James Lindsay Tears Apart Queer Theorist Paper Attacking Childhood Innocence

I hope I’m not boring you with all this, but I thought I should post this video by James Lindsay up as well. It follows his first video attacking Queer Theory and its deliberate grooming of schoolchildren through pornography and grossly inappropriate topics being taught in sex education. Lindsay argued, citing the postmodernists and Marxist writers themselves, that Queen Theory really isn’t about genuinely helping gay, bi and trans children and adults come to terms with their sexuality and find acceptance in society, so that they can lead normal, functioning, happy lives alongside straight people. Rather, it is all about increasing their alienation and making them even more angry and transgressive in order to turn them into a revolutionary mass which will overthrow capitalism instead of the working class. This follows closely Georg Lukacz’s sex education programme in Hungary, which was explicitly designed to use sexual liberation to alienate children from their parents and conventional capitalist society. This was then taken up by the Frankfurt school and played a very strong role in the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s. Lindsay backs up the arguments in his previous video by going through a Queer Theory paper, written by Hanna Dyer, a woman at Carlton University in Canada, that explicitly states this.

Queer Theory’s Rejection of Gay Rights

Early on in the paper, Dyer denounces the recent legislation granting gay people equal rights. Lindsay is not homophobic, even though his attacks on Queer and Critical Theory and calls for those promoting it to be put in gaol make him sound like a very right-wing Conservative. I don’t know what his political views are. He may be a man of the right, but he makes it clear that all parents should come together to combat what is being taught in schools in Social Emotional Learning and Comprehensive Sex Education regardless of politics, race, sexuality and religion. All that should matter is the class ‘parent’. Lindsay states that gay acceptance has been of immense benefit to society. But Dyer attacks it because such liberal legislation will help reconcile gays with the capitalist society they wish to overthrow. This continues throughout her wretched article. Later on she attacks Dan Savage’s video on YouTube, ‘It Gets Better’. Savage is gay, and with another man, produced a video to reassure gay children that even though they’re bullied and have an awful time at school, it gets better when you grow up. People are more accepting. I think this often depends on your particular place in society. Working class culture could be traditionally extremely homophobic, and there is a vicious homophobia prevalent in some parts of Black culture. But in general middle class culture has become very accepting to the point where one YouTuber described how a Conservative friend had completely accepted gay equality. Savage produced his video in response to the high rate of suicide amongst gay kids. He wanted to stop it by showing that ‘It Gets Better’. He released the video on YouTube because he felt schools would resist its message. According to Lindsay, Savage is actually ‘super liberal’. But to Dyer he’s an evil White man – she doesn’t call him a scholar or researcher, just ‘White man’ in order to show how evil he is. Apart from his race, she sees him as a servant of capitalism, trying to stop the revolutionary potential of the gay masses by incorporating them into neoliberalism and promoting upward mobility.

Now I strongly believe that the sooner we dump neoliberalism the better. It is doing immense damage to ordinary working people of whatever, race, creed, sexuality or religion. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to reassure vulnerable gay children that they can still a place as an accepted member of society, who should be able to look forward to the same job opportunities as the rest of us and have the same aspirations to social advancement. And I’d say that attacking a video that genuinely tries to stop gay kids committing suicide is actually evil.

The Attack on Childhood Innocence in order to Promote Radically Alienated Gay Identities

The paper goes on to attack the whole notion of childhood innocence. She hates the idea that children are asexual and proto-heterosexual. Lindsay states that here she comes into conflict with biological fact. Most people across society all over the world are heterosexual. Only a minority are gay. This is aside from any moral considerations that see heterosexuality as more moral than homosexuality. He makes it clear that he supports the teaching that ‘Some people are gay. Get over it’, as Stonewall once said in an advertising programme. Lindsay has said in his previous video that Queer Theorists really don’t like that common sense attitude. Moreover, they see gender and sexuality as identities without essence, social roles people perform rather than are. Therefore they seek to groom children for their role as queer revolutionaries by breaking down barriers and having them sexually experiment. This include the binary oppositions male/female, adult/child. And around the 1hr 14 minute mark, Dyer says this explicitly. Which clearly opens the way to grooming by paedophiles. Lindsay states that children have a very strong belief in these opposition and that he believes them to be biologically innate. He also makes the point that paedophile relationships massively damage the young victims psychologically. A very high number schizoid people have the condition due to childhood abuse. But Dyer seems also to be offended by the biological fact that most people are heterosexual. She wants to changes that, and queer not just gay children, but children as a whole. This is very much how the attacks on heteronormativity have seemed to me, and I’m glad that Lindsay has come to the same conclusion I have.

Later on, she attacks the whole notion of reproductive sex because gay people, who naturally cannot have children through gay sex, cannot achieve the same level of privilege as straight ‘breeders’ in a society that privileges heterosexual reproduction. But this is a revolt against biology, as it is through heterosexual reproductive sex that the human race is perpetuated. Ah, but so too are the mechanisms of capitalist control and repression. Instead the goal should be hedonistic, non-reproductive sex, which she explicitly connects with the death urge through Marcuse and other Marxist thinkers. This is just plain nihilism. Thinking about it, it makes me wonder if Pope John Paul II had a point when he described Enlightenment society as a ‘cult of death’. I think he was wrong about the Enlightenment, but certainly right about these pernicious postmodernist ideologies.

