Mark Pattie, one of the great commenters here, has asked me what my opinion if of Giorgia Meloni, the president or prime minister of Italy and the leader of the far right Fratelli d’Italia party. I have to say my opinion of her is very mixed. First of all, I think that she’s extremely intelligent, like her French counterpart, Marine le Pen, of the National Rally party. Both of them strike me as being far brighter and better communicators than their mainstream rivals. They are, or claim to be, offering real alternatives that will benefit their nations. All their rivals have to offer is pretty much the same neoliberalism and support for the European Union that many Italians and Frenchmen and women seem to be tired of. I think Macron a few weeks ago was again touting the idea of a common European army. That, if I recall correctly, was one of the ideas dreamed by the French president Jacques Delors over a decade ago. It was part of his European federalist project, which no-one, apart from Delors himself and his cohorts, seemed to have much enthusiasm for. It was vehemently denounced over here by the Brexiteers as an occupation force, which it wouldn’t have been. But I don’t think any nation would willingly surrender its control of its defence forces to any kind of superstate. If Macron was pushing this idea, then it seems to show that he’s run out of ideas and is groping around for anything that might inspire or enthuse the public.
I certainly am not happy about the two parties – Meloni’s Fratelli and Le Pen’s National Rally’s roots in Fascism. That said, Le Pen is a very canny operator. She dropped the Nazi stuff and turned it more centre-right, like the other ‘post-fascist’ party, the Allianza Nazionale that emerged from the Blackshirts of the MSI. And to give the Fratelli due credit, Italy is still a pluralist democracy. She hasn’t outlawed the other parties and there aren’t, it seems, uniformed black shirted storm troopers on the streets beating up Communists, liberals, democrats and foreigners.
Immigration and Improving Conditions in Africa
And I can well appreciate the forces that have pushed her into power. Italy, Spain, France and Greece are very much on the front line regarding the immigrant boats from Africa, and I think the question of how many more migrants Europe can take is a reasonable one. A friend of mine used to be a member of UKIP, and he once told me it wasn’t immigration itself that he had an issue with, it was just that they migrants kept coming. Mass immigration was an issue in Italy before Meloni. The Five Star Party, set up by an Italian comedian, was very anti-immigration. There were also reports that a Black African woman in one of the Italian governments had made a speech calling for the legalisation of polygamy. I’m strongly opposed to this, as I imagine most westerners would be. And she’s very clever at defending her anti-immigration stance. I had a video of her pop up on my YouTube feed a few days speaking in the Italian parliament about four years ago. She was rebutting accusations that she and her party were racists for demanding that Italy withdraw from the UN Migrant Charter by pointing out the number of nations that had already done so, including America and Austria, rhetorically asking if these countries were also racist. She criticised the French by pointing out that they were in no position to call anyone racist, as they sent any migrants heading over the border from Italy back over it to Ventimiglia.
But she’s also well aware that stemming migration means improving conditions in Africa. She called for support to be given to the Tunisian banks. These had crashed, and she afraid that this would result in a fresh wave of migration from north Africa. She also criticised the French for exploiting African nations. Thirty per cent of the uranium for the French nuclear power stations, she claimed, came from Niger, where children were labouring in the mines and 90 per cent of the population had no electricity. She has said that Africa needs to be freed from European exploitation. This is something I’ve only heard people on the left saying over here. I’ve heard no similar sentiments from Johnson, Truss or Sumak, let alone Rees-Mogg.
European Union, the Single Currency and the Dictatorship of the Troika
Regarding her antipathy to the European Union, some of that might come from Italy’s experience joining the single currency and then the effective government of the country by the EU troika on behalf of the banks. One of the speakers I heard at various seminars at Bristol Uni when I was study for my Ph.D. was an Italian theology student. Talking to her one evening at one of the meetings of a medieval studies group, she told us how the single currency had affected her homeland. It had been disastrous. Prices had risen massively to the point where people were extremely angry. So angry that she didn’t feel safe there. And then when the country had been hit with a financial crisis along with Ireland, Spain and Greece, they had had a government imposed on them by France, Germany and one of the other major players and policies dictated to them to pay back the loans. In practice, this means that the money was simply transferred from one German bank to another. Which I think may partly explain her hostility to the EU and international finance. Cut the anti-Semitism, and the great international financiers have caused immense damage to the global economy and working people are still having to pay the price.
Defence of the Family and Gay Rights
I also, as a general issue, don’t have any problem at all with her stance behind the general NatCon values of family, faith, flag. Although this slogan is close to Mussolini’s ‘Family, Faith, Fatherland’. As a general principle, I think the nuclear family needs to be strengthened and properly valued because of the immense damage that is being done to children from fatherless families. But I am well aware that there are single mothers who have done excellent jobs of raising their children, who are a credit to them.
Similarly, if I am honest, I cannot say that I find gay couples with children the ideal family situation. But, I am also well aware that there have been single-sex parents who have also been great at raising their children. And these kids respected them for the great job they’d done caring for them. There have been scandals over in the states where trans couples have been arrested for committing terrible abuse of the children they’d adopted, but there have also been sickening cases over here of straight couples, who have abused and murdered their children. In my view, gay parents are no more prone to abusing children than straights and so, when it comes to providing a home for a child, their sexuality shouldn’t be an object, only their general character.
The surrogacy issue is rather more involved, and to a certain extent here she has a point. She does not want foreign gay couples paying Italian women to carry their child. She has explained this by pointing to Ukraine, where women have been paid by foreigners to be surrogate mothers. The gay couples, who have fathered the child have not picked it up, and so these kids end up in orphanages. She also points to the moral prohibition against the commodification of the human body. People and their body parts are not items to be bought and sold like any other product. When this comes to human life and reproduction, this is especially important. Back in the 1980s Pope John Paul II wrote an entire encyclical about the issue. It was naturally attacked because I think it included the standard Catholic prohibitions on contraception and abortion, both of which I believe should be legal. But the objection to the commodification of the human body has, I believe, the general support of theologians and moral philosophers outside Roman Catholicism, but I think surrogate motherhood has been an exception to this up to now.
