Angela Merkel retires from public life

A few thoughts on the subject of writers, and filmed books

The writer Wilbur Smith has died.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-59278275;

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

I think that I have only read one or two of his books, long ago, in the 1970s. He sold 140 million copies altogether. When I visited Rhodesia in 1977, I found that the only large (perhaps even, the only) bookshop in Salisbury (now Harare) sold few books from Europe or North America (because of the anti-Rhodesia sanctions imposed, and because of shortage of foreign currency). South African or locally-published books about how to look after your horse, dog, even tropical fish, seemed to be the main stock-in-trade. Those, and Wilbur Smith.

Smith’s huge success as author did not translate well onto film, judging by the two films seen by me (Gold, and Shout at the Devil). Some have thought that the film The Wild Geese was based on a book by Smith, but that is not so [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Geese].

At one time, I thought that the book The Rain Goddess [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rain_Goddess] was one of his, but in fact it was written by another writer, Peter Stiff [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stiff].

Some writers, some characters, do not translate well onto film, or are hard to film credibly. In my opinion, Raffles has never been brought to life successfully. The same could be said of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.

One writer usually poorly-represented in the films of his books was Alistair Maclean; at least eleven of whose books were filmed. The best I have seen is probably Where Eagles Dare, though Ice Station Zebra is also not too bad. Some of the films based on Alistair Maclean books are very poor indeed, though, e.g. When Eight Bells Toll [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Eight_Bells_Toll_(film)].

Even much-filmed John le Carre has often not translated well onto screen. The BBC series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was incomparable, its sequel, Smiley’s People, also very good (and another mini-series, A Perfect Spy, was not bad, lifted by the stellar performance of Peter Egan); le Carre’s stuff is better in such series format, hard to squeeze into the couple of hours of a feature film.

The Tinker, Tailor film released a decade ago was, for me, pretty poor, pedestrian, though it seems that only the more thoughtful critics agreed with me! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy_(film)#Critical_response.

It may be that the best feature film adaptation of le Carre was the black and white The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with Richard Burton:

I myself rarely read any kind of fiction now; when young, I did. In the adventure genre, my favourite was Hammond Innes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_Innes]; rather forgotten now, I suppose. Four of his books were filmed, but (in my view) only one quite well, The White South, which was filmed as Hell Below Zero; the film contains historically-valuable, though unpleasant, footage of actual Antarctic whaling.

My favourite Hammond Innes book is The Strange Land, but it was never filmed.

Some writers’ books, which you would think would have made exciting films, never were filmed. Desmond Bagley [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Bagley] comes to mind. Adventure in tropical or other wild parts of the world: espionage, crime, treasure-hunting. I have only read a couple of his books. I recall reading The Vivero Letter about 50 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vivero_Letter_(novel).

[Update, 14 November 2022: since writing the above, I have become aware that The Vivero Letter was later, much later, filmed— in 1998, thirty years after the publication of the book. It seems that two of Bagley’s other books were also filmed, in all three cases unsuccessfully as far as fame is concerned— I had never heard of the films].

Desmond Bagley, like Hammond Innes, can create a credible and quite gripping world out of strange and unusual events.

Another author whose work went largely but not entirely unfilmed was Elleston Trevor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elleston_Trevor. His spy story The Berlin Memorandum, written under the nom de plume “Adam Hall”, was filmed as The Quiller Memorandum, though not very credibly, in my opinion. Somewhat in the Len Deighton area [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Deighton].

Trevor is arguably better known as the writer of the book The Flight of the Phoenix, filmed twice. As usual, the earlier film was the better by far.

Len Deighton himself (he is still around, presently aged 92) has had a number (I think three) of his early books filmed, and quite successfully, perhaps (?) because they are not as reflective and “psychological” as those of le Carre and some others. The IPCRESS File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain. Indeed, his own later work is more complex.

Tweets seen

This kind of “pile-on” is typical of Twitter, of course. Not that Twitter is of any real importance now. Most of the really interesting accounts have been “suspended” (expelled), including mine!

My own Twitter account was removed in 2018 after a big effort by a pack of Jew extremists. Now we see almost any “dissident” account worth looking at removed. The better-known names include David Icke, Mark Collett, Laura Towler, Alison Chabloz, Katie Hopkins, the London Forum. Many others.

The purge on Twitter continues: only a week ago, the account of thinker Nick Kollerstrom was removed. Why? Usual (((suspects))), of course…

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

I repost tweets on the blog as a quick and easy way of making points or illustrating matters, but in fact Twitter has little real political influence. I have blogged in the past about this. I am always seeing accounts with, supposedly, thousands of “followers” yet only a handful of “likes” or retweets on any given tweet. Some accounts do get hundreds and even thousands of likes/retweets, but then you look at the profile and find that those accounts (mostly of the “famous”) have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Twitter followers.

As I have blogged previously, it says much about the self-describing “Left” that their big idea is to “deplatform” this or that person or organization. Nothing to say about society or how to form a better one; just negativity. That is why such people rarely get anywhere politically. Their lives revolve around Twitter. Many of the Zionist Jew cabal on Twitter are like that. They even have a word for themselves, “J-Twitter”.

As for the campaign of propaganda (not only “Covid” passports etc but the whole racemixing campaign), I was alerting the people to that years ago. Now, many are waking up.

However, that propaganda campaign is not aimed at people like me (65-y-o), nor indeed at those in their fifties or forties, nor even at those in their thirties and twenties. This is propaganda, and subliminal propaganda, aimed mainly at children, whose critical faculties are at an early stage of development.

The idea is to normalize the multikulti society, the society composed of various and very different races and ethnic groups, which society will then form the mixed-race mass promoted by Coudenhove-Kalergi.

See: https://www.westernspring.co.uk/the-coudenhove-kalergi-plan-the-genocide-of-the-peoples-of-europe/; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi.

TV ads and “soaps” are an important part of this propaganda campaign: see https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/12/10/tv-ads-and-soaps-are-the-propaganda-preferred-by-the-system-in-the-uk/. Written by me in December 2018, and even more pertinent today.

More tweets

The ignorance of the police about the very laws they are supposed to enforce is one of the most alarming things today. They often seem to have a completely wrong idea about what the law actually is. This became apparent during the stupid “lockdown” shutdown.

Man proposes, God disposes…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10194941/Gurapareet-Bains-claimed-invent-worlds-healthiest-meal-dies-heart-attack-aged-43.html

Afternoon music

After the earlier discussion of writers, books, films, and film music, here is the full suite from Billion Dollar Brain, music written by Richard Rodney Bennett [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rodney_Bennett]

John Bean— obituary

https://counter-currents.com/2021/11/remembering-john-bean/

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bean_(politician).

General Donkey speaks

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/14/uk-must-be-ready-for-war-with-russia-says-armed-forces-chief

Actually, I love donkeys, but not those carrying the rank of general officer.

Imagine a real war between NATO (i.e. the USA, i.e., in reality, NWO/ZOG) and Russia. It would quite likely turn nuclear. Britain is still the USA’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the words, I believe of Roosevelt. You could say goodbye to the UK and most of the British people, were the UK to be attacked; we are just too small, geographically, and have too many people (and too many key targets) in far too small a space. Britain could do a lot of damage to Russia, but not destroy Russia. Russia, however, could destroy the UK, in effect.

Why is Britain still being the poodle of the American NWO cabals? It’s madness. Better to join with Russia, against both NWO/ZOG and, if necessary, China, and certainly against both Zionism and Islamism.

More tweets

Marr is of course compromized, in general terms: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2200493/Andrew-Marr-caught-kissing-groping-mystery-woman-outside-Soho-nightclub.html; not in a position to be too censorious as to the sexual aspect, though of course the facts in his case were very different, in that no misuse of public funds occurred.

A video worth watching

Late tweets

Denison’s Island. I have been there, in 1967, aged 10, with my school class. There was no-one else there at the time except the custodians. Strange place, quite small inside (the walls are over 12 ft thick in places), with a small area of lawn and a few old cannon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Denison. 54 years ago. Hard to believe.

The constant and seemingly neverending push for vengeance (not “justice”) against Germany and German people by the international Jew-Zionist lobby is, quite exactly, “a kind of distasteful Old Testament thing“, akin to the behaviour exhibited by the Israelites thousands of years ago.

For true European people, the idea of carrying on persecution of individuals, or a state, or country, for decades or even hundreds of years (will the Zionists stop whining and/or bullying in 2045?), for alleged crimes which are not continuing, is indeed distasteful.

The Japanese, or many of them, treated Allied prisoners abominably during WW2. We, meaning the British, after the war ended, hanged or shot a relatively few and clearly proven war criminals, persons who had cruelly or brutally transgressed the accepted rules of war. The rest were released.

Now, nearly 80 years later, we do not seek out Japanese who were 18-y-o typists or even sentries, and put them on trial in a grotesque parody of courtroom “justice”, which is actually (in the case of of 90 or 100 year old SS men or German female ex-typists) a deliberately-contrived ordeal because of the defendants’ age and medical condition.

Likewise, no-one has suggested that those who, at age 18 or 16 were typists or security guards at, say, Los Alamos, should be tried for “facilitating” mass murder of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima. That would be not only unjust but, as said, grotesque.

The same could be said of British people who worked as typists or teenage Home Guard personnel etc at RAF bases from where bombers left to devastate the cities of the Reich in 1941-45, killing between 600,000-800,000 people, mostly civilians, mostly women and children.

The German bombings of the UK killed far fewer, 60,000 or so, but that was still devastation on a wide scale; yet the British do not constantly whine about it now, and did not at the time, or immediately after 1945.

The attitude of many Jews, particularly the hardcore Zionists, is at odds with the culture of Europeans, including British. So why the trials? Because the present German state is still, in a sense, “occupied”…

Late music