Tokyo Bans Sale of Comics ‘Subversive of the Social Order’ to Children

It seems to me that there’s a real war going on in ostensibly democratic countries against freedom of speech and conscience. I don’t think this is confined to either the left or right either. In Britain we have had a successions of governments that have been determined to limit the right to public protest from David Cameron to Johnson with his wretched Criminal Justice Bill. And before then there was Tony Blair and his attempts to control what was being said about him and his coterie on state broadcasting, just as Berlusconi was doing to the Italian state media. John Kampfner wrote a rather good book about it, Freedom for Sale, a few years ago, arguing that governments from Blair to Putin were trying to bargain with their peoples. They got material prosperity in return for severe infringements on their ability to protest against their governments. Well, Blair was wretched, but he did at least tackle poverty with no little success. Cameron, Tweezer and Johnson are simply increasing it.

On the other side of the political aisle, the right are complaining about the imposition of curbs on free speech as part of the campaign against hate crime and the ‘cancel culture’. Some of this is exaggerated. Zelo Street demolished some of the claims Toby Young, Douglas Murray and the rest were making about right-wingers being prevented from speaking at universities by giving the precise statistics. These showed that, while it had happened, the percentage of speakers cancelled was minute. But I do think they have a point. For example, it should be accepted that trans people should not despised, persecuted or suffer discrimination. But I think there are legitimate issues and questions voiced by gender critical feminists about trans activism and that there are spaces that should only be reserved for ‘cis’ women. But to some people, simply voicing what to many people are reasonable questions and criticisms constitute hate speech. There are similar problems regarding the reporting and discussion of racial issues. Nobody should want to empower real bigots and Fascists, but it does seem that legislation put in place to protect minorities from real hate has now expanded into Orwellian thoughtcrime.

And these attempts to limit freedom of speech have got into what is permissible in comics. One of the astonishing snippets I found while flicking through Paul Gravett’s Comics Art yesterday, was that in 2011 Tokyo municipality expanded its ban on the sale of certain comics (manga) and animated movies (anime) to children under 18 by including materials ‘excessively disruptive of the social order’. (Page 72). I realise that Japan is a very conservative society. The right-wing Liberal Democratic party were in power for fifty years or so after the end of World War II. The country is very Confucian in that one respects one’s elders and superiors. Gender roles are very traditional, as are conceptions of nationality. I don’t know if it’s still the case now, but under Japanese law at one time a person could only be a Japanese citizen if both their parents were ethnic Japanese. I gather that there are ways you can become a naturalised citizen, but it’s extremely difficult. It’s also supposed to be a very conformist society, in which children are taught at school that ‘the nail that stands up must be hammered down’. But this attack on comics is extreme.

Such attacks on the four-colour funnies and related media haven’t been restricted by Japan by any means. In the 1950s there was a moral panic in America and the United States against comics, one of the major figures in which was the Austrian psychiatrist, Dr Frederic Wertham. Wertham was one of a number of left-wing, emigre intellectuals who believed that popular culture had assisted the Nazis into power. He believed that American youth was being corrupted into crime and sexual deviancy by comics. He accused Superman of being a Nazi, despite the fact that the character’s only similarity to Nietzsche’s superman is the name, and that the Man of Steel’s creators were American Jews. Batman and Robin were an idealised homosexual couple, an accusation that has continued to plague attempts to reintroduce Robin in the strips. Oh yes, and Wonder Woman was a sado-masochist feminist lesbian. I doubt any of these accusations would have been recognised by the kids who actually bought and read the strips. But Wertham’s denunciations were taken up by a variety of groups, from the religious right to the Communist party and led to the passing of laws across America banning or restricting the sale of comics to children. The ban led to the collapse of particular comic genres, specifically the horror and true crime comics, which were particular targets of the legislators’ ire. It also affected the SF comics, because some of them strayed into politically dubious areas. The superhero comics survived, not because they were the most popular, but because they were the type of comics least affected by the new regulations.

One of the SF comics singled out for censorship was a story in which an astronaut from Earth travels to a world populated entirely by robots. His face hidden in his spacesuit, he tells the robots that they’re being considered as candidates for joining a galactic federation. Shades of Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets by a slightly different name here. However, the robots are divided into two types, blue and orange, and there is hatred and conflict between them. At the end of the story, the astronaut informs them that they have been rejected because of these divisions. It was only when the people of Earth rejected their differences and united, that real progress was made, he states at the end of the story. In the last panel he removes his helmet, and reveals that he’s Black.

Shock horror! An anti-racist message! This was too much for one New York judge, who wanted the strip banned on religious grounds. He believed that God had only given speech to humanity, and hated the idea of talking robots. But the underlying issue is obviously its attack on racism at a time when Jim Crow was still very much in force. Eventually the judge had to back down, and the issue degenerated into a fight between the publisher, EC, and the authorities over how many beads of sweat they could show on the Earthman.

Well, at least there were comics creators in America prepared to deal with the issue. Pat Mills, the creator of zarjaz British comic 2000 AD, says in his book about British comics and his career in them, Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! that even in the late 1960s, the policeman heroes in British comics were making quite racist comments about Blacks. Part of what made 2000 AD’s predecessor, Action, so controversial was that Mills and the other creators there had been determined to make it as relevant as possible to contemporary British youth culture and deal with the issues and stories affecting and demanded by the young readership of the time. It was originally going to be called ‘Boots’, after Dr Martens’ distinctively rebellious footwear, followed by the years. So ‘Boots 1977′, Boots 1978’ and so on. But this was too much for the publishers, and the name Action settled on instead. In the end, the comic only lasted a couple of years because it was so controversial, with the major criticism that it was far too violent. 2000 AD was its successor, but here, unlike Action, the violence would be done in support of the law. This led to Judge Dredd, who was deliberately designed as a Fascist cop. The strip’s founding artist, Carlos Ezquerra, was Spanish, and so incorporated into Dredd’s uniform the style of the Fascists then making life a misery in Franco’s Spain, the helmet, the shoulder pads and the eagle badge. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the light reflected in Dredd’s visor looks like ‘SS’. Dredd was thus partly a comment by Mills and Wagner on some of the authoritarian trends in contemporary policing. Other strips tackled issues of racism and religious bigotry – Strontium Dog and Nemesis the Warlock, for example, and sexism, like The Ballad of Halo Jones. There was also a strong anti-war message in the ABC Warriors. Mainstream American comics had been tackling some of these issues for a decade or so previously. There were issues of Spiderman, for example, that tackled racism, and the Blaxploitation craze of the 1970s led to the appearance of Black superheroes like Powerman, Brother Voodoo and the Black Panther. Since then, and particularly since the collapse of the Comics Code Authority in the 1990s, comics have become an accepted and critically respected medium for the discussion of political and social issues. This has reached the point where Conservative and more traditional fans and comics creators believe that the medium and related forms of popular culture, such as SF and Fantasy film and television has become too politicised. In their opinion, contemporary comics writers and artists are too concerned with pushing overt messages about racism, sexism and gay rights at the expense of creating good, likeable characters and engaging plots and stories.

Martin Barker describes how comics have always been the subject of suspicion by the left and the right, going back to the Bloods and Penny Dreadfuls of Victorian Britain, and the cheap, popular novels being read by ‘the democracy’ in his Comics, Ideology and Power. Girls’ comics seem to me to have come in for a particular bashing. They were attacked by conservatives for being too radical and challenging traditional female roles. The left attacked them for being too conservative and not teaching girls their proper, traditional place. Barker shows how these attacks were way off, tearing to pieces specific criticisms of various strips. He argues that children actually subtly negotiate the content of the comics they read. They accept only those elements of the strips which appeal to them and ignore the rest. They do not simply accept everything they read. Barker’s final chapter is a passionate attack on those, who were trying to censor comics at the time he was writing. This included Thatcher and the Tories, but he was also angry at his own camp, the left. Brent and Lambeth councils were also leading an attack on popular literature through their zeal to purge their municipal libraries of anything they considered racist.

