Yesterday, the right-wing YouTube channel, Black Conservative Perspective, attacked a ‘woke’ YouTube channel for calling Vice-President Kamala Harris a racist. What had turned the VP into the equivalent of the Grand Dragon of the KKK in their eyes? She had dared to give a speech in which she became visibly choked talking about the enslavement of Black Africans by their fellows in order to sell them to White merchants. How horrendous that the VP should talk about such historical facts! The Black Conservative thought that there was a bit of political tit-for-tat going on here. Ghana is joining Uganda on passing further anti-LGBT legislation, and at least one of the country’s politicos had criticised Harris for trying to promote gay rights. So, in his view, Harris had tried to embarrass them by talking about Black African complicity in the slave trade.
Except that, if you go to Ghana, it’s not much of a secret. One of the former Gold Coast slave forts contains a museum as well as being the site of the local market. There are a number of guilds associated with it, one of whose name translates as ‘White Men’s Children’. Its members are people descended from the White slavers and their Black wives and mistresses. Outside Africa, Black African involvement in the slave trade is discussed and taught in some American universities. One of the books I’ve got on slavery is about African slavery, published by a respectable American academic. About a decade and more ago Channel 4 screened a documentary about Africa’s role in the slave trade, videos of which can be found on YouTube. When Bristol City Museum staged their ‘Respectable Trade’ exhibition on the city’s role in the slave trade, this also mentioned that Africans were partners in the horrendous trade. I also used to work with a West Indian historian, who once told me that his people were told by their ‘mammies’ that they had been sold by the Africans.
The Conservative then continued to say that African participation in slavery should be taught in schools, and attacked the woke people, who tell everyone that America is terrible and Black people are oppressed, but have no intention of moving to somewhere like Ghana. America, he concluded, was the best place in the world to be Black. I’m not sure about that, but it’s certainly true that America has pioneered Black empowerment in the west and its approaches are copied by countries like Britain.
I strongly agree that Black participation in the slave trade should be taught in schools, in contrast to the accepted view which seems to be to place all the blame very securely on Whites. But this would go against one of the reasons behind calls for the teaching of Black history in schools. The idea is to teach Black students about their people’s achievements in order to bolster their self-esteem, and in doing so encourage them to do well at school. There are schools in Bristol that teach Black history, and the subject was covered two years ago on the local BBC news programme, Points West. This claimed that Black history was having the intended results, and proudly stated that the pupils were taught about great Black civilisations before they covered the slave trade. This is all very well, but it also clashes with the idea that history should also be the search for objective truth. This will always be out of reach, because every historian has their own views and biases, just as the sources they use also have their biases. Hence historians develop different views of the same events, which may often strongly conflict with each other. African participation in the slave trade, and the existence of slavery in Africa itself, is something that would probably have a dispiriting effect of Black students, rather than inspiring them with pride and confidence.
Nevertheless, that is no excuse for it not being taught. It’s a fact of history, and so should be included in any teaching about the slave trade. As for America, the Conservative is right when he says that Blacks are better off there than in Africa. I’ve no doubt he’s right. Conditions for many Black Americans are poor, but on the whole they’re more prosperous and have better opportunities than most Africans. A friend of mine once told me that one of the Black Panthers escaped the FBI crackdown and fled to Ethiopia. After a year he returned, walked into an FBI office and handed himself in. The reason was that no matter how much he was oppressed as Black person in America, it wasn’t as bad as Ethiopia. Of course, the enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic could not possibly have foreseen that one day they would be free, and possess equality with Whites, at least in law. But that’s fortunately how it’s turned out, through much struggle by dedicated people willing to risk their lives and liberty.
America isn’t perfect, and there is still much to do to combat Black poverty and marginalisation. But it isn’t the hell some of the woke ideologues claim. And any objective teaching of the slave trade needs to include African as well as European and American participation in it.
I’ve blogged about Mahyar Tousi before. He’s a British Asian YouTuber with very right-wing views, a true-blue Tory Brexiteer of pretty much the same hard right views as the Lotus Eaters. But today he said something interesting about Iran. The country’s been rocked for several months now by protests and demonstrations celebrating women and freedom against the theocracy. This was spurred after the appalling death in police custody of a young woman, who’d been arrested for not wearing a hijab, or not wearing one properly. Iran’s a great, ancient and highly civilised country, and its young people have taken to the streets. According to Tousi, the protesters are demanding the the republication of its constitution before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the installation of the Crown Prince, the son of the last Shah, as the head of state. I think Tousi himself is Iranian, as he talks about how the country was a constitutional monarchy and had a bill of rights thousands of years ago. Well, the Shah was a tyrant who tortured, imprisoned and murdered his political enemies, but yes, ancient Persia did boast of its justice. In one of his monuments, Cyrus the Great or perhaps Xerxes wrote, ‘It is not my will that the strong oppress the weak. It is not my will that the weak oppress the strong.’ I’ve also come across papers on the web arguing that Persian women had full equality with men and citing instances where ladies led armies into battle.
And the democrats seem to be winning. Or at least have got the mullahs seriously rattled. So rattled that the head of state transferred $4 billion to his bank account in Venezuela. It looks like the mullahs are preparing to scarper over there if they get toppled, just as the remaining Nazis fled to Argentina and South America following the defeat of the Third Reich.
But he also mixes this up with conspiracy theory. Like Alex Jones and people like Godfrey Bloom, he spouts about the secret machinations of the globalists. In this instance, he claims that Iran’s protests are anti-globalist. The late Ayatollah Khomeini was installed by the CIA and other American secret agencies because the Shah was becoming an equal player and threatening their dominance. They also wanted to support the Islamic Revolutionaries in order to prevent them being supported by the Soviets, and so the Russians gaining the new regime’s support and goodwill. This lasted all of a day until the Revolutionaries turned very firmly against the West. Tousi talks about the possibility that others will try and interfere in the ongoing revolution and that any western interference will be seized upon as evidence of hostility and malign intent by the mullahs. He therefore urges his viewers not to interfere and let the Iranian people free themselves.