It may seem surprising, but Meloni’s stance on banning artificial reproduction for the benefit of gays was actually mainstream forty years ago. Back in the 1980s there were initiatives in Britain to set up sperm banks. The woman running one was interviewed by the left-wing Sunday newspaper, the Observer. She was asked about the issue of gay men providing sperm so that their lesbian friends could conceive. The woman replied no, that was happening with her bank. All her young men had girlfriends. This was, as I said, in the Observer, a liberal newspaper which is also pro-feminist and anti-racist. Meloni’s trying to drag Italy back to this era in respect to gay surrogacy. It’s reactionary, but I wouldn’t like to say that it is more than that. Where I have an issue with her on this is that it should also apply to heterosexual couples. Meloni’s prohibition doesn’t, and so is clearly discriminatory and homophobic.
Supporting Christianity
I’m also religious, and would like to see a revival of Christianity in this country, as well as in other parts of what used to be Christendom. But I want it to be a reasonable, tolerant Christianity, rather than the militant sectarianism I’ve seen from some extremely right-wing Christian evangelists. I think Christianity in America has been harmed by the right-wing televangelists that appeared under Reagan. Some simply preached ‘Prosperity Gospel’, the doctrine that if you accept Christ, you’ll become rich, and quite a few seemed to be interested in enriching themselves. The Rev. Jim Bakker got caught with his hand in the parish poor box, so to speak. He may also have been having an extramarital affair, as were others. He got sent to the slammer. He’s now out, and a few years ago he wrote a very good book attacking Prosperity Gospel as a heresy, and calling for people to accept Christ. It’s tarnished Christianity’s image amongst a section of young people. There are some brilliant Christian preachers, philosophers and theologians out there, who are well worth listening to, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. But you don’t hear so much about them.
Pride in Country Natural
As for pride in one’s country, I don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with that. Britain, America and the west have done terrible things, but they have also done immense good. America was a racist, apartheid state. But it dismantled those laws under pressure from civil rights leaders like MLK and Martin X. I similarly take issue with the glib anti-racism claiming that Britain is institutionally racist because of the British empire, and that we should therefore feel guilt and shame about being White. One of the other books I really want to review is Nigel Biggar’ Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Biggar’s a moral theologian at Oxford, and the book’s a rebuttal of this facile view. It’s been intensely controversial, and his publishing contract was broken at one point. But he does show that in very many cases, British imperialists genuinely acted for what they considered to be the best interests of the subaltern peoples. The first British governor of Egypt, for example, told the colonial secretary that if the best interests of the Egyptian people conflicted with orders from Britain, he would ignore those orders. And when he said ‘Egyptian people’, he meant all the Egyptian people, not just Arabs, but also Copts, Greeks, Armenians and Africans from further south. Even Cecil bloody Rhodes was better than he’s often painted. Yes, he’s a blackguard, but he stood up for the right of the minuscule Black electorate in South Africa to vote when the government was trying to deprive them of it. As for the Benin Bronzes, which many racial activists would like repatriated, they were seized during a military expedition part of whose objectives were to stop the Benin people enslaving and slaughtering the people’s around them in mass human sacrifices. Bacon, the expedition’s intelligence officer, wrote an account of it, including graphic descriptions of the victims they found, in his book City of Blood.
Anti-Semitic Undertones to Rhetoric about International Finance
What gives me profound misgivings about Meloni, however, is when she starts spouting the Nazi nonsense about nationality, faith and the family being under attack by international finance and George Soros. It has nasty anti-Semitic overtones, although so far, she hasn’t said anything outright against the Jews. Anti-Semitism aside, I do believe the development of capitalism has worked to undermine the nation state and people’s natural loyalty to their homeland and the family. There hasn’t been an evil genius behind this. It’s just that international financial speculators, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, have had no moral issues investing in Britain’s rivals and moving their money across continents in order to maximise profits. Mogg is, of course, a Roman Catholic, which I hope helps to explode any myth that the Jews are somehow behind it. Western nations like America and Britain are being harmed by outsourcing and the movement of their industries abroad. That’s one of the reasons many Americans voted for Trump, even though he promptly broke that policy once elected. And I believe that extreme individualism that has led to the decline of the family and attachment to wider British society partly comes from the way late 20th century capitalism tried to turn people from citizens into atomised consumers. Meloni has said this, and I agree with her.
Concern about Welfare and Economic Policies
I am, however, deeply concerned about her welfare and economic policies. She’s fiscally conservative, demanding low taxation, which in my experience means starving the state budget so that state supported industries and services decline to the point of collapse. And I have found a video of her speaking to the far right Spanish Vox party in a rally in Spain. This makes me feel profoundly uneasy given what a monster Franco was. He was more brutal and ruthless in the massacres he carried out than the Italian Fascists who fought for him in the Spanish Civil War. And when they’re worse than Musso’s storm troopers, it’s clear you’re dealing with a monster. Spain is still suffering the scars from his dictatorship. I realise that Vox and the Centre Right party have won a landslide election, but the thought that there are some people in the coalition that might be nostalgic for the old brute is deeply disturbing. This is my assessment of her so far. She’s anti-immigrant, but so far not racist; homophobic, but has a point regarding issues like surrogacy; broadly right about the importance of the traditional family, religion and country, though I am worried about the direction these common sense values could be taken. I don’t want them to be given the kind of totalitarian, intolerant support Mussolini and the fascists gave them. Nor do I want single mothers and gay parents to be demonised. And I have deep disquiet about her economic policies and attitude towards welfare provision. If she’s anything like the rest of the right, she’ll try and cut it to the point where working class poverty increases.