And they attack on popular literature has carried on. I remember the furore at the beginning of this century against the Harry Potter books. American Evangelical Christians accused J.K. Rowling of leading children into Satanism and the occult. Well, I admit I’ve only seen the films, not read the books, but I must have missed that one. It’s always seemed to me that the Harry Potter books actually were part of a long tradition of supernatural fantasy in children’s literature going right back to E. Nesbitt and beyond, and including The Worst Witch and Gobbelino the Witch’s Cat. Their attacks on Potter contrast with the Pope’s, who praised them and J.K. Rowling for encouraging children’s imaginations. There was also a rabbi, who wrote a piece praising Potter as a kind of model for Jews.

I’m not a free speech absolutist. I believe the promotion of certain opinions should be outlawed. Obvious examples include anything that encourages the sexual abuse of children or real hatred and violence towards minorities. I have no problem with the law banning the incitement to racial hatred. This was introduced in the 1920s or ’30s with the aim of combating the rise of real Fascism in the form of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Arnold Leese’s The Britons and other violent, deeply racist and anti-Semitic outfits. I also believe that parents have every right to exercise concern and control about what their children read or listen to, or are taught at school regarding certain highly controversial issues.

But I am afraid that the rules against certain types of hate are being used to silence perfectly reasonable criticism. One of the quotes that my accusers have cited to show that I am an evil anti-Semite is a statement where I say that every state and ideology should be open to discussion and criticism, even Israel and Zionism. There is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic in that. Even the wretched I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism states that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic only if it is applied solely to Israel. But that sentence makes it very clear that I don’t single out Israel and Zionism for especial criticism. I simply state that they should not be above it. But to the anti-Semitism hunters, this is obviously too much.

I am very much afraid that freedom of speech, discussion and conscience and true liberty of the press is under attack. The Conservatives want to close down any view that isn’t their own, all while arguing they’re simply standing up for free speech against the censorious ‘woke’ left. And there are forces on the left trying to close down reasonable debate and criticism under the guise of protecting people from hate.

We have to be careful, and defending freedom of speech and publication from attacks, whether by left-wing councils like Brent and Lambeth in the 1980s, or right-wing local authorities like Tokyo and its law of 2011.

This should not be a partisan issue, but should stretch across the political spectrum. But my fear is that it won’t. And as both sides struggle to establish the kind of censorship they want, real freedom of expression will die.

Edward Colston’s Statue Needs to Be in a Museum to Educate People About Slavery

Last week, the BBC local news for the Bristol area, Points West, reported that the statue of Edward Colston had been put on display in the M Shed, one of the city’s many museums. The statue was famously pulled down last summer by Black Lives Matter protesters and thrown in the docks. It’s being put on display, along with an old tyre that was also hauled out of the docks with it and a plaque. The M Shed is asking the Bristolian public what their views about its display are.

I think it needs to go on display along with an explanatory plaque. I don’t think the statue will be particularly missed from its plinth on the city centre. It’s naturally been controversial for decades, and there have been campaign to have it pulled down since the 1990s. But it needs to be retained and displayed because of the uncomfortable facts about the slave trade and those who dealt in it.

If Colston was only a slaver out for his own profit, then there would or should be no objection to the tearing down of his statue. But he was more complex than that. He gave most of his money away to charity, so that there have been schools founded on his bequests. I remember my old secondary school celebrating Colston Day each year, in which a few selected pupils got to attend a special service and receive a free bun. This was very definitely not a racist school. We had regular sermons against racism and the colour bar in school assemblies and the regular church services at Christmas and the beginning of term. Mike told me of one incident where the headmaster gave one boy a roasting for calling one of the Black lads a ‘N***er’. The school building was already crumbling, and the headmaster was so loud telling the lad off that bits actually flaked off.

One of the problems with slavery, and indeed much history, its that the morals of the past are very different from our own. This was first noted by the 18th century Italian historian and philosopher, Vico, and then by Nietzsche and his ‘transvaluation of values’. It’s extremely difficult for us to understand how otherwise good and decent people could perpetrate the most terrible atrocities, like slavery. But they did, and this needs to be recognised and understood. If nothing else, it helps to explain why it took William Wilberforce and the abolitionists so long to have it banned, and why decent people respected and defended Colston and his statue. History needs to be understood on its own terms, even when its controversial. Especially when its controversial.

We falsify it and create new dangers if we try to present it simply so as to fit modern morals.

Black Activists Plan Blacks-Only Town ‘Wakanda’ in Georgia

This comes via the Midwestly channel on YouTube. Midwestly is a White guy and his views seem to be Conservative. He’s posted criticisms of Black Lives Matter and the riots that have broken out in its name. But he also says that there’s nothing wrong in this, and gives them his support. He just feels that it’s not the way to bring people together, and that it creates division. He also makes the point that if it was done by Whites, it would be considered Alt Right.

Yes, yes, it would. and there is plenty wrong with a town founded deliberately to exclude or marginalise people simply because of their race or ethnicity.

Ashley Scott, Renee Walters, and the Foundation of the new ‘Wakanda’

According to the Insider, two Black Activists, Ashley Scott, a real estate agent from Stonecrest, Georgia, and her friend Renee Walters found 96.71 acres of land in Georgia. They then persuaded 19 Black families to purchase the land with the intention of setting up a town. Called ‘Wakanda’, presumably after the fictional African supertechnological state in the movie and comic Black Panther, it will be primarily for Blacks, although pro-Black White allies will be permitted to apply. One of the points Midwestly makes is that Georgia doesn’t have the fictional element Vibranium upon which Wakanda’s advanced technology is based. And so it ain’t gonna be Wakanda without the Vibranium.

Scott said that the year had made her feel distraught and was looking for ways to feel empowered. She also said that she envisioned ‘a place where we can all be proud and have human dignity, honour and respect, and equality amongst our Black people because we have Black talent.’

The Freedom Georgia Initiative

This produced the Freedom Georgia Initiative, which will spend the next three to five years installing everything from wi-fi and water before planning residential, retail and recreation areas. MidWestly makes the point that the amount of land purchased gives each family about five acres, which isn’t a lot, plus retail, plus recreation and plus public works. He also says it doesn’t sound like freedom.

Scott wrote an article for Blavity stating that the group saw the land as a fresh start with a city that could be a shining example of being the change they wanted to see by supporting Black families and companies. She said that they wanted to be involved in creating the lives they really want for their Black families. And maybe, just maybe, create some generational wealth for ourselves by investing in the land and their core values and beliefs. The intiative is, apparently, geared to offering a Black centric community a fresh start after the fall of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street by White supremacists and poverty enforced by Jim Crow laws.

Scott said that ‘it’s not even a Black thing. It’s a place where we can all be proud and have human dignity, honour and respect, and equality amongst our Black people because we have Black talent.’ Walter told Insider that despite major figures calling for change and speaking out in favour of Black America in recent months, the two hope the project can be an example to those that advocating for significant change can begin on an individual level.’ He comments that it’s cool they want to get out of the city, but that it sounds like they want segregation. Well, that’s the way it sounds to me!

