Nigel Wingrove's Blog

THE DEATH OF A BARE BREASTED COUNTESS

2012-01-19T04:27:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Anderson, or Tiffany Tarantula as she named herself during the period when she reincarnated her band The Nuns after relocating from California to New York, died of breast and liver cancer age 54 on the 16th December 2011. She died, so I understand, alone and without treatment preferring instead to rely on herbal remedies and at the same time cut herself off from the world. A truly sad end for anyone and especially someone as beautiful and charismatic as Jennifer, yet given that Jennifer's mental state was in many ways as fragile as her health I was not totally surprised when I heard this for she was very much, for good or bad, her own person.

I first met Jennifer online after a colleague who was dating a New York girl at the time mentioned that I'd really like this goth girl band he'd seen perform at New York's Limelight club, the band were The Nuns, and he was right I loved their brand of trashy, gothy, bad girl, SM pop and decided there and then that Redemption Films had to make contact. At that time, I think 2000 or 2001, the nucleus of the Satanic Sluts as a concept was gelling in my mind and I was also looking at forming a record label, Triple Silence, so The Nuns just seemed perfect.

Jennifer in turn was extraordinarily fast in taking on a topic or an idea so that if one suggested something and she liked the idea then she was on it immediately, so when I had decided to take the plunge and release The Nuns album she agreed straight away. Then she was suddenly commissioning photoshoots, booking a top producer for a new song, White Slave', and, most alarmingly of all, booking herself into hospital to have her breasts enlarged.

I should also say at this point that Jennifer had become fixated with me and talked constantly in her emails and on the phone, partly in fun and partly with a real sense of passion, of me. She had also read in an interview that I liked women with pale skin and large white blue-vained breasts which I do and therefore set about having hers suitably enhanced. At this time I hadn't seen Jennifer in the flesh but I knew that she was at least six foot tall, with long white blond hair and an almost amazonian figure so I knew that any surgery was a pretty extreme course of action and started trying very hard to distant myself from Jennifer in the sense that I really had no interest in her as a potential girlfriend. It was on this weird basis that our relationship developed over the years and which meant that some of our encounters were often a bit strange, sometimes strained and occasionally bizarre.

I first met Jennifer in the flesh when I arranged for the Nuns to come over to London to perform at the private members club, Home House, for their Halloween party. The Nuns at this time consisted of Jennifer and her long term colleague guitarist Jeff Olener plus the 6' 2" beauty, Kris, a wild girl and erstwhile model, who wore very little and gyrated around stage like a fetishised, sado-masochistic nazi vampire. On this occasion there was one more 'nun' on stage, the lovely and petite Emily Booth who at that time worked for Redemption and had as a big favour agreed to be a novice nun, and wearing as little as was decent, gyrated around on the cramped stage with her big sisters and put on a great show.

The next day I took Jennifer with me to visit a friend who lived in the countryside as she very much wanted to see 'olde' England. My friend had a big house, a couple of cute children, a lovely wife and some dogs and as it happened a piano and at some time during the day Jennifer started playing on it, I don't remember what piece it was but it was classical and very beautiful and to my untutored ear she played it very well. I mention this because this was a side of Jennifer that I had never seen before or saw again. Here for a moment was the Jennifer that could have been, the conventional, abet glamorous, wife in her nice home living another life, a life that Jennifer seemed to aspire to but would never have.

A few years later Jennifer came back to London with the Nuns again, this time to perform at the Marquee Club, and again for Halloween. She was also booked to play at Madame Jo Jo's where my club Black Mass was launching the first issue of the revamped and redesigned satanic magazine Rule Satannia. This time Jennifer not only brought Jeff and Kris over but also the gorgeous Satanic Slut Darenzia, plus by this time, 2004, with the Satanic Sluts out in force there were numerous other standee 'nuns' willing to join in on stage.

Jennifer had also had her breasts enlarged again, this time to truly enormous proportions, on top of this she had had her breasts tattooed so that they resembled nothing less than two highly decorative gothic orbs. In fact when I first arrived at the Marquee and went back stage to say hello to Jennifer I was greeted with "Nigel, darlink do you like my new breasts?". At Black Mass these 'new' breasts were out on display everywhere with Jennifer taking to the stage in nothing but a veil and covered in blood in what was to be one of The Nuns best ever shows. It also happened on the same night that a real black mass had been performed, one of the Satanic Sluts had almost died, the police and ambulance crews had been called with the film of the near death 'incident' confiscated as evidence. No wonder that by the time Jennifer flounced off stage that Madame Jo Jo's had banned the Black Mass club for good.

That was the last time I saw Jennifer though we kept in touch and worked on the DVD release of her MTV and Osbournes inspired project New York Vampires in which Jennifer filmed herself, Jeff and Kris and numerous drunken and half naked goth girls behaving badly in and around New York. The DVD project also allowed us to include footage of The Nuns performance at the Marquee and Black Mass and for Jennifer to catalogue all the press clippings and paraphernalia that had characterised The Nuns chequered existence over the last twenty five years. The result was a DVD that is as shambolic as its subject but which is in a way a fitting record of Jennifer's and The Nuns history.

Then, a few months after the DVDs release, news came through that Kris, Jennifer's drug-addled sidekick for many years had been murdered in a sleazy hotel and although Kris had never been an active part of the Nuns musically her death seemed to herald the demise of The Nuns as an active creative force. After that Jennifer dabbled in various projects like her recent stage play "The Rock Star Ghost" which was performed by her in April 2011 and described in the flyers thus: "A plane crash ends the high life of Nigel, the loveable, yet befuddled British rock star. When he returns as a ghost, he sees the error of his ways, forms a deeper bond with his daughter, and finds hope and faith in the everlasting"...

Yet for all the outrage and scandal of The Nuns Jennifer seemed destined to flirt with glimpses of success on the fringes of the Goth and fetish scene, forever seeing recognition in the distance. She dreamed, like so many, of being a star yet fantasied of a life in the English countryside. Though even this life was pushed into the realms of dreams as she talked of lords and castles and of rich aristocrats who would whisk her off to a life of enchantment and luxury. In the end she died aged just 54 and leaves the world a much duller place because for all of her nonsense and fantasies Jennifer was a real eccentric and in her own way a true star, indeed only a true star or a vampire could walk through the streets of New York and London clad in thigh length boots,a cape and nothing else.

Jennifer, if you're reading this then I hope there's a quiet corner up there with a piano for you to play...

Rest in Peace.

THE UGLIFICATION OF BEAUTY

2011-12-31T08:43:00.000-08:00

On the 30th December I was walking past the National Portrait Gallery in central London and on a whim popped in to have a look at a new exhibition, The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011, and was taken aback by its obsession with portraying the human body at its most flawed, broken, diseased or infected. This was portraiture as selected by Hieronymus Bosch and styled by Joel Peter Witkins, where stumped limbs vied with pierced genitalia and diseased flesh for our attention, where deformity and perversion are celebrated over beauty and perfection. It is in fact an exhibition not of man’s beauty or even of man’s ability to overcome adversity or of inner beauty but rather it is a celebration of the ugly and the vile and the objectification of the grotesque in the name of diversity and the pursuit of equality, while beauty and the perfection of the physical, is like intelligence, brought down to its most base level.

The celebration of beauty and perfection and even of the human and the human body as an aspirational object is now fraught with danger, with every limb and sinew a minefield of politically correct catechisms. Where once the pinnacle of each race was of a body perceived to have been created in God’s image and that the best and healthiest examples of that body, if not attainable for all, were at least to be aspired to. Now we spurn such perfection as elitist and hurtful of those less fortunate or able bodied. At worst such displays of Greek and God like perfection are seen as Darwinian, fascistic, racist, or as a veiled attack on the disabled or physically handicapped and as such are increasingly taboo.

Only in the freak show world of trash celebrity is the twisted and mercurial nature of the human body discussed, loathed or aspired to. In this world the celebrity aspirants in a gallery of ‘national portraiture’ would not be chosen for how many boxes they ticked on our ever burgeoning politically correct scales but rather for how many aspirational body segments that male or female celeb rated perfection in. Here, in a world as grotesque as its politically correct counterpart hanging on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, the human body is dissected and scrutinized for each flaw, with each imperfection celebrated as evidence of a celebrities fallibility and vulnerability. In this world scars signify surgical enhancement, large breasts a sure sign that nature has been cheated, fat, a sign of gluttony or sloth, thinness a symptom of anorexia or bulimia, while cellulite and wrinkles show that age, even in celebrity, cannot be stopped. The celebrity body is, like its atrophied counterparts in the National Portrait Gallery, a caricature to be gawked at, fawned over or examined like some exhibit in a Victorian sideshow.

The human body, like the human mind and the skin that encloses them, is being brought down to its lowest level. In picture after picture men and women are shown at their most base. Disease and wounds are nolonger hidden or concealed but in the name of diversity and inclusivity put on display. So a portrait of a couple is rendered somehow more ‘real’ for showing (genital) warts and all, and the picture of a soldier who has lost a leg is somehow made more ‘meaningful’ for showing the actual stump or a cancerous face more pitiable for us being able to see each rotting cell of flesh.

This is our brave new world, a world in which even beauty is to be tamed and restricted in the name of ascetic egality and visual equality. It was telling that even where real beauty was on display in the Taylor Wessing exhibition in the form of a large photograph of the actress Keira Knightley that the colours had been muted and subdued to the extent that all life had been removed from the picture. This left her flesh tones neither pale and interesting or bright and cheerful but rather dead and lifeless like those of a corpse in a morgue.

This grey-green hue seemed to pervade almost every image as if the exhibitors, not satisfied with displaying image after image of diseased, wounded and broken bodies, wanted to imbue the whole exhibition with a veneer of death and decay. If this exhibition of British photographic portraiture says anything of our nation and its people it is not, as I am sure the selectors and judges intended, one of hope over adversity or of tenacity over prejudice or sexual diversity triumphant, but rather of misery and squalor, of death over life, of ugliness and egotism, of perversion, pain and penury. This is not a celebration of human life and the human body in all its glory but of human life and the human body at its most vulnerable and miserable. It is a portrait of flesh, cast not in God’s image, but in his shadow.

It is no wonder then that as we enter 2012 and the nation prepares to embrace the Olympics and the human form at its most vigorous and athletic that the UK’s diversity obsessed establishment should have chosen as its mascot not some God-like creature

whose physical demeanor represented these noble qualities but rather its complete opposite. The 2012 Olympic mascot is in fact the antipathy of the Olympic ideal, a atrophied, limbless, grey, anaemic one-eyed shapeless blob that represents neither the human body, sexuality, intelligence, beauty or skin colour and as such offends none of the totems of multiculturalism, nationhood, gender, religion or able-bodied over disabled.

The Olympic mascot is the natural culmination of the Establishments quest for a non offensive human form, a shapeless blob. This too is where in a few more years The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait will end up in its striving to offend no one and to subvert beauty. Soon diseased flesh and genitals will not be enough and no doubt excrement and faeces will vie with open sores and corpses as being more real and inclusive. Until one day a one-eyed grey-skinned blob hangs on the wall and we will have achieved perfection...

Happy New Year.

RELOCATION, RELOCATION: A MIDDLE CLASS NAME FOR 'WHITE FLIGHT'

2011-12-11T10:42:00.000-08:00

The English, and the English middle classes in particular, are well known for their habit of saying one thing and meaning something else entirely. Racism is concealed behind a veneer of niceties and politeness, with prejudice being the hate that dares not speak its name. The liberal elites and sauvignon quaffing professionals who go out of their way to be broadminded and understanding on sexual diversity, race, religion and multiculturalism, would still be privately aghast at the idea of their son or daughter coming out, or marrying into another race, or embracing Islam. They would never say so, rather with British stoicism they would smile and carry on. Yet there is a perceptible change in the air, which since the riots is being driven by fear and a sense that our inner city populations are not the multicultural urban nirvanas that they were once thought to be, that they are in fact, an overflowing melting pot that’s been simmering for too long and is now getting ready to explode.

The first signs of this coming explosion were August’s riots, but these should be seen not as the actual explosion but rather as the first salvo in what will effectively be a violent realigning and redrawing of English society as future outbreaks of rioting destroy and undermine the social order on which our current way of life is structured. A structure which is being eaten away and weakened by the cancerous effects of being force-fed a relentless diet of multicultural diversity for thirty or more years and is now facing the prospect of being physically attacked as well. In such a fragile state its survival is not guaranteed, and it will need to fight hard to maintain the current status quo between the state and the people, or risk losing and seeing the country slide into anarchistic barbarism or becoming some form of quasi Weimaresque democracy which constantly teeters on the brink of collapse and paving the way for a period of political or military authoritarianism.

The middle classes know this not because there is an obvious sign but because there are little warning indications everywhere, in the papers, on the street, on the news, on the Net, in school, in colleges, in work, in the shops, and from the people they talk too. Everyday there are little things and big things all flashing red and those warning signs are all saying that the pot is getting ready to blow.

The journalist Graham Archer writing in the Daily Telegraph this week announced that he was leaving the inner city London borough of Hackney due, in a perfect example of middle class double speak, to a lack of empathy among the ‘separate communities’ and more importantly because of the ‘repellent antisocial behaviour that marks out too many bus journeys’, and specifically he says, ‘we’re leaving because of the summer riots’. He denied that this was about race and went on to castigate and cite the ‘tram lady’, Emma West, whose mouthy and slurred tirade at the world in general and non English whites in particular has made her a hate figure worldwide, seen her children taken into care and extraordinarily imprisoned without trial until January 3rd 2012 ensuring that she spends Christmas in prison. Such is the fate of anyone who dares to get ‘mouthy’ about race or who, in a very non middle class way, speaks their mind honestly. Better for her that she had thought what she meant and spoken what she didn’t.

Yet Emma West is also a spark, and the state’s brutal overreaction to what were in effect the drunken ramblings of a solitary woman on a tram has ensured that that spark rather than being extinguished will, like so many others, continue to burn. The police are adding their sparks as well by further talking up the doom-laden ante and demanding everything from tear gas, water cannon and new blinding laser lights to deal with future urban disorder. Those with a vested interested in portraying the riots as the cries of an underclass struggling for justice against a wicked, austerity driven world, have given future rioters the veneer of political respectability by reclassifying the rioters as protesters and in the background the silent majority says one thing, thinks another, dreams of relocating, and carries on.

Yes people are carrying on, but are increasingly nervous, as all the while the red lights keep flashing. Unemployment is rising, crime is rising, production and manufacturing are falling, banks could go bust, Europe is imploding, interest rates will rise soon as and as they rise so will mortgage repayments, and credit, once the driving force behind our reinvented ‘never-had-it-so-good’ culture, is now too in short supply. Nothing, in fact, is as it was, and nothing seemingly, is as it seems. There is a sense as well, that on top of all this the government and the natural cohesion of the people that has held the country together is falling apart. That we are, in fact, nolonger one people and one nation. Indeed, thanks to the wonders of multiculturalism we are now many peoples and many beliefs who have little in common and even more differences.

This frightens the middle classes whose world order is now under real threat. What for them is the purpose of all that cultural diversity and the tolerating and defending of multiple faiths and religious rights if the environment in which they live could be torn apart by the very people they have been supporting? They could, of course, run away to the suburbs or the countryside and relocate like the Daily Telegraph’s Graham Archer thereby escaping the ‘repellent antisocial behaviour’ that is so rampant on the streets of our inner cities, and many, many will.

They may also stay put and continue lying to themselves and each other and pretend that everything is fine and that there is nothing to worry about, or they can heed the warning signs for what they are and take a leaf out of Emma West’s book and say what they mean for once. For multiculturalism has failed totally and rather than relocating and running away the middle classes and the establishment they support needs to say enough is enough and bring an end to this ghastly social experiment before it destroys the country. The time for staying calm and carrying on is over, now is the time for speaking the truth.

EUROPE: SCREAMING ON THE OUTSIDE, DYING ON THE INSIDE

2011-12-05T14:25:00.000-08:00

A few months ago the UK suffered one of the worst and most vicious spates of rioting the country has ever experienced. The level of ferocity and destruction displayed should have been a wake up call to us that things in our green and pleasant land were far from right. Instead there was much rejoicing in the columns of the Guardian and in the corridors of the BBC that the riots in Tottenham, which involved predominantly black youths, were replaced in part by white, multicultural rioters on the following Monday and Tuesday. Phew, thank goodness for that, and within a few weeks, once the shock of seeing ‘normal’ people burnt out of their homes or beaten up and robbed in the street had worn off, the mainstream media was morphing the riots into spontaneous ‘protests’ against cutbacks and the government’s austerity programs with any other causes that might hint or point to flaws in our multicultural wonderland seemingly ignored or denounced as soon as they were aired.

Then in October it was announced that the UK was now one of the most densely populated countries on earth thanks to two decades of unchecked and utterly reckless immigration which has brought the UK population up to some 62 million with a density of 246 people per square kilometer. The latest forecasts are for a population of 71 million by 2031 and 90 million by 2050. This influx of immigrants, aside from putting a catastrophic strain on our health service, the welfare state, our education system and available housing is also adding to the slow erosion of the countries culture, religious base, core values and is threatening its environment. Yet our politicians continue to do nothing, say nothing and hear nothing. Even the riots, a real scream of a warning not just of things to come but of things wrong now, have been ignored.

Instead the government announces the deregulation of our planning rules so that the rape of our countryside can continue even faster than it is already, and more cheap, concrete dwellings can be built to accommodate ever greater numbers of immigrants. The State further fudges the issues of immigration numbers by playing lip service to people’s concerns either by toying with entry requirements or tinkering with the deportation of immigrants living here illegally. While all the while our legislators nurture and feed a growing sense of entitlement among immigrants and their dependents by championing the laws of discrimination backed up by a bureaucracy that grows relentlessly.

Every week the invidious effects of our failing, post war utopian multiracial experiment can be seen in falling education standards, rising crime rates and a general decline in any sense of a national cohesion beyond the furtherance of the self. Further, our moral decline has been accompanied by the slow, inextricable and now all but inevitable transition from a predominantly white, anglo-saxon, Judeo-Christian society with pagan roots and a sense of history and culture that bound us to the land upon which we live, to a society bound together by self interest, consumerism, debt, vacuous egotism and the religion of celebrity.

Now by necessity we live cheek by jowl with people who have no interest in us, have no or little knowledge of our country, its history, culture or beliefs. Part of the state’s multicultural agenda is to denigrate and besmirch our history and culture and to embark on symbolic acts of self flagellation whenever events like the slave trade, colonialism or our Empire are mentioned so that any sense of pride in our heritage is gradually crushed. It should be no surprise that many immigrants not only fail to ‘integrate’ but have no ‘respect’ for the country in which they find themselves.

In Europe fewer and fewer people understand the causes of the last world war, or even of how Nazi Germany arose, in fact Ad Busters, the magazine that championed and created the Occupy Wall Street movement and is pushing for a radical overthrowing of the capitalist system in favour of some sort of collectivist Facebookian utopia, wrote in their August issue that the Nazis had ‘conquered’ Germany. Making the Nazis sound as if they were an invading force as opposed to a revolutionary political party elected by, and made up of, German people who happened also to follow a new, anti-semitic, violent and radical ideology.

Nationalism and a belief in the nation state has in fact been reduced to a few crass slogans and corse chants, and national pride is now an erroneous concept to be mocked or discredited by Europe’s leaders rather than championed and promoted. So too is the belief in ones race, or rather it is unacceptable to believe or champion that race if that race is white or follows a Christian religion. However if ones race or religion is indian, Jamaican, Pakistani or Islamic, Hindu, in fact any other race or religion other than white or Christian then our leaders will defend that right in law absolutely and resolutely. European indigenous culture and the races whose blood is in its very soil is being destroyed by the very people who should be defending it.

Evidence of this realignment from the indigenous to the disingenuous can be seen in everything from the stripping of national war memorials and the stealing of statues so that they can be melted down for money, to the annexation of sections of our cities by peoples and religions that are not just alien to our way of life but openly hostile to it. Such civic barbarism can only happen when a nation or nations have lost not only their self esteem but their soul. When over decades a nation mocks its customs, its values, its religion and denies and decries its history, violates its land and even sets about breeding its own people out of existence it is no wonder that those same people, along with the governments new carpetbagging friends, see no issues with desecrating our memorials.

Now as the euro teeters on the verge of becoming the 21st Century equivalent of Midas’s gold we will see banks collapse and countries default and with them the slow but inevitable re-emergence of old hatreds, political, religious, class and ethnic and in their wake, violence. Europe’s elites may then finally begin to understand the terrible seeds that they have sown by encouraging unchecked immigration and the placid usurping of nation states by alien cultures whose religions are inseparable from politics and whose followers aim is global dominance over all either by conversion or the vanquishing of those who oppose it. Even now Europe’s bureaucrats and politicians are seeking to save their currency and the european super state it feeds rather than taking steps to salvage what they can by admitting their mistakes.

Nature though, either by design or inevitability, has ways of bringing or forcing matters to a head. In the UK our indigenous creatures along with the countryside on which they live are facing extinction or extermination either, as in the case of the red squirrel, by being colonized and killed by an alien invader, namely the grey squirrel; or in the case of the hedgehog and the weasel, two quintessentially English creatures, by the loss of their environment. The luckless fox or the other hand, once championed by shrill hordes of animal liberators intent on banning its hunting by groups of horse riding aristocrats, is being systematically exterminated by armed executioners for having the temerity to survive in our cities as its own habitats are concreted over. Strangely there is not a word of protest from those who previously opposed fox hunting, perhaps mechanized killing is to their liking or now that the killing is being done by workers in the public sector defending the luckless fox has lost its cachet.

If the demise of England’s four-legged creatures is symbolic of Europe’s two-legged populations future then coming events herald not just the collapse of the Euro but of the utopian experiment that created it and which has, in one guise or another, driven Europe’s political will since 1945. Now events, good, bad and catastrophic could create the scenarios in which governments and the old order simply cannot rule and which will, inevitably, produce new orders, new politics and new powers. What they are like, and whether of the left, the right, in the middle, religious, anarchic or capitalist it is unlikely that things will ever be as they were though I hope that whatever fate decides that there is still room in the new Europe for a some of our struggling four legged friends.

RIOT: DEMOCRACY BEGINS TO BE DESTROYED FROM WITHIN.

2011-09-03T04:17:00.000-07:00

Over four days in August 2011 the UK’s febrile multicultural and indigenous underclass rioted on a scale and with a ferocity that had never been seen before. Beginning in the borough of Tottenham on a Saturday, and culminating with widespread looting, arson, and general criminality across much of London on the following Monday, the underclass vanquished the police and evoked fear and chaos among the rest of the population. On that night Democracy was found wanting and vulnerable, while the chattering classes beloved liberalism collapsed as its champions temporarily ditched their faith in political correctness, cried out for the police and faced off hooded thugs whose rioting threatened to devalue their gentrified mansions, invaded their shops and restaurants and shoved a knife deep into their human rights. This wasn’t protest, it is was brutalism without rules; Capitalism at its most base and basic: ‘I want what you have and I’m taking it now’. Simples...

The BBC, SKY and many in the wider media initially tried to give the rioters a veneer of respectability by calling them protesters and speculating that the riots were directly linked to cuts in social services, student grants, unemployment and the shooting dead of a young black man armed with a gun in Tottenham. This was all nonsense of course and as the violence and destruction escalated and with it footage of people being robbed or attacked in the street, of peoples homes and businesses burnt down even the most politically correct commentators reluctantly started to use the words ‘rioters’ and ‘looters’.

However there was also a palpable sense of relief among those same commentators when among the first rioters in Tottenham, a few white faces were spotted. Thank goodness! This wasn’t a ‘race riot’ in the sense that it was all black rioters, it’s a mixed, multiracial riot, so that’s alright. Politicians, police leaders, community groups, the chatterijng classes and Polly Toynbe et al, rejoiced. The riots in the 1980s “now they were ‘race’ riots”, but now thanks to our wonderful inclusive society the children of the white underclass are throwing petrol bombs and looting too. How proudly must the likes of David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Shirley Williams, Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and co looked on as their theoretical offspring brought their ‘cry of rage’ to England’s milticultural never never land.

And because most of the rioters had their faces covered and surprisingly weren’t taking part in round table discussions on Newsnight, commentators and politicians could attribute any views they liked to them. In fact a media intent on finding the ‘right’ answers for the riots has been only too happy to attribute a conventional malaise to the riots rather than hint at a darker and more nihilistic cause. So not only, as the passing of days lessened the shock of the riots, were the chattering classes warming to the rioters and their attacks on the ‘coalition’s cuts’ or whatever appropriate cause they wished to attribute, but, safe again for now, they could also begin the process of defending and finding causes for the riots that would put them back nicely into the ills that the UK’s massive welfare depended and bloated public sector are set up to deal with. The Coalition of course, keen to be seen as tough, but caring, concurs and we are all happy again.

Of course some commentators have broken the mould and spoken outside of the box, most noticeably, historian David Starkey who dared not only to evoke the words and memory of Enoch Powell but cited black gangster culture as another possible cause of the riots. This was Heresy! Powell’s now infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, made 43 years ago in 1968, predicted a time in England when, if immigration was allowed to continue unchecked, that, “like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. and that:

“There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endevour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one to boot.

....Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial religious differences, with a view to the exercise of action and domination, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population.”

Powell’s speech, as with Starkey’s now, challenged the Establishment’s orthodox view that immigration and a multicultural society are desirable and such views when uttered by mainstream figures are not only rubbished and censured but where possible the figure that spoke them is either destroyed, or humbled to the extend that he or she will recant their views and, like a sinner, beg forgiveness. Thereafter that person will do their best to

reingratiate themselves with the mainstream, though like the sinner, forever tainted by their earlier utterances.

Starkey to his credit neither recanted or apologized and as such is to be ostracized by his peers and pushed to the margins of respectable society. The day after his appearance on Newsnight the Establishment reacted with fury to his words, with the Labour party leader Ed Miliband calling them “disgusting and outrageous” and that they were “racist comments”, and that “there should be condemnation from every politician and every politcial party”, the Guardian’s ghastly Dreda Say Mitchell felt that Starkey had “complete ignorance about the social dynamics of urban life in Britain” and that to understand the riots and their “causes”, we need “informed and articulate comment (even in Jamaican slang) from people who’ve lived life on the streets”.

Even more hysterical was the reaction of 100 fellow ‘historians’ who felt that Starkey should never have been asked on to Newsnight given that he was a celebrity historian more suited to commenting on Elizabethans. Presumably there are now at least 100 historians with suitably diversity friendly views waiting in the wings should there be more riots to comment on. These historians also felt that Starkey’s views had “disgraced the academic world” and want the media to stop putting the word ‘historian’ next to his name.

This is our new Democracy at work, now any political party, politician, academic, celebrity or individual who dares to question, challenge or criticise the wisdom of a multicultural society is shunned at best, at worst they are ostracized and cast-out into the wilderness. There is no “frank discussion” or “informed and articulate comment”, there is only diversity hyberbole and multicultural zealotry where any criticism of our racially engineered utopia is crushed. In our new Democracies there is no protesting, no commenting, no discussion, no debating, no voting or any form of dissent allowed when it comes to multicuturalism and race. The State is right and everyone else is wrong.

The riots may have given pause to the multicultural zealots and a few of the chattering classes in Clapham and Camden may have doubted their beliefs momentarily. But a few soothing words from the BBC and the sight of hundreds of their fellow Cabernet Sauvignon drinking chums waving brooms around as they ‘bonded together’ to clean up the mess have reassured them. We love our culturally diverse, multicultural city and we’re going to understand why these riots happened and make sure that they don’t happened again. Hurrah! Which is great of course because if after our ‘understanding’ of the ‘causes’ the riots do happen again, and they will, then they be more violent and more destructive than anything so far and the people that bond together in future won’t need brooms to clean up their city, they’ll need guns.

Simples.

ON VOICEMAIL EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOUR SCREAMS

2011-08-02T11:32:00.002-07:00

Watching the hysteria and escalating media on media clusterfuck that was surrounding News International, and inparticular its founder Rupert Murdoch and his unfeasibly Pre-Raphaelitesque and now ex-Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks, over the last few weeks has been akin to watching a kind of Inquisition style Burn the Witch frenzy, with Tom Watson MP playing the role of WitchFinder and the Guardian and other dubious high-moral tone acolytes backing him up as his Papal Tribunal. That is not to decry or mediate either the seriousness or vileness of the phone hacking of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's mobile phone or similar outrages perpetrated by the News of the World but rather to comment on the massive amount of cant, hypocrisy, sexism, agism and general ghastliness that were unleashed in its wake. In fact, what had begun as a wave of righteous outrage and moral indignation at journalism's descent into a sulphurous pit of, to quote Shakespeare, 'burning, scalding, stench, consumption', to which can now be added ' and phone-hacking', ended with few angels and many demons on display.

I worked for a Murdoch subsidiary once, News International / Hatchet, in the mid 1980's where a magazine concept I had proposed had been taken up for development. It was in 1986 and Murdoch at that time was locked in an almost life and death struggle with the dinosaur-like luddites that made up the newspaper print unions. This was an era when newspaper print jobs were sold on, the wages and perks being so good that when a vacancy came up backhanders and money, not skill and worth, secured the position and the threatened introduction of new technology, that is computers, had made the print workers apoplectic with rage and for weeks and months Murdoch's Wapping headquarters and the location of his newspapers and print presses, had been the focus of bitter picketing and often serious violence. The miners may have failed in their clash with Margaret Thatcher's ideologically driven policies but the battle to stop Murdoch and his technologically driven capitalism would not fail or so the bastions of the old left had decried.

