Britain's Got Cultural Stockholm Syndrome

For some time I've wondered how the UK's tolerant, inclusivity loving, diversity embracing, multiculturally aware, sexually outreaching and intolerant of intolerance establishment would deal with the inextricable march of Islamic fundamentalism and all that comes with it? Would our new enlightened leaders finally stand up to Islam's inherent homophobia or challenge its attitude to women's rights, or even, occasionally speak out against its treatment of animals, arranged marriages, female circumcision or criticise this politicised religion in anyway? 

The answer of course is not just no, but is, in fact, a much more sinister form of creeping cultural appeasement in which our establishment, (by establishment I mean everyone from politicians, to the police, councils and councillors, the Civil Service, educators at schools and universities, the mainstream media and those whose powers, when combined, effectively control what we say, read, and ultimately think), is nolonger just accommodating fundamentalist Islam, but is slowly being absorbed into it. This is the same way a hostage comes to care for, and eventually ally themselves with their captors; a paradoxical psychological process or phenomenon known as the Stockholm Syndrome.

This process of cultural, spiritual and political acquiescence has been slowly evolving over the last twenty five years and I think probably began, not with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, but with the fatwa issued against the UK author Salman Rushdie in 1989 by Iran's Revolutionary leader, the charismatic and media-savvy, Ayatollah Khomeini. For while the sight of Muslim demonstrators in London, Bradford and other English cities burning copies of Rushdie's book, the Satanic Verses, shocked and upset many on the soft left of the UK's then establishment, there were also many, even then, who for political expediency refused to directly condemn either the fatwa or the book burnings. Indeed some of the most notable deniers of all were the then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley and, Labour's then Shadow Foreign Secretary, Gerald Kaufman who are typical of those who have been championing multiculturalism since its inception.

Hattersley, a rather pompous man who has ironically re-invented himself as a man of letters and all-round bon viveur since leaving politics in 1992, though unfortunately having neither the intelligence or wit necessary to pull this off, tried to court the Muslims and find favour with Rushdie and his supporters at the same time. Firstly in a sop to his mainly Muslim constituents he called on Rushdie to cancel the paperback edition of the Satanic Verses as this would 'signify his regret for the offence, and assuage Muslim anger'. To make sure he won the most votes in the next election Hattersley further stated that "we might even have to support Islam's right to declare a fatwa against offending infidels". 


Secondly, remembering that he was also in the process of being reborn as an literary intellectual Hattersley added that a "free society does not ban books and nor does in allow writers and publishers to be blackmailed and intimidated" before going on to demonstrate that he was both intimidated and prepared to ban the paperback edition. 

The singularly unpleasant and caustic Gerald Kaufman was even more direct in his defence of the protesting Muslims as he immediately linked criticism of their protests as an attack on the emerging holy of holies, multiculturalism. By doing so, Kaufman demonstrated how in future, criticism of racially, sexually or religiously sensitive topics could be deflected or nullified by terming any such attacks 'racist', 'sexist', 'homophobic' or Islamophobic and if those terms didn't apply then in an emergency criticism could simply be branded as hate speech or incitement or extremism.

However, in 1989 this form of cultural censorship and politically correct trickery was in its infancy which makes Kaufman's early use of deflective guilt-speech all the more impressive:

"Britain has to decide if the freedom that we so value is consistent with attempts to suppress the religious practices of the county's fastest-growing faith. The fact that most of us do not share their beliefs (and some of us have no beliefs at all) is irrelevant. Only primitive people want to destroy everything they do not like or understand. The civilised, and sensible, approach is to welcome diversity as a stimulus to renewed vitality'.

Gerald Kaufman then went on to chastise and belittle English culture, its religion, education and values, which he saw, and still sees, as a threat to the greater good of multicultural and religious diversity. For Kaufman and other champions of multiculturalism, the immigrant is an almost revolutionary force that will firstly weaken, and then utterly transform the host nation. For Kaufman's defence of Islam and diversification is seething with class hatred and a barely concealed yearning to radically alter the then middle-class and Christian based society in which he was writing into an envisaged multicultural nirvana:

"the attack on multiculturalism is no more than a refined, middle-class version of "Paki-bashing". Yet people who ought to know better have joined in the chorus of intolerance. To demand that Muslims abandon their way of life - what they eat, how they dress, which way they choose their husbands and wives - is to make a frontal assault upon their faith. Islam is a total religion. People who go to church on Christmas Eve and think that makes them Christians may not realise that devout Muslims believe that the Qur'an should inform their whole lives. Britain has to decide if the freedom that we so value is consistent with attempts to suppress the religious practices of the country's fastest-growing faith."

