Fairies, Aliens and Folklore: A Response to CJ’s ‘What Are UFOs?

A few days ago the mighty CJ put up a piece on his website asking the question ‘What Are UFOs?’, in which he took aim at elements of the psycho-social interpretation of the phenomenon. CJ’s a long-term member of ASSAP, one of Britain’s leading paranormal research organisations. Unlike the Society for Psychical Research, which concentrates on laboratory research, ASSAP was set up to investigate paranormal phenomena in the field, whether they be ghosts, fairies, crop circles, time slips or flying saucers. CJ’s been investigating such phenomena since the 1980s, following very strict scientific protocols, and has a wealth of practical experience.

At the heart of his essay are two questions. One of these is on the nature of folklore itself. What is it? Does it include popular superstitions like not putting your shoes on the table or crossing on the stairs? Where does folklore begin and literary, composed culture end? For example, when football fans start singing Beatles’ songs on the terraces, does it become a piece of folklore? What are the authentic features of traditional fairy encounters, and, indeed, is there are a single class of being that comprises the fairies?

In fact, these are questions folklorists themselves have been discussing for a very long time. Books on folklore, such as Linda Degh’s Legends, often begin with that very question. And what counts as folklore is very wide. Folklore can be thought of as any popular custom. The folklorists of the 19^th century viewed it in terms of an ancient, timeless popular culture arising from a particular ethnic group, preserved in the rural customs of agricultural communities. There was supposed to be a distinction between this timeless, popular culture, the authors of which were unknown, and literary culture produced by the educated upper classes.

This distinction between elite, educated culture and that of the masses has more or less collapsed. The more you examine folksong and folk literature, the less it seems to be the timeless remnant of ancient beliefs and practises. The Marshfield mumming play, in which the hero fights an enemy, is killed, but restored with a pill from a doctor, has been one of those folk customs whose origins have been claimed to lie back with the dying and rising gods of pagan antiquity. Research back in the 90s by contrast claimed that similar plays dated no earlier than the 18^th century, and were commonly performed at local fairs. Similarly, songs and dances travelled across Europe, taken from one country to another by itinerant musicians from quite an early date. A 16^th century writer, for example, remarked on English musicians going to fairs to hear the latest tunes and catches from other performers in Germany. Instead of autochthonic expressions of the essential soul or spirit of a particular ethnic group or locality, people were swapping tunes and songs across countries and continents. Musicologists have suggested, for example, that there are African elements in western sea shanties. As for their connection to particular areas, that was frequently just where folksong collectors like Cecil Sharpe happened to pick them up. While he marked them down as coming from Suffolk, Yorkshire, Somerset or wherever, this didn’t mean that the songs were exclusive to those areas.

Nor is folklore restricted to rural communities. The focus on them by the early researchers no doubt was part of the reaction of some parts of educated society to the rise of science and the machine age in the 19^th century. This was felt by some intellectuals as a threat to traditional western culture and its metaphysical assumptions. And so scholars investigated the ancient traditions and stories of rural communities, collecting stories of witches, ghosts, giants and fairies as well as rustic tunes to preserve this popular, pre-industrial culture and its basis in the supernatural against the new, scientific materialism.

At the same time, other scholars questioned this focus on the countryside and asked whether towns didn’t have their folklore as well. Yes, they did, and there was a burgeoning interest in what became known as urban legend in the ‘90s, following the publication years earlier of Jan Harold Brunvand’s books on phantom hitch-hikers and so on. And the actual subject matter of folklore can be more or less anything that has entered popular culture. One book on folkloristics covers subjects as diverse as Navajo Indian pottery figures for tourists, American barn types, and jokes and humour in American gay culture. These latter have a deeper social purpose than just amusement. They were often told to subtly find out whether the person being talked to was gay or not. Some jokes would be only understood by other gays. If the person told the joke smiled and laughed, it could be assumed they were a fellow member of the community. And new forms of urban folklore were emerging all the time. One example of this was the photocopylore that turned up in offices and workplaces, in which someone had photocopied or faxed a particularly remarkable or humorous piece and pasted it up in the office. Several of these, I remember, were jokes at the expense of American football players on scholarships at universities, as well as the general drudgery of office life.