A few days ago, Frank Furedi published a piece about ‘woke’ academic attacks on key figures of the British literary and scientific canon because someone in a series of universities, schools and museums had decided that they were racist and colonialist. This included Chaucer, who was denounced as a rapist, racist and colonialist, Shakespeare, and Milton. Milton was an opponent of slavery, but he didn’t escape censure because he believed Whites were more beautiful than Blacks. Newton came in for it, because despite discovering gravity and revolutionising physics, he ‘may have benefited from colonialism.’ Sydney Opera House apologised for classical music. It was racist, because traditionally White culture views it as the highest musical form. Then there was the case of the Cambridge Archaeological, Museum, which staged a display of Greek statues drawing attention to their ‘whiteness’. The classics department at the same university also the role the classics have played in the development of racism. The article also described how one American high school English teacher boasted online about getting the Odyssey banned from the school library. At the same time, the science departments at British universities are under pressure to decolonise their curricula, because science was a tool the British Empire used to exploit and oppress its subject peoples. This is all being pushed by the Quality Assurance Agency, which also wanted Maths students to be told that some of the statistical techniques had been pioneered by eugenicists. It demanded instead that its teaching should also promote diversity. Furedi rightly considered this an attack on key figures in western culture motivated by the contemporary anti-racism craze.
I’m not a fan of Furedi. I think he started out as one of the Living Marxism crew, before joining the Libertarian hard right with the rest of them after the fall of Communism. But he’s right here. He writes that the ‘decolonisation project of British universities has no interest in academic learning. Its objective is to discredit and take down the leading historical figures in the sciences and humanities. When I say take down, I mean literally take down. In an attempt to emulate the Rhodes Must Fall campaign targeting the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, students at Cape Town University adopted the phrase ‘science must fall’! It appears that discrediting science is a small price to pay for decolonising some of the most precious achievements of humanity.’
And concludes
‘The campaign designed to discredit and de-authorise the humanities should concern us all, for what is at stake is the status of a cultural legacy that has endured for thousands of years and inspired people throughout the ages. If we lose sight of the artistic, literary and intellectual contribution of Ancient Greece and Rome, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we risk falling under the spell of cultural illiteracy. We owe a great debt to the humanities, for they provided the foundation for developing human civilisation’s moral and scientific insights.
The assault on knowledge threatens to corrode and discredit the intellectual foundation of our civilisation. Orwell’s prediction that by 2050 Newspeak will triumph no longer seems farfetched. Every time an academic subject or a field of intellectual or artistic endeavour becomes decolonised, we risk losing sight of what we have lost. As I noted elsewhere, society is coming under the spell of historical amnesia. That is why we must raise the alarm and take action to protect our arts and sciences from the cultural vandals stalking our institutions.’
It’s not hard to find rebuttals against these cancellations. Past people had very different cultural values, and it is wrong to expect them to share those of ‘woke’ 21st century militant anti-racists. But their attitudes towards race and colonialism does not invalidate their work, any more than any other aspect of their personal lives. Isaac Newton is a case in point. He was an extremely difficult, bigoted, quarrelsome individual. He deliberately lectured in Latin so that as few people as possible could understand his theories, and had a venomous hatred of Roman Catholicism. His descriptions of what he hoped would happen to Catholic nuns apparently is very misogynistic. He also had a long-running feud with the German scientist and philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, over who invented calculus first. During the feud, they both reviewed each others’ books under pseudonyms, along with other underhand tactics. But this doesn’t invalidate Newton as one of the key figures in the history of western science.
As for Milton, many peoples across the world believe that their own race is the most beautiful of all. This includes Black peoples, who regarded Whites as ugly, as described by anthropologists. But Milton’s Paradise Lost is a classic of British, and indeed world literature. As is another of his works, the Areopagita, which is one of the first pleas for freedom of speech. I think the various people and institutions intent on censoring and controlling what we say for ideological reasons should be forced to read it, along with Mill’s On Liberty, until they can recite in their sleep.
Moving on to the ‘whiteness’ of Greek statuary, it’s been known for a long time that in their heyday they were painted in bright colours. They only appear white because the paint has worn off over the millennia. And you can find white statues from earlier cultures in the Middle East going back to the Sumerians.
All these attacks ultimately come from the Critical Social Justice conception of ‘Whiteness’. White culture is innately racist and oppresses people of colour. Anti-racists should therefore insist on its decolonisation in order to create a more inclusive and diverse culture.
But in these attacks on key western figures and culture, it has moved beyond simply recognising the value of other peoples and their discoveries into an attack on White culture itself.
Having looked at the Art Newspaper’s report on the withdrawal of the ‘Medicine Man’ gallery at the Wellcome Museum and its replacement with shamanistic performances by Grace Ndiritu, along with her biography on Wikipedia, I think I now understand what’s happened there. One of the names that leapt out at me reading the Art Newspaper article was Dan Hicks. He was one of the lecturers in the Archaeology and Anthropology Department at Bristol University when I was there. This is going back over a decade, and when I saw him, he was young and hip. I think his speciality is Historical Archaeology, and from what I remember he has co-edited a series of papers about it. Over here, Historical Archaeology is merely that branch of archaeology concerned with monuments and artefacts from historical times, rather than prehistory. Over the Pond, however, it is very definitely ideologically loaded, and concerns itself with colonialism, the oppression of the indigenous peoples, slavery and the emergence of capitalism. And this focus can be very clear in the work of some lecturers and academics. It’s not all like this – some of the historical archaeological research is less left-wing. While doing my Ph.D., one of the papers I consulted was about the building of 18th century Annapolis and how it conformed to 18th century ideas about architecture and society. For example, the buildings were deliberately constructed with large windows so that outsiders could look in. This came from the view that business should be conducted as far as possible in public view, so that public scrutiny would make sure that everything was correct, orderly and legal. Hicks’ doctoral student studied the archaeology of Long Kesh, the Maze Prison, in Ulster. She gave a seminar one lunchtime about her research, and she was very, very good. She presented an excellent case for its preservation and exhibition from a non-sectarian perspective as somewhere that was vital to the heritage of the people of Northern Ireland.
