Morning music
Talking point
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/may/01/egyptian-human-skulls-pitt-rivers-dorset-auction-house
“An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism.
The skulls of 10 men, five women, and three people of uncertain sex, were listed by Semley Auctioneers in Dorset, with a guide price of £200-300 for each lot.
They were originally collected by the Victorian British soldier and archaeologist Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, who founded the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum in 1884.
The skulls, some of which are listed as coming from Thebes and date to 1550-1292 BC, were part of Pitt Rivers’ lesser-known second collection, which he displayed in a private museum on his estate in Farnham, Dorset.
Parts of the collection were later sold by Augustus’s grandson, George Pitt Rivers, a eugenicist, who was interned by the British government during the second world war due to his support for the fascist leader Oswald Mosley.”
[The Guardian]
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pitt-Rivers.
“George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers (22 May 1890 – 17 June 1966) was a British anthropologist and eugenicist who was one of the wealthiest men in England in the interwar period. He embraced anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism and became a supporter of Oswald Mosley, which led to him being interned by the British government for two years during the Second World War.
In 1920 he published a book, The World Significance of the Russian Revolution, the first of his anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic public activities. In it he wrote “the Jews are the principal agents of economic and political misery in the world, through their dealings in international finance and their actions in promoting democracy and revolution”.[16]
Pitt-Rivers was a member of The Link, a group which as its name suggests was meant to serve as a link to the NDSAP along with the British Council Against European Commitments headed by Lord Lymington.[24]
On 27 June 1940, Pitt-Rivers was arrested as a potential traitor.[24] He was an unpopular landlord whose tenant farmers greatly feared him, and there were concerns that he would be lynched by his tenants in the event of a German invasion.
Pitt-Rivers was held in Brixton Prison and Ascot internment centre (1940–1942) during the Second World War as a Mosleyite Nazi sympathiser under the Defence Regulation 18B.[1][27]
After the Second World War, Pitt-Rivers met Stella Lonsdale, who had been incarcerated in Paris by the Germans, suspected of being a British spy; when she eventually managed to make her way to England, she was imprisoned under suspicion of being a German spy.[30] She became the mistress of Pitt-Rivers and took his surname, although they never married. Stella inherited substantial property from Pitt-Rivers when he died in 1966.[31]
In his will, he left instructions that any properties to be sold must be offered individually, rather than as an estate, in order that tenants might buy the properties they leased from the Pitt-Rivers Estate.[32] Much of the village of Okeford Fitzpaine was thus sold to former tenants.
Stella also sold a large proportion of the artefacts held in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset, which she had also inherited from Pitt-Rivers.“
[Wikipedia]
The Wikipedia full version is more hostile yet to its subject; tendentious in places. If Pitt-Rivers cared so little for his tenants, why did his will provide for them to have the chance to buy the properties they had under lease from the estate during his lifetime?
Well, there it is.
There should be an institute or umbrella organization to co-ordinate historical, ethnographic and other studies, as existed in the German Reich under the name SS-Ahnenerbe, but with the difference that, while SS-Ahnenerbe was oriented towards the past, the new institute would be oriented towards the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe [naturally, be aware that “the usual” (((influence))) has resulted in vandalistic “editing” of the Wikipedia entry].
Tweets seen
“I don’t see the possibility that Ukraine can win on the battlefield, said Vadim Skibitsky, deputy head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
“Russia broke through the front at Ocheretin. The recent rotation of Ukrainian troops there was unsuccessful and the Ukrainian armed forces are unable to stabilize the situation.
The situation for Ukraine is now the most difficult since the beginning of the Second World War. The Russian army acts as a ‘one body’ with a clear plan and a single command ,” he explains.”
As frequently repeated on this blog, Russia cannot lose this war, and will not lose it.
The various peoples of Europe, particularly Western Europe, are now starting to realize that their own supposed leaders are actually their enemies.
Hardly surprising that the Kiev regime is finding it impossible to recruit soldiers willing to volunteer, or even willing to risk being forced into service.
“Member of the British Parliament, former Minister of the Armed Forces James Heappie – that NATO will have to send its troops to Ukraine: “There is no table that says they need 1,000 tanks, they need 300 fighters, they need 2,000 artillery pieces, and then they will win. It doesn’t work that way.
[Then need British troops on the ground?]
In Western Ukraine to provide training, yes. Macron was right when he put forward this idea. Because the idea is that you are going to rotate Ukrainian brigades from the front line and take them a thousand miles to the rear in Germany or Poland to train them in this high level. level of combined maneuver, I just don’t think it’s realistic.
I don’t think the Ukrainian generals can afford to keep them off the front line for that long.
So I think the next big step forward is not capabilities in the form of a weapon system or something. “The next big step is the arrival of the military in Western Ukraine to conduct this combined training.”
Cretins such as James Heappey will sleepwalk this country into a major war, and we shall be lucky to live through it.
“Rumours emerging that Susan Hall has won London Mayoral on low turnout. We won’t know until Sat evening. Wonderful if true, but let’s be clear: not to do with Sunak who did next to nothing for her and she was given minimum CCHQ support. The Sunakites wanted Korski. Would be down to @Councillorsuzie – her tenacity, true Conservative principles and decency, if true. Don’t be fooled by Sunak’s claims.“
If that turns out to be true, it would be an incredible turn-up. The last opinion poll I saw had Khan on 45% and Susan Hall on 27%.
Talking point
More tweets seen
As predicted for years on this blog, in the absence of a realistic electoral system, the voters are doing what they can to ameliorate the deficiencies of FPTP voting, by voting tactically.
The other point, made over the past couple of years, more forcefully over the past year, is that most voters have one aim at present, and that aim is not, as such, to elect a Starmer-Labour government; it is to stamp on the Conservative Party and, if possible, wipe it out.
Reform UK is not social-national, but “populist” small-c “conservative”, just like Farage’s earlier attempts, UKIP and Brexit Party.
Reform UK has no real ideology and, looking at its pro-Israel, pro-Jewish lobby viewpoints, no real national credentials.
That is why Reform UK is not doing better. Were it social-national, even to the very limited extent of, say, the former Front National in France, it might be looking at becoming the official Opposition, or even the Government. As it is, winning a couple of seats in the Westminster monkeyhouse seems to be its highest aim this year.
“Susan Hall has some very odd connections“, says Stephen Timms, who was quite content to be on good terms with the ATOS fraudsters and carpetbaggers.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 