had been under attack by Hitler’s Luftwaffe for three months. More than 14,000 British civilians died during the Nazi bombing campaign, to say nothing of the hundreds of brave RAF pilots who died in aerial combat against the Germans. England was entirely alone against Hitler for more than a year between the collapse of France in June 1940 and the U.S. entry into the war in December 1941. What enormous sacrifices the British people made, and what terrible hardships they endured, during that lonely fight against Hitler’s war machine, ought to inspire eternal admiration. Alas, most of us have forgotten what the British did in “their finest hour,” just as we have forgotten our own courageous history:

One of the great insights of Edmund Burke’s monumental treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France is his defense of the principle of inheritance in government. Burke argued against certain radical theorists who claimed that Britain’s limited monarchy meant that the King of England’s title was dependent upon the “right” of the people to “choose” their ruler. No such right existed under the British constitution, Burke made clear, citing the pedigree by which the king held his crown as an inheritance, just as the king’s subjects held their liberties as an inheritance.
This principle of heredity as the basis of government might strike most Americans as archaic. If they would take time to read our Constitution, however, they would find that it was the solemn intent of the Founding Fathers to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Thus, our rights as Americans have been bequeathed to us as an inheritance — a gift from our remote ancestors — and we can see in Burke’s argument how the rights of Englishmen were likewise inherited, through the same historical processes by which the king inherited his crown. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Celebrities, Great Britain

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