Childhood Innocence Blamed for Racism and Genocide

Naturally, race gets drawn into it in order to produce the broad, intersectional coalition of races and sexualities that postmodernists hope to create as an oppositional front against capitalism. Childhood innocence should be challenged, because it chiefly affects White children. Black children are less innocent, and stereotypically more streetwise. Lindsay says it’s rubbish. Here I think he’s wrong. I think the stereotype is that Black children are tougher, more worldly-wise, and more ‘street’. but that doesn’t mean that their parents don’t want to preserve and guard their innocence just as much as Whites. And apparently childhood innocence is also genocidal. Whites want to preserve their kids more than those of other races, and this is somehow ties in with one of the genuine mass-murderers of the US Indian Wars. This was the general responsible for the Sand Creek massacre, who wanted not only adult indigenous Americans killed, but also to be physically mutilated and their children murdered as well in order ‘to stop lice breeding’. It’s an absolutely horrific attitude and atrocity, but as Lindsay points out, just ’cause someone was an idiot in the past doesn’t mean that everybody who believes in childhood innocence is. She also brings social class into her argument about gay acceptance and queer children, although Lindsay states these are actually non-issues. He also points out that at the centre of all this is are repeated attacks on conventional ideas of childhood development, which stresses that children go through certain stages and that the material they’re given should be age appropriate. Like the books in school libraries that are graded according to suitability for different ages of reader. Dyer talks about getting Queer Theory to influence ideas of childhood pedagogy along with Critical Race Theory. But this isn’t about helping gay children. It’s all about destabilising children’s personalities, to make them angry and disaffected, to make them Marxist revolutionaries determined to destroy western civilisation.

Alex Jones Right about Queer Theory and Transhumanism

At times Lindsay sounds like the mad conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He says at one point that if he goes on reading it, he’ll end up screaming about Satan like the bonkers Texan libertarian. Well, Jones talked a lot of conspiracist nonsense about ‘the globalists’, which is very close to the wretched anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He also falsely accused decent people of being child abusers for the Democrat party, claimed Barack Obama was the antichrist, Hillary Clinton of being possessed by alien demons, a practicing witch and a robot from the waist down, and other nonsense. Like NASA was running a child slave labour based on Mars. Which nobody knew about, least of all NASA, as they took the time to deny it, not least because it would cost $16 billion just to send six people to Mars let alone the legions of kids Jones, or rather, one of his guests, claimed.

But it seems Jones had a point. I’ll admit I had a laugh when Jones ranted about feminism and gay rights being a transhumanist cult to turn us all into sexless cyborgs. But Lindsay says that transhumanism is one offshoot of Critical Theory. The World Economic Forum is made up of transhumanists, who all want to link us to the Net through biological implants so that we will live at least part of the time in Virtual reality. We will own nothing and we will be happy.

This sounds like Star Trek’s Borg to me. In ‘Q Who?’, the Star Trek The Next Generation episode which introduced them, Q transports the Enterprise to system J17, where they encounter and are attacked by a Borg cube that has just finished assimilating a planet. As one of them beams aboard, Q says to Picard, ‘Look at it, Jean-Luc. It’s not a he, it’s not a she… it’s an augmented humanoid.’ But one of the heads of the big American tech corporations is a transwoman and transhumanist, and wrote a paper promoting transhumanism as a feminist project to go beyond gender. And there certainly was a lot of talk about genderless future cyborgs when transhumanism was being discussed back in the ’90s. ‘We are Postmodern Borg. Resistance to Critical Theory is futile. You will be assimilated’.

Destroying State Education Not the Solution

Throughout the video, Lindsay angrily stops his analysis of the text to remind his readers that this is being done by groomers in the sex education now being taught in American schools. This means your children. And this is primarily state schools though some private schools are also involved. He loudly urges people to take their children out of these schools. I see his point. There’s a video by anti-trans ideology activists Kellie-Jay Minshull, in which she goes through some of the material recommended for schools by Stonewall. And it is about sexualising children. One of these is a game in which children put together various body parts and have to guess what sex act may be possible with them. This really is inappropriate. Yes, children should be taught about the changes happening to their bodies and their emerging sexuality in adolescence. And I quite agree that at an appropriate age, children should be taught that some people are gay but should be accepted like anybody else. But this doesn’t do that. It is about breaking down barriers, barriers which are there for a reason. There is an organisation, the Safe Schools Alliance, for parents worried about this form of indoctrination. He also points out that the ideas are very similar to Herbert Marcuse’s proposals for Marxism to take over university education.

But the solution isn’t to pull kids out of state education, as the Conservative right wants. I think the American public school system was founded by Thomas Jefferson, who realised that for America to work as a functioning democracy it needed an educated public. Absolutely. If you destroy public education, you get back to the conditions of 19th century Britain before it was made compulsory. Education was definitely not free, and only the rich could afford to send their children to the public (elite private) and the grammar schools. Working class children could go instead to dame schools, usually run by an elderly woman, hence their name, where educational standards could be very low. Many children couldn’t send their children to school, and so illiteracy rates were much, much higher. Proper state education has made the British public much more educated and informed, though sometimes you wonder.