I mention this as my brief six months or so working in this small outpost of Murdoch's then embryonic empire gave me some insight in the Murdoch way of doing things and how focussed he was. I had been taken out to lunch during this time with the specific purpose of being briefed and prepared for meeting Rupert Murdoch on the following Monday where, I was told, he would either like me and my magazine concept, in which case I was in, or... well there was no other option, if he didn't like it I was out. I was told that he wasn't a man to waste his time on frippery and sycophancy and that he would just be in London to sort out business issues and would be out again on the next plane. So no partying for him.

That weekend there was yet another very violent demonstration at Wapping, one of the worst, and Murdoch was said to be furious and was considering closing The Sun and pulling out of the UK for good. My meeting was cancelled and with no end in site to the dispute I was advised to take my concept title to another newspaper mogul, also expanding into magazines, his name, Robert Maxwell... And that's a whole other story!

What I did glean from this was just how close to the line Murdoch would go to win a battle and equally just how hated a man who chose to take on entrenched values and old orthodoxies could become. For Murdoch, the Wapping battle was about winning and about money, politics were secondary. For monetarists and free-marketeers Murdoch's almost pugnacious resistance to the unions was the stuff of which heroes are made and for a while Murdoch was not just the darling of the capitalist Right, but a champion, whether he liked it or not, of the Thatcherite revolution. To the Left Murdoch was an anathema and a figure to be hated and destroyed.

It has taken a generation, but now 25 years later that old Left is taking its revenge and like any sense of wrong that has had too long to gestate it has become bitter and much of the indignation of the last few weeks has had little to do with the very real wrongs of phone-hacking and everything to do with settling old scores. A lot of those old scores came about because Murdoch eventually won his battle and introduced computers into the running of his papers, with the rest of the UK's newspaper industry following suit and introducing them as well. But in winning Murdoch defined himself as an enemy of the Left and a champion of pure, unmitigated captitalism, a capitalism that was defined by Murdoch's own prejudice's and which paradoxically are as anti-establishment and anti-Royalty as those of any Marxist driven revolutionary.

Now two decades later Murdoch presides over a multi-state, multimedia empire with revenues and worth stretching into the billions and is courted by celebrities, politicians, the business world and by the vast multitudes that have, like fungi, sprouted and grown in the dark tributaries that feed his media organs. I have no doubt that many of the accusations of phone-hacking, deceitfulness and trickery that have been banded around over the last few weeks are true, though equally true, I am sure, are some of the denials from the Murdoch clan of culpability in them. Indeed it was exciting for a while to picture the 'flame-haired' Rebekah Brooks as some sort of Borg Queen whose News of the World minions fed her brian a constant diet of malicious gossip and tittle-tattle while her aged protector stroked her hair and whispered, over and over again, my precious, my precious...

But this is a fairy tale that has yet to reach its end, and the witch may yet become an angel and the covetous old King may end his days in peace and comfort. Yet equally the witch may be found to have used dark magic in pursuit of her dreams and be burned at the stake, the aged one and his brood may be cast out of the empire and usurped by stern-faced Inquisition types intent on upholding moral values. As a saga it is now worthy of becoming a top TV series and it is perhaps appropriate that in the midst of the scandal about News of the World, phone hackers, corrupt policemen, red-haired temptresses and the Murdoch family, that it was announced that Dallas was returning for a new series. JR is now an octogenarian patriarch trying to keep control over the Texan equivalent of the Borgias. Art imitating life or life imitating art? Who knows, but as I started with a quote from Shakespeare I'll end with one as he usually knows best: 'Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all'.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

Brutal, stupid and cruel: The rise and rise of Generation Eloi

2011-06-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

If the Nazi leadership famously cared for animals and were conversely capable of the utmost cruelty to people, then our post war, public sector driven, welfare dependent and

excruciatingly politically correct caring society is becoming a savage, vile and foul place for both. Day in day out the UK’s papers carry stories of children, the disabled, the old, sick or just those in the wrong place at the wrong time who have been beaten up, abused or worse by our nations burgeoning brutalligentsia.

Even more upsetting, given mankind’s supposed elevated status at the top of nature’s evolutionary ladder, is the increasing vileness with which many people mistreat, abuse, torture, maim and kill any animal defenseless or unlucky enough to fall within their vile, bestial grasp. From poisoned cats, stabbed horses, abused dogs and shot swans, few

species of the animal kingdom escape the attention of the sadists in our midst.

Yet our slow, and inextricable descent into a dystopian mire is not only of our own making, but its progress and acceleration is being driven by our government and societies lack of collective will to stop it. For years our inability to punish wrong doing with any sense of vengeance, or to chastise and set parameters for children’s behavior, or for parents to accept the responsibilities that come with parenthood and to discipline their children and set guidelines of what is and isn’t acceptable have created an inflexible, amoral mindset of self-serving apathy, viciousness and worthlessness. Our collective psyches slowly nullified by the combined forces of capitalism at its most crass and welfare statism at its most soporific and stultifying. Leaving us either incapable or unwilling to accept responsibility for our own actions at best, and at worst allowing us to shirk adulthood altogether in preference for a life lived forever young; like a kind of Chav Eloi which prefers tattoos and trainers to whites and pumps.

In fact, decades of rejoicing in stupidity, deriding competitiveness, elevating failure, rubbishing elitism and swallowing in the antics of ‘celebrities’, whose every move is fawned over, analysed and mimicked by a population desperate for something to believe in have created a society and a mindset in which the ‘self’ and self-gratification transcends all. Now the ‘I’ want, ‘I’ need and ‘I’ am is everything. Our selfish desire to consume more and more, for recognition among our friends and for a bit of our own celebrity, coupled with a sense of worth are fueled by our ‘rights’. It is our ‘right’ to play music loud, to behave badly, to shout and scream and to seemingly do anything, even commit crime yet be protected from punishment by our Human Rights. Rights that allow a serial burglar freedom from prison because of his ‘rights’ to be with his children. Children that are in turn paid for by the State because of the criminals ‘right’ to create life. Rights, more rights, and more rights, rights ad nauseam... But no Wrongs.

This slow corruption or morphing of society from one which, if not perfect, that at least still had a moral compass and enforced a sense of right and wrong to one which, devoid of virtue, has replaced basic moral values with a set of legal ‘Rights’. Rights which can, unlike morals but like goalposts, be moved and tweaked by clever lawyers and which allow wrongdoers and those whose actions have broken the old morals to not only claim the ‘moral‘ high ground again and again, but often to punish and chastise those whose views or values society once protected. Clever lawyers have made black white and white black and helped drive society towards a new barbarism where all values are only as strong or as a weak as the lawyer defending them and where wrong can often be right.

Now as a generation born into a Rights obsessed society give birth and their children reach adulthood and exercise their right to be stupid, inarticulate, illiterate and unemployable, so these Darwinian throwbacks take out their frustration and sense of worthlessness on the few creatures in our litigious society who have no rights, the animals.

Therefore when the fifteen year old thugs that destroyed, maimed and mutilated the defenseless animals in an inner city farm in Manchester are tried, their lawyers will defend their rights over all else and ensure that they are not punished as they deserve to be. As no doubt will the lawyers defending other representatives of the UK’s burgeoning Eloi population who are responsible for so much pain and suffering among our animal kingdom.

Perhaps soon the moral pendulum that has swung so far in favour of our Rights, will finally start to swing back in favour of our Responsibilities and begin restoring not just a sense of wrong but of punishment as well. For the people that commit these terrible crimes are truly unworthy of ‘rights’, or in fact the right to create life at all. They have no function, their life’s are pointless and we as a society should begin the process of eradicating them with the same thoroughness with which they now seem to be eradicating England’s wildlife.

Generation XXX - Born to Porn

2011-04-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

Years ago in 1967 or 1968, when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, I found a stack of porn magazines while exploring the families rambling home in which various members of our extended tribe resided, the house had seventeen bedrooms, labyrinthine cellars and extensive grounds and had been requisitioned by the army during the second world war so finding exciting items in some abandoned corner was not that unusual, though I never found a wardrobe into Narnia or some secret passage containing hidden treasure which is what I was usually looking for. On this occasion though I had found a fencing sword and was having imagery battles in one of the older and more dilapidated parts of the cellars when I rammed the sword into an old blanket that was lying on top of a pile of coal, and with a deft flick of my wrist had hurled the blanket into the air revealing a box full of porn magazines. Treasure indeed!

I can't remember much about the magazines now and think that probably they were mainly American strong softcore titles, which meant that they would have contained full nudity, women in stockings and fetish gear and strong sex scenes but not hordcore penetration, though they certainly contained much stronger and a lot more graphic material than was readily available in the UK at the time. I remember being very excited about my 'find' and took one or two of the magazines into my Church of England Primary School the next day to show my friends. This proved to be a big mistake...

When I got to school I showed the magazines to a few chums in the playground, the children went mad, shouting and screaming and calling their friends over and within minutes I was at the centre of a huge scrum of excited, almost hysterical boys and girls all jostling and fighting with each other to get a look at some naked flesh. Of course even in the non PC nineteen sixties a huge mêlée involving half the school was not going to be tolerated and soon a couple of our teachers waded into the throng to see what was going on and there in the middle was me, clutching a couple of, by this time, rather disheveled pictures of breasts and bottoms. I was also, I expect, smirking gleefully.

Then all hell broke lose. I was marched to the headmasters office, canned, my mother called in, my father notified and with stern faces all round I was cross-examined as to where I had got hold of such filth and threatened with expulsion. I stuck to my story that I had found the magazines in a bin on the way to school, this still being a time when children could walk to and from school without fear, and eventually the matter was dropped. I'm sure that there was a bit more fallout but if there is it is now lost in the mists of time and I suspect too that our coal bunker only contained coal in future.

I mention this story of my childhood because over the last few days newspapers and the BBC have been full of stories regarding the readily available amount of pornography on the internet and how easily accessible that material is to children, teenagers and young adults and wanted to illustrate that up until a few years ago the exact opposite was true. The main gist of these articles is the concern many parents, psychologists and the wider society have that children's attitudes to relationships and to each other are being harmed by exposure to often pretty extreme pornography. This concern is more focused now because the wider availability of pornography began with the arrival of Web2o in the early noughties and now almost a decade later we are beginning to see children and teenagers of the Web2o decade become adults.

This is the first generation that has grown up with pornography so readily available to them, yet they are also bombarded with warnings as to the malign, predatory and dangerous nature of sex. So in an already confusing world, sex is good and available at the click of button and bad because because every email or approach from an unknown adult is a paedophile out to do harm.

A new survey for the BBC has also shown that 8 out of 10 young men between 18 and 24 have looked at porn which is hardly surprising given that men of almost any age are thinking about sex virtually nonstop and between 15 and 30 are almost ready to explode with sexual angst so drooling over porn whilst not exactly edifying is hardly surprising. Nor is the fact that at least a third of young women have look at porn as well given that contrary to popular belief women are just as highly sexed as men if not more so, they are just a bit more circumspect in their drooling and lusting than men.

What is inconvertible though is that young people are seeing pornography at a younger and younger age and that is having an effect. The fashion for women to shave off their public hair stems from pornography, as does breast augmentation, labiaplasty and vaginoplasty. So did the demystifying of anal sex, cunnilingus and the introducing to a once fairly straight public a pornucopia of sexual proclivities covering everything from double penetration to fisting and beyond.

Many of these aspects of pornography are enlightening and for many empowering,

and, personally having fought adult censorship in the courts and having begun the legal process that legalized pornography in the UK, would not want to see the pendulum begin swinging back the other way. However it is not good that young children are accessing hardcore porn, yet the censoring of the internet is neither desirable or easily achievable unless the UK Government wishes to bring in draconian laws on a par with China or Saudi Arabia. Far better that we learn how to educate and help this new generation absorb what is going on around them and to understand, explain and reason the effects what they are or will be seeing.

For boys this may mean explaining to them that what they see in porn does automatically equate to how they have sex with their girlfriend and that equally a girl doesn’t have to make love like a pornstar. They can and should be themselves. Most of all they need to understand that pornography needs to shock to survive, and as its audience and they themselves becomes jaded and immune through over exposure, so pornography as stimuli has to become increasing jaded in turn as unfortunately that is the nature of the beast.

Yes pornography is desensitising and should not readily be available to children, but pornography is only one aspect of a sexualized media that is bombarding children and adults alike with sexual images and messages in everything we see. From pop videos to the marketing of clothes and make-up, through to the antics of celebrities and reality TV contestants. The message being that sex is at the centre of everything and more than ever that message is 'if you've got it, flaunt it!'.

The internet sex genie is out of the bottle and nothing short of an authoritarian or religious revolution will put in back in again. I suspect that now if a smirking ten year old brought a porn magazine to school he would find few takers and in a way that lost excitement of innocence is sad but time moves on. Now most young people will see porn as a kind of rite of passage to adulthood, they will look and then move on, some will have a problem with it, like others have problems with drink and drugs, but that is life and we cannot legislate for a minority. Far better to trust Generation XXX with being better able to handle porn than we think and let them get on with making Generation YYY in their own natural way...

LYING, VYING AND CRYING: POLITICIANS, IMMIGRATION & THE NATION STATE

2011-04-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

As the UK’s Coalition government edges ever closer to collapse and its politician’s snipe and jostle with each other, maneuvering themselves into the best and most favourable positions in which to jump ship or carry favour with the UK’s increasingly volatile media, so its leaders, Nick Clegg and David Cameron, appear ever more desperate and despairing. Clegg in particular seems to be on the verge of a breakdown, bursting into tears because he has become a hate figure to students for breaking his election pledge not to raise tuition fees, or getting hysterical and girly, worrying about all the anger ‘out there’. Yet it is his, and the nation’s, ridiculous leader David Cameron whose behaviour is really bordering on the manic. Cameron bigged it up with the Egyptian’s in Tahrir Square, then dressed down ‘man-of-the-people’ style with the Ryaniar regulars with nothing more than a change of socks for hand luggage for a long weekend holiday with his wife and as soon as he got back declared war on Libya.

Then, with hardly time to pause or breath in between making dire threats against Colonel Gaddafi, Cameron, now wrapped in the robes of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, launched into a bitter diatribe against Oxford University describing it as a disgrace for only admitting one black student in the last academic year based on her merits - the implication being that from now on Oxford should dumb down to let in more ethnically desirable types regardless of their academic qualifications. Then within days he had ditched the cultural diversity robes and wrapped himself in a Union Jack and set about attacking the number of immigrants in the UK, saying that Labour’s ‘open door policy’ was responsible and that the number of foreigners in the UK was dangerously high.

No doubt in the days to come Cameron will threaten to invade Syria, announce further cutbacks in the armed forces, pledge to observe Ramadan and eat only Halal meat before denouncing the failure of immigrants to integrate and threatening to follow France and ban the burka. This is Cameron desperately playing to the gallery and failing as his inconsistency and insincerity make it impossible for anyone to know what he really means and what he really intends to do about any of these soundbite pronouncements. Nothing probably.

Yet in amongst these ramblings are real concerns that have been ignored for years and which should be addressed, which makes their being spewed out by Cameron like so much political ectoplasm all the more tragic. There are too many immigrants in the UK and successive governments not only opened the door, they wedged it open and no one, even now, has had the guts to close it. Likewise, as mentioned in an earlier Cameron rant, multiculturalism has failed, failed in ways that will potentially destroy our societies as the sinister Talabanisation of London’s Tower Hamlet’s and other UK cities shows.

Here women, even non Muslim women, are being threatened and intimidated for wearing revealing Western clothes, and advertisements on billboards and bus shelters which feature scantily clad women are being painted black. Yet as usual the politicians and police play it down, dismissing the threats as the actions of a small minority, a ‘minority’ that will one day knock on their door as well. This sort of action has been building for years, in Bradford over five years ago prostitutes were driven out of Muslim areas and Western girls were ‘advised’ to dress conservatively walking through them and, in a sign of things to come, advertisers avoided giving ‘offense’ by not booking ads in their area that showed women in underwear or bikinis. Always appeasement, always avoiding confrontation, always defeat.

Cameron’s reason for attacking multiculturalism and immigration is cynical in that there are elections coming up and he’s trying to win back Tory voters who have drifted away by talking tough on issues they care about, yet he will do nothing. Even when in Tower Hamlets again, Muslim radicals attacked another totem of our inclusive society, gay rights, the powers that be first blamed the mysterious ‘minority’ and then, once a paper had suggested that members of the ‘far right’ had done it to stir up trouble, blamed members of the English Defense League. Of course they had done it, they or anyone other than the crazed Islamists in our midst who can do no wrong in the eyes of our weak and increasingly impotent democracy.

Again and again we are seeing the English revert to type, not the brave, bold warriors of legend, but the craven, subservient appeasers personified by Neville Chamberlain and the little man, the health and safety politically correct busy bodies that infest our councils and local government, whose aim is to facilitate our colonization as smoothly as possible. Yet nothing is done? Newspapers, websites and forums are full of vague threats and talk of people rising up, yet nothing happens. We are like the willing victims of massacres like Babi Yar, whereby thousands of people allow themselves to be marched out of their towns and villages, to be stripped and shot by a comparatively small number of soldiers. They often knew what was coming, heard the shots as they lined up over trenches of bodies and yet did nothing accept wait for death. The executioners often thought it was because the victims knew that their fate was to die and accepted it.

Perhaps our fate, like England’s, is to die too...

I Saw, I Filmed, I Ran Riot - Violence as Celebrity

2011-04-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

About 5 or 6 six years ago when I lived in London's Soho overlooking a street plagued by crackheads and drug dealers I remember hearing more shouting than usual and looked out of my window to see two junkies fighting and rolling on the ground. This wasn't an unusual sight but being early evening there were lots of people about and what was unusual, at least to my eyes at that time, was that the majority of the crowd who had stopped to watch, had taken out their mobile phones and were filming the fight. Needless to say no one intervened but thousands more would have watched the sight of these wretches rolling in the dirt as the video clips were uploaded to the net in the days to come, for violence, like sex, is something many people like to watch.

Six years on it is as if nothing is real unless it has been filmed and uploaded to YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, and yet with the reality has come an unreality as the line between film as fantasy and entertainment has increasingly crossed with film as a record of truth and real events. So it was that March 26th's anti-cuts riot had the bizarre spectacle of being both riot and entertainment, as news crews and the general public along with anarchists jostled with each other not to throw things but to get the best angle in which to film the 'action'. Equally each rioter seemed to have one eye on the police and the other on the nearest news crew so that he or she could be captured in their best revolutionary pose.

This was unrest for a generation weened on X-Factor and Glee, not so much the children of Che Guevara but of Simon Cowell. Every moment is captured, analysed and discussed, every pose, flame and flicker, blood and bruise is a potential front page image or Youtube sensation and another step up the blooded ladder of protest stardom. Now, as youth cults have all but been consigned to the past, and sad old punks, teddyboys, goths and skinheads look like anachronisms from Grannies attic so finally has a generation that had all but been written off as apolitical, narcissistic and obsessed with posting inanities on Facebook found itself taking the world by surprise, and creating something, that if not exactly new, then reinvented for their generation; Moral, Righteous Violence and Organised Anarchist Chic. Protest as a virtue and anger as a state of mind.

Suddenly the old mainstream Left and Right had to take notice, as first Millbank Tower and then Prince Charles and Carmilla, found themselves caught up in a wave of anger and destruction than was both unpredicted and unpredictable. For many this was a new entertainment, a new adrenaline rush that mixed violence, camaraderie and infamy into a heady brew of celebrity with a cause. If Cheryl Cole was 19 now and wanted to to get on the front page of the nation's papers what better way than to dress in black neo-Red Army Faction, radical-urban-terrorist-off-the-peg-at-Chelsea Girl Class War chic and wow the press with a bit of posing and teasing while lobbing a brick through the window of the nearest Ann Summers or Barclays. Within days every teenage boy, and quite a few girls, would have their anarchy sex symbol poster up on the wall and their heads filled with thoughts of love on the barricades.

For the hundreds of young, black-clad, masked-up anarchy-angries racing from bank to bank, pausing only long enough to smash-up symbols of wealth like the Porsche showrooms in Mayfair on the way, their main pursers were not the police but film crews and photographers. For every black-blocer smashing a window there were between ten and twenty photographers, maybe six or seven film crews, a few 'legal observers' making sure that the niceties of rioting were upheld and possibly the odd policemen looking self-concious and irrelevant. This was anarchy chic and riot-lite, no one gets killed and the only buildings trashed belong to the behemoths of bad capitalism, the banks and tax-avoiders. Collateral damage was limited to the odd tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time and the occasional bystander who got kettled. For everyone else this was a chance to go wild, keep the moral high-ground and watch it all on TV and your smart phone later on.

Yet so far this has generally been a very civilized, middle class kind of rioting with the police seemingly preferring the role of benevolent prefects rather than fascistic stormtrooper, and with the media literally interviewing plummy-voiced rioters as they smashed in windows and hurled bricks at the police it has so far been a very jolly affair all round. Virtually all the arrests made on the 26th March consisted of UK Uncut unfortunates who had peacefully occupied Fortnam and Masons and then 'surrendered' only to be arrested en masse by a police force desperate to be seen doing something other than getting hit by paint bombs and arriving outside wrecked banks long after the wreckers had moved on. The other arrests amounted to less than fifty in total and are unlikely to deter anyone from turning up again apart from the police who might decide they would be more effective if they stayed away.

Yet this is now, riot and protest, as with films, sex and violence, lose their edge when you've seen the same theme repeated again and again, sooner or later you have to raise the ante and that is particularly true of protest as adrenaline rush. Shortly those clips of black-blocers smashing windows or black-clad anarchists pontificating and posting pretentious drivel as to why they've targeted this or that store will just sound like so much self-centred waffle. People will escalate the violence and the state will escalate its response and then hopefully the reality and fantasy of what we watch on screen will separate and people will realise that protest at this level is both real and dangerous and that actions have consequences.

I have no doubt that our new generation will make mistakes and for myself would wish that the philosophy and motivation behind the protests had a more libertarian, right wing direction, but while capitalism's bloated banks continue to hold out their cosseted and profligate hands for ever bigger helpings of the States money to bail them out and save them from their mistakes, that can never be. In fact when the leading trends magazine, The Trends Journal, and its outspoken publisher Gerald Celente, begin predicting the virtual collapse of Western society due to its mismanagement by our current rulers, then perhaps it is probably time to stop watching and start doing and we all take to the streets.

"When the money stops flowing to mainstreet, the blood starts flowing on the street"

Gerald Celente.

Muscles in Search of a Tussle

2011-03-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

Cameron and Obama having been caught like a rabbits in a cars headlights during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt now seem determined to show the world that not only are they on the side of protest but that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the rebels in Libya. That they are, verbally at least, ready to fight and shed blood to topple the dreaded Gaddafi. Cameron in particularly seems to have been pumping himself full of testosterone and watching old Jean-Claude Van Damme movies with the result that he seems to be issuing blood-curdling threats against Gaddafi's regime on a daily basis.

Issuing threats is fine of course if one can back them up, playing to the world's gallery and saying that you're going to bomb Lybia, or send in troops or unilaterally enforce a no fly zone, when the UK's armed forces are so depleted that they'd now be hard-pushed enforcing a no-fly zone over the Isle of Wight let alone Libya is just crass. In fact all Cameron has done is draw attention to the UK's military weakness, his own volatility and capacity for decision making by petulance.

Obama too, along with his coterie of diversity experts and human rights advisers, has been falling over himself to look at one with Libya's rebel fighters and cool and caring to the rest of the world. Image and how that plays out on YouTube and Twitter rather than realpolitik now seem to obsess the West's leaders with Obama now so cautious not to be seen putting a foot wrong that he made himself look shallow and vacuous during Egypt 's uprising and then overzealous trying to compensate for past errors when Libya's protests escalated into civil war.

This is sound bite politics with foreign policy now being dictated by how it plays out on Twitter, with solutions wanted in days and alliances that were built up over decades now

abandoned with a click of the delete button. In France, President Sarkozy, who like Obama had been all over the place during Tunisia's and Egypt's uprisings, has gone even further in his attempts to be 'in' with Libya's rebels First France recognized them as Libya's rightful leaders and then sending in France's jets to bomb Libya within seconds of securing UN support for a no fly zone. No doubt we will soon see Sarkozy and Carli wearing matching Keffiyeh scarfs. Tres Cool.

Yet who are the rebels that Obama and company are so keen to be associated with? Are they really the ernest young Facebook, pro democracy crusaders so beloved of the West's media or are they Islamist fanatics who will replace Gaddafi's dictatorship with one of their own? The West has no idea. Certainly not the CIA whose director was reduced to watching Al Jezeera and CNN to find out what was happening during Mubarack's final days or the UK's Foreign Secretary Willaim Hague, whose overseeing and involvement in the sending of a 'small diplomatic team' to Libya which was then captured by Libya's rebel forces along with an SAS squad sent to rescue them made Hague and the UK look ridiculous.

More riduculous still is the West's rush to recognize, endorse and interfere in Middle East affairs at a stage where existing order is still in a state of flux and new rulers and governments have yet to emerge. In both Tunisia and Egypt it is very unclear who or what grouping will end up in control though in both countries the radical forces of Islam are increasingly showing their hand with many symbols of Western and Christian culture being attacked, closed or abolished. Yet within days of Mubarack's forced exit Britain's monarchial leader David Cameron was in Egypt shaking every hand presented to him without the faintest idea of who they were and what they represented. What mattered was that he was there first, in the flesh and on TV with the Tahrir Square celebs.

Yemen and Syria are now subject to daily protests and violent state put downs and in Bahrain protest has been virtually crushed thanks to nearby Saudi Arabia loaning tanks and soldiers to Bahrain's ruling royal family. Yet in Libya, where nature was taking its course and Gaddafi's forces were on the verge of winning their internal civil war against the rebels, the West has seen fit to interfere militarily, enforcing a no fly zone and bombing Gaffafi's troops into oblivion.

The result has been a reversal in the rebels forces fortunes, with the rebels recapturing cities thanks to Nato air support meaning that the country could end up split in two or, possibly, depending on how much Nato wants to big it up, the use of ground forces to ensure Gaddafi's demise and defeat. Whatever happens what would have been a violent but quick ending is now in all probability going to be a long drawn out, inconclusive mess with the West faffing around trying to maintain the moral high-ground while the Libya people continue suffering.

Yet this new liberal-left moral jingoism is also totally selective, with no help for Bahrain's Shia rebels who were being mowed down by the King's forces or the slaughtered in Yemen being offered. It is also ill conceived with the West's might seemingly being committed on an emotional whim rather than national or strategic interests and with no planned exits or long term goal other than being seen to have been good in righting a selective, morally approved, wrong.

That the move into Libya's affairs was orchestrated by France's vainglorious Sarkozy and backed by a reluctant US President should have been warning enough that this was probably not the best move. That it wasn't was obvious after Obama's brazen attempts to distance the US within days of the first bombings. That, and the emerging news that many of the rebels are sympathetic to, or supporters of, Al Qaeda show that far from Cameron bigging up our foreign policy he's actually dumbing it down.

WikiLeaks: Secrets, Lies and Egos

2011-02-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

This week, the pale-faced and reputedly rather smelly, Julian Assange, founder and champion of the website WikiLeaks, lost his battle to prevent his extradition to Sweden to face charges of rape and sexual assault. Assange, who now describes himself as a 'non-profit free speech activist', has, since WikiLeaks upped the ante back in October and November 2010 by releasing the Iraq War Logs and US state department diplomatic cables, slowly morphed from a champion of free speech to an egotistical Sméagol like figure who now speaks from behind his lawyers, his face occasionally popping into view from behind someone's shoulder. Or emerging, stealthily from an area of shadow before creeping back into the darkness, leaving presumably, only the lingering aroma of unwashed flesh to remind the world of his presence.

Courted by left-leaning glitterati like Jemima Khan, an heiress and the former girl friend of actor Hugh Grant; the film director and member of George Galloway's grisly Respect Party, Ken Loach, who claimed last year that the closing of the UK Film Council, the source of most of the state funding for his virtually unwatchable films, was akin to closing the Health Service; and the utterly ghastly journalist John Pilger whose CIA conspiracy theory obsessed diatribes against the US have, since Pilger began defending Assange, begun to read like the outpourings of a bipolar Maoist and can only alienate Assange from the rest of us still further. For that is what WikiLeaks and Assange have become now, a collection of bitter egos in search of a cause surrounded by thousands of secrets stolen by other egos keen to get in on the act.

Assange is unelected, unappointed and answers to no one. The source of WikiLeaks information is clandestine and illegal, with malcontents and activists deciding what information to put out regardless, or ignorant, of the harm or mischief it causes. For the Pilgers of this world, whose anti Americanism, were it transmuted into a definitive US racial type or a religion, would put him on a par with Julius Streicher, the infamous, whip-carrying Jew baiter of Nuremberg. For Pilger, any one, or any project, that disses the United States is good, and anyone, or anything that supports it, is bad.

Assange, having elevated himself to the God like status of a Veritas, has surrounded himself with a collection of acolytes, who, like him, are driven not by a sense of righteousness but by a sense that they have a God-given right to decide what the rest of us mortals should and shouldn't see. Then from the safety of their Mount Olympus style ivory towers they can look down and watch the results of their leaked mischief as countries and individual's securities are undermined, embarrassed and undone.

