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.
Long time readers of this blog will know very well how I feel about Sargon and the Lotus Eaters. They’re terrible right-wingers who idealise capitalism and stand four-square behind privatisation. They idealise the extreme laissez-faire, Manchester school economics that created massive poverty and deprivation in the 19th century. But there are also issues on which they have an excellent point. The madness of the transgender ideology is one, and Critical Race Theory is another. And in this video, they look at one of the very worst suggestions by one of the Theory’s advocates and ideologues. It’s from Dorothy E. Roberts, a woman of colour and professor of law, sociology and Africana at Pennsylvania University. It looks like Sargon has taken it from the seminal collection of papers by the Critical Race Theorists, which I think is simply called ‘Critical Race Theory’. And he’s deliberately chosen it because it is one of the worst, to show how terrible it all is. I’m no fan of CRT and am aware that there are plenty of people on the extreme anti-racist left who disagree with me. But I would hope we could all agree that Roberts’ paper is genuinely terrible. Because she seems to believe it should be acceptable for Black women to become addicted to drugs like heroin and cocaine while pregnant, and give birth to babies addicted to those substances. Because it’s racist and an infringement on the autonomy of Black women to do whatever they want with their bodies for the state to try to stop them.
Presumably is comes from a deeply defensive attitude towards the problem among the American Black poor. It looks like part of the argument is taken from pro-choice activists – that women should be able to do whatever they like with their bodies without government interference. It also seems to me that she may have started out simply resenting the right constantly criticising poor Blacks for such problems and then moved on to her currently extreme position.
But whatever she thinks, or wants to think, it’s a deeply immoral one. And one that runs against much previous Black activism.
Black activists of all persuasions have been extremely concerned with tackling the problem of drug addiction in their communities. Many activist groups take direct action against it. Way back in the 1990s there was a piece on TV which showed a Black crowd driving a drug dealer out of town. They marched on his house chanting, ‘Black man, respect yourself!’ And the dealer ran out of his house from an upstairs window. I got the impression that the Nation of Islam, despite being an anti-White racist space cult, are very effective at keeping drugs out of their communities. And some Black radicals saw drugs as as part of the degeneracy of White culture, a strong argument for racial separatism to benefit Blacks. I can remember reading a piece by one such Black activist in which he contemned the White man for drugs, prostitution and other forms of immorality. On this side of the Atlantic, in Christmas 1990/91 the Beeb screened a drama, Alive and Kicking, starring Lenny Henry and Robbie Coltrane, about the problem of drugs and gang culture in the Black community. This also dealt with Black women, who were addicts in pregnancy and who had consequently given birth to addicted babies. It was grim stuff, too grim for me, and I think we turned it off after five minutes.
This is a real, terrible issue. Mike when he was journalist in Bristol regularly went to talk to KWADS – Knowle West Against Drugs. Knowle West is a council estate in south Bristol which has more than its fair share of problems. It’s racially mixed, mostly White but with some Blacks and Asians. KWADS was formed by a group of mothers who decided they weren’t going to stand for the harm done to their loved ones and community by drugs any longer. And there are no doubt very many other groups like them, comprising people of every race and creed. I’ve heard terrible stories myself from people about the effects of heroin on people and families. Young men literally selling the clothes off their backs to pay for the habit, toddlers out of control because both parents are on the terrible stuff.
You bet the state has the right to try to stop people, whatever their colour, from taking addictive drugs and getting their unborn kids addicted to it.
Additionally, many Blacks in America and Britain believe that there is covert campaign of genocide against them. It’s because of the high mortality rate from crime and deprivation in poor Black communities. And drugs are seen as part of this. It’s believed that the government is deliberately smuggling drugs in order to get Blacks addicted and wipe them out. Like all conspiracy theories of that type, it’s nonsense but you can see how it can arise and gain credibility. Especially as the American intelligence agencies did make deals with foreign paramilitaries to ship drugs into America. The CIA did it with the Hmong hill tribes during the Vietnam War, smuggling the heroin they produced into America to finance their war with the Americans against the Communists. Then there was Iran-Contra under Reagan in the 1980s. As part of that nefarious conspiracy, the American intelligence agencies shipped cocaine produced by the Contras to help them finance their guerrilla war against the Sandinistas.
This was revealed by an American journo, who never worked again. And the news obviously caused massive upset in the Black community. There were public meetings and protests, if not riots about it in downtown Los Angeles for very obvious reasons.
And now it seems that some of the Critical Race Theorists don’t want the government to tackle the terrible problem drugs amongst Black Americans because it’s racist. Despite the considerable Black activism against drugs and suspicion that it’s being pushed by the same White supremacist state Roberts and co. despise.
Madness. Utter madness. It bears out the old saying that some ideas are so stupid only an academic would believe them.
I don’t know what else Roberts has written. She may have written some very good stuff that has genuinely benefited her community. But assuming Sargon hasn’t misrepresented it, this paper is vile, pernicious rubbish. It should have been thrown in the bin, rather than published, academic freedom or no.
Here’s something far more controversial after some of the posts I’ve put up recently. A few days ago, the writer and Youtuber Simon Webb put up on his channel, History Debunked, a piece about a worrying attempt by a young Black American woman, Kennedy Mitchum to change the definition of racism in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Webb states that most people would say that racism means racial prejudice, or that there are more profound differences between racial groups than their skin colour and physical appearance. The Merriam-Webster dictionary currently defines racism as
A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities, and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
A doctrine or political programme based on racism and designed to execute its policies.
Racial prejudice or discrimination.
This wasn’t good enough for Mitchum. Three days after the death of George Floyd, with riots breaking out across America, she emailed the publisher calling for the definition to be changed in accordance with Critical Race Theory. This holds that racism is due to the imbalance of power in society, and implemented by the dominant racial group. Instead of telling Mitchum where to stick her suggestion, as Webb himself would have done, the publishers responded to her, telling her that this issue needed to be addressed sooner rather than later and that a revision would be made. Peter Sokolofsky, one of the dictionary’s editors, stated that the second definition would be expanded to be even more explicit in its next edition, and would include systemic oppression as well as sample sentence, and would be formulated in consultation with academics in Black Studies.