What needs to be done is for parents instead to fight this indoctrination as hard as they can, so that their children get a proper education and not just indoctrination, whether from the extreme left or the extreme right.

James Lindsay on Post-Modern Marxism and the Indoctrination of Children in Sex Education

This is one of the serious videos I want to post and discuss. What Lindsay says is alarming and should leave any decent person deeply concerned about the direction sex education is taking in America and increasingly over here. Because he argues that the recent inclusion of real pornographic material as educational tools and very detailed discussion of different sexualities and gender identities isn’t by accident, nor is it done, as it claims, to help gay or transgender students. Rather it’s a deliberate ploy by a noxious coalition of post-modernist Marxists and MAPs – Minor Attracted Persons, or paedophiles to the rest of us – to destroy childhood innocence. The intention is not to help children properly understand their developing sexuality and anatomy, but to increase their anxiety and unhappiness in order to create socially disaffected young people alienated from their parents and society, ready to start the revolution.

Conspiracy theories like this have been going round the Conservative right for donkey’s years, usually ascribing this to ‘cultural Marxism’, the Frankfurt School and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. I didn’t give them much credence, especially as the term ‘cultural Marxism’ is derived from the Nazis ‘Kulturbolschevismus’, ‘Cultural Bolshevism’, and was part of their noxious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It sounds so bonkers and extreme, that if it appeared in the pages of Daily Heil, I would have quite happily disregarded it. But Lindsay is an American mathematician and part of the group, with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, that has taken on postmodernist Critical Theory and its offshoots – Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, to show how pernicious and destructive these ideas actually are. He’s familiar with the literature, although he states his knowledge of it isn’t perfect and he needs to do more reading. But he cites the lead thinkers to back up this argument.

Lukacz and the Destruction of Childhood Innocence

For Lindsay, this all started with George Lukacz, one of the leaders of the 1919 Communist Revolution in Hungary. Lukacz started sex education in Hungarian schools with the deliberate intention of fomenting radical dissent amongst the students against traditional, Christian society and morality. He introduced pornographic material similar to what is now being promoted in American schools. There was a outrage a few weeks ago about one of the Young Adult books now being recommended as part of American Sex and Social Development Education. This was explicitly about the character’s exploration of queer sexuality and included a scene where one individual has oral sex with a girl wearing a strap-on dildo. He also introduced notions of different sexual identities. This is because Lukacz, and later postmodern Critical Theorists, hate the idea of childhood innocence. They see this as part of a mechanism by repressive capitalist society to repress children’s sexuality in order to redirect it towards capitalist work. They also have similar ideas about ‘White innocence’. They don’t like people growing up in environments where race is not an issue and where folks value each other for what they are, rather than the colour of their skin. This is another function of repressive, exploitative capitalism. Only Whites are racially innocent, as Blacks and other ethnic minorities have to live with the reality of a very racialised society. Lindsay states that this is nonsense, as the attacks on White culture over the past 30 years have shown.

Bela Kun’s Communist government was overthrown, and Lukacz fled to Germany, where he met the Frankfurt school of Marxist scholars, including Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Horkheimer and Felix Weil, who bankrolled the movement. These took up his ideas and later imported them into America after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Also influential in this movement was Gramsci and his ideas of cultural hegemony. Gramsci turned the Marxist doctrine of the economic base determining culture on its head. Faced with the failure of the working class to rise up and overthrow capitalism, he theorised that what was needed was to change the prevailing culture. Lukacz and the others saw five main obstacles to spreading Marxism in Europe. One of these was religion. They also hated the natural bond between parents and their children, which also acts as a stabilising influence. According to Lindsay, they see sexuality and people as an ‘identity without essence’. They don’t have a fixed identity, and so Critical Theory deliberately tries to destabilise this even further, to create more confusion and discontent, and break the bond between children and parents as part of a wider campaign to discredit traditional culture. Lindsay compares this with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, its attack on the ‘Four Olds’ and the use of children to inform on and persecute their parents. These ideas were behind the far left discontent on the 1960s. Capitalism had produced rising living standards, and the working class were no longer interested in overthrowing capitalism. Marxist intellectuals were therefore determined to find a new revolutionary class, and so began looking towards other social groups like gays. The sexual radicalism of the 60s was part of a wider Marxist attack on traditional social mores.

Capitalism’s Suppresson of the Libido

Lindsay recognises that the monogamy the Queer Theorists despise is difficult for humanity. People aren’t good at it. Nevertheless, he believes that there is a human sexual morality and that traditional Christian morality roughly approximates to it, but not perfectly. I think Lindsay is an atheist/ Humanist. He is also aware that Christians have persecuted gays. But Queer Theory isn’t about solving those problems, and the Marxist sexual radicals have promoted paedophilia. In the 1980s Judith Butler, one of the founders of Queer Theory, wrote a book defending paedophilia. He also talks about a book by Herbert Marcuse which tried to mix Freud and Marxism to challenge what he saw as capitalism’s suppression of the libido and redirection into capitalist work. This also aimed at destabilising the personalities of the young minds, which were to be indoctrinated with this teaching, but felt they would emerge as ideologically ‘mature’ individuals. Lindsay notes that this is about spreading political awareness amongst children. Marcuse’s use of ‘mature’ rather than adult is deliberate.