Practical Problems

He goes on to read from a second article, which says that the planned colony is in Wilkinson County in rural Georgia, and that the group initially looked into Toomsboro, Georgia, until they were told that it wasn’t for sale. This second article calls it a ‘Black only safe haven called ‘Freedom’.’ But it also adds that pro-Black families can apply to live there. Midwestly asks what ‘pro-Black’ means. They also intend to clear the land for farming and fishing. He states that they don’t have nearly enough land for what they intend to do. Even if the 19 families only have one acre plots each, leaving 50 acres for building a lake, retail stores, it would mean that everyone would have to move into condos to make it work. He said that if it was him, he would want to have land with his home, because without land you aren’t going to create wealth.

Segregation and the Alt-Right

Midwestly says he wishes them all the best because they’re private citizens buying land to do what they want. It’s just that if White people did this, it would be called something different, like an ethnostate. Yes, because that’s what it very much looks like from here, the intended ethnicity of the settlement notwithstanding. He goes on to say that it’s what the Alt Right is talking about, and he doesn’t necessarily like all that division, after the University of Michingan launched its Whites and non-Whites separate cafes. This isn’t the way to create unity. It just creates more division. And ultimately it’s heartbreaking to see people talking about this stuff as if it’s stunning and brave.

Here’s the video:

Conservatives, Race and Property Rights

Midwestly is coming at this from the Conservative view that the private individual should be able to do whatever they like on their own land. This is, apparently, the reason Barry Goldwater opposed desegegration. He was not an opponent of Black improvement. I have seen it argued that he was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He also, supposedly, desegegrated his department store. But he thought that compulsory desegegration was an attack on individual freedom and property rights. But Midwestly is clearly troubled by the racism at the heart of this project.

Ideal Communities an American Tradition

In some ways, the project part of a long tradition of people trying to found better, more perfect communities in the New World. It was behind the Pilgrim Father’s decision to migrate, as was explained in this Sunday’s edition of the Beeb’s Christian programme, Songs of Praise. They intended their new settlement to be a shining beacon. It was the Puritan settlers who gave America its vision of itself as a uniquely more community, a shining city on a hill. It saw British nonconformists take to America ideas of democracy and religious tolerance which influenced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It should be pointed out, however, that the Founding Fathers determinedly weren’t democrats, and explicitly stated that the franchise should be restricted to elite White males to stop the poor majority oppressing the rich.

In the 19th century political radicals like the British poet Robert Southey, the Scots Utopian Socialist Robert Owen, and the followers of the French Utopian Socialist Fourier all tried to set up their own Utopian Communes in the US. These failed, though the Oneida community survived by reforming itself as a joint-stock company. A Jewish emigrant to the US also hoped to found a Jewish state there. I think this was originally going to be in the region of Niagara in New York State. And then there’s Utah, which founded by the Mormons as a theocracy for their faith before it joined the US.

Free Black Villages in the British Caribbean

In the Caribbean, radical Baptist missionaries founded free Black townships with like Sligoville, New Birmingham, Piedmont, Hoby Town, named after the British abolitionist Dr. Hoby, Unity, Refuge, which was originally named Wilberforce after the great British abolitionist, Kettering and Granville, named after another British abolitionist, Granville Sharpe, Buxton and Victoria. The radical Baptist missionary William Knibb estimated in 1840 that there were about 200 free villages with 8,000 inhabitants between them spread about Jamaica. Free Black towns were also established in Demerara and Berbice, now part of Guyana, starting with Northbrook Estate and then Den Amstel. They were also set up in Antigua. By 1842 they numbered 27 such villages with a total population of 3,600.

These villages were set up to protect Black people from re-enslavement by the planters. I don’t know if there were free Black communities established by abolitionists in the 19th century. But America’s Black community, while depressed and impoverished, is not enslaved. That came to an end with the Civil War. Nor do they have official implemented, state-sanctioned segregation. That came to an end in the late ’60s when Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. The Black community is, generally speaking, deprived and disadvantaged. But it is not enslaved, nor legally subject to discrimination. At least, not overtly. Blacks have voting rights, and there are Black politicians and members of the judiciary and legal profession. Since at least the 1980s, various affirmative action legislation has been passed with the deliberate intention of giving Blacks greater opportunities, freedom and prosperity and giving them genuine social and economic equality with mainstream America.

Nation of Islam, American Black Nationalism and White European Communes and Colonies

The proposed establishment of this town seems more like the separatism of the Nation of Islam. This demands the creation of an independent Black nation made out of five of the states of the southern US. Elsewhere in the world, it recalls Liberia, which was founded by American abolitionists as a country for freed American slaves, just as Britain attempted to do the same with Sierra Leone in the late 18th century.

And yes, it also resembles the communes proposed by White supremacists and Nazis, like those in the Hayden Lakes area of the American Midwest. Nietzsche’s cousin, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, was a proto-Nazi. She tried to found a perfect community of racially pure Germans in South America. But rather than finding prosperity, the community instead became poor and inbred. Over on this side of the Atlantic, there was also a move by two White British Nazis to buy a farm in France to build a pure, White colony there. This was passionately attacked by British anti-Nazis. Hope Not Hate have published an article about it, and it seems that after all these long years it’s come to nothing. Except that the Nazis behind it seemed to have spent their time trying to kill each other.

Return to the Ghetto

A few years ago in the 1990s or thereabouts there was talk about a ‘return to the ghetto’ amongst American Blacks. You can understand this. As a general rule, people prefer to live among their kind. This may be members of the same religious group, race, or ethnicity. For example, San Francisco has its Chinatown and Chicago a Little Italy, which was the main location of that city’s Italian community. But there is a difference between voluntary settlements, which just happen to be areas where a particular religion or ethnicity happens to live, and those deliberately planned which consciously exclude people because of their race.

Pro-Black Apartheid and the International Third Position

Round about 1985 the British newspaper, the Observer, published a piece fearing the demand for apartheid in Britain by sections of the Black community. It was a direct attack on the Black activist and Labour MP, Paul Boateng, who had called for autonomous Black communities in Britain. Now it seems that the same drives and demands have resurfaced in America by Black radicals in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

And there’s a section of the White Nazi movements which wants the same thing. In the 1960s Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam used to hold joint rallies with the American Nazi party. They both saw a common interest in dividing America on racial grounds. The Blacks would have the eastern seaboard, while the rest of America would be reserved for Whites. In the 1990s there was a strain of British Fascism called the Third International Position. This wanted separate communities for Blacks, including their own schools. It was opposed by the majority of Nazis, like the BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, who wanted their total repatriation. But it was also opposed by mainstream anti-racists and opponents of apartheid.

But now it appears apartheid is back, and being championed as pro-Black and anti-racist. It shouldn’t matter who’s doing it. Segregation and apartheid is always wrong, and should always be fought and combated.

Dominic Cumming’s Social Darwinist Views

On Sunday the Skwawkbox put up a piece about an article in the Groaniad revealing Dominic Cumming’s views on the value of education and social mobility: he doesn’t believe in them. In 2013 the Polecat produced a 250 page essay covering a number of subjects. One of these was in the importance of heredity in determining social advancement. He declared

differences in educational achievement are not mainly because of ‘richer parents buying greater opportunity’ and the successful pursuit of educational opportunity and ‘social mobility’ will increase heritability of educational achievement.

He also criticised a leading sociologist because

in a paper about class and wealth across generations, he ignores genetics entirely. However, using parent-offspring correlations as an index of ‘social mobility’ is fundamentally flawed because the correlations are significantly genetic – not environmental.

He concluded

However, the spread of knowledge and education is itself a danger and cannot eliminate gaps in wealth and power created partly by unequally distributed heritable characteristics.