Webb points out that if this is done, then it would redefine racism as something that only Whites do, and absolve people of colour of any responsibility for it on their part, or indeed see them as being racist at all, because Whites are the dominant race in Britain and America. This is, he claims, the attitude of many liberals and leftists, who believe that all White people are racist. It would also mean that Blacks, who hated Jews or Indians, would not be viewed as racist. He has personally seen such racism in the Caribbean street robbers of Hackney. They hated Orthodox Jews and used to go to Stamford Bridge to prey on the Jewish community there. He ends the video by stating that such a redefinition of racism would mean that all Whites in Britain and America are defined as racist but no other ethnic groups.
There certainly is an attitude amongst some anti-racist activists that only White people can be racist and are never the victims. Way back in October 2019 Sargon of Akkad, the man who broke UKIP, put up a post commenting on a report in the Guardian about complaints about an EHRC investigation into racism at Britain’s universities by a group of Black and Asian academics and students. The group, which included Heidi Mirza, the visiting professor of race, faith and culture and Goldsmiths College, University of London, Fope Olaleye, the NUS’ Black students’ officer, Gargi Bhattacharyya, professor of sociology at the University of East London, and Zubaida Haque, the deputy director of the racial equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust, were outraged at the Commission because it dared to include anti-White, anti-English racism. This, they seemed to believe, detracted from the Commission’s true purpose, which was to combat White racism against Blacks and Asians.
I’ve posted a number of pieces criticising the lack of attention and action against anti-White racism. At the moment the attitude that racism is something that only Whites are guilty of racism seems extremely prevalent. In fact, the situation regarding racial prejudice, abuse and violence is far more complex. About 20 years ago, before 9/11 and the subsequent massive rise in Islamophobia, Whites briefly formed the largest number of victims of racial abuse and violence. There are also tensions and conflict between different non-White minorities. In the 1980s or ’90s there was a riot in Birmingham, not between Blacks and Whites, but between Blacks and Asians. I’ve also heard that in one of the schools in Bristol in one of the very racially mixed areas, most of the playground fights were between different groups of Asians. Some people were aware that different ethnic groups also had their racial prejudices. Boy George mentioned it when he appeared on Max Headroom’s chat show on British TV in the 1980s, for which he was praised for his brave outspokenness by the world’s first computer generated video jockey.
There is, however, a real reluctance to tackle ethnic minority racism. A couple of years ago an Asian man told Diane Abbott that there should be more action on the racism members of ethnic minorities experienced at the hands of other non-Whites. Abbott told him she wasn’t going to do anything about it, because the Tories would use it to divide and rule. Like Kennedy Mitchum and the Critical Race Theorists, as well as the critics of the EHRC, she was solely focussed on tackling White racism.
That focus, in my opinion, explains why the Black comedian and anti-racist activist, Sophie Duker, felt she could get away with a joke about killing Whitey on Frankie Boyle’s podcast. Boyle had assembled a panel of mainly Black and Asian activists, to discuss the topic of how ethnic minorities were coming together to kill Whitey. Duker had made comments about racism being the product of an ideology of Whiteness, which was harming Blacks and Whites. She then said that they didn’t want to kill Whitey, before adding ‘we do really’. She was clearly joking, but her comment resulted in the corporation receiving 200 complaints. According to right-wing internet radio host and Youtuber, Alex Belfield, the Beeb is now being investigated by the Greater Manchester Police for what is described as a ‘hate incident’. His attitude is that while Duker’s comment was a joke, it should be unacceptable, just as making jokes about killing Blacks is unacceptable. See, for example, his piece ‘Reply BBC ‘Whitey’ Joker STAGGERING From Unapologetic Hate Lady Comedian’, which he put up on Youtube on the 8th January 2021. No, I’m not going to link to it. Even I have standards! I think one of the reasons she felt she could make the joke is because she and the other activists concentrate exclusively on White racism. Anti-White racism simply isn’t an issue with them. But anti-White racism, abuse and violence does occur, hence the angry complaints.
We really do need a study of anti-White racism and racism amongst ethnic minorities. Sir Alan Burns, a British colonial civil servant and former governor of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, discusses Black prejudice against Whites and other racial groups in his book, Colour Prejudice, published in 1948. Nigel Barley also discusses the blind spot Cameroonians had towards their own racism, as well as that of a Black American ethnologist in his The Innocent Anthropologist. The Black American was very racially aware. An idealist, he was inspired by notions of Black brotherhood and wished to live and be treated by the local people the same as one of them. He was shocked when they continued to regard him as they would White westerners, and failed to see how the Fulani traders rigged the local markets to exclude those from other tribes. As for the Camerounians generally, they commonly believed that only Whites were racist. Barley describes how they excused the massacre of French nuns in the Congo by the claim that the nuns were themselves racists. But they refused to recognise that their own hatred and contempt of the people he was studying, the Dowayo, was also racist.
Some Asian nations also have a reputation for racism. Back in the 1990s I found a book on Chinese xenophobia on sale in Waterstones in Bath. I’ve also read various books on Japan, which have also described how racist Japanese society is. I don’t know if it is still true, but one could only qualify as a Japanese citizen if both parents were Japanese. This meant that there was a sizable Korean community, who had lived in the country for generations, which had no civil rights under the law. In schools there was a strong suspicion of outsiders, so it has been claimed, which resulted in foreign students being segregated in separate classes. This is on the grounds that their Japanese language skills may not be good enough for inclusion with the rest of the pupils, but it is applied even to children who are fluent in the language. Outside Japan, expatriate or visiting Japanese will stick almost exclusively to themselves. Back in the 1990s there was a controversy in Australia, I believe, over the construction of a luxury resort there by the Japanese, because it was exclusively for Japanese and no-one else. I don’t mean by this to claim that all Japanese are racist. I’ve met people, who lived in Japan, who admire them and who told me that in their experience they were a very kind people. The travel writer and historian William Dalrymple also describes the anti-Black racism he encountered in India in his book, In Xanadu. Arriving at a railway station with a friend, a Black American soldier, he approached a group of Indian porters, only to see them turn away, sneering at the Black American simply for being Black. Again, I don’t wish to imply that all Indians are racist either.
