Yesterday I put up an episode of Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, in which an attempt to steal the crown jewels was thwarted by the police and the Beefeaters. The thieves were caught, and their leader revealed to be a computer. This was captured when it was down during a power cut. Trev, one of the great commenters on his blog, posted this remark describing how we don’t have electricity cuts just yet, but the high prices are leaving people like himself cutting back. Trev wrote
‘That’s great. I remember Potty Time and the power cuts. Now we still have power (for now) but can’t afford to use it. I’m only putting heating on for about an hour in a morning but in the evenings I’m wrapped in blankets and a wooly hat trying to keep warm. It’s not good. I don’t qualify for any of the discounts because the electricity account and bill are in the landlady’s name, and I don’t get the right Benefits to qualify for Warm Home discounts or Cold Weather payments (when they are due).’
This is what millions of people are being faced with, due to the greed of the energy companies, fully support by Sunak and the Tories. The energy companies’ vicious, exploitative avarice was even defended by Jacob Rees-Mogg back in the summer. It’s why we need to get the Tories out and Labour in, hopefully to do something that will really benefit the British public on this and other issues.
Leafing through the book The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church by J.K. Elliott (Oxford: OUP 1996) yesterday, I got to the chapter on heaven and hell. The book’s a collection of extracts from apocryphal Christian literature, the Gospels and various lives of the Apostles that weren’t included in the Bible because they were not considered historically reliable by the bishops of the Early Church. Despite being outside the accepted canon of scripture, they were nevertheless widely read and have influenced Christian art and literature. These writings include descriptions of the delights of paradise and the torments of the damned. Most of the torments are for moral offences, like fornication, adultery and homosexuality and failure to live according to proper Christian standards or neglect or rejection of Christianity. It’s grim stuff, and is the type of material and doctrines that now puts people off religion. How can a loving God inflict all these torments on people for all eternity, especially since the sexual revolution of the 1960s? Pre-marital sex is now the norm, homosexuality is accepted and opposition to it is seen as bigotry. It’s a good question, and I’m no fan of the hellfire and damnation preaching myself. As for Hell, I tend to follow the Father Duddleswell attitude from the books about the Irish priest by Neil Boyd. God’s justice demands it exists, but his mercy means there’s no-one in it.
But several of the torments described in these apocryphal books are for the rich and the exploitative. Like some of the people in the Tory and Brexit parties. One of the extracts is from the Acts of Thomas, in which the apostle raises up a dead woman, and commands her to tell what she has seen. And amongst the damned were people hung up by various parts of their bodies, including the hands.
Those hung up by the hands are they who took that which did not belong to them and have stolen, and who never gave anything to the poor, nor helped the afflicted; but they did so because they wished to get everything, and cared neither for law nor right. (p. 191).
In the Apocalypse of Peter, it is Christ Himself who describes the torments of hell, including those reserved for the rich.
‘And beside them, in a place near at hand, upon the stone shall be a pillar of fire, and the pillar is sharper than swords. And there shall be men and women clad in rags and filthy garments, and they shall be cast thereon to suffer the judgement of an unceasing torment; these are the ones who trusted to their riches and despised the widows and the women with fatherless children … before God.’ (p. 194).
In the Apocalypse of Paul, it is this apostle, who is taken by an angel and shown the heaven and hell, including this description of what happens to usurers:
And I saw another multitude of pits in the same place, and in the midst of it a river full with a multitude of men and women, and worms consumed them. But I lamented and sighing asked the angel and said, ‘Sir, who are these?’ and he said to me, “These are those who exacted interest on interest and trusted in their riches and did not trust in God that he was their helper.’ (p. 202).
We now have a government that is packed full of rich, highly rapacious individuals, who really don’t have any thought for the poor, the widows and the fatherless. And all too many of them are connected to the financial sector, like Jacob Rees-Mogg. Mogg and several other Tories come from the Christian right. It’s a pity they don’t read these passages, and those in the Bible itself, urging concern for the poor, the sick and marginalised, and do the right thing.
Which is stopping these exploitative, murderous policies of immiseration and exploitation, and resign!
As an old piece of graffiti in Bristol used to say: ‘Repent of your sins, Maggie Thatcher!’
Before the really serious stuff, I though I’d start with a funny story from yesterday’s I, for 29th June 2019. This reported that cops in Limestone, Alabama, had finally arrested a man, who owned a vicious squirrel. This was no ordinary fluffy-tailed denizen of the trees, but an attack squirrel kept on methamphetamine. The article, ‘Owner of meth-fuelled ‘attack squirrel’ arrested’, by Francis Blagburn, ran
An Alabama man who allegedly kept a so-called ‘attack squirrel’, fired up by giving it methamphetamine, has been arrested on new charges.
Limestone County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama tweeted that 35-year-old Mickey Paulk was apprehended following a chase in which he rammed an investigator’s vehicle.
Authorities had been seeking Mr Paulk on multiple warrants unconnected to the squirrel he named Deeznutz, which was made infamous after police said they were warned about a meth-fuelled squirrel that had been trained to attack. Earlier this week, Mr Paulk posted a video to Facebook of himself with Deeznutz, which he considers a pet, in which he denied accusations that the squirrel represented a danger to the public, or that it had been given drugs.