Most Teachers Want to Teach, Not Indoctrinate

Lindsay has nothing but loathing and contempt for these ideas and their promoters. He states at one point that they should be in jail, which is fascistic but understandable if he’s right about what’s going on. If this is being done to normalise paedophilia and to exploit young people’s discomfort about their emerging sexuality, it it’s not about genuinely helping gay and transgender children but about making their confusion and maladjustment worse, then it has no place in schools. In contrast to the scare stories about Commie teachers indoctrinating students, most teachers are severely normal people. They don’t wish to indoctrinate students but simply stand in front of a class and teach their subject. And these are boring, traditional subjects like maths, science, history, geography, whatever. I don’t know what the situation is in America, but in Britain Tony Blair brought in very strict legislation banning indoctrination in schools. All that is needed to stop the extremists doing it in Britain is simply to discipline and sack them according to the law. But I do agree that anyone deliberately promoting paedophilia to children should be banged up behind bars.

Mobilising People against Queer Theory

I think Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose are people of the left, not Conservatives. Pluckrose now defines herself as a liberal rather than a socialist, although she says her actual political ideas haven’t changed. Lindsay wants a coalition of people from left and right, Republican and Democrat, Black and White, to challenge and attack these ideas. People should be aware of what their children are being taught in schools. And if their kids are being fed literature like that wretchedly explicit book, they should confront the school board, film it and then try and place the video on YouTube. It won’t be accepted, because the platform will view it as pornography. Case proven.

Older Marxists Not Sexual Radicals

If Lindsay is correct, which he seems to be, then the right’s attack on ‘cultural Marxism’ is actually right, and definitely needs to be fought. But this doesn’t mean that anything else the right says – about free markets bringing prosperity, for example, is correct. The 60s were an era of prosperity partly because government was strongly involved in business and economic growth. And the Critical Theorists’ view of sexual morality is strongly contrary to the life styles and views of many of the older generation of working class Marxists. Instead of believing in free love, most of them believed in marriage and the family. When Andre Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, gave a lecture on free love to the French railwaymen’s union in the 1920s, his solidly Communist audience were very definitely not impressed.

What Lindsay says about the influence of Marxist critical attacks on traditional sexuality and its influence on 60s radicalism is important, if true. The attack on marriage and promotion of free love went far beyond Marxism into anarchism, situationism and similar movements, and I’d always assumed it was due to ideas that predated Marx and which were held across the radical left. In many cases, I think that’s true. But there does seem to be a definite Marxist strategy there as well. It explains why so many revolutionaries of that period were also rebelling against traditional sexual morality.

There is a danger here of starting a new McCarthyism in which anything vaguely left-wing is suddenly smeared as ‘Communist’, like the Right tried to do with Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in Labour.

But Queer Theory does seem to be utterly pernicious and really needs to be fought.

Were the Neanderthals Farming 125,000 Years Ago?

If this is correct, then it demonstrates that our Neanderthal ancestors were far more sophisticated than the Victorians thought, and millennia more advanced than the modern humans that replaced them In this video from the YouTube channel History With Kayleigh, the host, Kayleigh, discusses the recent excavation of Neanderthal activity at Neumark-Nord by a joint Dutch-German team of archaeologists from Leiden University in the Netherlands and the Johannes Gutenberg university in Germany. They found that the Neanderthals had been clearing the forest there, 125,000 years ago. This makes them the first hominid to do this. These generally To Kayleigh, this indicates that they were actually farming, although conventional archaeology considers that it only started 10,000 years ago. She is, however, careful to say that she isn’t saying the Neanderthals were definitely farming or engaged in other agricultural activities. But as this is the first step in the process of farming, she believes that the Neanderthals were the first farmers. The areas that weren’t occupied by Neanderthals were left covered with trees. Kayleigh points out that there considerable evidence indicated the Neanderthals were intelligent with their own culture. Far from being unintelligent apemen, the Neanderthals had death rituals and looked after their old and sick, as is shown by their skeletons. These generally have at least one fracture. They also used stalactites, which had they had broken off, to create six circulate structures in a cave in France. It’s believed that these also had walls before they collapsed. They also painted some of the Palaeolithic cave art.

Kayleigh considers that they were probably growing easy to cultivate plants and burning the wood for fuel as well as using it to build shelters. However, when this is usually done the remains of the rotted wood are left in the soil. She also suggests that the absence of such remains could be due to the immense age of the site, or to the Neanderthals simply using them for spears and as firewood. The archaeologists also found the remains of hundreds of slaughtered animals and a large amount of stone tools and charcoal. This included virtually complete skeletons of rhinos, straight-tusked elephants, fallow deer and aurochs, the huge primeval cattle. It was believed at one time that Neanderthals were simply and solely scavengers, but the finds from this site completely disprove that. They were the top predators, making spears, using fire to keep warm and perhaps cook their food, and lived in groups of about 10-20 people. She goes on to say that with more discoveries like this, the history books will have to be rewritten. Humans and Neanderthals existed for a considerably long time and interbred, so that there are a large number of northern Europeans with up to 4 per cent Neanderthal DNA. She believes that the Neanderthals taught humans everything they knew, including spear making and hunting skills and despite going extinct, the Neanderthal’s legacy continues in this genetic heritage. And she speculates that perhaps she’s one of them, and so is planning to take a DNA test. She intends to make further videos about Neanderthal intelligence and how their tools spread throughout the world. We therefore need to abandon our image of the Neanderthals as ‘ooga-booga’.