Racism and racial prejudice exists amongst all peoples and ethnic groups to a greater or lesser degree, even in this country. It is about time that there were proper academic studies of it amongst non-White ethnic groups and anti-White racism in this country. At the moment there is a feeling amongst Whites that only White on Black racism is taken seriously, and that prejudice against Whites is not only acceptable, but being fostered by supposed anti-racist activists.
If the authorities are serious about tackling racism, and all forms of it, that needs to change.
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.
This week is the Cheltenham festival of literature. It’s an annual event when novelists, poets, illustrators and increasingly TV and radio personalities descend on the town to talk about and try to sell the books they’ve had published. There can be, and often are, some great speakers discussing their work. I used to go to it regularly in the past, but went off it after a few years. Some of the people turn up, year in, year out, and there are only so many times you can see them without getting tired of it.
Dawkins, Atheism and Philosophical Positivism
One of the regular speakers at the Festival is the zoologist, science writer and atheist polemicist, Richard Dawkins. The author of Climbing Mount Improbable, The River Out Of Eden, The Blind Watchmaker and so on is appearing in Cheltenham to promote his latest book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. It sounds like a kind of successor to his earlier anti-religious work, The God Delusion. According to the accompanying pamphlet for the festival, he’s going to be talking to an interviewer about why we should all stop believing in God. There’s no doubt Dawkins deserves his platform at the Festival as much as any other writer. He’s a popular media personality, and writes well. However, his knowledge of philosophy, theology and the history of science, which forms the basis for his attacks on Christianity, is extremely low, and defenders of religion, and even other scientists and historians, who are just interested in defending their particular disciplines from factual mistakes and misinterpretations, have shot great holes in them.
Dawkins is, simply put, a kind of naive Positivist. Positivism was the 19th century philosophy, founded by Auguste Comte, that society moved through a series of three stages in its development. The first stage was the theological, when the dominant ideology was religion. Then came the philosophical stage, before the process ended with science. Religion was a thing of the past, and science would take over its role of explaining the universe and guiding human thought and society. Comte dreamed of the emergence of a ‘religion of humanity’, with its own priesthood and rituals, which would use sociology to lead humanity. Dawkins doesn’t quite go that far, but he does believe that religion and science – and specifically Darwinism – are in conflict, and that the former should give way to the latter. And he’s not alone. I heard that a few years ago, Alice Robert, the forensic archaeologist and science presenter, gave a speech on the same subject at the Cheltenham Festival of Science when she was its guest director, or curator, or whatever they term it. A friend of mine was less than impressed with her talk and the lack of understanding she had of religion. He tweeted ‘This is a girl who thinks she is intelligent.’
War of Science and Religion a Myth
No, or very few historians of science, actually believe that there’s a war between the two. There have been periods of tension, but the idea of a war comes from three 19th century writers. And it’s based on and cites a number of myths. One of these is the idea that the Church was uniformly hostile to science, and prevented any kind of scientific research and development until the Renaissance and the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek texts. It’s a myth I learnt at school, and it’s still told as fact in many popular textbooks. But other historians have pointed out that the Middle Ages was also a period of scientific investigation and development, particularly following the influence of medieval Islamic science and the ancient Greek and Roman texts they had preserved, translated, commented on and improved. Whole books have been written about medieval science, such as Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine, and James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers. Hannam is a physicist, who did a doctorate in examining the development of medieval science, showing that, far from retarding or suppressing it, medieval churchmen were intensely interested in it and were active in its research. Medieval science was based very much on Aristotle, but they were well aware of some of the flaws in his natural philosophy, and attempted to modify it in order to make it conform to observed reality. The Humanists of the Renaissance, rather than bringing in freedom of thought and scientific innovation, were actually a threat. They wanted to strip philosophy and literature of its medieval modifications to make it correspond exactly with the ancients’ original views. Which would have meant actually destroying the considerable advances which had been made. Rather than believe that renaissance science was a complete replacement of medieval science, scholars like Hannam show that it was solidly based on the work of their medieval predecessors.
Christian Theology and the Scientific Revolution
The scientific revolution of the 17th century in England also has roots in Christian philosophy and theology. Historians now argue that the Royal Society was the work of Anglican Broadchurchmen, who believed that God had created a rational universe amenable to human reason, and who sought to end the conflict between the different Christian sects through uniting them in the common investigation of God’s creation. See, for example, R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press 1972).
Christian Monotheism and the Unity of Physical Law
It is also Christian monotheist theology that provides one of the fundamental assumptions behind science. Modern science is founded on the belief that the laws of nature amount to a single, non-contradictory whole. That’s the idea behind the ‘theory of everything’, or Grand Unified Theory everyone was talking about back in the 1990s. But this idea goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Aquinas said that we must believe that the laws of nature are one, because God is one. It’s the assumption, founded on Christian theology, the makes science possible.
Atheist Reductionism also a Danger
When The God Delusion Came Out, it was met by a series of books attacking its errors, some of them with titles like The Dawkins Delusion. The philosopher Mary Midgley has also attacked the idea that science can act as a replacement for religion in her books Evolution as a Religion and The Myths We Live By. On page 58 of the latter she attacks the immense damage to humanity atheist reductionism also poses. She writes
Both reductive materialism and reductive idealism have converged to suggest that reductivism is primarily a moral campaign against Christianity. This is a dangerous mistake. Obsession with the churches has distracted attention from reduction employed against notions of human individuality, which is now a much more serious threat. It has also made moral problems look far simplar than they actually are. Indeed, some hopeful humanist reducers still tend to imply that, once Christian structures are cleared away, life in general will be quite all right and philosophy will present no further problems.
In their own times, these anti-clerical reductive campaigns have often been useful. But circumstances change. New menaces, worse than the one that obsesses us, are always appearing, so that what looked like a universal cure for vice and folly becomes simply irrelevant. In politics, twentieth-century atheistical states are not an encouraging omen for the simple secularistic approach to reform. it turns out that the evils that have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of.
