I suppose this is the ultimate triumph of that Enlightenment motto that - like rather a large number of important Enlightenment notions - turns out to be have terms and conditions applying too; that The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword. Mere bone-breaking and arming oneself for gang war is just part of life’s rich pageant, but writing something nasty where other, er, trivia fans can read it; well, that’s fighting talk in these parts Mister.
Curiously, the libs are happy to give a pass to a century and a half of Marxists defaming business-owners and anyone who owns property above the level of, say, the rags, flat caps and clogs they stand up in as responsible for all the world’s evils. The culture of calling people ‘posh and ‘toffs’ and ‘bourgeois,’ or singing the cunts are still running the world, and the power that it brings to such folkwas never going to cause any lasting harm or kill morethana hundredmillionpeopleor so.
The upside is that, once the smoke from the mass graves of communism settled; not one posh person; kulak; suspect businessman or capitalist was able to tweet any racist remarks and so inspire a lynching is fifty or a hundred years’ time. So that’s okay. We’re saved.
Mark Steyn; praise him! Praise him! Praise his blessed name! points out that the White House , ie President Obama, is asking American Citizens to report anybody who says anything dodgy ( read 'critical') about the nationalisation of healthcare to the White House.
Get that? The head of government of a nuclear-armed nation wants freeborn American citizens to report on other freeborn American citizens for saying things about government policy that the self-same government doesn't believe to be true.
Now, I would never, under any circumstances, want to to interfere with the internal politics of a friendly, sovereign nation, and I don't mean to start now. However, if they want untrue things reporting to the State, what harm could it do to give them TRUE information about, for example, actual socialized medicine here in Britain, plus other delightful aspects of the Welfare State which the Democrats so openly and flatteringly admire, who better to put them right than us Brits?.
Obviously, the American State might find it a bit more difficult or time-consuming to sort out and investigate freeborn American citizens who have been saying untrue things about socialized medicine's bright American future, but surely it's a small price to pay for putting them right?
The email address is: flag@whitehouse.gov
Thanks for all the Liberty Ships and Shermans and tyres and GIs and Polaris and NATO and Desert Storm and Sat Nav guys.
I still meet Marxists – there are plenty of them about, alas.
And useful idiots who buy some of the prejudices. There’s a draught beer called something like ‘Revolution’ or ‘Revolutionary,’ and I refused the offer of a taster from the very nice lad who’s probably the world’s best barman, saying I couldn’t drink from a pump with the picture of a mass murderer (Che Guevara) on it. He asked me with characteristic charm didn’t I like Cubans.
I know, I know. I explained that I liked Cubans just fine, and that Guevara was an Argentine and Castro’s executioner which nonplussed the lad. Oh, well. However, there was that familiar surly killer’s face on an English beer pump.
Capitalism.
And then it reminded me of a thought I’d had when the Iron Curtain came down thanks to President Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Helmut Kohl, Lech Walesa and many, many millions of free people and many more of freedom’s martyrs.
You have to keep kicking the Marxists – they only sometimes learn, and the kicking keeps us fit.
They own the academy and broadcasting, and much of social services and child lawand protection, and they are utterly unrepentant about the harm they’ve done and continue to do.
And sometimes they come back.
In all its brutal, bloody years of existence what did the Soviet Union ever produce to make people happy?
What piece of purely original Soviet design or consumer product exists now or has ever existed as a household name as something that improved peoples’ lives – a little, or a lot?
I don’t mean recycled ideas and art from all the rest of the world – revived Greek sports in the Olympic Games or lavishly-staged classical music, ballet and drama; financed by underpaying and over-taxing the masses to keep the nomenklatura in luxury and Communist prestige high. I don’t mean prestige science project like the useless Sputnik or its deadly descendants or the suffocating tomb of Laika.
What was that elusive, but globally-known and much-loved Soviet thing?
It wasn’t two internationally-known brands of cola, or very many cheap and sometimes acceptable knock-offs; nor a cartoon mouse; nor a cartoon duck; nor another cartoon duck and a rabbit and a pig and another mouse and a coyote and a flightless bird and a cat and a mouse and a cat and a canary; it wasn’t the original teddy-bear or charming children’s stories about a silly old bear, or about a Peruvian bear, or a distinctively middle-class English bear, or a smarter-than-the average-bear. It wasn’t any kind of cheap, mass-produced car that made millions free and mobile and their lives more convenient and that made spare time freer and happier; nor its German or French, Italian or Japanese, South Korean or British, Spanish or even Swedish counterparts; nor was it medicine for children’s sore throats or teething or disposable nappies or automatic washing-machines for the plentiful reusable ones or vacuum cleaners; nor was it many brands of cosmetics or toiletries or domestic cleaners.