Yet when countries react with rancour and anger at Assange's antics there is dismay and incredulity from WikiLeak supporters that a Government, and in particular, the US government, could have the temerity to attack such a pure, God-like figure. How dare they? How could such a corrupt country not see the truth? What do the lifes of soldiers, informers and undercover operatives in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere matter when compared to the egos of Assange and co, whose document dump, which is effectively what WikiLeaks is, is so much more important?

Of course being graced with God-like wisdom, Assange, no doubt ably assisted by the likes of Jemima Khan and Ken Loach who both I am sure also possess a knowledge of world affairs that surpasses that of lesser mortals, will be able to shift through the thousands of leaked files and emails and arbitrarily decide which ones in their lofty opinion are unfit or too dangerous for us common mortals to see. This, according to Assange, gives the world protection from the WikiLeaking of documents that really are dangerous. That is, of course, unless an uppity government dares to assail the mighty Assange and threaten to haul him before the courts to answer for his covetousness in which case WikiLeaks tends to resort to the very ungodly like practice of blackmail by threatening to publish those same 'sensitive' and potentially dangerous documents if the threats against Assange continue.

Now facing two charges of sexual assault and rape in Sweden, Julian Assange has become increasingly mortal, paranoid and egotistical. Firstly the Swedish women are of course lying. Surprisingly his left-leaning supporters who would normally rally round any woman claiming to have been raped by a powerful public figure have decided that in this instance the Swedish women are Yankee-loving sluts whose testimonies are worthless and should be dismissed. Secondly, Assange has begun the process of morphing from a Smeagol like figure with a God complex to an unwashed Gollum-like creature whose love for his documents and his right to decide the truth is all. To enforce and protect him in his new role Assange has supped with the devil and brought in two of the UK's leading Human Rights lawyers, solicitor Mark Stephens who tends to pop up every time a celebrity with a problem and a camera are in close proximity, and Geoffrey Robinson, husband of writer Kathy Lette, and one the highest paid barristers in the UK with an ego to match.

I should at this point mention that I was represented by Mark Stephens and his then law firm Stephens Innocent in my fight some years ago with the UK Governement and the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) over my short film Visions of Ecstasy which had been refused a UK certificate on the grounds that my film was potentially blasphemous. My barrister during what turned out to be a six year battle with the government was Geoffrey Robinson. What these lawyers actually represent more than anything though is the power of the UK chattering classes, the London based, soft, left-leaning, intellectual clique of media figures, writers, journalists, occasional politicians, lawyers, financiers and celebrities whose influence is all invasive and whose power far exceeds that of mainstream government.

These individuals shape and influence our society through television, through what we read and see, and through the laws that govern our intellectual thoughts and freedoms. When I was challenging the blasphemy laws, which at that time in the 1990's only pertained to Anglican christians, the main argument was that they should either be abolished entirely or extended to cover other religious faiths. My lawyers though wanted to see the law of blasphemy abolished and replaced with a law that would make it a criminal offense to discriminate against, incite hatred of, or defame a persons religion. This was something that I was totally opposed to as it would be replacing a pretty useless, ineffective and virtually unenforceable law with a highly effective and far more draconian new one. In 1996 I lost my case, yet the machinations of legal process had been set in motion, and ten years later a law dating back to the twelfth century was abolished and replaced with the ghastly Racial and Religious Hatred Act, 2006.

Assange has become the intelligensia's current champion not because they particularly like grubby rapist geeks but because Assange, for the present, represents knowledge and knowledge is power. He also represents secrets, American secrets, and these represent both power and the possibility by their being made public of hurting America or those close to America, another plus for the UK's chattering elites. All of those key figures that now surround Assange, from the lawyers to disgruntled heiresses in search of a cause, have their own agendas and sooner or later Assange will come to realise that their cause is not necessarily his cause and maybe then he'll grow up, take a bath and put his ego away. For whatever comes out of the WikiLeaks affair it will almost certainly mean more laws, more jobs for the lawyers and less true freedoms for the rest of us.

LET'S PARTY LIKE IT'S 1848

2011-02-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

In 1848, a revolution in France acted as a catalyst for a whole wave of uprisings and revolutions that erupted across Europe in its wake, with the year becoming known as the Springtime of the Peoples, the Spring of Nations and the Year of Revolutions depending on which country you happened to be in and how poetic the local historians were. Revolts against the old order spread from country to country via the 19th Century equivalent of Facebook and Twitter; word of mouth and newspapers. Revolutions and uprisings followed France's across Europe: in many of the states that would help form Italy and Germany, and in Schleswig, Denmark, the Hapsburg Empire, Hungary, Slovakia, Switzerland, Greater Poland, Wallachia, Ireland and amazingly Belgium.

Most of these uprising were bloody, violent and put down quickly but they led to changes, to the eventual creation of Italy and Germany, to a widening of the electoral franchise and the slow devolution of power to classes below the ruling elites and so on. 1848 was ultimately a watershed moment for Europe and one whose legacy would be felt for decades following. Fast forward past the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Fascist and Nazi ideological revolutions of the 1920s and 1930s, to 2011 and revolution is in the air again. Spreading from country to country like wildfire, the flames fanned by the new sirens of revolt: Twitter, Facebook and 24 hour news channels and suddenly everyone is a protestor with one eye on CNN and the other on his Twitter update.

The Tunisian uprising took just about everyone by surprise and drew attention to a regime that most westerners only know about from holidays, if at all, and yet in a few days the sight of people bravely battling brutal police thugs and amazingly winning, inspired many and led to the toppling of the country's dictator-like President Ben Ali after 23 years in power. Then came uprisings in Egypt and the unthinkable ousting of President Mubarak after 30 years in power and suddenly as a result almost the whole of the Middle East is galvanized into rebellion. Now rulers across the region are quaking in their palaces, while Israel watches nervously from the sidelines and western powers, in particularly the United States, are shown to be treacherous fair weather friends and hopelessly lost and out-of-touch when it comes to this new and radical Middle East. A Middle East where old tribal allegiances and religious beliefs are morphing with 21st Century social networking sites and instant media access in ways unthinkable only months ago.

Yet this wave of protest, national angst and Facebook fury is gathering pace and spreading, its tentacles reaching into Africa, Western Europe and the US and threatening yet more violence and ever greater unrest. For the financial crisis hasn't gone away its just moving into the second phase as the implications and impact of a decade incautious lending, greed and toxic debt come home to roost. The printing of obscene amounts of money may have calmed the financial crisis in the short term but its causing inflation, particularly of food, oil and other important commodities, bankers, bailed out by tax payers only two years ago, are paying themselves massive bonuses and bigging it up again, and with our societies cutting back and making increasing numbers redundant, people are beginning to get scared and angry.

Scared of losing their job, their home, their income and their security people in the West are losing faith in their traditional leaders ability to put things right. Years of affluence, easy credit and government benevolence has weakened our societies collective will and now cutbacks are threatening to erode our national resolve still further. Now the threat of cuts is met with incredibility and hostility, as if the financial crisis were some vagary in our distant past that had no meaning on the present and that our governments largesse was infinite. Yet criticism of those who oppose attempts to rain in government spending is now hampered by comparisons with the profligacy of our banks, bailed out as they were by the same taxpayers whose jobs and livelihoods are now under threat. How can one champion the free market when the heart of capitalism went cap-in-hand to the State at the first sign of trouble? You can't, and in the words of the UK Uncut protesters attempting to occupy High Street branches of Barclays on the 19th February, it's not the banks that our too big to fail, its society. The banks and our decision to save them in the manner we did have made arguing for radical change more difficult, but not impossible.

The truth is that Western societies are beginning to fail because our Governments failed us, they failed us through unchecked immigration, through multiculturalism and enforced societal changes driven by a radical adherence to political correctness that has empowered criminality and emasculated our police, subverted excellence, indoctrinated our teachers and undermined our national psyche. They have failed us by creating welfare dependency and a massively overburdened health service whose budgets are unaffordable and untenable, and most of all they are failing to lead and to govern, preferring instead the sound bite and opinion poll driven policies. This is the government of the weak for the meek which is fine when the meek are performing to type, but having been spoiled for the last twenty or so years and with their wealth and security under threat, the cries of revolt from the meek are getting louder by the day.

In the US the Democrats in Wisconsin have gone into hiding rather than participate in the voting through of cuts to public employees incomes and in doing so have brought in thousands of their fellow Americans for their protection and in doing so are whipping up a storm of protest and ludicrously evoking Egypt as they do so. That storm of protest is currently being directed at Republicans and members of the Tea Party and both groups are getting very angry... In the UK March 26th, the day of the TUC's anti cuts demonstration, is being seen as a massive chance for serious protest with leaflets and flyers depicting burning buildings and general anarchy under the new heading the 'Battle of Britain'. In fact across Europe discontent and disgust with mainstream governments is growing with groups and individuals on all sides of the political spectrum seeing events in the Middle East as the start of something big. How big, and whether they'll party like its 1848, remains to be seen

Europe's Big, Flawed and Very Full Society

2011-02-14T03:48:00.000-08:00

The UK's Prime Minister David Cameron, leader of the Coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal party, and erstwhile champion of the theme du jour, the Big Society, made waves recently by announcing, alongside his usual considered happy-clappy rhetoric, that in his opinion "state multiculturalism had failed". This was apparently because the races and cultures that have poured into the UK and the rest of Western Europe since the late nineteen sixties are not assimilating, or being assimilated into our culture. Rather, many are existing outside of it, or in some cases trying actively to destroy it and replace it with their own values, religion and culture. So rather than assimilating to our ways, we are being assimilated to theirs.

His speech was applauded by some for being, in our current politically correct times, brave and courageous and attacked by others including spokespeople for the non assimilated who, like Inayat Bunglawala of the ghastly named Muslims4UK, felt Cameron was "firing at the wrong target", while the Labour MP for Luton, Sadiq Khan, said that David Cameron was writing material for the English Defense League.

Yet for all the mock hand-wringing and cliché-ridden sound bites Cameron has said nothing particularly new or revolutionary and nor has he admitted that the main problem for Western Europe is not that multiculturalism has not worked but that it should not have happened. Multiculturalism was never put to Europe's voters, no political party or politician went to the polls announcing that they were embarking on a program of mass immigration that would transform our cities, our societies, our environments and bankrupt our social services and eventually threaten to destroy a way of life that had evolved over centuries. What we had was multiculturalism by the backdoor and immigration, driven by guilt at Europe's colonial past, through the front door. That immigration was combined with an almost imbecilic zealotry that believed that by transforming and undermining Europe's nation states and identities through mass immigration that the resulting racial and religious stew of multiculturalism would prevent Europe from ever again suffering the horrors of World War and genocide. Ironically this unasked for, and clandestine experiment in human manipulation, may, at best, be undermining the very societies that Europe's current generation of politicians were so keen to create, or at worst sowing the seeds of yet further and more terrible European conflicts .

While Cameron may have just dipped a toe into the murky waters of multiculturalism and found racial and religious discord beneath the surface, he has at least dipped it, most of his predecessors, like Narcissis, have just basked in the reflected vainglory of a multicultural wonderland that just does not exist outside of their politically correct imaginings. Once in the time of dynasties and empires, states would govern multi-ethnic groups and if those groups were loyal then harmony generally reigned, nationalism, revolution and 'people' power changed that and ensured that racial and religious type as much as national character created the new national boundaries and the nation states we know today. Now without war, and as yet little bloodshed, our politicians are seeking to remold and restyle the nation state from within using third world migrants as the foot soldiers in a new war which seeks to destroy the nation state as effectively as armies have done in the past. The zealots driving us towards a new multicultural european ideal these last three decades may have envisaged that they were creating a multiracial Camelot but if so they forgot to tell anyone first.

This is multiculturalism's true role, for with the massed ranked of families that have poured into Western Europe's cities over the last thirty years has come religious intolerance, social breakdown, the undermining of Europe's economies and welfare systems as the demands on each countries health, education and police services have become unntenable. Eschewing birth control and supported by a generous social security system that entitles all to money, home and support the moment each belligerent foot is placed on European soil, the thousands rapidly become tens of thousands as the womb is used as a Trojan horse to undermine Europe still further. For with each family have followed dependents, uncles, aunts, cousins and with them begin the babies, thousands and thousands of babies, growing up in Europe, feeding off Europe, living in Europe, undermining Europe, hating Europe and the nation states that feed it. Unassimilated, unlimited, unemployed, rootless and angry, the children of multiculturalism are Europe's nemesis.

For many of Europe's political elite multiculturalism is an endless love affair that has seen endless betrayals and cuckolds and is increasingly seen by outsiders as an abject failure of social engineering while, conversely the multiculturalites are getting increasingly militant and estranged from the societies in which they live. Multiculturalism has not just failed, it should never have been.

Now, even as the soft liberal elite begin to see the dangers of unchecked immigration and the financial crisis highlights how Europe's increasingly limited resources cannot sustain an unlimited population, criticism of multiculturalism is still coaxed in ludicrously coy language for fear of offending the offenders. Yet offend we must if we are to move on and tackle the issues that have been deliberately created by our increasingly useless and aloof political elites who hide behind a veneer of faux democracy by creating ever more draconian law to silence the few politicians and pundits brave enough to speak out.

Hate Speech is the new thought crime, and race the word that dare not speak its name in our new, politically correct democracies and anyone that dares criticise or even voice concern that the new european multicultural experiment might just be a mistake risks arrest, mockery or violence. Silence is golden and safer in the new europe. In Holland, the politician Geert Wilders has famously been fighting charges of hate speech for years and was even banned by the UK Labour governement from entering the country or from screening his anti Islamic film ‘Fitna’ in case it upset anyone. And in Austria the MP Suzanne Winter has been convicted of incitement for public statements she made against Islam, and another female MP, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is facing a charge for “hate speech” which included this comment; “Islamic doctrine discriminates against women and non-muslims. Islamic law, or shariah, cannot be reconciled with democratic principals and universal human rights”. Shocking! Criticism and freedom of thought is fine it seems as long as you say what the multiculturalists want to hear, otherwise criticism is ‘hate speech’ and the state will shut you up, and shut you down.

European peoples must learn to be hard again and to fight back against criticism, to attack those who would destroy our way of life, and inspire their people to love their countries and their nations rather than loath them, because for all their flaws they are all we have, and we should strive to make the best of them rather than championing the worst. Government is not about Big Society, or the Broken Society or even a Multicultural Society it is about the nation within which that society lives and which ultimately shapes that society and its peoples. Undermining the nation undermines the society that holds it together, big, small or indifferent, and right now Europe has undermined itself to the point of collapse, only its politicians appear to be asleep and haven't noticed. Perhaps the children of their multicultural experiment will be kind enough to wake them up one day.

SHOOTING THE MESSENGERS

2011-01-12T09:21:00.000-08:00

Few, if any, would condone the shooting and murder of six innocent people in Arizona on Saturday 9th January or the attempted murder of congresswomen Gabrielle Gifford by the deranged 22 year old Jared Loughner. Yet within hours of the shooting the American Left and its supporters and apologists in the media, both in the US and internationally, were exploiting the dead and injured for all they could by citing ‘hate speech’ and some of the slogans of the populist Tea Party movement as both cause and effect. The Right’s invective it seems may not have pulled the trigger but its words had, according to the Left, put the bullets in the chamber and thoughts of murder into the mind of an assassin.

Since that day, with absolutely no evidence to support their spurious claims, journalists, politicians, political opponents and mischief makers have leapt onto the incitement to hate bandwagon. Angry speech and violent metaphors are to blame for the actions of a 22 year old mentally deranged drug addict. Stick and stones may hurt, but now so do words and so much so that the hysteria is building up. Lawyers no doubt are looking to see if new legislation can be framed and the great mass of the politically correctly obsessed are framing a whole new lexicon of ‘tame and shame’ words and phrases to ensure that the verbal nasty is consigned to history, or least as spoken by the Right.

In the UK papers like The Guardian, The Independent and the Financial Times have hardly been able to contain themselves. The normally staid Financial Times, in fact, dived straight in on Monday with a news feature full of innuendo about how Sarah Palin, hate speech, and shooting rhetoric might all be responsible for the Loughners’ actions, but left it to a centre page feature; ‘Paranoia disfigures the Tea Party’ to really go on the attack.

Beginning with “When Gabrielle Giffords’ father was asked if his daughter had any enemies, he replied bluntly -‘Yeah The Whole Tea Party’ “. The article goes on to say that the Tea Party expresses its ideas in ‘wild language backed up with violent imagery’ and then attempts to besmirch the organisations Tea Party name as the act that sparked a revolution and as such its “foundation story is about the virtues of violent rebellion against an oppressive government” Ouch!

Then on Wedensday 12th Janaury the Financial Times was back for more, this time attacking Fox News and devoting an entire page to anti Palin, Fox, Tea Party and rightwinger vitriol, all somehow linked of course to the murder of six innocent people. Any joke or remark no matter how innocent or old was dragged up to re-enforce the articles reactionary nonsense. Fox News presenter Glenn Beck had once joked about ‘driving a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers in the democratic Party’ and worse according to the FT, Fox is creating a ‘climate where a fringe group of extremists and mentally ill people are going to be encouraged to do something’.

The UK’s Independent newspaper hardly waited for the split blood to congeal before linking Sarah Palin’s now infamous ‘cross-hairs targeted’ election map directly to the killings, saying in a refrained, reasoned way that Sarah Palin was using ‘war language’ and was “even stupid enough to depict the community with cross hair over it’. Apparently “many intelligent people (for which read leftwing Independent reading types) are suggesting that Palin demands this behaviour (the shootings) when she uses the utterly base, gun slinging Republican rhetoric she has become known and hated for”. The front page rant ended with the words “we must. of course, attempt to slow the march of far-right rhetoric’ and know doubt replace it with liberal-left hysteria instead.

It was left though to the American hating Guardian newspaper, a paper that only a few years ago pompously wrote to the voters of Clark County, Ohio asking them not to vote for George Bush, to explain where all this anti Tea Party and anti Sarah Palin invective was going. Gleefully it conjectured “Just imagine how a Palin presidential campaign would now unfold ... If, as those around her hope and pray, Giffords survives, she would need to do no more than appear on a platform or in a TV ad in the 2012 campaign to indict Palin”. This hysteria is nothing to do with stopping hate speech or caring for the victims of the Arizona shooting and everything to do with trying to stop the Tea Party bandwagon and land a massive blow on Sarah Palin and a couple of smaller ones on Fox News while they’re at it.

The unseemly rush to appoint blame where there was not only no evidence that the shooter had in any way been influenced by either Sarah Palin or the Tea Party movement, and who appears so far to be just your common or garden variety of deranged madmen, shows just how desperate the left are to keep the Tea Party and Sarah Palin out of power. They show themselves through their rantings to be not only desperate but shamelessly clutching at bloody straws and wringing every last drop of blood from the dead and wounded for use against their political opponents. Their relentless exploitation of these deaths may yet backfire for, as they say, people in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones, or spent cartridges for that matter...

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

2010-12-27T09:53:00.000-08:00

Ever since the failure of 2010’s general election to produce a clear winner and the unedifying sight of Gordon Brown desperately trying to cling on to power finally persuaded the Liberal Democrats to get into bed with the Conservatives and form a coalition, the country has been slowly and inexorably pushed towards collapse. Forces outside the government who see any cuts in state expenditure or the welfare state as an attack are rapidly forming allegiances with more militant groups to protest each and every cut. Those groups in turn are forming lose understandings with far more extreme antiestablishment individuals and collectives who see in this wave of protest an opportunity to create wider disorder, sow division, and to possibly bring down the government and with it the Establishment.

Ever since the first student protest and the taking of Millbank Tower caught not just the police, but just about everyone else by surprise, every protestor and militant grouping worthy of the name, from anarchists to the Socialist Workers Party, are seeing the coming year as a real chance to smash the Tories, kill a few police and really smash the rich. And I think that they might just do it, as for once the all the necessary ingredients for creating an explosive are coming together, and the students have unknowing lit the fuse.

It was Gordon Brown though who set everything in motion and who is conveniently now out of the public eye earning vast sums of undeserved money giving after dinner speeches and writing his memoirs while others have to deal with the results of his profligacy. Brown mired the UK in debt and created a false boom in house prices and borrowings by consistently keeping interest rates at historic lows. He compounded this when things started to go awry by using Quantitive Easing to try and buy the government out of debt in the short term by printing more and more virtual money to purchase its own government bonds.

The financial icing on the cake though was his ‘save the world‘ moment when Brown pumped billions of pounds into the banking sector in order to save key banks like RBS and Northern Rock from collapsing under the weight of their own financial indolence. In doing so he undermined any validity capitalism has in claiming that companies stand or fall by their own actions and those of the free market. He showed instead that greed. failure and incompetence, when on a scale of ‘too big to fail’, carried no responsibility and could actually be rewarded by unprecedented bailouts from the taxpayer.

The US and most of the West has in turn followed the same model and the world’s economies are now awash with QE and bailed-out bankers demanding enormous bonuses again. Yet such is the level of debt of banks, hedge funds and some countries who have mortgaged everything up to the hilt and then borrowed even more to pay the interest on the interest that someone has to take steps try and reduce it and start paying the debt off. At this point Gordon Brown vanished and the UK’s students lit the fuse that Brown had left conveniently out for them on a plate.

Cuts are never easy, particularly when for years the UK government has handed out money as if we had a limitless supply. Soon people take State spending for granted; their benefits, grants, health care, education, housing and so on is seen as a right yet where that money comes from is often overlooked. People understood that the country was in debt, people began to take on board some of the issues surrounding bonds, QE and so forth and yet as the cuts were outlined they also saw smug bailed-out bankers and the billions pumped into failed banks. Banks that should have been allowed to fail, with the shareholders and investors taking the hit instead of the tax payer. Instead the moral high ground has been lost. How can the government demand millions in cuts when they have just given millions to some of the very individuals and companies responsible for causing the financial crisis in the first place? The bailout of the banks is another ingredient added to the explosive.

The Coalition is yet another ingredient. A weak union between two weak parties that oscillate between indecision and niceties and along the way try and sneak in some ineffectual savings has no hope. Government spending in November 2010 was actually up on November 2009. It’s as if the government has lost control and despite desperately trying to do the right thing is secretly wringing its hands in despair. The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is, according to some newspaper reports, suffering depression or cracking up and Prime Minister Cameron has yet to show he has the mettle to be as tough or as strong as he will need to be to stand up the coming storm.

Alongside a weak government we have a dispirited police force that is disliked, maligned and restricted by politically correct dogma that has made its handling of anything from street crime to demonstrations the subject of discourse and remonstration. They are in effect damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Yet the police’s role in the coming year is crucial as they stand, often literally, between the force of the protestor and the Establishment. If they fall or fail then inevitably the Established falls with them.

The protests themselves, the cuts, a weak unstable coalition government, bitterness at the bankers bailouts and the potential of a UK sovereign debt crisis; non of these in isolation would be enough to destroy the status quo, but combined they just might.

Yet the Establishment as we know it has stood for over a thousand years and has weathered everything from the Spanish Armada and the second world war to the General Strike and flower power so why should this current situation be so different? Because the last ten to fifteen years has so changed both the make-up of the country, through immigration and social engineering, to the extent that nationhood nolonger binds the people together around a centre. Secondly the invasive and relentless attacking of the Establishment, by which I mean the State, Christianity and the values by which we live, have so undermined and devalued it as a core belief system that few would rush to defend it and many more would seek to destroy it.

And then the lit fuse reaches its target and bang! No more Establishment, or rather the slow unravelling of our society and Establishment would begin. Some riots, some nastiness, some looting, some whatever .. And then what? David Miliband and New Labour? A utopian non-capitalist ideal where we trade sandals for lentils and plant trees in the City and sacrifice bankers on May Day? Or will it be a slow disintegration into anarchy, where the police force slowly crumbles, where the veneer of decency and morality decays bit by bit until finally its gone and a brutaligenzia reigns?

But have those wishing for the demise of the Established order thought things through? Smashing a window is easy, finding and paying someone skilled enough to replace it is harder. And who will invest in a Britain racked with civil disorder and strife. Who will pay the bills and who will govern? Left or Right, if those wishing for the destruction of the old order win, then whatever follows will, in all likelihood, be far worse.

THE VAMPIRE’S LAST GASP

2010-12-19T04:36:00.000-08:00

When I head the news late on Wednesday evening, the 15th December, that film director and writer Jean Rollin had died due to complications brought on by pneumonia I felt a mixture of disbelief, something I often feel when I hear that someone I care for has died, and inevitability that the ill health that had plagued Jean throughout the nearly twenty years that I had known him had finally caught up with him. Ten minutes later it was all smiles again as I was informed that Jean hadn’t in fact died but that a museum curator with the same name had, and that Jean was alive and well. I decided to call Jean in the morning knowing that he would be amused by these untimely reports of his death. Sadly the initial reports proved to be true and Jean Rollin and his unique take on the vampire myth had gone forever.

I first met Jean around the time I formed Redemption Films, 1992/1993, when having seen a selection of fabulous photographs from his films in the book Vampire Cinema by David Pirie I was amazed to discover his films just weren’t available on video anywhere in the world. I remember as well the sense of disbelief with which those who had seen Rollin’s work greeted the news that I was planning on releasing Rollin’s films commercially.

They felt that it was wrong, that people wouldn’t understand Rollin’s films, that they might laugh at them or mock Rollin and his vision. What these people really meant was that they enjoyed Rollin’s obscurity and basked in a kind of elitist glory that only they and their selected associates had access to Rollin’s strange and unique world. Rollin on the other hand was delighted that his films were finally to be released commercially.

Up to that point I hadn’t met him and when he came to London, aged I guess about 53 or 54, he seemed older and frailer than I thought he would be, and certainly not what I expected. Not that I had an image in my mind of what Jean should be like, but the reality was quiet, not particularly friendly and to my mind a bit straight but nevertheless he was OK and he was Jean Rollin! From that point I met him in Paris, with my then girl friend Eileen Daly, at Cannes, in London and so on, and slowly got to know him.

I can’t say that ours was the easiest of relationships, it wasn’t and at times it was almost war. Jean always needed money and I never had any and from that premise we somehow forged a relationship that saw, painfully and often through litigation, Redemption slowly acquire the copyright and ownership of most of Jean’s films and in doing I got to know Jean as man and eventually as a good acquaintance which occasionally tipped into friendship.

I liked seeing Jean happy, and hated it when necessity on his part or our part, brought in lawyers and threats, and what made Jean happy was pretty women. I can’t remember why but sometime around 2004 or 2005 we had a Bulgarian girl helping out in the office whose main accomplishments seemed to be her beauty, her figure and the fact that she wore very little in the way of clothing. She also got on remarkably well with Jean on the phone. So as we had decided to film some interviews with Jean and were also in discussions to acquire another package of his films we decided to bring Jean over to London .

This was also one of those happy periods when Redemption had some money in the bank and we were able to put Jean up at the very stylish and posh Charlotte Street Hotel whose English breakfasts Jean loved. As he was in London for a few days I decided to entrust Jean’s well being to our delightful Bulgarian and, shoving a load of expenses money into her paw, sent her off to meet Jean in her best non-clothes, clothes. Her mission to accompany Jean and show him the sights of London and to generally look after him. Later I took him to dinner to meet up with the highly exotic Dr Patricia McCormack, who had previously interviewed Jean in Paris for us and our then publication Rule Satannia, and I can honestly say that in all the time I have known Jean I had never seen him look as happy as he did during that visit.

Yet aside from brief moments of happiness Jean to my mind was a tortured soul and a true artist, driven by the need to work, to be pursuing, and creating his artistic vision, regardless of what others thought of the results. For Rollin the sadness was that, like so many film makers and artists, he never had enough money and that, aside for a brief period in the seventies, he spent his time pursuing his dream rather than creating it.

Yet he never stopped working, writing vampire book after vampire book, writing his autobiography and in his last years making two more films, Night of the Clocks and Masque of Medusa, which features a rare appearance by his charming wife Simone. Night of the Clocks was intended to be his swansong, and when I first read his original script it was like reading his epitaph. Centred as it was on a an old chateau where a young women finds fragments of films and strange objects and slowly they build up into telling the story of the previous occupier, a film director. These objects and film fragments were his ghost, his memory, his life. The film as originally written was beautiful and its a shame to my mind that the budget restraints imposed on the actual film never allowed it to be the goodbye it could have been.

Yet still Jean worked on and following a successful heart operation he really seemed to have a new lease of life, making yet another film, The Masque of Medusa, which has real moments of Rollin magic within it.

The one film Jean and I talked about making though was George Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Bataille’s transgressive, shocking, savage and overtly sexual assault on Catholism. Discussing it Jean’s eyes would light up and at the time (about 2006/7) he had befriended and worked with the French feminist philosopher and pornographic star Ovidie, and I often wondered if he intended for her to be in his version of the Eye? But like so many of his later projects it wasn’t to be.

What was to be though was Jean’s amazing body of work, and his vision of the vampire, of women, of the twin, of death, of colour, flesh, love and ultimately of Jean Rollin himself. A director and artist who was perhaps his own worst enemy, and who, had he stepped back occasionally and taken some advice might have achieved the commercial success and recognition he so longed for. As it is he died loved by his fans but unknown to the wider world and if ever there was a man who deserves to become famous in death its Jean, for to leave his work languishing in obscurity, would be to leave it to the few to paw over all over again and he would hate that.

Here’s hoping that the angels are serving you a good breakfast in whatever dream you’re in now.

Jean Rollin 1938 - 2010

Rest in peace.