“You can’t give squirrels meth; it would kill ’em”, he said in the video.
In a phone interview with Associated Press, Mr Paulk said he had “a few loose ends to tie up” before he surrendered himself to authorities, including sorting out alternative accommodation for the squirrel.
The sheriff’s office said narcotics investigators spotted Mr Paul leaving a motel on a stolen motorcycle and chased him. He has been booked into Lauderdale County Jail on charges of attempting to elude, criminal mischief, receiving stolen property and felon in possession of a pistol after it was discovered he had a handgun in his waitband.
As for Deeznutz, authorities say he could not be tested for meth and has been released. (p. 27).
Okay, it’s clear from the article that, squirrel aside, Paulk himself was a crim, and the cops were right to arrest him.
But it also made me wonder what the press and various politicos on both sides of the Atlantic would do, if they thought they could get votes out of this.
Donald Trump would probably start claiming that it was all down to Mexicans. They were not giving the US their best squirrels, and instead Mexican drug gangs were smuggling meth, cocaine and crack-fuelled squirrels into the country, to embark on a reign of crime. It would be categorically proven that most rapists and murderers were Mexican squirrels, and that was why America needs that wall.
Hillary Clinton would claim, regardless that Paulk’s colour isn’t mentioned in the article, that a new breed of superpredator was breeding these vicious, meth-addicted squirrels. She would then demand harsher legislation against Black men feeding squirrels in inner-city America.
And the corporate Dems as a whole would claim that this was all part of a plot by Putin. The Russian spy services, in collaboration with RT America, had infiltrated the American eco-system, radicalising squirrels and turning them away from true, patriotic American values. At a secret signal from Moscow, the squirrels would all leap into decent Americans’ homes, grab the TV remote control and occupy the computers, and change them over to Russian fake news promoting Donald Trump.
Over here, the Scum and the Times would declared that it was Corbyn and his supporters, who had radicalised the animals, brainwashing them with the works of Trotsky and Stalin. They were being trained to jump on people and start indoctrinating them with socialism. Momentum had already sneaked thousands of these squirrels into the Labour party as part of a far-left take-over, and it was well-known that Corbyn himself and other members of his group had squirrelist tendencies.
And the Scum, Heil, Depress and Sunday Times would also claim that the squirrels were anti-Semitic, Corbynist squirrels. The animals were known to believe in and promote evil, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Israeli interference in British politics. Corbyn had several times in the past attended conferences held by squirrels, attacking Israel. And it was well known that leading squirrels were also Holocaust deniers. The CAA would declare that the typical anti-Semite was a young Muslim male who kept a squirrel as a pet. Squirrels were also being recruited by ISIS as suicide bombers, and it was well-known that there were already no-go areas up and down the country, which non-Muslims couldn’t enter, patrolled by squirrels trained in sharia law.
And all the right-wing newspapers would fall in, saying that only a strong Tory party under Boris Johnson could deliver Brexit. This would be good for Britain, and allow us to take control of sovereignty and immigration, and allow us to combat squirrelist subversion.
All right, so the papers aren’t that bonkers yet. But all the racism, bigotry and prejudice is there, as well as the sheer desperation to smear Corbyn with whatever they can. And the latest attack on him by the Times, claiming he’s too elderly, smells to me of very rank desperation. So perhaps it won’t be long at all before they sink to trying to run stories about him and Labour, smearing him as the leader of vicious, subversive squirrels.
This is another video, which I’ve just put up on my channel on YouTube. It’s about the Nazi concentration camp badge for the voluntary unemployed, which I made with cardboard and a safety pin the other day. I posted up a piece then explaining the concentration camp system of badges, and why I was making it: it’s a protest against the appalling poverty caused by the DWP’s wretched system of benefit sanctions and Universal Credit.
Here’s the blurb I put up for the piece on YouTube
Other groups apart from Jews and gays were made to wear identifying badges in the Nazi camps. ‘Asocial’ people – beggars, vagrants, prostitutes, pacifists and conscription-evaders were forced to wear a black triangle with an ‘A’ for ‘Arbeitscheu’ or ‘workshy’. This also included the voluntary unemployed. The Nazi punishment of the unemployed compares to their treatment now under the DWP’s benefits regime, which denies them money on the flimsiest of pretexts, such as missing an appointment because they were in hospital. At the same time Universal Credit and the delays built into the system are also forcing people into starvation and food banks.
I explain how the Tory policy of depriving people, who make themselves voluntarily unemployed, which came in under John Major, was a Nazi policy, and that along with the above groups Gypsies were also sent to the camps. I state that while it would be a case of Godwin’s Law to claim that the Tories were treated the unemployed like the Nazis – they aren’t rounding people up into concentration camps yet, nevertheless it is forcing people into grinding poverty. I also point out how parents are being forced to steal food from supermarkets, and are starving themselves to feed their children.
I show how the badge is just cardboard with a safety pin, and explain how I made it as my gesture against the DWP. I’d like it to become a mass movement, of course, with others using it to show their disgust at the DWP, but somehow I don’t think it will.
