The Union Jackal,
April 2023

Noddy and the Golliwogs

1,750 words

First they came for the golliwogs . . .

. . . but I was not a golliwog, and said nothing. At first glance this story looks encouraging, as it involves the rare taking into custody of a black gang by the British police, but on closer inspection it is just a repetition of what is happening all over Britain.

I don’t know if the golliwog was ever big in the States, but they are knitted children’s dolls, usually dressed in a smart red-and-yellow outfit, perhaps with a bow tie. But have a look at one and I am sure you will see the problem. Blacks in Britain, as everywhere else, are like Thomas More’s devil: They cannot endure to be mocked.

The owner of a pub in the county of Essex in England had a collection of “gollies,” as they are affectionately known, behind the bar, until the local police received a complaint from an aggrieved and offended third party. Two aspects of this story are instructive.

Firstly, the police arrived to confiscate the naughty gollies — not a police officer, but six of them. I have seen fewer coppers turn up at quite serious bar fights. Secondly, this SWAT-style raid was made because of one complaint. This is the new England. If one person, quite probably a middle-class woman bored with her life and anxious to upset someone else’s, decides they are offended at something, then that something must go, particularly if race is involved.

I wonder how long it will be before whites are required by law to salute blacks in the street. Leftist newspaper The Independent wouldn’t even spell out the word, writing “golli***.” The reason for this is that “wog” was once an English slang term for blacks, probably last heard in about 1974.

As vengeance must always follow transgression, just as it does in Greek mythology, the pub was graffitied and had a window broken. It has also been removed from Britain’s Good Beer Guide for its horrific racism in showing a collection of children’s toys. It may as well rename itself The Cotton-Pickers’ Arms or The Jim Crow.

I remember the doll and the image, but didn’t know the history, and this video from English YouTuber Rotten Politics gives a beautifully illustrated explanation showing that the doll has nothing to do with racism. I also remember the English cartoon character Noddy, a pixie-like character who had a bell on his hat and drove around in a little car. One episode of his always made me laugh. Noddy is driving through the woods one dark night when he hears his name being called. He stops the car to investigate, and is held upside-down by three golliwogs until the coins fall out of his pocket. Why was he mugged? Noddy couldn’t see the golliwogs in the dark as they were black.

Then they came for P. G. Wodehouse . . .

. . . but I was not the great English comic writer of the Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings stories, and said nothing. I wish I was P. G. Wodehouse. God knows his style has influenced me enough. For me he is the greatest English comic writer, and another great representative of that genre, Evelyn Waugh, best sums him up:

Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

The Bertie Wooster stories are my favorites in my language. The plots are almost always identical. Bertie, a fabulously rich, upper-class boulevardier is generally summoned from London to a stately home somewhere in the country, usually by an aunt. He gets engaged to Bobby Wickham or Honoria Glossop at least once and has to extricate himself from the affiance, involves himself in some mischief or other, is menaced by Roderick Spode (Wodehouse’s brilliant parody of Sir Oswald Mosley), and is finally hauled out of trouble by his valet, or gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves.

The Wodehouse Society may not have seen eye-to-eye on the small-screen adaptation of the stories which ran from 1990 to 1993, but I thought that they were a good rendition, with Jeeves played by Stephen Fry and Bertie by Hugh Laurie, who Americans will know from the series House. I wonder if Laurie will be recalled for more work in America once his executive producers see this.

Some of Wodehouse’s books, including the first Bertie Wooster novel, Thank You, Jeeves, are being rewritten — I’m surprised the publishers didn’t say “reimagined,” as that seems to be all the rage — because of the use of what whites are mandated to coyly call “the N-word.” In 1934, when Thank You, Jeeves was published, this was a word in common usage in England, never accruing the stigma it did in the United States, but, for the new Puritans, moral judgement extends through time as well as space. Bertie refers to a troupe of “nigger minstrels,” and I refer you to the Hugh Laurie link above.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.

This weaponizing of what are known in the publishing business as “sensitivity readers” (a term which could be employed for any snowflake reading anything from Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus to the back of a cereal box) is creeping through English literature like rust. They won’t stop until white literature has been thoroughly gelded to appease our new masters.