And this is where UFOs come in. The second question of CJ’s critique is whether fairies really can be identified with today’s UFOs and aliens. This is based on the books of Fortean writer John Keel and the American-French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee. They noted in their books – UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse by Keel, Passport to Magonia by Vallee- that UFO encounters often followed the same motifs as fairy lore. UFOs and their occupants. They suggested that UFOs and their alien pilots are the 20^th century successors to traditional fairy beliefs. But the imps and goblins of previous centuries have had to change with the times. In modern, technological society people no longer believe as they did in fairies. These have therefore been replaced by the imagery of Science Fiction and space travel.

Some of the motifs of traditional fairy lore do indeed seem to fit the UFO phenomenon. Evans-Wentz in his classic The Fairy Faith in Western Europe, quotes ‘an old Irish mystic’ as saying that the fairies are an older race, who come from the stars. Some of the UFO aliens reported from Scandinavia and also from Italy certainly resemble the short gnomes and goblins of western European fairy tales. And some of their activities also resemble those of past supernatural entities. The abduction phenomenon, in which people are forcibly taken aboard alien craft and raped to produce half-human hybrids, is very similar indeed to medieval tales of demons having sex with sleeping mortals, and even jinn in the Islamic world. One Arab story has three maidens made pregnant by a jinn, who enters their house through a gap into elsewhere opening in their bedroom wall. He is accompanied by a number of lights. And just like the aliens, who take their progeny away from those who bore them, so this jinn takes back into his world his children by the girls.

There are several problems with the identification of today’s aliens with fairies. One of these is with the collection and recording of such traditional narratives, that CJ identifies as a problem. He states in his article that European fairy lore is very much a literary phenomenon, influenced and shaped by writers like Shakespeare, and that we have difficulty knowing what ordinary people really believed about them. This is a fair point. Jeffrey Burton Russell in his history of witchcraft in the Middle Ages discusses fairies and their origins as it affects the later development of witch beliefs. Roman civilisation had a number of supernatural beings below the gods and their messengers, the daimones. These included tree spirits, the dryads, and lamias, part-women, part snakes. Belief in such beings persisted after the fall of the Empire into the 7^th century in Spain until they were somehow replaced by the fairies. He identifies the latter’s origins in the Latin fatare, ‘to enchant’, and states that there seems to be little difference between supernatural fairies and witches when they first appear on the continent.

It is suggested that fairies are ultimately based on the three fates that are believed in Greek folklore to appear at a child’s birth to cast its destiny. Other historians have suggested that there was an international fairy cult stretching over Europe and the Middle East, whose remains have sometimes survived to the present as in Romania. In the west under pressure from the witch hunters the fairy cult’s central beliefs were distorted. In the original fairy belief, young women left their bodies to meet the Queen of the Fairies and enjoy a round of singing, dancing and the company of the young men they fancied. Under the pressure of the witch-hunters’ interrogation, however, this became the witches’ sabbat, in which they flew to meet the Devil and instead of a pleasant feast, ate foul food among other lurid horrors.  In this manner, the elite concerns of the witch hunters served to transform traditional folk beliefs.

Western fairy lore has been the source and subject of literary romance since the Middle Ages. Medieval authors wrote and sang tales of the quests of heroic knights, assisted by benevolent fairies like Oberon, and these tales remained popular after the end of the Middle Ages. By the 17^th century authors started writing their own fairy stories as conscious literary inventions, and this has carried on down the centuries with much-loved tales like Peter Pan and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales. These have shaped to a greater or lesser extent the popular image of fairies. It was Shakespeare, apparently, who added the gossamer wings. As for their size, Oberon is described as about the size of a child of three or older. He’s small, but not tiny. And sometimes glimpses of popular beliefs about the fairies can be seen. For example, church records from 12^th century Exeter record the local bishop forbidding the local people from putting small objects, including bows and arrows, in their barns for the elves to play with.

CJ also talks about the differences between various kinds of fairy creature, such as barguests and other spectral entities. Are they of the same type as brownies, goblins and so on? These creatures may be very different from each other, and so it is reasonable to ask whether they refer to the same types of supernatural entity.

Keel and Vallee, however, did not argue that there was a simple equivalence between fold fashioned fairies and UFOs. To begin with, fairies were not the only supernatural creatures modern UFOnauts resembled. Vallee in one of his later books discusses the similarity between UFOs and their pilots and the pagan gods of the Ancient Near East. Keel also discusses medieval demonology. While demons are supernatural, they were also generally considered a separate set of beings than the fairies, although sometimes the two were identified with each other. Keel and Vallee also didn’t think that UFO aliens were literally fairies either. Rather, the phenomenon that took the form of fairies, demons, angels and other supernatural beings in the past now took the form of spacecraft and aliens in the UFO mythology. They saw them therefore as ‘Ultraterrestrials’ – beings from beyond our reality. Vallee considers that they come from parallel universes, a view that he has incorporated in his SF novels such as Fastwalker.