The Soviet good life wasn’t made world- famous by cheap computers or cameras or video-players or DVDs or personal stereos or hi-fis; nor were we made one jot happier by cheerful paperback love stories by the bucket load, or westerns or crime thrillers or brick-sized horror novels or supernatural romance; no-one’s Saturday morning lie-ins were saved by Soviet cartoon series or animal adventures or swop-shops or cowardly dogs chased by smugglers dressed as zombies.
Nobody chuckled the 1970s Recession nights away watching frustrated Soviet bachelors failing to seduce with their inaccessibly cute flat mates or Russian chancer-businessmen barely avoiding bankruptcy, invisible harridan wives and plodding police investigators, or back-to-the-land suburbanites or Ukrainian taxi drivers or Uzbek publicans hopelessly wooing their impossibly pretty and much smarter barmaids.
One dreary, enigmatic Soviet science-fiction film played against scores – hundreds – of space operas of varying quality and intelligence and a few truly original and interesting tales of time travel and inter-dimensional Illumination on large screen and small…and more than a few so-bad-they’re-funny utter howlers. No generation of kids ever dreamed of being secret KGB agents in their spare time and school holidays or imagined themselves setting out to rescue the trapped crews of sunken submarines or plummeting airliners from their secret bases in the Aral Sea or under mountains in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, and they were never encouraged into fantasies of evolving into peace-loving supermen whilst outsmarting alien invaders under Moscow’s polluted street.
Did you ever dance happily all night long to Soviet soul classics that segued into a Dialectical Materialist disco medley and then on into a last-orders set of Siberian party-time-sing-along classics? Me neither. And the good vodka was from Warrington.
Peace and freedom? Don’t make me laugh.
No. For all those high hopes upheld by massive lies in West and East alike – then and now - and for all its drifts and trenches and fields of slaughtered bodies; in all its miserable and harmful sixty-nine corpse-haunted years of existence, the Soviet produced on - just one – piece of original design that was manufactured in the millions.
We all recognize it immediately, and it’s still fulfilling the sole task that its creators intended it for even today.
The BNP cheats. Its supporters don’t wear sinister uniforms or flaunt evil-looking flags. They don’t disrupt pubic meetings as far as I know or try to intimidate democratically elected representatives of the people. Their local activists would be called ‘community leaders’ if they belonged to any other community than the white majority. If their famous race war is being planned in secret then it’s a damn well-kept secret, though some comment posters on some of their blogs look pretty bloody iffy even to my frothing-at-the-mouth, gun-me-down-like-a-rabid-dog Right-wing eyes.
No matter. I’m angry about this and so I’m going to labour the point two days running. Let’s forget the candidates themselves, their party and their policies real and imagined. Let’s read those numbers again. The number of people voting BNP across the UK as a whole went up slightly, from 808,201 to 943,598 in the European elections, but went down slightly in the two regions where it gained MEPs, with the party benefitting from a collapse in the Labour vote. They won 6.2% of votes, compared with 8.6% for the Green Party, 13.7% for the Lib Dems, 15.7% for Labour, 16.5% for the UK Independence Party and 27.7% for the Conservatives.
943,598 legally resident, fully-enfranchised British subjects cast their votes in a properly-run secret ballot for a legal organization whose candidates were not even in jail and on hunger strike or calling for the deaths of British soldiers or anything in the trusting and perhaps naïve faith that their own humanity mattered enough that their choices would be respected in the same way as the candidates of all the other parties would insist on being respected despite their recent financial and legislative records.
Apparently, someone has decided that this is not the case.They aren’t real people or proper people and their tribunes can be physically attacked and prevented from public speaking with immunity. And who decided this?
Well, the Labour Party, for starters – two of whose supporters I work with closely, and who yesterday expressed delight that Nick Griffin had been egged. Discussing this, I asked whether it would have been even more democratic if the missiles had been stones, or petrol bombs or grenades. This point missed their brains by several million realities, it seems, and they went on to discuss what a child had thought when he asked an adult what the man had done wrong. One colleague replied ‘Nothing, yet.’ The other one's making sure, I suppose, that the child in question knows which elected officials it’s going to be OK to attack and presumably with which weapons and weapon systems. That old Colorado Beetle's got a lot to answer for. If I’d suggested that we should egg people whose parties and fellow ideologues have recently killed and are still killing actual civilians and British soldiers, they’d have been all over me like a cheap suit.
I’m grateful to my colleagues for their words, though.
Previously I’d been finding it difficult to identify the fascists.
Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Waheed has been pelted with eggs and forced to abandon a press conference outside Parliament.
Dozens of protesters disrupted the event, which follows Muslim Brotherhood winning its first two seats in the European Parliament. Chanting anti-Islamist slogans and holding placards they surrounded Mr Waheed as he was bundled into a car.
Mr Waheed was elected for the North West region - a result condemned by parties across the political spectrum. Mr Waheed and Mohommed Ali, who was elected in the Yorkshire and Humber region, staged a press conference on College Green, opposite the Houses of Parliament. The Muslim Brotherhood leader began the event by holding up copies of national newspapers and talking about what he said were media lies about him and his party.