Kayleigh states that we can only know for sure if the Neanderthals were farming with further discoveries. I’m not sure that the deforestation necessarily means that the Neanderthals were growing plants. One of the commenters, Peter Schubert, wrote: ‘For the last 40K years, Australian Aborigines burnt the land to encourage grasslands that lured Kangaroos into graze and improve their chances of a successful hunt. They also cultivated a wide range of plants to make the ‘gathering’ part of their lifestyle a lot easier, too. I’m sure other indigenous groups around the globe would have done similarly. Still, Neanderthals be earlier.’ It’s possible that the Neanderthals were doing the same. I’ve also got a feeling that when modern humans started clearing the land before settling down to farm it, they cleared the areas around waterholes in order to hunt the animals that came there to drink better. I also don’t think the Neanderthals taught modern humans agriculture, as modern humanity, as Kayleigh says, only started farming about 10,000 years ago, which long after this period and the extinction of the Neanderthals themselves. But it does suggest to me that the Neanderthals may have been on the road to developing agriculture, and makes you wonder what more remains to be discovered about them.

The Utterance Robot that Speaks Like Humans

I hope everyone’s still enjoying the Christmas season. I know I haven’t posted anything political over the past few days, or even much at all, but I thought I’d try to leave the important, emotive subjects till after the holiday. Well, that’s not going to happen, as I’ve found a few videos on very serious issues I’d like to post and comment on. But first some fun.

This is another robot video, from the ikinamo channel of YouTube. It’s about professor Hideyuki Sawada and his team at Kagawa University, who have created a robotic version of the human mouth in order to mimic real, human speech more closely. The mouth looks like a long, flesh-coloured tube, below which are a series of rods which rise and fall to manipulate it. The mouth also has a tongue, The machine is operated by a pump, which pushes air into the mouth through vocal chords. Above the mouth itself is a plaster nose to add resonance, the plaster having the same resonance as a human nose. The robot needs this to make the ‘m’ and ‘n’ sounds, while its tongue allows it to say the ‘r’. The changes in the mouth cavity and movements of its artificial lips create the same types of sound as a biological human mouth. The machine also has a microphone so that it can hear itself. It possesses autonomous learning, so that it can correct its mistakes by listening, and working out what a particular sound should be. It’s not quite right just yet, as it has no teeth and so can’t pronounce the dental fricatives. However, they are teaching the pitch and words to a Japanese song so that it will be able to sing that.

Something very like this robot was created by Klemper, a German scientist, in the 19th century. He also reasoned that in order to create speech mechanically, you should start with a mechanical mouth. As he was German, the machine also spoke with a German accent. And back in the 1980s I read an article in one of the popular science magazines around then that the way to solve problems with robot and computer speech would be to build an artificial mouth, so that the machine would speak like a human would.

Like the various types of artificial muscle being developed, this is clearly another example of robotics engineers following nature in their quest to create machines that function like humans and animals more closely. It’s ingenious, but does look weird as a disembodied, mechanically operated mouth and nose.

Alex Belfield Spreading Fear and Suspicion about Armed Windsor Castle Intruder

I hope everyone’s had a great Christmas and/or holiday season, depending on their religious beliefs or lack thereof, despite the threat of another lockdown. Still, if it saves a few lives from the Coronavirus, it will have been worth it no matter how awkward and difficult it is for the rest of us. I really shouldn’t be giving the mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield any more publicity, but I caught one of his videos today commenting on the intruder, who tried to get into Windsor Castle with a crossbow to kill the Queen. According to the news, the would-be assassin was a 19 year old man, Jaswant Singh Chail. Chail said that he wanted to kill her to avenge the 1919 Jallianabagh massacre, in which British troopers fired on unarmed protesters in the Punjab. He also wanted to avenge everyone who had suffered racist persecution. Chail is believed to have mental health problems, and his father has said something about him hopefully getting the help he needs. As the lad has also declared that, in addition to being a Sikh, he’s also a Sith called ‘Darth Jones’, I think his father and the arresting authorities are probably right. But not so Belfield. He has said he finds it interesting that Chail’s been diagnosed as mentally ill following his intrusion, and thinks that there is an elephant in the room we’re not being told about.

This seems to me to be wrong and potentially dangerous. I might be reading him wrong – I hope I am – but it looks like a piece of dog whistle racism.

I don’t believe for a single minute that this is the case. I realise that there is good and bad in every people, but the Sikhs I’ve met weren’t any kind of angry fanatics. I used to work with a Sikh lad, who was very spiritual and wouldn’t say ‘boo’ to a goose. In fact, he was worried about the sectarian tension and violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in India. A few years ago I was on the bus and there was an older Sikh man in full traditional costume, turban, orange sash and robes standing near the driver, and the two were laughing and chatting. When I was studying religion as part of my minor degree at College back in the 1980s, as part of the course on sociology of religion we had to go to a different place of worship and observe what was going on. I’m an Anglican with Roman Catholic relatives, so they simply took me to the local Catholic church for mass. One of the girls in the class was taken by her sister to a Sikh wedding. The girls were Christians, but were nevertheless made very welcome by the people there. As far as I can remember, the last time there was mass protests or disaffection in the British Sikh community, it was in the 1970s when the government brought in the law that bikers had to wear helmets. I think some Sikhs protested because it made it difficult for them to wear the turban. And that was very definitely decades ago.