The investigation of the links between fairy beliefs and UFO lore does not end with the views of Keel and Vallee, however. Their books provided the foundations for the Psycho-Social Hypothesis, which goes further than this. It maintains that there is little or no objective reality to UFO encounters. They are primarily internal, psychological experiences that take their imagery from contemporary culture. In the past this was the myths about gods, demons and fairies. Today the content and imagery are taken from Science Fiction. These experiences may be sparked by a real phenomenon, such as a misidentified sighting of Venus or aircraft and the content generated by poorly understood psychological or neurological phenomena, such as sleep paralysis. Back in the ‘90s there was considerable interest in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as the source of such illusory encounters, and it does seem that it can explain some. Those suffering from it may experience hallucinations that do draw on contemporary culture and folkore. One poor fellow who had it used to see a witch, complete with cauldron, in his kitchen during attacks. But this explanation seems to have fallen from favour in recent years, possibly because there is no single explanation for UFO encounters.

But although the imagery is that of aliens and space travel, behind them lies traditional fairy motifs. Thus, Joe Simonton’s encounter with small aliens while out prospecting in the Rockies also follows one convention of traditional fairy lore. In fairy tradition, precious fairy objects taken from their owners by the heroes become, in the light of day, perfectly ordinary and worthless. Fairy gold, for example, becomes a pile of leaves. Simonton found the aliens cooking pancakes. He was offered one, and took it back to be analysed. It was then found to contain nothing more exotic than flour and salt. Back in the 90s the lawyer and TV host Clive Anderson had a pair of ufologists on his late night show, Clive Anderson Talks Back. These two blokes described their encounters with aliens. As proof these were genuine, the aliens had given one of guys a rock, which he duly produced. Cue audience laughter. A rock could provide convincing proof of the reality of the phenomenon, if it was made of some exotic material from one of the planets, say regolith from the Moon or Montmarillonite from Mars. But this, however, was just an ordinary stone.

There is a wider point about the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. As it rejects a supernatural or paranormal basis for the experience, it does not matter whether the material generating the experience is based in authentic folklore or not. The fairy literature behind encounters with aliens resembling fairies may be literary, such as the small, winged aliens who asked a British housewife baking Christmas cakes back in the 70s if they could have one, but this does not affect the nature of the experience itself. Not all ufologists, whose views have been influenced by the PSH go so far as to deny that there is a paranormal element to the UFO experience. Jenny Randles stated in one edition of her small press UFO magazine, Northern UFO News, that there was a paranormal element to the experience which was using the motifs of traditional fairy lore and SF. Kevin McClure, another long term writer and researcher of the world of the strange and paranormal, came to a similar view. There was a genuine paranormal phenomenon behind the experiences, which was using traditional supernatural tales and SF to communicate with us. This was the basis for his extremely short-lived magazine, Alien Scripture, with its subtitle ‘Who is talking to us and why?’

CJ states that theGareth essay is just one of a projected series in which he will discuss what UFOs are. In part 2 he intends to examine other features of the phenomenon. This should be interesting. Although the Psycho-Social Hypothesis has established itself as a major alternative explanation to the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis for UFO experiences, there are definitely questions to be asked about it. One is that sometimes paranormal encounters do not resemble established folklore or literary tropes. Gareth Medway argued this in article published by Magonia back in the ‘90s. I think Gareth’s a priest or leading member of one of the new pagan religions in Britain. He was also the author of The Lure of the Sinister, a book that cast a very sceptical eye on the various Satanism scares that have occurred over time and that were causing hysteria and distress then with rubbish stories of the terrible abuse of children in Satanic orgies. In his article, he discussed a paranormal vision a man experienced out riding one evening. This fellow reported seeing something like a fist rising up from the ground. He had no explanation for the vision and was genuinely confused by the experience. The next evening, just as he was out riding again, he experienced the same vision. Gareth argued from this that if such encounters were based on folklore and popular culture, then the vision should have conformed to the contemporary imagery of the time. But it didn’t. And I’ve no doubt that there may be other problems with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis and other explanations for the UFO phenomenon waiting to be investigated.