I don’t know where Tousi got the idea that the Shah was toppled by the CIA. We studied the Iranian Revolution in Islam when I was at college in the 1980s. The evidence then was that the Americans and the rest of the world were completely unprepared for the Islamic Revolution until nearly the very last moment. The only people who knew that a revolution was coming was the Tudeh, the Iranian Communist party, and they deluded themselves that it would be a communist revolution. When it did break out, the CIA issued a report saying that the Ayatollah Khomeini would govern Iran as a peaceful, nonviolent spiritual leader like Gandhi.
If only.
My reaction is to doubt Tousi on this, as Iran is full of conspiracy theories. One of these even holds that Khomeini was in reality British and his true surname was Williams, and there are even slightly blasphemous jokes about it. But it might be right. In any case, I strongly feel that Tousi is also right when he says that the Iranians should be left free to make their own revolution and destiny. Other Iranian dissidents, such as Shirin Ebadi, who has radically different views to Tousi, have said the same. She has attacked the Iranian regime for its oppression of Iranian workers. I’m sure both of them are right, as it was western interference in Iranian affairs – the overthrow of the last democratic Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, by Britain and the CIA, that led to the Shah’s brutal autocracy against whom the Iranians understandably revolted.
Tousi is also looking forward to the Mullah’s overthrow, because of their support for the Palestinians and Hamas. He thinks that if they go, there could be peace in the Middle East. Well, there might, but it looks like the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians would then go unchecked.
Here’s something that’s a bit more fun. It’s a trailer for the forthcoming UFO movie, Above Top Secret, presented by Dr. Stephen Greer with retired FBI agent John DeSouza alongside aerospace historians and others. The blurb for it on its YouTube page runs
‘We’re at a tipping point in history, the hidden technology that could change everything has been suppressed for decades. Dr. Steven Greer presents mind-blowing information along with never before seen access into the crusade behind disclosure. Retired FBI special agent John Desouza, Aerospace Historians James C, Goodall along with Michael Schratt breakdown the implications of the cover-up, and the false UFO narrative created by the major media. How much does the President of the United States really know about the UFO phenomenon, and the Above Top Secret projects involved with exotic technology? Billy Carson presents the real motivation behind the major media, and the U.S. Military role out of the UAP phenomenon. Multi award filmmakers Blake and Brent Cousins travel across the country to find the real answers to everyone’s questions whether we are alone in the universe, and expose the above top secret projects involved with ET recovered craft not of this world. Is they’re an Alien threat among us, or is the real threat human in nature? Above Top Secret the technology behind disclosure will change the way you think about UFOs, and the world of suppressed technology. Cast: Dr. Steven Greer, James Goodall, John Desouza, Billy Carson, Michael Schratt, Brent Cousins, Blake Cousins.’
The people featured in the trailer claim that the American government and aerospace industry are creating radical new air- and spacecraft using technology taken from crashed UFO, such as that at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. These have given scientific secrets such as Zero Point energy and gravitics, and that the spacecraft are thought actuated, moving through the ‘thought field’. The American government is also responsible for pushing a non-existent alien threat.
It looks fun, but I’m sceptical of all of this. The title seems to come from Tim Good’s book published in the 1980s, which contained all the conspiracy theory rubbish about alien abductions, the Majestic 12 group of scientists and senior military officers responsible for keeping it all under wraps, whose chief was called His Cerebral Phosphorescence. In short, pretty much the stuff that ended up in the X-Files in the 1990s. Good was, I believe, entirely genuine, but some of the material he published consisted of hoaxes, and misremembered or misidentified incidents. I do believe, however, that there are secret air- and spacecraft that have been developed that very much look and behave like alien spacecraft and are responsible for many UFO sightings.
The Torygraph has published a piece today revealing that a letter has come to light from the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali from the 1930s, in which he reveals just what an anti-Christian, fascist sympathiser he really was. It dates from 1935. Dali had already been suspended from the Surrealists the year before because of comments praising Hitler, amongst other things. In a nasty bit of social snobbery he said that the train crashes he most enjoyed were those in which only third-class passengers were killed. The Torygraph article also states that in another letter in which he claimed that one of the reasons why he was expelled from the Surrealists 1939 was his positive view of the lynchings in America. He loved Hitler, was fascinated by the Swastika and apparently thought the Nazi party were an example of Surrealism in action.
Uggh. Pass the sick bag!
The Torygraph article begins
‘Salvador Dalí wanted to enslave races he considered inferior and establish a new “sadistic” world religion, a newly-discovered letter has revealed.
In the letter, which was written by Dalí in 1935, the artist proposed the enslavement of “all the coloured races” as part of a new world order that would be “anti-Christian and materialistic, based on the progress of science”.
“The domination or submission to slavery of all the coloured races” could be possible, Dalí wrote, “if all whites united fanatically”. He also insisted on the need for “human sacrifices”.
As Europe was threatened by the fascist regimes of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Dalí’s letter to André Breton, the French writer and co-founder of the surrealist movement, speaks of the need for “new hierarchies, more brutal and strict than ever before” to “annihilate” Christianity.
“I believe that we surrealists are finally turning into priests,” Dalí wrote.
Scornful of Christianity’s “altruism”, he added: “We don’t want happiness for ‘all’ men, rather the happiness of some to the detriment of others”.
The letter was recently discovered in the digitalised personal archive of Sebastià Gasch, an art critic from Barcelona who died in 1982. It was published on Thursday by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.’
Dali scarpered to American during the War, returning afterwards to Spain as a supporter of the Fascist leader, General Franco.
Dali was a great artist but a revolting human being. He was greedy for fame and money, which is why some of the other Spanish Surrealists nicknamed him ‘Avida Dollars’. Malcolm McLaren presented a programme on him on Radio 4 a few years ago, in which he compared the publicity-hungry, media-savvy Dali with contemporary British artists like Damian Hurst and Tracey Emin. Well, Dali did share with Hurst, Emin and the rest of the Young British Artists the urge to shock as well as the pursuit of fame and cash, but YBAs, for all their excesses can never be accused of Nazism. Dali also wasn’t averse to selling his friends out to the authorities. Dali emigrated to America with Luis Bunuel, who also hailed from Catalonia. The two had worked together on the Surrealist films Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, both now regarded as classics of cinema. Surrealism was a mixture of Freudianism and Marxism, and many of the Surrealists were members of the Communist party. Bunuel was one of them. On arrival in the Land of the Free, Dali snitched that Bunuel was a commie to the FBI, and made little effort to excuse himself for doing so when Bunuel confronted him on his betrayal. Bunuel himself emigrated to Mexico where he continued to make Surrealist, anti-Christian films.
