Category Archives: historical

Special Blog Post, To Honour Professor Robert Faurisson [1929-2018]

A (arguably the) pre-eminent revisionist historian, and a man of great integrity, Robert Faurisson has died at the age of 89. Predictably, the usual tasteless jackals took the opportunity to gloat and laugh on the Twitter echo-chamber and elsewhere. (((They))) give themselves and their character away so easily. Ignore them.

The work of this courageous fighter for truth will now be disseminated to ever-wider readerships. I start that here and now by posting the English-language edition of his unpublished book about the “holocaust” controversy etc.

https://www.historiography-project.com/books/faurisson-on-the-holocaust/index.php

Notes

Faurisson’s Wikipedia entry (obviously, Wikipedia is tainted on certain topics by having been infiltrated by Jewish Zionists, but the more basic biographical facts are usually correct):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Faurisson

Biographical details from a more sympathetic source:

http://www.revisionists.com/revisionists/faurisson.html

Comment by the Jewish anti-Zionist Gilad Atzmon:

https://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2018/10/23/robert-faurisson-and-the-study-of-the-past

Books and other writings by and about Faurisson can be readily found on Amazon etc.

The Imperial Vacuum in the Middle East and Near East, and Its Consequences

Initial Thoughts

I have been reading about what appears to have been the appalling and unusually cruel murder of a dissident Saudi journalist, supposedly cut up while still alive by some kind of Saudi Arabian “security” team in the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul.

This news item made me once again muse on the unsatisfactory position in the “Levant”, the Middle East and also what was once called the Near East.

The region is not one that I know well personally. I have been to Qatar twice on short visits, once in 2001 (when Doha was a rather pleasant and rather sleepy place) and again in 2008 (by which time it had become a horrible, dystopian and skyscraping sprawl). I spent less than a week in the Luxor Hilton in 1994, and another three months in Egypt in 1998 (Aswan, the Red Sea, Alexandria and the oasis of Siwa). I have also spent about 4 months in Turkey and Turkish North Cyprus.

The Gulf

What many younger people fail to realize is just how recent (in present form) are the phenomena we know as Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Qatar etc. Take Abu Dhabi: when I was at school in England, aged 14, in 1970, there were a couple of rather unpleasant boys whose father was chief of police in Abu Dhabi, which was at the time a dusty desert enclave just beginning to profit from its huge hydrocarbon wealth. The British still supplied the senior military, police and other officials in Abu Dhabi at that time. Abu Dhabi, which had been known (right up to the Second World War) only for its pearls and for the slave trade, first struck oil in 1958 (or rather BP, as concession-holder, did). That first strike was followed by others, in 1959, 1962 and 1965.

The growth of Abu Dhabi in terms of population can be judged by the following progression: in 1960, the entire resident population of the city itself was 25,000. That grew to 50,000 by 1965 (though falling back to 46,400 by 1969). By 1995, the population was 398,695, and by 2014 was apparently 1,205,963, an increase of 31% even on the previous year! The latest estimate for the (entire) Abu Dhabi population (2018) is nearly 3 million! Abu Dhabi city (which contains about two-thirds of the entire population) was planned in 1967 for 40,000 inhabitants, which was changed in the 1970s (i.e. less than a decade later!) to a projection of 600,000. The present (2018) population of the city is said to number about 2 million. About 90% of the population of the emirate is foreign.

Qatar, likewise, is a very recent phenomenon in its recent form. Oil was discovered only in 1940, after which successive oil and gas finds in later decades transformed the small enclave once populated by a few thousand fishermen and pearl divers. The population of the entire sultanate in 1970 was 108,000, whereas in 2018 it is between 2.5 million and 3 million. As with Abu Dhabi and other Gulf Arab “states”, something like 90% of the population is foreign and that 90% does almost all of the work (from banking to street-sweeping), and has few rights.

I was once told, around 1977, by a construction person who spent his time in the Gulf, that he was engaged on constructing a new airport (I forget exactly where) there. He told me that the growth in the region (even then) had been phenomenal. I asked him where he thought that the Gulf Arabs would be by some date in the future (probably 2000, but I have in fact forgotten which year I specified) and he answered, cynically, “back riding their camels”! Well, he was wrong (if 2000 was the year), but I wonder whether he will be so wrong when looked back at from, say, 2050 or even 2030.

The Gulf “states” or statelets have no resilience: 90% of their population consists of expats, many of whom are from poor parts of Asia. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait showed that, for all their expensive Western military toys, the Gulf rulers and their forces are men of straw.

Some Gulf states are running out of hydrocarbons, others have understood that the demand for oil may have peaked with the development of other energy sources, and so have begun to diversify economically. However, in the end, the future for these socially-backward societies with their “ready-to-wear” (bought) Western toys and expertise may be not so good.

The Main Part of the Middle East

We have seen that, from the time of open proclamation of the New World Order [NWO] immediately after 1989, the NWO has destabilized the Middle East and North Africa. Israel is of course pivotal. The destabilization has, overall, helped Israel. Its major opponents militarily (Syria, Iraq) have been cast into chaos, Iran has been embroiled in conflict in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, Egypt has been further suborned and placed under NWO-controlled dictatorship, while even Libya (peripheral, but wealthy and always anti-Israel) has been broken up internally. There are now no regional armies able to pose an immediate threat to Israel, the “Zionist entity”.