I look forward to what CJ says in part two.

For further information, go to:https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/what-are-ufos/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3VCjJDO6tTcifznYHpDoUhHXVnYjQBpMeFnIJ4RLeGnxPDmefDSqsdsa4_aem_AYHr2BLRWzM6VP4g4Sb2M1eQvTF1mH6xUlD3z77kKpYv3RzWOrKnNgEtXrRJu121Y_Fi291mnyBHGQ194PTYrRv4

1978 Beeb Film on Day Trip to Lundy Island

This comes from the BBC Archives YouTube channel, from the 70s programme Day Out. I think this might have been a local programme. It was shown after the evening news, about Ten O’Clock-ish as I recall. I think one of its hosts was Angela Ripon, but I can’t be sure. It travelled over the West Country, and the programme I recall most was about Simmon’s Yat in Gloucestershire. This village was preyed upon in the 18th century by a gang of naked highwaymen. What caused this nudity? They reckoned that people recognised you from your clothes, and so dispensed with them when committing their acts of robbery.

Lundy’s an island off the coast of Devon. It’s a small, steep place – the presenter mentions that at times the winds have blown the cows off the cliffs onto the rocks below. There’s a church, a pub and a local shop, from which he buys a postcard. This already has a stamp affixed, though it’s on the right side, not the left. This is because the GPO packed up the local post office sometime ago, so the local landlord opened his own post box and started selling his own stamps. They cost a penny more than the Post Office’s, which is to cover the cost of getting it to the mainland.

The island has a long and interesting history. The story mentions that its surrounded by many wrecks, and it’s a favourite of marine archaeologists. The archaeology department at Bristol University used to train some of their students on Lundy. It also has seals and a diverse array of sea life, and so I believe it was one of the first places in England to become an offshore marine nature reserve. In the early Middle Ages it was briefly a Viking base. In the 14th century it was settled by a community of monks. in the 16th or 17th centuries it was held by the Barbary pirates from north Africa before they were cleared off by Cromwell.

Back in the 1990s there were plans to hold a two-week gay Pride style festival there. The organisers were to make it a gay republic, issuing its own currency and with its own monarchy. It was cancelled, unfortunately, through lack of interest. I wondered if it was just too far away for most people, especially from the main centres of gay life in England, Brighton and Manchester.

1977 Programme on the Mysterious Gnome Kidnappings in Formby

This is another video from the Beeb Archive channel, and comes from a programme ‘Voice of the People’. It’s about a local crimewave in Formby when people had their decorative garden gnomes stolen. It started with one It began with the theft of one family’s beloved garden ornament, who was cut off at his feet because he was fixed to the ground. The thief left a ransom note demanding 25 pence left in an envelope at the local car park. 25 pence was worth rather more in them days, when I think you could buy cheap chews for half a penny and 2000 AD for 16p. The thief then started stealing others’ gnomes as well. The programme has a naturally jokey approach to the topic, talking about underground coppers hunting the thief and jokes about trying to restore the broken gnome with the National Elf Service. It goes on to speculate about a mad millionaire in his castle determined to have the biggest gnome collection of them all, illustrated by a suitably sinister figure on a piano. Eventually the thief put all the gnomes back. The only clue to his identity was that he had big feet by the foot prints he left behind.

I’m putting this up because there was a craze for such thefts as late as the ’90s, mostly done as pranks. The thief or thieves would steal the gnomes, but pretend it had gone for its holidays and so send back postcards to the family of the gnome from locations around the world. In America there was a similar craze for stealing the pink flamingos with which some families decorated their front yards. The landlords of one house, that had been let to students, found 100 such birds in their basement.

1964 Tonight Documentary on the Cave Dwelling Villagers of Troos in France

This video comes from the BBC Archives channel on YouTube, and is about the village of Troos, forty miles from Paris, where the people live in caves dug out of the hillside. The village used to be site of a medieval fortress. The people are troglodytes, a word that means simply cave dwellers, but it has unfortunate connotations of subhuman cavemen and women, which these people clearly aren’t. Their homes’ frontages seem otherwise unremarkable, except that they are more or less flat to the hillside. Inside, they have all the amenities of the average French house of the time. They’re cheap, and cool in summer and hot in winter. The locals would, however, prefer a modern house, and are being priced out of their homes by wealthy Parisians, who want a nice, fashionable holiday home. Just like so many rural communities are seeing their houses bought up and priced out of the reach of local people in Britain today.