This is another great video from the Baltimore-based The Real News, posted on YouTube four days ago on the 25th February 2019. The news service’s host, Greg Wilpert, talks to Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada about Israeli meddling in British politics to smear and discredit Jeremy Corbyn.
The Campaign against Ilhan Omar and Leah Whitson
Wilpert reports that the same day that Ilhan Omar in the US was attacked for anti-Semitism for comments she made about her country’s Israel lobby, an orchestrated campaign was launched in Britain to smear Leah Whitson of the Middle East section of Human Rights Watch. She had tweeted ‘Why is Israel interference in British politics acceptable? Is it only a problem when Russia does this?’ She was talking about the al-Jazeera documentary about how Israeli politicians tried to delegitimise left-wing politicians, particularly in the Labour party. Then the eight Labour MPs split, accusing Corbyn of bad leadership on Brexit and anti-Semitism. The deputy leader, John McDonnell, said they were making a mistake and should hold bye-election. This is followed by a clip of McDonnell saying that they should remain in the party to fight their corner. But if they don’t, they lose Labour party support, and should hold an election.
Wilpert then introduces Winstanley, mentioning his recent article for the Electronic Intifada, ‘Yes, Of Course Israel Is Interfering in British Politics’. Wilpert states that Israel has allocated considerable funding for Hasbara -propaganda-operations through various channels. Hasbara groups are very media savvy and have coordinated attacks in America and Britain. He then asks Winstanley what they are trying to do. What would they gain by the sacking of Leah Whitson.
Winstanley replies that they have been doing a huge number of things over the years with various degrees of success and failure. Human rights watch has been a thorn in their sides for many years because Israel is a state that abuses human rights, and this is impossible for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to ignore. Human Rights Watch puts out detailed information about human rights abuses in Israel, war crimes against Palestinians and injustices that Israel has always perpetuated against them.
Corbyn and the Labour Party
Wilpert then asks about what Israel is trying to achieve by smearing the Labour party with anti-Semitism. Winstanley replies that the anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour party is a campaign by racists to smear anti-racists. It’s a complete inversion of reality. Which is not to say that there is no such thing as anti-Semitism in the Party, it’s a mass movement of half a million people according to the latest figures, so statistically there are going to be some anti-Semites. In the main all the headlines about anti-Semitism in the Labour party have been at best an exaggeration and in many cases outright fabrications. A narrative that pro-Israel groups in the UK have been pushing for the last 3 1/2 years in order to sabotage the Labour Party. There’s footage at this point of pro-Israel demonstrators, wrapped in the Israeli flag, standing around with megaphones. Winstanley states that the party’s left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has for many decades been a Palestine solidarity activist. It fits in with the Israel lobby’s decades-long strategy of accusing anyone who is involved in Palestine solidarity of being an anti-Semite.
Wilpert remarks that Corbyn seems to be taking a passive approach to these attacks and is not going on the offensive against pro-Israeli groups. that are trying to undermine him and his party’s electoral chances. He asks Winstanley why he thinks Corbyn’s taking this approach. Winstanley replies that he doesn’t know the answer, and believes that there are several different reasons. But Winstanley feels that essentially he feels boxed in and limited it what he can do. Corbyn’s support from the party’s grassroots always comes most strongly when he fights his corner, as he had done on so many issues. Unfortunately the issue of anti-Semitism goes straight to the heart of what it means to be an anti-racist popular movement. Jeremy Corbyn has a strong record in this regard for decades, and the accusations of racism really hurt and are having an effect. Anyone on the left, who doesn’t realise this is deluded, and there are too many people in denial about it. Smears and allegations of anti-Semitism are the main weapon of the anti-solidarity movement, and this needs to be faced up to before it can be combated.
Why No Official Investigations of Israeli Propaganda Groups?
Wilpert goes on to say that it isn’t just Corbyn, but the Israel/Palestine debate as been a major issue in British politics although Britain has not occupied Palestine for 71 years. Why doesn’t Britain investigate accusations of espionage by Israeli hasbara groups? And what do the eight former Labour MPs hope to achieve by going against the dominant political views of their own constituents? Winstanley replies that it’s an excellent question, and that when the al-Jazeera documentary ‘The Lobby’ first came out, showing Israeli interference primarily here in the UK, mainly in Labour but also in the Conservatives and others, the Labour Party’s initial response, even from people like Emily Thornberry, Corbyn’s shadow foreign secretary, who was one of the Israelis’ supporters in parliament, a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel, called for an investigation into ‘improper interference in British politics’. But this was not followed up and nothing came of it. And this week, with the defection of the eight, now nine, Labour MPs away from the party, all but one of whom joined this new group, called the Independent Group, a political party in all but name, the vast majority of whom were pro-Israel. Of the initial eight, six were listed as supporters of Labour Friends of Israel, and Ian Austin, who also resigned today [25th] is also a member of Labour Friends of Israel. This calls into question Labour Friends of Israel. If a number of its MPs are not in the Labour party, then what is it doing in the Labour party. In Winstanley’s opinion the NEC should proscribe this organisation. After all, it’s a front group for the Israeli embassy in the UK, and its activities really need to be investigated.