Turkey

Turkey was, for much of the past century, a relatively static and relatively neutral player on the geopolitical stage. That was the genius of Ataturk, to make Turkey militarily-strong without (usually, much) using that power externally. Now, Turkey risks being drawn into the sphere of destabilization.

The Big Picture

The combined region of the Middle East and Near East has always been the stage for empires, among them the Alexandrine Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantine Romans, the Ottomans, the British; the French too (from Napoleon’s day until 1945). There were attempts by others to exercise imperial power: the Russians under both Tsarism and Sovietism; also, briefly, Iran under the Shah in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, beyond the strictly regional squabbling players, there are attempts at larger-scale control: Russia, the USA (i.e. the NWO), as well as, on a more limited level of power than the first two (and also than under the Shah), Iran again.

It is clear that the only solution to the problems of the regions, particularly of the core Middle East, likely to last long, will be the imposition of a supervening imperium which can subordinate all existing states to its control. That means that the Arab states and Israel would be ruled by this quasi-imperial power. It is equally clear that such an imperium does not exist. The Americans have huge destructive resources, but lack the imperial will and desire which would enable them to succeed the British, the Ottomans, Byzantium, Rome etc. That is also true of the Russians, who also can be described as largely “defensive” (wishing to defend their Southern flank as much as anything). The Iranians have not the power to make a substantial difference in this arena.

The conclusion is, to me, obvious: the future of the region is not another imperial or quasi-imperial chapter, but large-scale destruction only.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi

http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/abu-dhabi-population/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar

 

How We Can Be Ready To Rebuild European Culture and Civilization

The former BNP leader, Nick Griffin, has of late been making the point that ordinary political action is a waste of time for social nationalists anywhere in Western Europe, because the “blacks and browns” etc are too numerous, thus making electoral success unlikely. That is certainly the case, at least superficially, in the UK. The non-white population of the UK is now over 10%, though concentrated in the cities, some of the cities, some neighbourhoods of those cities. In a few towns and cities, the non-white population is in excess of 50% of the population as a whole. It can probably be said that, once the non-white population exceeds –arguably– 20% of the UK population as a whole, the possibility of peaceful transition to social nationalism has disappeared, and the possibility of triumph through the ballot-box has disappeared.

Nick Griffin’s solution to the above problem seems to be, if I have not misunderstood his position, that white Northern Europeans (and also East and Central Europeans etc) should have more children! Griffin places the family in the forefront.

I have no quarrel with what I take to be Griffin’s position, except that it is too simplistic. The migration-invasion is gathering pace, and by that I mean not only the rusty tankers and open boats crossing the Mediterranean, but also the “lawful” immigration taking place in various ways. Huge numbers of non-Europeans are now being born across Europe. The European population, as matters stand, is unable to keep up with the pace of invasion and occupation. In addition, the simple biological-demographical imperative, though crucial, does not stand alone.

Merely having a white population is insufficient. I agree in principle with the dictum “race is the root, culture is the flower”: having a white Northern European population is the sine qua non; but at the same time , having that population is the starting point, not the end-point. We must have an advanced society too. That does not occur automatically and pre-supposes, in our present age, political power in the hands of only white Northern Europeans. Thus we come full circle.

It was in facing, intellectually, the above-delineated dilemma, that I understood that the main answer in the short term and medium term is for the social national element to cluster in “safe zones”. It is already happening in Germany. In the safe zone (though nowhere is completely safe under the NWO/ZOG dystopian police state), forces can be gathered.

Europe is approaching a crisis-point. By 2022, that point will have been reached. Depending on events, the population of the continent after 2022 may be only a small fraction of what it now is. Remember that 60% of Europe’s present population (and that means about 70% or more of its truly European population) is descended from, it has been revealed, only one so-called “Bronze Age king”! (see Notes below). It may well be that, perhaps as long ago as 5,000 years before today, though perhaps as recently as 2,500 years before the present day, a mere handful of people created families, then clans, tribes, nations and finally national states in Europe.

Rudolf Steiner, toward the end of his life [d. 1925] predicted, in answers to questioners, that in the 21st Century, Europe would be devastated. One lady asked whether she might be reincarnated with him in the Europe of that time. His answer was “only if you are willing to walk with me across Europe, across broken glass.”

Those who imagine that the answer to the present difficulties of the UK and Europe generally lies in forming a political party and then somehow achieving political power in the “acceptable” way, are very mistaken. A political movement must form, yes, and “all roads lead to Rome”, but in the end we may face the necessity of establishing a new Europe out of chaos. In such a scenario, we should be faced also with iron necessities. Beyond the harshness, though, lies a new land and a new society based on the latter-day or post-Aryan, or European. In that realm, only the blood counts. The couples who produce European children now are contributing to the founding of a new and, in time, better civilization.

Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/04/25/half-of-british-men-descended-from-one-bronze-age-king/

https://www.kn-online.de/Nachrichten/Hamburg/Voelkische-Siedler-Die-Bio-Nazis-von-nebenan

CFfvYYCXIAAkryu

Update, 3 December 2023

Well, 2022 and now 2023 have come and almost gone, and no major war has as yet affected the western and central parts of Europe, though parts of eastern Europe are now at war. What will 2024 and 2025 bring?

See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/01/26/the-tide-is-coming-in-reflections-on-the-possible-end-of-our-present-civilization-and-what-might-follow/.

There Should Have Been An Honourable Peace in 1939 or 1940

The Background

September the 9th, 2018. 79 years and 8 days since the famous German attack on the Polish radio station at then Gleiwitz; 79 years and 6 days since Britain (and so the entire British Empire) and France declared war on Germany; about 78 and a bit years since the German defeat of France, since the British retreat from Dunkirk; 78 years since the air Battle of Britain.

What weakens the usual System-history narrative about the history of those times is the a priori assumption or, if you like, a Grundnorm [basic underlying concept or belief, often unquestioned or deliberately made impossible to question], that the declaration of war by Britain and France was unquestionably both “the right thing to do” and unavoidable.

The typical, conventional System view, as displayed above, is of course grounded on an even deeper-held belief or Grundnorm, that is that the German government of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP was so evil that it had to be destroyed. That view (at the time and really until the 1970s at least –talking about British attitudes–) was based on the opinion that Germany was again trying, for the second or third time in memory, and as a continental power, to take over mainland Europe. More recently, the more Jewish-influenced attitude has held sway, because of the Jewish control or veto over the worlds of publishing, academia, politics, msm etc in the West: that Germany had to be confronted and defeated because of its policy re. Jews.

The whole “Germany had to be defeated because of the ‘holocaust'” nonsense is of quite recent date. Not often (i.e. never) mentioned to the brainwashed masses or to their equally brainwashed offspring in British schools, is the fact that not one of the world leaders or the most important military leaders (e.g. Churchill) made any mention of “extermination programmes” or “gas chambers” in their spoken remarks or post-war written memoirs. The Jewish-Zionist element has taken control of the historical narrative and completely twisted it. That is why “they” hate any historical revisionism. They present a weight of mutually-quoting fakery as if it were a weight of evidence. In any case, even the Zionist propagandists do not claim any German “extermination plan” or programme for the Jews  until 1941.

Returning to war and peace in 1939-40, we see that the big picture shows a world far more than today split between European empires. The British Empire ruled between a quarter and a third of the world. Most of the rest (leaving aside the Soviet Union, the USA and China) was ruled by other Europeans: empires of the French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Belgians. The depredations of the early imperial days had begun to give way to the idea of stewardship. The native peoples were beginning to be looked after, the wildlife the same. All that (which became so positive in the 1950s) was ruined by the Second World War and its aftermath. Decolonization, globalist finance-capitalism etc have been disastrous for the peoples and environment of Africa, South America, Asia.

In Europe too, we see how disastrous was the decision to go to war in 1939. Immense destruction, huge loss of life (some estimates say 80 million), cruelties, hardship etc. Also massive economic dislocation.

We often hear half-baked nonsense about how “the war” stimulated inventions and technological progress. Most of this is either not true or is at best half-true. In both Europe and USA, huge strides were being made in the 1930s. What the war did was to change priorities: planes built for speed rather than comfort, housing built on a utilitarian rather than an aesthetic basis etc.

In the UK, much nonsense is talked about the Welfare State in this regard. In fact, social housing (which had existed in limited forms for centuries) was being created on quite a large scale in the UK of the 1930s, particularly in and around London. As for the NHS etc, that was already being prepared in studies etc, though the war may have concentrated minds and so on.

The Phoney War

The Phoney War, also called the Bore War and (in Germany) Sitzkrieg, lasted from September 1939 to April 1940. At that point, few people, even in the armed services of either side (meaning UK/Germany) had been killed. Any bitterness or venom (mainly on the British side and stirred up by relentless propaganda) was small compared to what existed later. There could, after Dunkirk, have been an honourable peace, an armistice. Germany could then have turned its full attention to destroying Stalin’s regime the following year. The Russian people would eventually have come to a concordat with the German Reich. Only the Jewish commissars etc would ultimately have lost out.

Conclusion

Britain lost out hugely by going along with Churchill’s ridiculous adventurism. Terrible loss and turmoil during the years of war, 10 years of “austerity” after the war ended. The perceived “need” (in fact a conspiracy) to import blacks and browns in the 1950s and thereafter in order to make up for those killed and injured in that wholly unnecessary war. Slow poisoning of the folk.

Britain and France declared war on Germany, ostensibly, to protect the independence of Poland. It never happened. Poland was split between the German Reich and the Soviet Union at first, later taken entirely by the Reich, then later still taken entirely by the Soviet Union. Instead of one or two weeks of war, Poland was strafed by 6 years of it. Only since 1989 has Poland regained anything like full political sovereignty. When I myself visited Poland on several occasions in the late 1980s, one still met older Poles who might mention those worthless guarantees of 1939.