There are people living in similar accommodation today. A few years ago I read an article in an archaeological magazine about a community in rural Scotland whose homes were similarly dug out of the local cliff. And people used to how their homes dug out of the cliffside in Bridgnorth. Bridgnorth is divided into an upper and a lower town, and to get to the upper town from one side means either using the funicular railway or taking a long, winding route up. And cut into part of the cliff face are homes very much like those of Troos. I know people from there, who said that the advantage of these homes was that if you needed an extra room, all you had to do was dig out. I think this was stopped along with further construction of such dwellings, by the local council because of fears it was weakening the hillside.

This St. George’s Day, It’s the Tories Who Are the Real Enemies of the Patriotic Working Class (Of All Ethnicities)

It was St George’s Day yesterday, the day dedicated to England’s patron saint. There were parades in various parts of the country. I think most of the time these went very well, except in London where the right-wing demonstrators were involved in clashes with the police. They’ve been claiming on the net that, contrary to what the Met police have been tweeting, ’twas the cops that started it. Given that the Met police also have form starting fights with some left-wing protesters, such as during the Poll Tax riots back in the ’90s and against the miners during the miners’ strike, I can also believe that they may have started by attacking the rightists, even if I don’t agree with the protesters’ views.

The day was also accompanied by various bods arguing whether or not it should be celebrated on GB News and elsewhere. Femi Oluwalde popped up on GB News a day or so ago to argue against displaying the flag of St George because of England’s history in the slave trade and colonisation, while ignoring the fact that other countries also were involved in this long before England. But it also reminded me how the Tories under Maggie Thatcher draped themselves in the mantle of British patriotism. The 1987 general election featured Battle of Britain Spitfires zooming around the sky while an excited voice declared ‘It’s great to be great again!’ And there was a headline in the Torygraph quoting Maggie as saying, ‘Don’t call them boojwah, call them British!’ Well, it’s nearly forty years later, and there’s precious little great about Britain. Oh yes, I’ve seen the headlines announcing that Britain is the second most powerful country, but

1. Our public utilities are owned by foreigners,

2. An ever increasing number of working people are suffering real poverty, resorting to food banks because their not getting the welfare benefits they need, or their wages are too low to cover the costs of food and/or heating.

3. The NHS and dental services are being decimated due to Tory underfunding and privatisation. As a result, many people are pulling out their own teeth because of shortages of NHS dentists.

4. Rishi Sunak and the rest of his party of knaves and brigands has announced they’re going to stop GPs giving people sicknotes and cut Personal Independence Payments, because Tory ideology and the Heil say that everyone on benefits is a scrounger and malingerer.

5. Meanwhile, the Tory party is more than happy to received dodgy donations from the mega rich while doing their level best to reduce genuine democratic accountability by placing restrictions on the Electoral Commission.

6. And then there’s the issue of the Tories’ own personal corruption. Rishi Sunak has given public monies to his wife’s companies, the party also gave PPE contracts, for equipment that didn’t work, to companies with which they were personally linked, and BoJob handing out a computer contract to the woman with whom he was having an affair.

I also wonder about their personal commitment to this country and its people. Sunak, before he got the go-ahead for his political ambitions, was all set to get his green card and emigrate to America. Boris Johnson was born in America, and although he also became Prime Minister, showed precious little interest in actually doing the job of governing. He didn’t turn up to the COBRA meetings about Covid, and seemed to spend every available moment either off home for the weekend or having a holiday. He fancies himself as a statesman in the mould of Churchill, but his aptitude and abilities are, whatever we make of Winnie, in no way comparable.

I see precious little genuine patriotism amongst the Tories.

They have consistently betrayed the interests of this country and its great working people, of all ethnicities, while declaring the opposite.

They represent solely the interests of the global rich, and are impoverishing ordinary Brits in order to give vast tax cuts to their corporate paymasters.

Whatever party you decide to vote for, get them out at the next election!