Ryan and the Theft of Labour Membership Details
We have also seen this week Joan Ryan, one of the MPs, who’s joined this Independent Group, she’s being accused of improper access to Labour Party members’ data. Winstanley doesn’t know the full details about this yet. It looks like she accessed Labour members private electoral data. With her known links to Israeli embassy agents, including the embassy spy, Shai Masot, who was expelled from our country in 2017 after being exposed by the al-Jazeera documentary, questions have to be asked. There should be an investigation by the British authorities into this. What is she doing with that data? and it is a completely fair question to ask if she’s sending it back to Israel. In the al-Jazeera documentary on America, one of the LFI’s members, Jon Rubin, said in his own words ‘Joan will talk to Shai most days.’ She was in close association with someone who was effectively an Israeli spy. Is she still talking to the Israeli embassy most days? This is a real question to ask, but the mainstream media aren’t going there.
This is a video I’ve just uploaded to my YouTube channel attacking the suspension of Chris Williamson and the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party by the Blairites, and the political and media establishment.
Here’s the blurb I’ve put up for it:
In this video I attack the campaign of lies and smears against Chris Williamson, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party. They are not Trotskyites, Communists or anti-Semites, as alleged, but members and supporters who believe in its traditional policies and values before Blair and his Thatcherite ‘modernisation’. Many are also smeared because they believe in Palestinian rights against the brutality of the Israeli state. So there is a campaign by the Israel lobby of smearing them as anti-Semites. Those accused and suspended have been decent, anti-racist non-Jewish people like Williamson and Marc Wadsworth, and self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews, like Jackie Walker.
I state that Williamson was right when he said that Labour was the most anti-racist party, and that they had given too much ground to claims of anti-Semitism. Because in many cases they weren’t real claims, but smears. Labour is now the biggest Socialist party with a membership of 500,000, far larger than the Tories. And that frightens Labour’s opponents. These include the Blairites in the Labour party and the Israel lobby. The Blairites fear Corbyn and his supporters because they, the Blairites, stand for Thatcherism – privatisation, including that of the NHS, and the destruction of the welfare state. This has led to mass poverty, a quarter of a million people using food banks, 3.5 million children in poverty, mass starvation and people stealing food from supermarkets because of problems with Universal Credit. And this is also what the people, who split from Labour, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Ann Coffee, Mike Gapes stand for. The Blairites are not ‘Centrists’ nor Social Democrats.
Corbyn’s supporters, on the other hand, have been smeared as Trotksyites and Communists. They are neither. Corbyn’s policies are actually closer to the Social Democratic politics of the 1970s as set down by Anthony Crossland. These were the nationalisation of the utilities, strong trade unions, progressive taxation and social mobility. He believed these would bring the benefits of nationalisation without having to go beyond the nationalisation of the utilities or bring about industrial democracy. The Labour manifesto demands the nationalisation of the rail and water industries, strong trade unions and workers’ rights. It also wants working people and employees on company boards. Which is more radical than historical Social Democracy, but not that much more extreme, as the Labour left were considering it in the 1970s.
The Israel lobby and the Jewish establishment are also keen to attack Corbyn and his supporters because they support the Palestinians. But this does not mean hatred for Israel or the Jewish people. It’s the Israeli state which makes people believe it does. And Corbyn has the support of many Jews – Jewish voice for Labour, for example, and spent the Passover Seder with the Socialist Jews of Jewdas. But these are the wrong type of Jews – Jewish socialists. The type of Jews, who, at the beginning of the last century, the right of the Tory party and groups like the British Brothers’ League were telling people were a threat, because they were going to bring with them Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, and throw millions out of work. And the newspapers now repeating this today, like the Daily Mail, were responsible for these smears then. Lord Rothermere was a fan of Hitler.
I point out how false these claims are with the example of Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth. Walker’s a proud lady of colour, whose mother was a Black American civil rights worker with some Jewish blood, and her father was a Russian Jew. And Russian Jews know about anti-Semitism – Russia is the only country where you can buy the vile Protocols of the Elders of Zion on street kiosks. But she’s been smeared as an anti-Semite. As have so many other secular and Torah-observant Jews, some of who are the children of Holocaust survivors, or lost family in the Holocaust.
Then there’s Marc Wadsworth, who was smeared because he embarrassed Ruth Smeeth. They tried to smear him as an anti-Semite, because that’s how the press told it. But he wasn’t. Wadsworth’s a Black anti-racism campaigner, who worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1990s to frame stronger legislation against anti-Semitism when the BNP were beating Jews up around the Isle of Dogs. When the anti-Semitism accusation wouldn’t stick, they changed it to ‘bringing the Labour party into disrepute’. But he hadn’t. It was Smeeth, who had brought the Labour party into disrepute with her false accusations.
As you can see, this is quite an angry, impassioned piece. But this is a glaring injustice that infuriates me. I want this witchhunt, which I compare to that of 17th century Salem or McCarthyism, as Jackie Walker has said, to end.