Archaeology has also expanded its scope in recent decades. When most of us think of archaeology, I’m pretty sure it’s of prehistory and ancient civilisations like Egypt, Greece and Rome. But it can also be much more recent, taking in not just the Middle Ages but also recent history up to the Second World War and beyond. One of the lads I knew was studying World War II tank defences around Bristol and Somerset. There was even a pillbox study group, which catalogued and documented the various WWII pillboxes left along the country’s coasts and beaches to protect us from invasion. There has, like Ndiritu at the Wellcome Museum, also been artistic events performed or staged around pieces of archaeology. In one of these in America an historic barn or house was allowed to decay, with photographs taken and finally displayed showing its gradual destruction. When I was there, the archaeology department had been part of a similar project concerning the various objects at Severn Beach, a holiday resort near Bristol. From what I dimly recall, this photographed and decorated such historic monuments as the public benches and decaying boats. This was too ‘arty’ in the pejorative sense for some of the people at the seminar on it I attended. They saw themselves very definitely as scientists. It was too arty for me, and I see myself much more as coming from the arts rather than the sciences.
There was, at the time, a general movement towards drawing different disciplines together, and especially the arts and sciences. Interdisciplinary subjects were in vogue, and there was much talk about overcoming C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ arts and science, in which people from one side of the cultural divide had no knowledge or interest in the other. One such artistic project based in science I read about in New Scientist featured genetically modified organisms. One of these was a cactus, whose DNA had been tinkered with so that instead of prickles, it grew hair. Ndiritu’s performances at the Wellcome Collection come from archaeology and anthropology, rather than genetic engineering, but they are part of the same project of mixing science and art.
Her Wikipedia entries also mentions work at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium. Way back when I was at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum I got material from Belgium about some of their museums looking at their countries imperial history. One of these was a series of artistic projects and performances in the country’s museum about the Belgian Congo. As I’m sure readers are well aware, King Leopold’s personal rule in the Congo is one of the bloodiest holocausts in African history. About 8 million people are supposed to have been murdered by his Force Publique in order to produce rubber for export. I’ve been told that the country tried to forget about it all, until the first years of the 21st century when these events were staged at the museum as part of the confrontation with this infamous period in Belgian history.
There have also been other archaeological and anthropological events and displays in which indigenous peoples have performed their religious rituals. A few years ago, if I recall correctly, there was one where Amerindian shamans performed their people’s rites. When the exhibit is of those peoples, then it is only fair to include the people themselves. I think this is what was going on in the Wellcome Museum with Ndiritu and her shamanism. It looks like it’s an attempt by indigenous African culture to claim a proper place in the exhibit as a counterpoint to western rationalism.
This does not mean, however, that it should be free from criticism or that such criticism is right-wing. The decolonisation movement does indeed have as its goal the decentring of western science and historiography. It goes far beyond the usual explanation about including overlooked non-western and indigenous perspectives. The ‘Science Must Fall’ movement really existed. And some of the critical of modern postcolonial theory are left-wing feminists. Asian feminists, for example, have complained that they are given no support by western postmodern feminists in their struggle against their cultures’ own restrictions on women, because postcolonialism is only interested in such problems if they are caused by the West. This is described by Bricmont and Sokal in their 90’s attack on Postmodernism, Intellectual Impostures. And Sokal is, or was, very much a man of the left. He was a physicist who gave up his career to teach maths in Nicaragua under the left-wing Sandinista regime.
I also wonder how this all fits with Edward Said’s critique of western views of the east, Orientalism. His book was a polemic arguing that the west since ancient Greece had regarded the east as the Other, and produced images to justify its conquest and domination. Western travellers and explorers had therefore presented it as backward, irrational and feminine and somehow unchanging. But Nditiru’s performances are based on the non-scientific irrational and traditional, which are now presented as positive. This is indeed a challenge to the view of magic in indigenous cultures that I remember from my childhood. I can remember watching a BBC documentary about African shamanism when I was in my early teens, in which the voiceover concluded that while western science had succeeded in discovering so much about the world and made so many advances, while magic had reached an end and could produce no such advances. The great British scientist and broadcaster, Jacob Bronowski, said something similar in his TV series and book, The Ascent of Man. He looked at the traditional culture of one of Iran’s nomadic people, and considered that it similarly locked them in a stifling, unchanging world. Bronowski was no man of the right. He was a member of the Fabian Society at a time when that actually meant something, before it was taken over by the Blairites.
I am also very much aware of the crisis that has affected many indigenous society with the collapse of their world of meaning through contact with western modernity and the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. But there are also dangers in idealising indigenous societies. I mentioned in my previous article that in Nigeria, priests from one of the country’s pagan religions had been involved in the acquisition of slaves, and that a South African anthropologist had attempted to defend muti human sacrifice at a convention in this country, as well as witchcraft and witch hunting in Africa. Those aspects of indigenous religion and spirituality shouldn’t be ignored. I am not saying they should be stressed to restore the old image of Africa as a backward continent needing western civilisation, but not all the continent’s ills should be ascribed to western rationalism either. Hence it should be perfectly legitimate to question this latest policy by the Wellcome Museum, regardless of whether one is politically right or left.