I’m fascinated by the Surrealists and love Dali’s art, but the man himself is quite a different matter. I can well believe, despite his later conversion to the Catholicism, that at heart he was an atheist with a hatred of the religion to which he nominally belonged. I didn’t realise he was so racist, however. This was definitely against the Surrealist ethos, which was firmly against imperialism, but patronised the world’s indigenous peoples as seeing their art and culture based as based on the Freudian unconscious. This was the respectable scientific view at the time, but modern anthropologists have rejected it. Instead they see indigenous art and culture as the products of centuries or millennia of conscious intellectual development and no more based on the irrational or Freudian unconscious than our own.
As one of the best known of the Surrealists, Dali is a fascinating figure and he painted some of the greatest works of 20th century art. But as this letter shows, he was in many ways a squalid human being.
Clive Simpson is a gender-critical gay man, who vlogs against the trans ideology and its promoters. His videos are good, but I’ve avoided putting them up here because I know some of the great peeps who comment on my blog differ from me about this issue, and I don’t want to offend them gratuitously. But in the couple of videos below he touches on an issue that ripped apart families and destroyed people’s lives and reputations. This was the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare. This held that there were real Satanic covens across America, Britain and elsewhere, in which children were raped and abused as part of its worship. Young women remembered being raped by the cultists. After they gave birth, their children were seized and sacrificed to the Devil.
It was all nonsense. A report by Jean La Fontaine concluded, as had the FBI, that there was no evidence such cults existed. The supposed memories on which the accusations were based were false, confabulated either from the witch hysteria itself or from spurious psychological techniques like regression hypnosis, the use of play puppets to bring out further testimony and leading questions from the investigators. Members of New Age sects, like the Wiccans, suffered public suspicion and hostility. Wicca considers itself the survival of the medieval witch cult, but this has been extensively critiqued by Bristol University historian Ron Hutton in his book Triumph of the Moon, This is a history of the modern occult and pagan revival from its origins in the 19th century. There’s no unified cult or authority in Wicca, but it’s really about Earth Mother Goddess worship and the Horned God. There’s a lot of ecological consciousness and concern in it, or there was, so they’re far more likely to be involved in a protest against climate change rather than anything like human sacrifice. The late Anton La Vey’s Church of Satan did apparently hold ‘human sacrifices’, but this was toned down to a spanking in which the victim wore a pair of padded trousers and was entirely voluntary.
Simpson has produced two videos which are part of trilogy looking at the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare and the links between it and the trans craze with the involvement of Diane Ehrensaft. In the first video he discusses the origin of the craze with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers. This was co-written by the woman and her psychiatrist, and based on her weird and horrific memories. She remembered not only being abused, but also Satan himself turning up along with Christ, Our Lady and one or two other saints to fight over her soul. I don’t dismiss religious experiences, but I think that it’s highly unlikely that such events as ‘Michelle’ remembered actually occurred.
Michelle Remembers set off a craze, and its publication was followed by the McMartin preschool scandal. This started with the allegation that one little boy may have been abused. The police mishandled the investigation by sending letters to all the parents of children at the school, telling them they were investigating allegations of child abuse and asking for further information while urging them not to discuss it among themselves. Which is, of course, what they naturally did. This resulted in large numbers of the children being examined for signs of abuse. One of the methods the investigators used to get them to talk was using dolls and puppets. The children were asked to show with the puppets how they had been abused. The investigators also asked leading questions like, ‘Are you going to be bright, or are you going to be dumb’. As a result, the kids came up with more false memories of terrible abuse.
In his second video, Simpson talks about another notorious incident across the pond, this time at a US army child care facility in its Presidio quarter in San Francisco. One of the accused was a male assistant at the facility, who seems to have been targeted because he was a gay man. The accusations were stoked by a Christian minister, and ended up with one of the supposed victims, a little girl, accusing Michael Aquino, a Lt. Colonel, and his wife of being the other people in the cult who abused them. Aquino is, or was, the head of a genuine Satanic organisation, the Temple of Set. Now he has performed some tasteless stunts. He once visited Heinrich Himmler’s Wewelsburg castle, which the Nazi leader intended to be the headquarters for the SS. Despite allies the stories and speculation about Nazi occultism and was Hitler a black magician and so on, the evidence is that very few of the Nazi party with one or two exceptions took it seriously. Hitler said he was initially sympathetic to them, but had the neo-Pagan sects banned because he feared they would divide Germany. Himmler was one of the exceptions. He seemed to have seen the SS as some kind of Teutonic pagan elite and had the castle’s basement remodelled so that he and the SS could perform occult rituals down there. Way back in the 1990s Aquino went there to perform his own occult rites in the basement. It’s grotesque and at the very least, massively tasteless but I don’t doubt that Aquino and his wife are innocent of the charges of child abuse. And in this instance, apparently, they didn’t stack up because Aquino had a cast-iron alibi. He really was somewhere else at the time.
Unfortunately it seems that some of the child abuse was all too real. On examination, four of the children seemed to have suffered sexual molestation. But as Simpson states, this was probably at the hands of their parents. This was literally unthinkable to the witch hunters, who found it far easier to believe in lurid tales of evil Satanic rites.
I well remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare and the immense harm it did. In Scotland it resulted in something like 75 children from different families being separated from their parents and taken into care in the Orkneys. One of the accused was the local minister, who was supposed to have an inverted crucifix in his home. No, what he had was a model airplane hanging from his ceiling when he was investigated. There are some very nasty individuals, who have killed and mutilated animals and people in the guise of Satanic worship. But sociologists and criminologists call this ‘pseudo-Satanic’ crime, because often they’re just sick individuals doing it for kicks and add the Satanism to give it all an extra bit of excitement. Some of them may also be really mixed up kids from repressive Christian households, who’ve become convinced that evil is stronger than good.