From Brian May’s Channel, Brian Maycom: Miriam Margoyles Calls on Jews Everywhere to Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza

Bravo and respect to Margolies and Queen’s awesome guitarist, who says in the YouTube title of this video ‘my heart and soul bend in respect to this courageous woman’. In this video, the respected thesp introduces herself as an Australian citizens, speaking on behalf of the Australian Jewish council. She declares that she has not been as embarrassed a Jew due to the conduct of Israel as she has now. It is as if Hitler had won, and changed Jews from a good, humane people who did unto others as they would have them to unto them into genocidal monsters. Of course she condemns Hamas and its atrocities, but this has gone far beyond proper retaliation. It is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel for what it is doing in Gaza, and she calls on Jews worldwide, especially rabbis, in their synagogues and elsewhere, to demand a ceasefire.

Margoyles has condemned the Israeli state’s abominable mistreatment of the Palestinians for a very long time. She was a contributor to a volume attacking it nearly two decades ago, half of whose other contributors were Jews like herself. And when Israel subjected Gaza to the horrors of Operation Cast Lead, she spoke out against it as ‘a proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’.

Away from her denunciations of Israeli atrocities, she is part of a Jewish LGBTQ charity, Gay Y*ds, which attempts to tackle homophobia and prejudice in the Jewish community. As for Australia, apparently the Ozzie slang term ‘cobber’, for ‘mate’ or ‘pal’, comes from the Hebrew ‘cobar’, meaning ‘comrade’. In the 19th century Jewish Australians joined their Christian compatriots in condemning the slave trade and the enslavement of South Sea Islanders on the plantations in Queensland. In one public meeting against it, the protesters were addressed by Rabbi Davies of, I think, the Sydney synagogue, as well as Anglican, Methodist and Baptist priests, ministers and pastors. Now Jewish Ozzies are once again joining the rest of the world in condemning another human rights abuse.

And Queen still rock!

Glasgow Labour Party Selects Man Who Raised the Electricity Cap as Their Candidate for MP

Here’s another little item from Scotland, though not nearly as entertaining as the spoof documentaries from the Haggis Wildlife Foundation. This comes from the Silver Fox Hot Takes channel on Youtube. The Silver Fox of the title appears to be a Conservative, and the channel is very much devoted to attacking the SNP for its alleged corruption and wokery. He put one video up a week or so ago wondering if the Scottish Greens and SNP were planning massive purges of Greens and Tories from the country. This was after a Green MP had declared that she wanted to make Scotland a ‘Zionist-free zone’ and someone from Sturgeon’s merry band said something similar about ridding the country of Conservatives. Of course, the problem with shouting ‘anti-Semitism’ about criticisms and denunciations of Zionism, is that Zionism is an ideology. Not every Jewish person believes in it, and some, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, actively oppose it. It was originally a gentile, Christian doctrine aimed at hastening Christ’s return, or simply cleansing Europe of Jews. The biggest Zionist organisation in America is Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. And apart from that, some of us can still remember Thatcher ranting that she was going to destroy socialism, and the fear that she really did intend to put leftists in concentration camps.

The Silver Fox has also moved on to criticising the Scottish Labour party, no doubt because certain polls have suggested that they will take over from the SNP as the majority party in Scotland at the next election. The right are as alarmed by this as they are of the SNP continuing in government, as Labour is apparently just as woke as the Scots Nationalists. But there are other, left-wing reasons why people should be wary of giving Labour their vote. In this short video, the Silver Fox takes very good aim at the man, John Grady, whom Glasgow East has selected as their prospective candidate at this year’s elections. According to the Fox, Grady is a lawyer who successfully fought for the cap on electricity bills to be raised, thus doing his bit to make the country poorer. I find this all too credible. Scottish Labour was as Blairite as the rest of the Labour party under the rule of Tony, Gordon and Miliband. Many Scots were massively unimpressed by its leader, Jim Murphy, who followed the British Labour party generally in capitulating to the attacks on the welfare state. Jeremy Corbyn challenged the grip of the Blairites and lost thanks to a massive smear campaign, and now we have Kier Starmer, a very definite, loud Blairite. And so it seems the Blairites are back in Scotland, selecting their Thatcherite candidates and activists while telling the rest of us that somehow they represent working people and everything will be better under them.

Be very careful who you vote for this election. If there’s an alternative candidate you prefer, no matter how small their party, vote for them. We need to show the big beasts they can’t take our vote for granted.