GB News, the self-proclaimed alternative to the ‘wet, woke BBC’, is in this fortnight’s Private Eye. The broadcaster apparently has overtaken Sky News in ratings, and has taken to pushing stupid, and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories. These include myths that the vaccine doesn’t work, or is responsible for deaths, and that there’s no need for the lockdown. Pretty much staples of the wider right-wing anti-vaxxer fringe. But one of these conspiracy theories comes very close to fascism. Mark Steyn has apparently told his viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is the cause of the falling birthrate in the west of the ‘Aryans’, who built civilisation. Firstly, as the 19th century linguist, who used the term ‘Aryan’ for what are now termed the Indo-European languages, George Muller, it’s a linguist not racial term. A dark-skinned Indian, who speaks Hini or one of the other languages descended from Sanskrit, or an Urdu-speaking Pakistani can both be fairly described as Aryans, because their languages are derived from that introduced by the Aryans, who invaded Indian c. 3000 BC. But both would be targeted by the Nazis over here because of their race. Muller stated quite clearly that conflating Aryan with race was dangerous, and it’s a pity more people didn’t listen to him otherwise the carnage of the Third Reich might have been avoided.
He’s right that the birthrates in the developed west are falling along with the sperm count of western men. This is alarming, as there have been predictions by respectable magazines and newspapers that if it continues, by 2050 half of western men will be considered clinically infertile. No-one really knows the cause of this, but it’s been suggested since the 1990s that a type of plastic, phthallates, may be responsible. Other causes are probably the industrial pollution responsible for the reproductive deformities in amphibians, which Alex Jones notoriously declared were ‘turning the frickin’ frogs gay’. These chemicals are believed to mimic female hormones, hence their damage to those animals. I’ve also seen claims that it’s all due to female hormones from the reproductive pill getting into the biosphere, but I haven’t seen any scientist make this claim. In my opinion, it comes from that part of the right which is anti-feminist and so pro-life as to condemn contraception as well as abortion. I also got the impression that all western men were affected, including Blacks and Asians, and not just Whites.
Steyn’s claims resemble the conspiracy theories that were going around the Black communities in America and possibly apartheid South Africa back in the 90s. These claimed that the government was putting chemicals in Coca-Cola to sterilise young Black men. That was totally wrong, though it was understandable given the persecution of Blacks in both those countries. Steyn’s is a first-world, White version of this. It comes very close to all the stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about the machinations of the Jews to enslave and destroy the White race, although as far as I know Steyn isn’t an anti-Semite.
He is, however, an Islamophobe. About a decade ago he was a partner with late Reaganite bloviator Rush Limbaugh and his radio station out in New Hampshire. Much of the content Steyn put out on his blogs and columns on the internet were attacks on Islam, including some of the weirder rulings made by Iran’s late Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was one of those pushing the ‘Eurabia’ fear. This holds that Muslim birthrates are outstripping those of indigenous European Whites to such an extent that they will become the dominant race and religion and impose sharia law. A friend of mine told me he did some calculations, and that’s simply not going to happen. I don’t doubt that the Muslim population will expand immensely in the next decades, and this will present serious problems if the radicals and Islamists extend their influence over these communities, but it won’t lead to their population overtaking everyone else’s.
Steyn also tried to warn or scare people with the example of Feyenoord in the Netherlands. This is a majority Muslim town where some decades ago the Muslim dominated city council publicly invited the non-Muslim population to convert. I don’t know, but I think their attitude would be unremarkable, perhaps even ordinary in very pious, hardline Muslim countries like Pakistan, where non-Muslims can come under very intense pressure to convert. But obviously in the context of the non-Muslim, secular west, where religion is considered a matter for the individual’s private conscience, it’s totally unacceptable. The problem is, I don’t know how common such political moves by Muslim-controlled local authorities are. As far as I know, it only happened in Feyenoord, although I’m sure that non-Muslims living in solidly Muslim areas are under pressure to conform to their standards of behaviour.
Away from Steyn, the article describes how GB News, like Fox over in the US, threw in their lot with Donald Trump, talking him as US president until it became the ‘MAGA channel’. Their predictions of Trump’s eminent suitability for the Oval Office was definitely born out by the Orange Buffoons massive greed, incompetence and disastrous policies towards blue collar workers – more attacks on their rights, further decimation of their welfare provisions to enrich Trump’s friends and donors, and more outsourcing. As well as attempts to muzzle federal climate and environmental scientists for the benefit of the oil industry. And I could go on.
As for GB News’ attitudes over here, it’s solidly behind Farage and Brexit and resolutely against the welfare state and the NHS. If you’re a member of the working class, GB News is not your friend. But the stupid conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine threaten to do real harm. We’ve already seen instances where people have refused the vaccine, then caught the virus and died. And Steyn’s story about birthrates and ‘Aryans’ threatens to encourage real Nazis and Fascists, who’ll target not just Muslims but Jews.
I found this striking photo while looking for information on Google on Zimbabwe’s White farmers. They were brutally expelled nearly twenty years ago by the country’s dictator, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe was a thug, who had previously butchered and brutalised the Ndebele people, as well as his Black political rivals and opponents. I gather that there had been some kind of scheme to hand over the White-owned farms to Black Zimbabweans with money paid by the British government. Mugabe claimed that the money had not been paid, and sent in the army and his supporters to occupy them and expel the Whites. This was accompanied by murder and savage beatings, and I can remember being shocked by the images I saw on the BBC. Mugabe’s followers could no more run commercial farms than they could the rest of the economy. The result was that a formerly prosperous country that had been the breadbasket of Africa suffered massive, crippling inflation and starvation. Many of its people fled to South Africa. Meanwhile, Nigeria offered to provide land and sanctuary to the White farmers.
I gather that the situation has now been reversed, with Zimbabwe inviting the farmers back with promises of compensation. I found the photo particularly interesting, as the slogan says ‘Mugabe Killed Our White Farmers’. It shows that Mugabe’s ethnic cleansing has been condemned by at least a section of Zimbabwe’s Black population. A hopeful sign of racial reconciliation and solidarity amongst all Zimbabweans, regardless of colour.