Since then the Establishments cultural appeasement has continued unabated and witnessed everything from checkout girls refusing to handle wine purchases because it 'offends their religion', to, most recently, the London Metropolitan University deciding that in order to be more 'culturally sensitive' to Muslim students that it should ban alcohol. But beyond these ridiculous and almost daily examples of non Muslims self-abasing themselves before our would be conquerors, we are also beginning to see the slow realignment of the left's traditional political values when those values potentially clash with Islam.

Ken Livingstone, once the darling of the radical left and a champion of gay rights, has noticeably changed tact during his recent Lord Mayoral campaigning where Muslim votes now carry far more clout that the pink block. The Conservative Party, Livingstone declared in language more suited to the page of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, was 'riddled with people indulging in homosexuality' and further, that some Labour MPs only got their jobs because they were gay.  

Then, to further emphasise that he knows which side his bread is now buttered, at a speech delivered at the hardline North Central Mosque, Livingstone stated that he would make London 'A beacon of Islam', saying that if elected Mayor he would:

"…educate the mass of Londoners about Islam….I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands Islam's words and message. That will help to cement our city as a beacon that demonstrates the meaning of the words of the Prophet."

Not to be outdone, George Galloway, the milk-lapping, ex-Labour MP and founder of new political party Respect, who successfully campaigned and won the Bradford West by-election with Muslim support, is not only aggressively pro-Islam, but aggressively boasted of his teetotalism. He was also uncharacteristically quiet on where he stands on gay rights when challenged by activists. 

This is a new phase in our slow subjection to Islam and one that could finally wake up the mass of people to the threat posed by it to their cherished liberal democracy. However, for most people criticism of Islam is, as Gerald Kaufman so effectively said twenty years ago, a form of Paki-bashing and as such is still an anathema. Also people generally opt for a quite life and are more likely to begin accommodating their lifestyles with the changes creeping Islamification brings in its wake rather than manning the barricades or going on EDL marches. 

We can expect to see more politicians becoming apologists and converts to Islam, more shops and public meeting places becoming Islam-lite as they seek, not just the Islamic pound, but more importantly, Islamic approval. Equally interesting will be the shift of alignment as gay issues begin to lose their political kudos and the language of women's rights changes, as it already is. Recently the hijab has been described as 'liberating' and 'empowering' by female journalists trying to understand its growing use by female converts, further some Western commentators have said that arranged marriages work and that genital mutilation should not only be referred to as genital augmentation to avoid giving offence, but that clitoridectomies should be performed on the NHS as they would be done anyway. 

Apologism will be the new radicalism and, as demonstrated by the words of the Marxist activist and multicultural champion Tariq Ali which he wrote in the days immediately following the London tube bombings, fighting these views will soon be akin to heresy and probably just as dangerous. The alternative is, as with Stockholm Syndrome, that we come to love our oppressors... 

'In the face of terror attacks Anglo-Saxon politicians mouth the same rhetoric. One sentence in particular--shrouded in layers of untruth--is constantly repeated: 'We shall not permit these attacks to change our way of life.' It is a multi-purpose mantra. The first aim is to convince the public that the terrorists are crazed Muslims who are bombing modernity/democracy/freedom/ 'our values', etc. This is the first lie…'

Tariq Ali, after the London tube bombings in which 48 innocent Londoners were murdered and dozens more maimed and injured.

THE DEATH OF A BARE BREASTED COUNTESS

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.

x

THE UGLIFICATION OF BEAUTY

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.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

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

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.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

EUROPE: SCREAMING ON THE OUTSIDE, DYING ON THE INSIDE

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.

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.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

ON VOICEMAIL EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOUR SCREAMS

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