Hugo Rifkind is the son of Maggie’s cabinet minister, Malcolm Rifkind, so it shouldn’t surprise us that he espouses the same noxious politics as his father. He is like Boris Johnson in that he also has higher view of his own intelligence than he deserves. He once turned up on Mike’s blog trying to argue against him, only to run away when he started losing.
He turned up in the pages of the Spectator last week holding forth on the latest anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn and Momentum, a snippet of which was duly quoted in the I’s ‘Opinion Matrix’ column of selected short pieces from the rest of the press. Rifkind junior opined that, rather than trying to rebut the allegations of anti-Semitism, the Labour leader should reflect on why so many anti-Semites were attracted to anti-capitalism. It was all out of jealousy of more successful ethnic groups, he breezily declared.
Now it’s true that there, and always have been, anti-Semites amongst the Left. I found a book by one very Conservative writer in one secondhand bookshop about how many of the founders and leaders of early socialism were anti-Semites. It was clearly polemical. The argument running implicitly through such books is that because many of its leaders were anti-Semitic, socialism is intrinsically anti-Semitic. Which isn’t the case. Anti-Semitism is there, but it’s actually far less than on the right. And the Tories and their puppet media definitely don’t want you knowing that.
British Fascism grew out of right-wing, Die-Hard Conservatism at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It was fiercely anti-immigration, especially against Jews, who were held to be unassimilable orientals, like Muslims today. It spawned a range of racist organisations like the British Brothers’ League, and became particularly acute during the First World War, when Jewish industrialists of German origin, like Alfred Mond, were suspected of favouring Germany over Britain. While the Tories have subsequently tried to purge their party of racists and anti-Semites, they are still very much present.
It’s also a matter of considerable debate how anti-capitalist Fascism is. When Mussolini became president of Italy, he was backed by the industrial and financial elite, and declared that his party stood for Manchester economics – in other words, free trade. The corporate state he created, which boasted of having trade unionists and employers together in a Chamber of Fasci and Corporations, never did anything more than rubber stamp his own decisions as Duce. It was also designed to smash the power of the unions by leaving them under the control of the managers and proprietors.
In Nazi Germany, the Socialists, Communists and Anarchists were rounded up and sent to the concentration camps along with other dissidents and racial groups, including the mentally ill, male homosexuals, prostitutes and the disabled. So were trade unionists after the Nazis smashed them. And far from nationalising industry, as claimed by Conservatives in America and Britain, Hitler actually privatised a greater number of state-owned enterprises than other European governments at the time. He also made speeches hailing the biological superiority of the owners and leaders of industry, and declared his full support for free trade and competition, although later on he subjected industry to a weak form of corporatist organisation and imposed a rigid system of central planning.
The problem can therefore be reframed by asking why so many people on the right, believing in free trade and private property, are attracted to anti-Semitism? Part of the answer, it seems to me, is that they believe that free trade and private industry are the perfect system. The argument is that, if left alone by the government, industry will be run efficiently, workers receive their proper wages, people of talent will rise to the top, and society will become increasingly prosperous and well-organised.
When the opposite is true, when wages are falling and businesses closing, right-wingers look around for a scapegoat. They go a little way to realising that the fault is the capitalist system itself, but violently reject socialism itself. Hitler set on calling his party ‘Socialist’ because it appealed to those, who only had a hazy idea what the word meant, and as a deliberate provocation to real Socialists. They may reject laissez-faire free trade and impose some restrictions on private industry, such as subjection to central planning. But their critique of capitalism, in the case of the Nazis and the Fascist groups influenced by them, was based firmly on the notion that it was fundamentally good. It was just being undermined by the Jews. Thus Hitler in a speech started out by ranting about how the Nazis would overturn the exploiters, and throw their money boxes out into the streets. But he then turned this around to say it was only Jewish businessmen, who were the exploiters they would attack. Aryan Germans were entirely good, and respected their racial fellows in the workforce. They would not suffer any attack by Hitler’s thugs.
But Rifkind and the rest of the Tory party, and the Thatcherite entryists of the Blairites, really don’t want you knowing about all this. It would confirm too many ideas about racism in the Tory party, and their hypocrisy in the latest anti-Semitism smears.
They are using these smears to deflect attention away from the increasingly obvious failure of laissez-faire, neo-liberal capitalism. Don’t believe them, and their hypocritical smears and lies.
