LOOKING-GLASS ANIMALS

 

 

A syllogism for your amusement.

All white people are racist.

I am a white person.

Therefore, fuck you, nigger.

 

When all the darts are thrown and the scores counted up, this is a vicious and unstable time in which to be alive, particularly if you are white. Some aspects of the ‘woke’ (what a fucking stupid term) orthodoxy are laughable. The problem is that many people can’t laugh because one thing blacks and their idiot lobbyists cannot take is mockery. They share this with Muslims. That is one point you have to give the arch-victims, the Jews. They can laugh at themselves and don’t much mind if others join in, all goys together.

Other aspects are not so amusing. There has been a black crime-wave with whites as the target for years in America, and yet the ‘narrative’ says the exact reverse, that ‘black bodies’ – to coin a phrase much loved by word-mangling, race-baiting clown Ta-Nehisi Coates - are being killed by a collusion of the KKK, a racist white police force, and Donald Trump voters. Nigga, please.

As the West continues spinning in its death spiral, the weak are trying to stand on the heads of the strong so that they die first. This will not end well. There is increasing rhetoric from blacks that do more than hint at their desire to harm whites physically. That would be a big mistake for black society to make, whether in the USA or the UK, because white people are demonstrably more intelligent than black people, and therefore better able to marshal themselves to win what may well end up being street battles and organisational conflicts.

Whites who push the BLM line do not, it goes without saying, give a fiddler’s fuck about blacks, who are just useful pets, like guard-dogs or geese. They can be divided into sub-sections: the virtue-signallers, the ethno-masochists, the power-players, the confused and lonely, and so on.

And they are dangerous. It is inexplicable to me that not one politician in the UK has promoted sensible populism. I’m not talking about fat cunts in Doctor Marten’s from Burnley with shaved heads and a past in the British National Party. I mean that if a genuine Conservative stepped forward, they would clean up vote-wise outside the Left-run cities. But the question is not where are these phantoms, but would the deep state allow them to achieve prominence. Assuredly they would not.

We now have almost complete transvaluation of values, although possibly not in the manner Nietzsche might have envisaged. We have a Leftist bloc across Europe, the UK and America who view white Right-wing folk as though they were the ultimate evil, when in fact it is the hard Left who are – let’s not intellectualise it – the real fucking cunts.

COVID is largely a lie. The police are not there – in the UK, at least – to serve the people but to frighten and intimidate them. The government is not conservative in any sense of the term. The Muslim Council of Britain is far more conservative. We are through the looking-glass, and what we are finding there is a good deal more malevolent and ominous than anything young Alice found.

BRITISH BROADCASTING COERCION

I can't seem to make this a hyperlink, so you will need to cut and paste it into the URL bar. It is my piece on Alex Belfield, the BBC, and Nottinghamshire Police.

www.counter-currents.com/2021/03/british-broadcasting-coercion/

HETERODOX JOURNALISM: SHOUTING INTO THE GALE

 

I am a dissident journalist. We are the ones who don’t get paid and who hardly anyone reads. We are the heterodox. I have written for various online magazines over the last few years, as well as maintaining this weblog. I consider the ability to create and maintain a weblog to be a greater democratic boon than having a vote, largely because the vote in the UK is illusory in its range of effects. There is essentially one party in Britain whose two wings parade cosmetic differences which, in effect, are not differences at all but mere quibbles over how to put in place a repressive political system the need for which is agreed by both ‘parties’ and which is a good way into construction.

Professional journalists would sneer at my description of myself as a journalist, dissident or not. Journalism is a profession, they will say, and it requires training, apprenticeship and a professional approach. We are not nutters in basements, we are highly skilled information providers. Couldn’t agree more. I don’t go out and get stories. But nor, increasingly, do real journalists. But these same journalists know perfectly well that the percentage of journalism now that is so-called ‘op-ed’, or opinion journalism, is growing all the time. And I’m afraid that lets the oiks in, riff-raff like me who have opinions and can express them, but will never get near the regular media. I wasn’t trained to have an opinion in journalism school. My diploma comes from the great school of life. No newspaper would touch me with a shitty stick, although I still pitch them for laughs and so they know my name even if they would never print my writing.

It may be, of course, that I am a lousy writer who thinks otherwise. Heaven knows that Dunning-Kruger stalks the land, and there are many people who believe themselves to be talented writers who are truly dreadful. You only have to visit author or poetry pages on Facebook to confirm that. Writing is much like sex and driving in that everyone thinks they are really good at it, though many are sadly mistaken.

