tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19936064035268007282024-02-20T17:06:28.914-08:00Nigel Wingrove's BlogNigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.comBlogger84125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-80147740397737340792019-07-31T05:04:00.001-07:002019-07-31T05:04:58.484-07:00I Love you Bunny. I love you too Bunny...
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
BUNNY<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
by Mona Awad</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Imagine teen-dramas Mean Girls and Heathers mashed with TV’s Scream Queens or Buffy and then located in Sunnydale or Pretty Little Liars’ Riverdale. Call it Warren, as in rabbit, and give the town a high-crime rate where muggings, violent assaults, rapes and random decapitations are common and the large underclass population is addicted to opiates, cheap alcohol and bad food. Then pop an Ivy League university in the middle with the immediately surrounding streets reeking of money, opulent shops, chic eateries and good taste. Then add some bunnies to the mix…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Bunnies, the villains of this surreal preppy horror story, are four child-like hyper-feminine teenage-girl-women with a Borg-like hive group-think. Teen psycho bitches with sharp minds and even sharper claws who call each other Bunny and think and act as one.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink-and-white bodies, forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my breath away. And then the nuzzling of ski-jump noses, peach fuzzy cheeks. Temples pressed against temples in a way that made me think of the labial rubbing of the bonobo or the telepathy of beautiful, murderous children in horror films. All eight of their eyes shut tight as if this collective asphyxiation were a kind of religious bliss. All four of their glossy mouths making squealing sounds of monstrous love that hurt my face.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>I love you, Bunny.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The narrator whose face hurt is Samantha Heather Mackey a fellow graduate who is very definitely not a Bunny. Lonely. poor, creative, angst-ridden and excluded from the other students in her literary workshop, the four inclusive Bunnies, who she hates and despises but at the same time yearns to belong and be accepted by.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>She also has one main friend or lover? An art school dropout and hideously woke hipster girl called Ava who has the sides of her head shaved and wears lace-mesh gloves ripped tights and some sort of veil. While I describe her as hideous I think that Awad likes her and sees her as Samantha’s white knight against the Bunnies who, much to Samantha’s surprise and horror, invite her to one of their <i>’Smut Salons</i>’, that was their ‘<i>own private Bunny thing…something they’d talk about in low voices’.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Against Ava’s advise and her own judgement she goes…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So far so fabulous but Bunny soon morphs from the slightly surreal to a full-on Daliesque nightmare in which real rabbits explode and boys are axed to death and the reader is left wondering what the Hell<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is going on? Yet to an extent it works, essentially because Awad is such a good writer that she is able to hold our attention as Samantha’s angst and writer's block interplay with the Bunnies and Bunny-boys of her warped imaginings.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In many ways, Bunny infuriates because for half the novel it is simply brilliant and that brilliance is the Bunnies who are clever, stylish, sexy, funny and very ’dangerous’. Samantha names them Cupcake, Creepy Doll, Vignette, ‘<i>with her lovely Victorian skull face’</i> and the Duchess, who etches her poetry onto glass. These are the stars of Bunny who sadly become increasingly lost to us as Awad lets her surreal descriptions of Samantha’s mental meanderings and Id-like projections take over as she struggles with her thesis.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I say this not as a criticism but as a regret because I really enjoyed this novel, which is fabulously wicked and, in places, very funny, but it could and should be, so much more. I want more of the Bunnies and it seems I am not alone in wanting more as AMC, the media group behind Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, has just acquired the rights to develop Bunny into a TV series.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Perhaps the Bunnies explain this novel best.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>They smile that tsk-tsk smile again. Shake their heads.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>“Samantha we’re at Warren. The most experimental, ground-breaking school in the country.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>This goes way beyond genre. It subverts the whole concept of genre.”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Bunny</div>
<div class="p1">
Mona Awad</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
373 pages</div>
<div class="p1">
Hardback £18.99</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Published by Head of Zeus Ltd</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<br />Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-41838029389356300092018-08-12T08:43:00.000-07:002018-08-12T08:52:00.887-07:00Eat, Sleep, Bow, Sell, Repeat <div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>Convenience Store Woman</i> by Sayana Murata, the short novel and winner of Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, was for me a captivating and compulsive read but ultimately lacked the emotional clout of similar Japanese novels like<i> I Want to Kick You in the Back </i>by Risa Wataya or, in particular, <i>The Nakano Thrift Shop </i>by Hiromi Kawakami which shares many of the <i>Convenience Store Woman's</i> quirky and eccentric qualities.<br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The heroine is a 36-year-old woman, Keiko Furukura, who, as a child, stopped two classmates from fighting by bashing them over the head with a shovel. Later Keiko stopped a female teacher’s hysterics by pulling down the woman's skirt and knickers, behaviour that alarmed the authorities and her parents. </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">By adulthood, it was quite clear that Keiko was a little odd and in an effort to appear normal she got a job at a convenience store. Here, Keiko's carefully crafted veneer of normalness only emphasised her abnormalness as she created a stripped-down, pure version of Japan’s conservative society around herself. </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">In her world, Keiko exists inside but also outside of Japan's preordained life plan of work, marriage and children. She has no partner, no husband or interest in having one, no interest in sex and no life or interests outside of The Smile Mart, the convenience store she has worked at since it opened in 1998 when she was 18 years old. She eats food bought from the store and keeps herself fit and healthy in order to work well and defines herself proudly as a 'cog in the wheel' and as long as her particular cog keeps turning she is happy.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">To allay suspicion and avoid finger pointing Keiko adopts the style of speech and phrases of her co-workers and often repeats the same phrases back to them. She shops where they shop and buys dresses and handbags by the same designers but is careful enough to select ones in different colours or with similar designs so not to be thought copying or, perish the thought, displaying abnormal behaviour. Her sister also devises a number of phrases that Keiko can use to dispel criticism and divert probing questions about her private life, or rather her complete lack of life outside of the convenience store. </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">This charade works well until the arrival of Shiraha, a part-timer who looks down on his co-workers at the convenience store who he regards as losers. Aside from this and being especially lazy his speciality is stalking female customers in the hope of finding a woman rich enough to look after him so he doesn't have to work anymore...</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Funny and impossible to put down <i>Convenience Store Woman</i> is as much a clever attack on Japan's work and marriage ethic as it is on our concepts of normality. It is also a radical championing in praise of the hidden eccentrics and nonconformists that lurk in the most normal of places, even convenience stores. Highly recommended.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Convenience Store woman</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Sayaka Murata</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Grove Press</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Hardback </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">$20.00</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">UK, Portobello Books</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Paperback, £9.35</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div>
<style type="text/css"> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #232323; -webkit-text-stroke: #232323} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} </style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">162 pages</span></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-74467621192829560032017-11-13T03:12:00.000-08:002017-11-13T03:12:44.999-08:00Life, Lust and Death<div class="p1">
<i>Heather, The Totality</i> is a bit like having a shot of strong liquor, in that it’s downed quickly and then it hits you. Written by<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Matthew Weiner, whose previous credits include being head writer and executive producer of <i>Mad Men</i>, one the most accomplished television dramas ever produced.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Heather</i> is devoid of waste. Each sentence and paragraph has been stripped to the bone so that like a good script, only the essential information necessary to the story is conveyed, any fat has been cut away. The result is a sparse novel that can be read in a few hours, the key characters outlined in a few words, there is literally nothing else left in the story, backgrounds and descriptions are just brief outlines if at all, yet it works.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There is Mark Barrington, bland, funny to his wife, though not it seems to anyone else, and who is better than most at his job at a city traders. He benefits by getting generous bonuses at the end of each year which make him reasonably rich and secure but he doesn’t rise up the ladder to the extent a more ambitious man might have done. Later this becomes an issue.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Mark’s wife Karen is more beautiful than she realises but tends to be eclipsed by her friends and acquaintances, so much so that she often feels sidelined and lonely. When her first and only child, Heather, comes along Karen devotes her life to raising her and being Heather’s best friend.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Around the time that Mark and Karen met, Bobby is born. Bobby’s mother is a heroin and crack addict with a string of dysfunctional heroin-addicted lovers. Some hit her, some are kind, all are addicts and transitory in the life of her son, Bobby, who grows up in squalor and poverty. Later Bobby develops a taste for violent sex, so much so that the prison gang that beat him up as part of an initiation ceremony,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>nicknamed him ‘hard-on’ after he got an erection as he lost consciousness.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What these three will later have in common is Heather…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I read <i>Heather, The Totality</i> in a few hours and was briefly consumed by it and by Weiner’s ability to say almost nothing but at the same time say everything, leaving your mind to fill in the blanks. As when Mark sees his daughter being watched:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Mark wished it were just desire he had seen directed at his daughter and then he nearly collapsed against a bench to catch his breath, his body having deduced immediately what it took his mind an hour to figure out: the Worker’s gaze was so violent and hungry that Mark had actually run away.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Or when he first sees Karen:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Mark liked Karen because she had no idea how beautiful she was…. He thought he would never get tired of having sex with her and he took that thought very seriously and knew they would marry.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet novels generally envelop you and if I have a criticism of Weiner’s minimalist style it is that ultimately it is unsatisfying. It leaves you wanting more but in a bad way, a bit like a television drama that lasts for fifteen minutes and plays out brilliantly for that length of time and then ends. So, as the closing credits roll the viewer is left thinking is that it? Could they not write more? Did they run out of money? In the same way, much as I enjoyed this short novel, like the shot of liquor I started with, the effect has quickly worn off and I want more. Next time Weiner should write a feature rather than a trailer.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove, 2017</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Heather, The Totality<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
Matthew Weiner</div>
<div class="p1">
Published by Canongate in the UK</div>
<div class="p1">
and Little Brown in the US, 2017.</div>
<div class="p1">
138 pages</div>
<style type="text/css"> p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} </style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
£14.99 Hardback</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-21535342828213315322017-10-13T06:56:00.000-07:002017-10-13T06:56:14.083-07:00Hollywood Coercion: Weinstein and the Casting Couch<div class="p1">
The ongoing scandal that Hollywood mogul, Harvey Weinstein, allegedly used intimidation, coercion and, if needs be, brute force to grope, abuse or rape women should come as no surprise, and certainly not to anyone who either worked in, or had connections to, the film industry. If anything, it should be a surprise that it has taken so long to come out.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
My own Weinstein anecdote was at Cannes 1997 the year that the first Austin Powers film was released. A good girlfriend of mine had come to Cannes with me that year. She was good looking, sexy and extremely extrovert, so had after</div>
<div class="p1">
a few days really made her presence felt. One night she rang up very excited because she was on her way to Hotel Cap-Ferrat, one of the top hotels outside of Cannes where a lot of the top Hollywood people and stars stayed, including, I believe, Weinstein.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
She was in the company of an Italian man who’s name I can’t remember, but If was told afterwards that the Italian man’s role was allegedly to act as bait and bring back women for Weinstein. My friend, it appeared, was to be that<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
night’s entertainment. In the end my friend was fine, plus she was smart enough and streetwise enough to have handled herself. However, for many young women working in the film industry and caught up in the excitement of Cannes the outcome could have been very different. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
My company, Redemption is very much on the fringes of the film industry but nevertheless during the nineties and noughties for a couple of weeks a year I would always attend the Cannes film festival. Cannes in its heyday would bring in thousands of the great and the good into a what is essentially a small coastal town and transform it into a wonderland of flash cars, yachts, ghastliness, bling and excess.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Cannes film festival is essentially a melée of hundreds small, independent or national film companies trying to do deals to license or sell their films, or to get finance for a script or project, or, if you are an actor, to get a part in a film and so on. On top of that there are the big studios and film companies promoting key films, as well as the prestigious Palme D’or for the best film in competition.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Holding all this together are the marketing, PR and entertainment companies who organise all the parties and launches that go on every day. Finally, there are the journalists, the press and the TV and internet companies who also arrive in their thousands - all wanting a story and an invitation to the party.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Added to this excited mass of humanity will be alcohol, drugs, glamour, money and sex, lots of sex and lots of money with everyone wanting one or the other and the person who had both, plus that rarest aphrodisiac of all, real power, was Harvey Weinstein.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Its perhaps easy to forget now that in the nineties just how magnificent Weinstein’s record was. This was the man who, with his brother Bob, had either distributed, produced or executive produced some of the greatest and trendiest films of the 20th Century including; <i>Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Sex, Lies and Videotape, Scandal, Clerks, The Crow, Good Will Hunting</i> and the <i>Scream</i> series all of which helped make Miramax the most successful independent studio in America prior to it being sold to Disney in 1993.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There is no other industry like film, apart perhaps now in the age of celebrity for celebrities sake when the internet and reality TV have to an extent democratised the pursuit of fame, that attracts so many dreamers, people who are desperate for their first break - to act in a film, or write a film, or direct a film. Film makes fanatics of those that want to be part of it and as such people will do almost anything to make their dreams come true, literally anything …<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So Harvey Weinstein was the man with the midas grope and a finger, at the very least, in every actress. He would, like many popstars and other men with power or fame and with something that women wanted, have seen the exchange of sex for a part in one of his films or work in his company as a fair trade. And Weinstein was in no way an exception to this, its just that he did it all the time and in the main got away with it - if one woman told him to fuck off, then the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
next one would give him what he wanted and get the role or job in return.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Weinstein’s three mistakes were firstly thinking that this was normal or acceptable behaviour, secondly carrying on doing it when his power was diminishing, and thirdly not seeing that society was changing and that the new generation of women were just not going to except being used for sex if they didn’t want to be. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I have no doubt that a lot of the allegations now being made are true but also think, now that the worm has turned that there is danger, as with the Jimmy Saville scandal, that a kind of victim hysteria can take over whereby almost any woman that encountered Weinstein will be seeing themselves as having been abused. There is also a danger that Hollywood trendiness could make being one of Harvey’s victims a badge of honour and in Hollywood no one wants to be left out.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
My guess is that this will run and run, with Weinstein’s erstwhile friends proving to be fair-weather and treacherous who will turn on him now that he has no value thus reducing Weinstein to pariah status. However, it would be very wrong to</div>
<div class="p1">
think that Weinstein is unique because he isn’t, in fact I can think of several film people with similar reputations and I am sure that there are hundreds of others who would have seen the ’casting couch’ as a perk of their office and just as many actresses (and actors) who would, sadly, have seen it as a price to pay for getting their foot in the door.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; min-height: 22.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-54792873432586412292017-10-12T06:01:00.000-07:002017-10-12T06:13:09.452-07:00BREAKING THE GIRL - PIECE BY PIECE<div class="p1">
<i>Such Small Hands</i> by the Spanish writer Andrés Barba is a truly disquieting tale of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>a young, newly orphaned girl, called Marina, whose parents were both killed in a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>car crash, or rather her father was, her mother died in the hospital - a statement of fact that Marina repeats again and again almost mechanically to the child psychologists that question her.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Marina herself was ripped open in the accident with a wound that ran from her shoulder on through to her sternum,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>exposing her white ribs, tearing her young flesh, and leaving her with spectacular scars.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
At times the book reads almost like a ghost story or a dream, so strong is the writers sense of the child, of the etherial, and of Marina’s presence, a presence that we are never sure is of her dead,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>or of her remembered life, or of her now, with her little dolly that she clings to:<i>‘Because dolly was the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i><i>only one who didn’t lie’.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Marina is, after her wounds heal, taken from the hospital to an orphanage where she seems almost</div>