Racial nationalism is the official ideology of the BNP, National Front and others on the Fascist right. It’s the doctrine that only the traditional, white inhabitants of these islands are really British. It was supported by a wide section of the Conservative party base under Thatcher, although she tried to close it down and make sure that accounts of far-right infiltration of her party were never aired.
Despite this, it still lives on, and is promoted by some of the very same Conservative journalists now eagerly accusing Mike and the other victims of the smear campaign against the Labour left and critics of Israel.
A few years ago, I found myself looking around the Ethnicity section of the Central Library here in Bristol. Along with books on Black, Asian, and Gypsy culture, as well as studies of Jewish life and culture and analyses of anti-Semitism, I found a large volume on Whiteness as the defining characteristic of Britishness. The blurb on the back said something about Britishness being redefined in terms of culture, rather than ethnicity, in the wake of mass immigration. But for the mass of British people, the essential defining characteristic of Britishness was a White British origin. Which as a description of many people’s attitudes, is probably true. But this was more than a simple description of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ attitudes.
The book was a collection of writings on the subject, which included some far right journals promoting the idea, like the notorious Salisbury Review. It also included more respectable writers, like some of the famous hacks writing for the Telegraph, the Daily Heil, Express and the Spectator. The same journos I can remember complaining about the mass immigration of unassimilable immigrants. I can remember one of them in the Heil or Express – it was that long ago – raging about how unjust it was that coloured immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean found it easier to pass through the immigration restrictions than our racial kindred like White Canadians.
And these are pretty much the same newspapers and hacks now smearing Mike and the others as anti-Semites. Which shows their massive, gross hypocrisy, as 90 years or so ago, when Hitler was on the rise, these same newspapers hailed Hitler, in the case of the Mail with its notorious support for Mosley, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, or else were completely indifferent to the persecution of Jews under Nazism in Germany and Austria. There was also an attitude at the times that Jews were similarly not really European because of their origins in the Middle East. They were really orientals, with a different, and unassimilable culture and racial biology. Which is pretty much how many racists perceive Blacks and Asians today, and which, stripped of the racial biology, is the attitude of much of the Tory right and the right-wing press.
Mike and the others, who have been smeared by the Israel lobby and the Blairites, are not anti-Semites or racists. But the hacks smearing them – possibly including ‘Steerpike’ in the Spectator – are. And despite their lies, more and more people are becoming aware of how racist and hypocritical they are. They are using anti-Semitism as a weapon to destabilise Corbyn. But as Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite, and he is supported by very many Jews, anti-racists and Jewish groups, this will further serve to undermine public confidence in the press and mainstream media, and turn more people to getting their news from the Net. And these liars, bigots and moral frauds have only themselves to blame.
Here’s another snippet of information from that evil Russian propaganda machine, RT. And it’s one that very definitely hasn’t been on the mainstream news, which alone shows why we need alternative sources like RT and the others.
In this video, they reveal how 968 individuals from the Alt Right were referred to the government’s anti-extremism programme from March 2017, an increase of 28 per cent. 272 of these Fascists were under 15. 37 per cent of them were referred to the channel scheme, an increase from 26 per cent. There were 3,740 cases of Islamist extremism, but this had decreased by 26 per cent.
Clearly the majority of people being referred to Prevent are Islamist fanatics. But the extreme Right is doing its best to catch up fast. But no-one wants to talk about them, except the Israel lobby, which is trying its best to claim that it’s all about Momentum and the far Left in the Labour party. In America, Trump shut down the parts of the FBI which specifically investigated White Fascist terrorism. The government banned the Nazi youth group National Action last year, after the horrifying murder of Jo Cox. But the youthful storm troopers are still around. They’ve just gone under cover. They’re still training for violence, and making vile speeches about how the Jews are trying to destroy the White race through racial intermixing. And then there’s the influence of the Net, which allows Richard Spencer and the rest of them an outlet for their vile views.
But not a peep about this from the mainstream news. Probably for the same reasons that White racist shooters are always described as ‘lone wolves’ or ‘deeply disturbed individuals’, while Islamist butchers are called precisely what they are: terrorists. And so should murderous White fascists.
But despite the denials and smears of the Tories, the Conservative party has always had links to the extreme right, and consistently promoted the anti-immigration policies that are an integral part of modern British Fascism. Anyone remember the furore in the 1980s when parts of the Tory party declared they wanted ‘racial nationalism’ adopted as the party’s official policy? ‘Racial Nationalism’ is the ideology of the NF and BNP. Only White, traditional Brits, can be true citizens. It had massive support amongst the Union of Conservative Students, which is why Norman Fowler closed them down and merged them with the Young Conservatives to form Conservative Future. And a friend of mine in Cheltenham told me years ago that it split the Tories in his ward, as half of them were very definitely in favour of it.