As Bertie Wooster would say, one can only shake one’s head and pass on.

It’s all kicked off

For those who follow football — soccer in American — a local derby FA Cup final pleases even the neutral fan. Liverpool v. Everton, Arsenal v. Tottenham, Nottingham Forest v. Notts County (that’s about as likely as a singularity in the next five minutes) — any turf war making it to the final stage of the world’s greatest football knockout competition would be welcomed by those whose teams fell at earlier hurdles. And so, as sorry as I felt for the losing FA Cup semi-finalists last weekend (Brighton and Sheffield United, both sides for whom I have an affection), the prospect of Manchester United versus Manchester City in this year’s final is the stuff that footie dreams are made on. What could possibly spoil it? Oh, yes, there is something that could spoil it: I forgot about racism.

I have followed with interest the chasing down of American football and baseball teams who have logos with the temerity to refer to Red Indians — as we oldies from England still call them, although Americans have been strong-armed into calling them “native Americans” — whose names and emblems are generally cancelled and banned. (What kid ever played “cowboys and native Americans”?) Now, this latest episode in the dull soap opera that is woke has made it across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Kingdom.

A maritime image is not out of place. There has been an “argument” — indicating a slow news week at The Guardian — in Britain about the clubs’ emblems, worn traditionally on the shirt and referred to as “badges” or “crests.” Pictured here are the crests representing the two Manchester teams. Note that both of them feature a ship, three-masted and very similar. This has been deemed as a “celebrity celebration of slavery,” even though the theory that the ships had any such connection was debunked as soon as it hit an increasingly desperate media complex. The ship in fact commemorates the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1893. They probably carried mostly coal. Same color, but not slaves.

One gentleman, a long-time Manchester City supporter, made me laugh out loud by saying that you can’t keep going back in history; it would be like “being mad at the Italians for the Roman Empire.” Why not? Why shouldn’t every country invaded by Rome get reparations, and not in sesterces? As the famous question from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian reminds us: What have the Romans ever done for us?

As for the club crests, my own team, Arsenal, take their emblem from the Woolwich Arsenal in south London (although they relocated to the north of the city), which is where naval weaponry was stored. It is a good thing they are not an American team, as the anti-gun lobby would not approve of their badge.

Kilt by association

Let us leave England, which is obviously a cesspool of racism, and travel north to the land of haggis and heather, bonny Scotland. A warlike people, certainly, but a more peaceful land whose rulers, red-bearded as they are — even the women — and doubtless armed with claymores, keep the peace without the need to disparage those of a different color. Ah, just a second.

I have mentioned the new Scottish National Party (SNP) leader, the Muslim Humza Yousaf, before, and he is not too keen on white people. In passing, Yousaf received no official reprimand for his anti-white tirade. Compare this with the British Labour politician Diane Abbott, who has just been suspended by her party and cannot currently sit in Parliament. Her crime? She didn’t criticize whites — we already know she hates us — and if stupidity were a crime, she would be looking at multiple life sentences. She is genuinely thick, and if that is the best the “black community” can provide as a political voice, then it says much. But Abbott committed a crime far more heinous than Yousaf’s: She criticized the Jews. This is one crime in Britain no one can get away with. But back to Bonny Scotland.

Yousaf may have even more reason to hate the white devil, as his predecessor, Nicola Sturgeon, is currently embroiled in a financial scandal which is starting to make the dominoes fall in the SNP. Yousaf may be sweating under his immaculate shirt collar. When the police are digging up your predecessor’s back garden, an honor usually granted only to serial killers, and that predecessor has endorsed you, you will be counting the degrees of separation and hoping there are enough.

It has to be said that Scottish political scandals are a bit like their football team: constantly trying to live up to their underachievement. Now, the US knows how to do a proper scandal and witch hunt: Hunter Biden’s laptop — millions of dollars allegedly sent to the Biden family courtesy of China, hookers, crack cocaine, Chinese spies, strippers. That’s how you do it, Jocko. A few hundred grand missing from campaign funds and a police search of a camper van? It’s hardly McWatergate.

Here’s to the monarchy!

The Union Jackal.

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