<div class="p1">
invisible amongst the other little girls who she thinks are all alike and whose faces blur into one. Yet<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
at night while they sleep, Marina wanders around the dormitory and looks at them, at their faces:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>She’d slip out of bed feeling the cold floor tiles beneath her feet and creep over to one of them. She’d<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>get so close her lips would brush against her. She’d think, “If she woke up now she’d see me,” and that </i><i>thought frightened her. She’d rest her head very carefully on the pillow, inhaling the girl’s breath.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Just like pain. Exactly like pain</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Marina tries to fit in and to be loved, to make the other girls love her. She is odd one, the girl from</div>
<div class="p1">
a nice, middle class home who was taken to Disneyland and had her picture taken with Mickey Mouse,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and who went on a rollercoaster ride three times. Then when the adults weren’t looking the other girls would hit her, <i>“Never very hard, usually just softly”.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This is a story that doesn’t so much build but rather envelopes you in a world of child-like menace and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>loneliness and when Marina stops eating to try to win the other girls love and shows one<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of them her scars with a mixture of ecstasy and trepidation, we feel her pain,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>not just the physical but the emotional as well:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>…The skin around the scar contracted in a fleeting spasm and the girl opened her mouth,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i><i>as if she she wanted to devour everything: the air, the feel of the fig tree, Marina’s arrogance,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i><i>her own fear. It wasn’t the same scar she saw in the bathroom every day when they took their<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i><i>showers; this one was crying out to be touched, to be admired, nothing made it hide now.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
One day Marina’s beloved dolly is taken, later the girls return a leg…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This is a short story and at just a 100 pages can be read in one sitting but for such a compact novel it packs a big punch that will stay with you long after the book is finished. It is also, apparently, based on actual events which makes the story even more unsettling . Exquisitely written, macabre and beautifully atmospheric<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>this is a really moving and very unnerving take on childhood innocence, loss and cruelty that for no<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>particularly reason reminded me in places of films like <i>Sixth Sense</i> and <i>What Lies Beneath</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Such Small Hands</div>
<div class="p1">
Portobello Books, London 2017</div>
<div class="p1">
Hardback, 101 pages</div>
<div class="p1">
£9.99</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-58277783044406400652017-10-08T10:21:00.000-07:002017-10-08T10:21:11.001-07:00The ‘Far-Right’ reinvented as a 21st Century Political Nasty<div class="p1">
When I started my company, Redemption Films, in the early 1990s it happened not because I had planned to do it but rather because the UK film censors, the BBFC (<i>British Board of Film Classification</i>) had refused my short film, <i>Visions of Ecstasy</i>, a certificate on the grounds that they felt it was blasphemous, which effectively banned its release in the UK. That action forced my career sideways and I decided that if I couldn’t make my own films then I could at least release the films that l liked.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
That was in 1990 and, two years later, in 1992, I founded Redemption with the aim of releasing and distributing european horror and exploitation films. At this time because horror films, and particularly European horror and US exploitation films, had, in the UK, been labelled ‘Video Nasties’ there was an air both of persecution and of subversion in not just watching these films but even of handling or writing about them. Indeed, in the early 1990s when the internet was still in its infancy, word-of-mouth, fanzines and illicit bootlegs were the only way most horror fans read or heard about these films; with fans smuggling in rare or underground films from Holland and other less censored countries.</div>
<div class="p2">
<b></b><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>Ban this Vile Filth!</b></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Draconian fines and occasionally even more draconian prison sentences were imposed on horror fans caught with unclassified copies of films like <i>Nekromantik</i> or <i>The Gestapo’s Last Orgy</i>. This sense of hysteria and persecution increased even more, when in 1994, two ten year old boys were found guilty of the appalling murder of a two year old child called James Bulger, and the judge speculated on whether horror films might have influenced the two young killers? The UK media then had a field day linking films like <i>Chucky</i> to the murder and the BBFC, ever conscious of the public opinion, tightened censorship still further, banning, among many, three of Redemption’s films (<i>Bare Behind Bars, Sadomania </i>and <i>Exorcism</i>), a ban we challenged in court and lost.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In the end it would take several more years of expensive and time consuming legal battles against the BBFC and the UK government before the BBFC backed down and its ruling director, a man called James Ferman, resigned. With Ferman gone following the BBFC’s defeat over pornography in 2000, a case also instigated by Redemption, the level of censorship across all film genres was gradually relaxed with the UK going on to enjoy several years of relatively liberal film classification and censorship.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now though I am seeing and experiencing for the first time since those dark days new levels of censorship across all media, instigated in part by the UK government and supported in many cases by the mainstream media (msm), while being driven and fuelled by the ideological totems of the left - political correctness and cultural marxism. This time the state’s ire, rather than being directed at exploitation films, is being focused on what it loosely terms ‘right wing and ‘far-right’ politics, the modern day ‘Political Nasty’. Like the ‘Video Nasty’ of legend, the powers that be are determined to turn the Political Nasty into a ‘catch-all’ bogey man onto which they can blame everything from Islamic terrorism to ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Currently the Conservative Party are in power and it is a conservative Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who has proposed legislation that would make it a criminal offence to view ‘far-right’ material online. She has also created a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
whole slew of new powers for the police to tackle instances of online abuse and hate speech.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
To take the term ‘far-right’ first, the <i>Conservative Party</i> is technically a rightwing party, though since David Cameron was made leader it has become increasingly Blairite, a shift that has continued<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>under Theresa May’s leadership. It should also be remembered that way back in 2002 that it was Theresa May who described the then conservative party as the ‘nasty party’ and she wasn’t being complimentary.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Nevertheless, many on the left view the Conservatives as ‘fascist scum’ and definitely right wing, while <i>Hope Not Hate</i>, the UK’s equivalent to the US’s <i>Southern Poverty Law Centre</i>, describes as ‘far-right’ political parties like</div>
<div class="p1">
Ukip as well as news site like Breibart so the blanket criminalisation of all sites and organisations to the right of the</div>
<div class="p1">
now very soft-right conservative party would effectively be a massive act of anti-democratic censorship on a par<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
with the worst excesses of the Chinese government and one that would ban thousands of sites.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The UK has no <i>Bill of Rights</i> like the US to protect free speech and no <i>First Amendment</i> enshrined in our constitution so the people look to, and rely on, our government to protect our democracy and our freedoms to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>say, watch and think what we like, this Conservative government looks set to destroy that trust.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Home Secretary cited the sites of ISIS as justification for this legislation and most people would not have a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
problem with that as ISIS’s whole reason for existing is to destroy our way of life and it actively encourages</div>
<div class="p1">
its supporters to commit acts of terrorism and violence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The “far-right” is, aside from a few loonies, completely different to ISIS in every way in that to varying degrees it espouses political opinions and not violence. Many of those opinions are racist, or anti-semitic or offensive to many, but that is the point of democracy, it is our freedom to say what we like no matter how offensive it is. Furthermore the definition of far-right is so nebulous that the <i>Guardian</i> newspaper seriously described the mainstream and establishment <i>Spectator</i> magazine as the originator of the generally far-right <i>Alt-Right</i>, while others have called the entire Trump administration fascist, its leader, Donald Trump, literally Hitler, who in turn supports the <i>Klu Klux Klan</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The UK has always had an active far-right from Oswald Mosley’s <i>British Union of Fascists</i> in the 1930s, though to the <i>National Front</i> in the 1970s, through to the <i>British National Party</i> in the 1990s and 2000s which received<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
nearly a million votes in 2010 European elections. Ukip got four million votes in the last election and were it not</div>
<div class="p1">
for the success of Brexit were vying with the Liberals to become the countries third opposition party.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The far-right, which presumably now includes parties like <i>Britain First</i> and anti-Islamic pressure groups like <i>EDL,</i> have always been tolerated and accommodated by the establishment in the same way that groups like <i>Class War </i>and the <i>Socialist Workers Party</i> are tolerated. They may not be nice, but they have a legitimate voice and a right to be heard and people have the right to listen to them and make up their own minds should they wish to seek them out.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In turn the <i>Alt-Right </i>and <i>Alt-Lite</i> movement that is emanating from the US, but which has similar groups in the UK and Europe, is a young and eclectic mix of people, ideas and opinions covering all aspects of life and the right. There are also, infamously, groups like the <i>Alt-Right</i> headed up by Richard Spencer, that unashamedly promote white supremacy, and sites (when not blocked or offline) like the <i>Daily Stormer’s</i> which are genuinely antisemitic and deliberately offensive, and there are many others that are neither. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In much the same way that the <i>Conservative Party</i> and the <i>Labour Party</i> have activists and think tanks bouncing ideas around so does the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right with talk covering everything from feminism and relationships to immigration and the wall. Some of those ideas are going to be provocative, and unpleasant, or even deliberately offensive as on <i>4Chan</i>, but they are to paraphrase a certain Lord Mayor, part and parcel of politics online.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
These people are not ISIS or advocating terrorism, they are espousing ideas and new ways of dealing with old problems, they are talking and sharing thoughts not bombs, and regardless of the Home Secretaries opinions on their ideas the UK Home Secretary should welcome their expession and not try to shut democracy down.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-49980780428744204992017-10-04T03:48:00.000-07:002017-10-04T03:48:49.538-07:00WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! PART 4: TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY<div class="p1">
At the time of writing (October 3rd) it is some six weeks or so since the events at Charlottesville and the ripples caused by the violent clashes between Trumpers, Alt-Righters, white supremacists and rightwing nationalists opposed to the removal of Confederate statues and leftwing counter protestors. Protests which culminated in the death of Heather Hyer - the result of being hit by a car driven by a white supremacist in an act that may have been deliberate or accidental? Dozens more people were injured on both sides, either hit by the car, thrown rocks and bottles, or hurt in fighting between the two groups.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The fallout is radically changing and polarising American politics, and what happens in America eventually happens everywhere else. So these post Charlottesville events are important. The <i>’shut it down, shout it down’</i> nature of the debates between the left and the right and the increasing propensity of both sides to use violence is also creating a dangerous shift in the way that democratic politics functions and operates. Now the extreme position and what was the reaction of last resort, is almost the first reaction and the new normal, with debate bypassed in favour of shouting and fists.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Charlottesville has also done something else, it has begun to shift the dynamics of power and influence across the board, from left to right, from the mainstream media to the fringes of the internet, all have been and continue to be effected. It is as if on August 12th a game of chess had been in progress and then someone had knocked the board over and when the pieces were put back again on August 13th all the positions had been changed, making some weaker, some stronger and some completely irrelevant.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Key figures in the world of the <i>Alt-Right</i> have, like Richard Spencer, founder of the <i>Alt-Right</i> and a key organiser and supporter of the <i>Unite the Right</i> rally have been, if not absent from the scene, then certainly unusually low-key. Nathan Domingo, who headed up <i>Identity Evrope, </i>and was himself a key player in the Charlottesville rally, stood down as leader of <i>Identity Evrope </i>at the end of August in order to pursue other projects.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Likewise many groups across the right have attempted to distance and disassociate themselves not just from Charlottesville but from each other, or to spin the events either as a terrible failure of leadership and organisation, or praising them as a turning point, or launch pad for white supremacy and the far right movement as whole. Others have been, if not appalled, then certainly concerned at their image, thrust as they were from the relative safety and anonymity of the online world into the glare of the world’s media in the real world where many of them fell far short of their supremacist ideal.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Charlottesville showed the far-right in all its eclectic glory from the KKK to the preppy looking <i>Identity Evrope</i> and <i>Alt-Right</i>, resplendent in chinos, polo shirts and fashy haircuts, and in-between everyone from the paramilitary looking <i>National Socialist Movement</i> and <i>Traditional Workers Party</i>, to rag-tag brigades of fringe nationalist, militias and confederacy groups, through to isolated nazis wannabes with newly bought swastika flags and replica WW2 steel helmets, and overall it did not look good.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Equally unsettling for the far-right was the subsequent post Charlottesville backlash against them, coming as it did after almost two years of growing support and ascendency in the run up to Trump’s inauguration and presidency. Now the far-right suddenly found that their pariah status was back big time. No only that but as a direct result of Charlottesville and the death of Heather Hyer, coupled with an offensive opinion piece mocking Hyer’s weight and death in the <i>Daily Stormer</i>, that they were being banned online as well.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
As already covered in my blog <i>Whose Speech, Our Speech Part 3 - The Great Shuttening</i>, the <i>Daily Stormer’s</i> site was closed down on August 13th, followed by dozens of others, including the long established forum <i>Stormfront</i>, numerous other rightwing websites, personal blogs and thousands of individual <i>Twitter</i> accounts and <i>Youtube</i> postings, many of which were demonetised depriving many people not just of a political voice but an income.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In the White House Donald Trump was assailed by the media for not having specifically denounced the far-right in his first comments on the Charlottesville violence rather than just saying that there was violence on both sides. Later Trump would specifically condemn the far-right but by then his words were felt to ring hollow.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The media circled with many citing Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon’s links to the rightwing <i>Breibart News </i>and his avowed nationalism as evidence of Trump’’s covert sympathy for the far-right. They also linked in key adviser Sebastian Gorka, an English man of Hungarian descent whose father had fought and suffered at the hands of the Soviets. Gorka often wore a small badge commemorating this which was wrongly and deliberately claimed by the left to be of Nazi origin.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Whether because of sensitivities post Charlottesville or coincidence, both of these rightwing figures were out of the White House by the end of August, to great cheers from the left who regarded the departure of Bannon and Gorka as a great victory.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The fortunes of other high profile, but less mainstream rightwingers also suffered. Milo Yiannopoulos, the flamboyant writer and broadcaster, who had been actively rebuilding his personal brand over the last few months after his reprehensible and stupid comments on underage sex torpedoed his career back in March, floundered very publicly again. Milo was the organiser and champion of the grand sounding <i>Free Speech Week</i> at Berkeley University where speakers supposedly included among many Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter, Katie Hopkins and Pamela Geller.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This time rather than being surrounded by rioting students trying to prevent him from speaking Milo found himself outmanoeuvred by Berkeley Uuniversity officials who effectively and peacefully managed to get the whole event cancelled though not before many of the scheduled speakers cancelled themselves or claim that they had not even been booked. In the event Milo had to deliver a twenty minute speech outside the venue to a small desultory group of supporters. There was no <i>Antifa</i>, no riots, no drama and it was all over in a couple of hours rather than the promised seven days which undermined his credibility with distractors and supporters alike. Milo has now taken his brand of camp rightwingism to Australia.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Rebel Media</i>, one of the most successful of the new right-leaning media groups ended up sacking one of its most popular broadcasters, Faith Goldy, for taking part in a podcast affiliated to <i>The Daily Stormer.</i> Goldy had already put herself in her bosses bad books by covering the Charlottesville rally and the <i>Stormer</i> podcast was seen as beyond the pale. Since then Goldy seemed to spend most of August and September keeping an uncharacteristically low profile before she began re-emerging with the new Reddit group <i>TNR</i> or <i>The New Right</i> and appearances on <i>Youtube</i> chatting with fellow <i>ex-Rebel Media</i> colleague Lauren Southern.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There are dozens more examples of rightwing fracture but the overriding impression is of flux and changing fortunes; that basically whatever certainties were in place on August 12th no longer applied on August 13th. As if to reinforce this Donald Trump brought in former US Marine Corps general John F Kelly as White House chief of Staff and put an end to the state of organised chaos that previously prevailed. Now order and, by Trump’s standards, calmness reigns as was witnessed by Trumps widely praised handling of hurricanes <i>Harvey</i> and <i>Irma</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet now, some six weeks after Charlottesville, all of these repositioned chess pieces are beginning to adapt to their new roles and in many cases are proving to be much stronger as a result. <i>The Daily Stormer</i>, now without doubt the most banned website and publication in world history, has, by refusing doggedly to give up, become more successful and well known to a degree unthinkable a few months ago. Now producing a weekly downloadable edition, and increasingly talking of a future print edition, or of syndicating itself amongst its followers so that their website could in effect be reproduced hundreds of times, the martyred <i>’Stormer’</i> has shown that it is not going anywhere and that it would probably have been better if <i>Go Daddy, Cloudflare</i> and <i>Google</i> had just left it left alone.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Indeed many of the companies and individuals that led the attacks on the far-right are already feeling an ill wind. For example, Matthew Prince, the CEO of <i>Cloudflare</i> the company whose services had protected the <i>Daily Stormer</i> site from DDoS attacks, has been cited in a legal action by a porn company who has used the closing down of the <i>Daily Stormer’s</i> site as evidence that <i>Cloudflare</i> can, if it wishes, arbitrarily shut down a site if it choses to - the porn company in question is seeking to shut down sites pirating their products. <i>Cloudflare</i> meanwhile says that shutting down sites without a court order is against their policy…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Steve Bannon, the notorious lord of darkness and power behind the Trump throne, at least as portrayed by <i>Saturday Night Live</i> and his leftist critics, has, far from going quietly into the night, begun work on launching a <i>Breibart TV</i> channel with the aim of eventually rivalling <i>Fox News</i> and presumably further spreading the nationalist economic cause he champions. And, no doubt, also being able to use this new TV arm of Breibart to destroy his enemies.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Websites like <i>Stormfront</i>, which was dismissed by many on the far-right as being too old, boring and essentially past it, has proved itself to be both resilient and up for a fight, and is now back online. Equally, by closing down accounts and demonetising thousands of others, <i>Youtube</i> and <i>Twitter</i> have driven many on the right to seek refuge on <i>Gab.ai,</i> the <i>Facebook</i> and <i>Twitter</i> hybrid with a Pepe style logo. While <i>YouTube</i> refugees are fleeing to <i>Bitchute,</i> the new free speech alternative.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Perhaps most telling of all is the attempt by the right to challenge and launch a rival to <i>ICANN</i>, the corporation that controls the allocation and management of domain names, IP address and root servers. The new challenge comes from <i>WeCANN</i> which describes itself as being a ‘web equality coalition for assigned names and numbers’ with the aim of ‘protecting free speech’ by using emerging technologies.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