THE STUDENTS MAYBE PROTESTING, BUT IT’S THE LUVVIES WHO ARE REVOLTING!

2010-12-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago some 2000 plus students supported by a few anarchist ‘black bloc’ foot soldiers broke away from the main student march, where some 50,000 of their fellow students were protesting the coalition governments proposed student fees increase, and attacked Millbank Tower where the Conservative Party have their headquarters. The ensuing battle, destruction of the first three floors, and the seemingly powerlessness of the police to stop them was the main news story of the day, with images of young students smashing windows and partying like its 1968 being flashed around the world.

Suddenly there was an energy and focus to anti cuts protests, to frustration at the state of the economy, bank bailouts and so on, but best of all a new new government was in power that had had nothing to do with creating the problem but which included the Conservatives and a few posh, vaguely right wing, mildly Thatcherite types. Marvellous. So when footage of the destruction of the Millbank Tower started filtering back to the BBC, The Guardian, Facebook, Twitter, Sky and a myriad of other news sources the left suddenly sat up and took notice. Though none more so than the old-chardonnay-quaffing-Hampstead-socialist-handwringing-luvvie-activist types that usually regale anyone who’ll listen to them about their battles on behalf of the miners, CND, and of course fighting the great Thatcher evil!

It’s as if England’s legions of left-leaning luvvies, trade unionists, self-styled radicals, May-Day-Stop-the-City-Reclaim-the-Streets-Anti Poll Taxers and failed revolutionaries had heard a sirens cry and woken up from a hibernation that had set in some time in the early 1990’s. Suddenly the sight of a few thousand young students smashing windows and scrapping with the police whilst chanting “Tory Scum, Tory Scum, You’d Better Run”, (this winters equivalent of the miners ‘Here we Go, Here We Go”), had acted like a mass dose of viagra and woken up the Left’s long dead members.

Yet just as a man who as been pretty much sexually inactive for years can be embarrassing if he suddenly starts showing off his new drug-induced prowess by chasing young girls, so to is the zeal with which the nations aging radicals have jumped on the students bandwagon, desperate to be ‘in’ with the kids. On the 10th November, the day that Milbank Tower was trashed, Michael White, the Guardian’s political columnist, could barely contain his excitement, “Right on cue, exactly six months into David Cameron's premiership, the ancient British roar of "Tory scum" echoed across central London again” he squealed.

More predictable was the reaction of rich radicals like Tariq Ali who described the government cut backs as ‘atrocities’ and linked the student protests to those in Greece, France and so on. For the Ali’s of this world exploiting any situation that threatens to destabilise the goverment or destroy his adopted country is di rigueur of course, particularly as Pakistan, the country of his birth, is such a shining example of democracy, fairness and social cohesion.

Equally predictable was the reaction of the ‘radical’ folk singer Billy Bragg, who, when he isn’t singing to ex miners, donating his guitars to prisoners or running the Tooting Popular Front, is frantically Tweeting his support and excitement at each new student action and no doubt penning some catchy ‘Tory Scum’ ditties for his next greatest hits album.

Bragg’s enthusiasm was as nothing though compared to Britain’s Polly Toynbee who has, in keeping with the excitement engendered by the current wave of protest, reinvented herself as Che Guevara. For on the 4th December comrade Toynbee, no doubt inspired by the students successes, led a charge of UK Uncut protesters into Oxford Street’s branch of Top Shop. Pictured online afterwards looking suitably disheveled, angry and somewhat confused, the Guardian’s answer to Rosa Luxemburg was at least showing her fellow Guardianistas that when it came to protest Toynbee was in a league of her own...

The most alarming and damning support for the students though has come from John Pilger, one of the left’s ghastliest and most egotistical grandees. Pilger, who like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, has a ridiculously inflated opinion of his own importance, has decided that the coalition is undemocratic and that the students represent the will of the ‘people’. Maybe they do, though I doubt it, and typically of Pilger he has now elevated the lamentable coalition of the Lib Dems and Conservatives into a dictatorship.

He writes, tears swelling up in his eyes;

“Your action, and the action of your fellow students all over Britain, in standing up to a mendacious, undemocratic government is one of the most important and exciting developments in my recent lifetime. People often look back to the 1960s with nostalgia – but the point about the Sixties is that it took the establishment by surprise. And that's what you have done. Your admirable, clever, courageous actions have shocked and frightened a corrupt political class – coalition and Labour – because they know you have the support of the majority of the British people. It is you, the students on the streets – not the Camerons, Cleggs and Milibands – who are the authentic representatives of the people. Keep going. We need you. All power to you”.

Actually he needs you, and thousands like him need you, to live out their failed dreams, to fight the battles they never did, and just like the old man with with his memories of the women that might have been, they clutch at the students like a man clutches at his viagra for they both offer a chance to rekindle and reenact the failures of their youth.

Unfortunately for the Toynbees and Pilgers of this world there is nothing more embarrassing than the parent that wants to be ‘in‘ with kids. The father that wants to join in, the mother that wants to a ‘friend‘ to her daughter and her friends. The awful moment someone’s parent turns up at your club, or bar and sits down with you, because they want to be cool, to be young, to be ‘in’. But it can never be, the spectacle of sixty something Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, leading a charge of Tax Avoidance protesters into Oxford Street’s Top Shop store was the ultimate embarrassing parent moment and for the first time held the new wave of protest up to ridicule.

The anarchist blog, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, wrote “Having Polly Toynbee on your side is worse than shooting an albatross. She supported the SDP….New Labour….Tony Blair………..Gordon Brown……Lib dems…………AAAARGH She’s a JONAH – we’re finished!” Whilst umpteen other more radical sites are running caption competitions for the funniest speech bubbles to accompany the numerous pictures of the ‘revolutionary’ Toynbee in action.

What the students erstwhile supporters are doing is seeking to impose, exploit and interfere with the protests for their own ends and for their own gratification regardless of the consequences for the students. Many would as soon hand out petrol bombs and guns as they would advice if it served their purposes and helped bring about the revolution they have dreamed about for so long. The only likely result though of all this sexagenarian interference is not the collapse of the great coalition dictatorship, but rather that Toynbee, Pilger and co’s support will prove to be so ghastly that no self respecting protestor will want to be associated with them. In which case we can all shout “I’m a counter-revolutionary capitalist pig-dog get me out of here!” and go home.

THE LEFT’S OBAMANIA IS PAVING THE WAY FOR A NEW RIGHT!

2010-11-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

Almost two years ago the world, or rather the soft, left-leaning, socialist part of it, heralded the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States as akin to the second coming. Obama was the new Messiah, a man whose politically correct lineage and black skin made him irresistible to a large section of the democratic West. Here finally, was their

champion! A man whose polished prose and cool demeanor were so much more sophisticated than the incumbent President George Bush whose folksy delivery and often tearful connections with ordinary people drew derision and scorn from the media savvy Obama camp. Yet two years on hope has turned to mope and Obama’s joyous “Yes We Can” catch phrase is mocked as “No We Can’t”. Why?

Why indeed? Maybe it is because the Left are hardly ever right. They are either ridden with bitterness and invective as, fore instance, in their treatment of, and reaction to, the policies and personalities of Reagan, Thatcher and Bush; or, as in their embracement of the peace movement, Israel / Palestine, the Soviet Union, Nuclear Disarmament, Iran, environmentalism, multiculturalism, civil rights, racial and sexual politics and ultimately Barack Obama in whose diminutive figure all their causes were to be embodied, they become zealots and idolators. And like all idolators who invest all their hopes and fears in a single individual or cause, they are bound to be disappointed.

Obama is not God, nor is he a particular impressive politician, but he is black and for our new Establishment this was his greatest qualification and one behind which a myriad of causes could rally. Global Warming! Obama’ll Fix It! The Financial Crisis! Don’t worry Obama’ll Fix it! Terrorism! Iraq! Afghanistan! Education! Health Care! Whatever it is Obama’s The Man! The only trouble is, Obama isn’t The Man. In fact no one could ever be The Man that the Left expected Obama to be. Except God, and even God might have bulked at the Left’s ‘Fix It’ list.

Obama’s biggest mistake after putting on the mantle of the Messiah was to try and live up to the people’s expectations. Instead of focusing say on solving the financial crisis Obama stormed in with Healthcare Reform, global warming taxes and a whole raft of social engineering projects that guaranteed more government, more spending and no real job creation. The US is a country that espouses individualism and low taxes so these measures were stirring up a hornets nest that crystalized in the formation of The Tea Party.

Further Obama’s cronies may have mocked Bush’s emotional responses and failings but they showed that for all his faults George W Bush was human. Whilst Obama’s cold logical reactions and seeming indifference to his nation’s fallibilities only further exacerbate the sense of disappointment among his disciples. This has also given the wider public the impression that their new President has descended not from Heaven, as the Left seemed to think at his inauguration, but from the Planet Vulcan.

When Obama won in 2008 the Left lost all sense of propriety, with political commentators and pundits behaving more like star-struck groupies at a pop concert than hardened hacks. As this piece from the Guardian from the 5th November 2008 shows:

“There had been tears all evening ... “America, we have come so far” he said, as if the entire nation were gathered before him. “We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.”

He also had a message to the rest of the world, one that will be welcomed almost everywhere. “To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from Parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

In this speech, and with his victory, Barrack Obama has drawn a line under the last eight years, ending an American era that few will mourn. For today marked nothing less than the first day of the Obama presidency.”

Few mortal man, land even fewer politicians, warrant such clap-trap and of course receiving it is destined to disappoint and preordained to fail. Now that the world faces even greater uncertainty as the prospect of a second, darker wave of the financial crisis looms and political polarization follows as consensus gives way to self interest. Obama, far from unifying Americans around a ‘shared destiny’, has set them at each others throats. Not for decades has there been so much anger and mistrust of government and this anger is not going away, it is growing.

In Europe, where the Left rejoiced and celebrated almost as if Obama had been elected head of the European Union, hopes that some egalitarian wonderfulness would seep out of the US and envelope the world have been dashed as realpolitik and the economic realities caused by decades of government overspending sink in.

Europe and the US now face decades of high unemployment and falling living standards with the ever present threat of civil unrest, racial division, and political and financial collapse hanging over them like an acrid smog, irritating and at the same time, frightening.

Worse for nations used to their creature comforts and being top dog, the West’s role in the world’s pecking order is under threat as never before and in this as in everything else Obama has been found wanting. in his desire to be all things to all men Obama has weaken rather than strengthen the US abroad. Dithering or circumventing problems and by striving to please the antiwar brigade at home and those who see conflict and fighting terrorism as a series of wrongs rather than enforcing rights, Obama, like so many on the Left in Europe, has undermined and underwhelmed, when he should be been wowing and winning.

At the very time the West needs strong charismatic leaders, and decisive action it’s strongest country is failing. Its financial sector has already shown itself to be driven by greed and then weak when it should have been strong. Now at the behest of those same financial charlatans the President is seeking refuge in cheap exports, QE, and inflating away America’s debts with trillions of undervalued dollars. The irony is though that he may just be stoking the fires of revolution instead and paving the way for a President that is strong enough to restore the West’s place in the World Order and in doing so be hated by the Left and derided by Europe’s intelligentsia. In fact, that is how it should be, and by achieving such loathing, he or she, will show him or herself to be a true successor to Reagan, Thatcher and Bush, and worthy of the title, President.

SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL

2010-08-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

One can now add to that proverb, WRITE NO EVIL, if the ‘we’re all one society, appeasing, down-on-my-knees-begging-you-please, Islamic loving, inclusivity obsessed, multiculturally aware, touchy-feely, rightwing-hating, individual freedom go-to-hell, I care more than you care and the State knows best’ Guardian newspaper gets its way.

In this Saturday’s edition (21st August 2010) under the headline ‘Rightwing Blogs lead ‘War on Islam’ the Guardian gave vent to an hysterical rant against rightwing opinion and female blogger Pamela Geller in particular. Written by Chris McGreal, peace and blessing be upon him, it was a ludicrous attack on activist Geller that ultimately says more about the soft mainstream Islam-loving chattering classes and their fear of the new right than it did about Pamela Geller.

For the left the rise of grassroots activist movements like the Tea Party Radicals, the English Defense League, new political parties or the relentless rise of the right on the Net via the Blogosphere and related websites has usurped the left’s old street protesting stomping ground. Once the Left basked in the knowledge that ordinary people were by and large on their side, Trade Unions could muster thousands of followers, students were generally of the left, radical politics, activism and mass movements were of the left, and the right, where was the Right?

The right, in fact, was either perceived as Conservative, straight, male, Christian and white or shaven-headed, cranially-challenged, bigoted, straight, male and white. Worse, both were seen as being partnered by dull, plump, child-bearing dullards who were either Thatcher clones or broken bones and, who were, bar the odd exception, utterly asexual or sexless.

The left may have had followers of both sexes, but their dedication and pursuit of the monosexual being meant that each partner was often bearded, sandal wearing and obsessed with their diet, and as such were accompanied, in the main, by a bizarre array of multi-sexual, transsexual, cross-dressing, muesli-munching, hormonally-challenged, dungareed wearing, saddos whose idea of a good time was reminiscing about how much they’d collected for the striking miners in the eighties and planning their party of parties to celebrate the imminent death of Margaret Thatcher. Yet lurking on the edges of these leftwing clans were some of the world’s beautiful people, radical chick, could also be radical chic. From black-clad, capitalist-killing members of the Baader-Meinhof gang to free-lovin’ little rich girls, the left had them all.

But not any more. The Right got a growing army of discontented, sassy women and, at its head, Sarah Palin, a Republican hockey-mum and moose-hunting, heaving-bosomed, far right goddess who gave every red-neck American their biggest hard-on in years. Palin came along at a time when the US right was in free fall and the United States was still reeling from the aftermath of September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, foreclosures and the Credit Crunch and the election of the first black President of the United States. These events, momentous and challenging, happened at a time when the incumbent Republican President Bush was floundering and failing to take a lead. The American people wanted change and got it big time in the election of President Obama, a man whose radical, left leaning agenda, would soon galvanize the grassroots right in ways not seen in the US for years, if at all. It is this grassroots movement in the US, and from the US to the rest of the world, that is so alarming the left and its mouthpieces like the Guardian.

The left’s goon squads are now on the attack and when they attack they attack big time, first, as with Sarah Palin, they will attack their target in the media, they will ridicule and besmirch your family (as long as you’re white), your religion (as long as its Christian) and your character and if that doesn’t work the left runs to their legal friends to find ways of shutting you up, shutting you down, and banning you or all three.

For the UK left and the soft left establishment our Democracy is not enshrined in law or laid down in a Bill of Rights, it is fluid, changeable, and bendable. Not so much a constitution as a flexible solution to a problem should it arise, and as the new left creates laws, like for instance the law of religious hatred, so the left’s legions of litigators utilize them to silence and cajole its enemies. The UK’s array of new gagging orders are both vile and one of the single biggest attacks on free speech the UK has ever seen.

It's no coincidence that the abolition of an antiquated law like Blasphemy, which only applied to Anglican Christians and was hardly ever used, should, in fact, have heralded in a vastly more effective and draconian law that made it a crime to incite or promote religious hatred, a catch-all phrase that can mean anything and effectively protects Islam and other religions from criticism. Likewise protest movements like the English Defense League can be banned from marching if the local, often politically motivated, police think the EDL’s presence might upset the local residents.

Expect to see the ‘threat of disorder’ wheeled out again and again now when EDL and similar bodies attempt to march. Beyond that, the Commission for Racial Equality is heaping one legal challenge after another on the British National Party in its stated aim of bankrupting the party and destroying it for good, thus effectively denying a voice to a million voters. Would such a tactic, say used by the Conservatives against the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party, have been any more acceptable? The EDL and the BNP may well be unpleasant and be represented by some pretty ghastly individuals but their growth is indicative that something in society is wrong and shutting them down is not going to make the root causes that created them go away.

Now the left is moving on Bloggers, blogger and campaigner Pamela Geller is, according to the Guardian and Civil rights groups, guilty of "hate speech" for her repeated warnings of "Islamic domination" of the US. Further she has, according to the McCarthyist left leaning political monitoring group, The Southern Poverty Law Centre, mixed political exploitation with ‘hate-mongering‘. As a result Geller has, according to the Law Centre’s spokesman Marc Potok, ‘crossed the line from legitimate debate’, as it is in his words, wrong to ‘talk about conspiracies on the part of Muslims to dominate the United States’.

The whole article was implying that Pamela Geller and her ilk must be silenced, that their attacks on Islam and Muslims amounted to hate-speech and as such were committing a verbal ‘crime’ punishable by law. This is the left’s answer to everything now. If it offends ban it, gag it, silence it. The left has created a chaotic world of mass immigration, moved peoples from country to country without any thought as to the consequences, it has promoted lifestyles which are often at odds with people’s beliefs and done so regardless of the indigenous population. Now when grassroots movements against these decisions grow amongst the people the Left actively seeks to destroy those movements and deny the people a voice.

The Left and the mainstream Establishment will silence the people at its peril because every time a moderate is silenced, is mocked, or his ideas pilloried, then the more extreme will become his efforts to be heard and the more extreme his need to make the state and the establishment listen.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

2010-08-17T05:11:00.000-07:00

Watching the news, reading the papers and seeing our politicians in the UK, in Europe and in the US could make one feel that the excitement and impending sense of economic doom predicted by so many since the end of 2007, 2008, last year and this year, was over. That the world had moved almost effortlessly from sub-prime crisis, to credit crunch to ‘lets have lunch’ without anyone getting hurt, give or take the odd Greek bank worker and the occasional British Prime Minister voted out of office.

The stock markets have lurched, inched, spurted and crawled inexorably upwards in recent months and commentators and the media instead of using scary words like crash, depression, the Thirties, mass unemployment, social breakdown, collapse, credit crunch are now soothing us with words like; employment, new jobs, low interest rates, controlled cutbacks, bank lending, work force, skills, cohesion and of course everyone's current fave, coalition. Of course there are still a few yobs out there on the fringes swearing and shouting expletives like; double-dip, recession, deflation, inflation, pensions, baby-boomers, pensions, rising unemployment and, lest we forget, Quantitative Easing. But generally the world is calm. Or is it?

The world’s decision to use a Keynesian approach to solving its economic woes has temporarily calmed things, but the stimulus has been at a massive cost, particularly in the US where the home of capitalism has shown itself to be weak in the face of crisis, preferring the soft option, high taxes, Healthcare Reform, and delaying hard choices for the future. Yet that future could only be months away. Already the effects of the first stimulus are waning, consumer spending is slowing again almost before it started rising, house prices are still falling, new house building can barely get it together to erect a flag-pole let alone a new house and meanwhile evermore foreclosures beckon as debt carries all before it. Yet the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration’s only answer is another, bigger, stimulus package, more Quantitative Easing and ever more spending. It’s like having maxed-out all your credit cards, mortgaged and remortgaged the house and borrowed everything you can from the bank and your friends, yet you still believe if you can just borrow more it’ll be alright.

The effects of the first stimulus are fading because it didn’t create anything meaningful and props up businesses that should close. More money will just prop them up longer and create more meaningless jobs and when its removed or its effects wane then the failing businesses and McJobs will go to anyway. Better to get the pain over and build anew than risking a bigger collapse and hyper inflation in the months and years ahead. Stimuluses only work if there’s something to stimulate, if the patient is dying, then sometimes its kinder to let him die..

In the UK too, talk of cuts are beginning to be talked down and the threat of big cuts to social services moderated. The UK though will have to wait until October this year to find out exactly what is to be cut so it would be churlish to harp on and heap criticism on the Breakback Coalition before they have had a chance to show their true colours. I suspect though that given their current moniker that they will be multi-coloured as they try to be all things to all men. In which case they’ll please no one and disappoint all.

The US and potentially the rest of the West could be heading towards a double-dip recession or, in reality in the US, a full-blown, no-nonsense Depression, where nature will do what the governments of Bush, Obama and the Federal Reserve have failed to do and that is to burn away the rubbish so that a new economy and new businesses can rise from the ashes. The only genuine alternative is the half way measure of hacking away at the economic mess through cuts, but it remains to be seen if the UK coalition government has what it takes? If we have then we may avoid America’s fate, if not we to may see the dark clouds of Depression before too long.

SCUM NATION 2 - EXTERMINATE

2010-08-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

Reading the UK’s newspapers one gets inured to the daily horror stories of some elderly woman being pummeled to death by some feckless thug, or how some one, some son, daughter, father, mother, has been stabbed, kicked, beaten, to death and so on infinitum until one's brain turns off. However, every now and then some incident, or event trips a raw nerve and triggers a response. For me it was the story of a twenty five year old man who kicked and trampled on a goose before ripping its head off while still alive in front of a group of horrified children in a park. This vile piece of subhuman scum was sentenced to 25 weeks in prison and will no doubt be free to inveigle his cronies with tales of his daring bird killing in a matter of months.

The Guide Dog Association has also reported that at least three of its dogs are attacked by pit bull type gang dogs every month while out walking their owners on the lovely streets of England’s green and pleasant land. These attacks often result in the guide dog being left injured, traumatized and unable to function again as a guide dog while their blind owners already difficult life is made that much more awful.

Every day, like crimes against people, crimes and cruelty against this country's animals increase. The one difference from the awful crimes perpetuated on a daily basis against people is that animals cannot speak out or write to their MP, they cannot do anything other than trust in us to protect them and, in that, as with most things, we are failing.

The thug that unleashes his psyched up fighting dog on a hapless guide dog for a laugh will no doubt derive similar enjoyment from smashing an old lady's face in, or sticking a knife into someone for their ipod or wallet. Equally, the sub human bacteria that ripped the head off a goose is probably, as a recent article published in the New York Times by Charles Siebert stressed, well on his way to hurting people or children as many of the world’s vilest killers began their careers killing animals before turning to people.

But there is more here than just feeling sad and angry at the bestiality of some people, which is that we tolerate them. The 25 week sentence for our goose killer is nothing. The vermin that did it is unemployable, has never worked and probably never will. He has cost us money since he was born so, conversely, his financial sentence on the state and our taxes lasts a life time. His punishment costs us money and his release will cost us even more. No doubt his new found notoriety will increase his sex appeal among scum women and soon his State-funded home will echo to the pitter-patter of little scum feet dragging themselves across the floor. These little baby scum soon-to-be-sadists will no doubt start by torturing small animals and tormenting daddy's pit bull, which, if it doesn’t eat them, will put them in good stead for killing a few more of God’s creatures when they reach adulthood.

The fact is that he, and thousands like him, are human vermin, they contribute nothing to society yet cost a fortune and their families cost even more. They steal, rob and take on a huge scale. They breed, consume and contribute absolutely nothing off any worth creatively, societally or intellectually and now they hurt and abuse, and their scum offspring will do the same, only worse. We tolerate them because we are afraid of them and because we think we are civilized and can do nothing else, as any punishment beyond the conventional would be barbaric, that somehow they can be ‘saved’ and made ‘nice’, like us. That little scum gangstaman will sit down outside his crib and sip Pinot Grigio while his ho's hand out canapes. Or that our cool goose killer will turn over a new leaf having studied venetian antiquities at Her Majesty's Pleasure and start saving little scally scum boys and girls from turning to a life of crime. I think not.

What we have is an increasingly barbaric, vicious and, in many cases, barely human underclass, which we still treat as if we were Victorian missionaries on a crusade to save and civilise. Why? So that we can make them like us? Well, we know that’s not going to happen. Or is it to make us feel better? That we’re doing something for these poor people? Or is it that we cannot believe that our adventure and creation of a welfare state has failed and, instead of producing a happy working class, has produced a hybrid sub-human every bit as ghastly as if they been spawned as the direct result of mutating their DNA and cross-breeding them with rodents.

Scum, like goose-head man and the gangs of hooded bacteria than hang around our streets and parks stabbing people with the wrong postcode or menacing the blind, can’t be civilized because it isn’t worth the money or the man hours to try and do so. Far better to kill them or at the least sterilize them like we do strays, so at least they can be stopped breeding. They have NO purpose and we should stop pretending that they do.

The increase in the number of cases of cruelty and killing of animals should be a wake up call to all of us. We are not civilized and our society is not civilized, if it were incidents like this would not happen and therefore saying that society cannot kill is a non starter. Society can and should kill because we can’t. We live by the rules, the scum that kill animals and people don’t, and because of that the state has to be tough and do what we can’t and remove these people from our society permanently and not just for 25 weeks.

BANG MY HO TO MAKE THE ECONOMY GO!

2010-07-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

At the very moment that European governments are nervously, tentatively and almost coquettishly beginning to strip themselves of the socialist and welfare trappings that have so burdened them with debt, so Obama’s America is beginning to pick up Europe’s discarded robes and begin the process of making the United States the biggest socialist harlot on the block.

America’s new role as the world’s Welfare Whore of choice has come about at the very time that the majority of Europe’s states are courting Austerity, a leaner and healthier mistress, whose favours are hard earned but come with the promise of greater, lasting pleasure. Obama has in fact not only inherited and picked up Bush’s and Poulson’s cheque book, which had already seen billions in state aid thrown at America’s struggling banking sector, but has re-mortgaged the house, borrowed on the nation’s credit cards and taken up with some dodgy counterfeiters who have conceived a new way of turning paper into gold. Euphemistically called quantitative easing, or QE, America’s new Midas touch is enabling the Federal Reserve to buy up state bonds like there’s no tomorrow, which, if they carry on, there may well not be.

The Federal Reserve and the Obama administration, whether out of fear of a 1930s style Depression, self interest in getting reelected in 2012 or genuine conviction, have not only embraced Keynesian economics with the fanaticism of the convert but have reinvented statist interventionism and turned it into a war: we’re either stimulated or annihilated. With interest rates already at ground zero, the Fed is rumoured to be wheeling out its doomsday weapon, “monster’ quantitative easing with the Fed’s Chairman Ben Bernanke now poised, like some grotesque Baron Frankenstein figure, with his hand on the printing press levers ready to unleash Trillions more dollars, and buy more yet more bonds, in his bid to use ‘extreme monetary stimulus‘ in his war against deflation and to save much that should be allowed to fail.

Now that Europe has finally understood that its ‘spend, spend, spend’ mantra of the last fifty years has had its day and is finally, reluctantly and nervously beginning to rein in some of its excesses, Obama is on the phone telling everyone to put the music back on because the party’s not over. Simply put, if the Europeans are all desperate to get in Miss Austerity’s bed then there’ll be less than euro left for the US’s poor little state-rich Welfare Whore, no matter what sweet nothings and promises Obama and Benerke have been whispering in her ear.

Europe has woken up to the fact that its citizens may not be able to retire in middle age, or take months off when they have a cold, or expect cradle-to-grave welfare support. The party really is over and they know it. They know too that there’s a huge bill that they, the guests, who’ve been partying like there’s no tomorrow, will have to pay. So far, only a few of the party goers have actually put their hands in their pockets and chipped in, but the rest of the guests are at least working out what’s in their wallets, which is good for Europe. It’s good because, although people have known for years that our welfare wonderland was unsustainable, nobody has ever really bothered to do anything about it because we knew that it would hurt and be unpopular with the nation’s voters. Margaret Thatcher tried, but that was a long time ago and her policies caused riots and protest and no one wants that again. Far better to nothing and that, give or take the odd, easily reversed cutback, is exactly what the governments of Europe have done forever and a day.

Now, as a result of one of the most dire financial crises ever, governments not only have a scapegoat to blame but they can all get through hard times together. The people may moan, they are; they may riot, as they have in Greece and surely will in France; a few, like Hungary and Holland, may go all fascisti for a while but, cut back Europe can, and will. Even Germany, once one of the Welfare Whore’s best customers, has booted her out of bed and decided to get lean and, by all accounts, the Germans are loving it. Their country is doing well, they’re beginning to flex muscles again they didn’t know they had and they might even invade Poland. Yet, the land of free enterprise, CSI, cute cheerleaders, Hollywood and one of the world’s biggest Fiscal Deficits is getting all antsy in case this new craze for Austerity chic means that we start buying home grown produce for the first time in ages.

Well, maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but the surest way to guarantee that Europeans decide to start dissing the dollar is to start telling them to buy USA. No one likes being told what to do, least of all by a President who seems to walk down the yellow brick road with a welfare hoe on one arm and bags full of counterfeit cash on the other. Obama was elected as much by the Europeans as the Americans, or at least that’s how Europe’s left-leaning, snobby intelligentsia see it. Obama was their president of choice, black, smart, not called Bush and who spoke like a character from the West Wing. So he was in their eyes a cool president who would do what they wanted. Of course, almost two years down the line, Obama has not delivered, the US is still in Afghanistan and Iraq and, worst of all, he’s now becoming like them and creating a welfare state, which is just so uncool, last year and is, as the French say, c'est remo (it’s dead).

President Obama may want and perhaps need the rest of the world to spend, but it’s not going to happen, no matter how much money Bernerke prints and how much more financial stimuli banks are encouraged to make available. For the first time ever, there is a kind of reluctant, and albeit tepid, consensus between the peoples of Europe and the peoples of America and that is save, save, save. Credit cards are out, credit is out and most of all borrowing is out. People are ready for the first time in a generation to get down and frugal with each other and nothing Obama can do or say is going to make any difference; for, after all, a welfare whore in lipstick is still a welfare whore no matter how you dress her up. Equally, a president in pimps clothing is still a pimp no matter what he says.

