WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?

Continuing on the matter of the assassination of Charles Kirk, I would refer you to the column of Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian dated Friday 12th September 2025:  
 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/12/us-era-political-violence-donald-trump-charlie-kirk
 

It is worth reading.  It presents an excellent perspective of what appears to be happening in the United States today. Some might say, it is what it has always been, a country built on and used to violence, in complete contradiction of what it purports to be, the dominant civilised free society on the planet. It claims to be the greatest country in the world endorsed by God. 

I was a citizen of the United States for 33 years and I have now been a British citizen for 50 years.  As to civilised free society, I believe I made the better choice 50 years ago. I can explain. I was living in Southern California in the 1950’s, initially in West Hollywood and then Beverly Hills. The weather was glorious and life was reasonably carefree and just as glorious as the weather. I was growing up in what was essentially a well to do white society that was, in reality, a million miles away from the problems faced by the rest of the world. Opinions were divided and the predominant political views favoured the Republican party. I can recall the 1952 presidential election when ‘I like Ike’ posters and buttons where just about everywhere. 

Our house was practically the only house exhibiting a vote for Stevenson poster. It was also the only house on South Rodeo Drive to have cucumbers pickling in jars on the window sill to benefit from the sun. Be that as it may, the political conventions did not engender any violence or animosity between democrats and republicans. The  joint  bogey men  were ‘communists’. Liberal thinking and some ‘social concerns’ were not seen as ‘the end of society as we know it’. There was a mutual respect and civility expressed towards others with different points of view, just so long as they did not express views that were ‘too far left’, whatever that meant. 

Between 1953 and 1956 my family returned to France, during which time communist scare was in full bloom in the United States, and indeed atomic spies were exposed, including Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who were executed for espionage. In fact we left for Europe from New York on the Queen Elizabeth White Star Line at the end of June 1953. The Rosenbergs were executed on the 19th June 1953. I can remember, once we had arrived in France and I started back at school, riding my bike and seeing posters on walls and lamppost depicting Eisenhower looking like Nosferatu leaning over the figures of Julius and Ethel. There were also other posters refereeing to Ike as an assassin.

We returned to California in August of 1956 and I registered at Beverly Hills High School. A world of its own. In 1954 segregation had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, yet in 1957  nine black students were prevented from attending Little Rock Central High School, in Arkansas by the then Governor Orval Faubus. This set off riots and violence against integration, despite President Eisenhower’s attempts at peaceful intervention. The unrest and brutal treatment of black people were all over the television news. The Civil Rights movement had truly begun in the southern states and by 1961 the Freedom Rides were in full swing, again plastered all over the television news. But these events were 1500 miles away from Beverly Hills. It was as if they were happening in another country. The south however was riddled with racial violence since before the civil war. This was nothing new and although it was happening before our eyes, for most white people it did not seem to carry the sense of urgency that it should have. Los Angeles carried on in its own way and the laid-back southern Californians with it. In the early sixties with the coming of John F Kennedy on the scene, with his brother Bobby, things grew more confrontational. The problems mouldering beneath were beginning surface. I left the United States in July to 1965. I was sitting at a Cafe in Paris, near the Opera reading the Harold Tribune and its report on the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. The explosion I left behind me was astounding. I somehow found it difficult to process riots in Los Angeles on this scale, but of course I was late to appreciate the severity of what had been going on around me all the time. California was indeed a dream. 

I arrived in the UK in November of 1965. I found a bedsit in Northwick House on the corner of St John’s Wood Road and Maida Vale, at £5 a week which was not cheap, being equivalent of £123 per week today. I soon moved to slightly cheaper quarters at £3 a week not far away in Warwick Ave. just north of the tube station. The bus fare on the Number 6 bus to the Haymarket was 8d. I kept shillings for the meters to light and heat my room, and pennies and threepenny bits for  the geyser in the bathroom to get hot water. All very quaint and fun, a long way from the comforts of South Rodeo Drive. I was always apprehensive that I would set the entire place alight because of the rather dangerous electric fire heating the room and possibly causing a sever gas explosion lighting the geyser. I thought if I didn’t strike a match quick enough to light the pilot light it would all blow up. Believe it or not, London was not exactly a modern city with up to date facilities. The variety of plugs needed for just one room was extraordinary. 