This is what the Tory dominated media isn’t telling you. And by not doing so, they are reinforcing racist double standards and protecting the racist Tory right.
I found this little gem in the ‘Pseud’s Corner’ column of an old copy of Private Eye. Amid the usual, very pseudish remarks from football pundits and cookery writers comparing that last goal by Arsenal to Julius Caesar crossing the Tiber, or literary types extolling the virtues of their last excursion around the globe, where they took part in the ancient tribal ceremonies of primal peoples, was a truly astounding quote from the Young Master. This is, of course, the current darling of the Tory party, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who declared.
“I am a man of the people. Vox populi, vox dei!”
This was in response to Andrew Neil questioning him about the influence of public schools on British political life.
Rees-Mogg probably does see himself as ‘man of the people’. He’s in a party, which considers itself the natural party of government. Decades ago, the Tory ideologue, Trevor Oakeshott, tried to justify the overpowering influence of the middle classes by saying they were the modern equivalent of the barons who stood up to King John, in providing a bulwark against the power of the state. True in some case, but very wrong when the middle classes are in power, and the state functions as their servant.
Rees-Mogg has never, ever, remotely been a man of the people. He’s an aristo toff, who has made his money from investment banking. He holds deeply reactionary views on abortion and homosexuality, which are very much out of touch with those of the genuinely liberal middle and lower classes. And he has always represented the aristocracy and the rich against the poor, the sick, and the disabled. He began his political career in Scotland trying to folks of a declining fishing community that what this country really needed was to keep an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. In parliament, he has continued to promote the interests of the rich by demanding greater subsidies and tax cuts for them. For the poor, he has done nothing except demand greater tax increases on them, to subsidise the already very wealthy to whom he wants to give these tax cuts, and voted to cut welfare services and state funding for vital services. No doubt he genuinely believes all that Thatcherite bilge about making life as tough as possible for the poor in order to encourage them to work harder and do well for themselves.
Personally, he comes across as quiet-spoken, gentlemanly and polite. But he is not a man of the people. He hates them with a passion, but clearly thinks of himself as their champion and saviour against the dreaded welfare state.
Let’s prove him wrong and throw him out of parliament!
Although the comic has been revived and managed very successfully by Rebellion and its new editor for the past 15 or so years, some of the joy has gone. The close collaboration between writers and artists has disappeared, and the editor himself avoids close contact with the other creators. This is partly because of budget and time constraints. The attitude throughout the industry now seems to be one of diligent, quiet efficiency, rather than some of the fun-filled, boisterous meetings Mills and the others had, acting out what they wanted the characters to do in an atmosphere of playful fun. Not that it was always the case. Mills also worked hard, and as an editor he was often called up to deal with artists experiencing some form of crisis, including trying to stop one fellow from committing suicide. But the underlying cause of the decline in British comics remains unaddressed. This is the lack of ownership by the creators for their work. He states that this is the real reasons comics are declining, not computer games. They have those in France, but kids are still reading comics. He also talks about the immense fun he had over there with his Requiem: Vamnpire Knight strip, also available in English translation on the Net.
Mills also talks about some of the other strips he has worked on, which have influenced 2000AD, such as Battle, the notorious Action, Crisis and Toxic. Battle was a war comic, which Mills subverted with Charlie’s War, a First World War strip which had an anti-war message. Mills has come across a number of men, who joined the army through reading such comics. He’s very proud that Charlie’s War had the opposite effect, and after reading it one young lad decided he really didn’t want to after all. Mills is very political, and criticises British literature for its lack of working class heroes. He sees this as partly deliberate, as so many of the great adventure writers were connected to the Intelligence Services and the secret state. Names like John Buchan, Dennis Wheatly – who would have been gauleiter of London, had Hitler conquered Britain – and Ian Fleming. He describes how the script editor of Dr. who in the ’80s turned down a story he’d written, as it included a spaceship captain who was working class. The story has since been made into a CD adventure by Big Finish, and there have been absolutely no complaints.