But I consider that my writing has some value and some flair, and I’ll carry on regardless. The main point is this. If the UK continues on its present path it will become an authoritarian state on a par with North Korea. It won’t look like North Korea because it will be air-brushed and touched up to look like a free country. But already the UK is very far from free. And I have to say that and say it again, even if I am sitting in an empty room talking to myself. Freedom is being eroded with increasing rapidity in the UK, where the likes of BLM and The Muslim Council of Britain are currently having it all their own way.

The best – or worst, I suppose – example is the Scottish Justice Minister, a vile, sneering, chippy Muslim who says the word ‘white’ like a Louisiana Klansman would have spat out the word ‘nigger’ a century ago. He is introducing a bill which will mean that individuals can be charged and arrested for ‘hate speech’ taking place in their own homes. This law will almost certainly migrate south to England, which is probably the real target.

The MSM grumbles and indulges in some low-level kvetching about this, but they know that you can’t really criticise Muslims or blacks or any other ideologically protected species, or anything they do or say, and also they will know in their hearts that this law, and others like it, is in no way intended to stop hatred but to insulate Islam against criticism. There are a lot of these fifth columnists in British politics. London Mayor Sadiq Khan is another.

BLM is similar although they are not as intelligent as the Islamic lobby. British culture increasingly reflects that, actually, lowering its standards in the same way that American universities are lowering SAT scores, so that black people can join in. Blacks and their media enforcers, as well as their wealthy backers, only have to shout ‘jump!’ and the British government, the BBC, academia, the police and every other tentacle of the government squid asks politely, ‘how high?’

But black lives don’t matter to me any more than my life matters to the vast majority of blacks. And Islam is an enemy and an enemy to be feared, not because of any inherent strength or intelligence, but because they have the British government and the public sector and the media and the spurious class of ‘activists’ and ‘social justice warriors’ fully in support of them. Islam needs to be fought not appeased and BLM needs to be satirised and ignored.

This is not, however, a viewpoint you are likely to read in the MSM or see on the telescreen. And that’s why it takes punks like me – and those further up the ratings ladder (not difficult) – to shout it out. Put intellectually, there are certain of us who do not accept either the elective epistemology by which the Left privilege the subjective emotions of designated victim groups over objective reason, as well as dignifying the spurious concept of ‘offence’, nor your attempts to silence viewpoints that are critical of your favoured identitarian victim groups. Put more simply, some of us refuse to take any more of your fucking shit.

So, I’ll carry on shouting into the howling gale. I’m not waiting for any big break. The magazines I write for I respect and I read them anyway. The British press, with one or two notable exceptions, are a fucking disgrace, boot-licking, lick-spittle courtiers who never saw a brown person or a sexual deviant they didn’t like.

So, as the world goes to hell in a stylishly designed handcart while the British media tells you how wonderful last night’s BBC drama was, and wasn’t it wonderful that there were so many black people in it, when it finally arrives at its destination, don’t say people like me didn’t tell you where you were headed, and for free.

VANIKIN IN THE UNDERWORLD

 

Chapter 2

 

The fall of Mulciber

 

 

Just as every version of the underworld has its guardian or attendant devil, infernal factotum or dog of three heads, so too Europa House has Craig McCerrow. There he is now, shirtlessly grappling with some ancient lead fixture in the sweltering boiler room deep in the basement. His upper body is a patchwork quilt of tattoos, some professionally applied and some of more home-made provenance. They record past dalliances, the names of Craig’s awful sociopathic children, tribal affiliations in the world of association football, nationalistic aspiration, and mythical creatures, zombie overlords and full-breasted, broadsword-wielding vixens. Craig’s mental life is correspondingly crammed and chaotic, but he is grateful for the job of resident caretaker at Europa House.

Indeed, the job was a godsend. Craig had had quite enough of his regular employment as doorman of various risk-laden speakeasies across the city. He had been stabbed and shanked, shivved and striped too many times to justify the money and drugs he received in payment for plying his precarious trade, and the caretaker’s role allowed him to exercise power without the accompanying perils of the order of clientele to which he had become used. His biography presented here is a composite work, for which I must note the work of residents Lars, Declan, Ricky Rick and Mrs. Podolski, who together form a sort of BBC World Service concerning the happenings at Europa House.