Racism on the other hand was very up front. The Evening Standard, which had loads of adverts to find rooms to let, overtly advertised “Europeans only need apply” and although that sort of advert was soon deemed illegal, landlords were still making choices. They still do. Nonetheless there was a certain kind of politeness about it all It wasn’t just “Fuck off” it was “Please, fuck off”. I once had a prospective landlady say to me, “You’re not English, are you?”, “No, I’m American”, “Oh well, I suppose none the worse for that”. On the whole however, it was the 60’s, and swinging London was in full swing. So far as I was concerned it knocked Beverly Hills out of the park. It was an absolutely fab time. 

By now, of course, the United States was fully gearing up to Vietnam. I had turned 21 a month before President Kennedy was shot in Dallas Texas. The first and only American election I voted in was the 1964 general election between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater.  Even then, although there was a great deal of civil unrest, there was a degree of civility between the different political parties. Of course as the war in Vietnam took hold and University student unrest grew the situation changed dramatically. By 1968 and the Tet Offensive in January of that year the world was again on edge. Mr Dubcek was embroiled in the Prague spring. The May ‘evenements’ on the streets of Paris and indeed Grosvernor Square in London were momentous. 

As for myself, between November 1965 and May 1968, I was having a lovely time living, learning and growing up as a young adult in London. Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Labour Party were in Government. The world cup atmosphere of 1966 was very happy. Imagine a labour socialist government running the country, A far cry from the United States. The General Election of 1966 was a revelation. I went to a number of hustings to see and listen to Quentin Hogg, Joe Grimond and a few others. How civilised, I thought. A few hecklers, but it was all very good natured and a certain quality of speech that seemed to be more elevated than the rhetoric I had been hearing in the United States. On reflection though it was probably more the accents that seemed more erudite. Nonetheless despite the obvious racism and ridiculous class system there was a welcoming of the difference and the foreign where I was concerned. A lot of people were very good to me. I was taken in and made at home. I was entirely free to drift in whatever direction the wind blew. I was able to make decisions as they came up, and hardly ever hindered. I was very lucky, and overall this British history became important. The humanitarian values and respect for human rights and the duty of care are truly what makes this country Great Britain. 

I know it is no longer the power it once was and its influence in the world has diminished a great deal, but it can still make the headlines on occasion. The sad part is that it seems to be falling apart at the rate of knots. Its headline news is no longer of the kind one wants to see. I have watched and been part of its decline for the last 50 years. I am not being nostalgic and claiming things were better in the old days. A lot of things were not better, but what was better were the attitudes of the citizens. The emergence of the Reform party and the backward thinking isolationist thick headed persons that are its leaders is bewildering. They are not anything like being British. They are thugs and primed with ignorance and arrogance. They still imagine that Britannia rules the waves. The British Navy has some 37,601 personnel and 63 commissioned ships and a few supporting vessels. The US Navy has some 336,000 active duty personnel and 101,500 in reserve. They have a vast fleet of combat vessels and thousands of aircraft. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. China has more ships, but only three carriers in its navy. The United States effectively has carriers on every ocean across the globe, quite apart from its submarine fleet.  However one counts, Britain has no claim on ruling the waves.

The long and short of this rant is that the United States in its present form is the most dangerous place on earth despite the wars in the middle east and middle Europe. I say that because of violence seemingly embedded in its society. Any country that has more than one armed weapon per household  is insane. That the private citizen feels they must be personally armed to protect themselves does not say much about trust in their own values or society. That they are so alienated from each other that they require guns to protect themselves from themselves is without parallel. Praise be that the United Kingdom is not quite yet like that, but it appears to be going that way when thousands take to the streets to demand the deportation of refugees and displaced people caused by the mistakes of western democracy and tragically corrupt governments around the world. 

So I am bewildered by the actions of the children of the people who gave me the support I needed as a refugee from the United States back in 1965. What the hell have they been taught all these years?