A few days ago Mike put up a story about a couple, who had been arrested and tried for stealing food to feed their family. They were on Universal Credit, but this hadn’t been paid, and they had used up all the four visits to the foodbank that starving people are allowed. So simply to feed themselves and their children, they stole food from one of the supermarkets.
How absolutely horrific that this is happening now, in Britain, the sixth richest society in the world! And how absolutely, shamefully disgusting!
But this incident reminds me of one of the stories Gran told me about the poverty her relatives had personally seen during a trip to Scotland in the first few decades of the last century. Our gran was born c. 1907. At some time before the outbreak of World War II, she told me that some of her cousins had taken a holiday to Scotland, which included a trip to Glasgow. Wandering through the town, they found themselves in a back street, where a gang of men were eating pigswill. The men noticed them and started to chase them, but mercifully the girls were able to get away.
I realise that this this story is just anecdotal. And I also want to make it very clearly that I’m not writing about this incident to sneer at people from Glasgow, and make them appear to be somehow subhuman or animalistic. Glasgow’s got a reputation as a very rough town, but my gran told me this story to show the desperate poverty that existed up there at the time. Just as I’m very sure there was the same desperate poverty in other parts of the United Kingdom at the same time. Remember, the striking miners that Churchill had shot down in Wales were starving and in rags.
I wonder if this is what the Tories are trying to bring back today. Years ago I put up a piece which gave a late Victorian description of children waiting in a queue for charity food, and the news that the starving today were having to go to food banks. Since they’ve we’ve heard that working parents, who are unable to feed their children on their pay, are starving themselves. And that people are stealing food in order to survive. I also recall reading news stories about people taking uneaten food or leftovers from rubbish bins.
This level of poverty is happening today. We really do seem to be going back to the grinding desperation of the ’20s-’30s. How long before we read stories about the poor and starving eating pigswill, as in gran’s story? At this rate, it won’t be long. Perhaps it’s already happening.
Meanwhile, the Tory toffs and their propaganda machine in the Beeb and the right-wing papers will be telling us all how prosperous is, thanks to their free market reforms, and lying about how they aren’t destroying the welfare state, but making it more targeted and less wasteful, to tackle poverty where it’s needed. And how under them, average pay has increased. And all the vicious, murderous lies they tell whenever they get into power. While all the while the poor, the unemployed and the disabled and long term sick are further forced into greater poverty and misery.
The Tories – and especially people like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson – are making millions, while at the same time a quarter of a million people are forced to use food banks, and 14 million people are officially below the poverty line. It’s time to ignore their propaganda about Corbyn and Labour, and get them out, and Corbyn into No. 10.
Last Tuesday, Mike put up a piece commenting on an interview on that day’s Daily Politics of the Tory MP, George Freeman by Jo Cockburn. Cockburn had let Freeman’s comments that the Labour party was ‘nasty and intolerant’, with anti-Semitic and misogynist abuse rife in the party.
This is, of course, a falsehood. The anti-Semitism accusations and the witch-hunt against those accused of it is entirely political, and has zero to do with real anti-Semitism. It’s a campaign by Zionist organisation like the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Poale Zion, which states in its Constitution that it is a Zionist organisation, to defend Israel from criticism and opprobrium over its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Those accused are not just gentiles, but also self-respecting, secular and Torah-observant Jews. The non-Jews they also accuse are similarly very often convinced anti-Fascist activists, and campaigners against racism and anti-Semitism. It’s a tactic used by Zionists across the globe. Norman Finkelstein, one of the leading critics of Israel’s maltreatment of its indigenous Arabs, has described them as ‘a factory for making anti-Semites’. Mike is one of those smeared. So is Jackie Walker, the anti-racist daughter of a Russian Jewish father and a Black American mother. Her parents met on a Civil Rights march. Mike’s article comments on the way a Zionist troll, Emma Pickens, smears her by confusing her with another Jackie Walker. Which he observes is par for the course. The Zionists smear, lie and distort and twist evidence without compunction.
As for the ‘misogyny’, that’s similarly illusory. A group of 30 Labour female MPs accused Momentum of this, writing to Jeremy Corbyn to stop it. They were all entitled Blairites, who were frightened for their seats now that Corbyn moderates were the ascendant, and ready to reverse the decades of Thatcherism that has wrecked this country and impoverished its great people. And the way they decided to do this, was by following Killary’s lead against her left-wing opponent in America, Bernie Sanders. She made up stories about his followers being misogynists, and invented a class of supporters she called ‘Bernie Bros’. There was no misogyny on that part of the Left, and the ‘Bernie Bros’ existed only in her imagination. It’s the same with these ladies and their accusations, but it’s all grist to the mill for Tory and establishment propaganda.
Freeman then went on to excuse Boris Johnson’s comments, made over a decade ago during or after a trip to Africa, about Black Africans. BoJo had written a piece about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’. BoJo himself has apologised for these comments, but when asked about them, Freeman responded that ‘it was just Boris’. It’s all ‘journalistic language’. Or something like that. It doesn’t wash. Buddy Hell, of Guy Debord’s Cat, stated quite rightly that Johnson would not get away with writing similar material which used anti-Semitic stereotypes against the Jews. Many others on Twitter were also disgusted with BoJo’s racism, and Freeman’s defence of it.