The Haggis Wildlife Foundation on ‘The Worlds Most Elusive Creature Scottish Haggis’

It was the first of April last Monday, which in England and Britain is April Fool’s Day, the day when traditionally people played pranks and hoaxes on each other. This included masters sending their apprentices on ‘fool’s errands’ to get skyhooks or striped paint or some other such nonsense. There’s something similar amongst our French cousins, though over there it seems to involve calling people ‘Avril poussin’ – April Fish, from what I’ve read. When I was a child the Beeb used to celebrate this day by putting up entirely bogus, spoof documentaries. This included such classics as one of the Dimblebys telling the world how spaghetti grows on trees, as well as another one about moving islands. ITV got in on it with a spoof science documentary, ‘Science Report’, on Alternative 3 in 1976. This claimed that the world was heading towards ecological disaster with first a new ice age and then global warming. The Americans and Russians were prepared for this, and so were kidnapping scientists and ordinary people, who were to serve as slave labourers, in a secret project to colonise Mars. Although the programme was definitely a spoof, with the same actors appearing in different roles throughout the programme, the swelteringly hot summer drought that year gave it verisimilitude, and people in both Britain and America believed it. Alternative 3 thus became part of the growing mass of conspiracy theories. There were other hoaxes too. One I remember from my childhood was a piece on BBC 2, narrated by David Attenborough, which, if I recall properly, was about Hitler going to art school in England and the bombing of the Crystal Palace in World War II. The programmes were presented absolutely deadpan, and were really convincing. You had a complete suspension of disbelief right up to the end of the programme, when commonsense and scepticism kicked in, and you said to yourself, ‘Naaah!’

One favourite theme of comedy programmes in the 1970s was the idea that the haggis, the ‘great chieftain o’ the pudding race’, as Rabbie Burns had it, was actually a real animal. There was a Goodies episode in which Graeme, Bill and Tim went up to the highlands in search of it. In the same spirit is the Haggis Wildlife Foundation, a YouTube channel that posts highly entertaining spoof documentaries about the haggis as a genuine wild animal, deeply embedded in Scots history and folk tradition, and a proud symbol of Scots national identity. The video below presents the haggis as just such an animal, portrayed in ancient manuscripts, but now elusive to the point that some people believe it is entirely legendary. The video shows mock medieval and early modern manuscripts, spoof b/w photos of the creature amidst genuine shots of the majestic Scottish countryside and classical music of the Elgar type. All narrated by someone sounding more than just a little like David Attenborough, to make it more like a certain sort of nature documentary.

The Foundation has put up a number of these videos, including one which asks what happened to the last haggis farmers, how the haggis can be hunted sustainably and the haggis wool industry. It’s a great piece of make-believe and whimsy of a type that’s not so common as it used to be. Enjoy!

The Outlaw Bookseller Looks Around and Praises Comics and SF Bookshop in Cirencester

One of the people, whose videos I’ve been watching on YouTube over the past few weeks is the Outlaw Bookseller. He’s a Welsh chap who runs a bookshop in Bath and is an SF enthusiast. He’s extremely knowledgeable and well-informed, and is the author of the book 100 SF Novels You Should Read Before You Die. In his videos, he discusses the great SF authors of the past, like Robert Silverberg, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delaney, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and so on, as well as those writing today. His views are sharp and incisive, even if you don’t share some of his tastes. Many of his videos are about him going to other bookshops or book fairs, looking at what’s one display, buying books and talking to other SF fans and collectors.

In this rather long video, he looks round and praises Codex Books in Cirencester. He’s particularly impressed with it, despite there being a few gaps on the shelves, as it’s a real, bricks-and-mortar business. This is, as he says, very brave in these times when shops and businesses are closing across the country thanks to competition from the internet.

Down here in Bristol we’ve got Forbidden Planet, which is part of a chain of stores based in London. It’s a huge place, but I still miss Forbidden Planet, Bristol’s own SF books and comics shop half-way up Park Street. As well as comics and SF and Fantasy books, it also stocked role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, as well as magazines on illegal recreational substances like High Times and Weed World. Yes, I think it was very much a product of the Hippy era. It closed down when Forbidden Planet opened. There was also a similar SF/comic shop, the Hobbit Hole, on Gloucester docks in the ’90s. I don’t know if it’s still there. On the day I went there, they were having a promotion and had a Dalek costume complete with ring modulator for the voice. There were two of them in the store, and while one operated the suit the other pushed it outside so that the guy inside could tell them about their sale day, all in the harsh mechanical tones of Dr Who’s classic monsters.

