The Year of the Trolls

So a very Merry Christmas to all (both!?) my remaining readers.  I hope that you and yours have a peaceful and loving day and live safely and happily throughout the feast and New Year to come.

And if that is all, be off about it my friends. Wassail!

I for one will be celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ who came to earth to save us from our own chosen sins and to give us hope and strength and some ideas of how to live as men as God intended rather than as devils as his Enemy so often tempts us to do. And to you who share this belief and that is all (and it’s the biggest ‘all’ imaginable for creatures such as we) then God bless you and keep you and see you in church.

We must live in this world even if some of us are always aiming for the next (and who does that? I mean who can think of Heaven all the time? Who has the time?) And this is a political blog, when I blog at all.

Much of the emotional impact of the Nativity story is aroused imagining such a weak and defenceless creature as a baby, born in an outhouse in a divided and oppressed province of the most efficient and brutal tyranny of the ancient world, bereft of powerful protectors (powerful in the earthy sense) who would go on to teach us how not to be tyrannical in our lives and brutal in our souls and who still somehow won a battle for us even at the moment when Rome’s earthly power was at its most thorough and lethal…

After such a story, it seems foolish not to feel hope for the underdog, the oppressed and despised and the ridiculed. So in addition to the promise of eternal life and the prospect of knowing how and why not to be a plague and a famine to our neighbours, hope’s a pretty good feeling to have.

Nothing’s as precious in this life or the next than the love of Jesus, but if we must live with our neighbours and those who sin against us, then we must attend to the arrangements by which we live those lives.

And in this fallen world of the flesh and humanity and nations, 2016 was a barnstormer, wasn’t it?

In Britain and America this year and most recently in Italy, the despised, derided and persecuted ordinary folk of certain European or European-descended nations stood up against the might of today’s Romes: the centralized states with all their police and surveillance powers; the Academy from Reception class to the Senior Common Rooms; almost all broadcasters and all but a handful on newspapers; the bulk of show business and celebrity culture; the bureaucracies and free enterprise corporations of persuasion; street thug ‘protestors’ and ever-offended and threatening ‘minorities’; the European Union and the American Deep State; the banks and you name it…We stood up to them and won.

That’s hope. The hope exists that amongst other things, bloggers large and small and posters and pundits and tweeters joining their voices in a growing clamour of those who oppose the official lies and seek to speak truth… and can win.

And win we did.

Brexit. Trump. The defeated referendum.

Would any or all of those battles been won by us weak and sinful folk trying to be the good guys if you and your friends and allies had said less, posted or tweeted fewer times for freedom and patriotism and good government in 2016? Either in your despair or in your hope, you all helped make it happen. And some of you said many, many words.

2017 will be the year they try even harder to take it all back: more viciously and ruthlessly than ever, with the German Government and others deciding once more to define what is truth and to enforce it, our war continues.

But in the meantime, amongst other groups, 2016 was The Year of the Troll.

Buy Trolls mercandise here and here.