Had an honourable peace been found in 1939 or 1940, the British Empire would have wound down more gradually, as would the other European empires. There would not have been so much war and misery across the world, the American cultural death-impulse would not have been so powerful and destructive; also, the environment would not have suffered anything like as badly. Above all, Europe would be fully European and have a fully-European future.

Where Are The Limits Of Religious Freedom?

One of the pillars of a future “Threefold Social Order” society will be religious freedom. Such freedom is also said to be a pillar of our existing “Western” model of society.

“We” supposedly all agree with that ideal, meaning of course “we” white Northern Europeans. Of course, once one gets away from Northern Europe and its wider offshoots in North America, Australasia etc, that consensus ends. In the Middle East, much of Africa, South Asia etc, freedom of religion either does not exist, or exists only as a fragile plant.

In Europe, we see that the migration-invasion, and the societal takeover via a high birth rate of, in particular, Muslims, is threatening our fond belief that we have and always will have religious freedom. The pendulum is swinging. Whereas in the Middle Ages, Roman Catholic Christians repressed other religious communities and launched crusades to conquer Muslim lands (a simplification, of course, but let’s leave that aside), today the Muslims are invading Europe, not as armies (as happened several times in the past) but as migrant-invaders (immigrants, “refugees”, “asylum-seekers”, and as babies born in Europe…). If this continues unabated, we can expect to see more attempts to shut down religious freedom for non-Muslims, as shown in this cartoon:

CX9ZsZOWEAAky2e

This process can be seen in the UK. There have in fact been Muslims in the UK for a long time, at least in small numbers. An Islamic centre and cemetery was established on the edge of Woking, Surrey, in the 19thC (it can be seen just before trains enter Woking Station, on the Southern or lefthand side as the train travels from London). However, the political or societal strength has grown in more recent years, along with the numbers.

In the 1970s, the Muslim element rarely displayed itself politically. I myself recall that posters on the Underground in 1976 or 1977, advertizing the Libyan-funded film “Mohammed, Messenger of God” were often defaced, always with the same words: “Islam forbids representations”. That vandalism, along with “community” representation to the UK authorities and the film distributors, resulted in the film being renamed “The Message”.

Now, 40 or so years later, times have moved on. Despite the Muslim population of the UK only being between 5% and 6% (officially), there has been a gradual infiltration (I do not say that it has been particularly organized) into mainstream political parties, in areas where Muslim numbers are significant: parts of the North of England, the Midlands, smaller areas within London and elsewhere. The influence of Sharia law and courts has grown; the Church of England has shown itself craven (as indeed it is when confronted by the aggressive Jewish-Zionist element). In some cases, Christians wishing to display their faith, e.g. by wearing crosses etc, have been given the choice of not doing so or being dismissed.

I repeat, officially the Muslim population of the UK stands at little more than 5% (about 5.1%) so far, but a high birth rate may propel that to 10% in the short term and later to…who knows? What will then be its influence and power?

As to the Jews, in numbers they are small, somewhere between 250,000 to 280,000, though there are also very large numbers of part-Jews, many of whom have little or no day to day connection with Jewish religious practices. Their influence and power comes not from crude numbers, but from concentration in and control of key strategic areas: finance, law, politics, mainstream media and, now, large Internet organizations.

Christians and Muslims accept persons of any race into their communities, at least in principle. Both Christians and Muslims have traditionally accepted it as an article of faith that persons of other religions should be “converted”, whereas Jews do not seek converts (though some modern branches do accept small numbers, e.g. after marriage to Jews). Judaism, therefore, has never launched “crusades” or the like. The Jews do not aim to make the world Jewish, only to be the major influencing, controlling and profiting element in or over the world.

The modern Christian world of the post-Enlightenment has, in principle, accepted that people can be Christian, Muslim or Jew (or whatever else) freely. That is easy enough when it comes to beliefs, ideas, even public worship in particular buildings, though (as mentioned above) it took Europe a long time even to accept those aspects. Much of the world does not go that far.

Where things become more difficult is when the religious practice of a community contravenes the law or morality of the society as a whole. Halal slaughter, kosher slaughter, which revolt the sensibilities of thinking non-Muslims and non-Jews. Male and female genital mutilation by Muslims and Jews. The cries (now electrically amplified) of the muezzin from the minaret of the mosque. These are cases where, in my view, the demands of the society to prevent cruelty, the wish of Europeans not to hear constant mosque noise in their neighbourhood must prevail over the practices of both the Jews and the Muslims.

To take an extreme case: there were societies in the past, Aztecs, Incas, even Europeans of ancient Europe, who engaged in ritual sacrifice of humans. Would we accept such practices today just because “it is part of their religion”? I think not.

There have been problems in the recent past in relation to other religions: the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with their unwillingness to save the lives of their children via blood transfusion; the mental and sometimes physical cruelty to children of some small “Christian” sects such as the Plymouth Brethren; the contrived scam that is Scientology (the British government of the 1960s fought a long battle to suppress Scientology, because of its perceived cultic and controlling behaviour). There could be other examples given.