And there is a danger that, despite the scare having been largely disproven, the witch hunters haven’t gone away. They’re still meeting, and every now and then Private Eye reports their latest shenanigans in its ‘In the Back’ section. I don’t know who Ehrensaft is, and eagerly await the third part of the video series. I have said before that I do not wish anyone to be persecuted or discriminated against because of their sexuality or gender presentation. I think that there are people, who have been helped by transitioning into the sex with which they identify. But I believe that the massive expansion of the numbers of people claiming to be trans gender is a psycho-social contagion, in which vulnerable young women and men have been falsely led to believe that they are the wrong sex through an aggressive ideology and the greed of private gender clinics who have sought to exploit this craze for their own gain.
If Ehrensaft was a part of the Satanic Abuse Craze, using techniques that were accepted at the time but have now been utterly disproven to get the testimony the witch hunters wanted, then it may cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of her views on the trans gender phenomenon. Obviously depending on what it’s like, I’ll put up Simpson’s third video on this topic in due course.
In the meantime these videos are an excellent reminder of the origins of the abuse and how destructive it was.
One of the big international stories over the past few days has been the invasion of a Texas synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, in Colleyville by an armed British-Pakistani man, Malik Faisal Akram. Akram took the rabbi and the congregation, who were there for morning prayers, hostage demanding the release of a Pakistani neuroscientist, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, who was jailed for 85 years on terrorism charges in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the rabbi and his flock managed to escape as the FBI shot Akram dead. Akram’s brother blamed mental health issues, and two teens have been arrested, suspected of terrorism, in Manchester. Real anti-Semitic incidents like this are becoming all too regular. If I remember correctly, it was around this time last year that a White Nazi shot up the Tree of Life Synagogue in America. This is what real, vicious anti-Semitism looks like, not Jeremy Corbyn nodding in agreement with a Holocaust survivor who compares the Israeli state’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazis’ persecution of his. And as a survivor of the Shoah, I’d say that the gentleman concerned had every right to make that comparison, no matter how it may infuriate the extreme nationalists of the Israel lobby.
We’re used to western, Fascist anti-Semitism and its origins in stupid, poisonous conspiracy theories about an international Jewish plot to enslave Whites, and there is now a considerable amount of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. A few years ago Egyptian television broadcast an adaptation of the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While Islam’s history has not been entirely without Jew-hatred, historians have traditionally considered that it was much less than in Christendom. In fact, the type of poisonous anti-Semitism now inspiring such attacks and atrocities in the Muslim world really only dates from about the Second World War and the formation of the Jewish colonies in mandate Palestine. As conflict broke out between the Jewish settlers and Palestinians, the Nazis decided that they were going to try to appeal to the Muslim world as allies against the Jews and the British. They therefore recruited the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who formed a squad of Muslim Nazi auxiliaries to fight in the Balkans and elsewhere. The Nazis also got busy trying to formulate an Islamic version of their own wretched ideology, which would inspire Muslims to join them. They therefore decided that there were four important, defining similarities between Islam and Nazism. I can’t quite remember what they are – it’s a little while since I read up on it. But I do remember that they were so broad and vague that there was precious little in them that could be seen as unique to Islam, or convince anyone not already an Islamist Nazi fanatic that there was any particular similarity between Islam and Nazism. They also attempted to reformulate Islamic history, creating a gross distortion that presented the Jews as the inveterate enemies of Islam since the days of Mohammed. Mohammed did indeed fight battles against the Jewish tribes in Arabia during his career. But the impression I’ve had was that, after his victories over them, there wasn’t much anti-Semitism in Islam. Pogroms did break out sporadically, and in Morocco Jews were confined to ghettos as they were in Christian Europe. But generally Islam was more tolerant of the Jews than the Christian world.
From what I’ve seen, ,the Islamists responsible for terrorist atrocities across the world are very strongly influence by the Nazi conspiracy theories. They seem to believe, like their White, western counterparts, that there is some global, secret Jewish conspiracy controlling everything behind the scenes. The Jews are somehow responsible for every thing evil in the world, and particularly for any attack on Islam and its people. Combating Islamism means exposing and fighting the perverted view of Islamic history that was introduced by Hitler’s minions. Just as fighting anti-Semitism means standing up to White, non-Muslim Nazi thugs.
If this is done, then hopefully society will become more tolerant and terrorist attacks on synagogues, whether by Whites, Muslims or anybody, will become much rarer.
The ’90s were a decade marred by the mass deaths of cult members. There was the Order of the Solar Temple, the horrific immolation of the Branch Davidians in their conflict with the FBI and Heaven’s Gate. HBO Max started screening a documentary series about the latter on December 3rd last year. I found this trailer for it on YouTube. Although it’s just over 2 minutes long, it shows the cult’s main beliefs and the background to the tragedy.
The cult was led by a man and woman, here identified as ‘Do’ and ‘Ti’. They died wearing badges announcing that they were an ‘away team’, and believed that after they left their bodies, they would ascend to become aliens of a superior species and take their seats in a spacecraft in or following a visiting comment. Several of the men had been castrated. Their bodies were discovered covered in purple sheets.
The blurb for the series on its YouTube page gives a bit more information. It says
“Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults” is a thorough examination of the infamous UFO cult through the eyes of its former members and loved ones. What started in 1975 with the disappearance of 20 people from a small town in Oregon ended in 1997 with the largest suicide on US soil and changed the face of modern new age religion forever. This four-part docuseries uses never-before-seen footage and first-person accounts to explore the infamous UFO cult that shocked the nation with their out-of-this-world beliefs.
“Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults” is a Max Original produced by CNN and Campfire. Directed and executive produced by Clay Tweel (“Gleason”), the docuseries is also executive produced by Campfire CEO Ross Dinerstein (“The Innocent Man”) and Shannon Riggs, with Chris Bannon, Eric Spiegelman, Peter Clowney and Erik Diehn executive producing for the digital media company Stitcher (“Heaven’s Gate” podcast, “Sold in America” podcast).