I’m putting this up here, not just because I’m something of an SF fan myself, but also because I feel that small businesses and shops fully deserve all the help they can get in these straitened circumstances. These businesses are keeping Britain’s high streets alive, helping not just the local economy but also building and cementing communities. People go in their local newsagents not just to pick up the local paper, but also to talk to the other customers they may know and see around and the staff. Some of the shops specialising in comics and role-playing games, like Proud Lion in Cheltenham, also seem to hold sessions where their customers and the RPG community in Cheltenham come in to play some of the games.

Cirencester itself is a beautiful town, with a history going all the way back to the Romans. There’s a Roman villa close by, with a museum which shows you what the villa may have looked like in its heyday. It was also an Anglo-Saxon town, and you can see some of the remains for this period of the city’s history in the local museum.

German State-Owned Bank Freezes Assets of Jewish Anti-Zionist Organisation

We’ve seen Israel-critical Jews smeared as anti-Semites by the official Jewish organisations in this country, like the Chief Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the United Synagogue and that rag the Jewish Chronicle. These foul lies have been picked up by Stalin Starmer and used to purge the Labour party of dissenting Jewish voices and the gentiles who supported them. Incredibly principled people like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and so many, many others. About 3/5 or 4/5 of the people purged from Labour for anti-Semitism were Jews. In addition to this, there is the media blackout on the military aid Britain seems to be giving to Israel. Mike carried a report on his site last week about nine Israeli planes landing in Britain. Private Eye in its ‘Letter From…’ column a few fortnights ago reported that British airbases in Cyprus were being used by American planes en route to the Middle East. Mike asked whether ordinary Brits had been asked about Britain being involved in the Gaza genocide. Well, no, we weren’t, and anyone who does will be accused of anti-Semitism and, if Muslim, an Islamist and fanatical supporter of Hamas. Even if they’re just going by John Lennon’s words in another grotty war: ‘All we are saying is, ‘Give peace a chance’. It’d be great to see that translated into Hebrew and Arabic.

But this story from Middle East Eye shows that anti-Zionist Jews in Germany now seem to be suffering the thin end of the wedge of corporate/state persecution. And let’s be clear here – German Jews have every right to be critical of Israel. Before the Second World War Zionism was a minor movement in European Jewry. Most Jews wanted to stick to the homelands of their birth and fight to be accepted as fellow citizens, not to migrate to a country they’d never seen, to displace people who’d never harmed them, and who belonged to a religion many Jews believed had treated them better than Christianity. The Jewish groups the Nazis really feared were the German Jewish ex-servicemen’s association. These were courageous men who had fought for their country, and who patriotism was indisputable. They couldn’t convincingly claim that Jews had betrayed Germany in front of old soldiers with war wounds and the medals to match.

And the Zionists were quite prepared to sacrifice European Jewish lives if it served their purpose. David Ben Gurion said that he didn’t care if the Nazis exterminated half the Jews in Europe, if the other half went to Israel. And then there was Rudolf Kasztner, the head of the Hungarian Zionists, who made a deal to send Jewish Hungarians to the death camps if some could go instead to Israel. As for the trial of that abomination Erich Eichner, the nascent Israeli state also followed other western countries in recruiting Gestapo agents for their intelligence services during the Cold War. For more information, please go over to Tony’s blog and start reading. It all comes from respectable historical sources and is minutely documented.

Israel gets very strong support from Germany, no doubt motivated from guilt over the Holocaust. Germany was the no. 1 holiday destination for young Israelis because of how well they were treated. But this positive attitude shouldn’t exempt Israel from justified criticism nor permit the persecution of German Jews who do not share this attitude to Israel.

‘A state-owned bank in Germany has frozen the account of a Jewish anti-Zionist organisation and demanded the group disclose a list of all its members. Judische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost, or Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East, announced on Tuesday that its account with Berliner Sparkasse was frozen on 26 March with immediate effect. “In 2024, Jewish money is once again being confiscated by a German bank: Berliner Sparkasse freezes Jewish Voice account,” Jewish Voice said in a statement on its social media platforms. The group received a letter from the bank informing it that a full list of all members, including adresses, tax documentation, income statements and other internal documents, needed to be submitted to Berliner Sparkasse by 5 April to “update customer data”. “It’s a very creepy letter. You’d think they are working together with the state criminal police bureau,” Wieland Hoban, chairman of Jewish Voice, told MEE.’