It might be said that even mainstream Christian religions have done very evil things, e.g. the sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, though those involved acts not sanctioned or encouraged by the religion as such.

In the end, society, meaning the political element, must draw the line between the zone where religion holds sway and the zone where group or community religious practice must give way before the general secular law which should protect people and animals.

Their Last Throw of the Dice

The Jewish lobby (aka Israel lobby, Zionist lobby etc) have been pulling out all the stops to trash Corbyn, to make him resign or to surround him by Labour MPs, officials, NEC members, “advisers” etc who can restrain him, control him and maybe depose him.

The lobby has been gunning for Corbyn since he was first elected as Labour leader. I have previously blogged about that in some detail. “They” failed to prevent Corbyn’s election, then failed again (to prevent his re-election). In between, the lobby has applied maximum pressure on Corbyn himself, in order to try to force a resignation. They have also tried to remove key Corbyn supporters. The latest attempt to topple him even had the head of Labour group Momentum [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_(organisation)], Jon Lansman [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lansman], a Jew, reduce support for Corbyn in the key area of supposed “anti-Semitism”. Momentum itself is actually controlled by a private company ultimately controlled by Lansman:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5002774/How-ex-public-schoolboy-Jon-Lansman-hijacking-Labour.html.

In addition, John McDonnell MP, ambiguous if not favourable to Jews, and an ambitious man who (for the first time) is within sight of a ministerial and possibly prime ministerial role, has been prevailed upon to pressure Corbyn in person. He is, arguably, Corbyn’s closest ally in the House of Commons.

The most recent manufactured storm around Corbyn and Labour has been set in motion after Labour refused to adopt the so-called “international definition of anti-Semitism” promoted by a Zionist body called the “IHRA” (which tries to ban all critical examination of the “holocaust” narrative and fakery thereof). In fact, though 30-40 (ZOG-occupied) states have adopted the definition, 155-165 have not (there is dispute about the numbers).

The storm now raging as I write has been a revelation even to me, as I realized anew how deeply the Zionists have burrowed into the structure of the UK, especially in the fields of politics, law and the mass media. Not every journalist-scribbler, editor, msm CEO, lawyer, TV/radio talking head etc is a Jew; it just seems very like it…

At time of writing, it seems that Corbyn is going to tough it out, seem to give in in part, while actually withdrawing from the fray so that the Jew-Zionists have nothing against which to press. Corbyn must have studied Sun-Tzu!

This is surely the last throw of the dice for the Jewish Zionist lobby trying to unseat Corbyn. The assault this time has been frenzied. The reason is clear: Labour recently was ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, though it is at time of writing in second place again by reason of the contrived msm storm. Labour has every chance of at least forming a minority government after the next general election. If that happens, Corbyn will be Prime Minister and the Zionists (for the first time since at least 1989) will not control or very strongly influence the British Government politically. This is their last throw.

Notes etc

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/881317/momentum-leader-jon-lansman-jeremy-corbyn-money-investment-firm-property-market-mcdonalds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War

Update, 13 October 2021

Looking back at this post after three years, I see that my basic analysis was correct, even though I was wrong in predicting that a 2018 or 2019 general election would result in a minority Labour government. That would have happened had a few connected events not intervened.

Brexit Party was formed, gained huge support initially, could have stormed to power had a destined leader been its leader, but failed because it did not become social-national and simply stayed as quasi-Conservative. Its leader, snake-oil salesman Farage, then stabbed Brexit Party in the back in 2019 by standing down most candidates, thus almost guaranteeing a Conservative Party win. The rest is history.

As for Labour, of course Corbyn was deposed by what amounts to a Jewish lobby operation, probably assisted by Israeli organs of intelligence and security. The new-ish Keir Starmer Labour Party is suffused with pro-Israel MPs; Starmer himself is married to a Jewish woman, and their children are being brought up as if fully-Jewish.

What Do People Need?

On rereading Andrei Amalrik’s Involuntary Journey To Siberia of 1970, all sorts of impressions were received, most not at all new: the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union, the Kafka-esque Soviet legal system, the primitive life lived by Russian kolkozhniki (collective farm inhabitants) in Siberia etc.

However, at the end of the book, the author’s sentence for being a “social parasite” (5 years internal exile –2.5 years of which to be hard labour on a collective farm or elsewhere–) is quashed on appeal, Amalrik returns to Moscow with the wife whom he in fact married in Moscow and during his exile (because he was allowed compassionate leave from the collective farm or kolkhoz to visit his unwell father). He applies to the housing people in his district and, after some difficulty when he has to share with others, is given a flat with a decent bathroom and telephone.

Now, we are often told and quite rightly that Soviet people generally lived poorly, had to share, in many cases, their accommodation by living in communal flats or kommunalki (usually large flats expropriated from affluent persons during and after the Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Civil War, though in fact some such shared apartments pre-dated Bolshevism), sharing kitchens and bathrooms etc and given, at best,one room per person (it was usually worked out, in theory, at so many square metres per person or family).

All of the above is true, but when one looks at the situation in 2018 Britain, many are not much better off, and some are worse off. Would a prisoner released from incarceration in the UK be given a flat, even a small one? The most he could expect would be B&B accommodation of a markedly poor sort, and to be put on a local authority waiting list, probably behind a horde of “refugees”, “asylum-seekers” and other riff-raff.