Darwin Uninterested in Atheist Campaigning
Later in the book she describes how the Marxist Edward Aveling was disappointed when he tried to get Darwin to join him in a campaign to get the atheist, Bradlaugh, to take his seat as a duly elected MP. At the time, atheists were barred from public office by law. Aveling was impressed by Darwin’s work on evolution, which he believed supported atheism. Darwin was an agnostic, and later in life lost belief in God completely due to the trauma of losing a daughter and the problem of suffering in nature. But Darwin simply wasn’t interested in joining Aveling’s campaign. When Aveling asked him what he was now studying, hoping to hear about another earth-shaking discovery that would disprove religion, Darwin simply replied ‘Earthworms’. The great biologist was fascinated by them. It surprised and shocked Aveling, who hadn’t grasped that Darwin was simply interested in studying creatures for their own sake.
Evolutionists on Evolution Not Necessarily Supporting Atheism
Other evolutionary biologists also concluded that evolution has nothing to say about God, one way or another. Stephen Jay Gould stated that he believed that Darwinism only hinted at atheism, not that it proved it. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who published his own theory of evolution in Zoonomia in 1801, believed on the other hand that the development of creatures from more primitive forebears made the existence of God ‘mathematically certain’.
Frank H.T. Rhodes of the University of Michigan wrote in his book Evolution (New York: Golden Press 1974) on its implications the following, denying that it had any for religion, politics or economics.
Evolution, like any other natural process or scientific theory, is theologically neutral. it describes mechanisms, but not meaning. it is based upon the recognition of order but incorporates no conclusion concerning the origin of that order as either purposeful or purposeless.
Although evolution involves the interpretation of natural events by natural processes, it neither assumes nor provides particular conclusions concerning the ultimate sources or the significance of materials, events or processes.
Evolution provides no obvious conclusions concerning political or economic systems. Evolution no more supports evolutionary politics (whatever they might be) than does the Second Law of Thermodynamics support political disorder or economic chaos.
(Page 152).
Conclusion
I realise that the book’s nearly 50 years old, and that since that time some scientists have worked extremely hard to show the opposite – that evolution support atheism. But I’ve no doubt other scientists, people most of us have never heard of, believe the opposite. Way back in 1909 or so there was a poll of scientists to show their religious beliefs. The numbers of atheists and people of faith was roughly equal, and 11 per cent of the scientists polled said that they were extremely religious. When the poll was repeated in the 1990s, the pollsters were surprised to find that the proportion of scientists who were still extremely religious had not changed.
Despite what Dawkins tells you, atheism is not necessarily supported by science, and does not disprove it. Other views of the universe, its origin and meaning are available and still valid.
Early today I put up a piece reporting and commenting on two articles on the thuggish attempt by the Israel lobby to shut down the launch of a book, Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief by Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller, published by Pluto Press. The authors are respectable mainstream academics specialising in the media, Jewish-Gentile relations, anti-Semitism and political sociology at the universities of Glasgow, Cardiff, London, Harvard, Southampton, and Bristol. The book promises to reveal how the allegations of anti-Semitism have been used to misrepresent the Labour party in the press and by the BBC. This was too much for the Israel lobby, which cannot stand to have their smears against decent, genuinely anti-racist men and women, including self-respecting Jews, challenged. Like all witch-hunters, they do not feel that their victims should ever be allowed to defend themselves. And so they tried to have the launch closed down. They succeeded at Waterstones, which pulled the event due to threats and intimidation. It was moved to the Rialto, which stood up to them, despite suffering the same threats. This attack was supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Sussex Jewish Representative Council, and a score of foul individuals, whom Mike names in his article. Please read it, and another about this disgraceful affair by Tony Greenstein. They’re at
This is not the first time pro-Israel organisations have used threats and abuse to attempt to close down opposition voices. Tony Greenstein has posted about a number of occasions where the local pro-Israel group has turned up to throw its weight around against those demonstrating or handing out leaflets against the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. However, Zionist organisations have also not restrained themselves to threats. On Wednesday, 6th March of this year, 2019, Tony put up a piece about the Community Service Trust. This is a charity, supposedly set up to defend Jews, their synagogues and burial grounds, from attacks by racists. However, the Trust receives training and support from both the Metropolitan police and the Israelis. It has been used to steward pro-Israel rallies, whose speakers and organisers have included the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the-then Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. As Tony describes below, the Trust has used its position at these rallies to assault and physically remove protesters, including Israel-critical Jews and women. The section where Tony describes the paramilitary activities of the CST runs
The CST is essentially, on one level, a private security contractor called upon to provide security at all pro-Israel activities from demos, conferences, fund-raisers, and to protecting the odd visiting Israeli war criminal. It has three offices and employees 69 people with an additional 3,000 trained CST troops (‘volunteers’) on call. Apparently the CST ‘mainly consists of ex-Israeli security personnel’. The CST also give combat training (self-defence) to 12,000 Jewish youth a year(2008).
The CST has a special relationship with the Metropolitan police, it receives its training from them and is granted special privileges during the policing of demos, etc. Whilst stewards and legal observers from the pro-Palestine side of a demo are not allowed to cross the police lines to approach Zionist side, the CST which stewards the Zionist side are free to cross the police line and approach the pro-Palestinian side to intimidate, take photos, etc.
The CST has a particularly brutish reputation, especially in dealing with anti-Israel protesters at pro-Israel events. Their special relationship with the MET means they have not been brought to book for their thuggery.
In January 2009, during the Israeli slaughter of children in Gaza, the Board of Deputies of British Jews who claim to be “the voice of British Jewry” – in reality the voice of Israel in the UK, held a rally in Trafalgar Square in support of Israel, essentially a celebration of genocide. The CST provided the security for the event. One brave young Jewish man, Dovid Von Neumann, interrupted the Chief Rabbi Sacks pro-Israel rant with a Jewish children’s song, highlighting how Israel has perverted a line from a Jewish children’s poem about a spinning top which were traditionally cast in lead to name their military operation “Cast Lead” which murders Palestinian children. He was pushed into the frozen fountain and stoned him with lumps of ice, then the CST thugs smashed his megaphone and dragged him out of the fountain throwing him on to the pavement. The police did nothing to arrest his assailants – the CST, instead they incredulously detained the victim for several hours before they were forced to release him without charge.
In December 2009 when the CST was providing security to a JNF conference, the Israeli ambassadors speech was interrupted by two protesters. The Jewish Chronicle reported the protesters were “punched and kicked” and dragged out of the conference, again the assailants went scot-free.
