Afternoon music
On this day a year ago
Free speech in the UK
Extracts from the Daily Mail article:
“Once upon a time, in a halcyon era that now seems like a distant golden age, writing books was a creative endeavour; a job in which you let your imagination take flight.”
“Various points of view were allowed to flourish. Stories were peopled by both heroes and villains. The offensive, the reprehensible, even the downright evil, coexisted with the noble and good.”
“Fiction was as multi-faceted as the world we live in, and writing was a realm of free expression in which authors had licence to provoke thought, illuminate discussion, even — dare I say it — voice unfashionable opinions without fear of being pilloried and ‘cancelled’.”
“Our freedom to think expansively and creatively, even to express our own views, is being undermined as surely as it would be in a totalitarian state. Books are literally being pulped if their authors refuse to toe the line. It is as if the Communist Red Guard has taken over.”
“And some of us, myself among them, who have challenged the prevailing orthodoxy on anything from transgender issues to race have been summarily dropped by our publishers.”
“My successful career as an author — one of a team writing animal fantasy novels for children between eight and 12 under the name Erin Hunter — was obliterated overnight.”
“I now work as an HGV driver, a job I find more congenial — actually more intellectually liberating —because my workmates do not mind what opinions I have and are happy to discuss them with me.“
“They are also much less misogynistic than I have found the publishing industry to be.”
“It is ironic, too, that the cadre of self-appointed censors in the book world, who feel it is their role to defend every minority group from the tiniest slight, is largely white, privileged and middle class.”
[Gillian Philip, in the Daily Mail].
There are two main drivers of this slide into censorship, “cancelling” etc in the UK and elsewhere. The first is the Jew-Zionist, and pro-Israel, lobby, the second is the so-called “woke”, self-describing “antifascist” —but actually anti-European-people— element (“anti-white” if you like), as in the case of the hateful Indian academic at Cambridge University, Priyamvada Gopal.
A few cartoons in point:
A few experiences I myself have had over the past decade, most recently in 2021, targeted by a small cabal of Jew-Zionists calling themselves the “Campaign Against Antisemitism”, and who have wormed their way into a degree of influence with UK police, and also professional regulatory bodies: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2017/07/09/the-slide-of-the-english-bar-and-uk-society-continues-and-accelerates/; https://ianrobertmillard.org/2017/07/13/when-i-was-a-victim-of-a-malicious-zionist-complaint/; https://ianrobertmillard.org/2022/01/15/diary-blog-15-january-2022-including-an-outline-of-the-failure-of-the-latest-jew-zionist-attempt-to-prosecute-me/.
My position: that there should be absolute freedom of expression on social, political, historical and other subjects, meaning particularly, freedom from prosecution. The Court of Appeal in the UK has said more than once that there is “a danger” of a “chilling effect” on free speech, yet the slide continues. Indeed, the present government of sinister clowns is about to make most online speech even more constrained (both directly and indirectly); as for the joke “Opposition” headed by Jewish-lobby puppet Keir Starmer, all it says is “me too, but make the penalties even greater!” Starmer is a waste of space.
Meanwhile, the police of the UK, scarcely able to do their proper job, have eagerly embraced the idea that they should be a “poundland KGB”.
As a matter of fact, an editor at a leading Manhattan literary agency wrote to me, when I was in the USA, 30 years ago, that my unpublished book of 1990 was “without doubt the most extraordinary book I have ever read“, but added that “it will never be published in New York” [implied, though unwritten, “by reason of the Jewish influence in American publishing“].
Ukraine
While I hate the harm done to both civilians and their companion animals by the Russian invasion, it is noteworthy that the same newspapers and TV stations so biased and condemnatory about it all often scarcely covered the far worse harm (in statistical terms) done by NATO (NWO) forces to civilians during their campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. Millions killed. Not only outside Europe, incidentally. Look at the bombing of Belgrade and elsewhere in Serbia, in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia.
The Ukraine invasion has become a horrible bloody mess, but Russia now has no choice but to wade through to the end.
There is now a kind of crazy hysteria across Western Europe, North America etc, whipped up by the msm and what might be called “NWO/ZOG”, that it is some kind of sacred duty upon Western Europe etc to supply the Jewish regime in Kiev with advanced weapons, with money, even with fighter planes. People should be asking from where this comes, and what is its real purpose.
When you look at other recent conflicts (Syria, for example) we did not see anything like this, certainly not to the same extent. However, now that the Kiev regime is involved, complete madness has ensued in the West. The real or underlying reason seems to be a desire to undermine Russia strategically.
If NATO supports the use of donated MiG or other fighter planes by the Kiev regime, planes now based in Poland or elsewhere, that does come close to direct involvement in what amounts to a war against Russian forces.
If planes use Polish airfields in attacks on Russian forces in Ukraine or elsewhere, Russia is sure to take that as Polish involvement in the “war”. Forget the small print. The same would be true were such planes to be unable to land in Ukraine after use, and then land in Poland or elsewhere.
This situation is quite likely to lead to a widening of the conflict, which might then engulf the surrounding countries, almost all of which now belong to NATO. If that happens, then a full European war will be quite likely, and that might morph into a US-Russia nuclear exchange.
In terms of blame, yes… Russia invaded Ukraine, but the causation goes back 25 years, and in those 25 years NATO has expanded, and pushed the boundaries in every way. To blame Russia or Putin for everything that is now happening is facile, even if understandable. The public only sees the TV news headlines, and understands little of the subtleties.
If I had a few millions, or more, I should be relocating now to somewhere like New Zealand or South America.
More music
If I am not mistaken, that last film above shows Krakov, as it was in 1935. I was there in both 1988 and 1989.
Late tweets
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad“…
“Propaganda, propaganda, all is propaganda...”
They should have shot the driver.
Can you imagine? A stupid, ignorant bimbo like that is probably getting a couple of hundred thousand a year from Sky News, and she doesn’t know jack ****.
Incredible, but that is where we are now, in the UK.
Late news
Ian Robert Millard 
Hello Ian: This is very interesting. If we are lucky and we are not blown to bits, things are going to change dramatically:
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-banks-are-rushing-switch-over-chinese-card-system-2022-3
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Claudius:
If we are *un*lucky, though, we who survive go back to a primitive barter system
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