I’ve been reading various SF books over the past few days. These have been the collections of classic SF stories edited by the British Library’s Mike Ashley. One of these is a history of British SF in 100 stories. This doesn’t collect the stories themselves, but consists of precis of what he judges to be the 100 best British SF stories. It begins with H.G. Wells, as you’d expect and includes a number of other well-known SF authors from the period, like Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. But there are many others that are now obscure, but seem to be really interesting and sometimes chillingly prescient. For example, the 1918 novel, Journey to Meccania, is a terrible warning of what will happen if Germany wins the War and dominates Europe. It’s the account of visit to Meccania, a Nazi-style totalitarian superstate in 1970 by a Chinese traveller, Mr Ming. Another story, written by Charlotte Haldane, the wife of the scientist J.B.S. Haldane, written in 1932, describes another racist, eugenicist dystopia. This is a state in which the government rigidly controls who may be allowed to marry and breed. The scientist, who has founded this totalitarian society, has also created a poison designed to only kill Blacks. At the moment, this is the only such toxin of its kind, though the story states that there are others working on a similar poison to destroy east Asians. In the ’60s or ’70s the South African secret service, BOSS, was really working on a racist poison like it. The book also uses the term ‘holocaust’, though not in connection with the Jews. Charlotte Haldane was Jewish. Her maiden name was Franken, and so I wonder if she was just looking at the direction the contemporary craze for eugenics and racial ‘science’ was going and showing just how horrific this would be in reality. And it did become horrific reality in Nazi Germany.
Back to H.G. Wells, the book obviously discusses The Time Machine, possibly the first serious book about time travel. Wells based the future races in the book, the Eloi and the Morlocks, on what would happen if present social trend continued. The Eloi are the descendants of the aristocracy and the artists, living above ground but farmed like cattle by the Morlocks, the descendants of the working class, who have been forced underground to tend the machines. Wells set that part of the story 800,000 years in the future because that was when he predicted, using then current theories of speciation, that the two post-human species would have diverged. Apparently the book originally included a section on racial degeneration, which was later cut from the book and published as The Gray Man.
Years ago, Martin Kottmeyer, one of the contributors to the small press, sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, ran a series of articles ‘Varicose Brains’ on how the Grays of UFO lore conform to the aliens in much SF literature. These were based on contemporary theories of evolution, which predicted that as humanity advanced the brain would develop and become larger while the body would consequently become smaller. As humanity became more intelligent and intellectual, so it would become less sensual and food become increasingly simpler. The result would be small people with large heads and atrophied digestive systems. This sounds exactly like the Grays. And some UFO theories state that these are the degenerate remnants of an alien race following mutation and racial decline due to nuclear war. But it’s also the name Wells’ gave his future, racially degenerate humans that also fascinates me: the Gray Man. Did Wells invent the Gray as a cultural motif, which then became incorporate into the UFO experience in the late 1960s and ’70s following the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill? Or did he just predict the figure’s appearance based on nothing more than his literary imagination and scientific insight?
And there are other connections between UFO encounters and early SF. One female SF writer in the ’20s and ’30s wrote a story about Martians coming to Earth to take water back to their own world. UFOs have often been seen over water, including instances like the Joe Simonton encounter, where they appear to be siphoning it into their craft. And then there’s the film The Man Who Fell To Earth, directed by Nicholas Roeg and starring David Bowie, in which an alien travels from his desert world to bring back some of Earth’s water. Is it a case of the human imagination taking these images and narratives and turning them into accounts of encounters with aliens during extreme psychological experiences? Or is the phenomenon behind the UFO encounters taking these images and stories and manipulating them? Or is it just coincidence?
As I wrote in my last piece, I’ve been reading a number of collections of SF stories published by the British Library. These collections are on various themes – other planets, life in space, the threat of the machines taking over – and the short stories are mixed with introductions describing the history of the depiction of that planet or theme in SF. The introduction to the story about Venus notes that before the modern space probes revealed that it was hell planet of scorching heat, crushing pressure and sulphuric acid rain, Venus was often thought of as an Edenic world with peaceful, angelic inhabitants. But I found myself particularly interested in the brief description of the plot of a book published in 1930 by Leslie F. Stone. In his ‘Women with Wings’ the Venusians are humanoids descended from flying fish. Both they and humanity are declining from racial degeneration, which the two peoples successfully combat by interbreeding.
I find this fascinating, as much SF is about the threat of alien invasion, including the rape and forced interbreeding with human women, and occasionally men. You think of fifties B-movies like Mars Needs Women or the lurid covers of the mid-20th century SF pulp magazines with square-jawed earthmen attempting to stop evil Martians or Moon people or whatever carrying off the heroine. Then there’s the plot of Hammer’s notorious Devil Girl from Mars, in which a Martian woman lands in Scotland in order to kidnap a man and bring him back as breeding stock to the Red Planet. This kind of cosmic rape is part of the contemporary UFO abduction myth, in which evil grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli are abducting humans and either physically raping them or harvesting their sperm and eggs in order to create a hybrid race. In some forms of the myth, it’s because the greys are racially degenerate and need to incorporate human genetic material in order to continue. Alien abduction and hybridisation were an integral element in the original X-Files, in which FBI agents Mulder and Scully were pitched against a secret organisation, the Syndicate, who were at the centre of a global conspiracy to create a race of alien hybrids who would be the only survivors of an alien takeover.
At the time Stone was writing, many European and American intellectuals feared real racial degeneration. This was at the hearts of the eugenics movement, that held that the biologically unfit would outbreed healthy people and so the human race would inevitably decline. One element of these fears was the threat of racial interbreeding with the non-White races judged inferior in the contemporary racial hierarchy. Hence the legislation passed by various American states to prevent the congenitally disabled having children and to limit immigration and prevent intermarriage with racial inferiors. These not only included non-Whites, but also Whites from southern Europe. These fears were also expressed in the SF and fantasy of the period, such as in H.P. Lovecraft. Several of Lovecraft’s stories are about racial degenerates preying on normal humanity and forced interbreeding from outside. In ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, an entire fishing community has been taken over by a murderous cult and its people racially mixed through generations of interbreeding with a race of fish people. Stone stands out against these fears through presenting racial mixture with aliens as improving the biological stock of both races. He’s a curious exception to the trend, and I wonder if there were other writers with similar ideas.