On February 9th 2010 the CST provided the security for the “Israel: Blue White and Green” seminar at the Institute of Education (IoE). The seminar attempted to ‘greenwash’ the occupation, its key note speaker David Bellamy didn’t turn up after receiving many letters urging him to boycott the ‘greenwash’. During the questions session a Jewish member of the audience asked a critical question about Israel’s role in depleting Palestinian water resources, he was prevented from finishing the question and was “carried out bodily by members of the CST and denied re-entry”. When another member of the audience, a woman this time, wished to put a question on Israels denial of water to Palestinians as outlined in the Amnesty 2009 report she was “physically dragged out of the meeting by members of the CST. “I was frog-marched up the stairs”, she said afterwards. She later telephoned the Institute of Education to complain about the treatment she and her fellow activist had received, and received an apology. “From the reports the IoE have received from their own staff, they seem to feel that the level of restraint used by the CST was inappropriate for the situation”, she said. The two ejected activists are considering taking legal advice.”
It seems after every massacre the Zionists hold a celebration, like the celebration after Gaza in 2009, in 2002 after Jenin the Israel Solidarity Committee organised a celebration ‘Stand Up For Israel’. Funded by the United Jewish Israel Appeal(UJIA), the celebration was held in Trafalgar Square with the CST in charge of security. It was a particularly ugly event with an elderly anti-Zionist Rabbi in the counter-demo being punched in the face whilst police officers two metres away stood by and did nothing. After the rally Zionist gangs roved the streets attacking Muslims with impunity, easy visible targets being women with hijab – several were attacked. Even the Saudi ambassadors son was attacked by a Zionist mob. Both the MET and the CST were castigated for their roles.
The IHRC report on the ‘partisan’ policing of the rally with eyewitness statements is particularly damming. It reveals that whilst the police prevented Muslims from approaching the Zionist rally and even helped the CST eject any Muslims found in Trafalgar Square, they at the same time allowed free movement for the CST and other Zionists to approach, even walk through the counter demo draped in Israeli flags, and ultimately attack its speaker, Rabbi Grohman, whilst he was addressing the counter-demo. The thug was simply allowed to walk through two police lines unchallenged to carry out his assault.
The Jewish Chronicle reports that the Muslim Lawyers Committee complaints against the police included charges against the CST, one, the police’s ‘failure to prevent assaults against Muslims by CST officials’ and two, ‘the intimidation of Muslim women by CST officials’. The latter may be a reference to an incident where some Muslim women in hijab were enjoying a friendly conversation with some Arab Jews from Iraq in Trafalgar Square when suddenly they were surrounded by ‘blue caps’ – CSTs, who forcefully separated the Muslims from the Jews and with police help removed the Muslims from the Square despite protests from the Iraqi Jews.
There is also an account of how, at a rally celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary in 2008, the CST attempted to block a cameraman from photographing the event, and tried to manipulate the situation so they could have the police remove him. See
From the above accounts, it’s clear that threats and violence by the Israel lobby against those who oppose them, and especially against Jews and Muslims, are not accidental but usual, standard tactics. And the police turn a blind eye to their antics and even assist them. This includes assaults on women, the elderly, and rabbis – people, who have dedicated their lives to guiding their congregations in the way of the Torah and the Talmud. It is also glaringly obvious that in no sense can the Board of Deputies and CST be seen as serving the British Jewish community as a whole. Not when they attack and beat ordinary Jews like Dovid von Neumann and rabbis like Rabbi Grohman. These organisations are an absolute disgrace, and they should be investigated for their thuggery, racism, and vicious islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
The Board of Deputies, Sussex Jewish Representatives Council and the others, who supported the thuggery, bullying and threats yesterday need to be investigated, and the offenders arrested and punished. Bullying racists and bigots cannot be allowed to escape the law, even when they spuriously claim to be the victims of prejudice. It doesn’t wash when the NF claim they are only defending Whites from anti-White racism. It shouldn’t wash when the above Zionist organisation equally speciously claim they are protecting Jews.
My review of Nick Redfern’s Flying Saucers from the Kremlin (Lisa Hagen Books 2019) is now up at Magonia Review of Books. Magonia was a small press UFO magazine, which ran from the 1980s to the early part of this century. It took the psycho-social view of the UFO phenomenon. This is a sceptical view which sees the UFO phenomenon as an internal experience generated by poorly understood psychological mechanism, whose imagery was drawn from folklore and Science Fiction. It took the name ‘Magonia’ from Jacques Vallee’s groundbreaking UFO book, Passport to Magonia. Vallee, a French-American astronomer and computer scientist, along with the American journalist and writer on the weird and Fortean, John Keel, took the view that UFOs weren’t real, mechanical spacecraft piloted by beings from other worlds, but were created by the same paranormal phenomenon behind encounters with fairies and other paranormal entities. The name ‘Magonia’ itself comes from a statement by a sceptical 7th-8th century Frankish bishop, that the peasants believed that storms were caused by men in flying ships, who came from a country called Magonia.
The magazine didn’t just discuss UFOs. It also covered other paranormal phenomena and subjects, such as witchcraft. It provided a very necessary sceptical corrective to the Satanism scare of the ’80s and ’90s. This was a moral panic generated by conspiracy theories, largely from the Christian right but also from some feminists, that Satanic groups were sexually abusing and ritually sacrificing children. The Fontaine Report, published by the British government over 20 years ago now, concluded that there was no organised Satanic conspiracy. This effectively ended a real witch-hunt, which had seen innocent men and women accused of terrible crimes through warped, uncorroborated testimony. It needs to be said, however, that sociologists, social workers and law enforcement authorities do recognise that there are evil or disturbed individuals responsible for horrific crimes, including the molestation of children, who are or consider themselves Satanists. But the idea of a multigenerational Satanic conspiracy is absolutely false. See Jeffrey S. Victor’s excellent Satanic Panic.
