Thursday 8 January 2009

Culture Wars Begin At Home




Dumb Jon and Stan and Bob are much exercised over the culture wars this week.

And quite right too.

If grinning, child-destroying evil can be hailed worldwide as heroic and just but careful, measured resistance to this evil can be slandered and libelled to millions as evil instead, then we are way, way behind in the war for peoples' feeling and imaginations.

Here's a little point that James Higham points out from Conservative Home.


"I stopped giving to Christian Aid a long time ago and have never given to Oxfam or Muslim Aid.
Many charities are now highly opinionated. Open Europe and Peter Hitchens recently exposed some pro-Lisbon Treaty charities.
Those charities are entitled to their views, I suppose, but they'll never get another penny from me."


Many so-called charities and human-rights groups are leftist propaganda fronts.
I know that they receive a lot of funding from government and other government-funded 'charities.'
Here's stuff about this con trick from the libertarian Devil's Kitchen site.


"However, I am fed to the back teeth with "charities" that are effectively government agencies—QUANGOS, if you will—which earn their thirty pieces of silver by parroting government policy and lobbying for proposed government legislation.
"SmokeFree Action is headed up by the biggest fake charity of all: Action of Smoking and Health (ASH). ASH, like all the rest of the "stakeholders", were created by the government but try their best to pretend to be a grass-roots organisation. Since they are registered with the charities commission it makes it that bit easier to inspect their accounts:
Year ended 31st March 2007
Department of Health: £210,400
Wales Assembly Government: £110,000
Supporting charities: £185,228
Donations & legacies received: £11,143


Incidentally, take another look at that last figure. That is the full amount that was voluntarily given to this 'charity' in a whole year. To give you a frame of reference, the Cat's Protection League received over £30 million in private donations in the same year. The fucking Donkey Sanctuary was given over £20 million.
ASH - one of the most powerful charities in the UK - made eleven grand. If they were left to fend for themselves they wouldn't have the money to rent an office. They would be hard pushed to send out a solitary press release, let alone change the law of the fucking land every five minutes."


Now, at the weekend long ago and just prior to the time I began the briefest and one of the least glorious military careers in the British Army's history, I was sent out from a party to look for liquid reinforcements in one of those huge, trackless London housing estates. No off-licences or shops were open at that time of night, so it had to be a pub.

And what a pub: it wasn’t called The Potato Famine and Semtex, but it was immediately obvious it was Irish and not in a Ballykissangel way.


Pause.


Back to topic after surfing for images of Devla Kerwin.


And there was a collection going on; someone was passing a green velvet cushion around and little paper shamrocks were for sale for a Maggie each (it was the early 1980’s), and people were paying up. The cheerful chappie with the hat asked me, once I had come back from the bar laden with take-out bottles of Guinness, if I’d like to make a donation for ‘the boys.’

I said: ‘I’ll tell you what. I’m heading out for where that money’s going to be spent soon enough, and when I get there and I meet any of ‘the boys’ I’ll be sure to give them a small piece of metal in person. Maybe lots.’

Actually I didn’t say that. Instead, I made some soppy excuse - being outnumbered by plenty to one - and apparently the only Englishman within screaming distance. I left, in the best traditions of suburban middle-class libertarians* everywhere, to get drunker and blame the State for everything.


But suppose I’d paid? Not all that money would have gone to Phlobby Beobachter : some of it must surely end being spent on ammunition or explosives to send an actual, non-chickening-out defender of freedom to Valhalla ‘way too early.


So here’s the thing. We are up against Nu Labour’s open-handed spending on ‘charities’; not to say the fountain of oil-for-female-genital-mutilation-and-9/11 Saudi Arabian petrodollars, but the Widow’s Mite and all that…


When Julia showed up how feculent the childcare aristocracy had been about Baby P, I cancelled my NSPCC subscription.

I emailed replies and links to Ambush Predator to their ‘help prevent any further baby P’s’ begging emails, and I explained very politely to the young man who rang me (ever worked on the phones? – rudeness is right up there with the big wreckers of civilisation like car stereos and anything academic with ‘studies’ at the end of its name) about my subscription that I had cancelled it because, instead of calling for Haringey Social Services to be replaced with competents, their boss had sided with the three monkeys at the coal face. Chocolate-covered face. Dying face.


Every little helps, as I remind Mrs Northwester on the Queen’s Birthday and The Last Night Of The Proms, and so writing back to begging letters from lefty charities might cost them time, and make some of their employees think and maybe mend their ways.


And then there’s talking to those cute young things with clip-boards from Greenpeace or Amnesty in the High Street.

Five minutes listening to us is five minutes the industry-wreckers and Hezbollah-appeasers aren’t collecting money. And it’s odds-on that no-one has shown them a different point of view.


I think I’ll give it a go. Got to start somewhere, right?

So it's off down the canal for me to scatter breadcrumbs for stout English ducks and to chuck in a couple of plastic carrier bags for those bloody Communist turtles.




* Look, I was young, I needed the money and I thought nobody was going to get hurt, okay?

Home


BTW, my tiny personal donation of human love went equally to the Microloan Foundation and the Poppy Appeal.


4 comments:

James Higham said...

And what a pub: it wasn’t called The Potato Famine and Semtex, but it was immediately obvious it was Irish and not in a Ballykissangel way.

:)

Hacked Off said...

Yeah, Kilburn and the "collections for the boys" was a delight.

Mind you, there was the 24 hour offy if you bought in wholesale quantities. Run by an Indian, not a Bog Trotter.

Ballykissmyarseangel.

The Penguin

North Northwester said...

TRP, yes, I believe it was Kiburn. Spooky for provincial kid brought up in the suburbs.
Some hero I was - my mayfly military career was in a service corps rather than a fighting regiment but I sure was in the Royal Brown Trousers that night.

North Northwester said...

James; thank you too for the praise- always glad to have a felicitous phrase appreciated.

 

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