Boorish Johnson’s dated vocabulary brings to mind some of the sputtering of that other right-wing journo, who spent his time abusing and sneering at the left, Auberon Waugh. Waugh once complained in an interview in the 1980s to one of the middle market tabloid Sunday supplements – either for the Mail on Sunday or the Sunday Express – that his daughter had gone to Ethiopia to teach ‘Blackamoors’.
Going further back, it also recalls the racist invective poured out by Enoch Powell in his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. He made comments there about ‘grinning picaninnies’, along with all the racist incidents, which also happened only in his imagination.
I did wonder if Johnson’s anti-Black spleen was the result of extenuating circumstances. Africa is a continent with huge potential and a creative people, beset by terrible problems. Many of its countries are so corrupt that the Financial Times described them once as ‘kleptocracies, which are only considered countries courtesy of the UN’. The various warlords, who have arisen to plunge these nations into civil war are often guilty of the vilest human rights abuse. If you want examples, look up the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, and the horrific abuse they mete out against the children they kidnap as recruits. I think BoJo encountered some of these private armies and their commanders, and that would leave a very bitter impression. Although Whites, who have settled in Uganda have praised ordinary Ugandans for their great national character. These butchers are not representative of Black Africa as a whole.
But I don’t think this washes any more. Neither do I believe that it is just how Boris writes. Most people don’t make those comments, and many Whites would probably feel embarrassed reading them out in front of Blacks, even their Black friends. Several generations of children have been taught to know better. I can remember when I was at junior school, I picked up a few nasty racist terms for Blacks from the other pupils. When I tried them out that evening, I was told very firmly by my mother that these were certainly not ways to talk to, or about, Black people. And that if I did ever use it to one of them, it would get me hit, and quite right too. And I’m sure other people have had similar experiences.
Johnson may have been told this, but he clearly decided to reject it before he wrote the offending article. And I honestly don’t believe he’s the only one. Back in the 1990s a backbench Tory MP was thrown out for using similar racist terms about Blacks. In the 1980s there was a resurgence of ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the NF and BNP – in many parts of the Tory party. And going further back to the various British Fascist groups during the Second World War, the aims of one of them was ‘to purge the Conservative party of Jewish influence.’
Johnson’s image of an accident, gaffe-prone ‘lovable oaf’ – at least, that’s the image he and his supporters want to project – is very carefully crafted. In private his hair is carefully combed, but he messes it before appearing on TV. He is also a very shrewd, calculating, aggressive political manipulator. And those who know him have said that the bonhomie he exudes on programmes like Have I Got News For You is similarly false. In reality he has a vicious temper.
I simply don’t believe that Johnson’s vile comments about Black Africans are simply his way of writing about them. He’s made enough mistakes like that in his career as Foreign Secretary to show that he has no clue about not offending people, but I think this goes much further than that. I think this is how he, and a very large proportion of his party, sincerely feel about Blacks. Though in journalism they have been very careful to dress it up in dated language, in order to camouflage it and present it as a bit more upmarket than the gutter abuse spat out by the avowed Fascists.
And under Johnson there was an undercurrent of real anti-Black racism in the Spectator. Taking their cue from the Republicans’ appeal to ‘angry White men’, one piece in the Speccie began with the remark that there was only one ethnic group not welcome in inner London: White men. A piece in another issue by one of their other hacks told the story about how he had his mobile stolen by a Black man, and how mistaken he was when the thief phoned him to tell him he’d return it, only to do nothing of the kind. It was a scam designed to help the thief prolong the use he had of it before he had to ditch it. The writer of the piece added to this story his experience of giving the Black thief the benefit of the doubt, only to be disappointed. It was a coded piece designed to appeal to White prejudice about Black criminality.
Johnson is a racist, in my opinion, who appeals to the racist elements that still survive in a very racist party. Despite David Cameron’s attempt to purge it of racism and connections to the Far Right. And George Freeman looks very much like one of the racists. Meanwhile, they retail all the Blairite and Zionist lies about anti-Semitism and misogyny in the Labour party, while doing nothing – absolutely nothing – about the real bigots and vicious racists in their own.
The Blairites have been falsely accusing anyone they can of being an anti-Semite. Most of those smeared have been so libelled simply because they were opponents of Israel’s oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The victims of this disgraceful smear, as I have pointed out time and again, include Jews and anti-racist activists like Tony Greenstein, Rachel Nesbitt, Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone. One of the most disgusting examples of this was last weekend, when Mark Foster, a Jewish donor to Labour, denounced Momentum and the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn as Nazi ‘stormtroopers’.
This is more than a little hypocritical, considering the Israel lobby’s own attempts render Israel’s racist policies against the indigenous Arab population off-limits through the abuse of such accusations, and the appalling contempt the founders of the state of Israel had for Arab Jews and European Jews, who wished to stay in their traditional European homelands. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion wished to see increased Nazi persecution of European Jews during the Second World War, in order to encourage them to emigrate to Israel. One of the two even said that if there was a choice, between all of the Jews in Europe emigrating to Britain, and being saved, or half of the European Jewish population emigrating to Israel, while the other half were murdered by the Nazis, he’d prefer the latter.