Nick Redfern is a British paranormal investigator now resident in Texas. In this book, subtitled ‘UFOs, Russian Meddling, Soviet Spies & Cold War Secrets’, he proposes that while the UFO phenomenon is real, the terrible Russkies have been manipulating it to destabilise America and her allies. This comes from the Russians attempting to interfere in the American presidential elections a few years ago. In fact, the book doesn’t actually show that the Russians have. Rather it shows that the FBI, Airforce Intelligence and CIA believed they were. Prominent figures in the UFO milieu were suspected of Russian sympathies, and investigated and question. George Adamski, the old fraud who claimed he’d met space people from Venus and Mars, was investigated because he was recorded making pro-Soviet statements. Apparently he believed that the space people were so much more advanced than us that they were Communists, and that in a coming conflict Russia would defeat the West. Over here, the founder and leader of the Aetherius Society, George King, who also channeled messages from benevolent space people on Venus and Mars, was also investigation by special branch. This is because one of the messages from Aetherius called on Britain to respond to peace overtures from the Russians. This was seized on by the Empire News, which, as its name suggests, was a right-wing British rag, that denounced King for having subversive, pro-Commie ideas and reported him to the rozzers. King willingly cooperated with the cops, and pointed out that his was a religious and occult, not political organisation. But he and his followers were still kept under surveillance because they, like many concerned people, joined the CND marches.
It’s at this point that Redfern repeats the Sunset Times slur about the late Labour leader, Michael Foot. Foot also joined these marches, and the former Soviet spy chief, Oleg Gordievsky, had declared that Foot was a KGB spy with the codename ‘Comrade Boot’. It’s malign rubbish. Redfern notes that Foot sued the Sunset Times for libel and won. But he prefers to believe Gordievsky, because Gordievsky was right about everything else. So say. Actually, Gordievsky himself was a self-confessed liar, and there’s absolutely no corroborating evidence at all. And rather than being pro-Soviet, Foot was so critical of the lack of freedom of conscience in the USSR that he alarmed many of his Labour colleagues, who were afraid he would harm diplomatic relations. The accusation just looks like more Tory/ IRD black propaganda against Labour.
Other people in the UFO milieu also had their collar felt. One investigator, who told the authorities that he had met a group of four men, who were very determined that he should give his talks a pro-Russian, pro-Communist slant, was interrogated by a strange in a bar on his own patriotism. The man claimed to be a fellow investigator with important information, and persuaded him to take a pill that left his drugged and disorientated. Redfern connects this the MK Ultra mind control projects under CIA direction at the time, which also used LSD and other drugs.
But if Redfern doesn’t quite show that the Russians are manipulating the phenomena through fake testimony and hoax encounters, he presents a very strong case that the Americans were doing so. During the Second World War, Neville Maskelyn, a British stage magician, worked with the armed forces on creating illusions to deceive the Axis forces. One of these was a tall, walking automaton to impersonate the Devil, which was used to terrify the Fascists in Sicily. Redfern notes the similarity between this robot, and the Flatwoods monster that later appeared in America. The Project Serpo documents, which supposedly show how a group of American squaddies had gone back to the Alien homeworld, were cooked up by one of the classic SF writers, who was also a CIA agent. And the scientist Paul Bennewitz was deliberately given fake testimony and disinformation about captured aliens and crashed saucers by members of the agency, which eventually sent the poor bloke mad. He was targeted because he was convinced the saucers and the aliens were kept on a nearby airforce base. The American military was worried that, although he wouldn’t find any evidence of aliens, he might dig up military secrets which would be useful to the Russians. And so they set about destroying him by telling him fake stories, which he wanted to hear. And obviously, there’s more.
It’s extremely interesting reading, but Redfern does follow the conventional attitude to Russian. The country was a threat under Communism, and is now, despite the fact that Communism has fallen. He is silent about the plentiful evidence for American destabilisation of foreign regimes right around the world during the Cold War. This included interference in elections and outright coups. The most notorious of these in South America were the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile by General Pinochet, and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. He also doesn’t mention recent allegations, backed up with very strong evidence, that the US under Hillary Clinton manufactured the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2012 to overthrow the ruling pro-Russian president and install another, who favoured America and the West.
The cover story on Saturday’s I for 20th July 2019 was a report that Britain’s landed gentry had doubled their wealth in a decade. Beneath the headline declaring that very fact were the lines
Dramatic surge in fortunes of British nobility since the 2008 financial crash, I learns
600 aristcratic families now as wealthy as they were at the height of the British Empire.
The story on page 12 of the paper by Cahal Milmo was based on the research of two academics, Dr Matthew Bond and Dr Julien Morton, lecturers, sociology lecturers at the London South Bank University, who had examined probates, or settled wills, of 1,706 members of the aristocracy going back to 1858. However, the article made the point that these wills only represented part of the aristocracy’s immense wealth, and their real fortunes is likely to be much higher because their lands, property, art collections and business investments are very frequently held in separate trusts which cannot be examined.
The article stated that
A hereditary title is now worth an average of more than £16m – nearly twice the value it stood at proior to the 2008 financial crisis, I can reveal. their fortunes contrast starkly with the decade experienced by the vast majority of Britons, whose inflation-adjusted wages remain stuck at 2005 levels.l Since the Thatcher era, the value of a hereditary title has also increased four-fold.
The academics’ research also
shows that the minimum value of one of these (aristocratic) titles now stands on average at £16.1m. The same figure, adjusted to reflect current purchasing power, stood at £4.2m between 1978 and 1987.
The four-fold increase suggests the aristocracy has prospered spectacularly under the era of financial deregulation and economic liberalisation ushered in by Margaret Thatcher when she came to power in 1979.
The I also stated
The figures represent a sharp recovery in the fortunes of the nobility, which went into a decline during the Second World War and the post-war consensus, which brought in more progressive taxation and the welfare state. From a pre-war high of £23m, average fortunes fell to £4.9m by the 1980s.
The data suggests that Britain’s wealthiest aristocrats have more than weathered the economic problems caused by the 2008 financial crisis, apparently using existing assets to take advantage of low interest rates to buy up stocks and shares and other investments which have rocketed in value. In the decade to 2007, the average wealth of the nobility stood at £8.9m – suggesting it has nearly doubled in the decade since. (pp. 12-13).
The article also looked at the educational background of the ten richest toffs. And what a surprise! They nearly all went to Eton and Harrow, before going on to Oxbridge.
Of the ten largest probates between 2008 and 2018, seven of the deceased attended Eton or Harrow, with the remaining three also attending major public schools. Six of the 10 went to either Oxford or Cambridge universities. (p. 13).