This is bog-standard, textbook Social Darwinism – the survival of the economic fittest, as devised by Herbert Spencer. It’s the philosophy that passing legislation to improve conditions for the working class is useless, because their poverty and failure to ascend the social hierarchy is due to their lack of genetic fitness. Indeed, it may even be actually dangerous in the case of the disabled. If the ‘dysgenic’ – the genetically inferior – are allowed to breed, they will outbreed their genetic superiors in the upper classes. This will lead to racial degeneration. This was the reasoning behind the notorious eugenics legislation passed by 25 states in the US providing for the sterilisation of the mentally handicapped. It was also the reason the US also preferred not to take immigrants from southern or eastern Europe, let alone elsewhere in the world, because these peoples were deemed racially inferior to those of northern and western Europeans.

These eugenicist attitudes were a fundamental part of Nazi ideology. Hitler in his speeches declared that the business class deserved their position at the top of German society, because they were genetically superior to the proles. They also studied the American eugenics legislation, which influenced their own vicious policies towards the disabled, culminating in Aktion T4, the wholesale murder of ‘life undeserving of life’, as they called their victims. About their own eugenics legislation, they stated that they hadn’t done anything that the Americans hadn’t done already.

The Skwawkbox passed on Cumming’s views to a senior, unnamed, Labour politico. Who reacted with horror.

These views are appalling. They are chillingly eugenicist and the thought that they might influence public policy is frightening. Boris Johnson must act if the public is to have any confidence at all that their children are not going to be victims of even more deeply entrenched privilege and discrimination.

Unsurprisingly, Cummings is also a fan of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the preacher of the Superman. The Polecat declares that Nietzsche is probably the last of the line of recognisable great philosophers. He was particularly impressed by Nietzsche’s disgust at the animalisation of man to the pygmy animal of equal rights and equal pretensions. Skwawkbox states that Cumming’s seems to conclude that humanity can only achieve its best progress by casting aside the ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ that Nietzsche despised.

Nietzsche was a militant atheist, and is credited as the founder of atheist existentialism. He admired the aristocracy, and the heroic, aristocratic values of ancient Greece. At the same time, he despised Christianity and its ‘slave morality’ of compassion. One of his books, The Antichrist, is a splenetic attack on the religion. He is undoubtedly a great philosopher, though one of the lecturers in the Religious Studies department of my old college considered his ideas so evil he refused to teach him. And not everybody is impressed with him by any means.

The theologian and Christian apologist, Hans Kung, quotes the German Roman Catholic philosopher Johannes Hirschberger, who was very scathing about the philosopher of the Superman. Hirschberger wrote

There is far too much fuss about Nietzsche. The literature on Nietzsche is to a large extent not much more than hot air, music hall entertainment and attempts to create interest. It is time to stop playing about with the deeper sense, the non-sense and the manic sense of Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche has caused enough mischief. He thought wherever Germany reached, it ruined culture. It would be more correct to say that wherever Nietzsche reached, he ruined philosophy. A young man who tries to make his first contact with philosophy by studying Nietzsche will never learn to think clearly, soberly, critically and above all objectively, but will soon begin to lose balance and increase his subjectivity, to talk pompously and issue orders. This is the very opposite of philosophy.

In Hans Kung, Does God Exist? (London: William Collins & Sons 1980) 399-400.

Quite so. Hirschberger’s observation on what happens to young men, who read Nietzsche does seem to apply to the Polecat, if not Boris himself. They’re both masters of talking pompously and issuing orders.

What is more serious is that No. 10 refused to comment when the Skwawkbox contacted them about Cumming’s odious views. They replied

‘Thank you for contacting us but we won’t be offering any comment.’

They refused to reply when the Skwawkbox asked them if Cumming’s views would be influencing policy. But the Skwawkbox itself isn’t afraid to comment, stating

The Labour source’s assessment will be echoed by many and rightly so.

Even more concerning – while depressingly unsurprising – is the refusal of Boris Johnson and his office to even engage with the issues raised by Cummings’ Darwinian-Nietzschian views on inequality and the desirability of reducing it, let alone to offer any assurances that they will not be at the heart of government policy.

It should deeply worry everyone – and especially the vulnerable, the disadvantaged and their families, who have already endured the horrors of more than nine years of Tory government.

See: https://skwawkbox.org/2019/09/01/number-10-refuses-to-engage-with-questions-about-cummings-chillingly-eugenicist-comments/

I’m not surprised by their refusal to comment. The entire Tory party is riddled with such sentiments. Back in the 1970s Thatcher’s mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, caused outrage when he declared that unmarried mothers were a threat to the British racial stock. When Blair was debating reforming the House of Lords, the Tory papers defended it, declaring that the Lords deserved their right to sit in parliament through heredity and upbringing. And a few years ago Spectator loudmouth Toby Young attended a eugenics conference at University College, London, attended by real Nazis. And their determination to remove welfare support from the poor and disabled shows they share the Nazis’ hatred of such ‘useless eaters’ and see them die, even though it is through starvation on the streets and in their own homes, rather than by cyanide in death camps and clinics.

Cummings is a disgrace, as is Boris, and they and the whole Tory party are a threat to working people, and particularly the poor, the disabled. Get them out now! 

 

What Johnson as Nietzschean Superman Really Means – Amoral and Absolutely Self-Centred

Boris Johnson and other blond beasts

Zelo Street yesterday put up a post about the shameless grovelling panegyric Spectator journalist and Tory advocate of eugenics, Toby Young, gave to our new, rich and privileged Prime Minister, Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson on the Victoria Derbyshire show and on Quillette. This last included the lines

“I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time … With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him”.

To which the sage of Crewe simply added, ‘ Oh, just fuck off Tobes. I mean … just fuck off.’ Which is coarse, but exactly describes what very many people must have felt reading it.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/toby-young-says-gissa-job-bozza.html

But what exactly was Nietzsche’s superman?

This did not mean an individual with special, superhuman powers like Superman or the other, similar comic book heroes like Spiderman, the Hulk and so on. Rather, it meant the new, superior human ideal, who had rejected both the slave morality of Christianity, and the master morality of the aristocracy. This was someone, who fully lived up to the challenge of living in a world where God was dead, a universe that was now devoid of transcendent meaning. This was a person – the word Nietzsche used was ubermensch, which literally means Overhuman – who had moved beyond notions of good and evil, and lived according to his or her own notions of morality.

Nietzsche was an ardent individualist, who categorically rejected the idea of a  common morality shared by all , as put forward by the Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Nietzsche wrote

A word against Kant as moralist. A virtue has to be our invention, our more personal defence and necessity, in any other sense it is merely a danger … ‘virtue’, ‘duty’, ‘good in itself’; impersonal and universal – phantoms, expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life, of Konigsbergian Chinadom. The profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand the reverse of this; that each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative.

The British philosopher Mary Midgley attacked this in her book, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge 2011), writing

This, he said, would naturally lead any enlightened person in the modern age to live alone, despising his contemporaries and rejecting claims by others on fellowship or compassion, feelings that he regarded as shameful weaknesses. Nietzsche advertised this ideal strongly as a virile one, and buttressed it by a great deal of spiteful misogyny in the style of Rousseau and Schopenhauer. he did not, apparently, see that solitude might as easily be a refuge for weakness as an assertion of strength, nor that childish boasting about one’s own superiority makes this interpretation rather likely. (p. 135).

From this you can see that Boris does have Nietzschean qualities, and this isn’t a complement. He is amoral, self-centred, and, at least political, without compassion, as shown in his and his party’s dedicated loathing on the poor, the disabled, and the less privileged. He also very strongly reminds me of another remark by Nietzsche, hailing the new ‘blond beasts’: ‘Will without intelligence! How beautiful! How free!’