The Fortean Times did a piece about the cult. As the TV series’ blurb says, the two cult leaders had been knocking around the UFO world for years. I can’t remember their real names, except that they had a couple of nicknames. Apart from ‘Do’ and ‘Ti’, they were also called ‘Him’ and ‘Her’. I think their message had started off claiming that they end was nigh, but that the Space Brothers were coming to help us. It’s a message shared by several UFO religions and Contactees. In the 1950s a Chicago psychic had claimed she had received similar messages telepathically from alien telling her that the world was going to end, but she was to assemble as many followers as she could. These would then be saved by the aliens, who would take them aboard their spacecraft. The psychic and her followers duly assembled on the date of the predicted arrival of the aliens, but the world didn’t end and the aliens didn’t show up. The group had, however, been joined by a group of sociologists from Chicago University, who were studying them. They were particularly interested in how the cult’s members continued to believe in its central message even after it had failed to come true. One of the sociologist’s published a book about it, entitled, When Prophecy Fails, which I think is now a classic of academic studies on UFOs and their believers. The psychic’s group differed from Heaven’s Gate in that none of them, I believe, committed suicide.
The aliens in which Heaven’s Gate believed were bald and asexual, and look very much like one of the stereotypes of UFO aliens taken from SF ‘B’ movies. The bald heads and large craniums show that the aliens are super-intelligent. It ultimately comes from a 19th century evolutionary theory, which held that as humanity evolved, the brain would expand at the expense of the body, and the sensual aspects of humanity would similarly wither. As a result, humans would become smaller, with larger heads and brains. The ultimate endpoint of this evolution are H.G. Wells’ Martians from The War of the Worlds. Astronomers at the time believed that Mars was an older world than Earth, and so Wells’ Martians are similarly far more advanced in their evolution than terrestrial humanity. They consist of large heads with tentacles. As their brains have expanded, their digestive systems have atrophied so that they feed by injecting themselves with blood.
It’s because their supposed aliens were asexual that some of the men in the group had travelled to Mexico to be castrated. It’s also been suggested that it may also have been because the group’s male leader was gay. If he was, and the group’s rejection of gender and sexuality stemmed from his failure to come to terms with his sexuality, then it’s a powerful argument for the acceptance of homosexuality. It’s far better for a gay person to be comfortable with their sexuality than to feel such shame and confusion that they mutilate themselves. This aspect of the Heaven’s Gate ideology also seems to me to be similar to the reason for some families referring their children for treatment as transgender. Opponents of the contemporary transgender movement have claimed that the majority of children referred to clinics like the Tavistock Clinic come from extremely homophobic backgrounds. They’ve argued that they’re seen as transgender by their parents, who have convinced the children of this, because it’s the only way the parents can cope with the child’s sexuality. They can’t accept that their son or daughter is gay, and prefer to believe that they have instead been born in the wrong body. Gay critics of the trans movement and their allies thus see the transitioning of such vulnerable children as a form of gay conversion therapy. That’s certainly how Iran views it. Homosexuality is illegal there, carrying the death penalty. However, gender reassignment surgery is paid for by the state. I got the impression that Iranians gays were offered the choice between death and having a sex change.
The cult’s description of themselves as an ‘Away Team’ was taken from the Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 then on television. The ‘Away Team’ were what had been called in the Original Series the ‘landing party’ – the group that would beam down from the Enterprise to explore that episode’s planet. One of the cult’s members and victims was the brother of actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura in the Original Series and subsequent films.
Their belief that the world was about to be visited by an alien spaceship was the unfortunate consequence of a misidentification of a known star by a pair of German amateur astronomers. They had been out looking for a comet that was due to come close to Earth. They found it, but with it was an object they couldn’t find on their star maps. They therefore went on the web to inquire what it might be, and the myth developed that it was some kind of alien spacecraft many times bigger than Earth, which was following said comet. Of course, it was no such thing. It was a star that didn’t appear on the maps the pair were using because it was too dim to be visible to the naked eye. It was, however, bright enough for them to see it using binoculars. The Cult’s leaders took the appearance of this supposed alien spacecraft to be the spaceship they had long expected to take them all to a higher plane with tragic consequences. Although the world was shocked by this disaster and the cult’s apparently weird beliefs, folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand pointed out that their idea of being taken to heaven in a ship actually came from a strand of American Christianity. There have been a number of hymns written describing Christian believers going to heaven in just such a vessel.
The trailer for the series also says that the cult’s members were intelligent and came from good families. I don’t doubt this. I’ve heard that members of new religious movements are often of above average intelligence. Perhaps it’s because such people are more intellectually curious and less satisfied with conventional religion. However, it also seems, at least according to the Fortean Times article, that many of the cult’s members also had problems functioning independently. They apparently were always contacting somebody to help them solve ordinary, every day problems like how to peel an apple correctly. I wonder if they suffered from a psychological or neurological condition like autism, which left them unable to cope with ordinary life and so vulnerable to being dominated by a charismatic personality with a message that appeared to solve all their problems.
The series looks like a fascinating insight into one of the decade’s apocalyptic, extreme religions with its roots in the UFO milieu. However, the series will be over by now, and if it was on HBO Max, it’s doubtful that very many people will have seen it. But perhaps it’ll be repeated sometime on one of the more popular TV channels. And I hope that events and the landscape of religious and paranormal belief have changed in the meantime, so that there will never be another tragedy like it.
Paul Joseph Watson is another right-wing Youtuber. He used to be bonkers conspiracy theory peddler Alex Jones’ British buddy on Infowars, before he split with him and returned to Blighty. Leaving Jones to peddle his overpriced quack health supplements and mad ideas about the globalists running the world on behalf of demonic aliens, Obama and Hillary Clinton being demonic alien cyborgs set on imprisoning Americans in FEMA camps alone. Like Carl Benjamin, he’s also responsible for breaking UKIP. He entered the party along with Mark ‘Nazi pub’ Meechan. And the rest of the party, who really didn’t want to look like a bunch of racists, left in response.
But despite his extreme right-wing views and his opposition to immigration, I really don’t think it’s fair to call Watson a racist. And he does have a point about Black Lives Matter. BLM is centred around the perception that Black people are more likely to be killed by the cops than Whites, and that the police are institutionally racist. But this isn’t born out by the statistics.
Five years ago in May 2015 Watson posted this video, ‘Racist Facts White People Daren’t Talk About’ on his YouTube channel. He cites official government, police, FBI and academic statistics to show that Blacks aren’t killed by the cops more than Whites. But they do have more encounters with the rozzers because they disproportionately commit more violent crime.
He begins the video by showing that half of the police officers responsible for killing Freddy Gray, which set up of the Baltimore riots, were Black. But this fact is ignored. Black Lives Matter is about exploiting White guilt while ignoring the real causes of confrontations between Blacks and police.