The newspaper also asked the Labour MP, Chris Bryant for his views about this. Bryant was the author of A Critical History of the British Aristocracy, published two years ago in 2017. He responded
“For more than a century the landed aristocracy have been moaning about their terrible impoverishment. Ostentatiously sitting in dilapidated drawing rooms with buckets and pails catching drips from the beautiful but bowed stucco ceiling, they have extended the begging bowl.
“Yet the last century has seen many do remarkably well. The end result is that eh great old landed, crested and hallmarked families of the UK are still in possession of most of the land and a large part of the wealth of the nation.” (p. 13).
The I was at pains to state that the study itself takes no view on the social role of the aristocracy, whose fans argue that it plays a valuable role supporting rural communities through fishing and farming. It quoted Morton as saying
“It may well be that having a rich and vital aristocracy is good for the country. We are interested in understanding this group as objectively as possible.”
Well, that might be the case, but they’ve also been severely bad for the rest of us. The I doesn’t mention it, but one of the ways the aristocracy has almost certainly increased their wealth is through the massive tax cuts the Tories have given high earners. They’ve been enriched through the Thatcherite doctrine that taxes and government spending have to be cut, the welfare state destroyed and everything, including the NHS privatised, in order to benefit the upper classes. Their wealth will then magically trickle down to the rest of us, as they open new businesses, pay higher wages and so forth. Except they don’t. They simply take the money and put it in their bank accounts, where it stays. And far from opening new businesses, business proprietors simply carry on as before, laying off staff in order to enrich themselves and their shareholders. The Young Turks and a number of other left-wing American internet news shows, like the Jimmy Dore Show, have put up videos about various companies that have made thousands unemployed after they were given tax cuts by Trump.
As for the British aristocracy, way back in 1988 Private Eye published a very critical review, ‘Nob Value’, of Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd’s The Field Book of Country Houses and their Owners: Family Seats of the British Isles, as well as the-then emerging ‘heritage’ sector. Massingberd, who wrote a ‘heritage’ column in the Torygraph, was a massive fan of the aristocracy to which he belonged, and, of course, Maggie Thatcher. In this book he loudly praised her policies, and looked forward to a ‘social restoration’ that would see the blue-bloods return to power. The Eye wrote
The ‘heritage’ mania has softened us up for a return to inherited wealth. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd may be a richly Wodehousian figure, but his book, lauding the privately owned, is symptomatic. It is the correlative to Peregrine Worsthorne’s recent articles about the desirability of large inheritances and the return of a rentier class: the desirability in short of ‘a social restoration’. Come the day, of course, Massivesnob knows where he will be – in his seat again. But the fans of his snufflings seem curiously unaware of where that leaves them: which is sat upon.
In Francis Wheen, ed., Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion (London: Verso 1994), 320-2 (322).
Quite. It’s as true now as it was then, after Downton Abbey on the Beeb and now with the Tory party dominated by two toffs, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, coming after another Eton educated aristo, David Cameron, all of whom very much represent the interests of their class against the poor.
The only chance for the rest of us to shake them off, and go back to having a society where ordinary people have a decent standard of living, can enjoy good wages, proper welfare support and a truly national, and nationalised health service, is by voting for Corbyn.
Here’s another passage from the anarchist Bakunin that’s still very relevant today, in Tory-run Britain. Bakunin was strongly impressed by sociology, and believed, like the French philosophes of the Enlightenment, that humanity and society were governed by laws. So strong was this belief, that he rejected free will completely. I very much reject this philosophical stance, along with his atheism and denial of divine providence, which he claimed made science impossible.
Humans do have free will and not just meat machines, running according to a set of biological or sociological imperatives, and while sociology is a powerful tool for investigating the basis of society and suggesting solutions to social problems, it’s very different from the natural sciences based on experiment and prediction. People are still responsible for their actions. Nevertheless, sociological influences are a powerful cause of crime. Bakunin discusses this in his piece ‘All Round Education’, quoting the stastician Lambert Queteler on the sociological origins of crime, which he believed were completely responsible for its incidence. Bakunin writes
A science of statistics is possible only because of this natural and social inevitability. This science is not satisfied with ascertaining and enumerating social facts but looks for their links to and correlation with the organization of society. Criminal statistics show, for example, that in a given country, in a given town, over a period of ten, twenty, thirty or more years, the same crime or misdemeanor occurs every year in the same proportion [to the total], if the fabric of society has not been altered by political and social crises. Even more remarkably, a given modus operandi recurs from year to year in the same proportion, for example, the number of poisonings, knifings, and shootings, as well as the number of suicides committed one way or another, are almost always the same. This led the famous Belgian statistician Quetelet to utter the following memorable words: ‘Society prepares the crimes while individuals merely carry them out.’
In Robert E. Cutler, Mikhail Bakunin: From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin’s Basic Writings 1869-1871 (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985), p. 122.
Now I can remember one of the postgraduate archaeological students at Bristol University making much the same point as Bakunin in a talk she gave explaining her research into the physical structure of one of Bristol’s historic hospitals. She said that the total number of prison and mental hospitals tends to remain the same, although the proportions of people going to one or the other changes. She went on to discuss the beneficial effects of natural light and contact with the natural world in healing hospital patients and reforming criminals. Despite pressures from government across the political spectrum to cut costs in the prison service and abolish them, prison farms have remained because of their demonstrably strong influence in reforming convicts.
At present, Britain is suffering a very high incidence of crime and suicide. The media has reported the shocking number of knife crimes in the capital. There has been a rise in hate crime, not just against ethnic minorities, including Muslims, but also against the disabled. Suicides have also increased, and as Mike, Stilloaks, Tom Pride and so many other left-wing and disability rights bloggers have pointed out, these have included disabled people, who were left in misery and starvation due to being thrown off their benefits. Several left notes explicitly stating that they were ending their lives due to sanctions by DWP, or being judged ‘fit for work’ under the Work Capability Tests.
Predictably, the Tories have held up their hands and claimed that there is no absolutely no link between their shabby, degrading and vicious welfare policies and the tragic deaths of these people.