These are all small, David verses Goliath ventures, but nevertheless their existence and growing support has been caused directly by the assault on the far-right, and by the bludgeoning use of vaguely termed ’hate speech’ criteria to silence and shut down anyone, or group, or organisation, that the new ’establishment’. behemoths of <i>Google, Facebook, Twitter,</i> and politically motivated charities like the <i>Southern Poverty Law Centre</i>, decide is guilty.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Acting like a modern day Inquisition these corporations and wealthy charities who have a vested interest in perpetuating ‘hate’ crimes find guilt in the slightest infringement of their ever growing definitions of ‘hate speech’. Once found guilty they hand out any punishment they deem fit, which in the online world means banishment and unpersoning. In the real world it can mean abuse, doxing, loss of a job, career or physical assault.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The ‘hate speech’ net widens daily and has long moved to include mainstream conservatives and those whose opinions criticise or challenge the left, and who in turn the left then labels, ad infinitum, racists, or homophobes, or Islamophobes, or fascists, or of course, Nazis, the word to use if all else fails. This in turn is, in my opinion, pushing more and more people into the far-right camp, not because they necessarily want to be there but because they have no choice.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So the legacy of Charlottesville is not just an ever widening gap between the left and right, but an increasingly polarised and hate-filled one. It has also shifted allegiances and the balance of power between friends and foes, and, perhaps most importantly of all, it has seen Donald Trump become more political and a little less Trumpian, but whether that is to the benefit or detriment of his rightwing<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
supporters and the nationalists who put him into power is anyones guess.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; min-height: 22.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-82652537819849736142017-09-24T07:19:00.000-07:002017-09-24T08:04:18.564-07:00My Absolute Darling: Verbosity and Abuse Californian style<div class="p1">
<div class="p1">
Don’t judge a book by its cover people say, and I would add, or its reviews, for <i>My Absolute Darling</i>, the story of a survivalist who abuses and berates his fourteen year old daughter, Julia, or Turtle as she is nicknamed, in equal measure, has been praised to the heavens. In particular by Stephen King, who declared it a ‘masterpiece’ comparable to Harper Lee’s novel <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> and Joseph Heller’s <i>Catch-22</i>, after which, the literary world seemingly fell over itself in order to queue up and lavish further glory on this, Gabriel Tallent’s, first novel.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
That isn’t to say that <i>My Absolute Darling</i> is unworthy of the praise and the hype, but that it is flawed and falls far short of being the masterpiece that Stephen King seems to think it is.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Set in a remote, coastal woodlands in northern California, where a verbose survivalist called Martyn lives in a rambling house that has seen better days. Living with Martyn is his gun-savvy, tough, wood-wise daughter and alcoholic father, making <i>My Absolute Daring</i> a tale of simmering hatreds, love, jealousy, and sexual violence that occasionally crosses over into actual, physical violence. In the background nature mirrors real life by being as brutal and indifference to the suffering of the creatures that exist in its world.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
At the centre of this world is Turtle, the books sullen heroine, who, when not being raped by her father, spends her time cleaning guns, of which she has several, wandering naked through the woods at night, or being subjected to Nietzschean tests of her will and strength by her controlling and Sadean father. Examples include being forced to do pull-ups from a beam in the ceiling while her father holds a razor-sharp knife between her legs, meaning that should she try to lower herself to the ground before the task was completed that she would be impaled on the blade.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
On another occasion, in one of the novels genuinely tense and gripping scenes, Turtle is coerced into shooting a coin directly out of the fingers of a ten year old girl that her father has brought home with him. The little girl holds the coin at arms length as Turtle finally gives into her father’s wishes and pulls the trigger…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
But for all the books successes, there are many flaws and appallingly banal sequences, not least in the dialogue spoken by some of the books key characters, which not only seem contrived but undermine the book’s many strengths. This is most notable in some of speeches by Martyn, the abusive father. For example:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>“The temperate may rise six degrees in the coming decades, and that’s not just ‘rising temperature,’that’s a cataclysm. You think we can, stop that? People don’t believe in obesity, and that they can see in the fucking mirror. They can’t take care of their own goddamn bodies. How many people because their hearts are grimy with plaque, do you think? A lot. What is it —— seventy percent of all Americans are over-weight? Half of those are obese? And do you think - can this person, this average American, take care of anything? No. Fuck no. So the natural world, which they cannot see for all their roads and gas stations and schools and jails, the fucking natural world, which is more important and more beautiful than anything this average American has ever seen or understood in his whole fucking life, the natural world is going to die, and we’re going to let it die, and there’s no way we can save it. Fuck.”</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>“Optimism?”</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>“Optimism, hell,”…</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Martyn continues in this vein for another 200 or so words just in that paragraph and there are several more before he pauses for breath. Yet this environmental ranting is as nothing to that of two teenage boys, Brett and Jacob, from the school year above Turtle, who she encounters camping in the woods near her home on one of her nocturnal wanderings.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>“I told Brett the whole story over the phone-he was pissed! He was like, ‘I miss everything!’ - I told him how we were washed out to sea and how it was like making furious love to a clash of orgiastic rhinos in a swimming pool filled with broken glass, and how you made a fire by staring balefully down into the reflective bottom of an aluminium can until your immense force of will was concentrated and magnified by the parabolic mirror into a white-hot spark of pure Turtle rage that could light anything on fire, even the hearts of unwary high schoolers.”</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Or<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>“We could farm mealworms,” Jacob says, warming to the idea, “in our Styrofoam deserts. They can subsist entirely on plastic. I can see us now: farming our mealworms by day, and by night reading Plato aloud to one another beneath the constellations of a foreign sky, accompanied by the vast grind of an entire continent of plastic bottles churning in the current and by the ethereal whisperings of grocery bags saltating across the mounded plastic dunes.”</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Teenage dialogue is regarded as literary kryptonite for writers and the interminable eco-twaddle between Jacob and Brett makes me feel that Gabriel Tallent was exposed to a lethal dose around the time that he wrote <i>My Absolute Darling</i> as it not only destroys the brooding menace of earlier scenes but, in the context of two teenage boys, is not so much <i>Stranger Things</i> but just strange in that no one speaks like that.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Tallent also sets up interesting subplots early on in the story around Turtle and then just lets them disappear. In one, Anna her teacher, tries to befriend her and reaches out to Turtle by asking her to help, or put in a supportive word, to new girl Rilke who is being bullied. Yet, despite Turtle doing the opposite and briefly being shown joining in with the bullying, this interesting storyline is not developed. Nor disappointingly, is the relationship with Anna her teacher, as she effectively vanishes after this scene until the end of the novel when her reappearance seems perfunctory and staged.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Most disappointingly of all is Martyn, the abusive father, as no real attempt is made to explore or really question his behaviour or indeed why he is being so abusive or even what drives him? Turtles mother is hinted to have killed herself after discovering that he is abusing their daughter, but there is no timeline of the abuse so it becomes difficult to contextualise it within the story. <span class="s1">Nor is Martyn’s violence, or his random acts like arriving home with a ten year old girl in tow who he later rapes, an act that triggers the books climatic ending, really believable. For such a strong, controlling character they seem almost too out of control.</span></div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
If anything, <i>My Absolute Darling</i>, reminded me most of another Stephen King endorsed novel, <i>The Fireman</i> by Joe Hill, which was published in 2016. Joe Hill is, ironically, a pseudonym for Joseph Hillstrom King, one of Stephen King’s sons. I say this because the <i>The Fireman</i> is full of lengthy environmental diatribes and politically motivated speeches which, <span class="s2">like Brett and Jacob's eco rants,</span> often seemed more about re-enforcing the authors prejudices than moving the story forward.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
That said, the similarities between the two novels stop there and <i>My Absolute Darling</i> has much to recommend and an interesting, strong heroine in Turtle, though she needs to find some friends who can speak properly.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
My Absolute Darling</div>
<div class="p4">
4th Estate, London 2017</div>
<div class="p4">
(An imprint of Harper Collins)</div>
<div class="p4">
Hardback, 417 pages</div>
<div class="p4">
£12.99</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; min-height: 22.0px}
p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 22.0px}
p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000}
span.s1 {font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke: 0px #000000}
span.s2 {font-kerning: none}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p4">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-78068929428878494172017-09-16T10:08:00.000-07:002017-09-16T10:08:06.101-07:00Finding the Words to match the Deeds<div class="p1">
The only problem with writing an anonymous book about incest and, in this case, the author’s abuse and multiple rapes by her father over nearly twenty years, is that a question mark will forever hang over the book. Did she? Did he? The authors validity is conveyed only by her words and not by her deeds or the verdict of a court and as such the reader has to judge whether what they are reading is true, in which case <i>The Incest Diary</i> is a deeply disturbing description of child abuse. If not, then this book is an appalling attempt to eroticise and exploit child abuse for financial gain and having just finished reading this book I have no idea which verdict is correct?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What makes <i>The Incest Diary </i>truly disturbing is not just the subject matter, but its brutal eroticism and the authors honest depictions of the sex she suffered, endured and, unsettlingly, often enjoyed at the hands of her father. However, if this is fiction, then those descriptions become perilously close to pornography.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
From the opening pages onwards the author relates to her father in graphic terms. That she “<i>wanted and didn’t want him to come in and fuck me”</i> and that when her father wanted her; “<i>I felt his eyes on my shoulders and neck, on my legs, my breasts, and my hips” </i>and that she held her body differently when she knew he was looking.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It is this mix of desire and revulsion that lies at the heart of the book and the anonymous authors cathartic journey, which for some reviewers have made the book a disquieting mix of almost pedophiliac porn and, in that the abused victim admits to often enjoying and desiring the abuse, an abusers validation of underage sex. For others this is a searingly heartfelt and brutally honest description of being sexually abused from the age of three to twenty one by ones own father and as such who are we to judge how the victim describes it?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Stripped bare of any excess, this is a short and succinct memoir, yet it is also profoundly shocking one as well. For example; describing being tied naked to a chair and left in a cupboard she relates <i>“my father tied me up in the closet and face-fucked me until he came in my mouth and I vomited up the semen”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i> Or, perhaps more shockingly still, <i>“I liked the feel of his flesh rubbing my flesh. Putting his cock into me was pure pain until my body was big enough, which wasn’t until I was a teenager, I remember being afraid it would hurt the way it has before - like being torn, split in two, blood everywhere, but suddenly it didn’t. My body was finally big enough; I was wet, too.”</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The daughter is to her mother the other woman, and to the daughter her mother is the other woman. Each taking their man away from the other while destroying each other in the process. When the author finally spoke out about her abuse and rape her father denied everything, her family and friends sided with him while denying her. In the end she recanted to save her family and, at twenty one, slept for her father for the last time.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
She ends by describing her relationships with men now; her ex husband, quiet, calm, loving and gentle but not particularly sexual, who after twelve years she divorces. And her lovers, including one who uses a picture of the nine-year old author as a bookmark - <i>“He tells me that he imagines me as a little girl when he has sex with me …. that he masturbates to that photo”…</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
If this book is fiction then it is shameful because it exploits all the real victims of abuse in order to sell, and if it real then it is an horrific reminder of just how awful human sexual desire can be without morality or restraint.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Incest Diary<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
Anonymous</div>
<div class="p1">
132 pages</div>
<div class="p1">
£12.99 - Hardcover edition</div>
<div class="p1">
Bloomsbury Publishing 2107</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-17205239311276075482017-09-04T11:34:00.000-07:002017-10-04T04:02:11.465-07:00WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 3: THE GREAT SHUTTENING<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
In the days immediately following the events at Charlottesville, and before the dust had really settled there were some on the Alt-Right describing it as the Alt-Right’s Munich Putsch moment. The day, on November 9th 1923, that Hitler, hoping to emulate the previous years march on Rome when Mussolini had been able to intimidate the Italian prime minister Luigi Facta<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel to stand down in order to avoid civil war and thus handover the reigns of power over to him and his <i>National Fascist Party</i> (NFP). However, Hitler, unlike Mussolini who had some 30,000 armed men to back him up, marched on Munich with just 2000 men and was confronted by armed police who shot and killed 16 of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>them, causing chaos and his supporters to disperse . Hitler was arrested two days later, and would, on reflection, resolve to win power by legitimate means - eventually being elected Chancellor ten years later in March 1933.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Charlottesville was not Munich 1923, it was not even close, but it was nevertheless a defining moment in the evolution both of the contemporary far right and of how it is perceived, supported, opposed and accommodated, by the people, the media, the internet and the state. So in that sense the Munich analogy is not completely wrong…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
…After the putsch failed Hitler was put on trial and imprisoned where he used his time to plan and to write his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle or My Fight). The party he led, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) was banned and its main mouthpiece, their newspaper, the <i>Völkischer Beobachter,</i> was also banned. As a result numerous new nazi supporting newspapers were started to carry on the fight, likewise nationalists and NSDAP members formed a lose-knit political grouping, the <i>Völkisch-Sozialer Block</i> (the People’s Social Block) which in turn supported the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
newly formed <i>Deutsche Partei</i> (German Party), essentially the NSDAP with another name.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In December 1924 Hitler was released from prison. Two months later the authorities lifted the ban on the NSDAP and the party was reformed, publication of the <i>Völkische Beobachter </i>restarted and the rest, so to speak, is history.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
For the Alt-Right, the wider nationalist groups, assorted Alt-Right and Alt-Lite personalities, as well as numerous other rightist movements of various hues and shades, from the palest grey to the blackest black, nothing is as clear cut. There is no ‘leader’ or defining philosophy, no unifying manifesto, not even a party or uniting force to gather around or run to for a reassuring group hug or mass Hailing; there is, or rather was, the internet and perhaps Pepe, that great smirking frog in the cyber sky.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