Blacks commit disproportionately more violent crime than Whites. Blacks constitute just 13 per cent of the American population but commit half of all homicides. Department of Justice statistics from 1980 to 2008 show that Blacks were responsible for 52 per cent of all homicides compared to 48 per cent by Whites. FBI statistics for 2013 show that Blacks committed 38 per cent of murders compared to 31 per cent of Whites. From 2011 to 2013 38.5 per cent of those arrested for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault were Black. Young Black men between the ages of 15 to 34, who comprise just 3 per cent of the American population, are responsible for the proportion of these crimes from Black people listed above.
Whites, on the other hand, are twice as likely to be killed by the cops. Data from the Centre for Disease Control from 1999 to 2011 show that 2,151 Whites were shot by the police, compared to 1,130 Blacks. But as Blacks commit the same numbers of offences as Whites, then the numbers of Blacks shot should also be equal.
He also presents evidence to show that Blacks are far more like to commit crimes against Whites than the reverse. He claims that Blacks are eight times more likely to commit crimes against Whites than Whites are against Blacks. He cites FBI stats from 2007 that state that Black males were 40 per cent more likely to assault Whites as the reverse. And interracial rape is almost wholly Black on White.
He quotes the academics James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein , who stated in 1985 that the higher rates of crime amongst Black Americans cannot be denied, even allowing for discrimination in the justice system. Every official statistic shows Blacks overrepresented people arrested and imprisoned for street crimes.
And Blacks are more likely to be involved in violent confrontations with the police. Here Watson makes the point that this does not justify police brutality, but it does refute the BLM allegation that the cops are racist or solely brutal towards Blacks.
This raises the issue of whether Blacks are unfairly targeted and framed by the police. This allegation is debunked by looking at offenders described as Black by the victims. The number of Blacks arrested correlates with the numbers of perps described as Black by their victims.
Watson also goes on to consider the factors responsible for the greater incidence of criminality in the Black community. Poverty is one factor responsible for disproportionately predisposing Blacks towards violent crime, exacerbated by family breakdown. But there is also the problem that there is an element in Black subculture that actively celebrates criminality. This is encouraged by the White liberal media. After the Baltimore riots the media justified the violence directed against Black owned businesses. This is racist, and it leads to more police brutality.
He states that police brutality is a problem in the US. But the real problem is the violent criminality in the Black community. But until this becomes part of the national conversation the real, underlying issues will not be resolved. He concludes that by keeping silent about this, Black leaders and White liberals are responsible for maintaining a vicious cycle of violence.
Obviously this is very controversial stuff. There have been complaints and campaigns for decades about the reporting of crimes committed by Blacks to prevent the automatic association of Blacks with criminality and violence. This has now got to the point where many people assume that a perp must be Black, if his race is not mentioned in any news reports as there are obviously no such delicacies about the reporting of crimes by Whites. 20 years ago this resulted in a reversal of racial prejudices. A poll of the British public taken about then found that White youths were the most distrusted section of the British populace.It’s undoubtedly true that Blacks have been the victims of massive discrimination and prejudice by Whites down the centuries. Highly discriminatory legislation was put in place to keep them down and segregated after the abolition of slavery in America. And there was considerable, vicious racism against them over here. I’ve Black friends, who’ve had terrible experiences.
Black Lives Matter’s assertion that police are prejudiced against Blacks also has a basis in fact. The police were, but I don’t think it’s true so much now. As I’ve said in previous articles, I’ve had relatives and friends in the police who very definitely weren’t. And this ingrained prejudice against the police has caused terrible misperceptions of intent when the cops have gone to help Black people. Years ago back in the 1990s I was on a sociology course as part of a postgraduate degree I wanted to do on British Islam. The lecturer told us that we had to be aware how our views of events didn’t necessary match those of others. One of these examples was a case in America, where a Black woman collapsed in the street. Two White cops went to help her, but other Blacks automatically assumed that they were attacking her and an angry crowd gathered. This was an instance where Black prejudice against the police, which I don’t doubt came from previous experience, was actively harming them by preventing the rozzers from helping that poor woman.
Watson has the attitude that the liberals and the media are keeping silent about the real reasons for Black confrontation with the police, as they wish to keep them dependent on the state. This is the usual conservative nonsense about welfare dependency. I think one of the reasons Britain did not have the same level of violent crime until the last couple of decades or so was because we had a functioning welfare state, or at least some semblance of one, which meant that in the absence of properly paid work people weren’t faced with the choice of robbing or selling drugs to keep body and soul together.
I’m not great fan of Watson, and certainly don’t share his arch-Tory, Brexiteer opinions. But I think that the facts are behind him in this case. And this does need to be recognised, because without it nothing will change.
Even if it discredits Black Lives Matter’s essential assertion that more Blacks are killed by police.
Heaven help me, I can’t believe I’m actually defending something tweeted by the Fuhrage. On Saturday Zelo Street put up an article about a series of tweets by the man 2000 AD’s ‘Judge Dredd’ satirised as the anti-immigrant politician, Bilious Barrage. These revealed just how racist Farage is.
The tweets themselves were the standard right-wing stuff going around at the moment. Attacks on the BBC and the Finnish conductor for not singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ because they’re all unpatriotic, woke leftists. Asylum seekers being put up in hotels and defended by lefty activist lawyers, Brexit and the demand that we should be able to control our borders and a rant hyping his piece for the Telegraph about ‘cultural Marxism’. A phrase which has very definite anti-Semitic overtones, coming as it does from the Nazis’ idea of Kulturbolschevismus – cultural Bolshevism – and their conviction that traditional European culture was under attack from within by Commie Jews, as part of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
I agree with Zelo Street’s general point. I think Nige is a racist, and at times his carefully crafted image of being an ordinary bloke fighting to preserve traditional British culture does slip to reveal real Fascism beneath. But in one of the tweets cited by Zelo Street, Nige does have a point.
This tweet linked to a report about New York University now building segregated student housing for Blacks only. Zelo Street followed this up with a quote from Gore Vidal about the leader of American Conservatism, William S. Buckley and his support for racial segregation: To borrow the words of Gore Vidal, Farage, like William F Buckley, would have been over at the Wallace headquarters stitching hoods.
