OOGLE ME

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.