So no, I don’t believe there is more to it than an angry young man, who’s spent too long brooding about an historical injustice and no doubt his own experiences as a victim of racism. He may not be serious about the claim to be a Sith. ‘Darth Jones’ sounds like a spoof of a Sith name, rather than something genuine sinister like Darth Sidious, but I don’t think there’s any more to it than a grotesque sense of personal grievance.

It really does look to me like he was a disturbed loner, and any suggestion that there’s more to it is just dangerous fear-mongering.

Another Festive Musical Attack on the Tories from PoliticsJoe

I’ve been putting up some of the vids from Kunt and the Gang for their obscene song about our incompetent, greedy, and murderous prime minister. However, they haven’t only made one or two. They’ve made thirteen, which is far too many to put up. And I think we’ve got the message by now. But here’s another musical spoof of them I found on YouTube from JOE: Now That’s What I Call A Tory Christmas. It’s a parody of the long-running series of music albums, Now That’s What I Call Music. The spoof songs include a version of Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’, about them telling people to keep apart while they themselves partied, Michael Gove singing a version of ‘White Christmas’ with a suspicious sniff; the horsey woman sings about how cronyism got her the contract for PPE and Rishi Sunak and friends singing about how they’ve spaffed everyone’s money up the wall. Other songs satirise Dominic Cummings for his drive to Barnard Castle and the Tory party cutting aid to Africa. And there’s a final song from a football commentator, manager or somebody advising us all not to vote for these bellends. Which is excellent advice. All with a carefully cut and edited voiceover from the minister for the 18th century, which makes him seem even more of a ridiculous anachronism than he already is. So enjoy!

Kunt and the Gang Sing their Obscene Song about Boris in the Style of the ’70s

You may well be getting sick of me putting up version of Kunt and the Gang’s frank and profane song about Boris Johnson. Swearing is neither big nor clever. But I am fascinated by some of the inventiveness in the performance. This version is of what Kunt and his band would have been like if they had been on the Top Of The Pops 1973 Christmas show. So it’s all bright, Christmas colours, hippie fashions and glam rock. It fits the one or two line lyrics of stars of that period like Alvin Stardust and Gary Glitter, before he was finally caught as a paedophile monster. Of course, the actual chance of something with the amount of profanity of Kunt’s little ditty, let alone his name, being performed on the Beeb at that time was absolutely nil. I can remember when Jules Holland was thrown off Channel 4’s pop music show, The Tube, in the 1980s for dropping the F-bomb. Mind you, it was at six O’clock, well before the watershed. I think the attitude towards obscene language began to change in the ’90s with Have I Got News For You as one of the major offenders. Paul Merton seemed to use it a lot at one time. This was just after nine O’clock. And I noticed that there was an increasing use of really foul language at the same time. I don’t think Merton started it. It was the way the media was travelling at the time. Anyway, I hope to post a few more things today, which I hope will be rather more uplifting and with help to cleanse the palate after this assault on our sense of decency.

But they’re right about Boris.

The Victorian Invention of the Christmas Card

I found this account of how the Victorians invented the Christmas card in the children’s book Amazing Inventions and Concoctions, by Howard Elson, illustrated by Kim Blundell (London: Octopus Book 1988). This says

‘Every Christmas, it’s a great ritual to send out greetings cards to your friends and relatives, and the card industry is a thriving business all over the world.

The Christmas card was first designed in 1843 by an Englishman called J C Horsley for his friend, Sir Henry Cole. The card, printed on stiff brown cardboard, depicted a sketch of a family eating, drinking and making merry. The words, “A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year To You”, were printed underneath. 1000 were put on sale in London.

Americans had to wait 32 years before Christmas cards were introduced in the US by Louis Prang of Boston, Massachusetts.’

The BBC showed a programme on the origin of various Christmas customs the other year, which covered the invention of Christmas cards. According to them, Horlsey invented it because he had so many friends he was tired of having to write complete letters to them all. Well, it’s great to be so popular!

Wishing All My Readers a Merry Christmas

I hope everyone reading my blog has a Merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof. Unfortunately with a second lockdown looming, this is going to be a time when the toast ‘absent friends’ is particularly relevant and poignant.

I particularly wish my Jewish readers ‘Shalom’, Muslim and Arab readers ‘Salaam’, and the Russian people ‘Mir’. These are all words for ‘peace’. May our leaders step back from war, hatred and violence next year, and work instead to benefit our common humanity and combat climate change and the environmental destruction that is threatening our beautiful, fragile Earth.

Very best wishes to you all and everyone your pray and/or care for.