I think this is a misreading and Farage is condemning it. And he’s right to do so.
If this is the same story I’m thinking of, then it’s been around for several months now. It started with a video that was widely shared by Conservative YouTubers of Black students at the uni making statements before the university authorities that they did not feel safe rooming with Whites, and demanding segregated accommodation reserved only for Blacks. This is segregation, even if it is coming from Blacks and is demanded for their benefit. The kids making these statements are clearly genuinely scared, but it is also an expression of anti-White prejudice. The Black students made these representations, I gather, after a series of threatening, anti-Black racist posters were put up around campus.
It isn’t hard to understand their fear, given the history of official racist violence in American culture. Jim Crow and segregations, lynchings and whatever threats these kids and their families may have suffered in their own personal histories. And there does seem a culture of pro-Black racial segregation already on some American campuses. Another video shared by right-wing YouTubers is of an angry Black woman, another student, telling White students to get out of a study area reserved for Blacks and people of colour. It’s more anti-White racism, and what the Financial Times has described as ‘liberal apartheid’. I don’t think we have that culture of liberal racist separatism in British academia here yet, but I’ve no doubt it’s coming. Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, put up a video a few weeks ago reporting that Britain’s first all-Black university has now opened. I don’t doubt that the people behind it are copying the Black American colleges and universities, which began in the 19th and early 20th century by the great founders of the Civil Rights movements to prepare Blacks for taking their rightful place as equal members of society. They appeared during segregation. We didn’t quite have this in Britain and don’t have these colleges. And at a time when academia is under pressure to give more places to Black and Asian students, and open up the profession to more women and ethnic minorities, the founding of such a university looks less anti-racist than simple anti-White racism. It’s segregation with a Black face, and no doubt a lot of verbiage about Black empowerment, diversity and inclusion.
Back to New York University, the demands for racially segregated accommodation would be angrily dismissed and the students making such demands expelled if it came from Whites. It would rightly be seen as racist, and the product of racist views that see Blacks as particularly degraded, animalistic, criminal and a threat to White culture and racial purity. You’d have mass demonstrations and protests by people proclaiming that these views have no place on campus.
But if the construction of such all-Black halls of residence are a response to White racist mischief making, then the White supremacists have won. They’ve played on Black prejudice and racial fears to destroy racial integration and reimpose a kind of apartheid.
If you look at the tweet Farage links to, there’s a piece at the bottom comparing it to the drinking fountains in Black schools during segregation with an ironic line about ‘separate but equal’. This old lie is graphically exposed in the ’80s film, Mississippi Burning, about two White FBI agents breaking up a Klan chapter after the murder of a group of civil rights activists. It’s a great film, but it was also widely criticised itself for racism by having as its heroes White FBI agents, who are shown rescuing powerless Blacks. It was also attacked on the grounds that, while based on a real incident, the FBI at the time under J. Edgar Hoover hated the Civil Rights movement. Hoover believed it was a Communist front, and did everything he could to spy on it and harass its members.
But it opens with a scene showing two children at a water fountain. One’s Black, the others White. The water fountain for Black child is dirty and stained with verdigris and mould. That for the White child is pristine clean. It’s a graphic statement that, whatever else Blacks were under segregation, they were definitely not equal.
Racism needs to be fought, no matter what colour it has or claims to be defending. And Farage, heaven help us! – is right to call it out in this tweet.
Not that it changes what Farage himself is. He’s wretched videos have been widely covered by right-wing radio host Alex Belfield, another one who claims not be racist but the ‘voice of reason’. Belfield has approvingly commented on and defended Farage turning up at hotels putting up asylum seekers. And some how I don’t think it’s an accident – do you? – that the anti-Muslim Fascist outfit Britain First rocked up at one of these hotels to protest.
Belfield claims not be racist. But he and Farage are certainly playing to a racist crowd. Go down the comments section on his videos about immigration, Black Lives Matter and so forth, and you’ll see that while some of them make perfectly reasonable comments and criticism from a mainstream anti-racist viewpoint, there are a sizable number who are bitterly racist, posting venom about immigration and ranting about the Kalergi Plan. This is another conspiracy theory that claims that there’s a secret globalist, proto-EU plan to import Blacks and other non-White immigrants in order to break up the White societies of Europe. And then there’s the related mythology of the ‘Great Replacement’, and its underlying anti-Semitism. This is all being done, according to these poisonous myths, by the Jews. It’s yet another continuation of Nazi ideology.
This is the crowd that Farage and Belfield are playing to. And it’s despicable. But Farage’s own criticism of segregated student housing at New York University is actually anti-racist. It’s just a pity that it comes from him.
One of the most important things I learned when I was studying Geography for ‘A’ level nearly forty years ago was that poverty leads to political extremism. Part of the course was on the Third World, although I now gather that term, coined by Gandhi, is now out of favour. It was fascinating. We were taught that the countries of the Developing World varied in their levels of economic development and that many of their problems stemmed from the neocolonial system put in place when the European imperial power granted their independence. In return for their political freedom, the former colonies were required to confine themselves to primary industry – mining and agriculture. They were forced into a relationship with their former masters in which they were to trade their agricultural and mineral products for finished European goods. Punitive tariffs were imposed on industrial goods produced by these nations. They are therefore prevented from developing their own manufacturing industries and diversifying their economies. And as the primary resources they export to the global north are produced by a large number of countries, competition works against them. If one country tries to raise the price of copra, for example, the developed countries can simply find another nation willing to supply it at a lower cost. And so the Developing World is kept poor. And that poverty will drive people to political extremism – Communism and Fascism.
Poverty, Economic and Political Crisis and the Rise of Fascism
The same forces were at work behind the rise of Fascism in Europe. Part of the impetus behind the formation of Italian Fascism and German Nazism was frustration at the international settlement at the end of the First World War. Italy was angered by the great powers’ refusal to grant it the territories it claimed, like the Yugoslavian island of Fiume. Germany was humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles and the imposition of crippling reparations. The new democratic system in both countries was unstable. The Nazis made their first electoral breakthrough as the champions of the small farmers of Schleswig-Holstein in the 1920s. But arguable what gave them the greatest spur to power was the 1929 Wall Street crash and the massive global recession this caused. Combined with the breakdown of the ruling Weimar coalition between the Catholic Centre Party, the German Social Democrats – the rough equivalent of the British Labour Party and the two Liberal parties – the crisis boosted Nazism as a mass movement and allowed President Hindenberg, then ruling by decree, to consider giving them a place in power in order to break the political deadlock. He did, and the result was the twelve years of horror of the Third Reich. Faced with rising unemployment, national humiliation and social and political chaos, millions of people were attracted by the Nazis denunciation of international capitalism and Marxist Communism and Socialism, which they blamed on the Jews.