Action was initially suspended, and then banned outright for its violence. It was also controversial as the first strip to feature a sympathetic, non-Nazi German hero in Hellman of Hammer Force. The comic was so hated by respectable society, that one of the presenters of Nationwide, a 70s current affairs magazine show pretty much like today’s One Show, tore a copy up on camera in front of one of the writers. After it returned, the violence because even more over the top to the point where it shocked Mills, leading to its eventual ban.
Mills is unhappy with SF as a vehicle for social comment, as he feels it is ducking the issue. And so he created Crisis and its Third World War strip, which was all about the exploitation of the Developing World and the politics of food. He’s particularly proud of one story about the scandal of Nestle’s baby milk. But this was completely beyond management’s ability to understand why he included this issue in a boy’s comic.
And Mills and his co-creators were also accused of anti-Semitism by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. They did a story about Palestinian, in which a militarised cop, or a member of the IDF, beats a protester so badly, that they break all his limbs, and he falls to the ground. The Board complained that the man’s broken body resembled a swastika, which shows they were reading things into it which weren’t there. The three other creators of the story were Jews, and Mills thought that the Board couldn’t accuse them all of being self-hating. The strip was published by Robert Maxwell, who told them where they could stuff their idea. He was a crook, who robbed the Mirror’s pension fund, but here he did the right thing. You can beat the Israel lobby if you stand up to them.
Mills is clearly a hard-working, passionate enthusiast for comics, and a determined supporter of his fellow writers and artist. He wishes the industry to go back and try to appeal again to young children, although he makes the point they’re ruder than the adult fans, with whom you can have interesting conversations at conventions. He admits that its much harder now to get published in 2000AD, but not impossible, and gives valuable, careful advice to aspiring writers and artists.
As well as a fascinating account of the rise and career of 2000AD, it was for me also quite a nostalgic read. I remember some of the strips Mills wrote for and created, including the comics Whizzer and Chips, Battle and Action. I have mixed feelings about Action. I enjoyed strips like One-Eyed Jack and Death Game 1999, based on the film Rollerball. I wasn’t so keen on Dredger, which did have some horrifying stories. One of these was a Russian dissident punished by having his brain gradually removed by surgery until he was vegetable, and another tale in which a foreign politician is murdered. Sulphuric acid is poured into his shower so that he literally goes down the drain. But the strip I really didn’t like was ‘Kids Rule UK’, set in a future where all adults had died, and Britain was run by violent kid’s gangs. I was bullied at school, and this was for me an all-too frightening concept. I also stopped reading 2000AD for a time, because the stories there were a bit too sadistic. Which was a pity, as I later found out, because I missed some great strips.
2000AD will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in a decade’s time, thanks to the inspiration of Pat Mills and his fellow creators. And I hope that afterwards the comic will go on to enjoy another fifty years under new, equally enthusiastic, committed and inspiring creators.
Splundig vur Thrigg, as the Mighty Tharg used to say.
The brutal treatment inflicted by the two ‘Prefects of Discipline’ understandable left Mills with a hatred of the Catholic church. He isn’t alone there. The Irish comedian Dave Allen, and his countryman, the much-loved Radio 2 broadcaster and presenter Terry Wogan, also had no particular love of the church because of the similar sadistic discipline they’d also received as part of their Catholic education. And I’ve met many ordinary people since then, who have also fallen away from the church, and often against Christianity altogether, because of it. One of my uncles was brought up a Catholic, but never attended church. This was partly due to the brutality of the monks, who taught him at his school.
Mills also corrects the impression that Judge Dredd was immediately the favourite strip in the comic. The good lawman wasn’t, and it was months before he attained that position. And he also attacks Michael Moorcock for his comments criticising the early 2000AD in the pages of the Observer. Moorcock was horrified by Invasion, and its tale of resistance to the conquest of Britain by the Russians, hastily changed two weeks or so before publication to ‘the Volgans’. Moorcock had been the boy editor of Tarzan comic, and declared that in his day the creators had cared about comics, unlike now, when the creators of 2000AD didn’t. This annoyed Mills, and obviously still rankles, because he and the others were putting a lot of work in to it, and creating characters that children would like and want to read about. One of the recommendations he makes to prospective comics’ creators is that writers should spend four weeks crafting their character, writing and rewriting the initial scripts and outlines of the character in order to get them just right. And artists need two weeks creating and revising their portrayal of them. This was difficult then, as creators were not paid for what Mike McMahon called ‘staring out of the window time’, though Mills generally managed to find someway round that. It’s impossible now, with tight budget and time constraints.