Mike and Friends Tear Apart the Blairites’ Anti-Semitism Smears

Last week, Mike from Vox Political was on a net gathering on YouTube discussing Is Labour Anti-Semitic? Reaching Over the Noise, a documentary made with the express purpose of refuting the monstrous lies and smears made by John Ware’s wretched Panorama documentary, ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’ If you watched this nasty piece of very yellow journalism, you’d be convinced that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party certainly was, and the individuals identified as anti-Semites were the most utterly contemptible Nazis. Reaching Over The Noise, however, shows the opposite: Ware’s film was one long tissue of egregious lies from start to finish, which smeared and vilified thoroughly decent people.

Panorama Lies Refuted by Corbyn’s Jewish Supporters

The internet gathering Mike attended was to publicise the film. It was hosted by Lizzie, of Unity News Network, and apart from Mike the other guests were Jason Cridland of Dorset Eye and former Labour party member and activist Sian Bloor. They were there because they had helped raise the £2,000 needed to make the movie. The meeting began with clips from the film, including a little talk introducing it by Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP who was forced out and smeared as an anti-Semite because he dared question the witch hunt. This was followed by various Orthodox Jews in broad-brimmed hats, long coats, beards and side ringlets. One of these men appeared to me to be a rabbi, as he was elderly with a white beard, which suggested the sage wisdom of a man of God. All of them said that the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn was anti-Semitic was pure nonsense. This was followed by a Jewish woman, who described the effect the smears had had on her. She was made to feel she wasn’t really Jewish. But she was, just ‘the wrong type of Jew’. This is how these smear merchants work. Judaism has never been a monolithic religion or community. There’s the old Jewish adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’. The Talmud, Judaism’s second holy book after the Bible, contains the debates about theology and the correct interpretation of the written and oral Law of the great rabbis. Frequently these discussions simply conclude with ‘and so they disagreed’. Zionism, as the peeps in this meeting pointed out, was originally only a minority opinion amongst Jews. Most of them wished to remain in the countries of their birth, to be accepted as fellow citizens with equal rights as their gentile compatriots. But the Israel lobby wishes to recast Judaism into a single community rigidly behind Israel. Anyone who challenges this is immediately denounced as an anti-Semite. If they’re Jewish, they’re accused of self-hatred and being a ‘traitor’.

All of the people at the gathering had been smeared as anti-Semites, either because they supported the Palestinians, Jeremy Corbyn, or simply for standing up for historical truth and refuting the lies about some of those smeared. And they each described how the Blairites in the party, Zionist activists like GnasherJew and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism had smeared them with the active collaboration of the press and media. Like alleged Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund.

Labour Activist Sian Bloor Smeared by Sam Matthews and Gabriel Pogrund

The discussion started with Sian Bloor. Bloor was smeared after someone mistakenly sent information about her supporting Jewish Voice for Labour and its main woman, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, to Sam Matthews. Despite appeals not to, scumbag Sammy then passed it on to Pogrund. Who promptly did to her what he did to Mike: publish an utterly mendacious article claiming that she was in trouble with Labour because she was an anti-Semite. In fact Bloor had been under investigation, but for an entirely different reason, and been exonerated. But after Poggy’s smears the party went into proceedings against her as a Jew-hater. When she tried to clear herself, she got a letter from Schillings, the Labour party’s highly expensive libel lawyers, telling her that what she’d written was libellous. The stress of all this has shattered Bloor’s nerves and left her unable to work. What she found particularly disgusting was that Scumbag Sammy appeared on Panorama claiming that the anti-Semitic attacks on him had made him feel suicidal. A case of the bully posing as victim.

Mike, Ken Livingstone and the Nazis’ Real Support for Zionism

Mike then came on to recount his experience. He’d been targeted and smeared as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier by Poggy because he’d written a long piece defending Ken Livingstone’s remark that Hitler initially supported the Nazis. Mike admits that Leninspart has said some genuinely questionable comments later. He doesn’t defend them, only the mad newt-fancier’s statement about Hitler and Zionism. Which is absolutely correct. The Nazis and the main German Zionist organisation signed a pact, the Ha’avara Agreement, in which Nazi Germany pledged to smuggle German Jews into Palestine, then under the British Mandate. This is all historical fact. It’s mentioned on the Jewish Virtual Library and in the works on the Holocaust by Zionist Jewish historian David Cesarani. But like Trump, these fanatics live in a world of ‘alternative facts’. Mike was particularly interested in Bloor’s identification of Sam ‘Scumbags’ Matthews, as I think he should be referred to, as he had never been able to get the identity of the snitch in the Labour party who passed on his details to the press. But from this is looks like it could well be him. Mike was able to get the press regulator to rule against the articles smearing him which appeared in the Times, Scum, Jewish Chronicle and so on. Bloor had also been successful in getting some of the papers to retract the articles. But not the Times, because they had expensive lawyers which ordinary peeps can’t afford to challenge. Speaking in a completely different context, the veteran British ufologist Jenny Randles once said that under British justice you were ‘guilty until proven rich’. Absolutely.

Jason Cridland Smeared and Doxed by GnasherJew and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

Cridland then came next, to tell how he’d been doxed by the odious GnasherJew and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. He’d been contacted by a reader, who’d been falsely accused of anti-Semitism. The two Zionist organisations had gone further. They’d produced a map showing where supposed anti-Semites lived, complete with their names and addresses. The woman was on this map. And so, she revealed, was Cridland. This had left them extremely worried for their safety. One woman, who had been so smeared, who was in fact Jewish, had had her car torched as a result.