The Collapse of Louisiana Oil Industry and the Witchcraft Scare
Sociologists and folklorists critically examining the witchcraft scare of the 1990s also noticed the role poverty and wealth inequalities have in creating social panics and the persecution of outsider groups. From the ’70s onwards a myth had developed that there existed in society multigenerational Satanic groups practising child abuse and infant sacrifice. A critical investigation by the British government over here – the Fontaine Report – and the FBI over the Pond found absolutely no evidence that these sects ever existed. But large numbers of people uncritically believed in them. As this belief spread, innocent people were accused of membership of such cults and their mythical atrocities. As the American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand pointed out, this witch hunt emerged and spread at a time when the gap between rich and poor in America was increasing. One of the places hit by the scare was Louisiana. Louisiana had a strong oil industry, and the state levied a tax on its profits to subsidize local housing. This was fine until the industry went into recession. Suddenly ordinary, hard-working Louisianans found they could no longer afford their mortgages. There were cases where the banks were simply posted the keys to properties as their former owners fled elsewhere. With poverty and insecurity rising, people started looking round for a scapegoat. And they found it in these mythical Satanic conspiracies and in real, New Age neo-Pagan religions, which they identified with them.
1990s Prosperity and Positive Challenges to Affirmative Action
It’s a truism that poverty creates social and racial conflict, as different groups fight over scarce resources. There was a period in the 1990s when it looked like racism was well on the wane in America, Britain and Europe. Blacks were still at the bottom of American society, but some Blacks were doing well, and challenging stereotypes and the need for affirmative action. The Financial Times approvingly reported a self-portrait by a Black American artist, in which he pointedly exaggerated his ‘negrotic’ features in order to make the point that these didn’t define him. There were cases of Black college professors turning down promotion to senior, prestigious positions at their seats of learning because they didn’t want people to think that they hadn’t earned them through their own merits. They hated the idea that they were just being given these places because of their colour. Whites further down the social scale were also challenging the need for affirmative action in a different way, which didn’t involve racist abuse and violence. The FT reported that four American firemen had changed their names to Hispanic monickers, as this was the only way they believed they could get promotion under a system designed to give preference to ethnic minorities. Back in Blighty, some TV critics naively applauded the lack of racism in a series of Celebrity Big Brother, before that all shattered as Jade Goody and one of her friends racially bullied Indian supermodel and film star Shilpa Shetty. Sociological studies revealed that people’s accent was more important than their race in terms of social identity and acceptance. And then when Barack Obama won the American election in 2008, the chattering classes around the world hailed this as the inauguration of a new, post-racial America. But wiser voices reminded the world that the terrible racial inequalities remained.
Austerity, Poverty, and the Destruction of the Welfare State Behind Growth in Racism
All this has been shattered with the imposition of austerity following the banking crash, and the increasing impoverishment of working people across the world. The crash has allowed Conservative government to cut spending on welfare programmes, force through even more privatisations and cuts, and freeze and slash workers’ pay. At the same time, the top 1 per cent has become even more incredibly wealth through massively increased profits and tax cuts.
One of the many great speakers at last Saturday’s Arise Festival on Zoom – I think it was Richard Burgon, but I’m not sure – remarked that talking to people in the north, he found that they weren’t racist. They didn’t hate Blacks and ethnic minorities. But they were worried about access to jobs, opportunities and housing. He made the point that we need to restore these, to fight for all working people and not allow the Tories to divide us. He’s right. If you read rags like the Scum, the Heil and the Depress, the line they take is of virtuous Whites being deprived of employment and housing by undeserving immigrants. Who also sponge off the state on benefits, like the White unemployed the Tories also despise. But they’re obviously not going to tell the world that they are responsible for the shortage of jobs, the insecure conditions for those, who are lucky to have them, and that the shortage of affordable housing is due to them selling off the council houses and defining ‘affordable’ in such a way that such homes are still out of the pocket of many ordinary people. Even if enough of them are built by companies eager to serve the wealthy.
Austerity and Black Lives Matter
It’s austerity that has given urgency to the Black Lives Matter movement. Blacks and some other ethnic minorities have been acutely affected by austerity, as they were already at the bottom of society. If prosperity had continued, if the banking crash had not happened and austerity not imposed, I don’t believe that BLM would have received the wave of global support it has. Blacks would still have occupied the lowest rung of the social hierarchy, but conditions would not have been so bad that they have become a crisis.
White Trump Voters Whites Disadvantaged by Affirmative Action
At the same time, some disadvantaged Whites would not have given their votes to Donald Trump. While Trump is a grotty racist himself, who has surrounded himself with White supremacists and members of the Alt Right, some sociologists have counselled against accusing all of his supporters as such. Years ago Democracy Now’s anchorwoman, Amy Goodman, interviewed a female academic who had done a sociological survey of Conservative White Trump supporters. She found that they weren’t racist. But they did feel that they were being denied the jobs and opportunities they deserved through unfair preference given to other ethnic groups. She likened their mentality to people in a queue for something. Waiting at their place in line, they were annoyed by others pushing in ahead of them. And this was made worse when the queue jumpers responded to their complaints by accusing them of racism. I think the sociologist herself was politically liberal, but she stated that the Conservatives Whites she’d studied should not automatically be called racist and it was dangerous to do so.
Conclusion
It’s clear from all this that if we really want to tackle racism, we need to restore jobs, proper wages, trade union power, real affordable and council housing, and a proper welfare state. These are desperately needed by all members of the working class. I’ve no doubt that they’re most acutely needed by Blacks, but this certainly isn’t confined to them. Restoring prosperity would bring all the different racial groups that make up the working class together, and it would stop the resentment that leads to racial conflict by one group feeling disadvantaged for the benefit of the others.
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