I can see Moorcock’s point about the Invasion strip. It wasn’t Mills’ own idea, although he did it well. True to his beliefs, its hero was working class, a docker called Bill Savage. He didn’t initially want to work on it, and was only persuaded to by the then editor telling him he could have Maggie Thatcher shot on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But it is a right-wing, Tory fantasy. It appeared at the tale end of the ’70s, when MI5, the CIA and Maggie Thatcher had all been convinced that the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, was a KGB agent, and the trade unions and the Labour party riddled with Communists or fellow-travelers ready to do the bidding of Moscow. The strikes in the period led to various arch-Tories, like the editor of the Times, Peregrine Worsthorne, trying to organise a coup against the 1975 Labour administration. And ITV launched their own wretched SF series, in which a group of resistance fighters battle a future socialist dictatorship.
He also discusses the office hatred of the character Finn and the man it was based on. Finn was Cornish, driving a taxi round the streets of Plymouth by day. He was practising witch, and at night battled the forces of evil and against social injustice. The character was based on a man he knew, an ex-squaddie who was a witch. Mills has great affection for this man, who introduced him to modern witchcraft, and in whose company Mills joined in ceremonies at the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire. But the management didn’t like him, and had him sacked. There was a persistent dislike of the character, which seemed to come from its basis in witchcraft, and Mills himself was the subject of lurid stories about what he was supposed to get up to at these ceremonies. This ended with the strip’s abrupt cancellation, without proper explanation. Mills states that he is very distantly related to one of the women executed for witchcraft at Salem, and so is very definitely down on people, who despise and malign witches.
I’m not surprised by either the rumours and the hostility to the strip. This was the 1990s, the heyday of the Satanism scare, when across America, Britain and Europe there were stories of gangs of Satanists abusing animals. Children were being conceived by abused women, used as ‘brood mares’, to be later used as sacrifices to Satan. It was all rubbish, but repeated by a wide range of people from Fundamentalist Christians to secular feminist social workers. And it destroyed many lives. You may remember the Orkney scandal, where forty children were taken into care following allegations of abuse. The minister at the local kirk was supposed to be a Satanist, who had an inverted crucifix hanging from his ceiling. It was no such thing. It was, in fact, a model aeroplane.
Much of this dangerous bilge came from a group of rightwing evangelicals at the Express. I’m not surprised. I can remember the Sunday Express repeating some of this drivel, including the ludicrous claim that CND was Satanic because of its symbol. This was declared to be an old medieval witchcraft symbol, based on a broken cross. I mentioned this once to a very left-wing, religious friend, who had been a member of the nuclear disarmament group. He looked straight at me and said levelly, ‘No. It’s semaphore’. The scare pretty much disappeared in Britain after a regular psychiatrist issued a report stating very firmly that such groups didn’t exist. There are several excellent books written against the scare. The two I read are Jeffrey S. Victor’s Satanic Panic and Peter Hough’s Witchcraft: A Strange Conflict. Victor is an American sociologist, and he takes apart both the claims and gives the sociological reasons behind them. Hough is one-time collaborator of ufologist Jenny Randles, and his book comes at it from a sympathetic viewpoint to modern witches and the occult milieu. He talks about the political beliefs of modern occultists. These naturally range all over the political spectrum, but the majority are Lib Dems or supporters of the Green Party and keen on protecting the environment. And far from sacrificing babies or animals, those I knew were more likely to be peaceful veggies than evil monsters straight from the pages of Dennis Wheatley or Hammer Horror.
The 1990s were also a period of crisis for the comic, which went into a spiral of decline as their best talent was stolen by DC for their Vertigo adult imprint. There was a succession of editors, who, flailing around for some way to halt the decline, blamed the remaining creators. They were increasingly critical, and seemed to be encouraging the abuse letters being sent to them from what seemed to be a small minority of fans. There were also plans to interest TV and Hollywood in developing 2000AD characters in film. Mills and Wagner were horrified to find they were giving away the rights dirt cheap – in one case as low as pound. The comic was close to collapse, but was eventually saved by Rebellion and its current editor.