Nietzsche intended his superman to be a heroic figure with the ancient ‘tragic sense of life’, trying to live fully and create meaning in a cold, uncaring, meaningless cosmos. Johnson himself is a odious buffoon, whose incompetence matches his vaunting ambition. There’s nothing heroic or grand about him, and the clownish exterior with which he seeks to ingratiate himself with the public as nothing but a harmless character is nothing but a mask, a sham.

He’s a malign, selfish clown in a malign, greedy, selfish, conscienceless party. And his presence in No. 10 is a catastrophe that shames this country.

Boris Johnson and His Cabinet of Privileged Thugs Seize Office

So it’s finally happened. As just about everyone expected, but nobody outside his circle of the Tory far right actually wanted, yesterday Boris Johnson finally slithered into office. It was already on the cards on Monday, when the papers published this piccie of an expectant, jubilant Boris.

It sounds ridiculous, but I know people, who were genuinely unsettled by this image. They described him as looking mad, possessed even. I think it was probably due to a loathing of the man’s vile personal character and views coupled to his goofy expression. It also struck me that with his eye’s wide and his mouth wide open, there’s a certain superficial resemblance to the expression on this notorious American mass murderer, Charles Manson.

Which means that when they saw the picture of Johnson, subconsciously they saw this:

Which is enough to give anyone the creeping horrors.

Now Johnson isn’t a vile, unrepentant serial killer and cult leader like the late Manson. But he is an obscenely wealthy aristo, who has just appointed a cabinet of similarly obscenely wealthy aristos, none of whom seem to have the old virtues of genuine concern for the poor of the Tory paternalists. Because being ‘wet’ went out with Maggie Thatcher. They also stand for nothing more than their own enrichment and the simultaneous impoverishment of the less fortunate. They are vehemently pro-Brexit, anti-welfare and for privatisation and deregulation, despite the immense harm these zombie economics have done to this country and its proud, fine people. And it hardly needs to be said that they’re also pro-fracking and against the environment.

Two days ago on Tuesday, male feminist and anti-Fascist YouTuber Kevin Logan put up a video, Super Rich F**ks, which exactly described the Tory front bench. It was a piece of musical satire, mirrored from Dirty Little Owl’s channel, which showed images of various leading Tory politicians, with captions showing their personal wealth and a short piece about their horrendous voting record, while a song plays in the background viciously sending them up.

It begins with the statement that the Tories have a combined net worth of £2.4 billion, before going to the following –

Michael Gove

Net worth, £1 million +

Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability.

Chris Grayling

Net worth, £1.5 million

Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms. (Bedroom tax).

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson

Net worth £1.5 million

Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.

Is a massive child.

Theresa May

Net worth: £2 million

While her husband’s £1.1 trillion investment firm avoided UK tax, she cut 2,000 police, raised tax on the self-employed and took benefits from 60,000 disabled people.

Penny Mordaunt

Net work: £2.5 million

Always voted to reduce help with council tax for those in financial need.

Philip Hammond

Net worth: £8.2 million.

Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices.

Sajid Javid

Net worth: £8.5 million

Almost always voted against spending public money to create jobs for young people who’ve spent a long time unemployed.

Lord Stratchclyde

Net worth: £10 million

Voted against free school meals and milk.

Wryly commenting on the girth of the above aristo, the video comments that ‘clearly hasn’t suffered a want of meals himself.’

Jeremy Hunt

Net worth: £14 million

Here the video quotes his views advocating the destruction of the NHS:

‘Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain.’

Adam Afriyie

Net worth: £50 million

Voted for reduction in benefits for disabled and ill claimants required to participate in activities intended to increase their chances of obtaining work.

Zac Goldsmith

Net worth: £75 million

Voted in favour of proposed spending cuts and changes to the welfare system in favour of spending on new nuclear weapons.

Lord Deighton

Net worth: £95 million

Voted against protections for pensions being ‘raided’ when the master trust fails.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Net worth: £100 million

Voted for cuts in Housing Benefits for recipients in homelessness hostels, refuges, sheltered housing and accommodation for people with ongoing support needs.

Richard Benyon – richest MP in the UK

Net worth: £110 million

Voted to set the rate of increase for certain benefits, payments and tax credits at 1%, rather than in line with the increase in prices at 2.2%.

The Marquess of Salisbury

Net worth: £330 million

Receives £250,000 each year of taxpayers’ money for his inherited 10,000 acres, mostly in Jersey.

Lord Ashcroft

Net worth: £1.2 billion.

A tax exile in Belize who has poured millions into the Conservative Party over the years and strongly supported Brexit, which would remove Britain from the jurisdiction of forthcoming tax avoidance rules in the EU.

This bit has a clip from Panorama showing Brexit hiding in the gents’ toilets to avoid having to answer questions on tax avoidance.

I dare say that some of these grotesques are no longer in power, like Theresa May, thanks to Johnson’s massive purge of the cabinet. But those, who have replaced them are pretty much the same. They are what Private Eye once described as ‘the futile rich’. Their only concern is to grab more money for themselves, and steal it from the mouths of the poor.

And the press are complicit in this. Owned by millionaires themselves, they’ve now started a campaign of truly nauseating sycophancy, praising Boris to the rafters. Toby Young even raved about how Boris was a type of ‘Nietzschean superman’.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/tory-propaganda-assault-begins.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/toby-young-says-gissa-job-bozza.html

And the Beeb enthusiastically joined in last night on the One Show, where one of the guests was his father.

It’s all just Tory lies, one after another. Boris won’t do anything for this country. He doesn’t stand for more investment in the NHS or public services. He won’t put 20,000 more rozzers on the street. But he will privatise the NHS and cut welfare spending like the Tories always have. And Brexit will decimate our manufacturing industry, just as they’re anti-environmentalism will destroy our natural environment.

Get these thugs and hypocrites out now!

Boris, do what you said ought to be done when Blair transferred power to Brown and call an election so we can kick your sorry rear end out of No. 10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Arrows Attacks the Right-Wing Myth of ‘Cultural Marxism’

Three Arrows is a German vlogger, who makes videos attacking and refuting the lies and assertions of the internet far right. These are reactionary, anti-feminist and anti-immigrant – some would also say racist – personalities like Stefan Molyneaux, Jordan Peterson, Carl Benjamin AKA ‘Sargon of Akkad’ and Paul Joseph Watson, who was formerly Alex Jones’ little Brit buddy on Infowars. In the video below, he tackles the myth of ‘cultural Marxism’. This is the belief amongst the transatlantic extreme right that a group of Marxist intellectuals are trying to destroy western culture from within through feminism, immigration, postmodernism, gay and trans rights and other radical movements. They trace this movement back to the German Frankfurt School of radical Marxist thinkers, which included Horkheimer, Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno.

I’m putting up this video as it is directly relevant to the issue of some of the extremist literature that was found at the Tory conference this week. Mike over at Vox Political reported a piece by Vice that an extremist pamphlet, Moralitis: A Cultural Virus, had been found at a meeting of the Thatcherite, right-wing organization, the Bruges group, at the conference. This used the metaphor of a virus to describe the spread of left-wing ideas, particularly a positive attitude to immigration and Islam. These were attacking western culture, and were being promoted and orchestrated by ‘Cultural Marxists’.

Three Arrows shows how similar the modern Right’s ideas of Cultural Marxism to the Nazi idea of Cultural Bolshevism. The Nazis also believed that the Bolsheviks were spreading radical cultural and intellectual movements to bring down traditional western, and especially German culture, with the Jews at the centre of this Marxist conspiracy.

The modern right-wing myth of cultural Marxism started with two Americans, Pat Buchanan and William S. Lint. Buchanan wrote two books, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilisation and Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World. Three Arrows states that Buchanan is a palaeoconservative who has complained that there are too many Jews on the American supreme court. In the first book, he argued that the cultural Marxists, referring to the Frankfurt School, were trying to de-Christianise and subvert the country. This meant making America more open to issues like homosexuality. The second book argued that Britain should never have declared war on Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust was the consequence of its doing so.