MUZZLING, TAMING AND RESHAPING THE RIGHT

2010-06-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

It is interesting that, as the US’s grass roots Tea Party movement begins to exert real influence over the Republican Party and its choice of candidates for November’s Senate elections, so the mainstream right wing media is turning on them, both in the US and in the UK. The reason? The Tea Party and similar fringe or unofficial right wing movements often espouse ideas and thoughts that go against the grain and the soft media-friendly right doesn’t like it. Hence a succession of doom and gloom articles in everything from the Telegraph to the cover of the Economist all attacking the Tea Party, its supporters and its ideologies.

According to the Economist Leader's column, the American right should emulate David Cameron’s ghastly, touchy-feely, hug-a-hoodie, love your enemy approach if they want to reconnect with mainstream America and help the Republicans win the 2012 election, conveniently ignoring the fact that ‘Dave’ lost the UK’s election and was forced to cosy up to the Liberal Democrats in order to form a government. The Economist thinks that the Tea Party is too angry and too white, a terrible crime in the eyes of the multiculturally obsessed, and too far away from the centrist mainstream right ideology so favoured by the Economist. Good.

Good because the radical right is now hamstrung and gagged at every opportunity by a mainstream obsessed with keeping politics in the middle ground and if it’s beginning to get to the point where it can begin to ruffle a few harmonious middle ground feathers then so much to the good. Politics needs extremes and it needs anger otherwise it vegetates and eventually produces inertia in the electorate and leaders like Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Extremes get watered down, they get changed and altered but politics needs new ideas and they need anger to drive them and the people have every right to be angry.

Our leaders and governments have created and encouraged a spend now, pay later environment for years both at national levels and personal levels. They did this for a mixture of reasons, some altruistic, some nationalistic and some egotistic but the net result is the same, the West is in debt and struggling with welfare systems it cannot afford and populations, swollen by unchecked immigration, that it cannot support. Yet few political parties will give vent to the anger and the fear that people so clearly feel.

This is rage with a small ‘r’, the reasonable revolution. So far we have had a soft recession with a soft landing and mild discomfort. For most people it's business as usual, we might be told its tough ‘out there’ but in here the birds are still singing (unless an Eastern European migrant has eaten them) and the sun is still shining and those clouds on the horizon are still a long way away. But others are hurting and for them the Tea Party is giving them a voice but still the government and the media won’t listen because what people are saying goes against current norms.

It was interesting that, aside from attacking the Tea Party and its followers, The Economist's other key target was the “hysterical blogosphere”, whose writers ravings are apparently threatening the mainstream moderate Republican party and damaging its chances of winning the 2012 elections. Of course, what the Economist was really saying was 'stop the Tea Party movement now or we risk seeing a Sarah Palin / Mike Huckabee double act running for the White House', something that is an anathema to many.

Now every thing is pastel grey, a big bland in the centre with the right pushed to the loony sidelines, its followers dismissed as extremists who, according to the Economist are intolerant, gun-toting, immigrant-bashing and worse according to the Telegraph they harbour members who have “aligned themselves with an array of wild positions”. These “wild” positions often cover tax, immigration, crime and punishment and abortion, the great totems of the left and soft right and our new multicultural diverse society and as such are not only untouchable but now unmentionable.

Our Western multicultural democracies have contracted and reduced the political spectrum to a mid range of political ideas that drift slightly to the right and slightly to the left but effectively encourage Big government, maintain the key socialist totems of welfare and the multicultural society. That dissent will not be tolerated has become more and more evident as the new establishment, that unholy kabal between the mainstream political classes, the media and many in the public sector, exerts pressure to crush or rubbish any dissenters that dares to threaten the current status quo.

Regardless of what one thinks of the Tea Party, its agenda or those politicians like Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle, who are so aligned and associated with it, the Tea Party is a grass roots movement that has risen quickly to encompass hundreds of thousands of followers in less than two years. This movement, like other right wing dissent in Europe and the online blogosphere, is constantly dismissed as irrelevant and as the wailings of lunatics, yet it is growing in strength and anger and cannot be ignored any longer. The fact that British publications feel the need to weigh in and dangle the spectacle of David Cameron in front of Americans as something to aspire to only shows just how out of touch the mainstream right has become.

By the way, mine's white with no sugar.

Thank you.

Paying homage to the ‘Twat-in-a-hat’

2010-06-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

The death of the artist, writer and self-styled ‘dandy’, Sebastian Horsley, from a heroin overdose on the 17th June upset me much more than I would have expected it to have, had I ever considered it, which I hadn’t. Sebastian was a likeable, frail, witty, beautiful and tragic-comic figure who had started life as an artist and ended it as writer and self-styled Dandy. A kind of modern Beau Brummell, veiled in a veneer of Bryronic excess, fueled as much by his love of publicity as it was by debauchery.

I met Sebastian, not in Soho, with which he will be forever associated, but in Mayfair, in the late 1990s where he lived next door to a brothel in Shepherds Market and only yards away from Brummell’s former home in Chesterfield Street. I also lived in Mayfair then and had a house around the corner in Hays Mews where, as it happened, I was having an afternoon drinks party. A mutual friend brought Sebastian along because she thought that we’d like each other and we also both had a human skull collection which she reckoned made some sort of friendship a given.

Back then, Sebastian was still the Dandy he would become, but less so, as the artist and crack addict vied for his attention, only morphing into the fully formed Dandy a few years later. Sometimes he’d disappear for weeks, locked away in his flat while his dealers would deliver his longed-for poison by pushing envelopes of it through his letter box. At other times he’s emerge, clean, bright-eyed, witty and rearing to get on with his work. He’d even, on occasions, appear covered in paint, though with a dapper edge of course.

Some time in 2002/3 he came around to Redemption Films' Soho offices with a copy of a film by the artist Sarah Lucas, that had been made of his crucifixion in the Philippines, which he wanted me to watch with a view to releasing it. I remember sitting down in the Groucho Club watching the process of Sebastian being prepared and finally nailed and crucified and feeling incredibly disturbed by it. I can’t say why, perhaps it was my own track record with religion and blasphemy, or the fact that I was in therapy and feeling pretty emotional, but whatever the reason I found it very difficult to watch and very unsettling. In the end Sebastian decided to have a more art gallery-friendly style release rather than the more unrestrained 'shock’ release that Redemption would have brought to it.

By 2003, I had moved out of Mayfair and back to Soho and Sebastian, in turn, had also left Mayfair and bought a small flat in Meard Street (a paved street that runs between Wardour Street and Dean Street and which used to be home to Gossips Club, the Bat Cave and a brothel, but which now has the Soho House Hotel and a theme pub). He was still pursuing his art and came to see me about working in porn as a performer, with a view to theming his next collection on pornography. “I am very well endowed” he smirked. I linked him up with Jane Hamilton (the ex-pornstar Veronica Hart with a new name) and then producer of Michael Ninn’s award-winning films Latex and Shock, who seemed highly amused and interested in this english artist who wanted to fuck for his art.

Sadly though, it never happened, or maybe gladly it didn’t, for around this time Sebastian started to write for the Erotic Review and the middle class creatures that liked to peep through their net curtains at all the naughty goings-on but never did anything themselves. He used to moan about it, but obviously enjoyed his new found infamy that the PR savvy Rowan Pelling, the Erotic Reviews breathy editor, brought to his work. A column in the Observer followed though Sebastian’s graphic sexual anecdotes and non-politically correct views ruffled too many liberal feathers and his column was soon cancelled. But all the while the writer and the Dandy’s star was rising, yet, there was another darker star lurking, always threatening to eclipse the others.

Living, again literally around the corner from Sebastian, I would often see him from my window wrapped in a long black coat, pale and haggard, hurrying to the street crack dealers that hang around lower Berwick Street and Brewer Street night after night. These are the pits of the drug world, vicious and amoral and selling butchered crack and smack to desperate street life. Yet, day after day, I’d see Sebastian going to these creatures. Sometimes I’d bump into him, and he’d be nervous, anxious, his eyes on storks looking startled and frightened, keen to get home. This was the flipside of Sebastian, the sad, bad side, the Mr Hyde to his Dandy Jekyll.

Other times he’d be clean, off drugs, off drink and working, working for months on end. We would meet for occasional drinks and he’d be enthusing and/ or derogatory about his book at the same time and, yet, he was changing. The artist and painter was fading and a new creature, a living creation was emerging, one that was the same, only louder and with bigger hats. When Sebastian’s book was published there was a massive opening launch party and I was surprised at how his fame had spread, and the hordes of glitterati in attendance. Sebastian and Rachel No 3 (all his core girlfriends were bizarrely called Rachel and numbered accordingly) arrived in matching red outfits. They were adored and adorable. Stardom, it seemed, beckoned.

And stardom for Sebastian did seem imminent and justifiably so. His book Dandy in the Underworld had been made into a play and Stephen Fry had bought the film rights. I think, in fact, up until the 17th June, Sebastian had the world at his slippered feet. He could have been another Evelyn Waugh or whatever he wanted to be, instead he’s dead. Killed by a stupid drug and soon people will transform and mellow the real you into their you, a witty Soho bon-viveur of course, but a starry, larger-than-life character and that frightened figure in black will be forgotten as they pay homage to the ‘twat-in-the-hat-who-lived-in-a-flat’. The trouble was, like Jekyll and Hyde, one couldn’t exist without the other.

One day we’ll get around to having that drink.

Rest in Peace.

AS YOU SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP

2010-05-10T04:35:00.000-07:00

Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, says the bible, in which case, the people of the UK may well be about to reap the whirlwind for having created a political, economic and social climate that now has all the ingredients for disaster on a biblical scale.

We have three ‘leaders’ and three political parties that have totally failed to either address or acknowledge the true and dire state of this countries finances or the fragile social environment against which our national debt has been borrowed and whose foundations it props up. Equally, we have a population that has become so inured by credit, cocooned by public services and enfeebled by political correctness and human rights legislation that in a ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ kind of way they have become Generation Eloi. A placid and docile race content to shop, watch TV, and trade banalities on Twitter and Facebook while their comfort zone is fueled by ever rising property values, easy money and a sense that life just gets better and better. It doesn’t, sometimes it gets nasty.

This is one of those times and usually this country throws up a few strong leaders to rally the people, to speak the unspeakable and rouse us from our nice comfort zones. Instead we have thrown up a collection of political pigmies, men of such shallowness that their superficial values and trite displays of political ‘passion’ only highlight their complete lack of any beliefs worthy of the name. These worthless little men, the product, born not of deep political conviction and struggle, but of focus groups and public relation experts are our creations and our nemesis. They are what we deserve.

Clegg, Cameron and Brown and the political parties that they represent are finished. They are bereft of new ideas and incapable of leadership. Instead they, like smart and slick salesmen, smile and recite their latest formulated political ideas. Prepacked and preordained. Uniform, and for the most part interchangeable, this is one idea fits all politics. If it works for the Conservatives, then it’ll work for the Liberal Democrats and New Labour. They are like the Ford Ka, the only difference being the colour. Blue for the Conservatives, Red for Labour and Orange for the Lib Dems, with a big yellow streak down the middle. Perhaps, now that all the parties are up for a bit of Lib Dem action and are selling out any remaining credibility for the chance to bed Clegg, they should all have a yellow streak down their backs.

Our country is broke and teetering on the brink of a financial and social catastrophe yet during the three weeks of electioneering our would-be prime ministers barely mentioned it instead they fell over themselves to boast about what they would not cut. Brown, no doubt with a tear in his eye, announced that he was ‘shocked and angry’ that Cameron and Clegg were in a ‘coalition of cuts against children’ and that cuts in child tax credits were an anathema to him. As were cuts to the Health Service, Education, the Police, or it seems anything else that might hurt the vulnerable. In our new Eloi paradise it seems money is no object. If we’re short we can just borrow it from those nice people in the City or, better still, we can print it.

Watching and listening to these three wise men was like watching a troupe of fanatics that have been fired up by a preacher and told to spread the word. Suddenly Brown and Co. had seen the light, “No Cuts”, “Protect the Vulnerable” they cried. “What’s My Line?” had morphed into “What’s My Slogan?” and it was going to be cutback light, no pain, maybe an ache, no cuts now but a scratch or two next year or the year after that. Like the parent whose child had a nightmare, they were not only going to leave the hall light on but would sit next to the bed and watch over us. See, there’s nothing to worry about... The trouble is, there’s actually lots to worry about, not the least of which is the three buffoons that would lead us and the three parties they represent, for the longer they delay making cuts the sooner that their ability to act may be taken out of their hands. Very soon the financial markets and world events may, like in Greece, begin to exert pressure on our economy that will affect interest rates, the exchange rates and the Government's ability to borrow and maintain its current financial commitments.

Yet the mantra of ‘no cuts’ rules and the people like it. ‘Protect (the vulnerable) and Survive’ is the way to win this war. The only trouble is that you don’t win wars by being nice or by protecting the vulnerable, in fact, often the vulnerable are the first to go, after all they contribute nothing and often take more than their fair share. The Health Service is full of useless managers and inept staff that should be sacked to make way for people who can actually do the job. Unfortunately, politicians and sentimental journalists have so milked the whole ‘angels in uniform’ nonsense that the Health Service has become a sacred cow that consumes money faster that its asylum seeker, economic migrant patients can spend it. Likewise our bloated public sector is ludicrously over staffed with no-hoper under achievers who are being paid vast salaries for doing nothing more than being alive, while others are so obviously cranially challenged that the kindest thing to do would be to kill them.

The vulnerable, along with hundreds of thousands of individuals whose contribution to the UK is on a par with their IQ’s, is actually what a large percentage of our national debt is paying for and would be easy to cut if we had a government prepared to forgo the ‘nice’ in order to deal with the ‘nasty’ for once. However given that our three main political parties are now about to engage in some sort of ghastly love-in and the only political parties waiting in the wings are UKIP, whose leader flew his plane into a field on election day, the BNP, which collapsed into farcical disarray during the last few days of the campaign by getting sued by Unilever and having its website pulled and the Greens, who at least managed to get someone elected, it’s unlikely that anything will be done and that the vulnerable, the public sector and sacred cows are all safe for now.

The truth is that we are reaping what we have sown and that right now there is no alternative to the Clegg, Cameron and Brown Kabal in whatever form it finally takes and that is the truly scary aspect of this non-election. For, in order to protect the vulnerable and the public sector, these men will most likely damn us all. Amen.

THE BLAND LEADING THE BLAND

2010-04-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

It says something about the state of the UK when over ten million of its adult population choose to spend an hour of their time watching three virtually identikit politicians regurgitate three almost interchangeable responses to a series of preset questions and go wild with excitement. The media claimed the next day that the American-style format ‘leaders debate’ had ‘electrified’ voters and galvanised a previously lacklustre campaign and made the previously unelectable Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg the viewers’ favourite, a bit like the X-Factor, though with Peter Mandelson taking Simon Cowell’s role, Brown playing Subo and Clegg and David Cameron doubling up as Jedward. So far there’s all to play for, though, whoever wins, the loser will be the UK and its people.

Since the ousting of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative party in 1990, British politics began the process of morphing from nasty to nice and from nice to bland and from bland to banal. Firstly, the inability of the Labour Party to mount a credible campaign against the Conservatives kept them out of office for over eighteen years, necessitating the creation of New Labour and the election of a media-savvy leader in the form of Tony Blair. Secondly, Blair transformed Labour’s fortunes to such an extent that the Conservatives in turn became unelectable and ensured that New Labour has had thirteen years in office, a feat almost unimaginable a decade ago.

Blair’s triumph was that he was able to tap into the psyche of New Britain in a way that no one else, except perhaps Simon Cowell, could and, in doing so, stymied the opposition to such an extent that it was effectively dead. So dead, in fact, that the Conservatives have, rather than reinvent themselves as a credible alternative to New Labour, sought to become New Labour, Right. The Liberal Democrats in turn, have slowly moved from a party of ban the bomb, lentil-eating greenies to a slightly fadish and more socialist version of their previous selves and become, in effect, New Labour, Left. Blair, ironically, had admired Thatcher and her strength in sticking to her beliefs, something Blair, to his credit, did over Iraq but, to their shame, our opposition have no sense of. To them, belief is what they think voters want or what their focus groups tell them we want or, worse, is a watered down, or beefed-up version of an existing Blair or New Labour policy. If it worked for Blair then it will work for us. Radical ideas, like radical politics, are out. British politics is now lite and trite.

Now Blair’s Dauphin, Gordon Brown, the anointed one and his chosen successor is seeking to carve out his own niche and to wear the crown of elected office, something that has so far eluded him in his sham role as unelected Prime Minister and saviour of the world. Likewise, Clegg and Cameron are seeking the voters’ approval so that they too might savour elected office and yet they offer nothing. No new ideas, no new initiatives, no nothing. We have weak men, appealing to a weak electorate with neither able or willing to accept or utter the truth that our country is teetering on the abyss; financially, socially and morally.

Now, our would-be leaders feed and nurture belief that the worst is behind us that by some clever trickery and word manipulation, printing money became quantitative easing for instance, that they have all but conquered the recession. That we can avoid any hurt by cost cutting ‘savings’, by making our public services more efficient. This is against a national debt that is increasing by half a billion a day, which currently stands at £776bn and which, according to the governments own figures, is due to reach £1,406bn by 2014/15. Further, if government spending continues at current levels then as a percentage of GDP it will rise from 70pc now to 500pc of GDP by 2040 with the interest alone equaling 27pc of GDP. These figures are from the Bank of International Settlements the body for the world’s central banks and are contained within a report called The Future of Public Debt: prospects and implications. What they mean is that the UK is bankrupt and borrowing like a man possessed, with the report showing that, aside from Japan, which has higher savings, UK public spending is the highest in the world, totally out of control and heading for disaster.

Yet, our three main political parties are now virtually interchangeable, sub-Blair clones, scared of offending, scared of losing and scared of being different. Not for these men the hard choices and true cost cutting that hurts, that will bring protest and pain yet ultimately might go some way to averting disaster. No, what we have instead is inaction and inertia, the politics of fudging and prevarication, of sound bites and friendly chats on TV sofas, all driven by the politics of needing to be liked. Gone is the genuine passion of the convicted politician whose ideal’s drive him and in has come the need me, like me, fay politicians of today, the X-Factoresque Tweedle Dee’s and Tweedle Dum’s who will dance to almost any tune provided enough of us can hum it. Men and women whose message is vote for me because I’m nice and leave the nasty stuff to someone else.

Leaving the nasty to someone else is fine of course, provided that whatever bogey man is lurking in the wings stays away. We all like the nice and calm but, by and large, we don’t elect politicians to be nice and, more to the point, it’s usually the nasties that we ultimately remember and respect. Churchill’s demands to rearm and resist Nazi Germany weren’t exactly popular at the time as most of the electorate dismissed his dire warnings as warmongering. Thatcher was almost universally loathed when she tackled the Trade Unions and government overspending. In the US, Reagan was shot and mocked for his stand against communist Russian but all three politicians had stood up for what they believed to be right and more importantly had done what they knew had to be done at a time what doing so made them reviled by many.

Are Brown, Clegg or Cameron prepared to be reviled for tackling this countries spiraling debt? No, though they may well be reviled later for being nice and delaying the pain. But right now, they want to be liked so much that they’re not even admitting the extent of the problem. They’re lying, in fact; lying because they’re still spending and promising to do what we can’t afford; lying by printing money; lying by hoping that inflation will magically reduce the debt and, most of all, they’re lying because they all refuse to address our debt honestly and by doing so they cheapen and discredit our democracy, devaluing it to the point that one day soon someone might just kill it off and put it out of its misery ...

THE SILENCE OF THE SWANS

2010-04-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

Nothing symbolises England more than the swan, the beautiful, graceful white bird that has been protected in law for over 400 years; a law that has, barring the odd violation, been upheld and respected by UK citizens without question. Equally, nothing symbolises England’s decline and its current pitiful state more than the news that stateless migrants, who have been illegally camping in fields and woods alongside the river Nene in Cambridgeshire, have taken to killing and slaughtering the birds to eat around their camp fires.

In the nearby Cambridgeshire town of Peterborough, people have also had to deal with migrants setting up camps in their gardens, sleeping in their sheds and defecating on their lawns. These charming garden visitors have, in some cases, been in residence for over five months and counting, with the house owners being told by members of our useless politically-driven police force that migrants are a civil matter and consequently not something that they can deal with. The police did however warn house owners against hurting the garden squatters or forcing them off their land as this would infringe the migrants ‘human rights’, in which case the police would intervene against the house holders. The swans too, it seems, are also to be sacrificed on the alter of human rights and political correctness, as left-leaning officials are dismissing reports of swan-eating as ‘incitements’ to racism.

England 2010. A country in transition, its people cowed, its symbols mocked, its countryside bulldozed and its rulers too weak to do anything but connive in its ongoing demise. Forget too any nonsense that the English can only be pushed so far and that, like the symbolic lions that guard Nelson’s statue at Trafalgar and which decorate so many of our nation's other emblems, we will eventually rise up and roar. Now, all we are likely to see and hear is the bleating of a nurtured and beaten creature that is not so much ready to lay down its life for its country but rather one whose life has already been taken by its country.

For nearly twenty years the parties that govern the UK have allowed a poisonous cocktail of politically driven, Marxist-inspired doctrine and human rights dogma to allow immigration on a scale that will either destabilize or radically alter communities, cities and eventually the UK as a whole. Yet, still the powers that be shirk the issues its polices create, dismissing criticisms of their utopian plans as ‘racist’, or ignorant or, as is often the case now, enacting and evoking new ‘gagging’ laws that criminalize and deter criticism altogether.

The truth is that the UK is being subjugated and colonized, not so much by outsiders intend on conquest, but by insiders intent on change. This is not immigration as invasion or attack as some would see it, but rather immigration as manipulation and exploitation. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, immigration was primarily driven by our need for labour, in the seventies and eighties it was driven by our old colonies and by refugees fleeing crises in places like Uganda and Bangladesh. In the nineties, the relaxation of border controls and war in the Balkans began to change the dynamics of immigration, though it wasn't until the early noughties that UK politicians actively began to change the actuality of immigration itself to suit their own agenda and to see and exploit the movement of peoples for their own political ends.

For the last decade, immigration has accelerated with peoples moving to the UK, not for colonial reasons or fleeing conflict, but other reasons often at the behest or with the tacit connivance of UK ministers. The main reason, though, being that they could. They could, and our politicians acquiesced in the process, lowering regulations and raising expectations in terms of housing, schooling, health, and work and thereby making the UK the choicest option to move to.

Our politicians played the race card inversely because with the new century came a new vision, as was admitted recently by the former government adviser Jack Nather, 'that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural'. And that from 2001 onwards the Labour Party 'set about a deliberate policy of encouraging mass third world immigration, to socially engineer a multicultural society. With the alleged principle political aim of undermining the base of their opponents, the Conservative Party and to get rid of traditional conservative British culture'. To effectively swamp the country in diversity, whether we like it or not.

At the route of this are our leaders who see immigration as a means to an end, the end being the creation of a multicultural socialist utopia that, once in place, will be unassailable and unquestionable. Their reasoning a mixture of benevolence and malevolence as they seek to change society, as they see it, for the better, whilst rendering all opposition to their vision either powerless, usurped, or destroyed and, in that, they have been incredibly effective, though at a price.

Immigrants and, in particular, immigration that is visible and which brings with it new religions, new ideas and new votes, will naturally gravitate to the political party most likely to benefit it and its people and so in this Labour has done well. Furthermore, if the numbers of immigrants reaches a high enough level then at some stage their influence will be such that no political party will be able to ignore their wishes if they want their vote.

Yet our politicians are playing with fire as, on the one hand they exploit immigrants for their own ends using them as a kind of human chattel in their quest for votes and to cement their multi-cultural nirvana while, on the other hand, many immigrants exploit them and actively work against the planned diversity dream. Many would seek to create a society that is not only at odds with our politicians' utopian plans but which would in fact destroy it. Yet talk of Caliphates, of extremism, and intolerance is dismissed as the words of a few extremists, which will be overcome by further embracing Islamic or foreign culture and diversity. Dissing difference is not on the agenda. Likewise, rises in gang culture, inter-ethnic violence, honour killings and other less desirable aspects of immigration are masked by being absorbed into our wider crime statistics, leaving any direct criticism free to be dismissed as racist or discriminatory.

Race and Racist. The new taboo words. The words that have launched a thousand laws and as many lawsuits. Yet, how can one discuss immigration without mentioning race? You can't. Yet this is what our Machiavellian leaders would have us do and to make sure they have created a whole plethora of new 'race' laws to help enforce their racial state. No matter that the cracks in their scheme are beginning to show, that our services from housing to health are overloaded and that there is a simmering anger among many communities. For the government, to speak ill of multi-culturalism is racial blasphemy, and as such the language of the heretic.

If people cannot speak or voice their fears without fear of prosecution then what are they to do? It's all very well for the government to parade their multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, culturally diverse, non-discriminatory utopia but, if it's so good, why does it need so many laws to protect it?

The government have begun the process of transforming this nation, of reshaping its religious and racial balance without consultation, without debate and with all redress denied. They have, in effect, set up a sort of racial dictatorship where all dissent is crushed. Yet, the government should remember that most dictatorships, revolutions or social movements are driven by the motivation of the people, good or bad, not clandestine government initiatives enforced by Civil Servants. As such they really are playing with fire, in which case our swans won't be the only creatures sacrificed in the name of racial diversity.

OOGLE ME

2010-03-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

The last few months have seen a growing clamour regarding the sexualizing of children by parents, by the media, by retailers, by the music industry and by children themselves. This 'clamour' has been evoked by journalists, by books like Natasha Walter’s Living Doll, Pamela Paul’s Pornified and most recently by the Home Office's commissioned review into the ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ by Dr Linda Papadopoulos, the very media savvy Canadian psychologist who has appeared on TV programmes such as ‘My Big Breasts and Me’, ‘Celebrity Fit Club’ and ‘Big Brother’.

However, it wasn't until David 'call me Dave' Cameron jumped onto this august bandwagon and announced that he was, hand on heart, gravitas on face, 'very concerned that strap-ons and dungeonized Wendy-Houses were now being offered to five year olds' that things got really serious. Cameron’s carefully thought out response was that the Conservatives were going to rush through legislation that would ban ‘manipulative marketing techniques aimed at young people’, ‘strengthen the regulatory framework and give people the power to make complaints’, oh and ‘make Britain the most family-friendly country in the world’. So no pie-in-the-sky, knee-jerk policies there then.

Meanwhile, back on earth, the Home Office’s breathy new sexpert Dr Papadopoulos was appearing on countless TV shows, breasts heaving, lampooning lads mags and Beyonce videos for being too sexual. In actuality though Papadopoulos’s Home Office’s report covers a wide variety of topics, everything from the Internet, to sexual imagery’s impact on boys and girls, to relationships, to sexual violence and coercion, to pornography, computer games, fashion, music videos and body image. It is also full of sympathetic buzz words and phrases, of isms and concern. It talks of bullying - the new minority grouping, if you haven’t been bullied yet you soon will be - and partner violence.

The report is, in fact, a whole new layer of child protection, censorship, bullying and new words in the making, yet at its core are some very relevant concerns that should be addressed. The question is whether the media and, more importantly, the government, is capable of looking at anything that mentions children, sex, adults and the internet in the same breath, without immediately being consumed by apoplexy or, as David Cameron was, being compelled to adopt ‘concerned’ facial expressions and concoct legislative ideas out of thin air.

The reality is that children and adults now have access to hardcore pornography at the click of a button. Never in history has the human race had such a wealth of information, communication, imagery and graphic sexual material available, whether wished for or not. None of us know the long terms effects that such exposure will have on us or more particularly on young people growing up from birth in the age of the Net.

Already, theorists and psychologists and behaviorists have expressed concern at the inability of some children and teenagers to converse and fraternize with other people in a face-to-face situation. Though I tend to think that this is just using extreme examples to make a point rather than a comment on the young generally. However, without doubt, technology is changing our lives and none more so than the lives of the young and it is their unfettered ability to access ‘anything’ that is so alarming because it has no precedent, ever.

From head-hacking Taliban nasties, to gross-out anal gape videos to standard pornography to car crashes and celebrity sex tapes the whole lexicon of mans vileness and crassness is there for all to see at the click of a button. So as adults we can, if we chose to watch, deal with seeing anal gang bangs and watching Britney Spears chomping on her boyfriends penis, but can and should a ten year old? The answer is no.

As pre-Internet children, our journey to sexual awakening was varied and in many cases difficult. Some of us, no doubt depending on our age, saw adult magazines, TV programmes, films or videos, or whatever but in most cases these exposures would have been limited and for most of us seeing strong sexual content or pornography would have been rare. For many teenagers or children it would just have never happened. Now, given Internet access via mobiles, peer pressure and availability, I suspect that most teenagers and some children have looked at pornography a lot.

It may well be that exposure to strong sexual material will just be part of the rich tapestry of life in the 21st Century and maybe it will be. Certainly censorship isn’t the answer though education and sensible parenting is, though without an hysterical ‘something must be done’ approach from politicians and the media to drive our sensibilities. In fact far more invasive than pornography is the drip, drip of sexed-up imagery aimed at impressionable prepubescents,and child/adult crossovers that appear more and more in the media. Like Katie Price’s pictures of her three year old daughter heavily made up and looking like some bizarre hooker that she posted on Twitter or the sight of five and six years being dressed in sexually styled clothes by their parents who see it as cool. Yet in many ways these are the effects of the bombardment of imagery we all see and perhaps childhood is changing or adapting to the new technology as it must. Dr Linda Papadopoulos”s report and books like Living Doll are just some of the early manifestations of what will be an ongoing debate as people come to terms with the pornographization of the world and that the sexual act is now never more that a click away.