Pat Mills is the creator and founding editor of 2000AD, and this is history of the comic as he remembers it, although he recognises that others’ memories may be different and contradict his. It takes its title from the watchwords of his most popular villain: Torquemada, the ultimate Fascist Grand Master of Termight, in a feudal age of space travel, violence and magic far in the future. The book is divided into three sections, each named after one of Torquemada’s three commands. The slogan even turned up on the Berlin wall, which figures. The East Germans had been living under a dictatorship not too different from Torquemada’s. It was anti-racist and anti-Fascist, but still very much a police state, where the country was watched and dissent ruthlessly crushed. A friend of mine also told me that the slogan was used by Adolf Hitler in a speech he gave to the Bund Deutscher Madel, or German Maids’ League, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Which also figures. Torquemada wanted to exterminate every intelligent alien race in the Galaxy, and was constantly making speeches exhorting humans not to ‘have truck with deviant, dally with the succubus’ and so on. In other words, no racial mixing. Which was definitely what the Nazis were trying to indoctrinate these girls with.
The book tells how Mills and John Wagner got sick of grinding out stories in a garden shed, lit by paraffin lamps, and moved to London to revolutionise British comics with creation of Battle, Action and 2000AD – the Galaxy’s greatest comic. At this stage of their career, Mills and Wagner were so poor that they couldn’t afford new typing paper after they ran out, and so at one point ended typing them up on tracing paper. The economics of writing stories was such that to make ends meet, you had to write several stories very quickly in a matter of days.
It is this attitude, and the British industry’s contemptible treatment of comics creators, that Mills returns to criticise throughout this book, making a very strong and convincing case that it is these attitudes that have caused the decline in comics in Britain in contrast to France, where they are flourishing. In Britain, comics creators do not own the rights to creations. They can be given to other writers and artists, and their creators are not paid royalties for them. In France, the reverse is true, and so comics creators spend years, decades, writing and drawing some of the greatest strips in the world. Think of such comic greats as Moebius, Caza, and Enki Bilal, and the rest of them, who came out of Metal Hurlant and les Humanoides Associes.
He also had to cope with the lack of interest in any reform from the old guard, who were quite simply just content to go on as they always had, until the industry finally collapsed and they were made unemployed or drew their pensions. They were shocked when Mills bought several books on science, because he was writing and editing a science fiction comic. This was too much for company management, who found the idea of doing research for a children’s comic ridiculous. And then there’s the issue of the studied contempt the management treated artists’ work. They used them on dartboards, or to plug drains. Several artists told Mills flatly that they weren’t going to work him as IPC was the company that closed down Frank Bellamy’s studio. Bellamy, along with Frank Hampson, was the awesome artist who worked on the classic Dan Dare. And his artwork was treated in the same contemptible fashion. As a result, much of it has been lost, although its still a massive favourite at fan conventions and when it comes on the market, rightly fetches high sums.
Mills tells the story of how he came to create favourite 2000AD characters like Judge Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Slaine and Finn. He champions the work of artists, who he feels have been unfairly neglected, or even vilified. They include Belardinelli for his contribution to the Slaine strip, which he is proud to have had put back into Titan’s reprints of the strip, as well as SMS, David Bircham, and Fay Dalton. SMS is a superb artist, whose work has appeared on the cover of Interzone, amongst others. He drew the ABC Warriors strip when they were trying to save Termight and the universe from destruction from an artificial black hole, created by Terra’s engineers to give them quick access to space and the Galaxy. One of the results was a whole city like the dimension-twisting drawings of the zarjaz Max Escher. Fay Dalton won a £1,000 prize in a competition to get more women into comics. She draws and paints in a retro style, looking back to the glamour of the 50s. She didn’t last long. It was too sexy for the puritanical Thargs. Then there was the sheer abuse some fans meted out to John Hicklenton, another awesome artist best known for his work on Nemesis the Warlock. Hicklenton was stricken with MS, and sadly ended his life in a Dignitas Clinic. His career and struggle with the condition was the subject of Channel 4 documentary a few years ago. His escape from this ‘medieval, terrorist disease’ was his art, and so it was particularly cruel that he should have subjected to often very coarse abuse.
Mills is also unhappy, and understandably so, about the way his then wife, and co-creator of Slaine, Angela Kincaid, was treated by the other writers and artists. She was the artist on the very first Slaine strip. This topped the reader’s polls that week, but she was very much excluded from the boy’s club of the other creators. No-one rang her up to congratulate her and she was ignored by them. This wouldn’t have occurred if she was a bloke.