He denied he had past links with Sheikh Ragheb Harb, as the former Hezbollah leader "was very hostile to the Hizb ut Tahrir from which I am from".
He had been speaking for about two minutes when about 50 to 100 protesters marched towards him chanting slogans and throwing eggs.
Jamal Waheed was forced to retreat from College Green. There was a brief scuffle as Mr Waheed was jostled by protesters - and a scrum of cameramen - before the Muslim Brotherhood leader was bundled into the back seat of a waiting car by his security men. A tourist who was caught up in the melee was treated in an ambulance, after suffering an injured leg. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: "We are aware of the incident and will pursue charges if a complaint is made."
Members of Unite Against Islamism, a new group supported by synagogues and MPs from all parties, including Labour leader Gordon Brown, and veteran right wing campaigner Norman Tebbit, said they wanted to "defend democracy" against what they regard as the "theocratic" and "anti-Semitic" policies of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
One told the crowd his message for Mr Waheed was: "Wherever you go in this country we will make sure you are welcomed by demonstrations." The demonstrators kicked and hit the Muslim Brotherhood leader's car with their placards before cheering as he drove off.
Protest organiser Geert Wilders, national secretary of Unite Against Islamism, said he believed it was important to stand up to the Muslim Brotherhood.
"The majority of people did not vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, they did not vote at all. The Muslim Brotherhood was able to dupe them into saying that they had an answer to people's problems. "They presented themselves as a mainstream party. The reality was because the turnout was so low, they actually got elected."
Speaking to BBC News afterwards, Mr Waheed alleged that the three main political parties were trying to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood getting its message across by colluding with protesters who he said were mainly left-wing students. "It's a very, very sad day for British democracy," he said. "People should be entitled to hear what we have to say and to hear journalists question us robustly." He described protesters as an "organised mob that's backed by all three main parties to stop us getting our message across to the public" and added: "It does not represent ordinary people." He said he suffered only a "glancing splattering" with egg but a television cameraman was hit full in the face.
He says the Muslim Brotherhood is not anti-Semitic and says it won votes because it "spoke openly about the problem of Zionism".
And he argued that the "political elite" were responsible for making "the immigrant Muslim minority... second class citizens in every possible sphere".
Mr Waheed said the Muslim Brotherhood plans to hold a press conference in Manchester tomorrow and he hopes that the police will take action against any violent protests.
On Monday Tory leader David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said they were "sickened" by the Muslim Brotherhood 's win and Labour deputy Harriet Harman said it was "a terrible thing". The number of people voting Muslim Brotherhood across the UK as a whole went up slightly, from 808,201 to 943,598 in the European elections, but went down slightly in the two regions where it gained MEPs, with the brotherhood benefitting from a collapse in the Labour vote.
They won 6.2% of votes, compared with 8.6% for the Green Party, 13.7% for the Lib Dems, 15.7% for Labour, 16.5% for the UK Independence Party and 27.7% for the Conservatives.
I got going as well: some quips, a truly dreadful pun and…and then it struck me that I was wasting my time today.
This person is so far out of the world that we know and care about that even the pleasure of larting him remotely would be a guilty pleasure.
The British war dead don’t exist to him, or matter. The bed-wetting, emotionally retarded children of Israel unfortunate enough to live near the death-cult bearded crazy rocket monsters don’t matter to him. The Japanese and Nazi empires and what it took to stop them didn’t exist or matter to him; let alone the Soviet and Maoist and Cambodian charnel houses – they especially didn’t exist or matter to him – not to someone whose email address is
Miners poring by candlelight over Workers’ Educational Association books, or parsons meeting with local magnates to show off and explain about slavers’ chains and collars, or printers waiting to get into work at Wapping standing under a barrage of abuse and missiles; all nothing. Social Democracy and Christian Socialism, nothing; civic Conservatism and liberal individualism, nothing. Women’s’ suffrage and the Jarrow March, the Anti-Corn law League and the gentle, courageous work of pacifist nurses in the trenches, all nothing.
Modest, gradual, non-violent and piecemeal reform; worse than nothing – a foe to subvert or destroy.
His Manichean dualism with all good on his side and all evil everywhere else seems unlikely ever to let any other viewpoint in.
So I’d better do a bit, today, getting the message out elsewhere.
Sue’s idea is the first suggested incoming campaign to go on. Thanks, Sue.
Raw Dead Plant Diet Week.
Day Two.
Getting to me. Feinian colleague who can’t wait for Maggie to die to dance on her grave in ecstasies of delight over incoming snacks. Mange-tout and cucumber salsa not different enough from onion and cucumber salsa yesterday and not enough calories. More chocolate talk…gossip turns to pizza and slow cookers. I shall be strong. Got to stick it to the bad guys on blog tonight. Three more days of carrots and celery and not a crust or spud in sight.