Lint is more overtly right-wing and racist. He calls for hanging as the punishment for crime, but only in ‘urban areas’. Which is a dog-whistle reference to Black ghettos. In 1989 he told a conference that political correctness and cultural Marxism had turned American universities in little ‘North Koreas’, in which dissenters would be persecuted and punished by ‘gender feminists’ and homosexual activists. In 2002 Lint spoke at a conference organized by the Barnes Review, a Holocaust revisionist rag, in front self-described Holocaust revisionists, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. The character of the rag is shown by the cover of the issue Three Arrows puts up, which shows Adolf Hitler at a rally, with the caption, ‘In Defence of Adolf Hitler’. Lint is not, however, a Holocaust denier. He again talked about how the Frankfurt school were responsible for the ideas destroying America, and said that they were all Jewish. For which he was greeted with rapturous applause from the stormtroopers.

Three Arrows then goes on to discuss how, contrary to what Buchanan, Lint and their successors believe, the Frankfurt school were very definitely not supporters of postmodernism, and wished to preserve western culture. Indeed, Jurgen Habermas was one of postmodernism’s fiercest critics. He attacked the founders and major figures in postmodernism – Jacques Derrida, Foucault and Nietzsche contradicted themselves by using the methods of western rationalism to attack western rationalism. He also criticized Nietzsche for destroying the unity religion had given wester culture. The Frankfurt School were also appalled at the uniformity and coarseness of modern culture and expressed this in terms that resemble some of the comments of right-wing mouthpieces like Paul Joseph Watson. The difference, however, was that Theodor Adorno, who voiced these criticisms of the modern culture industry, placed the blame for western cultural decline on capitalism. Horkheimer, Adorno, Lowenthal and the other members of the School wished to preserve and promote western values like rationality and personal freedom. They believed that capitalism itself threatened Enlightenment values, and some of them attacked postmodernism, pop culture and ‘political correctness’. Three Arrows also makes the point that they wouldn’t have supported changing the culture to bring about Communism, because this contradicted the Marxist doctrine that this could only be done through changing society’s economic base.

Three Arrows also makes the point that there is absolutely no evidence for this ‘cultural Marxist’ conspiracy. Wikipedia had to move its entry for it to that of the Frankfurt School, because none of its readers could provide any. There are no Marxist countries in the West. And in Three Arrows’ homeland, Germany, in which Marx was born, the two biggest Marxist parties – the German Communist Party and the Marxist-Leninist Party together got less than 0.1 per cent of the vote combined. He suggests that instead of a secret Marxist conspiracy, these changes in western society owe more instead to politicians and businesses adopting ‘political correctness’ to appeal to a wider audience. As for left-wing students, they have always been around, and some of them do stupid things. Like the two young women in the late ’60s who took off their clothes and started kissing Adorno as a protest against ‘patriarchal structures’. For which Adorno called the cops and had them removed.

Three Arrows then argues that the similarity between the Nazis’ Cultural Bolshevism and the ‘Cultural Marxism’ of modern right-wing internet pundits like Stefan Molyneaux, Sargon of Akkad and Paul Joseph Watson isn’t coincidental. They both require their audience to accept the existence of this conspiracy on their word alone, without any supporting proof. The only difference is that Molyneaux, Sargon, Watson and the others aren’t anti-Semites. For them, the group responsible for this conspiracy aren’t the Jews, but the globalists. But their opinions do validate the Nazis’ own conspiratorial beliefs about Marxism, even while they decry the Nazis’ actions and murder of the Jews.

Three Arrows also makes the point that Molyneaux et al are massively wrong about the ‘Decline of the West’. According to them, Germany should have collapsed several times over by now. But Three Arrows declares with biting irony that he has no doubt that the Caliphate will be declared soon.

This is a good, short account of the idea of cultural Marxism, which makes it clear that it is just another extreme right-wing conspiracy theory, advanced and promoted by fringe ideologues with no real understanding of what the Frankfurt School actually was. Buchanan, Lint and the rest of them have mixed it up with the ideas of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who did believe that a change in culture could be use to alter social relations and society’s economic base.

As for Buchanan himself, he’s a Republican politician notorious for his extreme ideas. A pro-gun nut, he and his followers once went through a crowd
holding their guns in the air, crying ‘Lock and Load’ – basically, ‘take aim and fire’. Back in the 1990s he won an election in New Hampshire as part, I think, of the presidential primaries. The edition of the Radio 4’s Postcard from Gotham, a weekly show covering events in America over the previous week, began with a piece of Italian dialogue from the film Il Postino, which was then in cinemas. The show’s presenter, Joe Queenan, instead joked that it was Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini congratulating Buchanan on his success. He and his guests discussed the rise of the Right in America and Europe, and one of them, a Jewish woman, stated that despite his denials Buchanan was an anti-Semite. Going back to the subject of New Hampshire, Queenan joked yet again that now Buchanan had won the nomination for that state, all you could hear up there were cries of ‘Duce! Duce!’

Cultural Marxism doesn’t exist. It’s just a malicious conspiracy theory promoted by extreme right-wingers to attack the Left, and provide a spurious explanation for the social changes they fear and dislike – like gay rights, immigration, particularly Muslim communities and the decline of traditional morality. But while Cultural Marxism is a myth, those promoting it are a real threat to today’s culture of tolerance and pluralism.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Anti-Semitism and the Aristocracy

Last night I put up a piece debunking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, based on the chapter about this vile book in Jon E. Lewis’ The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups (London: Constable & Robinson 2007), pp. 433-50. The Protocols are a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, probably concocted by Matvei Golovinski of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to make his master, Nicholas II, even more anti-Semitic and to intensify the persecution of the Jews.

The Protocols purport to be the minutes of a secret meeting of a group of elite Jews, intent on destroying all non-Jewish religions and conquering and enslaving Christians and gentiles. They claimed that the Jews were at the centre of a massive conspiracy controlling the banks and were encouraging the downfall of Christian civilization by promoting liberalism, democracy, socialism and anarchism. At the same time they were distracting gentiles from uncovering this plot through using alcohol, gambling, games and other amusements.

There is absolutely no truth in any of this whatsoever. But the book became an immense success and was read and influenced many Fascists and anti-Semites. These included Adolf Hitler, who made the book a compulsory part of the German school syllabus.

Like much of Fascism, it’s a rejection of modernity – the mass society of modern politics that emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Modern politics and secular ideologies were attacked. At one point, the Protocols claim that Darwinism, Marxism and Nietzscheanism have been successful because they have been promoted by the conspiracy. (Lewis, Mammoth Book of Covers-Ups, p. 444). The forger’s own view of what constitutes the best society is revealed very clearly in another passage, in which the conspirators celebrate their destruction of the aristocracy.

The people, under our guidance, have annihilated the aristocracy, who were their one and only defence and foster-mother for the sake of their own advantage, which is inseparably bound up with the well-being of the people. Nowadays, with the destruction of the aristocracy, the people have fallen into the grips of merciless money-grinding scoundrels who have laid a pitiless and cruel yoke upon the necks of the workers. (p.446).

Historically, some of the persecution of the Jews in the later Middle Ages was due to the fact that a large number of the aristocracy had become seriously in debt to Jewish bankers, and tried to get out of their obligation to pay it back by urging for their persecution and expulsion.

A significant number of aristocrats and the upper middle class were supporters of Nazism before the Second World War. The leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, was a baronet. Aristocrats and landlords joined pro-Nazi and appeasement organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. Martin Pugh on his book on British Fascism between the Wars describes how the aristos welcomed members of the Nazi elite at dinner parties on their estates, when the swastika was discreetly flown from the flagpoles.