Mills takes the time to correct a few myths. He was determined that it wouldn’t be a comic dominated by a main strip, which carried the others, like Captain Hurricane in Valiant. Instead, it was to be a comic of all main strips, including the revived Dan Dare, Mach 1, a superpowered secret agent based on The Six Million Dollar Man, and Shako. This was about a polar bear, who was being chased by the American army because it had swallowed a top secret, radioactive satellite that had crashed to Earth. He also talks about the creation of such fave strips as Ro-Busters, which became the ABC Warriors, and, of course, Nemesis the Warlock and the inspiration for Torquemada.
The evil Grand Master and Judge Dredd were based on two, viciously sadistic monks teaching at his old Roman Catholic school, and, he strongly hints, were paedophiles. One of them was yanked from teaching and sent to monastery in the Channel Islands to sort out his sexual appetites. He was later sacked, and returned briefly as a lay teacher, before being kicked again. The schoolboys made jokes about how the other monks on the island must be similarly depraved, and imagined what shipwrecked sailors would do. Coming up the beach to find the Brothers running towards them, they’d turn and head as quickly as possible back to the sea. But neither of the two were prosecuted. Other old boys have found literary outlets to express their pain and trauma at the hands of these monsters. Mills simply states that his is humiliating Torquemada.
As this is Good Friday, I thought I write about one of treatments of Christ’s trial and crucifixion in one of the other languages of Britain, the Celtic language of Cornwall. The Pascon Agan Arluth translates as ‘The Passion of Our Lord’ I think it was originally written in 1637 in Middle Cornish. There is a bilingual edition of the text in both Cornish and English published in the 1980s by the Cornish language publishers Dyllansow Truran. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more about it nor show a picture, because I’m afraid I’ve mislaid my copy. Dam’. But like the English mystery plays in England, its a classic of literature for Cornish, regardless of whether you’re a Christian or not.
Dyllansow Truran have also published a number of other classic works of Cornish literature, which also date from the 17th century, and which are also on religious themes. These include
Gwryans an Bys: A Medieval Cornish Drama, William Jordan 1611, translated and amended by R. Morton Nance (Mordon) and A.S.D. Smith (Caradar), ed. by E.G. Retallack Hooper (Talek) (Redruth, Cornwall: Dyllansow Truran 1986).
It was written by William Jordan of Helston, and then translated into English by John Keigwin eight decades later in 1691, at the request of the Bishop of Exeter, Sir Jonathan Trelawney. This edition follows the translation and unified spelling of the two revivalists of the Cornish language, Nance and Smith. It’s a rough retelling of the story of Genesis from God’s creation of the world, the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels, the temptation of Adam and Eve, Cain’s murder of Abel and his subsequent life, Enoch and his translation alive into heaven, and ends with Noah and God’s revelation to him of the Enochian laws. These are four simply laws that guarantee salvation to everyone, provided that they believe in one God. This is obviously one of them. I can’t remember the other two, but another is that people are not to eat meat cut from a living animal.
It begins with the lines from God the Father
Ego sum Alpha et Omega:
hep dalleth na dewethva
pur wyr my yu:
omma a-jy dhe’n clowdys
war fas an dowr, yn-certan,
Try Person yn un Deways,
ow kesregnya bya vyken
yn mur honor ha vertu.
My ha’w Map na’n Spyrys Sans
Try yth on yn un Substans,
comprehendys yn un Dew.
I am Alpha and Omega:
without beginning ore end
right truly am I:
here within the clouds
upon the face of the water, verily,
The Persons in one Godhead,
reigning together for ever
in great honour and power.
I and my son and the Holy Spirit
Three are we in one Substance,
Comprised in one God.
And ends with the epilogue
an keth jorna-ma y de –
deh’n Tas Dew re bo grassys:
why a welas, pup degree,
lyes mater gwaryes,
ha Creasyon oll a’n bys.
Ynweth oll why a welas
an keth bys-ma Consumyes
der lyvyow a dhowr pur vras.
Ny ve un mabden sparyas
ma’s Noy, y wrek, ha’y
fleghes.
Deugh avorow a dermyn:
why a wel maters pur vras
ha redempsyon grontys.
dre vercy a dhew on Tas
dhe sawya neb us Kellys.
Mynstrels, gwreugh heny pbyba
may hyllyn warbarth donsya,
del yu an vaner ha’n gys.
This same day is ended –
to the Father God be thanks:-
you have seen, every degree,
many matters acted,
and the creation of all the world.
Also you have seen, all of you,
this same world destroyed
by very great floods of water.
No one human being was spared
except Noah, his wife, and his children.
Come in time tomorrow:
you shall see very great matters,
and redemption granted
by the mercy of God the Father,
to save whoever is lost.
