Ho. Ho. Ho.

And we’re not talking Charlie’s Angels here.

My own angel is sleeping on for a while and so I’ll have time to post this before breakfast and all that festive and family stuff come into play.

First of all, I wish you a merry Christmas.

It’s kind of you to visit my blog and I hope that the rest of the day goes uphill for you after this! Leave a comment if you wish, and if I can’t answer today due to family commitments then perhaps we’ll meet tomorrow - all unknowing and in spirit if not in person - in line at the corner shop while queuing for the milk that we forgot to buy on Christmas Eve when we had the chance. Perhaps our eyes will meet for a moment of shared joy as the newspaper headlines glare at us, bringing their eternally uplifting Boxing Day message: More Of The Bloody Same. Perhaps also we shall find comfort in the ever-changing seasons of our beautiful planet, (and in the three inches of Global Warming through which we have trudged and slid to get there), and from the marvellous patterns of Mankind’s inventive and industrious existence as we stand amongst the cheerful new displays (pregnant as they are with hope and change even in the deep midwinter) of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs.

It’s been a funny old year even if you discount how our formerly-free nations’ leaders have sold us and our posterity into tax- and debt-slavery while nearly finishing the project of abolishing our traditional freedoms. In response to all this my ranting will, inshallah, go on at least until the General Election campaign begins. Thereafter I might go a bit quiet as I tramp the lonely streets of Castle City spreading the news of something-or-other amongst people who I hope won’t immediately become an angry mob.

But that’s enough about me. Tell me - how wonderful do you think I am?

In politics there’s nothing so befits a man as malicious spite and hatred against his oppressors. I hope - or rather I fear - that 2010 will supply us all with far too many opportunities and way too much motivation to call down the wrath of Heaven (or at least of an enraged electorate) on our tormentors’ heads. As 1500 of you each month pop over here to glimpse me doing so, I plan to carry on publishing my hate-filled hate speech material: varied as its topics, quality and its ‘good taste’ can be…

But blog ranting is business: not personal.

…Or is it?

The personal is the political.

How to get back at the jokers?

How best to wreak vengeance on the destroyers who’ve scythed their nihilistic way through our civilisation like locust/chainsaw hybrids?

Mrs. Northwester; who is worldly wise as well as a gift from Heaven, suggests that living happily ever after is the best revenge. Forgiveness is the best way to get even. This seems on the face of it to be a paradox: as oxymoronic as the phrase Television Personality or a tabloid headline; Jordan’s Secret Wish.

Vengeance can tear you up. It can weaken you and waste your energy and your time when you could be fighting in the war instead of bemoaning its horrors. I’ve been involved in one of those long, draw-out family feuds that last for years and waste the substance and shatter the peace of the very people whom you are born to care for. It’s been very tiring and has served no purpose at all and it’s hurt some of my nearest and dearest and it wasn’t worth a damn.

So I’ve stopped.

I’m now making the most of the post-war peace and hoping that I turn out to be Japan rather than Italy, or West Germany rather than East Germany. But the way to cope with it now (and what would have been the way to prevent its several brutal winters of guerilla warfare), would have been to forgive the guilty parties for their offences (if such they were) and to have moved onto a battlefield where my faction could win, and win big.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean being passive in the face of injustice or threatened harm (or why else do we get involved with politics?) but it does mean not being eaten up with hatred for enemies, and worse still for lackluster or former friends. It’s working for me, up to a point, and in this fallen world that’s pretty much all you can expect. I’ve had to make some ideological adjustments (the go-to guy for forgiveness isn’t Hermes Trismegistus or The Great Mother after all, but the birthday boy Himself).

But being less like Mister Angry about perceived hurts to me and mine has left me with more time and in better spirits to live my life and to politick. The peace has left me with more energy to spend on active politicking in the real world so I can stick it to the Marxists and Islamists and their useful fools and dhimmi apologists and thus to become more active in supporting the British part of what’s left of Western civilisation and in cheerleading for its overseas branches.

The political is the personal.

Our enemies want us demoralized.

The Marxists want us alienated from love of family and from affection to traditionally respected institutions. Each time the Combined Left gets a cheap laugh at the monarchy or a Christian minister or other, respected person or institution, they make us weaker and less able to stand up for what generations of struggling people have come to regard as good, or useful, or right. The Islamists want us to be made full of doubt about our right to exist and to lead our lives as we have come to: free in conscience and speech, in our dress and in our entertainments.

Both projects are negative. Their activists believe that they are positive visions of the future but they are wrong. All Marxism will bring is what it always does: all-too-believable large numbers in terms of body-counts and refugee figures, and unbelievably high numbers where tractor production and literacy rates are concerned. Whatever the Caliphate brings, we probably won’t understand it because the message will be in Arabic and I don’t expect anyone to be teaching foreign languages to kaffirs come that dread day.

I’m sure you are all impeccably polite: thoughtful; charitable and tolerant (hell, you visit me, which proves the tolerant part), and have no need for lessons from me in making your way through life with grace and gentility. But be of extra good cheer: your good deeds and polite words are subversive acts against our rulers. Indeed, they are revolutionary in the old sense of bringing the old times round again.

Not only are our goodnesses just a matter of just plain getting along and doing it right for the sake of it; they are artillery salvoes in the culture wars.

Every time a man opens a door for a woman and she accepts it gracefully rather than with a glare it’s a victory for both over the Radical Feminists who argue that men will always oppress women as long as free institutions survive.

Each time we let someone onto the main road in front of us instead of making them wait then we both have another small reason to be grateful for living in a polite culture that’s not at civil war with ‘reactionaries’ or ‘lesser breeds’ or ‘the bosses.’

Every charitable donation is a declaration of moral independence from our gigantic and pernicious Welfare State and a rebuke to those who argue that only government activity can secure happiness and health amongst the suffering.

Every minute spent comforting a friend instead of heading on to the next pub or to supper (as Mrs. Northwester did last night) is both living the ideal of western civilisation and at the same time a standing rebuke to those who say our country and its neighbours are places where love and decency can never truly exist until they have destroyed all that we now possess and they have built their paradises.

Whether our ability to be good to one another derives from the instincts of group solidarity inherited from thousands of generations of hunter-gatherers in Africa; or whether it is the evolved result of rational self-interest moulded into habits of courtesy and charity and learned from living amongst the free institutions of commerce, property and law; or whether it derives from something eternal and supernatural, it is a blessing and something to fight for.

And fight for it we should: sweetly in day-to-day life, I would suggest, and bitterly and with eager venom on the political battlefield when necessary.

Okay, I’ve buttonholed you at the party and blocked you off from the drinks table and more interesting company for long enough (assuming that you’ve even read this far). You’ll be wanting to get all festive and there’s a goose to prepare or a nut roast to defrost and antacids to chug (mea culpa.)

I expect to be back tomorrow - as bitter and cynical as ever - a northern brother to Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. But inasmuch as this day is about one idea of where that goodness comes from originally, (and just this once I promise); I’ll see your Merry Christmas and raise you a God bless you, if you can dig it.

North Northwester.

Picture from here.

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.