But that was before Charlottesville and <i>The Daily Stormer’s</i> shut down beget the internet’s <i>Great Shuttening</i> which, in turn, essentially killed Pepe and the far rights digital <i>Never Never land.</i> Mordor had come to the Shire or Kekistan as the right had rechristened it, and were taking no prisoners.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>The Daily Stormer</i> went first, but like a hammy actor determined to make the most of his death scene, the <i>Stormer</i> has refused to die and has been resurrecting itself ever since much to the annoyance of the theatre’s management, which in this analogy, would be the Silicon Valley corporations.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>The Daily Stormer </i>may have screamed loudest when the knives went in, but there were hundreds of other victims, many killed quietly and for expediency, quickly, their domains and website content wiped out in seconds so that it was as if they were never there, that they had never existed. Others, less well known, or who had less followers but who were nevertheless important in contributing to the whole, were taken down in the cyber night and their screams have yet to be heard. In fact, many victims of the <i>Great Shuttening</i> will never be known.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Groups like <i>Cross Currents, The National Policy Institute, Occidental Dissent, Alternative Right, The AltRight, Identity Europe, Vanguard America,</i> <i>Radix Journal, Rebel Media</i> as well individuals like <i>Lauren Southern, Faith Goldy, Mike Enoch, Andrew Auernheimer (weev) </i>and <i>Richard Spencer</i> to name a very few. of all the hundreds and hundreds closed. What began as a bit of digital virtue signalling from internet companies like <i>Patreon </i>who closed the funding account of journalist and broadcaster Lauren Southern several weeks before Charlottesville on the grounds that it just didn’t like her views, escalated in the run up to Charlottesville when <i>Airbnb</i> started closing the accounts of anyone they suspected of using their services to attend the <i>Unite the Right</i> rally.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This digital virtue signalling then escalated massively after the banning of <i>The Daily Stormer,</i> almost as if the actions of <i>Google, Go Daddy </i>and<i> Cloudfare </i>in banning the <i>Stormer</i> gave legitimacy to actions that hitherto would have been unthinkable, that is the banning and erasing of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>a people’s opinion purely because they, that is, Silicon Valley, disagreed, or hated, that groups, or individuals, political views.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> Our Speech or No Speech was the motto of the day now!</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Perhaps driven by the hysteria of the liberal media in the aftermath of Heather Hyer’s death, or indeed as a way of exploiting her death, Silicon Valley joined in and began culling<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>websites and social media in ways one would usually associate with communist China, or Iran, or indeed Soviet Russia had the internet existed pre 1989, and certainly not with 21st Century USA.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Cheered on by the liberal media it was as if all the main hosting and internet companies had convened an emergency board meeting and decided that they had to be seen to be doing their bit in getting rid of some ’nazis’. And for the avoidance of doubt 'nazis' no longer means ‘nazis’ in the Third Reich sense, but rather anyone opposed to leftwing liberalism and cultural Marxism. They would not put it in those terms of course but that is essentially what they meant and each company presumably got staff to troll through their sites and social media postings to find ’nazis’ with a view to ’shutting them down’.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, nearly a month since the events at Charlottesville, the <i>Great Shuttenin</i>g is still going on. <i>Stormfront,</i> one of the oldest nationalist forums in existence, having been established for over twenty years and with some 300,000 registered users, was recently closed down without notice and its domain seized by its hosting company, <i>Network Solutions.</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> And so it continues with ban after ban.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet finally, though with reluctance, some in the mainstream media and liberal left are beginning to question both the validity of these actions and the power of Silicon Valley in being able to arbitrarily<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>silence an entire political point of view with a few clicks.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Equally disquieting, abet only for a few so far, is the begrudging acceptance that backing up and exploiting the online attacks on the right, has been violent intimidation from leftwing thugs and mobs of politically correct radicals who are behaving with the same violence and intimidation as Moa’s infamous student <i>Red Guards</i> did during China’s Cultural Revolution. For many, including Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, who to her credit unequivocally condemned <i>Antifa</i> and other leftwing thugs filmed beating up defenceless Trump supporters in a shocking display of mob violence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet despite these setbacks the Right is regrouping and rebuilding and learning from its mistakes. Rival internet social media sites like <i>Gab </i>and <i>Bitchute</i>, are openly committed to free speech and have started up to try and break the monopolies of <i>Facebook </i>and <i>Youtube.</i> There is optimistic talk of forming and creating a rightwing alternative to <i>Google</i> (now aka Goolag) and other Silicon Valley behemoths. While others, including perhaps not unsurprisingly many on the Left, are now calling for <i>Google </i>and <i>Facebook</i> to be regarded as utilities in the same way that water and electricity are so that they can be nationalised and regulated by the state.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Something, I am sure that would have unthinkable were it not for the <i>Great Shuttening.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
How these developments will play out over the coming months is anyones guess, but what is sure is that if Silicon Valley and the liberal left establishment thought by banning and closing down thousands of sites and individual accounts that they could silence at entire political faith and crush its supporters then they are in for a big surprise. History has shown that revolutions rarely start with one big event, rather they begin with lots of little events and happenings, an incident there, a skirmish here, an arrest in one city, and a speech somewhere else. Drip by bloody drip and word by bloody word, a revolution builds and grows, and the people silencing and beating on the right now, may<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>come to realise that their actions have helped unify and galvanise the right in ways that will make it<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>a formidable force in the years to come.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
See also:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 1: CHARLOTTESVILLE</b></div>
<div class="p2">
<b></b><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 2: WEAPONISED SATIRE</b></div>
<div class="p2">
<b></b><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>- WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 4: TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY</b></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-84137630997843622802017-09-02T11:56:00.000-07:002017-09-04T11:08:37.131-07:00WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - PART 2: WEAPONISED SATIRE <div class="p1">
<b>Because the events in Charlottesville were so calamitous and the fallout both extraordinary and ongoing I am going to write several blogs on it over the next few weeks. This is partly because the ripples from Charlottesville, whether in terms of online censorship, street violence, protests, Donald Trump, the Mainstream Media, and right and left wing responses to it, are still happening. It is also because I wanted some time to see how the dust settles…</b><br />
<br />
On Sunday August 13th, the day after clashes between supporters of the <i>Unite the Right</i> rally in Charlottesville and leftwing opponents had left dozens injured and a 32 year old woman, Heather Hyer, the online white supremacist newspaper, <i>The Daily Stormer,</i> lobbed a satirical grenade into the media storm that events in Charlottesville had caused and unleashed carnage.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
For those unfamiliar with <i>The Daily Stormer</i> website, it is a virulently anti-semitic, humorous, OTT and rightwing news site inspired in part by the notorious Nazi era newspaper, <i>Der Stürmer</i>, which was published from 1923 until1945 and the collapse of the Third Reich. Its editor, the ebullient and fanatical ‘jew baiter’ Julius Streicher, was arrested and tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and executed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Founded in July 2013 by Andrew Anglin, a 32 year-old Alt-Right supporting white supremacist, and run as a news site, <i>The Daily Stormer</i>, is unashamedly and outrageously racist and antisemitic, publishing stories that are often very funny while being savagely satirical and, depending on the reader, either deeply offensive or highly appealing, particularly to a young audience.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
A bit like <i>Family Guy</i> mashed with <i>VIZ</i> comic, <i>OZ</i> (a 1970s anti-establishment magazine prosecuted for obscenity, regularly raided by the police and constantly attacked by the mainstream media), and <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> magazine whose cartoons of Mohammed led to it being attacked by Islamic terrorists in 2015 and the murder of twelve of its employees. In a typical example of the <i>Stormer’s</i> sense humour on June 8th, the day of the UK’s general election, it endorsed the labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with the ringing praise that he would <i>“exterminate the entire Jewish race”</i>, while the Conservative party leader Theresa May was dismissed as a <i>“childless old woman with zero stake in the future of Britain who looks like a Cenobite”.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It was that mischievous sense of humour that led, on August 13th, to the exploding grenade. The article on the woman killed in Charlottesville was, even by the <i>Stormer’s</i> questionable standards, deliberately inflammatory and began with the headline: <i>’Heather Hyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year Old Slut’. </i>The article itself, written by Andrew Anglin, went on to state that most people would be glad that Hyer was dead as she was a fat slob who, had she lived until the average female life expectancy of 81, meant she would have been leeching off men’s work for another 49 years. Hence her death was a plus, with the added bonus that it took out a Bernie Sauders supporter.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Appearing less that 24 hours after Hyer’s death, and at a time when the US media was in a full <i>‘shock and awe’ </i>mode against anyone, or any group on the Right politically - from the KKK through to the Alt-Right, from Trump supporters to mainstream conservatives - the article exploded just like petrol thrown onto a fire in a burning building.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
This was full-on confrontation, upsetting not just the liberal left but wrong footing and alienating many on the Right and Alt-Right who were already reeling from the backlash following Hyer’s death and the events that had played out at Charlottesville. Yes, it was satirical, but at this stage no one, and least of all a hyped-up media who were now seeing neo-Nazis under every bed, had the inclination to debate the subtle nuances of describing a recently killed woman as a ‘fat slut’.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The backlash which began within hours of the articles appearance, while perhaps predictable, seemed to catch everyone by surprise. <i>Go Daddy,</i> the company that had hosted <i>The Daily Stormer</i> since its formation, and who made a virtue of its stance defending free speech and opposing censorship, gave <i>The Daily Stormer</i> just 24 hours notice to move its domain to another provider. This action forced the <i>Stormer</i> to register with Google, who, following complaints from leftist activists who were now buzzing around <i>The Daily Stormer </i>like angry wasps, cancelled the <i>Stormer’s</i> registration within hours of being asked to do so by activists. For added credibility <i>Google</i> also closed down <i>The Daily Stormer’s</i> Youtube channel as well (Google owns Youtube). This action then prompted <i>Cloudfare</i>, an internet company whose services help protect websites from cyberattacks, to also terminate <i>The Daily Stormer’s </i>account, in what was, like <i>Go Daddy,</i> a complete reversal of their previous neutral, anti-censorship stance.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
These actions, all of which happened over the space of a couple of days, took <i>The Daily Stormer </i>off line, while making its figurehead Andrew Anglin and his web savvy hacker colleague, Andrew Auernheimer aka ‘Weev’, into a sort of cyber <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.</i> It also heralded in a period of increasingly<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>farcical cat and mouse antics between the internet establishment and<i> The Daily Stormer </i>as it started on a seemingly never ending period playing <i>“What’s My Domain” </i>as the Stormer website hoped from one host to another.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Starting very briefly with China and .wang, the <i>Stormer</i> then moved to Russia and .ru where it lasted about a day before it was closed down only to resurface a few days later with the perfectly the suited .lol , which unfortunately lasted for just a few hours. After that the <i>Stormer</i> went dark, as in the dark web, the part of the web that is hidden from search engines and favoured by government agencies and notoriously gangsters, drug dealers, terrorists and paedophiles.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The so called dark web enables <i>The Daily Stormer</i> to exist and to be visited by any one who downloads a TOR link (the Daily Stormer’s hosting company on the dark web) but it is effectively</div>
<div class="p1">
removed from public view, the aim of its enemies. So, after a weeks absence <i>The Daily Stormer</i> resurfaced again in the real world, this time with the domain punishedstormer.com, where it bloomed, like some rare and poisonous Orchid, for a couple of days before vanishing once again into the darkness.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Predictably, and almost heroically, nearly a full three weeks after it was booted off the web, <i>The Daily Stormer </i>resurfaced yet again, this time bizarrely via an Albanian host<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>using .al. But it was not to last, and after three days of normal life in the daylight<i> The Daily Stormer</i> has, at the time of writing (September 2nd 2017), once again been consigned to the wilderness that is the dark web.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Many initially rejoiced in what they saw as the death of <i>The Daily Stormer,</i> especially the majority for whom it was just a name in a news story about some obscure racist, anti-semitic and nasty hate site. What did it matter if it was banned? Well, it matters a lot regardless of what the <i>The Daily Stormer</i> says or stands for, as this is the first time in the democratic West, where the internet was heralded and defended as a vehicle for freedom and free speech, where outside of criminal and illegal activity, ideas, opinions and so on were free, and no more so than in the United States, where under the First Amendment, The Daily Stormer, has every right to say what it likes, no matter how offensive it is.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Ironically, a side effect of all this is that <i>The Daily Stormer </i>is no longer an obscure website, because with each resurfacing, the traffic to the site, like people flocking to see some rare event, has grown, with the dailystormer.al domain getting in excess of half a million unique visitors a day. Consequently, the longer this farcical game of internet cat and mouse continues, the more publicity <i>The Daily Stormer</i> is going to get, with now even the BBC covering and naming it in a news feature describing its banning.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Another side effect of <i>The Daily Stormer’s </i>banning is that whereas it was originally dismissed as just a neo-nazis hate site, its plight now seems like bullying and victimisation, and the new world order loves a victim. Indeed, as <i>The Daily Stormer</i> is pitched from pillar to post on a weekly basis by massively rich, unregulated corporations, so increasing numbers of mainstream organisations and even leftist journalists are beginning to question the validity of Silicon Valley censoring opinions it doesn’t like. So much so that<i> Google, Go Daddy </i>and <i>Cloudfare’s</i> actions may prove to be one of the biggest shot in the foot incidences ever …</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
See also:</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 1 - Charlottesville<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 3 - The Great Shuttening<br />
<br />
WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 4 - Tomorrow is Another Day<br />
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-91458135029199702022017-08-28T08:51:00.000-07:002017-09-04T11:08:15.087-07:00WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! - Part 1: CHARLOTTESVILLE<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<b>Because the events in Charlottesville were so calamitous and the fallout both extraordinary and ongoing I am going to write several blogs on it over the next few weeks. This is partly because the ripples from Charlottesville, whether in terms of online censorship, street violence, protests, Donald Trump, the Mainstream Media, and right and left wing responses to it, are still happening. It is also because I wanted some time to see how the dust settles…</b></div>
<div class="p1">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>PART 1: CHARLOTTESVILLE</b></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Since the chaotic and shocking scenes at the <i>Unite the Right</i> rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th, the world, and the US in particular, has been in a state of virtual hysteria over both the rally, and the brutal violence on display. Violence which culminated in the death of a female protestor,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>32 year Heather Hyers, who was mowed down by a car driven at speed into a crowd of people opposed to the far right rally, killing one and injuring 19 others.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
To recap briefly, the <i>Unite the Right</i> rally had been organised to protest the removal of Confederate statues, specifically the statue of General Robert E Lee, that stands in Emancipation Park (previously Lee Park) in Charlottesville. There had already been two earlier peaceful protests against the statues removal, one by the Alt-Right in May when Richard Spencer, the founder of the Alt-Right and its charismatic spokesman, addressed a crowd of some 200 supporters, the other was in July, when some 50 or so members of the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated while several hundred protested against their presence. At neither event had there been any trouble or violence to speak of.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In June, a local rightwing activist, Jason Kessler, applied to the city for a permit to hold a rally and was granted permission to hold the event in Emancipation Park on August 12th. From that point on, as disquiet about the removing of statues grew so did the support among nationalist groups for the <i>Unite the Right</i> event, so much so, that by late July it was becoming obvious that this was going to be both a major spectacle, and, potentially, a major publicity coup for the Alt-Right, far right, and nationalist right, as well.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It was at this point, with just days to go before the rally, that Charlottesville’s city council decided to withdrew the permit for Emancipation Park issued to Kessler and offer him a permit for a rally in McIntire Park instead; a venue several miles away from Emancipation Park and the controversial General Lee statue. Kessler refused to be moved and legal action was taken to reinstate the original permit. Then, just 24 hours before the rally date, a federal judge sided with Kessler and the original permit was upheld for the rally to be legally held at Emancipation Park.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
That night, Friday August 11th, saw hundreds of Alt-Right and nationalist attendees stage an unofficial torchlit parade through the grounds of the University of Virginia. Chanting slogans like ‘You Will Not Replace Us’ and ‘Blood and Soil’, the slogan of Walter Darre’s Blut und Boden division in Nazi Germany which obsessed on the relationship between ‘pure’ German peasants blood and the land in maintaining pure German ethnicity for future generations, the march caused disquiet and upset many who witnessed it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The next morning, the day of the rally itself, pictures and footage of the march appeared online ensuring that the world’s media, together with thousands of for and against protesters would make the effort to attend. But it is the attendance of numerous uniformed and menacing far right members together with hundreds of supporters that really shocked the mainstream media more used to seeing 'big' far right gatherings attract less than hundred attendees on a good day - this was something new that they could not ignore and many were genuinely shocked by what they saw and the overt and open signs of Nazism on display.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Nor could the left ignore this resurgent right, or it would transpire, could the city council, the Mayor and the local police, who, seemingly furious at having their ruling to move the rally overturned, appeared determined to stop the rally altogether by any means necessary.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