Porn is always the driver of new technology. Photography, film, video, DVD and the Internet have all been exploited commercially by the sex industry and now technology has made porn mainstream. Female pubic hair has all but vanished, breast augmentation and labia enhancement have been driven by women’s ability to see other women’s bodies in ways once unimaginable and equally perceive men’s responses to them. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is another argument and one that Dr Papadopoulos touched upon with her comments on body image but the fact is we are changing, our relationships, our sexual expectations, our emotions and how we respond to one another are all in transition and it is inevitable that we should be concerned. After all if Adam and Eve had had access to the internet its a sure bet that they would have posted and Twittered the first sex tape minutes after Eve bit into that Apple...

TRIUMPH OF THE ILL

2010-03-01T06:34:00.000-08:00

The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so is not difficult to understand if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.

"The collective principle asserts that... no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means."

Aneurin Bevin, Labour politician who played a key part in the creation of the NHS and Welfare State.

"Marxism taught him that society must be changed swiftly, intrepidly, fundamentally, if the transformation was not to to be overturned by counter-revolution."

Labour leader Michael Foot on Anuerin Bevan and the creation of the Welfare State

When in 1945, Clement Attlee, the leader of the victorious Labour government stood poised to take over government from the wartime coalition having vanquished its charismatic head, the Tory leader Winston Churchill, at the polls, he must have felt tremendous excitement at the prospects for change that lay ahead of him, but daunted too, no doubt. Daunted by a country left broke and broken by six years of war, by a Europe almost destroyed and with millions of its people dead, daunted as well by a population that was sick of war, hardship and suffering and who wanted societal change in a big, major way.

Fearful too probably of a glowering, threatening Stalinist Russia whose liberation of Poland, Hungry, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Ukraine and numerous other smaller states had turned into occupation and whose desire for the h-bomb, nuclear capabilities and promoting communism by force would beget the Cold War within years. Fearful also perhaps of the expectations of his party and most of all of his party's supporters, the electorate, who had been promised the introduction of a Welfare State and a National Health Service as recommended by the Beveridge report three years earlier. Yet Attlee and his fellow supporters could never have envisaged the beast they were to unleash nor the wider changes its creation would have on the social fabric of the UK in the years ahead.

It's probable, though, that the man Attlee choose as his welfare champion, Nye Bevan, did know and in fact would have welcomed the change for he would have known that this was a change that, short of a revolution or seismic social upheaval, was irreversible. What Bevan could not have foreseen though was how weak and loathsome the introduction of the welfare state would make the population. For how could the introduction of a system designed to protect all from the adverse effects of poverty, hunger, sickness, homelessness and unemployment end up ultimately undermining and threatening the very people and the state it was set up to protect?

No one advocates a society that would see the ill die or the sick left to rot at the side of the road while the fit and able strut past seemingly oblivious to their plight rather it is the degree to which the state intervenes and our response to it that matters. Bevan saw the creation of a welfare state not just as an act of benevolence by the state but rather as a Trojan horse that would, with its promise of a ‘cradle to grave’ support system, herald the end of the old order. For Bevan the England of class, and the Tory party that he perceived as representing it were; ‘as far as I am concerned... lower than vermin’.

The creation of the welfare state therefore wasn’t just about alleviating poverty and sickness it was also about destroying an old, ruling order. Of cutting the hamstrings of an elite so that no matter what, the welfare state would stay and in that Bevan and the supporters of the new order were successful. Not even Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist gurus Alan Walters or Milton Friedman were able to persuade the party to pursue a policy of privatising the health service. Whatever else, and whichever party was in power the welfare state has been safe and has grown. Each decade seeing new departments, increased budgets, more employed by it, and even more dependent on it, until now over 50 per cent of the UK work force is dependent on the public sector for their livelihood.

Beyond that is a mass of people hidden and lost in statistics who exist totally because of the state, people who are dependent on it for their food, their clothing, their homes, their health and their life, from the day they are born to the day they die. A growing number of people in fact that whose purpose in existing is created by, and is dependent on, the State and in turn whose existence the Welfare state depends for its own existence.

This counter dependency has grown inextricably since the Welfare State’s birth in 1945 and is now at a tipping point as immigration, massive unsustainable state and individual borrowing, diminishing tax revenues and a dwindling private sector work force are combining finally to deny it any more money and to secondly overload a Welfare system that is bloated and put upon to the point of collapse.

Further the dependents and recipients of the State’s largesse are neither grateful nor accepting of their lot, rather a large section of them have become an underclass, criminalized, feckless, and dangerous. Many prey on, abuse and milk the system for all they can, new arrivals in the UK are helped by agents of the State, or advisory bodies funded by the State, or by lawyers grant aided by the State, to get the best possible out of the Welfare system regardless of whether they or their families or their dependents have contributed to its coffers. In fact for many immigrants the UK represents a land of limitless resource for the minimum of input. Not so much a land of the free as of the fee.

Fees, which like the treasury bonds that the Government issues against its borrowing and which are sold on the open markets but which in reality are currently bought by the government with its own money which has been created out of thin air by printing it in a policy euphemistically called ‘quantitive easing’, our welfare state pays itself. Yet it doesn’t stop there as it creates and recruits more and more advisers whose jobs are to find as many new and clever ways as possible of extracting money from their own employer; the welfare state. It is in fact repeating the cycle with more and more demands being made on its own financial resources yet at the same time creating nothing of worth to sell on to third parties. Even the people it nurtures from baby to adulthood in the main become immediate dependents on the state, rather than taxable workers paying contributions to it. And their children in turn will do the same creating an ever-expanding circle that consumes all and creates nothing except more demands on the State.

The dream of a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state where no one went hungry or was denied help when sick is now in danger of sucking the life-blood out of the population it was set up to help. Now that our national debts have reached levels that are unsustainable our politicians are being forced to address them. Yet even though events are forcing the states hand still no political party has the Will or the courage to tackle Bevan’s beast of burden full on. Instead politicians of all parties fudge the issues or talk in vagaries of a recovery that may or may not happen and which they assume will save the day.

Right now no politician or party will do more than tinker with the Welfare State’s budgets or its vast army of staff or its staggering number of dependents and recipients. Rather the government does nothing, which is fine as long as the resources are there to sustain it. But what happens when the legions of new, non tax contributing arrivals and the constantly demanding underclass and the growing numbers of unemployed suddenly find that the monies running out and there aren’t enough taxes coming in to pay for it? Then what? Borrow more? Tax More? Go to the IMF?

The fact is we have created a monster that has in turn led a large and growing number of people to expect the state to do everything for them regardless of merit or entitlement, Further like its clients, the Welfare State assumes that there will always be enough money there to cover its needs, whatever they are. To the Welfare state its needs are paramount, they usurp other sectors like the military, or the environment, and its budgets are seen as sacred. This bloated state cow is a sacred state cow and as such cannot be touched.

The Welfare State is weakening the country as much as its recipients are weakened by it. People no longer feel compelled to strive or look to provide for themselves instead they look to the state and the state in turn expects to provide. Each is sapping the other's strengths and corrupting the nations Will to do and for people to stand alone and to see the state as a last resource rather than a first resource, The state is consuming money at levels and as a percentage of our GDP that are ludicrous and is spending with a ferocity that borders on hysteria. And like the lottery winners who adopt a policy of ‘spend, spend, spend’ the money is going to run out.

Since 1945 governments have come and gone, chancellors have cut and spent, Bevan’s words and those of his colleagues have faded into history yet his, and Attlee’s, Trojan Horse has morphed from a lean stallion into a bloated beast, its body grossly obese and its strength and spirit sapped from years of abuse and overwork. And despite belated attempts to save it, it continues to consume, grow and decay simultaneously, as if the combined forces of good and evil were, like cancer and non-cancerous cells, constantly waging war inside it.

For more than anything now, the UK is defined by its welfare state and the welfare state in turns defines its people. Some foreigners may still be deluded enough to think that we still wander around in bowler hats and drink tea at the first sign of trouble but most see us for what we are and are becoming, a nation of the ill and the feign, whose priorities are drink and obsessing over vacuous celebrities whose fame, more often than not, is based not on a talent or achievement, but like many of the recipients of state welfare, is merely for existing.

It would be a great irony therefore if the verminous class-ridden society so hated by Nye Bevan was in fact being re-created inversely by the very Welfare State he had set up to destroy it. For soon the government, if they are to maintain their precious public sector untouched and uncut, will have to tax, exploit and cajole and suck dry all that aren’t part of this new Class in order to survive.

Americans in turn should beware of Presidents with Healthcare reform plans....

IN EUROPE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM

2010-02-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

Self-censorship is insidious, especially the kind of self-censorship that creeps into your consciousness unknowingly, unasked and unwelcome, like a disease that surreptitiously eats into your body and begins slowly to attack you from the inside. At first you probably ignore the early warning signs; the odd ache, tiredness, the occasional twinge or a general feeling of malaise, but then later there’s something more serious, bleeding perhaps or an excruciating pain, something that really shouldn’t be ignored but often is. Finally the disease can’t be resisted, its presence is in your face, in your gut and it’s going to hurt you and worse fighting it is going to be scary. It’s going to take all the courage you can muster, and more. Courage that you passed up on months earlier when it was easier just to be scared, when you could perhaps have dealt with it but still hoped it would go away, and now even worse the disease is so bad that you may lose the fight and the disease will destroy you. Yet often, knowing all that, knowing that you have just maybe one last shot at defeating it; when you can feel that lump, or see the blood in the toilet or just know that you really are unwell, you still sit there, scared, alone, waiting for the disease to slowly eat you away from the inside, in effect, to kill you...

Well that’s what politically-correct self-censorship is slowly doing to the psyche of the European, it’s infecting our collective body-politick and slowly destroying it, bit by bit, until the host body is overcome. Of course that probably all sounds very melodramatic and body-snatchers-like and what after all is self-censorship? Isn’t it just correcting or altering what one says, does or writes before making ones thoughts public. Don’t we do that say with swearing? Most of us wouldn’t swear in front of children or in a church and so curb and moderate our language for the sake of decorum. Likewise we often think thoughts that are best left unspoken. Telling the world that you fancy your partner's best friend or that you secretly lust after your wife or husband’s brother, sister or other close relation is probably a thought best left unspoken.

But there is another kind of self-censorship entering our thoughts now and that’s not a censorship born of manners, social settings or decorum but rather a censorship imposed on us by the state. A censorship, in fact, of values and beliefs conceived by a liberal, politically correct intelligentsia and driven by its supporters in the media, local government and vested interest groups relentlessly from the nineteen eighties onwards and which is making free thought, speech and expression increasingly restricted and at times dangerous. Why?

Why? Because of the ruling elites obsessive pursuit of a, to use the approved vernacular, racially diverse, non racist, multicultural, sexually inclusive, gender equal, disability friendly, multi-religious inter-faith, non-discriminatory, culturally aware society, free of derogatory labeling and individual stereotyping. In actuality they are overseeing the destruction of Europe, its peoples, its culture and its Will, replacing it with a cowed collection of weak, bureaucratic semi-nation states bound to an unelected, unanswerable and all powerful European Union whose post WWII, post colonial, secular, guilt-driven policies have sold out their indigenous populations and sacrificed their freedoms and their cultural, religious, racial and national heritage on the alter of politically correct dogma and left Europe ill and vulnerable to assimilation by unchecked immigration with it adherent cultures, religious-political faiths like Islam and its associated adherents. The European Union is in actuality, slowly killing Europe, its nations and its peoples and at the same time gagging the sick lest they cry out and try to fight back against the disease that has infected them and their countries.

The West, and Europe in particular, is losing its Will to live. It has embarked on a ludicrous social experiment, unasked for by its indigenous peoples, whereby on the back of the wider cultural liberalism that has so corrupted our societies, hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been allowed and encouraged to take up residency in their towns and cities with no thought as to their impact on the host nations. The figures are truly staggering: in Sweden of 9 million people currently 1.5 million are either immigrants or children of immigrants; in Holland out of a population of 16 million, 3 million are immigrants, though this figure is probably higher as it excludes Dutch born immigrants and their children. In the UK, even if immigration stopped today, there will be 7 million ‘newcomers’ by 2050 and 16 million if immigration continues at current rates. By the middle of this century between 20 and 30 per cent of European countries populations will be of foreign origin.

On top of that, our indigenous populations are declining. We are quite simply breeding ourselves to extinction. The average sized family needed in order for a population to sustain itself is for a woman to have 2.1 children in a lifetime, below 1.7 children in fact populations tend to collapse rather than decline. Indigenous women in Italy, Spain, East Germany, and the Baltic nations are averaging 1.3 children and face the prospect of halving their populations by 2050.

Coupled with our inability to procreate, it seems, is our inability to die. Europeans are living longer, working less and, whatever leisure time we have we’re certainly not spending it with Hella, Isabella or Chantal, rather we’re probably working out how to avoid offending Aalimah, Madeeha or Shumaila. Our multicultural, diverse and apparently impotent countries are being filled with immigrants, invited and uninvited and who, unlike us, are, it seems, only to ready to breed and procreate.

Our rulers currently see this as marvelous, as they can quell the indigenous population's fears of unchecked immigration and a clash of civilizations by the oft quoted nonsense that immigration creates diversity, that with new people come new ideas, energy and so on and of course these people will work, pay taxes and make our old age comfortable. This is hokum of course as immigration on this scale, and where assimilation is unachievable, is colonization pure and simple.

It is colonization by birth, by religion and by numbers and we, by which I mean Europeans, lie back and take it. We say nothing, we do nothing and we accept everything. Our leaders, intellectuals, opinion formers and our media, in return, reinforce this European wide acquiescence by politically correct self-censorship which is increasingly dictated by laws and implemented by a politically driven police force. Criticism of this new European ideal is a crime. Race relations acts have begat disability acts, have begat lesbian and gay transgender nonsense, have begat discriminatory hysteria that sees people arrested every day for daring to say aloud what, privately, we all think and know is wrong.

The European is not only physically impotent but the state is rendering him mentally impotent as well. Now he is afraid to voice his disquiet at immigration or forced changes in laws relating to race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation for fear of ridicule or, increasingly, of arrest. Now, as the assimilation of Europe gathers pace, so does the zeal with which our leaders, and the faceless little men that back them up through the power of Europe’s legislative process, block dissent. The European is, in fact, damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t and soon the disease will win.

What began two to three decades ago as a social experiment by nation states and idealistic left wing dreamers and intellectuals who, appalled at the horrors of WWII and riddled with guilt at their nations role in colonialism, sought to create a better, more harmonious world is, ironically, sowing the seeds of a new European catastrophe.

Never without conflict has a population and collective of nations the size of Europe allowed its people and land to be colonized by a people, religion and ideology of ideas so at odds with its own. Soon, in an effort to appease the growing Islamists in their midst, small token aspects of Sharia law will begin to be incorporated into European state laws and constitutions. More fundamental changes will follow, slowly and inextricably infecting and altering the host nations.

At some point, despite the gagging laws, despite the impotency, shame and our seeming inability to breed, despite the political correctness and utopian dreams of our leaders, I believe that the people of Europe are going to scream aloud and finally begin to fight the disease that is infecting their nations. When they do, the whole world will hear it.  

THE GREAT WAIL OF CHINA

2010-01-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

China has always been a mystery to the West. Ever since Marco Polo introduced Europeans to its charms in the 14th Century the West has been both captivated and horrified in equal measure. Whether by its isolation, perceived cruelties, its unChristianity, its sheer size, its Dynasties, its culture, foot-binding, use of opium, or just its inscrutable ways, China was, and remains, inscrutable.

Over time, the West has sought to conquer, then influence, then constrain, then trade, then exploit and now, it seems, coerce and cajole China to change its ways. To be, in essence, more Western, for China to be more like us and to be, in effect, less Chinese. Christian missionaries tried, governments tried, by force and by trade, individuals fell in love with China, Hollywood, artists and writers added to its mystique. The world too, from time to time, marveled at its past achievements like the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army, or gasped at the staggering statistics of China’s population, currently 1.3 billion people or 20% of our planet’s total, or more recently perhaps thought nervously of China’s growing strength, both militarily and economically, and tried to understand the unique hybrid form of totalitarian capitalistic communism that is driving it. And failed.

For China is not Western or a foreign country that has become Westernized, it is China, a great concoction of contradictions and anomalies that have built up over thousands of years to create one of the greatest countries on earth. An empire, in fact, that developed for the most part in total isolation from the rest of the world and which has gone from a feudalistic Dynasty, to gangsterism and warlords, to nationalism, near anarchy, brutal subjugation under the Japanese, civil war, revolution, and communist revolution in its purist and most radical form. A revolution that took in the cult of leadership, Stalinist style economic plans, genocide and a cultural-revolutionary revolution that would see China destroy utterly much of its non revolutionary past including its art, its literature and where possible many of its people and yet emerge with its communist ideology intact.

China’s communist revolution in fact grew out of foreign interference, for China had been sliced and diced by the British, the French, the Americans, the Russians, the Germans, and most noticeably the Japanese who in the 1930s decided to show how big and tough they were by attacking what was then a weak and virtually defenseless country. China was a mess, a 20th Century basket case, with foreign powers claiming chunks of it for their own and generally riding roughshod over the impotent Chinese government. Moreover, much of the land was controlled by feuding warlords, nationalists and communists, all of whom fought each other, the government, and who totally exploited any people not on their side.

By 1949 things were so bad that most foreign powers had packed their loot-filled bags and left while the nationalists, led by Chang Kai-shek, and the communists, led by Mao Zedong, fought it out. The communists won and Chanh Kai-shek fled with as many of his troops as could follow and set up camp in Taiwan, with US protection of course. Since then Chinese communism has followed its own unique path to nirvana in its own way and on its own terms, give or take the odd Soviet missile and the occasional copyright infringement.

Under Mao, China may have looked organised but it was an economic disaster. It had state-owned collectives and Soviet style state run industries none of which were remotely profitable. Mao instigated a plan for a Great Leap Forwards though it would have been better called A Great Step Backwards. It was a disaster, millions of people died from starvation, nothing worked and economic failures were hidden by political crusades and slogans. Everyone may have had a little red book but they didn’t taste good and when Mao went to the great politburo in the sky in the late seventies Mao’s successors set about not dismantling communism but by making it work, Chinese style.

The much-underrated Deng Xiaping got rid of a lot of the Soviet style collectives and introduced private ownership, and allowed private enterprise and new businesses to operate outside of government control. Further he created new Special Economic Zones in areas like Shanghai, which, free of much regulation and state interference, brought in foreign investment and business. Now, nearly thirty years later, China’s economy is booming and is second only to the US as a world power.

This is the new Chinese revolution; it's a revolution that is uniquely Chinese and the West doesn’t like it and, in particular, the liberal, human rights obsessed, Obama-riven, hand wringing West. Why? Because Chinese communism didn’t collapse in 1989 the way Russia communism did. In fact, when the pro-democracy brigade in China decided to get all happy-clappy and start banging their drums in Tiananmen Square and building papier-mâché statues to the Goddess of Democracy, the Chinese government showed exactly what they thought of free speech and human rights. They sent in the army, killed several hundred protestors, and drove a tank straight at the Goddess of Democracy and flattened her right in front of the worlds press.

Now, twenty years later, as China’s economic might by necessity makes her a big player on the world stage, so über democrats like Hilary Clinton feel that they can lecture China on Human Rights as if they were ticking off a cheeky coolie. Equally, trendy and crucially important companies like Google can threaten a nation state with the removal of its product if the State doesn’t change its behaviour in a way that suits that particular company’s business and, suddenly, it's 1899 all over again. Even the UK is getting in on the old imperialism act with the country’s entire liberal media backed up by our main political parties all lecturing and whining hysterically to China when China sentenced a UK citizen to death for attempting to smuggle four kilograms of heroin into the country. No doubt Gordon Brown sees the chance for an election boost here and will restart the Opium Wars with himself in the role of ‘Chinese Gordon’.

Chinese occupied Tibet now has more Human Rights activists in it than Buddhists and has to operate while being lectured to constantly by uptight angst ridden college graduates on how to run their country. China, it seems, is the New World Order’s yellow-faced bogeyman du jour, only now Fu Manchu has cut off his pigtail, shaved off his long moustache and wears a suit rather than silk robes. But to the West he’s still evidence that a leopard can’t change its spots. Once an evil Chinese bastard, always an evil Chinese bastard as they say in liberal, caring circles everywhere.

Yet do the Chinese care? If we believe the Human Rights brigade there are 1.2 and a half billion Chinese, all desperate for their right to send emails to other Human Rights activists in Palestine or wherever. The reality is that most Chinese are too busy making money, getting kitted out in the latest Gucci and Chanel uniforms and flogging Mao Zedong kitsch to tourists to care about their human rights.

This is China, not Tooting, a country that has never known democracy, that saw five million of its people starved to death as policy under Mao and watched the Japanese in 1937 rape, torture, mutilate and murder hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in their then capital Nanking and the West did nothing and said nothing. Even now, Japan denies it ever happened. Sorry, it seems for Japan, is the hardest word. The key Western powers were no better as virtually every possible item of value or cultural significance that they could get hold of was looted, stolen or smashed during their occupancy and China’s indigenous religions were mocked and decried as heathen and their followers dismissed as savages. Now as we start the 21st Century we’re at it again and still telling China what to do.

New ‘capitalist’ China, it seems, is where the East meets West and the West doesn’t like it. We don’t send gunboats any more, or send in troops to loot and destroy or grab territories like Hong Kong. No, now we whine and wail and political opportunists like Gordon Brown and Hilary Clinton have hissy fits and newspapers and commentators, who would normally bend over backwards to use the most gushing politically correct euphemism when describing someone’s race or ethnicity, feel it perfectly acceptable to describe the Chinese as barbarians and lampoon their culture and government.

China has no reason to listen. Its people will choose their own destiny, which may well be democratic or most likely a uniquely Chinese variation on it. Whatever they choose though, they should choose it because it is their choice and not the choice of self-aggrandizing Western politicians and egoistical human rights activists whose arrogance and hectoring of the Chinese is on a direct par with the Christian missionaries who so plagued China in the 19h Century, they were wrong then and the activists are wrong now.

Confucius say he who buys US treasuries will eventually own the seller.

TANTRUMS IN THE MACHINE

2010-01-06T06:25:00.001-08:00

The dawn of 2010 and the ending of a year, especially the ending of a decade is most always a time for reflection. Thinking back to the beginning of the decade, things were very different. The end of 1999 was a time of hysteria; the media was filled with nonsense about the millennium bug, doom-sayers were predicting the end of the world and media darlings like Naomi Klein had been so inspired by the legions of anti-globalization protestors who had battled the police and the worlds financial leaders at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) shindig in Seattle that year that she had put pen to paper to cash-in on the angst and wrote No Logo - Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.

The world, in fact, seemed poised to enter a whole new era of I-care-you-care-but-I-care-more-than-you-care compassion driven economics and the search for a better way. A world where realpolitik had become surrealpolitik and eunuchs had taken over the world machine. And, as befitted the times, the nation at the head of the machine and leader of the most powerful nation on earth cried and hugged as much as he huffed and puffed. Bill Clinton, interns aside, was a popular and charismatic world leader; he cared, he cried, he lied, and the world, generally, loved him for it. Globalization, it seemed, was something that just happened, driven by market forces rather than political forces, and for many represented the worst aspects of capitalism.

In 1999, as a new millennium dawned, the word ‘global’ was the expletive of choice. People, or rather, ‘caring’ people, wanted to protest targeted ‘global’ companies and, in particular, American global companies; McDonalds, Nike, Starbucks and, when they could get at them, US-owned multinationals. Global was a despised concept; it meant, in the minds of earnest ‘caring’ protestors, the worldwide destruction of indigenous businesses, traditional skills, the exploitation of labour and, of course, the absolute desolation of the local environment by ‘global’ companies intent on using cheap third world labour and accompanied by the vampiristic exploitation of the local resources. And, like the vampire, these faceless multinational global bloodsuckers were hated and feared, their presence seen as the harbinger of death and destruction, that at worst they would suck the life-blood out of a country and at best that they were making the world the same and filing it with American uniform trite; junk logos, junk food, junk culture, junk life and all driven by a junk, corrupt, capitalist ideology.

This was to be a decade where the traditional left / right in politics would begin to fragment and where individuals would unit behind a specific cause; Reclaim the Streets, Nuclear Power, anti new roads, saving trees, banning fox hunting, stopping wars, saving the whale, or supporting the Palestinians; where there was a cause there were thousands ready to march. Often these protest groups were loosely linked or collected under the umbrella of anti-globalisation, as indeed were the black bloc anarchist groups that, cuckoo-like, used protests for their own ends and a bit of ultra-violence. Then George W. Bush got elected and some religious zealots decided to take anti-Americanism to a whole new level.

Within two years of the world partying like it's 1999, a group of Muslim fanatics armed with nothing more deadly than a few penknives and their own hateful zealotry high jacked four airliners, crashed two of them into the Twin Towers and another into the Pentagon and a forth almost into the White House and virtually changed the world forever. What they did achieve, aside from killing a large number of innocent people and launching the biggest surprise attack on the US since Pearl Harbour, was to show to the Muslim world just how weak and fractious the West is when under threat and just how fractious, delusional and self destructive the West’s sense of protest has become.

For many on the left, anti-Americanism is endemic and almost a faith and, like all faiths, once one believes in its creed it is very difficult to change. Some felt that the US deserved 9/11, others that it was about time that the USA experienced an act of terrorism that, after years of carnage in Europe and the rest of the world, it would do America good to get a taste of just how horrible terrorism could be. For others, it was a terrible event but one that had been caused partly by America’s rampant globalization and equally gung-ho foreign policy coupled with their support of Israel, which justified and created Arab hatred towards the US. That 9/11 was in fact the US’s own fault.

Though another group saw the attack for what it was, an attack on the West, on the values and way of the life of the West, and on the centre of the West’s strength; the United States of America.

The USA’s reaction and the wider world’s response to it were sympathetic but hesitant and most of all careful not to attack or blame all Muslims for the actions of a few. In fact, the West went overboard in its efforts not to blame or offend Islam by appointing blame to the wider Muslim community and by doing so began to attack itself. Rather than lashing out, the West lashed in. We changed, altered and subverted Western culture and our Judeo Christian religions in favour of Muslim values so as to be seen as inclusive. New laws were rushed through parliament, making criticism of religion illegal and, for religion, read Islam.

When it was the UK’s turn to be hit and four Islamic disciples decided that they were doing Allah’s will by blowing themselves up on London’s underground, killing 52 people and maiming dozens more, the first people that the quota-driven BBC interviewed were not the victims and wounded but Muslims at London mosques to see if they were frightened of being victimised by thuggish Londoners who might blame them for the atrocity. Well boohoo and lucky for them that there was no fiery Iman calling for a ‘kristallnacht‘ style revenge as no doubt there would have been had the bombing happened in reverse and it had been Christians blowing themselves up in an Islamic country.

What we have had throughout the noughties is the steady and constant self-flagellation style erosion of our culture, beliefs and values in favour of Islam for fear of offending, or being deemed to have offended, Islam or Islamic values. We now self-censor and find ever more ridiculous and craven ways of kow-towing to Islam lest we offend those who would, and possibly will, destroy completely our freedoms and way of life. And why? Because we have no faith in ourselves, or in our values, or in our countries.

For the last decade we have protested everything and protested nothing. We have damned capitalism and smashed up McDonalds, we have hugged trees and championed same sex marriages, become colour blind on issues of race and ignored our own people in favour of foreign cultures that hate and despise our own culture and which would kill all homosexuals and which stones and burns women who question the decisions of men. Yet still our great Western liberal elite and politically correct soothsayers, bend over backwards to defend and protect Islam. Why? Because Islam is anti-American and anti-Isreal and to many on the left that is better than anything. It maybe be an unholy alliance but for the last ten years it has been the alliance of choice for many on the left, a choice that was made all the more imperative by the arrival of George W Bush in 2001.

President George W Bush was a man whose general demeanour, Christianity-driven Republicanism and slow Southern delivery, peppered with embarrassing Malapropisms, induced hatred and derision on an unprecedented scale. He was also seen as a man who had achieved his position in part because of who his father was. Whatever the reason, Bush failed to deliver as a President and led the US and its Allies into a disastrous war in Iraq, while presiding over, and sowing many of the seeds that would create one of the worst economic crises the world has ever seen.

The combined effect of 9/11 and the failed presidency of Bush ironically changed the forces of protest. Now, at the end of the decade, being ‘global’ is cool. Gordon Brown, the UK’s profligate and pompous prime minister called the economic crisis a ‘global crisis'; that is, it wasn’t his fault... "We need ‘global’ solutions", he said. President Obama, the liberal worlds messiah du jour has globalitus and talks endlessly of ‘global health initiatives’, ‘global warming treaties’, a ‘global currency’ and a ‘global poverty act’. Obama is noble and global and, as befits the Son of God, was awarded a coveted Nobel Peace prize after only a few months in office when he had actually done nothing but espouse his wishes for ‘global solutions’. But no matter the world loves him. They love him because he’s black, because he’s not George Bush, because he knows how to be cool and doesn’t fluff his speeches, and most of all because he’s global without the ‘ization’ bit at the end.