I dread Craig. On the few occasions he had been inside my cubicle here at the House I had cringed in the corner while he attended to trip switch or faulty tap, and he seemed exactly what he was, a dreadful man in a city of dreadful men. There is an order of being which seems to take place, to take its place, in a parallel dimension to that in which we, the weak and frail and fallible, live and breathe and have our being. To see Craig McCerrow, his sleeveless shirt showing enough of the hinterland of his squamously illustrated body to indicate his likely passage through life thus far, is to see a type of hell.

Now, he has simply turned off the water to the entire block to attend to some dysfunction in the ancient plumbing. Alerted by the boy, I have filled saucepans and the kettle and the old tin pail for my ablutions. Two hours was mentioned, but Craig keeps to no earthly temporal calibration. Once he turned off the electricity for an afternoon but was persuaded by one of his appalling coterie of friends to go on a three-day drink and drug field exercise, and Europa House remained plunged in darkness for the duration.

As I accept that it is the morning, I must prepare for my day. I heat water in my kettle, testing the great orange gas container with the ball-peen hammer to see how much remains. We are all of us hooked up to these containers, and Craig replaces them for a stipendiary fee when they expire. There is no working gas supply system at Europa House, a fact which exercises the gangling Estrella. She, like most of her generation, is well versed on her rights, and claims that the contraptions which Craig has rigged up in each of our battery cells (the original house has been divided and divided again to provide more hutches for the inhabitants) contravene various Health and Safety commandments. I wouldn’t know about that, although I do know that the last representative from the council to visit Europa House was so menaced by Craig that he had to take a month’s sick leave from his place of work. That awful hobgoblin Bertie Spedding told me that. Bertie Spedding, the Mercury of bad news and sniffer of ill winds.

My water ready in the singing kettle, I fill the basin, select a flannel (one of two, royal blue and washing-machine grey) and begin to soap and valet the various cracks and orifices of my awful old body. The body, writes Plato. A shadow which keeps us company. I can’t have a bath because the bath has a crack in it like lightning-split timber. It also has about a hundredweight of academic papers, newspapers, notepads dense with my scrawl, coverless books. Research, you see, for my next book, the follow up to my university-banned and universally unread debut. More later.

With my cleansed frame snugly inside my billowing dressing gown once more, I sit and read, transported to wherever today’s book (the first of many) will take me. Reading is life to me, the phrases, ideas, concepts, new words and formulations all pouring into the old Vanikin head like wine into a cracked gourd. I would rather be a notepad for the sayings of great men, writes the pugnacious Julius Caesar, than be a great man myself. Some time later, I rest my book on the frayed elbow of the sofa’s arm-rest as I hear the light tappity-tap on my door which announces the arrival of Lars and the news.

Lars is a bald and shiny-domed Dane who was once a laboratory assistant before retirement drew him to the dubious environs of Europa House. He eschewed a return to the Norse land of his fathers on the grounds that it was now overrun by Mohammedans to an extent that not even the sleeping Holger Danske (the giant but currently comatose defender of the Danish people) could ever counter. He and I sit washed by my pale bulb, and Lars will tell me of affairs in the wider world, carefully préçising the main currents of activity before expanding on one or two stories which have caught the attention of his enquiring Scandinavian mind, and dutifully omitting to tell me the date.

Lars sits in my guest’s chair, a sort of faux Regency throne with elegantly curved dark wood legs and the look of a creature with nocturnal habits all its own. Tufts of old horse-hair from a nag long dead protrude at intervals.

Lars speaks perfect English, retaining the slightly clipped tunefulness of his native land. His round-up of current affairs confirms the movements we all know to be taking place outside the ramparts of Europa House, as the world outside marches slowly but resolutely towards a second dark age, a sort of anti-Enlightenment. Money is still acting like an insane woman in the market square, all matted hair and flung excrement. Politicians still parade and speechify, like street vendors in the last minutes of Pompeii. The young still rule the streets while the old stay indoors praying to gods who are themselves frightened. Motor cars still tear around culling the population, television still holds a nation in its mesmeric grip, and it has not rained for eleven days in a row. I make tea.

Lars and I sip at our hot brew as the amiable Dane begins a circumspect tour of what counts these days for news. News. The media. These old shades are part of the reason I fell from the heavenly ramparts of academia and landed here. I think of Milton’s Mulciber in Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s angels pushed (by Michael, if memory is a good and faithful servant) over heaven’s battlements to fall to earth in a leafy forest, a descent which took a full day.