In fact, look at how many British people with full-time jobs live! Many in shared houses and flats, or in bedsit rooms. No better off than Soviet citizens! How many “hardworking” (the label of the past few years) people are living in not very nice shared accommodation in the UK, living off pot noodles and the like?

To go off at a tangent, this “hardworking” thing has become a joke: for example, school students all deserve (increasingly meaningless) “A” “grades” in exams because “they have all worked so hard”. Doesn’t matter if they are thick as two short planks and know only force-fed “facts” (often incorrect, as in the case of “holocaust” “history” etc). They are “hardworking” and so are the “deserving” academic poor. They therefore “deserve” to attend a “uni” where they will also “work hard” to “achieve” an almost meaningless “degree” (an equally-meaningless “First”, in half the cases) before –for many–getting a minimum wage (or not much better) job…

The above thoughts should impel us to think about what people need in a basic way, about what should, arguably, be the State-provided or guaranteed minimum.

Ideally, everyone should live in a decent house or flat, free of worries, with pleasant neighbours if any, while doing work which benefits society. That of course is a counsel of perfection, but that fact should not stop us from aiming at a higher and better form of living for all citizens.

For me, everyone should at least have a home, preferably one where there is reasonable space, reasonable peace, reasonable access to green gardens or wider Nature. Living space should be regarded as a human right, not as a way for buy to let parasites to make profits from the need of others. Everyone should have access to telephone and Internet. Everyone should have access to cheap or free public transport, at least in the local area and arguably within a 20-mile radius of home. Everyone should have (up to a determined cap) free water, electricity, heating. Beyond that, everyone should also have a “basic income”, even if only (in today’s money) £20 a week.

We can move to a society where the basics are provided. When people have the basics, they can work to get more, or to improve aspects of society in other ways.

Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Amalrik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Involuntary-Journey-Siberia-Andrei-Amalrik/dp/0156453932#customerReviews

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&text=Andrei+Amalrik&search-alias=books-uk&field-author=Andrei+Amalrik&sort=relevancerank

 

 

The 20th of July

I cannot let the 20th of July pass by without a few words. On 20 July 1944, discontented officers tried to kill Adolf Hitler. Transposed (arguably pointlessly) to a British context, that would be equivalent to discontented British officers trying to kill Winston Churchill and the King (Hitler being both head of government and head of state). In fact, it is at least arguable that both the UK and mainland Europe would have been better had that happened (in 1940, when Germany offered honourable armistice between the Reich and the British Empire but was refused by Churchill and his circle). There would then have been no devastation throughout Europe, certainly in Western Europe, no carpet bombing of German and other cities (eg some French ones, largely destroyed by Allied bombing and shelling: Brest, Le Havre etc).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10877137/D-Day-French-torn-over-criminal-British-and-American-D-Day-bombings-of-Caen.html

Above all, Stalinism might well have been destroyed or at least contained. Sovietism would not have been allowed to invade the East and Centre of Europe.

Do not imagine that there were no British senior officers who despised and hated Churchill. Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and (from 1944) Field Marshal makes his distaste for Churchill’s charlatanry clear in his diary.  However, officers such as he were imbued with automatic-reflex loyalty to, not the head of government, but the King as head of state. They probably never thought of mutiny, still less assassination.

On the German side, most of the senior officers plotting against Hitler were content to do his bidding while the German forces were in the ascendant; when Germany started to fail, though, they thought in terms of surrendering on the Western Front, at the same time as holding on on the Eastern Front, thus saving Germany and much of the rest of Europe from what actually later happened, the savagery and barbarism of the Red Army engaged in wholesale murder, rape and looting, followed by the icy grip of Soviet socialism.

Those “disloyal” senior officers of the Wehrmacht (and some others, such as Canaris) were not motivated solely or even mainly by self-interest or their class-interest as aristocrats (not all were aristocrats; among the middle-class ones were Rommel and Canaris), but by a concern for what they conceived to be the ultimate focus of their loyalties– the future of the German state and German people, as well as, beyond that, European culture and civilization generally, threatened by Sovietism which, at that time, was Stalinism.

History is not black and white. National Socialism was a very fine movement overall, but not without flaw. The General Staff and other plotters likewise cannot simply be written off as “traitors” even though, from one point of view, they were. Their point of view, i.e. that Germany was losing the war on at least two fronts, was accurate to that extent. Where they went wrong was in assuming that the USA and UK (and their dependent entities, as well as hangers-on such as de Gaulle) would in fact conclude a separate peace, separate from the Soviet Union. That was pie-in-the-sky thinking. The Allies had already proclaimed, at Casablanca, that only “unconditional surrender” would be acceptable,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_Conference

so the plotters would have had to throw themselves entirely on the mercies of the Western Allies and Stalin, were they to have eliminated Hitler. Even so, it is arguable that that might have been a better result for Germany and the rest of Europe than what actually transpired in 1945. However, that is to look with the benefit of what is now known. At the time, things must have looked very different, especially in Germany itself.