By all reasonable accounts the various nationalist and Alt-right groups began heading to Emancipation Park at around 9.30 - 10.00 on the Saturday morning. They found that the police had fenced off the park in such a way as to only allow access at an entrance on East Market Street, one of the main streets in Charlottesville, and one also chosen by those opposed to the rally to congregate in. Unusually, or in fact unknown in situations like this, there was very little police presence and absolutely no attempt by the forces of law and order to keep the two opposing groups apart, making violent clashes and confrontations virtually inevitable.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What followed was shambolic, predictable and totally avoidable. The protesters, including numerous supporters of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, were inevitably hyped up by the reports of the previous nights torchlit parade and by the presence of so many neo-nazis types in one place. Also protesting against the right were many non-violent, but extremely vocal local people determined to stop what they saw as a direct assault on their values and city by a resurgent Nazism. On the other side was an assorted mixture of the Alt-Right, the old right, the new old right, nationalists, militias, Christians, Trump supporters, and the assorted right curious.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
With no attempt by the police and authorities to keep the two sides apart, and with the protesters outnumbering the right who were generally making there way to Emancipation Park in small groups, it meant that the shouting of abuse very rapidly escalated into physical confrontations and the throwing of missiles by protesters at the rally attendees. However, that said, once the <i>Unite the Right</i> supporters had managed to battle their way into the park, which was surrounded by metal fences erected by the police, they were relatively safe in their enclosure. <i>Unite the Right</i> attendees also maintained a ‘shield wall’ at the single open entrance to the park to ensure that only pro <i>Unite the Right</i> supporters were admitted.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
With the first speeches due to start at about 12 o’clock, a sort of shambolic order had been established and was being maintained despite the increasingly violent atmosphere and attempts by the protesters to disrupt proceedings by throwing missiles into the park and the people in the park throwing missiles back at the protesters.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Then, at about 11.30, some thirty minutes before the first speaker was due to address the crowd the police on duty were pulled on the grounds that the event was unsafe. Shortly after that at about 11.40 several canisters of Tear gas were thrown into the park area by the protesters - tear gas is not something that can be legally bought and is usually held by the authorities ,so it is unclear as to how several canisters of it were in the hands of the protesters?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Regardless, a few minutes later the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, declared an official “State of Emergency” in Charlottesville, meaning that even a gathering of a small group of people was illegal. To enforce this ruling, heavily armoured riot police formed a wall and began driving out all of those gathered in the park out onto East Market Street where large numbers of protesters, including those aligned to Antifa and BLM, were gathered. The the police had made no attempt to disperse the protesters first to avoid a confrontation and instead pushed the right wing attendees straight into the arms of their sworn enemy.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Inevitably with hundreds of attendees of the <i>Unite the Right </i>rally suddenly forced onto a crowded street filed with hostile people shouting at them and, in many cases physically attacking them, it made an already volatile situation incredibly dangerous for everyone.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Lots of people on the <i>Unite the Right</i> side would have been unfamiliar with Charlottesville and unsure of where they were to go (many walked several miles to the McIntire Park only to be told that that gathering was also illegal) and worried for their safety. As a result many found themselves being attacked as they tried to disperse.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Many have described having to fight their way out, and looking at footage of the event it is obvious that the authorities at best had, by their actions, made a bad but totally legal situation, much worse. Either that or they had cynically orchestrated and allowed a near riot to develop in order to be able to declare a ‘State of Emergency’ and prevent the rally from happening at all.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The resulting chaos and sporadic street fights that followed in turn began attracting local toughs and thugs or saw in the virtual anarchy an opportunity to have some fun at the expense of the ‘nazis’ in their midst. As <i>Unite the Right</i> supporters tried to get to their cars or became separated from their colleagues in side streets so they were attacked by Antifa, BLM activists and gangs of teenagers armed with baseball bats and other weapons.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This, it seems, is what possibly happened to James Alex Fields, the man who drove his car into the crowds of protesters celebrating the collapse of the <i>Unite the Right</i> rally killing Heather Hyer. Footage taken of his car up to the moment he drove into the protesters and again as he reversed away afterwards at speed, shows the car being chased by some 10 to 15 youths armed with clubs which some of them were hitting the car with. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Possibly Fields panicked, fearing for his life, possibly he got angry at his car being hit and drove at the crowd in a rage, or perhaps it was just some terrible accident? Whatever the reason, and that will be for a jury to decide, it was unlikely a planned or premeditated action, and had the two sides been kept apart and order maintained, would likely never have happened.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; min-height: 22.0px}
</style>
</div>
<div class="p1">
Indeed, many, including the Texan Republican, Louie Gohmert, have called for a full Justice Department investigation into governor McAuliffe and Charlottesville’s Mayor Signer, who he believes were behind the violence and indeed may have facilitated it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Whatever the outcome of an investigation, or of Field’s trial, it is also obvious that what could have been a media triumph for the Alt-Right and nationalist movements, was in the end a public relations disaster, the ramifications of which, for good or bad, will be felt for the far right, Donald Trump's administration, the left, and American society, for a long time to come.<br />
<br />
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 18.0px Helvetica; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000}
span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-small;">© Nigel Wingrove 2017</span></span><br />
<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span>
<div class="p1">
WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 2 - Weaponised Satire<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span></span><br />
<div class="p1">
WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 3 - The Great Shuttening<br />
<br />
WHOSE SPEECH! OUR SPEECH! Part 4 - Tomorrow is Another Day</div>
</div>
<br />
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-38434316050795237192017-01-28T09:41:00.000-08:002017-01-28T09:41:37.542-08:00I AM CURIOUS, BLACK - AMERICAN NOIR WITH A TWIST<div class="p1">
Eileen by Ottesa Moshfegh has sentences and passages that are quite simply breathtaking in their perfection. One after the other her words tantalise and tease. She never says too much, nor too little, they are just perfect. Poisonous, cutting, funny, odious, grotesque, dangerous, plain, scary - her writing is marvellous. In just a few sentences in the books’ opening paragraph we know Eileen</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>You might take me for a nursing student or a typist, note the nervous hands, a foot tapping, bitten lip. I looked like nothing special. It’s easy for me to imagine this girl, a strange, young and mousy version of me, carrying an anonymous leather purse or eating from a small package of peanuts, rolling each one between her gloved figures, sucking in her cheeks, staring anxiously out the window. The sunlight in the morning illuminated the thin down on my face, which I tried to cover with pressed powder, a shade too pink for my wan complexion. I was thin, my figure was jagged, my movements pointy and hesitant, my posture stiff. The terrain of my face was heavy with soft, rumbling acne scars blurring whatever delight or madness lay beneath that cold and deadly New England exterior. If I’d worn glasses I could have passed for smart, but I was too impatient to be truly smart. ….</i> <i>I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life - the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen. </i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Eileen is like no other heroine or hero. She lives with her mentally unstable, alcoholic father, a retired policeman, in a filthy house that neither clean. She eats little of anything, biscuits or sweets mainly, and embraces her thinness. She is obsessed with her bowels and avoids washing. She is twenty four, a virgin, and works as a clerk in a correctional facility for teenage boys. She is plain, small-breasted and hates her body which she hides under layers of clothes. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This is Eileen until she meets Rebecca who changes everything. Rebecca, who Eileen felt on meeting, must, like Doris Day - <i>live in a charmed world of fluffy pillows and golden sunshine</i> - and instantly hated her. Yet within minutes of actually talking to Rebecca Eileen discovers her soul mate, or, as Rebecca puts it, her partner in crime, and the books unexpected twist begins.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Eileen is so perfect a novel that it was an almost emotional disappointment when Moshfegh’s ending fails to ring true. Here was Eileen and Rebecca, not as a darker and perverse take on Thelma and Louise or as a sapphic romance like Carol mashed with Bound, but as ineptitude. It is almost as if having brought the reader brilliantly up to this point that there was pressure to bring the story to an end or to find a twist that sashayed nicely into Eileen’s conclusion. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Everything so far has been flawless, with Eileen’s thoughts on life and its banalities leading us inextricably to her meeting with Rebecca and from there we anticipated, deliciously, trouble ahead. So it was doubly disappointing that when that ‘trouble’ arrives it is caused not be wickedness but by uncharacteristic silliness on the part of our heroines. As a result Eileen, whilst not unravelling, is now imperfect and flawed. as if, like her creations, Moshfegh had messed up, not a lot, but enough.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Eileen is still an extraordinarily, and at times, beautifully revolting story, that seeps into your consciousness like a strong whisky, nulling and stimulating, while sowing the seeds of corruption. Yet it could and should have been a truly brilliant novel and the fact that it falls short lies in part with Rebecca, who, like her creator, steps out of line in a way that disappoints rather than excites - leaving the reader feeling flat when we should have been bubbling with anticipation and excitement. So much so that even Eileen cannot hide her disappointment at the turn of events.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>I could have told her she was crazy, that I wanted nothing to do with her, that she ought to be committed, but I was so hurt, so dismayed by her scheme to seduce me into being some sort of accomplice that I failed to muster any cutting words or phrases, “Good luck.” might have been enough, I suppose. </i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
A remarkable, brilliant, but flawed masterpiece. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
EILEEN by Ottessa Moshfegh is published by Viking Books</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p1">
260 pages £14.99</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-34757106241407304562017-01-14T10:48:00.000-08:002017-01-15T10:32:15.459-08:00ARE GIRLS ELECTRIC?<div class="p1">
<i>The Power</i> by Naomi Alderman is part science fiction, part thriller and part feminism reborn as a morality tale in which all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts most of all no matter the gender of those that wield it. In this instance, teenage girls, and, eventually through them, all women, - the ‘power’ being electricity generated by a skein of knotted muscle and veins that grow under the skin and across the collar bones of girls and becomes the source through which, girls, all girls, can learn to discharge electrical power from their hands and fingertips. A power that, handled correctly, can hurt a man, wound a man, kill a man - from that beginning women begin to take the societal power away from men changing society, religion and male / female relationships, forever.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Told through the lives of three women and a man whose stories, like the skeins from which their power derives, are intertwined and seemingly damned by their newly acquired strength. This is particularly so in the case of Tunde, a young man and aspiring photo-journalist from Nigeria whose Youtube video of a girl taking down a man who was pestering her in a supermarket and reducing him to a gibbering wreck bleeding from his eyes and mouth after she has touched him, sets the worlds’ media ablaze and ushers in what will become known as the Day of the Girls…</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
From here on Alderman’s impressive cast of characters, Roxy the daughter of a London gangster, Allie (or Mother Eve as she becomes) who morphs from abused teenage orphan to the leader of a new, feminised take on christianity, to Margot an American senator whose troubled daughter Jocelyn lacks the ability to use her power, to Tunde, who documents the world’s rapid shift, which, like an electrical Arab Spring, moves from patriarchy to matriarchy in a series of tumultuous set pieces, not least the collapse of male controlled countries like Saudi Arabia.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<i>The Power</i> is also savagely violent in places and as the world shifts from male control, with its inherent, endemic violence, to female control, which unleashes its own, equally brutal, female take on revenge. Now, hundreds of years of being an abused and subservient sex, of being prostituted and beaten, is crystallised into an almost bestial discharge aimed straight at the heart of the male id, which, at its most basic, means his cock. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Here, in this world, men are raped by women who use their electrical powers to induce an erection in the unwilling male victim and then, when satiated, are shown killing the man in scenes that only mimic mans' savage raping of women in wars through the centuries. Elsewhere men are tortured, limbs and organs are fried or severed, eyes burnt out. Men, in their turn, plant bombs and resort to terrorism and war in a futile effort to return the world to the old order. Alderman hammers this home in scenes that are as disturbing as they brutal:</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<i>“The woman on top cups his balls and dick in her palm. She says something. Laughs. The others laugh, too. She tickles him there with the tip of a finger, making a little crooning sound, as if she wants him to enjoy it. He can’t speak; his throat is bulging. They might have broken his windpipe already. She puts her head to one side, makes a sad face at him. She might as well have said in any language in the world. ‘What’s the matter? Can’t get it up?’ He tries to kick his heels to get away from her, but it’s too late for that”</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
In this world, as the initial shock of women’s new power and status sinks in, so men try to fight back, underground groups form, the Saudi King funds rebellion to take back his kingdom and the military tries to hardness and control women’s power to use it as a weapon. Yet the dynamic between men and women has flipped and no banging of fists by the old patriarchy can change that. </div>
<div class="p1">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<i>“He sees the dark eyes of the women watching him from the factory. He knows something then. A simple fact that should have been obvious from the first, had he not been pushing the knowledge from him. The women are not glad to see what he has done, or that he could do it. The fucking bitches are just starring at him: their mouths as closed as the earth, their eyes as blank as the sea. They walk down the stairs inside the factory in orderly file and march towards him as one. Darrell lets out a sound, a hunted cry, and he runs. And the women are after him.”</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Yet, despite the violence, this is a serious and highly readable novel that moves at a cracking pace. Its ideas and the societies that it imagines, believable, real and, at times, frightening. The shift of emphasis from the male Jesus to the female Mother Mary and Eve, the first woman, not just apt, but in the circumstances described, absolutely right. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
In some ways <i>The Power</i> reminded me of books like Margaret Atwood’s<i> The Handmaids Tale</i>, Joanna Russ’s <i>The Female Man, </i>of John Wyndham’s <i>The Trouble with Lichen</i> and Edmund Cooper’s almost forgotten novel of the early seventies, <i>Who Needs Men </i>or <i>Gender Genocide</i> as it was titled for its US release - a dark tale of a future societies extermination of men by women. That said, <i>The Power</i> is totally its own book, and a shockingly good one at that! One that not only provokes, but whose story and characters stay with you long after the last page has been read and the book finished, and I cannot recommended it highly enough. Fabulous!</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
The Power by Naomi Alderman is published by Viking Books</div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p2">
342 pages £12.99</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-51430055177136342332017-01-05T01:21:00.001-08:002017-01-15T10:34:38.264-08:00Enemies of the People…<div class="p1">
<i style="font-size: 12px;">The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-size: 12px;">Joseph Stalin</span><span class="s1"></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p4">
When is european democracy not a democracy? When the citizens of its nation states go against the beliefs of the left-leaning, liberal establishment which controls most of the countries that make-up the european union would be the answer. Or, as is the case in the UK, where 52% of the population voted for Brexit against the wishes of the establishment and the metropolitan elite, the establishment, supported by a Kabal of rich lawyers, celebrities and leftist sections of the UK’s intelligentsia, seek to neuter, delay and castigate its troublesome discontents with a mixture of legalese, small print and politically correct name calling. Smoke and mirrors in other words. </div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
The essential effect in all cases being that if the people follow the rules, obey the law and cast their vote at the ballot box, if what they want goes against the established liberal orthodoxy then their vote and their views will be rubbished and sneeringly dismissed as ‘populism’. Or the result itself will be queried as having been engineered by a combination of fake news stories and post-truth lies. If that fails then the establishment will claim that those who voted against the orthodox view, were, in fact, too stupid to know what they doing. The net result being that the established liberal order and ruling elites will do everything in their power to ignore the wishes of the people and to crush, mute and censor anyone who says otherwise.</div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