Yet now at the beginning of a new ‘global’ decade where are we? The Reclaim the Street activists have all bought cars, and the anti globalization hordes are making lots of money online, or advising ‘global’ companies how to look cool. Bush has gone and is making, like Mr Blair, vast sums of money talking on the lecture circuit where his Bushisms are seen as quaint and endearing. Iraq is in a bloody mess, its streets strewn with the limbs and entrails of our soldiers, suicide bombers and the countless innocents caught in the middle and the countries that went in now can’t wait to leave. Iraq may fall to Islamic extremism or it might not, all that’s certain is that, whatever happens, no country in the West is going to go back in and help the Iraqi people, which leaves the fanatics, Iran and Syria waiting like vultures to pick at the remains.

In the West, governments have borrowed and printed money on a scale unprecedented in history and despite the current euphoria in the markets there is an upturn, there is, as they say, ‘many a slip twixt cup and slip’ and the world may yet see a crash or social upheaval caused by a market crash. In the US, the great liberal messiah is losing popularity almost as fast as Bush lost his words. 2012 may in fact see the US people elect a curvy woman from Alaska as President, which would be a fitting revenge on the President who said of her; ‘a pig in lipstick is still a pig’, which is an unfortunate phrase coming from a someone who is black, liberal and presumably likes to be seen as a respecter of women...

Yet the decade began with the threat of radical Islam and it is ending with it as well. From the attempted bombing of Flight 253, to the nuclearisation of Iran, to the Islamification of Europe, the West’s way of life is under real threat and the next decade will be crucial in deciding how and where that threat leads. One in the know, of course, is the daughter of anti-porn crusader Bonnie Klein, the journalist and ‘activist’ Naomi Klein who launched the decade with her anti-capitalist diatribe, No Logo. Now having ditched the anti-globalization mantel in 2007 with her book, The Shock Doctrine, she has got in early on the 'stop Sarah Palin getting elected in 2012' bandwagon with the publication of Going Rouge: Sarah Palin An American Nightmare a play on the title of Palin’s best selling book Going Rogue. No doubt Going Rouge will be full of the kind of liberal left bile and invective that was spat at Palin following her sensational arrival as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election and no doubt she will shrug it off but if Klein and her po-faced acolytes are on the warpath already then Palin must be doing something right.

Klein and her kabala of liberal left opinion formers protest anything as long as it's anti-Amercian and anti-capitalist and have been wrong consistently. Their opinions morph from one bogey man, or woman, to another and now that their chosen one is in office they are desperate that it is their politically-correct quasi-Marxist take on the world that sets the agenda for the coming decade. I for one sincerely hope that it isn’t but believe that the fight to save and keep some of the West’s values after another ten years of Islamification, liberal left fifth columnism and political shenanigans will make the next decade one of the most decisive and toughest ever. Happy New Year.

UNNATURAL ATTRACTION

2009-12-15T10:17:00.000-08:00

In Oscar Wilde’s story ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ the antihero makes a Faustian pact in which he keeps his beauty while a portrait of himself ages and also displays all the twisted marks that his debauched lifestyle makes on his soul. In the end Gray’s vanity and immorality conspire to destroy him. Wilde’s character had ultimately attempted to cheat nature and failed.

In a similar manner the antihero of Joris-Karl Huysmans “poisonous French novel”, ‘A Rebours’ or ‘Against Nature” rebelled against the boring trappings and limited thrills offered by petit bourgeois society as personified by 19th century France and embarked on a journey of his own to create an artistic and ascetic capsule in which he can escape the vileness of the world that surrounds him. In the end though his decadent lifestyle threatens to overwhelm him and he is forced to return to the mainstream in order to survive. Again the natural order of things quietly triumphs.

Fast forward a century and the ascetic obsessions of these writers and the angst ridden guilt and poetic desperation of their heroes to rebel against the norm seem almost quaint. Indeed their adolescent yearnings for sexual relief among the painted and seemingly exotic prostitutes of bohemian Paris. or in the forbidden embraces of their own sex may seem tame by today's standards but at the time these stories shocked and scandalised. Indeed Oscar Wilde’s hints at homosexuality during his trial and the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ were testament to how underground talk, and knowledge of, sex was at the time. Wilde, had in fact, like his creation, gone against nature and as such he would pay.

Now the natural order has again been tampered with, though not, on this occasion by angst-ridden fops clutching glasses of absinthe in their trembling hands, but by the far more deadly forces of political correctness, or cultural Marxism as its becoming known as. Over the last decade an army of lawyers and civic busybodies has been intent on sweeping aside any vestige of that bourgeois world order so loathed by Wilde and Huysman’s creations. Now any budding rebel with a liking for the wild side can witness almost any sexual perversion or depravity in seconds on the internet or for real should he or she so desire. Most drug’s are easily available and human behaviour is now all but devoid of restraint and morality, anything goes in fact.

The denial of gratification or limitations on personal desire have, in just over a century, moved from seeing a renowned writer like Wilde imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’ with another man to seeing that same sex act enshrined and protected in law. Likewise lesbianism, transsexuals, same-sex marriages and a whole plethora of other sexual acts which were until recently deemed perverse, or existed only in the twilight world of pornography or were at best known but unmentioned are now discussed openly and even taught to school children. Six year olds can now seemingly describe the three F’s; fisting, felching and fucking better than they can perform the three R’s; reading, writing and arithmetic, such is the wonder of our modern education establishment.

The liberal lefts obsession with the propagation of human rights and sexual rights no matter at what cost to society has now removed the fun and thrill of illicit sex and moved it from the bedroom, where it belongs, into the realm of officialdom, lawyers and bureaucrats. Now what a gay man does to another man’s bottom or what someone else may think of such activity is proscribed by law, people can be arrested, not, as in Wilde’s time, for committing an act of indecency, but conversely for thinking or saying out loud comments or statements that maybe deemed derogatory of that once, ‘indecent’ act.

Gay rights, along with women’s rights, have in fact championed and set the tone and tempo for all other rights legislation since the UK legalized consensual sex between two men in 1967. Originally an act of genuinely liberalism to remove an unjust and unwarranted criminalization of a small number of homosexuals, ‘gay rights’ have since been used as a sledgehammer with which to bully and cajole the wider society firstly to accept and tolerate a minor sexual proclivity, then secondly to champion and promote it as a lifestyle choice and finally to offer it as an alternative to the male / female relationships so beloved of nature.

Now the sexual act is almost irrelevant as its ‘rights’ obsessed supporters have sought out other sexual causes and variants to add to their orgiastic lexicon of rights legislation. Reading almost like a Karma Sutra for the politically correct sexually minded almost no sexual act or minority group is excluded from the liberal lefts great rightsgasm except of course straight, bourgeois, for which read middleclass, society. For this despised group who taxes fund this liberal lasciviousness and who must grin and bare it for fear of prosecution when their children come home clutching copies of the latest copy of ‘Same Sex, Safe Sex’ or

a pop-up guide to fellatio, there are no rights only wrongs.

Human rights, sexual rights, race rights, religious rights, age rights, gender rights, disability rights, fat rights, slim rights, children’s rights, animal rights, criminal rights, asylum seeker rights, immigrant rights, ugly, low IQ, semi-human, thieving non-entity, welfare dependent all-my-life rights. In fact any rights accept those for the indigenous mainstream population are now enshrined in law like some new ten commandments, though these are written not in blood, or hewn from stone but scrawled in semen like the ejaculatory musings of the sexually obsessed. For the world that Dorian Gray or Jean Des Esseintes, the anti hero of Against Nature, sought out in the dark and forbidden recesses of their cities red light areas is now establishment policy, and protected by law.

Many would argue that this is a good thing, that the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for being homosexual or that societies previous Victorian attitude to sex and sexual freedom was both harmful and damaging to society. Further many would see sexual repression or self restraint as harmful and to many it was, but like many aspects of life it was also the natural balance between desire and denial that kept families and the wider society intact. Now in our new, rights-enshrined, fisting, same-sex, burka wearing, disabled, fat-friendly, ethnically aware, carbon-footprint reducing, multi-ethnic, religiously tolerant, tree-hugging liberal utopia we have championed human pleasure, decadence and gratification over family, stability and abstinence.

And now that the world that Jean Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray sought out is here in reality would Oscar Wilde relish the rights enshrined pleasures on offer to him or would he recoil in horror from the vileness of a culture that promotes anal sex to children and champions the rights of transsexuals and gender awareness over families and the laws of nature? Would he, in fact, do as he did before and get on the ferry to Dieppe in France and leave England for good?

I think he would. He might get intimate with a sailor on route, but that is his business, and his alone, it is not the right of the state, of lawyers or of a collective army of shrill, liberal left activists determined to enshrine every illicit sex act in law as a right. There is after all nothing more unappetising, unarousing or unerotic than someone demanding that you have sex when you don’t want to and yet that is what the state is doing. It is turning illicit fun sex into licit, civic duty sex, and who wants that? Not nature. And nature, long term, has a tendency of winning...

SPITTING IN THE FACE OF UTOPIA!

2009-11-09T04:42:00.000-08:00

About twenty or so years ago when I was in Paris with my then girlfriend Nadine I remember seeing large groups of well dressed, in a kind of petit-bourgeoisie French kind of way, looking people emerging from a hall near Place Maubert in the 5th arrondissement where I was living at the time. There were hundreds of people and I remember that they all seemed very excited and animated, with lots of them talking loudly. There was also a lot of hand-waving going on accompanied by occasional cheering and spontaneous clapping. I imagined that they were just leaving some sort of religious meeting or service, but I was wrong. They were in fact, Nadine informed me, just leaving a Front National meeting which, this being Paris, had been addressed by Jean Marie Le Pen, the charismatic leader of France’s far right nationalist party.

Around the same time, Nadine told me that a lot of her associates from school now went to, or hung around, a university located near the Jardin de Luxembourg and that this was a well known college with strong fascist links. She also said that someone she knew, the ubiquitous friend of a friend, had recently been arrested for shooting dead a black man, simply because he was black. This was Paris circa 1985/86.

The French don’t conceal their racism in the way that the English do, rather if they don’t like someone because of the colour of their skin, they tend to make it obvious. This was the big difference that I noticed between English racism and French racism, ours was concealed and wrapped up in niceties’ and politeness whereas the French just spat in your face or, if they were being polite, they would just turn their back on you. This didn’t make it right, it was just the way it was.

This was true too of our racial parties: France’s Front National has always been a very different political animal to the UK’s National Front or its latest incarnation the British National Party in that in its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen it had a charismatic, pugnacious, humorous and highly effective public speaker who was able to build and maintain electoral support at between 10 and 15 per cent. This level, whilst not sufficient to get the party elected to office, meant that the Front National had been able to carve out a credible place in French politics without too much hassle in the form of opposition. This all changed in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen stood in the presidential elections and got voted through to the second round of a three-part contest. This gave him a real chance of gaining the Presidency. Quelle l’horreur!

At this point the French media and opposition parties of all political persuasions behaved in a similar way to that in which the UK’s media and politicians are responding to Nick Griffin and the British National Party following Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC’s Question Time. They have unified against a common enemy with the single aim of stopping them at all costs. In France, this meant that life long communists and die-hard socialists would vote for the despised Jacques Chirac, the right-leaning, incumbent president that Le Pen was threatening to succeed. The media and the political opposition threw normal democratic rules aside and attacked Le Pen on an unprecedented scale, ultimately achieving their objective with the generally loathed Jacques Chirac obtaining a colossal 82 per cent of the vote. At no time did the hysterical French Establishment address the issue of why so many people had voted for Le Pen, instead the media damned them as at best, stupid, white, ignorant racist scum and at worst, stupid, white, ignorant, racist, Nazi scum. The Establishment being made up of white, highly intelligent, non-racist people who know best, of course.

In the UK, we are now following a similar path though in our own inimitable way. From the Queen to Ken Livingstone, to politicians and the nation’s media, virtually anyone who could has condemned the BBC’s decision to allow Nick Griffin air time. Yet, unlike the French leader Le Pen, Griffin is neither charismatic nor a particularly good speaker but, despite this, within 48 hours of a particularly unimpressive appearance on Question Time, 22 per cent of the UK’s population have said that they would seriously consider voting for the BNP. Cue shocked political pundits! Cue gasps of amazement! Cue anti BNP media frenzy!

Why? Why the hysteria and why the big potential increase in support for the BNP? Why indeed? For the new Establishment any form of politics or opinion that dares to criticize their multiracial utopia is an anathema, likewise the reinvented heirs to Blair, the Conservatives, are now so desperate for power and to be seen as ‘nice’ and ‘inclusive’ that David Cameron would probably black-up, cut off a limb and go gay if he could and our mainstream media is now so spineless when it comes to issues of race that despite a few rare exceptions they have almost universally joined in the assault on the BNP. Again, as in France, the fact that 22 per cent of the population would consider voting for the BNP is ignored as these people are again dismissed as ‘stupid, white, ignorant, racist, Nazi scum’.

Yet our erstwhile leaders and opinion formers in their absolute arrogance, sneers and rights off voters who fear for their country and their way of life, forgetting that these same people were never consulted or even asked if they wanted a ‘multicultural society’ and might now be seeking someone to give their fears a voice. This multiracial ‘utopia’ was a ‘vision’, unasked for and in the main unwelcome, and is a ‘vision’ which now threatens the stability of Europe. Yet an unelected cabal in Brussels is continuing to impose its vision of a multiethnic, irreligious, centralised, neosocialist utopia on its 27 member nations regardless of its peoples wants and this is why a growing number of their electorate are prepared to vote for political parties once thought beyond the pale.

The last twenty or so years have seen an orchestrated attempt by Europe’s leaders to deliberately alter the indigenous make up of Europe’s member states and while the political will may have varied from state to state the end result in most cases has been the same; a radical increase in immigration resulting in a seismic shift in each State’s population with immigrants placing an increasing demand on social, welfare and housing resources and in some areas altering the entire way-of-life of communities.

Many would argue that this is a good thing. That immigrants bring with them cultural diversity, new ideas, that they bring energy and vitality to otherwise staid and moribund societies and that this in turn boosts the economy. And in many instances this may be true. But ludicrous, unplanned and unrestrained immigration is also dangerous and grossly irresponsible and threatens the welfare not just of the indigenous population but also of immigrants already settled in an area.

Europe is now at a tipping point where immigration is actually threatening real societal change, change that is to be expected as immigrants grow in number and strength. Next, obviously and inextricably the new populations will want a bigger say in the way their adopted homeland is run. Their religions, their standards and so on, already in many cases tolerated and incorporated, will become increasingly important and as the scales tip from the old and aging indigenous populations, toward the young, growing, new populations, so people will become scared and fearful as the world, manners, customs and religions they know begin to disappear to be replaced by manners, customs, dress and religions that are both alien and to them, often threatening.

Yet, even now when it is obvious to even the most fanatical supporters of a multiracial State, that the resources of Europe are finite and limited, discussion and criticism of their utopia is still forbidden with anyone who dares to raise a voice against it branded a racist, ignorant or, to use the current politically correct term of abuse, Nazi scum. Yet criticism and discussion is crucial before the silent and silenced indigenous peoples of Europe are forced to seek the extreme in order to be heard. If they do that, then there may be more for the Establishment to worry about than whether or not a few second-rate fascists appear on the television. For then the people of Europe will be, like the disaffected Parisian racists of twenty years ago, either ready to kill someone for the colour of their skin or, if not, at least ready to vote for someone who is. In which case, it’s time to forget the niceties and spit in the face of multiculturalism before its too late.

SCUM NATION

2009-10-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

Open any UK newspaper, log on, tune in, or whatever, and week in, week out, all year long, you’ll see story after story of some man, some son, someone who has been beaten, kicked, stabbed or shot to death on Britain’s streets. The offender nearly always either a blank-faced sub-human white twat or blank-faced sub-human black twat, linked only by their single figure IQs and amoeba-like social skills. What we are seeing is the spawn of generation I-don’t give-a-fuck mating with the children of I-feel-guilty-about-the-death-and-destruction of-WWII-so-I’ll-punish-no-one-and-live-a-life-of-total-indulgence-baby-boomers producing vicious sub-human vermin fit only for extermination, yet kept alive and allowed to breed by a nation state obsessed with political correctness, inclusivity and see-no-evil, speak-no-evil legislation. A state that is, in fact, sacrificing the rule of law and order and its duties in maintaining a democracy worthy of the name, on the alter of creating a touchy-feely Nirvana. Scum Nation to you and me.

Trying to cite an individual case as an example of our current malaise is pointless, as barely a day goes past without some new horror and some new sallow-faced scum boy criminal being paraded before us in the newspapers. Recently, the media was full of the plight of a mother with a disabled daughter who was persecuted so much by a particular group of vermin youth that she killed her daughter and herself by setting themselves on fire. Think just how desperate you would have to be to do that? The police, of course, did nothing to help her over the preceding months, even advising on one occasion, when youths had again gathered to shout abuse and throw stones at her house, to ‘close the curtains’ and perhaps they’ll go away. It's telling that, once the brouhaha around this story broke and the youths' families in turn felt the wrath of the mob, the police rushed to defend them from attack rather than, perhaps, arming their officers with sash windows or venetian blinds.

Examples like the mother hounded to death by vicious underclass dross are in fact all to easy to find, from the father kicked to death for asking youths to stop vandalising his car or to keep the noise down a bit to 21 year old Goth girl Sophie Lancaster, who was kicked to death last year while walking through a park on her way home on a summers evening. The mother of those responsible also found the later court proceeding so hilarious and the grieving of the murdered girls parents and friends so funny that she had to be ordered to stop laughing in court. Perhaps if her son on conviction had been shot through the back of the head rather than sentenced to a few years in one of our HM prison hotels and she had been forcibly sterilised to stop her producing anymore vermin she might have shut up. As it is, I am sure that she and her thug litter are doing just fine.

And why is Mummy Underclass Scum doing fine? Because, since the day her mother, Granny Underclass Scum, gave birth to her in a previous litter, she has been sucked into our great ‘breed for greed’ culture whereby money, clothes and a house are provided immediately mummy scum gives birth and all she has to do to contribute is to open her legs. This means that her litter can be looked after immediately without her ever having to work or think about the responsibility that usually comes with having children. It also allows time for the newly arrived infant scum to be prepared for their own entry into our ‘breed and greed’ culture a few years later without mummy scum being too ‘stressed out’ by life.

Female adolescent scum are usually able to breed and produce a litter at about 12 or 13 years and, from that point, can often be in season and ready to breed again within weeks of giving birth. This increases their value and wealth within their chosen career path and will enable them, like Mummy Scum, to get a house and smooth their entry into our government’s womb wealth scheme. It also means that the scum family is now secure and provided for from cradle to grave without the hassle of providing for itself. This is mainly because daddy scum belongs to the ‘cum and run’ school of fatherhood whose perceived duties end as soon as his cock's out of whatever means-tested minge he’s just got lucky with.

Young underclass males are the scourge of New Britain, surly, feral, with no focus beyond their own stupidity and with a world view so myopicly narrow that they are reduced to stabbing and shooting each other over postcodes and iffy trainers. No doubt these geographic throwbacks would stab themselves if they ever got a ‘return to sender’ letter from a rival borough. These street name sados and wannabe criminals, whose entire life consists of mooching around shopping malls and council estates dressed like a twat monk in a short robe, are not fit for purpose. The purpose, in this instance, being human life.

Usually a species, even germs, create, mutate and continue to propagate because there is a benefit to their species in expanding their number, or of continuing to exist. The rise of our new sub-human species; scum-boy and scum-girl, however has broken natures rules. Were we lab rats or some form of bacteria, no doubt we would turn on these deformities and wipe them out but, because we are a caring community, we do the opposite and nurture them, feed and clothe them and then when they are big and strong, they thank us by stabbing and robbing us. Such is the way of the world in 21st Century New Britain.

This is our future; one that breeds but can’t read, one that steals but can’t work and one that kills because it doesn’t want to live or is too stupid to do more than exist.

Our society created this mess yet resolutely refuses to deal with it, rather it throws money and resources at a species that was created and spawned by the very excesses of our welfare culture and one which, given its womb wealth and breeding for greed training, will only ever take more and more. The state needs to be cruel to be kind, very cruel in fact and start penalizing illegitimate birth rather than rewarding it and then perhaps the womb can be separated from wealth and a child no longer seen as some form of cash commodity. It may also force the fathers and mothers of the feral vermin currently prowling our streets to do something about their offspring before next generation scum rises up from the sewers as on current trends they may actually cross the vermin / human divide in which case it will be a waste of timing drawing the curtains as they’ll come up through the sewer pipes.

THY SHALT NOT OFFEND, EVER!

2009-09-30T09:33:00.001-07:00

Twenty years ago I made a short film, Visions of Ecstasy, which was refused a certificate for release on the grounds that it was potentially blasphemous, effectively banning the film and stopping it from ever being shown. In the summing up I was deemed to have ‘outraged the divinity of Christ’ and it was feared that the public broadcasting or distribution of my film was a threat to public order and since then, for better or worse, ‘visions’ has sat on my shelf gathering dust. Preserving God’s divinity and saving the country’s streets from riots and baying mobs seeking divine retribution. As a result of this I have had, aside from a loathing of State censorship, an equally strong dislike of religion, particularly when followers of a religion seek to use the State to enforce their values. So it was with some surprise this week that I found myself not only siding with some Christians but actually getting angry on their behalf as the zealots of political correctness, appeasement and ‘cultural diversity’ sought to further the advancement of their new PC Jerusalem by censoring personal beliefs and the dress of Christians.

In the first of three separate incidents, a Christian couple, Ben and Vogelenzang, were charged with breaching Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which apparently covers causing harassment, alarm or distress, because they allegedly insulted a Muslim woman. The Muslim in question was staying at the Bounty House Hotel in Liverpool, which is run by the Vogelenzangs, when a conversation arose about her faith. During the chat one of the topics discussed was whether Jesus was a minor prophet as Islam teaches or whether he was the son of God as Christianity teaches.

It was further stated by the fun-loving intellectual Mr Vogelenzang, that Mohammed was a warlord, while the equally philosophical Mrs Vogelenzang stated that she thought the burka was a form of bondage for women. Apparently this line of conversation so outraged the woman that she felt compelled to rush to the nearest policeman who, instead of telling her to grow up and get a life, questioned the Christian couple and charged them with a ‘religiously-aggravated public order offense’. They are now awaiting trial.

Now, to my mind, having a chat or an argument about politics or religion or whatever is what makes the world go round, and a religiously-aggravated assault would have meant that the Christians had donned Mahamoud Ahmadi-Nejad face masks and fist-fucked Ms sanctimonious up the arse while reciting the ten commandments and telling her to convert, as opposed to having a quiet tete-á-tete about the pros and cons of shrink-to-fit burkas. Still, I’m sure that the police know best and rounding up Christian law-breakers is really going to make us all feel safe out on the streets.

The UK’s next ‘feed them to the lions’ moment came when Exeter NHS nurse, Shirley Chaplin (no relation to Charlie, though he probably scripted her case), refused to remove her crucifix neckless and now faces the sack. Chaplin is the second nurse this year to suffer this fate as NHS nurse Caroline Petrie was suspended in February for the same ‘offense’. Chaplin has apparently worn her crucifix for 38 years without hordes of non Christians running out of Exeter’s NHS hospitals in shock and horror that a ‘christian’ was openly walking the wards.

It would have been interesting had Exeter’s wannabe twat-boy suicide bomber, Muslim convert Nicky Reilly, not failed in his attempt to blow up a café to see whether the local NHS authorities would have rushed around getting Muslim nurses to remove their ‘approved’ headscarves in case they gave offense to non-muslim infidels who had just had their limbs blown off? I doubt it.

The UK’s third Christian pogrom has, surprise, surprise, come from the Government, where so much nonsense comes from these days, and is contained in the hysteria-driven new legislation called ‘lets protect little children from everything and wrap them in cotton wool until they are 18’, or the ‘Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’, as it's more popularly known.

Under this new legislation, anyone coming within two miles of children has to be vetted by the ISA to see if they are a crazed sexual predator, murderer or a Scout master whose idea of getting ‘hands-on’ experience is to turn the local camp into a nonce nirvana. Christians, who are well known for their happy-clappy-touchy-feely tendencies, are of course worried that the authorities have singled out the ‘touchy-feely’ part of the bible for special attention, and they have.

From summer 2010, everyone from School governors to dentists and nurses (though not crucifix-wearing ones as they will have all been sacked) must have their backgrounds checked by the ISA, as must authors who visit schools and parents who organise lifts to sports matches and so on. Christians fear that, because of their beliefs on homosexuality, marriage and of course shrink-to-fit burkas, they could be unfairly targeted by this legislation and have their careers ruined as a result, which, given current trends, is quite likely. So now the UK's Christians, the people that for years who were seen as the guiding moral force in the land, the people who used to pack our churches on a Sunday morning and whose quaintness was, like rain on bank holidays, robins and Rupert annuals, forever England, are now being persecuted by the forces of multiculturalism, mediocrity and modernity.

Normally, the trials of tribulations of a few Christians would, like the idle wind, pass me by, but such is the speed and unceasing advance of political correctness, appeasement and abasement by the authorities to all things Islamic that I felt genuinely aggrieved by their plight. In particular because petty officialdom mixed with an almost fawning desire to please and carry favour with all things Sharia (note the Home Office announcement to its employees not to eat food in front of their Muslim co-workers during Ramadan as it might make them feel hungry or Councils desire to rename Christmas as a ‘holiday’ and to remove Christmas trees) is destroying our pagan/Christian roots and the moral basis on which we live.

The religious base of this country is pagan and then Christian and, whether we like Christianity or loathe it, its key commandments form the moral code which holds us together. We know that it is wrong to kill, to steal and to fuck our friends' partners and get jealous when someone has more than us and these rules and a few others have for centuries made us what we are. As we have have become less religious so the laws have been weakened and amended, we no longer lock homosexual men up or burn witches, but generally the Christian moral code still holds sway, or rather it did.

With the demise of Christianity will fall our values, not all at once of course and not immediately, but they will fall. Every assault on Christianity is an assault on our wider freedoms, on women’s freedoms, on sexual freedom, on, ironically, religious freedom and the freedom of speech and into the gap will step another religion. A religion whose moral code allows for no dissent, no sexual freedom, no individual rights and which will enforce its laws totally. It is a religion that would, were it in control, certainly not allow a member of another religion to discuss and comment on its shortfalls and allow complaints against it to be made in law. In fact one of its first acts, should it become the leading religion in the UK, will almost certainly be to abolish Section 5 of the Public Order Act and its ubiquitous religiously-aggravated public order offense. We should abolish it first, reclaim the moral high ground, celebrate our culture and protect the Christians in our midst, for without them the country will move another step closer to the abyss.

Hallelujah

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

2009-09-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

For some reason, and without any rhyme, I have become increasingly obsessed by end of the world science fiction films these last few weeks. Usually my thoughts, such as they are, flit between the Third Reich, an idyllic England that probably never existed but in my mind resembles Devon circa 1965 and large, milky-white breasts preferably attached to a sex-crazed woman whose own obsession is to sit naked on my face and wriggle, slowly.

As an obsession this future sci fi doom scenario began quietly and, by obsessional standards, surreptitiously with my re-reading some predominately 1950s and 1960s novels over the last few weeks including John Wyndham’s brilliant Day of the Triffids and the gorgeously haunting Chocky, Edmund Cooper’s All Fools Day and Kronk and a few forgotten gems like Steve Frazee’s Sky Block (Bodley Head, 1955) and George O. Smith’s Hellflower (Bodley Head, 1955). These apocalyptic tomes sowed the seeds of my own personal journey to a kind of McCarthyite nirvana where mankind or rather mankind as personified by pockets of very middle class ‘nice’ people fought off nasty, untrustworthy aliens and, after many setbacks, won.

And thus it came to pass that I watched on an almost daily basis films like ‘War of the Worlds’ including both the 1953 version and the 2005 versions, Independence Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Day After, Threads, The Omega Man, Day of the Triffids, No Blade of Grass, Village of the Damned, The Earth Dies Screaming, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Gattica, I Robot, Planet of the Apes and a film that terrorized me as an eight year old, Dr Who - Invasion Earth 2150 AD.

Why my usually earth-bound mind had filled with end-of-the-world visions perplexed me for a while, particularly as all references to this phenomenon usually cite the fifties fear of communism and the burgeoning Cold War as the cause. Which, given that all the West has to fear coming out of Russia right now is the nouveau riche and visually disturbing fashion, meant I was obviously barking at the wrong shoulder pads. But fifties sci fi films did capture a mood and a sense of a nation's fear. Fear of communists and of invasion purvey films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars more than anything else and, despite Senator Joe McCarthy's perhaps overzealous patriotism, the alien was the bad guy, and the bad guy was communist scum, admittedly portrayed as a little green man, but commie scum nevertheless.

It is interesting that in the original 1953 version of War of the Worlds, mankind, personified by action man actor Gene Barry, is prepared to fight the alien no matter what the cost and to exhaust every remedy in their desire to fight to the last. But in Spielberg's 2005 reworking of the War of the Worlds. mankind, personified by new man Tom Cruise, is portrayed as a fleeing, craven rabble where even the ‘hero’ is shown killing a man who had hidden him and his daughter from the aliens because the man who saves him is prepared to fight the invader and Cruise is worried that the noise of the man’s gun might alert other nearby aliens and consequently endanger him and his daughter. So Spielberg reduces the fighter to a crazed ‘survivalist’ that Cruise has to kill in order to survive. Crazed man bad, craven man good is the modern message which that means that 21st Century man doesn’t kill and fight the invader he hides and flees and lets the alien assimilate him and his culture. Ultimately of course, mankind fails and is only saved by our bacteria which, unsurprisingly given how generally revolting we all are, poisons and kills the aliens. But still Spielberg leads by example and the example is give in.