They considered the Mizrahim, Arab Jews, culturally inferior, and only took them in because there was a shortage of labour after their expulsion of the Palestinians. They were segregated, given the lowest-paid and most menial of jobs to perform, and taught in special schools in order to remove any trace of their inferior Arab culture. This included the theft of Arab Jewish children from their parents, who were then given to childless European Jewish couples to bring up.
Lobster has also been a persistent critic of Tony Blair and New Labour. It has also not been shy of pointing out the similarity between Blair and the Nazis. For example, Blair’s warmongering in Iraq is exactly the same war crime committed by the Nazi leader Ribbentrop. And Blair’s rhetoric was also very close to that used by Oswald Mosley when he was the leader of the British Union of Fascists. So close is this resemblance that Robert Henderson published an article on the similarity, ‘New Labour, New Fascism?’ in issue 38 of the magazine, for Winter 1999. He opened with the statement
Tony Blair’s rhetoric is heavily if unconsciously littered with fascist buzz words: NATION, NEW, RENEWAL and so on. But there is a greater similarity than single words: Blair frequently expresses ideas which have a remarkable similarity to those of Oswald Mosley. To demonstrate this, I have compiled a series of quotes from Blair and Mosley.
He then provides a series of quotes, and challenges the reader to decide which is Blair and which is Mosley. There was a key at the bottom of the article giving the answers. All the quotes from Mosley were taken from Eugene Weber’s Varieties of Fascism, shortened to VoF. Those from Blair came from Iain Dale’s, The Blair Necessities, and were abbreviated to BN.
Here are the quotes. See how you do. There is obviously no prize, but I feel that if there was one, it should consist of a speech in the winner’s favour by Tom Mann at the Nuremberg Stadium.
1. It combines the dynamic urge to change and progress, with the authority, the discipline and the order without which nothing great can be achieved.
2. It is largely from family discipline that social discipline and a sense of responsibility is learnt.
3. Our challenge to be a young country is not just economic, it is a social and moral challenge.
4. I believe we have broken through the traditional barriers of right and left; they were are developing a new radical economic approach for the left and centre.
5. Above all it is a realistic creed. It has no use for immortal princip0les in relation to the facts of bread-and-butter; and it despises the windy rhetoric which ascribes importance to mere formula.
6. One Britain. That is the patriotism for the future.
7. The steel creed of an iron age, it cuts through the verbiage of illusion to the achievement of a new reality…
8. It is no good waving the fabric of our flag when you have spent the last sixteen years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.
9. A young country that wants to be a strong country cannot be morally neutral about the family.
10. We have in unison in our case the economic facts and the spiritual tendencies of our age…
11. We need a new social reality.
12. We seek to establish a new ideal of public service, and a new authority based on merit.
13. It must be absolutely clear to the British people that we are apolitical arm of no one other than the British people themselves.
14. The mild tinkering with the economy proposed by the Social Democrats nowhere near measures up to the problem. A massive reconstruction of industry is needed… The resources required to reconstruct manufacturing industry call for enormous state guidance and intervention.
15. We will protect British industry against unfair foreign competition.
16. There is nothing odd about subsidizing an industry.
17. It is true that within the old parties and even within the old parliament are many young men whose real place is with us and who sympathise with our ieas. The real political division of the past decade has not been a division of parties, but a division of generations.
18. The market collapsed: its guardians, the City whizz-kids with salaries fractionally less than their greed, now seem not just morally dubious, but incompetent. They failed miserably, proving themselves ut5terly unfit to have such power.
19. Politically, the fall-out from the events of the past two weeks will be immense. There will be few politicians standing for election next time on a budget advocating ‘free markets’.
20. The new establishment is not a meritocracy, but a power elite of money-shifters, middle men and speculators… people whose self-interest will always come before the national or the public interest.
21. The case advanced in these pages covers, not only a new political policy, but also a new conception of life. In our view, these purposes can only be achieved by the creation of a modern movement invading every sphere of national life.
22. We will speak up for a country that knows the good sense of a public industry in public hands.
23. A nation at work, not on benefit. That is our pledge.
24. Social aims without economic means are empty wishes. By uniting the two we can build a better future for all of our people.
25. In our project of national renewal, education renewal must be at the forefront. Our watchwords will be aspiration, opportunity and achievement.
26.I want a negotiated settlement and I believe that given the starkness of the military options we need to compromise on certain things.
27. It is the primary responsibility of any government to defend the country. That much is obvious. But my contention here is that a strong defence capability is an essential part of Britain’s foreign policy.
28. To change our country, we must show that we have the courage to change ourselves.
29. I think that you should always put the national interest before any section of interest in your party.
30. Our task now is nothing less than the rebirth of our nation. A new Britain. National renewal…The task of building new Britain now to come.
31. We ask them (our supporters) to rewrite the greatest pages of British History by finding for the spirit of their age its highest mission in these islands.
32. Without an active interventionist industrial policy… Britain faces the future of having to compete on dangerously unequal terms.