In the United States where Donald Trump’s surprise victory sent the left into a bizarre mixture of denial, grief, apocalyptic rage and whining on an epic scale there have been Herculean attempts to overturn, discredit and refute the result; with everything from recounts and Russian hacking being used or cited as a way of overturning or undermining the result. </div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Yet, as this wave or rightwing ‘populism’ grows, so the liberal left, which has effectively held sway over the West’s cultural, social and political output for the last 50 or so years, is feeling its grip on the <span class="s2">l</span><span class="s3">evers</span> of power, both political and cultural, loosening, and it doesn’t like it. Not only does the liberal establishment not like this rising rightwing insurgency, it will have none of it and will fight tooth and nail to stop it.</div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Indeed now that the initial shock of the Brexit win and Donald Trump’s election victory are wearing off, so the crying, stamping of feet and gnashing of teeth has given way to a whole plethora of tactics designed not only to stop Brexit and tame Trump but to vilify and fraught the resurgent right everywhere. Already charges of hate crime, hate speech, racism, white supremacy, homophobia, sexism, antisemitism and Islamophobia are being hurled around like verbal confetti at everyone from Steve Bannon, the ebullient founder of the Breibart news site, and soon to be President-elect Trump’s chief strategist and senior counsellor, to anyone on social media who dares to post an opinion critical of the liberal orthodoxy.</div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Right wing heretics are now being sought out by a kind of liberal left Inquisition who are scouring Twitter and Facebook in search of unbelievers to haul before their appointed judges, the ‘enemies of the people’, as some UK newspapers called them. Thought crimes are being merged with actual crimes, as in the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox and the alleged people who stupidly tweeted their support or joy at her death, actions that are now being used to further the catch-all nature of 'hate speech' as a crime. Hate speech or thought crime, that is speech or ideas critical of the establishment, or the voicing of ideas which are opposed to those of the liberal intelligentsia, will soon ensure that free speech is effectively legislated out of existence, along with as many rightwing political groups and parties as the liberal Inquisition can concoct a case against. </div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Only the right it seems can do or say evil. Left wing activists can mock and spew vile hatred at the death of Margaret Thatcher, scream ‘scum’ and spit at Conservative supporters attending their annual party conference or beat up and violently assault those they accuse of being rightwing or fascist, seemingly with impunity. Universities and student groups now ban anyone whose views are even vaguely rightwing or just deemed controversial, UKip and Brexit supporters are shouted down as racists or dismissed as neothandrals, too thick to warrant being heard.</div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Multimillionaire hedge fund owners, like the Guyana born Gina Miller and her husband, Alan Miller, joint owners of the wealth management company SCM Private, can use their money to thwart the will of the english people and usurp the UK’s democracy with impunity. In turn these two unaccountable millionaires are cheered on by their leftwing liberal supporters who would seemingly stoop to any hypocrisy in order to stop Brexit. </div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Yet the delicious irony is that soon, events in Italy, Holland, and France, may herald the implosion and collapse of the european union regardless of whether the UK stays or leaves or the actions of the Remainer’s nefarious millionaires. In which case there would be no european club left to belong to.</div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Indeed as the working class, the disenfranchised and the untermensch of Europe and the US fight back against the liberal elites we can expect to see the establishment become ever more vicious and draconian as they try to hold back and reverse the demands of a resurgent populous. Expect to see more censorship, more arrests, more legislation, and more euphemisms created as liberal lawyers invent and twist words to create new crimes and misdemeanours as a way of protecting cultural Marxism’s place in the world, and silencing those that challenge it. </div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #323333}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #323333; min-height: 16.0px}
p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #323333}
p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
span.s2 {color: #b51a00}
span.s3 {color: #00364a}
</style>
</div>
<div class="p4">
© Nigel Wingrove 2017</div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #323333}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #323333; min-height: 16.0px}
p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #323333}
p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
span.s2 {color: #b51a00}
span.s3 {color: #00364a}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-85787947452301481142016-09-21T07:40:00.002-07:002016-09-21T07:43:46.997-07:00Petite Meller lands on Planet Gong!<div class="p1">
If bands could musically beget children then those children would, like their flesh and blood counterparts in the real world, display not just some of the musical characteristics of their </div>
<div class="p1">
parents but probably some of their inherent eccentricities as well. In which case the YouTube-proclaimed ‘<i>Aryan pedo nightmare</i>’ that is the French phenomenon Petite Meller would be the </div>
<div class="p1">
love-child of the hippy-dippy band <i>Gong</i> circa 1970.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Meller is 22 with an MA in philosophy, a fabulously distinctive and accented gallic vocal sound, which, when coupled with her Lady Gaga style theatrics and personal raison d’être to turn ‘libidinal unconscious dreams’ into reality while flirting with terrorism, race and Lolitaesque sex, make her hard to ignore. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This anarchic approach to life, which <i>The Guardian </i>newspaper dismissed as pop with a ‘<i>creepy aesthetic</i>’, comes alive in Meller’s videos, where, usually scantily clad, cheeks rouged in pink blusher</div>
<div class="p1">
and brandishing a variety of inappropriate props, she cavorts and her dances her way through a series of improbable landscapes that have included; a Kenyan village where she danced with the local school children and kissed a giraffe for <i>Baby Love</i>, New York City for <i>Backpack</i>, a geriatric rest home in Florida for <i>Barbaric</i>, and, most recently, she played with reindeers and the local tribesmen in the grassy plains of Mongolia for her single, <i>The Flute. The Flute</i> also sees Meller wearing a grass skirt and a pointy hat that, has, metaphorically at least, <i>Gong</i> written all over it.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
While this global dancing has upset some who see it as ‘<i>cultural appropriation</i>’ and worry that Meller’s white flesh denotes a hidden racism when displayed next to her black co-dancers in videos like <i>Baby Love</i>, Meller undoubtably has a unique visual style that is rapidly becoming her own signature look and the only hidden message it really displays is a true celebration of being alive.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, having spent the last twelve or so releasing one infectiously dancey pop single after another, Meller has released <i>Lil Empire</i>, an equally quirky and contagious album. Almost every track is filled with a delirious pop sound; <i>Milk Bath</i> (cute and bonkers), <i>America </i>(<i>like Baby Love</i>, only more so), <i>Argentina</i> (softer, with the merest hint of <i>Madonna’s La Isla Bonita</i>), <i>Geez </i>(fab, play it to death), as well as all of her previously released singles. This is an album brimming with joie de vivre and a fabulous, almost gospelish pop sound that demands to be played loudly, again and again. Pointy hats optional. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
@ Nigel Wingrove 2016</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Flute - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLwgeV7dXOI</div>
<div class="p1">
Baby Love - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDBJVgIVPcs</div>
<div class="p1">
Barbaric - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRj_4YZXLQY</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-38606305289592496722016-09-11T07:02:00.000-07:002016-09-11T07:02:24.471-07:00Life, Love and Keeling Over <div class="p1">
Hiromi Kawakami’s first English language book was called <i>Strange Weather in Tokyo</i> and published in 2014, (in Japan it was titled <i>The Teacher’s Briefcase</i>) and was a gentle, touching, almost surreal and dreamlike story of a thirty something woman slowly falling in love with an unassuming retired school teacher in his seventies who she sees in a café where she eats regularly. <i>The Nakano Thrift Shop</i> treads a similar path. only more so.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>In The Nakano Thrift Shop, </i>Hiromi’s narrator is again a young woman, this time one who kind of, hesitantly, tentatively, possibly, falls in love with the twenty something Takeo, her co-worker at Mr Nakano’s thrift shop. Called Hitomi, our heroine and narrator, drifts, not so much through life but rather life drifts through her, as Kawakami’s small cast of characters; Mr Nakano, the roguish womanising thrift shop owner, Masayo, his artistic, doll-making, older sister, Sakiko, Mr Nakano’s sensual and beautiful lover, and the awkwardly shy Takeo, all gently impinge on Hitomi’s consciousness.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Kawakami has an extraordinarily way of drawing you into her etherial world, where, although nothing really happens, when they do, little transgressions or events cause ripples that spread seamlessly throughout the whole book and stay with you long after the story has finished. In <i>Strange Weather in Toky</i>o it was the descriptions of food and the cherry blossom that heralds the arrival of spring that permeated, whereas in <i>The Nakano Thrift Shop</i> it is the inconsequential bric-a-brac and the minutiae of life that you eventually cherish. Until, as Mr Nakano’s sister says, we keel over;</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Masayo wrapped up by saying, ’That’s why, when I haven’t heard from someone </i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>for a while, the first thing that occurs to me is that they might have just keeled over.’</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Keeled over. I repeated Masayo’s phrase, in the same tone she had used.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>‘You know?’ Masayo suppressed a chuckle as she peered into my face.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>I-I don’t think he’s dead, I replied, shrinking into my seat.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Beautifully written and faultlessly translated by Allison Markin Powell, both <i>Strange Weather in Tokyo</i> and <i>The Nakano Thrift Shop</i> are a poignant, funny and effortless reminder of the pleasures to be found even in the banalities of modern life. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The covers to both books are by the Japanese photographer Natsumi Hayashi who specialises in taking slightly spooky and etherial pictures of Japanese girls levitating and floating and whose imagery seems the perfect visualisation of Hiromi Kawakami’s novels. See more of her work here: yowayowacamera.com</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2016</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>The Nakano Thrift Shop</b></div>
<div class="p1">
Hiromi Kawakami</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
260 pages, Paperback</div>
<div class="p1">
Portobello Books</div>
<div class="p1">
£12.99</div>
<div class="p1">
2016</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>Strange Weather in Toyko</b></div>
<div class="p1">
Hiromi Kawakami</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
176 pages, Paperback</div>
<div class="p1">
Portobello Books</div>
<div class="p1">
£7.99</div>
<div class="p1">
</div>
<div class="p1">
2014</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-78809493296031922612016-09-04T10:43:00.000-07:002016-09-04T10:54:49.517-07:00Tears in the Day, Screams in the Night <div class="p1">
Chris Petit’s <i>The Butchers of Berlin,</i> is a brutal and disquieting take on a city and a people inured by years of terror, violence and vicious anti-semitism, who find survival in indifference, and sustenance in betrayal. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Set in the death throes of the Third Reich during 1943, in an increasingly dangerous, demoralised</div>
<div class="p1">
and bombed-out Berlin. Here, food and basic necessities are in short supply and the cities infrastructure is run less and less by German men and more and more by slave labour brought in from conquered nations. Slaves who would like nothing more than to hurt their German hosts and who provide a potential mass of suspects to the grisly murders at the books core. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Centred on a detective and an SS judge assigned to investigate a series of extreme murders; the bodies had been frayed, butchered, and their skulls smashed to a pulp, the <i>Butchers of Berlin</i>, soon expands its remit to take in the regime’s round-ups and deportations of Berlin’s remaining Jews and the desperate attempts by some to evade capture and stay hidden from the authorities. Alongside the skinless bodies and vanished Jews, a German warden is also murdered, a police informer is found castrated, there is corruption in the Gestapo, and a counterfeiting racket is threatening chaos. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It is though the inclusion of two young Jewish women, Sybil and Lore, in the story that truly evokes our sympathy after they find themselves at the mercy of the Gestapo and its local commander, the sadistic Gersten, who is happy to use torture and threats to cajole them into becoming ‘catchers’; Jews who seek out and betray other Jews that have become <i>‘U-boats’</i>, that is Jews hiding as non-Jews. In particular, Petit brings in the real-life ‘catcher', the beautiful blonde Stella Kübler as a character. In reality Kübler's striking good looks and vivacious nature helped her ensnare and betray some 3000 of her fellow Jews to the Gestapo, who in turn nicknamed her ‘<i>Blonde Poison’. </i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It is in this mashing of real characters like Kübler, along with Goebbels, Himmler, and the agricultural minister and man behind the Blood and Soil (<i>Blut und Boden</i>) movement, Walter Darré, who all feature walk-on parts, with actual events and evocative depictions of wartime Berlin that jar with the books over-the-top emphasis on gross-out descriptions of butchery and slaughter. These forays into <i>Grand Guignol</i> territory tend to move the book away from a world war two crime thriller into straight horror territory. A pairing that weakens and detracts from the books strengths.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Chris Petit is unusual in that he combines writing with directing, particularly TV movies and short documentaries, and the first two thirds of <i>The Butchers of Berlin</i> reads like a well-paced thriller script, its short, punchy chapters making for concise scenes that in turn make for an exciting, gripping, story. Real, edge-of-your-seat stuff, or in this case, a page-turner. Then, a bit like a film that runs out steam, Petit spends the final third part of the story laboriously tying up all the strands while totally over-egging the blood and gore to an almost cartoonish level in the buildup to the books, or perhaps that should be, films, climatic ending. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Petit is perhaps best known for the Northern Ireland based thriller, <i>The Psalm Killer </i>(1997), which, like <i>The Butchers of Berlin</i>, had at its core almost bestial descriptions of violence, though involving a biblically inspired killer operating during the Troubles rather than crazed Nazis. Yet the violence of </div>
the <i>The Psalm Killer </i>seemed, despite its graphic nature, to fit within the context of the story, yet in the <i>Butchers of Berlin</i>, where in reality the most appalling slaughter the world has ever seen was being carried out in the background, Petit’s horror seems not just crass but disrespectful of the real events and that is a shame because with a little, <i>less is more,</i> this could have been a great thriller instead of one that ran out of oomph!<br />
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2016</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>The Butchers of Berlin</b></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>Chris Petit</b></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
496 pages,</div>
<div class="p1">
£12.99 </div>
<div class="p1">
</div>
<div class="p1">
Published by Simon & Schuster, UK 2016</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-13879656332815510712016-08-29T05:11:00.000-07:002016-08-31T03:25:37.729-07:00They are your children...<div class="p1">
<b>These children that come at you with knives, they are your children - Charles Manson</b></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In 2019 it will be, amazingly, fifty years since Charles Manson’s band of hippy-dippy losers set about viciously murdering white residents living the American dream in the Californian sunshine, including the actress Sharon Tate who was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant at the time she was killed, in order, they hoped, to spark a race war. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet all these years later the horror of these murders still resonates and has recently been the inspiration for a number of Manson inspired projects including the TV series <i>Aquarius</i> and, most successfully, the novel, <i>The Girls </i>by Emma Cline. It is now the source for another book, <i>American</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Girls</i>, by Alison Umminger.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Both debut novels, <i>The Girls</i> and <i>American Girls</i> (titled <i>My Favourite Manson Girl </i>in the UK) are by young female writers and both eschew Manson in favour of the teenage girls that hung around him like wide-eyed groupies and who would, ultimately, act as his surrogate assassins dispensing death as brutally as any man. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In <i>The Girls</i>, Manson’s female followers were a kind of cipher for Evie the books young</div>
<div class="p1">
anti-heroine whereas in <i>American Girls</i>, Anna, the books fifteen year-old narrator, is every</div>
<div class="p1">
teenage girl and, as such, every American girl is a potential Manson girl.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Less haunting and etherial than <i>The Girls</i>, Umminger’s novel centres on the trials and tribulations</div>
<div class="p1">
of Anna who steals money off her mother’s girlfriends’ credit card in order to fly from her home</div>
<div class="p1">
in Atlanta to Los Angeles so that she can stay with Delia, her glamorous, struggling actress older sister. From here Anna progresses through the usual teenage angst and love hate relationships with her mother, always a text or email away, and her sister whose complicated love-life with aspiring filmmaker boyfriends and low budget horror producers provide an entertaining and, at times, very funny backdrop to the Manson theme that pervades the book.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Umminger also manages in a few words to clarify the awfulness of what ‘the girls’ actually did all those years ago, as when Anna is unknowingly confronted with the graves of Sharon Tate and her unborn son, Paul Richard Polanski.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>The gravestone marked four bodies. The top read “In Loving Memory” and the left side continued with “Our loving daughter and beloved wife of Roman, Sharon Tate Polanski”. The dates she lived were separated by the thin slivers of a cross, 1943 - 1969. Beside that were the dates for her mother and, at the bottom, her sister. But as haunting as it was, the name that knocked me down was just below Sharon’s, “Paul Richard Polanski”, followed by “their baby,” and no dates beneath the name. No dates below this tiny person who both was and wasn’t, but who had a name.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
On Sharon Tate after watching her in <i>Valley of the Dolls</i> she brutally and effectively says:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>She went from being a body on the screen to a body in a bag</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
And on Manson girl Susan Atkins who years later claimed that she didn't kill Sharon Tate, or anyone else, that she had, in fact, just pretended to have killed them so that she could be the centre of attention. So that she would fit in with the rest of the girls...</div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>If you crossed 'Mean Girls' with the 'Lord of the Flies' and weaponised all of them, then you pretty much had the Manson girls. </i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Umminger, like Cline, has, by making the Manson girls so everyday, managed to make them both more accessible and more monstrous, so that ultimately they really are potentially just, not so much American girls, as <i>any</i> girl.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
American Girls </div>
<div class="p1">
Alison Umminger</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
304 pages</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
US edition - Flatiron Books $17.99</div>
<div class="p1">
UK edition, as My Favourite Manson Girl - Atom Books - £12.99</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2016</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-13263740235146294232016-07-25T08:39:00.002-07:002016-07-25T09:30:55.442-07:00GIRLS - SCREAMING AND DREAMING<div class="p1">
<b>Without any planning and totally coincidentally I seemed to have beeen immersed in feminine, or rather female culture, both written and </b><b>visually, over the last two days, with both genres, a book and a film, offering extraordinary portrayals of women. </b><b><i>The Girls</i> is a new novel by the American writer Emma Cline and uses the Charles Manson murders as inspiration, whereas <i>Carol</i>, </b><b>a film by Todd Haynes, is the story of a lesbian love affair. Yet despite their differences they are bizarrely similar. Both centre on the </b><b>attraction of a young girl for an older, stronger woman, and both stories are played-out in dream-like, past worlds that are both </b><b>haunting and strangely enchanting, and which, when they conclude, leave you needing time to emerge back into this world…</b></div>
<div class="p2">
<b></b><br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<b>The Girls</b></div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