This is a lie. The anti-immigration rhetoric and stance of many of the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign, and anti-EU parties and organisations like UKIP has led to an increase in racist hate crime. And the Tories are also responsible for stoking this hostility through their campaigns to get illegal immigrants to turn themselves, their attempt to deport the Windrush generation, despite the fact that they had a perfect right to stay in Britain, and the racist and islamophobic comments of many of their members. Like Boris Johnson and his wretch article describing women wearing the niqub as looking like dustbins and letterboxes. Only a tiny minority of Muslim women wear it, and many pro-Muslim political figures, like George Galloway are opposed to it. But Galloway also believed that women had a right to wear it, and condemned Johnson’s comments as racist. He was also bitterly critical of Johnson’s remarks along with many other people, including Mike on his blog, because after Johnson made them attacks on women wearing the burka increased. At least woman was killed. Despite this, the Tories concluded that BoJo’s article wasn’t racist, but ‘tolerant’ and ‘respectful’.
There have also been vicious attacks on the homeless and the disabled, again due to Tory policies and the rabid right-wing press, which demonizes the poor and the unemployed as scroungers and the disabled as malingerers. Thanks to rags like the Scum and the Heil, people believe that a quarter of all benefit claims are fraudulent, while the reality is that fake claims account for less than 1 one per cent of them.
The crime figures, and particularly the increase in hate crimes, clearly shows that the Tories have had a disastrous effect on British society, making it more suspicious, hateful and violent. Individuals are still responsible for the crimes they commit, but Quetelet’s and Bakunin’s views are correct. Society is a powerful influence in the amount of crime and suicide.
And the conclusion is undeniable: the Tories have prepared these crimes by deliberately creating a society where they are carried out, however much they scream and try to deny it. They have to be got out, before they cause any more attacks and deaths of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.
Neumann then moves on to what Israel should do now in ensure its survival: it must leave the Occupied Territories.
‘with the acquisition of the
Occupied Territories in 1967,
Israel had a chance to make
handsome amends for the crimes
on which it was built. Saint-
lines or selfless optimism
were not required. Israel could
have sponsored and supported,
with true generosity, the
establishment of a sovereign
Palestinian state by backing
those amenable to reconciliation
and attacking those who were not.
This might not have been a just
settlement, but it would have
worked.’
American support for Israel following 1967 has made that possibility harder to achieve, and an exploration of this relationship is the subject of the book by James Petras. He dedicates the Power of Israel in the United States to Rachel Corrie, ‘US citizen and humanitarian internationalist volunteer in Palestine murdered by the Israeli military’. His style is that of the committed activist, in sharp contrast to the cool rigour of Neumann. There re times when his use of capitals, as in Terror Experts or Zionist Power Configuration, irritate. But while his writing is urgent, at times to the point of stridency, it is well sourced and invites the reader to inquire further into the areas he explores. Here is a flavour of the Petras style:
‘Through overseas networks the
Israeli state can directly inter-
vene and set the parameters to US
foreign aid in the Middle East.
The overseas networks play a major
role in shaping the internal debate
on US policy toward Israel.
Propaganda associating Israeli
repression of Palestinians as the
righteous response of the victims of
the Holocaust has been repeated
throughout the mass media. President
Ahmadinejad’s suggestion that
Holocaust victims might more properly
be compensated by land located in
Europe or in the countries that
victimised them was misreported, then
highly circulated to fuel, instead,
the notion of a rabid, anti-Semitic
Iran. From the height of the network
to the lawyers’ board-rooms, and the
doctors’ lounges, the pro-Israel
supporters of the network aggressively
attack as “anti-Semites” any critical
voices. Through local intimidation and
malicious intervention in the
professions, the zealots defend Israeli
policy and leaders, contribute money
organise voters, and run for office.
Once in office they tune in to Israel’s
policy needs.’
But hasn’t the United States always been subject to pressures exerted by those of its citizens with connections in other countries, be they links with Ireland or the countries of the former Eastern bloc? Petras accepts this, but answers:
‘The Cuban exiles in Miami
exercise significant influence
in both major parties. But in
no other case has linkage led
to the establishment of an
enduring hegemonic relationship:
an empire colonised by a
regional power, with the US
paying tribute to Israel, subject
to the ideological blinders of
its overseas colons, and launching
aggressive wars on its behalf.’
Who are these ‘overseas colons’? Petras has a very long line of ‘Israel Firsters’, people both inside Congress and electoral politics, and those unelected, such as Paul Wolfowitz and his friends in the Office of Special Plans driving the Iraq invasion, as well as many in the media. He tells us about the muscle asserted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations
with its Daily Alert (www.dailyalert.org/) prepared by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs; the American Jewish Committee; the Anti-Defamation League, and the Zionist Organisation of America.
Petras looks critically at the four principal US sources of financial support for Israel he lists as:
‘1. Wealthy, Jewish contributors
and powerful disciplined fund-
raising organisations. 2: The US
government – both Congress and
the Presidency. 3: The mass media,
particularly the New York Times, Hollywood and the major television
networks. 4: The trade union bosses
and the heads of pension funds.’
In addition there are well-organised fundamentalist Christian groups with close links to Israel. Petras also sees the emergence under President Yeltsin of the Russian oligarchs (most possessing Israeli passports and having major financial interests in that country) as in part being due to President Clinton’s closeness to the Zionist lobby in the United States.
At times Petras is a little breathless in his description of the activities of those close to Israel, especially the people against whom legal proceedings have been taken after spying for that country while holding important Washington positions. This seems to be a measure of his anger and frustration at his native country being drawn into conflicts that he believes do not serve its interests. While I prefer the cooler logic of Neumann I also recognise the value of an emeritus professor of sociology like Petras alerting his readers in matters they can then look into in their own way and about which they can reach their own conclusions.
If Attorney General Lord Goldsmith advises prosecutions over cash for honours we may learn something of the financial network to which Tony Blair’s Middle East ‘envoy’ seems so central, and then perhaps something of the extent to which the Israel lobby has been influential on the politics of New labour. Whether or not the Crown Prosecution Service gets to dig a little below the surface of our political life, Britain could use both a Neumann and a Petras
to provoke examination of the way our electoral politics is linked to the fortunes of Israel. We should not be distracted by controversy over the veil covering the faces of Muslim women: there are other forms of concealment requiring our more urgent attention.
(Pp. 40-2, Winter 2006/7).
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