We are fallen too. Crashing to earth where we sit huddled in a damp, loamy forest to be told tales by various spirits of the wood who do not have our well-being in mind. Inappropriate teaching methods. I tried to teach my students the truth; no one had told me that the truth was no longer wanted. Think of Orwell, lanky, pencil-moustachioed, public-school George with his fags and his TB. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Vanikin the revolutionary, Vanikin in a beret, bearded and chomping a cigar. I told them that Media Studies, the degree for which so many of them clamoured like ducklings at the water’s edge, was a waste of time. Media studies was what you did in your own time. Media studies was just reading the papers and watching television. University education should be more than a breakfast-time habit tenured. Inappropriate teaching methods.

Lars is summing up the state of world affairs. But we all know where the world is heading. It’s heading here, to join exiled Vanikin in the underworld. The world outside my retired theatre curtains was a rickety pier full of whizzing circus rides with the nuts and bolts all loosened and the lights off when I last trod the boards. I tremble to think what it has become since I groped my way below stairs, but I suspect that if I were to re-emerge from my dank and Gyprocced chrysalis this very day, I would not walk out into a second Renaissance.

It’s consciousness, you see. Nietzsche called the brain our last and least developed organ, and he was right, poor mad syphilitic old Friedrich. Giving consciousness to homo sapiens was like giving the Large Hadron Collider (and there Lars did hold my attention) to a saloon bar full of association football aficionados. There was the Renaissance, of course, but it was hardly general issue. A Milanese peasant born the day Fra Angelico was born and breathing his final rasping breath, a rare octogenarian, the day Uccello passed away would in all probability have lived his entire span without setting eyes on a framed painting. A frame was what you grew your turnips in. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernism; these were mostly things that happened to other folk, the folk on the hill. The majority of the world’s population went on much as before while Michelangelo was creating his wonders, dirt under the nails and trying not to get killed by their neighbours. My tea is cold, and Lars has finished his report.

I bid Lars a fond farewell in his native Danish. Farvel. It more or less exhausts my knowledge of that jolly-sounding language, and sounds to me like a minor character from a Dickens novel. Little Farvel. Dickens, with his mad hair and social conscience. No, Vanikin! Come back here this minute. I feel vaguely unclean after being sprayed with the ordure of the outside world, and I head for my bath tub. I retrieve something soothing and recline on the buggered sofa, wondering who the house will throw at me next.

Europa House was built at the start of the 1960s, and so has no exterior charm and resembles a hybrid of an East German tax office and a giant lock-up by a ring road. As mentioned, the original spacious apartments have been cordoned and sub-divided and partitioned to produce the current human hen-house, and I am merely one lonely occupant among many. A surprising proportion of the inhabitants are, by any reasonable usage of the phrase, clinically insane (I am one), but there are gems amid the chaos. Part sanctuary for the disenfranchised, part asylum, part dormitory, part ghost train, Europa House has been my abode these seven years since my public disgrace and defenestration. After the fall, this is my pandemonium.

No one came to see me as I cleared my office at the university. To associate with Vanikin was to be on McCarthy’s black list, in the FBI’s little black book, marked down for a Leninist show trial. I had become toxic, a pariah or pharmakos or scapegoat. And so for seven years I have wandered in the desert of myself, apart from the ways of men...

A small drum roll at my hollow door. The boy has returned with my provisions. I trust him with my pension, giving him a small stipendiary consideration of which I suspect Manda would not approve. All modern mothers believe that all elderly men are sexual predators with their offspring squarely in the crosshairs. The danger, however, lurks elsewhere. Mentally and intellectually, the peril starts when teacher arrives with her curriculum of anti-life skills. Outside the school gates, meanwhile, the drug dealers lurk.

The boy, as always, leaves two gossamer-thin carrier bags outside my warped front door, and I retrieve them like a laboratory rat snatching at a food pellet.

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, cordial, tea, milk, biscuits, porridge oats. Ahmed’s prices are reasonable, and I have purchased enough to keep a sub-Saharan family for most of a week. I have modest requirements; such is the life of the fallen angel, the outcast scowling back at the city of the sun, the civitas solis.

THE HUNT

 

 

One of the most wonderful things about the post-COVID world for which we all long is the wonderful films we will be able to see when the cinemas re-open and Hollywood comes back to life to enthral us all with the magic we grew up on. Because I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for 63 movies about fucking slavery.

