Generation XXX - Born to Porn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerald Celente.

Muscles in Search of a Tussle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WikiLeaks: Secrets, Lies and Egos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LET'S PARTY LIKE IT'S 1848

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Europe's Big, Flawed and Very Full Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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