These racial fears were the basis for the horrendous legislation and political moves against people of different race and the disabled that culminated in Nazism and the Holocaust. It’d be interesting to know a bit more about Stone and whether he had the same attitude to terrestrial peoples of different colours intermarrying and having children. It might be that such anti-racist attitudes were just confined to that fiction and involved the idea of people breeding with an equal or superior race. But nevertheless, it is remarkable that someone wrote a story that had a positive view of it at all, especially as racist regimes like apartheid South Africa, banned literature with similar themes and messages long into the 20th century. And in Israel there are still Jewish groups devoted to stopping Israelis forming liaisons and marrying Palestinians.
As you can see, I’ve tried to experiment by drawing her with coloured pencils. I hope you enjoy it.
Marti Caine is another performer I dimly remember from childhood. According to her Wikipedia page, she started performing when she was 19 after auditioning at the local working men’s club in the Sheffield suburb of Chapeltown in order to get the £19 to pay her mother’s funeral expenses. Her real name was Lynne Denise Shepherd, but her stage name was chosen for her by her husband from gardening catalogue. It was originally Marta Caine, after tomato cane, but the first name was misspelled ‘Marti’ and she stuck with it. She performed on the Yorkshire club circuit before winning New Faces in 1975. This brought her more appearance on TV, including her own show, Marti Caine. She returned to New Faces as the show’s host in the 1980s. She also starred in the sitcom, Hilary, which was specially written for her and ran from 1984-6. In that year she starred in her own one-woman show about her life at the Donmar Warehouse, where she performed 14 songs about her experiences. She also starred in a production of Funny Girl, which toured the UK.
From the Wikipedia entry it seems she saw herself first and foremost as a singer and dancer and released several records. But this was overshadowed by her role as a comedienne. Unfortunately, she made the mistake of performing at Sun City, breaking a campaign against performing there by the UN and other international performers. The boycott was against South Africa’s apartheid regime. Caine denied that she was racist and spoke of the work she had done for and with the Black community. She said she had a number of records by Stevie Wonder. She also performed a medley as a tribute to Gladys Knight on her first studio LP. She died in 1995 of lymphatic cancer. She had published her autobiography, A Coward’s Chronicles, four years before in 1991. She gave it its title to rebut the image of her as heroic and courageous. She said that ‘You fought for dear life because you were too coward to face death.’ She was also a great fan of modern art. Mick Farrell’s sculpture, Sheen, which is also frequently called Marti, is dedicated to her. She was due to unveil it, but two weeks before she could so. It was commissioned by Sheffield Hallam University and is in the university’s Arundel Gate.
Wikipedia also states that the film, Funny Cow, starring Maxine Peake as a troubled northern comedienne, was based on her.
I can just about remember her show as a stand-up comic. I thought I’d draw her and put up a piece about her as, although there have always been great comic actresses, she was part of a new wave of female comics along with Victoria Wood.
Here’s a very provocative little video I found on the YouTube channel for left-wing publisher Verso. It’s a 27 minute long talk by 60’s radical Tariq Ali about his book, Winston Churchill, His Times, His Crimes. It’s entitled ‘The Churchill Cult Is Out of Control: Tariq Ali on Winston Churchill’. Ali explains how he was initially reluctant to write about the great war leader, not least because he didn’t want to waste his time reading what Churchill himself wrote, until he was finally persuaded by another historian. He states that the students at Oxford protesting for decolonisation, demanding that Churchill college change its name and who poured paint over his statue were quite right. Churchill, by his own admission, was a racist and White supremacist. He supported Mussolini in Italy and General Franco in Spain. In fact, Franco’s three greatest supporters in Europe were Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill. He talks about Churchill’s imperialist wars around the world against non-Whites, but also his atrocities in Ireland during the Irish revolution when he was Home Secretary. Churchill is also bitterly resented in Wales for sending in the troops during the Tonypandy strike. According to Ali, when there was a collection for him on his death, not one Welsh council contributed. He also states that it is a complete lie that the experience of the Second World War changed him. It didn’t. After the war, in the 1950s, when the Tories were discussing what slogan they should adopt for their election campaign, Churchill responded, unprompted, with ‘Keep Britain White’.
He also hated the Labour movement. He sneered at Clement Attlee for beating him in an election. The only Labour politician he did like was Ernest Bevin, who was a nationalistic, and jingoistic as he was, and anti-Semitic to a certain extent. Churchill was also unpopular in the Conservative party for being very right-wing and changing parties when it suited him. Talking about his crimes, Ali mentions the Bengal Famine but also a very obscure incident that he says is only mentioned in one book. Churchill was behind the British expeditionary force sent in to topple the Bolshevik revolutionaries. But Churchill wanted to go even further and use chemical weapons against Bolshevik villages and territories. There was a mutiny in the force, which resulted in the court martial of a South African officer. Churchill was also proud of the overthrow of the democratic regime of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran. He also says that Britain was hampered during the War by the very class-bound nature of the officer corps. He gives the comparison of Rommel, one of the Nazi’s great generals, and quotes one authority who said that if Rommel had been British, he wouldn’t have risen above sergeant. The class-bound nature of the officer corps was recognised by the junior officers.
Churchill was also responsible for the brutal suppression of the Greek resistance movement because it was led by the Communists. One of the tactics of the British forces was to decapitate their enemies, put their heads on poles and carry them around outside prison camps. This was justified with the statement that it was the only thing they would understand.