Can you imagine the future cinematic landscape? The only positive thing to be said about it is that it is a good time to be a black actor. Unless there is a part for an evil slaver, or a pathetic incel, or a crooked cop, or an evil capitalist raping Africa for its minerals, white thespians need not apply. On the silver screen, at least, white supremacy really is over.

Which brings us to The Hunt. Naturally I had read a good deal about the film when it came out - a couple of years or so ago, I believe – and I had seen a couple of excerpts on YouTube. But the whole film is now available on the same platform and worth an outing. I won’t go into detail about the plot because all of that is available elsewhere should you wish to know it.

The film’s premise is that a rich Democrat elite – imagine such a thing! – organise an annual hunt of Republican citizens taken hostage, drugged and taken, apparently, to Arkansas. (Although it turns out to be a very long way from anywhere in America). The film follows a central character, Crystal, as she struggles both to save herself and to get to the heart of the mystery. It is entertaining, taut on a psychological level, ultra-violent, and one of those films where reality is moot. When Crystal executes an apparent saviour, her companion asks how she knew he was lying. Because, she replies, everyone is lying.

Deception and the persecution of the political Right does not have to be sought for by members of that faction. Literally, the hunting of Republicans in America has been limited to some less-than-well documented beatings of folk in MAGA hats. But that may change. Implicitly, of course, attacks on Right-wingers increasingly means attacks on whites, and the big question is what happens when specimens tougher than college kids kicked around a parking lot will become riled enough to stomp into town and start knocking heads together.

On a more figurative level, however, the hunt is very much on, and the bloodlust has spread to the UK and Europe (two separate areas, in case the MSM forgot to tell you that). Unlike the unfortunate quarry in The Hunt, you won’t be riddled with arrows, or have your legs blown off by a mine, or your head splattered by an assault rifle, or be poisoned by a snack in a Potemkin gas-station store, but the Left will hound you until they have another type of trophy. Try Wrongthink just at the moment, and you could be saying goodbye to your job, income, family and personal safety. As I have said before, America now features another knock-off from China; its social credit system.

It has long been common currency that if America did descend into Civil War 2.0, and the warring factions were broadly speaking the Left and the Right, there wouldn’t be much of a contest. Antifa, however, are very violent people indeed and would not exactly fight fair. Andy Ngo, the brave journalist beaten into the hospital with a brain injury by Antifa, shows in his book about them that they are training themselves militarily.

Also, Antifa, along with BLM, Muslims and white Liberals, have the full weight of the deep state behind them, including its judiciary. This is why, when Antifa notoriously attacked Gavin McInnes’s Proud Boys, it was Proud Boys who ended up in jail. Resistance is futile.

This is rather a risky time to be outspokenly Right wing. But don’t worry, that will all change. Soon, sooner than you think, it will become outright dangerous to be Right wing. The globalist elites, who I believe see the escalating European, British and American civil tension as a fun, real-time, life-size video game, are goading, pushing, teasing all the time, trying to force the balloon to go up.

Their media presenters make no pretence about their bias now. A clearly defective fundamentalist Christian sex-nut shoots some Oriental women in three Atlanta wank-parlours and the media explodes with the usual narrative of white supremacy, which exists in the same way Wakanda exists. The next week, a Muslim blows ten kufr away and we mustn’t jump to conclusions. Oh, fuck off.

The Hunt has an ambivalent ending – after a hell of a final fight scene between the two pivotal women in the film – cleverly cross-referenced with Orwell’s Animal Farm. If roles are reversed, does the hunter get captured by the game, to paraphrase an old Grace Jones song-title? If the Right had the whip hand now, would Left-wingers be getting doxed, fired, publicly shamed and attacked? No, they would not. And this because the stereotype (the Left love a certain type of stereotype) of the Right-winger as being fundamentally ignorant, bigoted, and violent is of course exactly the reverse. The majority of the Left are as thick as mince. So much of life now, as it expresses itself via media both conventional and social, takes place through the looking-glass, and features a transvaluation of values even Nietzsche could not have envisaged.

The hatred festering within the hearts – if such they have – of the Left now is reaching critical mass. Antifa will start killing soon. There is already a crime-wave across America and featuring the slaughter of whites by blacks, pace the ‘narrative’. In Britain, the concomitant collateral in the culture wars are the thousands of girls groomed, drugged and raped by gangs of Muslim men, and its attendant and shameful media silence.