A debut novel by Emma Cline that is both compelling and repelling at the same time. <i>The Girls</i> is inspired by, but not about, the Manson girls, the women that were a part of Charles Manson’s family and who would brutally kill a number of people, including the actress Sharon Tate, on Manson’s orders. Set now and during the summer of 1969 when the Manson murders took place, Cline has created a dream-like parallel world in which the central character, the fourteen year-old Evelyn, or Evie as the ‘girls’ call her, becomes fascinated by Suzanne, a feral but beautiful girl who she sees one day walking in her local park with two other girls. Cline describes their arrival:</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>There was a suggestion of otherworldliness hovering around her, a dirty smock dress barely covering her ass. she was flanked by a skinny </i><i>redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake. All their cheap rings like a second set of </i><i>knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them </i><i>through the park. Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn’t name. Women reaching for their boyfriends’ </i><i>hands. The sun spiked through the trees, like always - the drowsy willows, the hot wind gusting over the picnic blankets - but the </i><i>familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.</i></div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Cline writes beautifully and cleverly, managing in a few choice words to convey the alienation of adolescence and the threat of the outsider and wraps all of this into an etherial and languid sense of menace that builds up around Evie as she becomes part of the ‘family’. In many ways Cline’s </div>
<div class="p1">
decision to create her own take on the Manson cult, hers centres on a man named Russell, and to focus on the girls, and in particular Evie’s infatuation with Suzanne, brings a powerful and refreshingly raw feeling to the whole Manson mythology. Equally, by eschewing the actual</div>
<div class="p1">
Manson story and creating her own, borrowing elements of real events and mixing these with her ‘girls’, Cline has been able to bring a real sense of California’s dreamy callousness to the shocking murders that follow, and Cline’s succinct and brutal descriptions of killing are as disturbing as any I have read.</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet, despite the murders, or perhaps because of them, <i>The Girls</i>, is essentially about teenage girls, their clothes, their smell, their struggles to please an older, charismatic man, their desperate faith in his vision of the world, their fragility and vulnerableness to sexual exploitation and to the mores and ideas of the time. Unnervingly so given that Cline, a Californian girl herself, is only 27 and yet <i>The Girls </i>is perfectly of the sixties and reminds us that beneath all the talk of peace and love real horror was waiting.</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>I only got out of bed after I heard the girl. Her voice was high and innocuous. Though it shouldn’t have been comforting - Suzanne and the </i><i>others had been girls, and that hadn’t helped anybody.</i></div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Girls by Emma Cline is published by Chatto & Windus (£12.99, $27.00)</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<b>Carol</b></div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
Carol, director Todd Haynes’ visually beautiful interpretation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel of a lesbian love, <i>The Price of Salt</i> (also known as <i>Carol</i>) is, like a passionate kiss, breathtakingly good and will leave you shivering with lingering emotion long after the end credits have finished. Set in the early 1950s and centred in and around New York, the Carol of the title is a wealthy, glamorous woman (Cate Blanchett), who is in the midst of getting a divorce, from her neglectful husband (Kyle Chandler - <i>Friday Night Lights, Homeland</i>) and befriends, then falls in love with, a shopgirl and aspiring photographer called Therese (Rooney Mara - <i>The Social Network, Pan, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i>). </div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Carol is powerful but not predatory, glamorous but not glam, and beneath her monied confidence, vulnerable and frightened. Frightened of losing her only child in an increasingly fractious custody battle with her husband who both knows of her lesbianism and, reluctantly, is prepared to use it against her in court if necessary. Against this backdrop she is also falling deeply in love with the much younger Therese, whose rawness and innocence, at first amusing, then captivating, has unleashed an all consuming and highly believable love in both women for each other, a love that will either playout or crush them in its embrace.</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Touted and praised as a gay film about two women having a relationship at a time when lesbianism was barely mentioned, let alone understood or tolerated, <i>Carol</i> doesn’t flaunt or bang the gay rights drum, rather it is what it is, a love story between two women who suffer trials and tribulations as they struggle, not so much for acceptance, but to make their relationship work in the same way a straight couple would and it is all the stronger for that. Mara in particular, looking like the reincarnation of Audrey Hepburn, though with a rawer sexuality, has an extraordinary presence and natural beauty that is mesmerising and which Haynes manages to exploit in a myriad of tiny ways that, coupled with Carter Burwell’s hypnotic score, make watching <i>Carol,</i> like watching a half remembered memory of someone you too loved but who was always, tantalisingly, just out of reach. </div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Simply fabulous.</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Trailer: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2402927">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2402927</a></div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
On AMAZON PRIME and DVD / Blu-ray (Studio Canal)</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-28342716670330245932016-06-18T09:45:00.001-07:002016-06-18T09:45:26.460-07:00THE MURDER AND EXPLOITATION OF JO COX<div class="p1">
Jo Cox MP, whose brutal murder on the 16th June by a 52 year man with mental health problems and alleged sympathies with the US based neo-Nazi <i>Nationalist Alliance</i> organisation, and, <i>Britain First</i>, a UK based nationalist party, had hardly been dead more than a few hours before a number of self-serving, left-leaning, ‘Remain’ campaigners leapt onto the now blood-soaked Cox bandwagon in order to make political capital from her utterly pointless murder.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
First was the London Labour MP for Bermondsey and Southwark, Neil Coyle, who when interviewed just a few hours after Cox’s killing sought to link it directly to <i>Brexit</i> and the Leave campaign, saying that they had published “dangerous material” which risked inspiring the “extremist elements on the hard right in this country”. Hard Right being the latest terminology of the left, as opposed to Far Right, or Extreme Right, which apparently nolonger convey the correct amount of ‘rightness’. So ‘Hard Right’ it is.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Coyle’s comments were predictably followed the next day by the hysterical ravings of <i>The Guardian</i> journalist Polly Toynbee who saw in Cox’s murder a causal link between the ‘open and shocking’ statements of the Leave campaign whose ‘inflammatory language’, ‘finger-jabbing’ ‘dog-whistling’ and ‘overt racism’ she claimed was a ’noxious brew’ and ‘dangerous’ mix of ‘anti-MP’ and ‘anti-politics’ which led inextricably to Jo Cox’s murder. Toynbee then damned, among other things, Leave’s new ‘Breaking Point’ poster, which showed, in a style reminiscent of the Thatcher era Conservative Party election poster, ‘Labour’s Not Working’, a never ending queue of refugees waiting to enter Europe.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Using the poster as a springboard Toynbee went on to link the Leave campaign indirectly with, not just Cox’s murder, but the rise of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, the White Power movement, Neo-Nazism, and Oswald Mosley and called for Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Chris Grayling to be expelled from the Conservative Party for making immigration a voting issue in the <i>Brexit </i>campaign. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>The Guardian</i> then claimed in its editorial that Jo Cox’s death was an affront to the ideals of diversity and multiculturalism, both causes that I am sure Jo Cox supported, and which therefore is not an unreasonable </div>
<div class="p1">
assertion, but then <i>The Guardian</i> extrapolated that the ‘Hard Right’s’ racism and Islamophobia was the mirror image of the ideology Isis and Al Qaida use to attract recruits. From that it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to imply a direct link between Cox’s murder and Leave’s campaign. Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster was especially singled out for attack and called repugnant, while Leave’s campaign was ’nasty’, ’divisive’</div>
<div class="p1">
and encouraged UK voters to turn their backs on the world and to embrace ‘barbarism’.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet in using Jo Cox’s murder to smear and undermine the Leave campaign and at the same time shunning much of ‘parochial’ Britain as William Haig sneeringly referred to those supporting Leave, the Remain campaigners and the Left should look in the mirror, for that is where the viciousness and thuggery began. When hundreds gathered to mock and celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s death, or when a mob of thugs attacked Nigel Farage and his family in Scotland, or when Conservative’s were spat at, punched and called scum while trying to attend their party conference in 2015, or when members of antifacist groups openly talk of wanting to kill their opponents, and so on ad infinitum politicians reap what they sow.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Toynbee wrote that the use of immigration in this campaign was unleashing ‘dark and hateful’ forces, yet it was the Labour party that unleashed immigration on an unprecedented scale with hundreds of thousands of people arriving in the UK during Labour’s time in office that destroyed communities, jobs and caused a housing crisis. It was a Labour Home Secretary, David Blanket, who said in 2003 that there was “no upper limit” to the number of people that could settle in the UK. It was a Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who, in 2010, dismissed a concerned woman’s questions on rising immigration, as ‘bigoted’ and it is Labour that has consistently attacked and silenced any form or discussion on immigration and migration as ‘racist’. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So yes people are angry, and yes people are fed up with politicians, and yes, there are ‘dark and hateful’ forces at work, but they have been caused not by the ‘Hard Right’, or Leave’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster, but by the Left, by mainstream politician’s, and by the EU’s unelected officials telling us what to do. What Polly Toynbee, David Cameron, George Osborne, <i>The Guardian </i>and the rest of the political and chattering classes who try to shame us into obsequious silence by their taunts of racism and nationalistic parochialism forget, is that it is they who have taken away the people’s voice and our now causing some people’s anger to turn into rage. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The utterly pointless, brutal and stupid murder of Jo Cox may have been a symptom of those ‘hateful’ forces, or equally it could just be the actions of a pitiful man with mental health problems. Yet whatever motivated the killer, it was nothing to do with the Leave campaign and if the Establishment try to make it otherwise in order to shut the people up then those dark hateful forces really will find a voice and they will make the Establishment listen whether they want to or not.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Nigel Wingrove © 2016</div>
<br />
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-55167042601159053102016-06-15T05:44:00.001-07:002016-06-15T05:44:55.524-07:00Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will be, Will Be) <div class="p1">
There was something frighteningly inevitable about the latest mass killing by a fanatical Muslim of a large group of unarmed Western citizens, in this latest instance some 49 gay men and women at <i>The Pulse</i> nightclub in Orlando, Florida. First there will be shock, though less so now that we, by which I mean the West, have become inured to this kind of atrocity, then secondly the outpourings of grief, some real, some false and affected, necessitated more by our need to show our Facebook and Instagram followers that we care, than real, emotional pain. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Then, inevitably, will come the Orlando hashtag and the clever graphic memes, in this instance the first appeared within a few hours of the assault almost as if the shooter had kindly uploaded it to Twitter along with his ‘I Love ISIS’ video before he started spraying bullets into the infidels. For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, today’s <i>meme du jour </i> is a gay ‘ribbon’, coloured half gay rainbow, and half the US Stars and Stripes, which, like the Paris Eiffel Tower and <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> pencil, will do nothing beyond allowing a few people to share some chic grief-graphics, and be forgotten almost before the victim’s blood has dried. Thirdly, and finally, will come the apologists with their “This has nothing to do with Islam’ mantra…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
President Obama and the worldwide liberal media will unite and then tie itself in knots as it tries to avoid the armed elephant in the room, bigger now and covered in blood, as it blames American gun laws, Homophobic bigotry, the Christian right, Donald Trump, a lone wolf, almost anything rather than the Muslim religion. Indeed the killer’s parents, Afghan Muslims, immigrants welcomed into the US a few years ago, including the killer’s Taliban supporting father, have already said that this is nothing to do with religion and that their son was just upset at having seen two men kissing recently. Anyway, the father later insisted, God will punish homosexuals. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So that’s alright then, Islam and our liberal democracies have a ‘get out of jail’ card and the wonderful state imposed multicultural migrations that are slowly transforming our culture and the indigenous cities of America and Europe into Islamic favelas can carry on regardless. Another day, another mass killing. <i>Que Sera, Sera</i> (Whatever Will be, Will Be) as Doris Day might have sung had she been asked to perform at <i>The Pulse</i> when its audience was still alive.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There is though a difference to this mass killing in that the victims were not predominantly white heterosexuals as in France’s <i>Bataclan</i> shootings. Rather they were mixed racially and all members of the LGBT community, a sexual grouping sacred to our new Establishment and an abomination to most Muslims, ensuring that there will probably be plenty of dry-eyes and an absence of rainbow flags at your local mosque. This has produced the extraordinary spectacle of the West’s left-leaning media and politician’s bypassing their usual ‘nothing to do with Islam’ mantra and going straight on to the attack against Islam’s critics and anyone who doesn’t adhere to their new mantra that Orlando ’is all about homophobia and LGBT hatred and not about Islam’. An argument typified by the sixteen year old <i>Guardian</i> journalist Owen Jones who had a hissy fit on <i>Sky News</i> and flounced off in a huff when his interviewer wouldn’t accept Owen’s argument that this attack was different because it was on gay people. It isn’t. It is part of a never ending attack on the West’s values, regardless of sexual orientation, race or religion and the fact that the Orlando killer had also considered Disneyland as a potential target means that the world could just as easily have been mourning the deaths of 50 children this week.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Islamic State’s followers may throw gay men off buildings but the rest of the Muslim world, if not exactly cheering from the street, won’t be stopping them either. Mainstream Islam will never condone Gay rights, any more than it will see equality between men and women as a desirable aim and arguing and nitpicking over who ‘owns’ this latest massacre is an insult to the dead and a dangerous distraction for the living. The Islamist’s have at least found equality in hatred even if we haven’t found it in grief.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2016</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-16329183516298427202016-03-22T17:45:00.000-07:002016-03-22T17:51:23.309-07:00Je Suis......Memed Out<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
About sixty minutes was all it took for 129 mainly young people to die and for another 352 to be wounded, their bodies raked by bullets and shrapnel, as Islamic fanatics, their hearts black with hate for the infidel and his depraved Western civilisation, fired off round after round from their ubiquitous AK47s and casually tossed grenades into the piles of wounded afterwards just in case some were still alive. This latest attack, Paris’s second in a year and one of the worst terrorist atrocities committed in modern Europe, was an Islamic declaration of war, and one that the West must respond to. <i>The Clash of Civilisations,</i> so long predicted and so long avoided, is finally upon us and to win this war the West will have to become what it has so long feared to be, a people whose belief in their culture, faith and values is as strong as our enemies is in their religion. Strong enough in fact to wipe ISIS and radical Islam off the face of the earth or at least drive it out of Europe. Anything less and Europe at least will be lost to Islamic barbarism for centuries.</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
For years those who have decried Islam and warned of its slow encroachment and insidious usurping of our culture have been dismissed as racists, Islamophobes and fascists while Islamic appeasers, multicultural zealots and politically correct apologists have paved the way for the West’s pending subjugation. Indeed ever since the Iranian revolution in 1979 when the Shah, a Western backed puppet, was left dangling while the West effectively betrayed him and his westernised country, abet a corrupt and shabby interpretation of one, and left Iran to its fate while the Ayatollah’s revolutionary guards did their stuff, we have misjudged and misunderstood the Islamic world and the Middle East in particular. No more so than in our ludicrous embracing and encouraging of the Arab Spring, which led, body-part by bloody body-part, to the Friday 13th massacres in Paris.</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Rarely has the West’s liberal intelligentsia shown itself to be more self serving than over the Arab Spring, where, from its first stirrings in Tunisia which saw President Zine El Abiding Ben Ali pack his bags and flee to Saudi Arabia, Western governments have dumped old and loyal allies and thrown in their lot with the new kids on the chopping block. Seemingly with little or no understanding of who the trendy ‘rebels’ are or what a new government created by these romanticized ’freedom fighters’ would look like? Or indeed what kind of society would emerge by overthrowing the existing regime? </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
To the dreamers that make up much of the West’s liberal Establishment or among the Young Turks that swan around Washington’s Capital Hill clutching their iPhones and whooping at every Arab Spring posting on Twitter; Tunisia would become a democratic wonderland full of Starbuck cafés where the bright young things of the day could discuss new ideas like LGBT rights, Safe Place Apps and Global Warming. This was just too wonderful! And it was….</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
After Tunisia came Egypt’s moment and following a big ballyhoo in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, lots of shouting, a police charge on Camel back, Egypt’s 30-year rule by President Hosni Mubarak, ended. Mubarak, who had supported the Allies in the first Iraq war and committed Egyptian troops in the </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
campaign to liberate Kuwait, who had risked assassination several times by his opposition to radical</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Islamist movements, and made treaties with Israel. Who had, in fact, proved himself a reliable ally to the West on many, many occasions and a stabilising factor in a region known for its volatility was </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
effectively sacrificed on the alter of Western liberal ideology and hypocrisy. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
For while Mubarak’s regime was plagued with corruption and allegations of brutality against his opponents this had not prevented the West from maintaining good relations with Mubarak, who was generally viewed favourably by Western governments up until the Arab Spring. So it was vaguely revolting to see Prime Minister Cameron on the first flight out to greet the military rulers who were keeping the lid on things following the ousting of Mubarak. Britain he said was a true friend to Egypt, though he should perhaps have prefaced that with fair-weather. Cameron also said that <span class="s1"><i>“there really must be a move to civilian and democratic rule as part of this important transition to an open, democratic and free Egypt." </i>Hurrah! </span></div>
</div>
<div class="p3">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="s2"><i></i></span><br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Not to be left out, a more cautious Hillary Clinton visited Egypt two months later, saying that the </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
US was committed to seeing true democracy in Egypt led by a government that reflected the true</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