In our brave new world there is no modern McCarthy to alert the citizens to the threat of an alien, dangerous ideal. Nor is there a fear of another Cold War because Communism has been trounced by the Capitalist West and hurrah the wicked commie alien witch is dead. Or is she? Perhaps she’s just changed sex, grown a beard and started believing in an ideology that is as vicious and as threatening to our way of life as anything that Marx and Lenin concocted. In fact, if anything, the witches new cave dwelling cronies are more dangerous because, since the fifties, we have lost the will to fight the alien and those that can or do want to fight, are portrayed, like Spielberg's gibbering survivalist, as dangerous fools. It is no coincidence that George Bush’s attempts, tragic as they were, to fight Islam were damned as the futile gestures of a ‘stupid’ man. The new ‘wise’ men reason and emphasize with the alien and alien culture for they see only goodness in aliens and will ‘assimilate’ their culture into our culture and eventually our differences will blur and we will all live as one. Cue singing birds and smiling, multi ethnic crowd.

In the post WWII world, where the shadow cast by Nagasaki and Hiroshima was still fresh and communist expansion into China and Korea were just happening, McCarthy saw a threat to the US and the US way of life that was very real and his ‘scare-monger’ views permeated society creating witch-hunts against perceived communists. Reds-under-the-bed scare stories were everywhere and many card carrying communists, trade unionists, socialists and indeed totally innocentists were arrested and quizzed by the FBI and also, which is often forgotten, many real Moscow connected spies and radicals were outed and exposed. Despite the cost in liberal sensibilities and a few left wing casualties, the Cold War was won and communist ideology silenced.

The ‘red’ Russian alien too would eventually be defeated, and ironically by another ‘tough’ actor from the fifties, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was also portrayed as stupid and hateful by the liberal media and, in particular, Europe’s left-leaning intelligentsia who ruthlessly lampooned Reagan from the moment he took office. They were so clever and he was so stupid but then what could Europe expect from America? What indeed. Here, proclaimed the liberal alien loving intelligentsia, is a crazed, gibbering, communist-baiting half-wit who will start a nuclear war, a man who won’t even talk to the Russian aliens. Well the alien-loving intelligentsia were wrong and the ‘stupid’ actor was right and communism collapsed and right now the intelligentsia are wrong again, only now there’s a ‘smart’ man in the Whitehouse with the hots for bearded alien witches and Spielberg is writing the script.

The 21st Century alien is not to be feared, its followers are not to be hated, and most of all it is not to be fought. In fact we created the alien with our bad policies and imperialist ways and now must make amends and even if the aliens do bad things now and then like fly planes into tall buildings or blow up tube trains we mustn’t get angry because most aliens aren’t like that and when they are its our fault anyway. We should in fact listen to the new Obama disciples, men like actor Sean Penn and director Oliver Stone, who has just made a love-you hugumentary about Venezuelan President, the thug Hugo Chavez, and who paraded with him arm in arm at the Venice film festival last week. Stone leads by example and gets into bed with the enemy. Not for Stone, the red-under-the-bed, the reds in his world are in his bed and fucking him up the arse!

No, the witch is not dead, she’s alive, has a beard, a poe-face, a hatred of women and a circumcised clitoris-severing cock and is preparing to lead her people out of the caves and into the promised land or, to be more specific, Europe. We now live in a world where the fifties' science fiction cold war analogies have become realities, only no one is listening. We need a big bad wolf like McCarthy to stir the people up and champion our imperialist, capitalist, wonderful and flawed world before it is too late and yes, we probably need a ‘stupid’ commie hating leader too. One who speaks from the heart rather than one who speaks well to the heart and who isn’t afraid to look a crafty alien in the eye from time to time and, if necessary, blow his head off. But most of all we need to tell Oliver Stone he’s crap.

Mad, Bad and Culled: Come Back Eugenics, All is Forgiven

2009-08-24T05:47:00.000-07:00

Apparently the UK now has some 84,150 people locked up in its prisons, give or take the odd dying train-robber and Libyan terrorist, with more being added every day. This, given the fact that you have to be on your twentieth offense or whatever before one of our courts would even consider locking you up, means that there are probably one to two million criminally minded types or their dependents hanging around, feeding off welfare, stealing what they can, breeding or generally behaving like some parasitic munchkin any one time.

This vast criminally-minded sway of the population is the Underclass, the great cradle to grave, totally welfare dependent, semi-literate, thieving subhuman dross that has sunk its rotten teeth into the soft belly of Brown’s Britain and is, in conjunction with the Government, bleeding it dry.

For years successive UK governments have cosseted the weak, the needy and the medically unfit along with the undeserving, the could work but won’t, those that can take whatever the State has to offer and more, and turn welfare dependency into an art form. They are encouraged to do so at every turn by a system that rewards sloth and indolence as much as it penalizes success. 21st Century Britain is rotting from the inside and yet our leaders go on prescribing more of the same, like some quack doctor that goes on pumping mercury into a patient even when it is obvious that his medicine is killing him.

Our ‘we’re all victims now’ culture, coupled with the States self-flagellating obsession with human rights and being seen to be politically correct, has now become so insidious and all pervasive that many of us utter and enact PC pieties with the same gusto that a religious zealot once used in trying to do, and being seen to do, God’s work. Both kinds of zealotry are insufferable and both carry the same degree of saintly sanctimoniousness but whereas, at least for most of the last hundred years, Christianity operated separately from the state and strived to instill a basic set of moral values in the population, the modern politically driven PC mandarin is driven not by morality but by the spurious concept that all humans have rights and that, contrary to modern notions of evolution, that we are also all equal.

We are also all vulnerable and must therefore also be protected from all possible harm which has led to the formation and writing of new legislation under the ‘catch-all’ header of ‘Health and Safety’, the politically correct world’s Sermon on the Mount, the Holy Grail of the blame someone else, Help me I’m a victim give me compensation, Ism-ist culture that is destroying Western life faster than the plague wiped out our ancestors.

Now a criminal has rights, his skin colour cannot be mentioned as that is racist, his photograph cannot be displayed as that breaches his human rights, his religion has to be respected along with his sexuality, food intake, living space, hair style, and so on infinitum. The Victim has less rights. In the UK, defending your home against burglars can make you more of a criminal that the burglar. Hurting or hitting a criminal is a minefield of politically driven nonsense that rarely favours the victim and all the while the crime rate climbs, though now of course criminals can add the ‘credit crunch’ to their lexicon of woes, grievances and excuses for their criminality. This is the ‘you made me a criminal so my crime is your fault’ concept. We are in fact the cause of crime, not the criminals.

I though would like to see a state that removed all rights from criminals other that the right to exist and only then if they had committed a crime that didn’t warrant the death penalty. Murderers and other criminal dross should be killed. To my mind, the day that a criminal commits a crime is the day that their ‘human rights’ cease. California’s “three strikes and you’re out’ legislation whereby any criminal convicted of more than three offenses was put away for life seemed pretty fair. If you haven’t learned that crime is pretty stupid after getting caught and convicted twice then maybe jail is the best place for you to be after all.

In the US and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a far more dramatic, draconian and, many would say, unacceptable policy with regards not just to criminals, but to their offspring, families, the disabled, the infirm, and those on the margins of society, this policy's name was Eugenics and in the US a policy of sterilizing criminals to stop them breeding and creating more criminals caused consternation and fear in prisons throughout the country. Eventually the war and concerns at the Germans' capacity for death (even in the early 1930s the Nazis were killing tens of thousands of the so-called feeble-minded and sterilizing thousands more under the guise of eugenics) ensured that US lawyers would be able to protect prisoners' rights to their bodies.

Consigned to the lunatic fridges of the science world after WWII’s eugenics nightmare showed that the Nazis' enthusiasm for bumping off anyone with so much as a cleft palette had led to the killing of some six million Jews, homosexuals, communists, Slavs and a large number of Gypsies, meant that the idea of the State killing off its perceived undesirables was going to have to take a back seat for a while. But, ideas like Eugenics, which is basically the study or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive traits), have a habit of coming back. As they say in the bible (Genesis 40-41) ‘you can’t keep a good man down’ (though actually you can if you shoot him).

Modern science, with its ability to ‘enhance’ babies in the womb, clone, alter cells, preventing certain hereditary diseases from occurring, understanding DNA and so on, show that we are getting extremely close to creating a ‘perfect’ human or at least science's idea of a perfect human. Indeed, James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, who is also an outspoken proponent of using genetic engineering to "redesign" future children and "improve" the human species. said that: "If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease.... So I'd like to get rid of that.... Those parents who enhance their children, then their children are going to be the ones who dominate the world.... People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

Yet, while the world talks of the perfect human, our society appears obsessed with encouraging the rise of the imperfect human. We dumb down, we despise elites, we mock intelligence and celebrate stupidity, we ignore differences of race and ability for fear of nebulous ‘rights’ and we nurture a parasitic criminal underclass allowing it to breed and fester while undermining and damning the rest of society. The underclass is like a great sway of vermin that lives, like rats, only a few feet from us at any one time. The underclass does no work, contributes nothing, is uneducated, steals, is violent, takes up property and landspace, and constantly whines for more. It is ungrateful, vile, and dangerous, yet we pay it millions upon millions of pounds every year. We provide the feckless young underclass girls, pregnant almost as soon as they can be, with homes and money, rewarding their careless promiscuity, young underclass males can procreate at will as the state will pay for their offspring. All responsibility for their actions is absolved and paid for by the State. This is anti-eugenics, the rise of stupidman.

The 21st Century Brave New World is not populated by the beautiful and the ultra intelligent rather we are evolving the super-stupid. The new stupidtelligentsia is probably the first species on earth that is regressing and disproving Darwin’s theory of evolution at the same time. Each generation born in the underclass has less brain power, is more brutal, less able to speak and more criminally minded that the last and each generation is more likely to destroy the hand that feeds it, us.

Eugenics may have had a bad start and a bad history but it offers a solution for the future, a solution that we will inevitably begin to be used as it becomes available. For, as sure as part of our population rejoices in its own squallor and simian qualities, so another will be striving for higher goals, to produce the perfect human and drive the human race forwards. It will be interesting to see how the champions of the underclass and of political correctness and Health and Safety deal with the rise of the über babe... Born of human to be better than what went before, or born of subhuman to be less than... No doubt the only winners, as in all things, will be the lawyers, a species that neither evolves or regresses but, like God, just is.

THE AGE OF THE ELOI

2009-08-03T06:43:00.000-07:00

The soft, fluffy, cotton wool mindset that seems to have reduced most of the world's left/right political animals to a sort of sludge-brained Eloi have somehow convinced themselves and, seemingly, most of the population, that the secret of a happy life is now to log-on, dumb-down, spend-large, think-small (if at all) and care lots. Empathy is the new apathy. I feel, you feel, we all feel but ideally I feel more than you. Now, if a butterfly sheds a tear in Japan, there’s hysterical grief in New York.

From President Obama’s recent beer swilling love-in with a policeman and a crabby black professor whose brilliant IQ he demonstrated by breaking into his own house (the professor then cleverly got himself arrested by getting all mouthy with the policeman who had come to check out a reported burglary), to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s lamentable attempt at bonhomie on breakfast TV, our leaders strive to be our mates.

A few weeks ago, when Gordon Brown tried to get all pally with the nation over concerns that hirsute singer Susan Boyle was going loopy and spent his airtime discussing Boyle, while at that very moment Moslem psychos were dicing their British hostages (reader’s may recall that Boyle’s sudden fame and wealth coupled with her inability to shave her face had made her go insane). No doubt the link between sudden fame and madness might go some way to explaining Brown’s own transition from smug and inept, but little known Chancellor of the Exchequer, to smug, power-crazed, I-can-walk-on-water-and-heal-the-world loony, Prime Minister. Our leaders are now desperate to connect with the people and more importantly to be seen connecting with the people. To show us that they ‘feel’ and ‘share’ our concerns: that our issues, no matter how trivial, are now their issues. That these tears of concerns are crocodile tears and not butterfly tears is now irrelevant, if they feel then we feel and vice versa.

Obama maybe in charge of the most powerful nation on earth, but years of touchy-feely rhetoric from the liberal left/right intelligentsia, coupled with his predecessors' failings and perceived gungho US-style Jingoism, have created the USA’s first Presidential enoch. Obama may be black, but his balls are distinctly pink and, judging from the amount of make-up he’s wearing, possibly shrinking as well. So when Iran’s religious thugs stamped all over their people’s valiant attempt at protest it was no surprise that the US uttered barely a word in protest. It should also be no surprise that Iran is now storming ahead developing their nuclear bomb or that North Korea can can lob nuclear test missiles around with impunity . After all, what’s Obama’s new all inclusive US of A going to do to stop them? Have a group hug probably or, maybe, if Obama gets really angry, he’ll stamp his feet and buy a new dress - cos he’s worth it and anyway that’ll show ‘em.

Our leaders though are only reflecting the deeper ‘nicey’ malaise that is sweeping the West. Now that political correctness, health and safety mania, sexual, religious and racial offend-thee-not legislation and a total obsession with making sure that no one is hurt or emotionally upset by life we are collectively dumbing down and regressing so fast that soon we’ll all be on a par with the Taliban. Lest we forget the Taliban are a species that, in 2000 years, has barely evolved beyond the stone-age; not, for them two brain cells when one will do.

It is telling too that the UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband and the Obama administration now want to arrange for talks and hugging with the Taliban. No doubt in this touchy-feely world we can overlook the fact that the Taliban blows up and murders school children in an effort to stop young girls being educated, that men can be killed for shaving and that being caught with satanic objects like a radio will get you thrown into a Taliban slammer. The liberal left/right coalition also conveniently ignores and turns a blind eye to the fact that the Taliban’s treatment of women is on a par with our treatment of battery hens only worse, given that we thankfully don’t stone chickens to death or burn them alive. Oh and lest we forget to the Taliban homosexuality is an abomination, so no same-sex beard love-ins in Afghanistan unless Susan Boyle decides to drop in for a sing-along and a bit of back door action.

We now have a world at the pinnacle of our achievement so far and we can either progress or, in a fit of mass hysteria, embrace a utopia that never was, can be, nor will ever be despite Obama’s pink testicles and Gordon Brown’s Saviour complex. What we have instead is a slowly evolving do nothing, want everything, emotional feel for everyone, upset no one, we are all equal, no gain cos we don’t want the pain, con trick. We are rapidly morphing from a can be, can do people, into a should we, can we, what if population of dullards not fit for anything except emotional turpitude and emphasizing with celebrities.

In the 1960s film version of H G Wells novel the Time Machine, the hero, played by actor Rod Taylor, stumbles across a seemingly idilic scene where young, good looking people sit around a river bank eating and drinking, seemingly without a care in the world. Suddenly a young woman falls into the river and starts drowning. She screams but the people ignore her cries and carry on eating and drinking, oblivious to her plight. These are the Eloi, a people who want everything but do nothing.

Then today a news story broke of a man who drowned in 18 inches of water after his car plunged down a steep bank into a stream. The rescue services and police arrived quickly along with a ‘health and safety’ officer who deemed the bank and water too dangerous for the men present to attempt to rescue the man and consequently a unit with 'water experience' were summoned from 50 mies away. While they waited for the second unit to arrive the men present sat around drinking tea while the man cried for help and died.

In the Time Machine the hero, in despair at what mankind had become, cried out to the Eloi:

"What have you done? Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating so that you can let it crumble to dust. A million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams, for what?!!! So you can swim, and dance, and play”.

Had the film been made now Rod Taylor would of course have hugged them...

SPASTICS ELASTIC

2009-07-15T07:49:00.001-07:00

The reissuing of the book Art of the Nasty which Salvation originally published in 1998, which has now been revised and updated and published anew by FAB Press, has, along with the passing uncut of Lars von Triers' new film The Antichrist and the reclassifying of an episode of Friends from PG to a 12 for the use of the expression ‘laundry spaz’, meant that film censorship is again in the news. Has the BBFC gone too far? Is the BBFC too soft on sex and violence? Is the reclassifying of Friends politically correct lunacy?

Who knows and who cares?

What matters ultimately is the quality of the work on screen and our response to it. Adults will respond to something that they don’t like or which offends their tastes by switching off, not buying something or through disinterest. They do not need a censor telling them that this year's PC bugbears are offensive ‘words’, but showing a close-up of a woman hacking off her clitoris or a man ejaculating blood, as is the case in The Antichrist, is now OK.

Jennifer Aniston’s Friends character, Rachel, used the expression ‘laundry spaz’ to describe her ineptness in using a washing machine. According to the BBFC’s head of policy, Peter Johnson, ‘spaz’ is “short for spastic or ‘mong’ (originally a reference to people with Down’s syndrome), which is quite common in American works and we (the BBFC) have found that UK audiences are quite offended... research told us that for the public this is now as important as drugs or horror or sex”. Boo hoo.

What Mr Johnson and co at the BBFC mean is that they now seek offense, that they see racial and disability discrimination, sexism, agism, homophobia and religious hatred seeping out of the cinema screen relentlessly. Now censorship is morphing, moving away from the old taboos of the sexually explicit and the gratuitously violent and into a new, quasi Orwellian world of thought control and new speak where disapproved words and ideas outside of the new norms are excised and erased forever.

This move is the censors Shangrila where they can be part of the brave new world where hatred and wickedness are excised not just from film but ultimately from our minds. Spaz may have been one small word for Rachel but it was a whole dictionary for the BBFC. Already, filmmakers and scriptwriters are pouring over their Thesauruses in search of nicer, more cryptic ways, of calling a dwarf a ‘dwarf’ or of insulting a black or gay man without using the ‘n’ or ‘f’ words. If they can’t find the appropriate ‘nicer’ euphemism then rest assured that the BBFC will have a whole selection of tasty morsels in their new ‘it's a wonderful world’ lexicon of life. When opened, it plays ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’, unless you’re a spaz of course in which case you can just dribble along to the chorus. Offensive? Well yes. Should I or anyone else be stopped from saying things like this? No.

The episode of Friends that caused all the fuss was an early episode that consequently fell foul of the BBFC’s new offend-thee-not word holocaust, which is currently culling non pc words from our vocabulary faster that you say spastics elastic to someone with a speech impediment. Such is the odious advancement of the notion that we are all equal and of equal worth (except white, working class males and Christians who are of course scum), and being of equal worth should not be offended or discriminated against in any way least we get upset or emotionally damaged. Hence highlighting the noxious and improper use of the word ‘spaz’ in Friends which might not only ‘offend’ us but legitimate spazes as well, that is someone born with spastic diplegia, or hypertonia, which is better known as cerebral palsy, or just plain ‘spastic’ but which has now be reclassified by the generic term ‘disabled’. Likewise the ‘Spastics Society’ was rechristened ‘Scope’ in 1994 which of course means nothing and offends no one and therefore conforms to the new pc mantras of inclusivity, touchyfeely, niceness where no one gets hurt. No matter that you have an incurable neurological disorder that will probably kill you by age thirty, just so long as no one refers to you as a spaz it’ll all be alright and life is so much better for the rest of us now that your offensive sounding ‘spastic’ disability has morphed into ‘scope’, which of course rhymes with ‘hope’, which is wonderful and sounds so much nicer.

Likewise, the BBFC will no doubt be removing words like nigger, poof, faggot, cripple, spic, yid and so on from films where their use is deemed inappropriate or likely to cause offense. Yet, why is it so offensive? ‘Sticks and stones may break our bones but words will never hurt us’ children use to chant in response to being called a fat pig, or indeed a spaz. Yet in our new utopian society where you can get three months community service for mugging someone yet years for offending another race or religion, words not only hurt they are deemed so dangerous that they cannot be heard or spoken. Silence in Brown’s Britain is indeed golden.

What is it that modern society now fears so much that we have to censor words, and has in a sense made words more alarming to the BBFC than the sight of a woman mutilating her vagina? Is it that words hurt? Or that words make us do things, that they inspire us to hate as well as to love or like? That they can make us despise someone or something that pictures cannot, or is it that these now ‘forbidden’ words are part of something intangible that the new politically correct quasi religion of mainstream soft left/right political thought cannot tolerate? That some thoughts and the words that represent them are now deemed so dangerous that they have become the new taboos? I think so.

Hatred of a religion or race is a taboo. Hatred of a particular sexuality is a taboo. So is questioning women’s rights or the rights of the disabled or rights for other groups. All are now protected and enshrined in law. Discrimination is in many cases a crime as is the telling of racist or sexist or religious jokes to various degrees a crime. One may argue that this is a good thing. That allowing groups and individuals the freedom to express hate or to promote hatred against an ethnic or specific minority is bad and unnecessary in these enlightened times. Yet there is a balance to be struck between protecting society from those that potentially would destroy it or aspects of it and an individual's right to express his or her disgust, or hatred of that society.

By censoring words, the BBFC and the government that sanctions and endorses their decisions are denying those individuals, and the wider voice of dissension that doesn’t buy into this new nicetopia, a voice. And when people are denied a voice they get angry.

In the US, freedom of expression is enshrined in law as the First Amendment and protects the extremes from the mainstream. So pornographers and the Ku Klux Klan can sup with Pro Lifers and radical Islamists and no one gets hurts. American society manages to be what the UK aspires to be, but which in our new politically driven times is failing to be; a true Democracy. The BBFC and those that seek and take offense so readily should remember that the first recorded case of word censorship was of the philosopher Socrates whose writings were believed to be corrupting youth, his punishment was death...

I VOTE, THEREFORE I AM

2009-06-22T03:51:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been historic for many reasons. In the UK, our main political parties have disgraced themselves so much that they may well have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Indeed, Labour and the rubbish that is Gordon Brown may well be dying before our eyes and it may yet be that Labour will collapse as an electoral force in much the same way that the Liberals did in 1921 when dissatisfaction, with their handling of the First World War, the suffragettes and Irish Home Rule, all combined to convince the electorate that the once great Liberal party was a weak and spent force. Indeed, in the general election of 1922 the Liberal vote totally collapsed allowing the Labour Party to become the main opposition to the Conservatives for the first time. The Liberal Party never recovered...

This would be exciting if the Conservative or Liberal parties offered an exciting alternative, unfortunately they don’t, in fact, many of the expenses-fiddling MPs belong to the Conservative Party anyway and, more importantly, neither the Tories or the Liberals have anything new to say. The reality is that our three once great political parties and those that join them and represent them at Westminster are tired, bereft of ideas, indolent and corrupt. Theirs is the politics of the sound bite and the vacuous, of the craven preaching to craving, whose political agenda is that of the prostitute who ‘will be whatever you want me to be’ and whose ‘passionate beliefs’ are rehearsed and acted out before us with all the conviction of a poor man’s Hamlet performed by the local amateur dramatic society.

Anyone who watched Gordon Brown’s ludicrous ramblings last week as he sought to galvanise Labour Party members would have seen right through Brown’s vainglorious displays of ‘passion’ as he listed his intention, at a time when the country is collapsing under the burden of State debt, of spending yet more money we don’t have eliminating child poverty, youth unemployment, third world hunger and, if I remember correctly, curing AIDS in Africa. Each tear-jerker policy accompanied by Brown’s now familiar punching of his fist into the palm of his other hand, while with his one good eye he stares wildly around like some myopic cyclops buoyed up on crack-cocaine and his own rhetoric. No wonder that the latest reports have him planning to slink out of office some time soon so avoiding the double whammy of a decimated Labour vote and an economy reduced to the level of basket case Zimbabwe. It's no surprise that Gordon Brown is suddenly so keen on giving money to Africa as the only countries likely to take in a buffoon like Brown once he decides to flee the UK as his financial chickens come home to roost will be the the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia or Zimbabwe, though I suspect that even Robert Mugabe may think twice before letting Brown get at his coffers.

So it was moving and wonderful to see the brave and truly passionate men and women of Iran braving that regime's religious zealots and Revolutionary Guards to march through Tehran’s streets demanding that their votes count. We forget in the UK when we take our democracy for granted that, in other countries, the right to vote is often a fragile right and that people, as in Iraq and Iran, brave life and limb literally just to put their precious ‘X’ next to their candidate of choice.

I remember the collapse of the Shah’s regime in 1979 and watched the Iranian Revolution unfold as an impotent West and in particular an impotent and useless US administration led by Jimmy Carter, floundered and vacillated as disaster followed disaster and the seeds of Islamic fundamentalism were sown. So it would be genuinely exciting if the people of Iran were able to topple and overthrow what is currently one of the most destabilizing and dangerous states in the world. It is also worth remembering that the pre-revolutionary Iran was one of the most pro West Muslim countries in the Arab world and one of the most modern and forward looking despite the Shah’s excesses and abuses of power and its people deserve a lot better than being led by a second rate Holocaust denier with a death wish who wants to lob nuclear bombs around.

It's a shame then that, while some of those most deserving of democracy fight and die for their right to choose their political leaders and style of government that, in the UK, we seem to have chosen the ‘am I bovvered?’ path to political oblivion. It's ironic too that we have democracy but are represented by politicians and political parties that are so ghastly that we can no longer be bothered to vote while those who can’t vote but want to are currently represented by some of the bravest people alive, themselves.

Perhaps when the UK’s political system collapses or when our increasingly invasive police state finally crosses the line and takes control because our politicians are so crap that they can no longer do their job then people may realise what we had. Though I doubt it, for now our democracy is about the freedom to watch Jade Goody die, or read Katie Price’s thoughts on sex or fly to our second home in Malaga or whatever. Where is my Vote? is the cry on the streets of Tehran ours may well be Vote - Why should I?

We may soon have the answer.

Democracy Betrayed, Betrayed by Democracy

2009-05-22T03:24:00.001-07:00

England is often cited as the Mother of Democracy, a defender of freedom and a nation that values the beliefs and hopes of its citizens above all, and who will, if necessary, defend those beliefs to the death. Yet, since this nation and its people last fought for its survival in World War II, some 70 years ago, our Governments, politicians, and the Establishment that nurtures them have slowly eroded our freedoms, ignored the values of this nations people, mocked our culture and betrayed our beliefs. In so doing, they have created a society and country that is corrupt, decadent (in a bad way) and totally at odds with the nation our forebears fought and died for all those years ago.

These last few months have shown the people of this country, the ‘Mother of Democracy’ just how corrupt, weak, criminal, shameless and our utterly immoral our politicians and the Establishment have become. Not content with riding rough-shod over the values of centuries, of destroying this nations identity, of mocking its laws, its religions, its indigenous peoples and our morals they have looted and stolen at will. The credit crunch and the expenses scandal may well prove to be the defining moment, the events that finally tipped the scales between public indifference to the machinations of our self-serving politicians and financial institutions to real public anger at our current malaise.

What Labour has done, as to various degrees the majority of governments since 1945, is pursue the creation of a racially harmonious, sexually progressive and socially cohesive society where crime, poverty, racialism, disadvantage, class divides and equal opportunity prevailed. Indeed, with the best of intentions, the new European ideal was to be colour blind, racially mixed, classless, sexless and devoid of strife and, in order to achieve this, our leaders and betters have passed umpteen laws and sublimated our culture in pursuit of an unattainable Utopia that has absolutely ignored our past and will destroy our future.

So it is, for the last 65 years our politicians gradually, and with increasing fervor under New Labour, have sought to limit opposition and silence criticism of their new multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-everything Shangri La. Yet, by criminalizing our right to expression, successive governments have in turn denied us the benefits of the Democracy bequeathed to us by forefathers. Instead, we are being subjected to the iniquities and vagaries of a vile, weak and utterly useless system of beliefs that has no mandate, no validity and no longer even the veneer that it has the law on its side. For the utter contempt by which our politicians, and the Establishment which props them up, have lined their pockets and feathered their nests should be the last straw, for democracy has damned us and we in turn should damn the democracy that protects them.

What is the point of democracy if those empowered by its citizens steal from its coffers and pursue political objectives regardless of the wishes of its citizens? Maybe it's because our politicians hold us in contempt. Maybe its because our hopes and fears are too basic and simple for our grandiose politicians, with their notions of a vast multicultural disneyland, to bother with.

After all, most people believe in the death penalty for murder and child molestation, yet such attitudes are mocked by our leaders. People under the threat of prosecution may seem to embrace the fact that successive governments have filled this country to overflowing with the world's human flotsam and jetsam, and that the son of God was probably a sodomite who took it up the ass to save the mankind yet, I think not.

Rather it may be that the people of this country are sick of the rubbish done to them in their name. Sick of the vested interest groups lining their bank accounts with Euro grants paid for by our taxes. Sick of lying and thieving politicians who patronize them on the one hand and buy their second homes from them on the other and, most of all I suspect, sick of the mess that England has become.

Politicians may say sorry but words cost nothing and, in these circumstances, come very cheap indeed. In fact, Gordon Brown and his ilk are, in my opinion, for their fleecing and making destitute of our economy and in the mass immigration that they have overseen and encouraged, treasonable. They have engineered the virtual financial and racial destruction of our nation and it is yet possible that this country will collapse or at best emerge greatly altered. How altered depends on how angry the people of England are. In times passed, traitors' heads were stuck up on pikes on the top of the Tower of London, where their sightless dead eyes could gaze out over the City of London. It would be fitting if Brown and his cronies could share the same fate. So I hope that the people of this nation are very angry indeed...