Ali states that Churchill was not as popular as he is now, when he is the centre of what Ali calls a cult, until the 1980s and the Falklands. He quotes from a 1970s play by a radical British playwright, in which two soldiers carrying his coffin talk about how horrible the great man was. Churchill then bursts out of his coffin waving a union jack and with an unlit cigar, his face a mask. Ali considers that most of South America and the world considered the Falkland Islands to be properly Argentina’s and states that the islands were defended by the alliance between Thatcher and General Pinochet. Churchill’s image was part of the propaganda movement for the war, which the British Labour party under Michael Foot supported.
Ali believes the cult of Churchill has arisen because the British political establishment and ruling class, including Labour, are still fixated on the empire. This has partly been done in order to retain some small independence against the Americans. After the War the European empires fell, or were taken over by the Americans, as in Vietnam. Churchill was saddened, but cheered that they were going to another, White, Christian power. The special relationship was also his creation, because he was half-American. Other countries, such as Scandinavia, have been able to find a role after the War, but Britain is still obsessed with the empire. He states that what emerged after the war was a form of social democratic planning, as well as the NHS and the nationalisation of the mines, which was a particularly sore point. The miners’ leaders wondered why it had been left for so long. This wasn’t particularly socialist, and other countries were doing the same. The ruling class has persisted in Britain because they were able to co-opt Labour and the trade unions. The cult around Winston Churchill is very much an English phenomenon. It doesn’t exist in Wales and hardly exists in Scotland. If Wales leaves, then the Churchill cult will form the heart of an English nationalism. The Churchill myth will continue for some time, but all myths eventually fall, and the British people will eventually turn against this one.
This is very interesting. One of the great commenters on this blog remarked a few days ago that he doubted the Tories would honour their pledge to cut immigration, and that the Labour party had a better policy towards it. I agree. From what I remember, Labour’s policy would remove the barriers that encourage aspiring migrants to cross the channel in flimsy inflatables and put them in with the rest of the asylum-seekers. They would also negotiate and try to find solutions to the problem of migration with the countries of origin. This is undoubtedly much more sensible and humane, in that it makes the crossing safer for the migrants and seeks to end some of the push factors that force them to risk their lives coming to Europe and Britain in the first place. But it’s not as exciting as having illegal immigrants exiled to Rwanda.
I have real doubts that the Tories have the will or the wish to find proper solutions to the migrant crisis. The Rwanda policy looks very much as if Johnson and Patel cooked it up just to take the pressure of Johnson, partygate and his general massive ineptitude. I also wonder if the Tories actually want to keep channel migration going, as it whips up nationalistic anger against immigration, anger that they exploit with promises that they and only they will tackle it while making sure that they don’t, or just tinker with it through malicious policies like Patel’s. The Tories used fears over immigration to boost support by Brexit by deliberately giving the impression that Black and Asian immigration was being assisted by the EU constitution. It wasn’t. In fact EU law stated that migrants, once in Europe, should remain in the countries in which they landed. And the Schengen agreement, which the Tories also claimed were enabling non-White immigration through the EU, actually only affected those countries which signed up to it. And we weren’t one of them. In fact the real legislation enabling asylum seekers to reach this country was the 1950s UN agreement on the rights of the refugee. Mike pointed this out on one of his articles. But the Tories kept very quiet about that, is their lies about immigration and Europe were too useful for pushing Brexit.
And now we’ve got Brexit, and illegal immigration hasn’t stopped. Indeed, it is claimed that there have been 100,000 such migrants this past year. There are signs that parts of the right are talking about scrapping the 1950s UN agreement, and that part of the hard-right Tory base are ready to desert the party over its inaction on immigration. Yesterday I caught the thumbnail for a video by the Lotus Eaters, which castigated the Tories for the lack of will to tackle immigration. I can’t remember the title’s wording, but the thumbnail featured a photo of one of the prominent Tory politicos with a speech bubble saying that the issue would wait until after the election.
This morning there’s been a video from the New Culture Forum featuring its main man, Peter Whittle, stating that the Tories have to act against the wokeness destroying British society. Critical Race and Queer Theory should be banned in schools, and woke quangos should be cut. This was the subject of a previous video from them, entitled ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’. And I’ve seen the odd video from Farage on GB News stating that it is now the time to act on the UN agreement on refugees.
But I wonder how far the Tories can tackle immigration. Britain needs a certain amount of immigration to get technicians, medical staff and skilled workers. The Tories are also keen to give British citizenship to rich foreigners. But I also wonder if there are diplomatic constraints. For example, the Indian prime minister Modi gave a speech the other year stating that Indian would still provide science graduates to other countries. When Boris announced that he was going to cut immigration from the sub-continent, he got a sharp rebuke from India’s premier. I’ve got the distinct impression that there’s a lack of domestic jobs in India, and so the country and its economy depends to a certain extent on exporting workers, who then send their remittances home. I have absolutely no doubt that other developing countries are in the same boat. I did see somewhere that the country most dependent on remittances is Somalia, where they’re more or less keeping the economy afloat. All this makes the pledge to cut down on non-White immigration – which is essentially what is being meant here – extremely difficult. It isn’t just going to be opposed by domestic anti-racism protesters, but also by the non-White commonwealth countries. I can remember a period a few years ago where tensions between Britain and these nations were so great that some of the newspapers speculated about Britain being thrown out of the Commonwealth as Pakistan and South Africa had been previously. No government would want such a diplomatic catastrophe.
Although, I don’t know though. The Tory right are pushing the idea of an Anglosphere, essentially an international federation of White majority, English-speaking countries – Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Would the fanatics desiring such as union as a bulwark against Black and Asian immigration go so far as to see the Commonwealth destroyed to set it up? Well, the fanatics of the Tory Brexiteers have shown themselves more than willing to sacrifice the Union just to leave the EU, all the while blaming Nicola Sturgeon and the Scots Nats.
I can therefore quite see various papers like the Heil and Depress pushing for an end Britain’s membership of the Commonwealth, if they thought they could spin it that it’s the Commonwealth’s fault and it would stop non-White immigration.
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