Hitler might have won out, even at the last moment, in terms of the conventional battlefield. The new jet fighters might have turned the tide, had they existed in sufficient numbers; new tanks were outclassing Soviet and Western models; above all, the East-West tension that blew up as soon as Germany was defeated in 1945 might have, in that final year, spelled the end of the alliance between the West and the Soviet Union and given Germany what is now called wriggle-room.

Having said all that, Germany would have been devastated to an even greater extent had it continued to fight after, at latest, the Summer of 1945. The Jewish scientists who created the atom bomb did so on the basis that it would be used against Germany, not, primarily, Japan. Had Germany started to defeat the Western Allies and Soviet forces on the ground and in the air in mid-1945, Berlin and other cities would have been attacked by atom bombs and destroyed; admittedly, in the case of Berlin, Hamburg etc, let alone Dresden, the difference might have been only academic:

Dresden1945

[Dresden after the UK/US bombing, 1945]

The key point is that Germany was not making atomic weapons and had no means with which to do so. It had been checkmated.

So there we have it. I cannot approve (and my approval is irrelevant either way) the actions of the backstabbers of 20 July 1944: Meine Ehre heisst Treue, but the plotters of that time were not all-“good” or all-“bad” in motive or action. As Wolfram von Eschenbach says in the introductory part of Parzival, “blame and praise alike befall when a dauntless man’s spirit is black and white mixed, like the magpie’s plumage”…

History has its own judgment. As Schiller observed, die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht [“the history of the world is the judgment of the world”].

We honour the past but advance to the future.

Adolf-Hitler-1889-1945-German-statesman

 

Call No Man Happy Until He is Dead

It is generally believed that the saying “call no man happy until he is dead”, attributed to Herodotus [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus], was originally uttered by Solon [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon]. Perhaps. Many believe that the saying dates back only to the 19th Century. At any rate, the saying has stood the test of time. The basis of it certainly has.

How often have we seen the spectacle of the “famous”, the wealthy, the “happy” or those we perhaps imagine should be happy, brought crashing down, often to obscurity as well as ruination? It was ruminating on this that caused me to write today. Some may think (assuming much, as many do) that I am thinking of myself, once a barrister, once living in (at various times) a Little Venice house, a penthouse apartment, a Caribbean villa, a large English country house with 26 bedrooms, but now cast down and living in extremely reduced circumstances, on a limited income etc and having to give thought to what things cost and so on.

I am sorry to disappoint those who hate me (usually without reason). My life has been one of considerable ups and downs, particularly financial. Every one of my luxurious habitations was supported, as by bookends, by relative and occasionally absolute poverty at each end. Such irregularity fosters a philosophical and perhaps stoical and/or fatalistic attitude missing in those who, having always known wealth and entitlement (or who achieved the same from humble origins) find their lives as well as livelihoods swept away by Fate. These are those who jump off buildings, massacre their families before shooting themselves etc. People with my attitude just think “tomorrow is another day”.

If even my thoughts and feelings are not truly me, in the Egoic sense, if my body is not me, then how little is my bank balance me, how little are my cars, former dwellings and (now long gone!) Rolex watches “me”? Scarcely at all; not at all.

A few examples:

  • Terry Ramsden, now completely obscure (and, presumably, broke, or maybe not: you never know with his type) but “famous” in the 1980s, and so wealthy that he could bet £500,000 each-way on his own horse at the 1986 Grand National (it came fourth; Ramsden profited by £1 million).

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2004/apr/03/horseracing.comment3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Ramsden

  • Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, born into a wealthy family and with every possible material advantage. Judging purely from what I saw occasionally on TV, I thought her useless and brainless, but others thought quite highly of her, I am told. It was reported that she died alone, having not seen anyone for days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_Palmer-Tomkinson

  • Various national leaders: Gaddafi (killed by a mob of Libyans, who first shoved a pipe up his rear end); the Shah of Iran (deposed and everything he had worked for destroyed; died in exile); Adolf Hitler (shot himself when the forces of East and West, that is to say Sovietism and finance-capitalism, burst into his capital, having battered down by air and land everything he had built); Stalin (died surrounded by sycophantic ghouls who feared and hated him; a ghastly death, dragged down by unseen forces).

I think too of others, people I have known personally. For example, in my own class and/or year at school, there have been a variety of outcomes (to date: that is one race still not at the finishing post).

One boy became a police officer, at least one an Army officer; a third became a helicopter pilot, later Captain of the Queen’s Helicopter Flight and, later still, the personal pilot of King Hussein of Jordan (he must always have had the makings of a royal servant, having had at school the nickname “Crawler”…). I suppose several boys became office bods, accountants etc. One unacademic but amusing fellow became a banker in Switzerland, of all things; another one, actually part-(francophone)-Swiss, became a structural engineer with his own firm in Paris. Another became, eventually, a chartered surveyor who has written a series of property-conversion manuals. Several no doubt inherited their families’ businesses. A number became BBC producers etc. Some did time in prison (all for GBH, oddly: was it something in the water?) or so I heard. In fact, that last sentence is wrong, because I did read in the Daily Telegraph about one boy (an Organ Scholar, if I recall aright, who used to play the massive school organ), who became a music teacher and (hence the interest of the Press) when in his thirties was convicted of sexually assaulting one of his piano pupils.