33. [We aim to] convert the existing chaotic survival of laissez-faire liberalism into a planned economy serving the needs of the State as a whole.
Key
1. VoF p. 170.
2. BN p. 18 1993
3. BN p. 19 1995
4. BN p. 14 1996
5 VoF p. 170.
6. BN p. 13 1996
7. VoF p. 171
8 Bn p. 13 1996
9. BN p. 12 1995
10. VoF p.172.
11. BN p. 19 1996
12. VoF. p. 111.
13. BN p. 28 1996
14. BN p. 39 1982
15. BN p. 39 1983
16. BN p. 40 1983
17. VoF p. 172
18. BN p. 41 1987.
19. BN p. 41 1987.
20. BN p. 42 1994
21. VoF p. 171.
22 BN p. 521988.
23. BN p. 65 1995.
24. BN p. 65 1995
25. BN p. 69 1994
26. BN p. 89 1982
27. BN p. 90 1997
28. BN p. 94 1993
29. BN. p. 98 1996
30. BN p. 106 1995
31. VoF p. 175.
32. BN p. 57 1988
33. VoF p. 116.
It seems the comedy Fuhrer is back to his old tricks again of causing trouble on the internet, while disguised as someone else. According to today’s Independent, the Avon and Somerset Police took him in for questioning for abusive tweets attacking the gay poverty campaigner, Jack Monroe. Ms Monroe had been forced off twitter due to a series of abusive tweets, including one from someone claiming to be from a UKIP member.
The tweets read
“Your sick form of Lesbianism and militant queerism is destroying this country. Get out and give us Britain back! #VoteUKIP” the mock profile tweeted at Monroe.
“@MsJackMonroe I think you’re an absolute disgrace as well, Queers should all be sterilised. #VoteUKIP2015.”
To their credit, UKIP have utterly condemned the tweets, expressed their sympathies to Monroe and Owen Jones, and deplored the fact that a member’s reputation was also tarnished because of the abuse.
According to the Indie, the true author of the tweets has now revealed himself on his own website to be Joshua Bonehill. He posted a piece about his arrest on his website, claiming it to be his fifteenth arrest for free speech. He states that he is without a computer or laptop for the time being. He wouldn’t comment on whether he was guilty or innocent, but states that he was confident the police investigation will reveal the truth. He then went on say he’d seen tweets against Monroe, and thought they were ‘comical’ and ‘commended the level of free speech used’.
Quite Mad
Bonehill is, of course, quite loopy. Despite crediting himself as the future of nationalism, his antics have done more than most to turn British Fascism into a laughing stock. This is the man, who, over his career in the Far Right, has had himself arrested for trying to defecate in the frozen food section of Tesco’s; been arrested for trying to break into a police station to steal a uniform and body armour; and tried to present himself as the White messiah promised by the ancient racist prophet, Aryanus.
He was the source of further hilarity last weekend when he launched his latest mighty Fascist party, consisting entirely of, er, himself, in a park in Yeovil. Where he was outnumbered by the police, journalists and anti-Fascist campaigners. He later tried to tell everyone on his blog that really, his new party had fifty members, who had met an hour before in secret away from prying left-wing eyes.
As for his views, they’re the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy bilge. I’ve reblogged a conversation between him and a radio host for LBC, when Bonehill phoned in on a programme discussing anal sex. Bonehill claimed that AIDS was nature’s way of wiping out homosexuals, who were unnatural. He also claimed that homosexuality was being promoted by the Jews in order to wipe out the White race. This is just a piece of projection, as the Nazis did encourage homosexuality amongst Jewish men in order to wipe out the Jews. Bonehill’s views are so bonkers that the presenter found it impossible to take him seriously. In between bouts of laughter, you can hear him wondering aloud whether Bonehill seriously believed what he said.
Yes, I’m afraid he does.
More seriously, Bonehill has a history of making false claims against others to malign them and cause them serious harm, often as other people. He was prosecuted for falsely claiming that a pub would not serve members of the British armed forces so as not to offend Muslims. He also took over other’s blogs to post pieces on them claiming that they were paedophiles, for which he has also been prosecuted.
It was Bonehill, who was behind the altered election poster purporting to be from Labour for Diane Abbott, with a false quote intending to claim that Abbott was an anti-White racist.
He also attempted to make some political capital out of the sad death of much-loved fantasy author, Terry Pratchett, by inventing a racist quote by this great man, who definitely wasn’t.
He has also been banned from entering London, after he attempted to organise an anti-Semitic march through Stamford Hill, a Jewish majority area.
I wonder how far Bonehill’s antics will continue before he either gets the message that no-one takes him seriously as Fuhrer, and he gets sick of seeing the inside of prison cells, or he does something so serious that he ends up in prison. Either that, or he manages to annoy the other few, remaining stormtroopers so much that he gets himself into some serious bovver.
Unfortunately, he hasn’t learned his lesson just yet, and will probably continue abusing and slandering innocents for a long time to come. The only consolation to come out of this, is that it is just Bonehill. He’s clearly deeply sad, and probably a little mentally ill.
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