Minstrels, do you pipe for us
what we may dance together,
as is the manner and the fashion.
The play continued on a second day, but William Jordan didn’t write it down, and so it’s been lost.
The Camborne Play: A Verse Translation of the Beunans Meriasek by Myrna Combellach (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran 1988)
The play’s manuscript was written in 1504, though this is just the date the play was finally written down, and it may have been composed much earlier. The manuscript itself comprises there separate plays bound together in a logical sequence, with a cast of 120, and intended to be performed in the round, probably in a natural amphitheatre. Myrna Combellach’s version of the play was produced for a performance directed by Jerry Finch of for the Cornwall Drama Association at the Cornish Eisteddfod, 1986. It was rehearsed and performed at St. Paul’s Church, Truro, in February 1986, and the performers were a mixture of amateur, student and professional actors. The play is a treatment of the life of Camborne’s patron saint, Meriasek. Hence the title in Cornish Beunans Meriasek.
The blurb on the back cover reads
Vitality and joy of life are the keynotes of this new translation of the sixteenth century Cornish language play, Beunans Meriasek. In it, Camborne’s noble patron saint, Meriasek, is sent to school, refuses marriage and all world considerations, embarking instead on a priestly career of such piety that it ends in a bishopric of immense wealth and grandeur of the kind that he had studious worked to avoid all his life. Meanwhile, in Rome eight centuries earlier, the pagan emperor Constantine is stricken with leprosy, only to be cured by the outlawed Christian pope, Silvester, resulting in the Christian conversion of an empire. A black mass takes place, an evil worm of a dragon is slain, a forest is set on fire in Brittany, the Duke of Cornwall goes to war against paganism, and a third play on a completely different theme is added for good measure.
Today is Good Friday, the day when Christians commemorate the crucifixion and death of our Lord, and look forward to His resurrection on Easter Sunday.
But whatever you religious beliefs, or lack of them, I wish the readers of this blog a very happy and peaceful Easter holiday. Enjoy yourselves, and don’t let the squalid spawn of Thatcher grind you down!
The papers and TV news were naturally full of the anti-Corbyn rally organised by the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies of British Jews. They claim Corbyn is an anti-Semite and sides with anti-Semites in the Labour party. As I’ve blogged about countless times before, this is vile rubbish. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t. The real reason they were protesting is that he wants a just settlement with Palestinians which will stop the ethnic cleansing and the theft of their land. But this is too much for the racial nationalists of the Israel lobby, who are driven into a sanctimonious, self-righteous fury if anyone dares to mention how racist Israel is, or reports the brutality it metes out to the Palestinians and other Arabs.
Amongst the piccies of the pro-Israel racists and hypocrites all decrying Corbyn in the I newspaper was this little photo below.
It’s of a group from Labour Against the Witch Hunt. The I never commented on them, which seems to me to indicate that they either didn’t know who they were, and thought they were another group of anti-Corbyn protesters. Or the I knew full well who they were, but were afraid to point them out in case they too were smeared as anti-Semites simply for reporting them.
Labour Against the Witch Hunt very definitely aren’t connected to the Israel lobby, and the British mouthpieces like the Jewish Leadership Council. They directly opposed to them. They’re for all the Labour members, that have been wrongly expelled, suspended or smeared as anti-Semites. As I’ve stated repeatedly, these people include self-respecting, secular and Torah observant Jews and genuinely anti-racist gentiles. Many of these people, Jews and gentiles, have been attacked by real Nazis for trying to combat racism and anti-Semitism. And the Jews smeared are often people, who have suffered anti-Semitic abuse and assault. And I have no doubt that many of them did have family members butchered in the obscenity of the Holocaust.
But they are not going to get coverage from the press, the Beeb and the other TV channels. Because these are all biased towards the Tories, or else back the Blairites, who are deeply enmeshed in the Israel lobby. And the power of the Israel lobby is too strong for many editors. These bigots are so arrogant, that they even claimed respected BBC jouros like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin were anti-Semitic, simply because they dared to report Israeli atrocities during the invasion of Lebanon. And when Jonathan Dimbleby criticised these smears, he too was investigated for anti-Semitism.
Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite, and this isn’t about anti-Semitism. This is about the Israel lobby using it as a weapon to get rid of a Labour leader they hate and fear, backed by a craven, mendacious and deeply compromised press. It’s long past the time it was stopped.
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