But the Left must beware. If you hunt us, and you fail to catch us, all of us, then it may be your nights that become sleepless and unquiet.

THE BLAIR IT'S OKAY TO LIKE

 

 

A university friend of mine, last seen working his way up the production side of an ailing broadsheet, once gave his measured opinion on the pitfalls of dalliance with the fairer sex. ‘The trouble with passion,’ he opined, ‘is that it creases your trousers.’

Another unwanted consequence of les affaires du coeur – along with diminutive appetite, disrupted sleep patterns and a tendency to relocate to the boozer – is an inability to read. The squalls and seismic shifts of the last six weeks have meant that I have not finished a single book. Oh, I’ve pecked at things and played with the occasional newspaper, but I’ve been a book a week man for the last thirty years, and my reading habit has been allowed to drift and idle.

A relief then to see Eric Blair ride to the rescue. Eric Blair was, of course, George Orwell’s given name, and it may help to remember this little device:

 

Tony Blair X

Ian Blair X

Lionel Blair X

Eric Blair √

 

I’d been reading Orwell piecemeal over the years before the glorious summer of 2004, when I first went to live on the canal full-time and spent long days on deck in the sun reading the Collected Letters and Journalism.

The first aspect of the public-school educated ex-military policeman is the atmosphere of honesty. It must have struck Orwell’s contemporaries, but now, in an era where lying is not simply tolerated but has become the operational strategy of a mendacious political class and its catamite journalists, it stands out like a flare against a night sky. Orwell simply doesn’t flinch away, either from experience or from ideology. This is what connects the national self-assessment of The Lion and the Unicorn with the sheer existentialist testament of the brilliant Down and Out in Paris and London and the tough reality of The Road to Wigan Pier. He is also a wonderful encyclopaedist of the small concerns of real, ordinary people.

Of the novels, Animal Farm is overrated but that is a function of its age. When Orwell wrote it, Communism needed satirising, much as, say, Islam does now. At this end of Animal Farm’s life and effects, intelligent people know that Communism is a corrupt confederacy of dunces, and the critique is weakened. I like Keep the Aspidistra Flying for its description of poverty familiar to me from my own life, and I like the character of George Bowling [is it Bowling? Can’t Be Arsed To Google] in Coming Up For Air. I re-read 1984 last year and was struck by what a forceful love story it is. The repressive state angle of the book has been much discussed in our Socialist times, but I can’t take that comparison completely seriously. Big Brother and O’Brien are genuinely frightening but, as I’ve said before, just try the little experiment of putting David Miliband’s 12-year-old face on the posters and you’ll see what I mean.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Homage to Catalonia, which I read at university. One thing that arrests you about Orwell is how quickly you slip into his cadences and rhythms; he must be one of the most readable writers in the language, as well as being a model stylist. His writing is never fussy but runs along taut, mannered channels.

Catalonia charts Orwell’s tenure in one of the anti-fascist units fighting Franco in Spain, and the description of trench life are the most veridical war scenes I’ve read. The lice, the cleaning of guns with bacon fat, the pot-shots at flitting fascists, Orwell’s own bullet in the throat; everything has a clinging reality rare in reportage.

I could open the book at random and stick in a pin and whatever it hit would be worth quoting, but here are some personal highlights.

The simplicity of Orwell’s response to being shot almost made me cry:

 

“My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.”

 

It should never be though that Orwell is a wholly dry writer. His small amusements smile through this apparently most serious of texts, such as when he describes his attempts to communicate in ‘my villainous Spanish’.

As for Socialism, the modernes should hang their pinheads in shame while reading Orwell. Here is his overview of Socialism from Catalonia:

 

“The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.”

 

I don’t even know if I believe that, but what I do know is that Orwell’s vision of a classless society has bitten the dust now. We just have a society with no class.

No writer portrays poverty better than Orwell, the squalid state to which individuals are brought if they are excluded from the economic cycle. This small description from Catalonia may also serve to explain the peculiar horrors of 1984’s Room 101:

 

“In the barn where we waited the floor was a thin layer of chaff over deep beds of bones, human bones and cows’ bones mixed up, and the place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side. If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness. However, I had the satisfaction of catching one of them a good punch that sent him flying.”

 

Orwell punching rats. How much we need fists like that here and now.

A NOTE ON TRUTH AND THE POLITICAL CLASS

 

This reminds me of something on Samizdata a few weeks ago – which I don’t have time to gurry around and find just now – to the effect that it is important, when considering a political ‘truth’ to look at the past form of the person or body giving voice to it, and make your decision as to whether to believe or disbelieve it accordingly. For example, if Gordon Brown states that there was no deal with Libya for the release of the Lockerbie bomber, should you believe him because his position is that of the British Prime Minister and therefore unimpeachable, or do you look at his track record for obfuscation and deceit? That, it seems to me, is what our academically stratospheric young people would call a ‘no-brainer’ [and they should know].

Lying is, of course, implicitly tied to morality. If you have read your Nietzsche – all of it, not just a Penguin primer – you’ll know that morality is a complex construct, historically produced and de facto rather than de jure. This is not to say, however, that there is no such thing as morals or that it is not possible to morally evaluate something or someone, or even that it is not possible to act immorally. Nietzsche is often referred to as an immoralist, but even a cursory reading of his biography will show a man of impeccable moral rectitude. By his works shall ye not know him. The notion that one can operate outside morality is not, here, supposed to be an invitation to the Chaos Ball, but rather a type of truth in its own right.

Now, there are truths of different types. This is not a post-modern radio jingle; compare the truths of mathematics with the truths of history and you’ll see they are of different orders. It may be true for some, to take a topical example, that Israel is an illegal Zionist entity and true for others that it is a legitimate spiritual homeland, but both sets of believers will either hold that 2 + 2 = 4, or they are on a one-way trip to the rubber-lined room.

When it comes to non-hermeneutic truth – ie. that which can be disputed – we can at least state a truth about truth. For the post-modernes, including almost all of the Western political class, ruling elites and media, truth is a malleable construct which can be designed to serve desired ends. The problem is that those desired ends are rarely shared by the electorate who mandate these political set designers. The post-modernes – exemplified, I think, by Peter Mandelson – know that truth is not some shining grail, but rather an adaptable device to be deployed in a number of ways. They aren’t wrong about this; they are merely in power. Those who can see the harm of these truth-constructors differ in their solutions to the problem, and Brown, Mandelson et al are now quantifiably one of the biggest problems faced by the ordinary people of the West.

So, what to do? One of the biggest obstacles to the individual in her attempt to get at anything like the truth is the huge, manufactured complexity of the information streams. It is not a coincidence that any modern Socialist, when interviewed, will often begin an answer with something like, “Well, John, in actual fact it’s a lot more complicated than that…” Straw and Blunkett were masters of this weaselly rhetoric gesture. This preamble almost invariably means both that the interviewer is correct, and that the facts are actually a great deal simpler than the interviewee would like. Simplicity very much stands in the way of [post-]modern[e] Socialism, and is something to be feared. The way to dispel this fear is to complicate, to add layers of informational white noise until the original fact can no longer be heard above the din.

So, a drive to simplification seems to be a sine qua non in untangling the Gordonian knot of modern political discourse. What’s needed, in short, is an attack on the political progressives by way of their systematisation; bring on the new regressives.

There is an excellent piece – as always – by Douglas Murray in the September issue of Standpoint. I missed this magazine a lot, by the way, during its recent two-month break. I am expecting a bit of a punch-up, however, when various shouty Muslim groups get hold of this issue. It is the most critical yet of aspects of Islam and, while this is possibly the most required area of cultural critique after the one currently under consideration [and the ruling elites and Muslim pressure groups are dangerously intertwined], the self-appointed Muslim ideologues intent on the cultural caliphate will not stand for it. See Clive James and Nick Cohen in the current issue; we’ll be hearing cries of ‘Islamophobia’ before long. How long before the Standpoint offices need security?

But back to Murray – who was himself stopped from speaking at the LSE because order could not be guaranteed in the face of intimidation. He begins by ridiculing George Osborne – not a difficult target – and his ‘progressive’ speech to Demos. Murray pinpoints the vapidity of this kind of ‘non, je ne regresse rien’ mantra infesting the modern political voice. He ends with a call for another type of political proponent:

 

“What we need are…decent ordinary folk [in power] who have been let down by every arm of the state. It seems to me that we will have to find inspiration and example in civic leaders. We will have to show our political leaders that we expect those we pay to be in public life to demonstrate real principles and actual decency. This might well not be a ‘progressive’ ideal. It might even be old-fashioned. Perhaps I can suggest the starting of a movement. What we need is a movement which is not merely regressive, but unapologetically so.”

 

Back to the future, indeed.