diversity of Egypt’s peoples. It was a pity then that that the Egyptian people voted in the Islamist Egyptian Brotherhood party and that within a year the newly elected President Morsi would be deposed and arrested by Army chiefs along with thousands of his supporters, hundreds of whom would be executed. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This great democratic experiment in one of the most important countries in the Middle East has seen a relatively stable and prosperous Arab country reduced to being run by a military dictatorship, while an ISIS backed insurgency grows in the Sinai region. Its tourist industry is ruined and the country is increasingly riven by strife and the threat of violence and, surprisingly, Prime Minister David Cameron, Egypt’s great ‘friend’ is nowhere to be found. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
After the toppling of President Mubarak, the West’s crusader liberal evangelists were on a roll and </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
encouraged uprisings everywhere, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria were now in their sights. Even</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Saudi Arabia was talked about in hushed whispers, if Libya could fall …. then why not the House of Saud, the Mordor of dictatorships gasped the Young Turks.</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
By now though street protests and catchy hashtags on Twitter had given way to bullets and baton rounds. Yet still the West encouraged dissent, and when it came to Libya we wanted to join in. </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
France, England and the US committed jets and led a bombing campaign against government buildings and the forces of Colonel Gaddafi with the result that, a few months later, a terrified Gaddafi was shown being roughed up and shot by a mob of jeering rebel soldiers. Hurrah!</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Again, seemingly drunk on the heady mix of revolution and victory, Prime Minister Cameron, along </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy flew straight out to Tripoli to big it up with Libya’s gun-totting rebels.</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Here, surrounded by armed men and the world’s press, Cameron spewed forth, what, even</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
then seemed like absolute drivel, and now, with the benefit of hindsight, was madness:</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>“The Arab Spring is a massive opportunity to spread peace, prosperity, democracy</i></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>and vitally security, but only if we really seize it”</i></div>
</div>
<div class="p3">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The Libya rebels of course seized the opportunity with both hands, murdering opponents, grabbing and selling weapons, fighting amongst themselves, murdering the US’s ambassador, Chris Stevens,</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
in Benghazi, and generally creating a lawless and ungovernable Hell-hole on the edge of Europe. A Libyan Hell-hole that ISIS started moving into about three years ago and of which they now control a sizeable and growing section around the coastal city of Sirte, which no doubt David Cameron will be visiting soon to explain the marvels of democracy to those citizens that still have heads. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It was in Syria though that the West’s addiction to spreading democracy amongst Muslim peoples</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
with no tradition of democracy reached its nemesis. Here President Assad, who has presided over Syria for some 15 years and where, in the historic city of Damascus in an area once known as the Cradle of Civilisation, he allowed all faiths, Christian, Jew, Muslim to worship, and where alcohol was permitted and where, for most, life was pretty tolerable. However Assad is a dictator; Syrian elections allow for no opposition and his regime, like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq, is Ba’athist, in that it follows an Arab nationalist ideology and allows for no criticism. It can also be brutal in its suppression of opponents but as in Iraq, for the majority of its citizens life was stable, and for many good. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In fact Syria and Assad, again like Iraq and its former ruler Saddam Hussein, posed no threat to the West, yet buoyed up on Arab Spring mania the West stirred up opposition groups to Assad and egged on the protestors who rapidly went from throwing stones to firing guns and the regime did the same. The West’s liberal pack had now created what they wanted, a civil war against a ’fascist’ style dictator, this was Spain 1936 all over again, with Assad in the role of Franco and updated for the 21st century. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
With Syria, Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron wrapped in the flag of democratic self-righteousness, was on the attack straight away saying to the United Nations in 2012; <i>“Those who look at Syria today and blame the Arab Spring have got it the wrong way around. You cannot blame the people for the behaviour of a brutal dictator. The responsibility lies with the dictator”</i></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
A year later Cameron would go on to propose, as with Libya, bombing Syria to help the ‘rebels’ remove Assad. However, unlike with Libya, by 2013 even the most fanatical supporters of the Arab Spring could see that their Spring was turning rapidly to Winter. Further, the Syrian rebels, who the West were arming indiscriminately, were committing atrocities against Christians, destroying villages and butchering captured Assad soldiers. So much so that Russia’s President Putin described the rebels as animals and for the first time the West had doubts over who these ‘rebels;’ were.</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Then one of the more shadowy rebel groups fighting in Syria called the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate, merged with another, even shadowier group, led by a Wahhabi/Salafi jihadist extremist called Abu Bakr ak-Baghdadi. This merger initially went relatively unnoticed in Western circles, which is a pity as the new rebel groups name was: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL… Now generally known as ISIS this shadowy group is now on a major tour, shooting up cities in Europe and downing airliners. Its followers wear chic black clothes, are wizard on social media, and are known to take a dim view of gay men, women, Christians and non-believers generally, often removing their heads. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Yet the West, despite helping to create ISIS, destabilising large parts of the Middle East and as a result causing the worst refugee crisis since World War 2 the West continues to avoid tackling the </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
growing elephant in the room, Islam, preferring instead to skirt around the issue by hiding in safe places on social media and creating inane visual memes and soft, comforting phrases. As if by giving each other linguistic hugs ISIS will go away. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Thus within minutes of the Paris attacks beginning, the victims of the attack were busy creating Paris hashtags, illuminating buildings in the colours of France’s flag, denouncing any criticisms of Muslims as racist, and designing a Paris victims peace sign with the Eiffel Tower as its centre. People loved it and the attack’s victims, that is, us, ensured that it went viral. As if by pouring our grief into creativity we could defeat or pacify our enemies. </div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
We cannot. Radical Islam hates the West, it hates our culture, our weaknesses and our beliefs. It has no love of art, poetry, literature or music. It hates it. It loathes our heritage and will destroy our libraries, our art galleries, our museums and the places where we entertain each other. It will burn and eradicate all that is not Islam and kill or enslave all those who will not convert or bow to the sword of Islam and it will stamp on your hashtags and pretty logos. That is what is coming. That is what a <i>Clash of Civilisations</i> means.</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
We created this mess by our meddling, by our ludicrous support of the Arab Spring and by our arrogance and we have to make it right or ISIS, or its successors, will destroy us and all that we love unless we are prepared to fight to save it. To preserve what our ancestors created. If not, then we deserve what’s coming and no amount of hashtags and clever graphics will save us then.</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
©Nigel Wingrove 2016</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-90046182374479574002015-01-18T12:57:00.000-08:002015-01-18T13:09:42.707-08:00TRIGGER WARNING<div class="p1">
Since the slaughter of nine cartoonists and journalists at the offices of the French satirical magazine <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> a huge amount of pious nonsense has been said and written about defending free speech and the right to offend. Indeed, many of the West’s leaders, including the UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron, marched arm-in-arm with France’s François Hollande and over three million French people to pledge and show their commitment to free speech and the right to ‘offend’. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Yet out in the real world ‘offending’ against Western societies new politically correct totems of racial inclusivity, sexual tolerance, religious cohesion and all the other ‘isms’ so beloved of our multicultural nirvana is increasingly difficult, or indeed, an ‘offence’ in itself. Western society, and the UK in particular, may pay lip-service to the concept of free speech but has over the last two decades become so inured to protecting minorities from possible ‘offence’ that any dissent in the form of criticism is regarded as either extremist or criminal. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Now our post<i> Charlie Hebdo</i> world is already extending its talk of ‘extremism’ beyond the kalashnikov wielding jihadists and their head-hacking disciples to include the far-right and anyone else who criticises Islam too much. Many establishment people are, having perhaps looked at <i>Charlie Hebdo’s</i> cartoons for the first time, characterising their arabic caricatures as both racist and as ’going too far’ and thus are slowly becoming apologists for their creators murderers. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Free speech should mean just that, the right to say and offend anyone regardless of their religion, race, sexual orientation, disability, and physical appearance. People’s feelings should be open to attack but the introduction of the concept of ‘hate’ speech’, ‘incitement’, ‘extremism’ and of course the catch-all, ‘causing offence’ mean that virtually any dissent, whether verbal or written, can be censured or prosecuted, or both, and our ‘Free Speech’ championing governments are to blame.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
The relentless pursuit of inclusivity and tolerance have instead created a society that is both intolerant of dissent and which fears and avoids virtually anything that may cause ‘offence’. Schools and universities are increasingly encouraged to preface literary and artworks with ’Trigger Warnings’ in case the content upsets or emotionally disturbs a reader unprepared for such ghastliness. Lectures are can be stopped or elicit protests on the grounds that the words or subject that are intended to be discussed, abortion or non abortion for instance, may be too offensive for some to hear, or even consider as a concept.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Yet ironically it is at one of our centres of learning and of free speech, <i>The Oxford Union</i>, that our post <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> love of ‘Free Speech’ is about to be truly tested. <i>The Oxford Union</i> has a history and reputation for inviting people from all walks of life and opinion to speak and that list includes many controversial figures from all sides of the political spectrum including politicians like Tony Blair, Tony Benn, US Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, the Reverend Ian Paisley, the current Home Secretary Theresa May, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, Yasser Arafat as well as quirkier figures like Pamela Anderson, Russell Brand, Salman Rushdie and Tracy Emon. All have spoken and demonstrated the value of ‘free speech’ at its most basic, the freedom to speak ones view and for the listener to hear them. So it is ironic that less that ten days after the <i>Charlie Hebdo </i>slaughter that there are calls for the Oxford Union’s latest guest speaker, Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s <i>Front National,</i> to be banned from speaking on the grounds that her words would promote division and Islamophobia. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
There is also a good chance that Marie Le Pen may become the President of France in two years time so hearing her speak and debating with her may have some validity… The move to ban her is </div>
<div class="p2">
also systemic of the UK’s growing victim culture. Marie Le Pen’s words may offend so rather than let her speak she should be banned. Silenced. Any words, spoken or written, that challenge our new totems of inclusivity and tolerance, are now silenced by cries of racism, Islamophobia, homophobia sexism, and fattism (the victim du jour,). </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
If it offends, or hurts or hates then whole armies of bureaucrats and the ‘offended’ are now on hand to prosecute and to hound the ‘offender’ and silence them. A great victimhood waiting to be outraged or offended, their fingers forever poised over their Twitter App, ready to wail and demand retribution. For them free speech is only about the power to say NO and never about the right to say YES. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
Of course uncensored bigotry is offensive and upsetting. Words, despite the schoolyard rhyme, can and do hurt. Hatred causes fear and alarm, and so can cartoons. Yet in the US, the<i> Ku Klux Klan</i> can say what they want protected by the <i>First Amendment</i> as can pornographers, racists and fascists alongside communists, anarchists and Islamists for that is the essence of free speech. Hate speech is as valid as nice speech, it is the darkside of the same coin and by prosecuting and silencing all that offends we risk creating a world of bland soundbites and inane platitudes and that would be the greatest offence of all. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="p2">
© Nigel Wingrove 2015</div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1993606403526800728.post-31473288555607027352015-01-10T14:19:00.000-08:002015-01-18T12:58:47.578-08:00JE SUIS..... NOTHING <div class="p1">
Last year (2014) following the brutal abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, Borno by militant Islamist movement Boko Haram, (’Western education is forbidden’), President Obama’s wife Michelle posted a photograph of herself on twitter holding up a sign which read #BringBackOurGirls. Within hours hundreds of thousands of celebrities and ’concerned’ people worldwide reposted the same hashtag and achieved absolutely nothing, accept perhaps a sanctimonious glow of having done the right thing. Indeed following this decisive action by America’s First Lady, the European Union followed the Twitter assault on Boko Haram with one of their own, passing a resolution <i>“calling for the immediate and unconditional release of the abducted schoolgirls”</i>. Boko Haram, of course, ignored both, and in the meantime have gone from strength to strength, recently murdering some 2000 people around the town of Baga. The schoolglrls are, surprisingly, nowhere to be seen…</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
While Boko Haram were busy raping schoolgirls and massacring villagers and anybody else who doesn’t adhere to their brand of Wahhabi and Salafi inspired jihadism another group of happy-go-lucky head-hacking rapists were getting ready to party. The new gang had the catchy name of Islamic State of Iraq and Levant or ISIL for short and this time the party was in Syria and Iraq where there were thousands of defenceless Yazidis Christians and other minority groups that these new Islamists on-the-chopping-block could amuse themselves with. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The rise of Islamic State on a tide of blood, rape, heads, genocide and atrocity videos has had the West in turmoil about how to fight it, not least because ISIL’s brand of slice ’n’ dice Wahhabism, which encourages the taking of sex slaves and souvenir heads, has acted like Islamic catnip to the legions of young wannabe jihadists that mope about Western cities despising Western culture and spend their evenings watching radical Imans and decapitation porn on Youtube. In fact, ever since the Islamic State spread out from Syria into Iraq and started decapitating Western hostages, and at the same time turning their chief hacker, Jihadi John, into an internet sensation, ISIL have put the West on the back foot and high-lighted yet again the West’s seeming inability to confront Islamic fundamentalism. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
With ISIL, while there was universal condemnation of its brutality this was, and is, always mixed with the absurd spectacle of Western leaders, like the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and numerous media outlets, who repeatedly state and trumpet that ISIL is an affront to Islam, and that it is not representative of Islam or Muslims generally as they are peaceful and represent a religion of peace. This is both patronising and nonsense coming as it does from non Muslims.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet this softly, softly approach to radical Islam’s excesses is as nothing compared to the West’s abject abasement and verbal contortions every time a ‘lone wolf’ ‘mentally deranged’ or ‘Asian’ drives a car into passers by, or stabs, or shoots, or decapitates or blows himself up in the name of Islam. Then, like the followers of Islamic State or Al Queda, these ‘Muslims’ are suddenly not real ‘Muslims’, but aberrations, or unMuslims, their actions and statements a bastardisation of Islam and Islamic teachings. So, in recent months as these unMuslims murdered, rammed and hacked to death people in Canada, Australia, France, the UK and the US we could relax because, although all the perpetrators were Muslim and all the victims weren’t, these attacks were, despite the evidence, carried out by unMuslims. Then France happened. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Charlie Hebdo. A magazine born and put together by the generation of 1968. Its pages flavoured by the CS gas that wharfed in from the barricades that had lined the boulevards of Paris all those years ago and its ink the same as that which had written all the antiestablishment slogans that had inspired the students in their ‘revolution’, and now, 47 years later, that same ink had killed them. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This magazine and its cartoonists, in a nation that loves cartoons and graphic art, had lampooned all religion and the Establishment, yet, like its close ally in print, the newspaper Libération, it had also embraced and championed multiculturalism, attacked racism, hated the Front National and generally pursued a left-leaning secular socialism. Therefore the murder of its editor and key cartoonists by French Muslims was both truly shocking to the French nation, and to the wider left-leaning establishment in the Western world generally. This was a bullet to the heart of Europe’s multicultural nirvana and it hurt. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
These murders couldn’t just be dismissed as the actions of the mentally disturbed or an unMuslim and at first it seemed that the media and the West’s political intelligentsia might just have been shocked out of their multicultural stupor and would see the Charlie Hebdo slaughter for what it really was: a further demonstration, if one were needed, that the West is at war with a religious faith that has one aim, the establishment of a worldwide Caliphate that the rest the of the world must submit to or die. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yet within minutes of the attack the BBC and other news agencies, as well as politicians, were going through incredibly complex mental contortions in which to represent the wider French Muslim community as the real victims and, in an amazing piece of verbal dexterity by the BBC, they also managed to reappoint the wider blame for the shootings back to Chalrie Hebdo and the West by suggesting that the Islamic faith is more sensitive to attacks on it than other faiths and therefore it shouldn’t be ridiculed or criticised to the extent that Charlie Hebdo lampooned Islam as that would in a sense ask for Islam’s followers to attack it. The BBC also suggested that French society was to blame for not allowing Muslims to be truly both Muslim and French in France and that France’s very secularism was, in fact, a hinderance to Muslim integration and that France should therefore change its constitution to accommodate Islam rather than the other way round.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Then, as if to ram home the West’s utter inertia and ineffectiveness in the wake of a murderous assault on its values, France, having had its 9/11 moment, also had it’s First Lady moment and created a completely useless hashtag; ‘#JeSuisCharlie’. Now millions of people worldwide can hold up a pen, and a piece of paper, and for a brief, fleeting moment, feel that they are standing up to terrorism and radical Islam, or at least standing up to those ghastly unIslamic, unrepresentative, mentally-challenged Muslims that give all the nice Muslims a bad name. Then, in a few weeks, like the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, it will all be forgotten until the next time some unMuslims decide to demonstrate the failure of the West’s ongoing Appeasement policy. Perhaps our next hashtag campaign should be #IamNevilleChamberlin </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
© Nigel Wingrove 2015</div>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Nigel Wingrovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08154249836624309774noreply@blogger.com0