And there still seems to be a fascination and dangerous sympathy with Nazism even today. Way back in the 1990s and early part of this century, Private Eye published a number of stories about one Cotswold aristocrat, who had very strong anti-Semitic, racist and anti-immigrant opinions.

And then there’s the Traditional Britain Group on the far right of the Tory party. These also have the same, genuinely Fascist attitudes, and one of their leaders is fascinated with the Nazis and the Third Reich. It was the Traditional Britain Group, who invited Jacob Rees-Mogg to their annual dinner, which Mogg accepted. When the Observer published the story, Mogg claimed that at the time he hadn’t known anything about them. If he had, he wouldn’t have gone. Which doesn’t really sound convincing, as people don’t normally accept dinner invitations from organisations and people they know nothing about. But perhaps Mogg, as well as being viciously right-wing, is also very naïve.

As for the Tories being good friends of the Jews, as the current head of the Board of Deputies, Marie van der Zyle claimed in a speech, David Rosenberg posted up in response a series of incidents across the decades which put the lie to it. These showed very clearly how anti-Semitic the Tories had been, and which parts of it may very well still be.

And one of the attractions of anti-Semitism, apart from sheer racism, is that, in the form of conspiracy theories like the Protocols, they blame the Jews for all the forces of modernity that threaten the aristocracy and the upper middle class, and celebrate the aristocracy itself as the people’s saviours, and so appealing very strongly to certain types of Tories.

Books on God and Religion

On Thursday, Jo, one of the great commenters to this blog, asked my a couple of questions on the nature of the Almighty, which I tried to answer as best I could. I offered to put up here a few books, which might help people trying to explore for themselves the theological and philosophical ideas and debates about the nature of God, faith, religion and so on. I set up this blog about a decade and a half ago to defend Christianity against attacks by the New Atheists. I don’t really want to get sidetracked back there, because some of these issues will just go on forever if you let them. And I’m far more concerned to bring people of different religions and none together to combat the attacks by the Tories and the Blairites on the remains of the welfare state, the privatisation of the NHS, and the impoverishment and murder of the British public, particularly the disabled, in order to further enrich the corporate elite. Especially as the Tories seem to want to provoke war with Russia.

But here are some books, which are written for ordinary people, which cover these issues, which have helped me and which I hope others reading about these topics for themselves will also find helpful.

The Thinker’s Guide to God, Peter Vardy and Julie Arliss (Alresford: John Hunt Publishing 2003)

This book is written by two academics from a Christian viewpoint, and discusses the Western religious tradition from Plato and Aristotle. It has the following chapters

1. Thinking About God – Plato and Aristotle
2.The God of the Philosophers
3. The God of Sacred Scripture
4. Religious Language
5. The Challenge of Anti-Realism
6. Arguments for the Existence of God
7. The Attributes of God
8. Life After Death
9. Miracles and Prayer
10. Jesus, the Trinity, and Christian Theology
11. Faith and Reason
12 Attacks on God, Darwin, Marx and Freud
13 God and Science
14 Quantum Science, Multi-Dimensions and God

God: A Guide for the Perplexed, Keith Ward, (Oxford: OneWorld 2003)

1. A Feeling for the Gods
God, literalism and poetry, A world full of Gods, Descartes and the cosmic machine, Wordsworth and Blake, the gods and poetic imagination, Conflict among the gods, Friedrich Schleiermacher: a Romantic account of the gods; Rudolf Otto: the sense of the numinous; Martin Buber: life as meeting, Epilogue: the testimony of a secularist.

2. Beyond the gods
Prophets and seers; The prophets of Israel and monotheism; Basil, Gregory Palamas and Maimonides: the apophatic way; Thomas Aquinas: the simplicity of God; The five ways of demonstrating God; Pseudo-Dyonysius the Areopagite; The doctrine of analogy; Three mystics.

3. The Love that moves the sun
The 613 commandments; Pigs and other animals; the two great commandments; The Ten Commandments; Jesus and the Law; Calvin and the Commandments, Faith and works; Theistic morality as fulfilling God’s purpose; Kant, the categorical imperative and faith, God as creative freedom, affective knowledge and illimitable love.

4. The God of the Philosophers

God and Job; Plato and the gods; the vision of the Good; Appearance and Reality; Augustine and creation ex nihilo, Aristotle and the Perfect Being; Augustine and Platonism; Anselm and Necessary Being; Evil, necessity and the Free Will defence; Creation as a timeless act; Faith and understanding.

5. The Poet of the World

The timeless and immutable God; The rejection of Platonism; Hegel and the philosophy of Absolute Spirit; Marx and the dialectic of history; Pantheism and panentheism; Time and creativity, The redemption of suffering; History and the purposive cosmos; Process philosophy; The collapse of the metaphysical vision.

6. The darkness between stars

Pascal: faith and scepticism; A.J. Ayer; the death of metaphysics; Scientific hypotheses and existential questions; Kierkegaard: truth as subjectivity; Sartre; freedom from a repressive God; Heidegger and Kierkegaard: the absolute
paradox; Tillich: religious symbols; Wittgenstein: pictures of human life; Religious language and forms of life; Religion and ‘seeing-as’; Spirituality without belief; Non-realism and God; The silence of the heart.

7. The personal ground of being

God as omnipotent person; The problem of evil; Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: beyond good and evil; Omniscience and creative freedom; God: person or personal; Persons as relational; The idea of the Trinity; The revelatory roots of religion; Conclusion: Seven ways of thinking about God.

Bibliography

Teach Yourself Philosophy of Religion, by Mel Thompson, (London: HodderHeadline 1997)

Introduction
What is the philosophy of Religion?
Why study religion in this way?
What is involved?
The structure of this book
What this book aims to do.

1. Religious Experiences
Starting with experience
What happens when you experience something?
What is religious experience?
Induced religious experiences
Prayer
Conversion
Mysticism
Charismatic experiences
Revelation
Some features of religious experience
What can we know?
Authority and response
Conclusion

2.Religious Language
A private language?
Knowledge and description
Faith, reason and beliefs
The rational and the non-rational
Interpreting language
Cognitive and non-cognitive
Language games
The limitations of language

3. God: the concepts
God as creator
Eternal
Omnipotent
Omniscient
Transcendence and immanence
Theism, pantheism and panentheism
Atheism, agnosticism and secularism
Nietzsche: God is dead
Secular interpretations of God
A postmodernist interpretation
The Christian concept of God: the Trinity
Beliefs, language and religion
Saints?
Religious alternatives to theism
Basic beliefs

4. God: the arguments
The ontological argument
The cosmological argument
the teleological argument
the moral argument
the argument from religious experience
Conclusion

5. The Self
Bodies, minds and souls
Dualism
materialism
Idealism
Knowing our minds
Joining souls to bodies?
Identity and freedom
Freedom?
Life beyond death
Some conclusions

6. Causes, providence and miracles
Causes
Providence
Miracles
Summary

7. Suffering and evil
The challenge and the response
the problem
God as moral agent
Suffering and the major religions
Coming to terms with suffering
The devil and hell
Religion and terrorism
Summary

8. Religion and Science
The problem science poses for religion
the key issues
the changing world view
the methods of science and religion
the origin of the universe
evolution and humankind
Some conclusions

9. Religion and ethics
Natural law
Utilitarianism
absolute ethics
Morality and facts
How are religion and morality treated?
Values and choices
Conclusion

Postcript, Glossary, Taking it Further

God and Evolution: A Reader, ed. by Mary Kathleen Cunningham (London: Routledge 2007)

Part One
Methodology
1. Charles Hodge ‘The Protestant Rule of Faith’
2. Sallie McFague ‘Metaphor’
3. Mary Midgley ‘How Myths work’
4. Ian G. Barbour ‘The Structures of Science and Religion’.