Life is always surprising. Who knows where my next port of call will be?

Afterword [19 July 2018]

In fairness to the school I last attended,

https://www.rbcs.org.uk/

it has, since the 1970s, become rather more organized in sending its charges on their way. In fact, reading “Old Blues’ News” [https://www.rbcs.org.uk/old-blues-association/] and the other newsletters they put out about activities and careers etc is alone enough to make one fatigued, so active and driven seem the sharp-elbowed middle classes reported upon. The ranks of former pupils are now replete with quite well-known and even famous people to add to the commanders of ships and heads of economic enterprises: actors and actresses, TV people, film people, and the odd “celebrity” who is “famous” enough to be known even to me (I suppose that those “Old Blues” would include TV presenter Jeremy Kyle and MP Alok Sharma).

Fake News, Fake History and Fake Memories: the UK in the 1970s etc

The Story

“I went to school on the train endless strikes waiting on cold platforms for hours. Then returned home to a house with power cuts no heating hot food it was a nightmare for at least 10 years“— who can guess on what the lady I quote was, in a semi-literate fashion, commenting? The Second World War? Surely not: that only lasted for 6 years. The Siege of Leningrad? No, that lasted for a shorter period yet— 2 years, 4 months. What, then? In fact the lady in question was commenting, in the online Daily Mail, on the UK railways and, in the wider sense, on the UK generally in the 1970s.

Well, it certainly sounds like it was awful. The problem with that, though, is that it is in fact not true. The trains in England (where I lived; Wales and Scotland were similar) were not subject to “endless” strikes (though there were certainly far more than is now the case) and the station platforms were no colder than they are now. What about “power cuts”, “no heating [or] hot food”?

The Reality

The “Three Day Week” only lasted for 3 months (January-March 1974) and only commercial users of electricity were cut off or required to cease using electrical power. Most domestic users were unaffected. Newspaper printing, supermarkets and hospitals were also exempt. In other words, if the lady quoted at top is not simply making up her story of hardship (or failing to remember accurately), the reasons must lie elsewhere. Maybe her parents failed to pay their electricity bill! Only joking…In fact, two years before that, there had been announced (on 16 February 1972) a rolling programme of area outages (including domestic users) but peace broke out 2-3 days later (midday on 19 February 1972) so, again, few domestic users were affected, though a minority had seen limited outages earlier, in early February.

There was, also, the “Winter of Discontent”, which occurred in the winter of 1978-79, but in fact (in its acute phase) was only effective in January and early February 1979. In reality, we are talking about weeks rather than months. Neither domestic nor commercial users of electricity lost power; gas and coal users were likewise unaffected.

So there we have it: the lady commenting on these matters at top seems to be a victim of selective amnesia when she regards a decade of her childhood as having been an awful ten years without rail travel, heating, lighting etc. The “decade” in question turns out to have been affected for about 2-4 months out of 120…

In fact, the amnesiac lady is not alone. Time and again we read about how the UK spent much of the 1970s in the dark, in the cold, without public transport, without food, rubbish uncollected and dead bodies unburied. It’s nonsense, but many really believe it, even those who were there, which is worrying…I should add that I myself was there, having been born in 1956; by the way, those “dead bodies unburied” did exist briefly (for a few days) in the winter of 1978-79, but only in two or three small areas of Liverpool and Manchester. Less noxious rubbish did pile up, but not for very long and not everywhere.

This fake history, that the 1970s were a decade of “socialist” chaos and dislocation, is quite entrenched now. This canard has wings! The various “Conservative” newspapers in the UK repeat it as an article of faith.

Other Fake Memories

No, I am not going to blog, here anyway, about the “holocaust” scammers and delusionals. I want to focus on a few other things. One persistent idea (which I have even seen said and written by journalists and TV talking heads older than me) is that Britain had no decent food until about 20 years ago! It’s just nonsense! Another is that life was harder for people in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s than it now is. More nonsense. In, say, the 1970s, people mostly had secure jobs, which paid enough to live on; there were no such things as foodbanks; social security was far better overall, the disabled and unemployed were not bullied by DWP jobsworths; the mass immigration which is making the UK (especially parts of England) into a human zoo had not really begun to snowball; workers had fixed hours, which included decent lunch breaks of 1 hour (often interpreted generously); there was no such thing (for most employees) as being on call after hours, in the evenings or on weekends and holidays. In addition, it was far easier (for anyone qualified) to access higher education.

Conclusion

There is a wave of unreality around. I have a –perhaps idiosyncratic– theory that the various kinds of lies or lying fake “facts” that people are often now expected to believe (“holocaust” fakery, the idea that races and peoples are all somehow “equal”, the idea that National Socialism was “evil” etc) have affected the general sense of truth in society, so that many cannot detect lies, and indeed often lie to themselves as well as others about recent history and even about their own experiences.

Notes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/16/newsid_2757000/2757099.stm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent