Peter Simple on The New World Order

From his Daily Telegraph column, 11th June 1999. I suspect that Michael Wharton was the greatest political writer of my lifetime. SIG

The Ethos of Empire

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=9778

According to USA Today, “A gunman killed two American military advisers with shots to the back of the head Saturday [February 25] inside a heavily guarded ministry building.” The story notes that the Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the killings and cited them as “retaliation for the Quran burnings” at an American military base.

One Night, We Can Hope, the Whole World will Shine Like This!

A Minimum Wage or a Free Economy?

by D.J. Webb

A MINIMUM WAGE OR A FREE ECONOMY?

 dj

The Conservative and Liberal Democrat halves of our ruling coalition government are engaged in a debate over employment legislation, with some Conservatives calling for less regulation of employment and also for smaller companies to be exempt from minimum-wage legislation. Libertarians oppose state regulation, although I think it would be fair to say that libertarians are seeking a more holistic, workable approach than simply deleting minimum-wage laws. The reason for this is that, in the absence of welfare reform, abolishing the minimum wage will have the result of decreasing yet further any incentive for the unemployed to find work. I am not convinced that removing the minimum wage—especially one set at current rates—will have a significant positive impact on the employment market in the absence of a broader package of measures to free the economy.

Time for reality: how to simultaneously close-down the UN and end “drug crime”

David Davis

Living very near as I do, as the LA’s Director of Northern Affairs, to these places which the UN chooses to highlight today, I’m not certain that they have their facts right. Yes, the “War On Drugs” has been lost, and yes, some places near here are a bit , er, what we’d call “scallyish”.You’d not want to wander about for more than a few minutes alone at 1.00-am in some Liverpool suburbs. But then, you could say that for Peckham or Brixton or Havana or Salisbury/Southern Rhodesia: or even Rhiyadh or Pyong-Yang – the latter two because the State will be after you as well as the sundry scallies.

But I don’t think we yet have here in The North the results of drug-turf-war-beheadings hanging from buildings the following morning as they do in, say, Mexico. Mexico is a bit nearer to the UN’s adopted home. Perhaps some of its dictatroids might like to address their evidently vast revenues towards that place first? Pot calls kettle black I think.

Oh well, I suppose people are allowed to be vain in a free society

David Davis

I spotted: L F06TER (a sort of jeep thing) … RI0 (can’t remember the car, fairly big but not that big) …X27 EMA … oh, and I almost forgot NA51YMA (It’s a silver Lexus) … (her hubby has a couple of Bangaldeshi takeaways near here.) I also see many K155 (…) which must be intra-partner gifts of some kind. Truly, the North West of England is a trainspotter’s paradise. Perhaps it’s something in the water.

Perhaps I begin to understand what gets up the noses of leftoNazis (which is to say: all lefties, pursuant to the Godwin stuff of the other day.)

I do wonder, and care about, how individuals would aspire to behave in a classical-liberal-minimal-statist civilisation. This is the closest to a truly libertarian one that that we practical guys can hope might be achieved, sometime soon before the Next Glaciation. I wonder if the neoplastic rate of sprouting of these sorts of things, is inversely proportional to the absolute amount of liberty available in the UK.

And lastly, why the **** does anyone think that others might want to know, on the road, who the **** you are? And that you are actually there, now?

Pam Norfolk Reviews Sword of Damascus

Sword of Damascus
by Richard Blake
Published by Hodder & Stoughton
Hardback Edition: June 2011
Paperback Edition: January 2012 432pp, £19.99
ISBN: 978-1444709667

Age has not entirely wearied Brother Aelric of Jarrow and the years have not yet condemned him to a sedate and sedentary lifestyle.

Illustrious Neighbour!

by Sean Gabb

I saw this, the other day, in Sandwich, just a few miles from where I live. What would he have thought of the ruling class England now has?

Gatwick Airport’s Cultural Revolution

by D.J. Webb

I read a story in the Daily Telegraph today that reminded me somewhat of my experience in Gatwick airport last year. A man who, incidentally happened to be the creator of the Fireman Sam children’s character, made a comment while going through security checks about a Muslim woman in a veil who had not been subject to the same level of checks that he had. His comment was not a racial attack, or a diatribe on the subject of immigration or multiculturalism, but the following: “if I was wearing this scarf over my face, I wonder what would happen.”

New Book by Madsen Pirie

Another Review of The Churchill Memorandum

by Mark

A very enjoyable read of an alternative history diverging in 1940 from ours. Centering around the Churchill biographist Dr Markham who is caught up in a plot for the future of the British Empire. The economic changes are the most fun: maglev trains in 1959 with roads in ruin, decentralized electricty, airships, heated pavements and famous economic and historc figures in new roles!

Do-It-Yourself Regulation

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=9776

In a recent post at the UK’s Libertarian Alliance Blog, Director Sean Gabb points out that “government charters, grants personhood to, mandates sales for, creates price floors for, regulates industries to eliminate competition for, allows former employees to regulate their own, responds to lobbying by, bails out, subsidizes, [and] is comprised of politicians whose campaigns are financed by … corporations.” Whew! So in light of this, “Corporations should be policed by … ?”

Richard Blake in The Morning Star

by Sean Gabb

The Morning Star has a long and honourable record of reviewing the novels of Richard Blake. SIG

By Matt Coward, The Morning Star, 16th October 2011

The Sword Of Damascus (Hodder, £19.99) is Richard Blake’s fourth book about Aelric, a 7th-century Briton whose natural cunning, charm and ruthlessness have led him from desperate beginnings to the highest councils of the dying Roman empire. Now extremely old, he’s hiding from his many enemies in a Jarrow monastery until a series of misadventures finds him in Damascus, caught in the struggle between the retreating empire and the rising might of Islam. But even old and half-blind, Aelric is no man’s pawn for very long. It would be hard to over-praise this extraordinary series, a near-perfect blend of historical detail and atmosphere with the plot of a conspiracy thriller, vivid characters, high philosophy and vulgar comedy.

Nazi Exceptionalism; or, How Godwin’s Law Gets It Backward

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=9757

Most participants in online debates are familiar with Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” The implicit corollary, of course, is that the first person to descend to such a comparison automatically forfeits the debate. Oddly enough, though, I don’t remember electing anyone named Godwin to legislate for me. And more importantly, that corollary is — or can be — quite stupid.

A Note on Corporations

Mr Kipling Does Write Exceedingly Good Poems

“A Servant when He Reigneth”

by Rudyard Kipling

…but a Servant when He Reigneth
Is Confusion to the end.

His feet are swift to tumult,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason,
His lips are loud in broil,
He knows no use for power,
Except to show his might,
He gives no heed to judgement,
Unless it prove him right.

Because he served a master,
Before his Kingship came,
And hid in all disaster
Behind his Master’s name,
So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary Hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on someone else.

His vows are lightly spoken,
His faith is hard to bind,
His trust is easy broken,
He fears his fellow-kind.
The nearest mob will move him
To break the pledge he gave –
Oh, a Servant when He Reigneth
Is more than ever slave!

Keith Preston on The New Totalitarianism

by Keith Preston

Note: I’m very impressed by the work of Keith Preston. I came up with the phrase “Enemy Class” to describe the enemies of bourgeois civilisation. Our Blogmaster uses a long circumlocution. Ian B has his preferred terminology. I suggest we should adopt the Prestonism of “totalitarian humanists.” We are all talking about more or less the same group of people.

Totalitarian humanists are people whose legitimising ideology is cultural leftism, and who are imposing this via a police state at home and military force abroad. They have merged with a much older corporate elite. They have massively enlarged the military and police arms of the State. Until about 30 years ago, they were denouncing these three forces. But they have now spread their ideology to their former enemies, and thereby cleansed them of evil. They seek absolute and unaccountable power, and the consequent destruction of ancient liberties and intermediary institutions, by insisting on the absolute goodness of their legitimising ideology and the absolute evil of the various “hates” they are combating. They control business and education and the media, and politics and law and administration, and every medical bureaucracy. They are embedded in every main religion except Islam. They are absolutely supreme in every transnational bureaucracy.

As an aside, I suggest that the European Union is evil not because it is run by Frenchmen and Germans, or whatever. Let’s be reasonable – rule from Paris or Berlin would not in itself be catastrophic. It isn’t evil because our own liberal institutions are being destroyed – these have already been destroyed. It is evil because it is another place from which the totalitarian humanists can exercise absolute and unaccountable power to reshape us as they desire.

A good British example of totalitarian humanism is the Stephen Lawrence circus. Two men faced 20 years of administrative and legal harassment and media vilification. They were finally brought to trial and convicted on the basis of what looks like fabricated evidence. One of them could only be tried after the very ancient protection against double jeopardy had been stripped out of the Common Law. Had this been done to Sinn Fein/IRA terrorists, there would – rightly – have been howls of outrage. In this case, the entire ruling class set up a squeal of delight. Nothing – certainly not due process or even common decency – can be allowed to stand in the way of crushing racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, or any other excuse for not joining in the Potemkin love feast of the totalitarian humanists.

Other examples are the persecution of Emma West, the persecution of Christian hoteliers who won’t rent out rooms to homosexuals, refusal to let devout Christians foster children, denial of NHS treatment to people who live other than as directed, the attempted use of sporting associations to
brainwash the white working classes. These really are all examples of the same war against bourgeois civilisation.

I could say more. But here is the essay. Read and consider its implications for our own strategy. [SIG]

The Leveson Inquiry and the suppression of evidence

by Robert Henderson

Note: The key quote here is that “the [Leveson] Inquiry is not intended to be more than PR exercise and, as with virtually any government instigated inquiry, any evidence which may seriously damage those with power, wealth or influence is to be suppressed. It is scandalous.” It may be that these things were manipulated with more finesse in the past. On the other hand, it may just be that the Internet now lets us see gross manipulations that would once have gone unreported by the media.

I’ve paid less attention to the Leveson Inquiry than I perhaps should have. Even so, it appears reasonable to suppose that its purpose is to soften us up for something approaching a formally licensed and censored media in this country, while making sure that no media person of any standing with the ruling class should suffer harm.

• There is no doubt that Piers Morgan admitted in 1997 to obtaining information from the Police in a manner that suggests impropriety.
• There is no doubt that he testified in 2011 that he had never paid for information from the Police.
• Surely, he should be asked to clarify in what circumstances he received information from the Police in 1997.

Robert Henderson’s trench battles with the British State are often hard to follow. But this possible discrepancy between what Mr Morgan has said on two occasions is easily grasped. [SIG]

Hatecrime du Jour!

A Communist Writes

by Emma Goldman (1940)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1940/individual.htm

The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship. Man’s greatest battles have been waged against man-made obstacles and artificial handicaps imposed upon him to paralyze his growth and development. Human thought has always been falsified by tradition and custom, and perverted false education in the interests of those who held power and enjoyed privileges. In other words, by the State and the ruling classes. This constant incessant conflict has been the history of mankind.