Part Two
Evolutionary Theory
5. Charles Darwin, ‘On the origin of species
6. Francisco J. Ayala ‘The Evolution of life as overview
7. Michael Ruse ‘Is there are limit to our knowledge of evolution?

Part Three
Creationism
6. Genesis 1-2
7. Ronald J. Numbers ‘The Creationists’.

Part Four
Intelligent Design
10. William Paley ‘Natural Theology’
11. Michael J. Behe ‘Irreducible complexity: Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution’
12. Kenneth R. Miller, ‘Answering the biochemical argument from Design

Part Five
Naturalism
13. Richard Dawkins, ‘The Blind Watchmaker’
14. Richard Dawkins, ‘God’s utility function’
15. Daniel C. Dennett, ‘God’s dangerous idea’
16. Mary Midgley, ‘The quest for a universal acid’
17. Michael Ruse, ‘Methodological naturalism under attack’.

Part Six
Evolutionary Theism
18. Howard J. Van Till, ‘The creation: intelligently designed or optimally equipped?’
19. Arthur Peacock, ‘Biological evolution-a positive theological appraisal’
20. Jurgen Moltmann, ‘God’s kenosis in the creation and consummation of the world’.
21 Elizabeth A. Johnson, ‘Does God play dice? Divine providence and chance’.

Part Seven:
Reformulations of Tradition
22. John F. Haught, ‘Evolution, tragedy, and cosmic paradox’
23. Sallie McFague, ‘God and the world’
24. Ruth Page, ‘Panentheism and pansyntheism: God is relation’
25. Gordon D. Kaufman, ‘On thinking of God as serendipitous creativity’.

RT Interviews Ken Livingstone on Boris Johnson in Moscow

Boris Johnson has flown to Moscow to try to repair some of the damage the new Cold War has done to Anglo-Russian relations with his opposite number, Sergei Lavrov. And despite declaring himself a Russophile – and I’ll believe that claim when I see concrete evidence – Eton’s blonde ambition seems to have made matters worse. He’s declared that there’s evidence that Russia’s been interfering in the affairs of countries all over the globe.

So RT spoke to Ken Livingstone to see what he thought of it all. And the man Private Eye calls ‘Leninspart’ and makes jokes about being a ‘Leninist newt fancier’ has some very interesting things to say. They are definitely what you are not going to hear on the lamestream news or tonight on Have I Got News For You.

Livingstone states that he knows Boris very well, having fought against him in four elections. He comments that the old Etonian blonde beast (Will without intelligence! How beautiful! How free!, as Nietzsche rhapsodised) doesn’t want to be a politician. He wants to be a celebrity. And he very often doesn’t read the briefing documents his aides prepare for him. Thus he managed to get Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s sentence extended by the Iranians for supposedly teaching journalism, when she was there on a holiday visiting her family.

As for the reasons behind the latest Cold War, Livingstone suggests that it’s all today with America’s failure to come to terms with the fact that China is about to overtake them as the world’s largest economy. Way back under Obama, the US tried to put together a coalition against China, because they were afraid of its growing power. Obama tried to get Russia to join their alliance, but Putin wouldn’t play ball. He had good reason. Russia does a lot of trade with the Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom. In pique, the Americans have decided to attack Russia and punish them for this disloyalty. Despite the fact that, as Livingstone says, a growing number of academics are pointing out there’s absolutely no truth in the allegations that Russia is manipulating other countries internal affairs.

It’s also very hypocritical. Livingstone was there in 1996 when Yeltsin, who by then he describes as ‘completely dysfunctional’ was up for re-election. Livingstone’s convinced that the election was rigged. The Communist candidate, Tsuganov, won the popular vote 54-46. But somehow Yeltsin got himself back into office. The result was his drunken antics on the international stage, the crash privatisation of the Russian economy, resulting in total meltdown and mass poverty and colossal corruption that reached all the way to the top. Livingstone states that most Russians probably found it a relief after Yeltsin to have Putin. I don’t doubt it. Putin’s another fascistic militarist, like Trump, and I’ve no doubt that the allegations of corruption around him are true. It’s why I’ve referred to him as the ‘arkhiplut’, a Russian term meaning ‘arch-criminal’. But he’s given his people stability, prosperity and national pride after the chaos of Yeltsin’s grotesque reign.

Livingstone is also pessimistic about any possibilities of change in Anglo-Russian relations. Despite Boris calling himself a ‘russophile’, Boris will probably start making speeches attacking the Russians the moment he gets back to Britain. And the situation itself will continue as long as America cannot reconcile itself to the fact that it is no longer going to be the world’s only superpower. Instead there are going to be many superpowers. But the Americans can’t accept that.

This sounds exactly right. I hadn’t heard that Obama had tried to put together an anti-Chinese alliance, but it doesn’t surprise me. It would explain why Killary also had a bitter enmity towards them, and why she was doing her best to ramp up tensions with the Chinese as well as the Russians. Counterpunch and other radical, left-wing news sites have also documented the way the Americans poured money into Yeltsin’s campaign, subsidising it to the tune of hundred of millions, if not billions, in order to get the drunk capitalist re-elected. Because Yeltsin was selling off state assets cheaply, and American multinationals wanted their ‘piece of the action’. Some of the resentment towards Putin coming from the other side of the Pond now is because Putin has stopped all that. Russia was supposed to be under America’s economic yoke, like every other country America has ‘helped’, going all the way back to the Marshal Plan. And because Putin has followed Lenin’s dictum of smashing the West’s economic imperialism at its weakest link – Russia – the Americans are furious and want to see him toppled and Russian influence combated.

There are, of course, other, personal reasons why the Americans hate Russia at the moment. Like Killary trying to fend off the fact that precious few Americans actually like her, and that she was caught fiddling the DNC’s internal elections to take the presidential nomination away from Bernie Sanders. Because she, like the men around her in the corporatist Democrats and Republicans, is the puppet of big business and very definitely in Wall Street’s pocket. So to try to distract attention from her glaring faults, she’s claiming it’s all due to Russian hacking. It wasn’t. WikiLeaks have said they got the leaked emails from a disgruntled insider. The FBI has said that the Russians aren’t interfering in America’s political affairs, or at least, no more than they usually do. The only people repeating this lie are Killary, the lamestream media, who fear losing out to alternative news media, like RT, and a group of Nazi libertarians, the Von Mises Foundation, who want everything privatised and have published eugenics ‘scientific’ racist balderdash claiming that America shouldn’t have a welfare state, because Blacks and the poor are racially inferior and undeserving.

As for BoJo, I also don’t doubt here that what Livingstone has said is correct. BoJo definitely enjoys being a celebrity. He’s appeared on Have I Got News For You, and used it as the title for one of his wretched books – Have I Got Views For You. He is ruthlessly ambitious, completely unprincipled, and absolutely bereft of any recognisable talent.

There’s a simply way to repair relations with Russia: sack Boris, and stop doing what the Americans say. This is another example of the ‘special relationship’ working against our interests and for the Americans. The Americans want Russia punished, and so our politicians act once again as their poodles and lapdogs. Just like Blair enthusiastically backed Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq. We’re trying to maintain our own failing status as a great power by riding on their coat-tails. And because America’s now in trouble and wants to hurt China and Russia, we have to follow suit.

The Special Relationship is all very well, but it’s time to assert our independence and do the right thing by refusing to toe the American line on Putin. Global peace may depend on it.