Posting people’s personal details on the net so that others can attack or harass them is despicable. It’s completely out of order. It’s been one of the tactics used by real anti-Semitic, Nazi organisations. Way back in the ’90s the NF or BNP in Brighton decided to publish in their vile rag the names and addresses of local ‘reds’. They were stopped when local trade unionists published theirs in turn. I suppose doxing might be justified in cases like it with real Nazis, like the banned National Action, who really do believe all that vile nonsense about secret Jewish conspiracies against the White race and who are dangerous and violent. But not for ordinary, decent people.

In addition to this, litigious Countdown numbers person Rachel Riley raised her metaphorical head. Cridland had a couple of cops appear at his house to talk to him, as Riley had complained that he was anti-Semitic. In fact after talking to him they decided he wasn’t, and the conversation moved to how she could be prosecuted for wasting police time.

Political Context

The meeting then moved onto a general discussion about official attempts to silence campaigns for Palestinian rights. The Tories wish to ban the BDS campaign as anti-Semitic, as has been done in America. But the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign isn’t anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli. It does not seek to prevent people purchasing from Jewish or Israeli businesses, only those that are in the Occupied Territories. And many of its supporters and activists are Jews. They also talked about Keef Stalin’s campaign of purging socialists from the Labour party. Many of those purged as anti-Semites had been so demoralised by the direction the party was taking under his misgovernment that, rather than being upset over their expulsion, they were glad to leave. They also made the point that what stopped Labour getting elected wasn’t the anti-Semitism witch hunt, but Brexit. As for the people themselves and their political views, Lizzie and Jason Cridland made the point that they weren’t party political. They didn’t support the Labour party, but supported Jeremy Corbyn because of his policies. Sian Bloor was targeted because she was particularly close politically to the Labour leader. She had been part of the original group, JC4PM, which became Momentum. The smears were about silencing and purging Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party, who wished to return it to genuine socialism after Blair as much as attacking support for the Palestinians.

The Psychology that Smears Innocent Anti-Racists

During the talk Bloor commented that the witch-hunters and smear merchants really didn’t care about the harm they were doing to ordinary people. This raises the whole issue of their mentality, as people have been harmed and even taken their lives. I think it’s worse than that. Not only do they not care, but they actively see their opponents as enemies to be destroyed. I’ve got the impression that they really believe, whether they are religious or atheist, that the modern state of Israel is the culmination of Jewish history and that anyone who opposes it really is a Nazi. They really do seem to view themselves as the modern successors to Judas Maccabaeus, the great Jewish hero who fought against the pagan forces of the Greek general Antiochus IV Epiphanes. That general really was an enemy of the Jewish people. He banned the Torah, forbade circumcision and the observance of the Law, and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem. He was a genuine anti-Semitic tyrant. Unlike the people they now smear and vilify, who simply want justice and equality for the Palestinians.

Just to show you how utterly insane this attitude is, you think of some of the people, who have been smeared as threats to Israel by these nutters. Four-fifths of them are Jewish, and they include convinced anti-racist activists, like Marc Wadsworth, and victims of genuine racism and anti-Semitism. Jackie Walker is a respectable Jewish granny and academic, whose demeanour, at least from what I’ve seen online, is more that of the lecture hall and seminar room than any kind of violent confrontation. Much the same can be said about Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi. None of the people accused and smeared, including those in the meeting, remotely resemble any real, fanatically genocidal anti-Semites. But this is, I fear, how GnasherJew, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Starmer’s coterie sees them.

Toby Young, Hack, Eugenicist and Anti-Semitism Tsar

Real Nazis are horrific, but they’re also so grotesque they can be easily lampooned. P.G. Wodehouse sent up Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists as Spode, the leader of the Black Shorts, who stood to defend the British knee against the Asiatic immigrant horde. The ranting and raving of Hitler has provided endless comic material for anti-Nazi satirists and comedians ever since the War. In a saner, more just society the smears and lies told by the Ware, the Israel lobby and the Blairites would similarly be laughed out of court. But unfortunately it isn’t. And so we have the grotesque judicial travesty of decent people being tarred as racist by those who really are. Like the right-wing Labour politico, who published anti-Roma material as part of his election campaign. I think he may have been made one of the Tories’ anti-Semitism tsars. The other, and this is not a joke, is Toby Young.

Yes, that Toby Young. The Toby Young who wrote a creepy piece in the ’90s for GQ in which he described how he’d been a ‘lesbian for a day’. Tobes had decided he wanted a bit of hot lesbian action, and so dressed in drag to see if he could get off with any of the ladies in New York’s lesbian bars. As bad as it was at the time, it’s arguably worse now. Part of the controversy over the transgender issue is the propositioning of lesbian women for sex by biological men who identify as women . Lesbians aren’t attracted to the male body, but queer theory erases biological sex in favour of gender, social sex. And so when these women turn the men down because of their biological sex, they’re accused of transphobia. But there’s worse than Young’s dated, dodgy article from the ’90s. Private Eye caught him attending a eugenics conference. Yup, selective breeding to improve the race. The doctrine the Nazis believed in. And while Tobes isn’t a racist, many of the people he was mixing with were.

But we’re expected to believe that Jeremy Corbyn, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson and the above folks are the Nazis.